Текст книги "Plague Ship"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

As soon as he was firmly on deck, she threw her arms around his shoulders. “Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, you are a bloody genius.”

“Far be it from me to disagree, just remind me what feat of brilliance I performed this time.”

“Eric found an online database of cuneiform from a university in England. He was able to translate the tablets from the pictures you e-mailed with your phone.” Cabrillo had sent those as soon as they reached the Manila airport.

“The computer was able to translate,” Eric corrected modestly. “I don’t speak a word of ancient Sanskrit.”

“It’s a virus after all,” Julia gushed. “From what I’m able to deduce, it’s a form of influenza, but unlike anything science has ever seen. It has a hemorrhagic component almost like Ebola or Marburg. And the best part is that I think Jannike Dahl has natural immunity because the ship where it first broke out landed near where she grew up, and I believe she’s a descendant of the original crew.” Juan could barely keep up with the rapid flow of words. “What are you talking about? Ship? What ship?”

“Noah’s ark, of course.”

Cabrillo blinked at her for a moment before reacting. He held up his hands like a boxer begging for the fight to be over. “You’re going to have to start this from the top, but I need a shower, a drink, and some food, in whatever order they come. Give me twenty minutes, and meet me in the conference room. Tell Maurice I want orange juice, half a grapefruit, eggs Benedict, toast, and those potatoes he does with the tarragon.” It was nearly dinnertime, but his body was telling him it wanted breakfast. He turned to go but glanced back at Julia. “Noah’s ark?”

She nodded like a little girl dying to tell a secret.

“This I’ve gotta hear.”

Thirty minutes later, his meal gone, the sourness in Juan’s stomach had been replaced with a contented glow, and he felt he had just enough energy to listen to Julia’s report.

He looked to Eric first, since he had done the translation. “Okay, from the top.”

“I won’t bore you with the details of enhancing the pictures or finding an online archive of cuneiform, but I did. The writing you found is particularly old, according to what I was able to learn.” Cabrillo recalled thinking the same thing. He motioned for Stone to continue.

“I turned the problem over to the computer. It took about five hours of tweaking the programs to start producing anything coherent. The algorithms were pretty intense, and I was bending the rules of fuzzy logic to the breaking point. Once the computer started to learn the nuances, it got a little easier, and after passing it through a few times, adjusting here and there, it spat out the entire story.”

“The story of Noah’s ark?”

“You may not know this, but the epic story of Gilgamesh, which was translated from cuneiform by an English amateur in the nineteenth century, chronicles a flood scenario a thousand years before it appeared in Hebrew texts. Many cultures around the globe also have flood myths as part of their ancient traditions.

Anthropologists believe that because human civilization sprang up in coastal areas or along rivers, the very real threat of catastrophic flooding was used by kings and priests in cautionary tales to keep people in line.” Eric adjusted his steel-framed glasses. “As for myself, I can see tsunami events being the genesis for many of these stories. Without written language, stories were passed down orally, usually with added embellishments, so, after one or two generations of retelling, it wasn’t just a giant wave that wiped out your village, it was the whole world that had become inundated. In fact—” Cabrillo cut him off. “Save the lecture for later and stick to what you’ve discovered.”

“Oh, sure. Sorry. The story starts out with a flood, but not a sudden swell of water or a heavy rain. The people who wrote the tablets describe how the water of the sea they lived by rose. I believe it rose about a foot a day. While nearby villages simply moved to higher ground, our folks believed the rising would never stop and decided the only way to survive was to build a large boat. It was in no way as large as the boat described in the Bible. They didn’t have that kind of technology.”

“So we aren’t really talking about Noah and his ark?”

“No, although the parallels are striking, and it is possible that the people who remained behind and described what happened laid the foundation for Gilgameshand the biblical story.”

“Is there a time frame for this?”

“Fifty-five hundred B.C.”

“That seems pretty precise.”

“That’s because there is physical evidence of a flood just as it’s described on the tablets. It occurred when the earthen dike at what is now the Bosporus collapsed and flooded what had been, up until that time, an inland sea that was some five hundred feet lower than the Mediterranean. We now call this area the Black Sea. Using underwater ROVs, marine archaeologists have confirmed that there were humans living along the ancient shoreline. It took more than a year for the basin to fill, and they estimate the falls at the Bosporus would make Niagara look like a babbling brook.” Cabrillo was amazed. “I had no idea.”

“This has only been confirmed in the last few years. At the time, there was a lot of talk that this catastrophic event could be the origin of the biblical flood, but scientists and theologians both agreed that it wasn’t.”

“Seems, with what we’ve discovered, that the debate isn’t over yet. Hold on a second,” Juan said as a thought struck him. “These tablets were written in cuneiform. That comes from Mesopotamia and Samaria. Not the Black Sea region.”

“Like I said, this is a very early form of the writing style, and it was most likely brought southward by people leaving the Black Sea region and taken up by those other civilizations. Trust me on this, Chairman: the tablets you found are going to fundamentally alter our understanding of ancient history.”

“I believe you. Go on.”

“Okay, so this one seaside village thought the rising waters would never stop. Like I said, it took a year of flooding to match the sea level, so I can imagine how they came to that conclusion. They also write that with so many refugees there was a great deal of sickness.” Dr. Huxley interrupted. “It would have been the same stuff we see today in refugee populations. Things like dysentery, typhus, and cholera.”

Eric picked up the thread of his story again, “Instead of joining the mass exodus, they cannibalized the buildings in their town to build a boat that was large enough to take all four hundred of them. They don’t mention the dimensions but did say the timber hull was caulked with bitumen and then sheathed in copper.

“Now, this was the very beginning of the Copper Age, so it must have been a prosperous area to have enough of the metal to cover the hull of a ship that size. They brought livestock, like cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats, as well as chickens, and enough silage to last them a month.”

“I’d estimate the boat was at least three hundred feet long, for all of that.”

“The computer agrees. It came up with three hundred and eighteen feet, with a beam of forty-three feet.

She probably would have had three decks, with the animals on the bottom, supplies in the middle, and the villagers on top.”

“What about propulsion?”

“Sails.”

Cabrillo held up a hand. “Sails didn’t appear until two thousand years after the period we’re talking about.”

Eric scrolled down on the laptop sitting in front of him on the conference-room table. “Here’s a direct translation: ‘From two stout poles anchored to the deck a sheet of animal skins was stretched to catch the wind.’ ” He looked up. “Sounds like a sail to me.”

“I’ll be damned. Keep going.”

“The water eventually rose high enough to float the boat, and they started off. It’s kind of ironic, because they must have started their journey not long before the water level stabilized. Otherwise, they never would have made it out of the Black Sea. Anyway, they stayed at sea much longer than a month. In the places where they tried to land, they either couldn’t find freshwater or they were attacked by people already living there.

“After five lunar months, countless storms, and the loss of twenty people, the boat finally grounded, and no amount of work could get it free.”

“Where?”

“The area is described as ‘a world of rock and ice.’ ” Julia leaned forward to catch Juan’s eye. “This is where Eric and I started using some deductive reasoning.”

“Okay. Where?”

“Northern Norway.”

“Why Norway?”

Eric replied, “You found the tablets in a facility that Imperial Japan’s Unit 731 used to perfect biological weapons. The Japanese were very keen on this kind of research, unlike a certain ally that preferred chemical agents to do their mass killings.”

“You mean the Nazis?”

“Who else would have given the tablets to them?”

Juan rubbed his eyes. “Hold it. I’m missing something here. Why would Unit 731 want some old writings about an ancient boat?”

“The disease,” Julia said. “The one that broke out on the boat after they landed. The scribe who wrote the tablets described it in detail. As best I can tell, it was an airborne hemorrhagic fever with a contagion level equal to influenza. It killed half their population before burning itself out. What’s really interesting is, only a small handful of the survivors could bear children after they recovered. A few managed to breed with the indigenous people living nearby, bear but the virus had made most of them sterile.”

“If the Japanese were looking for a way to pacify mainland China,” Eric said, “they would definitely be interested in a disease like this. Julia and I think that, aside from the tablets, the Germans also gave them any mummified bodies they found when they discovered the boat.”

“Ah. I get it now. If the Japanese got the tablets from the Germans, you’re guessing they found them in Norway, because Germany occupied Norway, starting in 1940.”

“Right. A land of rock and ice could describe Iceland, or parts of Greenland, but the Germans never took those countries. Finland fell to the Russians, and Sweden remained neutral throughout the war. We guessed Norway, most likely a fjord on the northern coast, which is sparsely populated and largely unexplored.”

“Wait. Julia, out on deck you said Jannike was immune to this disease?”

“The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t come up with a definitive answer for why she wasn’t affected when everyone else on the Golden Dawnhad died. The disease mentioned on the tablets is airborne, and if it is the basis of whatever new virus the Responsivists have developed then she still would have breathed some contaminated air even if she was on supplemental oxygen.

“However, if an ancestor of hers had been exposed to the virus and survived, there’s a good chance she has the antibodies coded into her DNA. The fact that she comes from a small town in northern Norway only bolsters our hypothesis.”

“Can you test for it?” Juan asked.

“Sure, if I had a sample of the virus.”

Cabrillo tried to stifle a yawn. “Sorry. I need sleep. I think we’re still missing another piece of the puzzle.

Let’s assume that the Germans discovered the boat and translated the tablets. They learn about this horrible disease, and it’s something they aren’t interested in, but their Japanese allies are, so the Germans ship it to Japan, or, more precisely, to an island in the Philippines, where Unit 731 is conducting its experiments. We don’t know if they managed to perfect it, but we can assume they didn’t, since a disease like this has never been mentioned in the history books.” Julia and Eric nodded.

“How do we make the jump to the Responsivists getting their hands on it? If the Japanese failed sixty years ago, how did Severance and his gang succeed?”

“We thought about that,” Eric admitted, “but couldn’t come up with any sort of link, other than the fact that their founder, Lydell Cooper, was a leading disease researcher. They used the same facility that the Japanese had used during the war, so it’s obvious they knew about their work on the virus. We just don’t know how.”

“The next question is, why?” Juan said. “They used the virus or a derivative to kill everyone aboard the Golden Dawn. What do they plan to do with it now?” He overrode whatever answer Eric was going to give and added, “I know they see overpopulation as the worst crisis facing the planet, but unleashing a virus that kills off humanity, or even a majority of it, would leave the world in such a state of chaos that civilization would never recover. This thing is a doomsday weapon.”

“What if they don’t care?” Eric said. “What I mean is, what if they want civilization to collapse? I’ve read up on these people. They’re not rational. Nowhere in their literature do they espouse going back to the Dark Ages, but it could be that that’s exactly what they want—the end of industrialization and the return to humanity’s agrarian roots.”

“Why attack cruise ships?” Juan asked. “Why not just release the virus in every major city in the world and be done with it?”

Eric made to reply and then closed his mouth. He had no answer.

Juan pressed himself up from the table. “Listen, guys. I really appreciate all the work you’ve done, and I know this will help figure out the Responsivists’ end gambit, but if I don’t hit the rack I am going to fall asleep right here. Have you briefed Eddie about all of this?”

“Sure have,” Julia said.

“Okay, ask him to call Overholt and tell him the entire story. At this point, I don’t know what he can do, but I want the CIA in the loop. Are Mark and Linda scheduled to report in anytime soon?” Eric said, “They didn’t bring a satellite phone, so they have to use the Golden Sky’s ship-to-shore telephone. Linda said they would check in again”—he looked at his watch—“in another three hours.”

“You tell Linda that I want the two of them off that ship even if they have to steal a lifeboat or jump off the damned rail.”

“Yes, sir.”

IT SEEMED THAT JUAN had just put his head on his pillow when the phone rang.

“Cabrillo.” His tongue was cemented to his mouth, and the weak twilight streaming through the curtains was like the glare of an arc lamp.

“Chairman, it’s Hali. I think you had better come down to the Op Center to see this.”

“What is it?” He swung his legs off the bed, cradling the phone to his ear with his neck and shoulder so he could reach for his prosthesis.

“I think we’re being hailed on the ELF band.”

“Isn’t that what our Navy uses to talk to submarines?”

“Not anymore. The two transmitters they operated were dismantled a couple of years ago. Besides, they transmitted on seventy-six hertz. This is coming in at one hundred and fifteen.”

“What’s the source?” Juan tugged on a pair of pants.

“We haven’t received enough to pinpoint a location, and because of the nature of Extremely Low Frequency transmission we may never know.”

“Okay, you’ve got my interest. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Juan threw on the rest of his clothes, not bothering with socks, and spent a moment brushing his teeth. According to his watch, he’d been asleep for three hours. It had felt like three minutes.

Entering the Op Center always gave Cabrillo a charge. It was the sleek design, the quiet hum of the computers, and the thought of all the power that could be controlled from this room, not just the Oregon

’s revolutionary engines but also the awesome fire-power the vessel could unleash at a moment’s notice.

Hali had a steaming mug of coffee ready for him.

Cabrillo grunted his thanks and took a sip. “Better,” he said, setting the cup next to Kasim’s monitor.

“Tell me what you’ve got.”

“As you know, the computer automatically scans every frequency in the radio spectrum. When it detected something transmitting at the ELF level, it paused to record the signal, and when it recognized the beginning of the word it alerted me. When I got here, this is what has been sent so far.” He tilted his flat panel so Cabrillo could see what was on the screen: OREGON.

“That’s it?” Juan didn’t try to hide his disappointment.

“ELF waves are incredibly long, upward of twenty-two hundred miles. It’s their length that lets them circle the globe and penetrate deep into the ocean. Basically, an ELF transmitter turns the earth into a giant antenna. The downside is, it takes a long time to send anything, and submarines can’t reply because they can’t carry a transmitter of their own. That’s why the Navy abandoned the whole system. It was just too inefficient.”

“Remind me why a sub can’t carry an ELF system.”

“The antenna alone is roughly thirty miles long. And even though it’s only an eight-watt signal, it would use more electricity than a sub’s reactor has the surplus capacity for. But the biggest reason is, a transmitter has to be located in an area with extremely low ground conductivity in order to avoid the absorption of the radio waves. There are only a handful of places in the world where you can send in the ELF band and a submarine definitely isn’t one of them.

“Going back through the logs,” Hali continued, “I found that there was another ELF transmission on this same frequency at ten o’clock last night. It consisted of only a random jumble of ones and zeros. I have the mainframe trying to crack it, if it is a code, but I’m not optimistic.” The letter I appeared on Hali’s screen, followed sixty seconds later by the letter T.

“This is worse than pulling teeth,” Juan remarked. “Besides us, who else has built ELF antennas?”

“Just the Soviets. Their only use is to contact submarines in deep water and over great distances. There’s no other reason to set one up.”

“So if ours were dismantled, then it has to be the Russians. I wonder if this has something to do with us spying on Kerikov.”

“We’ll know in a minute.” Hali then amended: “Well, ten or fifteen.” And so they waited, as a letter a minute appeared on the computer. So far, they had OREGON ITSMA.

When the next letter came through, Juan stared at it for a second before letting out a triumphant whoop.

It was the letter x.

“What is it?” Hali asked.

"It’s Max. That crafty SOB. He’s found a way to contact us on the ELF band.” Hali suddenly cursed. He opened another window on his computer and retrieved the archive of the wiretap they had installed in Gil Martell’s office. “Why didn’t I see this right away,” he mused aloud, angry at himself. On his screen popped:

I DON’T . . . (1:13) YES . . . (3:57) ’BOUT DAWN AND SKY ... (1:17) (ACT)IVATE THE EEL

LEF . . . (:24) KEY . . . (1:12) TOMORR(OW) . . . (3:38) THAT WON’T BE . . . (:43) A MIN(UTE)

. . . (6:50) . . . BYE.(1:12)

“What am I not seeing?” Juan asked.

“The fourth word cluster. Activate the ‘eel lef.’ It’s not ‘eel lef,’ it’s ELF. Activate the ELF. The Responsivists have their own ELF transmitter.”

“What the heck for?” Juan asked before giving the answer. “If they’re releasing toxins on cruise ships, an ELF transmitter would allow you to synchronize an attack all over the planet.” Cabrillo was burning with impatience at how slowly Max’s message was coming through, but he was still fighting a sleep debt he could barely pay the interest on. “Hali, this is taking forever. I’m going back to my cabin. Wake me when you have everything, and I want you to pinpoint their transmission site. This takes precedence over everything else. Get Eric to help with whatever you need.” He turned to the computer, as if Max Hanley could hear him. “I don’t know how you’re pulling this off, but you, my friend, are a piece of work.”

CHAPTER 28

IT HAD BEEN THE OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK AND IT had worked flawlessly.

Max had discovered the cliff only moments after escaping the underground bunker. He’d hopped off the ATV and gunned the throttle, sending it over the edge. It had been too dark to see how it landed, but he knew Kovac would scour the countryside, looking for his escaped prisoner, and the little machine would be found.

He had then returned to the bunker’s entrance and, amid the confusion of search teams heading out and medical staff attending to the injured mechanics, Max had brazenly walked right back in. Returning to the scene of the crime, so to speak, was the last thing Kovac would ever expect, and the facility was the last place he would think to search.

There were more than enough hiding places within the subterranean complex. He felt more confident exploring dressed as a mechanic, so he opened some of the doors he’d passed during his earlier exit.

Many of the rooms he found were laid out like dormitories, with countless bunks with cloth curtains for privacy and large locker-room-style showers. Max estimated they could house several hundred people here, although only a fraction of that number were in residence at the time. One room was a massive cafeteria. Checking the stoves’ burners, he could tell nothing had ever been used. The walk-in freezers were packed with food, and he found a storage area that was stacked from floor to ceiling with pallets of bottled water and canned goods.

He figured that the facility was like a Cold War-era fallout shelter. It appeared to be fully self-sufficient, with enough food, water, electricity, and space for people to ride out a disaster in comfort, if not style.

The fact that it was new, and built by the Responsivists, led him to believe that they would be causing the disaster. He thought back to the horror Juan and his team had discovered aboard the Golden Dawnand shuddered.

He helped himself to two bottles of water and a large can of pears, eating with his hand, so that the sweet syrup dripped down his battered chin. He also wound cling wrap around his torso, even though he knew modern medical practice was to leave cracked ribs unbound. The pressure of the plastic wrap eased a great deal of the pain, and the food and water gave him a modicum of strength.

Max stuffed a couple more waters into the deep pockets of his overalls and continued his exploration. He passed a few people in the meandering corridors. They looked askance at his injuries, then nodded with sympathy when he explained he had been attacked by the escaped prisoner.

He was one level above where they had held him in the cell when he discovered that not all the Responsivists would ride out Armageddon in a concrete maze. There was a set of double doors with a security keypad. The electronics were in the process of being dismantled, and tools lay on the floor next to a small stool. It looked like the repairman had dashed off to retrieve something he’d forgotten.

Max wasted no time in entering the secured area. The floors were covered in a thick green carpet and the walls were covered in sheetrock and wainscoting. The paint gave off a slightly acrid smell that told him it had been recently applied. The lighting was still fluorescent, but the fixtures were of a better quality, and there were even occasional sconces. The framed artwork hanging on the walls was gaily colored but bland. For some reason, it reminded him of the law office of one of his divorce attorneys. It was institutional, but a higher quality of institutional. The dining facility was more like an upscale restaurant, with flat-panel monitors on the walls in place of real windows. The chairs were heavy and covered in soft leather, and the top of the bar was a plank of solid mahogany.

He found a cubicle farm for a small army of secretaries outside a suite of offices and a communications center that would have made Hali Kasim drool. He entered the center and started looking for a phone or radio, but the system was unlike anything he had ever seen. Feeling exposed in the small room, he decided he would try again later and continued his exploration.

Set away from the functional side of what Max had dubbed “the executive wing” were bedrooms appointed like a five-star hotel, right down to the minibars. There weren’t any Gideon Bibles in the bedside tables but rather copies of Lydell Cooper’s book, We’re Breeding Ourselves to Death.There were enough rooms for forty people or couples, depending on the sleeping arrangements. Max guessed that this would be for the very cream of the Responsivist movement, the leaders, board of directors, and wealthiest believers. At the very farthest reaches of the executive wing was a suite of rooms that had to belong to Thom Severance and his wife. They were, by far, the most luxurious. The bathroom alone was the size of a studio apartment, and the tub looked big enough to need a lifeguard.

Max spent the night on Severance’s bed, and, in the morning, brushed his teeth with what would be Severance’s toothbrush, once he arrived. To Hanley’s utter shock, he heard voices from the living room while he was rinsing. He recognized Zelimir Kovac’s thick accent and precise diction, and heard a second, smoother voice he assumed to be that of Thom Severance and a third voice that gave his heart another jolt. It was Dr. Adam Jenner, the deprogrammer.

Max listened to their conversation in stunned horror. Each revelation seemed more shocking than the next. Jenner was really Lydell Cooper. There was a simple genius to the ruse, one that Max couldn’t help but grudgingly admire. Their dedication to their cause was deeper than anyone had ever believed. This really was a religion, with prophets and martyrs, and a body of faithful willing to do anything for their beliefs.

Severance said something about Gil Martell’s suicide that Max took to mean Kovac had killed him. And then Max heard the terrifying truth about their plans to release an engineered virus on the world and sterilize half of humanity.

There was no admiration this time, but Max understood the genius of this plan as well. Civilization would never survive a coordinated global bioattack that killed half its victims, but what they intended was survivable. Mankind would be set back a generation but would emerge more prosperous in the end. He had read up on Cooper’s movement when his ex had told him their son had joined. Cooper had written that the Dark Ages never would have ended if not for the plague that wiped out half of Europe and ushered in a new era of prosperity.

He was pretty sure it wasn’t as simple as that, but he wondered how today’s world of twenty-four-hour information and high-speed travel would react. Fifty years after the pandemic, populations would have shifted to fill the gaps left by the reduced number of people, and the world very well might be a better place.

But it was no place Max wanted to be a part of. In his mind, Cooper, Severance, and Kovac had no more right to decide what was best for humanity than Larry, Moe, and Curly.

He wanted to rush from the bathroom and take them on single-handedly. He thought he might get five, maybe six, paces before Kovac gunned him down. By force of will alone, Max made his body relax.

There would be another opportunity. He would just need to be patient.

After the three men had left, Max slunk out of the suite and holed up in the closet of one of the unused hotel-style rooms, reasonably confident that he was safe for the time being. As much as his brain wanted to focus on the hell Severance and his band were about to unleash, Max concentrated on how they were going to pull it off.

They had mentioned a transmitter. They were going to coordinate the release of the virus by transmitting some sort of activation code. Max saw the flaw immediately. An aerial broadcast, even on shortwave, couldn’t encompass the entire world with any measure of reliability. There were too many variables, from atmospheric conditions to sunspot activity, that could cause a signal failure.

Not shortwave, he thought.

He recalled the tunnel at the subbasement level and the coils of thick copper wire, as well as the excess power-generating capacity, the Responsivists had installed.

“It’s a bloody ELF antenna,” he whispered, and knew exactly how he was going to warn Juan.

He waited until after Kovac had run their test before sneaking into what he had first thought was the communications room. It took him nearly twenty nerve-racking minutes to figure out how to operate the ELF transmitter. He fine-tuned the frequency and sent his message: OREGON ITS MAX BUG ATTACK 50 CRUISE SHIPS NOT KILL WORSE ELF IS KEY

NUKE IT >72 HRS

He would have loved to add the location of the transmitter, but he had no idea where he was. He would just have to trust that Hali would be able to trace back the source of the signal. He had also used the word nukedeliberately because he felt this was an impregnable bunker and could only hope Juan would figure out a way to destroy it.

He returned to his hidey-hole in the closet, after helping himself to a couple of protein bars and a beer from the minibar. He was certain that with the day of their attack fast approaching, Severance would have Kovac station guards near the exit, so Max knew he wouldn’t be leaving that way. Wth no intention of sacrificing himself, he had less than three days to find another way out.

THOM SEVERANCE WAS in his office, chatting with Lydell Cooper, when someone knocked. He looked up from his desk and hastily whipped off the glasses he had been recently forced to use. Zelimir Kovac stood just inside his door. The normally dour Serb looked downright morose. Whatever had happened, Severance knew it couldn’t be good.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“It was just on the news, a death on a cruise ship in Istanbul. It was one of our people on the Golden Sky, Zach Raymond.”

“He was heading the cell we put aboard her, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do we have any details?” Cooper asked

“Apparently, he fell from the balcony of the ship’s atrium and was killed instantly.”

“So it was an accident?”

“That’s what the news is saying, but I don’t believe it. It is too much of a coincidence that our team leader died.”

“You think that whoever was behind Kyle Hanley’s abduction has people on the Golden Sky?” Severance asked with obvious sarcasm. “Don’t be ridiculous. There is no way that anyone could make that connection.”

“There’s more. I just received word from our team in the Philippines. They said that two men arrived at the abandoned virus factory and discovered the old Japanese catacombs. The two men were buried inside following an explosion, but the very fact that they were there is troubling.” Severance steepled his fingers under his cosmetically cleft chin. “If someone did a little digging, they would know we had a facility in the Philippines. I don’t know how they knew about the abandoned Japanese tunnel system. Maybe they did more than a little digging. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because they’re dead, and we left nothing behind that could incriminate us.”