Within lies the true heart of the Bloodline.
Gray pondered those words as he stood at the threshold of the sealed museum space.
“I was first brought here when I was a boy,” Robert explained. “I was too naïve to understand the true cost of the knowledge inside, of the blood pact that it would require of me, of the losses I would have to endure.”
Two symbols, etched on the glass, flanked either side of the air-lock door. To the right was a cross, emblazoned with spirals of DNA. Gray had seen that symbol before, enough to know Robert was not lying about the importance of this space. To the left was the same cross, only it was decorated with entwining snakes.
Robert noted his attention. He touched the cross with the snakes. “This was our past. The other is our future.”
Without further explanation, Robert unsealed the air lock and brought Gray into the room. Lights flickered on, revealing a neighboring clean room branching off from this chamber. Gray spotted towering banks of black mainframes back there, but Robert drew him onward.
Still, Gray’s eyes drifted hungrily to the computer room.
What do those massive servers hold?
Apparently, such questions would have to wait.
Their destination stood at the very back of the museum space. A tall glass case held a single nondescript object: an upright wooden staff.
Curious, sensing the palpable age of the artifact, Gray leaned closer, his arms still cuffed behind him. Upon the surface of the staff, three serpents had been faintly carved, winding around and around the shaft in a complicated tangle.
“What is it?” Gray asked, straightening back up.
“An artifact discovered by an ancestor of mine during the Crusades, found in a citadel atop a mountain in Galilee. It is called the Bachal Isu. It was the staff carried by St. Patrick.”
Gray turned to him. “The saint who chased the snakes out of Ireland?”
“Exactly, but do you know the staff’s history, how St. Patrick came to possess it?”
Gray shook his head.
Robert explained, “The legend goes that when Patrick was returning from Rome on his way back to Ireland, he stopped at the island near Genoa. There he met a young man who claimed to have received the staff from ‘a pilgrim of sweet and majestic countenance’ and was told to hold it until ‘my servant Patrick rests here on his way to Erinn for the conversion of its people, and give it into his hands when he quits you.’ This caretaker also claimed that, while the staff was in his possession, he had stopped aging, living over a century as he waited for Patrick.”
Gray eyed the historical artifact skeptically. “A staff that grants immortality?”
“According to the lore of St. Patrick, that pilgrim was Jesus Christ.”
Gray stared at the simple staff with both awe and not a small amount of disbelief. “Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know. But there are other stories that claim this staff is much older, said to have been possessed by King David and, before that, by Moses.”
Quite the pedigree, Gray thought to himself, not wanting to offend or stop this recitation. The longer the story took, the more time Painter had to solve the riddle Gray had left behind in DC.
Plus, the man’s prior words kept him attentive.
You may be useful to my plans.
The words hadn’t sounded like a threat, more like an offer.
He let the man talk.
“Who knows if any of that is true?” Robert admitted. “The one who found this was a Templar knight, hence the cross that decorates our symbol. According to that story, the staff was in the possession of a guardian claiming to be over five hundred years old. She stole that staff, slaying that man—”
“Wait? She?”
“Yes, she was a Templar, one of the original nine, though her name was stricken from the historical record after her discovery. That moment was our ancestors’ greatest triumph and our most bitter failure. But I’m jumping ahead of myself.”
“Then go on.”
“Upon her return to France with the stolen staff, it became apparent—though it took years—that the staff bore no miraculous properties.”
“So it didn’t hold the secret to immortality.”
Robert eyed him. “No, it did—but it would take centuries for us to discover the truth. For it wasn’t the staff that was the miracle. It was the knowledge written on it.”
Gray squinted at the staff. “The three snakes?”
Robert shifted him to an old, illuminated Bible resting open on a stand, the pigments brilliant under the lights.
“Snakes are a common religious theme,” he said. “Patrick cast out the serpents of Ireland. Moses turned his staff into a snake. But it’s the earliest story of the serpent, from the book of Genesis, that revealed the truth. There were two trees in the Garden of Eden. The tree of life, which bore the fruit of immortality. And the tree of knowledge. God cast out Adam and Eve after they ate from the tree of knowledge because He feared with that knowledge they would ‘take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.’”
“But the tree of life is just symbolic.”
“That’s not true. It existed—or, at least, it did in the past.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There are plenty of stories in the Bible of people living to incredible ages, the most famous being Methuselah, who lived 969 years. But there are many others. And not just in the Bible. The clay tablets of Babylon and Sumer claim their kings lived centuries upon centuries.”
“But those ages are just allegorical, not the literal truth.”
“Perhaps. Except the story of a plant that sustains life is not limited to the Bible. In the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, the hero of that story hunts for the plant of life, a plant that grants immortality.”
Robert pointed to another case, this one holding old books. “In the ancient Hindu Vedic scriptures, they describe a plant called soma, with the same properties. ‘We’ve quaffed the Soma bright, and are immortal grown.’”
He moved next to a plate of Egyptian art, showing a falcon-headed god plucking leaves from a tall plant. “Here is an actual depiction of the tree of life from Egyptian mythology.”
Robert turned to look across the breadth of artifacts. “There are many other examples, but what’s unusual about all of these stories is one detail. In the Bible, Noah is the last person to live to such an extreme age. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the adventuring king discovers the plant he seeks had been drowned away. In both those stories and many others, this life-sustaining plant is destroyed by a great flood.”
Robert turned back to Gray. “Maybe this is just a coincidence, but maybe there was a seed of truth to these stories. And from that seed, a new Tree of Life could be grown. That’s what the Bloodline came to believe. For centuries, they’ve searched for the meaning of those three snakes, sensing there was some significance to it that was tied to immortality. They were confident enough to incorporate those snakes into their own symbol.”
Robert pointed back to the glass doors.
“And it wasn’t just our mark. We left that fingerprint everywhere, hoping to draw out those with hidden knowledge. My ancestors believed so firmly in that connection that they incorporated that symbol into the various secret organizations that hid us.”
He led Gray over to an open page of a book of Masonic rites. It showed three men clasping hands, entwined very much like the snakes on the staff. And if there was any doubt, the snakes were depicted there, too—with three heads.
“So you see how steadfastly we believed,” Robert said. “And in the end, we were proven right.”
“Right? How?”
“The drawing on the staff was knowledge encoded for future generations. Genetic knowledge.” Robert pointed to the other symbol on the door. “That’s when the symbol got changed, transforming the snakes into what they really represented: strands of DNA.”
“You’re saying that ancients in the past knew enough about DNA to encode it as snakes on a staff.”
“Possibly. Back in the sixties, a scientist named Hayflick determined that man’s natural age could not exceed 120 years. He based that on the number of times a cell could divide.”
“I’m familiar with the Hayflick Limit,” Gray said, having studied biophysics.
“Then is it mere coincidence that the book of Genesis came to the same conclusion about the limits to a man’s lifetime? To quote from that book of the Bible: His days shall be a hundred and twenty years. The same conclusion as Hayflick’s. Where did that knowledge come from?”
“Okay, that’s strange, I admit. But that’s a far cry from saying that the snakes on the staff represent strands of DNA. There are three snakes drawn there. DNA is a double helix.”
“Ah, but there’s the rub. The secret of immortality doesn’t lie within two strands, but three, a triple helix. That’s what is written on the staff. It took until the modern age, with the aid of DNA analysis, for us to unravel that mystery.”
“How did you do that?”
“When our errant knight left with the staff, she killed the previous immortal who possessed it—likely the last of his kind. She spilled his blood, which was preserved on the staff. In his blood, we discovered his white cells possessed triple-helical DNA.”
This sharpened Gray’s attention. “Triple-helical DNA?”
He was beginning to appreciate the enormity of the revelation here.
Robert nodded. “Once genetic science advanced enough to let us decode that third strand, we determined it was actually a viral protein—from a plant virus. The protein was a natural form of peptide nucleic acid, PNA. It infected human cells after someone ate that plant. A side effect of this virus leaping from plant to animal was that it stabilized cells, staved off cellular degeneration, and extended the life spans of the infected dramatically.”
Gray pictured the Garden of Eden. “The mythical tree of life.”
“Maybe not so mythical after all.”
“But I thought you said the plant’s fields were drowned during the Great Flood. How did this guardian come to possess it?”
“Apparently, someone had the foresight to stockpile some of the plants, drying them out like tea leaves. From the chronicles of the knight who stole the staff, written on her deathbed, she described a row of Egyptian sarcophagi full of brittle leaves and stems in the crypt. Focused on her goal, she didn’t think anything about it and left it all to burn.”
Gray appreciated the irony. “So, like the Eve of old, your knight stole the tree of knowledge, bringing you this cryptic clue about immortality—but she left behind the tree of life.”
“So it seems. In the end, we tried to reverse-engineer that viral PNA protein, but it proved no good. Too much degradation. So we had to start from scratch, engineering our own PNA and testing it.”
Gray imagined the horrors and abuses involved with that research.
Even Robert didn’t sound proud, his voice growing hushed. “But over time, we improved enough to produce the first stable child.”
“Amanda’s son.”
He nodded. “But that stability ended up to be only temporary. And yet the cost of it was still so high. First, Amanda’s life. Now, my brother’s.” He pointed toward the door. “And soon my grandnephew. It’s too much. I must do what I can to preserve the rest of my family.”
They headed across the hall.
Robert’s melancholia settled back on his shoulders. “I was a boy when I made my pact with that inner circle of the family, with the Bloodline. I thought what we were doing here was so much larger than any individual life.”
Until it hit closer to home.
Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
And that weight and guilt would only grow when he assumed his brother’s place at the White House, bringing the Bloodline fully into power versus pulling the strings behind James Gant’s back.
“Why have you told me all of this?” Gray asked. “Why did you bring me down here?”
“So you might understand why a naïve boy might succumb to such a cruelty, but an old man cannot suffer more loss.” Robert turned to him. “I brought you down here so that you could tell the world.”
Gray gaped, shocked. The loss of his brother must have been the proverbial straw that broke this camel’s back.
But didn’t Robert order that assassination? Or was he as much a puppet on a string as President Gant?
For now, Gray had a more important question if the man was folding up his tent. “Why don’t you come forward yourself?”
“I’ve suffered enough. I will take those closest to me and vanish, to go where the Lineage cannot find us.” Robert headed away. “I leave the rest on your shoulders.”
Gray followed behind him, passing the neighboring bank of mainframes in the other room. If Robert wanted to spill all, then he wanted to know everything.
“What’s with the computer servers?” he asked, sensing something important hidden there.
Robert glanced disinterestedly in that direction. “If this room is our heart—that’s our brain, our memory. It holds our entire lineage, not just under the Gant name but the others who were lost to the past. All the way back to our rumored beginning.”
Gray wanted to hear this. “What beginning?”
“The crescent and the star. Our first symbol. Some of our earliest records connect those two symbols to the Canaanite god of human sacrifice.”
That’s certainly fitting.
“That god was named Moloch, represented by the horns of a cow or the horns of a crescent moon. A closely related god was Rephan, represented by the star. Some of our historians believe our roots go back to the time of Moses, that we were cast out by him for worshipping the crescent and the star.” He glanced back to the staff. “There is a verse from the biblical Acts. ‘You have lifted up the shrine of Moloch and the star of your god Rephan, the idols you made to worship. Therefore I will send you into exile beyond Babylon.’”
“So you’re saying you’re the descendants of those exiled idol-worshippers?”
“I don’t know. But the Bloodline is ancient, and they still carry on some old Jewish traditions, like—”
Beyond the glass wall, the elevator doors opened with a buzz, drawing their attention forward. A familiar figure stepped out. The tall blond woman strode purposefully forward. Those glacial eyes took in the situation with a single cold sweep.
Stiff with surprise, Robert strode forward. “Petra? Why . . . how are you down here?”
On the far side of the glass barrier, she stepped to the air lock, typed in a code on the outer door. Thick steel rods locked the room down.
Robert rushed forward and tugged on the door handle.
Apparently, someone had grown wise to his coming betrayal.
Robert stopped tugging, realizing the truth. He called through the glass wall to her. “You’re of the Lineage. Why was I never told?”
“We are legion,” she said. “And not all are happy with your stewardship. When we lost the child—a useless thing, really—I contacted those whom I serve, reported what I found here. How you place grief over necessity. Immediate family over the Lineage. You tug and rip against the fabric that has lasted millennia. No more. You are of no further use to the Lineage.”
“But I’ve led for so many years.”
She smiled, a wicked look, as if scoffing at such a claim. “When the body is strong, the head can be cut off. We will grow a new one and be stronger for it. You are to be set aside. This branch of the Gant clan is to be pruned away, including all the fruit born from it. We will purge the old to make way for the new. With no tears, only purpose.”
Robert’s palm, which had been resting against the door, fell away.
“The purge will start here. In ten minutes. At three o’clock, an appropriately powerful number. I’ve engaged the fail-safe for both your labs and this vault of ages. This day, the Lineage will shed its past and set its eyes only on the future. Immortality is within grasp. Ultimate power at our doorstep.”
Petra bowed, oddly respectful. “Those you love will not suffer,” she said, her eyes fixing at Robert. “Even those you do not believe we know about.”
Robert lunged forward and pounded his fist against the glass, his voice breaking. “Stop!”
She retreated to the elevator, facing them—though her gaze was directed elsewhere. They were already forgotten.
Gray waited for the doors to close, then turned to Robert. “Looks like you’re out of a job.” He tilted his cuffed wrists toward the man. “How about we get these off?”
Robert looked both angry and grief-stricken.
Been there, Gray thought.
As the man undid his cuffs, Gray asked the question he was afraid to know the answer to. “What’s this fail-safe?”
Robert’s face went grave. “A thermobaric bomb. One will incinerate the vaults down here. But over at the lab . . .” He shook his head, looking sick.
“What’s going to happen at the lab?”
The evacuation alarms echoed across the facility as red warning lights flashed, turning the world shades of crimson.
“Sinkhole,” Fielding explained as he shoved papers into a briefcase.
“What?” Edward asked, sticking close to the man. Others fled in various directions, grabbing what they could.
“A majority of the complex sits above a dry underground lake. Miners at the turn of the century discovered the lake below, fed by an underground river. Later, engineers capped that river during construction, built scaffolding to support the lab over the pit. We’re not in an underground lab.” He snapped his briefcase closed with a note of finality. “We’re on a massive suspension bridge over a yawning pit. And they’re about to blow out that suspension.”
He moved to his workstation.
“It will create a twenty-acre-wide sinkhole that will flood as that main river is unplugged. And a new lake will be born over our graves if we don’t get clear of here.”
Edward urged the man. “Then let’s bloody well go.”
“I’m not going to lose my research—or my work.” Fielding tapped at a screen. “This will be their ultimate test.”
“What are you doing?”
“Giving them a fighting chance.” Fielding leaned to a microphone as green lights flashed down row after row of pod designations. He spoke the final command order, transmitted to all of his army. “SURVIVE.”
Beneath Edward’s feet, a low rumble rose. He backed toward the door. What was Fielding thinking, unleashing that horde now?
“Just the generators powering up,” Fielding assured him, picking up his briefcase. “The activation sequence and warm-up mode takes eight minutes. We’ll be far away by then.”
Still, Edward hurried to the door. He turned to see something leap from the worktable and latch onto Fielding’s back, landing square between his shoulder blades. It was one of his new hexapods. In the excitement, the researcher had forgotten he’d activated this one earlier, left it on standby mode while he tinkered.
Fielding screamed and struggled to reach the beast, but its ice-pick-thin legs, sharpened to surgical points, punctured deep, latching on firmly.
Edward backed toward the door. Fielding had explained about this newest pod, a nester. Its bulbous body housed a swarm of smaller robots.
Fielding backed toward him. “Get it off! Get it off!”
Edward retreated, unable to tear his gaze away. Now, latched against his back, the pregnant creature vomited a stream of smaller bots from its swollen abdomen. They spread like fire ants—racing down his back, up his neck, over his shoulders, along his chest and limbs.
“No, no, no . . .” Fielding cried, spinning in a circle, knowing what was coming.
Then, as if on cue, the march of the bots all stopped at once—and began drilling into his flesh.
The animal howl of pain finally broke through Edward’s shocked paralysis. He twisted away. He knew what they were drilling for. The other, larger pods were attuned to body heat. These smaller ones were attracted to the sound of beating hearts.
They would drill and drill until that beat was finally silenced.
But from the endless howling that chased Edward toward the surface, it took a long time.
As minutes ticked down, Gray lay on his side, rubbing his chafed wrists. The secretary of state of the United States knelt over his head, picking a plug of C-4 out of his ear canal, using a three-thousand-year-old sliver of Egyptian bone, a funerary object stolen from one of the cabinets.
“That looks like most of it,” Robert said.
Good.
Gray didn’t want to be down here when the thermobaric weapon exploded. Fuel-air bombs created blast waves that rivaled nuclear bombs and ignited oxygen to five thousand degrees.
Gray rolled to his rear end and set to work digging out the earpiece and blasting cap. He used a pair of tweezers to poke, prod, and pull the device free. It felt like yanking a walnut out, leaving his ear ringing.
“Got it.”
He hurried and gathered everything together. The barrier was layered tempered glass, too thick to break through with anything in the room. He stuck the reassembled explosive charge to the glass wall to the left of the air-lock door. He centered it in the middle of the etched symbol of the genetic cross.
“Get back,” he warned.
Gray carried the transmitter that Robert had given him. They found shelter behind a case, and Gray pressed the button. In the enclosed space, the blast felt like two anvils striking the sides of his head. He coughed against the smoke, reeking of burned tar, and hurried Robert to his feet. He waved a hand in front of his face and saw the tempered glass barrier had shattered to a bluish-white crumble.
With his ears deafened, he had to yell to hear his own voice.
“Out!”
Gray cast one last regretful glance behind him, at the vast wealth of history about to be destroyed. His eyes settled on that staff—the Bachal Isu, the staff of Christ—but it was sealed behind bulletproof glass. He did not have the time or force of strength to rescue it.
With a heavy heart, he had to abandon it.
Robert stood on shaky feet, dazed by the blast, but he allowed himself to be dragged along. It took his palm print and code to call the elevator back down. As they waited, Robert stared toward the smoky museum.
“Maybe it’s better I should die,” Robert said. “After what I did . . .”
Gray had to keep the man motivated and moving. “Robert, I need to share something with you. Your brother, Jimmy, and his daughter, Amanda.”
“What about them?” Robert asked, with a catch in his voice.
“They’re both still alive.”
Robert flinched, turning sharply to him. “What?”
As the elevator arrived and the doors opened, Gray gave him a thumbnail sketch of the story.
“And then there’s Amanda’s son to think about,” Gray said. “You mentioned he was here.”
Robert stared sullenly as the cage rose. “He was, but he was kidnapped again.”
This time, Gray jerked his head in the man’s direction.
Robert explained, “By another captive. A medical doctor. A woman investigating our fertility clinic.”
Gray pushed his shoulder and stared him hard in the face. “Lisa Cummings?”
“You know her?”
“Was there another woman with her?”
“Yes. They were both at the lab complex, with my grandnephew. But it’s ten miles away. We can’t even get word there in time.”
Gray swore, his heart clutching. He pushed Robert against the wall, harder than he had meant to. “What about the woman I was captured with? Seichan. Was she taken to that damn lab, too?”
Robert’s brows pinched at Gray’s reaction. “No,” he said slowly. “I . . . we kept her here.”
As the elevator stopped at the top, the heavy vault door took forever to swing open. Gray had to restrain himself from pounding his fists against it, both in his anxiety to get to Seichan and in frustration that he could do nothing to help Lisa and Kat.
Finally, the thick door opened enough for Gray and Robert to exit and climb out of the massive wine barrel and back into the main cellar. He hurried, not knowing if the thermobaric weapon was of sufficient size to burn through the cellars, too—or would it take down the whole castle?
Robert was equally clueless.
Gray didn’t want to be here to find out.
“Where’s Seichan?” he asked, ready to run ahead.
“You’ll get lost.” Robert rushed alongside him, keeping up. “I’ll show you. But . . .”
“But what?”
“After Petra left us trapped”—Robert looked both scared and apologetic—“I think she was headed to kill her.”