The Miracle Strain (13 page)

Back Bay

Boston

Jasmine Washington had never seen so many guns in her life, and they frightened her.

"Larry, what the hell are you doing with these in the apartment?"

"Relax, will you? They're fakes." Larry smiled and put the brown box on the floor of the spacious lounge.

"Fakes?"

"Yeah, fakes. Props. They're samples for the thriller we're making in L. A. I only had the consultant send them here because I'm seeing the director first thing on Monday. She wanted to see the kind of weapons the hero and villain might use."

Jasmine hated guns, and it wasn't just because of what had happened to Olivia. Throughout her childhood in South Central L. A., guns had been a daily feature, as had the shootings and schoolyard murders that went with them.

She said, "Just keep them out of sight."

Larry raised his hands in a placating gesture. "Come on, Jazz, you won't see 'em again. But perhaps you should at least consider looking at one of them. Just to see how they work."

She shook her head. She remembered her elder brother saying the same thing back in the 'hood, when she was almost ten. Just before he'd been killed by a random drive-by shooting and her parents had banned her from going out on the streets alone. "Put them away, Larry. Okay?"

Larry bent and pushed the box behind the couch. His voice was apologetic. "They're gone. Okay. I'm sorry." He walked over to her and took her in his arms. He was a tall, athletically built man with a sensitive face. But it was his strong arms that Jasmine loved most. She prided herself on her fearless independence, but there were times when it was reassuring to surrender all that hard-won independence for a moment, and retreat into those arms. Olivia's death and Holly's disease had made her realize how very fragile everything was. Her recent exposure to the Preacher's exploits hadn't exactly restored her faith in humanity. So Larry's protective embrace felt particularly comforting right now. She knew it was irrational, but she believed that nothing truly bad could happen while he held her. Offering no resistance, she allowed him to guide her gently onto the couch as he kissed her mouth.

She had got back from work unusually early tonight and, despite the guns package, was delighted to find Larry at home. They hadn't seen much of each other recently. He had spent half the week in Los Angeles preparing to shoot his new movie there, and she'd been working all hours getting the Gene Genie software to work. It was bliss to be at home by six-thirty on a Friday night with the whole evening and weekend to themselves.

She snuggled closer to Larry as she felt his arms tighten around her and his sweet breath warm the back of her neck. Inevitably, it was when his hand slipped inside her silk blouse and began to caress her left breast that the phone rang.

And rang.

And rang.

"Shit," she said under her breath.

"Relax! Let it be," he murmured behind her, his fingers now undoing her bra, and moving to cup her other breast. "The machine will get it."

She sighed, and surrendered to the warm feelings coursing through her body. She murmured, "You should stay away from home more often."

The phone kept ringing.

"Shit," she said again.

Larry continued to stroke her breasts, then began to move down her stomach, making those feelings heat up in her belly--and lower.

He whispered urgently in her ear. "The machine will kick in soon. Don't worry about it."

But she did worry about it, and the answering machine wasn't kicking in. Ever since she'd almost ignored that scholarship call from Stanford, she'd been unable to leave a phone ringing, convinced that each call could be the next big one, the one she ignored at her peril.

She disentangled herself from Larry and moved to the phone. "Must have turned the machine off."

"Well, turn it on again."

But she couldn't. She had to pick the phone up now that she was standing over it.

She spoke into the mouthpiece. "Jasmine Washington."

She recognized the voice instantly. He sounded more excited than usual. "Jazz, it's Tom."

"Hi, where are you?"

"Back home."

"How was Paris?"

"Very interesting."

"What about Sardinia?" She glanced over at Larry, who was frowning at her and gesturing for her to wind the call up quickly. She wanted to get back to him but was curious about Tom's trip. "Jean Luc called me three days ago to ask if I knew why you'd dashed off there. Why did you, Tom? Did it have to do with the spontaneous remissions?"

There was a pause. "Kind of." Then Tom said the words she'd heard so often before--the words that usually made her completely revise her understanding of what was or wasn't possible. "I've had an idea."

She braced herself. "Yes?"

"It's a long shot, but I think I may have found a way to help Holly."

"Really? How?"

There was almost a pleading quality to Tom's voice when he replied. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Are you doing anything now? Can you come over? It's important, Jazz. Alex and Jack will be here too."

"Come over now?" She flashed a questioning look to Larry, who angrily shook his head.

"Only if you can make it of course..." she heard Tom say quickly.

Larry looked like thunder, daring her to defy him and go. So she smiled at him as sweetly as she knew how, then put the phone closer to her mouth. "Sure, Tom, I'll be there in a moment."

Chapter Eleven.

Beacon Hill

Boston

It was almost eight by the time Jasmine parked her BMW convertible outside Tom's house in Beacon Hill, having taken a few minutes to calm Larry down, promising to make it up to him when she returned.

Alex's Saab and Jack's vintage Jaguar were already there when she arrived, and she wondered again what Tom's idea might be. He had said it was only "kind of" related to the spontaneous remissions he'd gone to investigate in Paris. But she'd learned from personal experience that whenever Tom Carter said "kind of" it usually meant "not at all."

When the Carters' housekeeper, Marcy Kelley, opened the front door, she directed Jasmine to the kitchen. Jasmine walked across the large hall and, since there was no sign of Holly, guessed she must be in bed. At the closed door of the kitchen she halted. Jack's angry voice was audible through the oak.

"Tom, there's somebody out there trying to fucking kill you. Christ, just before you left, the Preacher sliced up some sleaze in Manhattan."

"I know, you've told me enough times already," she heard Tom reply. She could hear the strained patience in his voice.

"Well, you can't just fly off where you like without tell ing people where you're going. You have a police escort for a reason, dammit. And what the hell were you doing in Europe anyway?"

"If you'll just calm down, Mother Hen, I'll tell you."

Jasmine opened the door and paused in the doorway, loath to get involved in their argument. The three of them, Tom, Jack, and Alex, were gathered around the old pine table at the far end of the large kitchen. Tom sat at the head, his hair even more wild than usual. He held what looked like a small glass vial in his right hand. On his left sat his father, Alex. The semiretired Harvard professor of theology was as composed as ever, pouring steaming coffee into four cups. A manila folder and a pile of books lay in front of him. Jack Nichols stood opposite in what looked like jogging sweats. Tom had obviously called him away from his Friday night wind-down as well. Jack was frowning, and she could imagine his wife and two kids giving him as much grief about deserting them as Larry had given her. The atmosphere in the kitchen was as thick with tension as it was with the aroma of strong coffee. She'd rarely seen this tight-knit partnership so volatile.

Tom looked to her and smiled with what looked like relief as much as anything else. "Jazz, thanks for coming." He waved his hand toward the chairs. "Grab a seat."

As she sat down, Alex smiled, creasing eyes almost as blue as his son's, and pushed one of the coffee cups across the table to her. "Hello, Jasmine. I think you've missed most of the fireworks."

"Story of my life, Alex," she replied with a grin, glancing at the pile of books in front of him. Their titles surprised her. If they were related to Tom's idea, then it clearly went beyond normal gene therapy.

Jack gave her a wry grin, and took a seat himself. "Hi, Jazz. I believe we'll all need to sit down when we hear what Tom's got to tell us. After all, it's got to be big. The stupid bastard risked his neck to get it."

"It is big, Jack," said Tom, raising the vial in his hand. "If I'm right, then this small glass tube could contain the cure for all genetic diseases--perhaps others too."

"How can you say that, Tom?" scoffed Jack, his arms folded across his chest. He was clearly still pissed off with his partner. "You disappear to Sardinia, giving no explanation to any of us..." Jack glanced at Alex. "Most of us anyway. Then you come back here and tell us you've found a miracle cure. Give me a break!"

"I'm being serious."

"What's so special about what's in the vial, Tom?" asked Jasmine.

"It's blood and if it's genuine, then it could contain healing genes."

She sat forward. "How come? Whose genes are they? Somebody with your positive virus?"

"Kind of. If it's genuine."

"Did it cause the two spontaneous remissions in Paris?"

Tom shook his head. "I doubt it."

"So, whose blood is it?" Jack asked. Jasmine could see his eyes narrow as he tried to work out where Tom was going with this. She certainly had no idea.

Tom said nothing. He just looked at them, a weird gleam in his blue eyes.

"Must be somebody interesting," she said slowly.

"Goddamned interesting," agreed Jack. Jasmine could see he was intrigued now, despite himself. "Who?" he asked again.

Tom smiled at them both and shook the vial. "What if I said this contained the DNA of a man who died some two thousand years ago? A man who was a tradesman--a carpenter to be exact. A carpenter from Nazareth."

Jasmine froze, her mouth wide open in shock. And she could see Jack wasn't immune either.

She heard him mutter, "Jesus Christ..." under his breath.

"Exactly," said Tom, putting the vial on the table in front of a silent Alex. "Makes you think, doesn't it?"

The stunned silence seemed to last minutes.

"But it isn't genuine, is it?" said Jack eventually, reaching for the vial, watching the brown-red liquid move around the glass. "This can't be two-thousand-year-old blood."

Alex sat forward and said, "You're right. It's not. It comes from the weeping statue of the Madonna in Cittavecchia in Sardinia. The locals claim that the statue weeps blood--the blood of Christ. Back in '95 they tried to get the Vatican to declare it a miracle officially. But they never did. The blood is human all right, male too. But tests at the time proved that it matched one of the villagers'. Even so, the statue still weeps blood and the tourists keep on coming. You may have seen an article on it in the papers a few weeks ago."

"So it's just a hoax?" asked Jasmine, surprised at how relieved she felt.

"Yes," said Tom, "but it got you wondering, didn't it? What if it really was his blood? What could it contain?" Tom turned to Jack. "And before you both dismiss it, let Alex talk you through the research."

"Hang on, Tom," said Jasmine. "Just give me a second to understand this." She regarded Alex and Tom Carter closely for a long moment. The Harvard theology professor and the genetic scientist both looked unfazed by the outrageous idea. She glanced at the books in front of Alex. The Dead Sea Scrolls and theChristian Myth was tooled in gold leaf on the spine of the top leather-bound tome. Beneath that, in a torn dust jacket, was a thicker volume: The Nag Hammadi Texts in English. And the other three books had similar titles: Edgar J. Goodspeed's A Lifeof Jesus; The Apocryphal New Testament; The Agrapha of Jesus.

She looked up at Alex, as an undefined unease began to uncoil in her belly. "You guys are serious, aren't you?"

Alex shrugged and gave a small smile. "Sure, Jazz. Why not?" he said, as if Tom's bombshell was no big deal. This was typical of Tom and his father, thought Jasmine. Both of them thrived on new ideas--the more wacky and uncomfortable the better.

She was a little different. Although proudly open-minded, she needed time to accept weird notions, particularly ones that challenged what she believed in. When she glanced at the frowning Jack, arms folded defensively across his chest, she could see that his pragmatism was being sorely tested too. On a scale of normal to strange, she guessed this idea went way beyond Orville Wright saying to his brother, "Hey, Wilbur, let's try and get this thing to fly."

She cleared her throat. "Let me just make sure I've understood this." She paused for a moment, not quite sure how to express it without sounding foolish. "You want to find a sample of Jesus Christ's remains--some genetic material which contains his DNA. You then want to run this through the Genescope to analyze his genes and unlock any healing powers he might have had. And you want to use those powers to help Holly. Is that broadly correct?"

A calm nod from Tom. "Broadly, yes. In a roundabout way Jean Luc Petit gave me the idea." Jasmine listened as Tom briefly outlined what had happened in Paris. He concluded, "So instead of a virus, Jean Luc suggested that chemicals might be the genetic agent of change between humans--like pheromones with insects. So a person with the right rare genes could heal others through the secretion of certain chemicals."

Jack put his coffee down and frowned. "But why Christ?"

"Because we don't have time to search for people who may have these healing genes--if they even exist. A chance remark by Jean Luc made me focus instead on the one person with the best-documented record of healing. And that of course is Jesus of Nazareth."

Jack shook his head. "But, Tom, you're a goddamned atheist. You don't even believe in Christ!"

"That's the whole point, Jack. I'm perfectly prepared to believe the man existed." Tom patted the pile of books in front of Alex. "I've seen enough evidence of that. I'm even prepared to believe he had certain abilities. What I don't buy into is that he was the so-called son of God. If he could do what the scriptures say, then as far as I'm concerned his ability must lie in his genetic makeup. Jack, just imagine what we might find there: smart genes that can repair DNA; codes for proteins with undiscovered healing properties. Whether the man got these endowments from God or the lottery of nature, his genes may hold the key to correcting all our genetic flaws."

It was now that Jasmine's initial unease began to take shape. Tom Carter, the man she admired above most men, seemed to be suggesting something alarmingly close to blasphemy. She thought of her Baptist parents back in L. A., the strict values they had drummed into her and the faith they had passed on to her. The familiar guilt weighed down on her now, like a priest's heavy hand on her shoulder. She wasn't strictly religious anymore and certainly wouldn't call herself devout, but she did have faith. God might move in ways so mysterious she couldn't fathom them at times, but in her mind he existed all right. And this plan of Tom's made her feel uncomfortable. It was just too ambitious--even by his standards.

Jack, on the other hand, seemed to be warming to the idea. "Tom," he asked, "do you seriously believe you're going to find special genes in his DNA?"

Tom shrugged. "I don't know, but there can only be three options. One, the guy was a fraud; two, he had divine powers; or three, he was a genetic rarity, blessed--or cursed, depending how you see it--with supernatural abilities. Naturally, I don't believe in option two."

"What if it's option one?" asked Jack.

"Then it won't work of course. But because I can't see any other way of helping Holly in time, I'm willing to take that gamble. The patients in Paris who experienced spontaneous remission had their genomes changed by just a few code letters, just enough to kill their cancers. We don't know how or why this happened, but I guess the change agent for their DNA came from outside their bodies, probably via the blood transfusion they both received. I don't know what form that catalyst took. It might have been a virus or a chemical secretion, or something else. But the fact remains that their DNA did change, so a catalyst must exist. And I can't think of a better place to look for it than the DNA of Jesus Christ."

Jack frowned, stroking his scar in thought. "Okay, you're the genius and if you think you can get some gene corrector or clever proteins from the DNA of Christ, who am I to argue? But however feasible your idea might be, it's entirely academic if you can't answer one simple question." Jack reached across the table, picked up the vial of fake blood, and laid it in the palm of his right hand. "How the hell are you going to find a genuine sample of his DNA? The man's been dead over two thousand years. Where are you going to find what's left of him--if anything still is?"

Jasmine watched Jack sit back, arms folded, studying Tom and Alex. His whole posture seemed to say, "Okay, now let me hear some facts, some evidence." She and Jack both instinctively looked to Tom, but it was his father who leaned forward to reply.

Alex put on his glasses and quietly opened the folder in front of him. He looked up at Jack and gave him a small smile. "Is that all you want to know?" He seemed disappointed as he flicked through the bulk of the papers in the folder. "Not the documented evidence of Christ's healing powers? Not the debate about whether he was even crucified, or whether his so-called 'Signs' were just political symbols? You don't want to know about the historical evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts? Or see a list of his miracles? Or examine the fact that he features in the Koran as well as the Bible because even the Muslims thought he had powers?"