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  GENE

  Also by Stel Pavlou

  Novels

  DECIPHER

  Short Stories

  The Strange Case of Jared Spoon Who Went to Pieces for Love

  The Big Uneasy

  Short Stories for Doctor Who

  Checkpoint

  Omegamorphosis

  You had me at verify Username and Password

  Movies

  The 51st State / Formula 51

  Rendezvous with Rama (in development)

  GENE

  STEL PAVLOU

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2005

  First published in the United States of America by Vibrant, 2011

  Copyright © Stel Pavlou, 2005

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Stel Pavlou to be identified as author of this work has been

  asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  eBook ISBN pending

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual people living or dead,

  events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Cyclades is a chain of Greek islands sat on the wine dark Aegean Sea and is in effect the eye of a great storm that has been raging for over three thousand years. If you trace the coast of the Mediterranean that runs concentric to the Cyclades you find Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt and Italy. You find Crete and you find Troy. You find that Western history has been shaped by what has happened around the Cycladic circle, almost as though history were the hands on the Cycladic clock; the Trojan War at midnight, the Crusades at 3 a.m. and all the way through until dawn. Even now what happens around the Cyclades dictates the focus of the world. The world’s youngest power, America, is drawn to this region it calls the Middle East. Ancient Babylon remains the beast. It is as if we have come full circle - yet the enemies have remained steadfastly the same. Thus is the nature of a clock. The nature of man. The nature of Cyclades, with whom we journey.

  Gene is an historical fantasy. Where possible the history and the figures presented within it are real, but on occasion elements have been purposely altered to fit the needs of the story. My characters interact with them, or at times are them, though of course my tale is simply a new weave made from their tapestry.

  New York City, too, has been shaped for my purposes. Many aspects are real, but sometimes I have altered them, the size of buildings, for example, or a little geography. I hope the people of NYC can forgive me; I do this with genuine respect and affection. New York Police Department procedures have also been altered intentionally where required, but only a real cop should notice and it is out of respect to the NYPD and the work that they do that I mention this.

  Thanks go to William Belmont, Director of Operations at Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations, W. Mark Dale, Director of the NYPD Crime Laboratory, NYPD Detective Peter Dzik (retired), NYPD Detective John Cornicello (retired), Steven Pinker, who did not have to answer my questions on his excellent book The Blank Slate, Jim B. Tucker, MD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatric Medicine, University of Virginia, Gary A. Wasdin at the New York City Public Library, Jon Thorpe, MSc, Dr Andrew Holder, James Sprules, Louis and Christina Pavlou, Alex Franke, MA and Carol Anderson. Where artistic concerns necessitated I ignored them all completely and add the caveat that any mistakes that I have made as a result are mine alone.

  A very big and special thank you for their enormous help, advice and support goes to Maureen Pavlou and Rowland Wells. Thank you also to my editors John Jarrold and Ben Ball (may his nerves recover) and my agent Sophie Hicks.

  for Dad

  PAUL PAVLOU

  1928-1999

  DECLARE THE PAST, DIAGNOSE THE PRESENT,

  FORETELL THE FUTURE

  HIPPOCRATES

  CYCLADES IN THE

  UNDERWORLD

  I remember the day I died.

  The details are a fog now. A haze distinct enough only for the nightmare. I remember the scything sounds of metal on metal, the shrill creation of bloody carnage upon a canvas. The bloodlust. The rivulets of sweat running down the channels of my arms. Dirt and animal fat smeared in a marble glaze. The smell of burning flesh. Like strips of rancid swine all crackling and spitting on a split wood fire. Juices oozing. Blood flowing like wine. The human animal makes a fine sacrifice.

  They said the horse had worked. I do not know why I remember that. The horse had worked. But that was the way it was. I remember I killed, with my own hands. One I ran through as quickly as one might sneeze and on instinct guard the nose. I remember I took one man’s face in my hands as though to caress him and instead gouged out his eyes with my thumbs, until they were sunk deep up to the knuckle. I do not remember if he screamed. I suppose he must have. It’s all a blur now. All part of that carnival of terror that ended with my belly sliced clean, and my bowels spilling out like the flowering ribbons of a child’s toy.

  I remember I was at the top of another blow when the dull thump of a side swipe caught me unguarded, and away flew my hand. End over end. Tumbling in the dust, my bloody fingers still grasping my sword.

  What happened next I do not know. The details are a fog now. A haze distinct enough only for the nightmares. Perhaps it is for the best. The horror I witnessed I do not wish to remember, though I know that I met evil that day and was not man enough to stop it.

  I returned in time for the darkness, pulled back by much tugging at my clothing. Perhaps they assumed I was carrion. My moaning soon put paid to that. I was dragged through the streets, and loaded on to something, I know not what.

  Later there was dripping. An occasional splattering of filthy water caught up in snatches by the feeble flame of cavern fires. I lay, slipping in and out of my stupor for I know not how long. Only she would know. That wild-haired bitch with her hungry eyes and need to see me choke. Wafting the smoke of her strange concoctions, holding me fast so that I could not look away, but was forced to consume her vile magicks.

  She perused my innards as though I were a prophecy. As though the meats of my self could tell the future. I do not know what she saw, for there was no future here. I was beyond restoration. But she smeared me in honey nonetheless and patched me with cloth. She fed me berries and brews and the strips of bark and forced every morsel down my withered throat. She recited her incantations and as the flames began to dance, as the cavern began to swim, she hitched up her garments and exposed the thick black hair of her moistened furrow. She squatted down on me, and, much to my surprise, had more control over my parts than I. She writhed and cursed and spat at me to deliver to her my seed. She struck at me with balled fists. And all the while the flames and smoke of the fires rose up around her, a crescendo to her wild hair and her hungry eyes. Until at last I released into her what she sought.

  And when she was satisfied she snuffed out the fires and left me to squalor and starvation. And as I lay there, my nostrils filled with the rotting, bilious stench of my dying carcass, she led him in and claimed she had saved me for him. He took up his blade and drove it into my temple.

  And as I died I looked deep into those hungry eyes and knew.

  I remember the day I died. It was the day I bore witness to my own conception.

  My name is Cyclades. And this is my story.

  THE SEVEN TRIALS

  OF

  CYCLADES

  BOOK ONE

  KNOW THYSELF

  PLATO

  NEW YORK CITY r />
  He stabbed the first visitor at precisely 10.23. They determined this later when they pulled the time code from the security tape.

  It happened like this: he wandered into the Great Hall wearing a plain grey sweatshirt, harmless looking, a regular guy. He passed through the metal detector without tripping the alarm. He loitered under the imposing glass domes of the entrance hall for ten minutes. Didn’t take a map from the help desk. Didn’t ask for directions.

  He watched the staff change the flowers, a continuing donation from Lila Acheson Wallace, for almost three minutes, made a move towards the staircase up to the next floor, changed his mind, turned left away from the stairs, and walking the thirty or so feet towards the Greek sculpture exhibit, never stopping to pay the voluntary entrance fee at either of the two booths, entered the Belfer Court looking – lost. Though not like a tourist. This was something else.

  This was when he started to weep.

  Not a sudden outburst. If it had been, perhaps one of the blue-blazered attendants might have come to assist him, realizing something was wrong. Instead he made his way over to the Cubiculum from Boscoreale – frescoed walls and a mosaic floor assembled as a room from a Roman villa – where Mrs Margaret Holland (a history teacher from Scarsdale High School who was at the museum as part of a group) remarked, he looked like that boy at her last school who’d smoked all that crack in the student library.

  She knew enough to get out of his way.

  At the Grand Sepulchral Vase over on the right he traced his finger over the pictures of the prone black corpses depicted on its terracotta surface. He touched a number of other objects until he reached the middle of the court.

  Surrounded on all sides by marble statues of gods and kings, the young man’s attention was drawn to the figure in the centre – Volneratus Deficiens, the Wounded Warrior, a depiction of Protesilaos, destined to become the first Greek to die at the battle of Troy, but shown here raising his spear arm, preparing to kill.

  Lauren Bergen, a 21-year-old Art History major from NYU, explained that she had been making sketches of the Wounded Warrior when the man suddenly appeared by her side and spoke to the statue. Puzzled, she asked him if he was familiar with the work. He replied that he was not familiar with the work but familiar with the man.

  At this point, Lauren Bergen decided to leave the Belfer Court.

  It was as she did so, and as the man tried to follow her, that he appeared to notice the special exhibitions gallery through the doorway under the sign: The Greek Achievement. Inside, artefacts from the Trojan War to the first Olympic Games had been placed on display in celebration of this summer’s games. Hoplons, spears, pots, bowls, coins. But it was the swords that interested him the most.

  The swords and the skulls.

  Lauren Bergen said that she wished she had never struck up conversation with the man. Perhaps then he wouldn’t have done what he did next.

  At 10.23, the young man picked a three-thousand year old bronze short sword off the museum wall and in the same movement slashed the arm of Richard Scott, the only other visitor in the room. In seconds he had hacked down the room’s attendant, and the attendant from the next room who attempted to intervene, both blows of practised ease. The sword seemed still solid and sharp. There was a lot of blood.

  Swinging the bronze sword above his head, he brought the ancient weapon crashing down on display case number 43. Inside were a helmet and broken skull.

  His hand studded with glass fragments and running rivers of red, he reached inside the case and plucked out the objects.

  And then, just as suddenly as his fury had erupted, he began to hyperventilate. The security tape later showed the confusion written across his face as he studied the bleached white human bone and then collapsed in a heap.

  For several minutes he remained on the floor, ranting in a language nobody could understand.

  He pressed the skull to his chest.

  And he wept.

  NORTH

  The mid-August morning was hot and oppressive, an asphyxiating New York broiler that left the air thick and charged, drenched with the naked fumes of the gasoline and diesel engines crawling down Fifth Avenue like sweat.

  Parked behind three oily Scarsdale school buses idling at the sidewalk, North chewed over Bruder’s report. He marked up the doer’s location on a tattered blue and white museum ground plan before peeling it off the hood of his dark blue motor-pool Impala.

  ‘When does ESU get here?’ he asked.

  The Emergency Service Unit was the NYPD’s tactical branch. Negotiators and SWAT. As a catching detective from the Fourth Precinct, North didn’t work hostage – they must be short-handed.

  Patrolman Don Bruder’s swollen features, about three minutes short of heat stroke, bulged with agitation as the chaos on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art continued to unfold relentlessly. Patrolmen were marshalling the public out the exits. Morbid crowds of tourists pooled around the hot-dog vendors and picture sellers. And though he could hear more sirens trying to squeeze out of the 86th Street Transverse just a block away, so far only two squad cars had made it here ahead of North.

  It was now 10.41.

  ‘It’s your call,’ Bruder replied.

  ‘You’re the first officer on the scene. Did you put a call in for ESU or not?’ North asked sharply, throwing open the trunk.

  ‘Central didn’t tell you?’

  ‘Tell me what?’ North fished his heavy body armour out and secured the fastenings over his sweat-soaked T-shirt.

  ‘Ah, Jesus,’ Bruder trembled. ‘ESU’s your call.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘ ’Cos the mope’s asking for you by name.’

  North slammed the trunk shut. Cold sweat beaded down his clammy forehead. He could feel the black city grime thick on the back of his neck as he shook his head.

  ‘Asking for me?’

  ‘Detective James North. That’s what he keeps saying. Think maybe you pissed someone off?’

  North marvelled at the understatement. ‘I’m a cop,’ he said. ‘Listen, call up Central Park, tell them to get their asses in gear and send more guys to quarantine this area,’ he ordered. ‘You locked down inside?’

  Bruder thumbed at the crowds still fighting each other to exit the building. ‘You kidding me? There’s over three thousand people in there, and a little kid trapped with this nut. They said it could take up to half an hour just to empty out.’

  North watched as a couple of Met staffers were helped out by paramedics to the only FDNY EMS ambulance to breach the midtown gridlock. One held a blood-soaked cloth to his face. Another had a T-shirt wrapped around his hand.

  If he’s touched that kid...

  North reached to check his piece but the cloud crossing Don Bruder’s face spoke for him. ‘I wouldn’t want to be you right now.’

  ‘Trust me, we all want to be someone else.’

  ‘Central gave the order: no gunfire inside the museum.’

  North was stunned. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Someone called up the Mayor’s office. Said they’d made a three-thousand year old donation to the exhibit. Next thing I know, dispatcher’s coming back with the order it’s worth more than whoever goes in there.’

  North didn’t answer. He checked the action then holstered his Glock 21 .45. Eight rounds. Hollow point. All cops knew a full metal jacket pierced the target and went in and out. But a hollow point opened up inside like a lead flower. Its damage was vicious; its stopping power absolute. And there was no risk it would emerge from its target to hit anyone unfortunate enough to be standing right behind. The gun was going in.

  ‘I didn’t see you do that.’