Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

There was a brief interruption as the plane was readied for departure, and then Jenna felt motion once more. Just a few hours ago, she had never been on an aircraft. Now, she was about to embark on her third trip into the sky, yet somehow the experience had already lost its novelty. She was much more interested in hearing what Soter had to say.

A few minutes later, when they were cruising through the sky, Soter resumed speaking. “Cloning is a rather generic and dated term for duplicating cells from a sample of genetic material. Scientists have been cloning cells, tissue, even entire animals, for decades. A clone is nothing but a carbon copy, and most clones are imperfect copies at best.”

“Cort showed me pictures of people, men and women, who looked almost identical to me. And her.” She pointed at Mercy. “Was I cloned from you, Mercy? Is that how this works?”

“Jenna, you aren’t a clone,” Sotor insisted. He drew in an appreciative breath. “You are so much more.”

“I don’t understand.” That was not entirely true. Smarter, stronger…dangerous. “If I’m not a duplicate, what am I? A different version? Like Human 2.0?”

A faint smile touched Soter’s lips. “I couldn’t have put it better.”

Jenna stared at Soter, then at Mercy. She knew that Mercy was in her late thirties—thirty-six if she had been telling the truth, though that seemed pretty doubtful now. She would have been born in the late 1970s, back when cloning was definitely more the stuff of science fiction. She turned back to Soter. “I think I’ve got this figured out. You took some of Mercy’s DNA, spliced in the Mutant X gene, and started growing super-soldier test-tube babies for the Soviet Union.”

Soter’s smile broadened and then he started to laugh. “Those are some remarkable conclusions, my dear. Unfortunately, they are largely incorrect conclusions.”

Jenna felt her face reddening. She was rarely wrong about anything, and to have this man laughing at her…teasing her with the promise of information, like the candy in a pi?ata at a child’s birthday party, and then laughing when, blind and disoriented, she struck only air…

“Then fucking help me fill in the gaps,” she said in a tight cold voice.

The man’s smile faded some. “To begin with, I have never worked for the Russian government.”

Jenna wasn’t sure she believed him, but she had only Cort’s statements as evidence against him. Noah hadn’t written exactly where the facility was located. Cuba made sense, though it wasn’t the only island in Hurricane Alley. “Then who do you work for?”

Soter’s smile softened into a more thoughtful expression. “What a marvelous question. My research is funded by the US government, but the work I do is for the benefit of all humankind.”

Jenna considered this boast in the light of what Cort had told her. “From what I’ve heard, your genetically modified clones are about to start World War III. Is that part of the plan to benefit humankind?”

Soter winced. She had struck a nerve. When he spoke again however, he did not answer her directly. “I fear I may have given you the wrong impression of me. You see, I don’t actually know anything about genetic modifications. I’m not that kind of scientist.”

“Then what kind of scientist are you?”

“I dabble in this and that, but my formal training is in the field of mathematics.”

Mathematics? That didn’t make any sense. Despite some serious disagreements, Cort and Soter were in agreement on one point: Jenna and the others were the result of a genetic experiment, and Soter had already claimed to be the genius behind it all. “Why is a mathematician involved in a cloning experiment?”

“That, my dear, is the long story that I will tell you now.”





42



August 20, 1977

2:48 p.m. (local time)



It took him a moment to realize that he wasn’t alone. He dropped his burden, a thick sheaf of accordion-folded computer paper, on his desktop and glanced over his shoulder at the man seated in the chair by the door.

The glance told him what the man was not.

Not a member of the mathematics department or even, to the best of his knowledge, a faculty member.

Not a student—he was too old and too well dressed.

Not a visiting professor—too young and too well dressed. The man’s clothes and bearing marked him as an outsider, not merely a stranger in the physical sense, but someone completely unfamiliar with the environment and culture in which he now found himself, unaware of just how out of place he was.

A lawyer.

The man stood and extended a hand. “Are you Dr. Helio Soter?”

Soter was a little surprised to hear the correct pronunciation of his name. Most people meeting him for the first time mangled it—Heel-ee-oh Saw-ter being the most common. Sometimes he would patiently explain: “The ‘h’ is silent and the ‘e’ sounds like a long ‘a’. Ay-lee-oh. And Soter rhymes with ‘motor’ not ‘water.’”

He wondered if it was a bad sign that this stranger, who looked an awful lot like a lawyer, already knew how to say his name correctly, but the man had offered his hand. Soter took it. “I am. What’s this about?”