Kirchner nodded to one of the techs, who produced a pair of scissors and cut through the layers of gauze. He peeled them away, exposing a battered, unrecognizable face and a gaping, horrific head wound.
“Looks like someone blew away about a quarter of the skull,” Lawson commented.
“Someone did.” Genaro studied the wound. “You’re sure the injury will affect only higher brain function, Doctor?”
“I’ll verify it once I perform the necessary scans, but yes.” Kirchner sounded confident. “For all intents and purposes, the body is mindless.”
After he’d acquired a rare DNA sample from the biotech black market in Europe, it had taken Genaro another ten years to research and put into place the resources needed for GenHance’s latest and most important phase of development. This final acquisition would initiate the last step toward his goal of creating, customizing, and selling the ultimate in human enhancement.
He turned to Lawson. “Where are we with the transerum?”
“The last series of human blood trials were quite promising,” his director told him. “None of the primate test animals survived vaccination, of course, but you anticipated that.” He glanced through the view panel at the shrouded body. “Once the subject is cleared by Dr. Kirchner, the lab is fully prepared to begin testing.”
If the transerum developed by his microbiologists worked, it would bestow increased strength and enhanced senses, and make inviolate the immune system of the test subject. If it did not, and it killed humans as quickly as it did chimps and gorillas, they would still learn from it. The transerum had already undergone several hundred modifications; Genaro expected it would require many more before it was perfected enough to sell. Then nothing else would stop him from acquiring enough wealth and power to do whatever he pleased anywhere in the world.
Genaro noticed that Kirchner was bent over the body and studying the head wound closely. He switched on the intercom and asked, “What is it?”
“I thought I saw the eyelids moving,” the geneticist said, and straightened. “My mistake.”
Jessa checked in with Caleb before asking him to close the office for her. Normally she was the last one to leave, but after dealing with Ellen Farley, she needed time to think.
“Ange said to tell you that the certificate numbers were a match,” Cal said. “That would make Ellen Farley a very well-preserved ninety-four-year-old, or an identity thief. Do you want me to call Linda McMann?” he asked, referring to North and Company’s personnel director.
“Give her a heads-up so Farley doesn’t get back into the building, but tell her we’ll verify the information before we turn over our official report.”
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You sound upset.”
“Headache. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Jessa switched off her cell phone and leaned forward. “Would you drop me off here, at the corner?”
“Sure.” The cabbie pulled over to the curb and accepted her fare before glancing out at the deserted park. “You meeting someone out here, lady?”
“My boyfriend,” she lied, smiled, and got out.
No one except Jessa knew who had bought the four acres of prime Atlanta real estate and turned it into a public park, or that it had been modeled on a more famous square in the northern part of the state. Jessa had arranged it all through a local city beautification group, and donated the property to the city under the condition that it be given the name she had chosen for it, and that the land never be used for any other purpose than a park. It was her small piece of home away from home, and walking along the cobbled brick paths lined with magnolias and azaleas, she could almost imagine herself there again.
The fountain, a masterpiece of copper alloy sculpted to resemble a phoenix rising from the flames of the basin, was so new it still gleamed rosy red in the sunlight, but in time the weather and air would turn the bright metal green. As Jessa sat down on the bench before the fountain, she felt the weight of old grief and the sharp twist of new fear.
She couldn’t keep doing this; she knew that. No matter how careful she was, eventually someone in authority would come looking for her. Then there would be the inevitable questions: How did you know? Who told you? What evidence do you have?
If she lied, they would know. If she told them the truth, they would have her committed.
Jessa knew she could stop reporting what she discovered when she went into the shadowlight. At most Ellen Farley would have been turned in as an identity thief to the police by North and Company. On that charge she probably could have made bail, left the city with her partner, Max, and started a new con somewhere else. In this era of electronic everything, high-tech grifters like Ellen and her boyfriend were becoming a common class of criminal. Corporations wrote off their losses and tightened their security measures. No one really got hurt by embezzlement, and often the crimes resulted in better business practices.
What no one but Max and now Jessa knew was that someone would die this time: Ellen.
Because Ellen had been having sex with Max when Jessa had looked into her soul through the shadowlight, the connection of their bodies had also allowed Jessa to see into his. As soon as Ellen finished this last job, her boyfriend planned to kill her, frame her for all the crimes they committed together, and then leave the country for the islands, just as he had seven times in the past. There he would transfer the stolen money into a fat numbered bank account, where he kept another $20 million from his past crimes before moving on to find and groom and teach the game to his next victim.
“I can stop doing it,” Jessa told the fountain as if it were listening. “Step back and let my people do their jobs. They have the talent and the resources. They don’t need me.”
The water splashed, merrily indifferent to her quandary. But there was something else there, an unseen presence, like a lost soul hovering somewhere just out of sight.
Imagining he was there brought Jessa’s emotions out of the tight, small place where she kept them secreted away. They were mirror twins, the desperate regret and yearning grief, born in agony, nurtured in silence. She protected them from the world, and in return they had grown to become her oldest friends, her closest companions.
Jessa felt tired of it, all of it. She’d done her best to save the Ellen Farleys of the world, and prevent the Max Grodans from hurting anyone else. If by now she hadn’t paid for her mistakes, she never would. There would always be an endless supply of Ellens and Maxes in the world, and they would never stop, so maybe it was time she did.
“I’m not spending the rest of my life in this park. I don’t have the nightmares anymore. I was glad when they went away.” She glanced down at her hands. “There has to be someone else. Someone I can touch. Someone you’d like. If I’d died that day, and you had lived, I know I’d want the same for you.”
Talking to a man who wasn’t there, who could never be there, made little sense. Jessa didn’t believe in an afterlife. She knew he was gone forever. A therapist would have told her she was talking to herself, nothing more. But if by slim chance she was wrong, and the souls of the dead lingered around the living, she wanted him to know. He had always been the love of her life—and he would understand.
Her wireless chimed in her pocket, and she tasted something salty on her tongue. Jessa reached up to wipe away the tears that had trickled unnoticed down her cheeks before she checked the sender ID: Aphrodite.
The text, as always, was short and unsweetened: You fucking off in the park again, Jez?
Jessa popped out the tiny keyboard and thumbed a brief reply: Not now, Di.
Talk to me. The woman she knew only as Aphrodite sent a small graphic of a smiley face brandishing a bouquet of virtual roses between the lines she typed. Or I’ll start texting you about the last episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Scene by scene.
The joke threat tugged a smile out of her. Oh, God, anything but that. Bad day here, but I won’t whine. What’s up?
She forwarded an e-mail from Vulcan, tagged with the words, Vulcan thinks he’s found another Takyn. Wants to sched a group chat.
The man they knew as Vulcan served as their chief scout. In the three years since Jessa, Aphrodite, and the other members had formed the Takyn, their very private online support group, he had been searching for others like them. Vulcan wouldn’t kid about something like this; the unique problem they all shared was too dangerous.
I told you, Aphrodite wrote when Jessa didn’t reply. There are more out there. A LOT more. At least forty or fifty.
I’ll read the e-mail. That was as far as Jessa was willing to commit herself. Don’t get crazy about this.
I’ve been crazy, Aphrodite wrote back. Now it’s starting to make sense.
Jessa felt a pang of shame. Di had been through all seven levels of hell, and Jessa had no business spitting on her friend’s hopes. Your lips, God’s ears. Got to go.
Immel8tr.
Jessa ended the connection, switched off the power to her phone, and popped out the rechargeable battery pack and the SIM card. Vulcan had taught her to do that; anyone trying to trace their wireless communications would lose the signal.
Who would want to find us? she’d asked him once.
With what we can do? he wrote back. Who wouldn’t?
In the very beginning, when Jessa had formed the private network with Aphrodite, the others they had found online had treated them and one another with guarded, suspicious reluctance. It had taken more than a year of cautious communications before they’d opened up to one another. That had been an enormous comfort to the entire group, but it had made them even more paranoid. To protect everyone, they’d agreed to remain anonymous to one another. No one used their real names, ages, addresses, or referred to any detail that might be used to identify them, even within the group.
To Aphrodite and the others, Jessa was the founder of the Takyn, a woman they knew only as Jezebel.
Vulcan wouldn’t have made a mistake about this prospect; the criteria for joining the Takyn were too exact. The person would have to be between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-four, adopted from a specific list of placement agencies run by the Catholic church in only a handful of cities. There would be no records of the person’s birth parents, and few official documents filed with state welfare agencies. The adoptive parents would have to be wealthy or well-to-do orthodox Catholics with no biological children of their own or other adopted children.
