“I don’t know,” Donahue said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing her in a bikini.”
Beck stopped dead in her tracks and glared back at the pair of them. “If you two Don Juans think that creature is a force to be reckoned with, then you’ve obviously never seen me pissed off.”
Donahue raised his hands in mock submission and moved back with his man. Knight moved up and walked with Beck. “From what I can tell, no one has seen much of you over the past few years.”
“You’ve looked?”
“I might have Googled you once or twice.”
Beck grinned. “I’ve kept a low profile. I think you know why.”
“Actually,” Knight said. “You have no reason to hide.”
Beck turned a curious eye toward him.
“The events at Manifold Alpha are classified. Chess Team has taken over the facility. Ridley topped the most wanted list for a while, but—”
“Ridley survived?”
That’s right, Knight thought. The last time Beck saw Ridley, he’d flung himself from a helicopter several hundred feet in the air.
“He’d taken the serum. He survived the fall and a whole lot more. We caught up with him, though.”
“Where?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
She perched her eyebrows high on her forehead. She wanted to know.
“Plus, then I’d have to kill you.”
Her disappointment was easy to see, but he couldn’t tell her about Babel, he mother tongue or how the world was nearly enslaved by Ridley.
“What’s important for you to know is that your name isn’t on any agency list. There are no warrants for your arrest. You’re not even on a no-fly list. You’re clean.”
“So you really aren’t looking for me?”
“Me, as in the U.S. government? No. Me, as in me? Let’s just say I’m not disappointed to have found you. Though the circumstances could be improved.”
Remembering they were hiding from a killing machine similar to the Hydra sobered Knight. He moved on in silence, hoping to continue the conversation later, if they survived.
20.
Phillip Cho peered down through the lens of the Zeiss and Olympus microscopes at the sample of Hydra DNA. Then, he re-examined his notes. If only the sample he had collected hadn’t degraded as he made his escape from the Manifold Alpha facility or if he could have procured Todd Maddox’s actual findings. Or, he thought in disgust, if he had been given access to the equivalent of five NSA Cray Triton supercomputers capable of handling three hundred twenty billion instructions per second as Maddox had.
He cursed and shoved the papers from the lab station. The area around him contained some of the most sophisticated genetic research equipment in the world: automated karyotyping and fluorescence in-situ hybridization stations, low-temperature freezers, barocyclers, automated Vysis VP2000 slide processors, Axon Scanners and Thermotrons. Despite all of the fancy equipment though, he couldn’t find a way to retain the benefits of the serum without inducing the terrible side effects, namely turning into a human-reptile hybrid like his pet, Huangdi.
Creating Huangdi hadn’t been easy, but with Salvatori’s help, they were able modify a porcine circovirus—a single-stranded DNA virus—for use as a carrier. The virus crossed the cell membrane of the host cells and infected them with the DNA alterations from the Hydra-derived serum. The infected cells divided, the virus spread and the host was transformed on the cellular level. Huangdi had been the product of several generations of trial and error, but Cho still couldn’t determine the specific genes necessary for regeneration only. Todd Maddox had cracked the code, but Cho hadn’t been one of the inner circle, so he wasn’t privy to the genius’s methods. The truth was that he had never been much of a scientist, but he refused to allow those shortcomings to rob him of his true destiny.
His creature, who had once been a Chinese soldier, was named for the first legendary emperor of China. At the end of his reign, the original Huangdi was said to have been immortalized into a dragon that resembled his emblem, and then ascended into heaven. Cho’s pet dragon had an undeniable usefulness from a military standpoint, but the serum could be used for so much more.
It could quite possibly grant immortality.