Free The Eden Prophecy by Graham Brown Page A

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    Genetic material in the midst of some examination. There was no way for her to tell what it was. She looked around. The computer was her best bet.
    She moved to the desk, sat down at the computer, and hit enter.
    An encryption screen came up. Not the standard operating software that could easily be breached but a heavy-duty, industrial-grade system. Whatever the computer held, it was well protected.
    She pulled a specialized USB drive out of her pocket. It had a program that could auto-launch through most encryption firewalls.
    She plugged it in; the green LED lit up and it went to work. If that didn’t work, there was the possibility of opening the computer and stealing the hard drive itself. She located the tower under the desk and turned it her way. It didn’t move easily. The normal bundle of wires connected to the back of the box was a bad enough tangle, but it seemed to have been augmented by something.
    A thin locking cable and a plain red wire held it in place. The cable could be breached easily, but the red wire was suspicious. It terminated in some kind of magnetic switch attached to the back of the computer.
    She followed the wire through a hastily drilled hole into one of the desk drawers. There it connected to a brick of what looked like C-4.
    Who needs an alarm, she thought, when you can just blow the whole place to hell.
    A second length of wire ran from the C-4. It led out behind the desk, under the rug, and across the room. Other wires ran to the incubators and refrigeration units.
    She followed one to a credenza against the far wall.
    Cautiously she opened the drawer. A stash of binders lay inside. She eased one out. The red wire ran through its binding, but there seemed to be enough slack.
    She opened the binder to find handwritten notes. If theywere Ranga’s notes—and they did look like a sample of his handwriting that she’d seen—it seemed unlikely they’d be left here unless they were no longer needed. Perhaps whatever samples he had created were enough.
    She studied the writing. Tabular entries recording test results. She leafed through the pages, careful not to pull on the wire.
    Page after page of numbered experiments, all with failed results. She understood that too.
    Despite the incredible things that modern genetic science was capable of, somewhere around 99 percent of experiments were failures. At the big pharmaceutical labs around the world, incredibly gifted men and women often toiled for years with nothing to show for it. One study she recalled stated that a geneticist at a top biotech lab had a fifty-fifty chance of working his or her entire career without ever producing a usable drug.
    Part of it was the safety precautions and protocols that purposefully slowed the work to a crawl, but for the most part it was just an incredibly difficult task. Nature had spent five billion years coming up with life in its myriad forms. Five billion years of trial and error. Genetic engineers were desperately trying to take a shortcut in that process.
    Outside, half a block down on rue des Jardins-St.-Paul, Hawker sat in the rented Peugeot, watching for trouble. So far the quiet streets of this Paris neighborhood had remained just that, quiet.
    A few cars had rolled by. A white Isuzu delivery truck had come down the road and gone around the block and a few pedestrians had strolled by, but none of them had stopped or lingered near the building.
    The street was quiet, the neighborhood was quiet, and Danielle had also been quiet for several minutes.
    He grabbed the phone and clicked the push-to-talk button. “You finding anything?”
    It took a few seconds before the reply came.
    “Some kind of lab in here,” she said. “Computers, incubators, microscopes. Everything rigged to explosives.”
    “Wonderful,” he said, thinking maybe they should get the French police and the bomb squad involved.
    “Any trouble out there?”
    “The coast seems clear for now,