Furthermore, he could find no trace of
himself
on the Internet. No online birth certificates. No online adoption records. So far, the only thing Cadel had learned was that his first name meant "battle" in Welsh.
It was all very peculiar.
Thaddeus spun around. He walked slowly back to where Cadel was sitting, then stood with his hands clasped behind him, contemplating his young client.
"What if I told you who your father is?" he said at last.
Cadel gasped.
"My—my
real
father?" he stammered.
"That's right."
"You know who my real father is?"
"I've always known," Thaddeus said calmly. Placing his hands on the armrests of Cadel's chair, he bent at the waist until his head was almost level with his client's. "I work for him, you see. He employs me to keep an eye on you."
"But—"
"He can arrange these things. He has a lot of influence, despite the fact that he's been in prison for the last five years or so." Thaddeus's gaze bored into Cadel like an ebony drill-bit. "His name is Darkkon. Dr. Phineas Darkkon. You might have heard of him."
Mutely, Cadel shook his head. He was overwhelmed. For a long time, he had worked hard to suppress all interest in his real parents. Having been unable to trace them, he had come to the conclusion that fretting about them would be pointless; it would ultimately drive him mad.
And now, all of a sudden, he was being offered the truth. After so many years, he wasn't sure if he could handle it. He was almost afraid.
"Your father was sentenced to life imprisonment," Thaddeus explained. "You were taken away from him, but he swore that he would never lose sight of you and that you would come to know from whose blood you sprang. Therefore, despite the American government's best efforts to keep you ignorant and unaware, your father has triumphed. Once again." Thaddeus pushed himself upright, so forcefully that the back of Cadel's wheeled typist's chair struck the rim of Thaddeus's desktop. "The Piggotts know nothing of this, naturally."
Cadel drew his knees up under his chin. In a breathless voice, he said: "Are you lying?"
"No."
"Truly?"
"Truly." Thaddeus folded his arms. "Though you're right to doubt me, of course. You should always doubt everyone."
"What about my mother?"
"Ah." Thaddeus took a deep breath. His tone softened. "Your mother died, Cadel. I'm sorry."
Cadel swallowed. He didn't know if he was sorry or not. "How?" he croaked.
"It was an accident, I'm afraid. Very unfortunate." A pause. "Your father was devastated."
"What did he do?"
"Do?"
Cadel lifted his head and looked Thaddeus in the eye. "What did he do
wrong?
Why is he in jail?"
At that moment there was a knock on the door. Thaddeus glanced at his watch with a frown.
"Your next client is here," Wilfreda announced from out on the landing.
"Thank you," Thaddeus replied. He smiled at Cadel. "Time's up, I'm afraid."
"But—"
"Do some research, Cadel. Phineas Darkkon. Look him up and see what you can find before you visit me next. It shouldn't be hard." The smile widened until it became a jagged grin. "As long as you don't tell the Piggotts, of course."
The day after Thaddeus dropped his bombshell about Dr. Darkkon, Cadel went to the library with his current nanny, Linda. Linda was English. She had blond hair and a slouch, and she sighed every time she spoke. She sighed when she asked Cadel how long he was going to be. She sighed when he replied that he didn't know "I'll wait over here, then," she sighed and slumped into a seat at one of the reading desks, where she sat noisily sighing, and flick-flick-flicking through magazines about movie stars and soap operas. (Her acrylic nails were so long that she had trouble getting a good grip on the shiny paper.)
Cadel went first to the computer catalog. From there he moved to the reference section, the biography section, and the shelves devoted to biochemistry. A few old news magazines, one or two scientific journals, a book called
Gene Crime,
and another book on famous fraudsters were all that he needed. After trawling through these, he had a pretty good idea of who his father was.
In fact, he couldn't believe that Phineas Darkkon had never attracted his notice before.
Phineas Darkkon hadn't always been Phineas Darkkon. He had been christened Vernon Bobrick and had kept the name until he was well into his sixties. By that time, he was a famous geneticist, who had made a great deal of money developing "synthogenes"—artificial genes cobbled together out of genetic material not already patented by big research companies. Vernon had bought himself several mansions, an island off the coast of Australia, and a huge laboratory complex in California. He had used this complex to study what he called "human potentialities," namely, the possibility that some people possessed "supergenes."
According to Vernon, while most humans were the equivalent of junk DNA, a very few were genetic gold mines. He had been investigating something called "spontaneous combustion"—a concept widely regarded as a myth—and had come to believe that the strange phenomenon of people suddenly bursting into flame, for no apparent reason, was related to a rare childhood skin disorder. Vernon argued that an extremely small portion of the human race was pyrogenic. "Pyrogenes" (as he called them) allowed some people to light fires using only their body heat. Most of these people were unaware of their hidden talent. Indeed, most were unable to harness it properly, with the result that they spontaneously combusted.
Hmmm,
thought Cadel.
"Hello, dear," said a female voice, shattering Cadel's concentration. It was one of the librarians. She knew Cadel because he was a regular at the library. She was always asking him questions about the books he borrowed. "How are you today?"
"Fine," said Cadel, cautiously.
"You didn't come on your own, did you?" she asked, and Cadel pointed at Linda, who had her feet on a chair and was unwrapping a stick of gum.
"Oh dear," said the librarian, before hurrying off to have a word with Linda about rules and regulations. Cadel returned to his books.
It appeared that most respected scientists had laughed at Vernon's views. Then they had become alarmed when some of his experiments resulted in the deaths of two university students. Vernon's research was outlawed and driven underground. Meanwhile, Vernon was pursuing another theory about UFO sightings and alien abductions. It was Vernon's opinion that such experiences were hallucinations, accidentally caused by
other people
—people with psychic powers.
Once again, however, he wasn't taken seriously.
It angered Vernon Bobrick that so many of his fellow scientists were blinkered and stubborn. He wanted to prove his theories, but to do that, he required even more money. First he engineered a fake genepatent scam, which robbed thousands of eager investors of their life savings. Then he quietly established a franchise of faulty vending machines, all of which swallowed money without vending anything. He was behind a handful of miracle cures that cured nothing at all. Finally, and most importantly, he started an organization called GenoME.
Very few people realized that Vernon had anything to do with GenoME, which claimed that its trained GenoME "potentializers" could map your exact genetic code and tell you where you were going wrong in life. By knowing exactly what potentials were contained in your genes, you could see where you were pointlessly fighting against your very nature. GenoME's motto was "Messages in matter are messages that matter."
It cost a lot of money to get your genes mapped, and even more money to have the map analyzed by experts. Soon GenoME was enormously successful, with offices and members all over the world. "GenoME changed my life" was a remark often bandied around in the GenoME advertising. It was almost like a religion.
If Vernon Bobrick had simply sat back and enjoyed the profits that rolled in from GenoME and his other business interests, he would have been left alone. But Vernon was a man with a vision—a vision that he intended to pursue at all costs. He changed his name to Phineas Darkkon, pointing out to everyone who would listen that it meant "Dark Lord." Then he produced from his secret laboratory a person he named Doel the Disruptor. Doel, he said, possessed the power to make other people hallucinate. To prove his point, Dr. Darkkon made Doel concentrate his disruptive energies on an English politician, who collapsed in a gibbering heap, screaming about giant spiders. Phineas warned that if a sum of $500 million wasn't paid directly to him, a whole army of disrupters would be unleashed on the world, at his command.
Actually, Phineas didn't have a whole army of disrupters at his disposal. He only had Doel. And when the world's politicians called his bluff, his entire plan collapsed. (A great many powerful people were convinced that the shrieking politician had simply been drunk.) When Doel was arrested, it was discovered that his powers—if they existed—only worked in controlled laboratory conditions. Poor Doel ended up in a mental hospital.
Meanwhile, Phineas Darkkon vanished. When Interpol began to pursue him, he moved from hideout to hideout, waging a very peculiar war against the scientists whose lack of vision, he thought, had condemned him to life on the fringes. He contaminated gas pipelines with a curious kind of molecule. He corrupted computer systems across the world with a new strain of computer virus called "Darkkon." And he developed a vicious little retrovirus, which he threatened to release so that he could wipe out all the "junk human beings" who had hijacked mankind's destiny. Only those with "supergenes," he said, would be immune to the effects of this retrovirus.
That was when he hit the top of Interpol's Most Wanted list.
Shortly afterward, he was arrested while buying a box of tissues at a gas station in Colorado. He received a life sentence, at his trial. After attempting a couple of jailbreaks, he was put in a top-security prison, where he seemed to lose his fighting spirit. No one had heard much about him for several years, though rumors continued to fly concerning the whereabouts of his multimillion-dollar fortune. While much of it had been traced and confiscated, a good portion was supposed to be hidden away in various tax havens around the world. No one had yet identified Dr. Darkkon's mysterious accountant, who was believed to hold the key to the Darkkon Empire.
There was no mention of a son. No mention of a wife, or even a girlfriend.
Cadel examined the photographs of Phineas Darkkon. They showed a Yoda-like figure in his late seventies, squat and bald, with large ears, huge eyes, and a grayish complexion. Failed plastic surgery had left him with an almost nonexistent nose. Though he claimed to have stalled his own aging process with genetic manipulation and antioxidant flushes, Cadel saw no evidence of it.
He also saw no trace of himself in that strange-looking face.
Studying it carefully, Cadel turned various questions over in his mind. Why had there been no mention of Darkkon's family? If Cadel
was
a Darkkon (and why should Thaddeus lie?), then who had his mother been? When had she died? According to Cadel's calculations, he had been just under two years old at the time of Darkkon's imprisonment. Had his mother died before then? Was that why he had been sent to Australia—because one parent was dead and one was serving a life sentence? If so, where had the information on his birth certificate come from?
Cadel glanced around him. There weren't many people in the library, though all the computers were being used. No one was looking his way. The librarian had finished admonishing Linda and returned to her desk. Linda was scowling as she flipped viciously through a magazine about hairstyles.
Cadel slid his own magazine under the desk in front of him. Then, slowly and carefully, he tore out the article on Phineas Darkkon while pretending to read the book about GenoME that lay on top of his desk. Having folded the three-page article into a small, thick square, he tucked it into his pocket.
He did the same to the chapter about Phineas Darkkon in
Gene Crime,
and to the piece about synthogenes in one of the scientific journals. Then he got up, returned all his reading materials to their proper places, and left with Linda, who sighed with relief when they emerged into the sunlight.
During the next couple of days, Cadel pored over his stolen texts, in private. He couldn't leave them alone; he was unable to think about anything else. Yet he told no one about them. This was partly because Thaddeus had warned him against it, partly because he had no real friends, and partly because he wasn't sure that he wanted the world to know who his real father was. On the one hand, Phineas might have been a man of vision and genius, embittered by ill treatment. On the other hand, he might have been a loony. It was hard to tell from the media reports. They were so
very
incomplete.
"I couldn't find anything about my mother," he remarked when he was next in Thaddeus's office. This time he hadn't even approached the computer; he was sitting on the crimson couch.
Thaddeus sat facing him, legs crossed.
"No," Thaddeus replied. "It wasn't widely known that your father had a girlfriend. He tried to keep it a secret."
"Why?"
Thaddeus shrugged. "Less chance of anyone trying to get at him through your mother—or you. Of course the police found out. You were bundled off quick smart when they arrested him. I suppose they decided to hide you away in Australia so that Phineas would have a hard time trying to locate you." A soft laugh. "Although he did, of course. At least
I
did."
Cadel thought for a minute. "Are you a GenoME person?" he finally asked, whereupon Thaddeus winced.
"Cadel, please," he protested. "That garbage? Give me some credit."
"So where do you fit in? Are you his accountant?"
"I'm merely his right-hand man."
"Then why haven't you been arrested?"
"Because I've kept a low profile." While Thaddeus's foot flicked back and forth, the rest of him remained absolutely still. He didn't even blink as he watched Cadel. He was like a cat with a twitching tail. "One thing your father has learned, since his arrest, is that you don't draw attention to yourself. He's a brilliant man, Cadel, but that was his error. He knows better now."