Tom Hyman (30 page)

Ajemian had been using the Biotech research department to dig up all the dirt on her it could find; but now that she was part of the ownership, he had had to stop. As it was, he lived in dread that she might get wind of how much he had already done. He had removed all the files on her from the department and taken them home. He had erased all traces of the investigation from the computer banks and the backup storage system as well. And he had taken the additional precaution of warning those who had been involved in the research that they would be fired immediately if they ever so much as mentioned it to anyone.

Still, he worried.

And what had he uncovered? The most damaging stuff had to do with the right-wing political fringe in Germany. Ajemian had discovered that she was secretly bankrolling the neo-Nazi New Germany party, the ND.

Ajemian believed the baroness was also pouring money into similar movements in Eastern Europe, where crime, economic hard times, and political confusion made the right-wing message especially appealing.

If Jupiter proved to be a success, then a lot more money was going to be siphoned off into these causes in the future.

Ajemian took one last look at the view. The Transylvanian Alps. The location was quite appropriate, he thought: the estate of a dead Romanian despot, located in Dracula’s own backyard.

What did the baroness really want from Dalton? he wondered.

It was hard to believe she was in love with him.

It must be Genny, Ajemian thought. She was the key. Stewart had said as much himself: Genny proved the project worked.

But Anne was clearly determined to get full custody of Genny.

And meanwhile, she was doing her best to keep Genny away from Dalton as much as possible. And keeping her away from Dalton meant keeping her away from the baroness.

Ajemian felt a sudden chill at the back of his neck. How far might the baroness go, he wondered, to make sure that she had access to Genny?

Lexy helped Anne solve her immediate practical needs. She let her and Genny stay in her large Manhattan apartment as long as Anne wanted, and loaned her the money she needed until the separation papers were finalized.

After a few weeks of adjustment, Anne began to enjoy her new emancipation. By March she had found her own apartment—a five-room floor-through in an old brownstone on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village. Genny’s nanny, Mrs. Callahan, moved in with them. It was cramped for three people, but Anne loved it.

Lexy began immediately bringing men around to meet Anne.

They invariably asked her out, and the results were invariably disappointing, or worse. Anne just wasn’t interested in any of them, and she quickly grew tired of fighting them off at the end of the evening.

Her last date—a charming, boyishly handsome, and very rich Italian playboy—was the last straw.

All evening he was the perfect gentleman—a little shallow, but still fun to be with. They had a good time. Anne felt receptive.

At her front door, he asked to see her again, and she said yes.

Then he asked if he could come up to use the bathroom. Anne showed him the bathroom—off her bedroom at the back of the apartment. When fifteen minutes had passed and he hadn’t come out, Anne went back to check on him. But he wasn’t in the bath

1 room. He was lying on her bed with all his clothes off, sporting a big grin and an even bigger erection.

Anne wasn’t amused. She scooped his three-thousand-dollar suit and the rest of his clothes up off the chair, tossed them out of the apartment, and dialed 911. He was out of the building, half-dressed, seconds before the police arrived.

Anne called Lexy and told her to lay off for a while. She just wasn’t interested in romance at the moment.

Her main concern was her daughter.

Dr. Elder promised her all the help with Genny he had time for, but his office was always jammed with patients, and it was all he could do to keep up. His workday began at six in the morning, with hospital rounds, and ended anywhere between seven and ten at night. Part of Sunday seemed to be the only time he took off. Anne felt guilty imposing on him, but she did it anyway. It was part of her new determination to be more assertive.

She also began the study of genetics. She was astonished, and a little discouraged, to discover how much genetics had advanced since she had finished college. Even with her background in the biological sciences, she could make only minimal sense out of the latest books and articles in the field. She realized that to master the subject in any depth was going to require an enormous amount of work.

Once or twice a week she would appear at Dr. Elder’s office and make herself helpful doing files, making appointments, and updating charts.

Then, at the end of the day, she’d steal a few minutes to discuss Genny and the subject of genetics. Sometimes she’d bring Genny along, and sometimes she’d bring Chinese takeout food and they’d have their discussion over a makeshift dinner.

Elder enjoyed these breaks in his busy routine, and Anne felt wonderfully comfortable with him.

Gennys medical history dominated their discussions. The results of the most recent tests were highly unusual. The early testing, done when Genny was an infant, had missed a great deal.

The technicians responsible had lacked the imagination to test the girl for anything outside the most obvious medical categories Even at that, the testers might have been suspicious of their results. Elder had never seen such perfect scores. Genny was a model of robust health in every respect.

The first MRI scan, done when Genny was a year old, might have caught someone’s attention, too, but whoever had viewed the results had missed some minor anomalies. Those were now more apparent in the second scan.

Genny’s brain-wave patterns appeared to be normal, except for one curious thing. The corpus callosum—that thick bundle of nerve-cell strands that connects the right hemisphere of the brain with the left—showed an unusually high degree of neurotransmitter activity.

The function of the corpus callosum was still not entirely understood, but it was known to be the main communications link between the two hemispheres. Elder wasn’t sure what the test results meant. The neurological specialists he had talked to weren’t sure, either, but several had speculated that the girl’s brain might be processing a lot more information than a normal brain.

This possibility was reinforced by Genny’s scores on the WISC (Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children), which Elder had persuaded a psychologist friend to administer. The psychologist had called Elder immediately after scoring the tests to tell him that Genny was almost off the scale. The test showed an IQ near 200—the highest score he had ever seen.

Elder tested Genny’s hearing and vision himself, and the results astounded him. Genny could detect sound waves well below and well above the normal range of the human ear. And her sensitivity was so great that she could detect a mere .02 decibel of sound-equivalent to the sound of a coin dropped on cement from a hundred yards away.

Her vision was equally extraordinary. She could resolve distant objects with acuity approaching that of a hawk; and, even more astonishing, she could see into both the infrared and the ultraviolet ranges of the light spectrum—areas completely invisible to the human eye without the use of special equipment. Elder thought that this probably explained the auras Genny said she…

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saw around people’s heads. She could be seeing the individual’s body heat, which would register in the infrared range.

Elder had decided to let the remaining three senses—smell, touch, and taste—go untested for the time being. They were more difficult to administer and score, especially with someone so young. And it didn’t really matter. He had more than enough to try to comprehend as it was.

The doctor had also measured Genny’s physical aptitude, and here he got yet another shock. At twenty-eight months, she possessed the muscular strength and coordination of an eight-year-old boy. He refused to believe these results at first, because her musculature appeared to have the normal tone and firmness for someone her age and size. But he had to accept the evidence of his own eyes. Genny—who weighed thirty pounds—could lift a forty-five-pound weight.

Elder told Anne that he no longer doubted that Genny Stewart’s extraordinary abilities were the result of Harold Goth’s genetic program. But what completely mystified him was that even accepting a thorough revamping of Genny’s genes, these test results were still impossible. It was accepted theory in genetics that you could improve someone’s genes only up to the optimum limit found in the human genome.

In other words, you could rearrange genetic code so that an individual who would otherwise suffer from defective vision—myopia, for example—would have perfect twenty-twenty sight. But you could not insert code into the genes that would give that person the eyes of a hawk, or the ability to see into areas of the electromagnetic spectrum clearly outside the range of the cones of the human eye, as it had evolved over many thousands of years. Yet Goth had somehow done it.

Elder gave Anne the names of several prominent geneticists who might be able to give more complete help and advice than he could. He also urged her once again to bring him a copy of Goth’s Jupiter program.

Without an understanding of how that worked, he explained, it was doubtful that anyone would ever be able to understand Genny. And without that knowledge, it was impossible even to guess what might happen to her as she matured.

Anne promised again that she would get the program, although she didn’t know how. Dalton had already refused her, and Ajemian told her it was impossible. The few copies that existed were closely guarded.

Genny, meanwhile, continued to produce new surprises.

One evening, while rearranging some furniture in her bedroom, Anne had bruised her shin on the sharp steel edge of the bed frame. She sat down on the bed and rolled up her jeans to examine the wound. The spot was swollen and sore and had begun to turn black and blue. Genny wandered in, dragging Rabbit.

“What’s the matter, Mommy?”

“It’s all right, darling. I just bumped my leg.”

“Can I make it better?”

Anne laughed and shook her head. “No. It’ll be okay.”

“But I want to, Mommy. You always make my bumps better.”

Anne pointed to the spot on her shin. “Okay, little doctor. It’s all yours.”

Genny bent close to the bruised area, pressed her little hand against it, and held it there. Anne started. Genny’s palm was very warm. She could feel the heat from it spreading through her flesh.

The warmth was accompanied by a pulsing, tingling sensation, like a mild electric current. When Genny removed her hand, the tingling sensation lingered. The little girl looked slightly flushed, as if she might have a fever.

“Do you feel all right, darling?”

Genny nodded and smiled.

“How did you make your hand so warm?”

“It’s a secret,” Genny said in a solemn tone.

“Give us a hint?”

“Well, I don’t think I can.”

“Have you done it before?”

“Well, just with my dolls, but that was only pretend. I tried to put my hand on Moby Cat where he hurt his leg, but he wouldn’t hold still.”

Moby Cat was an overweight, lumbering, goodnatured Maine coon cat Genny had acquired a year ago during a visit with her mother to the ASPCA.

1..

, Suddenly Genny announced that she was very sleepy. Anne carried her into her bed. She put her head down on her pillow and ‘ fell instantly into a deep sleep.

Anne noticed that the bruised spot on her leg no longer throbbed. An hour later both the swelling and the discoloration 1 had disappeared. There was no tenderness in the area, no trace of the injury whatsoever. Normally she’d have expected to have a visible bruise for a week. She wanted to call Dr. Elder but lies itated; he might think she was getting a little carried away. She called Lexy instead.

“Psychic healing,” Lexy announced. “Must be. Fits right in ~; with the auras. Let’s face it, your daughter must have psychic powers.

Maybe extraordinary psychic powers.”

“I don’t believe in them,” Anne declared.

“No? How do you explain what just happened to you?”

“I can’t. But there must be a better explanation than psychic healing.

“More plausible one, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Lexy laughed. “Ask your favorite doctor. See what he says.”

“I don’t dare. He’ll laugh at me.”

Lexy began researching the subject of psychic phenomena for Anne, and in the weeks that followed they discussed—or argued —the matter frequently. Anne finally brought it up with Paul Elder.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t rule out anything. It could well be that by enhancing the senses genetically Goth may have stumbled across the threshold of the psychic realm. The whole subject of extrasensory perception is an enigma. Genny may give us some new insight into it.”

“Do you believe it exists or not?” Anne persisted.

Elder smiled. “You won’t let me weasel my way out of anything, will you?”

Anne smiled back. She was beginning to like this man very much.

“Don’t like to be pinned down, huh?”

“Well, I don’t mind being pinned down by you,” he confessed.

Anne laughed. Elder flushed with embarrassment at his words.

“Get me a copy of Jupiter,” he said, recovering himself. “Then we’ll find the answer.”

Joe Cooper called the special number and waited for the call back.

When it came, he felt a powerful urge not to answer the phone.

He was sick of this business. It threatened to go on forever. He hated New York City, and he hated working in a hotel kitchen.

He wanted to be reassigned. He sighed and lifted the receiver.

The scrambling devices used to make the line secure made Roy’s voice on the other end sound disembodied and distant.

“Cooper?”

Speaking.”

“Time to set up a new surveillance.”