The Judas Strain (27 page)

“But where exactly in Persia?” Gray asked.

“Hormuz,” Balthazar answered. “In southern Iran. The island of Hormuz lies at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.”

Gray glanced to the table.
An island
. He picked up the golden
paitzu
and traced the line encircling around the angelic symbol. “Could this be a crude map of that island?”

“Let’s check,” Vigor said, and stood up. He crossed over to the curator’s old illuminated map on the wall.

Gray joined him.

Vigor pointed to a small island near the bottom of the Persian Gulf, close to the mainland of Iran. It bore the same rounded shape with a distinct teardrop tip. It was almost an exact match to the drawing around the gold glyph.

“We found it,” Gray said, his breath quickening in anticipation. “We know where we have to go next.”

And that meant his plan could still work
.

“But what about Nasser?” Vigor asked.

“I haven’t forgotten about him.” Gray faced the monsignor and gripped his shoulder. “The first key. I want you to give it to Balthazar.”

Vigor frowned. “Why?”

“In case anything goes wrong here, we can’t let Nasser get ahold of it. We’ll present the second key we found here as the
first
one. Nasser can’t know that you found a key in the Vatican.” Gray stared between them. “I assume you two kept it between yourselves.”

Both men nodded.

Good
.

Still, Vigor’s frown had not dimmed. “Surely when Nasser gets here, he’ll search Balthazar and find the other golden key.”

“Not if Balthazar is already gone,” Gray said. “Like with Kowalski, I doubt Nasser knows your colleague traveled with you. Why would he suspect you came here with the dean of the art history department? By tracking your cell phone, all Nasser knows is that
you
left to meet us. We’ll use that to our advantage. We’ll send Balthazar with everything he needs to know. Out to Seichan. Along with Kowalski, the three of them can get a jump start and head over to the island of Hormuz. It will be up to them to find the last key. Once Nasser arrives here, we’ll have to stall the bastard for as long as possible. But for the sake of my parents, we may have to eventually send him on the right path.”

“Where hopefully Seichan will have already found the last key,” Vigor said.

“Then we’ll have something to bargain with,” Gray said.

Still, Gray knew all of these plans hinged on one last hope.

That Painter found a way to free his parents.

And of course, that Gray had not made any gross miscalculations himself.

1:06
P.M.

S
EICHAN WAITED INSIDE
the hotel room across from Hagia Sophia’s west entrance. She sat by the fifth-floor window. Her cheek rested against the stock of her Heckler & Koch PSG1 sniper rifle. She stared down its telescopic sight, focused on the plaza in front of the church.

She had watched the police come and go, stopping only briefly.

What had happened?

Behind her, Kowalski lay stretched on the bed, chewing on olives and cleaning five hand pistols and a 5.56 mm NATO A-91 assault rifle.

They had gone shopping, stocking up on the essentials.

Kowalski whistled around an olive pit as he worked. It was getting on her nerves as she kept her post. But at least he knew his armaments.

From her vantage, Seichan had a clear view of the street, park, and plaza. She watched for anyone taking an inordinate interest in the church, more than the typical flash-and-go tourist. She also watched for any telltale sign of someone carting heavy weaponry.

So far so good. Either that or she was losing her edge.

Through her telescopic sight, she watched everyone leaving or entering through the western Imperial Doors of Hagia Sophia. She adjusted the focal length to get a clear view of the faces. She kept inventory. To see if any of the
same
faces came and went, indicating someone who was canvassing the place.

She wanted to know where as many of the hostiles were positioned as possible.

In case an assault proved necessary.

So far nothing. It made no sense.

Where were Nasser’s men? They should have been here by now, taking up positions. The Guild had many resources and assets in Istanbul. The supply of arms behind her was proof enough of that. Or was Nasser operating lean? Keeping his manpower to a minimum? It was easier to blend one or two men into the scenery than a half dozen.

Still, Seichan wasn’t buying it.

“Something’s wrong,” she muttered, bobbling her view.

What was his game?

She concentrated back on her duty. A large man exited the church, crossing in large strides, not attempting to hide. Seichan focused on him, bringing up his bearded face.

That’s more like it.

She didn’t know his name, but she had seen the man before, meeting with Nasser, two years ago. A fat envelope had passed between them. Nasser hadn’t known Seichan had tailed him, spied on his rendezvous. Seichan had a series of photographs of the unknown operative somewhere in her Swiss bank vault. Something tucked away for a rainy day.

Or a sunny one like today.

“No wonder Nasser is operating lean,” she mumbled.

The bastard had someone positioned
inside
Hagia Sophia. That did not bode well. If this man was leaving, that meant someone else had already relieved him. She watched him stop in the plaza and take out a cell phone.

Probably calling Nasser, letting him know his quarry was safe and sound inside the church.

Her cell phone rang.

Odd.

She reached blindly to the phone, pressed talk, and lifted it to her ear. “Ciao,” she said.

“Hello,” the caller responded, his voice bright. “I am looking to speak to a woman named Seichan. I was told to call at this number, to arrange for us to get together. A certain monsignor and an American would like us to meet.”

Seichan’s skin chilled as she listened, focused on the figure, watching his lips move in synchronization with the voice in her ear.

“This is Balthazar Pinosso, with the Vatican’s art history division.”

At least Seichan finally had a name for the man in the photograph with Nasser. Balthazar Pinosso. A Guild operative. She breathed through her nose. Nasser didn’t just have someone positioned inside the church—he had someone inside their own goddamn inner circle.

Seichan mentally kicked herself. It wasn’t Sigma that had a Guild mole. The Vatican did.

“Hello,” the man repeated, with a trace of worry.

Seichan leaned her cheek tighter against the stock, taking dead aim.

Time to plug the leak.

“Kowalski…” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

“The shit’s about to hit the fan.”

“Hell of about time!”

Seichan pulled the trigger.

J
ULY
6, 7:12
P.M.

Aboard the
Mistress of the Seas

T
HANK
G
OD,
the cocktail party had finally ended.

Lisa hurriedly unbuttoned the hand-beaded silk coat that overlay her black cocktail dress, a pleated silk charmeuse. The Vera Wang–designed ensemble was well over her budget, but she had found the dress spread out on her bed earlier when she returned to get ready for Ryder Blunt’s soiree, welcoming the cruise ship to the pirates’ home port.

Dr. Devesh Patanjali must have handpicked the dress himself from the ship’s luxury shops down on the Lido Deck. That was reason alone to get it off her body. Lisa had not wanted to go to the party, but Devesh had left no choice. So she had joined the other senior staff up in Ryder’s suite.

Champagne and chilled wine had flowed. Hors d’oeuvres were passed atop silver platters, borne aloft by liveried wait staff, while iced trays of caviar surrounded by toast points decorated the buffet table. Apparently there remained enough members of the ship’s orchestra still alive to form a string quartet. The group played quietly out on the balcony as the sun set, but they were forced to disband when the winds kicked up and rain began to pelt down in heavy, stinging drops.

Thunder rumbled overhead even now as the storm grew in intensity. At least the ship remained steady, sheltered in the caldera of a sunken volcano. Still, word of a typhoon and countless responsibilities had soon ended Ryder’s impromptu party.

It had lasted only a couple of hours.

Lisa stripped to her bra and panties, glad to be done with the matter. She climbed back into her jeans and slipped a loose blouse over her head, shimmying it in place. Barefoot, she crossed to the evening purse on the bed, another gift of Dr. Patanjali, a Gucci frame bag with silver tassles. The bag had a price tag still on it.

Over six thousand dollars.

Still, what it held was of far greater value. During the festivities, Ryder had discreetly passed to her a pair of party favors, which she had quickly tucked into her purse.

A small radio and a pistol.

And the news that accompanied the gifts was even more welcome.

Monk was alive!

And on board the ship!

Lisa quickly hid the gun in the waistband of her jeans and covered it with the edge of her loose blouse. Radio in hand, she crossed to the door and listened with her ear pressed against it.

There was no regular guard posted at her door. The entire wing had been cordoned off at the stairwell and at the elevator banks. Devesh had assigned an inside cabin for her, only two doors down from where her patient still slumbered in a catatonic stupor.

Satisfied she was alone, Lisa dialed the radio to channel eight and slipped on the radio’s earpiece and microphone. She pressed the transmitter. “Monk, are you there? Over.”

She waited.

A bit of static rasped, then a familiar voice spoke. “Lisa? Thank God! So Ryder got you a radio. Did you get the gun? Over.”

“Yes.” She desperately wanted to hear his entire story, how he survived, but now wasn’t the time. She had more important concerns. “Ryder said that you had some plan.”

“A plan might be too generous a term. More like a seat-of-your-pants run for your life.”

“Sounds great to me. When?”

“I’m going to coordinate with Ryder in another few minutes. We’ll be ready at twenty-one hundred. You be ready, too. Keep the pistol with you.” He gave her a brief overview of his plan to free her.

She filled in some necessary details to help him, then checked her watch.
Less than two hours
.

“Should I tell anyone else?” Lisa asked.

A long pause.

“No. I’m sorry. If we’re going to have any hope of escaping, we’re going to have to bolt with as few people as possible, using the cover of the storm. Ryder has a private boat in a slide launch on the starboard side. I’ve got a map from your friend Jessie. There’s a small township about thirty nautical miles away. The best hope is to reach it and raise the alarm.”

“Is Jessie coming with us?”

An even longer pause followed.

Lisa clicked the transmitter again. “Monk?”

A sigh filled her ear. “They caught Jessie. Threw him overboard.”

“What?” Lisa pictured his smiling face and propensity for stupid puns. “He’s…he’s dead?”

“Don’t know. I’ll explain more when we meet.”

She felt a well of grief for a young man whom she had only known for a few hours. Lost in that well, she could not find her voice.

“Twenty-one hundred hours,” Monk repeated. “Keep your radio with you, but out of sight. I’ll contact you again then. Out.”

Lisa removed the headpiece and grasped the radio in both hands. The physicality of the hard plastic helped center her. They would talk again in a couple of hours.

Thunder rumbled.

She clipped the radio inside her pocket, folding and tucking in the headpiece. She kept its bulge hidden by the drape of her blouse.

She stared at the cabin door. If they were going to make an escape, Lisa did not want to leave empty-handed. She knew there were reams of data and files in the room with her patient.

Plus there was a computer…with a DVD burner.

She had talked with Henri and Dr. Miller up at the cocktail party. In hushed whispers, they had related how Devesh and his team were collecting samples of various toxic bacteria produced by the Judas Strain, the worst of the bunch, storing them in incubation chambers in an off-limits lab, run by Devesh’s virologist.

“I think they’re also doing experiments with the virus on known pathogens,” Dr. Miller had reported. “I saw stacks of sealed plates marked
Bacillus anthracis
and
Yersinia pestis
disappear into the restricted lab.”

Anthrax and the Black Plague bacterium.

Henri postulated that Devesh must be experimenting to produce a superstrain of these deadly pathogens. During their discussions, one word remained unspoken—the reason for all of this.

Bioterrorism.

Lisa checked her watch and crossed to her door. If the world was going to have any chance of stopping the myriad plagues that the Guild was collecting and producing, they needed as much data as possible from her patient. The woman’s body was healing itself, ridding its tissues of the toxic bacteria, flushing it clean.

How and why?

Lisa knew Devesh was right about Susan Tunis.

This one patient holds the key to everything
.

Lisa couldn’t leave without gathering as much data as possible.

She had to take the chance.

Squeezing the door handle tightly, Lisa tugged it open. She crossed the five steps to Susan Tunis’s room. Ahead, the circular bay of scientific suites was still busy with technicians coming and going. A radio was playing honky-tonk, but the singer crooned in Chinese. The air smelled of disinfectant and an underlying earthy smell.

Lisa briefly made eye contact with the armed guard who patrolled the central space, circling the pile of discarded crates and idle equipment. Down the hall behind her, she heard more guards talking.

She ducked over to Susan Tunis’s room, swiped the card Devesh had given her, and pushed inside. As always, two orderlies manned the room. Devesh never left his prize patient unattended.

One man lounged in a chair in the main salon, feet up on the bed, watching television with the volume on low. It was some Hollywood movie shown on a shipwide broadcast. The other orderly was in the well-lit bedroom with the patient, clipboard in hand, recording the quarter-hour vitals.

“I’d like a moment alone with the patient,” Lisa said.

The large man, shaved bald and dressed in scrubs, could be the identical twin of the other. She never learned their names, internally referring to them as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

But at least they spoke English.

The orderly shrugged, handed her the clipboard, and crossed out with his partner.

Lightning flashed brightly through the balcony doors, and thunder grumbled. The world beyond—lagoon and surrounding forested island—appeared in stark relief, then vanished back into darkness with a fierce clap.

Rain pounded more heavily.

Lisa slipped on a mask and a pair of surgical gloves and crossed over to her patient. She again collected the ophthalmoscope from the tray of examination instruments. She had been monitoring a strange anomaly in the patient’s eyes, something she had kept secret from Devesh. Before she left she wanted to check one more time.

She slipped back the flap of the isolation tent, leaned down, and used a fingertip to gently peel up the lid of the woman’s left eye. Lisa clicked on the ophthalmoscope’s light and adjusted the focus. Leaning down, nose to nose, she began a funduscopic exam of the patient’s inner eye.

All the retinal surfaces appeared normal and healthy: macula, optic disk, blood vessels. The anomaly was easy to miss, as it wasn’t structural. Holding her position, Lisa clicked off the ophthalmoscope’s light source. She continued to stare through the instrument’s lens.

The back of the patient’s eye, the entire retinal surface, shone back at her, softly aglow with its own milky light. Some strange phosphorescence had infused the retinal tissues. It had started around the optic disk, where the main nerve bundle from the brain attached to the eye. But over the past few hours, the glow had spread outward and now encompassed the entire retinal surface.

She had read the historical reports of the first manifestation of the disease, an algal bloom, back at the island, how the seas had glowed with phosphorescent cyanobacteria.

And now the patient’s eyes glowed.

There must be some clue here. But what?

Based on these earlier findings, Lisa had discreetly performed a second tap of the patient’s cerebral spinal fluid. She wanted to know if anything had changed in the fluid around the brain. The results should be back by now, fed into the computer in the corner of the room.

Lisa finished her exam, shed her gloves and mask, and crossed to the computer station. It was out of direct view of the other room.

She brought up the menu for laboratory tests. Her CSF tap’s results had indeed returned. She glanced through the chemical analysis. Protein levels were rising, but little else had changed. She switched over to the microscopic exam. Bacteria had been detected and identified.

Cyanobacteria.

As she had suspected.

When the blood-brain barrier had been weakened to allow the Judas Strain virus into the brain, it brought some company.

Company that was growing and multiplying.

Anticipating these very results, Lisa had done some earlier research. Cyanobacteria were one of the most ancient strains of bacteria. In fact, they had the distinction of being among the world’s oldest known fossils. Almost four billion years old, one of the earth’s first life-forms. They were also unique in that they were photosynthetic, like plants, able to produce their own food from sunlight. If fact, most scientists considered cyanobacteria to be the ancestor of modern plants. But these ancient bacteria also proved to be very adaptable, spreading into every environmental niche: salt water, freshwater, soil, even bare rock.

And with the help of the Judas Strain, apparently the human brain.

The glow of the patient’s eyes suggested that the cyanobacteria in the brain must have traveled along the optic-nerve sheath to the eye, where they were now setting up house.

Why?

From the sample Lisa saw that a technician had performed a new microscopic scan of the Judas Strain virus. Curious, she brought the fresh image to the screen. Once again, she was faced with the true monster here: the icosahedron shell with the branchlike tendrils sprouting from each corner.

She remembered her earlier words.
No organism is evil for evil’s sake
. It just sought to survive, to spread, to thrive.

The file was also cross-indexed to the original viral photos. She brought those up, too.

Old and new. Side by side. All the same.

She reached to close the file, but her finger hovered over the button.

No…

Her hand began to tremble.

Of course…

Lightning cracked, blindingly bright through the balcony doors, followed by an immediate clap of thunder that made her jump. The entire ship shuddered. The balcony doors rattled.

The lightning had struck right over the ship, maybe hitting it.

The cabin lights flickered. Lisa glanced up just as they went out. Darkness fell over the cabin.

The orderlies yelled out a complaint.

Lisa stood up.

Oh. My. God.

Then the lights zapped back on with a surge of current. The computer squelched a complaint and made a loud smoky
pop
. The television in the other room garbled, then settled into regular movie dialogue.

Lisa stayed where she was, frozen in shock.

She continued staring down at the figure in the bed. In the moment of brief darkness, Lisa had made another discovery about the patient. Had no one ever turned out the lights in here? Or was this phenomenon new?

It wasn’t only the woman’s
eyes
that glowed.

In the darkness, dressed only in a thin gown, the woman’s limbs and face had glowed with a soft blush, a sheen of phosphorescence that was not evident in the bright light.

The cyanobacteria had not just spread to her eyes—but everywhere.

Lisa was so stunned that she failed to note one other detail for a full breath: the patient’s eyes were open, staring back at Lisa.

Parched lips moved.

Lisa read those lips more than heard the words.

“Wh-who are you?”

8:12
P.M.

M
ONK LISTENED TO
the radio’s earpiece as he climbed the stairs from the lower decks. He had gone down to check the access to Ryder Blunt’s private dock, where he kept his boat. It was unguarded. Few knew about the private slide launch.