Seven Wonders Book 3 (7 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

D
AD

“J
ACK?
”

Cass's voice piped up through the waning dream. “Tell me you're evila.”

I peeled my face from the back of the seat. “Tell me you're not speaking Backwardish in heaven.”

We were tilted sideways. Through the window I could see an airstrip about a hundred yards ahead of us, with a jet marked MGL parked at a hangar. Beyond it, a scrubby plain stretched out for miles to distant mountains. Cass was still belted into his seat, but it had ripped out of the floor and slid against the wall. “Heaven is really uncomfortable,” he said.

I felt as if I'd been punched in the chest. I loosened my seat belt to relieve the pain. Torquin was struggling to get out of his seat. I spun around to see Aly slumped forward, her hair limp over her forehead.

“Aly!” I staggered toward her, hanging on to the plane's wall for support.

Dr. Bradley beat me to her. She was feeling Aly's pulse and looking at her face with a flashlight.

Aly flinched and turned away. “Owww . . . turn that thing off. I have a headache.”

I exhaled with relief, crumpling to the floor of the plane. “You have quite a lump,” Dr. Bradley said. “We'll have to examine you more closely.”

“Jack . . .” she murmured. “How is Jack?”

“Fine,” Cass said. “I am, too. And Torquin. In case you were wondering.”

I felt my face turning red. “How's the professor?”

“Shaken up but okay,” Dr. Bradley said. “Ironically, lying down in that protected area, he was the least vulnerable of us all.”

“Landing gear gone,” Torquin announced, digging a rope ladder from under his seat. “Use this.”

He unlatched the door and it swung open sharply. As he fastened the end of the ladder and dropped the rest of it out the door, my eyes were fixed on an old Toyota speeding toward us across the rocky soil. As it skidded to a stop, the driver-side door flew open.

I knew it was my dad without even seeing his face. I could tell by the angle of his feet, pointing outward as if they'd been screwed on slightly wrong. “Jack!” he shouted, running hard toward the tilted plane. “Jack, where are you?”

The ladder was only about eight feet. But I stood frozen in the doorway. Dad was smiling so hard I thought his face would crack. His hair was less brown than gray now, his face lined a bit more than I remembered. Which seemed impossible, because I'd seen him only a few weeks ago.

He stood at the bottom of the ladder, holding out his arms, and even though I'm way too heavy I jumped. He caught me and held tight, turning around and around, swinging me like I was a little kid. He was crying, repeating “Oh thank god” over and over, and even though I was crying, too, I kept silent because I just wanted to hear his voice.

“I'm okay, Dad,” I said as he set me down and we began walking away from the jet. “Really. What is this place? Why are you in Mongolia?”

“Where have you been?” he said. “I want to know everything!”

As Cass and Aly scrambled down the ladder, a medical van with the logo MGL skidded to a stop.

“Look, Dad,” I said, “there's someone on the plane who needs to go directly to a hospital. He's pretty old and in bad shape.”

“Okay . . . right . . . roger that.” As Dad's eyes moved toward the plane, his whole face seemed to stiffen. I glanced back to see Dr. Bradley and Torquin carefully lowering the professor out of the plane. Emergency workers were already racing toward them with a stretcher.

“That's just Torquin,” I explained. “He's a little strange looking, but he grows on you. These are Cass Williams and Aly Black.”

But Dad wasn't paying attention. “Radamanthus Bhegad . . .” he murmured. “What is that man doing here?”

“You've heard of him?” I said. “He was a famous professor at Princeton or something.”

“Yale,” Cass called out.

Bhegad moaned painfully as the team of white-coated Mongolian workers set him on the stretcher. Dad stood over them, his hands on his hips. “Just a second,” he said. “I have a few questions before anyone moves this man.”

Professor Bhegad's eyes were hollow and scared. “M-Martin . . .” he sputtered.

How did Professor Bhegad know my dad's name?

“I'm Dr. Theresa Bradley,” Dr. Bradley said. “We have to take the professor to a medical facility immediately or he may die.”

“I am a fair and kind man,” Dad said, his face turning redder. “I believe in charity and forgiveness and liberty, and I don't believe in hate. But this is the one man I can safely say the world would be a better place without. This man is . . . is a monster!”

“Dad!” I'd never seen him like this. I glanced helplessly at Dr. Bradley, who was speechless. “Okay, Dad, I know what you're thinking: This guy kidnapped my son. But as crazy as it sounds, he wants to save our lives. My friends and I—we have a condition. It's going to kill us—”

“By the age of fourteen,” Dad said. “Like Randall Cromarty. Like all those kids your mother and I researched.”

Cromarty. I remembered one of the last things he'd said to me over the phone on the day I was taken:
Did you see the article I sent you about that poor kid, Cromarty? Died in the bowling alley near Chicago
. . . He was always talking about these not-so-random tragedies, kids who were dying for no apparent reason.

“Researched?” I said. “You knew about G7W all along . . . and you didn't tell me?”

“It would have scared you,” Dad said. “You were a kid. Instead, your mom and I tried to do something. We dedicated our lives to finding a cure. That's why I'm here. That's why I have been financing McKinley Genetics Labs all these years.”

“You never told me—all those plans and
you never told me
!” I said. “Dad, please. Let them take care of Professor Bhegad. You have to talk to him. We've been at a secret institute devoted to the study of G7W. He did find the cure!”

Dad barked a sad, bitter laugh. “He told your mother that lie, too. Which was why she ended up in the bottom of a crevasse in Antarctica.”

“He knew Mom?” I said.

Professor Bhegad's eyes flared with urgency, but he was too weak to speak.

“He killed her, Jack,” Dad said. “The man is a murderer.”

“No!” I said. “It's not true! She—”

“She went to meet him at a secret lab in McMurdo Sound and never came back.” Dad barreled on. His entire body shook as he stood over Professor Bhegad, blocking the EMTs' path and ignoring their pleas in Mongolian. “Then, years later, he came for you. First my wife, then my son. When I got home from Singapore, you were gone. They said there was a man at the hospital, posing as a priest. An obese man with a red beard.” He turned, peering at Torquin.

“Not obese,” Torquin muttered. “Large bones.”

“Dad, please, listen to me!” I tried to pull Dad away from Professor Bhegad, but he held on to my arm. “She's not dead.”

Dad's eyes were filling with tears. “You always believed that, Jack. I never had the heart to contradict a little boy's optimism. But she fell hundreds of feet—”

“Into a crevasse,” I said. “No one found the body, remember? Because there was no body. Because the whole story is wrong. It was faked, Dad. I don't know how or why. But I've seen her. We've spoken. Trust me on this. She's alive.”

Dad's body went slack. He looked at me through hollow, uncomprehending eyes. “That's impossible.”

“Anne . . .” Professor Bhegad murmured, struggling to get the words out, “was . . . my trusted associate. Lovely, smart . . . but impatient for the cure. Afraid for Jack's life. Our research was too slow for her . . .” He took a deep breath. “She thought . . . the Karai and Massa should join forces, to go faster. I told her . . . impossible to heal a rift centuries old. But she was young . . . persistent. She confided to me that she had contacted the Massa. This was a breach. I had to bring it up . . . to my superior.”

“There's someone higher than you at the KI?” Aly asked.

The professor nodded. “The Omphalos. A code name. I do not even know if it is a man or a woman. We speak through a go-between. I relayed everything Anne had told me. The response was swift . . . angry. Speaking to a Massa agent . . . the highest-level breach of security. Punishable by death. I became afraid for your mother's life. I blamed myself for revealing too much. And then . . . the news came . . . her accident in Antarctica. I don't know what she was seeking there. The KI has no base in McMurdo Sound. Her death devastated us all. I never suspected she was staging a fake disappearance. That she was—defecting to . . .”

The professor began to cough, his face turning bright red. As he fell back onto the stretcher, his eyes rolled up into his head. “Please,” Dr. Bradley said. “He is very weak.”

Nodding numbly, Dad stepped aside. The medics lifted Bhegad and carried him away.

As they loaded him onto the van along with Dr. Bradley, Dad's face was the color of snow.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

G
ENGHIS AND
R
ADAMANTHUS

“S
O...YOUR MOTHER
looked okay?” Dad said. “Healthy?”

We were all packed into his small Toyota, bouncing up a rutted road—Torquin and Dad in the front; Aly, Cass, and me in the back. The EMT van was disappearing around a long, sleek, glass-and-steel building that looked all wrong in the rugged landscape. Out the other direction, a railroad train snaked across the flat Mongolian plain, and a flock of sheep moved away like softly blowing snowdrifts. My body still ached from the crash landing, but I barely noticed that. Half of me was thrilled to see Dad. The other half was angry at what he'd been keeping from me.

“Healthy, but working for the enemy,” I said. “Why didn't you ever tell me you knew about the KI, Dad? Why were you keeping secrets?”

Aly put her hand on top of mine. That was the only way I knew it was shaking.

“You were a little kid, Jack,” Dad replied. “We didn't want to alarm you.”

“I'm not a little kid now,” I said.

Dad pulled into a space in the glass building's parking lot and stopped the car. “You're right. I owe you an explanation. All of you.” He rubbed his forehead. “You see, years ago, your mom had begun noticing strange deaths of young people—all fourteen, all amazing prodigies. They all had a similar mark on the backs of their heads, white hair in the shape of a Greek letter lambda. I thought it was just an odd news piece, but Mom believed it was something more. She had two cousins, both prodigies—one a musician, the other a mathematical genius. Both dead at fourteen. Both with a lambda pattern in their hair. And so she began obsessively looking for this pattern on you. And she found it.”

“How old was Jack?” Aly asked.

“Five, six, maybe.” Dad stroked his chin as he thought back. “The hair wasn't white yet, but it was a different texture. Nothing anyone would notice unless they were looking for it. Of course, we panicked. Mom tracked down thousands of obscure hints and finally learned about Bhegad's work, his theory of the Selects and their genetic abnormality. She contacted him and they began corresponding. He was always very secretive—I didn't trust him, but Mom was convinced he was onto something. He took more and more of her time and then one day she announced she had to go to Antarctica—to meet him, she said. I didn't want her to go, but I was so busy setting up biotech research companies, raising money, hiring geneticists, investigating theories. One day I got the call. Your mom was . . .”

He turned away. I felt a lump in my throat. I still remembered the day, the way it smothered everything in my life.

Aly pressed my hand harder, closing her fingers around mine.

“I never heard from Bhegad again,” Dad went on, his voice barely audible. “I was devastated. Furious. I thought about tracking him. But that wouldn't have brought her back. So instead I doubled down—I became obsessed with finding a way to save you.”

“Which is why you were out of town so much,” I said. “You were setting up this place. In secret. But why here?”

“This country is paradise for geneticists,” Dad said. “Mongolians share more common genes than any other human beings on the planet. Statistically, almost all descend from one ancestor dating to about 1200. We believe this to be Genghis Khan, one of the greatest conquerors in history. His achievements were superhuman. If anyone in history was a Select, he would be it. And he lived way past the age of fourteen. Which means there must be others like him, still alive.”

“So you came here on a guess?” Cass said.

“I came here after a lock of the Genghis's hair was discovered,” Dad said, stepping out of the car, “and genetic analysis suggested some abnormalities in the G7W area. An incredible finding! The problem was, the DNA was degraded. When I visited, I discovered a country with great natural resources, isolated from the rest of the world. It appealed to me as a location for a secret project. It wasn't easy, but we were able to collect more hair and bone samples. We have just completed a thorough mapping of the great khan's genetic code and are waiting for the findings. If we find the mechanism that kept Genghis Khan alive, maybe we have the cure for you.”

As we all piled out, Aly said, “I'd like to see the genome.”

“It's bewildering to a layperson,” Dad said, walking toward the building. “A human genome has billions of lines of code. I'll show you when we get inside. But I have a few questions myself.” He pulled a cell phone from his pocket. “What are your phone numbers? While we're waiting to hear about Bhegad, I'll call your parents.”

“No!” Cass and Aly shouted at the same time.

“They can't know,” I said. “If Aly's parents find out about the Karai Institute, they'll come after her.”

“Jack, I'm a parent, and you mean everything to me,” he replied. “I can't not call these other parents, knowing what they're going through.”

“But she'll miss her treatments,” I said, “and—”

“Treatments?” Dad stopped and turned toward us. “What exactly was Bhegad doing to you?”

Before I could answer, Dad's phone beeped. “McKinley,” he said. “He what? Be right there.”

He shoved the phone back in his pocket. “There's been a complication,” he said. “Professor Bhegad has had a heart attack.”

 

I'd seen Torquin fuss, fight, joke, and operate machinery, but I'd never seen him fret.

He had taken Cass's worry beads and was flipping them, one by one, down their string. I was feeling pretty worried myself. Bhegad was in the operating room and we were helpless in a small office down a glass-walled corridor. I sipped from a cup of warm liquid Dad called milk tea, but I could barely taste anything. My head ached, my stomach burned, and my legs felt weak. Dad had told me the tea would make me feel better, but it wasn't true.

“Bhegad strong . . .” Torquin was muttering to no one in particular. “Very strong . . .”

Cass and Aly were hunched over a desktop monitor, where Dad was showing a section of Genghis Khan's genome. The letters and numbers looked blurry to me and I had to blink a few times. “All these tiny combinations of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs?” Dad said. “They're amino acids—adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine. The building blocks of life.” He pointed to a spot on the screen. “Here's where the G7W gene resides. If our scientists are correct—”

“They're not,” Aly said.

“Beg pardon?” Dad said.

“Your scientists are wrong.” Aly was scrolling down the screen. “It is the general area of the G7W group, but you're off a few million places on the chain. It's . . . here. And right off the bat, I'm seeing a guanine where a cytosine is supposed to be, and a whole lot of discrepancies in this area at the top of the screen. I could go on. Khan may have been king of conquerors, but sorry, he has nothing to do with G7W.”

Dad's jaw dropped open. “But—how would you—?”

“Because Aly is a Select,” I said. “She can hack into any computer system, analyze data, break any firewall. Marco's an amazing athlete—”

“I nac kaeps drawkcab,” Cass piped up. “Osla I have a photographic memory. I can tell you how to get anywhere from anywhere else. Try me.”

“What on earth—?” Dad sputtered.

“Seriously,” Cass said. “Anywhere.”

“Okay . . .” Dad thought a moment. “New York City. Fifty-Third and Fifth. To, um, parking lot three at Jones Beach. I used to work there as a lifeguard.”

Cass thought a moment. “Uptown on Fifth. Right on Fifty-Ninth to the Queensboro Bridge. Queens Boulevard to either the Grand Central or the Long Island Expressway to the Meadowbrook Parkway to the end, where you veer left onto Ocean Parkway and find the parking lot. You may have to go around a rotary. But I think in New York they call it a traffic circle . . .”

Dad nearly dropped his milk tea. “That's right. That's absolutely right.” He glanced at the screen and immediately took out his cell phone. “I need to have my team check your work, Aly. If you're correct . . .” His face suddenly looked years older.

As he called the genetics team and told them what Aly had said, I sat in a chair. My head throbbed. “Jack?” Aly said. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. “Guess the crash kinda shook me up.”

“You kinda might have a concussion,” Cass said.

“After they're done working on Professor Bhegad, I'll mention something to Dr. Bradley,” I said.

“What? Are you sure?” Dad blurted out, his voice suddenly loud and animated. He hung up the phone and set it down on the table. “The head surgeon just cut into my other call with an update on Bhegad. He pulled through.”

“Yyyahhhh!” Torquin bellowed, leaping up from his chair.

I felt a jolt of relief. Cass shot me a smile and said, “Emosewa!”

As Aly gave me a tight hug, Dad headed for the doorway. “And he wants to see you four. Immediately. Follow me to the recovery room.”

We raced out of the room, down the hallway, and through a set of doors. Professor Bhegad was lying on a slanted bed, dressed in a white hospital gown that looked like a tent on his skinny frame. His face was papery white, his hands spotted and even more wrinkly than usual. “Hello . . .” he said, his voice hoarse and whispery, barely audible above the beeping and whirring of the machines.

Aly took his hand. “You look great, Professor!”

He managed a pained half smile as his head rolled to the side and his eyes fluttered shut. “He's still fragile,” Dr. Bradley said. “Asleep more than awake. We found a lot of internal trauma. Bleeding. We'll monitor him and do what we can. But there's only so much we can do.” She sighed. “He's an old man.”

“Not exactly cause for great yoj,” Cass said.

Dr. Bradley lowered her voice, casting a quick eye toward Dad. “The professor told me he's concerned you move as swiftly as possible in your quest.”

That seemed to rouse Bhegad. “Go . . . g . . . go . . .” he said, crooking a gnarled finger to us, gesturing us to come closer. We sank to our knees in order to hear his soft voice. “Neck . . . lock . . .” the professor rasped.

“Next Loculus?” I said. “Is that what you want, Professor?”

“Yes . . .” he said, staring at me with an expression of urgency. “H . . . h . . . he . . .”

“Jack?” Aly said. “
H
e meaning Jack? What about him?”

“L . . . l . . .” Bhegad swallowed and tried again.

I leaned closer. “What are you trying to tell us? Go slowly.”

“Ling,” he finally said.

“Ling?” Cass said. “Is there someone here named Ling? Dr. Ling?”

Bhegad's eyes fluttered and his body gave a sudden jerk. The room resounded with piercing beeps. “What's happening?” Aly exclaimed.

“Heart arrhythmia,” Dr. Bradley said. “Get the pads, stat!”

We backed away fast. Medical workers swarmed into the room. Dr. Bradley lifted a pair of pads like small catcher's mitts and applied them to the sides of Professor Bhegad's chest.

The old man's body lurched upward like he'd been poked with a dagger.