Kingdom (11 page)

Fuck it
, Campbell thought, as he moved out into the warm Tiber City drizzle, squinting against the inescapable neon; whatever the story, all that mattered was that, so far, no one had noticed them.

“God damn lucky,” Campbell muttered, squinting against the neon.

“Luck’s got nothing to do with it, Campbell.” The voice—female and low—drifted out of the shadows. Campbell grinned in spite of everything and ducked under an adjacent fire escape, lighting a cigarette.

“I didn’t know you were around tonight,” Campbell called into the darkness.

“Yeah, well, I heard they brought a new one in, so here I am.”

Striding out of the shadows and into the neon twilight, Jael moved with purpose, studying Campbell’s face before pulling the cigarette from between his lips and taking a drag. Her olive skin was accented by deep, intense eyes and full lips. She had scars but flaunted them like other women wore
diamonds; Campbell was half-convinced she wore her hair back so everyone could see exactly how far the gash along the right side of her cheek went. She wore dark jeans, boots, and a knee-length leather coat, but Campbell knew that was all bullshit; underneath her street clothes was a network of ultrahigh molecular-weight polyethylene.

“Pretty bad, huh?” It wasn’t so much a question as a statement.

“Actually the kid was having a blast,” Campbell replied. “Gurgling up blood—what kid wouldn’t want an extended stay in Ramoth? It’s like Disneyland. Next thing you know, the Order are gonna be running around in fucking mouse suits.”

“Funny. I’m surprised they don’t let you do stand-up down there,” Jael said. “But I’ll take that as a yes, because anytime your hard-ass act goes into overdrive, it’s bad.”

“When is it good?” Campbell asked, his breath hanging in the air, his words more accusation than question.

Jael turned away, taking another drag off the cigarette.

“You tell me,” she shot back. “You’re the one who decided to re-invent mankind; the one who decided the original model wasn’t any good.”

Campbell opened his mouth to reply but she was already moving away, flicking the cigarette into the air. Before she melted back into the alleyway she stopped, turning back toward him.

“Oh yeah. I almost forgot…” she said, reaching into her coat, seconds later producing a small leather carrying case—the kind Campbell had seen chefs on television use to store knifes. Catching the bag, his hands closing around the worn, cracked leather, he knew that, whatever its original purpose, it no longer carried knives; there was something else inside.

He stared at the bag for a moment before looking back toward Jael but she was gone. The red glow from the discarded cigarette burned for another few seconds but then the fire died and there was only the rain.

After tucking the carrier under his arm, Campbell stood there for a moment, watching two massive spotlights strafe the starless sky, wheeling back and forth, motion for motion’s sake, purposeless and frenzied. The rain began falling harder and Campbell closed his eyes, tilting his face toward the sky, imagining for a moment that the water pelting his face was clean and pure and cleansing. But the smell was too strong: sulfur and garbage. And then he was moving, away from the entrance to Ramoth and deeper into the Jungle district, the taste of the rain rancid in his mouth.

The Journal of Senator Robert Fitzgerald
Excerpt # 1

To Dylan,

I had intended this journal to be a gift. I had visions of drafting a series of letters in this journal that, collectively, might guide you as you grew older. They would compensate, to whatever extent possible, for all the time our family was apart. Or, perhaps more accurately, for all the time I was apart from our family.

And yet, what you are holding is no gift. It is a confession, written by a scared, broken man. I do not seek absolution: such a luxury is well beyond my grasp.

I seek only to explain—to the extent that I can do so.

And to ask your forgiveness.

Love,
Your Father

Tiber City
Aug. 27, 2015
Noon

G
ripping one end of the red rubber tourniquet between his teeth, Campbell twisted his neck, tightening the other end’s grip on his upper forearm, just below the elbow. Instantly, several veins rose to the surface of his skin; hungry, expectant. He ran his finger along the fat purple vein, the thickest of the group, slapping it until it strained against his flesh, the valve easily recognizable.

With his free hand, he picked a syringe out of the leather carrying case Jael had procured, which was now unrolled and stretched across the cot where Campbell was sitting. Including the syringe in his hand, Campbell counted three dozen doses, enough to last him six months, give or take a few weeks. But that was just an approximation: His battle against his own DNA was growing increasingly fierce and unpredictable.

Holding the syringe upright, the smell of wet leather heavy in the air, Campbell pressed down on the plunger, forcing himself to watch as the needle punctured the skin and pricked the vein. The effect was immediate: a huge mushroom cloud of warmth rising up through his chest before blowing out into his legs, arms, brain, white heat devouring his nervous system.

His jaw seized up and the rubber tubing tumbled from his arm. Campbell dropped the syringe as blood began to trickle out of the hole in his arm: This was the point at which most junkies would nod off, collapsing back onto some pile of filth in whatever abandoned building-turned-shooting gallery they scored in. Campbell, however, was not like most junkies; he was a special kind of junkie. Not exactly like the William Burroughs-Johnny Thunders brand of addict, but not exactly unlike them either. The tools of the trade were the same: rubber dinosaur tied tight around the crevice where forearm met elbow and a syringe full of shit churned out in a laboratory. Yet when he pushed down the plunger, Campbell had shot his body full of a different kind of junk, a chemical cocktail Project Exodus had dubbed “the Treatment”: a series of designer enzymes created to keep the ends of certain specific chromosomes from degenerating, which, in turn, slowed man’s aging process to an imperceptible crawl.

Campbell’s head was pounding now as the chemicals he injected assailed his system, his brain an overloaded power grid flickering in and out of consciousness as it tried to keep up with his body’s demand. He sank backward onto the cot, gritting his teeth, his eyes struggling to focus on his surroundings, on something—anything—other than the pain. When Campbell first left Exodus, he could go years without an injection. Now, he could go a month, tops. And he didn’t even have the real thing; just a synthetic approximation that simply warded off total physical collapse. Jael and the Order helped him come up with the chemicals he needed to make an approximation of the Treatment and while it wasn’t as good as the original, it beat the black market garbage he used to score in the first few years after he left Project Exodus.

Project Exodus. The words echoed through Campbell’s brain, reverberating from synapse to synapse as he squeezed his eyes shut, his mind flashing back to the desert as he felt the Treatment bearing down on his body.

Project Exodus was originally a product of the Cold War. In the years leading up to Exodus, America had grown obsessed with gaps: The space gap, the first-strike missile gap, the education gap, the bomber gap; the concept of a gap between the United States and the USSR was the new national nightmare, complete with the specter of Khrushchev slamming his shoe on the table, promising to bury all the Orange County kids in their subdivided backyards. The government was spooked and began taking
action to address these “gaps.” One such emerging gap was the “leader gap.” Although information on Soviet party leadership was shadowy at best during much of the Cold War, by the time Watergate rolled around, there were some very powerful men in the government growing tired of defending the health of the republic from human frailty
.

This was where Campbell entered the picture. By the mid-’70s, Jonathan Campbell had already established himself as the preeminent geneticist of his generation. The youngest faculty member ever granted tenure by Harvard, Campbell had talent that was matched only by his desire to use genetics to end the suffering of mankind: to not only eradicate genetic diseases but to actually learn how to reprogram human DNA to resist various viruses and influenzas. Campbell’s focus wasn’t just on the West, but the entire world
—
India, Africa, all the third world hellholes where the flu was still a death sentence
.

Believing the Cold War would last indefinitely, the government approached Campbell about the possibilities of using genetics to close this “leader gap.” As far as Campbell had been concerned, the proposal was ludicrous. But still, he accepted the government’s challenge: How could he not? As human beings, America’s leaders had failings that had been naturally hardwired into their DNA. If the alleged gap was to be corrected, Campbell would need to somehow reprogram the DNA of future presidents; that kind of program would grant him access not only to technology and resources the private sector couldn’t match, but the freedom to pursue his true goals outside the established legal framework regulating the biotechnology industry. For those kinds of perks, he could deal with the occasional hysterical lecture from a cold warrior. So Campbell compromised; the first of many concessions that would haunt him for the rest of his life
.

The operation, which began in 1976, was code-named Project Exodus: a reflection of the idea that the American people had been abandoned by their leaders, left to wander in the Cold War desert. The goal of the Project was simple yet audacious: Stem any potential for a “leader gap” by isolating the genes responsible for certain human failings that undermined American executives’ ability to lead effectively. Eventually, the goal was to expand the Project to include the military and intelligence agencies
—
Wall Street was mentioned as well
—
but the executive branch was the primary concern
.

To assist him in overseeing Project Exodus, Campbell recruited the only other scientist able to rival his talent and ego, a Harvard graduate student named Michael Morrison. Campbell had been Morrison’s mentor at Harvard. While ostensibly working toward what he considered the government’s rather delusional goals, Campbell dreamed of locating and isolating those poisonous genes transmitting conditions such as
Tay-Sachs and Alzheimer’s: God’s mistakes would now be corrected by Campbell and Morrison. At the time, Campbell believed he and Morrison shared the same ideals, the same belief in science’s ability to liberate, to heal, to transcend. If that meant playing ball with paranoid cold warriors, so be it. Were he not consumed with his own crusade perhaps Campbell would have detected the subtle signs of treason earlier
.

In order to placate their government sponsors, the pair sought to correct the genetic components of traits deemed “undesirable” in future leaders of the free world. The idea was to be able to cure certain genetic conditions that might hobble an otherwise effective leader: manic-depression, alcoholism, sex-addiction, Alzheimer’s
.

Almost all of these afflictions were the result of mutations that would cause the protein encoded by a specific gene to malfunction. When a protein malfunctions, cells that rely on that protein’s function can’t behave normally, which in turn causes so many of the conditions Exodus sought to eradicate. While medical treatment was available for some of these mutations, others remained untreatable. So, rather than merely wrapping a very expensive bandage around these problems, Campbell and Morrison committed themselves to pushing Exodus to the next level, to correct the source of the mutations, replacing faulty genes with healthy, fully functioning ones through a then-revolutionary technique known as somatic gene therapy
.

After manufacturing a healthy copy of the mutated gene in the laboratory, the Exodus team placed the new, therapeutic gene into a transmissions device known as a vector. This vector was delivered to the patient through a series of injections into a specific tissue, and the new gene was carried into a subject’s defective cells
.

Determined to expand these somatic gene experiments beyond the government’s desired scope, Campbell and Morrison soon began introducing genes into the blood cells of the patients with hemophilia and the brain tissue of Alzheimer’s patients. There was some success: On a few occasions, Project Exodus research reversed the effects of some of mankind’s most feared afflictions. There were also, however, some stunning failures: More than one “volunteer” from Attica’s death row spent his final moments hemorrhaging to death in the Exodus laboratories. Campbell’s resolve wavered after each death, but each time Morrison convinced him to stay with the Project
.