“It’s over, Kovac. Let her go.”
“It is over for her if you move a muscle.” To emphasize his point, he pressed the gun even harder to her ear. Linda fought the pain but couldn’t manage to stifle a whimper. “Drop your weapons now or she dies.”
“You do it and you’ll follow her a second later.”
“I realize now that I am a dead man, so what does it matter to me? But wouldn’t you hate to see this young life extinguished needlessly? You have five seconds.”
“Shoot him!” Linda cried.
“I’m sorry,” Juan said, and let his machine pistol drop from his fingers. The incredulous look on her face crushed his heart. “Everyone, put them down.”
The men let their weapons fall to the floor.
Kovac pulled his pistol away from Linda’s head and aimed it at Cabrillo. “Smart move. You will now kindly jump over the rail and return to your ship. If you follow this vessel again, I will continue to throw passengers overboard, only from now on I will bind their hands.”
He pushed Linda into Juan’s arms.
A thousand yards ahead of the Golden Sky, Franklin Lincoln stood at the stern rail of the Oregon, watching everything unfold though the telescopic sight of his favorite weapon, the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle.
“Bye-bye.”
While Kovac had been concentrating on the Chairman, his man had used subtle hand gestures to get the women he’d posted in front of the windows to lie flat on the floor to give Linc a clear field of fire.
On the bridge, they heard only a quiet ping as the bullet passed through the safety glass. The sound of it hitting Kovac between the shoulders was something altogether different, a thick meaty tone like a hammer striking carpet. Blood fountained from his chest, as the bullet transited his body with enough kinetic impact to toss his corpse a good five feet.
“Did you doubt me?” Juan smiled down at Linda.
“I should have known when I didn’t see Linc,” she said with a saucy grin, her composure fully restored. “I assume that was him.”
“I can’t think of anyone else when I need a million-dollar shot.”
“Well?” It was Max.
“Congratulate Linc. He was dead on target. Linda’s fine.” Juan pulled away his earbud and put the radio on speaker mode so everyone could hear.
“Hi, Max,” she said
“How are you doing, honey?”
“Other than this lousy cold, I’m fine.”
Mark had been released from the office and the FlexiCuffs cut away from his wrists and ankles. He shook Juan’s hand, smiling broadly.
“I’ve been thinking,” Max continued. “You guys should probably check down in the laundry room. I think you’ll find that is how they planned to disperse the virus.”
Mark’s smile fell until it had turned into a pout. His moment of glory had been stolen.
Juan read his emotions perfectly. Mark had figured it out, too, and was doubtlessly going to impress the nubile Miss Dahl with his insight. He didn’t have the heart to tell him his competition for her affections was a bona fide astronaut now, and, in his book, that trumped just about anything in ways to impress a girl.
EPILOGUE
IN THE WEEKS SINCE THE DISASTER ON EOS ISLAND, age had finally caught up to Lydell Cooper. He had spent decades and millions on reversing the process, having cosmetic surgeries and illegal organ transplants. However, it wasn’t his body that was letting him down. It was his mind.
He couldn’t accept his utter failure, and, because of that, he went through the motions of life in a daze.
It had been his daughter Heidi who had taken charge when they were still flying toward Turkey. She had told the pilot to alter their flight plan and had directed them to Zurich instead. There, she had drained several Responsivist bank accounts, converting the cash into stocks purchased by a dummy company she had the bank set up for her. She had understood that, with Eos destroyed, the authorities would arrest every high-ranking member of the organization, and her only chance to remain free was to go into hiding with her sister.
Cooper wanted to stay with them, but she said that he had loose ends to tie up back in the States, and since his Dr. Adam Jenner persona was a world-renowned critic of Responsivism he was above suspicion.
So he had returned home, mostly to empty a series of safe-deposit boxes in Los Angeles that the FBI didn’t know about. When he’d taxied past the big house in Beverly Hills, there was crime-scene tape draped like a garland along the perimeter fence and uniformed police with cruisers camped in the driveway.
The dream was well and truly over.
Greek authorities had closed the Responsivists’ compound in Corinth, and nations were kicking out Responsivist clinics all over the world. Even though there had been no mention in the media of the plot to sterilize half the planet’s population, the corruption charges filed against the group had caused a backlash that continued to reverberate. Famous members, like Donna Sky, were turning their backs on the faith, claiming they had been brainwashed in order to financially support the group.
In a fourteen-day span, Cooper’s lifetime achievement had been reduced to fodder for comics on late-night television. He closed up Jenner’s practice, happily telling the other psychologists who shared the office suite that his work was done and he was retiring, while, inside, he was dying by degrees. He put his house up for sale, instructing the broker to accept the first offer.
Rather than live in glory as the famed Dr. Lydell Cooper in a sustainable world, he was forced to retire to obscurity as Adam Jenner.
He was returning to his house the day before he was to fly to Brazil, which has a notoriously lax extradition treaty with the United States. Because of the crippling arthritis in his hands, he had replaced a normal lock-and-key entry with a push-button pad. He pressed the sequence and stepped inside, using his elbow to close the door behind him. A moving company had packed the few possessions he wanted to keep, while the rest was to be sold with the house.
He crossed the foyer and made for his study to check the latest news on his laptop. The heavy wooden door closed behind him when he entered. He turned. A stranger had been hiding behind it.
Had he been in a normal frame of mind, he would have demanded the person leave, but he just stood there mutely instead, staring at the man who had invaded his home.
“Dr. Jenner, I presume?”
“Yes. Who are you? What do you want?”
“I paid you a great deal of money to help a friend not too long ago.”
“I am retired now. All that is finished. Please leave.”
“And how do you feel about that?” the stranger asked. “Responsivism is dead. You won. You must feel vindicated.”
Cooper couldn’t bring himself to answer. His identities blurred in his mind. He didn’t know how to feel or act any longer.
“You know what?” the man continued. “I don’t think you feel good about it at all. In fact, I think you’re reeling inside because I know something that would surprise a lot of people.”
Somehow, Cooper knew what was coming. He sat heavily on a couch, his artificially youthful face ashen.
“Even if you hadn’t been overheard bragging to Kovac on Eos Island, I think I would have figured it out. You were the only person who could have betrayed us in Rome. We thought Kyle might have had an embedded radio tag, but now we know he didn’t. He had no idea where he was being taken, so there was no way he could get a warning out to Kovac to snatch him back.”
Now that the truth was out, Cooper sat straighter on the sofa. “That’s right. I did make the call, getting Kovac to Rome and then telling him which hotel, once I had arrived and was left alone with that kid. You were behind the attack on Eos?”
The stranger nodded. “And we discovered the virus in the Golden Sky’s and all forty-nine other cruise ships’ laundries you tampered with. The fifty containers are at a level-four biohazard lab in Maryland.”
“Don’t you understand that the world is doom
ed? I could have saved all of humanity.”
The man laughed. “And do you know how many crackpots have been saying the world is doomed over the past couple hundred years? We were supposed to run out of food in the 1980s. We were supposed to run out of oil in the 1990s. The population was supposed to hit ten billion by the year 2000. Every one of these predictions was wrong. Heck, they wanted to close the U.S. Patent office in 1900 because everything that could be invented had been invented. I’ll let you in on a little secret: you can’t predict the future.”
“You’re wrong. I know what is coming. Anyone with half a brain can see it. Fifty years from now, civilization will be swept away in a tidal wave of violence, as nations realize they can’t support their populations. It will be anarchy on a biblical scale.”
“Funny you should mention that.” The man removed a pistol from behind his back. “I’ve always liked biblical justice. An eye for an eye, and all that.”
“You can’t kill me. Arrest me. Put me on trial.”
“And give you a stage to spout your demented ideas? I don’t think so.”
“Please!”
The gun spat. Cooper felt the impact, and when he moved to touch his neck he could feel something sticking in his flesh, but his clawlike hands lacked the dexterity to remove it.
Cabrillo watched for ten seconds as the tranquilizer from the dart gun coursed through Cooper’s body. When Cooper’s eyes closed and he slumped over, Juan brought a radio to his lips. Moments later, a big ambulance pulled up the drive, and two paramedics burst out the back doors, pushing a gurney.
“Any problems?” Eddie asked, wheeling the stretcher into the study with Franklin Linclon.
“No, but after talking to him I feel like I need a shower. I’ve seen some loons in my life, but this one beats all.”
Linc gingerly lifted Cooper off the couch and set him on the gurney. As soon as Cabrillo found Cooper’s passport and a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro in a kitchen drawer, they rushed out of the house. A neighbor had come out of her house to see what was going on.
“He’s had a heart attack,” Juan told her, as he held open the ambulance doors so Linc could slide the gurney inside.
Forty-five minutes later, the ambulance arrived at LAX, and, ten hours after that, the Corporation’s Gulfsteam touched down at Gardermoen airport, thirty miles north of Oslo, Norway.
They had a brief reunion at an airport lounge with Jannike Dahl. She had permitted Eric Stone to escort her home. When Eric declined her invitation to show him the sights of Oslo, saying he had to return to the ship, Juan had taken him aside and explained that she wasn’t that interested in him seeing her home-town. Eric had asked what she really wanted, and the Chairman had to explain it further. Red-faced with embarrassment and unbridled enthusiasm, Eric quickly accepted her offer.
It took another jet flight to Tromsö, in the far north of the country, and a helicopter ride, to finally arrive at their destination. Cooper was kept sedated the entire time and was closely monitored by Julia Huxley.
The glacier sparkled in the bright light of a summer afternoon, glittering as though it was the finest lead crystal. Outside the valley, the temperature hovered in the mid-fifties, but on the ice it was just above freezing.
George Adams had flown them in on an MD-520N, the replacement for the little Robinson. This chopper was larger than the previous one, and required some modifications to the hangar elevator, but it was also much more powerful and faster. And because it vented engine exhaust through the tail, to counter the main rotor’s torque rather than rely on a second, smaller rotor, it was significantly more quiet. The Oregon was positioned just off the coast, and Adams would fly them out once they were finished.
Cooper was half conscious by the time they touched down but didn’t fully comprehend where he was until another fifteen minutes had elapsed.
“Where are we? What have you done?”
“Surely you recognize where we are, Dr. Cooper,” Juan said innocently. “But, then again, maybe not. After all, it’s been more than sixty years since you were last here.”
Cooper stared blankly, so Cabrillo continued. “The one thing that kept nagging at me this entire time was how a virus discovered by the Nazis and later given to their Japanese allies ended up in your hands. There was no record of its discovery, or of its transfer to the Philippines, nothing to give any indication of what was found here.
“Only one thing made sense to me. You discovered it yourself. There are quite detailed records of the Nazi occupation of Norway, and my team found something rather interesting. A four-engine Kondor reconnaissance plane was shot down on this very glacier on the night of April twenty-nine, 1943. Every member of the crew was killed save one, a gunner named Ernst Kessler.”
Cooper winced at the mention of the name.
“What I find so fascinating is that Kessler is the German word for ‘cooper.’ Ironic, isn’t it? And the publishing house you started to get your book in print—what was it called? Raptor Press, I believe—is it coincidental that a condor is a kind of raptor? I don’t think so.”
Cabrillo threw open the chopper’s door and shoved Kessler/ Cooper onto the ice. In all his dealings with Cooper, Juan had kept his tone light, almost pleasant. But his anger suddenly boiled over, and he seethed. “We also discovered that after the plane crash, Ernst Kessler was accepted into the Gestapo, and was allowed to receive medical training at a lovely spot called Auschwitz. His final orders before war’s end was a transfer to the German Embassy in Tokyo. I assume that was a cover for your going to work for Unit 731 in the Philippines.
“You should have died that night and saved the world a lot of misery, you sick freak. I have dealt with al-Qaeda assassins and Soviet torturers, and every perverted piece of slime in between, but you are the single-most-evil human being I have ever met. You could have shown the world one of the greatest discoveries of all time, perhaps the inspiration for a most beloved Bible story, but instead you only cared about reaping death.
“Well, Kessler, you have reaped what you’ve sown, and when I think about you freezing to death, tonight over dinner, I am going to smile.” Cabrillo closed the helicopter door. “Let’s go.”
“What happens now?” Julia asked as the chopper shot past the edge of the glacier and over open water.
“He dies.”
“I mean, with the ark.”
“Oh that. I’ve already contacted Kurt Austin at NUMA. He told me they are going to find a way to convince the Norwegian government to let them do a detailed survey of that glacier. With her copper bottom, they should have no problem locating the ancient wreck.”
“I wonder what they will find.”
Juan gave her a dreamy look. “Who knows, maybe all the creatures of the world loaded two by two.”
MAX HANLEY SAT ON A BENCH near the Griffith Park Observatory, overlooking downtown L.A. A shadow passed over his face, and when he looked up his son Kyle was standing over him. Max made a wordless gesture for him to sit. He could feel the anger radiating off the boy as though it were waves of heat.
Kyle was staring off into the distance, so Max studied his profile. There was a lot of the kid’s mother in him, but he saw a few of his own features. As he watched, a single tear rolled down Kyle’s cheek, and as if a floodgate had opened Kyle began to cry— deep, choking sobs that sounded like his soul was being torn apart. He clutched at his father, and Max took him in his arms.
“I am so sorry, Dad,” Kyle sobbed.
“And I forgive you.”
Because that’s what fathers do.
Clive Cussler, Plague Ship
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