The Genesis Code (20 page)

The Field Museum of Natural History
Chicago, Illinois

Grace’s legs cramped as she crouched behind a row of wooden boxes and coffers in King Tutankhamen’s treasury, hidden in the shadows of the darkened chamber. The air was musty and still. Kneeling beside her, Madison barely fit within the narrow alcove between the head-high stack of funereal offerings and the rear wall of the treasury.

Beads of perspiration traced lines down the small of Grace’s back beneath her shirt.

Madison’s breath was hot in her ear.

“Here he comes.”

Through a narrow crack in the wall of painted crates, Grace peered out into the chamber. Facing the doorway to the treasury was the most beautiful shrine she had ever seen. Egyptian hieroglyphs covered a grand canopic chest, gilded in gold and decorated with a canopy of solar disks and intertwined serpents. An ostrich-feather fan with an ivory handle rested atop a casket of ivory and wood inlaid with gold and blue. An eight-foot-tall carved ebony statue of the Jackal God Anubis kept vigil over the boy-king’s treasures.

A dark, hulking shadow passed through the entrance to the treasury.

Crowe.

Muted footfalls whispered on the rough stone floor. A thin beam of red laser light pierced the darkness, searching.

Grace felt a hand on her shoulder, a light touch of warning. Madison’s eyes spoke to her in the silence, darting toward a door at the opposite end of the treasury.

Someone else is coming.

Grace pressed her lips tightly shut and held her breath, fearful of making the smallest noise that might betray their hiding place behind Tutankhamen’s treasures.

Crowe paused, hearing the same small noises that reached Grace’s ears a moment later. Someone else was walking toward the treasury.

Crowe froze, and the red laser beam vanished.

Seconds passed.

The doorway swung open.

The beam of a flashlight swept across the floor.

A museum security guard stepped cautiously into the treasury, his sillouette neatly framed in the open doorway.

He’s just an old man,
thought Grace.

The aging guard peered nervously into the room, wielding his flashlight with a shaky hand. Flickering light reflecting from gilded gold painted the guard’s anxious expression with an unearthly pale hue.

Grace watched the light of the guard’s searching beam slowly inch across the room toward the shadows where Crowe stood motionless in the dark.

The flashlight beam stopped its forward advance.

Grace looked back at the guard. The flashlight momentarily forgotten, he appeared puzzled, brushing at a pinpoint of red on his chest with a sweaty hand.

“No!” Grace yelled.

There was a small puff of light from the dark shadows across the room, a muzzle flash from Crowe’s silenced weapon.

The impact of the bullet spun the guard around, clutching at his chest. His knees buckled and he dropped to the floor.

Crowe stepped from the shadows, turned, and focused his gaze on the stacks of wooden boxes that concealed Grace and Madison. He raised his weapon and began advancing across the room.

The Field Museum of Natural History
Chicago, Illinois

A storm of anger swept through Madison’s mind.

Anger at Grace for revealing their hiding spot to Crowe by yelling out a warning.

Anger at himself for thinking such a selfish thought, knowing that Grace had called out in a desperate attempt to save the life of the security guard.

The security guard who now lay dead or dying on the cold stone floor.

Like Dr. Ambergris, lying dead in a pool of his own blood on the floor of his office.

Like Justin, lying dead beneath a dingy white sheet in his hospital bed.

Madison’s anger turned to rage, emotion overpowering reason.

The footsteps were close now. Red laser light flashed through cracks between the crates, searching for a target as Crowe neared. Madison placed his right shoulder against the towering wall of crates.

Wait.

Panicked, Grace’s body tensed as she helplessly watched Crowe through the narrow slit in the wall of boxes. Madison nudged her leg with his foot.

“How close?” he asked in a barely audible whisper.

Grace’s eyes flashed with understanding. She held up a hand, indicating that he was still out of range.

Wait.

Footsteps. A flash of red light.

“Now,” hissed Grace.

Madison threw his weight against the stack of crates, pushing against the rear wall of the chamber with his right foot for leverage.

The wall of boxes creaked and groaned, and then began to fall.

Realizing his mistake, Crowe threw his arms above his head as the first crate slid from the toppling wall and fell, striking him a glancing blow across the shoulder.

“Door!” yelled Madison, pointing in the direction of the lifeless body of the guard and the open door behind him.

The wall of crates collapsed on top of Crowe, knocking him to the ground beneath its weight in a tremendous crash.

Grace bolted toward the door. Madison was only a step behind her.

Crowe’s weapon clattered across the floor, dropped from numb fingers as he was knocked unconscious by Tutankhamen’s falling coffers.

It slid across the stone, coming to rest at the feet of the ebony statue of Anubis.

John F. Kennedy Expressway
Chicago, Illinois

Grace closed her eyes and leaned into the wind that streamed in through the open window of the taxi, allowing the cool breeze to wash over her face. She rubbed her fingers in small circles over her temples, willing the wicked headache behind her eyes to subside. The abraded skin on her back stung like a bad sunburn. Her muscles ached from exhaustion.

She opened one eye, squinting at Madison. He was staring out the window, deep in thought. His fingers nervously massaged his knuckles.

“Hey,” said Grace. Her voice was soft.

Madison shifted his gaze from the space beyond the window to Grace’s blue eyes.

“You okay?” she asked.

Madison forced a half smile. “I’m not sure.”

The narrow escape from Crowe at the Field Museum had left Madison and Grace physically and emotionally exhausted. After fleeing from the museum through a delivery entrance behind the exhibit hall, they took temporary refuge in a nearby transit authority station. Grace washed up in the public restroom while Madison wolfed down three chili dogs he bought from a Jamaican hot dog vendor.

“I just can’t watch anyone else die,” said Madison in the backseat of the taxi. He closed his eyes.

Justin was a ghost of a child, lying thin and frail under the starched white sheets of a hospital bed. A tangle of tubes and wires crisscrossed his chest, connecting his dying body with IV bags, monitors, and machines.

The monotonous beep of a heart monitor ticked off the passage of seconds. Christian Madison sat at his bedside, gently holding his son’s hand.

Most of the time, Justin didn’t seem to know what was happening. He stared straight ahead, his eyes glassy and vacant. His breathing was labored. At times, the rise and fall of his chest would stop completely. He would make a small gurgling sound, swallow, and then his breathing would start again.

Madison was utterly powerless. He worshipped science like a religion, but science refused to perform any miracles for one of its most faithful disciples. He prayed to a God he didn’t believe in, bargaining for the life of his dying son.

Grace squeezed his hand, bringing Madison back to the present. He opened his eyes.

“I will not watch anyone else die,” he said.

Madison sat up in his seat. He allowed his anger to give him strength.

“We have the disk. With a little technical assistance from Quiz, we should be able to translate the Genesis Code. We have to get back to New York.”

9:17
P.M
., June 12
Quiz’s Loft
Chinatown, Manhattan

Quiz’s loft was near the edge of Chinatown on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As their taxi rolled down the street, Madison peered through a grimy window, searching for Quiz’s building. From the tinny speakers of a battery-powered radio on the cab’s front seat, the voice of an obnoxious talk radio host berated the show’s hapless callers and proselytized about the New York Mets.

“Can you turn that down?” asked Grace.

The greasy cabdriver grunted. He reached over and lowered the volume on the radio, but only slightly.

On the sidewalk, a Chinese teenager with slicked-back hair and an irritating sneer argued with a small, feisty elderly man in loud Cantonese. The sidewalk was filled with ice-filled boxes of fish, buckets of fresh-cut flowers, and tables filled with knockoff designer handbags. Smoked ducks and featherless poultry hung by their necks behind cloudy windows. Faded signs written only in Chinese jutted out from the densely clustered brick and stone facades that lined the street.

Halfway down the block, Madison spotted the building.

“Right here is fine,” he said to the cabdriver. Madison fished two twenties from his pocket and handed them to the sullen cabbie, who eyed Grace’s backside in his rearview mirror as she climbed out of the taxi.

A shop window on the first floor of the building was filled with a variety of gnarled roots and dried herbs. Through the herbalist’s open door, soothing traditional Chinese music mixed with the bustling sounds of the street. The sharp odor of ginseng and incense mingled with the strong smell of yeast emanating from a small bakery selling tea buns and rice cakes.

Madison consulted a directory beside the entrance to the upper floors of the Earnhardt Building. He picked out Quiz’s name from a list dominated by Li’s and Chung’s and Chow’s, and pressed the buzzer next to the peeling label. Within seconds, the lock of the door clicked open. Grace grabbed the door’s brass handle and swung it open.

Quiz met them at the landing on the fourth floor and led them into his small loft.

“I’m so glad to see you guys,” he said, throwing an arm around Madison’s shoulder and grasping Grace’s hand. “Anyone want a beer?”

“Absolutely,” said Grace.

“Christian?”

“Sounds good.”

Quiz twisted the caps off three bottles of light beer and distributed them to Madison and Grace, reserving one for himself.

They sat around Quiz’s coffee table beneath fourteen-foot ceilings and sipped their beers in silence, watching the activity on the street through oversized windows.

Madison and Grace took turns bringing Quiz up to date on their experiences in New Haven and Chicago. Then Quiz recited what he could remember from the remainder of Dr. Ambergris’ research journals.

The trio sat in silence as they tried to assimilate the new information that had been exchanged. Quiz was the first to break the silence.

“So what now?” he asked.

Madison shifted in his chair. “I think that we can translate the Genesis Code,” he said. “Dr. Vasquez gave us a disk that contains the rest of the encryption key that Dr. Ambergris encoded in his e-mail to me.”

Grace picked up his train of thought. “Dr. Bowman told us that it’s a type of substitution cipher called Gematria. Each of the sixty-four different codons in our DNA corresponds to a unique Mayan hieroglyph. It should be simply a matter of running the encryption key against the intron sequence Dr. Ambergris was studying.”

“Do you know which sequence of introns he was using?” asked Quiz.

“No, but the data must be in Ambergris’ research journal or his notes. Did you see any DNA sequences in the computer files you found on the Triad Genomics server?”

Quiz considered. “I did. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, but one of Ambergris’ files was just a long sequence of genetic code.”

“That must be it,” said Grace.

“Can we access Ambergris’ files on the server remotely?” asked Madison.

“No,” said Quiz. “The security server that Ambergris hid his files on is not interconnected with the Triad Genomics mainframe. It’s an independent network, secure from outside access.”

“So we need to get back inside the Millennium Tower,” said Madison.

“How the hell can we do that?” asked Grace. “We’ll never get past security.”

Quiz drummed his fingers on the table.

“I may be able to get to the subbasement without passing any cameras or security stations. There’s a maze of corridors and hallways down there. And there are several maintenance entrances at street level and in the parking structure that lead into portions of the subbasement. It’s risky, but not as risky as trying to bluff our way through security.”

“And how do we get into the subbasement?”

“With my security pass, I can open the doors. Triad Genomics has no reason to lock out my security clearance. We just have to try to avoid any areas or entrances with security cameras.”

“And you can get us through the subbasement?”

“I don’t know. But I think it’s our best shot. There are some remote terminals in the server farm with access to the network. We can tap into Ambergris’ data from one of those terminals.”

Quiz drained the last of his beer and pushed his chair back. “Let me show you something.”

Madison and Grace followed Quiz into a small bedroom that Quiz had converted into an office. The room was a miniature version of his office at Triad Genomics. Racks of computer components lined one wall and an overabundance of equipment filled every available space.

Quiz dropped into a rolling office chair and toggled the mouse sitting next to a modified keyboard. Three large flat-screen monitors sprang to life.

“Give me a second,” he said, punching the keys on the keyboard and entering Triad Genomics’ remote access Web address into his Internet browser.

When the Triad logo appeared, spinning on the monitor, Quiz keyed in a password.

“I always leave a back door,” said Quiz. “Never know when you might need it.”

“But I thought you said we couldn’t access Ambergris’ data remotely,” said Grace.

“We can’t, but this will help us find a way into the building.”

Quiz navigated through several menus and pecked at the keyboard. On the monitor, a three-dimensional rendering of the Millennium Tower appeared.

“Building schematics,” said Madison.

Quiz smiled. “Watch this.”

Quiz toggled the mouse and the solid surfaces of the image of the Millennium Tower vanished, revealing the details of the building’s interior framed in thin lines like a three-dimensional blueprint.

“Let’s find the subbasement.”

As Quiz maneuvered the mouse, the image on the screen moved in response.

“This software allows you to virtually move through the inside of the building, almost as if you were there. It allows architects and designers to do a virtual walk-through of their designs before the building is ever built.”

On the screen, the building rotated in cyberspace.

“This is parking garage number three,” said Quiz, pointing to the monitor. “And this is a maintenance access to the HVAC system below the parking structure. That’s our way in.”

“But that parking garage is locked down at night. The gates don’t open until 7:00
A.M
.,” said Grace.

Madison nodded.

“Tonight we’ll study the specs for the subbasement. We’ll leave for the Millennium Tower first thing in the morning.”