The Messiah Code (49 page)

Not surprisingly, the other members of the Brotherhood hadn't told the FBI anything. But at least they had Gomorrah and Tom had been able to tell Karen about Ezekiel's confession. It was still unclear what could or couldn't be proved against the surviving members of the Inner Circle, but according to Karen they wouldn't pose a threat to him any longer. As for the rest of the Brotherhood, its assets and members were impossible to identify, let alone locate. But there was no indication that they were even aware of the killings. As far as Tom was concerned he didn't care what happened to the rest of the Brotherhood as long as they left him alone.

He climbed out of the car and locked the door behind him. In the last three weeks, after having had the opportunity to think everything through in the hospital, he must have flown around the world at least four times. But it had been worth it. Almost everyone he had spoken to had eventually agreed to the principle of his scheme. What's more, their response had reassured him that he had made the right decision. But after tonight's meeting he would definitely take a holiday. Just Holly, him, and some sunshine.

Tom walked across the quiet atrium and greeted the two new guards. The sun had barely risen but he still reveled in the pyramid's space and light. He felt a sense of freedom here, a sense of no frontiers or walls to hold him back. He stepped through the hologram of DNA that issued from the center of the atrium, and headed for the Hospital Suite. Tom hoped he would find confirmation there of the choice he had made.

Creeping into the silent ward, he waved at the duty nurse, who sat smiling behind her desk. The small bulb above her head was the sole light in the slumbering darkness. In the gloom Tom could just make out the dormant shapes of patients in the seven occupied beds. With the stealth of a ghost he went from bed to bed staring down at their sleeping faces, registering the humanity behind each pair of closed eyes. Tom knew that at best the experimental therapy available at GENIUS would save three of them, perhaps significantly lengthen the life of one other. But even with the best odds, three would almost certainly die.

Unless
he
cured them.

In the semidarkness he looked down at his hands, and at that moment Ezekiel's words came back to haunt him.

"...
A world in which anybody could heal everybody, and no
one ever died of natural diseases. Imagine a world where there
would be no consequences for any actions we took. A world with
such an enormous population that instead of a heaven on earth
we would create a living hell. No space. No food. No respect for
life--or death--and certainly not God. Just a crowded desert of
lost souls assured of only one certainty--a long life of suffering
."

Perhaps the old man was right, he thought. Perhaps three of these unfortunate people
should
die. Who was he to interfere? He couldn't play God, deciding who should live and who should die. But then the doctor in him spoke, telling him that if he could save patients, then he must save them. It was as simple as that.

He imagined for a moment that each of these sleeping forms was Holly, and that he was their father, husband, or son. He knew then that he had no choice when it came to these seven patients. But as he walked past their beds again, touching a hand here or a forehead there, feeling them draw the energy out of his body, he still felt a sense of disquiet. This was easy. Thinking again of the meeting tonight, he hoped that he'd correctly answered the
bigger
question--made the right
overall
decision.

He left the last patient and waved back at the nurse, wondering what her reaction would be in a few hours when her sleeping charges awoke refreshed and well.

Leaving the ward, he made his way to the elevator and went straight to the second floor. Passing through the main body of the Mendel Laboratory Suite he opened the door to the Crick Laboratory. Jasmine was sitting, diet Coke in hand, poring over a pile of documents.

She looked up at him, her face lit up with pleasure. "Hello, stranger. How are you? How was your mysterious trip?"

"It was good. What are you doing in so early?"

Jasmine flashed an excited smile and patted the papers on her desk. "Well, since your success with Holly, Jack

and I have been busy filling in the first draft patent applications for the serum. Plus of course this." She picked up a typed form from her desk, brandishing it like a trophy. "The FDA application so we can go into trials. Jack's already signed it. We just need your approval and signature."

Tom found her enthusiasm unsettling. He took off his jacket and hung it on the coat rack by the door. He walked over to the glass-fronted refrigerated cabinet at the end of the lab. Looking through the locked door he counted the vials left in the tray marked "Trinity Serum--Nazareth Genes." Good, he thought, they didn't appear to have been touched in the month he'd been away. There had originally been thirteen after the mice trials, one of which had been used on himself. This left these twelve vials--the only twelve in existence.

"What happened to your healthy skepticism, Jazz?" he asked, moving over to the drawer where the labels were kept. He opened them and checked that there were enough. "And what about your religious concerns? Now that Holly's safe I thought you'd be happy to put Cana behind you and get back to more conventional stuff."

Jasmine paused. "I've thought about this a lot, and believe that these genes aren't what made Christ the Son of God. How he used them, what he taught us, and how he died for us were what made him divine. These Nazareth genes are the greatest discovery in medical history--a true gift from God--and as such should be used. Just think how much good we could do once we gain FDA approval and market the genes. After we massproduce them--"

"Whoa, Jazz. We haven't even decided whether we
should
develop the Nazareth genes for wider distribution. You're making the assumption that it's a good thing."

"Of course it's a good thing. How can it not be?"

Tom moved to the cupboard where the backup hypodermics were stored. He quickly counted them and gave a small nod when he realized there were enough of them too. He'd be able to gather everything together discreetly, with no fuss or requisitions. "All I'm saying, Jazz, is I think we should consider it very carefully."

J
asmine couldn't believe her ears. Here was the man who had always said that the only constraint to what you can do should be what you
can
do. Nothing more, nothing less. This was the man who had inspired her to help him invent a fantastic supercomputer that could read DNA as effectively as a checkout scanner reads the bar code on a can of beans. The same man who had convinced her to trust him and put aside her religious fears, to seek out and exploit the genes of her Christ in order to save her goddaughter. And now all of a sudden, after succeeding beyond his wildest dreams, he was saying, "Whoa, Jazz!" and getting nervous about
overreaching
himself.

"What's going on, Tom?" she asked, folding her arms across her chest. "You have amazing power literally at your fingertips. But all we've got is a lousy twelve vials. We've got to clone the genes, make more of them, and give them to others. We've
got
to spread the healing power. It's only right."

"But who do we give it to?" asked Tom quietly. "Or as Jack would have it--who do we
sell
it to? Just those who could afford it?"

"This isn't about money," said Jasmine, horrified.

"I agree, it
shouldn't
be. But even if we ignore the greed factor, you must realize the economic implications. For a start, making the serum universally available would bankrupt every major pharmaceutical company in the world, causing shock waves that could cripple whole industries, perhaps whole economies. But assuming we
could
control the financial repercussions, then who would you give the genes to?"

"Well, eventually everybody, I hope."

"Everybody? So we can create a world in which anybody can heal everybody, and no one need die of natural diseases?"

Jasmine frowned, not sure where he was heading with this. "Yeah, why not?"

"So we can create a world with such an enormous population that instead of becoming a heaven on earth it be

comes a living hell? With no space. No food. No respect for life--or death."

Jasmine's frown deepened as she listened to Tom. His eyes had a faraway look as he spoke, as if he was reciting lines he'd read or heard from someone else. "Well, perhaps we shouldn't give them to everybody," she conceded, seeing some of the obvious dangers. "Just some people."

"Who?"

"I don't know." And she didn't. She hadn't even considered the negative consequences. "People who they could do the most good for, I guess. Like those in Third World countries."

"Why? Because the genes could save the most lives there? Thousands, perhaps millions of people?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"The same people who currently don't have enough food to feed the population they already have? Did you know that accidents, murder, and suicide account for only five percent of all deaths? This serum could eradicate all other causes, including aging itself. Do you know how long that would make the average human life span?"

"No, not off the top of my head."

"Well, I'll tell you. Given our current population, the
average
age we would have an accident, be murdered, or commit suicide would be about six hundred years. Some of us might be run over by a bus on the day we were born, but others could live forever. Just think about it. An average life span of six hundred years."

She shook her head in frustration, trying to absorb the staggering implications. He was right, of course. It wasn't as simple as she'd thought. She looked down at her FDA and patent application forms, the forms that would unleash this powerful secret gift of healing on an unsuspecting public. Twice she thought she had the answer and turned to voice it, but each time she thought of an obstacle and swallowed her words.

Eventually she turned, deflated, and looked at Tom standing quietly by the cabinet, staring at the vials of serum. He'd obviously gone through all these questions in his own mind already, and had reached some kind of answer him

self. An answer that probably explained why three weeks ago, still far from recovered, he had leaped out of his hospital bed and jumped on a plane to God knows where. There were times when Tom's genius could really tee her off. And this was one of them.

"Well?" she said eventually. "I assume you think we should do something about the genes, right?"

He nodded coolly. "Obviously."

"But you don't think we should flood the world with them?"

He shook his head. "Not until we know the ramifications. It could do more harm than good in the longer term."

"It's not like you to worry about disrupting the natural order."

A humble shrug. "Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps there is some method in the madness out there."

She couldn't believe this was Tom Carter speaking. "You mean God?"

A dry chuckle. "Hardly, but perhaps old Mother Nature isn't quite as arbitrary as I thought."

Jasmine drummed her fingers on the desk in front of her. "So, maestro, what the hell
should
we do with the genes? Destroy them? Pretend we never even found them?"

Tom shrugged again. "That's one option."

"Tom, I was kidding. You can't seriously believe we shouldn't use the genes
at all
?"

Tom smiled at her then, and in his blue eyes she saw a spark of excitement. "Do you really want to know what I think we should do with them?"

"Yeah."

"Well, come here at midnight tonight, and I'll show you."

A
t 11:56 P.M. all was dark when Jasmine pulled her car up outside the closed gates to the GENIUS campus. She peered into the darkened gatehouse, but it was completely deserted. She was just about to get out of the car and open the gate using the DNA sensor when it suddenly opened for her.

She gunned the BMW into motion and drove under the

full moon to the pyramid ahead. Pulling up outside the main door, she found herself shivering in the warm night air. There were no visible lights on in the dark glass pyramid, save for the dull glow in the atrium and a light on the first floor above her--where the Crick Laboratory and Conference Room were.

"This is too weird," she whispered to herself, as if someone might overhear her. She had left work early after she'd realized she wasn't going to get any more out of Tom. Trying to fill the time, she'd immersed herself in mundane chores. But she'd kept on thinking of the genes, and Tom's response to her sarcastic challenge about destroying them: "That's one option."

What the hell was he going to show her tonight? The only thing she could think of was Tom destroying the twelve remaining vials of serum in the sterilizing autoclave. Just the idea incensed her, and she had racked her brains all day and all evening trying to work out how best to use the genes, without abusing them. But the problem was proving far harder than any cyberchallenge she'd faced, and so far she'd come up with a big round zero.

She opened the car door and heard her feet crunch on the gravel. The main door was open when she reached it, so she walked straight into the dimly lit, deserted atrium. The DNA hologram writhed in the gloom like ghostly serpents. Beyond it she noticed that the doors to the Hospital Suite were open. Hearing only the clicking of her heels on marble she walked toward the open door. There was no light on inside, so she pressed the switch beside the door, instantly bathing the waiting room in light. Walking onward she came to the ward. Again darkness. Not even a glow from the duty nurse's reading light. Nothing.

As her eyes became accustomed to the gloom she searched for the shapes of the patients lying in the beds. But there were none. Every bed was stripped. A neat pile of blankets and two pillows sat atop each bare mattress. Jasmine felt her heart beat a little faster as she turned around and walked back to the atrium. When she'd left this afternoon, she'd noticed some excitement outside the Hospital Suite, but hadn't investigated further. Still, she knew