Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (22 page)

The letters, ATCG stood for adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine—the four nucleobases that formed the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule.

Someone, somewhere out in space, perhaps hundreds of light years away, had sent them a message coded in DNA.

44

Over the Atlantic Ocean

Sunday, 8:50 a.m. (Atlantic Standard Time)

Jenna stood alone in the small galley, staring at the unopened bottle of water like she might gain some insight from the light refracting through it. Reality had become a very fluid substance in the last few hours. The revelations, each one more incredible than the last, had poured down on her, washing away the foundations of everything she believed about herself. She would have rejected every word, demanded to be given her life back, if not for the simple fact that, deep down, she knew it was all true.

Mercy came to join her a few seconds later. “You okay, honey?”

Jenna continued to stare at the bottle. “How did you…?” She didn’t know how to finish the question.

Mercy hugged her. Jenna did not resist, but neither did she return the embrace.

“I was the first,” Mercy began. “I suppose that’s obvious to you now. Back in ‘78, gene splicing was a completely new field. The Human Genome Project wouldn’t be started for several more years, but biologists had already started mapping DNA. Soter’s team was able to identify several of the gene sequences in the message and recognized that it was human DNA. They found human donors who were a close match and cultivated several
in vitro
embryos. A ready supply of genetic material. Of those, I was the closest match. In the years that followed, as gene science improved and computers got faster, they were able to fine-tune the process. Meanwhile, I grew up. I had a pretty normal childhood, I guess. It seemed normal anyway.

“We had a private compound in Arecibo on the other side of the island from the lab. I lived there, and when I was old enough, I taught the younger ones. They sent them over from the lab when they were old enough. Even though we weren’t like other people, Dr. Soter and the team thought it was best to have us live normal lives—education, careers, families—but I stayed there until…”

She gave a shrug. “Dr. Soter was with me, on the far side of the island, when the lab was destroyed. It looked like a natural disaster, but he knew better. We were a secret project—‘deep black,’ they call it. Someone in the government found out about us—someone who wasn’t supposed to know—and decided it was better to make us disappear. Dr. Soter knew they would be looking for us, so we scattered. Later on, when we realized that you had survived, we decided I should stay close to you, keep you safe if anyone ever figured out who and what you were, and when you were old enough, tell you the truth.”

Jenna listened without interrupting, but when Mercy fell silent, she said, “That’s not what I meant. I was wondering how you got on that helicopter. If you were in contact with Soter all along, then you must have known what was happening.”

“It was too dangerous to stay in contact with him. When you told me that someone had tried to kill you, I knew, but there was no way to make contact. When the helicopter showed up at the safe house looking for you, Dr. Soter recognized me. That was the first time we’d spoken in ten years.”

“But you must have known what was going on. You just let me stumble around on my own. You could have told me everything back home, before I went on that wild goose chase in the Everglades.”

Mercy frowned. “Jenna, it’s difficult to explain. There’s still a lot you don’t know. And if I had told you all of this, would you have believed me?”

Jenna didn’t allow herself to speculate on what her reaction might have been. Even now, after everything she had experienced, everything she had done, it was a lot to swallow. Yet, as crazy as it sounded, it also felt like the truth. “Did you always know that it was Noah who destroyed the lab and took me?”

Mercy nodded sadly.

“And yet you…you were
with
him?”

“Noah was a good man, Jenna. I believe he deeply regretted what happened that night. That’s why he saved you. And why I always trusted him.”

Jenna wondered whether Mercy knew that it was Cray and his partner who had killed Noah, but there was something else that she was even more curious about. “Did he know who you really were?”

“I think he must have wondered about our resemblance. He may have suspected that we were related, but I don’t think he knew the particulars about what was going on at the lab. If he had…well, I don’t know if he would have been so quick to save you that night. A lot of people would call us ‘abominations.’”

Jenna sighed. “What
are
we, Mercy? Cort told me that the…the clones…are doing terrible things, trying to start a world war. Is this all part of Soter’s plan?”

“It most certainly is not,” a voice intoned from behind Mercy. Dr. Soter stood in the aisle, leaning heavily on his cane. “And I would caution you against believing anything that man told you. The government needs a scapegoat, someone to blame for their own ineptitude. They have chosen you and your brothers and sisters.”

The response rang hollow. If the government needed someone to blame, there were much easier targets than a group of alleged clones cooked up from a recipe beamed in from another galaxy. Nevertheless, Jenna could tell from Soter’s expression—his body language and his eye movements—that he believed it to be true. Mad scientist or not, he wasn’t lying to her about any of it.

“If you were working with the government, why did they turn on you?”

Soter smiled patiently. “Politics. The project was begun under the auspices of the Office of National Estimates, which was a division of the Central Intelligence Agency. Our funding was deeply buried in the black budget, and as the years passed, few within the agency, and no one in the administration, knew what we were doing. I can only surmise that someone learned about our research and found it politically expedient to erase all traces of the program.”

“Do you still have contacts in the government? People who could protect us and set the record straight?”

“Yes…and no. We had to be discreet. Our genetic research has been at a virtual standstill, but we have done our best to monitor the progress of the children in hopes that there would be a breakthrough. Just the opposite has happened, and now the government means to finish what they started fifteen years ago. My contacts cannot risk taking direct action.”

“But
something
is happening. Someone intentionally released the SARS virus in China. And I think Cort was telling the truth about the cyber-attack.” She thought back to what else she had been told. “He showed me pictures of two people—Kelli Foster and Jarrod Chu. Are they…?”

Soter’s expression was that of a parent refusing to believe reports of his child’s delinquency, but his answer was reserved. “Kelli and Jarrod were from Generation Six, cultivated in 1984. By that time, we had refined our approach. They were an almost perfect match to the genome code we received in the transmission, particularly Kelli, since the original message was coded for XX chromosomes.”

“Cort said they have disappeared.”

Soter drew in a breath. “You have to understand, Jenna. The children aren’t my agents. It was always my intention that their lives be as normal as possible. After the attack, we had cut all lines of communication, and when the children still in my care reached maturity, they were mainstreamed in secret. Kelli and Jarrod were two such. They pursued their personal goals and interests, and that led to important positions in civil service. For their safety and my own, I have kept a distance.”

Jenna saw his eyes flicker ever so slightly to the side. Now he was lying, though she didn’t need to be a human lie detector to catch it. “You’ve been keeping tabs on everyone, even me.”

Before he could protest, she continued. “Your men—Cray and the other guy—were there just minutes after someone tried to kill me. You knew the hit was coming down, and you sent them to rescue me. Did you also tell them to kill Noah? Payback for what happened at the lab?”

Mercy gasped in surprise at this news, but Soter just sagged, defeated. “I knew. I was alerted to the government’s intention to hunt down and kill my children. I warned those that I could, but the only way to protect you was direct intervention. I am sorry that your…that Mr. Flood was caught in the crossfire, so to speak. I bore him no ill will.”

Soter was either telling the truth or learning how to control his response better. Jenna chose to believe the former. Nevertheless, there were a lot of gaps in his story. If the destruction of the lab had driven him and the others underground, then how was it that he had a veritable army at his disposal—manpower, firepower, helicopters and executive jets? Someone was funding him, and she saw no evidence that it was not a foreign government as Cort had claimed.

“So what happens next?” Jenna asked. “Where are we going?”

“Back where it all began, my dear. There is still much that you need to be told. And I need you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“I would prefer to explain it when we reach our destination.”

Jenna shook her head. “If you want my help, start talking now.”

The old man sighed again, this time in surrender. “Thirty-seven years ago, an extraterrestrial intelligence reached out to us. They sent us a message, and even though I succeeded in unlocking that message, I still do not understand what it means.

“They sent us instructions, in the form of a complete DNA sequence. A human genome, but with some very slight differences. You are more intelligent, faster and stronger than an ordinary human. You may also have other abilities of which you may not be aware, or which might not yet have become manifest. But these traits are the means, not the end itself.”

Jenna thought she understood what he was driving at. “You think the ETs told you how to make us smarter so that we would be able to figure out how to talk to them?”

“Perhaps. But there is another possibility. Are you familiar with genetic memory?”

Jenna knew the term from her psychology classes, but sensing that Soter meant it as a rhetorical question, she shook her head.

“For years, biologists have believed that humans acquire nearly all of our memories from interacting with the environment, but recent research is showing that some elements of memory—acquired phobias, for example—may be genetically transmitted from one generation to the next. This has been posited by many as an explanation for past-life regressions.

“Memories, you see, are nothing but sequences of proteins stored in our brain, and accessed by pathways of neurons. There’s no reason that the formation of memories cannot be coded in the DNA, especially when you consider that 98% of the human genome is non-coded, sometimes erroneously called ‘junk’ DNA.

“We don’t know what purpose non-coded DNA serves, but the intelligence responsible for sending us the message most certainly does. And I believe that every single nucleotide is important.”

Jenna nodded slowly. “You think the message is coded into my DNA.”

“Jenna,” Soter spoke in a solemn, almost reverent voice. “You
are
the message.”

45

Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico, USA

9:55 a.m.

The light rain that greeted Jenna as she stepped onto the tarmac intensified to a downpour, as the car in which she rode, along with Mercy, Dr. Soter and the two
faux
feds, made the half-hour trip into the rugged interior of the island territory of Puerto Rico. She had learned that Cray’s partner was named Markley, but she had learned little more about herself. The terrain was like nothing she had ever imagined. They were surrounded by undulating domes and valleys, lushly carpeted with verdant foliage, looking somehow greener beneath the gray sky.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Jenna turned and saw Mercy watching her. She nodded. “I’m used to flat islands and open water. Until last night, I’d never even left the Keys. I had no idea…”

She stopped, realizing the absurdity of the statement. This wasn’t a field trip. It was a homecoming. She had been born—if that was the word for it—and lived the first few months of her life somewhere on this very island. “Where was the lab?”

Soter fielded the question with a grave expression. “On the south coast, near Ponce. We stayed here to be close to the observatory. At the time, we had no idea where our research would take us, but we felt certain we would be…communicating…with someone. Even though our project shifted to a new discipline—genetic research—we stayed, because we knew that eventually, we would need to use the radio telescope.” He reached out a laid a hand on Jenna’s forearm. “And that day has finally come.”

The overt familiarity made Jenna uncomfortable, but she kept her reaction neutral. It was too soon to let her guard down, too soon to blindly trust Soter. His words belied the display of affection, a none-too subtle reminder that to him, she was a science experiment, not a daughter. And even if that wasn’t the case, she was nowhere near ready to embrace him as a father.

Father
. That was the worst aspect of this latest revelation. She had been so quick to demonize Noah for taking her away, depriving her of parents and a normal childhood. Now, the imagined crime was meaningless. She had no parents and her childhood would have been anything but normal. Noah, in taking her away from all of that, had given her normalcy. A life. That made him the closest thing she would ever have to a father.

But all that was behind her now. Father, home, childhood…normal…all of it was gone.

She blinked away tears—self-pity was a pointless indulgence—and turned her attention back to the passing landscape. The route took them through a valley dotted with residences, and then wove back into the turbulent landscape. Rising above the limestone domes was something that, while impressive, would only have been beautiful to an engineer—a gray-white spire, stabbing straight into the heavens. Large cables stretching away from the tower became visible as they climbed out of the valley. The tips of two more spires appeared further off in the distance, to form the three corners of a triangle. The cables were connected to an enormous structure of exposed metal beams—Jenna thought it looked like an unfinished suspension bridge—that seemed to hover above the tree tops. A huge geodesic dome dangled below the framework. Jenna recognized it as a radar dome, similar to the kind used on newer naval vessels. Given their destination, that made perfect sense.

“The Arecibo Observatory,” Soter said, slipping into tour guide mode. “The largest single aperture radio telescope in the world. This is where we received the second signal, hidden in background radiation. It has guided our journey and brought us full circle.”

He turned to face her and added, “You might recognize it. It’s been featured in a number of films.”

Jenna resisted an urge to shrug indifferently. “Looks like a busy place.”

“The observatory is a popular tourist attraction. Public funding for the sciences has always been meager, so it’s necessary to generate new streams of revenue. In this case, a comprehensive visitors’ center at the base of that tower.” He gave a conspiratorial smile. “Of course, my research is very well-funded. I have been able to pass some of that along, which has given me a great deal of influence with the administrators. We won’t need to stand in line today.”

The traffic on the road leading up to the remote site was heavier than she expected, especially on a Sunday. A line of cars and buses traveled toward the observatory. A few cars passed them going the opposite direction. The rain had not kept anyone away.

When they reached a junction, Cray turned out of the queue and headed up a solitary road toward a tall building. A blinking red light on a sign caught Jenna’s attention. The legend on the placard, written in both English and Spanish read: ‘Unshielded vehicles do not pass this point with red light.’ Cray did not stop.

“The 430 MHz transmitter can fry the electronics of older cars,” Soter explained. “Our ignition system is protected.”

Jenna wondered vaguely if they ought to be concerned about the effects of the radio waves on their bodies, but assumed that any such hazard would have long since been addressed by the scientists who operated the facility. Soter’s mention of the transmitter had raised a much more immediate question. “What exactly is it that you want me to do?”

“It will make more sense once we are inside.”

Jenna found this answer woefully inadequate. “You think you can just sit me down in front of a space radio and…what? Suddenly it will all just pop into my head? How to talk to them? What to say?” Too late, it occurred to her that she was letting her emotions take over. She narrowed her eyes, fixing his gaze, and when she spoke again, her tone was much softer. “I’m sorry, Helio…can I call you Helio? Doctor Soter just seems so formal, and...we’re family.”

He nodded slowly, almost reluctantly. His eyes darted away for a moment, but she waited until he was looking at her again to resume speaking. “Helio, it’s just that anything you can tell me about what’s really going on would help. A lot.”

She watched Mercy in her peripheral vision, wondering if the woman—
my sister? Mother? Clone? Double?
—would recognize what she was attempting to do. She thought it unlikely. These were tricks Noah had taught Jenna. Not some manifestation of mutant-alien superpowers.

“Yes. Of course. I’m not trying to withhold information, my dear. It’s just that it will be easier to explain once you’ve seen the signal.”

“The signal? The message with the DNA sequence?”

Another nod. “It may be that seeing the message for yourself might have a stimulating effect on that part of your brain where the genetic memory is stored.”

His eyes darted ever so slightly away as he said it. He wasn’t being completely forthcoming, and yet what he had said was, at its core, truthful.

“Is that all?” The message was the key component to all of this, but why did he believe that seeing her own genetic code would have any kind of effect?
Maybe there’s more to it?
“What about the rest of the message?”

His look of surprise confirmed that she had made the right guess. “You are every bit as remarkable as I had hoped, my dear. Yes, there is a portion of the message that we have not been able to make sense of, even after all these years of research. It’s a long binary sequence. Coming at the end of the message as it does, it may simply be normal background radiation, but it might also be a sort of signature, the sender signing off, as a HAM radio operator might do.”

All these years of research
. The words triggered a cascade of questions and Jenna had to fight to maintain her pleasant demeanor. “That’s right. You’ve been working at this for a long time. I know you told me, but why didn’t you have Mercy or one of the others do this?”

Something changed in the old man’s expression, like a curtain falling over a stage in the middle of a play. “With each successive generation, we were able to fine-tune the DNA sequence. The early generations…lacked something…but you, my dear, were the most perfect expression of the message, thus my hope that you will be able to unlock its final secrets.”

This time he was lying, but not about his intentions. What had he said earlier about Kelli Foster and Jarrod Chu?
Generation Six, cultivated in 1984…an almost perfect match to the genome code
. He was holding something back, something that concerned him enough that he was dodging her subtle manipulations.

She decided not to press him too hard just yet. “Oh. I figured it must be something like that. I’m surprised you didn’t come round me up sooner. I mean, since you knew where I was.”

“I was sorely tempted. Thirty-seven years is a very long time to wait for an answer. But it was important to allow your abilities to fully develop. If not for this threat to your safety, I would have been content to wait a few more years.”

Once more, she sensed an omission, but before she could figure out where to probe next, the car pulled to a stop and Cray shut off the engine. Over the steady drum of rain on the roof, Jenna could hear a loud rumble like an industrial generator.

Soter peered through the rivulets of water streaming down the windows, then threw the door open. “I’ve forgotten my umbrella. I fear we shall all get wet.”

“Won’t be the first time today,” Jenna replied. Mercy gave a good-natured groan.

Outside the car, the noise was even louder, making conversation impossible. “That’s the transmitter,” Soter shouted, waving for them to follow.

A second car pulled up beside theirs. Four men wearing rain slickers got out and joined their procession. Jenna guessed they were part of Soter’s security force. They certainly didn’t fit her stereotype of what astronomers were supposed to look like.

Cray hurried ahead to the front door of the building and held it open for the others. As Soter had warned, the brief trek from the car to the structure left them all soaked, but the downpour didn’t dampen Soter’s enthusiasm. After shaking off as much water as he could, he took the lead, guiding them inside with child-like eagerness. His cane was all but forgotten, tucked under one arm, as he moved. Cray and Markley brought up the rear, while the other four men remained outside.

The mechanical noise was dulled, but Jenna could feel vibrations rising through the floor and emanating from the walls. The transmitter was inside the building. Soter ushered them into a dimly lit room that reminded Jenna of the signal room in Cort’s safe house, but on a much larger scale. Computer servers lined the walls, along with a variety of other electronic devices and their blinking red and green LEDs. A few of these were no bigger, and looked no more sophisticated, than a citizen’s band radio, while others looked like the sound controls at a rock concert. Soter moved past these, his wet shoes squeaking on the black and white checkerboard tile floor. He led them to an area that had been partitioned into smaller workspaces. Each desktop held no less than four computer monitors, and each screen displayed incomprehensible graphical and textual data. A broad window, looking out at the metal-frame structure Jenna had glimpsed from the road, stretched across the wall beyond the workstations.

Soter approached one of the men working in the room and shook his hand. After a brief exchange, the man turned to his co-workers and said simply, “Lunch time.”

After the events of the last two days, Jenna didn’t trust her internal clock, but she was fairly certain that it was only about ten in the morning. That the men were ceding the room to Soter bore testimony to his influence, and made Jenna wonder again about the source of his funding. Cort’s assertion that the project had been run by the Soviet Union, and then later by the Russian government, seemed less likely here on American soil, but she couldn’t rule it out completely. Foreign or domestic, Soter would have had to cover his tracks very well, especially with the CIA gunning for him.

When they were alone, Soter gestured for Jenna to join him at a desk near the window. As she approached, she caught a glimpse of the panorama that lay beyond the glass.

“Whoa. Now I see what all the fuss is about.”

Soter grinned. “Quite impressive, isn’t it?”

Impressive was one word for it. Spread out before them, directly below the hanging structure, and hovering next to and above the surrounding treetops, was a vast bowl-shaped depression, silvery-gray like exposed concrete, stained a darker shade in some places, presumably from long years of exposure. Jenna knew there would be a satellite reflector dish of some kind, but nothing on this scale. “It looks like God dropped a contact lens.”

“An apt simile,” Soter said, “since it is a lens of a sort—our lens for gazing back into the heavens.”

There was something familiar about it, and Jenna recalled Soter’s comment about the observatory being featured in several movies. The dish, or something very nearly identical to it, had appeared in a James Bond movie, one of Noah’s favorites from the series, though as was his custom, he found plenty to complain about. Noah had been a real James Bond, after all.

“The reflector is a thousand feet across, and the antenna assembly is suspended four hundred and thirty feet above it. The dish itself comprises almost thirty-nine thousand aluminum panels, all perfectly machined to create a spherical reflector. The location was chosen because of a naturally occurring sinkhole crater, but the dish is suspended above it.”

Jenna looked at it more closely and could just make out the square lines where the individual panels were joined—not solid concrete like in the movie.
They totally got that wrong
, she thought, and then realized that it was exactly the sort of thing Noah would have said.