Текст книги "The Judas Strain"

Автор книги: James Rollins

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

He flipped through the pages, looking for the right one. When he found it, he leaned closer, tracing with a finger. Could this be right? He needed to investigate it more.

He checked his watch.

With less than a half hour left, do I have enough time?

Before he could find out, a rattle of automatic fire echoed to them, sounding like firecrackers. Pop, pop, pop, pop…

Gray leaped up.

God, no…had Nasser found them?

He crossed to the chapel opening and stared out into the dark halls.

“Get everything together,” he urged without turning. “Now!”

Backlit by the filtering sunlight, Gray made out the slim shape of a figure running toward him. Bare feet slapped stone – then a voice called out, balanced between urgency and stealth.

“Hurry!”

It was Fee’az.

The boy did not slow and ran straight at them.

Farther out, coming from the direction of the castle courtyard, angry shouts in Farsi echoed.

Gray caught the thin boy’s shoulder as he flew up to them, breathless.

“Hurry. Smugglers.”

Fee’az did not wait and rebounded back into the outer hall and headed in the opposite direction, paralleling the rear of the castle.

Gray turned to the others. “Grab what you have…leave the rest!”

They set off after Fee’az.

The boy waited halfway down the hall, then fled onward.

Fee’az continued a running commentary. Apparently even the threat of smugglers did not stifle his tongue. “You take so long. With your prayers. I sleep. Under palms.” He waved back in the general direction of the courtyard. “They not see me. Almost step on me. I wake and run. They shoot. Bang, bang. But I am fast on the legs.”

Proving it, he flew through the back rooms and halls.

Behind them, shouts changed in timbre, indicating the raiding party had entered the castle.

Fee’az led them to crude stairs leading down. “This way.”

They reached a narrow, low tunnel, barely taller than a crawlway. It shot off to the south. Fee’az scurried ahead.

After fifty steps, it ended at an old rusted iron grate. The bars had long been sawed away, leaving only stumps. They pushed through and out into the castle’s silted-up moat. Crumbled stone walls marked the boundary.

Gray glanced behind him. The crawlway must have been the castle’s old sewer line.

Waving them to stay low, Fee’az led them along the moat, toward the eastern bay. Shouts still echoed from the castle. The smugglers had not yet realized the mice had fled.

Reaching the water, Gray saw the plane still waited, unmolested.

Fee’az explained, “Dirty smugglers. Never steal plane. They pinch little.” He demonstrated by holding his fingers apart, almost touching, then shrugged. “Sometime kill. Throw bodies to sharks. But never take something so big. Government will send bigger planes, bigger guns.”

So not worth the risk.

Still, erring on the side of caution, they used oars to silently paddle the boy’s boat out to the waiting seaplane. Fee’az waved them on board.

“Come again! Come again!” he said, formally shaking each hand.

Gray felt obligated to give him some bonus for pulling their asses out of the fire. He reached to his pack, fished inside, and handed him the princess’s golden headpiece.

The boy’s eyes widened, holding the treasure with both hands – then pushed it back toward Gray. “I can no take.”

Gray folded his fingers over it. “It will cost you only a promise.”

Fee’az glanced up to him.

“There are two bodies, two skeletons, in the castle. Under the room of crosses.” He pointed to the castle, then out to the distant hills. “Take them away, dig a deep hole, and bury them. Together.”

He smiled, unsure if Gray was joking.

“Will you promise?”

He nodded his head. “I will get my brothers and uncles to help.”

Gray pushed the golden headpiece toward him. “It is yours.”

“Thank you, sir.” He shook Gray’s hand and said with all the solemnity of a blessing, “Come again.”

Gray climbed into the plane.

Minutes later they were airborne, shooting up out of the bay and headed back toward the international airport.

Gray returned to the rear seat, joining Vigor.

“You gave the boy the princess’s headpiece?” the monsignor said, staring down at the boy’s retreating skiff.

“To bury Marco and Kokejin.”

Vigor turned to face him. “But such a discovery. History—”

“Marco has done enough for history. It was his last wish to be buried in peace with the woman he loved. I think we owe him that much. And besides, we don’t need the headpiece.”

Vigor stared at Gray, one eye narrowed, plainly sizing him up, judging his generosity. “But you thought the headpiece might hold a clue. That’s why you took it.” The monsignor’s eyes widened and his voice raised. “Dear Lord, Gray, you actually solved the angelic code.”

Gray pulled his notebook out. “Not quite. Almost.”

“How?”

Seichan overheard their discussion and came back to join them, standing between the seats. Kowalski twisted around, peering over the seat back.

Gray answered the monsignor. “I solved it by throwing out all our old suppositions. We kept looking for a letter-substitution code.”

“Like the inscription in the Vatican spelling out HAGIA.”

“I think that was done to purposefully mislead. The big mystery on the obelisk is nota letter-substitution puzzle.”

“Show us,” Seichan said.

“In a moment.” Gray checked his watch. Eight minutes left. “I still have part of the puzzle to figure out. The three keys. Keys organized in a certain order.”

He opened his notebook and tapped the three angelic symbols.

Gray continued, “With the obelisk’s code always in plain sight, the keys only served one purpose. To reveal the correct way to read the code. The obelisk has four sides. But on which side do you start? In which direction do you read it?”

Gray flipped his notebook open and found the original page of script supplied by Seichan. “For the gold-inscribed symbols to be so important, they must be written somewhere on the obelisk. And so they are.”

Gray circled them.

“This sequence only appears once. It’s unique. Notice how it wraps from one of the obelisk’s surfaces to the next. It’s delineating where to begin reading and in which direction.”

He added an arrow.

“So you must reorder the sequence to match the keys.” He flipped the notebook pages, searching through the eight variations that he and Vigor had mapped out earlier. He found the right one and circled the key symbols. “This is the proper way the map must be laid out to be read correctly.”

Seichan leaned closer. “What map are you talking about?”

“This is what I noticed back at the chapel,” he said. “Watch.”

He took a pencil and began poking holes through the page and marking the next blank page.

“What are you doing?” Vigor asked.

Gray explained, “Notice how some of the diacritical marks – those small circles in the angelic script – are darkened and others are not. We know from the second key how that symbol’s black diacritical mark ended up being a marker for the Portuguese castle. So the blackened circles on the obelisk’s code must be markers, too. But markers to what? If you poke out each dark circle onto a fresh page, stripping all else away, you get this.”

“Well, that sure helped,” Kowalski said sarcastically.

Gray rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin, concentrating. “Something’s here. I can sense it.”

“Maybe you’re supposed to connect the dots,” Kowalski said with no less sarcasm. “Maybe it’ll form a big flashing arrow spelling out go the fuck here.”

Seichan frowned. “And maybe it’s time for you to shut the hell up.”

Gray did not need their bickering. Not now. Kowalski was fine as a getaway driver, good in a firefight, but Gray needed sage advice, not kindergarten suggestions, like connect the dots.

Then he saw it.

“Oh my God!” Gray sat up, fumbled his pencil, and grasped it more firmly. “Kowalski is right!”

“I am?”

“He is…?” Seichan responded.

Gray turned to Vigor, clutching his forearm. “The first clue! In the Tower of Winds.”

Vigor frowned – then his eyes widened. “Which holds the Vatican’s astronomical observatory…where Galileo proved the earth moved around the sun!” Vigor tapped the sheet. “These are stars!”

Gray took his pencil. He had been staring hard at the sheet and recognized a familiar pattern. “This is a constellation.” He drew it in.

Vigor recognized it, too. “That’s the constellation for Draco, the dragon.”

Seichan cocked her head as she stared down. “Are you saying it’s a navigational star map?”

“It looks that way.” Gray scratched his head with his pencil’s eraser. “But how does one constellation tell us where to go?”

No one answered.

“It can’t,” he finally conceded.

Gray’s heart pounded in his throat. They were running out of time. Had he just taken them down the wrong path?

Vigor sat back. “Wait,” he mumbled. “Remember Marco’s story. The last stanza. Marco said he drew a map ofthe city, not a map tothe city.”

“And?” Gray asked.

Vigor took the paper, spun it around. “This can’t be stars. It has to be the layoutof the City of the Dead. That’s what Marco’s text stated. Possibly the Vatican made the same mistake we just did. They misinterpreted Marco’s map in the same manner. They also thought it was a navigational star map.”

Gray shook his head. “That’s a rather strange coincidence that a city should be laid out in the exact pattern of the Draco constellation. If I’m not mistaken, even the stars outside the dragon line mark the placement of real stars.”

Vigor nodded. “But remember, from my study of ancient civilizations…from the Egyptians through Mesoamerica, many civilizations built their monuments and cities patterned after the stars, made to mimic them.”

Gray remembered a similar lesson. “Like the three Egyptian pyramids are supposed to represent the stars of Orion’s belt.”

“Exactly! Somewhere in Southeast Asia is a city patterned after the Draco constellation.”

Seichan suddenly swung around. “Choi mai!”she swore under her breath. “I remember something…something I heard about…some ruins in Cambodia. My family has roots in the region. Vietnam and Cambodia.”

Seichan rushed to her pack, pawed through it, and pulled out her laptop. “There’s an encyclopedia program on here.”

Seichan squatted down between the knees of Vigor and Gray. She called up the program and typed rapidly. She double-clicked on an icon and a digital map filled the screen.

“This is the temple complex of Angkor, built by the Khmer people of Cambodia in the ninth century.”

“Notice the layout of the temples,” Seichan said, “where each one lies. I had heard stories of how these ruins were supposedly laid out in a starlike grid.”

With his finger Gray drew a line connecting the temples in a pattern and tapped the remaining temples. He held up the first star map and placed it next to the open laptop.

“They’re an exact match,” Vigor said, awed. “Marco’s City of the Dead. It’s the ancient city of Angkor Wat.”

Gray leaned down and hugged Seichan’s shoulders. She tensed, but didn’t pull away. Gray owed everyone a debt of gratitude, even Kowalski, whose simplistic overview had broken the way to the solution.

Gray checked his watch.

Not a minute to spare.

He held out his hand toward Vigor. “Your phone. It’s time to make a deal.”

Vigor passed him the cell phone and battery.

Gray snapped the battery in place, praying for some measure of good fortune. He dialed Nasser’s number, supplied by Seichan. Vigor reached over and gripped Gray’s hand, offering support.

The phone rang once and was picked up.

“Commander Pierce,” a cold and furious voice answered.

Gray took a steadying breath, struggling not to lash out. He needed to be deliberate and firm.

“My plane is about to land,” Nasser continued, not even waiting for acknowledgment. “For your treachery, I will allow you to decide which of your parents will die first, your mother or your father. I will make you listen to their screams. And that parent, I promise, will be the luckier of the two.”

Despite the threat Gray took some solace. If Nasser wasn’t lying, both of his parents were still alive.

Taking comfort in that, Gray kept his voice even, his jaw muscles aching with the restraint. “I will offer you a trade for their lives.”

“There is nothing you can offer,” Nasser barked back.

“Even if I told you that I’d solved the obelisk’s angelic code?”

Dead air answered him.

Gray continued. “Nasser, I know where Marco’s City of the Dead lies.” Fearing even this might not be enough to sway the bastard, Gray spoke the next words slowly, so there was no misunderstanding. “And I know how to cure the Judas Strain.”

Vigor turned to him, startled.

Silence continued on the phone.

Gray waited. He stared at the digital map of Angkor Wat on the laptop. He sensed that the two arms of the Guild operation – the one following the scientific trail, the other following the historical – were about to slam together.

But who would be crushed between them?

Nasser finally answered, his voice a trembling rage.

“What do you want?”

OUTBREAK

13
Witch Queen

JULY 7, MIDNIGHT

Island of Pusat

The drums pounded louder than the rumbles of thunder overhead. Lightning spattered, flashing the jungle into stark greens and blacks, limned in silver by the reflection off the wet leaves.

Bare-chested, Monk pulled Susan by the hand up a steep turn in the jungle path. They’d been following the trail for the past two hours in the dark, sometimes waiting for lightning to show them where to step next. Rain continued to pour through the canopy. The switchbacked trail had become a running stream. But the remainder of the jungle was a dense tangle of grappling vines, heavy leaves, thorny bushes, root-choked trunks, and sopping mud.

So they kept to the trail, heading up, always up.

Ryder climbed behind them. He had their group’s one pistol. A 9mm Sig Sauer P228 with a Teflon finish. Unfortunately he had no spare magazines. Only the thirteen rounds already in the gun.

Not good.

Monk knew that once the storm broke, the jungle would be scoured by Rakao’s men. This island was their base of operation, giving them the home-field advantage. Monk did not delude himself into thinking he could escape being tracked and captured.

He glanced back through a break in the jungle. They were about three hundred feet up. The giant cruise ship sat in the center of the lake, a quarter mile out. Somewhere on board was his partner, pulled alive from the black waters, out of the grip of some nasty calamari.

But was she still alive?

Until he knew for sure, Monk would not give up hope.

Not for Lisa, not for himself.

To that end, Monk needed allies.

Drums continued their perpetual beating, louder and more urgent, as if striving to drive the typhoon away. They had climbed high enough that each pound of leather drum now reverberated against his rib cage, down to the bone.

Monk pushed through a drape of branches, waterlogged and drooping low. He spotted a glow ahead, flickering.

Firelight.

He took another two steps and stopped.

Only now did he realize they weren’t alone. To either side of the path, sentinels stood, half hidden by the dense foliage, but plainly in the open, wanting to be noted. Men stood, bare-chested, wearing wide grass hats tied to their heads. Their faces had been painted with oil and ash, turning their countenances pitch-black. Polished white boar tusks and yellowed rib bones pierced noses. Brilliant feathers and snail shells were threaded around upper arms.

With a shout, Ryder lunged forward, his pistol raised.

The sentinels were unimpressed.

Monk shoved down Ryder’s arm and stepped forward, holding up his hands, palms forward. “Don’t spook the natives,” he whispered to Ryder.

One tribesman shifted onto the trail. He wore a breastplate of bone braided together by leather. His waist was circled by a kilt of long feathers. His legs and feet were bare, painted with grease and ash, too. He carried a sharpened shoulder blade of some animal.

At least Monk hoped it was an animal.

Monk heard a rustle behind him, knowing their back trail was already being closed off. Drums pounded ahead. The firelight spat momentarily brighter.

The man on the path turned and led the way toward the glow.

“Looks like we’re invited to the party,” Monk said, putting his arm around Susan.

Ryder followed, pistol in hand.

If things went awry, they might need the billionaire’s remaining thirteen rounds to blast their way to freedom. But for now, Monk knew their best bet was to cooperate.

The path ended at a cliff face in the volcanic rock. A natural coved amphitheater had been carved out of the reddish-black rock, roofed over with thick palm thatching. The downpour drained in a sheet of rain off the roof ’s front edge, creating a watery curtain.

Beyond the flow, lit by a massive bonfire within, Monk spotted lines of drummers along both walls, working hard, pounding away. Two massive drums, as wide as his outstretched arms, hung from the rock walls and were struck with bone hammers. Each stroke shook the thin waterfall that cascaded from the thatched roof to the rock floor.

They were led forward.

A single boar rooted through the open space in front and squealed back from the strangers’ approach. More pigs huddled under an overhang, squeezed tight together, rump to rump.

Monk led Susan through the sheet of water and under the large overhang. He shivered as the rain cascaded over his bare chest. The heat of the fire inside was welcome, but the smoke choked and stung, doing its best to exit a narrow flue in the thatching.

Around the fire ahead, a crowd had gathered, some standing, some squatted. Monk estimated over a hundred. Men, bare-breasted women. But cave openings lined the walls. More faces peered out. A few naked children stood staring, wide-eyed. One cradled a piebald piglet.

At some signal, the drums suddenly stopped with one resounding note. The quiet intimidated.

In that sudden silence, a voice called out.

“Monk!”

Startled, he turned. A thin figure stood pressed up against the bamboo bars of a cage built into a back corner. He wore a torn shirt and a pair of muddy white briefs.

“Jessie?”

The young nurse was still alive!

But before they could continue their tearful and heartfelt reunion, a towering figure stepped forward, though for the tribe, toweringwas about five-foot-nothing. The old graybeard looked like someone had sold him a skin suit two sizes too large. He was greased and daubed in ash, too. He wore some sort of twisted gourd over his privates and a shock of purpled feathers in his hair, sticking straight up, as if startled. And nothing else.

Monk recognized that this was the tribe’s leader.

It was time to perform, to dance for his supper – or rather, to dance not to becomesupper.

Monk lifted his arm toward the elder. “Boogla-boogla rah!”he intoned solemnly, then tensed his forearm and reached his other hand to pull the toggle at his wrist.

Freed from its electromagnetic contacts, his prosthetic hand dropped to the muddy volcanic stone.

A gasp arose from the crowd.

The leader fell back a step, almost into the fire.

Monk lowered his arm, staring down at his disembodied hand.

Besides looking authentically fleshy, the prosthetic was a marvel of DARPA engineering, incorporating direct peripheral nerve control through its titanium wrist contact points. It also was bioengineered with advanced mechanics and actuators, allowing sensory feedback and surgically precise movements.

But that was only half the story.

Monk’s stumped end of his wrist was encased in a polysynthetic cuff, surgically attached to the end of his wrist and wired into nerve bundles and muscle tendons. In actuality, it was the other half of his prosthesis. The hand might be the brawn, but the wrist cuff was definitely the brain.

With his remaining hand, he manipulated the titanium contacts on the cuff. It was the best feature of his artificial hand. Monk performed this stunt at parties all the time. So why should this be any different?

The cuff and hand were linked wirelessly, a digital radio interface.

As Monk tapped a practiced sequence on his wrist, his severed hand lifted up onto its fingers and began to dance across the rock like a five-legged spider.

This time the cannibal leader did step into the fire, searing his backside enough to yelp and leap away.

Monk sent his hand chasing after him.

By now a wide ring cleared around the party.

Ryder had drawn Susan back into the shadows of the cliff face, giving Monk the stage.

“Now that I have your attention,” Monk bellowed.

He strode toward the fire.

Guessing no one spoke English here, he had to sell it with a bravado of expression and a great pounding of his bare chest. Still, it wasn’t good enough just to scare the superstitious folk. He needed to win them over. It was time for an American-led coup of Cannibal Island.

Turning on a heel, Monk pointed back to Susan.

On his signal, she unwrapped Monk’s borrowed shirt from around her head. Ryder reached and stripped the hospital gown from her shoulders and let it fall away. Susan lifted her arms, bare-breasted like the women here.

Only she glowed in the shadows.

A hushed amazement spread through the tribespeople.

Monk gaped at Susan himself. She glowed even brighter than when he had first seen her. Significantly brighter. Her skin shone with an inner moonlight, turning her skin almost translucent.

Ryder motioned to Monk, urging him from the sideline to continue.

Rattled, Monk collected himself. He stepped to Susan, dropped to his knees, and shouted the only word he knew in the cannibals’ language, taught to him by a toothless pirate.

A name.

“RANGDA!”Monk called out, naming the cannibals’ queen of the island, mistress of the lagoon’s glowingdemons.

Glowing like Susan.

He bowed down.

“All hail the witch queen of the islands!”

1:04 A.M.

Devesh entered Lisa’s room, tapping his cane.

Sprawled in bed, hooked to an IV, Lisa knew she could not stall any longer. Earlier, as she was hauled back onto the ship from the tender dock, she had swooned in her guard’s arms, catching him by surprise and collapsing with a bone-jarring thud to the deck.

Lisa had split her lip doing so, but she’d had to make it look convincing. It hadn’t been hard. With her calf sliced open by a sword, her body torn and lacerated in hundreds of places by the clawed grip of the predatory squids, and her lungs still coarse from the near drowning, only adrenaline had kept her on her feet.

So she had collapsed, even passing out for a few breaths.

The act had her rushed up to the scientific suite, where she was treated by the ship’s doctor and one of the WHO medical staff. Her leg had been cleaned and stitched, along with the worst of her lacerations. An IV catheter was established, streaming in fluids, antibiotics, and pain relievers. She now lay in her old room, an inside cabin with no balcony or window, under guard. Beneath the thin sheet, her body was a patchwork of bandages and taped gauze.

Such care was not administered out of mercy or compassion. It was done to serve one end: to make sure she completed her promise to Devesh atop the deck.

The Judas Strain. I know what the virus is doing.

For such a revelation, Devesh was not about to lose her, especially with Susan Tunis vanished somewhere on the storm-swept island. Devesh needed Lisa. So she stretched her advantage, stalling. She had tasked Devesh with some busywork, various assignments for the head of his clinical labs.

Her justification: to test and confirm her hypothesis.

But that could stretch for only so long.

“So,” Devesh said. “Results are being compiled right now. It’s time to have our little delayed chat. If I don’t like what I hear, we’ll begin slowly reversing all your medical care. I imagine reopening your wound with pliers will persuade you to cooperate.”

Devesh turned on a heel and waved to a waiting nurse.

Lisa’s IV catheter was quickly pulled and taped over.

Lisa sat up. The room swam a bit, then steadied.

Ever the gentleman, Devesh held out a thick cotton robe with the ship’s logo. Lisa stood up, draped in a thin hospital gown, but naked underneath. She tolerated his politeness to pull on the robe and cover herself. She cinched the belt snugly.

“This way, Dr. Cummings.” Devesh crossed back to the door.

Barefoot, Lisa was led out of her cabin. Devesh headed across to the infectious-disease suite.

The door stood open. Voices could be heard.

Following Devesh inside, Lisa immediately recognized two familiar faces: the bacteriologist, Benjamin Miller, and her confidant since arriving, the Dutch toxicologist Henri Barnhardt. The two clinicians were seated on one side of a narrow table.

Lisa glanced around. The back half of the suite had been emptied of all furniture and refilled with laboratory equipment, much of it stolen from Monk’s gear: fluorescence microscopes, scintillation and auto-gamma spectrometers, carbon dioxide incubators, refrigerated centrifuges, microtiter and ELISA readers, and along one wall, a small fraction collector.

Some universities weren’t so well equipped.

Dr. Eloise Chénier, the Guild’s virologist and chief administrator of the infectious-disease lab, stood on the other side of the table, dressed in an ankle-length lab coat. In her late fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a pair of reading glasses hung on a chain around her neck, she looked like some quaint schoolmarm.

The virologist had an arm raised to a pair of computer stations behind her. Data flowed across one monitor, the other displayed a jumble of overlapping files. She was just finishing some explanation with Henri and Miller, accented heavily in French.

“We gained an excellent viral load by washing a sample of the cerebral spinal fluid through a series of phosphate buffers, then fixed it with glutaraldehyde, and pelleted it by centrifugation.”

Chénier noted their arrival and waved them to the table.

Devesh joined his colleague while Lisa found an empty stool next to Henri. Her friend placed a reassuring hand on her knee. Henri glanced at her, his expression asking, Are you okay?

She nodded, glad to be seated.

Devesh turned to Lisa. “We’ve completed all the ancillary tests you requested, Dr. Cummings. Perhaps now you can explain why?”

His accusing gaze weighed heavily on her.

Lisa took a deep breath. She had delayed for as long as possible. Her only hope for further survival was to offer the truth and pray her ingenuity proved of great enough value to overcome her earlier betrayal.

She remembered Devesh’s first lesson: Be useful.

Lisa started slowly, relating her discovery of the strange retinal glow in Susan’s eyes. But as she spoke, she read the disbelief shining already in Devesh’s expression.

Lisa turned to Henri, seeking substantiation. “Were you able to perform the fluorescent assay on the spinal fluid sample?”

“ Ja. The fluid sample did demonstrate a low fluorescence.”

Chénier agreed. “I spun the sample down. The bacterial pellet did glow. And was confirmed to be cyanobacteria.”

Miller, the bacteriologist, nodded his agreement.

Devesh’s skepticism shifted to interest. His eyes focused back to Lisa. “And from this, you determined the bacteria migrated from the brain, down the optic nerve, and colonized the fluids of the eye. So you ordered the second spinal tap.”

She nodded. “I see Dr. Pollum is not here. Was he able to finish the protein assay on the viral shell?”

Lisa had ordered this test, too. It wasn’t truly necessary, but it had promised a good couple hours of extra labor.

“One moment,” Chénier said. “I have the results here.” She turned to one of the monitors and began collapsing screens while narrating. “It might interest you to know that we were able to classify the virus from genetic assays into the Bunyavirusfamily.”

Henri noted the pinch to Lisa’s eyes and explained. “It was what we were discussing before you arrived. Bunyaviruses typically infect avian and mammalian species, causing hemorrhagic fevers, but the vector for transmission is usually arthropods. Biting flies, ticks, mosquitoes.”

He slid over a notepad.

Lisa glanced to the open pages. Henri had diagrammed the pathway of infection.

Henri tapped the center. “ Insectsare necessary to spread the disease. Bunyaviruses themselves are seldom transmissible directly from human to human.”

Lisa rubbed her temples. “Unlike the Judas Strain.” She picked up a pencil and altered the diagram. “Instead of an insectto spread the disease, it takes a bacterialcell to pass the virus from one person to another.”

Henri frowned. “Yes, but why did—?”

Gunfire blasts cut off his words. All of them jumped.

Even Devesh dropped his cane. With a muttered curse, he recovered it and headed to the door. “You all stay here.”

More blasts followed, along with guttural cries.

Lisa stood up. What was happening?

1:24 A.M.

Devesh collected two guards stationed in the science wing and hurried over to the middeck security post by the elevators. Automatic gunfire erupted in sporadic bursts, as loud as detonations in the confined space.

Shouts rang out between the blasts.

Keeping his guards ahead of him, Devesh followed more cautiously as the post came into view. Six men manned the security detail. The leader, a tall African soldier from Somalia, noted Devesh and fell back to his position.

He spoke tersely in Malay. “Sir, a dozen of the afflicted broke out of one of the back wards. They rushed our line. Attacked.”

The leader nodded to one of the guards, seated to the side, cradling a bloody arm. He had his sleeve rolled back, revealing a deep bite wound.

Devesh took a step forward and pointed absently to the wounded man. “Isolate him.”

Beyond the security post, a hallway extended toward the stern. Some doors stood open, others closed. Down the passageway, a few bodies sprawled, riddled with bullets, blood soaking into the carpet. The closest two – a naked obese woman and a shirtless teenage boy – were tangled together. Devesh noted the bubbled rashes and the blackened boils on the corpses.

He fought to control his temper, breathing heavily through his nostrils. The stern section of this level housed the most debilitated patients, making them readily available to the research team. Devesh had outlined a firm protocol when dealing with patients on this level. Such lapses would not be tolerated. Not when he was this close to success.