The Lucifer Code (16 page)

'Welcome, Your Holiness.'

'Thank you, Doctor.'

'The other members of the Truth Council are-'

Accosta raised his hand and smiled, 'Can we discuss that later? I'm impatient to see her. Is she here?'

'Follow me, Your Holiness. She's secured in the black sector.'

Accosta followed Soames down the corridor through the white sector. VenTec was laid out like a pie: four colour-coded slices surrounded the central pillar of the dome. The front white sector was unrestricted and contained the communal areas and general laboratories. The blue, green and black sectors were all restricted, open only to those with the necessary clearance. Accessed by an elevator in the central pillar, there was a fifth sector beneath the dome, deep in the mountain itself. This was the red sector, also restricted.

As they passed through the white sector, their heels clicked on the varnished beechwood floor. The conditioned air was devoid of odour but held a hint of static. To his left Accosta could see a series of open-plan laboratories. Some were empty except for unrecognizable apparatus; others were peopled with technicians and scientists in white bodysuits like the Doctor's. One was filled with row upon row of computers, whose screens flickered with intense white light.

In the residential quarters, Accosta barely glanced at the white chevrons on the sheer walls, which gave directions to the various facilities: the accommodation suites, restaurants, the cinema, medical suite, swimming-pool, gymnasium and a prayer room. The few external windows were tinted blue and gave the external Arctic landscape an even more frigid outlook.

Reaching the central pillar, the elevator leading to the red sector was marked with red chevrons and warnings: Authorized Personnel Only. Eye Shields Obligatory. Turning left, they passed another sealed security door, which led to the green sector.

Finally the corridor curved round to the northernmost slice of VenTec, the black sector, home of the Soul Project.

Opening the glass security door by placing his palm on a sensor beside the locking mechanism, Soames led Accosta through the complex, passing the conference room and communication room to the main laboratory. Outside he introduced Accosta to a striking blonde woman and a tall black man in glasses. Both wore the enamelled cruciform of the Church of the Soul Truth on their white bodysuits. The woman wore a musky perfume that Accosta found overpowering.

'Dr Felicia Bukowski and Dr Walter Tripp have been helping me on the Soul Project. Most of the work we've done so far is largely down to them.'

Accosta shook their hands. 'You are embarked on a sacred and glorious venture and I thank you for all your work and ingenuity'

'It's an honour to be involved,' Tripp said.

A privilege, Your Holiness,' added the blonde woman.

Accosta studied them for a second. Both were respectful but there was something about their manner and the way they returned his smile that didn't ring true. He prided himself on being able to see into a person's heart, and although he couldn't pinpoint exactly what was wrong, he felt as if the scientists were humouring him - two precocious children indulging a dull relative. He brushed these thoughts aside, and allowed Soames to usher him into the black sector's private accommodation suites.

Soames stopped at the first door and gestured for Accosta to look through a round porthole in the wall. 'She's asleep in there. The drugs will wear off soon.'

Accosta stepped close to the glass and stared at the woman in the single bed. She was attached to an intravenous drip and a life-signs monitor, which beeped with reassuring regularity. 'How is she?'

'Fine. She'll be kind of woo2y when she wakes, but she'll be strong enough when we're ready for her.'

'Excellent,' said Accosta. Her dark hair was splayed out on the pillow, her olive skin glowing against the white linen, her long lashes flickering on her cheeks. As Accosta watched the sleeping Amber Grant, her ethereal beauty pleased him.

She was more than simply beautiful, though: she was a gift from God.

The drugs blurred Amber's already muddled sense of what was and wasn't a dream. Opening her eyes, she discovered that she was lying in an unfamiliar room, with her wrists strapped to a strange bed. Her heart raced when she saw the intravenous drip and monitor. Was this real or another nightmare? A sudden movement in her peripheral vision made her turn her head towards the small circular window to the left of the bed. Through it a pair of dark eyes stared at her. The hunger in that intense stare unravelled her courage far more than the wrist straps and the drip. The man's face was disconcertingly familiar, but in her post-drugged state she didn't recognize the aquiline nose and chiselled cheekbones. Then the face moved back an inch from the glass so that his whole head was framed in the window, including his scarlet skullcap. With a stab of fear so intense that it made her gasp, she realized who he must be.

This has to be a dream, she told herself. A nightmare.

For he was the Devil, come to take her soul.

*

The black sector conference room.

VenTec

The lighting was muted and Accosta sat at the head of the long, rectangular table. Flanking him were Monsignor Diageo and Bradley Soames. Soames's wolves sat behind him, still and silent as grey statues. Bukowski and Tripp were further down the table, hands resting in front of them.

On one of three holographic plasma screens facing Accosta, Frank Carvelli could be seen, absently fingering his unnaturally black ponytail. The head of KREE8 Industries, and member of the Truth Council responsible for media presentation and public relations, was dressed in his trademark black, including a cashmere jacket and roll-neck sweater.

However, for all Carvelli's media contacts, today's breakthrough hadn't come through him. It had come through the third member of the Truth Council who, to Accosta's annoyance, still hadn't come on-line. 'You said they'd all be here?' he said, turning to Soames.

The Doctor shrugged. 'They should be, Your Holiness.'

Accosta frowned and looked over Soames's shoulder. Behind him, through the two-way mirror that acted as one of the walls of the conference suite, Accosta could see into the gleaming white splendour of the main laboratory. The glass head-sphere lay with its visor open in a protective transparent cabinet beside the laboratory couch, at the foot of which was a battery of ancillary monitors and apparatus.

'Let's start,' Accosta said abruptly. 'Tell me again why Amber Grant is so important.'

Carvelli craned forward on screen and Soames smiled, revealing his perfect white teeth. 'I've known Amber Grant for many years as a business partner and have always admired her abilities,' he said, 'but I'd no inkling of her real talents till we started the first soul-capture experiments nine months ago. Of course, she was unaware of these experiments but it was about then that she began to experience unusual migraines. As time progressed it became apparent that her headaches coincided exactly with the experiments.' He explained Amber's unusual medical past. 'Ever heard of entanglement, Your Holiness?'

'No.'

'It's a ghostly, almost telepathic link between quantum particles that have interacted at some time in the past. The connection is instantaneous and works even if the particles are on opposite sides of the universe. Because of her unique medical history I think Amber is entangled with her dead twin. I've already explained how particles in the double-slit experiment change their state when observed, as if conscious of the set-up of the experiment. Well, I'm convinced that when we conduct a soul-capture experiment we collapse the particle wave duality of the soul, causing a disturbance felt instantaneously throughout the universal boson system connecting all souls.'

On screen Carvelli nodded. 'And because of her entanglement with Ariel, Amber feels the disturbance as a phantom migraine.'

'You got it,' said Soames, and went on to tell Accosta about Fleming and the NeuroTranslator. 'What Miles Fleming unwittingly discovered was that Amber's the perfect lab rat for the Soul Project.'

'Why?' demanded Accosta, still unsure of the relevance of the complex quantum concepts.

'As I said once before, Your Holiness, what we really need is an impossibility, someone who can die more than once. Amber Grant possesses part of the living brain of a dead person, and if her neural signals are suitably stimulated when she enters REM her subconscious tries to contact her dead twin, and mentally she leaves her mortal body. By inducing the dream state we can track her mind's - soul's -journey each time she leaves and returns to her body. And because we can repeat her dying again and again we can run iterative loops to lock on to the holding frequency'

'How can you be so sure of this?' Carvelli said, from the screen.

At that moment the second plasma screen fizzed into life and the third member of the Truth Council appeared. She wore a navy suit with the obligatory scarlet cruciform brooch on her lapel. A qualified medical doctor, she treated only one patient nowadays: Accosta. In addition to managing a major clinic in Britain she also held a number of other posts, and had overall strategic responsibility for the Church of the Soul Truth Hospices around the world. She was the source of the secret flow of untrace-able terminal patients to Soames's soul-capture experiments. Apologies for being late, Your Holiness, but I had to attend to matters affecting this meeting.'

Before Accosta could say anything, Soames gestured to her. 'We were just wondering how we can be so sure that Amber Grant has a unique talent, Virginia. Perhaps you could explain.'

Virginia Knight looked at Accosta. 'I heard her soul cry out, Your Holiness. And I've seen all Fleming's data. The evidence is compelling.'

Accosta tried to keep his excitement in check -the project had already yielded a bounty of disappointments. 'Thank you, Dr Knight.' He turned back to Soames. 'But how do we keep Dr Grant here without alerting the authorities?'

Soames smiled again. 'No problem. She's formally signed out of Barley Hall and Optrix aren't expecting her back for a month. Our only real area of exposure is her mother.'

And I've seen to that,' said Virginia Knight crisply. 'Since Gillian Grant is in one of our hospices it was relatively easy to arrange.'

'In that case,' said Soames, I guess we've got about a month before Amber's disappearance starts raising difficulties.'

Knight coughed. 'What about Miles Fleming?'

'What about him?' said Accosta. 'I thought he'd been isolated, suspended from Barley Hall.'

'He has, Your Holiness, but Dr Fleming's determined. He doesn't like things he can't explain, feels compelled to understand them - particularly as it was his brother's death that alerted us to Dr Grant's abilities. That's why he's so good, and that's why we've got to watch him.'

'Sure we'll watch him,' Soames chipped in. 'We need him. Take a look at the stages of the project so far.' He began to tick off points on his fingers. 'We've detected the existence of the human soul, made it visible to the human eye and identified each soul's individual signature through the photon-detector screen. Now we've got Amber Grant we ought to be able to capture its tracking frequency. But for the Soul Project to succeed in its entirety...' Soames looked meaningfully at Accosta '. . . and for your destiny to be fulfilled, we must complete the final stage.' Soames turned to Carvelli. 'Frank, though your particular expertise is undoubtedly key in making this final stage happen, Miles Fleming's contribution will be of critical importance, particularly as our earlier attempts to replicate his technology haven't been entirely successful and it'll take too much time to perfect it ourselves.'

'So we just watch him and wait?' Knight asked.

Soames grinned as though this was a game he was enjoying immensely. 'We use his determination to find answers to make him help us.'

'That'll be dangerous,' Carvelli said.

Soames's grin became broader and Accosta had to suppress his distaste for the man. 'Of course it'll be dangerous. Especially for him.'

*

Rome. Four days later

The Eternal City was unseasonably warm and humid for October and Fleming's shirt clung to his back as he wove his way through the tourists in St Peter's Square. In the ha2y sunlight he squinted at his watch, noting he had twenty minutes before his two o'clock appointment.

In the last few days he had tried in vain to contact Amber Grant. He didn't have her private cellphone number, and her home phone at Pacific Heights in San Francisco was on answer-machine. When Optrix had informed him she was on leave of absence for a month, he explained that he was her doctor but was told that they could not provide him with a contact number: according to the Barley Hall authorities, he was under investigation for malpractice.

When he called the hospice in Marin County to inquire about Gillian Grant and leave a message for her daughter, the receptionist was similarly tight-lipped, which made him realize that Virginia Knight was subtly undermining his reputation. Unsubstantiated reports of him as 'brilliant but ruthlessly ambitious' and 'sacrificing his own brother in the pursuit of glory' were already appearing in the press. And when he'd called his office yesterday even Frankie Pinner had sounded nervous, cutting him off apologetically: she wasn't allowed to talk to him, she said, until 'everything had been sorted out'.

Finally, after every avenue had closed, he had come to Rome.