The Messiah Code (32 page)

Seventeen seconds.

The fill was now 78%.

Then, suddenly and simply, a match was found.

"Hallelujah," she whispered, springing swiftly into action. She didn't bother to open the found file and examine it. She just selected it, copied it, and exported it to her backup disk. Then with speedy clicks of the mouse and sweeps of the cursor she moved the Nazareth genes icon out of the search box and exited.

As the clock on the screen ticked to 3.

"
Sixty seconds
," bleated her watch.

Only now did Razor Buzz wipe off the perspiration that had gathered on her brow, and let out a long sigh of relief. She had her prize. The cyberlord had been into the heart

of the Black Hole and escaped undetected to tell the tale. She was safe.

Suddenly the screen fizzed and the main menu came up. With a frown she realized that the modem line must have gone down, or been disconnected.

She reached for her phone and punched out the internal number for the atrium reception desk. Nothing. Dead silent. What the hell was going on?

She rose and walked out of her office to the computer room, and looked through the tinted glass to the atrium. Where were the guards? Both desks were empty. Since the scare over Carter, Jack had made it a sackable offense for both stations in the atrium or the gatehouse to be left unmanned at any time. She walked over to the nearest desk.

Then she saw the black, perfectly polished shoe.

It looked odd, sticking out from the other side of the desk at a weird angle. It took her tired brain a second to realize that the shoe possessed a foot. With mounting horror she walked around the desk, watching the ankle come into view, then the trousered leg and its twin splayed out to the left, and finally the whole body of George, the security guard. She liked him; she'd met his wife and two sons at the company barbecue last summer. He was staring at her, but his eyes were like a blank computer screen. Three neat bullet holes punctured his chest and neck, and a slick of blood had leaked across the marble toward her, nudging her toes.

Jasmine felt nauseous as she stepped across the sticky puddle of spreading red to check the pulse on George's still-warm wrist. But his eyes had told the truth; George's wife was now a widow, his two sons fatherless. Just as the nausea hit her she saw the second body lying behind the other desk.

Holding her hand over her mouth and trying to quell the rising panic, she instinctively grabbed for the phone. She numbly put it to her ear and cursed her own stupidity when she once again heard the silence.
Think, damn you! Think!

Run! Get out of here! Now
! The orders came coldly and unbidden from deep within her. With them came the fear. No longer was she simply shocked by what had happened

to the two men, she was suddenly terrified that it might happen to
her
. She turned from the bloody bodies and the desks, barely registering the CCTV monitors as she focused on the stairs to the underground garage.

The white coat on the screen, seen only for a microsecond, burned into her retina. Hoping her eyes had been mistaken, she forced herself to delay her flight, and look again at the monitors in front of the desk. The figure in the white coat was moving now--on the screen marked
Crick Laboratory.

Tom was still here.

And in that instant she knew that the Preacher had come to kill him.

There were two voices in her head now. One still shouted
Run
! but only louder, and more persuasively.
Get to your car!
it said.
Call for help! No one could ask you to do more than that.
The other voice, a whisper she could almost ignore, told her that help wouldn't come in time. That it was up to
her
to help her friend--to warn him.

"But what can I do?" she said aloud, looking down at her feet, watching them lead her to the garage stairs and safety. Then the thought came to her and she stopped. She turned and walked back to George's body. Trying not to look in his eyes, she rolled his body over in the sticky blood.

The holster was clipped down, but the ugly, black gun was still there.

With trembling fingers, she unbuckled the leather, checked the gun's chamber--just as her brother had taught her to. Fully loaded. She took off the safety and held it in her hands, feeling its weight, reminding herself of her dead brother's macho words--
only pull a gun if you're prepared to use it.

Was she prepared to use it? To do what she had vowed never to do: to aim a gun at someone and shoot? Her mouth felt dry and her legs jelly-weak as she walked to the elevator.

No
! commanded the voice in her head.
Don't take the

She turned and ran for the stairwell. And as she pushed open the doors she tried to imagine she wasn't Jasmine anymore, but the Razor Buzz of old--a cyberlord freed from the virtual world to roam the real one. She had a gun, and she had motivation.

What more could she ask for?

Courage
, she thought,
I could do with a hell of a lot more
courage.

Then she took a deep breath, steadied her trembling legs, and began to climb the dark stairs.

O
n the floor above, Tom sighed and looked deep into the man's eyes.

"Tell me about the third gene!" he commanded. "Tell me what it does!" He raised a glass vial of the serum loaded with the new genes, and thrust it in the man's face. "And tell me what this does!" he demanded. "How the hell do the three genes work together? Dammit, tell me!"

The man said nothing--just stared back at him. Tom took a frustrated swing at his head, but gained little satisfaction when his hand passed through it. That was the problem with holograms; they didn't make great talkers--or punching bags.

Tom shook his head in disgust and yawned. He walked back over to DAN, still running countless iterations in its "virtual mind," trying to unravel the Gordian knot of the third gene. He bent and punched two keys on the keyboard and the hologram of Christ vanished. Tom had been reviewing all the findings since half past eight in the morning--yesterday morning--and was still no wiser.

He picked up one culture dish bearing the title "
Naz 3--E coli"
written in Nora's tidy script. He held it up to the light and just stared at it for a while. No proteins. Nothing. He did the same with "
Trinity--E coli
," containing all three hybrid genes together. An entirely new protein had been produced. Lots of it too. But what the hell did it do?

Perhaps the genes do nothing
, his tired mind taunted him.
Perhaps there is nothing to know
. Tom checked his watch and walked to the phone. He wondered whether Jasmine was still downstairs working on finding a match. It wouldn't be the first time she'd worked all night. He picked up the handset and put it to his ear. Then he shook it and listened again. This was all he needed. It was completely dead.

He slammed the phone down and turned to walk to the elevator. The shadowy uniformed figure in the doorway took him by surprise.

"George, is that you? What the hell's gone wrong with the phones?"

"I've closed them down, Dr. Carter. We're alone. Just you and me."

The deep female voice shocked him. "What the hell's going on? Who the hell are you?"

The shadowy figure stepped into the full light of the lab. "You know who I am."

Tom froze by his workbench, an icy band of fear squeezing his chest. The man was shorter than he was but still above average height. His build was athletic with powerful shoulders. The face was conventionally handsome to the point of being bland, with a firm jaw, fine nose, and sculptured cheekbones. It was only the eerie voice and striking cat-shaped eyes--one blue and one brown--that told Tom he wasn't looking at a man at all, but a woman. He remembered seeing those eyes before. On the hologram of the Preacher. And he knew without a shadow of doubt that he was looking at Olivia's killer.

At that moment, even as he watched the woman pull a gun out of her bag, his fear left him. And in its place came a rage he had never known before.

Keeping his eyes locked on hers, Tom edged his right hand along the workbench, trying to locate the keyboard behind him.

M
aria Benariac walked toward Carter and weighed the Glock in her hand. It was lighter now that she'd used eight of the slugs in the magazine, but there were still nine left.

The guards in the atrium had been too easy to kill. And sealing the door to the Hospital Suite so the night nurse couldn't come snooping around meant she had Carter all to herself.

Up close his eyes were arctic blue. When she looked into them she was annoyed to find them unrepentant and devoid of fear. But that would change when she used the nails. And when he was dead she would leave her message in his blood: "
He that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." Ecclesiastes 1:18.

She leveled the silenced gun at his head and smiled. This was truly a righteous moment. "Dr. Carter," she said, "the wages of sin is death."

"What is my sin?" came the immediate response, his voice betraying only one emotion--anger.

With her left hand she put her bag on the large table next to her, while her right kept the pistol pointed at him. "What is your sin? I have been watching you, Dr. Carter. Very closely. Your sin is wanting to become God. Not only have you meddled with God's creation, you have meddled with God's own son."

"My meddling
saves
lives. How many lives has the Preacher
taken
?"

She smiled, recognizing the foolish sobriquet the papers had given her. She liked the fact that he knew she was responsible for killing the others. "Only those that needed cleansing."

"Cleansing? You mean
murdering
? Who decided they should die?"

She swept all the other debris off the table. Bottles, flasks, and beakers smashed to the floor. A strange white instrument with a round rubber pad sticking out the top, and
Omnigene
written down one side, almost fell on her foot. She sized up the scientist and thought the table would be just about big enough if his arms weren't extended full length. One by one she took the nails out of the bag, laying them in a neat row. "God decided they should die, of course."

"What God?" scoffed the scientist. "You can't pass the responsibility on to him. He doesn't exist. We only created him to explain what we couldn't understand, and now that science has given us knowledge we don't need him anymore. Is that why you need to kill me? Or do you enjoy killing--using God as an excuse?"

She laid the rope and mallet next to the nails and tried to keep her anger in check. She knew how important control was, but this angry, arrogant man in front of her wasn't like the others. He had no sense of his guilt, or any fear of his executioner. He clung to the stubborn, twisted belief that he was
right
. If she still maintained some vestige of righteous detachment toward him, then it vanished at that moment. No longer could she see him coldly as a threat that needed to be removed; he was someone she hated, the very personification of everything she feared and despised.

"I will give you a choice," she said. "Which hand?"

His angry eyes looked puzzled for a second. "What do you mean?" He was looking at the nails now, wondering what they were for. Or trying hard not to.

"As I said, I have been watching you. I know what you are doing. Since you want to possess the power of Jesus, then you will die like him." She trained the gun on his left hand, hanging by his side. "I am going to tie you to this table and drive a nail through each hand and foot." She couldn't help a smile. "I need to make a hole for the first nail. A bullet will make it easier for both of us. Which hand?"

Fear at last. Genuine fear flickered in those fierce eyes. Good. Not so arrogant now, are we, Dr. Carter? Then, before he could react further, she fired.

"Shit!" he screamed in agony.

It was comical the way he jerked and spun around, nursing his injured left hand with his right.

She felt a rush of satisfaction when she saw the neat hole in his palm and the blood dripping to the floor. The scientist looked pale as he examined his wound. She thought he was going to be sick. But when he raised his head she saw no trace of fear in his eyes--only an icy glare. "You sick bitch."

He was incredible. "Do you still not repent?" she de manded. She wanted him to yield before she executed him--to acknowledge her righteous truth.

He laughed then. "
Repent
? For what? For wanting to save lives?"

She stepped forward to push the gun into his temple. They stood now between his workbench and the table. "Those lives aren't
yours
to save. You don't change what God ordained just because you can. People have to earn salvation. The Lord decides who should be saved by his miracles--not men like you."

Dr. Carter's jaw muscles tensed as he tried to control the pain in his hand. And when he spoke his words were spat out through clenched teeth. "But they're not
his
goddamned miracles, you witch," he hissed, "they're
ours
. Like fire and being able to fly. Anyway, what gives
you
the right to decide what he wants done...to
know
his will?"

"He has chosen me."

Carter laughed at that, a loud manic laugh. "How do you know? Have you asked him face to face?"

She was tiring of this conversation. The insufferable scientist wouldn't concede on any point. It was time to make him see reason. She ground the gun into his temple. "Place your left hand on the table." She was prepared for a struggle but to her surprise he grimaced and laid his damaged hand palm upward on the table beside the nails. All the time his blue eyes stared defiantly into hers.