“No, Excellency. Not powerless.”
“And what weapon have you left me?”
Omidi once again focused on the cleric. “Caleb Bahame.”
They’d spoken of it before, but Khamenei had been noncommittal.
“The Ugandan.”
Omidi nodded, pulling an envelope from his pocket and arranging the photos it contained on the floor. “The dead white men were killed by Bahame’s people near his camp. The other photos are from an American newspaper article about a training accident that recently killed a group of special forces operatives.”
Khamenei squinted through his glasses. “They’re the same men.”
“Yes, Excellency. The Americans sent them to assassinate or capture Bahame, and when they failed, they lied about the circumstances of their deaths.”
“Then they know something. What?”
“We’re not certain. I don’t believe they understand the potential of Bahame’s discovery, but they soon will. We have to act now or face the possibility of losing our ability—”
“To bring down the Americans and Jews,” Khamenei said, finishing his thought.
“Not just to bring them down, Excellency. To unleash hell on them for all the world to see. To make people remember the terrible power of God.”
The holy man sank into thought a moment. “I want you to go personally.”
“Of course,” Omidi said, hiding his elation at Khamenei’s change of heart and attributing it to the hand of God. As with all great things, this path had significant risks. The rewards, though, were nearly infinite. Nineteen seventy-nine had been nothing. The real revolution — the one that would re-create the earth in God’s image — had finally begun.
22
Jon Smith jogged to the top of the stone stairs and turned toward the pillared building that dominated the University of Cape Town’s lush campus. The craggy mountain that framed the nearly two-hundred-year-old college seemed almost too perfect to be real — a patchwork of gray and green beneath an unbroken blue sky.
The temperature had climbed into the mid-eighties, but a cool breeze coming off Table Bay rippled across the thin cotton of his shirt as he threaded his way through backpack-toting students in search of Dr. Sarie van Keuren.
After a few wrong turns, he found the door he was looking for and entered, scanning the lab for the meticulously groomed Betty Crocker look-alike depicted on the school’s website.
He’d almost decided that she wasn’t there when a bulky young man in a rugby shirt wandered off and revealed the woman behind him.
Granted, all faculty photos had a certain staged quality to them, but they’d taken it to another level with her. In real life, the wavy blond hair was well on its way to winning its fight with the tie trying to contain it. Her face was a slightly sunburned tan that faded into a yellow bruise on her left cheek. The nose that had seemed so regal from the angle the photo was taken hinted at an old injury and was just crooked enough to keep her face from devolving into generic California surfer girl.
She looked up from the clipboard in her hand and he immediately started toward her, hoping she hadn’t noticed him staring.
“Can I help you?” she said in a pleasant African drawl.
“Dr. van Keuren? I’m Jon Smith.”
“Colonel Smith! I was starting to think you’d gotten lost somewhere over the ocean.”
“We spent some time sitting on the tarmac in London and got in a couple hours late.”
He offered his hand and she pumped it energetically, the athletic outline of her body hinted at beneath the flow of her lab coat.
“Well, let me be the first to welcome you to our beautiful country, then.”
“Thanks. And thanks for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice. Every time I ask someone about parasites, your name seems to come up.”
She ignored the compliment. “Never a good idea to refuse a request from the most powerful military in history. USAMRIID, right? A virus hunter from Maryland. I’ve only been to New York and Chicago. I want to go to Montana, though.”
“Being African, you might find it a little cold right now.”
“But it’s wild, isn’t it? Big sky country. I love that phrase.” She used her hands like a symphony conductor when she repeated it. “Big sky country. It explains so much.”
She had an engaging way of talking just a little too fast, as though there wasn’t enough time in life to say everything on her mind.
“I never thought about it. I guess it does.”
“But you’re not here to listen to me babble. You want to talk about parasites. Do you have an interesting one for me?”
He looked around him, confirming that none of the students were within earshot. “That’s the problem. I’m not really sure. It’s not my area of expertise.”
“Of course. Viruses…How awful for you.”
“Sorry?”
A pained expression spread across her face. “Well, I mean, they’re just little bags of DNA, really.”
“I take it you’re not a fan.”
“Oh, I don’t mean to be insulting, but they’re technically not even alive, for God’s sake.”
“They may be small, but they pack a big punch,” he said, feeling a sudden inexplicable urge to defend his life’s work.
“Oh, please. What’s the best you’ve got? Smallpox? Malaria — now, there’s a nasty little parasite that’s killed more people than all other diseases combined. In fact, you can make a lucid argument that it’s killed half the people who ever died.”
She grabbed his arm and tugged him toward an enormous glass tank against the lab’s far wall. “Let me show you something.”
Her size belied her strength, and he allowed himself to be dragged along.
“This is Laurel,” she said pointing to a foot-long fish swimming around the tank. “She’s a spotted rose snapper from California. Tap the glass. Go ahead. Get her attention.”
Smith did as he was told and Laurel swam toward him, opening her mouth as she approached.
He barely managed not to take a step backward when he saw something that looked like a small lobster staring out at him from the fish’s maw. “What the hell is that?”
“Hardy,” she said, grinning broadly. “Cymothoa exigua. When he was young and tiny, he swam through Laurel’s gills and attached himself to her tongue to feed off the blood from the artery underneath. Eventually, the tongue rotted away and Hardy replaced it. Doesn’t harm the fish at all. They’ll live together like that for their entire lives.”
“You win,” Smith admitted. “That’s truly disgusting.”
“Isn’t it brilliant?” she said, snatching a worm from a dirt-filled box and dangling it over the tank.
As Smith watched her feed the unfortunate fish, he couldn’t help thinking of his fiancée, Sophia. They had worked together at Fort Detrick and she’d had the same endless fascination for her field as Sarie did. In the end, though, it had killed her.
“Colonel Smith? Are you all right? I’m sorry. Did Hardy upset you? He has that effect on some people.”
His smile returned and he concentrated on making sure it didn’t look forced. “No, Hardy’s fine. In fact, if you have somewhere we can talk privately, I may be able to one-up you.”
Her tiny office was crammed with books that looked like they’d spent most of their lives in the field, but most were completely obscured by her fetish for sticky notes. There was hardly a square inch available anywhere that didn’t have a reminder of some type attached to it. He paused in the doorway to read one demanding — with multiple exclamation marks — that she not forget a faculty meeting held just over two years ago.