The Eighth Day [Hardcover]

"And on the Seventh Day, He rested." --Genesis, 2:2-3 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

A breathtaking international conspiracy thriller - A Manchurian Candidate for the new age --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

"And on the Seventh Day, He rested." --Genesis, 2:2-3 THE EIGHTH DAY is an explosive, compulsively readable novel of suspense that plunges a clever young man into a web of mystery and international deceit, bringing him face to face with the ultimate evil. Danny Cray is a struggling 28 year-old sculptor/video artist who lives in Washington DC. To make ends meet, he does occasional freelance work as a researcher for a large firm of private detectives. When one of their most powerful clients approaches him with a job, the money is too good to resist. All he has to do is learn what a recently deceased university professor was working on when he died. But Danny stumbles on far more than he expected when he discovers that the professor was in touch with the Vatican about a remote tribe of Kurds who worship the Peacock Angel -- Satan. (This tribe does indeed exist.) After others connected to the professor start to disappear, Danny finds himself in great peril and must travel into the ancient land where this tribe still lives in order to discover what is truly at stake in his investigation. A mesmerizing blend of science, religion, history and suspense, THE EIGHTH DAY confirms John Case's position as a master of intelligent commercial fiction.

A new novel of breathtaking adventure and dazzling scope from the New York Times bestselling author of THE GENESIS CODE.

John Case is the author of international bestseller THE GENESIS CODE and the novels THE FIRST HORSEMAN and TRANCE STATE. He lives in Northern Virginia.

It was the mailman who reported it, calling 911 half an hour before Delaney's shift was supposed to end.
The pickup was sitting in the driveway and there were lights on in the house, so the mailman thought someone must be home. But it had been days now, and still no one answered when he knocked. The mailbox was filled to overflowing. So maybe, he figured, maybe Mr. Terio had suffered a heart attack.
Delaney shook his head and swore at the mailman's timing. Brent had a play-off game at six, and it was five after five al-ready. Helen would kill him. (You've got to be there for him, Jack! Show a little support! What's more important-your own son or your buddies at the station?) Well, actually . . . the truth was, he liked to go to his son's games. Brent was a good player-better than he had ever been-and it was fun to bask in the kid's re-flected glory. When things were going well, Brent didn't really need him there. But when the kid screwed up-well, his son was one intense little guy. Took his own failure way too hard. And Helen didn't have a clue how to help the kid handle it. (Will you stop that crying! It's just a game.) So Delaney liked to be there-especially for a big game. But his chances of making it were fading. He and Poliakoff were all the way to hell and gone, way out by the county line where civilization turned to kudzu.
Sitting behind the wheel, Poliakoff gave Delaney a sidelong glance and chuckled. "Don't sweat it. You want to use the siren?"

Delaney shook his head.
"The guy's probably on vacation," Poliakoff insisted. "We'll take a look around-I'll write it up. No problem."
Delaney gazed out the window. The air was heavy and still, thick with gloom, the way it gets before a thunderstorm. "Maybe it'll rain," he muttered.
Poliakoff nodded. "That's the spirit," he told him. "Think positive."
The cruiser turned onto Barracks Road and, suddenly, though they were barely a mile past a subdivision of bright new town houses, there was nothing in sight but vine-strangled woods and farmland. The occasional rotting barn.
"You ever been out this way?" Poliakoff asked.
Delaney shrugged. "That's it, over there," he said, nodding at a metal sign stippled with bullet holes. PREACHERMAN LANE. "You gotta turn."
They found themselves on a narrow dirt road, flanked by weeds and at the edge of a dense wood. "Jesus," Poliakoff muttered as the cruiser crested a rise, then bottomed out with a thud before he could brake. "Since when does Fairfax County have dirt roads?"
"We still got a couple," Delaney replied, thinking the roads wouldn't be around much longer. The Washington suburbs were metastasizing in every direction and had been for twenty years. In a year or two, the farmhouse up ahead-a yellow farmhouse, suddenly visible on the left-would be gone, drowned by a rising tide of town houses, Wal-Marts, and Targets.
The mailbox was at the end of the driveway, a battered aluminum cylinder with a faded red flag nailed to the top of a four-by- four T set in concrete. A name was stenciled on the side: C.TERIO.
Next to the mailbox, three or four newspapers were jammed into a white plastic tube that bore the words the washington post. A dozen other editions lay on the ground in a neatish pile, some already turning yellow.
When the mailman had reached out to 911, he'd suggested, "You should go in, take a look around the house, see what you can see." But of course, they couldn't exactly do that. Under the circum-stances, the most they could do was knock on the door, walk around the property, talk to the neighbors-not that there were any, far as Delaney could tell.
Climbing out of the cruiser, the deputies stood for a moment, watching and listening. Thunder rumbled in the south, and they could hear the distant hum of the Beltway. With a grin, Poliakoff sang in his cracking baritone, "H-e-e-ere we come to save the da-a-yyyy-"
"Let's get this over with," Delaney grumbled, setting off toward the house.
They passed an aging Toyota Tacoma at the end of the drive-way, its rear end backed toward the house as if its owner had been loading or unloading something. Together the two policemen crossed the overgrown lawn to the front door.
The knocker was a fancy one-hand-hammered iron in the shape of a dragonfly. Poliakoff put his fist around it, drew back, and rapped loudly. "Hullo?"
Silence.
"Hello?" Poliakoff cocked his head and listened hard. When no reply came, he tried the door and, finding it locked, gave a little shrug. "Let's go around back." Together the deputies made their way around the side of the house, pausing every so often to peer through the windows.
"He left enough lights on," Delaney observed.
At the rear of the house, they passed a little garden-tomatoes and peppers, zucchini and pole beans-that might have been tidy once but was now abandoned to weeds. Nearby, a screen door led into the kitchen. Poliakoff rapped on its wooden frame four or five times. "Anyone home? Mr. Terio! You in there?"
Nothing.
Or almost nothing. The air trembled with the on-again, off-again rasp of cicadas and, in the distance, the insectoid murmur of traffic. And there was something else, something . . . Delaney cocked his head and listened hard. He could hear . . . laughter. Or not laughter, actually, but . . . a laugh track. After a moment, he said, "The television's on."

Poliakoff nodded.
Delaney sighed. No way he was going to get to Brent's baseball game. He could feel it.