The Eden Prophecy

by Graham Brown

  A question from the audience prompted him.

  “So what’s the answer, Dr. Milan?” someone asked. “Is there hope?”

  Ranga cleared his throat. “In some sense we are searching for the impossible,” he said. “The best answer would be a crop that resists stressed growing conditions, produces more food per acre, and does not drain the soil or water table excessively. We are looking for ways to do this,” he said proudly, then continued less energetically. “But it’s a bit like trying to make an elephant fly without asking him to lose any weight.”

  Laughter spread through the crowd.

  “It’s problematic,” Ranga continued. “We do what we can. But if you must know, we are really attacking the issue from the wrong direction. It is often said that the world produces too little food. But rarely is it stated that we consume too much.”

  Hawker sensed the pause. Ranga had always paused before stating his most important point.

  “There will soon be seven billion people on this earth. In twenty years that number will near ten billion. And despite slowing growth rates, some projections go as high as twelve to fifteen billion by 2075. The earth cannot sustain such numbers. Especially if we all wish to live like Americans.”

  A grumble went through the crowd.

  “Make no mistake,” Ranga continued. “In every corner of the world people dream of living like an American. But that means each person consumes six times as much food, water, and fuel as the worldwide average. That would be the equivalent of a planet with fifty billion people on it.”

  A collective gasp escaped from the audience.

  “Like any population growing out of control, be it animals, insects, or bacteria, such growth ends in a crash. Our species will eventually crash as we destroy the host and starve.”

  “The host?” It was one of the other panelists.

  “The earth is our host,” Ranga replied, then turned back to the crowd. “The real solution lies not in growing more food but in reducing the population. The sooner we take action the less radical it will need to be, but based on religions that demand we all go forth and multiply and on both cultural and secular morality of reproductive rights, we will likely only act when it is far too late. At that point the action will have to be drastic. Beyond voluntary birth control, beyond individual decisions, beyond the Chinese one-child rule.”

  An uneasy question came from somewhere off camera. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

  Ranga cleared his throat again. “Just as it is possible for us to engineer crops, it is within our grasp to engineer humankind. A virus could be created that would spread randomly from person to person. It would bring with it genetic coding that would either sterilize some percentage of those it attached to, or reduce fertility or drastically shorten life spans. If the average life span were forty to fifty years—as it was once in this world—population growth would be severely curtailed if not reversed.”

  “What!” someone shouted.

  “Are you out of your mind?” a second voice said.

  “Please,” Ranga said, speaking over a murmuring, restless crowd. “This may be the only real solution. There are either too many of us making too many babies, or we live far too long. One variable must change. It is up to us which one.”

  It was an academic argument, delivered to the wrong crowd. They broke into jeers and shouts.

  “You’re a freak,” someone shouted.

  “Nazi!”

  “Calm down,” the moderator requested.

  Other shouts came forth, but Ranga did not back down.

  “You live here in a big country, with plenty of space. But go to other places. See the crowds in the slums. See the children naked and begging. That is overpopulation. Not a crowded freeway or a line at a restaurant. It’s hundreds of thousands begging. People crawling on each other like ants.”

  A shoe came flying onto the stage, barely missing Ranga’s head. He ducked and then looked out into the crowd. The discord was so loud it became hard to hear him, even with the microphone.

  “You have to understand!” he shouted, trying to get his point across. “If we don’t do this ourselves, nature will eventually do it for us. Nature will always cull the herd.”

  More shouts and accusations came from the crowd. The moderator took the microphone and started pleading for calm. People began to walk out, others pressing up onto the stage pointing and shouting. The room became chaotic; something crashed into the table, and then the tape ended.

  Hawker stared at the static on the screen, blindingly aware that Ranga had used the very term written in the cult’s letter. If the jury was still out on Ranga, they had to be leaning toward conviction now.

  “I’m sorry,” Danielle said.

  He appreciated her words, appreciated that there was no “I told you so” tone to her voice.

  “Not your fault,” he said.

  His thoughts turned back to the tape, and the friend who now sounded like some version of the Nazi regime’s Dr. Mengele. Ranga looked awfully young, thinner, smoother face, fuller head of hair.

  “When was that tape made?”

  “In ’98,” Moore said. “At a conference on food production, two years before he went on the run.”

  Hawker looked up at the ceiling and exhaled. “Well, my old friend certainly sounds like a lunatic,” he admitted.

  He looked at Danielle and tried to telegraph his regret without saying it. She turned to Moore.

  “So what are we dealing with here?”

  “Walter Yang and the CDC are analyzing the data you pulled off the computer. I’ll let you know what we can find.”

  “And this group?” Hawker asked. “Can they really be capable of what they’re threatening?”

  “They wouldn’t be the first to try,” Moore said. “Jim Jones poisoned more than nine hundred of his own people with cyanide in Guyana. He and his thugs shot everyone who tried to interfere, including a U.S. congressman. The Aum Shinrikyo cult dumped Sarin nerve gas into the subways of Tokyo. Twelve people were killed, thousands more injured, but the scary part came when police raided the cult’s headquarters. They found anthrax and Ebola cultures, explosives, hallucinogenic drugs, and storehouses of chemical precursors. Based on what they had on-site, they could have manufactured enough Sarin to kill four million people.”

  “I remember that,” Hawker said. “I didn’t know they had anthrax and Ebola. Why didn’t they use them?”

  “They weren’t ready,” Moore said. “Rumor had it the police were about to raid them, so they went suicidal. Same with Jim Jones. He was getting a lot of heat about keeping people trapped there; that’s what Congressman Ryan went to check out. When things start to look bad, the leaders of these groups snap. Suicide pacts, murder suicide, mass killings. The endgame is always the same.”

  “Whoever’s leading this cult, he sounds a lot like Shoko Asahara,” Moore added. “The guy who led the Japanese cult. His obsession was bringing about some type of apocalypse that combined the writings of Revelation with Buddhism and the predictions of Nostradamus.”

  “Another lunatic,” Hawker noted.

  “Like I said, they don’t have to make sense,” Moore noted. “They just have to get others to follow them. In Asahara’s case those who didn’t were jailed in cells at their headquarters or killed. In Guyana the same thing. Waco was the same.”

  “We’ve seen that they’re capable of murder,” Danielle said. “And torture as well, in a very direct one-on-one style. Releasing a bioweapon might be easy by comparison.”

  Moore nodded. “And if Ranga’s work went the way it seemed to, they might be close to possessing one: a weapon with the power to either sterilize a good portion of the human race or cut their life spans in half.”

  For the first time in a long while Hawker felt a wave of uncertainty. He couldn’t imagine his old friend being part of such a group, but he’d obviously been just that. At least he’d tried to break away. “We have to stop these psychopaths, whatever it cos
ts.”

  He looked at Danielle, who nodded.

  “So what do we do in Beirut?” she asked.

  “Bashir was a known dealer in stolen art,” Moore said. “Beirut is one center of that trade. Gateway to Europe, as it’s often been called. We know somebody there who might be able to help. Might be able to get you into the party.”

  “For what?” Hawker asked, thinking it sounded like an absurd waste of time.

  “To follow the lead,” Moore replied sternly.

  Danielle took the middle ground. “You think they were using stolen art to fund Ranga’s experiments, or even the cult itself?”

  Moore shook his head. “We thought of that. And we haven’t been able to link anything else to them, so maybe. But the word is Ranga was a buyer, not a seller. Why? We have no idea. One of you is going there to find out.”

  “One of us?” Danielle said.

  “Our other lead is in Dubai,” Moore explained. “A venture capital fund-raiser for a start-up drug company called Paradox. They once claimed Ranga as one of their founders.”

  To Hawker that sounded even thinner than the Beirut lead.

  “A land with bombed-out buildings and dangerous black-market activities or a high-tech ball in one of the most luxurious cities on earth,” he said. “Guess I know where I’m going.”

  Moore nodded. “You’re going to Dubai.”

  Hawker tilted his head. He wasn’t sure he’d heard that right.

  “We got a call this morning on your line,” Moore explained. “Sorry it didn’t go through. But once you two got plucked we had to shut things down, divert all data to Central Communications. A man named David Keegan called you. Former MI-5 striker, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Hawker nodded. “He gave me the information on

  Ranga.”

  “Yes, well, he found the person you asked him to look for,” Moore said.

  Moore reached over and clicked an icon on the laptop in front of him.

  Keegan’s voice came from the speakers. “Listen, mate, I’ve found your girl. Told you, you should have married her, she’s some big shot at a pharma company now. You’d done like I said and you’d be sipping champagne and buying polo horses instead of dodging bullets and hanging out with the likes of me. Anyway, she’s in Dubai for a shindig with her company, Paradox. I’ll text you the info. You take it from there. Let me know if you need anything else.”

  The playback ended. Hawker looked on as Moore clicked the x and closed the program. Whatever doubts they’d had about his objectivity could have only been confirmed by the words Keegan had chosen to use. Perhaps that was even why Moore played it. A preemptive shot, like Danielle’s the day before. Hawker understood.

  “Were you really going to marry her?” Danielle asked, sounding half-shocked, half-amused.

  “It’s just Keegan. He thinks he’s funny,” Hawker said.

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said, smiling. “Does sound kind of funny.”

  “Sonia is now a geneticist in her own right,” Moore said. “She’s also part of Paradox. She’ll be in Dubai giving a speech to potential investors. You’re going to meet her, Hawker. And you’re going to find out what she knows.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Yousef stood in near-perfect darkness, with only a pinpoint of light aimed down at him from above. He wore sweatpants. His hands stretched out to either side—cuffed to rails on the right and the left.

  Metal walls sweated around him while machinery hummed and a strange vibration grew and faded and then returned again in a slowly repeating pattern.

  Shadows moved just beyond his view and then passed him. Shapes dressed in black, hoods partially covering their faces. As each went past, a blade cut his arm. Just deep enough to make him bleed.

  He winced at the pain, saw the knives retracted in the dark, felt the blood trickling down his arm and heard it dripping drop by drop onto a metal tray.

  It flowed to a space in front of him, where they tossed their relics: crucifixes, golden pendants in the shape of the crescent moon and the Star of David, other symbols that he did not recognize.

  As the last cut was made, Yousef was already shaking.

  In front of him the group stood, but in the darkness he could see little.

  He felt a presence behind him but he knew not to turn.

  “What is the lie that we have been told?” the figure behind him said.

  Now Yousef recognized the voice as that of Marko. It was deeper and echoing in the metallic chamber but he was almost certain.

  “That we are fallen,” the group replied in unison. “That we are incomplete.”

  “Do you lay down the lie?” the voice said.

  “We lay down the lie,” they said together. “We take up our truth.”

  “And what is the truth?”

  In his dizzy state, Yousef listened. He tried to remember what was being said; he would have to remember these words.

  “That together we are whole.”

  “From where comes the truth?” the voice behind him asked.

  Yousef felt as if he’d been drugged. It was the air and the loss of blood, he thought. His head was spinning.

  “Cruor speaks the truth,” they said, speaking as one. “Blood speaks the truth.”

  “And who speaks to Cruor?”

  “The Master.”

  Marko’s hand, the hand of Cruor—the Man of Blood—pressed onto the back of Yousef’s neck.

  “Do you lay down the lie?” he asked.

  Yousef knew what to say.

  “I lay it down,” Yousef said. “There is no God. Only man. There is no punishment. Only life. There is no death for us. Only for others.”

  He looked down at the metal tray. A thin layer of his blood had spread across it, soaking all the religious icons, drowning them in blood of man.

  He smelled fire, and he looked over to see a glowing rod being carried through the darkness. There were letters and numbers on it. It was the brand of the brotherhood. It signified the moment when the first man had rejected God.

  All the brotherhood wore it. None could be part without it.

  “Do you accept the brand?” Cruor said.

  Yousef stared at it. The heated metal glowed red in the dark, as if it wanted to taste his skin.

  “Do you accept it?” he was asked again.

  What had God done for him? he thought. If it was the will of God that he live in the gutter, tormented by the police and the drug dealers, sometimes lacking even the basics of life, then what use was God for him?

  He would be part of something. He would have power. Like they did.

  “Do you accept it?” he was asked a third time.

  “I accept the brand,” he said, steeling himself for the pain.

  “Then you shall be Scindo,” Cruor said.

  And the glowing metal was pressed into his flesh.

  Yousef howled in pain, trying to pull loose from the cuffs. Steam and smoke rose from his chest and the stench of burned skin filled his nostrils. He leaned forward and retched even as cold water was thrown upon him from all sides.

  He fell to his knees, his arms held up by the cuffs. His body heaved and he vomited again as a layer of burned skin peeled off and fell to the floor beneath him. He looked to it, a twisted version of the mark in his own flesh. On his chest it would become a scar, a brand that marked him for what he was.

  Soaking wet, blood dripping, dry-heaving on his knees, he heard a voice. And then other voices.

  “Scindo,” they whispered. “Rise, Scindo. Rise.”

  He pulled on the bars to which he was cuffed, grasping them and straining with what strength he had left.

  The voices grew louder until they were shaking the room. He felt their power. With one last effort, he heaved himself up until he stood before them. Yousef was banished; he existed no more. He had become something greater. He was now Scindo: the one who divides.

  CHAPTER 18

  Hawker stood near the exit door of a sleek monorail as it cut acro
ss Dubai and angled toward the Persian Gulf. In the distance the sun had begun to drop, lending long shadows to the afternoon and drawing out the hues of red and yellow that normally lay subdued under the blistering white light of the day.

  The monorail was part of Dubai’s never-ending push toward the modern and spectacular. It ran all over the city. This particular line took them toward the coast.

  Up ahead he could see their destination: the magnificent Burj Al Arab hotel, rising 1,052 feet from the man-made island on which it had been built.

  The incredible wedge-shaped building soared into the sky like a sail on the horizon. Its western edge stood sharp and vertical like a mast, its eastern side curving gracefully back toward the ground like the billowing canvas of a spinnaker. A winglike structure protruded forward like the bridge of a great ship, and in its sheltered rear section a helipad jutted out some eight hundred feet above the waterline.

  There were few things in the world that Hawker considered impressive simply in and of themselves, but setting eyes on this building, he added one to the list.

  Far behind him, in the central part of the city, the tallest building in the world towered like a spike, but the Burj Khalifa did not hold the eye or move the spirit like the structure in front of him.

  For a moment Hawker was speechless.

  Unfortunately the man beside him was not.

  “It was hella hot when we got off that plane,” the man said, pulling at his silk tie. “Damn hot. Worse than I expected.”

  “It’s a desert,” Hawker said. “And it’s July.”

  The man looked up at him. “That’s a good point. You are damn observant. No wonder you went into the security business.”

  The man laughed at his own joke and Hawker struggled to decide if he wanted to laugh with him or slap him. “Yes, sir,” he said, somewhat painfully.