“I will die before I submit to that,” Terra hissed beside him.
“Heads up,” said Erebos, whom Zowan noticed now for the first time. He’ d taken up a lookout position at Parthos’s side, facing away from the conversation so he could watch the mall. “He’s on his way.”
“That’ll be Gaias,” muttered Parthos. “Are we good on this plan?”
Zowan heaved a breath of resignation. “Okay. We’ll do it your way.”
Nodding, Parthos stood and, taking a sudden strong interest in the contest at the Tangle Grid, slipped away into the crowd. At the same time, Terra released Zowan’s hand and slid off the bench, leaving him to sit alone, contemplating what he’d just set in motion. The destruction of his friends’ lives might not stop with Andros, he realized. For if Parthos and Terra had guessed the hole to the surface originated in the physical plant, surely the Enforcers had, as well. What if all this ended with him leading his best friends to their deaths?
But what if it leads you all to freedom? The question brought with it the awareness that only minutes ago he’ d had no idea how he might get to the surface again, and now he had a plan, with the disguise and access he needed provided for him, along with two—no, three—co-conspirators. Could that possibly be the work of I Am? It certainly wouldn’t be hard for a being who had created the Earth and destroyed it with water to take care of such minor details in Zowan’s insignificant life, but would He?
Zowan wished he had more of the Key Study. When God had told Abram to leave, he’ d obeyed, but Zowan had no idea what had happened after that.
He stood up just as Gaias pushed between the wall of people surrounding Zowan and stopped before him. The Enforcer frowned, eyes flicking from the empty bench to the backs of the immediate bystanders, all of them focused on the Tangle Grid contest and none of Zowan’s closest friends among them. Frustrated, Gaias scowled darkly at him, then shoved him aside and continued through the crowd as if he had not been watching Zowan at all.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Cam’s cell phone rang early Saturday morning, rousting him out of a deep sleep and then out of bed as he groped across the bedside table trying to find the phone. From the way the light blazed around the cracks in the bedroom’s blinds, he judged it well past his normal hour for rising. But when he’d fallen into bed around 3:00 last night, he’ d planned to sleep in. For the second Saturday in a row.
Finding the phone, he answered with a groggy hello. Immediately the person on the other end apologized for a wrong number and hung up. By then awake enough to remember the calls he’ d made last night, Cam waited, and after a moment an encrypted message appeared on the screen. He pressed the key to decrypt and read: “Frog prnts & bld smpl = PS. EMP fryd Jp.”
As soon as he’ d read the words, the message vanished, erased by the BlackBerry’s automatic security function. Even so he stood there, staring down at it, struggling to get his sleep-fogged brain around what he’d just read: An electromagnetic pulse had fried the Jeep’s electrical system, and the prints off the plastic frog and the blood sample were . . . Parker Swain’s? But Cam hadn’t taken a blood sample from Swain, only whatever saliva was on the fork he’ d pilfered.
Finally he realized that the prints and DNA profile Rudy’s lab had gotten off that fork matched the prints off the frog on the one hand, and the blood on Lacey McHenry’s lab coat on the other.
Which meant either Director Swain was indeed some kind of modern-day Jekyll and Hyde or . . . Cam drew a deep breath as the pieces fell into place.
Frogeater wasn’t Swain’s son; he was his clone. As incredible as that was, it was the only explanation that answered all the questions, particularly in light of the conversation he’ d overheard last night in the Golden Saguaro viewing gallery. Somehow Swain had succeeded in producing a human clone of himself that had survived to adulthood. More than that, he’d succeeded in subsequently introducing genetic modifications into that clone without immediate catastrophic malfunction. Modifications which had resulted in “phenomenal phenotypical transformation” and given him terrifying abilities. Like his extraordinary strength and speed. Like the wielding of the electromagnetic pulse that had fried Cam’s Jeep.
Light suddenly flared at the edges of Cam’s vision, and he gasped as the flashback swept him back into the depths of the Hindu Kush. With his three remaining teammates on his heels, he raced into the tomb’s vast outer chamber, where the hundred mighty warriors glared down from their seventy-foot-tall panels—clubs, swords, spears, and stylized bazookas raised to annihilate all intruders.
A roar of fury erupted from the inner chamber Cam and his fellows had just exited. The ground shuddered as static crackled in his headset and everything went dark—the gallery’s twelve standing lamps and the men’s head lamps alike. Acutely aware of the approaching roars from behind, Cam pulled a handheld flare from one of his side pockets and lit it.
“Run!” Cam yelled to the others. “Run!” And they ran. The ground shuddered again as a sharp wind buffeted them. The rock around them groaned, followed by a series of earsplitting cracks as fissures parted the gargantuan panels. Still in the lead, Cam was halfway down the vast chamber when the first piece bowed out from the wall and flung itself at them. He put his head down and sprinted, leaping and dodging debris as the chamber itself assaulted them, hurling jagged shards of itself into their path.
Choking dust rose up around them, obscuring the meager light of the few remaining torches. The dark hole of the tomb’s exit yawned ahead, and he sprinted harder. Suddenly a strong downdraft pummeled him and he seemed to rebound off a wall of air as a huge piece of panel, broken into a spearhead shape, planted itself directly in front of him. It was part of a man’s face, the eye of the warrior glaring at him, so strangely alive he expected a sword swing to come in the next moment.
It didn’t. Instead he raced around the self-embedded shard and sprinted all out for the doorway lost somewhere in the smoke and dust ahead, wondering how they would ever survive. . . .
He drew a deep, shuddering breath and blinked as his present reality returned. His apartment lay around him—quiet, clean, aglow with the light of a new day. Yet he trembled, and sweat slicked his underarms; he tasted dust and smoke, and his stomach churned. He’ d forgotten the deep sense of evil that had filled that tomb. And the hatred the creatures trapped there had for him and all his kind. The Afghanis had released six of them. Though he could not remember how they’d done it. Or even how he knew they had.
He forced himself to take a deep breath. Those were all dead now. Killed. Vaporized. Incinerated. He didn’t know how they had perished, either, only that they had. Along with all the sarcophagi in that vast chamber. Which didn’t matter anymore if Rudy’s new information was true and Swain really had found more monsters in the tombs of the Bekaa Valley and elsewhere.
Cam went to the bathroom and drank a cup of water, then sat on the side of his bed and checked his voice mail. There were two messages. The first, sent at 4:55 a.m., was from the campus garage. “We have your vehicle,” the mechanic’s voice informed him. “Unfortunately, we had some trouble getting it out of the ditch, and it has sustained a small amount of additional damage.”
The second, sent at 6:00 a.m., was from Deena Flynn, informing him that Director Swain would like his company at 10:00 a.m. in the resort’s poolside restaurant for an early brunch. It was a summons he’d anticipated, and a meeting he didn’t expect to enjoy. Swain had to know he’ d met privately with Lacey McHenry last night, and that alone would anger him. It was also possible he knew Cam had a firearm, in violation of K-J’s rules forbidding staff members to keep a weapon on-site. As closely as security had been tracking Lacey, someone could well have heard the shots Cam had fired at Frogeater. His one hope was that Swain wouldn’t confront him openly on it, since that would lead to the question of what Cam had been shooting at, which Swain probably didn’t want to answer.
He left his apartment at 9:30 and headed for the resort by way of
the garage to see about his Jeep. As it turned out, the “little bit of additional damage” was a complete flameout of the engine and interior. Something about a gas leak and a spark from the cables against a rock. He could translate that easily enough: they’d discovered the engine had been fried and deliberately torched the car to hide the evidence.
After calling his insurance agent again to provide the latest news on his car, he strolled across the campus to the resort’s restaurant. There the maître d’ directed him to Swain’s table in the sunny back room beside a long poolside window. Talking to him was Lacey McHenry. She stood with her back to Cam and was apparently just leaving, if the mostly empty plate across from Swain was any indication. Indeed, in moments she turned and headed up the aisle toward where Cam stood waiting. It can’t be good, he thought, that Swain’s booked appointments with both of us back to back.
Watching her approach, though, he felt the same warm tingle he always did in her presence. It was a sensation intensified this time by the way her eyes lit up at the sight of him. As she drew closer, however, her expression grew troubled.
“Good morning, Dr. Reinhardt,” she said softly as she reached him.
“Good morning, Ms. McHenry,” he replied, adding as she started past him, “Are we in trouble here?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’ve just been invited to be his date for tomorrow night’s reception.” And with that she was gone.
Stunned, even as he knew he shouldn’t be, Cam reluctantly forced his attention to Swain, who was conversing now with the server refilling his coffee cup. As the server left with Lacey’s plate, Cam strode up. But other than gruffly telling him to have a seat, Swain ignored him, focused on adding sugar and cream to his coffee.
Then, after sipping from his cup a couple of times, he leaned back and said quietly, “You disappoint me, Cameron. Here I offer you a prime position with our most important program and you let me down like this.”
Even last week, Cam would have been thrown completely off guard by the man’s sudden and open hostility. Today he was braced for it. “Sir?”
“You know how I feel about drunkenness. My disgust for it is matched only by my disgust for those who betray my trust.”
“Drunkenness? Betray your trust?” He must be referring to last night, but . . . “What are you talking about, sir?”
“Oh, come, Cameron. I know about your evening tryst with my graduate student up at the overlook last night. I and everyone else.”
Cam leaned back in his chair. “Ah.”
“Have you no sense of propriety at all?” Swain asked with quiet intensity. “No concern for the lady’s reputation? You, the so-called devout Christian among us?”
“Sir, I assure you I was not drunk, and—”
“You ran your Jeep right off the road, boy! The dispatcher told me your voice was slurred when you called last night.”
“Sir,” Cam said quietly, “you know we did nothing remotely along the lines you are implying.” But he understood now that this was the story being used to cover the real reason for his crash, and to dish out a little punishment on the side.
Swain glared at him, unable to deny what Cam said was true, unwilling to let go of his anger, anyway. “The bare bones of what you did was unseemly,” he said finally. “Whether you actually had relations with her or not is irrelevant. As I keep telling you, the truth doesn’t matter. It’s only what’s perceived to be true that matters. And it’s all over the campus now that you and Ms. McHenry were indeed having relations last night out on the rocks above the overlook picnic area.”
Cam met his angry gaze with fortitude, knowing there was nothing he could say.
“You could’ve at least had the decency to rent a hotel room,” Swain hissed. “We have plenty.”
He fell silent, tapping at the tablecloth and glaring at Cam. Then he said, “You’ll have nothing more to do with Ms. McHenry, neither during work nor afterward. And should you decide you don’t want to abide by that rule, please recall that no one has yet actually seen or spoken to our Argentinean Rhodes scholar. If anyone were to investigate, however, they’d find his resignation letter was composed on your office computer.” He leaned back in the chair. “Have I made myself clear?”
Cam sat at rigid attention. On my computer? “Yes, sir, you have.”
Swift and painful as the strike of a snake, the dressing down was over. Swain seemed to forget it entirely, as if they’d been discussing the weather rather than murder and blackmail. “So. What do you think of the efficacy of continuing your investigation with the frog mitochondria? Ian Trout has already been asking about it, and I want to tell him where we stand in our meeting this afternoon.” He glanced over Cam’s shoulder and gave a nod to someone there.
Cam pointed out Swain had already agreed the preliminary results had not been as good as they’d hoped, and for a few moments they discussed the pros and cons of proceeding. Then the server showed up with a plate of eggs over-easy, Canadian bacon, and half a whole wheat Belgian waffle, along with coffee and juice. “I took the liberty of ordering breakfast for you,” Swain said. “Just to speed things along a bit. I presume you haven’t yet eaten today?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, then”—the director gestured with his cup toward the food— “dig in.”
And Cam did. Meanwhile, Swain’s eyes drifted to the window and the pool with its bikini-clad beauties, and for a time he sat lost in thought, nursing his coffee.
Cam was nearly done eating when, seemingly out of the blue, the director said, “Taking death out of the equation would really put a kink in your beliefs, wouldn’t it?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Without the fear of death, how could you Christians bring people into the fold? If death were vanquished, there’d be no need for Christianity.”
Oh. This again . . .
Cam speared the last square of his waffle and ran it around the plate, mopping up the remaining syrup. “Of course there’d be a need, sir,” he said. “We’d still be estranged from God. Still be in these present bodies, governed by the desires of the flesh.” He paused to eat the syrup-laden bit of waffle, and then, since Swain was giving him the opportunity, added, “Frankly, I’d prefer not to spend eternity in my current body with all its limitations. I’d rather have the new one God has promised me.”
Swain set down his cup and leaned forward. “But don’t you see, Cameron? The point is, we will overcome the limitations. With science we don’t have to trust in the claims of some old book of dubious origins. We can believe what we see and feel. We don’t have to wait for a new body we know nothing about; we can transform the one we already have.”
They paused as the server came and refilled coffee cups. As he left with Cam’s empty plate, Cam said, “That’s a fine dream, Director, except for the fact that we can’t do any of it. Which makes it as much a matter of faith as believing in a resurrection.”
“Yet. We can’t do any of it yet. And yes, it does require faith—but faith backed up by concrete facts of science that lead logically to the next step.” He steepled his fingers and cocked his head at Cam. “Sometimes I wonder if you really want to be part of that next step. If you think our quest to extend longevity is as futile and unnecessary as you claim, why pursue it?”
“Maybe I want to prove that death and aging cannot be stopped.”
Swain cocked a brow at him. “That’s an unprovable hypothesis.”
“But each new effort proven false may help people to look toward the true solution.”
The director grimaced with displeasure and leaned back. “Not good enough, Cameron. It’s negative. It’s passive. . . . It’s depressing. I told you last week I wanted your loyalty, not so much to me as to my vision. I’m beginning to think perhaps you can’t give that to me. Because my vision is all about finding a fountain of youth you’ve pretty much admitted you don’t believe exists.”
“If I do my work to the best of my ability, why does it matte
r what I believe?”
“It matters profoundly if your bias compromises your ability to evaluate the data fairly. For example, the mitochondria project. I think the preliminary data has promise; you think it has none. Why? Could it be your bias is blinding you? That the evidence is right in front of you, but you can’t see it because you have already decided it’s not possible?”
Cam’s indignation kindled. “Excuse me, sir, but why would I want to compromise my professional integrity in such a way? I’d only end up looking the fool.”
“I’m not saying you’d do it consciously. It’s just a built-in blindness produced by your world view.” Swain let his steepled fingers interlace. “Then there’s the lack of fire and passion for the search. If belief forms the reality—as I believe it does—then your doubts will inevitably disrupt our progress.”
Swain regarded him almost smugly, and Cam realized that Swain had not finished with his dressing down after all.
Sure enough, the director hit him again from an entirely different angle: “You’re doing a very poor job of persuading us of your sincerity and commitment, son. That little stunt last Sunday when you stood us up at the security meeting and drove almost to Mexico, knowing I had people on you . . . I could forgive you that, knowing you were distraught. But then there was that embarrassing fiasco in your unity meeting yesterday, where you offended almost all your co-workers with your silly accusations. And finally the profound lapse in judgment you used in connection with Ms. McHenry last night.” He shook his head. “After all that, is it any wonder the others remain skeptical? Even I am having my doubts.” He leaned forward again. “Do you really want to be with us, Cameron? Or are you just here to convert us all?”
“Sir, you knew who I was when you brought me here,” Cam said. “And one of the reasons I came was because of the freedom I thought you were offering me. Freedom to pursue the truth. But I see I was wrong.” He paused, then added, “I’m not going to renounce my faith for this, if that’s what you’re after.”
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