The Judas Strain (8 page)

He stepped away from the car and faced Gray.

“Where is it?”

Gray fixed the man with a steady stare. “Where is what?”

He sighed. “Surely she told you, or you wouldn’t be making such an effort for an enemy.” Without turning, he signaled the man who had searched Seichan. The man pressed his pistol against his father’s forehead.

“I don’t ask questions a second time. You probably don’t know that. So I’ll give you this moment of leeway.”

Gray swallowed, noting the raw fear in his father’s eyes.

“The obelisk,” Gray said. “The one you mentioned. She had it with her, but it broke when she crashed her bike at the house. She passed out before she could say anything about it. For all I know, it’s still there.”

And it might be.

He had forgotten about it in the rush to deal with Seichan.

Where
had
it gone?

The man kept his eyes fixed on Gray. He studied him with a calculating and steady gaze.

“I think you’re actually telling me the truth, Commander Pierce.”

Still, the Egyptian signaled his gunman.

The shot was deafening.

1:10
A.M.

A
MINUTE AGO
Painter had noted movement on the plasma screen to the left. The interior video cameras of the safe house were still working. He spotted Mrs. Harriet Pierce crouched behind the kitchen table.

The attackers seemed unaware she was hiding inside.

No one except Gray had known he was coming to the safe house with an extra two passengers. The van had arrived
after
Gray’s mother had gone inside. With the one guard stationed at the house immobilized, they had assumed the scene was locked down.

Painter knew it was his only advantage.

He called for a silent alarm to be raised at the house and a line opened. He watched the amber light beside the house phone blink and blink.

See the flashing light,
he willed her.

Whether it was the alarm light or the simple instinct to call for help, Harriet crept over to the kitchen phone, reached up, and pulled the receiver to her ear.

“Don’t talk,” he said quickly. “It’s Painter Crowe. Don’t let them know you are inside. I can see you. Nod if you understand.”

She nodded.

“Good. I have help coming. But I don’t know if they’ll reach you in time. The attackers must know this, too. They will be cruel and quick. I need you to be crueler. Can you do this?”

A nod.

“Very good. There should be a pistol in the drawer below the phone.”

1:11
A.M.

T
HE GUNSHOT WAS
deafening.

Deafening
.

Not a silencer like before.

Gray knew the truth the fraction of a second before the gunman holding a weapon to his father’s head fell to the side, half his skull splattering against the front quarter panel of the Thunderbird.

He knew the shooter.

His mother.

She was Texas bred, raised by an oilman who worked the same fields as Gray’s father. Though his mother constantly petitioned for gun control, she was not shy around them.

Gray had both feared and hoped for some distraction from her. He’d kept ready for it, legs braced. Before the gunman’s body even hit the ground, Gray leaped straight back. He had been watching the Asian woman’s form in the polished chrome of the rear bumper.

The loud gunshot and the sudden backward leap caught her by surprise. Gray raised his right arm and hooked her arm, the one holding the Sig Sauer. As he struck her, he smashed his boot onto the inseam of her foot and cracked his head backward.

He heard something
crunch
below and behind.

Ahead, Kowalski had already elbowed his gunman, grabbed him by the scruff, and slammed his face into the edge of the convertible’s door.

“Eat steel, jackass.”

The gunman dropped like a sack of coal.

Without a pause Gray cradled Anni’s captured fist and swung her arm toward Dr. Nasser. He squeezed the woman’s finger against the trigger. She fought. Compromised, Gray’s aim was off. His shot struck the brick wall with a ringing spark.

Still, it succeeded enough. Dr. Nasser ducked to the right, diving into the bushes that fronted the house, vanishing away.

Gray yanked the pistol from the woman’s grip and back-kicked her away from him. She stumbled but kept her feet. Bloody-nosed, she twisted around and fled toward the van, sprinting like a gazelle, oblivious of her smashed foot.

Going for more weapons.

Gray did not want an encore of
Anni Get Your Gun
.

He raised the pistol toward her, but before he could fire, a round sizzled past the tip of his nose. From the bushes.

Nasser.

Startled, Gray stumbled backward, going for shelter under the porte cochere. He fired blindly into the bushes, not knowing where the bastard hid. He backpedaled until his calves struck the rear bumper of the T-bird. He fired another two rounds toward the med van.

But Asian Anni had vanished inside.

His shots ricocheted off the van. Like the president’s med van, this one was armor-plated.

Gray yelled. “Everyone inside the car! Now!”

His mother appeared at the kitchen door, holding a smoking pistol. She had her purse over her other arm, as if she were going out for groceries.

“C’mon, Harriet,” his father said. He reached up and hauled her toward the passenger door.

Kowalski leaped headlong into the backseat. Gray feared his bulk might finish Seichan off quicker than anything Nasser planned.

Gray vaulted over into the front seat and crashed hard. He twisted the key, still in the ignition, and the hot engine roared.

The passenger door slammed. Both his parents crowded the one seat.

Gray glanced into the rearview mirror.

Anni stood braced in the opening of the van. She balanced a rocket launcher on her shoulder.

The show is
Anni Get Your Gun—
not
rocket launcher,
you bitch!

Gray shifted into gear and slammed the accelerator. Three hundred horses burned the rear tires, rubber smoking and screaming.

His father groaned from the next seat—Gray suspected more about the wear on the glossy new tires than his own safety.

The wheels finally caught a grip, and the Thunderbird leaped forward, crashing through the wooden gate to the backyard. Once through, Gray yanked the wheel hard to avoid hitting a massive hundred-year-old oak. The tires dug a half-doughnut trench across the rear lawn, then sped them deeper into the yard.

Behind them, a sonorous
whoosh
was followed by a fiery explosion.

The rocket struck the large oak, blasting it to a ruin of flaming branches and bark. Blazing debris shot high. Smoke rolled.

Without glancing back, Gray punched the accelerator.

The Thunderbird smashed through the back fence and barreled into the woodlands of Glover-Archibold Park.

But Gray knew one certainty.

The hunt was just beginning.

J
ULY
5, 12:11
P.M.

Christmas Island

B
OXERS AND BOOTS.

That’s all that stood between Monk and a sea of cannibal crabs. The feeding frenzy continued throughout the jungle, fighting, clacking, ripping. It sounded like the crackle of a forest fire.

Stripped, with his bio-suit in hand, Monk crossed back to Dr. Richard Graff. The marine researcher crouched at the edge of the jungle. He had also removed his bio-suit as instructed by Monk, wincing as he pulled the plastic fabric from his wounded shoulder. At least the marine researcher was better dressed, in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.

Monk’s nose crinkled as he stepped up to him. Out from beneath the thicker jungle canopy, the air burned, and the stench of the dead pool below was like being slapped in the face with a rotting salmon.

“Time to go,” Monk said with a scowl.

A shout echoed up from the tunnel that led down to the toxic beach. The pirates were approaching more carefully, cautious. Graff, stationed there, had been lobbing chunks of limestone down the tunnel. Moreover their pursuers didn’t know that Monk’s pistol was down to one shot. But fear and rock throwing would only hold the pirates off for so long.

For the hundredth time Monk wondered at the strange persistence of their attackers. Hunger and desperation certainly made men do stupid things. But if the pirates wanted to raid and steal the Zodiac, to get ahold of their supplies and equipment for the Indonesian black market, then nothing was now stopping them. Most of these local pirates, brutal and ruthless as they might be, operated on a smash-and-grab modus operandi.

So why this persistence? To just silence them, to cover their tracks? Or was it something more personal? Monk pictured the one masked man toppling into the waters, clipped by one of his wild shots. Or was it revenge?

Whatever the reason, the raiding party was not settling for just the spoils—they wanted blood.

Graff choked at the burning air as he straightened. “Where are we going?”

“Back to visit our friends.”

Monk led Graff into the jungle fringe. Steps away, the crimson sea of crabs chattered and clattered. If anything, their numbers had grown over the past few minutes, perhaps drawn by their voices or the fresh blood from Graff ’s seeping shoulder.

The marine researcher balked at the edge of the clearing. “There’s no way through those crabs. Those giant claws can rip through leather. I’ve seen them take off fingers.”

And they were fast.

Monk danced back as a pair of crabs, locked in mortal combat, rushed past them, sharp legs a blur, as fast as any jackrabbit.

“It’s not like we have much choice,” Monk said.

“And there’s something wrong with these crabs,” the researcher continued. “I’ve witnessed some of their aggression during migrations, but nothing of this caliber.”

“You can psychoanalyze them later.” Monk pointed to a large neighboring tree. A Tahitian chestnut. The evergreen was draped with many low branches. “Can you climb that?”

Graff clutched his wounded arm to his belly, trying to keep from moving it too much. “I’ll need help. But why? It won’t hide us from the pirates. We’ll be sitting ducks.”

“Just climb.” Monk walked him to the tree and helped him scale the first few terraces. The branches were thick and easy to grab. Graff managed well even on his own, climbing higher.

Monk dropped down, landing near a crab. It raised both pincers in threat.
No leaving the party early, buddy
. Monk kicked him back into the hordes of his brethren, then called back to Graff. “Can you see the tunnel opening?”

“I think…yes, I can.” Graff shifted in the tree. “You’re not leaving me up here, are you?”

“Just whistle when you see the pirates.”

“What are you—?”

“Just do it, for Christ’s sake!” Monk regretted the harshness of his tone. He had to remind himself that the man was not military. But Monk’s mind was stacked with worries of his own. He pictured his wife and baby girl. He was not about to lose his life to a bunch of cutthroats or a forest full of Red Lobster entrées.

Monk crossed to the jungle clearing and stepped to the edge of the churning, snapping horde. He lifted his pistol in one hand and balanced his grip with his prosthetic one. He tilted his head and breathed through his nose.

C’mon, let’s see what you got…

He heard a noise from the chestnut tree behind him. It sounded like air leaking out of a half-deflated balloon.

“They’re coming!” he heard the man whisper, tension plainly sucking the wind out of his whistle.

Monk aimed across the clearing. He had one round, one shot.

Across the forest glade a pair of air tanks rested against the foot of a boulder. Earlier, as they were stripping out of their suits, Monk had Graff pass him his bio-suit’s air tank. The portable air cartridges were lightweight, constructed of an aluminum alloy. Using the ankle holster from his pistol, Monk had quickly bound the doctor’s tank together with his own and pitched the package in an underhanded throw across to the far side of the jungle clearing. The tanks had crashed amid the crabs, crushing a pair and sending their neighbors scurrying.

Monk took a bead upon the tanks now, steadying his aim with both flesh and prosthetics.

“They’re here!” Graff moaned.

Monk squeezed the trigger.

The blast froze the image in his mind for a split second—then one of the pressurized tanks spat a brief flash of flame. The bound tanks spun and clattered, hissing and jumping. Then the second tank’s nozzle cracked and the dance became more frenzied, smashing into crabs and sweeping and bouncing.

It was enough.

In the past Monk had strolled beaches covered with crabs that—once a seabird or stranger appeared—would clear in a heartbeat, crabs diving back into their sandy burrows. It was the same here. Those crabs nearest the commotion fled, climbing over their neighbors, jarring them into a panic. Soon a trickle became a stampede. The crabs, already riled up, fled on instinct.

The sea of crabs turned their tide—toward Monk—literally becoming a surging, churning wave of claws, climbing over one another to escape.

He fled back to the chestnut tree, pincers snapping at his heels.

He leaped and scurried up into the branches. One crab latched on to his boot. He cracked the shell against the trunk. It fell away. The pincer was still snagged tight to his boot. He felt the sharp edge cutting into his heel.

Damn.

Below, the tide of crabs swept past, obeying some instinct, possibly tied to their annual migration patterns. They fled toward the sea.

Monk climbed up to join Graff. The researcher had one arm hooked around the trunk. He eyed Monk, then turned back toward the slice of open rock that lay around the mouth of the sea tunnel.

The pirates, six of them, were out of the tunnel, spread a bit, but they had ducked low with the pistol shot. Only now were they rising to their feet, unsure.

Then from the jungle, the roiling sea of crabs burst forth.

It struck the man closest to the jungle fringe. Before he could react, comprehend what he was seeing, they scrambled up his legs to the level of his thighs. He suddenly screamed, stumbling back. Then one leg gave out under him.

During combat, a fellow Green Beret had had his Achilles tendon cut by a bullet. He had dropped in the same crooked manner as the pirate.

The man fell to one arm, screaming.

He was overrun, crabs scrabbling across his writhing body. But his wails continued, buried under the mass. For a moment, he surged back up. His mask had been stripped away, along with his nose, lips, and ears. His eyes were bloody ruins. He screamed one last time and fell back under the tide.

The other pirates fled in horrified panic, back to the tunnel, vanishing away. One man was cut off from the tunnel, pinned out on a spur of rock jutting off from the sea cliff. The crabs swelled toward him.

With a final cry he turned and leaped off the cliff.

More screams echoed up from the tunnel.

Like water down a drain, the sea of crabs swirled into the mouth of the tunnel, spiraling away in a red tide of razored claws.

Monk found Graff panting heavily beside him, eyes unblinking.

He reached and touched the man. He flinched.

“We have to go. Before the crabs decide to return to their forest.”

Graff allowed himself to be led down to the forest floor. There were still hundreds of crabs down here; they moved cautiously through them.

Monk broke off a feathery branch of the chestnut tree and swept away any of the crabs that got too near.

Slowly Graff seemed to return to himself, to settle back into his own skin. “I…I want one of those crabs.”

“We’ll have a crabfeed when we get back to the ship.”

“No. For study. Somehow they survived the toxic cloud. It could be important.” The researcher’s voice steadied, in his element.

“Okay,” Monk said. “Considering we left all our samples behind, we shouldn’t return to the ship empty-handed.”

He reached down and snagged up one of the smaller crabs with his prosthetic hand, grabbing it by the back of its shell. The feisty fellow snapped its claws backward at him, straining to get him.

“Hey, no marring the merchandise, buddy. New fingers come out of my paycheck.”

Monk went to smash it against a tree trunk, but Graff waved his good arm. “No! We need it alive. Like I said before, there’s something odd about their behavior. That bears examination, too.”

Monk’s jaw tightened in irritation. “Fine, but if this bit of sushi takes a chunk out of me, you’re paying for it.”

They continued through the plateau forest, wending across the island.

After forty minutes of trekking, the forest thinned and a panoramic cliff-top view opened. The island’s main township—named simply The Settlement—spread out along the beach and port. Out in the surrounding sea, beyond Flying Fish Cove, the white castle that was the
Mistress of the Seas
floated, a cloud in a midnight-blue sky.

Home, sweet home.

Movement drew Monk’s eyes to a group of smaller boats, a dozen, rounding Rocky Point, each leaving a contrail of white wake. The group traveled in a wide V, like an attack wing of fighter jets.

A matching group appeared on the other side of the township’s port.

Even from here Monk recognized the shape and color of the crafts.

Blue speedboats, long in keel and shallow draft.

“More pirates…” Graff moaned.

Monk stared between the two converging groups, two pincers, even more deadly than any red crab. He gaped at what was trapped between them.

The
Mistress of the Seas
.

1:05
P.M.

L
ISA STARED AT
the radiograph X-ray.

The portable light box was set up on a desk in the cabin. Behind her, a figure lay sprawled on the bed, a sheet fully covering the patient.

Dead.

“It looks like tuberculosis,” she said. The radiographs of the man’s lungs were frothy with large white masses or tubercles. “Or maybe lung cancer.”

Dr. Henrick Barnhardt, the Dutch toxicologist, stood at her side, leaning a fist on the table. He had called her down here.

“
Ja,
but the patient’s wife said he’d shown no signs of respiratory distress prior to eighteen hours ago. No coughing, no expectorating, and he does not smoke. And he was only twenty-four years old.”

Lisa straightened. They were in the cabin alone. “And you’ve cultured his lungs?”

“I used a needle to aspirate some of the fluid from one of the lung masses. The content was definitely purulent. Cheesy with bacteria. Definitely a lung abscess, not cancer.”

She studied Barnhardt’s bearded face. He stood with a bit of a hunch as if his bearish size somehow embarrassed him, but it also gave him a conspiratorial posture. He had not invited Dr. Lindholm into these discussions.

“Such findings are consistent with tuberculosis,” she said.

TB was caused by a bacterium,
Mycobacterium tuberculosis,
a highly contagious germ. And while the clinical history here was definitely unusual, TB could be dormant for years, slow-growing. The man could have been exposed years ago, been a ticking time bomb—then his exposure to the toxic gas could have stressed his lungs enough to cause the disease to spread. The patient would have definitely been contagious at the end.

And neither she nor Dr. Barnhardt wore contamination suits.

Why hadn’t he warned her?

“It wasn’t tuberculosis,” he answered. “Dr. Miller, our team’s infectious disease expert, identified the organism as
Serratia marcescens,
a strain nonpathogenic bacteria.”

Lisa remembered her discussion earlier, regarding the patient with normal skin bacteria that was churning out flesh-eating poisons.

The toxicologist confirmed the comparison. “Again we have a benign non-opportunist bacterium turning virulent.”

“But, Dr. Barnhardt, what you’re suggesting…”

“Call me Henri. And I’m not just suggesting this. I’ve spent the past hours searching for similar cases. I found two others. A woman with raging dysentery, literally sloughing out her intestinal lining. Caused by
Lactobacillus acidophilus,
a yogurt bacterium that is normally a healthy intestinal organism. Then there is a child demonstrating violent seizures, whose spinal tap is churning with
Acetobacter aceti,
a benign organism found in vinegar. It’s literally pickling her brain.”

As she listened, Lisa found her vision narrowing, focusing on the implication.

“And these can’t be the only cases,” Henri said.

She shook her head—not disagreeing, only in the growing, terrifying certainty of the truth of his words. “So something is definitely turning these benign bacteria against us.”