He could sense Sonia on the point of breaking. She felt as if the answer was out there, just around the corner. Exactly as Ranga had felt through ten years of searching.
The more I see pleasures about me, so much more I feel torment within me.
She looked up at him. “Besides,” she said, “he didn’t destroy 951. He sent it to me.”
“The truth at last,” he said. “And the cult knows that, or at least they suspect.”
She remained quiet. Maybe she was beginning to understand.
“They came after you for a reason,” he said. “I have to take you where they can’t get to you. Stick you in the president’s bunker or Fort Knox or somewhere like that, where they’d need an army to even get close to you.”
“They got into the UN,” she noted.
She was right about that. Despite intense efforts, no one knew how the cult had pulled that one off. It suggested someone with infiltration skills, someone well acquainted with government systems and a background in the type of spycraft that it would take to break into such a place. That seemed a little beyond a cult of the lunatic fringe but it had happened. Another puzzle piece from a different box.
“You’re right,” he said. “But I promise this will be different.”
“Why?” she whispered. “Why save me?”
From a personal perspective, because the idea of her being harmed by these thugs was too agonizing to think about, but as he kept saying, there were bigger reasons.
“With your father gone and his lab destroyed, you’re the only link to 951. Without you they can do nothing. But with you, if they get 951 from you, they can murder half the world.”
She gulped at a lump in her throat. “Then why not just kill me?”
“Because I’m going to kill them instead.”
Silence hung over the room.
Sonia sat and buried her face in her hands as if she might burst into tears. He could only imagine the strain. He was asking her to hide until he could make the world safe for her. It might take months or years or it might never happen, and in the meantime, Nadia would wither and die. And her father’s life and half of hers would be in vain.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “They don’t need 951. They don’t even really want 951. They want the seeds from the Garden. The fruit of the Tree of Life.”
This didn’t make any sense to him. “Why?” he asked. “You can’t kill with the Tree of Life.”
She looked at him sadly. “They’re devils, Hawker. They don’t want to just kill, they want to destroy. Even in the Garden, Satan didn’t kill Adam and Eve, he just tricked them into bringing death onto themselves.”
“Meaning what? What are you getting at?”
She sighed and a weight seemed to come off her shoulders, as if she’d finally decided to put down the burden of holding in what she feared most.
“A virus that kills millions or even billions won’t destroy the world,” she said. “It would be a horrendous tragedy and we might not recover for centuries, but in the long run it might even help the world. And in any event, we could fight it, just like we fight every other disease and condition. Theoretically we could even create a counter-virus or use gene therapy to patch the DNA their plague destroyed. This is not what they want.”
“So what do they want?”
“They want to take the virus from the Tree of Life,” she said. “They want to mate it with the carrier virus that they already have and then spread it around the planet.”
Hawker could hardly follow. He had to be missing something.
“The virus from the Tree of Life?” he asked. “The same one you want? You’re telling me their big threat is to infect us with a plague that makes us live forever?” Hawker’s tone had become incredulous, but it sounded like being threatened with cake and money and good looks all at the same time. “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Not to you,” she said. “Not at first. But as time goes by and the virus spreads, and virtually all human life spans are doubled, tripled, or quintupled, what do you think will happen? When the old don’t die and the young don’t grow old and child-bearing age lasts a century, instead of a decade or two, the population will utterly explode. And in very short order, this planet will die under the weight of humanity.”
Suddenly Hawker began to understand.
“Seven billion now,” she said. “Fifteen billion in twenty years. Thirty billion people on this rock by the middle of the century. There will be nothing but war and misery and starvation. It will no longer matter if there’s a heaven, because earth will become hell itself and the immortal humans will be consigned to it for all eternity.”
As the words rang in his ears, Hawker felt as if he’d been blindsided. Rarely could he remember being so stunned and shocked or feeling so simple and ignorant and blind. At this moment he was the fool he’d claimed to be in Lavril’s office. In fact, he was worse.
“They could come up with an antidote,” he stammered. “Fight it like you said.”
“And who’s going to take it?” she asked. “If everyone else will, that would be awfully nice, but are you? Am I? Most people are going to refuse to take a suicide pill just for the greater good of the world.”
“It wouldn’t be a suicide pill,” he said, realizing he was wrong even as he spoke the words.
“Of course it would. It would be exactly that. A pill that makes you live a far shorter life. What else would you call it?”
Hawker went quiet. It was the same argument Ranga had made as a young man. There were too many people in the world. And it was the same response: fine, but someone else can decrease the population, not me.
“If the carrier virus can spread the plague, another version can spread the antidote,” he said. “Something to cause the telomeres to shorten. We can use 951 to offset it.”
“Yes,” she said. “Sounds like a great idea. In fact it’s exactly what you thought my father’s murderers were about to do. Now you’re suggesting it as if it sounds rational.”
“It’s different,” he said.
She shook her head. “Only your perspective has changed.”
He knew she was right.
“A worldwide genocide. Is that what we need? A final solution? My father was derided for suggesting something similar years ago. He was called a fascist and a fanatic. But it doesn’t sound so fanatical to you anymore, does it?”
It still sounded fanatical and fascist and evil to him. He was just grasping at straws. But what else could the world do? Forced sterilization? You might have to sterilize 90 percent of humanity just to keep the population stable.
And who decided which 10 percent got to reproduce? A lottery? An even division among all races, creeds, and colors? A scientific board choosing which traits would survive and which would die? Once again they were right back to the master race.
More than likely, the rich and powerful would get eternal life and the chance to pass on their genes, while the poor would be sterilized without their consent.
And if they did nothing, the whole world would be covered in humanity with no space to breathe or good food or clean water. Exactly what Ranga had always fought against and now he might be the cause of it.
Unforgivable. Hawker now understood what he’d meant.
“Once this genie is out of the bottle, it can never be put back in. It cannot be treated. It cannot be cured any more than ‘life’ can be cured.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a fool who should have kept his mouth shut. I now understand what you’re afraid of. Why you fear it so deeply.”
“I don’t want to be the cause of that, any more than my father did,” she said. “But I don’t want to give up on the only chance I have to save Nadia. I want to give her and others like her a life.”