The Venetian Betrayal (31 page)

"I didn't come alone," Thorvaldsen said.

She kept her gun aimed at the Dane.

"San Marco is littered with police. Going to be tough for you to leave. You're a head of state, in a foreign country. Are you really going to shoot me?" He paused. "What would Alexander do?"

She couldn't decide if he was being serious or patronizing, but she knew the answer. "He'd kill you."

Thorvaldsen shifted his position, easing to her left. "I disagree. He was a great tactician. And clever. The Gordian knot, for example."

She called out, "What's happening up there?"

Her guardsman did not answer.

"In the village of Gordium," Thorvaldsen was saying, "that complicated knot attached to a wagon. Nobody could untie the thing. A challenge Alexander solved by simply cutting the rope with his sword, then untying it. A simple solution to a complex problem."

"You talk too much."

"Alexander did not allow confusion to affect his thinking."

"Viktor," she called out.

"Of course," Thorvaldsen said, "there are many tales to that knot's story. One says Alexander withdrew a pole connected to the wagon yoke, found the rope ends, and untied it. So who knows?"

She was tiring of this man's rambles.

Head of state or not.

She pulled the trigger.

Chapter
FIFTY-FOUR

SAMARKAND

Vincenti remembered the first indication of a problem. Initially, the malady possessed all the characteristics of a cold, then he thought it the flu, but soon the full effects of a viral invasion became apparent.

Contamination.

"Am I going to die?" Charlie Easton screamed from the cot. "I want to know, dammit. Tell me."

He dabbed Easton's sopping brow with a damp rag, like he'd done for the past hour, and quietly said, "You need to calm down."

"Don't bullshit me. It's over, isn't it?"

Three years they'd worked side by side. No sense hedging. "There's nothing I can do."

"Shit. I knew it. You've got to get some help."

"You know I can't."

The station's remote location had been selected by the Iraqis, and the Soviets, with great care. Secrecy was paramount. And the price of that secrecy was fatal when a mistake occurred, and a mistake was exactly what happened.

Easton jerked the cot with his restrained arms and legs. "Cut these damn ropes. Let me out of here."

He'd tied the idiot down knowing their options were limited. "We can't leave."

"Screw policy. Screw you. Cut these damn ropes."

Easton stiffened, his breath grew labored, then he succumbed to the fever and relaxed into unconsciousness.

Finally.

Vincenti turned from the cot and grabbed a notebook that he'd started three weeks back, the first page labeled with his partner's name. Inside, he'd noted a progressive shift in skin color. Normal, to jaundiced, to such ashiness that the man now appeared dead. There'd been an incredible weight loss, forty pounds all told, ten over one two-day period alone, the intestinal intake dwindling to an occasional gulp of warm water and a few sips of liquor.

And the fever.

A raging torrent of a constant one hundred and three, sometimes peaking higher, moisture escaping faster than it was being replaced, the body literally evaporating before his eyes. For years they'd used animals in their research, Baghdad providing an endless supply of gibbons, baboons, green monkeys, rodents, and reptiles. But here, for the first time, the effects on a human being could be accurately gauged.

He stared down at his partner. Easton's chest heaved with more labored breaths, mucus rattling deep in the throat, sweat beading off the skin like rain. He noted every observation in the journal, then pocketed the pen.

He stood from the cot and tried to work some feeling into his rubbery legs. He lumbered outside into a crisp night. He wondered how much more Easton's ravaged tissues could take.

Which raised the problem of what to do with the body.

No protocol existed for handling this type of emergency, so he'd have to improvise. Luckily, the station's builders had thoughtfully provided an incinerator for disposing of the animal carcasses used in experimentation. But making the oven work on something as large as a human body was going to take ingenuity.

"I see angels. They're here. All around," Easton cried from the cot.

Vincenti walked back inside.

Easton was now blind. He wasn't sure if the fever or a secondary infection had destroyed the retina.

"God's here. I see him."

"Of course, Charlie. I'm sure you do."

He took a pulse. Blood snapped through the carotid artery. He listened to the heart, which pounded like a drum. He checked blood pressure. On the verge of bottoming. The body temperature was a steady one hundred and three.

"What do I tell God?" Easton asked.

He stared down at his partner. "Say hello."

He pulled a chair close and watched death take hold. The end came twenty minutes later and seemed neither violent nor painful. Just a final breath. Deep. Long. No exhale.

He noted the date and time in the journal, then extracted a blood and tissue sample. He then rolled the thin mattress and filthy sheets around the body and carried the stinking bundle out of the building into an adjacent shed. A scalpel was already there, sharpened to the degree of broken glass, along with a surgeon's saw. He slipped on a pair of thick rubber gloves and sawed the legs from the torso. The emaciated flesh cut soft and loose, the bone brittle, the intervening muscle offering the resistance of a boiled chicken. He amputated both arms and stuffed all four limbs into the incinerator, watching with no emotion as the flames consumed them. Without extremities, the torso and head fit easily through the iron door. He then cut the bloodied mattress into quarters and quickly stuffed it, the sheets, and gloves into the fire.

He slammed the portal shut and staggered outside.

Over. Finally.

He fell to the rocky ground and stared up at the night. Against the indigo backdrop of a mountain sky, silhouetted as an even darker shadow, the incinerator's brick flue reached skyward. Smoke escaped, carrying with it the stench of human flesh.

He lay back and welcomed sleep.

Vincenti recalled that sleep from over twenty-five years ago. And Iraq. What hell. Hot and miserable. A lonely, desolate spot. What had the UN Commission concluded after the first Gulf War? Given their mission, the facilities were wholly archaic, but within the frantic atmosphere of the time they were thought state of the art. Right. Those inspectors weren't there. He was. Young and skinny with a head full of hair and brains. A hotshot virologist. He and Easton had eventually been detailed to a remote lab in Tajikistan, working in conjunction with the Soviets who controlled the region, at a station hidden away in the Pamir foothills.

How many viruses and bacteria had they searched for? Natural organisms that could be used as biological weapons. Something that eliminated an enemy yet preserved a culture's infrastructure. No need to bomb the population, waste bullets, risk nuclear contamination, or put troops in jeopardy. A microscopic organism could do all of the heavy lifting--simple biology the catalyst for certain defeat.

The working criteria for whatever they found had been simple. Fast-acting. Biologically identifiable. Containable. And, most important, curable. Hundreds of strains were discarded simply because no practical way could be found to stop them. What good would infecting an enemy be if you couldn't protect your own population? All four criteria had to be satisfied before a specimen was cataloged. Nearly twenty had made the grade.

He'd never accepted what the press reported after the Biological Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972--that the United States quit the germ-warfare business and destroyed all of its arsenals. The military wouldn't discard decades of research simply because a few politicians unilaterally decided it was the thing to do. At least a few of those organisms, he believed, were hidden in cold storage at some nondescript military institution.

He personally found six pathogens that met all of the criteria.

But sample 65-G failed on every count.

He first discovered it in 1979, within the bloodstream of the green monkeys that had been shipped for experimentation. Conventional science then would never have noticed, but thanks to his unique virology training, and special equipment the Iraqis provided, he found it. A strange-looking thing--spherical--filled with RNA and enzymes. Expose it to air and it evaporated. In water, the cell wall collapsed. Instead, it craved warm plasma and seemed prevalent throughout all of the green monkeys that came his way.

Yet none of the animals seemed affected.

Charlie Easton, though, had been another matter. Damn fool. He'd been bitten two years prior by one of the monkeys, but told no one until three weeks before he died, when the first symptoms appeared. A blood sample confirmed 65-G roamed through him. He'd eventually used Easton's infection to study the viral effects on humans, concluding the organism was not an efficient biological weapon. Too unpredictable, sporadic, and far too slow to be an effective offensive agent.

He shook his head.

Amazing how ignorant he'd been.

A miracle he'd survived.

He was back in his hotel room at the Intercontinental, dawn coming slowly to Samarkand. He needed to rest, but was still energized from his encounter with Karyn Walde.

He thought again about the old healer.

Was it 1980? Or '81?

In the Pamirs, about two weeks before Easton died. He'd visited the village several times before, trying to learn what he could. The old man was surely dead by now. Even then he was well up in age.

But still.

The old man scampered barefoot up the liver-colored slope with the agility of a cat, on feet with soles like leather. Vincenti followed and, even through heavy boots, his ankles and toes ached. Nothing was flat. Rocks arched everywhere like speed breakers, sharp, unforgiving. The village lay a mile back, nearly a thousand feet above sea level, their current journey taking them even higher.

The man was a traditional healer, a combination family practitioner, priest, fortune teller, and sorcerer. He knew little English but could speak passable Chinese and Turkish. He was a near-dwarf with European features and a forked Mongol beard. He wore a gold-threaded quilt and a bright skullcap. Back in the village, Vincenti had watched while the man treated the villagers with a concoction of roots and plants, meticulously administered with an intelligence born from decades of trial and error.

"Where are we going?" he finally asked.

"To answer your question and find what will stop the fever in your friend."

Around him, a stadium of white peaks formed a gallery of untouched heights. Thunder clouds steamed from the highest summits. Streaks of silvers and autumnal reds and dense groves of walnut trees added color to the otherwise mummified scene. A rush of water could be heard somewhere far off.

They came to a ledge and he followed the old man through a purple vein in the rock. He knew from his studies that the mountains around him were still alive, slowly pushing upward about two and a half inches a year.

They exited into an oval-shaped arena, walled in by more stone. Not much light inside, so he found the flashlight the old man had encouraged him to bring.

Two pools dotted the rock floor, each about ten feet in diameter, one bubbling with the froth of thermal energy. He brought the light close and noticed their contrasting color. The active one was a russet brown, its calm companion a sea foam green.

"The fever you describe is not new," the old man said. "Many generations have known that animals deliver it."

To learn more about the yaks, the sheep, and the huge bears that populated the region was one of the reasons he'd been sent. "How do you know that?"

"We watch. But only sometimes do they pass the fever. If your friend has the fever, this will help." He pointed to the green pool, its still surface marred only by an array of floating plants. They looked like water lilies, only bushier, the center flower straining through the shade for precious drops of sunlight. "The leaves will save him. He must chew them."

He dabbed the water and brought two moist fingers to his mouth. No taste. He half expected the hint of carbonate found in other springs of the region.

The man knelt and gulped a cupped handful. "It is good," he said, smiling.

He drank, too. Warm, like a cup of tea, and fresh. So he slurped more.

"The leaves will cure him."

He needed to know. "Is this plant common?"

The old man nodded. "Only ones from this pool work."

"Why is that?"

"I do not know. Perhaps divine will."

He doubted that. "Is this known to other villages? Other healers?"

"I am the only one who uses it."

He reached down and pulled one of the floating pods closer, assessing its biology. It was a tracheophyta, the leaves peltate with the stalk and filled with an elaborate vascular system. Eight thick, pulpous stipules surrounded the base and formed a floating platform. The epidermal tissue was a dark green, the leaf walls full of glucose. A short stem projected from the center and probably acted as a photosynthetic surface because of the limited leaf space. The flower's soft white petals were arranged in a whorl and emitted no fragrance.