Kingdom (31 page)

“Our company is going to be facing a lot of challenges in the coming months. Fortunately, we’re going to have a little more help. Please join me in
welcoming back to Morrison Biotechnology, one of this company’s founding fathers, Jonathan Campbell.”

For a moment, the entire room, which was still buzzing over the Tru-Life announcement, again plunged into silence. Then the unimaginable happened—Jonathan Campbell appeared on the side of the stage. Thunderous applause filled the ballroom, and Campbell made his way slowly across the stage, shaking hands with his former protégée as the crowd continued to cheer, the walls of the ballroom glowing with the endless streams of data that were now considered art, the very lifeblood of a city, a country, a people.

Morrison squeezed Campbell’s hand, grinning as he looked into his former mentor’s eyes, before turning to the crowd, holding Campbell’s hand in the air like a victorious prizefighter.

Havenport
Sept. 12, 2015
1:15 p.m.

D
ylan sat alone in the tidy office, staring at the pictures arranged on the far wall: a mixture of canned family portraits, vacation photos, and a child’s scribbling. The pictures consisted of Mike Beasley, the manager for Capital Bank’s Westland branch, whom Dylan had just met and was currently looking up information on the safety deposit box that corresponded to the numbers on the back of the Heffernan flyer; a fading blonde in her late 30s-early 40s, a woman who was still pretty but the years and the pounds were piling up, a transformation documented by the collection of pictures which seemed front-loaded with memories of a younger Mrs. Beasley, all tits and white teeth, big hair and no crow’s-feet; and then there were the kids: By Dylan’s count there were four. He didn’t know anyone that had four kids. He wasn’t even sure if he knew anyone with three.

A wooden ceiling fan rotated overhead, pushing the same stale air in circles around the room as seconds stretched into minutes and Dylan grew restless. He and Meghan had entered the bank just over 20 minutes ago, moving in stops and starts through the line created by a nylon strap attached to a series of plastic pillars. When it was their turn, Dylan approached the
only open teller’s window and asked for information on account number 061280091177. Although it was possible his mother hallucinated the whole thing, that she pulled these numbers off a television bar code, his gut told him otherwise.

The teller—a girl in her mid-20s, not much older than Dylan but wearing a wedding band and too much makeup—punched something into her computer: maybe the numbers Dylan had given her, maybe something else. She tapped her bright blue nails on the mouse, she snapped her gum, she frowned.

“I’m going to need to get the manager,” she told him.

The bank manager had taken his license, along with social security number, and gone off to verify that Dylan was authorized to open the safety deposit box. Was he authorized? Dylan had no idea.

Fighting the urge to pick things up off Mike Beasley’s desk, he took out his iPhone instead because he needed to do something, to be entertained or amused or at least distracted in some way. He called up the Web browser, punching in a few random websites, mostly Tiber City news or gossip blogs—scrolling, scanning but not absorbing; information for information’s sake, something terrible yet soothing and familiar in the blur of banner headlines, graphics, hyperlink stacked on top of hyperlink, a continual flow of raw data: heroin for the 21st-century boy.

And then Beasley was back, shuffling a stack of papers as he re-entered the room, flakes of dandruff shaking free from his hair gel’s iron grip, floating down toward his shoulders as he spoke.

“Mr. Fitzgerald, you are indeed one of the authorized account holders for safety deposit box 061280091177. One of our oldest and most valued accounts.”

Despite his rising anxiety, Dylan laughed.

“I’m a valued account holder?” he asked.

“No,” Beasley said, his face expressionless. “But your father was.”

As he approached Capital Bank Westland’s safety deposit box vault, Dylan was simultaneously underwhelmed and terrified. A lifetime of Hollywood movies had conditioned him to expect military-grade levels of security: retina scans and thumbprints, beefy men with automatic weapons. Instead,
the security guard was old age personified. Pick a stereotype and this guy fit it: He moved slowly, he talked slowly, he shuffled, and stuttered, and shambled. His uniform fit his frail frame like a tent, loose and billowing as he stood to greet Dylan.

The old man nodded at Dylan; the bank manager had called ahead and the ancient guard was already opening the round vault door. His heart pounding, Dylan stepped past the guard and into the vault.

The inside of the vault was filled with a terrible stillness—a patience at odds with the modern compulsion toward perpetual motion. Hundreds of black rectangles of various sizes lined the walls, each with a single keyhole and a silver plate mounted dead center. And on each of these silver plates was a series of 12 numbers.

Dylan looked down at the papers in his hand, nodded, and made his way across the vault, stopping in front of box number 061280091177. He paused, looking around the vault, half-expecting someone—the bank manager, the old guard, anyone—to appear and explain how to proceed. Instead, there was only the silence of the vault.

Struggling against a creeping sense of claustrophobia, Dylan remembered the gnarled key in his back pocket. He took the key out, turning it over in his palm a few times. The metal was cool and hard and with trembling fingers, Dylan pushed the key into the lock, twisting it until he heard a mechanical click. The safety deposit box popped open, and Dylan reached inside.

An hour later, Dylan was pushing his way through the revolving glass at the front of the bank, staggering out into the parking lot, tears forming at the corner of his eyes, rage twisting his stomach into knots. A hot wind swept through the parking lot; plastic shopping bags, empty beer cans, and sand cascaded in between the cars, under the cars and somewhere in the distance Dylan could hear sirens. When he was little and an ambulance sped past, he used to cross himself. But that was a long time ago, before sirens took his father’s lifeless body to the hospital; these days he just watched, irritated that someone else’s crisis—the misfortune and suffering of a stranger—made it more difficult to hear his iPod. But at that moment he was overcome by such a monumental wave of empathy that it almost drove him to his knees.

In middle of the parking lot he saw Meghan, standing by the bike, two cups of coffee from the local chain resting on the sidewalk, her sunglasses down, shielding her eyes from the debris, which continued to spray the parking lot like buckshot.

She reached for him but Dylan pushed past her, the tears streaming freely now.

“What is it? What did you find?” she was asking.

But he just shook his head and pulled himself onto the bike, the roar of the engine drowning out Meghan’s pleas for an explanation. Seconds later he was blasting out of the parking lot, the woman he loved receding in the distance, the two items he found in Capital Bank Westland’s safety deposit box 061280091177 stuffed in his jacket pocket: a thick, beat-up black journal filled with letters from his father, and a flash drive marked with a strange symbol.

The Journal of Senator Robert Fitzgerald
Excerpt # 6

To Dylan,

Bad night last night. There were pills and booze, there was a woman but the details are hazy. I remember she spoke with a Hispanic accent and had a tattoo of an asterisk inside a circle on her lower back. But when I woke up this morning the woman was gone and in her place was a flash drive bearing the same symbol.

Project Exodus_231.avi—That was the name of the only file on the drive, a video I wish to God I never opened.

The footage was mostly dark—but I could hear grunting and groveling and anguished braying.

Then whoever was behind the lens hit the infrared button.

Creatures—monstrous, misshapen beasts—filled the screen.

And every one had my face.

Love,
Your Father

Tiber City
Sept. 12, 2015
2:30 p.m.

G
uarded on either side by jet-black Hummer H5s, the stretch limo raced down the highway toward the Tiber City airport, broken streetlights observing the caravan’s progress like burnt-out angels on high. The TruLife unveiling had ended less than 24 hours ago; Campbell and Morrison would be at the airport in 20 minutes, where a private jet was waiting to take them back to Morrison Biotech. It had been a long time since Campbell had been to New Mexico, since he had been to the desert. Sitting in the back of the limo, staring out into the starless, moonless night, Campbell wondered if agreeing to rejoin Project Exodus was the right decision. But what choice did he have?

Return to Project Exodus or what happens to the rest of the Order’s camps makes Ramoth look like a tea party: That had been Morrison’s ultimatum. Campbell had to buy enough time to warn the Order, to clear out the camps—only then could he make his move. But how to warn the Order? It wasn’t like he could just drop the gurney men a text. And so, under the guise of assisting the TruLife product launch, Campbell was returning to Exodus.

“Tell me Jonathan, is it bullshit?” Morrison asked, shattering Campbell’s train of thought.

Campbell looked across the limo at Morrison, who was sitting with his legs crossed, a drink in one hand; his face, neither young nor old, shifting from shadow to light, light to shadow, the artificial illumination pouring out from Tiber City’s skyscrapers momentarily eclipsed by concrete each time the car passed under an overpass. The back of the limo consisted of two leather seats capable of accommodating four people, two on each side. Morrison sat with his back to the tinted glass partition; Campbell faced forward.

“Is what bullshit, Michael?” Campbell replied.

“The story that crucified monk told Lieutenant al-Salaam. He seemed convinced that the Omega gene is…” Morrison paused and took a sip of his drink, a smirk dancing around the corners of his mouth. “The human soul?” he finished, his voice dripping with mock reverence.

The car entered a tunnel—one of the dozens of two-lane, claustrophobia-inducing concrete tubes that ferried traffic under Tiber City—and the inside of the limo went dark. Campbell blinked, his eyes trying to adjust to the sudden change. He was exhausted but still running on adrenaline, on fear, on rage—each time he shut his eyes he saw the Ramoth massacre: monks dismembered; the bodies of children slain while they slept. He had accepted an injection of the Treatment at the MOMA just before Morrison announced his return to Exodus; having used a synthetic substitute for so many years, the initial rush almost killed him. But now he felt the familiar warmth flowing through his veins, revitalizing each of his body’s 11 systems. It was rather ironic, Campbell considered: The Treatment, designed to ensure the founders of Exodus remained physically and mentally sharp well into old age, was now providing Campbell with the endurance he needed to destroy the Project.

“No Michael, it’s not bullshit,” Campbell said. “Is it the human soul? That depends on what you think the soul is. It has nothing to do with an afterlife. But there is another component of human existence, something beyond the physical, beyond the material—I’m convinced of that and this gene is the key to that
something
. A radio tuned to the divine: That’s the way the monks explained it to me. This gene is what holds people together, what makes them whole. Without it, people are cut off—not only from one another but from…God.”