The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [87]
“You look like hell,” she observed, then returned her gaze to the computer screen. She had just connected to the Seekers’ main computer system in London to view the results of the analysis she had initiated her last morning in London. The Seeker labs had just completed it. Crimson words scrolled across the screen.
REPORT FOR: D. FALLING HAWK / SA- 9774U
REQUESTED ANALYSIS: PARTIAL MITOCHONDRIAL SEQUENCE—CROSS-POPULATION COMPARISON WITH PHYLOGENETIC TREE
SUBJECT: CODE NAME—GLINDA
“I go to London and come back to Denver in the space of a day, and that’s all the welcome I get?” Farr threw his leather satchel on the sofa, tossed a much-worried newspaper on the table, and moved to the room’s minibar. He pulled out a miniature bottle of scotch and twisted the cap.
“You know, those little things are perversely expensive,” Deirdre said, her eyes still on the screen. She clicked a button, and a progress bar appeared: Downloading …
Farr snorted. “Good. It’s on the Seekers.” He drained the bottle in one draught, grabbed another, and flopped into a chair, scowling at her. Farr was one of those men who looked dangerously handsome when he scowled.
“Aren’t you even going to ask me how it went?” he said.
She watched the progress bar: 32% complete. “I already know how it went.”
“What do you mean, you already know? I just got off the bloody plane.”
“Yes, after a nine-hour flight. In the meantime I used this fascinating little invention called the telephone. Have you heard about it?” 74% complete. “Anyway, Sasha told me everything. Congratulations. It looks like we’re still in business.”
Farr grunted, then struggled to open the second bottle. He gave up, tossed it down beside him. “By God, I hate hotel rooms.”
“Well, right now your hatred is costing the Seekers four hundred American a night. So be sure to make the very most of it.”
Data started to stream across the screen: small bars, each representing specific genetic loci. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Deirdre watched them go by, letting her eyes drift out of focus as if she might somehow see patterns if she did.
“Anyway,” Deirdre said, “I fail to see what you’re so upset about. They approved your invocation of the Ninth Desideratum, didn’t they?”
Farr had left Denver yesterday morning for a whirlwind trip to London. Deirdre had urged him to make his case via electronic means, but he had insisted on going in person. Which made little sense, for as far as she knew no one had ever talked to the Philosophers directly, not even Farr. The leaders of the Seekers were always in communication, but they remained out of view, veiled in secrecy and anonymity. So it had been throughout the five-hundred-year history of the Seekers.
However, Farr had thought it best to return to London. Perhaps, if nothing else, it demonstrated his commitment to the cause. And evidently it had worked. Despite their direct violation of the Third Desideratum—A Seeker watches but does not interfere—there would be no reprimand from the Philosophers.
Not that Deirdre believed she and Farr had done anything wrong in coming to Denver. After all, it was Grace Beckett who had called them, not the reverse. However, the Nine Desiderata were not written in shades of gray. The intention of the Third Desideratum was to forbid Seekers from interacting directly with otherworldly subjects, so as to prevent any contamination of their behavior.
Fortunately, Seeker agents tended to be a clever and resourceful lot, and as a result it was nearly four centuries ago that one of them, Marius Lucius Albrecht, first invoked in his defense the Ninth Desideratum: Above all else, a Seeker must let no other being come to harm.
Albrecht had been faced with expulsion from the Seekers for contacting—and some stories said falling in love with—a woman who had otherworldly connections. However,