The Seventh Plague

  He trembled under her grip. “I don’t know where to start. There’s so much to tell you.”

  “That can wait,” the man barked from the doorway. He stepped aside and waved. “Out. Both of you. Now.”

  Rory immediately obeyed, ducking his head like a beaten dog. Safia hurried to follow. The tattooed man trailed them, his hand never leaving the butt of his sidearm. She had noted his Russian accent and pictured the frozen landscape beyond her window.

  Did that mean we’re somewhere in Russia, maybe a gulag in Siberia?

  She kept close to Rory, seeking that answer. “Do you know where we are?”

  “Canada,” he answered, surprising her. “Up north in the Arctic archipelago. A place called Ellesmere Island.”

  Safia frowned, struggling to reorient herself to this revelation.

  Why Canada?

  “It’s my fault you were brought here,” Rory mumbled. “All my fault.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rory looked over his shoulder, his voice going even softer. “They were keeping me here to force my father to cooperate. If he didn’t help them with their efforts in the Sudan . . .”

  Rory lifted his left hand. His pinkie finger was gone.

  Dear God . . .

  “My father had no choice,” he said, his face pained. “Neither did I. I had to cooperate with the project here, or they’d do the same to my dad. They even threatened Jane.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, trying to soothe his guilt.

  “Then my father escaped.” Rory rubbed his forehead with a palm. “I don’t know why he took that risk after so long.”

  She had wondered the same and came to one possible conclusion. “Maybe he learned something he didn’t want your captors to know.”

  Rory’s eyes pinched. “That’s what they believed, too. Or at least considered it a possibility. After hearing of his death, they pressed me hard. They needed someone to fill my father’s shoes. They made me name names, to list people with the knowledge to continue his work.”

  She understood. “And you named me.”

  “You were at the top of my list. You knew more about my father’s work than anyone else.” He gave her an apologetic look. “The only other one who understood my father better was Jane, but I insisted she was too inexperienced. I . . . I tried to protect her.”

  Like any good brother would.

  Unfortunately, it had put Safia in harm’s way.

  “After kidnapping you,” he continued, “their plan was to destroy any evidence of what my father was working on—both past and present—and to transfer the subject of his study here to keep it safe.”

  “And that came from the Sudan?” She pictured Harold weaving drunkenly out of the deep desert. “Was that where they were holding him?”

  “I think so.” Rory hid a scowl. “Along with another research team.”

  “What were they working—”

  “That’s enough chatter,” the guard warned, his tone brooking no argument.

  By now, they had reached the end of a windowless white corridor. The passage ended at a set of double doors.

  The tattooed man swiped a card to unlock the way and motioned for Rory to take the lead. Cowed by his captor, Rory pulled the door open. It was accompanied by the soft hiss of a pressure seal breaking.

  Rory led the way across the threshold into a small anteroom that held benches and lockers. Beyond a wall of glass, the next room contained a sprawling state-of-the-art lab. To enter required passing through a series of airlocks where yellow biosafety suits hung like limp balloons. Inside the lab, stainless steel equipment, along with refrigeration units and freezers, lined the walls. Most of the instruments were beyond Safia’s comprehension.

  Still, she knew why she had been brought here.

  In the center of the lab stood a tall, glass-fronted sealed case. It held what appeared to be a tarnished black throne. The design motif was distinctly Egyptian. The crest rail across the back supported two sculpted finials: One was the profile of a lion, the other that of a woman, maybe an Egyptian queen.

  But it was the figure seated atop the throne that drew Safia’s full attention. It held the desiccated remains of a woman. Her mummified body appeared to be welded to the chair; the skin along the edges looked charred. Still, as the woman rested there, with her chin bowed to her sunken chest, her withered features looked oddly serene.

  “Who is she?” Safia asked.

  Rory’s voice went bitter. “Someone we need answers from.”

  She frowned. “What’s this all about? What’s going on?”

  The explanation came from a stranger who had appeared out of nowhere behind them. He stepped next to the tattooed man. The newcomer was older, with salt-and-pepper hair, and dressed in a flawless suit. He looked vaguely familiar, but she was too shaken to put a name to that face.

  The man lifted a hand toward the sealed case. “We need your help in solving this mystery, Dr. al-Maaz.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  He smiled, showing perfect teeth. “I promise no harm will come to you.”

  His gaze flicked toward Rory, who took a step back.

  Anger burned through her at this threat, but she kept her face stoic. “Then tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “Fear not.” His smile widened. “We’re merely trying to save the world.”

  SECOND

  EGG OF COLUMBUS

  ∑

  9

  June 2, 1:15 P.M. EET

  Cairo, Egypt

  “I come bearing good news and bad,” Monk said.

  Gray looked up from his inventory of the team’s gear. Packs, along with weapons and ammunitions, were spread across a long table under an open tent. Beyond the shelter, an expanse of tarmac stretched toward a waiting C-130 U.S. military transport plane.

  His team was scheduled to hitch a ride aboard the turboprop aircraft for the two-hour hop from Cairo to Khartoum. The capital city of Sudan lay a thousand miles to the south, nestled at the confluence of the Blue and White Nile, where those two main tributaries merged to form the mighty Nile River.

  From there, the group would head out and search the surrounding region for a trail of bread crumbs that might lead them to where Harold McCabe had been held. He pictured the professor stumbling forth across the desert, near death, half-mummified, and carrying a plague inside his feverish skull.

  What had happened to the old guy?

  To help answer that, Jane and Derek were holed up in a hotel neighboring the airfield, poring through field journals and searching historical references. Gray had left them to their work, guarded over by Seichan and Kowalski.

  Gray shaded his eyes against the glare of the Egyptian sun. Heat mirages shimmered over the tarmac as midday temperatures crested the century mark. He watched Monk duck under the tent, followed by Dr. Ileara Kano.

  “So good news or bad?” Gray pondered. “I’m not sure which I want first.”

  Monk swiped a damp brow with an equally wet palm and gave a tired shake of his head, clearly not sure himself of where to start.

  Ileara let out a gasp of relief once inside the shade. “No wonder my parents emigrated from Nigeria. Remind me never to complain about London’s rain and fog again.”

  The pair had spent most of last night and this morning at NAMRU-3, the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit located in Cairo. The base had been established back in 1942 to combat a typhus outbreak during World War II. Since then, the unit had grown into one of the largest U.S. biomedical research laboratories outside of the States, the goal of which was to study and combat emerging diseases.

  So NAMRU-3 had become ground zero for monitoring and investigating this new pandemic in its own backyard. The unit’s military doctors and scientists were working with the Egyptian Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to coordinate a worldwide effort to stop its spread and find a cure.

  Monk and Ileara had been a
ttending scientific briefings and talking to the frontline researchers investigating the new pathogen, a strange organism that subsisted on electricity. From their puffy red eyes, the pair looked like they’d gotten little sleep.

  “Let’s start with the good news,” Gray decided.

  He’d had his fill of the bad. And it might get worse, even on the personal front. His brother had left him a voicemail, asking Gray to call him first thing in the morning, which with the six-hour time difference between D.C. and Cairo would not be for another hour or so. He knew the sudden call must concern his father’s health, and that worry sat like a stone between his shoulders.

  But one disaster at a time . . .

  “The good news,” Monk started, “is that some patients are showing signs of recovery. Which means the disease is not one hundred percent fatal.”

  “Yet, at the moment, we don’t know why some rebound and others succumb,” Ileara cautioned.

  “Still, that is good news,” Gray admitted.

  “I’d call it somewhat good.” Monk shared a worried look with Ileara. “While there are survivors, current estimates still put the mortality rate between forty-five and fifty percent. We’re lucky the rate isn’t higher, but it’s rare for an infectious disease to kill every person it afflicts. Even the Ebola virus isn’t one hundred percent fatal. In fact, it shares the same mortality rate as this microbe, around fifty percent.”

  Gray grimaced.

  “But it’s still early for such firm conclusions,” Ileara said. “It’s only been five days since the first reported case. Much is still up in the air.”

  “Okay, then if that’s the somewhat good news, what’s the bad?”

  Monk turned to Ileara, who answered, “We’ve determined the disease can spread via the air. One sniff of the microbe and it latches on to the nerves inside the nose and travels straight to the brain, triggering encephalitis. But even more frightening, it can take as little as two hours from exposure until the pathogen is settled in the brain, where treatment becomes problematic.”

  Monk rubbed his palms. “And like a cold bug, this bastard spreads easily. It’s why we’re anticipating this pandemic will quickly grow into a firestorm.”

  Gray was not surprised. He remembered the trip from the airport to their hotel yesterday. Cairo was normally a bustling city, but the streets had been nearly deserted. The handful of pedestrians in sight had worn paper masks or scarves over their mouths and noses. They had hurried along with their shoulders hunched, sidestepping one another. According to news reports, people were already hoarding essentials. Fights had broken out. Many had been killed—either out of fear of the sick or from altercations during looting.

  It seemed panic was proving to be as deadly and contagious as this disease.

  Even now, Gray heard a scatter of gunfire echo in the distance.

  “But all of this raises one other mystery,” Ileara said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s strange that the first people to become sick were those who attended the autopsy of Professor McCabe.”

  Gray recalled the shocking footage of that event. “But why do you find that surprising? Clearly the morgue team would have been directly exposed when the professor’s skull was opened.”

  “True,” Ileara said. “In fact, I suspect the electromagnetic stimulation from the prior MRI may have exasperated the situation by exciting the microbes in the brain. Which probably also contributed to the glowing effect caught on video. We know these electricity-eating organisms not only consume electrons as a food source, but in the right circumstances, they can shed them if overfed, too. For that reason, it might be better to consider these specimens to be electricity breathing rather than eating.”

  “She’s right,” Monk said. “I did some reading. Researchers right now are looking into practical uses for such microbes. A lab in Denmark cultured vats of these electrical bacteria, showing how they could form daisy chains and carry electrons over some distance, like living wires.”

  Ileara nodded. “And Archaean biology is extraordinary. They’re true shapeshifters. Some are capable of fusing together to form supercells. Others link up into hairlike filaments.”

  Gray pictured the frilly cells that Ileara had shown them on her laptop and imagined them tying together, one after the other.

  “I think,” Ileara continued, “that this microbe might be capable of doing the same. It could explain why there are persistent reports of vivid hallucinations. Maybe these living filaments are rewiring the brain and directly stimulating those hallucinations. Maybe even on purpose.”

  “What do you mean?” Gray asked.

  “Perhaps these hallucinations are intended to inflict fear, which would further fire up the victim’s brain, creating a richer energy source for the microbes to feed upon.”

  “Like stuffing a goose to make foie gras,” Monk added.

  Gray’s stomach churned at the thought.

  “Still,” Ileara conceded, “this is all preliminary.”

  “And perhaps off track for the moment.” Gray returned the conversation to the original train of thought. “Dr. Kano, you never explained why it’s a mystery that the morgue team was the first to be infected.”

  Ileara cringed. “Sorry. You’re right. It’s strange because they shouldn’t have been the first. Remember the group of nomads who found Professor McCabe in the desert? They transported him in their cart for hours, caring for him until he died. Yet, they still remain perfectly healthy. They never got sick.”

  “Which makes no sense,” Monk said, “especially considering how contagious we now know this pathogen to be.”

  “Could they be immune?”

  “We can only hope so,” Ileara said. “The family has been quarantined for testing. But so far, the doctors have no explanation.”

  Gray read something shining in the woman’s eyes. “But you have an idea.”

  She nodded.

  Gray’s mind raced to catch up with her.

  What possibly could be the reason for—

  Then it struck him.

  His back straightened. “You’re thinking it’s connected to the strange state of Professor McCabe’s body.”

  From Ileara’s shocked look, he had hit the nail on the head.

  Monk chuckled. “It’s okay, Ileara. After a while, you get used to Gray making these damned intuitive leaps. Sure, it pisses you off at first, but then you learn to roll with it. But never play poker with him. Trust me. That’s a real bad idea.”

  Gray appreciated his partner’s support, but he stayed focused. The one detail of this story that made no sense was the mummified state of the professor’s body. The supposition was that the man had been tortured by his captives into undergoing this painful process and had escaped before it was finished.

  But maybe we got this all wrong?

  Gray stared at Ileara. “You’re thinking the mummification could have been self-inflicted. That it was done on purpose by the professor.”

  “Possibly. Especially after talking to his daughter over the past two days. While Professor McCabe was certainly stubborn in his theories, he sounded like a kind man. So it got me thinking why he would come out of the desert carrying a disease that could trigger a pandemic. I think he would’ve sacrificed himself before allowing that to happen.”

  “Unless he believed he could do so safely.”

  Ileara nodded. “Maybe this process of preservation poisoned the body enough to kill the organism throughout his peripheral tissues, driving it into the only place it could survive.”

  “His brain.”

  “Where it became bottled up.”

  Gray imagined this threat like a snake coiled inside the professor’s skull.

  Ileara squinted toward the burning tarmac. “Perhaps the professor set off across the desert, hoping he could live long enough to tell his story, to warn us of some threat, something his captors were planning.”

  Gray considered this, his heart pounding harder. He knew t
his entire region was a hotbed of terrorist activity. He also recalled Seichan’s story of the assassin who attacked her group at the church in Ashwell. The tattooed woman had a connection to the Guild, a group notorious for twisting scientific discoveries to their own ends. If someone were planning an act of bioterrorism, this Archaea organism would be the perfect ready-made weapon.

  He considered how it had taken only one patient zero—Professor McCabe—to inflict this much death and panic.

  What if the enemy unleashed a whole infected army?

  Monk drew him back to the moment. “Okay, Gray, we’ve given you the good news and the bad. Now how about the truly terrifying?”

  Gray braced himself. “There’s worse?”

  Monk glanced to Ileara, then back to Gray. “Oh, yeah. We’ve only been talking about the first plague. There’s more to come.”

  Ileara turned away. “But this is something Jane McCabe needs to hear.”

  1:48 P.M.

  This is all going to get much worse . . .

  Jane huddled at the end of the hotel room sofa, hugging her knees as she watched the newscast on the television. Her lunch sat forgotten on the end table next to her. She cradled a cup of coffee between her palms, needing its heat to ward against the cold certainty of what was to come.

  For the past hour, she had been flipping between the BBC and local stations. She was fluent enough in Egyptian Arabic to follow the various talking heads on the Cairo broadcasts. There were persistent reports of growing chaos, of lawlessness in the streets. But she didn’t need the news to tell her that. Sirens echoed continually from outside. A glance out the suite’s fourth-story window showed an achingly blue sky marred by multiple columns of black smoke.

  The city was coming apart at the seams.

  And all because of my father.

  Guilt weighed on her. She had to make this right somehow. Her father had always sought to leave his mark on the world, to forge a legacy, one that could be carried on by his children. It was what drove him so adamantly to pursue his belief that events recounted in the Book of Exodus were more than allegory. He wanted his name known to the world at large.