The Eden Prophecy (22 page)

“Like the copper scroll from the Dead Sea,” he said.

“So I’m told, although it’s been said that this one is much older.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Somewhere in Iraq,” she said. “Or maybe Iran. Some of the writing on it is supposed to be Sumerian. Although it could be Klingon for all I know.”

McCarter laughed. “I can work on the Sumerian for you. And I know a few Trekkies who can do the Klingon, if you need it.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m sending an encrypted email.”

“What’s the password?”

“The date our last adventure ended,” she said. “Do you remember?”

It had been the culmination of years of research, a moment that had changed his perspective on what man was truly capable of.

“How could I forget?”

“Good,” she said. “The file’s on its way. Moore knows how to reach me when you have something.”

McCarter knew how to reach Arnold Moore, and though he would have preferred just to deal with Danielle, he guessed she would be on the move constantly.

He looked around at the nice suburban setting he now called home. He was wearing flip-flops, a faded Hawaiian shirt, and some old comfortable jeans. He felt safe and secure and blissful in his son’s house.

And yet the call from Danielle sparked worries in his mind. Worries for her and Hawker, worries for what they might be involved in trying to stop. Worries for his children and most of all for his grandchild.

“Should I be afraid?” he asked.

“You won’t be in danger for doing this,” she insisted.

“That’s not what I mean.”

Danielle hesitated; an ominous sign.

“It may be nothing,” she said.

“But …”

“We’re trying to stop something from happening,” she said. “Something that none of us wants to see occur.”

Of course they were. What else would they be doing?

“The scroll may have nothing to do with it,” she added. “Or it might. It’s just a lead we have to run down, but the quicker the better.”

For a moment McCarter thought of digging deeper; if he pried she would tell him. She owed him that. But then he decided he didn’t want to know. If the answers were too terrible, it would distract him.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“Bad enough that I need all the help you can give us,” she said.

McCarter took a deep breath. “I’ll get to the file as soon as it comes in,” he said. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

H
awker stood near the aft end of a forty-foot cabin cruiser as Savi piloted the boat away from one of Dubai’s marinas. Behind them the lights of the city blazed into the night, obscured in places by the smoke rising from the base of the Burj Al Arab. The glare made it impossible to see anything else. No stars, no features on the water beyond fifty feet or so. Looking ahead it seemed as if they were sailing into a void.

In some ways, that matched the feelings Hawker fought to silence. The situation reminded him of the past, the dash across the Republic of the Congo and into Algeria he’d guided Ranga and Sonia on in a desperate attempt to escape dangerous men. But the facts were plain then, or at least he’d thought they were. He didn’t know the facts here, not enough of them anyway.

He needed to press Sonia about her father, the people he’d been mixed up with and the work he’d been doing. That was all that really mattered, but the sudden turn of events—the revelation that Sonia had a sister and the young girl’s odd condition—had stunned him, blinding him in a sense to what was up ahead.

Sonia had taken her sister into the forward cabin, bringing with her some medications and hoping to put her back to bed. She did not seem to be in pain, nor did she seem
undeveloped mentally. To keep her calm as they drove to the boat in the middle of the night, Sonia had practiced spelling and math with her. Then the little girl had picked up a book and begun reading on her own.

At first he’d guessed that maybe her aged appearance was just cosmetic, and then she struggled climbing into the boat, because of a knee that Sonia said was arthritic. And the thick glasses suggested vision problems like many older people had.

He suddenly remembered Ranga’s questions about retribution and divine punishment and his speech about humanity living too long, a speech given before Hawker had even met Ranga, before he had even become a renegade. If Hawker had the dates right, it was the year before Nadia was born. Since then she must have been hidden with Savi: Ranga’s sister, Sonia’s aunt. Certainly the little child hadn’t been with them in Africa.

Crazy thoughts ran through Hawker’s mind. Thoughts he wanted to banish but couldn’t. Could Ranga have done something to Nadia? Could he have administered some drug or experimented with some type of genetic therapy on his own child? Could Ranga have created a prototype of his life-shortening drug and given it first to his own child? Aging her, like the rats Danielle had seen in his lab?

He prayed it was something less evil, but he couldn’t say it was impossible.

For one thing, that might explain why Ranga wondered about divine retribution even as he claimed not to believe in any God. The scientist messing with the code of life, an act previously reserved for the Almighty alone. It reminded him of Pharaoh determining the last of God’s plagues by threatening to kill the son of Moses, destroying his own child and all the firstborn of Egypt in the process.

The door to the front cabin opened and Sonia came up from below. She reached out to Hawker, took his hands, and squeezed them in a gesture of thanks. He gazed at her face. The exhaustion showed through.

“I need to ask,” he said. “What do you know about the men your father was mixed up with?”

Sonia looked away, let go of his hands.

“I don’t know much about them,” she said. “After we left Africa, Father and I went different ways. We had contact at times but …”

She looked back at him. “I told you, ten fallings-out, and at least nine reconciliations.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted a different life.”

“So why go back to working with him then? I know you’ve had more contact than you’re admitting,” he said.

She looked away again.

“Why?” Hawker asked.

“For Nadia,” she said plainly.

Somehow the child’s condition played in this, but what mattered most was the cult, the danger.

“Why would your father work with a cult?” he asked.

“He had nowhere legitimate to turn, so he always ended up with these kinds of people.”

“How long had he been working with them?”

“A year or so?” she said, her gaze falling away. “Did they hurt him?”

It was an odd question. “They killed him, Sonia.”

“I know,” she said. “Dying is one thing, but I just … I always feared that someone would hurt him. Make him suffer. There are worse fates than dying. In Africa they threatened such horrible things.”

Hawker understood that thought. He didn’t know how to answer.

“Please tell me he didn’t suffer,” she said.

He didn’t want to lie to her, but she didn’t need the details. “People like these don’t let someone go easily.”

She looked out into the blackness of the night, her body tensing as if fighting back tears. Hawker decided to change subjects.

“What’s wrong with Nadia?” he asked. “What happened to her?”

Sonia sat down on the padded bench and studied Hawker.

“You mean, what’s
happening
to her.”

“Happening?” Hawker said. “As in
still happening
?”

Sonia nodded. “Yes. And unfortunately what’s happening to her is happening to all of us.”

“I’m sorry,” Hawker said. “I don’t understand.”

Sonia brushed a strand of hair back over her ear and motioned to the seat across from her.

Hawker sat, guessing it would be a long story.

“She’s aging,” Sonia said. “Only far more rapidly than the rest of us are.”

“You mean it’s not just her appearance?”

“Nadia is only eleven,” she said. “Nineteen years younger than me. Yet she has advanced osteoporosis. Her eyes are filling with cataracts; her skin is so brittle that if you grab her, she’ll bruise or bleed. And soon, hopefully not too soon, she’ll need dialysis because her kidneys are failing.”

Hawker looked away, finding it hard to believe such a thing was even possible. If Ranga had done this …

“How did it happen?”

“It’s a genetic disease,” Sonia said. “They call it progeria, or Werner syndrome. It’s caused by a defect in the way her DNA repairs itself.”

“It’s naturally occurring?” he asked.

“If you call that natural,” she said.

Hawker took a deep breath. He was damn glad to hear that Ranga hadn’t caused it, at least not directly. “What I mean is, no one did this to her?”

She looked away. “Only God, if you believe in that sort of thing.”

Hawker believed in God. He’d seen enough horror in the world to make him angry at God and wonder where He was, but he’d also seen what he considered miracles.

“Is there any way to stop it?”

Sonia smiled a half smile as tears welled up in her eyes again. She seemed lost like him, looking for answers that were not there.

“We’re trying,” was all she could say, wiping away the tears.

“We,” Hawker noted. “You and your father?”

She nodded.

“Is this what you were working on in Africa? Is that what this has all been about?”

She took a deep breath. Hawker guessed he was right, but he wanted to hear it from Sonia, he wanted to understand finally what had been hidden all this time.

“My mother died giving birth to Nadia and a year later we detected the disease in her. Father tried to convince the company he was working for to fund some research, or to allow him to use their equipment to do his own research on his own time. But no one wanted to help.”

“He worked on it anyway,” Hawker said.

“He did it without their knowledge. Maybe that was foolish, but what else could he do? When they found out, they were furious. He took the data, the samples, and what money he could and he ran. I had just finished my sophomore year at Princeton. I wanted to help. I forced him to take me with him.”

She looked to the woman piloting the boat. “Nadia went with Savi. I went with Father, first to Costa Rica
and then Africa. We thought that in the right place, a place with no restrictions, we might find the answer in a year or two.”

She laughed sadly. “Didn’t exactly turn out that way.”

“That’s why he stalled in the Congo,” Hawker guessed. “He thought you were close.”

“Father always thought we were close.”

Hawker was beginning to understand Ranga’s fanaticism. He’d always wondered how a man could seem kind and good and yet knowingly endanger his daughter the way he’d endangered Sonia. But he was trying to save the more helpless of his children.

He glanced toward the forward cabin where the young girl was sleeping. “So what causes it?”

“There are different types,” she said. “In Nadia’s case, structures in her DNA that we call telomeres are rapidly shortening. We all have them. Every time our cells divide, the telomeres shorten. It happens in all of us, but in her case, they shorten far too much with each regeneration.

“Some progeria patients are affected in a different way—they don’t get cataracts or all the signs of aging—but Nadia has a form in which virtually all her cells are affected. Her telomeres are all but used up.”

“Used up?”

“Without a breakthrough, she’ll die of old age before she turns twelve,” Sonia said.

The words hit Hawker like a ton of bricks. They reminded him of another child he’d met who never had the chance to live.

“So all this,” he said. “The money, the research, the lies to people who wanted other things from him: All of that was for her?”

Sonia nodded. “Would you do any less?”

Hawker grew silent, hoping he would do as much.

With a better understanding of Ranga’s obsession and even his odd dealings with those who’d acted as benefactors,
Hawker considered the current situation. Ranga had been working on something in secret. His lab in Paris proved it. But if the data Danielle found was correct and the information in Ranga’s notes was true, it sure didn’t seem like he was headed in the right direction.

Sonia’s company, Paradox, seemed to be closer, although glossy ads and a slick sales presentation didn’t mean they’d discovered the fountain of youth. And then there was the matter of trial 951.

“What about Paradox?” Hawker asked. “Your father is listed as one of the founders. Is that why he started it?”

A look of disdain came across Sonia’s face. “Father started Paradox to move money about,” she said. “I was the one who realized we could do more.”

Sonia’s aunt joined the conversation. “And he never agreed with it,” Savi said. “He told you it was too public. He said something like this would happen.”

“To him,” Sonia clarified. “There were people looking for him, not me.”

He’d obviously stumbled on some long-simmering argument. Something he didn’t have time for. “Does your company have a solution for Nadia?”

She hesitated. “Not yet,” Sonia said. “But we’re working on it.”

“So the big shindig at the top of the hotel …”

“We need funding,” she said. “No one wants to cure progeria. At least not businesspeople.”

“I would have thought—”

“Progeria is extremely rare. It would cost ten thousand times more to develop a treatment than you could ever make selling it. Even if you sold it for a million dollars per dose.”

“Can’t you get grants?” Hawker asked.

“Not with my family name,” she said. “Besides, dribs and drabs of money won’t save Nadia.”

Hawker understood. As in many other things, economics drove the bus. “So you sell the idea of eternal youth to those who might spend ten million.”

Sonia nodded back toward Dubai. “There are people in this world with money to burn. People with millions and billions that are just sitting in the bank doing nothing—even in these times. If Father taught me anything, he taught me that.”

She shrugged. It was just a fact.

“With that kind of wealth the only downside to life is that it ends.”