The Lucifer Genome: A Conspiracy Thriller

by Glen Craney

  “Mind if I put you on hold?” Moments later, the deputy came back on line. “That plate comes from Llano. Town’s in a county south of Dallas.”

  “That’s a known smuggling route,” Cas said, not having a clue whether it was or not. “Can you get anything off IAFIS or NCIC?”

  The deputy took a deep breath over the line. Asked to access the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System and National Crime Information Center databases, he sounded confused. “Wouldn’t you have faster access to those directly from your office, sir?”

  Cas felt the fish wiggling off the hook. “Man, it’s Sunday. You know how hard it would be to get that jackass Mayhue in Washington off his big white butt to help with this?”

  The deputy chortled, as if he got the joke about some federal desk jockey that Cas had just made up. “Of course, sure. Lemme see what I can call up.” Moments later, the deputy said, “Nothing off IAFIS because, well, it’s mostly fingerprints, but … I did get state records here—”

  Cas put a hand over his phone to muffle an exhalation of relief. Then, he said, “I’m putting you in for a commendation.”

  “Aw, well,” the deputy said with no small pride, “Says here that the plate and car are registered to a Lightgiver LLC. I’m showing a little activity, but only down there in the Dallas office. Nothing that would mean much here, far as I can tell.”

  “Activity, huh. Car might be hot.”

  “Says here it’s a black BMW sedan, just like you spotted”—the deputy rattled off the long VIN number—“and the vehicle is considered stolen.”

  “Any suspects listed in the theft?”

  “Dallas had a warrant out.”

  “Are the perpetrators named?”

  “Yeah, it’s an Earl … ”

  “Jubal?”

  “Ayup.”

  Cas felt his jaw muscles tighten. “You said ‘had’ a warrant out.”

  “Looks like it was withdrawn a few months ago. By request of the victim.”

  Seth Cohanim, again. Why did that Texas mystery man keep showing up? Had Jubal and his CrossArrow goons stolen those Beemers from Cohanim just to throw everyone off track? If so, why go to so much trouble? And if Cohanim had been an innocent victim of a heist, why did he drop the charges a few days after the Black Stone had been returned? Isserle insisted that Cohanim had nothing to do with the Stone theft, but something now stank like a fresh, steaming cow patty. He gave the officer his sincerest thanks, clicked off, and called the New York number that he had dialed earlier.

  Marly answered. “Hang up on me like that one more time and—”

  “Listen up. Purchase a couple of ducats for us on the next plane to Dallas tonight. Take me out of Burbank. LAX is a nightmare.”

  “What? Oh, sure. I’ll just—”

  “And get me an aisle seat on an exit row. I gotta be close to the john. And if you have any frequent flier miles, upgrade me to First Class. I’ll be starving—”

  “I swear to everything holy, you’ve got the balls of a—”

  “Easy there, Scarlett. If your hunch is right, you’ll get Tara plantation back in no time. And we’ll both never have to fly coach again.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Ghajar, Northern Israel

  SETH COHANIM PULLED THE THIN curtain back an inch and peered across the street into the window of the fifth-story apartment building. This rented one-room tenement perch offered the perfect undetected view of the Syrian family he had been surveilling for nearly a year now.

  He smiled, congratulating himself again on having chosen the ideal surrogate for his mission. The family’s daughter, Zaynah Al Homra, was coming along nicely late in her third trimester, with no signs of complications. Moreover, she seemed to have accepted without question the marriage that he had secretly arranged for her with the Syrian man on his payroll. The blood tests that he had surreptiously ordered at the local hospital under the name of the fifteen-year-old virgin’s father had come back that week cleaner than Caesar’s wife. Blood sugar was stable; normal levels of plasma protein; chorionic gonadotropin hormone well within the range for chromosome normality. He hadn’t even bothered with an ultrasound. He already knew the gender of the fetus.

  Within a few days, he would be the proud father—no, maybe not the father, but the creator—of a bouncing baby boy.

  And soon the world would get a little more interesting. Sure, it would take a few years for the child to grow into his true destiny, but with the birth now accomplished, the hard part was already—

  He heard a knock at the door. Drawing his Glock 9mm, he peeked through the crack in the jamb. He opened the door cautiously and, looking both ways down the hall, growled at his right-hand man, “I thought I told you never to come here during the day.”

  “Boss, we got a problem.”

  Cohanim motioned him into the small room and quickly shut the door, locking it. “I don’t have time for petty financial issues. Just handle it.”

  “It’s the Saudis this time.”

  Cohanim closed the curtains, making certain no one saw them from the street outside. “What could those heathens want now?”

  “They say one of those Black Stone fragments we sold back to them has a corner missing.”

  Cohanim’s jaw dropped. “No one had access to those fragments except…” He glared at his nervous lieutenant. “You said you got everything back from Fielding and that ditz in Dallas.”

  “Boss, I swear it. Seven fragments. I counted them.”

  “Counted? Did you examine each one?”

  The fixer paled, shaking his head in confession.

  Cohanim paced the room. “What would those two losers want with a piece of …” Struck by a terrifying thought, he bit off a curse. “Drive me back to the lab.”

  A HALF-HOUR LATER, COHANIM RUSHED into his laboratory at Shaaba Farms and threw open the storage refrigerator. He exhaled with relief.

  The Petri dish with the back-up embryo was still there.

  He laughed at himself, assured now that his fears had merely been playing games with his mind. For a moment there, he thought Fielding and his New York floozie had discovered his plan. He shook his head at his paranoia, and laughed again. Those two freaks couldn’t mix a decent martini without screwing it up, let alone pull off a sophisticated genetic sampling. That nerd Columbia professor was nothing more than a rock hound. She probably cut a piece off of the Stone fragment to save as a souvenir or sell on the meteorite market.

  “You okay, Boss?”

  Cohanim slapped his man on the back. “Just fine, Bolin. Let’s go find a steak dinner and a beer. We’ll celebrate in advance.”

  The Texas rancher was about to close the refrigerator door when something odd caught his eye. He picked up the remaining Petri dish and turned it over. The top label showed that the lab plate was the back-up embryo, the one he had brought from Llano in case the first embryo cloning didn’t take. But the code engraving on the bottom of the glass was different from the number he remembered.

  “What’s wrong, Boss?”

  “Check the security logs from eight months ago.”

  The rancher’s lieutenant ran the entry data in the computer. “Everything looks okay.”

  Cohanim stared at the glutinous contents of the Petri dish. Finally, as if fearful of the results, he carefully opened the lid, dug out the embryo, and put it under a microscope. His face turned beet red. “Son of a bitch … This is the embryo we seeded.”

  “That can’t be. You planted the original embryo in that girl yourself.”

  Cohanim stared at the embryo in the Petri dish through the high-powered lens. “Get me the most recent blood test results for the fetus.”

  The underling ran to the safe, dialed the combination, and opened it. He pulled out a file with the medical information on the Lebanese surrogate and brought it over.

  Cohanim thumbed through the pages until he found what he was looking for. He threw the file against
the wall in hot anger.

  His goon picked up the scattered documents and examined them. “X-X chromosomes. What’s that mean, sir?”

  Cohanim removed his sweat-rimmed Stetson and ran his hand through his thinned hair, trying to make sense of it all. “This is impossible. That Stone DNA was a mixed X-Y. Somebody would have had to take apart the DNA, reshuffle the genetic contents, and recombine them into a double-X structure. Then they would have had to implant the new DNA into the back-up embryo. I don’t know of any technology that can do that.”

  His fixer scratched his head. “I’m not following, Boss.”

  Cohanim stammered in full-blown rage. “That Lebanese bitch is about to give birth to a … ” He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  His lieutenant finally guessed the unthinkable. “This place has been sealed tight. Who could have done it?”

  Cohanim glanced around the lab. Suddenly, he flushed. “Did you make sure that witch Whelan got on the plane home after we fired her?”

  “I had a little tire trouble when I picked her up. But I dropped her off at the airport terminal gate later that afternoon, Boss. I just figured—”

  “You just figured?”

  The minion blinked hard. “You don’t think she had something to do with this, do you?”

  “You know what? I’m glad you're asking me what I think. Because I’d hate to have to rely again on what you think!”

  “I’m not sure I’m following—”

  Cohanim drove the baffled minion against the wall. “I’ll spell it out for you this time. You’re gonna search every burning bush and hermit’s cave from here to Tel Aviv until you find her. Didn’t she have one of those horny kibbutz boys sniffing after her?”

  “Now that you mention it, yeah.”

  “Yeah? Then hemight be a good place to start, you think?”

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Llano, Texas

  CAS PULLED THEIR DUSTY JEEP CHEROKEE into one of the angled parking spots that fronted the Llano County courthouse, a neo-Romanesque tower of faded reddish sandstone that looked right out of a Larry McMurtry novel. He glanced down the street toward the old town’s stretch of drab cinderblock buildings, but nothing moved along the sun-baked sidewalks, not even the bluetick hound that lay next to the back door of Charlie’s Barbecue Pit. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and muttered, “I’d hate to see the jail here.”

  Marly dug around in her bag and pulled out the plastic vial containing the dirt specks that she had found in her apartment. She compared the hue of the tiny specimens with the blocks used in the courthouse’s construction. “Looks like there’s a lot of iron in that stone. I think we’re in the right place.”

  “Go scrape off one of your samples while I do a little reconnaissance.”

  Before she could protest getting the short end of that deal, Cas got out of the Jeep and walked to a gas station. Catching his breath in the relentless heat, he opened the screen door and found a wild-whiskered codger in bib overalls listening to a Texas Rangers baseball game on the radio. He tipped his imaginary Stetson to the seated fellow. “What’s the score?”

  The attendant didn’t bother to move his boots off the counter. “If you gave a damn, you’d have it on in that piece of crap you just drove up in.”

  “It’s a rental. Normally I drive Fords, but the Model T production line is behind schedule.”

  Looking him over with unchecked contempt, the ol’ boy spat a black mash of chaw into his RC Cola bottle. “You don’t say. I figured that Avis sticker on the bumper was put there for free advertisement.”

  Cas saw he was getting nowhere fast with this dyspeptic relic. “I can see you’re pretty busy, so I won’t stick around to fry the grease. Is there a place in town to get a bite without catching a case of tourista?”

  The surly attendant made a cranking gesture with his chin, as if trying to smooth out a kink in his neck. “Kilroy’s garage is three blocks down. The monkeys over there get back at two.”

  Cas figured the heat must have fused the redneck’s ear canals. “Maybe you don’t understand my American accent. I don’t need a garage.”

  “You will if you keep driving that tin can on balloons around here. Last guy who came in with one of those Cherokees spent three days at the local motel while his new tie rods were drop-shipped from Dallas. You’ve been given fair warning. Myrtle only changes the sheets on Mondays.”

  Cas banged the screen door open again and walked out. “Thanks for wasting my time, amigo. I hear they’re casting a sequel to No Country For Old Men, if you’re interested.”

  Chased off by a flurry of unintelligible curses, he sauntered down the street and found Marly, who had failed to locate a beverage to slake his impossible thirst. “Friendly little pueblo we’ve got here.”

  “I just saw a place to eat around the corner from the courthouse,” Marly said. “Maybe somebody inside will know something.”

  They made their way across the patchy hardpan that passed for the courthouse lawn and entered a diner that looked as if it might have once served Sam Houston. The joint featured a long counter and a dozen Formica tables scattered across a peeling linoleum floor. Cas figured Santa Ana got a more hospitable welcome at the Alamo. Those locals not hovering on stools and tucking into the fried-catfish special were congregated in threes and fours around cups of muddy coffee. The conversation, which seemed mostly about the local high school football team, lowered to a whisper as he and Marly settled into a pair of seats at the far end of the counter. He nodded to several of the suspicious faces, trying to break the ice. But nobody returned the greeting.

  The waitress slapped down a couple of menus. “Need more time?”

  Cas flashed her his best flirting grin. “My momma always told me a pretty lady will never steer you wrong.”

  The waitress glared at him. “Your momma was either a fool or downright desperate to get you married off and out of her hair. Now, you gonna sit here and flap your gums, or do you want something to eat? The chicken-fried steak and jalapeño gravy’s the special today—”

  “I hear the beef in these parts is a little different,” Cas said with a wink.

  The waitress turned to Marly. “Hon, I’m assuming you’re the intelligent half of this road trip.”

  Marly leaned in closer. “I think what he’s saying is, we wouldn’t want to get a steak from one of those heifers they raise around here. You know, the kind with two heads and half an ass.”

  The other customers, overhearing the remark, fell silent.

  Cas shot an admiring glance at Marly, impressed by her cajones.

  The waitress grabbed the menus and slammed them back into the slot. “You gonna badmouth my food, then get out.”

  Cas smirked a puppy smile at the waitress, having gotten the reaction he had hoped at their mention of the strange cattle rumors. “A person can’t be too careful these days, darlin’. We must have been misinformed.”

  A man in a rawhide hat and ranch duds stood from his table in the corner and came shadowing over Cas’s shoulder. “Misinformed about what?”

  Cas turned and, seeing a teenage girl with the rancher, tipped his imaginary cap to them. “It’s nothing, really, sir. It’s just, we’ve heard talk there’s some unusual breeding going on in these parts, is all.”

  The rancher’s expression shifted from suspicion to hostility. “And what business exactly would that be of yours?”

  “All due respect," Cas said, "we represent an interested buyer—”

  “Next cattle auction’s not till next month.”

  “Our buyer's not interested in an auction, friend. He's interested in a straight and, guess I should say, pretty damned lucrative, trade.”

  The rancher glanced with grave suspicion at Marly. “And who's this?”

  “Oh, her? She’s my veterinarian. Know how to keep an Aggie busy?”

  Marly picked right up on her cue. “Put her in a round room and tell her to pee in a corner”

>   The rancher started to walk away, shaking his head at their buffoonery.

  "Mr. Cock in Hand," Cas piped.

  The rancher turned with a menacing look. “What’d you say?”

  “The fella we’re looking for. Can’t rightly remember his name at the moment. Cock in Hand … Cockamamie … Something like that.”

  “Cohanim,” Marly said, playing along with his jestering act.

  The rancher’s eyes narrowed.

  Cas tipped his imaginary cap again, this time to Marly, in appreciation for the reminder. “If you ask me, that’s a strange name for a Texas boy. Sounds a little …”

  “Jewish?” Marly suggested.

  “I was gonna say Communist. But maybe that’s redundant around here.”

  Several of the diners stood up abruptly and walked to the cash register to pay their checks. The rancher flipped a couple of dollar bills on the counter and nodded for his daughter to leave with him. The young girl glanced pointedly at Marly as she stepped out.

  When the place had emptied, the waitress shook her head in despair over the lost business. “Thanks for running off my rent check this month.”

  “Did we kick somebody’s dog?” Cas asked.

  The waitress kept a wary eye on the front window. “Seth Cohanim is the straw that stirs the drink in this county. Lots of people here owe him their livelihoods. You won’t hear a negative word spoken about him. He’s a good Christian man. Does lots of charitable work.”

  “When you say Christian,” Marly asked, “you mean, like, an evangelical, believe-in-the-Bible-literally Christian?”

  “Didn’t I just say he was a good Christian?”

  Marly risked testing the waitress’s patience. “The patron saint of Llano does seem to get around the world.”

  “Fact is, we ran into him in Saudi Arabia,” Cas added.

  “He breeds cattle for foreign governments,” the waitress said. “That’s the word, anyway. Brings in more business and jobs for us. Good for him.”