.
Mike stirred in his bed. His head was throbbing and he felt suddenly nauseous. Struggling to his feet and stumbling across his bedroom, he made it to the toilet just in time to bend over and wretch noisily into the porcelain bowl below. Okay, so he had drunk quite a bit last night, but that wasn’t the cause of his illness. No, Mike was scared and sick to the stomach with fear. Fear, because he knew he would have to face Louisa again.
On the one hand the idea of seeing her filled him with excitement. But then came the fear of rejection and the realisation that when she saw him there would be no smile. No sparkle in her eyes. More likely she would scream at him and push him away, full of anger and hatred.
Mike was sick into the toilet again.
Yet, because he loved her he knew he had to warn her. He had to tell her of the danger she and her team were now in. Mike knew that time was short. They would only have another week before an assassin was sent over to complete the task that he had refused to do. One week.
He poured himself a small whisky from the half-empty bottle of Bells beside his bed, and swallowed the hair-of-the-dog in one gulp. He returned to the bathroom and forced himself under a cold shower, trying to sober himself up and become alert. He had to find and warn Louisa today. Standing under the jet of cold water, his mind quickly cleared and for the first time in days he began to feel alive. As he towelled himself down, he promised himself that he would remain sober until he had warned Louisa of the danger.
After all he had done, that was the very least he owed her.
.
---------------------
.
Mike sat in the car outside the I.G.E.G.G.M. and waited for Louisa to materialise. He had already been waiting for nearly three hours.
He had followed her to the lab from her house, where he had originally hoped to catch her before she drove to work. But sitting in the car outside her home, he hadn't been able to pluck up the courage to knock on her door. When she had eventually come out and driven off, he had followed her at a distance, hoping that she was first going shopping or somewhere he would get the chance to talk to her. When she had pulled into the underground car park at the lab, he didn’t know what to do. Except wait on the road outside. Louisa didn’t cook and ate like a horse, so it was a pretty good guess that later on she would need to go out and buy something for lunch….
Just then the glass doors to the I.G.E.G.G.M swung open and the Professor and his whole team stepped out.
“Shit!” Mike muttered under his breath. Scared that they might see him, he ducked down in his car. When after a few minutes they hadn’t walked past his car, he looked up and saw that they’d walked down the street in the other direction. Mike reasoned with himself:-
“She’ll have lunch with the gang, and then come back, and work all afternoon...best wait till she gets home this evening...”
After sitting for a few minutes he switched on the ignition and drove home. All afternoon he sat at home watching various programmes on the television, flicking between channels, and drinking copious amounts of black coffee. At five thirty he decided that he had waited long enough and drove back to wait outside Louisa’s house. Surely she would be coming home soon?
He only had to wait another hour. At five minutes before seven her car drew up in front of her house and she stepped out.
“Louisa...Louisa…” he called her name loudly as he ran across the road towards her.
She turned around, closing the door of the car behind her. A look of panic and shock flashed across her face.
“What are you doing here? I told you I didn’t want to see you again...Go away! Leave me alone!”
Louisa’s words bit deep, and Mike recoiled for an instant, momentarily unsure what to do next. In that moment, Louisa turned around and jumped back into her car, obviously intending to drive off rather that confront him.
Mike reacted instantly, covering the last few steps between them and lunging for the back door of the car.
“Louisa…don’t panic! It’s okay!”
“What are you doing in my car! Get out!…GET OUT!!!!!” She screamed at the top of her voice.
“..but Louisa…I have to talk to you…I have to warn you!”
“GET OUT!!!! GGGGETTTTT OUTTT!!” She was screaming very loud now, and becoming hysterical. A neighbour walking a dog across the street stopped to stare at them, and recognising Louisa in the front seat started towards the car. Mike panicked. He swung the car door open, and with Louisa still screaming in the car behind him, he ran down the road. A minute later his car turned the corner of the street and Mike was gone.
He would have to find some other way to warn her.
.
Chapter Fifty Nine
Oxford, England
Saturday 10th Dec 1.30pm
.
The bus from London drew into the bus station in Oxford and the small American man stepped from the front entrance. As he got off the bus he held on tightly to the sports bag he carried with him, waiting patiently at the side of the coach for the others to unload their luggage from the boot. His had been one of the first cases to be packed as they boarded the bus in London’s Victoria station an hour and a half ago. The little man didn’t mind waiting. ‘Patience is a virtue’, his mother had told him when he was a child, and he had adopted the expression as the motto for his career. Many a time he had been waiting for a target to come into sight during his past missions when he had heard his mother repeat those words to him in his mind. And sometimes, afterwards, when the kill had been taken, he recited the words ‘All good things come to those who wait.’ Indeed, the little American was a patient man.
The man yawned, but nobody else noticed the tired little man trying to stay awake on the platform waiting for his bag. In fact, the little man was one of those people that went through life largely unnoticed. People passed him on the street, sat beside him on trains and buses and airplanes and never even noticed he was there. Insignificant and almost invisible, along with patience, these were two other attributes that made him ideal for the job.
“So what do you want to be when you grow up, little Johnny?” his career advisor had asked him at school when he was a child.
“I want to be a spy, Miss...a secret agent....and kill bad people the government doesn’t like!”
“Oh....” the shocked school teacher had been taken aback. “Would you not rather be a train driver or a fireman?"
“No miss...I want to be James Bond!”
Although fate hadn’t give him the good looks and charm of his hero, when he had applied to the CIA following a stint in the army after college, they knew a good man when they saw one. Especially one with such consistently high scores in rifle marksmanship and weapons training. The man was a natural with guns.
The sports bag he carried contained three of his favourite, and the bag never left his sight. Not for an instant. He had picked up his guns from the American embassy within two hours of his flight arriving in London that morning, along with a package containing details of his assignment.
His plan was straightforward. He would carry out the job, return the guns to the embassy and catch the shuttle train to Paris, where he would lay low for a week or two before returning to America. That would give him some time to see the sights of Paris, something that he had never had a chance to do yet.
International travel was one of the perks of his job, and he enjoyed that aspect of his career almost as much as the satisfaction he got from maintaining his record of success. So far there had been forty missions, and over forty successful kills, sometimes a single mission offering more than one target. He was amongst the best of the best. Yet, sadly, another measure of his professional success was that very few people knew his name.
Little Johnny caught a taxi to the Randolph Hotel. He was travelling as a rich American, here to visit a fictitious son who was studying at Keble College.
“How long will you be staying, Sir?” the desk clerk had asked when he checked in.
&nb
sp; “I don’t know...I’ll probably be leaving on Wednesday but if I like the place maybe I’ll stay a while and look for an apartment for my son...it might be nice to buy him a place of his own, since he’ll be here for three years...”
He knew that within a few hours, no one would notice him as he came and went from the hotel. Soon he would blend into the surroundings and become Mr Cellophane again, his favourite character from the old musical Chicago that he had seen as a child.
“Would you like a newspaper delivered in the mornings, Mr Schmidt?”
“No, thank you. The papers are always just full of violence and sadness. I find it too depressing to read. Why can’t they print happy stories?” He replied, smiled and went up to his room.
.
The file that Little Johnny had been given at the embassy was, even in Johnny’s opinion, a pretty good piece of work. It contained full details on the targets he had been assigned: their home and work addresses, addresses of clubs and societies they attended, copies of the last three months of their credit card bills which would allow him to predict their movements to a certain degree- i.e. their favourite restaurants, pubs, cinemas, etc., details of known acquaintances, copies of their recent mobile phone bills with telephone numbers dialled, their Facebook and Twitter accounts, copies of selected emails and tweets they had sent out within the past two months, recent photographs and video footage of them taken in the last three months.
After a quick shower, he called room service for a meal and a few drinks, and settled down to read the profiles. By the time he was ready to call it a night it was 3am, and he felt that he had learned more about each of his targets than he knew about his own brother and sister.
The next morning when he awoke, he refreshed his knowledge again by re-reading his hand-written notes from the night before, and set about constructing a plan on how he was going to acquire his targets. According to the file, with the exception of their field agent, all the other individuals on the target list worked together in a place called the Institute of Genetic Evolution for the Greater Good of Mankind.
Normally Little Johnny didn’t get involved in the politics of why his targets had been selected, but from the title of the place they worked at, he could guess that they were probably a bunch of trouble makers, a bunch of do-gooders tinkering with science and things that should better be left well alone.
“Nature has its own course and you shouldn’t tamper with it!” he whispered to himself under his breath. They probably deserved to die. He would certainly do his best to help them on their way.
.
The file also contained full schematic layouts of the I.G.E.G.G.M lab, and a breakdown of the security for the building. Most worrying to Little Johnny were the two security guards permanently posted outside the lab on the third level of the building, where their agent in Oxford had indicated the group was currently working. Almost as bad were the CCTV cameras which secretly monitored the streets around the lab.
If it hadn’t been for the intense security at their place of work, the ideal solution would have been a bomb in the I.G.E.G.G.M. He could have killed all his birds with one stone, so to speak. Even better, the explosion could have been blamed on some opposing humanitarian or student group, although admittedly there were few of those around. Geneticists were the golden boys of science and had few opponents nowadays. Little Johnny was one of the small minority who opposed them, the emphasis perhaps a little unfairly being on ‘small’.
“Best deal with them one at a time…” he decided. The plan, simple though it was, was to break into each of their homes late at night and assassinate them all during the same evening. It had to be done the same night, otherwise those that survived would be alerted by the deaths of the others. When all his primary targets were dead, he would find and kill the rogue field agent, Mike Sanderson.
For the rest of the Sunday, Johnny rented a fairly non-descript car and drove around the city visiting the homes of those on the target list. He worked out the best route in his mind between their homes, and calculated how long it would take to move from one house to the next.
He inspected them from the outside and took digital photographs of the houses and their security locks. When he got back to the hotel he prepared his plan, calculating how long he should allow for breaking in, locating and removing each target, before exiting the location and moving onto the next one.
By ten o’clock in the evening, he had convinced himself that if he started with Jason as soon as he arrived home in the evening, he could move around the others and finish the job by 4am in the morning at the latest. He was allowing for the fact that between Jason and the next target he might have to wait an hour or two, depending on what time Jason got home and when he could be reasonably sure that his next target, Louisa, would be asleep.
As far as home security was concerned, from experience and analysis of the photographs which he had taken, it would be a simple matter to break into each of their houses. He decided to spend the rest of that evening and the following two nights, surveying the areas and routes between their homes, and making as many observations of the targets as he could.
It was always his policy to familiarise himself as much as possible with the movements of his targets, their locations and their surroundings, without being too obvious or alerting suspicion.
If everything looked okay by end of play on Tuesday, he would start the clean-up operation on Wednesday night. From what he had seen and learned so far, they looked like easy targets.
In fact, since outside their lab they had no personal security and they were not expecting a threat, he felt quite comfortable that the whole thing should be quite simple to accomplish.
With any luck he would be in Paris by Thursday.
.
Chapter Sixty
Oxford, England
Monday 12th Dec 4pm
.
“I’m finished. It’s all there...I think we’re ready!” Don announced.
The others had been waiting patiently for him to complete his assigned allocation of work. The rest of the team had been ready to proceed since that afternoon. With the completion of Don’s work, they should now have all the genetic material necessary to make several attempts at making another G-clone.
Maria, their new found friend and team member, had already allowed herself to be operated on, and Loudon MacIver, their doctor, had come in at short notice and removed some eggs from Maria. From these, Louisa had prepared some egg cells which had been enucleated and forced into the genetically primed GO-stage.
While they were doing that, Jason, the Professor and Don had extracted some cells from the skin tissue they had found and genetically copied them using several tried and tested processes developed over the past ten years at the I.G.E.G.G.M.
This time round, the Jason-Wainright process would not be necessary. In theory, all they had to do now was to first take a genetic copy of a nucleus which had been taken from one of the skin cells, then insert it into one of the egg cells, apply the spark of electricity and the process of cell reproduction should begin.
.
“Before we go any further, I think there’s something you should all see…” Don announced proudly to the group.
“Oh no...I recognise that tone. You’ve found something more haven’t you?” Louisa chirped up.
“ You might want to call it that. The thing is, I’m pretty sure the new approach is going to work... But I must admit that I couldn't stop wondering why the J-W process didn’t work? The egg-cell kicked the nucleus out…Why was that? Was it because the egg-cells of a virgin are genetically different to those of a non-virgin? We know that’s not the case...so there must be something else happening. Okay, granted, part of that may be supernatural and we may never be able to identify what’s going on there. But…maybe, genetically we’re missing something...Could the nuclei of Jesus Christ be slightly different from nuclei extracted from normal human cells? Maybe ‘God made man in His image' but man can’t make G
od in man’s image! Is there a fundamental difference in the genetic makeup of Christ, in comparison to a normal human? And if so, what is it that we have been missing?”
“An interesting train of thought, Don. What are you getting at?” The Professor asked on behalf of the others.
“....Well, now we have complete cells to dissect from the skin sample, we can really look inside the cell and the nucleus to see what the differences are. So, as well as doing my other work, I spent some time separating out all the chromosomes we could find in the nuclei of the new skin cells, which we found embedded in the resin of the thorn, and although I expected to find twenty-three different chromosome pairs, I found twenty-four!…"
"....and when I broke them down into their constituents I found twenty-five different chromosomes!! That’s an extra chromosome pair with two new chromosomes that we’ve never seen before!”
“You’re kidding! Are you sure?” Jason couldn’t believe his ears.
“I’ve counted them over and over again, identified all the normal ones...plus two extra which only ever seem to exist together in a special chromosome pair. Look for yourselves…” Don sat down again at the Smithsonian, and flicked a switch on the front panel, connecting it to the overhead screen. All eyes turned to the image overhead.
“What you can see are the two chromosomes that shouldn’t really exist…”
On the screen there were two blurred images, one long and thin, and the other almost round with a diameter of about half the length of the other. They both glowed lightly with changing tones of colour, due to the MVWLE effect they had discovered in the G-type blood. The images on the screen shimmered, vibrating and shaking before their eyes.
“I tried everything, even freezing a sample in liquid nitrogen, but I can’t get them to stand still. They’re vibrating or moving so fast I can’t get a clear picture of what they look like. I even tried recording the images on high speed digital tape, and looked at the recorded frames on slow motion and freeze frame. It didn’t make any difference...the pictures are still blurred. If you look at them closely, sometimes the images fade in and out too. It’s almost as if sometimes they’re not there.”
The Messiah Conspiracy - A gripping page-turning Medical Thriller - [Omnibus Edition containing Book 1 & Book 2] Page 30