Free The Eden Prophecy by Graham Brown

jamming a radar by putting out masses of electromagnetic energy, but those things left a specific signature. If they were present Danielle would find them easily.
    The readout flatlined. No vibrations, no dampening equipment, no TV left playing to itself. The house was quiet.
    She flicked a switch on the scanner, changing it to infrared mode.
    Slowly panning back and forth along the walls, she picked up no heat sources.
    “No one home,” she said.
    “Good,” Hawker said. “Let’s go.”
    She scanned the street around them. The road was fairly vacant. On a Wednesday at 2 P.M. , it seemed most residents were working.
    Hawker opened the door.
    “Where are you going?” she said.
    “Inside.”
    “Let me go,” she said.
    He stared at her.
    “What do you know about genetics?” she asked.
    “Apparently we’re all related to viruses.”
    “Very funny,” she said “What about encryption, hacking computers, and bypassing alarms? What about breaking and entering without actually breaking anything?”
    It took a moment, but Hawker smiled. “I do like to break things.”
    “Yes, you do,” she said. “Let me go in. I can do it quietly and you can watch my back.”
    He hesitated and then nodded. “Keep your line open. You go silent I’m coming in.”
    She nodded, opened the door, and stepped out.
    Striding casually across the street, Danielle secured the speaker of her headphone to her right ear. She climbed the steps and made her way to the front door. Holding out a small handheld device, she checked for any alarms. None present, she went to pick the lock. It took a moment, as it was not her most often used skill.
    She heard Hawker’s voice over the line. “Sure you don’t want me to come up and break the door down?”
    “I got it,” she whispered.
    The lock popped. She slipped inside.
    Her footsteps echoed on hardwood floors. The large open room in front of her was all but empty. A single overstuffed chair sat in one corner, draped in a dust cover beside a bookshelf devoid of titles.
    She went through this room to the kitchen and then a den or bedroom. Little to see, as if someone had recently moved out.
    Finally, she entered what might have been a living room. There she found a desk and chair, a large throw rug on thefloor, and stacks of high-tech equipment, including a bank of computers and a wall lined with incubators as well as industrial refrigerators whose clear doors were now covered with frost and condensation. To the left of all that was a Plexiglas-enclosed workstation. It looked to be hermetically sealed, complete with a set of powerful microscopes and the armholes with long rubber gloves attached for manipulating things inside it.
    The living room was a makeshift lab.
    She stepped over toward the incubators. The first two were warm but appeared to be empty. She could see no sample trays or glass slides inside, only what looked like irrigated soil and wet, muddy clay. A second incubator had a layer of water two inches deep on top of the soil but nothing growing inside. Not even mold.
    The refrigerators were next. Condensation on the Plexiglas made it impossible to see inside. She wiped the glass.
    Empty.
    Each one of them.
    A smaller incubator had something moving inside. She looked closer. Rats, some dead, others looking withered and aged, shaking as they tried to move around. The containment habitat was sealed and a thick length of tape covered the seal as if to remind someone not to break it.
    “What the hell is all this?” she whispered.
    She wondered if Ranga had cleaned the place out or if someone had beaten them to it. Most likely he would have given up the address while being tortured.
    She moved to the enclosed workstation and realized the main scope was a scanning electron microscope, an extremely expensive medical device.
    She turned it on and looked through. Nothing to see. But the device had an electronic readout and a small keypad. She pressed the power switch and then found a menu to