Cautiously, almost fearfully, Rudy opened his eyes. The little prisoner sat calm and erect in the chair. He was smiling. A cruel and secretive smile, a smile brimming with an awful amusement.
He was Nicodemus again. Rudy looked around. The others in the room wore the expressions of people who had witnessed horror. He had seen expressions like those on the faces of the people at Ground Zero and in Thailand after the tsunami and in Haiti. No one spoke.
Before Rudy could say anything, Nicodemus spoke in a voice that was as soft as a whisper but as grating as teeth on the tines of a fork. “I am looking over water to a dark and pestilential place. From this place a new river of blood will flow, like the Nile flowed with blood when Pharaoh defied the will of God and refused to free the people of Israel. Oh, woe to the enemies of the Goddess. May their bones bend and crack like wheat straw in a hot wind. Stand not in the path of the Goddess’s righteousness and wrath.”
Rudy licked his lips. “What was that?” he said. “A minute ago—what was that?”
“Why, nothing at all happened a minute ago, and if it did, I was not here to behold it.”
“Who
are
you, Nicodemus?”
The little man chuckled. “Maybe I’m that in which you do not believe, Dr. Sanchez.” He stared at Rudy and would say nothing else.
Rudy tried several times to elicit further comments, but the prisoner might as well have been a statue. Minutes stretched and snapped and still Nicodemus merely sat there and looked at Rudy.
“Very well,” Rudy said at last. He turned to Warden Wilson. “Warden, I think it would be in the best interests of national security for this prisoner to be kept in complete lockdown. He goes nowhere alone, he is allowed no contact of any kind with other convicts, and anything that he says to the
guards is to be reported to me or my office right away. Are we agreed on this?” His voice was mild but pitched to accept only agreement and cooperation.
Wilson nodded and then jerked his head to the guards. The prisoner rose without being touched and turned toward the door. But at the doorway he paused and turned back to Rudy.
“I will leave you with one last thing, Doctor, since you are a Bible-reading believer in the Holy Word.”
Rudy waited.
“Your friend has stepped into harm’s way.”
“What do you mean?” Rudy asked.
“When the Sword of the Goddess falls, it is better to stand with the righteous rather than with those who allow the wicked to prosper.” He did the slow, reptilian blink once more. “You and yours fight to defend the house of bones and that path is impure and filled with snakes and thorns. The river of blood will sweep your friend away.”
Rudy stood. “You accused me of being disingenuous, Nicodemus, and as far as I’m concerned this is a con game. Everyone has friends and a case can easily be made that at any given time one or more of our friends are in some potential danger. Car accidents, plane crashes, take your pick. Scare tactics are cheap theatrics, and frankly, I expected more from you.”
Nicodemus smiled. “Well now, sir, I would not want to be compared or confused with carnival barkers and sideshow tricksters. No sir. Yet my comment stands. Your friend is walking in harm’s way.”
“Which friend?”
The smile became degrees colder. “The killer,” he said. “The one who has lost the
grace
of the Goddess. The one who walks with
ghosts.
”
Rudy’s mouth went dry. Nicodemus laughed and fell into his intractable silence, and after several minutes he allowed himself to be led away.
“What was that all about?” demanded Wilson in a ghost of a voice.
Rudy’s throat was so tight he could not speak to answer.
T-Town, Mount Baker, Washington State
Two Months Before the London Event
Hugo Vox roared at her, “You did
what
?”
Circe winced. “Grace was a good friend, Hugo, and I thought that she might be able to use MindReader to—”
Vox slammed his open palm down on his desk hard enough to make everything jump. A dollop of coffee splashed onto the blotter. “God
damn
it, Circe, why the fuck did you do that?”
“I thought—”
“You thought? You
thought
! Jesus H. Christ, talking to your pals at the DMS is one thing, but everything—
everything
—official that is going to land on Church’s desk gets vetted by me. Every goddamn thing. We live and die on federal goodwill. We piss them off—and breaking protocol is the fastest way to do that—and suddenly they forget where their checkbook is. You
know
that, too.”
“I—”
“I don’t care what connections you have there. You could bring down ten kinds of shit on my head. What were you thinking, kiddo? You trying to kill me here?”
His booming voice was so loud that it rattled the windows and hit her like shock waves.
“I … I’m sorry, Hugo.”
He made a disgusted noise and pivoted his chair to face the wall. He seethed in silence for a long time and she let him. She didn’t dare say anything else.
Finally he drew in a deep breath and let it out like a hot-air balloon collapsing. Without turning, he said, “I give you a lot of slack, Circe. Because of your dad, and because you do good work, exceptional work, and I’ve got nothing but praise for it.” He turned back to face her. “Except for crap like this. It’s not the first time you’ve jumped protocol, but by god it had better be the last. And I’d say the same thing if you were my own daughter.”
“I’m sorry.” Tears burned in the corners of her eyes.
“Yeah, well … Shit. I don’t mind that you spoke with Grace Courtland, but you know goddamn well that it had to be an off-the-record thing. Nothing official, and no copies of a report that I haven’t frigging well okayed.” He drummed his fingers on the desk blotter. “Okay, here’s the deal. The Goddess stuff is over. Give me your final report and then you’re off the project effective now.”
“But that’s not fair, Hugo. I—”
He held up a warning finger. “It is so important to your future that you not finish that sentence, kiddo.”
She clamped her mouth shut.
“I’ve got another project that is career valuable but also off-site. I want you way the hell off the DMS radar for a while. I’m sending you to London. You’ll be our liaison for the
Sea of Hope
thing.”
“But—”
He cocked his head and glared at her.
“Yes, Hugo,” she said contritely.
“This isn’t a demotion and no one will see it as such. Hell, it’ll probably help you sell more books. But I want you out of T-Town in case your end run brings down any heat. Which it will. So, go pack and, Circe … do us both a favor—stay out of my way for a couple of days.”
“Yes, Hugo.”
She sniffed back her tears and left the office.
Fair Isle Research Endeavor
The Shetland Isles
December 18, 2:54 P.M. GMT
“I’m at the door,” I said quietly. I was in a hazmat-augmented HAMMER suit with a bunch of
Star Trek
gizmos clipped to my belt. I was miked into the temporary command center set up in the chopper and there was a small camera on my helmet. I passed a sensor gadget over the door frame but got no pings, so I knelt and peered through the glass and along the cracks.
“No visible booby traps. Dalek, what’s the call on the lock?” We’d switched to call signs only. Redcap was Prebble; Church was Deacon. Dr. Hu’s call sign was Dalek. He was a nerd on several continents.
“The outer door is nothing special, Cowboy,” replied Hu. “All of the special locks are inside.”
“Nothing visible through the glass,” I said. “Proceeding inside.”
I took a very careful hold of the metal door handle. No shocks and nothing exploded. I pulled gently and the door yielded, but I stayed on the balls of my feet. If I felt the tension of a wire or heard a click, I was going to set a new land speed record for a scared white guy in a hazmat suit.
The door opened with a wonderfully boring lack of explosions.
I went inside. The reception area was empty and sparsely furnished with a functional desk, a file cabinet, two ugly plastic visitor chairs, and a glass coffee table littered with magazines that were three years old. The walls were covered with posters about bacterial research and its benefits to the fishing industry, a map of the coastal waters, and a complex set of tide tables. I quickly searched the whole room and came up dry. No traps, no surprises.
And that, by itself, was surprising.
There was a set of double doors behind the counter that looked cheap and fragile, but the wood grain was a clever fake and when I ran a finger along the surface I felt the cool hardness of steel. A keycard scanner was mounted in a discreet niche in the wall. All DMS agents have a programmable master keycard, and the key codes to this facility had been uploaded to mine. I swiped the card and was surprised that it worked. I’d expected the codes to have been changed or at least disabled.
I did not, however, take that as a sign that all was well and that the wacky professor was brewing a pot of chamomile for us to share with a plate of ginger snaps. There are a lot of ways to lay a trap.
The door opened with a click. I unclipped a handheld BAMS unit—a bio-aerosol mass spectrometer—from my belt. It was one of Hu’s sci-fi gadgets, a few steps up from what they use in airports. The BAMS allowed for real-time detection and identification of biological aerosols. It has a vacuum function that draws in ambient air and hits it with continuous wave lasers to fluoresce individual particles. Key molecules like bacillus spores, dangerous viruses, and certain vegetative cells are identified and assigned color codes. Most of the commercial BAMS units were unreliable because they could only detect dangerous particles in high density, but Church always made sure that Hu had the best toys. Ours wasn’t mounted on a cart like the airport model.
I checked several spots in the room and the light stayed green. If there were pathogens loose in here, the concentration was too low for the BAMS unit to detect.
I moved inside.
The door opened into a faux vestibule that was actually a low-level air lock. As I key-swiped the inner door, the one behind me swung shut with a hydraulic hiss. With the BAMS unit in one hand and my Beretta 92F in the other, I moved out of the air lock. The inner room was large and empty. Computer workstations and wheeled chairs, flat-screen monitors in the walls. A Mr. Coffee on a table. Coffee cups.
The scanner was still green, but I had an itch tickling me between the shoulder blades. It was the kind of feeling you get when you think someone’s in the tall grass watching you through the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. I crept across the room, moving on the balls of my feet, checking corners, checking under desks, looking for trip wires, expecting an attack. Doing this sort of stuff for a living does not totally harden you to the stress. Sure, you get cooler, you learn the tricks of ratcheting down the tension on your nerves, but you aren’t a tenth as calm as you look. It’s one of the reasons we take precautions, like keeping our finger flat along the outside curve of the trigger guard. You keep your finger on the trigger and you either shoot yourself or shoot the first poor son of a bitch who wanders into the moment.
Like the kid who opened the side door to the staff room.
I never heard him, didn’t see him, had no clue he was there until he spoke.
“Are you him?”
I instantly spun around and screwed the barrel of the pistol into soft flesh between a pair of large watery green eyes. In the split part of a second it took for me to pivot and slip my finger inside the trigger guard I registered how short and how young he was.
Maybe seven.
Fire engine red hair, cat green eyes in a freckly face that was white with shock as he stared cross-eyed at the gun barrel. In a movie it would have been a comical moment. In the flesh it was horrible on too many levels to count.
“I.I … ,” he stammered, and I stepped back and pulled the gun away,
but only just. Kids can kill, too. They can pull triggers and they can wear explosive vests. The only reason he didn’t get shot was because his hands were empty.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
He had to try it several times before he could squeeze it out. “M-Mikey,” he said. “I’m Mikey Grey.”
“Hold your arms out to your sides. Do it now,” I ordered, and after a moment’s indecision he did it, standing there like a trembling scarecrow as I clipped the BAMS unit to my belt and patted him down. He was wearing jeans and a Spider-Man T-shirt. Sneakers and a SpongeBob wristwatch.
A couple of tears boiled into the corners of his eyes, and despite his best efforts to be brave, his mouth trembled. Seven was no age at all. A baby.
I hated myself for this.
“Is your dad Charles Grey?” I asked, trying to take the edge off my voice and utterly failing. I wasn’t prepared for this even though I knew that Grey had brought his family into the lab with him.
“Yes,” Mikey said, almost making it a question, unsure of what kind of answer would placate this big, mean stranger with the funny costume and the gun. Then he found another splinter of courage and lifted his chin. “Are you here to hurt my dad?”
“Why would I want to do that, kid?”
“I don’t know. ’Cause he said you were.”
Christ.
“I’m not here to hurt anyone,” I said, and hoped that it wasn’t a lie. Of course, this was coming from a guy holding a loaded gun. “But I do have to talk to your dad.”
“I’m scared,” said the kid. His face was still paper white with fear.
“It’ll be okay.”
“I’m scared of my dad,” he said.
I wanted to peel off my hood and put my sidearm away and give this kid a hug, get him outside this madhouse. I knelt in front of him.
“Why are you scared of your dad, Mikey?”
“He keeps yelling,” he said. “Yelling and crying. I don’t like it when he cries.”
Swell.
“Listen, Mikey … can you take me to him?”
“No! You’re going to hurt him.” He rubbed his eyes with his fists, but the action looked more like he was tired than crying. In the harsh fluorescent lighting his pale skin looked almost green.
“I’m not here to hurt your dad, kid.”
He stared up at me, his face filled with doubt; then his eyes shifted away toward the door. “I’m scared to go back in there.”
“I’ll be right with you, kiddo,” I said as I straightened.
The kid sneezed and I instantly jerked back from him and made a grab for the BAMS unit. The light was no longer green. It glowed orange.
Mikey wiped his nose with his sleeve. “I have a cold.”
“How long have you had a cold, kid?”
He sniffed. “I don’t know. I just got it, I guess.”
“Today? Did you wake up with a cold?”
“No.” He sniffed again and there was a fine sheen of perspiration on his forehead. “I keep sneezing and I can’t find any tissues. I think Mommy used them all.”
“Does your mom have a cold, too?”
“She sneezed so much she had a nosebleed.”
“Where is she? Where’s your mom?”
He looked around for a few seconds, like he was trying to orient himself. “Isn’t she here?”
“No. Where is she?”
He sneezed again. I held the BAMS out to try to catch some of the spray.
The light changed from orange to red.
Everything in my gut turned to greasy ice water.
“I … don’t know,” Mikey said distantly. “I think she went to lie down. She had a nosebleed.”
Mikey wiped at his nose and stared at the drops of blood on his wrist. He looked at me, confused, wanting and needing an answer. He was swaying slightly, as if there was a strong breeze. Beneath his freckles his color was bad. Definitely green, with dark red splotches blossoming on his cheeks.
I heard a click in my ear and then Church’s voice: “Deacon for Cowboy, Deacon for Deacon, copy?”
“Go for Cowboy,” I murmured, stepping away from the boy. The kid
stood there, clearly unsure of where he was. Blood ran from both nostrils and he didn’t appear to notice.
“Cowboy,” Church said, “we’re receiving the telemetry feeds from the BAMS unit. Be advised that the room is now officially compromised. Repeat, you are in a hot zone. We’re getting V-readings.”
V
for virus. Damn.
I stepped away and touched my earbud. “What kind?”
“Dalek is matching the readings with the facility’s database and—”
Another voice cut in. Dr. Hu. “Cowboy, be advised, the kid appears to be infected with a strain of QOBE.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“It’s something they were working on at Fair Isle. Quick Onset
Bundibugyo Ebolavirus
.”
“Say again?”
Church’s voice cut back in, “The boy has Ebola.”
A cold hand clamped around my heart.
“Then it’s in the main air supply. Talk to me about containment, ’cause I’m outside of the Hot Room.”
“We’ve got the exterior vents draped and we’re sealing them with foam. Nothing can get out.”
“Does that include me?”
“We’re airlifting in a hyperbaric decontamination module. We’ll soft-dock it to one of the doors. You’ll be okay as long as your suit seals are intact.” He sounded almost disappointed.
The kid couldn’t hear the conversation. He was using his sleeve to blot blood from his nose. At first I thought he was remarkably calm, but when he glanced at me I could see that his eyes were already starting to glaze with fever.
“That’s nuts,” I whispered. “Ebola has a five-day incubation—”
“Not QOBE,” said Hu. “It’s a bioweapon engineered to hit and present within minutes to hours. Introduce it into a bunker or secure facility and everyone in there dies. Without living hosts an insertion team in HAMMER suits can infiltrate and gain access to computers and other materials. Infection rate is ninety-eight point eight; mortality rate among infected is one hundred percent.”
“Tell me that someone else cooked this up and that we were just working on a cure.”
There was silence on the line, and then Hu said, “Grow up, Cowboy.”
“We’ll talk about that when I get out of here,” I said softly, though it occurred to me that Hu probably wouldn’t have made that comment if he thought there was a snowball’s chance of me getting out.
“What’s my time frame here?” I asked.
Church said, “You’re fighting the clock. If the boy has just started showing symptoms, say one hour before you’re alone in there.”
“Deacon,” I said, “tell me one thing. Did you know about this?”
“That it was being studied? Yes. That it was off the leash, no.”
What remained unsaid was whether he would have sent me in here regardless. I think we both knew the answer to that.
Second day back on the fucking job.
I turned back to the kid. “C’mon, Mikey … let’s go see your dad.”
The kid sniffed again and turned toward the nearest door, but he blinked at it for a moment, his face screwed up with uncertainty.
“What was I doing?” he asked distractedly.
“You’re taking me to see your dad.” My voice almost cracked.
“Oh … okay.”
He reached for the knob, turned it the wrong way several times, and then wiped his nose with his wrist. When he reached for the doorknob again there was a long smear of blood on his wrist. Mikey finally opened the door and walked through, and I followed, torn between the demands of the mission and the horror I felt for what I was seeing.