The Eden Prophecy

CHAPTER 52

As Arnold Moore sat listening to Walter Yang, he hoped the young man was about to tell him it was all a hoax, that they could call off the dogs and let it all be, but the look on Yang’s face suggested something else.

“Be quick,” Moore said.

“I’ve been studying the virus like you suggested,” Yang said, “not the data Ms. Laidlaw recovered but the original Magician virus from the UN.”

“What did you find? Anything that will change our response.”

“Not really, but something interesting.”

“It’s a little late for interesting, Walter.”

Yang nodded. “I know what you mean but—”

“You don’t know what I mean,” Moore said curtly. “Two of our best are moving on the site right now. It’s probably heavily defended. Even if they’ve survived the insertion and the recon, the island will probably be blown out from under them before they can find what they’re looking for and get off of it alive. So trust me, you have no idea what I mean, when I tell you: it’s a little late.”

Moore knew his pain had gotten the best of him. Yang’s face said he regretted coming in, but he didn’t flinch.

“You don’t understand,” Yang said. “That’s why I’m here. I’ve been studying the inert section that you asked me to look at.”

Moore exhaled and shook his head. “I thought you said it was just blank space reserved in the DNA, a space that would be replaced by the payload?”

“It is,” Yang said. “But I think it’s something else as well. I think it’s a message.”

Moore felt as if ice water had just been poured down his spine.

“A message?”

Yang nodded.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what the DNA molecule looks like?” Yang said.

“Basically,” Moore said.

“The parts that go up the side are called nucleotides; the molecules that go across the middle — the rungs in the ladder if you want to think about it like that — they’re called bases or base pairs.”

“Right,” Moore said. “Go on.”

“In standard DNA there are only four types of bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. We abbreviate them A, C, G, T.”

“You’re saying someone coded a message in these base pairs,” Moore guessed, trying to jump ahead and hoping that it would be something they could use.

Yang nodded. “The primary parts of the virus are designed as we would expect, but the inert section is different. Successive rungs show a repeating pattern. You see this in certain sections of DNA. Often the telomere sections are the same over and over again: TTAGGG. But I found something different here. The repetition starts, stops, and then restarts.”

“How is that a message?” Moore asked. He felt the clock ticking.

“Because the pattern is neither consecutively repeating nor sufficiently random. That means it has to be purposeful. In this case, I found fourteen consecutive rungs of one type of base pairing, eighteen consecutive rungs of a second type, nine consecutive rungs of a third type. Then the pattern started over again. Fourteen, eighteen, nine. Fourteen, eighteen, nine. It seemed odd to me.”

It seemed odd to Moore, mostly because it seemed odd to his geneticist. “But what the hell does it mean?”

“Genetically it means nothing,” Yang said. “But then I remembered what you said about Ms. Gonzales working for the NRI years ago and the connection hit me. N is the fourteenth letter in the alphabet, R is the eighteenth, I is the ninth. Fourteen, eighteen, nine, three times in a row. NRI, NRI, NRI. In a virus sent to a former NRI employee.”

Moore felt the hair on his neck stand up.

“Could there be any other reason?” he asked, feeling the claws of panic pulling at him. “Any reason at all for such a pattern?”

Yang shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Using the same logic, I ‘read’ the rest of the inert strand,” Yang said. “The next seventy-eight base pairs are arranged as follows, repeating patterns, eighteen in a row, then five in a row, then twenty-two, then five, fourteen, seven, and then five again. If you take those as letters they spell out one word: REVENGE.”

Moore felt the room spinning. Someone was after them. Whoever it was wanted them to know it at some point. Perhaps they’d been meant to discover this earlier, or perhaps well after the fact. But who and why?

Moore ran through the facts in his head. Ranga’s involvement brought Hawker in. The letter to Gonzales tipped the NRI and brought Moore and Danielle into the fray. All along whoever they were dealing with had been one step ahead of them, to the point where they’d even found or guessed the location of the safe house in Kuwait where Hawker had stashed Savi and the little girl.

Ranga.

Hawker.

Danielle.

Information that no one outside the NRI should have known.

Revenge.

The answer hit Moore like an anvil.

Each of them had plenty of enemies, plenty of people who might want to see them suffer or die, but Moore could think of only one person with reason to hate them all.

He grabbed his phone and hit the button to autodial Danielle’s satellite phone.

“Pick up!” he shouted to the air. “Pick up.”

A British voice came on the line. “This is Keegan.”

“Keegan, put Danielle on the line,” Moore said.

The response brought added pain.

“It’s too late,” Keegan said. “They’re already on the island.”

It was too late. And if Moore was right, Hawker and Danielle were walking into a death trap.