She reached up reflexively but caught herself before making contact. Not that it would have mattered; she knew what she would find. Damn it. This isn’t happening.
But it was. They’d been exposed to something in the tomb.
“Isolation protocols,” she said, the words barely getting past the lump in her throat. “Everyone stay back.”
There was an emergency wash station in the lab tent; all three of them would need to be disinfected, their clothes and shoes destroyed…
Suddenly, Han let out a choked gasp and collapsed to the ground.
Katherine stared in disbelief at his motionless form. Han’s cheeks bore several dark smudges and the rims of his eyelids were encrusted with the black substance, but this wasn’t the cause of his distress. The doctor’s skin was cyanotic; he was suffocating.
It wasn’t possible. He couldn’t have inhaled it, she thought. He’s still wearing his mask, for God’s sake.
His mask!
The filter cartridges on Han’s respirator were weeping beads of a fluid that looked like crude oil. The substance had clogged the filters; that was why he’d passed out.
She frantically ripped the mask away, revealing the doctor’s blue-tinged lips but also a scattering of black blemishes around his mouth and nose.
Han still wasn’t breathing.
Katherine discovered that she was also having difficulty drawing breath, and against her better judgment, she removed her own respirator. She was trying to figure out what to do next when a cry sounded from the gaggle of onlookers.
Like some biblical miracle, the crowd parted, the team members retreating in a panic from one of their own. A female archaeologist — Katherine couldn’t remember her name — was gazing in stunned disbelief at her hands, and even from a distance, Katherine could see that the woman’s fingernails had turned completely black.
Then another shriek went up, and pandemonium erupted.
My God! What have we unleashed?
Stafford abruptly fell to his knees and pitched forward, face down and unmoving, but Katherine made no effort to loosen his mask.
She felt a rattle in her lungs with her next breath, like the beginnings of a chest cold.
Whatever it is, it’s fast.
Something about that realization soothed her. Her fear receded, replaced by a calm that was clinical but at the same time, almost reverential.
She had discovered something new, something unique, and that was what she had lived for. So what if it killed her?
She unclipped the satellite telephone from her belt and hit the redial button.
The call connected almost right away, but there was a momentary delay as the signal traveled into space and then back down to its destination. “Katherine? I wasn’t expecting you to call so early.”
She tried to answer, but there was no breath in her lungs to form the words. Her only reply was a mewling sound that turned into a coughing fit. Black phlegm sprayed across the backlit display of the phone handset.
There was another maddening pause, and then the tiny speaker erupted with a strident: “Katherine!”
Dark clouds gathered at the edge of her vision, but the coughing spasm had cleared some of the fluid from her lungs. She managed to draw a shallow breath and willed herself to speak one last time.
“Richard. I’ve found something.”
CIPHER
ONE
They seemed to materialize out of thin air, like ghosts, or perhaps more in keeping with the superstitions of the region, like jinn—spirits of smokeless fire that inhabit the space between earth and heaven.
Not that there was anyone around to notice.
Even if the inhabitants of Ramadi had been inclined to venture out after dark, a curfew was in effect and the streets were patrolled by a combined force of United States military personnel and soldiers of the newly reinvented Iraqi Army. At two a.m., anyone wandering the streets was likely to be shot on sight.
The eight men who moved swiftly and soundlessly through the night weren’t worried about being discovered. They had timed their advance perfectly to avoid detection by the patrols, and it was unlikely that anyone glancing out a window into the darkness would have been able to distinguish them in their camouflaged uniforms with matching body armor and helmets. Peering through the monochrome display of their PVS-14 night-vision devices, they advanced to the front of the target house and assembled in groups of four on either side of the door, bunched together like coiled serpents preparing to strike, which was more or less exactly what they were.
The second man in formation to the right of the door whispered into the lip microphone of his radio headset. “This is Cipher Six. By the numbers. Last chance. Go or no-go? Over.”
The replies crackled in the earpieces of the headsets worn by all six men.
“Eagle-Eye One. Go. Over.”
“Eagle-Eye Two. Go. Over.”
“Eagle-Eye Three. Do it. Over.”
“Cipher Seven, good to go. Over.”
Cipher Six, a man named Kevin Rainer — formally Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Rainer, though no one had called him that since he earned his green beanie—nodded, a gesture that went unnoticed by the other seven men arrayed around the door. The gesture was seen by the three sniper teams — Eagle-Eye One, Two and Three — who watched over them all from a distance.
The Eagle-Eye snipers were literally able to see through the walls of the house with their thermal scopes, verifying that only two occupants were within, but heat signatures could reveal only so much. Were the men wide awake but lying still on their beds? Would they be instantly alerted to the presence of intruders and snatch up a handy AK-47 or activate the detonator on an IED? Were they even the right men?
“Danno, go.”
The third operator in the stacked group on the left side darted forward and knelt in front of the door. One gloved hand came up to test the knob. It didn’t move, but Daniel Parker had been expecting that; he would have been surprised if the door had opened on the first try. On any other night, he might have blasted the door off its hinges with a shotgun, used a shaped charge to blow out the latch plate or simply kicked the damn thing down, but not tonight. This mission demanded a more subtle approach.
Parker took a lock-picking gun from a pouch on his tactical vest and slid the metal pick into the keyhole. There was a faint clicking noise as he worked the trigger lever, but a moment later the cylinder rotated, allowing him to ease the door open a crack. He slid a hand inside the gap, probing for trip wires or some other booby trap. Finding nothing, he gave the door a push and then spun out of the way, as Rainer’s team moved fluidly inside.
There was the briefest pause and then Rainer’s voice whispered across the radio net. “Room clear. Move in, Jack.”
Parker fell into line behind his team leader, Jack Sigler, as the second group filed into the house. All but one of the members of the first group were spread out throughout the front room in tactical positions. The remaining operator stood guard over a figure that lay face down and motionless on a mattress in the corner, his hands secured behind his back with flexi-cuffs.
Just as they had rehearsed dozens of times…hundreds of times…Sigler’s team lined up on the corner of the hallway, and at a gesture from their leader, each advanced into the unknown space beyond. Sigler was the second man into the room, as was their protocol, and he broke to the right. Parker, in the number three position, peeled left behind the point man, Mark Adams. Another mattress was positioned along the far wall right in front of Parker, and a bearded man lay sprawled out atop it, snoring loudly.