The Athena Factor by W. Michael Gear
“Happy?” April asked as she lifted a forkful of scrambled eggs from her plate and balanced them. Her robe hung open far enough that he could see the soft curve of her breast.
Hank finished chewing his bacon, washed it down with a shot of black coffee, and wiped his lips. “I think I’ve fallen through the looking glass.” He chuckled, opening his arms wide to take in the surroundings. He wore a white terry cloth robe belted at the waist.
April scraped up the last of her eggs, used her napkin, and asked, “Want to see the rest of the ship?”
He gave her a thoughtful look. “Beyond the infamous bulkhead?”
Her sober eyes took his measure. “First, I have to know. Are you in? All the way?”
He chewed his lip, gave a curt nod, and stood. “Yeah, I’m in.”
“Why?” she demanded. “What would convince you to do this? You used to be a federal agent. Sometimes, working for Genesis Athena, you’ll have to skirt the law. Why would you sell your soul? For a payback?”
“Nah, I’m smarter than that.” He gestured around at the plush quarters. “I like the way you do business. Charter aircraft, your own ship, and capable personnel? I could be an asset to you. And I’m assuming you weren’t blowing smoke about the salary.”
“No smoke.”
“Things went so fast the other night. Until now I never understood that you can just get swept away. I mean, we kidnapped Christal. It’s a felony, April. Whatever it was that we did, we can’t go back. Can’t rethink it and change it.”
“You feeling trapped?” she asked as she stood and slipped her robe off.
He stopped short, watching her perfect body. A dancer had a body like that, toned and agile. She stepped to her dresser, pulled the top drawer open, and fished out a bra and panties. He watched one long tanned leg after the other slide through the openings.
She glanced at him as she snapped her bra and slipped her arms through the straps. The question hung between them. Trapped? Hell, how did he answer that?
“Sure. But I was part of the entrapment. I knew what I was doing, setting Christal up. When we packed her out of that place, I had a momentary hesitation. I was doing everything I’d ever been trained to prevent; but you know, I haven’t lost any sleep over it.”
She laughed as she pulled gray cotton slacks on. “I keep telling you, we’re not doing anything illegal. People may disagree with our methods, but there are no laws—”
“Kidnapping—”
“Shit!” she snapped. “Cut it out, Hank. Remember? I asked her. She said she’d go if we answered her questions. You heard her.”
“She was drugged! A good DA would—”
April walked up to him, slipped her hands inside his robe, and pressed her palms against his chest. They were cool on his warm skin. “We’ll make it right with her. She won’t press charges when we’re through. We’ve paid her back in a way she’ll never forget. Genesis Athena has the resources to fix almost anything. We’re here for the long term—with a product no one else is going to be able to provide.” A smile curled her lips. “Trust me.”
He hesitated, staring into those marvelous eyes. Then he nodded. What the hell. “Yeah, like I said, I’m in.” He gave her a sly grin. “And I could get real used to the lifestyle.”
“Come on,” she added impishly. “Get dressed. Let me show you why you’ve made the best decision of your life. You’re in on the ground floor of the biggest industry of the twenty-first century.”
Moments later they rolled the cart with their demolished breakfast out into the narrow companionway for the staff to pick up, and April led him through one of the hatches and into a major corridor.
“As you’ve no doubt guessed, ZoeGen is an old cruise ship. Greek, originally, and perfect for our needs. She provides us with accommodations for fifteen hundred clients at a time. Currently we have over three hundred staff and crew on board. They berth in the lower decks. We do everything from genetic scans, genetic engineering, gene replacement and therapy, molecular engineering, all the way to providing complete reproductive services for any client, male or female.”
“What do you mean, male? How does man reproduce himself?”
“Our geneticists retrieve one of his germ cells from the testes before it divides into sperm. They remove the nucleus and insert it into a host woman’s denucleated egg. Once it’s implanted in her womb, she carries the fetus to term, delivers it, and after we’re sure the child is healthy, it’s given to the father.”
“You have women who will do this?”
“For a price, Hank. It’s a big world out there, and you’d be surprised what an incentive a couple thousand US can be in a place like Bangkok. None of this comes cheaply, but what some people will pay for an exact genetic copy of themselves would amaze you. It’s the ultimate narcissism on a mobile platform we can take anywhere in the world.”
“As long as you stay in international waters.”
“That’s right. That’s our ace in the hole.” She had pulled her reddish hair into a ponytail that bobbed as she nodded. “We have a full legal team, but sometimes even they can’t keep up with the laws in individual countries. The high seas are open territory for Genesis Athena.”
She stopped at a hatch, pressed a series of numbers into a keypad, and opened the sealed door.
Hank stepped through into what had once been an open two-story room, perhaps fifty feet across and sixty long. The balcony where he stood was now glassed, providing a view of the floor a story below.
“This used to be the ballroom,” April said, taking a position on the railing before the glass. “You’re looking down onto one of the G Deck labs.”
Hank could see white-clad people seated at counters around what was clearly a laboratory. Racks of test tubes, beakers, tubing, and trays were everywhere. He could identify the microscopes, of course, but the rest of the equipment baffled him. “The last time I took science was in college. I was in the criminal justice program, not biology. What is all this stuff?”
April shrugged. “I haven’t the slightest idea. What you’re seeing is where the real heart of Genesis Athena lies. Those people down there are the brains that make it all possible.”
“Okay, enough of the melodrama. What am I seeing?”
She gave him a sidelong glance as she said, “You would call it cloning, Hank. Pure and simple. The world market for molecular biology, gene therapy, infertility, and genetic engineering is huge. Billions huge, and I’m talking dollars, euros, pounds, what have you.”
“So, what was Christal doing that hacked you off?”
“She was nosing her way onto my particular turf.”
“And that is?”
“Obtaining DNA.”
Hank frowned. “Whose DNA?”
“My biggest single acquisition was Elvis Presley.”
“Get off it! The guy’s dead.”
Her laughter sounded musical. “His body, yes. We used a truck-mounted drill to bore a hole through his tomb. Center-punched his casket and inserted a probe into the corpse. By employing the correct procedures, our techs can recover intact nuclear DNA despite the mortuary preservative.”
“How come I didn’t hear about it? Drilling a hole in Presley’s grave, I mean.”
“Because Graceland covered it up. They didn’t want the publicity. Put yourself in their place. Would you want the whole world to know that someone had violated your security, drilled a hole in your hero, and walked off with a piece of him? It might tarnish the myth, or worse, encourage someone else to try.”
“You drilled a hole …” He shook his head, baffled.
April stared down pensively. “Since then we’ve changed our methodology. Now we don’t leave any doubt about the validity of our samples. As to Elvis, it’s okay. You remember that eBay auction of Elvis’ hair a couple of years back? We’ve got rock-solid provenance, and can cross-compare the DNA from that to our Graceland sample. We’ve got a waiting list of clients scheduled for implantation for the foresee
“For tubes of dead Elvis DNA?” He was looking out at the laboratory, thinking of how much money people spent for things like Elvis’ guitar.
“Tubes of … Hardly! You still don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
She teased him with her eyes. “Do you remember the line in the movie Men in Black? The one where they’re driving on the roof of the tunnel?”
“Yeah, Tommy Lee Jones says that Elvis isn’t dead, he’s just gone home.”
April gave him a bewitching smile. “Our first Elvis clone was born last week. The host mother is a rich widow from Indianapolis. So you see, the movie was right. He went home—but now he’s back.”
“This is a joke, right?”
“Do you remember the Tasmanian wolves a few years back? One of our people pioneered that process. DNA is only a molecule, a code. It doesn’t die along with the body. If it’s preserved, the code can be reactivated.”
He stared, openmouthed.
April’s eyes seemed to enlarge as she shook her head. “Now, Hank, are you beginning to understand the power behind Genesis Athena and why people will pay millions for DNA that we control the patents to?”
After a night of unrelenting nightmares, Sheela sat on her poolside recliner. In the cool protection of the shade, she watched turquoise water lap at the white cement walls. “The cement pond,” the Beverly Hillbillies had called it. How appropriate for a Saskatchewan girl’s final retreat. The only standing water she had known for her first fourteen years had been the clear water in the dugouts where the horses and cattle drank.
How did I get here? Looking back through the kaleidoscope of her tumultuous life, she might have been carried off by a tornado. Batted this way and that by the winds of opportunity, fortune, and plain dumb luck, she had come out on top.
How much of myself did I sell on the way? She pursed her lips, shifting her gaze to the fountain in the flower bed, where water bubbled and danced in a delighted spray beneath the Sacagawea statue.
Not as much as most do, she decided. Truly talented people always wrestled with the green-eyed demon of insecurity. She too was constantly plagued as the beast hung its scaled head over her shoulder to whisper that she wasn’t any good anymore, that she could never conjure. an Oscar-worthy character like Cassie Evens in Blood Rage again. That Jagged Cat was going to be released to howls of derision. It would land at the box office stillborn, the dissection of its carcass celebrated by the wags in Time, Newsweek, Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
“Washed up!” the headlines would decry.
How did I let Christal down? She rubbed her right thumb across the smooth back of her left hand, feeling the skin, bone, and tendons slipping beneath. If I had taken the meeting Rex wanted me to, would it have been different?
Had it been the gods staring down from their aeries on high? Had they seen her desperation to change her life? To save herself? Her belief in the capriciousness of fate was tragically Greek in nature. For any good thing, some terrible price ultimately had to be paid.
“Sheela?” Felix’s soft voice interrupted.
She glanced over her shoulder as he came walking out in an expensive silk suit that rippled like a rainbow trapped inside gray. “Hello, Felix. Come, sit.”
She watched his lean body as he bent, fingered the fabric-upholstered pad to ensure that no lotions, oils, or other liquids could soil his suit, and seated himself.
An image of her father flashed in the back of her mind: He was bent behind a cow in the squeeze chute; his arms buried up to his elbows in her rear; blood, amniotic fluid, urine, and manure dripping down his brown-duck Carhartts. She could see the expression on his face as he struggled to turn a breeched calf to free a stuck leg.
The image came from light-years beyond Felix Baylor and his immaculately tailored three-thousand-dollar suits.
What kind of men have we bred in this business? Aloud, she asked, “What have you found out?”
Felix straightened his white cuffs where they protruded from his suit coat. “Genesis Athena is quite an organization.” His brown eyes were thoughtful. “You asked me to contact them, see what kind of information they had on Sheela Marks. Well, it appears to be substantial. They forwarded a fairly complete biography of you and your achievements. The document we received would have done Dot proud.”
“Flattering or derogatory?”
“Most flattering.” His expression left little doubt about that. “Sheela, you asked me to contact them in behalf of the name Jennifer Weaver. May I ask why?”
“A hunch, Felix.” She gave him a weary appraisal, then asked, “Who are you?”
“What?”
“I asked who you are, Felix. Really, deep down inside your bones and soul, who are you?”
“I …” He shrugged, perplexed. “I’m an attorney. Your attorney. Um, the father of three. Some of my cases—”
“Yes, yes, but do you know yourself? If I stripped all that away, dropped you on a desert island like Tom Hanks in Castaway, would you know yourself? Would you still have that kernel of ‘self’ on the inside to cling to? Or are you a paste-up of your various images? A collection of events and actions stuck together with no discernible order to become this rendition of Felix Baylor?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
She studied his wary expression, reading complete bafflement in his brown eyes. “I’m talking about being, Felix. Not just, What am I? Or, What do I do? But what I am inside, at the heart, the soul, in the marrow of the bones.”
He blinked, expression thinning. “Oh, I get it. You’re doing some sort of preparation for a role. Rex wanted me to talk to you about—”
“Fuck him. Fuck you, too.” She closed her eyes, rubbing them. “Felix, I’ll tell you this once. I’m tired. Exhausted. I’ve done three films a year for the last ten years. Through all of that, I’ve clung to something, deep down inside. It was a piece of me.” She tapped her breastbone. “Way down in here. Deep. Do you understand?”
He just listened with no change of expression.
“A couple of days ago, I asked Christal Anaya if she, too, depended on me. And do you know what?” She didn’t wait for his blank look. “She honestly told me no. Finally, one person had the balls to tell me no. But more than that, that same woman told me that if I wanted, I could depend on her. And she really meant it. Now, isn’t that a switch?”
“But she’s the one who’s missing.”
“No shit!” Sheela narrowed her eyes. “I’m at a real rocky place in my life right now. I checked the accounts. You and your firm have made a little more than three and a half million off me and my production companies. That doesn’t count the additional work that my reputation has brought your firm.”
“But that—
“I’m not complaining. You earned every cent of it that you didn’t get by padding the billing.” She gave him a wry smile. “And you’ll be paid for your time now.”
“And that is to do what? This Jennifer Weaver thing?”
Sheela nodded. “Pay attention. Here is what you need to know: Jennifer Weaver is thirty-four, single. With the sale of her deceased father’s cattle ranch, she has a portfolio worth a little more than ten million. She lives in LA and has been fascinated with Sheela Marks for the last ten years. She has seen all of my movies at least ten times. She attends every venue she can, hoping to get a glimpse of me. She wants to know if Genesis Athena can get her close to Sheela Marks.”
Felix looked confused again. “But, I don’t get it.”
“That’s your assignment. Make it happen, Felix. I don’t care what you have to do. Build an identity for Jennifer Weaver. Driver’s license, passport, address, billing history, whatever it takes. You can make it happen.”
“What’s the point?” He spread his arms. “Genesis Athena is a big company; we’ve checked their stats. Financially, they’re huge, but they’re not players. If someone wanted to get close—”
“The
“Sheela, this sounds nuts! Maybe you should talk this over with a friend of mine. She’s a psychologist. A real one from Stanford. Not one of these astro-babble psychotherapists, but the genuine—”
“You are not to discuss this with anyone. Period. Every shred of attorney-client privilege is now in effect. If you so much as breathe a word, even to Rex, I’ll have your balls.”
He made a pained expression. “So what am I going to do?”
“You’re going to make it so that I can find them. Genesis Athena is doing something with DNA. My DNA. Genetics, cloning, whatever. You’re going to set it up so that Jennifer Weaver can buy whatever kind of piece of Sheela Marks that they’re selling.”
She watched him finally glom onto the realization that whatever happened, legal action was looming at the end of it.
He said, “Let’s say they take the Jennifer Weaver bait.”
“Then you set up an appointment for Ms. Weaver.”
“Sheela, you’re one of the most recognizable—”
“I’m also an actress. Just in case you’ve forgotten. And, in spite of what some of the critics say, a damn brilliant one! I’m going after them. Then, when I find out everything, you can have them.” She gave him a predatory smile. “If they’re as well fixed as your research indicates, you could clean up a tidy bundle—and add to your reputation by making some interesting new law, too.”
“It could be dangerous.”
“The key to this game is deception. And no matter what your objections, or the counseling you’re going to feel obliged to give regarding my safety and ethics, and all the other bullshit, I’m doing this.”
“Sheela—”
“Dammit! Don’t you understand?” She felt a tear in her soul. “If I don’t, I’m going to lose what little is left of me!”