The Atomic Priesthood

One evening, while beset with misgivings about her career, reporter Trish Cagle watches a 60 Minutes Program. Instantly, she is captivated. She watches Ed Bradley narrate a story in Kazakhstan not long after the Berlin Wall has come down and the Soviet Union has been dissolved. In clinic Number Four, in the city of Semipalatinsk, Soviet doctors have secretly collected and stored human fetal specimens during the Cold War. The genetic characteristics of the mutant specimens are due to the effects of massive radiation exposure from the former Soviet Union’s atomic testing grounds. The mysterious and shocking images of the mutants are burned into her memory, and will haunt her for months to come. It is as though something deep and eternal within her DNA is calling out to her. She knows that there is much, much more to this story, one that is longing to be heard, screaming to be told. She has stumbled onto the reporter’s Holy Grail: the ancient origins of a modern-day apocalypse. Ignited by her reporter’s urge to dig, she pursues those origins and how they impact the present and future of the human species. This quest takes Trish across the globe, and turns into an archeological dig into areas of the human psyche she did not know existed, and into the very genetic patterns of flesh and bone.