The Eden Prophecy

CHAPTER 8

Hawker and Danielle touched down at Paris — Charles de Gaulle Airport just before noon. Thirty minutes later they were humming along the motorway from the airport into Paris, driving a rented Peugeot.

A conversation via satellite with Arnold Moore, the NRI’s director of operations, had confirmed how little anyone knew about the situation. No leads, evidence, or even “chatter” had been discovered to link any known terrorist group to either the situation in Paris or the letter sent to the UN.

They were dealing with either an entirely new group or one that had managed to keep itself hidden from the world. Or the threat was so deadly that even groups that would normally boast about such things were remaining quiet for fear of reprisals.

Understandably, the French had been whipped into a frenzy by the deaths of four police officers, but after rounding up and questioning hundreds of possible suspects they had no new information. At least nothing they wanted to share.

About the only lead they had came from the CIA. Since the Iranian, Ahmad Bashir, was a prominent member of the Green Revolution, the CIA had been keeping track of him, perhaps looking for ways to support him. With Iran it was always tricky. Open U.S. support for a candidate there could often cost more votes than it earned them, if it didn’t get them killed outright. So far they’d done nothing but watch and listen. In the process they’d intercepted a call to him the night before he and Ranga disappeared. It had come from a house in central Paris, and the voice on the phone had since been matched to Ranga Milan.

“This address is a block from the Seine,” Danielle said, studying the GPS map on her phone.

“Any idea what we’re going to find there?” Hawker asked, navigating a bend in the highway.

Danielle was studying the satellite photo from Google Maps. “Aside from a group of Baroque townhomes and a highly recommended bistro, not a clue.”

Hawker had expected a darker neck of the woods, industrial or commercial. Apparently whatever backing Ranga had secured in Paris included enough funding to live well.

“Life on the run, mad scientist style,” Hawker joked. “Who needs a spider hole when you can rent out riverfront property?”

Danielle laughed lightly, then turned to him. “I’ve been reading about your friend Ranga,” she said. “Do you have any idea how brilliant he was?”

“Can’t have been that brilliant,” Hawker said. “Or he wouldn’t have ended up dead.”

Hawker recognized the edge in his own voice. The words had come out oddly, but the truth was, it felt as if his old acquaintance had betrayed him somehow. Never one to be great at understanding his own feelings, Hawker struggled to put his finger on the reasons.

Maybe he felt that way because the situation had brought back just enough of his past to remind him he hadn’t always been on the right side of things. Maybe it was because Ranga had gone and got himself killed some horrible way — so what the hell was the point of saving him in the first place? After all that he and Keegan had been through to drag Ranga and Sonia over the mountains of western Congo, it almost felt like Ranga owed it to them to stay out of trouble.

The thought was ludicrous — Ranga didn’t owe him a damn thing. But as Hawker struggled to get a handle on his feelings, he had the sense of firing at a target and hitting all around it but never right on.

He blocked it out and focused on the task ahead. Hopefully they would find something in this town house that would tell them more about whom Ranga was working for and what he’d been doing.

Danielle continued. “Did you know he was one of the first to prove that genetic splicing in the lab is markedly inferior to the way viruses and bacteria have been doing it to their hosts for millennia?”

Her voice was kind. That helped.

“Didn’t know that,” Hawker said. “Don’t even really know what that means.”

“What it means is that half the DNA in our genome is now believed to have come from viruses and bacteria, deposited there during infections and now part of what we consider to be human DNA.”

“So we’re part virus?” Hawker asked.

“In a way,” she said.

Little could have sounded odder to him than that. “Gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘going viral.’ ”

She laughed. “Your friend also helped decipher the main strands of human DNA and developed three different techniques for gene sequencing that were considered giant leaps in the field.”

Hawker hadn’t known any of this; it didn’t matter to him at the time. But even back then he’d found it strange that a man like Ranga would be living the way he was.

“So why did he throw away a life of privilege, prestige, and what must have been pretty decent money to hang out in the gutters of the world?”

Danielle shook her head. And Hawker guessed that solving the riddle of who killed Ranga and why might require them to answer that question as well.

He thought about Ranga’s message on the flash drive.

The message left much to interpretation. It included an email address for Hawker to respond to. Something that hadn’t happened. It never had a chance to. It had taken Keegan two weeks to find Hawker and catch up with him in Croatia. And Ranga had been killed the very next day.

Somehow that made it worse. Hawker guessed that Ranga had died thinking he was alone. Abandoned. Somehow it tore at Hawker’s heart that his friend would think he’d been left to the dogs by the one person he’d reached out to.

There was little else in the message. No details as to whom he was running from. No information as to what he was close to finishing.

That was to be expected. If Hawker came, Ranga could have told him, and if he didn’t the secrets would remain hidden.

“Next right,” Danielle said.

As Hawker followed her directions and maneuvered through the crooked streets of Paris, he considered Ranga’s life. At each stage of action, Ranga made choices that led him through doorways and onto different, darker paths. Hawker had been on a similar course once. By luck, or grace, or some miraculous combination of both, he’d been given a reprieve from his own, self-inflicted damnation.

He tried to remind himself of that. He had to focus on finding the people who’d tortured and killed his friend because it was his job, not for some personal act of vengeance. Allowing that to become his motivation might endanger all that he’d found in this new life.

He glanced over at Danielle. She was one of the things he valued most now. Over the past few years they had grown close in fits and starts. Had the information about Ranga surfaced, he might have hoped they’d be driving around the French countryside in his new Jaguar, promising to turn it in to the CIA when they were done and looking for a hotel to disappear into for a week or so.

Some other time, perhaps.

They pulled onto the street containing the address Moore had given them. Just a normal street in suburban Paris. The town house at the end of the row looked no different than any of the others. And yet as Hawker studied it, he had a sinking feeling about what they might find inside.