“Your Holiness, I have to ask,” De Santis said. “Are you all right? You seem to be in considerable pain. Shall I call your physician?”
“There is no need. He’s run tests,” the pope said. “I hear ringing, but he finds nothing. I’m afraid it’s a different kind of trouble that plagues me.”
“What is it, Your Holiness? What trouble are you referring to, then?”
“It’s what I must ask you to investigate, Giancarlo,” the pope said. “The child I’ve spoken of, the one Father Parenti claims came from the Shroud, is said to be in Kolkata, of all places.”
“Kolkata? Are you certain?” De Santis said. “If you’re correct, the child is in certain danger. I’m sure you’ve heard the news from there. It’s very dangerous. I’ve heard reports that there are now a million dead. Some believe it is the beginning of the end of the world.”
“Yes, that is the problem. You see, my friend,” the pope said as he lowered his voice to a whisper again, “if what Father Parenti relays is true, and I believe it quite possibly is, this child clone may be the cause of this terror.”
“What are you saying, Your Holiness?”
“I’m saying the Church—indeed, the world—has not seen something like this in a very long time. I’m saying we’re getting word that this child born of the Shroud is possibly a Watcher.”
The term nearly made De Santis ill. He couldn’t believe the pontiff’s words. The last time he’d heard mention of a Watcher was in relation to studies done by noted Vatican scholars more than half a century before. They had carefully researched the suspected relationship between Adolf Hitler and the occult. It was suspected that the depth of Hitler’s evil and his near success in achieving his unthinkable goals stemmed from a pact between the heinous dictator and a supernatural force that had befriended him in the form of a Watcher. There had even been rumors of a document, an agreement signed in blood, between the two. He knew the Vatican’s deep archives held secret files that some had said provided definitive proof.
De Santis was a confident man, but he looked down at the floor as though a great weight had been placed directly on his shoulders. Perhaps his assignment was not a gift after all, he thought.
“What is it you would like me to do in your service, Your Holiness?” he asked. He had never imagined such a story was possible, nor had he expected an assignment so large. On the other hand, success might mean extraordinary things, perhaps even a mitre, a bishop’s cap.
“I’m deeply sorry to say this,” the pope said. “But in some way, we are responsible. The Church is responsible. I am responsible. We have put Christianity at risk. If what I’ve learned is true, we helped to bring about this godforsaken resurrection of evil through our ill-conceived plans to humiliate Dr. Bondurant. And now we have a responsibility here. You must find the child. We must learn for ourselves what we have done.”
“I suppose I should start with our Domenika,” De Santis said. “I know that she and Bondurant have wed. Forgive me, Holy Father, but I still despise the man.”
“I beg you to remember the Church’s sin against him when he was a child,” Augustine said.
De Santis turned his head from the pope as if to avoid the charge. “However, perhaps he can be of use to us by providing a clue,” De Santis said.
“Yes; reach them quickly, Giancarlo. We’ve no time to lose.” The pain now evident on the pope’s face looked as if it stemmed from the blade of a knife twisting into the back of his neck.
“And if I do track down a monster, a Grigori, Your Holiness,” De Santis said, worried about the misery on the pontiff’s face. “If there is indeed a Watcher reborn, then what?”
“Then God forgive us, my son. Our souls are at risk, for we have opened a doorway to hell,” the pope said. “We are but his servants, and as his son proclaimed, we know not what we’ve done.”
Chapter 13
Kolkata
It was two o’clock in the morning, and Khan made her way across the living room of her massive suite at the Oberoi Grand, the finest hotel in Kolkata. Her assistant, Juliet Armistice, had just rung the doorbell to Khan’s suite. Khan, bleary-eyed and in search of the front door, had to navigate her way through the dark to find it. An obstacle course of paper mounds and towers of research reports reached for the ceiling at almost every turn. They were poised to topple at the slightest touch.
“These are the very last of them,” Armistice said as she breathlessly unloaded the heavy stack of documents into Khan’s waiting arms at the door. “WHO says this is it. It’s everything they have left on the flu.”
As a foremost authority on the Spanish flu, a devastating disease that had appeared out of nowhere exactly one hundred years before, Khan had begun zeroing in on some grave similarities between that flu and the plague that had swept the Indian subcontinent during the past year.
Armistice, a lovely brunette almost six feet tall, had the figure of a runway model. But her looks betrayed her. She had worked on postdoctoral studies in immunology at Duke for the past year, and had been invited up from several floors below to confer with the “Great Khan” for a few reasons. For starters, she was one of the few on Khan’s investigative team who had knowledge of the science behind the evolution of certain plagues, including the Spanish flu.
The Spanish flu—or the “Great Flu of 1918”—was the largest medical catastrophe in history. It had likely killed more people than the infamous “black death” of the Middle Ages or even World War I. Five hundred million people around the world had suffered from the Spanish flu. One hundred million had died. Life expectancy around the world had declined by twelve years. The flu had killed more than seventeen million people in India alone. While the new “Devil’s Sweat” in India had claimed just more than one million lives since Khan had been asked to intervene, most of her highly confidential computer models showed at least twenty million dead in India alone before a cure might be found.
Khan invited Armistice into the suite and turned on a single lamp in what was once an opulent sitting room. The light revealed somewhat of a catastrophe, a space that resembled a dormitory study lounge more than a presidential suite. Khan had not allowed the housekeeping staff to touch the room for several days, for fear they might shift a single document out of place. She had even threatened to horsewhip one of the waitstaff who had attempted to collect the scores of take-out cartons and water bottles strewn about the floor. A few piles of trash overtook a coffee table that had disappeared from sight.
“Let’s talk about shapeshifters, shall we?” Khan said as she cleared several pizza boxes from a white linen sofa to find a seat.
“We can talk all night,” Armistice said.
Khan watched as Armistice sorted through the pizza boxes. To her delight, she found one box half-full of slices that looked relatively fresh. She reached for a piece.
“Okay, then,” Khan said. “We’ve been running tests for a week now on frozen remnants from the 1918 flu virus.”
“Yes,” said Armistice. “I was on the team that ran the compares on the Devil’s Sweat today. We detected H1N1 in the mix.”
“Which means, for starters, we have a known quantity on our hands. A highly known virus containing subsets of eight commonly recognized genes.”
“I can name the genes if you’d like,” Armistice said. “But while we haven’t fully confirmed it, we may have a shapeshifter in our midst. With sixteen possible H types, mankind has only ever seen and identified three: H1N1, H2N2, and H3N2. We wouldn’t know what to do if the genetic structure of a virus such as H4 or H5 appeared. We’d be . . . well, we’d be—”
“Screwed,” Khan said as she helped herself to Armistice’s pizza find. She took a slice in one hand and with the other picked up a document that had been lying on the coffee table. She flipped to its executive summary and handed it to Armistice to read. Khan stretched her legs on the coffee table before them while Armistice spent several minutes carefully studying the summary of the report.
“I
n the last century,” Armistice said, “we . . .”
“Go ahead and say it,” Khan said.
“We’ve never seen shapeshifting like this before,” Armistice said. Her voice quavered a little. “Call it what you want: H4, H5, H6. Call it faerie blood. The genetic substructure of our Devil’s Sweat is truly different from anything we’ve seen before.”
“It carries an extra gene,” Khan said.
“This explains why everyone who encounters the virus is dying regardless of what we try.”
“Yes, it does,” Khan said. “There’s not even partial immunity to a virus mankind has never seen before. There’s no ‘herd’ immunity present. It’s what I thought. Everyone dies.”
“What do you mean, everyone dies?” Armistice asked.
“Well, it takes time for everyone to die, Juliet,” Khan said. She spied a thermos on the table and hoped it held the slightest bit of warm coffee inside. Mercifully, two cups were left. Khan poured the coffee into some Styrofoam cups she found stuck together on the floor. “Do you recall what they said about the Spanish flu when it had run its course?” Khan asked.
“Somewhat,” Armistice said.
“Before the virus burned itself out, it circled the world three times,” Khan said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you and I are just going to have to find a way to save everyone.”
Armistice took a seat on the couch beside Khan, crossed her legs, and stared forward.
“What’s wrong?” Khan asked. She knew she’d struck a real nerve.
“I had the opportunity, if that’s what you want to call it, of talking with some of the dying today,” Armistice said. “It’s for that report I promised to Dr. Ryan. I can’t help but envision the likes of me, the likes of you, in these terrible circumstances sooner than we might know, and I—”
“Cyanosis? The bluing of the skin?” Khan asked. “Edema of the lung? The suffocation?”
“For God’s sake, stop it, Dr. Khan,” Armistice said. She looked sick. She pulled away from Khan and retreated into a ball in the corner of the couch.
“If we’re to do any good in this great big mess we find ourselves in, it means it’s likely we may find the answer outside the bounds of science. Something strange is happening here, and I’m worried but hopeful that we’re going to stumble upon a solution. You know about Albert Mitchell, don’t you?”
“I used to laugh when I heard the stories about him when I was an undergrad. You don’t mean to say you believe any of those tales?”
“What did you hear?” Khan asked.
“He was the devil’s agent or something who started the Spanish flu, and he was the only one capable of stopping it.”
“On the morning of March 4, 1918, a company cook by the name of Albert Mitchell reported sick to the infirmary. He was stationed in Fort Riley, Kansas, at the time.”
“Here he was in Kansas, but they called it the Spanish flu. I never understood that,” Armistice said.
“Just about every country in the world censored its press over how devastating the flu had become so as not to cause a panic,” Khan said. “The only exception was Spain. They censored nothing, and as a result, the world looked at Spain as the likely source of the plague. But it wasn’t.”
“So it all starts with this Mitchell?”
“Toward the end of his shift, he reported to the infirmary with a simple fever,” Khan said. “By noon that day, more than one hundred soldiers had checked themselves into the same hospital. They literally melted in their beds. Within a week, more than five hundred men reported in sick, but just as many had been sent around the world to fight the war with their flu intact.”
“I know the symptoms were horrid,” Armistice said. “Un-speakable.”
“Here’s the thing, Juliet,” Khan said. “The Army researched this over and over and over. They’re world-class record keepers. But they have no record of a company cook by the name of Albert Mitchell at Fort Riley, Kansas. There is no record of his ever being stationed there. No record of his having spent even a day in the infirmary. Yet somehow he became the cause of the greatest pandemic in the history of the world.”
“But how could he possibly matter today?” Armistice asked. “I don’t see the relevance.”
“Juliet, I can’t explain it. But I believe that for the first time in our lives, we’re facing a completely unknown threat, something not of this world,” Khan said. For a very rare moment, she felt what it was like to be truly afraid. Her father had taught her to meet every fear, every challenge, with eyes wide open and head-on. Those who couldn’t were weak.
“I saw your notes, Dr. Khan,” Armistice said. “You believe our odds of defeating the plague in the time we have are slim.”
“I know it sounds strange, but I know when the long odds are right. My gut is telling me that just like a hundred years ago, there’s an Albert Mitchell out there somewhere,” Khan said. “We need to find him, or he needs to find us. Otherwise, it really could be the end of it all.”
Chapter 14
Amtrak Acela, Washington, D.C., to New York
As soon as Domenika’s photo popped up on his phone, Bondurant smiled and tapped the screen to answer her call.
The picture he had chosen to identify her when she called from her cell was a classic, one of Bondurant’s favorites. Her mother had taken it when Domenika was only about eight years old. In the photo, she posed playfully, holding her first violin in one arm and striking a classic “muscleman” pose with the other. For Bondurant, the photo captured the essence of both the child and the woman he had come to love. Beautiful, strong, artistic. He was fascinated by the determination in her eyes.
“Where are you?” Domenika asked. The urgency in her voice was clear. “Do you have Wi-Fi?”
“We’re on the Acela to New York. The press conference is at ten a.m.,” Bondurant said. He took his phone away from his ear for a moment to look at its screen. “I’m fine. Plenty of signal here.”
“I need to send you a video. I have something incredibly important for you to see.”
Bondurant looked past Parenti to catch the swift-moving scenery as it passed by in the large window beside them. The train was moving at top speed halfway between its two main stops along the Northeast Corridor.
“Padre Parenti says hello, by the way,” Bondurant said.
The little priest nodded. Bondurant could see he was preoccupied, positively captivated by the coffee, juice, and Danish the first-class car offered for free.
“Did you get it yet? Did you get it?” Domenika asked.
“Get what?”
“The link! The link I sent you from Fox!”
“What link?” Bondurant asked. He hadn’t a clue what she was talking about.
“The link about Laurent!” Domenika shouted. “I just texted you.”
Bondurant looked down at his cell phone’s screen again. As he did, a new text message from Domenika popped up. She’d spared any words in her haste. It was simply a link to a video. Bondurant tapped it with his thumb. “Okay, stand by,” Bondurant said. “I’ll call you right back.”
He hadn’t heard news of Laurent in a long while. He’d wondered whether Meyer had eliminated him after the cloning when he was no longer of use. He stared at the screen. Suddenly, he saw the face of the man he had seen only in news photographs before: Dr. François Laurent.
Parenti set down his treats. He too fixed his eyes on the small screen, incredulous at what was before them. As the two looked on, video of an anchor at Fox News appeared.
The anchor said, “Speaking of science and mystery, we have a strange story to report to you today, this one from France. An infamous French obstetrician—Dr. François Laurent—who had gone missing and was once tied to a strange religious sect, has turned up claiming success for something he has purported to be attempting for years: the cloning of a human being. Michelle DuMont has our story from Paris. Michelle?”
“David,” the corresponde
nt said, “I’m standing outside the apartment building of Dr. François Laurent, who, just days ago, apparently returned to Paris and has informed medical authorities here that he has accomplished what few scientists believed was possible—that is, the cloning of a human being; indeed, his own son.”
Bondurant paused the video. “I can’t believe this,” he said.
Parenti sat stunned.
Bondurant hit play again.“While he has not yet provided specific proof of his effort, he is promising to deliver remarks before the French Academy of Sciences next month detailing what he claims is an unprecedented scientific feat. If his claims prove to be true, he will have succeeded in making history, history that most in the scientific and religious communities around the world have feared for several decades. We’ve been down this road before, though, with bogus claims from one group or another suggesting success in human cloning, only to find hoax after hoax. Before Laurent went underground a few years back, he was known to be affiliated with the Demanian sect, the same sect that previously claimed success in this area only to have their assertions proved false. Laurent is not talking for now, so we’ll have to stay tuned. I’m Michelle DuMont, Fox News, Paris.”
Bondurant speed-dialed Domenika.
“Did you—”
“The monster’s in Paris, Jon!” Domenika shouted. “As soon as you’re done, we’re going there to get him. Do you hear me? As soon as you’re done.”
The Second Coming Page 9