The Lucifer Genome Read online

  She froze.

  “Turn around.”

  She dropped her bag and inched her eyes around her shoulder. Two men in military jumpsuits were pointing pistols at her. “I’m here,” she said, her voice trembling, “for the new position.”

  The guards lowered their weapons. One of them spoke into a small transmitter strapped to his upper arm. “Secured.”

  Seconds later, a stout man in a Stetson and rattlesnake-skin boots marched out with a hitching gait from the shadows. He had a scraggly face as long and droopy as a hound’s, with a huge triangular nose and a chin that sloped out like the overhang of a washed-out arroyo. Growling in disgust, he took another step forward and sized her up from head to foot.

  “Whelan,” she peeped. “Bridget Whelan.”

  The man motioned his two guards away. Then, alone with her, he broke the sinister smile of a coyote stumbling across fresh road kill. “You can never be too careful in the biotech business.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She had heard that deep, grating voice before. It sounded like the grind of a rusty windmill in a breeze. Wait a minute. This Lone Ranger was the guy she had spoken to on the phone? Seeing him waiting for a response, she nodded, still forcing her heart back down her throat.

  “So, you’re Whelan.”

  She began calculating the change she’d need to find in her wallet to catch the bus back to Lubbock. “I think I may have made a mistake. I thought …”

  The man reached into his jacket pocket.

  She flinched, afraid he was going to whip out a handgun and shoot her.

  The man laughed at her skittishness as he pulled out a check and pushed it into her hand. “I like to give my new employees a little incentive when they start. There’s more where this comes from, if you perform as expected.”

  She looked down at the sum on the check, and her jaw dropped: A five, followed by … three zeros.

  “Now, Miss Whelan, tell me. Have you been saved?”

  She swallowed a curse. Not another one of those. If she had a nickel for every time she’d been asked that in her life, she would have been saved, all right—by the bank. But heck, for five thousand bucks, she’d speak in tongues for him. “I come from Lubbock, Mister, um …”

  “Cohanim.”

  “Yes, sir, I knew that. Folks where I come from believe that Jesus spent his missing years”—she clawed quotes in the air around her reference to the Messiah’s life from age twelve to thirty—“they say He was living in Texas, learning everything he taught the Apostles.”

  Cohanim nodded soberly, apparently not getting the joke. “Use some of that cash to buy yourself a proper outfit. We have a dress code here.” He tapped his temple. “You’re a smart girl. I know I’ve made myself clear.”

  Bridget glanced around for an escape route, until she remembered how easy it would be for him to put a stop payment on the check. So, she resolved to hunker down for the day, at least. “Is there some paperwork I need to fill out?”

  Cohanim spun on his heels. “Paperwork? You’re not signing on with the government here. This is Dallas. We shoot first and apply for the gun permit later. Go scrub up. There’s a lab coat and a head-band magnifier in the storage closet just outside the lab.”

  Scrub up? Does this guy think I’m going to assist him in surgery?

  She followed him down several long, dark corridors, scurrying to keep up while trying to avoid falling over boxes and binders strewn across the floors.

  “You’re trained on the newest needle technology for carbon extraction, right?”

  At that moment, Bridget was wondering if her bank had a branch in the neighborhood. Getting that check deposited and cleared today would really send her to the moon.

  “Whelan!”

  His bark jolted her from her fantasizing about a new car. “Yes, sir?”

  “We just got a new Magnosyringe Twelve-Hundred unit in. You can drive it?”

  She didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but he wasn’t going to get that bonus check out of her hands now. So, she lied, hoping she’d be able to wing it, whatever the machine was. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Cohanim pointed toward a changing room. “Press that button on the wall when you’re ready. And make sure you’ve washed up thoroughly. One contamination screw-up, and you’re terminated.”

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, BRIDGET, ATTIRED in a white smock, was buzzed through another door. She entered a modern laboratory that featured a circular workstation surrounded by a glass bubble. On the far wall was a tinted glass pane that she guessed was a one-way mirror.

  Cohanim handed her a stick of gum.

  “No, thanks,” she said, baring her teeth like a hyena. “I’ve got soft enamel.”

  He glared at her. “For the pressure change.”

  She shrugged, and let him stick the gum into her mouth.

  “You’ll have ten minutes before the barotrauma kicks in. Signal me if you start feeling any of the usual symptoms. Heaviness in the lungs. Aching in the sinuses. Blurred vision. I’ll be in the control room next door.”

  It slowly dawned on her that this space capsule she was about to step into was an outsized hyperbaric chamber that pumped in high levels of oxygen. Whatever this guy expected her to do in there had to involve handling highly degradable material. She took a step closer to the glass and saw a stainless steel machine on the table that looked like a drill press. A slender needle about six inches long was attached to its neck. The intricate mechanism resembled a multi-million-dollar sewing machine. Next to it sat a Mac laptop.

  Cohanim led her around the circular chamber. “Let’s go over the protocol.”

  Being a natural empath—a skill that she had honed in coven training—Bridget was sensing her boss’s increasing anxiety, and that wasn’t doing her any favors for her own spinning chakras. She faked confidence. “Right.”

  He was now talking a mile a minute. “The specimen you’ll be drilling is an iron chondrite with a mass half the size of a ping-pong ball. You don’t need to worry about precise measurements. They’ve been scanned in and registered into the three-dimensional rendering program on the drill’s chip.”

  Bridget exhaled a held breath in relief. Extracting minerals was no big deal. Heck, she had done that at Tech so many times with the metallurgical syringe needles that she could manage it in her sleep. These new virtual-imaging babies made the whole thing easier than flying a plane on automatic pilot. She looked around for a jar or tray. “Where do you want me to put the deposit?”

  Donning surgical gloves, Cohanim walked to a stainless steel refrigerator and carefully brought out a prepared Petri dish. “In here.”

  Bridget pressed her nose against the glass pane of the hyperbolic chamber and peered over at the drill. Under its tip was positioned what looked like a small lump of coal.

  “The secondary layer of the rock is white, like the fruit of a coconut,” he explained. “The needle has a nano transmitter in its tip that senses changes in density. When you reach the innermost kernel, an audible signal will be sent to the laptop. That’s when you draw the sample into the syringe. Deposit the extraction into the Petri dish and cover it. Leave it inside the chamber, and then get out. Other lab assistants will take over the process from there.”

  “I don’t mind the grunt work.”

  Cohanim dismissed that teamwork offer with an unsettling smile. “Here at Lightgiver, we don’t let our Formula One drivers run the lawn mowers.”

  Straightening with pride, Bridget stared through the glass again at the drilling device. “That’s some bitchin’ needle.” She rubbed her hands together, now looking forward to this little excursion into the mineral kingdom. “Chondrite. Shouldn’t be more than a five on the Mohr scale.”

  “Nine.”

  She did a double take, not sure she had heard correctly. “That’s almost the hardest material on Earth!”

  “Almost.” Cohanim nodded to the control room on the other side of the one-way mirror. “The needle’s tip is
crystal diamond. Ten trumps a nine. I hope I don’t need to tell you how expensive such a custom-made instrument is to replace.”

  “The Colin Powell rule, right?”

  “What?”

  “I break it, I bought it?”

  “That’s the Pottery Barn rule.”

  Bridget was about to scratch her head, then remembered her gloves had been sanitized. “Where’d I get Colin Powell out of that?”

  “Just get the job done.”

  Again he ignored her humor, and just like that, Bridget’s excitement went up in smoke. She chewed harder on the gum to redirect her nervous energy while she tried to steady her hand. Pressing an elbow against her pocket, she felt reassured knowing that her green aventurine was still with her. And that check for five hundred big ones next to it didn’t hurt. She took the Petri dish from him and stared at it. Why would he want to place an inert mineral on a lidded agar plate used to grow cell cultures? Despite his foul mood, she risked another question, “What am I looking for in the rock?”

  He wouldn’t meet her inquiring eyes. “We’ve done some infrared scans. These specimens have a protective core in their center. Kind of like a kernel in a nut. Once you’re past the blackened skin—”

  “Blackened? What caused that?”

  His impatience bubbled to the surface. “Look, I am not running a grad school seminar here! Are we clear? Just get the sample and corral the questions.”

  “Right, boss.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mojave Desert, California

  FORCED TO STEP OUT OF his air-conditioned kiosk, the guard manning the entrance to the remote CrossArrow Global compound cursed at the vehicle approaching through the dusty haze. The blazing sun threw sparks off the concertina wire fence stretching for miles in both directions, and a sudden blast of heat stole his breath. He peered out at the incoming visitor, but all he could see were drops of condensation dripping toward his nose. Three hundred bucks for non-fogging lenses, and it was like looking through a sauna porthole.

  He wiped the shades with his sleeve and then aimed his submachine gun at the puke-green VW microbus churning up plumes of dust and acrid diesel fumes. His finger itched at the safety behind the trigger. Before he retired, he’d like, just once, to put a bullet through one of these New Age kooks who kept getting lost out here on their way to smoke weed and play Indian vision quest at Joshua Tree. He blasted the warning siren, but the douchebag behind the wheel just kept barreling toward him.

  Are you friggin' kidding me?

  He couldn’t make out the driver’s face through the sand-scratched windshield, so he fired a warning shot over the vehicle’s corroded roof. The crazy sonofabitch didn’t even hit the brakes. He sprayed a few rounds into the front right tire, sending the van careening to a stop with its tie-rods squealing like wounded coyotes.

  “Get out!” the guard shouted. “Hands up!”

  The driver didn’t budge.

  The dust on the windshield prevented the guard from seeing how many sat inside. He aimed his barrel at the driver’s window. Was this pothead just too stoned to hear him? He knocked out the pane with the gun’s stock and—

  The door flew open, smashing into the guard’s face and crumpling him to the ground. On his knees, he cursed and picked shards of glass from his forehead. “Bastard!” He looked up to see his own submachine gun pointed between his eyebrows. He blinked, not trusting his concussed senses.

  The man hovering over him wore a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to the navel, a shark-tooth necklace, and sandals with flapping soles half-torn from the straps.

  Had the ghost of Don Ho just mugged him?

  The driver prodded the bleeding guard on hands and knees toward his van’s front flat tire. “What size are those radials on your Jeep?”

  The guard’s head was pounding. “I’m gonna dislocate every joint in your—”

  “Fill it up.” The guy in the Hawaiian shirt heeled the guard’s nose toward the rim of the van’s right front tire.

  “What the hell?”

  The van owner drove the guard’s mouth to the stem. “Screw off the cap.”

  With the barrel pressing into the nape of his neck, the guard had no choice but to bite on the tire’s stem cap and slowly chew it counterclockwise.

  “Now, take her to thirty seven pounds.”

  “The damn tire’s ripped!”

  “Then you’re just going to have to blow harder, aren’t you?”

  The guard pretended to puff into the stem, spewing and coughing. “Nobody can do anything like this!”

  “Just keep blowing until your dick gets hard,” the intruder ordered. “If it reaches four inches, you’ve hit maximum pressure.” He fired a couple of rounds into the sand, inches from the guard’s knees. “Damn. These new AK issues are touchy. I barely kissed the trigger. It’s like I think, ‘fire,’ and the mo’-fo’ fires! Must be some kind of mind-body connection.”

  The guard was now shaking. “Look, pal, I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, just put down the weapon, and I’ll forget what happened.”

  The van driver slammed his foot into the small of the guard’s back, forcing him to crawl toward the rear of the van. “You’re gonna take those four tires off your ride and put them on mine. Are those Michelins still under warranty? I’ll be needing the paperwork.” He shuffled in the sand. “Y’know, damn, it’s hotter’n Beezelbub’s shite out here. Makes a fella thirsty. You got any brews in that ice-fishing shack?”

  “Are you nuts?”

  The lunatic fired another dozen rounds into the sky, letting the bullets fall and thump the sand like pigeon droppings. “How come everybody keeps asking me if I’m nuts? I mean, just before I left Malibu, I told this hot little blonde that I had to drive four hundred miles into the freakin’ desert to meet with a prick named Earl Jubal, who just so happens to rake in billions of dollars by killing inconvenient civilians for NATO. And you know what she asks me?”

  The guard shook his head slightly, too frightened to risk an answer.

  “Just like you, she asks the same thing you just did.” The van hermit pointed the barrel at his own chest. “And I’m the one who’s nuts?”

  The guard’s fingers crept toward the cell phone clipped to his belt.

  The driver stepped on his hand. “Don’t even think about it. Jesus Christ, can’t I just finish my story?”

  The guard didn’t dare move.

  “So, I tell this hottie, right, I say, ‘Honey, listen. We the People get exactly the kind of government we deserve.” The lunatic fired a few more rounds into the distant desert and screamed, “Semper fi! Hooah, mothahumpa!” He spun in a circle, something of a weird victory dance, as if the heat and euphoria of shooting something really was getting to his head.

  The security guard kept crouching lower, trying not to draw attention.

  The loon’s tone turned serious as he aimed the barrel back at the guard’s head. “Listen up, amigo. The jack is under the spare in the back. You might have a little trouble finding a solid spot around here to crank it up, so you better get started. I hear the noon sun out here can turn monkey brains into huevos rancheros.”

  A black SUV, followed by two armored Humvees, flew over the cactus-crenellated horizon and skidded to a stop within a few yards of the van.

  A tall, leathery-faced man in snappish khakis, leather boots, and dark blue cavalry hat stepped out from the passenger side of the SUV. Four toughs armed with assault rifles clambered out of the Humvees and came aside the head honcho. As the gruff cowboy in charge sauntered up, he spat at a scorpion scampering through the brush. “You’re late, Fielding.”

  Cas shook his head, amused by the flamboyant millinery. “Hey, Robert Duvall called. He wants his lid back from Apocalypse Now.”

  “Still working toward your Scout badge in cleverness, Casbo?”

  Cas winced. He had seriously messed up the last guy who used that nickname for him. He unlocked the clip from the commandeered submachine gun and threw it at the k
neeling guard, bouncing it off his back. “Well, if it isn’t Early-to-a-Whore’s-Bed Jubal. I see you still maintain the same excellent hiring standards.”

  The flummoxed gate guard staggered to his feet and, with a large urine stain at his crotch, lurched to attention. “He sucker-punched me, General.”

  “General?” Cas roared. “What’d you do, Jubie? Give yourself a battlefield promotion when the latest Warcraft game came out for your Sony Playstation?”

  Jubal aimed a glare of disgust down his thick red nose at Cas. “Boys, hard as it is to believe, this steaming pile of whale puke used to be one of the best black-ops guys in the business. Former Army Ranger, then special agent for Defense Intelligence. A rare specimen of diamond-studded excrement, this one.”

  The CrossArrow thugs standing behind Jubal shook their heads and puffed the air in disbelief.

  “Mecca in 1979,” Jubal said. “A deranged fringe of the Saudi Republic of Fanatics decided to take over the Grand Mosque. That damn fortress was built like one of Saddam’s bunkers. The concrete walls were too thick for conventional artillery, so the Saudi king has a dilemma. His army doesn’t have the firepower to force the rebels out, and nobody wants American birds dropping bunker-busters from Saudi airspace. Islamic law forbids non-Muslims from entering the mosque. Who you gonna call?”

  “I’d call you,” said one of his armed sycophants.

  Jubal nodded as he circled Cas. “Of course they called me! And I assigned our wonder boy here to the task. Damned if he doesn’t come up with a brilliant plan. He and three volunteers from the French GIGN counter-terrorism agency offer to convert to Islam for the day. The Saudis buy off one of the imams to make it happen, and in go our new Muslim raiders from a hole in the roof.”

  The CrossArrow mercenaries now studied Cas with newfound admiration.

  “The ragheads nicknamed him Cas the Dervish. Wild man of the desert.”

  “Give it a rest,” Cas said.

  But no, the CrossArrow warlord was on a roll. “Only, like everything else he did, from eating to screwing, Casbo took things too far. Says he wants to flood the mosque with a few million gallons of water. In the middle of a desert He plans to electrocute the bastards by adding a few thousand kilowatts of high-powered voltage to the mix. Even the Saudis think he’s loco.”