“Maybe cuts on their heads? Some kind of ceremony?”
“Sorry, Jon — no way to know. I cleaned up the video as much as I could, but we’re at nowhere near the resolution we’d need to see little self-inflicted wounds. Call me before you do something like this again and I’ll build you some decent cameras.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“Just one more thing,” Zellerbach said as another video started running in slow motion on the screen. “Look in the back — the tall guy with the sunglasses falling on his face.”
Smith watched the man drop to the ground and skid to a stop, lying motionless in the dirt.
“Was he shot?”
“Nope — no impact. Now look at these stills and the time codes.” A collage of the man lying on the ground came up, spanning almost the entire time of the attack.
“I compared all these down to the millimeter, and that guy doesn’t budge. I’m pretty sure he’s dead. And what’s interesting is that this is just the best video we have of this phenomenon. I counted three separate occurrences.”
“If not a bullet, then what?”
“Nothing, as near as I can tell. That’s what’s so weird. They just dropped dead.”
Smith drummed his fingers quietly on the table. The mind automatically inhibited extraordinary physical feats to prevent catastrophic injury and exhaustion. That safety valve could be bypassed, but it was rare — women pulling cars off their children, people under the influence of certain narcotics, extreme fear.
“Okay, thanks, Marty.”
“No problem at all. If you ever get anything like this again, send it to me right away. I’ll drop everything. Unbelievable. Crazy—”
“I will. Now I want you to delete the video and your analysis.”
“No problem.”
“I don’t just mean delete it; I mean write zeros to it. I want it completely unrecoverable from your system.”
Zellerbach sounded a little put out. “Fine.”
The screen went blank and Smith powered the laptop down.
“What do you—,” Klein started but then paused when Smith made a cutting motion across his throat.
“The computer’s turned off, Jon.”
Smith picked it up and slammed it repeatedly into the edge of the desk, leaving the floor strewn with parts. “Never underestimate Marty Zellerbach.”
18
So you’ve got nothing, Barry?”
Jon Smith cradled the phone against his shoulder and looked around the office Klein had set him up in. Beyond a chair, a desk, and a pad of paper, it was completely empty — reflecting the utilitarian nature of the man who ran Covert-One.
“I dunno, Jon. Bleeding from hair follicles is pretty unusual. Scurvy is the only thing that comes to mind, but it wouldn’t create the kind of flow you’re talking about. Are there any related symptoms?”
“Not that I know of,” Smith said, irritated that he had to lie. Science was about the free exchange of ideas, and keeping the big picture from one of Harvard Medical School’s top people wasn’t the way to get answers.
“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Thanks anyway. If anything comes to mind, you know my number.”
He hung up and marked the man off the long list of scribbled-through names representing luminaries in every field from toxicology to infectious disease to psychology. And what did he have to show for it? A bunch of guesses. Incredibly educated guesses, but guesses nonetheless.
There was a quiet knock on his doorjamb and he glanced up from the pad. “Tell me you’re here with good news, Star.”
Her training was as a librarian but her look leaned more toward outlaw biker. It drove Klein crazy, but there was nothing he could do — she was to paper what Marty Zellerbach was to the cloud.
“I think I may have found everything,” she said, sounding strangely despondent.
“Thank God. I knew you’d come through.”
“Yeah…The problem is that when I say ‘everything,’ I mean this.” She held up what looked depressingly like two sheets of paper.
“That’s it?”
“Sorry, Jon.” She slid one of the pages onto the desk. “Did Mr. Klein tell you about the German doctor who mentioned attacks like this sixty years ago?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t give me any details.”
She tapped the document in front of him. “This is a note from a Stanford professor who spent a few months working with the late Dr. Duernberg on a project in Uganda. Skip to the highlighted part — the rest is just a bunch of yada yada yada.”
The passage was only a few lines long and discussed a possible parasitic infection that caused insanity in humans. It went on to say that the transplanted Jewish doctor was looking into the phenomenon. And that was it.
“If Duernberg’s dead, what about the good professor?”
“’Fraid not. Shark attack.”
“Seriously?”
“Swear to God.”
Smith leaned back in his chair. A parasite. Interesting, but improbable. He pointed to the sheet still in her hand. “What’s that?”
A smile spread slowly across her face. “The pièce de résistance. You ready to be impressed?”
“Always.”
She laid the black-and-white photocopy on his desk with a flourish and Smith leaned over it, reading an elegant longhand description of a tribe of fierce warriors who fought covered in blood and didn’t use weapons. Local villagers believed them to be possessed by demons.
“Flip it over,” Star said.
He did and found a fuzzy photo of a dead African male in traditional dress. His hair was thick with dried blood and his torso was streaked black.
“Where did you get this?” Smith asked excitedly.
“The National Geographic archive.”
“Can we get in touch with the guy who wrote it?”
Her expression turned a bit pained. “You didn’t read as far as the date, did you?”
He ran a finger quickly down the page, stopping at the bottom. October 3, 1899. Great. The trail of dead scientists and explorers continued to lengthen.
“Any progress?”
Fred Klein had taken a position in the doorway, his arms crossed tightly in front of a tie that had seen better days.
Star immediately turned nervous. “I’ll just take off and let you two talk.”
She went for the door but Klein didn’t move, instead pointing to the gold ring in her nose. “New?”
“No, sir. But I only wear it on Fridays.”
To his credit, Klein managed to not grit his teeth when he responded. “Very becoming.”
She flashed him a broad smile and ducked past, escaping to the relative safety of the hallway.
He frowned at her retreating figure for a moment and then closed the door behind him. “Thoughts?”
“No intelligent ones,” Smith said. “Star found a brief mention of a possible parasite that causes insanity, but no details. And there’s this hundred-year-old picture of a warrior who appears to be in a similar condition to the people who attacked our ops team. Doesn’t prove anything, though. It could just be a forgotten ritual that Bahame brought back to life.”
“People dropping dead for no reason? Women setting land-speed records? It’s starting to look like more than a ritual to me.”
Smith nodded. “Incredibly strange, I agree. But not completely unprecedented. Think of the berserkers, for instance.”
“The what?”
“They were the most feared of the Vikings. There are a lot of theories about where they came from, but it seems likely that they were carefully selected for their personality traits — maybe including mental illness — and that was combined with elaborate rituals and alcohol or drugs. The bottom line is that they displayed very similar characteristics to the people in Uganda: superhuman strength and speed, imperviousness to pain, fearlessness, and so on.”