House of Acerbi (god's lions) Read online

Standing next to him was a stunning woman that fit the cliche description of a raven-haired beauty. She had the kind of looks that made men stop whatever they were doing so that they could stare shamelessly at her when she passed. They stared even when they were with other women, because the women who were with them also stared.

  “Please, allow me to introduce two very talented scientists who have very generously volunteered their time to be here. This is Dr. Evita Vargas. She specializes in epidemiology and statistics.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Dr. Vargas,” Leo said, trying consciously to keep his eyes focused above her shoulders.

  “Likewise, Cardinal.” Her lips were perfect and her eyes positively sparkled when she looked at him. “I look forward to working with you, Your Eminence.”

  “And I you. Please, call me Leo.”

  “And this is my good friend, Dr. Raul Diaz,” Mendoza continued. “Dr. Diaz is a world-class molecular biologist and heads the genetics research program at the University of Madrid.”

  “I read a magazine article about you last year, Cardinal,” Diaz said. “They called you God’s Commando.”

  Leo smiled. “I only indulge in spiritual combat, Doctor.”

  “We’ve heard the situation in Pakistan has eased somewhat,” Mendoza said, clearing his throat. “It seems the pathogen is dying out more quickly than it did in New York or Italy..”

  “We’ve heard … very puzzling.” Leo noticed the new arrivals’ eyes had taken on a look of awe as they looked around the gigantic yacht. “Why don’t you let me show you to your rooms? We’ll be putting to sea soon.”

  Diaz looked surprised. “Putting to sea? I thought we’d be working from the boat here in the harbor.”

  “We thought it would be a good idea to put some distance between us and any population centers for the time being. After you’ve all settled in, we’ll introduce you to the rest of the team.”

  The Spanish scientists all exchanged glances before shouldering their backpacks and following Leo and Ariella down below decks to their rooms. When they had stowed their gear, Leo introduced them to Lev, who immediately began showing them around the yacht.

  Built in Holland in 2002, the boat was immaculate. Painted white, the brilliant superstructure contrasted sharply with a dark blue hull highlighted with two gold stripes that ran the entire two-hundred-thirty-foot length of the yacht just below the main deck.

  Lev began the tour in the wood-paneled hallway just below the main deck. Antique brass lamps gave off a soft yellow glow and provided a fitting ambiance for Lev’s collection of classic oil paintings of sailing ships at sea. This region of the yacht was reserved for guests and contained twelve staterooms, all superbly decorated with their own private baths.

  To the rear of the guest’s quarters, a large, garage-like space held some of Lev’s favorite water toys. A wall full of scuba diving gear provided a backdrop to the two speedboats and several jet skis stowed in front of a large hydraulic door that could be lowered down to the surface of the water at the stern of the yacht.

  Climbing up a set of narrow stairs at the end of the passageway, they found themselves standing on the main deck. This was the area that served as the focal point for most of the socializing that occurred onboard the yacht. The first half of the deck just outside the grand salon included a seating area and bar that was covered with a blue-and-white-striped canvas awning, while the back area of the deck along the stern railing was left open to the sky so that guests could sit under the sun or the stars and sip their drinks as they watched the yacht’s wake recede into the blue-on-blue horizon.

  Moving through thick glass doors into the formal grand salon, they encountered an elegant space filled with antiques and museum quality artwork. They marveled at the blue marble floor that caught the reflection of a white grand piano as they continued forward into a large dining room next to a fully equipped gourmet kitchen large enough for a team of chefs to prepare a dinner for at least fifty guests.

  Beyond the dining room was a small foyer that held the yacht’s main stairwell beneath a round stained glass skylight. Three flights of stairs followed a circular wall of carved mahogany panels crafted by some of the finest wood workers in the ship building industry. Climbing the stairs to the second deck, they stepped out into the more informal atmosphere of the mid-deck salon. This was the acknowledged party room on the boat and resembled a hotel bar.

  Furnished with several cozy, red leather booths facing a cherry-wood bar topped in black granite, two flat-screen TVs above the bar were linked to one of the yacht’s many satellite dishes so guests could watch sporting events from all over the world. The aft portion of the salon held a spacious seating area surrounded by large horizontal windows that ran the entire length of the space, giving it a bright and airy feel. Again, thick, oversized glass doors opened outside onto a covered deck furnished with several tables and built-in bench seating that followed the curvature of the railing.

  Reentering the salon, they continued up the stairwell to the bridge, where the captain gave them a brief demonstration of his state-of-the-art navigational equipment before Lev led them out to the top deck and showed them the yacht’s small blue chopper with the name Little Carmela stenciled in gold below the pilot’s window.

  “Amazing,” Mendoza whispered to Leo. “This boat has it all. Your friend Lev must be a very wealthy man.”

  “He is, but I’ve never seen a man put his money to better use. There are a lot of people who own their own homes and have college educations due to his generosity.”

  They watched as Lev headed back toward the bridge. “Come on, Javier. I think the professor has one more thing he wants to show all of you … something most outsiders never see.”

  After following Lev down a narrow hallway behind the bridge, they were ushered into the yacht’s command center.

  Standing inside the darkened room, all three scientists stared open-mouthed at their high-tech surroundings.

  “If I didn’t know better, I would think I was standing in the combat information center on a warship,” Mendoza said. “I was in the Spanish Navy when I was younger.”

  “Well then,” Lev said, “you should feel right at home in here, Doctor. I hope you haven’t lost your sea legs.”

  “No, but I’m afraid Dr. Diaz has never been onboard a boat of any kind before.” Looking behind him, Mendoza noticed that Dr. Diaz was no longer with them. Evita Vargas smiled and pointed to one of the consoles. Sitting in front of one of the computer monitors, Diaz was totally absorbed by a glowing green image of the pathogen that was displayed on the screen before him.

  “You’ll have to excuse Dr. Diaz,” Mendoza said. “I’m afraid he’s not much on social graces.”

  “Is this the pathogen?” Diaz asked, his question thrown to the air and aimed at no one in particular.

  “Yes, it is,” Lev said, glancing around the room. The fact that they possessed an image of the pathogen had not yet been discussed with the new Spanish members of the team. Normally, this would have been considered a serious breach of security, but in this case time was of the essence and soon it would become necessary for the Bible Code Team to share everything they had learned about the virus with their new Spanish friends.

  “We just received that image this morning. Have you ever seen anything like it before, Dr. Diaz?” Lev asked.

  Diaz looked shaken. “Uh … no … no I haven’t.”

  Lev shrugged as he watched Evita pull a pair of thick, black-framed glasses from her purse and take a seat next to the heavyset Spanish scientist. Looking back over her shoulder, she smiled at Lev. “Nice yacht.”

  “I’m glad you like her.”

  Watching her, Lev thought how much she reminded him of his late wife-beautiful, yet down to earth and all business when it came to getting things done. If only Carmela could be standing here with him now. A knot formed in his stomach. Some days were better than others, but even after all this time, she was constantly in his thoughts.

 
A slight shudder beneath his feet signaled the startup of the twin turbines in the engine room below. Ten minutes later, the big yacht began easing out of the harbor.

  CHAPTER 25

  A pod of dolphins took turns surfing the crest of a wave created by the Carmela’s bow as it sliced through the sparkling blue water of the Mediterranean Sea. In an effort to avoid coming into contact with the virus, the team had decided that the yacht should remain at sea, sailing just off the French coast.

  It was noontime, and lunch was being served outside on the main deck. All the major players had gathered at a long table lined with pitchers full of iced tea nestled between baskets full of freshly baked bread and heaping platters piled high with grilled fish and vegetables.

  “For the benefit of our new team members, I think this would be a good time to go over everything,” Leo said.

  The others nodded their approval.

  “What have we learned so far about the Acerbi Corporation?”

  “Well, we were able to do a computer analysis on the napkins found at the crash site,” Lev said. “As we suspected, the Acerbi Corporation’s logo is an exact match with the painting on the chapel wall. To me, this is the most puzzling connection to date. The images we found at the chapel last year portrayed actual events that came to pass … but this … it’s an enigma. There’s the biohazard sign, which by itself is significant, but nothing to connect it to a specific event. We believe it’s a general warning. I did some checking, and the Acerbi Corporation is a multi-national conglomerate begun after World War II by a man named Eduardo Acerbi. His son, Rene, now runs the company and is one of the richest men in the world. Agriculture is only one of many divisions within the company. They also have oil, pharmaceutical, chemical, and green technology divisions.”

  “The aircraft that crashed in Spain belonged to the corporation,” Alon added. “It was registered in France. I called Morelli this morning, and he said that Cardinal Orsini often accepted rides on corporate jets, but he seemed to favor the Acerbi Corporation for some reason.”

  “Their agricultural division houses one of the largest genetics research labs in the world,” Lev continued. “Have you ever heard of them, Dr. Diaz?”

  All heads at the table swiveled toward the molecular biologist. “Yes. Anyone in the field of genetics has heard of the Acerbi labs. They have labs outside Washington D.C., as well as in France and Switzerland. They also donate huge sums of money to various political entities on both sides of the Atlantic. Because of all the controversy that seems to surround any form of genetic engineering, they employ a dozen lobbyists to patrol the halls of Capitol Hill in Washington. It’s been estimated that most of the wheat in the world is now grown from genetically altered seed that’s been developed in their labs.”

  “Are they capable of altering anything other than plants?” Leo asked.

  “Of course.” Diaz set his cup of coffee on the table and leaned forward. “Genetic engineering is a wide-open field. Basically, any human modification of an organism’s genetic material that does not occur in nature is genetic engineering. The technique involves the manipulation of recombinant DNA instead of the traditional way in which animals and plants reproduce. The first organisms to be genetically engineered were bacteria in 1972.”

  “What about viruses?” Mendoza asked, casting a sideways glance at Leo.

  “Yes, viruses have also been altered. Just recently a virus was genetically modified to produce a more environmentally friendly lithium-ion battery by a division of the Acerbi Corporation in Switzerland.”

  Leo noticed Mendoza looking straight at him with his eyebrows arched. The cardinal knew that the time for secrecy had passed.

  “Ok, Javier. I’m pretty sure you’ve already guessed what I’m about to tell you, and since we’re all going to be working together, we’ve decided to lay all our cards on the table. The pathogen is manmade. It’s a virus artificially engineered to target the specific DNA code within a certain target population.”

  Mendoza leaned back in his chair and looked at the other two Spanish scientists. “We know, Cardinal. It’s true, I am an anthropologist, but for the past five years, the three of us have been working for the CNI.”

  “CNI?”

  “The Centro Nacional de Inteligencia. It’s a counterpart to your CIA in America and the Mossad in Israel.”

  “You’re a spy?”

  “He’s an analyst,” Lev chimed in. “He’s one of their resident experts in pattern recognition.”

  Mendoza practically choked on his coffee. “How did you …?”

  Lev lit a cigar and blew out the match. “You forget, Senor, I was once a Mossad officer. So was Moshe. Surely you knew we still had connections within the Israeli intelligence community. No one comes on this boat unless I know who they really are. You revealed yourself the night we all had dinner together in Spain. Not too many people in the world know about Institute 398, even in the scientific community, so I had you checked out by some old friends. I knew all about you thirty minutes after we returned to the yacht the day we met.”

  “Wait a minute,” Leo said, looking at Lev. “Just what’s going on here? And what in the world is pattern recognition … was anyone going to let me in on any of this?”

  “I was waiting for Javier to tell us himself. The fact that he’s admitted who he’s really working for proves to me that he’s on our side. Sorry, Leo.”

  “Yes, Cardinal. I apologize for not telling you sooner, but the people I work for also have rules I must go by. In answer to your question, the science of pattern recognition is the study of random events … meaningless bits of data that coalesce into a recognizable pattern. In the intelligence community, we’re constantly on the lookout for seemingly unrelated events and activities by individuals or groups that come together in a point of focused activity … a goal as it were. There are actual mathematical algorithms that ferret out such things, but in many cases we get our best intel from a working knowledge of human behavior along with our intuitive gut instinct. In the past, we had psychologists performing this kind of work, but we found that they were usually too far off the mark when it came to matters of intelligence because they were working on a model derived from abnormal behavior. Our decisions are based on what any normal person would do in a given situation. As an anthropologist, I’ve studied cause and effect based on decisions made by literally hundreds of different civilizations throughout history, and that enables me to see patterns in a historical perspective. It’s very useful for deciding what kind of action a particular group is going to take when they’re seeking to achieve an outcome that is in their best interest.”

  Leo sat back for a moment and tried to take in all of what Mendoza had just said. The man was obviously brilliant, and he was exactly what they needed right now.

  “What about Dr. Diaz?”

  “Also CNI, as is Dr. Vargas. We’re fighting a war right now, Cardinal, and we’re here to help. Dr. Diaz is one of the world’s premier molecular biologists, and like me, he’s also an expert in pattern recognition. The only difference is that he uses it to study the random behavior of viruses, especially those that have been engineered. We believe that only a manmade virus could behave like the one we’re facing … killing some, while leaving others virtually untouched.”

  “What about natural selection?”

  “In relation to what?” Diaz asked. He was frowning impatiently as he slurped his coffee. He wasn’t the most warm and fuzzy guy in the group, but he was smart, very smart.

  “In relation to the natural hereditary mutation of a species versus one artificially created by man.”

  “Ah,” Diaz exclaimed. “Mendel’s peas.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Mendel’s peas, Cardinal. Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian priest who observed the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants back in 1865. He is considered to be the father of modern genetics. His observations led to experiments proving that certain hereditary characteristics are p
assed from parent organisms to their offspring, and when the theory of Mendelian inheritance was integrated with the chromosome theory of inheritance by Thomas Morgan in 1915, they became the core of classical genetics.”

  “So, they are one and the same?”

  “In a way, yes. Humans have been altering the genomes of species for thousands of years through artificial selection.”

  “Artificial selection?”

  “Yes, fiddling around with their crops by weeding out the unhealthy plants. Now we can do it with genetic modification in the lab. Take, for instance, wheat. Ancient man took his best and most hardy plants and used their seeds for the next year’s crop. They kept doing this until soon they had bigger and better grain yields and had weeded out the plants that didn’t seem to fare as well. In other words, through human intervention, they weeded out the genome for crop failure and thereby created a hardier, more productive species. They did the same thing with animals.”

  “What about men?” Leo asked, thinking back to the painting on the chapel wall.

  “As far as we know, no one’s tried it yet, at least not out in the open. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that genetic modification of humans was tried by the Nazis using artificial selection. Mendel altered bees using the selective process, but the hybrid bees that resulted were so vicious they had to be destroyed.”

  A sudden realization jolted Leo with all the subtlety of a cattle prod. Wheat same as man! Were the images on the chapel wall referring to some kind of chance evolution of a hybrid species of man that had sprung forth thousands of years earlier? Was this what the paintings were trying to tell them?

  “Good versus bad … the Cain and Abel dichotomy,” Leo blurted out loud.

  “I beg your pardon, Cardinal?”

  “Good against evil … strong wheat versus bad wheat … good bees versus vicious bees.”

  “Really, Leo, what on earth are you talking about?” Lev said.

  “I know I’m not being clear. This might sound crazy, but we’re living in crazy times.” Leo gazed out at the hazy outline of the French coastline in the distance and took a quick sip of coffee.