“Hullo?” Mike half bellowed into the phone, before correcting his volume so as not to wake Louisa.
“Mike, it's Ambassador Johnson in London.”
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Louisa was dreaming that she was on holiday in the Caribbean with Mike. They had just made love in the ocean, and were now lying side by side on the cool, wet sand. She heard a shrill bird calling overhead, calling repeatedly, and she began to wake up.
The room around her was foggy, and her eyelids were twitching uncontrollably. At first she struggled to open her eyes, almost as if they were glued shut, but then they opened. She couldn’t see clearly, but she recognised the wallpaper and immediately realised she was in Mike's bedroom. Her eyes were twitching for some strange reason, and there was a grogginess in her head, as if she had just been forcibly woken from a very deep sleep. She closed her eyes again, and tried to wake up slowly. Then she heard Mike's voice speaking to someone, and she relaxed and listened to him, half hoping she would return back to the Caribbean where she'd been lying in the afterglow of making love with him on the sand.
“Ambassador, how are you? Listen, it’s a difficult time to talk just now…”
Mike peered quickly round the door and looked at Louisa. Her eyes were still tightly closed and she was laying just as he had left her. The telephone had not woken her from her trance. “…I’m in the middle of hypnotising my contact in the Haissem team. You know the one I wrote to you about. I’m just debriefing her.”
“That’s why I’m calling you. I've read your report and your conclusion but I cannot allow your personal feelings to interrupt your duties. You must continue your contact with her, and control your own feelings. That is an order!”
“Colonel, there is more involved here than you understand!”
“Are you mad? You must never address me by military title. This is a public line!”
“Sorry...but that’s just another example how much my feelings for Louisa are clouding my judgement!”
“Listen Mike, I’ll make it clear to you. If you don’t maintain contact with the girl, I’m going to close you down and send you back to the States. Then you won’t see her at all. The only way that you will be able to continue seeing her, is if you carry on with the project! Do you understand me?”
Mike hesitated, not knowing how to answer.
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
“Yes, sir. I do.”
“Good. I’m glad we’ve got that straight. Now tell me, are they still on target to ship the Crown of Thorns back to France tomorrow?”
“Yes sir, as far as I know, the switch we did with the Crown of Thorns was completely effective. No one suspected that Louisa swapped the real one for a fake. Even Louisa is totally unaware of her involvement or her actions...I hypnotised her to do it for me...The operation has been a complete success. The fake Crown is due to be picked up tomorrow afternoon by the Cardinal.”
“Excellent. Our team in the States has received the Crown and has started working on a similar project at their end. I want you to give me a weekly update on the progress the Oxford team is making. Every Tuesday evening. Call me at home. You have my private business number. Is that clear?”
“Yes sir.”
Louisa’s eyes were firmly shut but she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Mike had been hypnotising her? She had helped him steal the Crown of Thorns? When? How? How come she had no recollection of it?
What was going on? A cold fear swept over her and she fought with the urge to stand up and scream. She forced herself to be calm and controlled, and with all her senses now alert, she continued listening to Mike’s voice coming from the hallway.
“…Okay, and one other thing. The team in the States need you to get a copy of the details on just how the graduate Jason’s proposed new methodology works for ‘breaking down the DNA to reproduce the complete chromosome sets.’ I don’t know exactly what that sentence means, because I’m not a scientist. I’ll leave that side of things up to you. Please get it within the next two weeks.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s asking too much! It’ll be far too difficult to hypnotise Louisa to get that information for me, or even for the bloody CIA!”
Mike knew that it was in actual fact totally possible to programme Louisa to do anything he wished, but he was trying to protect her.
“Don’t give me that Mike. I don’t want any ‘no’s or ‘can't’s’. Just do it. Understand?”
Mike hesitated, wanting to argue, wanting to protest...
“I repeat, do you understand?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
“Good, then get on with your work. Speak to you next week.”
Mike hung up, and turned towards Louisa. For a few quiet moments he watched her lying peacefully asleep in his bed. Before the phone rang he had been on the verge of deprogramming her. To setting her free. Now he had to go back in there and ask her to betray her friends even more. How could he do it?
Mike sat on the edge of the bed beside her, and stroked an almost invisible hair out of the corner of Louisa’s eyes. His throat was tight, and he found it difficult to speak. But somehow the cold professionalism that had been installed in him from years of clandestine operations resurfaced and buried once again the human emotions that Mike had begun to enjoy over the past couple of months. He hated himself. He was nothing. Just a little cog in a big machine. With no personal feelings.
“Louisa, I am so jealous of the knowledge that you have…of the fun you have in your group with your colleagues…I love you so much that I really want to understand everything about you. Especially about your work, which I know means so much to you. I would love to know and understand what the process is that Jason has developed to break down the DNA, and just how he can reconstitute and create a complete set of chromosomes of the person from which the cloned blood cell came. Next Saturday night, at 3 o’clock in the morning, just like last week, I want you to slip down from the lab and give me a complete set of Jason’s notes on how to do this. Can you do this for me?”
Louisa was listening with horror to everything that Mike was suggesting. This was all the confirmation she needed that the bastard was abusing her in a way she could never have imagined. Instinctively she knew that the absolutely wrong thing to do just now would be to show any sign that she was conscious. She had to pretend that she was still hypnotised, for it was clear to her now that that was exactly the state she was in before the ringing telephone had disturbed them. Mike had hypnotised her!
“Yes Mike. I can do this for you.”
“Good...good...that’s very good...now after you have given me the papers on Saturday I will drive you home and drop you off at your apartment, so make sure you have switched everything off in the lab before you leave it. When you get home you will go to bed normally, and fall asleep. When you wake up the next day, you will remember nothing from the night before. But you will miss me and your desire for me will be stronger than before …Louisa, I want you always to know exactly how much I love you...”
The last part caught her off guard. She hadn’t been expecting that.
“Right, now I’m going to count back from three to one, and when I reach one I want you to feel very happy, and wake up feeling as if you had just been asleep. A long good sleep. …three...two...one...”
Louisa pretended to wake up.. She fluttered her eyelids a few times, and yawned.
“Oh...Mike, sorry I must have fallen asleep...hey,.I feel GRRREEEEAAAATTT!! I don’t know what you do when you make love to me…but it certainly makes me feel good!” she said.
That was on the outside. On the inside the first seeds of hate germinated within her and she made herself a solemn promise.
“How could you have done this to me? Made me betray my friends and my country? Made me let you rape me? Made me think I loved you. I’ll get you back for this you bastard…if it’s the last thing I do.!”
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Chapter Thirty
Six
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She left Mike’s flat about thirty minutes later, making some excuse that she had to sleep at her house that night, because she was expecting her mother to call her first thing in the morning.
When she got home she poured herself a large brandy, and took it with her into the shower, where she tried to wash and scrub the lies and filth and betrayal from her body, to cleanse her skin, and her mind.
She banged her head against the wall of the shower and pulled at her hair, and cried uncontrollably while the water poured over her and washed away her tears.
When standing seemed too much of an effort, she sat on the floor of the shower, coiling her legs up into her chest in the foetal position and wrapping her arms around her legs, hugging them as tight as possible. She began to rock back and forward, all the time the tears flowing from deep within her and the hot water pouring down on her head and washing away her sorrow.
She must have been in the shower for almost half an hour before the tears stopped and she realised the water had become cold. She was shivering. Slowly, she stood up and towelled herself down. She knew she had to call the Professor immediately.
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It was five forty nine in the morning when the phone rang. He had just got into bed about thirty minutes before and after the hectic evenings activities he had only just been able to doze off. The Professor tried to ignore the ringing phone, hoping it would go away. But it didn’t. For a few moments he thought about simply unplugging the phone but he knew that anyone calling at this time of the night would have a good reason to do so. The call had to be important.
“Hullo? Whoever you are do you know what time of the morning it is?”
“Hi Mathew… I’m sorry to disturb you…but I have to speak to you...now...”
The Professor sat up, pulling the pillows up behind his back in the bed. It was Louisa on the phone, and the Professor could hear that she was crying.
“Calm down girl. Can’t it wait until daytime?” He was puzzled. What did she have to tell him? How could she have found out so quickly that he was on to her?”
“No. It can’t. I need to speak to you now...face to face...I’m sitting outside your house in my car.”
“Okay, okay. Give me five minutes to pull on some clothes and I’ll let you in.”
A wave of emotions swept over the Professor as he searched for some trousers, and a shirt and jumper. How could he face the girl now, knowing what she had done? The anger started to boil beneath the surface of his skin, threatening to explode at any second. On the other hand, when he had heard her crying on the phone, he had felt sorry for her, and he had fought hard to prevent himself for trying to console her as they spoke.
He switched the lights on in the hall, and walked slowly down the old curving stone staircase while fighting with a thick woollen jumper. As he threw back the latch and opened the door Louisa poured her way into the hall and was inside his house and at the bottom of his staircase before he'd had a chance to say "Come In."
He looked her up and down. Her hair was a mess, and she made a pathetic figure standing there. She looked like a lost child, her hands hidden in the arms of her long, purple jumper, which clashed violently with her black track-suit trousers. Her training shoes had seen better days, and as the Professor looked at her she erupted into a mountain of tears.
“Oh Professor...I’ve done something terrible...something unbelievable...”
“Hush now child. Perhaps we’d better go into the kitchen and make a cup of tea. You can tell me all about it in there!”
Unable to fight the nice, old man syndrome that welled up within him, the Professor put his arm around her shoulders and walked her through the back of the house into the kitchen. It was obvious that the woman had come here to confess her crime, and before he passed any further judgement on her, he was going to listen to every word she had to say. He sat her down at the big old oak table in his large kitchen and while he made a fresh pot of Earl Grey, she wrapped her arms around herself inside the big jumper and rocked herself back and forward on the edge of the chair, an obvious sign that the woman was in terrible mental distress. She wasn’t acting.
He filled the pot with hot water, and brought it to the table with the cups, fetching some milk and some digestive biscuits and placing them on the table beside her. He poured the milk into the cup and then filled it up with tea. Louisa wrapped her both hands round the cup, took a sip and slowly started to tell the Professor what had happened.
“I’ve been such a fool. Such a fool ...I thought I was in love…I thought it was real…”
“Louisa, start at the beginning, and tell me slowly and clearly what's happened.”
It was thirty minutes before Louisa had finished telling the Professor everything. She told him all about her love affair, and the events of the evening, and the realisation that she must have stolen the Crown of Thorns and handed it over to Mike and the Americans. And how only two hours before Mike had asked her for details of the process that Jason had discovered. The Professor listened carefully, and by the end of it he was both pleased and ashamed. Pleased that Louisa was really just an innocent bystander in the whole thing and that she had come to him to confess immediately she had found out what she had done. Ashamed because he had believed that she'd had a part in it. Ashamed, because he hadn’t trusted her.
When she was finished, he comforted her in the best way he could, gave her a hug and took her up to the spare bedroom where he left her to find some sleep.
Closing the bedroom door quietly behind him, he returned to the kitchen to make himself another cup of tea. He had some more thinking to do.
The Haissem project had now become an international affair, a power play which superpowers would play against a backdrop of national security and international politics. From the outset this was exactly what he’d wanted to avoid! From here on in it could get very ugly.
Regrettably, the time had come to tell the British government the full details about the Haissem project. He couldn’t hide it much longer. He would have to tell them soon.
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Chapter Thirty Seven
CIA Biological Warfare Institute
Vale, Colorado
America
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The team now stationed at the CIA Biological Warfare Institute (CBWI) in Vale was headed up by Jim Stuart, head of the government's Genetics Research Core. David Calvert had agreed to act as his second in command.
Each man was equally as clever as the other, but Jim was senior in terms of years spent on the planet, and was a good stabilising influence on the younger more adventurous David.
Together they had assembled a truly impressive group of the intellectual elite of American biologists and geneticists. It would be fair to say, that the last time such a well respected team of scientists had been pulled together for delivering a key project would have been for the Manhattan project during World War Two in the Twentieth Century. The result, the atomic bomb, has shown that such think tanks could and did work.
The only difference was in the way the team was formed. In America the group had been forced together under unspoken threats from the CIA. The threats such as they were, had been obsolete and unnecessary, since to a man, the whole team would have volunteered for such a project anyway.
In the past month the progress they had made had been incredible. They believed that they had already caught up with the work that the graduate student Jason had theorised, and were eager to start experimentation as soon as possible. One of the team had requested that their intelligence should try to get hold of the theoretical papers from Jason in Oxford, just to check they were on the right track and had not missed anything. The CIA had agreed and instructed their London branch to deal with the request.
The amount of resources allocated to the project allowed the team to be split into two different groups. Each group comprised of ten lead scientists, and both teams were instruct
ed to proceed independently of the other.
The idea was to not to put all the eggs in the same basket. This strategy encouraged different approaches to the same problem, which should double their chances of taking the lead away from the English. If either team came to an obstacle that they could not overcome they were allowed as a last resort to consult with the other team to see if they had already encountered and overcome the same problem.
Jim Stuart headed one team, the ‘J’ team, and David Calvert the other, the ‘D’ team. Each knew that the likelihood of one asking the other for help would be minimal.
The only time the two teams would be working together was at the very beginning, when blood samples would be taken from the Crown and sufficient quantity of the genetic material would be recreated and reproduced for both teams to be able to proceed alone with all the material they needed.
They had awaited the arrival of ‘the shipment’ expectantly, and when it finally came they all gathered in the main laboratory to witness its almost ceremonial unpacking and placement into a new sterile, secure, super clean and regulated environment. Afterwards, they all stood around the Crown of Thorns in its new transparent, cylindrical, fire-proof, temperature and humidity controlled casing and looked on at it in awe.
The team was made up of a mixture of Jews, Christians, and a couple of complete agnostics, but to a man the presence of the Crown had a strange and calming effect on them. The Crown affected each man in a different way. With the Crown physically now in their presence, the project suddenly crystallised and became real, and overnight the attitudes of the teams changed. Whereas the team under Jim Stuart became very serious and almost religious in their commitment to success, the team under David Calvert became more lively and happy, full of excitement and jovial banter. Both teams were committed to success, but their commitment materialised in different ways.
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