The Sixth Station(35)
“My boss, who was on a satellite conference call, yelled ‘What the bloody hell good is a radius of one hundred damned miles in a country that no longer has electricity?’
“The cardinal actually raised his arms to God. ‘We need to find them and do the right thing. That devil spawn and its Satan-fornicating mother and the whole damned band of Satanists she’s with must be eliminated, before the next sunrise.’ He said he believed that the lights would not come back on until the thing was disappeared. He declared that it was ‘sucking the energy right out of the world!’ And he was right. I said, ‘Cardinal Renzi, I assure you we’ll find this child.…’
“That put him into orbit. ‘It is not a child,” he roared. ‘Because it is not a human!’
“I’ve thought about that these thirty-three years—after what we did. Anyway, I said to him, ‘Excuse me, Your Eminence, but really we don’t know what it is until they examine it.’
“That drove him crazier. ‘Examined? You mean autopsied!’
“Our orders were clear. It was to be destroyed, and so were the people behind the cloning, because this must never happen again.”
“Do you mean cloning a human, or do you mean cloning Jesus?” I asked.
She pierced me with her gaze. “Frankly, both. The Vatican as well as top Jewish leaders, four Shia Grand Ayatollahs, and several Sunni leaders had, we were told, condoned the decision of the president and other world leaders on this issue. They wanted whoever was responsible to know that cloning was not going to be allowed and that killing cloned babies was not infanticide; it was the right thing to do. They all agreed that it was not just bad science, it would create a race of godless monsters.”
“Well, maybe the baby was the Prince of Peace, after all,” I injected sardonically—I hoped. “Who else could get all those enemies to agree on anything?”
Instead, a sadness passed over her face, which was totally unexpected. “You have no idea how much that has weighed on—” And then she changed the point abruptly, bringing herself back upright and stone-faced.
“At any rate, using the blood, the actual DNA, or whatever to reproduce Jesus? Do you think that the pope or any leader of any Christian country in the world could allow scientists to decide when the Second Coming would take place? And it wasn’t just the Christians. Every religion’s power base would be vulnerable to a new Messiah.
“I tried to tell them that even if we killed ‘the thing,’ it was just as important to find out where the blood had come from. Or it could happen again. I never doubted that whatever the source, it still existed and still held the DNA.”
Bursting with curiosity, I asked, “What kind of vessel held the DNA or blood that this mysterious laboratory supposedly possessed?”
“Don’t know. It may have been something that a few godless knights—perfecti is the proper term—of the heretic Cathar cult carried down Montségur Mountain in France in the thirteenth century; supposedly some kind of treasure. But logic tells us that one can’t rappel down the backside of a mountain in the middle of the night carrying a treasure chest. Legend has it that one or perhaps two of them were women.”
Not that again. Another true cross meets the Holy Grail.
But then I remembered, even in my exhausted state, that Sadowski had said something about that same cult earlier.
He called them Gnostic Christians, though, not godless heretics. Hmmm.
“Can you spell that for me—catheters,” I joked.
She laughed—finally. “Well, I suppose DNA would have been left on a catheter if they had such a thing in the thirteenth century. But it’s C-A-T-H-A-R, a Gnostic heretic Christian sect.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, not seeing at all.
Then she made a joke. Another actual joke. “Speaking of catheters, you probably need a bathroom break.”
“Thank you, Jesus. No pun intended,” I said.
13
She showed me to the bathroom, where I reached into my pocket, retrieved Sadowski’s phone, and tried him again. Again I got the recording.
“Where the hell are you? I’m up here with that woman, and I’ve got your car. Call me back or I’m sending your Caddy and the witch over the cliff. Got it? Good.”
I peed and walked back in.
“The real problem,” she continued, as though we hadn’t been interrupted, “was that the people who were in possession of the baby might actually escape, what with all the tracking devices in that area of the world down while we were sitting around a damned campfire!
“And it then got worse. There we were in this super-secret setting at the edge of Asia and Europe, and suddenly the door swings open and in walks the Reverend Dr. Bill Teddy Smythe, dusting off his Stetson on his jeans like it was just an ordinary day. How he got there, I will never know. How he knew where to find us, I would never say, but it was pretty clear.”