The Miracle Strain (11 page)

Just before her blade reached the jugular she pulled back from the already copious flow of blood and hissed into his ear, "You will die now, and be damned forever." Satisfied that the man knew his sins had caught up with him she pulled the blade across the rest of his throat. She watched, along with Sly, as the blood from his ruptured jugular sprayed the screen--then, after a second or two, the giant pupils flickered and went blank.

Maria released a small involuntary sigh. The kill had been executed. She should leave now. She was Nemesis, the professional avenger who had performed another perfect kill. But she couldn't go. Not yet.

She had to sign her work: to prove that she'd performed the act. She reached into the tote and pulled out the fountain pen, unscrewing the cap to reveal the custom-made extra-long nib. Then she approached the corpse, and after locating the jugular in Sly's neck wound, plunged the long nib into the artery, filling the pen's reservoir with blood.

When she had enough she withdrew the nib and proceeded to write on the still-dry area on the back of his pale cream shirt collar.

"All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword."Matthew 26:54.

Afterward she replaced the cap on the pen and put it back in the tote with the rest of her equipment. Then she fixed Babe's blond locks back on her head, picked up the roses lying on the floor of the hallway, and threw them into the kitchen trash can. She thought nothing of the small pain as one of the thorns ruptured the rubber glove, and pierced the soft flesh of her right thumb. And as she sucked it clean, she barely registered the metallic, salty taste on her tongue. Finally she checked that the hallway corridor was clear, and quietly left the apartment, closing the door behind her.

No mistakes this time. The perfect kill.

Damascus

Ezekiel De La Croix walked in his garden, past the orange trees to the olive grove that sloped down to the perimeter of his land. He stopped and looked out at the Damascus skyline two miles to the south. The air was chill, but the late afternoon light cast a warm golden glow on the twisted olive trees and distant city. He had spent his life traveling the world but the large old house behind him had always been his home--as it had for six generations before him. It saddened him that he had no child to inherit it. He loved this place, especially at this time of day. It reminded him of the walks he used to take with his wife when she was alive. When they would talk, and soothe away each other's problems.

A sudden searing pain in his stomach made him reach for the small metal box in his pocket and take out a white tablet. He swallowed it, letting the antacid work on his ulcer. As the pain softened he thought of Brother Helix's plan. Last night, after returning from the meeting of the Inner Circle, Ezekiel had endured his recurring nightmare again. And as always in the dream he had not only failed to save the New Messiah but had helped crucify him too. It brought home the dread he felt of failing in his life's mission, making him consider Helix's proposal more seriously. He was only too aware that as each day passed without finding the Messiah, the balance of risk moved in favor of adopting the younger Brother's daring plan. Assuming, of course, that Helix could convince the blaspheming scientist to work with them.

He turned and began to walk back up the hill to the large house. What if Helix did get Dr. Carter to cooperate with them? Would he, as Leader of the Brotherhood of the Second Coming, really enter into an unholy alliance with the atheist?

He was wrestling with the implications of this when he saw his manservant beckoning from the arched courtyard of the house. Ezekiel waved in acknowledgment as David's tall figure began walking toward him across the manicured lawns. He held something in his hand, and when Ezekiel scrunched up his eyes he could see it was a phone.

"Who is it, David?"

"She would only give her name as Nemesis."

He took the phone and sighed. The message would be digitally encoded. Still, he didn't encourage Maria to call him direct, especially at home. Putting the phone to his ear he said, "Nemesis, what is it?"

Her voice was contrite. "Father, I had to call you. You haven't contacted me since Stockholm. I needed to explain my mistake. To tell you that it won't happen again, and that I want to correct it."

"You should talk with Brother Bernard, not me. If you want to explain or apologize to anybody, it should be to him."

"But, Father, I need to know if you forgive me for Stockholm."

He shook his head in exasperation. Maria had always been like this, ever since he'd found her twenty years ago. She could at once be the vulnerable child craving a parent's love, and the most ruthless operative their training camp had ever produced. He didn't blame her for Stockholm, not really. It was her first and only mistake. "Nemesis, Stockholm is over. It happened and now we must all move on."

"Do you forgive me, then?"

He could hear the anxiety in her voice. He allowed himself a small smile, remembering her in the Corsican orphanage, so damaged and so desperate to belong. He'd been tempted then to think of her as the child his wife could never give him. And even now he had to admit that he had an affection for her. "Yes, Maria, my child. I forgive you. Now, what--"

"Can I finish the scientist, then?"

He hesitated. "Wait, you have other priorities. The Manhattan--"

"That's done. I've successfully completed the Manhattan kill. I deserve another chance with Dr. Carter."

Ezekiel chose his words carefully now. He knew how passionately Maria took her responsibilities. "Nemesis, you don't decide who is to be cleansed. You are an excellent operative, but as I've already said, your role is to carry out the kills given you by Brother Bernard."

"But--"

"Nemesis!" His voice was firmer now. He hadn't even decided what to do about Dr. Carter yet. "When and if the scientist is to be cleansed we will tell you, assuming, of course, Bernard chooses you to conduct it."

"But what do you mean if? What has changed? If Dr. Carter was a kill two months ago, then surely he still is. And if I don't complete the deed, who will?... Gomorrah?"

"Nemesis, listen to me!" As he lost patience, his stomach ulcer began to hurt again. Usually he supported giving Maria a free rein. It helped keep her motivated, and even her obsessive need to leave messages on her overelaborate kills had done the Brotherhood no harm. But perhaps Bernard was right; perhaps he did give her too much leeway. "Nemesis, you should deal with the Champion of the Secondary Imperative, not me. And remember! You take orders from him. You do not give them. Is that clear?"

"Yes, but--"

"Is that clear?"

Her voice sounded subdued, but cold. "Yes, Father."

"Good!" He hung up. Ezekiel was seeing Brother Bernard Trier tomorrow and would tell him of this conversation. It was important that the Champion of the Secondary Imperative stop Maria from dwelling on her failure in Stockholm before it affected the rest of her work.

He walked back to the house, watching the sun set to his right. And as he thought of Maria and Dr. Carter, he reached for another white tablet. He was too old for this. He was ninety-six. Was it right that the salvation of mankind should rest on his decrepit shoulders?

Anybody else would be relaxing now in the sunset years of their life.

Or dead.

He gave a tired shrug, and for a fleeting moment welcomed the rest that death promised. But even as he stepped onto the terra-cotta tiles of the courtyard, his nightmare intruded on his consciousness, kindling afresh the fire in his heart. He knew that he could never die in peace. Not until the prophecy had been fulfilled. Not until the New Messiah had been found, and anointed in the Sacred Flame.

Chapter Nine.

L'Hopital de la Medecine

Troisieme Arrondissement

Paris

Jean Luc Petit was as full of energy as Tom Carter remembered him. Despite Tom's superior height, his limp meant he had to lengthen his stride just to keep up with the Frenchman as they raced down the corridors of L'Hopital de la Medecine.

Tom still felt dazed, and it had nothing to do with the eighthour flight from Logan Airport to Charles de Gaulle. When the mouse experiment had failed so disastrously he'd resigned himself to beginning again, even though he knew there was no hope of developing a genetically engineered solution in time. Then, almost immediately, the idea of searching for the viral root of spontaneous remissions had come to him. And if that wasn't enough, minutes later Jasmine had found not only one but two rare cases of the phenomenon--on the same ward. If he'd been a religious man, Tom might have been tempted to call it divine intervention.

"Jean Luc. Plus lentement, plus lentement. You walk too fast," said Tom, slightly out of breath.

Tom watched the French doctor turn his head, his dark, comically sad eyes brimming with remorse, his splendid nose pointing at him. The man gave a shrug, sidestepped two nurses without missing a pace, and apologized. "I am very sorry. I don't know how to go more slowly without stopping."

Jean Luc was slightly built but carried himself with the relaxed stoop of a much taller man. His short legs moved like pistons as he clattered down the fluorescent-lit corridors, throwing out the occasional "Bonjour" and "C a va" to those caught in his wake. The French doctor carried two files under his left arm as he led Tom to the Francois Mitterrand Oncology Ward--where the socalled "miracles" had happened.

"Jean Luc, are you sure you've got no idea at all why they got better?"

The Frenchman's shoulders shrugged, his face turned, and the dark hangdog eyes smiled. "Perhaps it's a miracle. Like everyone says."

"But there must be a reason," Tom insisted as he avoided a porter wheeling a patient down the corridor on a gurney. "Something that explains what happened. Something we can learn from. Surely? What have your tests shown?"

"You can see for yourself later, but nothing really. Nothing to explain why their bodies cured themselves. Only that they did." Jean Luc's smile broadened, wrinkling his impressive nose. "My friend, why must science always explain everything? It is so rare that something good happens that we cannot understand. Perhaps we should just be grateful. Non?"

Dr. Petit barely broke his stride when he came to the closed swinging doors of the oncology ward, and pushed them open. The room was surprisingly cheerful, with a bright blue and yellow color scheme similar to the ward back at GENIUS. Carter wasn't sure if it was copied, but it had definitely been redecorated since Jean Luc had last visited him in Boston. There were two rows of ten beds, each with enough space between them to offer a modicum of privacy. Some had curtains pulled around them.

Still moving at full speed, Dr. Petit scanned the beds, his nose pointing like some targeting device. Then he spotted his objective. "Ah, bon. We shall visit Mademoiselle Dubois first."

As he followed the doctor through the ward, Tom was struck by the atmosphere of the place. There was a palpable buzz coming from the patients and staff. He'd never experienced anything like it in a mainstream hospital before. Cancer wards were usually hushed, reflective places, populated by people trying to come to terms with their life and the possible end of it. But this ward was charged with more expectancy than reflection. And the bed they were heading for was surrounded by flowers. Not formal wreaths, but riotous blooms that confidently shouted "get well soon." Tom could tell that this was the bed of someone who would be leaving. Out of the front door. On her own two feet.

When Dr. Petit introduced Tom to Valerie Dubois, the first thing he noticed about her was the calm in her violet eyes. They radiated a self-assured, almost arrogant serenity. Those eyes had witnessed what few mortals had. They had stared death in the eye and seen it blink. Tom could tell just from looking at her that she was well. She was slender to the point of thin, and a cap covered her hairless scalp, but there was nothing frail about her. The skin over her high cheekbones had none of the chalky pallor associated with disease. Instead it had the subtle blush of the convalescent; the pink that heralded the dawn of a new lease on life.

Dr. Petit beamed and patted her proudly on the shoulder. "Valerie is a twenty-five-year-old law student studying at the Sorbonne. So I'm glad she's better, otherwise she might have sued." He laughed and his shoulders moved with every chuckle.

Valerie seemed pleased to have him here, as if his wonder at her condition reinforced the fact that she was indeed better. Tom guessed it made a change from before, when every doctor she saw gave her only bad news.

Dr. Petit opened one of his two folders. "She had primary tumors in her stomach and kidneys. And secondary metastases all over her body, including two on the meninges of the brain." He handed Tom two X rays.

Tom held them up to the light. The shadowy tumors in the stomach and the kidneys on the chart in his left hand were clearly visible. And the small but distinct shadows on the brain were unmistakable on the other chart. This woman had cancer all right--rampant terminal cancer that was well into the final stage of clonal evolution.

But not anymore.

"We were just about to start her on immunotherapy with genemodified cells," continued Dr. Petit, "when she told us her headaches had stopped and that the metastases she could feel on her side were shrinking." His intelligent eyes looked down at Valerie, who smiled back at him.

"Valerie, how sudden was it?" asked Tom. "The decrease in your tumors."

"It was noticeable in a day. At first I thought I must be imagining it. Hoping it. But then by the evening I decided to tell Dr. Petit." Valerie shrugged, her eyes radiating confidence. "Also I felt better. I just knew I was getting better."

He nodded as he looked into her assured eyes. What was that overused quote? "That which does not destroy us makes us stronger." He understood what the philosopher really meant then, and felt a rush of envy. This woman would never be frightened of death again.

"How long ago did this happen?"

Dr. Petit checked his file. "Today's Tuesday. Valerie alerted us on Thursday evening. And by last thing on Sunday we had seen this much improvement." He handed over two more X rays.

Tom took them and again held them up to the light. The difference was remarkable. They could almost be the X rays of a different patient. The large tumors in the stomach and kidneys had shrunk to just a smudge and the brain looked clear. No tumors at all.

"We also conducted exploratory surgery to check," explained the French doctor. "The pathologist confirmed from the tumor samples that they were now necrotic. The tumor tissue was dead, killed by the body's antibodies."

Tom looked at the two sets of X rays side by side. "And there's no clue at all how, or why?"

"Nothing. Except the DNA analysis we got from GENIUS Paris."

"You've already done DNA analysis?" he asked with a mixture of excitement and disappointment. "And you found nothing?"

"Au contraire." Dr. Petit pointed across the ward at another bed similarly bedecked with flowers. "We used the GENIUS Processing Laboratory in Paris to scan the blood of both the patients, Valerie here and Monsieur Corbasson over there. The gene scan showed that their blood prior to the remission carried the genetic defects that led to their disease. But after the remission their genome was changed, altered..."

"The genetic sequence in their genome had corrected itself? Their whole genome? Not just the affected cells?"

"Mais bien sur," said the Frenchman. "But we don't know how. The only link between the two is that they share the same blood type and could have received blood transfusions from the same batch. But we don't have any samples left of the batch used."

"They received the same blood transmission, but nothing else? No other links?" asked Tom.

Dr. Petit shook his head. "Rien."

"Were any other patients treated with the same batch?"

"Not cancer patients. No. It was a rare type. AB." Jean Luc's eyes sparkled again. "Come! Let us meet with the second miracle patient. A bientot, Valerie."

Tom thanked Valerie and said goodbye. And by the time he turned to follow Dr. Petit, the Frenchman was already standing across the ward by the other bed, beckoning him with quick impatient gestures.

The second miracle patient was Guillaume Corbasson, a fortyfive-year-old farmer from near Toulouse. Tom shook the man's hand and greeted him in French.

Dr. Petit took a photograph from the second file under his arm and explained, "Monsieur Corbasson had a major sarcoma on his thigh, and a number of secondary metastases throughout his body." He showed the photo to Tom, who studied the hugely distended lump on the man's right thigh. A tumor the size of a grapefruit, it threatened to break through the skin.

Tom asked, "When was this taken?"

"One week ago exactly. It had doubled in size in almost eight weeks. So we were getting desperate to control it." Dr. Petit looked up from his file. "Again we were just about to put him on gene therapy, when it began to decline."

"At about the same time as Valerie Dubois's condition began to improve?"

"Within a day or so," replied Dr. Petit. The French doctor asked his patient if they could see his leg.

"Mais bien sur," declared Guillaume, eagerly pulling back the covers to show the proof of his victory.

Tom reached down and ran his hands over the man's thigh. It was virtually flat. If he pressed hard, he could still feel a small ball of hard tissue, but it was tiny--a pea compared to the photograph.

"Incredible!"

"Oui. Incroyable!" agreed the patient with a gleeful grin that revealed two missing teeth.

Tom smiled back, then turned to the doctor. "How about the secondaries?"

"All are necrotic, completely dead. Now I suggest we go back to my office where we can talk further."

Tom thanked Corbasson and followed the doctor out of the ward. As they walked he continued to bombard the French doctor with questions.

"Jean Luc, this can't just be coincidence. You have two terminally ill patients, months away from death; then all of a sudden they're both cured. And the only link, apart from being on the same ward with the same doctor, is that they have the same rare blood type, which means they may have shared a similar batch of donor blood. Perhaps there was something in the blood transfusions?"

"Like what?" Dr. Petit asked.

Tom shook his head in frustration and said, "A new virus perhaps. A rare positive one that carried a corrective genetic sequence in it. It could happen, Jean Luc."

Dr. Petit sighed and rolled his dark doleful eyes. "Yes it could happen. But the odds are long, are they not? Both patients have been thoroughly screened for viral infections and nothing's been found. And don't forget that all the blood samples undergo numerous heat treatments to kill all known viral agents."

"Yes, but only known viral agents."

"But there was no evidence of any virus in either Valerie Dubois's or Guillaume Corbasson's bloodstream. Nor any change agent either." Dr. Petit stopped outside his office and then walked in. He gestured for Tom to take a seat and went to the coffee machine, where he poured two cups. Tom took the coffee offered by his host. "But there was a change," he insisted. "That's evidence that something happened. Something changed. Perhaps there was something in the genetic makeup of the blood they received that modified their own DNA? An instruction that canceled their own badly spelled program and replaced it with the correct code in the donor's blood?"

"Perhaps," admitted Dr. Petit, taking his seat and a drink of his coffee. He looked at Tom over the rim of his steaming cup. "Look, I want to find the reason as much as you do. Obviously, because then we could perhaps replicate the effect. But we can't find the reason. As you know, the blood transfusion came from a compound batch of numerous anonymous individuals. And because we don't have any remaining samples of the particular batch, we can't analyze the blood. Of course you're welcome to analyze the cured patients' blood, and look at all the gene scans. But that will tell you nothing. It would be like using a spent match to re-create fire. The catalyst has gone. But anyway, Tom, if this miracle strain of yours does exist, why haven't we all caught the virus?"