The Lucifer Genome: A Conspiracy Thriller

by Glen Craney

  “What’s wrong?”

  He shook off her question. “Nothing, I guess.”

  Marly heard voices and footsteps approaching down the hall. “You’d better resume your medical internship after we get out of here.”

  Cas rushed to the bed and pulled the tubes from the girl’s arms and throat.

  Marly was horrified. “She could go into labor any minute now! After all the trauma she’s obviously been—”

  “Cohanim and his thugs may be in the hospital right now.” Cas lifted the sleeping girl into his arms. “They’ll kill her. We’ve got to get her out of her. She’s the only one who can tell us what’s happening.”

  “And take her where?” Marly asked. “Just how do you expect to deliver the baby? I’ve never done it. And I sure as hell know that you—”

  “Bring the chart!”

  “Why?”

  “We may need to get her more medications.” Cas lifted the heavily sedated girl into his arms. With Marly trailing him, he rushed from the room.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Jerusalem

  THE FRIAR WHO HAD SAID Mass for Cas and Marly in the Holy Sepulchre chapel sat at the admissions desk of the Franciscan Foundation for Unwed Mothers. Attending to his day job, he looked up from his Scripture reading and saw a young pregnant girl standing before him. “Welcome, child. Have you come seeking the mercy of Our Lord?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why then have you come?”

  With a weak voice, she said, “I was told to ask you something, Father.”

  “Of course,” the friar said. “God’s wisdom is on offer here with lodging and meals. What is it you wish to know? How Christ can be forgiving even when we disappoint Him with our carnal sins?”

  She shook her head again.

  “What then, child?”

  “I was told to ask you … Do you still rat out Palestinians to the CIA for monkfish dinners and bingo money?”

  The friar’s eyes rounded. “Who told you such a—”

  Cas and Marly stepped forward from behind a pillar.

  The friar slapped his hands against his tonsured head. “For the love of Mary, Jesus and Joseph. Will I never be rid of you two?”

  Cas grinned grimly at his confessor. “We just couldn’t stay away from all of that Godly wisdom you dispense. Speaking of Jesus, Mary and Joseph—”

  Marly jumped in. “Jesus was in the line of the royal House of David, right?”

  The friar frowned, uncertain what these two crackpots were driving at now. Despite his qualms, he risked an answer, “Yes. But what does that—”

  “Here’s what doesn’t compute,” Marly said. “If Jesus had no natural father, how is it that his genealogy reaches all the way back to Adam?”

  The friar dropped his head into his hands. “Oh, Lord, just send me to Purgatory and be done with it!” Finally, he looked up and warned them, “You think the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was complicated? Don’t even get into this House of David quagmire.”

  “We’re still waiting,” Cas said.

  The friar sighed. “St. Matthew says the line runs through Joseph.”

  “That means there was no genetic link,” Marly said.

  The friar raised his hand for patience. “There’s more. St. Luke, on the other hand, says the line runs through Mary.”

  Marly stared at the friar in stunned silence. “You mean …”

  “Yes, the Gospels are contradictory.”

  “So,” Cas said, “if ol’ Luke is right—and I’ve never known him to be wrong—then Mary could have passed on her DNA from Adam to Jesus.” He thought a moment. “But there’s still the problem of the ‘Y’ chromosome. Jesus was a man, obviously, and He had a Y chromosome. The Virgin Mary couldn’t have passed Jesus’s Y chromosome to Him, right?”

  Marly suddenly paled. “Cohanim didn’t have to get the Y chromosome from the Marian source. He got the Y chromosome of Adam and the Davidic line from … the first DNA on Earth.

  Cas understood at once. “The DNA that Texas rattlesnake extracted from the Black Stone.”

  The friar made a move for the phone on the desk.

  Cas slammed a fist into the phone cradle. “We need just a couple more minutes of your time, Tuck. Then we’ll be on our way.”

  The friar glared at the pregnant girl. “What have you done to this child?”

  Marly supported Zaynah by the shoulders, helping her stay on her feet. “She’s carrying a little package you might be interested in.”

  “Every unborn soul is held precious by the Lord our God,” the friar said.

  Cas sat on the corner of the desk and fingered a rosary. “Yeah? You and the Pope might want to rethink that policy on this one.”

  “What do you mean?” the friar demanded.

  Marly was equally perplexed. “Yeah, what do you mean?

  “Something about this whole God-embryo thing has been bugging me ever since you told me your theory about the cloning,” Cas told her. “Believers have been trying for years to clone Jesus, taking DNA samples from tombs here in Israel and even from the Shroud of Turin. So, why hasn’t it ever happened?”

  Marly shrugged. “Probably because no one ever found a DNA sample that was sufficiently preserved.”

  “Maybe,” Cas said. “But even a psychopath like Cohanim would know that God and Jesus could never really be cloned. I mean, come on.”

  Thinking about it, Marly nodded. “Only the likeness of their spirits in the flesh could be created.”

  Cas turned back to the friar, who looked totally lost. “Tell us about the Book of Revelation.”

  “Revelation? What about it?”

  Cas screwed his face into a distorted, demonic scowl. “The Antichrist … where is he supposed to be born?”

  The friar edged back in his chair. “Are you back on the hashish?”

  “In thirty seconds,” Cas said, “I’m going to start yelling at the top of my lungs that you’re the father of this baby. The excitement of it all could cause the girl to give birth right here.”

  Horrified, the friar motioned them into an office and shut the door. After a hesitation, he explained, “The Antichrist is prophesied to come from Assyria. Is that what you wanted? Happy? Now kindly depart and leave me out of your insane spook games!”

  “Assyria?” Marly exclaimed. “That’s not even a country now.”

  “The ancient kingdom covered modern Syria, Iran, Iraq, and—”

  “Lebanon,” Cas piped in.

  The friar nodded, not sure where this line of questioning was leading.

  And neither was Marly.

  Cas kept pressing the friar, “Does the Bible say anything about the mother of the Antichrist?”

  “What are you suggesting?” Marly asked him.

  “If there’s an Antichrist, then there has to be an Anti-Virgin Mary, right?”

  Cornered, the friar finally admitted, “The early Church fathers taught that the mother would be an unclean woman.” He turned to his library of books and pulled down a volume. “Here it is. St. Hippolytus wrote that she would be polluted, a supposed virgin, a Jewess from the house of Dan.”

  “And who is to be the father?” Cas asked.

  “The Devil,” the friar said. ”But the conception will be unnatural.”

  “Unnatural in what way?” Marly asked.

  “Saint Nilus said the Evil One is to be born of the seed, but … ”

  Cas pressed him. “But what?”

  “Without man’s sowing.”

  “So, the Antichrist won’t have a human father?” Marly asked.

  “As the Son of God in His human birth manifested His Divine nature,” the friar said, “so also shall Satan appear in human form.”

  In a whisper, Cas repeated those conditions to himself. “A supposed virgin. Unclean. From the tribe of Dan.” He turned a glower of accusation on the pregnant girl. “You’re not a virgin, are you?”

  Zaynah staggered back a s
tep, stunned by the charge. “I swear by Allah, praise be upon Him, that I did not conceive this child by lying with a man.”

  Cas closed in on her. “That’s not what I asked. You’ve had sex. Long before nine months ago.”

  Zaynah darkened with shame. “I could not tell my family. I had to lie.”

  He grasped her shoulders roughly. “That’s not all you’re lying about, is it?”

  Marly rushed to comfort Zaynah, cradling the distraught girl in her arms. “What are you trying to do to her? Send her over the edge?”

  He drove the girl back a step. “Where is your family from?”

  “I told you!” she said, sobbing. “Lebanon!”

  “And before your ancestors moved to Lebanon?”

  The girl’s eyes darted. “My grandmother called it Canaan.”

  “Your ancestors were Jewish, weren’t they!”

  Zaynah fell to her knees, undone by the exposure of her dark secret.

  Cas nodded to Marly. “Cohanim did his homework, all right.”

  “What are you talking about?” Marly asked.

  Cas paced in rising agitation. “Our Texan mastermind hasn’t been trying to clone God. You were right about the DNA he extracted from the Black Stone only reproducing an Adam-Jesus facsimile in the flesh. But the Antichrist is a whole other kettle of Galilean fish. The Bible says that the Evil One will resemble the Messiah so closely that the entire world will be fooled.”

  Marly’s eyes suddenly rounded. “Then he is—”

  “Trying to spur the Apocalypse by giving birth to God’s corporeal body,” Cas said. “He thinks Satan will enter the shell of the Messiah and wreak his havoc on the Earth.”

  All three turned and glared at the girl’s bulging abdomen.

  “My God,” the friar muttered, now realizing what was in his presence. “What abomination have you people brought into this city?” Helpless, he could only bless the girl with the Sign of the Cross.

  Zaynah wailed hysterically.

  Scolding the friar with a glare, Marly pulled the girl even closer into her arms. “She’s carrying a child, not the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Stop with the nonsense.”

  The friar shook his head. “You have no idea of the evil forces in our midst.”

  Marly huffed, angered by the friar’s attempt to blame the Devil for the work of stupid men. “I got a pretty good idea of the ignorance in our midst.”

  Cas snapped his fingers to stop their argument. “If you two are done convening the Council of Nicaea, can we get back to the problem at hand?”

  Marly paced in deep thought, keeping Zaynah at her side while patting her head. “Okay, let’s just say if, for some wild reason, Cohanim is trying to clone the Antichrist. Why is he now trying to kill her?”

  Cas stared out at Mount Zion through a cruciform window. After several moments in thought, he turned back and asked the friar, “Didn’t the good ol’ boys once practice a little human sacrifice somewhere around here?”

  “What on earth is going through that demented mind of yours now?”

  “Nothing on Earth … yet.”

  The friar suddenly looked as if he understood the reason for the question.

  “Just fill me in.” In a bad imitation of Cary Grant’s transatlantic accent, Cas added, “And I don’t need any morality lessons from you, Ju-das, Ju-das, Ju-das.”

  Pinned against by the wall, the friar sighed heavily and gave up the shameful truth. “The Old Testament says that King Ahaz of Judah sacrificed his children born of pagan wives and concubines in a valley below Jerusalem.”

  “Which valley?”

  “Most biblical scholars say it was the Kidron valley, the slope that runs right below us. At the time of Ahaz, it was known as the Geenon. Some called it …” He stopped, as if stunned by his own discovery.

  “What?” Marly demanded. “What did some call it?”

  “Geenom.”

  “You mean, like—” she could barely speak it— “a ‘genome’ of one’s DNA?”

  The friar looked up at her coldly, as if preparing to dispense an exorcism, and nodded. “The Valley of Abomination.”

  Cas interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles, stretching his arms. “If I were one of those Bible Code freaks, I might find that more than just a little coincidental.”

  Police sirens blared outside, racing closer.

  Cas pushed Marly and Zaynah into a corner, out of the window’s line of sight. Had Cohanim and his Mossad enablers tracked them down?

  He turned to the friar. “Is there another way out of here?”

  The friar hesitated, acting unsure about what God would want him to do. Finally, he led them through a series of rooms. “A tunnel runs from the basement to the sewers in the Armenian section. They won’t think to look for you there.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Old City, Jerusalem

  CLIMBING OUT OF SEWERS THAT pre-dated King David, Cas lifted Marly and the heaving girl from a drain hole. Exhausted from their underground escape, they huddled under the shade of a back alley to catch their breaths. Cas looked around, trying to orient himself by listening for a distant rumble of traffic. The only sign of life was a stray cat skittering across the lane.

  Marly waited for one of his brilliant ideas to surface. “Which way now? Got any nifty secret-agent tricks to get us out of here?”

  He was getting tired of taking all the blame. “I was thinking of rappelling down the Old City walls using the dental floss I happen to have with me.”

  Faint from the afternoon heat, Marly was about to lose it. “Lord help us.”

  “By the way, there’s been something I’ve been meaning to ask you, but just haven’t found the time.”

  “The answer is still no.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Doc.”

  Marly’s look hovered between confusion and hurt. “Then … what?”

  He settled down on his haunches to rest against the niche wall. “There’s something that’s been gnawing at me.”

  “Probably tapeworms, considering your laundry habits.”

  He let that one pass. “Why would a Bible thumper like Cohanim would want to clone the Antichrist, anyway?”

  Marly made sure Zaynah was as comfortable as possible. Then, she tossed her knapsack under her own head to use as a pillow. Finding him still waiting for an answer, she whispered, “Are you really that dense?”

  “Guilty as charged. Present and accounted for. All hands on deck—”

  “Shut up for once!” She huffed at his incredibly annoying habit of taking everything too far. “These fundamentalists think Beelzebub or Lucifer or whatever name they’re using for him these days has to show up first before the End Times arrive. Apparently even God Himself can’t deviate from the movie script.”

  He nodded slowly, finally starting to see the big picture. “So, these Rapture crackpots are trying to fast-forward the DVD to Act Three of the story. Forcing the Big Author in the Sky to hurry up and get to the end.”

  “You’d make a great studio executive.”

  “And that barbecued red heifer? How does that fit into your theory?”

  Marly angled her head in a gesture that, roughly translated, suggested he take a look at the gleaming gold dome in the distance. “Just one of the props essential for the big production finale that’s supposed to happen right here.”

  He was still troubled by one missing piece to the jigsaw puzzle.

  “Cat got your tongue? Or does the feline species not like the taste of rum-marinated delicacies?”

  “This Antichrist is supposed to be a man, right?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  She knew that worrisome look of befuddlement. “What’s wrong now?”

  Cas looked over at Zaynah. She was asleep, out cold. Inching a few feet away to prevent her from hearing, he whispered, “Did you bring her medical charts?”

  “They’re in my bag. Now that
you mention it, we’d better get her some pain medication, or—”

  “Take a look at the copy of the sonogram.”

  Baffled, Marly pulled out the sheaf of documents from the knapsack she was using for a pillow. She waited to hear why he wanted her to look at it.

  “When Shada was pregnant with Farid, she showed me her sonogram.” He nodded toward Zaynah. “It looked a little different from our virgin’s there.”

  “So? They’ve probably advanced the technology since the Stone Age.”

  “I’m not a fake doctor like you, but … something seems to be missing.”

  Intrigued, Marly thumbed through the mess of sheets they had stolen. She found the Xerox copy of Zaynah’s sonogram. She stared at the image of a fetus … with no male genitalia.

  The blood drained from her face.

  Cas nodded, having expected the look of shock. “That cat must have spat out my tongue to get yours.”

  Marly still couldn’t find the words.

  “Now, tell me where my logic goes wrong here, Dr. Einsteiness. Christ was a man. The Antichrist is supposed to resemble Christ in all ways. So much so that everyone mistakes him for the Big Kahuna. Post hoc, ergo proctologist hoc, the Antichrist has to be man.”

  Marly’s eyes drifted from the sonogram to the sleeping Lebanese girl. Looking at Zaynah’s rounded belly, she muttered, “Oh, no.”

  “So much for your theory about Cohanim cloning the Antichrist.”

  “My theory? Hey, you bought in on it, too. … This can’t be happening.”

  Cas shrugged. “Fifty-fifty chance. We should have thought of it.”

  Marly stood to stare down at him. “No. It’s zero chance.”

  “How could it be zero?”

  “That DNA we found in the Kaaba Stone had a Y chromosome.”

  “Yeah, but Cohanim—you think—combined it with the Lucy DNA.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Marly said. “The Y chromosome always passes to the offspring. The God child from the Adam DNA in the Stone has to be male.” She turned inward, thinking hard. “Unless …”