The Clone who Didn't Know (The Genehunter) Read Online Free PDF Page A

something down here. You’re afraid of the dark, that’s your problem.’
    The guard swore to himself and strode back towards the subvault. Simms lay perfectly still. He watched the guards continuing to debate, the one who had walked over still glancing suspiciously around, the others laughing at him when he did so. Eventually, they seemed to decide they hadn’t set the security systems properly and returned upstairs. Once again, Simms was left to the darkness of his crypt.
    He instructed his plug-ins to begin suppressing his metabolism once again. Soon, icy torpor reclaimed him.

     
    Twelve hours later, Simms strode from the church into the glorious warmth of the Sienna day. There was little sign of his diversion from the night before, no police anywhere and just a black singe on the ground where his device had exploded. He’d kept the bang as small as he could. There was always a chance Ballard knew about Forty Days’ interest in Saint Sofia. The less attention he drew to himself, the better.
    He walked across the cobbled square towards the town. His clothes and ID were still those of Felippe Lombardi. His limp was entirely real. His body ached from his twenty-four hours in the tomb and the demands he’d made of his muscles. He needed food and drink and he needed to rest. Somewhere warm and comfortable.
    But first, he had one task to complete. He had no real way of knowing what Forty Days expected of him, but he could only assume it was this. He inspected the sample from the head. It looked degraded but it was the best he had. He encrypted it with what he assumed was the key provided for the purpose and sent it out into the ether, to the address he also assumed was provided for the purpose.
    The MRI scan had found the two numbers etched onto one of his ribs, right beneath where the word Chosen had been cut into his flesh. Tiny digits drawn with some fine, diamond-toothed drill: a twenty-one digit number that looked like a jump address and a sixty-four digit one that might be an encryption key. The whole procedure must have taken Jones hours: he would have had to cut through skin and intercostal muscles to get to the bone, then put everything back together afterwards. Had he done all that, there in Simms’ stackroom? The guy was insane, no doubt about it.
    Simms was past caring about any of it. He was done with Forty Days now. They were a disappointment, in truth. For all their weirdness and apocalyptic talk they’d ended up being one fairly straightforward piece of DNA collection. He’d imagined this job being one the young punks like those in the Double Helix talked about for years. Something big . But beneath all the nonsense about Soldiers of Megiddo , there seemed to be nothing more to Boneyard. Gideon Jones hadn’t been back in touch. There were no stealth plug-ins in his brain. It was all boring.
    Maybe they’d pay him for what he’d done and maybe they wouldn’t. That was the way it went. They hadn’t even formally employed him, just given him vague clues and left him to join the dots. The hell with them. Simms was at least left with the knowledge he’d done the job, got the DNA. His strike rate remained a perfect 100%, unless you counted the Zombies of Death gig. An anti-climax but there it was.
    He just had to hope neither the GMA nor clONE knew about his night’s work.
    He sat down at a street café in the full heat of the sun and ordered strong, sweet coffee and several sugary, high-fat cakes to bring up his blood-sugar levels. While he sat, basking in the glorious heat, he let his mind go blank.

     
    ‘Mrs. Douglas? Can I speak to you?’ Three days later, Simms stood shouting through the door of the ramshackle house on the outskirts of London. His attempts to electronically hail the woman inside had gone nowhere. But of course, old people sometimes didn’t have even the basic plug-ins. How did they survive? But she was definitely in there. He could hear her pacing about, like she was