by Toby Tate
“You don’t know what you are asking, Ms. Lincoln. Abel is a very dangerous man. He has capabilities beyond that of any human. He could easily manipulate us into doing anything. He is like a chess master who is always ten steps ahead. You could never hope to win against someone like that.”
“Which is exactly why we need him on our side,” Gabe said.
“If we’re going to help each other, Dr. al-Shamari,” Gordon said, taking a sip of Gahwa, “we really need to know what happened from the time you brought Cain here up until now. Maybe you should start from the beginning.”
The Saudi scientist sighed deeply, glanced around the room, and then said in a low voice, “What I am about to tell you has been disavowed by the king himself, although my government is still involved.”
“Sounds familiar,” Gordon said.
“If any of this were to ever leak out,” al-Shamari continued, “I would be held responsible, and my family will be killed. Do you understand?”
“We understand, doctor,” Gabe said. “Nothing said here leaves this table.”
He sat back in his chair and said, “When Cain first arrived, he was much like any other human boy. But we helped him tap into the powers that he possessed. That was our first mistake.”
Chapter Seventeen
Eighteen months earlier
Since its inception in 2008, Dr. al-Shamari and his staff had been an essential part of the Date Palm Genome Project, or DPGP. Working with scientists from the Beijing Institute of Genomics, the Saudis established the Joint Center for Genomic Research, or JCGR, and began building the physical and genetic maps for several living animals, insects, microorganisms, and plants like the date palm, which is where the project derived its name. Their goals were quite ambitious. The first phase of the plan was to use the results from date palm genome sequencing to control the red palm weevil, enhancing the quality and quantity of dates and deriving selectively bred plants that were more resilient to abiotic and biotic stresses. That would lead to a study of the individual human genome to find the relation between common epidemics and diseases in Saudi Arabia such as diabetes, obesity and cancer. They would study neurogenetic diseases like mental retardation, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, and more. Ultimately, they hoped to eradicate all diseases from the earth, a rather idealistic goal that al-Shamari knew was unattainable. Yet the enticement of studying and possibly manipulating the human genome overrode his cynicism. He wanted to know everything he could about God’s greatest creation, man.
Then, he had received a strange email from someone who identified himself only as Charlie Chaplain. Al-Shamari had attended some of the finest schools in the world—he knew Charlie Chaplain was the American silent movie star. He figured the email was likely a hoax. But it had also mentioned the fact that Mr. Chaplain had proof of his claim—that he had gained possession of a boy from a superhuman race long extinct from the earth, who he was ready to sell to the highest bidder. If al-Shamari was interested, he would send the proof.
Al-Shamari, going against his better judgment, took him up on the offer. Then, he put the email out of his mind. If it was a hoax, he had nothing to lose. But if it was true…he had everything to gain.
Days later, a package arrived with a sealed container inside. At first, the scientist thought it may contain an explosive, or perhaps ricin or some other deadly toxin. After it was thoroughly inspected and found to be safe, al-Shamari opened the container and found cell samples inside—samples from Mr. Chaplain’s alleged superhuman.
The sample did not disappoint. They were definitely cells from a human, but a human unlike any al-Shamari had ever seen or even read about.
Each cell was sorted and analyzed with a flow cytometer, and one singled out for study during mitosis, or cell division. In order for a human to grow, cells copy their genetic material and then divide into two cells the same size as the original. The human cell cycle, as it’s called, usually takes about twenty-four hours, but these cells were dividing in a fraction of that time, as if they were competing in a race. It also appeared that instead of twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, these cells had twenty-four. In his experience, trisomy, or possession of an extra chromosome, was a mistake similar to cancer where the same cells, say pair number twenty-one, were replicated more than once. This replication usually resulted in deformities and genetic disorders like Down syndrome. But as al-Shamari and his staff would learn, this extra chromosome was not a copy of another chromosome—it was a new chromosome, one never seen in the human, or any other, genome. They had no idea what it did or where it had come from. But they would soon understand its power.
Al-Shamari, using the name Muhammed, made arrangements with the government to be flown to America. He was assigned two men from Saudi Intelligence, much to his disdain. They met with Gordon Powers, aka Charlie Chaplain, at a cheap hotel outside Washington DC in the middle of nowhere. Forty-million dollars was a lot to pay, but al-Shamari convinced his government that it was worth the price, not only for the possibility of creating a new breed of military fighters, but for the purposes of science. The study of this boy would help them leap ahead by years with the treatment and possible eradication of all manner of sickness and disease. Man would finally be within reach of achieving immortality itself.
But the only thing they would discover was death.
* * *
He had no idea where he was, or even who he was. For all intents and purposes, he was a twelve-year-old boy, though he was in reality just a few months old. He could speak, but only the few words that he had heard from the people around him. They tried to lock him in a cage, but it made him feel as if they thought him inferior somehow. He quickly remedied this by breaking the lock into pieces and escaping. They soon caught him, however, by shooting him full of animal tranquilizers with a hunting rifle. Though his blood could effectively fight off practically any disease known to man, the tranquilizers were something else altogether. They acted very quickly, flooding his veins like ice water before hitting his brain and rendering him unconscious.
The boy could sense that although he looked like them, he was not one of them. He was different…somehow. He found that if he concentrated hard enough, he could receive the thoughts of most people he focused upon. He didn’t think the others could do this, because they were always communicating verbally. He also thought he could almost see through things, both animate and inanimate. If he focused all his will, he could look through a wall to see what was on the other side or see a person’s internal organs and bones. But he hadn’t mastered this ability yet. He did know one thing—he was much stronger than his captors. He discovered this when they had first brought him to this place. They were rolling him into the building on a gurney and they thought he was still unconscious. As they were moving along, he suddenly sat up and grabbed a man by the throat with each hand, effectively stopping his forward momentum. Dr. al-Shamari and the others were stunned. He had caught them by surprise. It was an interesting test, and that was exactly what he was doing—testing their strengths and weaknesses.
But the boy was also curious. As the two choking men fought helplessly to break the grip of such small yet impossibly strong hands, al-Shamari tried to reason with him, telling him that they meant him no harm, that they only wanted to help him—help him understand who and what he is.
Then al-Shamari called him Cain.
At this, the boy released his grip and the two men fell to the ground, gasping for breath through their nearly crushed larynxes. Then he looked up at al-Shamari. He had never had a name before. For nearly his entire life, up until now, he had been kept heavily sedated, the outside world filtering in through a haze of narcotics. A human’s mind and body would have atrophied under such conditions. But this boy, as they had learned, was something other than human.
“Cain,” he said. “That is my name?”
The Saudi scientist smiled. “Yes. Yes, that is your name,” he said. “Your name is Cain.”
Chapter Eighteen
&n
bsp; In the beginning they treated him well, teaching him how to speak and read Arabic as well as some English, instructing him on Saudi customs and on Islam. He was allowed to roam the facilities and watch the scientists perform experiments, surf the Internet, watch TV, read—whatever he wanted to do, as long as he was available when it was time to do another test. He found this arrangement to be satisfactory at the time. He was growing mentally and physically at an almost supernatural pace, and would soon be a man.
When he began to wonder about who he was, where he had come from and who his parents were, the answers seem to come to him as if through some primal instinct, some genetic code passed down through the eons like a message from the past, telling him what he needed to know to survive. It told him that he was not human, that he would never be human. This idea was somewhat unsettling to him, because if he wasn’t human, then what was he?
The woman named Lydia had been the only one that he trusted, the one with whom he felt he could talk openly. She spoke to him kindly and had a way about her that put him at ease. Her mind and heart seemed to be at peace with herself as well as with the world around her. Often, late at night, she would come to him in his quarters and try to comfort him, to ease his misgivings about his situation. It was during this time that Cain was the closest to what anyone would think of as vulnerable. He was growing at ten times the rate of a normal human, and learning at an even faster rate, but like a human, his emotions fluctuated with his changing body chemistry like a traffic light during rush hour.
Once she had come to him on a night when he had been feeling anxious, sensing that something was about to change, but not knowing what. She tried to assuage his fears, to put his mind at ease.
“Have you been thinking about your mother again?” she asked in Arabic as she sat on the edge of the bed where he played Minecraft on an iPad.
Cain shook his head without looking away from the game. “I don’t think about her as much anymore. It seems futile. She was a beast, not a human...or whatever I am.”
“You musn’t think of it that way.”
“What way should I think of it?”
“That she loved you. Even if you didn’t know her, you have to believe that she loved you.”
He turned from the game and looked at her. “What is love?”
Lydia smiled. “Love is when one person gives selflessly to another, without the thought of getting anything in return.”
“Is that what you’re doing now?”
Her thoughts told him that the question had caught her by surprise. “I suppose I am, yes,” she said. “I love you like I would love a little brother. I want you to be happy here.”
“If you want me to be happy, then why do you keep me prisoner?”
“Who said you’re a prisoner?”
“Am I free to go?”
“Well...”
“Then I’m a prisoner.”
“Cain, we’re your family. You have to believe that. We only want to help you.”
He turned back to his game. “You want to study me. But that’s OK. I really don’t mind. I like it here, and you treat me well. I suppose it’s better than being without a home.”
“Yes, it is. Much better.”
He glanced at her and said, “I like you, Lydia. You’re the only one who treats me with respect. The others talk down to me, like I’m a child. But I’m not.”
“No, of course not.”
“Besides, if I wanted to leave, I could have gone long ago, and there’s nothing any of you could have done to stop me.”
“You’re not a prisoner, and no one is going to treat you like one. You’re a boy, and you have a good heart. Just remember that we care about you.”
For a while, Cain took Lydia’s words to heart. He wanted to believe that he was good, and not a beast like his mother had been.
Then one day came the military men with their dead eyes, black hearts and minds set on one thing—forcing him to do their bidding, to become their idea of the perfect killing machine.
At first he was enraged and wanted to destroy them all for leading him to believe they only desired to help him, when the truth was they wanted to help themselves. Al-Shamari and his staff seemed to be taken by surprise at this turn of events, telling Cain that they had no idea of their government’s plans, that they had nothing to do with it, but that didn’t satiate his anger. But instead of fighting it or running away, Cain resolved himself to become a survivor, to put aside the weakness of emotional attachment and sentiment and to learn everything he could about the art of war.
* * *
It began with simple games and a daily workout routine. They put him on a high-protein diet to build muscle quickly, but they found he didn’t really need it. Cain was as strong as any five men, though he was but a boy. He was very adept at the games, especially Call of Duty. He consistently maintained the highest achievable score. His reflexes and accuracy were off-the-charts.
His main teacher for the military training was a man named Masoud al-Nassar. Al-Nassar, who resembled a cave bear in both size and temperament, had been born in the US and served with the US Army’s Delta Force. After his enlistment, he had “seen the error of his ways” and returned to Saudi Arabia to take up arms against the infidels. Or so he had said. The truth was that al-Nassar did not work well with others and found that the Saudis were more than willing to pay big money to learn the secrets of one of the most elite fighting forces in the world. Since al-Nassar had been raised by a mother and father who spoke fluent Arabic, there was no language barrier. In fact, that had been one of the selling points that got him into Delta Force. His keen intellect and seemingly unbreakable will to succeed against all odds got him through six months of training.
Unfortunately, the big man liked giving orders much better than taking them, so after four years he had decided it was time to move on to where the money was.
After a stint at training the Saudi army for special ops, he was called in for this particular job. He wasn’t told much about the boy he was to train accept that he was supposed to have “special talents.” When he first saw Cain, he had reservations. The boy didn’t look as if he could do a push up, let alone train as an elite killer.
But those silver eyes…those were something else altogether. It was as if Cain were staring into the black recesses of his soul for every dark secret that lay hidden there.
By the end of the first day, he realized how wrong he had been about the boy’s strength. Cain was able to do not only two-handed pushups, but one-handed ones, as well as an inordinate number of chin-ups, sit-ups, leg lifts, and anything else they could throw at him. He could dead-lift a ninety kilo barbell without straining, and al-Nassar clocked the boy on a kilometer track at thirteen meters per second, faster than the fastest human on record—and he wasn’t even fully grown yet.
On another occasion, al-Nassar had decided to test the boy’s strength for himself and nearly had his wrist broken in an arm-wrestling match. Al-Shamari had told him that Cain’s bone and muscle density was ten-times that of a normal human, so muscle size wasn’t a factor when it came to his strength.
Al-Nassar eventually found himself at an impasse. How was he supposed to challenge someone with superhuman abilities? But instead of building up the boy’s muscles, which seemed to be happening naturally, he decided to concentrate on teaching tactics and on psychological control—in other words: brainwashing. It would do no good to have the world’s greatest assassin if they could not control him.
In the US, there were rumors that the CIA had created their own mind-controlled assassins in something known as the MK Ultra program. Candidates were brought in, told they would be part of a secret experiment, promised money, and then heavily drugged into what was called a “Twilight Zone” state using a combination of barbiturates and stimulants. The brain, locked into a state of waking dreams, left the candidate with neither will nor memory, the perfect assassin. If captured, assassins would be disavowed, with no way to defend themselves or
even retain the memory of what they had done.
Shock treatment, hypnosis, and sexual abuse were used to create split personalities, with one personality acting as a covert assassin, activated by a simple phone call and code word. The other personality had no memory of the call, the assassination or even of their mission.
But these techniques proved useless with Cain. Since he could read thoughts, he knew what they were planning before they could even begin, and he told them so. What surprised al-Nassar was Cain’s insistence that there was no need for mind control, because he was willing to kill whoever they wanted killed, without hesitation, without question. There was only one thing he wanted in return—money.
And that was something the Saudi family had plenty of.
Chapter Nineteen
Day after day, week after week, Cain continued to grow and to train in the use of every kind of weapon, hand-to-hand combat technique, and psychological warfare tactic, quickly morphing into a cunning and dangerous killer. That worried al-Nassar. Cain was headstrong and independent, and he possessed frightening powers. His teacher did not fear Cain’s strength, for he feared no man. But this was no ordinary man. He could sense his opponents coming, spot them through thick walls, and even knew what they were thinking. He was also extremely logical and remembered everything after only seeing, hearing or doing it once. Al-Nassar had never witnessed anything like it.
But the most worrisome thing was that Cain seemed to have no loyalty to anyone but himself. After months of intense training coupled with his almost god-like powers, he would be unstoppable. What if he were to turn those newly acquired skills against his teachers?
Now they were going to further his training by letting him track down and kill an armed human being.