As he looked around, it seemed like Ranga’s sister possessed a substantial amount of wealth, but according to Sonia it was all spent. The large house, the sloop they’d traveled in, all of it was mortgaged to the hilt and utterly dependent on Paradox getting funding.
With that in mind, Sonia had returned to business mode, spending the last hours of the day calling investors, talking with various members of the UAE security apparatus, and trying desperately to put a different spin on what had happened, one that might allow Paradox to rise from the proverbial ashes.
Yes, of course they would come back to answer questions. They’d only fled out of fear for their lives. No, they didn’t know who had attacked them or why.
Hawker wondered about that. The thugs who’d hit them in Dubai were far more professional than the group in Paris. They were Caucasian men, not locals. And they were armed to the teeth and using a stolen helicopter. It was such a different mode of operation that Hawker wondered whether these were core members of the cult or another player. Like everything else in this mess, he could only ask the question. There were no answers.
And Danielle was faring no better. He’d received a text saying she’d lost out on the scroll but had their old friend Professor McCarter examining photos of it. She doubted it mattered much and Hawker felt the same.
Moments later a second message had come in from her. It read: Have you figured it out yet?
Hell no, he hadn’t figured it out. It seemed like a bunch of puzzle pieces lying at his feet, but instead of a coherent whole it was like the pieces all came from different boxes with different pictures on the top. Not only did nothing fit, but even if you smashed them together and forced them to fit the result was a disjointed mess.
And so it went. As he waited for Sonia to finish, Hawker shared a cup of tea with Savi and Nadia, which the little girl proudly prepared and served. With teatime over, he wandered about, watching for trouble. Shortly after nightfall, he found himself in Savi’s library.
He studied the selection.
A huge tome titled History of the Middle East rested side by side with various medical journals. Next to them were several works on the archaeology of the region, and then textbooks on genetic sequencing, two of which Ranga had written himself.
Hawker found little order to the arrangement. Not alphabetic or by type of book. Not even by subject.
A book on the Sumerian horse culture stood one space from a thick hardback called Atrocities of the Crusades.
“Haven’t you guys heard of the Dewey Decimal System?” he wondered aloud.
The next book held a familiar title: Paradise Lost, the very book the cult had quoted from in their threat. He pulled the tattered copy from the shelf. Several pages were dog-eared. He turned to one of them. Underlined in red ink was a verse from the epic poem.
He knew the verse was a reference to Satan’s fall. By his own choice Satan had challenged God and been cast out. Hawker wondered if this was how Ranga felt. For a man who claimed not to believe in God, Ranga had talked about Him an awful lot. Had Ranga’s own search, his own belief that he could change the code of life, caused him to fall?
Hawker flipped the pages and found another underlined verse. As he read a voice spoke it from behind him at almost the same time.
“The more I see pleasures about me, so much more I feel torment within me.”
Hawker turned to see Sonia.
They stared in quiet stillness for a moment.
“Are you a fan of Milton?” she asked.
The more appropriate question, he thought, was whether she and her father were fans of Milton.
“I tried to read it once,” he said, closing the book. “Too close to home. So I put it away.”
“It’s brilliant,” she said. “It explains many things about the state of man.”
“The verse you quoted,” he asked. “Did you underline it?”
Sonia shook her head. “Those were Father’s marks, but that one’s my favorite.”
“What does it mean?”
“I take it as the pain of reality,” she said. “Knowing what you cannot have is infinitely worse than not being able to have it in the first place. The pleasure of wanting causing the pain of lacking that very thing.”
He nodded. That’s what he remembered. Too close to home.
“You know, the cult that your father got mixed up in seem to be fans of Milton as well.”
“I know,” she said.
Of course she did. “You know more than you’re telling me,” Hawker said bluntly.
Tears filled her eyes; she turned away.
“Sonia.”
She looked back at him, dabbing at the drops of liquid running down her face. “How far did you get in Paradise Lost?” she asked.
“Not far enough to take a test,” he said.
“Do you know who Urial was?”
He shook his head.
“Urial was the brightest of all God’s angels. The Angel of the Sun and the very eyes of God. But in his reverence for what God had created, Urial stared too long at the Garden of Eden. He meant no harm by it, but through this fault, he accidentally revealed the location of the Garden to Satan. And thus the story begins.”
“You led your father to these men,” he guessed.
“The other way around,” she said. “I led them to him.”
The thought shocked Hawker. “How?” she asked.
“Before I realized what we could do with Paradox, we’d reached a point of desperation. Everything was tapped out. There was nowhere left to turn. A man came to me interested in genetics. He was odd but he said he had money. He wanted someone to work on a genetic problem the rest of the world was ignoring. It sounded perfect. I told him about my father. If anyone could help him, it was my father. I was proud. I was desperate. Father needed another hand, and by the time I’d realized the danger, Father was tangled up in it as deep as ever.”
“They wanted a weapon,” he said. “Like the generals in the Congo.”
She nodded. “And just like in Africa I couldn’t get Father to break away. This time until it was too late.”
He sensed her drowning in guilt. He’d lived that way himself after certain failures.
“I understand what you’re feeling,” he said. “I can only imagine how much it hurts. But there is a bigger issue here.”
“Yes, there is,” she said. “My sister will die if we don’t do something soon. That’s bigger to me. I need to find the Garden, Hawker. I need to finish this.”
“You don’t understand, Sonia. These people want to finish something, too. They have your carrier virus; they sent it to the UN to scare the hell out of the world, but it doesn’t do much, not without your payload. Your father rigged his lab to explode to keep them from getting 951. He suffered at their hands but he didn’t give it up, because he knew what would happen if they got ahold of it. He gave his life. He destroyed his life’s work to prevent something far worse from happening.”
“Worse to some,” she said.
He stared at her and wondered if she could really mean what she was saying.
“To see my sister die after knowing my father threw his life and half of mine away trying to save her is as bad as any plague.”
“You don’t mean that. You don’t want to see a billion children suffering like she is.”
She hesitated, choking up and fighting it off again. “No,” she said finally, “but I wish I did. I want to feel that way, to care more about Nadia than anything else, or what good am I?”