The Eden Prophecy (8 page)

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.

P
arked across the street from the house at rue des Jardins-St.-Paul, Danielle aimed a cameralike device at the property.

The “camera” was actually an eavesdropping mechanism, able to listen to conversations inside a building by bouncing a laser off the glass and picking up on the minute vibrations caused by voices and sounds. Special types of glass could block or dampen the vibrations, and jamming devices that shook the windows could be attached to glass in an effort to overload the signal, much like jamming a radar by putting out masses of electromagnetic energy, but those things left a specific signature. If they were present Danielle would find them easily.

The readout flatlined. No vibrations, no dampening equipment, no TV left playing to itself. The house was quiet.

She flicked a switch on the scanner, changing it to infrared mode.

Slowly panning back and forth along the walls, she picked up no heat sources.

“No one home,” she said.

“Good,” Hawker said. “Let’s go.”

She scanned the street around them. The road was fairly vacant. On a Wednesday at 2
P.M.
, it seemed most residents were working.

Hawker opened the door.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Inside.”

“Let me go,” she said.

He stared at her.

“What do you know about genetics?” she asked.

“Apparently we’re all related to viruses.”

“Very funny,” she said “What about encryption, hacking computers, and bypassing alarms? What about breaking and entering without actually breaking anything?”

It took a moment, but Hawker smiled. “I do like to break things.”

“Yes, you do,” she said. “Let me go in. I can do it quietly and you can watch my back.”

He hesitated and then nodded. “Keep your line open. You go silent I’m coming in.”

She nodded, opened the door, and stepped out.

Striding casually across the street, Danielle secured the speaker of her headphone to her right ear. She climbed the steps and made her way to the front door. Holding out a small handheld device, she checked for any alarms. None present, she went to pick the lock. It took a moment, as it was not her most often used skill.

She heard Hawker’s voice over the line. “Sure you don’t want me to come up and break the door down?”

“I got it,” she whispered.

The lock popped. She slipped inside.

Her footsteps echoed on hardwood floors. The large open room in front of her was all but empty. A single overstuffed chair sat in one corner, draped in a dust cover beside a bookshelf devoid of titles.

She went through this room to the kitchen and then a den or bedroom. Little to see, as if someone had recently moved out.

Finally, she entered what might have been a living room. There she found a desk and chair, a large throw rug on the
floor, and stacks of high-tech equipment, including a bank of computers and a wall lined with incubators as well as industrial refrigerators whose clear doors were now covered with frost and condensation. To the left of all that was a Plexiglas-enclosed workstation. It looked to be hermetically sealed, complete with a set of powerful microscopes and the armholes with long rubber gloves attached for manipulating things inside it.

The living room was a makeshift lab.

She stepped over toward the incubators. The first two were warm but appeared to be empty. She could see no sample trays or glass slides inside, only what looked like irrigated soil and wet, muddy clay. A second incubator had a layer of water two inches deep on top of the soil but nothing growing inside. Not even mold.

The refrigerators were next. Condensation on the Plexiglas made it impossible to see inside. She wiped the glass.

Empty.

Each one of them.

A smaller incubator had something moving inside. She looked closer. Rats, some dead, others looking withered and aged, shaking as they tried to move around. The containment habitat was sealed and a thick length of tape covered the seal as if to remind someone not to break it.

“What the hell is all this?” she whispered.

She wondered if Ranga had cleaned the place out or if someone had beaten them to it. Most likely he would have given up the address while being tortured.

She moved to the enclosed workstation and realized the main scope was a scanning electron microscope, an extremely expensive medical device.

She turned it on and looked through. Nothing to see. But the device had an electronic readout and a small keypad. She pressed the power switch and then found a menu to cycle through the most recent images.

Genetic material in the midst of some examination. There was no way for her to tell what it was. She looked around. The computer was her best bet.

She moved to the desk, sat down at the computer, and hit enter.

An encryption screen came up. Not the standard operating software that could easily be breached but a heavy-duty, industrial-grade system. Whatever the computer held, it was well protected.

She pulled a specialized USB drive out of her pocket. It had a program that could auto-launch through most encryption firewalls.

She plugged it in; the green LED lit up and it went to work. If that didn’t work, there was the possibility of opening the computer and stealing the hard drive itself. She located the tower under the desk and turned it her way. It didn’t move easily. The normal bundle of wires connected to the back of the box was a bad enough tangle, but it seemed to have been augmented by something.

A thin locking cable and a plain red wire held it in place. The cable could be breached easily, but the red wire was suspicious. It terminated in some kind of magnetic switch attached to the back of the computer.

She followed the wire through a hastily drilled hole into one of the desk drawers. There it connected to a brick of what looked like C-4.

Who needs an alarm, she thought, when you can just blow the whole place to hell.

A second length of wire ran from the C-4. It led out behind the desk, under the rug, and across the room. Other wires ran to the incubators and refrigeration units.

She followed one to a credenza against the far wall.

Cautiously she opened the drawer. A stash of binders lay inside. She eased one out. The red wire ran through its binding, but there seemed to be enough slack.

She opened the binder to find handwritten notes. If they
were Ranga’s notes—and they did look like a sample of his handwriting that she’d seen—it seemed unlikely they’d be left here unless they were no longer needed. Perhaps whatever samples he had created were enough.

She studied the writing. Tabular entries recording test results. She leafed through the pages, careful not to pull on the wire.

Page after page of numbered experiments, all with failed results. She understood that too.

Despite the incredible things that modern genetic science was capable of, somewhere around 99 percent of experiments were failures. At the big pharmaceutical labs around the world, incredibly gifted men and women often toiled for years with nothing to show for it. One study she recalled stated that a geneticist at a top biotech lab had a fifty-fifty chance of working his or her entire career without ever producing a usable drug.

Part of it was the safety precautions and protocols that purposefully slowed the work to a crawl, but for the most part it was just an incredibly difficult task. Nature had spent five billion years coming up with life in its myriad forms. Five billion years of trial and error. Genetic engineers were desperately trying to take a shortcut in that process.

Outside, half a block down on rue des Jardins-St.-Paul, Hawker sat in the rented Peugeot, watching for trouble. So far the quiet streets of this Paris neighborhood had remained just that, quiet.

A few cars had rolled by. A white Isuzu delivery truck had come down the road and gone around the block and a few pedestrians had strolled by, but none of them had stopped or lingered near the building.

The street was quiet, the neighborhood was quiet, and Danielle had also been quiet for several minutes.

He grabbed the phone and clicked the push-to-talk button. “You finding anything?”

It took a few seconds before the reply came.

“Some kind of lab in here,” she said. “Computers, incubators, microscopes. Everything rigged to explosives.”