The Pharaoh's Secret (7 page)

Hospital Ship
Natal

Mediterranean Sea

Kurt, Joe and the other survivors from Lampedusa sat in the open air on the deck of an Italian supply ship with a big red cross on its funnel. They'd been evacuated by soldiers in full chemical gear, loaded aboard military helicopters and flown east. The operation went smoothly. The most difficult part was prying Joe off the MRI scanner, but as the metallic sections of his gear were cut away, they were able to pull him free.

After decontamination showers and a battery of medical tests, they were given new clothes in the form of spare military uniforms, put out on deck and offered the best espresso Kurt could remember drinking.

After a second cup, he found he literally could not sit still.

“You've got that look in your eye,” Joe said.

“Something's bugging me.”

“It's probably the caffeine,” Joe said. “You've had enough to give an elephant the jitters.”

Kurt glanced down at his empty cup and then back up at Joe. “Take a look around,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”

“Nothing better to do,” Joe replied. He glanced in every direction. “Blue skies, shimmering water. People happy to be alive. Though I'm sure you've spotted something to be glum about.”

“Exactly,” Kurt said. “I have. We're all out here. Every one of the survivors. Everyone except the person I'm most interested in talking to: Dr. Ambrosini.”

“I got a fair look at her when we came on board,” Joe said, stirring some sugar into the coffee. “I don't blame you for wanting to see her again. Who wouldn't want to play doctor with that particular doctor?”

There was no denying how attractive she was, but Kurt wanted to speak with her for other reasons. “Believe it or not, I'm more interested in her mind.”

Joe raised an eyebrow and then casually took another sip of his coffee—a move that said,
Sure you are
.

“I'm serious,” Kurt insisted. “I have some questions I want to ask her.”

“Beginning with ‘What's your number?'” Joe guessed. “Followed shortly by ‘Your cabin or mine?'”

Kurt couldn't help but laugh. “No,” he insisted. “She said a few things when I first arrived at the operating room that seemed odd to me. She seemed to know something about the guy who tried to kill us. Not to mention the fact that she called the incident an attack right from the beginning, right from that radio call we intercepted.”

Joe offered a more calculating look. “What are you getting at?”

Kurt shrugged as if it were obvious. “A freighter burning offshore, dark smoke drifting over the island, people falling down dead because of it: that's a disaster. An accident. I'd even call it a catastrophe. But an attack?”

“Those
are
strong words,” Joe said.

“As strong as this coffee,” Kurt said.

Joe gazed out into the distance. “I think I see where you're going with this. And while I normally like to be the voice of reason, I've been wondering how she knew enough to gather a bunch of people together and seal off an entire room quickly enough to avoid the fate of everyone else in the hospital. Even for a doctor, that's an awfully fast response.”

Kurt nodded. “But it's the kind of response someone expecting trouble might've already had in mind.”

“A contingency plan.”

“Or standard operating procedure.”

Kurt looked around. They were being watched by a trio of Italian sailors. It was a cursory honor guard of sorts and the sailors didn't seem all that interested in the duty. Two of them were leaning against the rail, talking quietly to each other, at the far edge of the deck. The third guard stood closer, smoking a cigarette, beside a small mechanical crane. “Think you can distract the guards?”

“Only if you promise to sneak past them, stir things up and get us into so much trouble that they decide to throw us off the boat,” Joe said.

Kurt raised a hand as if he were taking an oath. “I solemnly swear.”

“All right, then,” Joe said, finishing the rest of his coffee. “Here we go.”

As Kurt watched, Joe stood up and sauntered over toward the third chaperone, the only one near enough to actually matter. A conversation was quickly struck up, complete with Joe making hand gestures to keep the guard's eyes busy.

Kurt stood and made his way forward, easing back into the shadows beside a closed hatchway and leaning against the bulkhead. When Joe pointed toward something high up in the superstructure, the guard tilted his head and squinted into the sunlight as Kurt pulled the hatch open, slipped inside and closed it silently behind him.

Fortunately, the passageway was empty. It didn't surprise him. The supply ship was a large vessel, six hundred feet long, mostly empty space and probably crewed by less than two hundred men. Most of the passageways would be empty; the real challenge was to find the one that would take him to the infirmary, where he suspected Dr. Ambrosini would be found.

He started down the hall, heading toward the bow, where the decontamination procedures and testing had been performed. The sick bay had to be close by. If he found it, he'd knock on the door, fake a sore throat or maybe appendicitis. Something he hadn't done since trying to get out of school in the eighth grade.

He grabbed a small box of parts that had been left outside the machine shop. Years in the Navy and traveling around the world with NUMA had taught him many things, one of which was that if you didn't want anyone to stop and chat, walk briskly, avoid eye contact and, if at all possible, carry something that looks like it needs to be delivered ASAP.

The tactic worked like a charm as he passed a group of sailors without receiving a second glance. They disappeared behind him
just as Kurt found a stairwell and dropped down one level, before continuing forward.

Things were going fine until he realized he was lost. Instead of the medical center, he was finding only storerooms and locked compartments.

“Some explorer you are,” he muttered to himself. As he tried to figure out which way to go, a man and woman in white lab coats shuffled down the stairs, talking quietly between themselves.

Kurt let them pass and then followed. “First rule of being lost,” he told himself. “Follow someone who seems to know where they're going.”

He trailed them down two more flights of stairs and along another gangway until they disappeared through a hatch that closed softly behind them.

Kurt eased up beside it. He saw nothing on the door that suggested it was anything other than another storeroom, but when he opened the door a fraction and peeked through, he discovered how wrong he was.

A cavernous room spread out before him, lit from above by stark-white lights. It looked like a cargo bay, but it was empty except for hundreds and hundreds of bodies lying in cots or on mats laid down on the cold steel floor. Some wore bathing suits, as if they'd been collected from the beach, others were in casual shorts and T-shirts, and still others were in more official-looking clothes, including gray scrubs that matched those Kurt had seen on the staff at the hospital. None of them were moving.

Kurt pulled the door open wider and stepped through, moving toward this mass of people. It was not their presence here that surprised him—after all, someone had to collect the dead and helicopters had been taking off and landing all day long. It was the
fact that many of the victims were now attached to electrodes, monitors and other instruments. Some had IVs hooked up to them, and still others were being poked and prodded by the medical staff.

One figure went into spasms as a technician jabbed him with electricity and then became still as the current was shut off.

For a moment, no one noticed Kurt—after all, he was dressed like a crewman and they were too busy doing whatever it was they were doing. But as he moved into the room and recognized Cody Williams and two other members of the NUMA team, Kurt gave himself away. One of them was being injected with something even as a set of electrodes was pulled from his head. Cody was being given the shock treatment.

“What the hell is going on here!?” Kurt shouted.

A dozen faces turned his way. Suddenly, everyone knew he didn't belong. “Who are you?” one of them asked.

“Who the hell are you?” Kurt demanded. “And what kind of sick experiments are you doing on these people?”

Kurt's booming voice rang through the cavernous hold. His angry demeanor shocked the medical personnel. A few of them muttered to each other in whispered tones. Someone said something that sounded German to him, while still another shouted for Security.

Instantly, a group of Italian military police appeared. They moved toward him from two sides.

“Whoever you are, you're not authorized to be here,” one of the doctors said. His English was accented, but not in Italian; he sounded French to Kurt.

“Get him out of here,” another one said. To Kurt's surprise, this doctor sounded as if he came from Kansas or Iowa.

Despite the warning, Kurt stepped forward, moving toward the NUMA personnel who appeared to be being experimented on. He wanted to see what they were doing to his people and put a stop to it. The MPs cut him off. Batons in hand. Tasers on their hips.

“Throw him in the brig,” another doctor grunted. “And, for goodness' sake, secure the rest of the ship. How in blazes are we supposed to work like this?”

Before Kurt could be dragged away, a female voice intervened. “Do you really think it's necessary to clap our hero in irons and bury him in the depths of the hold?”

The words were English but Italian-accented and spoken with just the right mix of authority and sarcasm to ensure they would be obeyed. They came from Dr. Ambrosini, who was now standing on a catwalk above them.

With the grace of a dancer, she came down a ladder and across the cargo bay to where Kurt and the MPs stood face-to-face.

“But Dr. Ambrosini . . .” one of the foreign medics protested.

“But nothing, Dr. Ravishaw. He saved my life, the lives of eighteen others, and he's given us the best clue to the origin of this problem since the beginning of our investigation.”

“This is highly irregular,” Dr. Ravishaw said.

“Yes,” she replied, “as a matter of fact it is.”

Kurt took some pleasure in the exchange and noted wryly that Dr. Ambrosini was the smallest person in the room but undeniably in charge. She seemed genuinely pleased to see Kurt, yet a few smiles and kind treatment weren't enough to defuse his anger. “You want to tell me what's going on here?”

“Can we talk in private?”

“I'd love to,” he said. “Lead on.”

Dr. Ambrosini made her way to a small office next to the cargo hold. Kurt followed and shut the door after he stepped through it. By the look of it, the office was normally meant for a quartermaster, but it had clearly been co-opted by the medical personnel.

“First off,” she began, “I want to thank you for saving me.”

“Looks like you just returned the favor.”

She laughed it off, brushed a strand of hair back from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “I highly doubt I've saved you from anything,” she said. “More likely, I saved those poor MPs from a painful scuffle that would have bruised their egos, at the very least.”

“I think you overestimate me,” Kurt said.

“I doubt that,” she replied, folding her arms in front of her chest and leaning against the edge of the desk.

It was a nice compliment. Probably half true, but Kurt wasn't here to exchange pleasantries. “Can we get to the part where you tell me why those quacks out there are doing experiments on my dead friends?”

“Those
quacks
are my friends,” she said defensively.

“At least they're alive.”

She took a deep breath, as if deciding how much to say, and then exhaled. “Yes,” she said. “Well, I understand why you're upset. Your friends, like everyone on the island, have suffered quite a bit. But we need to find out—”

“What kind of toxin killed them?” Kurt said, interrupting. “I think that's a great idea. Unless I'm mistaken, that's done through blood tests and tissue samples. And while you're at it, maybe someone should be testing the smoke coming from that freighter. But unless you can tell me something I'm missing, there's no need for the Dr. Frankenstein treatment I just saw out there.”

“Dr. Frankenstein treatment,” she repeated. “That's a surprisingly apt description of what they're trying to do.”

Kurt was confused. “And why is that?”

“Because,” she said, “we're trying to bring your friends and the rest of them back to life.”

For a moment, Kurt was at a loss for words. “Say that again” was all he could muster.

“I don't blame you for being surprised,” she said. “As Dr. Ravishaw said, the situation is highly irregular.”

“More like crazy,” he replied. “You can't really believe you're going to reanimate people like some kind of witch doctor?”

“We're not ghouls,” she said. “It's just that the men and women in that cargo bay aren't dead. At least not yet. And we're desperately trying to find some method of waking them back up before they do pass on.”

Kurt considered what she was saying. “I checked several of them myself,” he replied. “They weren't breathing. On my rounds, while I was waiting for the Italian military to arrive, I passed
rooms filled with patients hooked up to EKGs: there were no heartbeats.”

“Yes,” she said, “I'm aware of that. But the fact is, they are breathing and their hearts are pumping blood. It's just that their respiration is extremely shallow and occurring at long intervals, with less than one breath every two minutes on average. Their heart rates are hovering in the single digits and the ventricular contractions are so weak that a typical monitor won't pick them up.”

“How can that be?”

“They're in a type of coma,” she said, “a type we've never seen before. With a normal coma, certain parts of the brain are switched off. Only the deepest, most primitive sections continue functioning. It's assumed that the body does this as a defense mechanism, allowing the brain or body to heal itself. But these patients show residual activity in all parts of their brains, yet they're unresponsive to any drug or stimuli we've tried so far.”

“Can you give that to me in layman's terms?”

“No damage has been done to their brains,” she said, “but they can't wake up. If you imagine them to be computers, it's as if someone put them on standby or sleep mode and no amount of pressing the on switch will get them functioning again.”

Kurt knew just enough human physiology to get himself in trouble, so he decided to ask rather than jump to conclusions. “If their hearts are pumping so softly and infrequently and pumping such little amounts of blood, and their breathing is so restrained, don't they risk oxygen deprivation and brain damage?”

“Hard to say,” she replied. “But we think they're existing in a state of suspended animation. Low body temperatures and low levels of cellular activity mean their organs are using very little oxygen. That could mean the shallow breathing and weak cardiovascular activity is enough to keep them healthy, enough to keep
their brains intact. Have you ever seen someone pulled from frigid water after a near drowning?”

Kurt nodded. “Years back, I rescued a boy and his dog from a frozen lake. The dog had chased a squirrel onto the ice and got stuck when his hind legs broke through. The boy tried to help him, but the ice cracked and both of them plunged into the water. By the time we got them out, the poor child was blue, he'd been underwater for seven minutes or more. He should have been long dead. The dog should have died too, but the paramedics were able to bring them both back. The boy ended up being fine. No brain damage at all. Is that what we're talking about here?”

“We hope so,” she said, “though it's not exactly the same. In the boy's case, the frigid water caused a spontaneous reaction in his body that could be reversed once he was brought back to a normal temperature. These people didn't face such an instant temperature change; they were affected by some kind of toxin. And, at least so far, neither warming nor cooling nor electric shock nor direct injections of Adrenalin nor anything in our Frankenstein's bag of tricks has been able to bring them out of it.”

“So what kind of toxin are we dealing with?” Kurt asked.

“We don't know.”

“It has to be the smoke from that freighter.”

“You would think,” she said, nodding, “but we've sampled the smoke. There's nothing more than burned petroleum fumes in it, with a slight mix of lead and asbestos, no different than what you'd find from any shipboard fire.”

“So the fire and the cloud enveloping the island are just a coincidence? Somehow, I don't buy that.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “But there's nothing in that cloud to cause what we've seen. At worst, it could produce irritated eyes, wheezing and asthma attacks.”

“So if it's not the smoke from the ship, then what?”

She paused, studying him for a second, before continuing. Kurt sensed she'd decided to speak more freely. “We believe it was nerve toxin, weaponized by the explosion, either deliberately or accidentally. Many nerve agents are short-lived. The fact that we find no trace of it in the soil, air or in blood and tissue samples from the victims tells us that whatever agent it might have been, biological or chemical, it lasts no more than a few hours.”

Kurt saw the logic, but still other things made no sense. “But why use something like that against a place like Lampedusa?”

“We have no idea,” she said. “So we're leaning toward accident.”

As Kurt considered that, he glanced around the room. There were medical terms scribbled on two whiteboards behind the desk. A list of various drugs they'd tried crossed through. He also spotted a map of the Mediterranean with several pins stuck in it. One marked a spot in Libya, another was pinned to a section of the northern Sudan. Several others were in the Middle East and sections of Eastern Europe.

“You called this an attack in your radio message,” he said, nodding toward the board. “I'm guessing you suspected it was an attack because this isn't the first incident of its kind.”

She pursed her lips. “You're too observant for your own good. The answer is yes. Six months ago, a group of radicals in Libya were found in this same state. No one knew what happened to them. They died eight days later. Because of Italy's historic ties with Libya, my government agreed to look into it. We soon discovered similar incidents in various Libyan hospitals and then in all of the places you see marked on the map. In each case, radical groups or powerful figures slipping into unexplained comas and dying. We formed a task force, took this ship as our floating lab and began looking for answers.”

Kurt could appreciate that type of response. “What's your part in all this?”

“I'm a doctor,” she replied with indignation. “A specialist in neurobiology. I work for the Italian government.”

“And you just happened to be on Lampedusa when the attack came?”

She sighed. “I was on Lampedusa watching the only suspect we've been able to link to the incidents. A doctor who worked at the hospital.”

“No wonder you knew how to protect yourself and the others,” Kurt noted.

She nodded. “When you've done the work I've done, seen the things I've seen, in Syria, Iraq and other places, you have nightmares of people falling dead in front of you, invisible gas poisoning your body and destroying your cells. You become very aware of your surroundings. Defensive. Almost paranoid. And, yes, when I saw that cloud and the people falling as it reached them, I knew instantly what was happening. I just knew.”

Kurt respected her history and her reflexes. “So the dead man,” he said. “The one who attacked us. Was he your suspect?”

“No,” she said. “We don't know who he is. He obviously had no ID on him. He has no truly distinguishing marks and his fingerprints have been burned off—I would assume deliberately—nothing but scar tissue left there. We have no record of anyone matching his description arriving on the island. Normally, that wouldn't tell you much, but with all the immigration and asylum seekers who come to Lampedusa, everyone gets documented thoroughly whether they land at the airport, come through the harbor or wash up onshore in a dilapidated raft.”

“So if the man with the gun is not your suspect, who is?”

“A doctor named Hagen. He worked in the hospital part-time. Hagen has a shady past. We knew he was waiting to take delivery of something and we knew it was to arrive today. We just didn't know where it was coming from, who was delivering it or what exactly it was. But we were able to confirm his presence in three of the locations during and before the time of the other attacks. So we believe he was connected.”

Kurt put the parts together. “So the dead man with the gun was the courier,” he said, “bringing this nerve agent or toxin to your Dr. Hagen, when it literally blew up in his face.”

“That's our theory,” she replied.

“And what about Hagen?”

She offered a dour look. “Of the roughly five thousand people on Lampedusa, Hagen is the only one currently unaccounted for. We had him under constant surveillance, but, unfortunately, the team was afflicted by the toxin like everyone else.”

Kurt leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling, his eyes settling on a line where two different shades of paint overlapped, forming a third, darker color. “So a deadly cloud covers the island and the only two people apparently immune to its effects are your suspect and the man who tried to kill us.”

She nodded. “Correct. Does that tell you something?”

Of course it did. “They have some kind of antidote,” he said. “Something that blocks the paralyzing effects of whatever toxin caused these comas.”

“Our thinking exactly,” she said. “Unfortunately, we've found nothing in Hagen's office or his home or his vehicle that can help us. Nor have we found anything in the dead man's blood that would allow us to guess what the antidote was.”

“Is that surprising?” Kurt asked.

“Not really,” she said. “Since the nerve agent was short-lived, it stands to reason that any antidote would have a short half-life as well.”

Kurt could see the progression now. “So the antidote has already decayed. But if you could find your missing doctor, he might be persuaded to tell you where we can get some more.”

She grinned broadly. “You're very sharp, Mr. Austin.”

“Stop calling me that,” he said. “It makes me feel old.”

“Kurt, then,” she said. “Call me Renata.”

He liked that. “Any idea where your suspect might be hiding?”

She gave him a sideways glance. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

“You're not planning on looking for him, are you?”

“Of course not,” Kurt said. “That sounds dangerous. Whatever would make you think such a thing?”

“Oh, I don't know,” she said coyly. “Only everything I've seen from you so far, backed up by a conversation I had with the Assistant Director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency shortly before you broke into my temporary medical ward.”

Kurt offered a droll look. “You spoke to my boss?”

“Rudi Gunn,” she said. “Yes. Charming man. He told me you'd probably ask to help. And if I refused your offer, you'd get involved anyway and most likely muck everything up.”

She wore a permanent grin now, so pleased with the direction of the conversation that Kurt could easily guess what had transpired. “So how much did he sell me for?”

“I'm afraid he gave you away for a song.”

“
O sole mio
?”

“Not quite
sole
,” she said. “He threw in Mr. Zavala as a bonus.”

Kurt feigned indignation at being traded to the Italians like a
minor-league ballplayer, but he was more than happy with the deal. “So do I get paid in euros or—”

“Satisfaction,” she said. “We're going to find the people that did this and we're going to stop whatever it is they're up to. And if we're lucky, the antidote that kept Hagen and the assailant from succumbing to the toxin can be used to bring the victims out of their comas.”

“Couldn't ask for better compensation,” Kurt replied. “Where do we start?”

“Malta,” she said. “Hagen made three trips there in the past month.”

She opened a drawer, removed a file folder and pulled from it a set of surveillance photos that she handed to Kurt. “He met with this man several times. Even had a heated argument with him last week.”

Kurt studied the photo. It showed a scholarly man in a tweed jacket with elbow patches. He was sitting at an outdoor café, speaking with three men. It looked more like he was being surrounded.

“The one in the middle is Hagen,” she said. “The other two, we're not sure. His entourage, I suppose.”

“Who's the professorial-looking fellow?”

“The curator of the Maltese Oceanic Museum.”

“I don't get it,” Kurt said. “Museum curators don't normally rub elbows with terrorists and those trafficking in nerve gas and biological weapons. Are you sure there's a connection?”

“We're not sure of anything,” she admitted. “Except that Hagen has been meeting with this man on a regular basis, intent on buying some artifacts the museum is about to put up for auction after a gala party two days from now.”

Kurt didn't like it. “Everybody has their hobbies,” he said. “Even terrorists.”

She sat down. “Collecting ancient artifacts isn't one of Hagen's. He's never shown an interest. Not until now.”

“Okay,” Kurt said. “But surely he wouldn't be stupid enough to go back there.”

“That's what I thought,” she replied. “Except that someone just put two hundred thousand euros into Hagen's account on Malta. An account he opened the day after he met with the museum curator. Interpol confirmed the transaction. It was initiated several hours
after
the incident on Lampedusa.”

Kurt saw the logic. There was no denying it. This Dr. Hagen was alive, he'd escaped Lampedusa and moved money into the Maltese account after the fact. Whatever the reason, it sounded like the fugitive doctor was headed back there for another meeting with the head curator of the Maltese Oceanic Museum.