by J D Lasica
“I’m not sure what you’re asking.”
“I’m asking this, Sharon Sullivan. Will you work with us? I can make anything happen for you. Riches beyond your dreams. Career advancement—say the word and you can be the next CEO of Birthrights Unlimited. The world waits for you to come grab it.”
She sat there, stunned and horrified by this man’s audacity. If he thought she could be induced to be part of … what? … a human trafficking ring? … then he was sadly mistaken. There was no amount of money in the world that would make that happen.
He reached across the table and put his hand on top of hers. She pulled her hand away.
“You don’t need to give me an answer tonight,” he said. “But tonight I would very much like to have you.”
44
Dallas, August 28-29
K aden checked the settings on her Eyewear for the third time. Everything looked normal, but she had lost communication with Nico just before midnight. She decided to bail on the Lab and head straight over to the Data Zone. Something’s wrong.
She gathered her go bag and stepped out of the Sequencing Lab into the hallway and then out the exit. She cut through the Fertility Zone and whisked past a spotlit fountain without being seen. Another fifty yards and she’d hit the main road leading straight to Nico’s position.
Suddenly, the entire quadrant between the block of buildings was filled with brilliant white lights. They spotted me! She moved quickly to her left, then her right, looking for a vantage point out of direct line of sight so she could ready a clean shot with her tranquilizer gun. But her vision was overwhelmed by the lights, disorienting her.
“Drop your weapon and get to your knees,” a voice blared from a loudspeaker .
Her instinct was to fight, but she saw five—no, six guards approaching with their weapons drawn.
She sank to her knees, dropped her gun, and tossed her go bag a few feet away.
Her eyes were adjusting, and she saw two figures approaching from her right flank. The lead figure was big and burly and looked to have his hands tied behind his back. As he drew closer, his features became clear. Nico!
Behind Nico was his captor, a man with a military gait holding an automatic rifle pointing at Nico’s back.
“Take the intruder into custody,” he ordered. One of his men approached, tied her hands behind her back, and lifted her to her feet.
That voice. So familiar. As he approached, the outline of his wizened face came into sharper relief. She could barely believe who it was.
Gregor Conrad left Nico with a troop of guards and came up inches from the left side of her face. “Soldier, you disappoint me.”
Another figure approached, traipsing across Birthrights Plaza and out of the shadows. “What’s the commotion?”
Kaden recognized him from the videos she’d studied. Sterling Waterhouse.
“These are two of the operatives from the St. Peter’s operation,” Conrad reported.
“And we’re here to set things right.” Kaden tried to approach Waterhouse but was restrained by her captors.
Waterhouse stopped and weighed what to do with her and Nico.
“There’s only one thing I ask of my people,” he said. “Loyalty. Of all of man’s sins, none is a greater affront than betrayal.”
He made a gesture with a nod of his head as if to say, Get rid of them.
Conrad turned to three of his men. “Take the prisoners to the Cold Room.”
45
Dallas, August 29
W aterhouse slept fitfully that night. He had the same vivid dream again, of being in a deserted cemetery, unable to escape from the dead rising from their graves. He shook it off as his subconscious’s attempt to make sense of his newfound preoccupation with the dead.
In recent weeks, whenever Waterhouse drove past a cemetery, whenever he glimpsed a mausoleum, his mind went there: What secrets were hidden in these remains? Did the deceased possess some tangible value that could be unlocked for future generations?
When he founded Birthrights Unlimited, mining the DNA of the dead was not even a remote consideration. Lately, though, he had become transfixed by the idea. It wasn’t just about the potential profits. There was something epic and lyrical—worthy of a Homerian poem or a Mayan frieze—in the idea of the dead giving back to the living. The circle of life would run right through the Birthrights Lab.
And it would all start today—in just a few hours.
Waterhouse stepped inside the makeshift Command Center in the Multimedia building. He was relieved to see Gregor Conrad already preparing for tonight.
“Chief, about the security breach earlier this morning,” Conrad began. “They’re secured in the Cold Room. But we don’t know if there are other threats—I’ve stationed my men to patrol the perimeter. I can’t question the intruders right now. Unless you want to postpone—”
“No delays!” Waterhouse cut him off. Today was Blackburn’s deadline, and there was no power on earth that would make him miss it.
“The truth is, we’re spread thin. I’ve already had to move three dozen of my operatives out of their tracker roles and activate them for Project Minxx.”
“You said you can handle both at once—and it wouldn’t affect tonight’s operation!”
“I can.”
“We move ahead as planned. Proceed as you were.”
Waterhouse took a seat and studied the large monitor with a nervous anticipation. Conrad fired up his Eyewear to get a status report before each of the forty extractions got underway.
The grave operations would start late this afternoon with a simple break-in at a nondescript house in the Midwest containing a brain fragment from Albert Einstein. All told, Conrad had lined up grave teams ranging from two to twelve operatives, a highly skilled private army of military contractors, special forces veterans, and misfits whose skill sets were a mismatch for the new economy.
An hour passed, and then another, as he watched Conrad optimize the Command Center’s setup and communicate with his people in the field. Two of Conrad’s former Lost Camp trainees, Phantom and Sunshine, were heading up one of the trickier grave operations in France.
Waterhouse couldn’t help but marvel at the massive amount of strategic planning and brute force Conrad had amassed for this operation. Dmitri Petrov would be arriving with his men in two days’ time when his final deliverable was due. They would need every ounce of firepower when Petrov learned that Birthrights was unable to meet its commitment. Inventory was on the rise, but Petrov was not about to wait another nine months for delivery.
Back to the matter at hand. Focus! As far as he could see, there were no hitches Conrad couldn’t handle.
“Some of these dead legends have a hell of a backstory,” Conrad said as he began optimizing his monitoring and communications equipment. “Take Einstein. They cremated him after he died in 1955, but the pathologist sawed open his cranium and removed his brain without telling the family. For years he kept it right in his living room, floating in a mason jar under a beer cooler. His wife even once threatened to throw the thing out. But he doled out little chunks of the brain to friends. One of those friends will receive a visit today.”
“Parts are parts. A body, an eyelash, a piece of cranium floating in a jar—it’s all the same.” When it comes down to it, aren’t we all just a string of six billion letters?
“As long as they don’t go the cremation route,” Conrad observed.
“Don’t get me started on cremation!” They had lost some valuable opportunities because of that infernal practice. “Gandhi, cremated! Julius Caesar, cremated!”
“Not to mention Joan of Arc,” Conrad chipped in.
So many lost opportunities over the centuries! Mozart, buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. King Tut’s body accidentally carbonized by incompetent embalmers. Moses—the Book of Numbers says no man knows his final resting place. Cleopatra and Antony, buried somewhere beneath the streets of Alexandria. King Solomon, Aristotle, Socrates
, Plato—no tomb for the lot of them. Waterhouse took each one as a personal affront.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you.” Conrad began checking the live feeds. “If it doesn’t matter which body part, why not just take a hand or foot or a few bones? Why the entire body? Logistics are a lot harder.”
Waterhouse had once considered going that route until Blackburn talked him out of it. “Two words. Exclusive rights.”
Conrad shrugged and returned to readying his equipment. Waterhouse knew marketing was not his strong suit.
“Time to get down to business.” Waterhouse rose and began a slow pace. “The next twelve hours are deadly serious.”
He began counting down the minutes. He closed his eyes and ruminated about what this could mean. Not only for Birthrights Unlimited but for the whole of humanity! Once his pioneering, transformative work went viral, it would unalterably change the face of all future generations. Perhaps calendars centuries from now would mark this as the new starting point. The beginning of self-evolution.
The future is coming at us faster and faster, he thought. You just have to project your dream forward and catch up to it. Today we may finally catch it.
Waterhouse settled in for a long night. A Rubicon was about to be crossed, and there was no returning to the old world. He let the purity of this moment course through him. In a few hours he would wake up in a different world. Day one of the New Epoch.
46
Kandy, Sri Lanka, August 29
H undreds of thousands of shrines have been built across Southern Asia in honor of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha who founded one of the world’s great religions twenty-five centuries ago. But Bundt knew why tonight’s target was selected. The shrine stood apart from the rest because it held a precious relic of Buddha himself.
He paused a half block from the Temple of the Tooth and waited for the moment they’d agreed on.
Bundt had become something of an expert on the sacred tooth. Its fame had grown throughout the Buddhist world since the fourth century, when a princess, fleeing war-torn India disguised as a religious pilgrim, hid the relic in the tresses of her hair and smuggled it safely onto the teardrop-shaped island of Sri Lanka. Since then, the Buddha’s left eyetooth has been enshrined in magnificent relic chambers on the island nation. Wars have been fought for its possession. Buddhists the world over make pilgrimages to the holy temple. And every August during a ten- day festival, the sacred tooth is honored on the ancient streets of Kandy in one of the most elaborate pageants in all of Asia.
This was the last night of the great Esala Perahera—the Festival of the Tooth—and the frenzy of the streets was near its peak. Bundt felt the hot breath of a flame dancer’s torch as it whooshed close to his face at the walkway’s edge. He folded his hands in prayer and pressed them to his chest, still sore from the flesh wound during the St. Peter’s job four weeks earlier. He checked his converted dart gun in the thin strap under his saffron-orange monk robe.
It was time.
Bundt turned to Vanderhorst, Stubblefield, and Trang and gave a slight nod. They began moving through the rear of the crowd that lined the narrow boulevard along Kandy Lake. Cool veils of mist rolled down from the lush jungle hills, and Bundt’s body gave an involuntary shiver at the shrill sounds of conch shells and oboes and martial and temple drums that pressed into his bones like a tattoo. Smells swirled in his head: burnt incense, sweet jasmine, copra from the braziers of coconut torches that flamed up the night.
The four of them glided, heads bowed, eastward along the Dalada Veediya, coming up to the spotlight-splashed temple on the north shore of the lake. On the street, whip crackers cleared the way for the dancers in their traditional headdresses and beaded vests that shot brilliant crimson and silver colors from the glow of the torches into the crowd. Then, the elephants. A parade of elephants began to lumber by, bodies draped in elaborate bejeweled fabrics and ablaze with small, bright red and gold lights.
Bundt saw the special one he was looking for. The Maligawa Tusker strode regally along a white sheet of cloth laid in the center of the road, carrying on its back a golden relic casket studded with cat’s eyes and other gems, an ostentatious display worthy of a maharaja. In days of yore, the actual tooth itself was paraded around on the back of the tusker. But no longer. The practice was considered unsafe.
What is the world coming to? Bundt mused.
The elephant trudged past, with the temple officers and custodians of the sacred tooth following solemnly behind. This was the cue they had agreed on.
Bundt led them toward the temple, past the massive concrete row of shoulder-high incisors—a great white wall of teeth that wrapped around the courtyard of the Dalada Maligawa. They padded up the steps in their bare feet, past twin stone-slab carvings of elephants, and glided over the moat on a short bridge that took them through an immense stone archway that ended at a pair of enormous dome-shaped doors.
Vanderhorst went to work. He hunkered down, pulled a small leather pouch from his pocket, and removed a small metal pick attached to a thin wire. To screen him from view, the three of them huddled at the top of the steps and began chanting the Heart Sutra.
Thirty seconds passed. “Speed it up,” Bundt hissed.
Vanderhorst swore. Finally, a faint metallic thukk . “Hold on, I think I got it.” He threw the brass bolt, and the huge door cracked open. They entered the dark chamber and drew their tranquilizer guns. Bundt took out his mini-flashlight and shined it in Vanderhorst’s face—the man looked frightening with that shaved head. Then he stroked the narrow beam across the vaulted tunnel-like hallway, the dark-hued figures on the wall murals peering back like ghosts from another world.
Bundt led the three others down the hallway and into a cavernous drum hall, lined with giant stone columns. Straight ahead loomed the Inner Temple, the ancient building that housed the tooth relic. Bundt turned toward the others—and caught his breath .
“Where’s Vanderhorst?”
Stubblefield and Trang looked behind them and then at each other. “He was right here,” Stubblefield whispered.
“Find him! Be back here in two minutes.”
They began hunting for Vanderhorst up and down the rectangular drum hall, searching the crevices and small chambers behind the stone pillars.
Bundt had a hunch. He veered off to the left and found the entrance to the Image House. He entered and spotted a figure in the thin light on the far side of the chamber, standing motionless before a plexiglass display case, staring at a six-inch-tall statue of Buddha. The crystal statue, carved from a single piece of precious green jasper, was nearly as famous as the Buddha’s tooth, and Bundt knew it was worth a small fortune.
Bundt recognized Vanderhorst’s outline and snapped his voice across the room. “Do your job, soldier!”
Bundt drew closer and noticed Vanderhorst wasn’t carrying one of the tranquilizer guns they’d been issued. Instead, he scraped the barrel of his Ruger semi-automatic pistol across the plexiglass. Vanderhorst hesitated a moment. He peeled away from the glass case and brushed past Bundt, not meeting his eyes.
They found the others and continued toward the Inner Temple, past elaborately painted walls and silver bo-trees. The chamber was quiet, the only sound coming from the steady thrum of kettledrums outside. They entered the courtyard and stood before the temple, a two-story pavilion with a graceful, sloping golden roof.
They hurried up the short staircase and Vanderhorst went to work on the ornamental doors. Two minutes later they were inside. They flew up the narrow flight of steps to the inner sanctum and paused at the entrance to the chamber. The room seemed to herald from another time: burning oil lamps threw shadows across the beaten wood floor; ancient paintings, blackened by fumes, glared from the dark walls .
Bundt whipped his light from wall to wall. Then he saw it, at the back of the chamber—the great dhatu karanduwa. They moved toward it.
Bundt had prepared for this moment. Even so, it was a stunning sight. Behind a bullet
proof window, just beyond a wood altar and a pedestal of silver, was the dome-shaped shrine, topped by a large spiraling tower covered with gold and jeweled necklaces donated by kings and dignitaries over the ages. At the shrine’s base was a golden casket, about five feet across, bedecked with emeralds, diamonds, and rubies. The casket seemed to dance in the flicker of the oil lamps.
Bundt turned to Vanderhorst. “Go to work.”
Vanderhorst put on his protective mask and gloves and drew a small container from his robe. He aimed the nozzle and began spraying in quick, steady bursts. He applied a second coating, and four minutes later the chemicals had chewed through the polycarbonate pane. A melted hole, big enough for a man to slide through, gaped from the base of the shrine.
Bundt went first. He slid through the opening, careful not to touch the edges of the melted glass. He got to his knees and brushed his hands over the relic casket. He smashed the lock with the small hammer he’d brought. Inside was ... another golden casket, about two feet high and shaped like a burial mound, just like the outer shrine. Again, he crushed the lock, opened the top, and saw—another casket.
Bundt cursed. The legend was true.
“Help me with this thing,” he called out to the others.
Stubblefield and Trang climbed into the glass case, knelt beside Bundt, and bashed open the caskets, one after the other. All told, there were seven caskets, all made of pure gold and studded with gemstones, all slightly smaller than the last.
At last they came to the last one, the daataq karanduwa. Bundt reverently opened the top and heard the others draw a breath. Inside rested the sacred tooth, nestled inside a gleaming lotus with petals of gold.
Bundt plucked the tooth and held it up between his fingers, inspecting it with his flashlight. It was small, pointed and discolored a dark yellow except for a small brown spot at its truncated base. It looked ancient. He returned it to the gold case and placed it in a small pouch.