The paradise key, p.1
The Paradise Key, page 1
Also by Nick Thacker
Harvey Bennett Thrillers
The Enigma Strain
The Amazon Code
The Ice Chasm
The Jefferson Legacy
The Paradise Key
The Atlantean Artifact
The Book of Bones
The Cain Conspiracy
The Mendel Paradox
The Minoan Manifest
The Napoleon Job
The Embers of Siwa
The Epsilon Event
The Cerberus Protocol
The Russian Betrayal
The Eye of Odin
The Polaris Cycle
The Devil's Cut
Harvey Bennett Thrillers - Dutch
Het Phoenix Project
Het Hoopornament
Het Verlaten Station
De Enigma Strain
De Amazone Code
De Ijs Afgrond
De Erfenis Van Jefferson
De Paradijselijk Eiland
Het Atlantis Artefact
Het Boek van Botten
De Kaïn Samenzwering
De Mendel Paradox
Het Minoïsche Manifest
De Napoleon Baan
De Sintels van Siwa
Het Epsilon Gebeuren
Het Cerberus Protocol
Het Russische Verraad
Het Oog van Odin
De Poolster Cyclus
Harvey Bennett Thrillers - German
Der Enigma Virus
Der Amazonas Code
Die Eiskluft
Das Jefferson-Vermächtnis
Der Paradies-Schlüssel
Das Atlantische Artefakt
Das Buch der Knochen
Das Kain-Komplott
Das Mendel-Paradoxon
Die Minoische Offenbarung
Der Napoleon-Job
Das Erbe von Siwa
Der Epsilon-Vorfall
Der Höllenhund-Plan
Der Russische Verrat
Das Auge Odins
Der Polaris-Zyklus
Der Teufelsanteil
Harvey Bennett Thrillers - Italian
Il Progetto Fenice
Il Ceppo Enigma
Il Codice Amazzonia
Abisso di Ghiaccio
l'Eredita di Jefferson
La Chiave del Paradiso
Il Manufatto di Atlantide
Il Libro Delle Ossa
La Cospirazione di Caino
Il Paradosso Mendel
Il Operazione Creta
Il Lavoro di Napoleone
Le braci di Siwa
L'Evento Epsilon
Il Protocollo Cerberus
THE PARADISE KEY
A HARVEY BENNETT THRILLER
NICK THACKER
CONTENTS
Wait!
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Afterword
About the Author
Books by Nick Thacker
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PROLOGUE
The child sat between the two trees, waiting for death. He knew it would come — his caretaker had told him as much. The two trees were supposed to provide comfort, the feeling of protection.
But they couldn't provide safety.
He would die, just as they all would. It was not a thought that plagued the boy as much as concerned him. He knew about death, as any child of his age did. He understood it, agreed with it. Everything must die. The jungle around him, the trees and plants and animals, all of it must go. It was told to him through the stories shared around the fire, and sometimes directly from the older children when they brought him out with the men to hunt.
He was not allowed to speak in those times, but that did not mean he misunderstood. He knew what death was, and he knew it was coming. The two trees offered solace, but not hope. They, too, would die. Not today, maybe many years from now, but they would shrivel up and disappear just like his ancestors — the mothers and fathers of his own mother and father, just as they had. His caretaker, too, would die.
But death was an easy thing to understand when you looked at it from a distance. When it was a story told by an elder around a fire, or a memory described by a hunter after a kill. The child remembered these stories, and they flooded his mind as they came back to him.
He remembered his parents’ death, one after the other, struck down by a blow from a neighboring tribe, one even more ruthless than his own. They were gathering food, their only son between them. He was crouching in the brush when they came, not even slowing to search the area. So he had survived, and he had simultaneously learned of death firsthand.
He remembered the feeling. The quick snap of life taken away, not fully recognizing that he would never speak to them again. They were gone, taken brutally and quickly, yet all he could remember was the way his mother had dropped the food she was carrying, spilling it all over the forest floor. The waste of it; he hadn’t even reached out to grab it.
He had returned to the village to find it had not been changed in any way. His family and friends worked, played, and slept, as if nothing had happened. No one had known about the attack until he had told them. There was a ceremony, as there always was, and then he was given to a caretaker and life had resumed as normal.
Death was here, and it was coming for him.
He felt it, stronger than he had felt it when it had taken his parents.
Stronger even than the feeling he had when listening to the stories. The forest took everyone, they said, but the taking was always far more brutal when it wasn’t the forest doing the work.
He heard the screams. They’d found the village. His home, his caretaker. All of them were there. There were no hunts today, and there were no scouting groups. Everyone would be at the village, preparing the food and clothing. There were three women carrying children, and they would need preparations for their young. Everyone was there, everyone screaming. The men howled with sporadic war chants, not together and organized but scared, knowing.
He crouched closer to the forest floor. He touched the ground, feeling the forest crying out in complaint at the attack. It was all a part of them, a part of him. He was old enough to know that now. They were connected, the forest and the trees and the animals and the tribes. Even the tribes they fought, they were connected.
His caretaker had explained it once, in terms of a story that he had forgotten the details of. But he knew the premise: they were all part of the same story, part of the same world here. Life was far more important than bringing upon the death of others.
So he had run, without thinking and without looking back, when he had first heard the heavy trudging of the feet, crashing through the forest. They were not another tribe, they couldn't be. They were too loud, too big. He was scared, but he was able to push it away and focus on running toward the trees. The trees where the ceremony had taken place, the trees that towered over their small village. He had climbed them once, only to discover that the trees were hardly the tallest around. They poked at the canopy and even scraped it some places, but the inside roof of the canopy itself, he was surprised to learn, was formed by the bottom of even taller trees.
The world was a large place, he had learned that day. It was large, and he was a small part of it. He didn’t know how large — his people didn’t worry about things like that — but he was always fascinated by the thought of it. The trees he had come to trust loomed over him, reminding him that even when he thought the biggest thing around was staring down at him, there was something even bigger out there, somewhere.
; Those bigger things were crashing around, causing the screams and subsequent silencing of his people back in the village. He didn’t dare look, for fear of what he might see. Maybe it would be over soon, but what then? Where would he go? The nearest tribe was hostile, and they would jump at the chance to bring death upon him just as the bigger people were bringing now.
So what to do? He waited, crouched and small and shivering in the forest, the two trees offering what little they could — solace and sympathy, which he could feel through the ground. They were telling him that they were there, but that they were sorry they couldn’t do more. They were sorry they couldn’t help, that they —
One of the bigger people crashed around and came to his spot by the tree. He thought for a moment, hoped, that they wouldn’t see him. That he had somehow become a tree, or a bush, or something that didn’t seem like it needed death brought upon it.
But they saw him. He knew it when the feet of the thing turned toward him, the shadow of it creeping out and over and around him, consuming him like its owner didn’t even need to move to know it had captured him. He sobbed, once, then told himself to be strong. Death comes upon us all, he told himself. Death is not the enemy.
The feet stepped forward, and he smelled the person. This was certainly not another tribe. The legs were covered, as well as the feet. Some sort of cloth or skin, bunched in places but sturdy, stained with the dirt and mud of trekking through the jungle for days. Splashes of silt on the things covering the feet. Not sandals, but something bigger. Stronger.
The feet moved again, but not toward him. They simply shifted, moving slightly, leaving an ugly streak in the mud. He felt a hand grasping at his hair, which he had kept just long enough to cover his ears. It was black, oily and nice, some of the nicest hair of any of the children his age. He was proud of it.
The person’s hand ripped his hair upward, and he yelped in pain. His hair stayed attached to his head, and he stood up with the force of the person’s hand. He fought against the hand, but the hand was wrenched around his hair and yanking him up, up.
He cried now, openly. He was a child, and he knew children were allowed to cry. They were encouraged to think about their tears with wisdom, as reactions to a particular feeling. If one could understand the feeling, one could fight against the tears, it was said.
He knew the feeling — pain. Loss. He wanted his caretaker.
He wanted his mother. His father.
He wanted anyone.
He looked up, forced to by the hand that was wrapped tightly into his hair. The face was of a man’s, but the man’s skin was light, not bronzed by the sun but browned by the mud. His eyes sparkled, a light-greenish blue that the boy had never seen before.
He was suddenly scared. The fear gripped him tighter than the hand in his hair, and he sobbed once again. The man stood, frozen. Examining him. Questioning him.
He wanted to speak, to ask why. To understand. The tears kept coming. The man kept staring.
Finally the man released his hand from the boy’s hair and reached into a bag he was wearing. It was also made of skin, some sort of leather that the boy hadn’t seen before. The man watched the boy with those sparkling eyes as he fumbled through his bag.
He retrieved something from inside the bag, held it tight in his hand. It was sharp, pointed and clear, like water that had been hardened into a tube shape and placed around a shiny, bright point. He pointed it at the boy, near his left arm.
The boy shook, sobbing.
The man looked down at the boy, smiled. He opened his mouth and spoke words the boy didn’t know, didn’t understand.
“You will do just fine, boy,” the man said. “Just fine, indeed.”
CHAPTER 1
The man watched him through the glass, his hands and arms pressed up against the pane, like an animal anxiously awaiting for his captor to feed him. The man cocked his head sideways, watching Dr. Joseph Lin as he fumbled around with the gray, metal box in his hands.
Dr. Lin knew what the man wanted. It was what they all wanted.
Freedom.
The man was docile, tamed through hundreds of cocktails of medications and sedatives, but Dr. Lin couldn’t help but feel like the subjects were always watching for a mistake, for an opening. Something they might be able to take advantage of.
He wouldn’t fail today. He hadn’t failed yet, and he wouldn't now. The task was simple, mindless even, but then again that was why it was easy to fail when performing it. The mundane tasks were the ones to be worried about — a person could go through the motions much more easily with these types of tasks and assignments, and that’s where mistakes were made.
It wasn’t the large-scale, complicated things he needed to worry about. The multi-layered tasks that required a nuanced understanding of something or a delicate hand were, in a way, easier to perform flawlessly. He was the best in the world at those types of things, which was why he was here in the first place.
It was the easy things, the simple and repetitive that he needed to be most careful with. That was how he — a world-renowned scientist — had ended up doing the job of one of the lab assistants; the girl had been careless, she had lapsed and allowed a small oversight to become a large mistake.
And here in the lab, mistakes were unacceptable. The assistant had learned that the hard way, but in this environment there were no second chances. There were no lessons — it was perform or be removed.
Dr. Lin was disappointed with the girl’s removal, as she had been a good assistant. But he also understood the reasons behind it. He was calm, centered, not allowing the assistant’s removal to affect his work, and for that he was proud. He could do the work of a lowly assistant. He could stoop to that level and get the job done. It would mean a later night for him — his own work sat by idly awaiting his return — but he would finish.
The man brushed up against the glass, an inquisitive look on his face. Dr. Lin watched him for a moment. The man turned his head again, his eyes searching the doctor’s face. There would be nothing there for him to read, Dr. Lin knew. Even if Dr. Lin had been the type of man to allow the weakness of emotion to show on his face, this man on the other side of the glass was incapable of recognizing and acknowledging it. That function of his neural programming had been stifled to the point of being useless. The ‘empathy gene,’ or ‘emotional resonance,’ the marketing suits upstairs called it. The ability for a human to recognize, acknowledge, and respond to a particular micro-expression.
Dr. Lin opened the metal box. The lid snapped up abruptly, as if it had been fitted for a slightly smaller box, and Dr. Lin peered inside. He reached in and grabbed the first tube that lay on top of the pile. He closed the box, then set it down on the cart that sat next to him. He reached for the syringe on the cart and placed the tube inside the back of the syringe.
The man inside watched him. Waiting. Knowing what was coming but unable to react in any overt way.
Dr. Lin pressed the tube down into the syringe until he felt and heard the slight popping sound that told him the medication’s seal had been opened and was ready for injection. He turned to the man behind the glass and held up the medication.
“Time for your medicine, 31-3,” he said. His voice was quiet, softened from exhaustion. He’d already been awake for twenty-four hours and he knew his job would continue for at least another ten. He was glad there were no meetings scheduled, no reason to use his voice much.
