God's Lions - House of Acerbi (11 page)

Lev tried to calm himself by taking deep breaths as he leaned back in his seat. “My God! What just happened back there?”

Francois increased their speed. “I’m afraid the pathogen has arrived in Italy.”

The Villa in Israel

Reclining in a weathered beach chair, the blinding reflection off the white sand dunes caused Ariella to squint as she looked out at the contrasting blue of the Mediterranean Sea and stroked her husband’s tanned arm. The two had just returned to their little beach house from a morning swim after John had speared a sizeable string of red snapper for supper.

She smiled to herself as she studied his calm face in the chair beside hers and thought back to his first attempt at spear fishing, when he had proudly captured a five-inch-long mackerel. “Would you like some orange juice?”

John opened his eyes. “That would be great ... thanks.”

Turning his head, he observed the lithe form of his lovely wife as she stood and walked toward the small, wood-shingled beach house her father had given them the year before as a wedding present. After she disappeared past the transparent curtains blowing from the sides of the open French doors, he turned his attention back to the sea, causing him to marvel at how much his life had changed in less than a year.

For a mile in either direction, the land along this stretch of coastline belonged to his father-in-law, Lev Wasserman. Shortly after Ariella was born, Lev and his late wife, Carmela, had purchased two hundred acres here along the beach with the intention of building a small farming cooperative safe from the constant terrorist bombings that plagued Israel’s cities.

From his seat on the beach, John could see the dim outline of his father-in-law’s immense house in the distance. Set at the end of a long paved driveway, the enormous Mediterranean-styled villa was the centerpiece of the farm. Three stories high, with white stucco walls and a red-tiled roof, the villa was set back from the beach, connected to the sea by a rickety boardwalk that ran through sugar-white sand dunes and tall palm trees to a sparkling blue swimming pool at the back of the house.

The entire compound was run much like the communal kibbutz Lev had been raised on, except in this case he retained ownership of the land. Scattered around the property, twenty smaller houses were tucked in among the vineyards, orchards, and planted fields that made up the farm. These single-family dwellings were used mostly by professors and graduate students, who lived there free of charge in exchange for providing security, growing the community’s food, and taking care of the villa. The community also owned several vehicles that were available for everyone. They were used mostly for going to school or shopping or just a night out on the town.

People of various ages could be seen walking around the property, the most noticeable being the young men and women of the villa’s security force dressed in olive-colored shirts and matching shorts. From the beachfront to the gatehouse to the fields, these dedicated young people could be seen everywhere, patrolling the property with radios and automatic weapons slung over their shoulders.

It was on this very beach the year before that John had first laid eyes on his wife after he and Father Leo had escaped from Rome when they were being chased by a group of rogue Vatican security men led by an evil priest who had long since disappeared.

Returning from the house with the orange juice, Ariella settled into the chair next to John. The breeze from the sea whipped strands of long brown hair across her face and over her eyes, forcing her to pull it back and hold it off to the side as she fixed her young husband with a look that made it obvious to him that her next words had been planned out in advance.

“So, John, when are we going to have a baby?”

John continued staring out to sea as he sat his glass of orange juice on the small table beside him.

He’s not getting off that easily
, Ariella told herself. She twisted around in her seat and faced him full on. “Did you hear what I just said?”

John reached up and scratched his beard before adjusting his sun glasses with both hands.

Ariella leaned in closer. She had to give him credit for his ability to feign deafness.

He’s good—but so am I.

“How do you like the new futon we bought in Tel Aviv?”

“What?”

“I asked what you thought of the new futon.”

“It’s great. I love the red color.” An intuitive sense of dread was working its way up from his stomach into his throat. “Why do you ask?”

“Because if you don’t answer my question right now, you’ll be sleeping on it tonight.”

There it was.

“I thought we discussed this last month. Didn’t we both agree to wait at least two more years before we made an attempt at parenthood?”

“You know it’s what I want.”

“Oh ... now I’m a mind reader.” John instantly regretted his words.
Sarcasm—a sure ticket to the futon.

He glanced over at a pair of liquid brown eyes blinking back at him ... eyes he had fallen in love with the moment he had first noticed them that day on the beach in front of the villa.

“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to sound like a jerk. It’s just that I still have another year of graduate school. I’d kind of like to keep any outside distractions down until I graduate.”

Ariella’s eyes narrowed at him.

Oh man, I’ve really stepped in it now.

“Did I just hear you refer to our future children as
distractions
?”

Just take me now.

“You know very well what I meant, Ariella.”

“There are always going to be distractions, John. Life is full of distractions. My father always told me that managing them successfully is the key to success. You’re the ultimate boss. You rule the distractions. They don’t rule you.”

“Your father is a very wise man, and I think he’d agree that now is not the time to be bringing a new baby into the world.”

“You’re worried about the virus. That’s it. Am I right? You think we’re all going to die?”

“From everything we’ve heard, it could grow into a worldwide epidemic. This could very well be the big one they’ve been predicting for so long.”

“Do you really think it’s coming our way?”

“No way to tell. With the speed of modern jet travel, it could already be here in Israel. That’s why your father told us to stay on the compound until he gets back from Rome. We should be safe as long as we don’t go into the city. We have the advantage of being totally self-sufficient here on the farm, and I have the internet for all the research I need to finish my thesis. At least that eliminates the need to drive into Jerusalem for classes.”

“Daniel told me this new virus was acting strange. Some people weren’t affected at all, while others died within hours.”

“I know ... it’s horrible. Even your father’s friends in the government don’t seem to have a clear picture of what’s going on. Worst case scenario, it could be a mutation of a type of flu that’s turned super deadly. I’m more worried about my folks back in New Mexico, but at least out on the ranch they’re away from any major population areas. Mom cans fruit and vegetables every year, so they should have enough food stored to keep them from having to go to the store in town, and dad was smart enough to convert over to solar and wind power after they came here for the wedding last year and saw what your father had done on the compound with the new technology.”

Reaching out to each other, they locked hands and looked out at the waves crashing onto the sloping shoreline as the sound of a phone ringing in the background interrupted their brief moment of silence.

“Want me to get it?” John asked.

“No, that’s ok. I need to get some more sun block anyway.”

Ariella lifted herself from the chair and strolled back into the house while John continued watching the waves.
He really did live in paradise.

Seconds later Ariella was back, standing over him and blocking the sun. “We have to go.”

“What?”

“We have to go. That was my father on the phone. He just ordered the Carmela’s crew to prepare the yacht for sea.”

“Right now?”

“He wants us underway in an hour.”

“An hour! Did he say why?”

“No. He just said to make sure Alex kept the boat at full speed all the way and ...”

“And what?”

“And for us to stay away from populated areas.”

Ariella turned and began walking back toward the house.

“Ariella ... wait. Where are we going?”

Ariella stopped and glanced back over her shoulder. “Italy.”

Leo looked down at his shaking hands and realized he was still holding the paper that Morelli had given him earlier. Pushing his glasses down from his forehead, he noticed a bold header that ran across the top of the page:
USAMRID
,
Fort Meade Maryland
. Stamped diagonally over the heading was the word
ULTRA
in bright red letters. The page was filled with cryptic scientific jargon that included lines of numbers, rows of shaded blocks, a few graphs, and a fuzzy digital photographic image taken through an electron microscope.

“What is all of this, Anthony? What’s USAMRID?”

“It’s the U.S. Army’s biological warfare center.”

“Looks like some kind of top secret document. How did you get it?”

“Don’t ask. That paper contains some of the data American scientists have collected so far on the pathogen that struck New York.”

Leo glanced down at the page again. “I’m afraid this is totally outside my realm of expertise. I have no idea what any of this means ... all this scientific jargon is like a foreign language to me.”

“Do you mind if I take a look, Leo?” Lev asked.

Leo handed the paper to Lev and stared back out the window as they approached the hill country of Umbria.

“This organism has been artificially engineered,” Lev said. “But there’s more. It has some very specific markers.”

“What kind of markers?”

Lev hesitated as the enormity of what he was looking at began to sink in. “Genetic markers, Leo.”

“I’m not sure I understand?”

“It was designed to affect certain people ... maybe even a specific race.”

“Are you saying this thing could be ethnically targeted?”

“Precisely. They could do it by manipulating the pathogen so that it would affect only those with a specific DNA sequence, which itself is actually a code.”

Leo’s mind was reeling from the implications. “That’s monstrous! Who in their right mind would do such a thing?”

It was a typical response, but in truth, Cardinal Leopold Amodeo knew quite well that the world was overflowing with those who would love to acquire a weapon that could wipe out an entire race while leaving others untouched.

Lev cracked his window a few inches before pulling a cigar from his shirt pocket and lighting it with a match. “We know that there have been several attempts at such a thing in the past, most notably in South Africa. Ten years ago, an Israeli Mossad agent spotted a well-known South African scientist at an airport in Libya and followed him to a secret underground biological lab that Colonel Gadhafi had constructed out in the desert.”

“I’ll bet that got the Israeli’s attention.”

“It not only got our attention, but it prompted us to launch a full scale investigation into just what the South Africans were up to. I was working for the Mossad at the time. Turns out the scientist our agent had followed was the head of a South African biological warfare research program. The program was called
Project Coast
. What we found sent chills up everyone’s spines. We discovered that the South African government had constructed their own biological research facility beneath an old farmhouse located on scrubland ten miles north of Pretoria. We had accidently stumbled upon what was possibly one of the most evil research centers since the Nazi experiments in World War II. They were working with smallpox, Ebola, anthrax, botulinum, the plague ... they had it all.”

“Do you think the same scientist is behind this new outbreak?”

“It’s possible. After the apartheid regime collapsed the lab was destroyed, but the scientist, along with most of his research notes, disappeared. Evidently, he tried to burn some of his secret files, but one of his research assistants was actually a Mossad agent that we had just put into place. After the other scientists had left the room, our agent put out the fire and retrieved the notes. That’s when we found out what these guys had really been up to. In addition to learning the essentials of biological engineering, they were discovering ways to freeze dry and weaponize various organisms by mixing them with nanopowder so that the pathogens could become easily airborne and penetrate human lungs. All of this was being done elsewhere around the world of course, especially in Russia and North Korea, but what was different about this program was the fact that they were also doing genetic research and isolating genes with the goal of making a biological weapon that could target a specific race. They were actually creating an
ethnic bomb
.”

“Sounds like some kind of diabolical Nazi plot,” Leo said.

“Believe me,” Lev continued, “if Hitler had been able to develop such a weapon he would have used it. When word of what the South Africans were up to got out, a well-known Nobel Prize-winning scientist dubbed it
the monster in our backyard
. He also predicted that the release of a genetic weapon like that would unleash genetic variations that could create a mutant form of the pathogen that would wipe out not only the targeted race, but the entire human species ... a real life Andromeda Strain. Unfortunately, we now know that the North Koreans have taken over where the South Africans left off. They’ve invested huge amounts of money and manpower into the same kind of research. In fact, some of our people believe that North Korea is where the missing scientist fled to, so the threat is still out there.”

Leo shifted uneasily in his seat and tapped his fingers on the armrest as he looked around inside the vehicle. “Your men didn’t happen to stock any wine in the back, did they, Francois?”