Beyond Eden Read online

  The door swung open, and the lights turned on. A largish man in jeans and a lab coat was at the door. Another goon stood nearby, in the shadows; Daniel couldn’t see which one.

  “She needs you,” said the man in jeans. “Now. Come on.”

  Daniel groaned and made a production out of pretending he’d been awakened from a deep sleep.

  His older brother, Zeke, had a watch that their dad had given him for his birthday. It told time in 24-hour increments and contained a compass and a stopwatch and all kinds of cool stuff. Daniel had a $40 Swatch with nothing but a dial and two hands. The clock said it was 8:36, but he no longer knew if it was a.m. or p.m. or even what time zone.

  It was 8:36 at the Pentagon City Mall in Virginia, USA.

  Wherever that was.

  He groaned again for effect and sat up, then slowly stood and walked over to the door. Truth was, he almost didn’t mind when they came for him. It relieved the terrible monotony of being in the small room alone. They’d given him a bed, a desk, a rocking chair with a standing lamp, and a bookshelf with lots of books in English. But you couldn’t read forever.

  “You going to be a good boy?” the man in the lab coat asked.

  Daniel turned around and put his wrists together. The man snapped on real old-time metal handcuffs, which held Daniel’s hands behind his back. Then they went into the hall together, the man in the shadows following them.

  It was dead quiet in the halls. Outside the windows were woods and snow.

  The door to the laboratory where Daniel had been taken before was slightly ajar. Lab coat guy knocked but opened the door without waiting for an answer.

  The woman Daniel assumed was a doctor was there. Her lab coat was longer than the guard’s. It hung below her skirt, and although she had it buttoned, the belt didn’t encircle her waist, but the ends were tied to themselves in back.

  She was thin and pretty. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore lab glasses. She’d been sitting at a desk facing away from the door, but when they entered, she scooted back on her round padded stool and said, “Ah, Daniel.

  “You want to go outside?” she asked. Her English was accented, but he couldn’t place her native language.

  The question was shorthand. It meant, “Will you cooperate and let yourself be tied down to the chair and let me do stuff to you, whereafter I will, in turn, let you go outside into the yard until you get cold enough to want to come in? Or are you going to struggle and make lab coat guy give you a shot to go limp?”

  Daniel had discovered that shots really hurt when you were struggling and some big goon punched a needle into your muscle as hard as possible and then pushed the burning stuff into your arm as fast as he could. He’d only tried it once.

  “I’d like to go outside,” he said.

  She nodded appreciatively. As he walked toward the metal chair, he heard an unexpected sound. It was sort of… a chortle. Then a little sneeze. It wasn’t the doctor, and it sure as heck wasn’t lab coat guy. A couple of loud breaths—and then a scream. An earsplitting baby scream.

  Lab coat guy looked like someone had shot him. The doctor said, “See to it.”

  He looked like he’d rather die.

  “Is that a baby?” asked Daniel.

  “No, it’s an elephant,” said the guy gruffly. “You, lie down.” He unlocked Daniel’s handcuffs and pushed Daniel’s long sleeves up as far as they went.

  Daniel climbed onto the chair, positioning his arms and legs. It was uncomfortable. There were thick leather straps that wrapped around his ankles, thighs, wrists, arms, and chest. Lab coat guy seemed to take an extra long time buckling the straps. The baby, who was in a sort of incubator box across the room, kept up the wail. It was shrill and loud.

  “See to it,” the doctor said again.

  This time when Daniel looked over, there was a little head popped up over the side of the box. It had thick black hair and large round eyes, which were currently scrunched in either pain or anger.

  “Feed her and change her,” said the doctor.

  She had rolled her stool over toward Daniel. She held a needle and syringe with extra vials to fill with his blood. He sighed. His brother, Zeke, had one weakness in this world: He was deathly afraid of needles, made a big deal every time he had to get some kind of shot, and was probably remembered at as many military posts around the world as his dad was. Daniel never made a fuss because after Zeke’s theatrics, certainly no one would have noticed his.

  And here, certainly, nobody cared.

  He’d done this before. His arms were strapped down, so it wasn’t like he had a choice. He looked the other way as the doctor probed for a good vein. “Make a fist,” she said.

  Across the room, the baby had pulled herself up to a standing position. The guard had run out of excuses and was heading over to follow the doctor’s instructions. The toddler screamed louder as the man got closer. She wore a little shirt with brightly colored flowers.

  You go, girl, Daniel thought.

  February 25, 2006, 2:46 p.m.

  Athens, Greece

  * * *

  Her captor walked quickly, forcing Jaime in front of him. He was significantly taller than she; she could tell because her head kept knocking against the bottom of his helmet. They made a quick turn into another alley. As she planned her next move, she heard a heavy door scrape open, and she was thrust through it in front of him. The stench of garbage swirled around her. The door closed behind her and the air became merely musty. She assumed she had been brought in a service entrance.

  He held her left hand in a vise grip as she heard the scrape of metal against metal—a caged service elevator was her guess, borne out as she was forced into it and the door clacked closed again.

  She bided her time as the cage laboriously climbed four floors, bouncing enough to be disconcerting as it passed each landing. The ropes at her wrists were prickly and tight. She was taken from the cage and heard it descend.

  Jaime was taken down a hall with a tile floor and shoved into a room. A heavy door closed behind her. To her surprise, she realized the windows must be open, as she was able to hear children playing outside.

  She was thrust roughly onto a simple wooden chair. Her captor wasted no time, questioning her now in English.

  “Who are you?”

  “Jaime Lynn Richards.”

  “Where have you come from?”

  “I just flew in from Germany.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be going back to Germany.”

  “You’re American military. What is your rank?”

  “I’m a chaplain.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Major.”

  “You were missing for three years. Where were you during this time?”

  Before she answered this final question, she succeeded in freeing her wrists, and with one clean action removed her blindfold and stood up, brandishing her chair as a weapon. Before her stood a strapping man, six feet tall, with tousled black hair and a devilish grin.

  “For crying out loud,” she said to him, “can you just once let me come up in the passenger elevator?”

  February 25, 2006, 2:56 p.m.

  Patmos Island, Forty kilometers from the coast of Turkey

  * * *

  Witgard Villella knew for a fact that science would save the world. That is, science would save the world if human beings quit acting in an irrational manner and took advantage of the information at their disposal.

  Villella was a short man, balding, full of energy, and contentedly misanthropic. Today he sat at his desk, staring at the e-mail that had just come through on his computer.

  Great news! Am looking forward to presentation on Tuesday.

  Tuesday. That was good news and bad.

  Good news because the breakthrough was so close. So close.

  Bad news because the breakthrough Allende expected to hear about hadn’t actually happened yet. But without new funding, th
e plug would be pulled. To get Allende to kick in the final underwriting amount, Villella had to lie and say it had. Well, not lie. Fudge the timing. In research, things never went smoothly, yet Villella pulled it off, time and again. Fantastic things. It would happen again.

  Tuesday. That was three days from now. Three days to change the history of science, the history of the world.

  It would give Witgard great satisfaction to be present when science once again changed the world.

  Witgard Villella had grown up in heavily Catholic Spain in a family who worshipped science. Both his German mother and Spanish father were research scientists; Witgard’s sister was a brilliant student. The family didn’t know what to make of Witgard, who could make neither heads nor tails of scientific theory and saw only gibberish when he looked at the Periodic Table.

  Witgard was a poor student and a worse athlete. Once, a well-meaning elementary school teacher gave her class a talk about how everyone was gifted in some area—whether it was the arts or science or sports. Nothing resonated with Witgard. One of his classmates even taunted, “Except Witgard, he’s not good at anything!” Over the laughter of his classmates, Witgard heard his teacher say, “Well, perhaps he’s good with people. Perhaps he’s good at being a friend.”

  As he hunkered down at his desk, Witgard knew he wasn’t good with people, at least not in the social sense. Most of them were too hopelessly stupid for him to like, let alone cultivate as friends. It was a miserable couple of years until Witgard discovered what he was good at: manipulating people. He was able to insert himself into a situation and get both sides to listen. He had the ability to stop fights and get people to work together—if it was toward a goal that would benefit Witgard. In high school, he started a homework service that employed nearly a third of the class and was paid for by another third of the class. Witgard didn’t stop there. He became known for coming up with entrepreneurial ideas and seeing them through.

  Even though Witgard was clueless when it came to performing scientific research, he did appreciate the ideas and breakthroughs the rest of his family discussed at dinner. While his family thought he was hopelessly dense, he now began to think scientists were the ones who were stupid. They worked for a pittance, fought for grants, labored in small, windowless laboratories, and signed away the rights to the fruits of their hard work to corporations. He also thought scientists were amoral prigs, always bragging and flaunting and comparing who had published most often and most recently. They weren’t above appropriating information and ideas from graduate students and one another.

  Witgard also noticed that breakthroughs were coming fast and furious in every field of science and that the most brilliant scientists were often hampered by the incredibly slow and arcane methods of pleading for research funding.

  He reserved his greatest scorn for those who ran the think tanks that claimed to delineate public morality and whose members would whip the public into a frenzy of thinking certain lines of research were immoral. By now society should realize what happened when the public was allowed to dictate morality: witches burned at the stake and heretics crushed with stones. Absurd.

  The current climate in the scientific community provided a great avenue of opportunity for Witgard. There was a lot of money to be made for companies that were not in the public eye, didn’t care about tax breaks, and weren’t concerned about the legal boundaries placed on research. He found he was adept at operating within the scientific underground and had become known as one who could provide funding and space for research that was not necessarily legal.

  Discoveries and breakthroughs started coming—and Witgard’s lifestyle became more comfortable. And now, if this Sunmark woman was correct in her theories, he was the one who would be making the profits from it.

  Villella’s practiced fingers blazed over the keyboard.

  He went to his e-mail program and chose “new message.”

  Time is of the essence, was all he wrote before he pressed “send.”

  February 25, 2006, 3:02 p.m.

  Research laboratory, somewhere dark

  * * *

  A watched pot never boils, thought the scientist as she stared hopefully at the computer screen. She gave a wry laugh even as she repeated the adage. Of course the act of watching water as it heated would have no effect on the outcome. However, it did tend to affect the watcher.

  She felt like she had been staring at this screen forever, but it had only been five minutes. Five minutes at the end of a long day of purifying mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from blood samples, resuspending it in sterilized water, and adding a master premix of chemicals for the Dye Terminator Cycle Sequencing. Now she was using a special computer program to analyze the sequence of the mtDNA.

  She had blood samples from five subjects. She should be seeing a pattern in their mtDNA, at least if her hypothesis was correct. But the computer had not been able to find a common sequence to them all. And even more puzzling, the program could not match these subjects to any known haplogroup. She had hoped the recent addition of the fifth subject would provide enough data to correlate the results, but so far nothing.

  She didn’t have time for this! Her backers had given her a “no-kidding” cutoff time for tangible results from her studies, and that time was almost here. Time is of the essence was the last admonishment she’d received.

  Mitochondria, she thought. O mighty mitochondria … you are the bane of my existence!

  Mitochondria were her specialty. Those were the tiny powerhouses that sat inside human cells and produced most of the energy needed to grow and live. About the size and shape of long, threadlike bacteria, mitochondria were self-sufficient to the point that they even carried their own set of DNA, which was inherited completely from the mother. People related by blood on their mother’s side of the family would have similar mtDNA. Scientists had been able to trace entire races of people back to ancient times by common markers in their mtDNA and called these haplogroups.

  She had been so sure these subjects had a common ancestry, that they were from a race of very long-lived people whose mtDNA might hold the secret to long life.

  She brought her attention back to the computer screen, which was flashing the “analysis complete” message. Perhaps this would be the time. Perhaps the answer was there, flashing, ready to be read.

  Britta stabbed the “enter” key and held her breath.

  February 25, 2006, 2:56 p.m.

  Safe house

  Athens, Greece

  * * *

  “When did you know it was me?” Yani asked.

  “Not till the alley,” answered Jaime.

  “Pretty good escape. Under two minutes. Assuming you’d decided to let yourself be brought into the building.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Ten down?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Ten down” was code for “let’s take ten minutes to catch up on other topics before getting into the business at hand.”

  Jaime took a step back and looked at Yani. She hadn’t seen him for over a year, yet he looked just as she remembered him. His hair was tousled from the helmet, but it was still jet-black and long enough to be noncorporate. His black leather jacket was unzipped, and he hadn’t taken off the black motorcycle pants that had served as part of his disguise. Even with the outer garments on, she could tell he was in top physical shape.

  Yani was the mysterious guide, called a Sword, who had invited her to Eden three years before. They had unexpectedly worked together on a mission during the first days of the Iraq war, and Yani had proved himself to be honorable and trustworthy. If he hadn’t, Jaime would never have accepted the invitation to go. Yet when she’d awakened in Eden—same procedure as her recent return, she’d let herself be drugged for the trip so she did not know the way in or out—and asked for Yani, no one knew of whom she spoke.

  It had taken a while for the others to figure out she was talking about the man known as Sword 23. When they finally made the connection, she�
�d enjoyed the widening of the eyes, the intake of breath. For in that most egalitarian of societies, Sword 23 was accorded something akin to rock-star status.

  Throughout history, at any given time there were only 12 members of the rarified group of men who knew the way in and out of the hidden society of Eden. None of the Swords intermingled with the Eden population. When they were not out in the Terris world on assignment, they stayed on the Mountaintop, a compound set apart up on the northern mountains where Operatives were trained. Once their training was complete, Operatives did live normal lives among the populace when they were in Eden. Swords did not.

  During her time there, she’d discovered that gardeners (as Eden dwellers called themselves) loved to tell stories of true adventures and accomplishments—hero epics, was how Jaime thought of them—and the Swords were always prime fodder. But Sword 23 was a legend among legends.

  Jaime had been disappointed—OK, very disappointed—that Yani was no longer to be a large part of her life. But Eden had been so teeming with life and joy that she was soon completely entranced. Meeting her mother again during this lifetime was something Jaime had never expected; it was a huge life shift, one that she made gradually.

  All residents of Eden, before they chose a life track, spent a year learning to garden, and Jaime had loved her year. It had helped her come to terms with her new life, her relationship with God, her new outlook. She’d always thought she had a “black thumb,” but in fact she’d loved the simple daily routines that helped coax new life from the soil, to produce fruits and flowers where there had been none.

  She had been so content with gardening, the contemplative life had been such a welcome change, that she’d thought the simple, spiritual track might be the one she chose. Until the day Sword 23—Yani—had shown up in her garden.