The Eden Prophecy (6 page)

Ranga slid a few more inches. “Better than the hell on earth you want to see.”

“We do only what is necessary,” Marko said. “What you suggested so long ago.”

The thought sickened Ranga. It had come full circle, the arrogance he’d always been accused of, the indictment of his profession. Geneticists playing God. And now …

What had he done?

Despite a decade of effort, he saw the truth plainly. His work must die. He must die with it.

He inched closer to the edge. He whispered to himself, “I’m sorry, Nadia. I tried.”

He turned, fired his last shots blindly, and then lunged for the edge without hesitation.

He made one full step before the crack of a gunshot cut him down.

Ranga’s back arched as blistering pain racked his body. He slumped to his knees, one hand on the railing. The tablet fell from his hand, landing on the deck, the Mark of Eden staring back up at him.

He tried to stand but lacked the strength. He reached for the tablet, felt its smooth surface in his hand once more, and then heaved it.

He watched it fall. It spun and tumbled, dropping silently through the air for what seemed like an eternity. Farther and farther down. And then it hit. Shattering into a thousand fragments on the concrete below.

Collapsing facedown, Ranga drifted toward darkness, expecting a bullet to find his skull. But instead of a finishing shot, he felt rough hands yank him up.

“Take him with us,” he heard Marko say. “Take them both.”

“What about the tablet?”

The second voice sounded nervous, fearful. Ranga understood that, too. The Master would be furious.

Marko was less afraid. “We will find the others, once we have the scroll.”

Marko grabbed Ranga by the hair and shook him awake. “And we will force the truth from your lips before you die. I promise you that.”

Ranga heard these words through a fog. He saw Marko’s unforgiving eyes and felt the hatred in his soul. He knew it was not a lie.

He had failed. He would die in horrendous pain. His dream would be twisted into an endless, living nightmare and hell would come to the earth after all.

D
anielle Laidlaw sat in the passenger cabin of a Citation X business jet as it idled on the ramp at an airport forty miles south of Dubrovnik. The main door stood open, the stairs down and locked. Activity was at a standstill.

This jet would be Hawker’s method of extraction, a departure in a style appropriate to the people he was supposed to represent. If anyone was watching, all they’d see was Hawker boarding a jet owned by a mysterious corporation chartered out of Malta and known to be involved in international weapons sales.

The only possible link to the United States would be Danielle herself. For that reason she stayed inside, window shades down, restricted to watching the ramp via a closed-circuit camera feed that displayed on a flat-screen monitor at the front of the cabin.

Hawker was late, twenty minutes so far. Not an overly concerning amount, but enough to stir a small degree of worry. She cared a great deal for Hawker. He had a way of bringing out the best and most honorable parts in her own personality. Parts she had lost in her initial climb up the ranks of the National Research Institute.

Her job often required lying, stealing, and deceiving in the name of the greater good. She didn’t really have a problem with that. But a time had come when it all went
too far, when the NRI began hiring civilians, putting them at risk and lying about the dangers they would face.

Two and a half years ago, on a mission like that, they’d also retained Hawker. He’d been little more than a hired gun at the time, but as the mission frayed at the edges and then blew itself apart, Hawker had been the one factor that kept the damage from becoming all-encompassing.

The final tally was grave, with more than a dozen deaths and a barely contained scandal that led right back to the agency’s then director, Stuart Gibbs. He’d disappeared before Danielle and the team made it home, and the NRI itself had almost collapsed, maintaining its existence by the thinnest of margins.

In the words of one critic, the mission had been “cataclysmic in the scope and magnitude of its failure,” but she and several others, mostly civilians, had survived, almost exclusively due to Hawker’s efforts.

The experience had been so intense that it took Danielle a while to work out her feelings. Only later had she come to realize the irony of Hawker, the fugitive mercenary and pariah, showing her, the upstanding straight-A government agent, what mattered and what didn’t.

It reminded her of deep-seated beliefs about honor and righteousness that she’d somehow buried or rationalized away as a hindrance to getting the job done. It had been the beginning of the way back to herself. And when the dust cleared, she found that she liked new her—the old her—better.

Eventually she’d returned to the NRI with renewed purpose and strength, determined that she could do what was right and still do her job.

Perhaps that was why her feelings for Hawker went deeper than the physical attraction they both felt. She was fairly certain that he’d touched her soul somehow.

Someday, in some way, she hoped, they’d get a chance to see where things might go, but so far Hawker’s cover
required him to live exactly as he had for the previous decade. He lived in the shadows as a target for Interpol and American agencies like the FBI that were purposefully kept in the dark as to his change in status, lest it leak out. He never spent more than a few weeks in one place. Not exactly the way to start a relationship.

She’d hoped that after this mission to Croatia they might have some time to be by themselves, but Hawker’s message and the information she’d uncovered trying to help him meant there was little chance of that.

As she waited and worried for him, it grieved her that she was here to deliver terrible news.

On the screen she saw an expensive-looking white sedan slide through the gate at the edge of the taxiway. The car rolled across the apron and parked beside the Citation, stopping at the foot of the stairs. Her heart filled with relief when Hawker got out, handed the keys to another man, and then began to climb the stairs.

He stepped through the door and looked directly toward her.

She couldn’t help but smile.

He grinned back at her, handsome and rugged.

“I have to ask,” she said, playfully, “why are you driving a Jaguar?”

“They didn’t have an Aston Martin,” he said.

“That’s not what I meant.”

As the stairs were rolled away, Hawker pulled the door shut, locked it into place, and came back to sit with her.

Pressing an intercom button on her armrest, she spoke to the pilot. “We’re ready to go.”

The pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “We’ve filed a flight plan to Hamburg. Do you want us to amend?”

“I’ll let you know once we’re airborne,” she said, and then turned her attention back to Hawker. “That’s going to be a little hard to explain on the expense report.”

“Tell them it’s a finder’s fee,” he said.

La Bruzca had been suspected of trafficking arms for years, but the extent had never been known. Loaning Hawker out to the CIA for a while gave them a chance to get a look at his operation. Danielle had read his report already, including the successful planting of a tracer in the nose cone of one missile. Wherever La Bruzca took his wares they should be able to follow. And if he sold them, the tracer that Hawker planted would lead the CIA right to the end user. She guessed that ought to be worth a car or two.

As the engines spooled up outside the cabin, Hawker’s eyes tightened on her. Despite her efforts to turn the conversation in another direction, he asked the exact question she’d hoped he would delay.

“Were you guys able to get a line on Ranga?”

“Yes,” she told him. “But it’s more complicated than that.”

He nodded. “I figured it would be. I don’t need you to release the hounds or give me a key to the National Archives. I just want to know if there’s anything you can tell me.”

She took a breath.

Hawker’s fears for an old friend might have fallen on deaf ears, except for a few simple facts. To begin with, Ranga Milan was considered a ticking time bomb, an A. Q. Khan in the making, only in possession of knowledge far more deadly than the simple skills required to build an atomic bomb.

Genetic technology could be almost infinitely dangerous. It was telling that the SALT and START arms limitation treaties and the Geneva Convention all but banned the creation and use of biological weapons, while nations stockpiled tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and pointed them at one another.

The fact was that biological weapons were easily controllable,
right up until the moment they were used. After that, all bets were off.

A biological weapon was alive. It could change, mutate, grow, or spread in ways never predicted. Once you sent a plague into your enemy’s backyard, no one could promise it wouldn’t return home, even with an ocean in between. Nor could anyone guarantee that such an organism would not mutate and overcome defenses and vaccines prepared against it in advance. To use such a weapon was like building a house in a field of dry grass and then setting fire to your neighbor’s hut.

Rational minds, even if interested in world domination, knew such weapons were not practical. But in the hands of a fanatic, a suicidal lunatic, or a doomsday cult, such a weapon might be perfect.

And without an announcement by the user, it might be months before something was even noticed, at which point a disease or plague would have spread far beyond its initial starting point and become unstoppable.

Fortunately or unfortunately, someone had recently made such an announcement, in the form of a letter, carrying an unknown virus and delivered to Claudia Gonzales, the assistant U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Suspicion focused on its being the work of Ranga Milan.

That was fact number two. In the long run it would be the most painful. But under the current circumstances, Danielle guessed fact number three would bring on the most immediate anguish.

“It’s more complicated than that because of a pair of incidents that occurred over the last forty-eight hours.”

Not wanting to seem evasive, she focused first on Hawker’s question.

“Regarding Ranga,” she said. “We took the information you gave us. We found him in Paris. I’m sorry, Hawker, but Ranga’s dead.”

Hawker’s jaw clenched and he took a slow breath before responding. “How?”

The file in front of her detailed the life and painful death of Ranga Milan. She could have handed it to him, but that seemed so cold.

“Twenty-eight hours ago, a shooting occurred on the secondary observation deck of the Eiffel Tower. At first blush, it was considered a terrorist incident or even an assassination attempt against an Iranian exile who happened to be there. But we know differently now. Ranga was on that deck.”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded. “Eyewitnesses and video from the site show two men being captured and hauled off by the Parisian police. Only the police reported no one in custody.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Last night the bodies of four officers were found in an abandoned house on the outskirts of the city. Someone had killed them the day before and taken their place in the tower patrol.”

“Someone who needed access to the tower.”

She nodded. It was clear the officers had been targeted and taken before the incident. Their uniforms, IDs, and even their cars had been used.

“Any idea who?”

She shook her head. No one had a clue. Certainly no group had claimed responsibility.

“What about Ranga?” Hawker asked.

“They found him this morning,” she said. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but he’d been tortured and mutilated in some way.”

Understandably she could sense the anger rising in Hawker. “Tortured.”

She nodded slowly. “I don’t have all the details. I’m hearing it was pretty bad. He was left tied up in another vacant property for the police to find.”

After a deep breath, Hawker held out his hand. She passed him the file. It contained everything they knew, including the fact that an Iranian, confirmed to be a member of the Green Revolution and a dealer in stolen antiquities, was still missing, that a large sum of cash was found at the site, and that something had been thrown from the deck. Analysis showed the object to be made of dried clay, but the destruction was so complete it was impossible to determine just what had been destroyed.

She pointed to the file. “There’s background information in there,” she said, referring to Ranga’s profile. “Some of it you may know, some of it maybe not.”

Hawker began to read. She could see the tension in his face, could sense him battling the frustration and anger.

“I hate to say this,” she added, “but that’s not the worst of it.”

Hawker looked up.

“The day before Ranga’s disappearance, a letter was received at the UN. It carried a rather bizarre rambling threat and also some form of unknown virus.”

“I heard about an anthrax scare,” he said. “Is that what we’re talking about?”

“That’s just the cover story,” she said. “To keep people calm.”

“Anthrax is the cover story?” he repeated. “What the hell is the real story then?”

“It’s bad,” she said. “It’s like nothing anyone has seen before. It may be close to one hundred percent infectious. The threat indicates it is designed to cause a plague.”

By the look on his face, Hawker had already guessed where this was going. “And the source?”

“The letter was anonymous, but on an impermeable layer inside the envelope they found fingerprints pretty much everywhere. The prints are Ranga’s.”

Hawker looked up at the ceiling and exhaled. It wasn’t
a look of disbelief but a look of frustration, as if something long feared had just been confirmed.

“He said he’d done something unforgivable. I’m guessing this is it.”

“He was your friend,” Danielle said, “so I don’t expect this to be easy. But I need you to tell me anything about him that we might not already know.”