Текст книги "Plague Ship"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Kovac couldn’t get an angle, and rather than risk being spotted by passersby who were starting to gawk at Eddie’s insane stunt Kovac holstered his pistol and stepped back into the suite.

For a moment, Eddie considered leaping onto the balcony and entering the third-floor room, but he had no idea how many men Kovac had covering the building. His best chance was to get away as quickly and cleanly as he could and regroup later.

He stepped back again, smearing skin off his now-dry palms as he slid down the spindles. The second-floor balcony was a story and a half above the pavement, to allow for a high ceiling in the hotel’s lobby. The drop was nearly twenty feet. Just off to Eddie’s left was a bright yellow canopy arching out over the sidewalk to protect the entrance from the elements. Like a tightrope walker, he padded across the top of the railing and dove for the canopy, torquing his body so his back slammed into the stiffened fabric.

Sliding down its curved face, he was able to reach between his legs and grab onto the underlying metal frame. He somersaulted over the edge, holding on as tightly as his damaged hands would allow, and dangled for a second before nimbly dropping to the ground. A few in the gathered crowd cheered, not understanding what was happening.

Eddie started running down the sidewalk, dodging through the throngs as best he could. The noise of a powerful engine roared over the din of regular commuter traffic. He whirled to see a black motorcycle jump the curb and start after him, panicked people scattering out of its path as the rider hit the throttle hard. Less than fifteen feet separated him from the bike, and the big Ducati was accelerating.

Making like he was running for the entrance of the bookstore next to the hotel, Eddie leapt to his left instead, flying onto the hood of a parked car. His momentum slid him across the vehicle and dumped him in the road just ahead of a Volvo truck that had found a little room in the congestion to speed up. The driver never saw Eddie fly over the car, so he kept on the gas. Eddie had a second, at most, to twist out of the way of the heavy-duty tires. He covered his head in a vain attempt to protect it as the ten-wheeler rolled over him. Heat from the engine was like the open door of a blast furnace on his back.

The truck suddenly braked, wheels skidding on the asphalt. Eddie heard the bike again. It must have returned to the road between two parked cars right in front of the Volvo.

He scrambled from underneath the vehicle. An open-topped double-decker tourist bus was in the opposite lane. It had paused to let people off. Eddie was near the rear of the vehicle, far enough away from the driver that he most likely wouldn’t be noticed. He jumped hard at the side of the bus, thrusting upward to get himself off of the roadway. He kicked out with his other foot, connecting with the truck, still idling three feet away, gaining himself another foot. He did this again and again, kicking each vehicle in turn, ignoring the startled faces of passengers in the bus, as he used his strength and dexterity to shimmy up the gap between the two trucks until he reached the top of the Volvo. He rolled onto its roof, panting, and would have paused to catch his breath except a sizzling hole appeared inches from his face.

He looked up. Kovac was on the balcony again, taking deliberate aim. With little chance of alerting pedestrians with the shots, he could take his time. Eddie jumped to his feet, running along the top of the truck, and leapt for the bus as it started to pull away. He sailed over a bench seat of Japanese tourists and tumbled into the aisle. He ran to the back of the bus to see the Ducati pull out from in front of the Volvo truck and start after him.

Eddie might have made it clear of the hotel, but he hadn’t escaped yet.

The motorcyclist in black leathers stayed right behind the bus, making no attempt to hide the fact he was following it. Eddie didn’t know if the man had a radio tucked into his helmet. If hewas running the operation, he’d make sure all team members stayed in constant communication, which meant the guy on the bike would have reinforcements soon. And since Kovac must have a detailed report on the hostage-rescue team that had snatched Kyle Hanley, he would most likely bring a large force to get Hanley back.

The bus pulled out onto a four-lane road, picking up speed as it approached the Colosseum. Cars zipped by, horns blared, and the occasional rude gesture was thrown out the window by their drivers. The Ducati rode in its wake like a manta ray following a whale.

Eddie flexed his fingers to work some blood back into them as he thought of a way out of this mess.

He’d left his cell phone in the suite because Max had been carrying his. A crazy idea popped into his head and, if he hadn’t felt he was running out of time, he would have dismissed it entirely, but he was getting desperate.

A set of spiral stairs at the rear of the bus led Eddie down to the first level. He was relieved that there weren’t many tourists taking this part of the trip. There had been only fifteen people upstairs and just a handful were downstairs. No one paid him any attention as he strode down the aisle. Eddie kept in a crouch as he approached the driver. There was a translator sitting in the front seat, working on her nails with an emery board between her canned speeches from the tour script. Seeing Eddie approach, she set aside her file and smiled brightly. Judging by his appearance, she assumed he was part of her group and asked him something in Japanese.

He ignored her entirely. The driver wore a white shirt, black tie, and a cap more befitting an airline pilot.

Eddie was just thankful he had a slender build. In one motion, Eddie grabbed the driver’s right arm and heaved him out of his seat. Seng ducked, as the man rolled across his shoulder, and then straightened quickly, hurling the driver down the couple of steps near the bus’s main door. He hit the door upside down and collapsed in an untidy heap.

The big diesel barely slowed before Eddie was in the driver’s seat, his foot on the gas pedal. The tour guide was screaming, and passengers farther back began to look frightened. Watching the big wing mirrors, Eddie hit the brakes.

Horns immediately erupted all around, and the Ducati shot from around the back of the bus, narrowly avoiding the car that rear-ended the double-decker. The guide wailed at the impact. The bike was hugging the center line, riding the gap between traffic, and Eddie let him travel halfway down the bus’s length before hitting the gas again and swerving left. The bike had nowhere to go. The other lane was bumper-to-bumper. Had he hung back near the rear of the bus, he might have been able to tuck back behind it again, but he had committed himself to the gap. He dropped a gear and wrenched the throttle.

The front wheel leapt off the tarmac, as the 1000cc engine shrieked, the rider bending low over the handlebars to reduce air friction and give him a fraction more speed.

He never stood a chance. The bus clipped him ten feet shy of where Eddie was sitting. The Ducati careened into a car in the left lane. The rider was launched over the front of his bike. Limbs flailing, he smashed headfirst into the rear window of the next car in the line of traffic. The safety glass turned into a glittering explosion of diamond chips. Eddie could only hope the helmet saved his life. The collision started a chain reaction of minor accidents behind him that quickly engulfed all four lanes.

Eddie stopped the bus and hit the controls that opened the door. It swung only partially inward, blocked by the unconscious form of the driver. As the adrenaline surge that had sustained Eddie over the past frightening minutes began to ebb, he thought of the Chairman and how he always made some sort of joke at a time like this. It wasn’t Seng’s style.

“Sorry,” he said to the tour guide, and pushed his way out the door.

He looked back at the accident. The road was blocked from curb to curb with damaged cars. Drivers were out of their vehicles now, shouting and gesturing as only Italians can. He was about to turn on to a side street when a sedan smashed through the wreckage like a charging battle tank. Two men dove out of the way as their cars were crushed up against other vehicles. The sedan barely slowed, its front end mangled and its driver and passenger invisible for a moment behind their inflated air bags.

Eddie knew they were coming for him.

He ran back onto the bus, clipping the slowly rising driver behind the ear to keep him down. The pretty tour guide screamed when she saw him jump into the driver’s seat again, jabbering at him in Italian so fast that the words blended into one long, continuous sound.

He slammed the automatic transmission into gear. The bus took off with a lurch that sent the few passengers who’d gotten out of their seats sprawling.

Cranking the wheel one-handed, to keep the bus on the road ringing the Colosseum, Eddie grabbed the PA system microphone dangling over his right shoulder. He shouted, “Everybody! Upstairs! Now!” The handful of terrified tourists rushed to the rear of the bus, jamming the stairs in their effort to follow his order. Eddie kept his eye on the rearview mirror as the red sedan, a Fiat Bravo, he thought, bulled its way through the congestion in pursuit. It roared up alongside the bus. Eddie could see three men inside.

The front passenger’s hands were below the doorsill, but he spotted a weapon cradled in the arms of the man in the rear seat.

The man in back thrust the barrel of an assault rifle through the window and sprayed the side of the bus.

Glass exploded as the rounds found their mark, and seat stuffing was blown into the air like confetti.

Eddie swerved into the car, forcing it back once again, while the shrieks of the passengers upstairs grew to a fevered pitch.

Turning even tighter to avoid a stalled lane of traffic, Eddie felt the bus go light on its inside wheels as centrifugal force made the vehicle want to roll over. He edged the steering wheel slightly, and the heavy bus mashed back down on its suspension, rocking precariously. The road straightened out as they completed their sweep around the Colosseum and headed northeast. On either side of the road, the new blended with the ancient, as they raced past office blocks, churches, and ruined temples. The Fiat tried to pass the bus again, and Eddie swerved, feeling the satisfying crunch of metal.

Accelerating past fifty miles per hour, Eddie thought that he had damaged the sedan more than he’d thought, because they didn’t try to pass him again. That’s when he heard the hammering crack of an automatic rifle. Despite the bus’s size, he could feel the weight of shots through the chassis. They were firing at the engine in the rear, hoping to disable the vehicle and gun Eddie down at their leisure.

Ahead, Eddie could see what he could only describe as a giant wedding cake. The building was massive, constructed entirely of marble, and seemed to loom over the area. He dimly recalled from somewhere that this was the monument to Victor Emmanuel II, the ruler who united all the Italian states into the modern nation it was today. The pomposity of the architecture was made worse by the sheer size of the building, its columns and steps making it look more like an enormous set of dentures than a memorial to a great leader.

The road swept around to the left, revealing a huge bronze statue of Victor on horseback. With the sun beginning to set, tourists and backpackers still lounged on the marble steps, sipping drinks sold by vendors from carts.

Another barrage pummeled the back of the bus, and the tourists outside started to scatter like startled birds.

Eddie knew it was only a matter of time before they hit something critical or that he’d run into a police roadblock. The distant sound of sirens blaring was drawing closer by the second. A sign said he was on the VIA DEI FORI IMPERIALI, not that it meant anything to him. The road was broad, by Roman standards, and too open for Eddie’s tastes. It divided ahead, next to an open parking area filled with buses much like the one he’d commandeered.

He veered left down a street hemmed in by four– and five-story brick buildings. The storefronts offered everything from leather goods to electronics to exotic pets. But it was still too wide for what Eddie had in mind. Brake lights suddenly flared in front of the bus as traffic came to a crawl. Eddie pounded on the horn, and he steered the bus onto the curb. The sidewalk wasn’t nearly wide enough for the large vehicle.

As he made his way down the cobbled walkway, the bus mowed down parking meters like wheat before a combine and shouldered aside automobiles amid a cacophony of car alarms and shouts.

The bus plowed through the outside displays of a tourist shop, sending up a blizzard of brightly colored postcards and what Eddie thought, for one terrifying moment, was the body of a woman, but it turned out to be a mannequin displaying a T-shirt. The right-side mirror was ripped off when the bus scraped against a building.

He burst out onto an intersection. Cars screeched all around him, as Eddie guided the bus toward a narrow lane that was more of a trench cut between buildings than a road. There were cars going into the alley but not emerging from it.

Kovac’s men fired at the bus again, having replaced spent magazines. The gas pedal suddenly felt mushy under Eddie’s foot, and in the undamaged left-side mirror he could see smoke erupting from the back of the bus.

“Come on, baby, fifty more yards.”

The engine coughed and caught again and again, sputtering and surging in its death throes. Eddie reached for the microphone, as the gap between the buildings grew closer but not larger.

“Everybody, brace yourselves.”

Eddie sensed the engine about to let go, so he slipped the transmission into neutral and coasted the last thirty feet. Behind him, he heard the motor seize, in a tearing of metal that would have lanced Max’s engineer heart.

The bus entered the dim alley with barely five inches of clearance on either side. The remaining left mirror was sheared off. Eddie saw that the road constricted even further just ahead, because one apartment building was slightly larger than its neighbors. He hit the brakes an instant before the bus struck the building, bounced back, and smeared against the opposite apartments, before becoming completely jammed. The impact caused a fresh wave of frightened screams from above, but Eddie could tell by how quickly the sound faded that no one had been hurt.

A large red fire extinguisher was clipped just below his legs. He popped it free and smashed it into the windshield. The glass starred but didn’t break. He hit the windshield again and again until he’d opened a man-size hole. He jumped though it, setting a hand on the warm asphalt when he landed to steady himself before taking off at a run. When he looked back, he could see dense smoke boiling from behind the bus.

Kovac’s men couldn’t climb over the vehicle, so they would have to backtrack around the apartment block, provided they weren’t boxed in by other cars who’d followed them into the alley.

He rounded the corner and slowed to a normal pedestrian gait, blending in with the flow of people headed home from their offices or out to dinner with their families. A minute later, he heard car tires screeching as he ducked into a taxi. The cab pulled away as the Fiat Bravo braked in front of the alley.

He’d lost them.

A few minutes later, he threw some Euros at the driver and jumped out of the vehicle while it was stalled in traffic. He bought a prepaid disposable cell phone from a tobacco stand. Eddie walked into a crowded bar, ordered a beer from the girl behind the counter, and dialed the hotel. The staff was still buzzing about the man who’d climbed down the balconies, so it took him a few minutes to explain that gunmen had broken into his room. The reception-desk staffer promised to call the polizia. Eddie gave him his cell number.

Fifteen minutes later, Eddie’s beer gone, his phone chirped.

“Mr. Kwan?” That was the alias they’d used to book the suite.

“Yes.”

“Our desk manager entered your room with the police. There was a man in your suite named Jenner with a cut to the head,” the clerk said apologetically. “They would like you to return here to get your information, a statement, I think you call it. They have many questions about what took place and about an incident that happened nearby.”

“Of course, I’ll be happy to cooperate with the authorities. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kwan.”

“Thank you.” Eddie dialed another number. When it was answered, he said, without preamble, “Tiny, file a flight plan out of the country. I’ll be there as quickly as I can.” He didn’t wait for the pilot’s reply before cutting the connection and dialing again. As he listened to the ringing over the line, he knew that there was no way Kovac would remain in the city—or in Italy, for that matter—so there was no reason for him to wait around for the police to pick him up.

“Hello.”

“Chairman, it’s Eddie. Kovac has kidnapped Max.”

A heartbeat passed before Juan responded. “What about his son, Kyle?”

“I think the little punk was in on it.”

CHAPTER 20

“HOLD ON ONE SECOND,” CABRILLO SAID, GETTING his mind around the situation.

He was alone in his cabin. His desk was strewn with paperwork that had gone ignored too long. He hit the intercom button for the communications station in the Op Center.

“Yes, Chairman,” the night-duty supervisor answered at once.

“What’s the status of Max Hanley’s radio ID chip?”

Each member of the Corporation had a locator microchip surgically embedded in the leg that beamed a faint signal to the constellation of communications satellites circling the globe. Powered by the nervous system, with an occasional transdermal boost of electricity like with a pacemaker, the devices allowed Juan to know where any member of his team was at all times.

“I’m not getting a signal. Hold on. Here we go. The computer says his transponder stopped working eleven minutes ago, about two miles from the hotel where he was staying with his son. Eddie’s is working fine. I show him in central Rome, about a quarter mile from the Colosseum.”

“Thank you.” Juan released the intercom and spoke into his desk telephone, a modern instrument disguised to look like a Bakelite phone from the 1930s. “Max’s transponder’s out.”

“I already figured it would be,” Eddie replied.

“That’s how they tracked you to Rome, isn’t it? Kyle Hanley was chipped when he was in Greece. And they took the precaution of sweeping Max in case we did the same thing.”

“They probably carved it out of his thigh, in whatever vehicle they used to make their getaway.”

“But even the best chips can only give you a rough approximation, they aren’t as powerful as GPS,” Juan said.

“That’s why I think Kyle helped them. When they ambushed us in the hotel’s elevator they brought Max and me back to the suite. Kyle didn’t look all that drugged to me. I think he came to during our flight from Crete and was faking it for the last part of our trip. He was left alone for a few minutes in one of the bedrooms while we spoke with Dr. Jenner. Supposedly, he was unconscious, but if he was awake he could have called Kovac, or someone else in the movement, and given them the name of the hotel and the room number.”

“So Kovac tracked him to Rome using a radio tag and Kyle guided him to the exact location.”

“That’s the only way it makes any sense.”

“Just spitballing here, but what about Jenner? He could have blown our location to the Responsivists.”

“He could have,” Eddie agreed, “but I could tell he hates them the way a drug counselor hates crack.

Also, you didn’t see the way Kovac pistol-whipped him. No, Jenner’s definitely on our side on this.”

“Like I said, just throwing it out there.”

“You know, Juan, they took a hell of a risk to get the kid back. Doesn’t make any sense if Kyle’s just some low-level believer.”

“Then he’s somehow involved in whatever they’re planning.”

“Or at least exposed to the information at the retreat,” Eddie said.

“They snatched him back to keep operational security absolutely airtight.”

“If they’re at this level of paranoia, there’s no way they will let Linda into that compound.”

“I already scrubbed her mission. We learned that Kovac was aboard the Golden Dawnand was most likely responsible for those murders. She’s going to babysit Kevin Nixon until he can make contact with Donna Sky.”

Eddie thought about this for a moment before saying, “I was with Kovac for only a minute before I escaped, but I could see that. The guy looks like Boris Karloff, with crazier eyes. I just thought of something. Kovac said that Severance gave him explicit orders not to kill Jenner. I don’t understand the reasoning behind that, but why would they leave Jenner behind and snatch Max?”

“They don’t know if Kyle talked to him during the time he was with us.”

“No. What I mean is, why not simply kill them both? They had the opportunity, and it would have been a lot easier.”

“Same reason. They need to know if Kyle talked.”

“Max is in for a rough time, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Juan said softly. “Yeah, he is.”

“What do you want me to do?” Eddie said after a lengthy pause, as both men thought about the implications of Cabrillo’s answer.

“Meet the Oregonin Monaco. I’m putting you in charge of the eavesdropping job.”

“You’re still going to the Philippines?” Eddie was surprised.

“I have to,” Juan replied, resignation in his voice. “We need some sort of leverage over Severance if we’re going to get Max back.”

“It’s going to take the better part of a day just to get you there. God knows how long to find something, even if it exists. Do you really think Max can hold out that long?” Juan’s next words were as much for his benefit as they were Eddie’s. “You don’t know this because Max never talks about it, but he spent six months as a POW during his second tour in Vietnam. The stuff they did to him during his confinement defies belief. He’ll hold out. Of that, I am certain.”

“Juan, that was forty years ago. Max isn’t a young man anymore.”

“Surviving torture isn’t about your physical strength. It’s about how tough you are mentally. Do you think Max has lost any of that? If anything, he’s tougher now than he was then. And he knows that we will do whatever it takes to get him back.”

“How did he get out of it? Was he rescued?”

“No. During a forced march to a new location, he and two buddies jumped their guards. They killed four VC with their bare hands and vanished into the jungle. Only Max found his way to an American firebase.

The other two are still considered MIA.”

JUAN WAS ON THE WING BRIDGE of the pilothouse just after dawn the next morning to watch the sun reveal the principality of Monaco and the city of Monte Carlo perched on rocky cliffs over the warm Mediterranean. One of the last functioning monarchies in the world, the tiny state had been ruled by the Grimaldi family for more than seven centuries. Only Japan’s Chrysanthemum Throne was longer lived.

Monaco was long a playground for the world’s elite and its harbor was carpeted with gleaming luxury yachts, many over a hundred feet in length, several approaching three hundred. Juan spotted the Matryoshka, the target of the eavesdropping job on Russian arms merchant Ivan Kerikov. High-rise apartment blocks rose all around the harbor, and luxury villas clung to the hillsides. He knew that real estate here was some of the most expensive in the world. From his vantage, he couldn’t see the fabled Monte Carlo casino, but he had a few fond memories of the place.

From within the inner harbor, he saw a sleek speedboat rocketing toward the ship, where it lay at anchor a mile from the coast. Harbor authorities had already been informed that the ship’s engine was disabled and the crew were awaiting parts from Germany. Although the vessel was inside Monaco’s three-mile territorial limit, the harbormaster had declined to come aboard, after observing the Oregonthrough binoculars fifteen minutes earlier.

The speedboat ate the distance to the ship at nearly sixty knots, cutting across the light chop like an offshore racer. Juan descended to the main deck near the ship’s boarding ladder. Linc was waiting for him with their overnight bags, his eyes hidden behind stylish sunglasses.

“I don’t like leaving right now,” the big former SEAL said, and not for the first time.

“This is the best way we’re going to get Max back. I’ve called Thom Severance’s office in California a dozen times, all but telling them who I am and what I know, and the bastard won’t call back. We’ve got to force his hand and to do that we need leverage.”

“Langston Overholt won’t help?”

“Not without evidence. I talked to him for an hour last night. The bottom line is, the Responsivists have a lot of money, which means they have a lot of clout in Washington. Lang won’t act on anything other than solid proof that Severance is up to something.”

“This sucks.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why don’t we bypass the Philippines, go straight to the source, and take on Severance for ourselves?”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. Lang warned me specifically about not going after Severance. And you and I both know if we get caught operating in the United States, we will never see the outside of a prison again.”

“So we don’t get caught.”

Juan looked at his friend. Linc was dead serious. “If it comes down to that, I’ll put it to the crew.” He knew every member of the Corporation would risk everything to get Hanley back, even if they knew they would never get another contract from Overholt again, which the cagey CIA veteran had threatened if Thomas Severance or his wife so much as suggested they were under surveillance.

The executive water taxi pulled up alongside the ship. As sleek and beautiful as the boat was, it was nothing compared to its driver, a young blonde wearing a blouse that couldn’t be cut any lower and a skirt that couldn’t be raised any higher. With their chopper still in pieces down in the hangar, the harbor taxi was the fastest way to shore without calling undue attention to the Oregon.

“Capitaine Cabrillo, je suis Donatella,”she called over the burble of the boat’s idling engine. Her accent sent a wolfish grin flashing across Linc’s face.

“Only in Monaco,” Juan whispered to Linc.

“You think some rich guy wants an ugly driver taking him out to his yacht after a night at the casino?” The young woman kept her craft steady by holding the boarding ladder as the two men made their way down with leather duffels over their shoulders. At the end of the twenty-foot climb, Juan tossed his bag onto the rear bench seat and stepped over the gunwale.

“Thank you,” he said.

When Linc jumped into the boat, it bobbed as if it had been hit by a wave. Donatella gave them both a big smile, her eyes lingering on Linc much longer than Cabrillo, as she reached for the chrome throttle controls.

“Chairman! Hold up!” Eric Stone leaned far over the railing overhead to get his attention.

“What is it?”

“I found something.”

“Can it wait? They’re holding a chopper for us to take us to the airport in Nice.”

“Hold on a sec.” Eric climbed over the rail and awkwardly descended the ladder while clutching a laptop computer. He noticed Donatella for the first time when he reached the boat but barely gave her a first, let alone a second, glance. Obviously, he was distracted by whatever news he had.

Juan nodded to her and she eased forward on the throttles. He went aft to let Linc chat her up while he pushed aside their luggage so he and Eric could sit. They had to raise their voices over the rush of the wind and the throb of the powerful motor.

“What do you have?” Juan asked.

Eric opened his computer. “I’ve been checking for any unusual incidents that may have occurred on ships where the Responsivists were holding their Sea Retreats.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Did I? Oh yeah. Do you remember recently how there have been reports of viral outbreaks on cruise ships, usually a gastrointestinal norovirus?”

“Seems there have been a lot more in the past couple of years,” Juan remarked.

“It’s not a coincidence. At first, I was checking passenger manifests from the cruise companies.” Juan didn’t need to ask how Eric obtained such confidential information. “I cross-referenced those to Responsivist membership lists. When I started seeing a pattern, I switched my focus to cruise liners struck by unusual illnesses. That’s when I hit pay dirt. Of the seventeen outbreaks I’ve looked into in the past two years, sixteen of them occurred when Responsivists were on board. The seventeenth wasn’t a norovirus and was traced back to E. colifound on lettuce grown on one specific farm in California. That strain also hit people in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“It gets worse. Mind you, there’s no pattern to cruise lines or ports of call. But there is one definite pattern we could see. During the first incident, only a handful of passengers were sickened, and most of them were elderly. The second one saw forty people showing symptoms. But by the time we get to the seventeenth, which happened two months ago aboard a ship called Destiny, nearly every passenger and crewman was infected. The cruise line had to chopper in a medical team and a healthy group of officers to get the ship back to port.”

Juan leaned back in the soft leather seat, feeling the engine’s vibration trying to loosen the knotted muscles in his back. In the cockpit, Linc towered over their driver, and he could tell she was delighting in his company. Her laughter carried through the air. He suddenly leaned forward again. “They’re perfecting disbursal methods.”

“That’s what Mark and I think, too. They got better every time until they achieved a near one hundred percent infection rate.”

“How does the Golden Dawnfit into the pattern?”