the Miracle Strain (aka The Messiah Code) (1997)

by Cordy, Michael

  Leaving nothing out he started from the beginning. It was as if Olivia was actually there listening to him, as she had done so often when alive.

  "So, what should I do?" he asked aloud. "Do I accept the inevitable and make the most of the time left to Holly? Or do I risk missing the precious year she does have left trying to find an accelerated cure?"

  As he sat there quietly watching the clear, cold fingers of dawn push back the darkness, he remembered Olivia's favorite poem and he smiled. He couldn't recall all the lines Dylan Thomas wrote to his dying father, but he remembered enough to know he had Olivia's answer. He would not let Holly go gently into any night. He would rage alongside her, using all his skill and resources to hold back the encroaching darkness.

  Jasmine would have told no one of DAN's verdict and Tom wanted to keep it quiet. He certainly didn't want Holly to know anything of her imminent illness yet. He'd tell Alex and Jack tomorrow, along with whoever else could help and be relied on to keep their counsel. Together they would work out what the best plan of attack should be. After all, if they couldn't save Holly, nobody could.

  It was then, just as the rising sun leaked its angled light on the cemetery that he saw the fresh footprints in the snow. They led his eyes from the grave, across the wide expanse of white to an anonymous brown sedan parked at the far end of the plot, and the broad-shouldered man standing next to it. The man was only a silhouette against the rising sun, but something about his posture told Tom he was watching him.

  Tom stood and looked down at the deep prints, following them back to the grave, and for the first time noticed the small cross-shaped wreath of blood-red roses on the snow behind the gravestone. As Olivia would have wanted, he had asked wellwishers to make a donation to their favorite charities rather than present any flowers, so he wondered about the donor. Intrigued, he leaned over the gravestone and picked up the wreath. An envelope fell from the red flowers onto the snow in front of him.

  With cold-numbed fingers he tore it open, revealing a small card. On the top was a quotation: "The wages of sin is death."Romans 6:23. And beneath it he read the words that chilled him more than the icy cold: "Your wife paid for your sin this time. But your punishment will come." It was unsigned.

  At last he felt something. All the anger and grief he had been denied since Olivia's death now came bursting to the surface. With blood pounding in his ears he squinted into the rising sun. Ignoring the pain in his leg he began to run in the direction of the lone silhouette. He pushed his legs through the thick snow as fast as he could, his breath visible in the cold air. But before he had covered twenty yards and been blinded by the sun, he knew that the man had already gone.

  Three days later Jasmine Washington sat with Tom Carter and Jack Nichols in the GENIUS boardroom at the top of the pyramid, on the floor which housed all the commercial offices, including Jack's. She was shaking her head in disbelief. She had barely come to terms with DAN's prediction on Holly and now this--

  "What I don't understand, Tom, is why didn't your police protection try and catch him?" she asked.

  "Because the police weren't there," said Jack, his powerful hands clasped on the black table in front of him. "Mr. Einstein here decided to give them the slip."

  "Jack, spare me the big brother shit. Okay?" groaned Tom. "I had enough of a lecture from your friends down at the Bureau."

  Jack kept his weather-beaten features impassive. Despite the gray peppering his sandy hair, and the scar on his face, he looked good for a fifty-year-old. Jasmine had known Jack for almost as long as she'd known Tom. As well as being the commercial brains behind the company, the FBI man turned MBA was a "fixer," the pragmatic worrier who bridged Tom's flights of fancy to the real world. Jack had told her once that he saw his role as the protector of their fragile ideas from the "men in suits," as he called the investors. Ever since Tom and he had met twelve years ago at a biotech investment conference in Manhattan, theirs had been a marriage of minds.

  Although GENIUS was already proving a success, Tom had been looking to raise additional money for his Genescope idea without losing control of the company. Jack, fresh out of the Wharton School with one successful year under his belt at Drax Venture Capital, was desperate to find a venture to capitalize--ideally one that would change the world. They talked off and on for thirty-nine hours, ignoring everyone else at the conference. And at the end of it Jack had resigned from Drax and joined Tom. Within three weeks he had not only interested six major Wall Street investors in Tom's venture, but by playing one off against the other, he had graciously allowed three of them to put up the necessary hundred and fifty million--on the condi tion that they didn't interfere with the running of the business for at least ten years.

  "So what does the FBI think, Tom?" asked Jasmine.

  Tom stood up, walked over to the glass outer wall, and leaned back against it. Behind him Jasmine could see the skyscrapers of downtown Boston looming in the distance.

  "They think it might be the Preacher," he said.

  Her eyes opened wide with shock. "Jeez," she whispered. "Really?"

  Jack Nichols stroked the scar on his face as he always did when he was puzzled or surprised. "Are you sure?" he asked.

  "That's what the FBI told me last night," said Tom. "I spoke to Karen Tanner down at Federal Plaza and she said the handwriting and the use of the biblical quote are consistent with the Preacher."

  Jack let out a small whistle. "If Karen thinks it's him, then it probably is."

  Jasmine understood why Jack was impressed. Karen Tanner had been Jack's rookie partner about fifteen years ago. She had helped him put away Happy Sam. Jack's wife, Susan, had almost become one of the psycho's victims, before Karen had helped Jack rescue her. He had got badly sliced up in the process. It was then that he had decided to get out, to spend more time with his wife and two sons, and find a different way to make the world a better place.

  And now Karen Tanner was saying that a killer who made Happy Sam look like a Little Leaguer was after Tom Carter. Jasmine wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't seen the way Olivia had been dispatched.

  Like everyone else, she'd read the stories. Jeez, there'd been enough of them. The Preacher was supposed to be some religious nut on a warped crusade to clean up the world. It was common knowledge that his victims were mainly high-profile, lowlife scum: mob lawyers, drug dealers, heads of the major crime families--generally any slimeball considered beyond the reach of the law.

  Jasmine could still remember reading about the Preacher's first victim some thirteen years ago. The crooked evangelist Bobby Dooley had been found bobbing up and down in the Hudson with his throat cut from ear, and the message "Beware of false Prophets, which come to you in sheep'sclothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." Matthew 7:15 rammed down his gullet in a plastic bag.

  When the next bodies were found, all with similar messages attached to their persons, the press had gone wild with stories about the guy, calling him "The Preacher of Death." But over time interest had waned; the police had got no closer to identifying him, and most of the victims weren't likely to win any Humanitarian of the Year awards. Now, with a worldwide tally of some sixty or so victims, the only media angle was whether the police really wanted to catch him, or whether they let him alone because he "only killed scum" and therefore made their lives easier.

  "But, Tom, why are you a target?" asked Jasmine. "You're not exactly regarded as a lowlife. Unless the Nobel committee is completely out of touch."

  Tom gave a dry laugh. "I asked Karen Tanner the same thing last night. Her guess is that he doesn't agree with what I'm doing. Her behavioral sciences people at Quantico think that to a religious freak like him, my genetics probably makes me the lowest form of scum around--only a few rungs up the slime ladder from the great Satan himself. And don't forget. Not all his victims have been conventional scum. Remember Max Heywood, the Supreme Court justice?"

  Jasmine grimaced. She remembered.

  Max Heywood's only "sin" ha
d been to say that the American Constitution was as sacred as anything written in the Bible. The Supreme Court Justice had been found in his chambers with the trademark biblical quote written in his own blood, nailed to his chest: "Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is thewhole duty of man." Ecclesiastes 12:13. He had been garroted, and his tongue pulled out with pliers.

  "But why's he after you now?" asked Jasmine. "You've been involved in genetics for years."

  "Who knows? One guess is that the publicity about the Nobel Prize pushed him over the edge. Anyway," said Tom, "I don't care who the Preacher is. If he killed Olivia I want him put away. Which brings me to the purpose of this meeting. I want to discuss a change in two priorities. The first relates to Holly and the second to helping the FBI catch the Preacher."

  Jack reached for his phone. "I'll get Paul and Jane in here."

  Tom stopped him. "No. I want to keep Holly's predicament just between us for the moment."

  Paul Mandelson and Jane Naylor were the last two members of the main board. Jack oversaw all financial and marketing matters, Tom, the Research and Development Department, and Jasmine, Information Technology. Paul, the Operations Director, was in charge of all procurement and production. Jane Naylor was the Human Resources Director.

  Jack took his hand off the phone and leaned back in his chair. "Okay. Let's start with Holly. I assume it relates to DAN's prediction."

  Tom nodded. "Because our policy has always been to concentrate on the more common genetic disorders, we've ignored the rarer, more difficult conditions, such as brain cancer. So to have even a hope in hell of helping Holly I'm switching three of the top lab teams onto developing gene therapy protocols to get around the blood-brain barrier and specifically target glioblastoma multiforme. That means some of the more mainstream, profitable projects will be delayed. There will also be increased funding implications which you should be aware of. But otherwise nothing should change. Okay?"

  Jack shrugged. "Sure. Whatever you need. Just give me the breakdowns so the bean counters can open the relevant budget centers and account codes."

  Tom turned to Jasmine. "Jazz, I've told the FBI about the Gene Genie software, and they're keen to trial it. They have no idea what this mysterious Preacher looks like. Even the film of Olivia's shooting just shows a guy in a big coat, wrapped up against the cold. But they're convinced that sooner or later he'll leave a genetic trace of some kind at one of his crimes. And when he does they want to use Gene Genie to summon up his likeness. I want to help them. How's the latest prototype doing?"

  The Gene Genie software was a second-generation add-on to the Genescope software. The current Genescopes could give a good physical description of a person from their DNA: color of skin, hair, and eyes as well as ethnic type, probable height and build. The Gene Genie software went one step further. Building on the early nineties concept of developing computer-generated photo-fits, using input from witnesses, Gene Genie was intended to create a three-dimensional hologram of a subject built up entirely from his or her genes.

  Jasmine opened the laptop in front of her and called up the critical path for the project. "It's almost finished," she said. "The latest timetable puts it at being ready for Beta testing in ten weeks."

  Tom frowned. "If you made it top-dollar priority and threw money at the problem, how soon could you have it finished?"

  "A month. Five weeks. Assuming we don't have any major glitches. But it'll cost."

  "It doesn't matter," Tom said. "Spend whatever you need to get it operational. But make it four weeks."

  Jack looked at him. No doubt thinking about the millions they would have to spend to bring the project forward a few weeks. "What's the rush, Tom? We've got a monopoly on the software. And you don't really think this'll help catch Olivia's killer, do you?"

  "At least we're doing something."

  Jack looked as if he was about to argue, but then he leaned back in his chair with a shrug. "Okay. Okay. But whoever this Preacher guy is it'll take more than a ghostmaking machine to catch him. He's been around for over thirteen years and nobody's come close." Jack sat forward and looked him in the eye. "Shit, Tom, the guy's a ghost already."

  Chapter Five.

  A month later, February 2, 2003

  Beacon Hill

  Boston

  Tom Carter poured his third cup of black coffee, and watched the clock ticking away in the quiet of the kitchen. It was five fifty-eight in the morning; not even Marcy Kelley, their housekeeper, was up yet.

  Seven weeks, four days, and six hours had now elapsed since Olivia's death--he often wondered when he would stop measuring it so precisely--but still the authorities were no closer to finding her killer. Apart from the Gene Genie software, which was now almost completed, the only glimmer of hope Tom could see was that the FBI were convinced he was still a target. If they were right, then Carter thought there was a chance the bastard could be caught by the agents and police watching over him.

  The thought of being stalked by such a killer was frightening, but any concern for his own life was overshadowed by his fear for Holly's. Moment by moment he was aware of the even more implacable killer stalking his daughter. Today, after weeks of work, he would know whether one of his team's key experiments had been successful, and whether he had at least a hope in hell of finding a cure in time.

  He stood, picked his crumpled jacket up from the back of his chair, and left the kitchen. Walking across the large Chinese rug that covered much of the hall, he made his way to the oak staircase. At the top of the stairs he straightened his injured leg and rubbed the area just above his knee. He would need an operation to cure his limp completely, but it was hardly a priority. He gently pushed open Holly's door, preparing to tiptoe inside without disturbing her, when he was surprised by a bright desk lamp shining directly at the door.

  "Hi, Dad," said Holly, her spiky blond hair bent with sleep. She sat at her desk in a baggy green WHAT ARE YOU STARING AT? T-shirt, tapping away at her computer.

  Tom blinked away the dazzle and ruffled her hair. "What are you doing up so early?"

  "Couldn't sleep. So I thought I'd have one more go on the Wrath of Zarg."

  He smiled and sat on her bed, next to the desk. It was rare to catch her awake this early. Holly was usually awakened by the cheery "rise and shine" of Marcy Kelley's booming brogue just before eight--in time for breakfast and the ride to school with her friends.

  He turned to the screen and watched the warrior queen Holly was controlling. The ridiculously muscular figure was standing beneath a ceiling that seemed to be raining fiery bricks down on her head. A dragon was approaching from her left and a huge troll-like animal from the right.

  "Looks like you're in trouble."

  Holly laughed. "Piece of cake."

  "Oh, yeah? How are you going to avoid being roasted by the bricks without the dragon eating you, or the troll crushing you?"

  "Like this." Holly immediately pressed a couple of keys and the warrior queen on the screen bent down and picked up a rock from the ground, revealing a small blue bottle. Another few taps on the keyboard and the character picked up the blue bottle and drank it. Suddenly she was glowing, immune to the falling hot bricks. And in no time she was using her sword to dice the dragon, kebab the troll, and move on to the next level.

  "Magic potion," Holly explained with a wise-guy grin.

  "Makes you invulnerable. Works every time. You just need to know where to look."

  He looked at his daughter, oblivious to her impending disease. "Magic potion, huh. I'm impressed." He wished it was as easy for him.

  The screen changed and a new level came up.

  "Level six," Holly exclaimed triumphantly. "Awesome."

  Tom was glad Holly liked the new computer. It had been a Christmas gift from Olivia and him. Jasmine had helped choose the model, and it was about the only fun Holly had enjoyed over an otherwise doom-laden Christmas. Sure, Alex and other relations had stayed over, and Jazz and all their friends had been h
eroically considerate, but nothing could distract them from the void of Olivia's absence. All in all the whole festive season was right up there with a week's vacation in hell.

  He glanced around Holly's room. On one wall a Jurassic Park3 poster vied with a life-size picture of The Internet Troopers. A soccer ball sat on the middle shelf above the desk, next to a large photo of Olivia laughing in the garden. He quickly shifted his gaze to the collection of CD-ROM computer games and GI Joe action figures. He smiled inwardly when he considered how there wasn't one doll, cute Peanuts poster, or doe-eyed Disney character in sight. From when she was tiny it had been obvious that Holly wasn't a Barbie doll kind of girl. So much for genetics, he thought.

  Suddenly he imagined this room empty. The fear came so quickly and unannounced that he needed a second to compose himself. He took a deep breath and reassured himself that the CAT and PET brain scans they had taken together had shown no sign of Holly's tumor yet. Again he told himself that there was enough time to find her a cure. He would find the time.

  "Dad?"

  He turned to Holly, who was studying his feet. "Yes?"

  "You ready for work already?"