Kruger reached out and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her head down to waist height and starting to shake it around as he yelled in her face. “Maybe you should be a little nicer to this stupid bastard before he blows your fucking head off?”
Hawke lunged forward, never wanting to kill a man more than this, but before he got five yards Rajavi stepped in and beat him to the ground with his rifle stock.
Kruger smirked. “Now be nice and quiet while we get on with our business.”
Saqqal sent Rajavi and Corzo to the shore of the underground river. Despite their NBC suits, neither looked very happy about going, but they obeyed, and moments later they collected a sample of damp soil from the riverbed.
Saqqal then ordered Dr Jawad forward with his soil-testing kit. The bacteriologist padded forward through the rubble and moss, stumbling occasionally on pieces of loose rock before finally reaching the sample.
“It’s never a nice feeling,” Scarlet said, “when you’re the only one in a room full of people wearing NBC suits.”
“What sort of parties do you go to?” Lexi said.
Over the next few minutes Bashir Jawad worked diligently on the riverbank while Rajavi kept the ECHO team in place with his submachine gun. With the silicon face under the NBC suit he was the man behind the mask behind the mask, and it looked even weirder than usual.
Hawke stepped back, keeping one eye on the bacteriologist and the other firmly fixed on Rajavi who was still holding the submachine gun in his face.
Saqqal took a couple of steps forward, a look of anxious expectancy in the eyes lurking behind the NBC face mask. The humidity in the small cavern was high, and they were all covered in a persistent film of sweat.
“Well?” Saqqal snapped.
Jawad turned and looked faintly ridiculous as he nodded in the NBC suit.
Saqqal gasped audibly and turned to Kruger, shaking his hand. “Then that confirms it. Well done, Mr Kruger! You have been true to your word. I will wire one hundred million dollars into your account as soon as we’re in Rio and the rest of this city is yours to gut at any time you choose.”
“What the hell is this?” Hawke said.
Kruger turned to him. “Meet Utopia… a bacterial infection totally unknown to modern science. Think of it as a sort of mutated halfway house between the bubonic plague and anthrax, capable of existing outside of both reservoir and vector for an almost limitless time. Its power is in its will to live… the fastest bacteria we know doubles every four hours, but not this stuff. In the hour we’ve been here our tests show it doubles every few minutes — but only when exposed to the atmosphere. When it’s underwater it reproduces at a normal rate. But if this is released into the air outside it will mutate and reproduce while airborne into a devastating cloud of death.”
“And you’re waking it from the dead to play with it,” Lea said in disgust. “You are absolutely out of your freaking mind.”
“That is distinctly possible,” Kruger said with a dismissive glance emanating from behind the mask. “My friend the general here is of the opinion it can also be weaponized. The deal is I get all the lost treasure for myself and another one hundred million on top, and he gets the nasties in the river.”
“You’re going to allow him to spread this thing across the world?”
“Not the world — just the United States and Europe, and of course — only after we have created an antidote for ourselves.”
“But why?” Lea said.
Saqqal replied, his voice cold and hard. “It is time for the pestilent West to be annihilated and wiped from the surface of this world. Only then may we grow spiritually as a people and know real peace.” He paused and indicated the vast city of gold behind them “Do you think the people of a city like this would just give it up? Why do you think the Incas disappeared from history so fast? The answer, my friends, is Utopia. It wiped them all out, and that is what I intend to do to the West! Only then will the world be liberated.” He held the vial up to the light streaming down from the crater and stared at it through the goggles in his gas mask.
“If you had a mind you’ve be out of it,” Hawke said.
“Your pathetic insults mean nothing to me,” Saqqal said. “Besides, there’s already a good chance you’ve already contracted Utopia. It has been dormant beneath the water for countless centuries, and drinking the water would be fatal, naturally. Whether or not you have caught it we cannot tell, but you should know that Dr Jawad here considers it to be highly contagious… as history has shown.”
“And what about the tribe?” Lea said. “Don’t you care about them?”
“No,” Saqqal said flatly.
Hawke shook his head in disgust. “If I were you I’d scare myself. You’re a madman!”
Saqqal gave a shallow nod of evaluation as if he were seriously weighing the possibility in his mind. “Perhaps.”
“Isn’t this treasure enough for you?” Lea said, taking another step back from the river.
“And what can treasure give me that Utopia cannot? With the power to realign global politics and wipe out as much of the human population wherever I choose I will have something much greater than a pile of gold plates and jewel-encrusted statues. Your problem is that you do not think big enough.”
“My problem right now is that you’re insane.”
“If I am insane then I have been drive mad by the lust for revenge. Three years ago the American fighters killed my family while they slept in their beds. The rage grew inside me until it was no longer containable. I have had much time to consider what it’s like to feel that much anger coursing through your veins night and day. I wonder if it has driven me to a kind of madness.” He turned to face Hawke. “But the thing is I don’t care at all. All I care about is that the people who murdered my wife and children will now pay a truly unthinkable price, and they will pay that price to me — Ziad Saqqal.”
Lea had been edging closer to Rajavi, and suddenly she made a lunge for the submachine gun. She grappled with him for the gun and almost got her hands on the handle but then the Iranian saw what she was doing and swiftly pulled it away.
Hawke burst into action but Kruger whipped a pistol out of his belt and told him to get back.
Now, Rajavi was moving his hands up around Lea’s neck and beginning to choke her. Up close she was even more terrified by the weird mask and struggled to get out of his grip. His breathing became more rapid under the silicon layer and the only sign of humanity was his crazed, bloodshot eyes as they blinked madly from behind the two crude slits that lurked under the NBC goggles.
She brought her knee up into his balls and he flinched but didn’t let go, so she did it again and then a third time. He took one of his hands off her throat and tried to use it to stop her knee from coming up a fourth time but she was too fast and delivered the heftiest smack of them all. It did the trick and then a strange howl emanated from behind the mouth slit in the mask and he staggered back in pain.
“Enough!” Saqqal barked.
Corzo walked over and pushed Lea back to the others, and helped Rajavi to his feet. The Iranian knocked him back and snatched up the gun.
“How did you know this was here, Saqqal?” Ryan asked.
“Mr Kruger here has been studying Inca quipus for a very long time.”
“Indeed, I have. You see, they are a form of semasiography, and on top of being used for purposes of arithmetic they were also used for recording other narratives, such as myths, legends and much more prosaic things like diaries. It didn’t take me long to realize that the many references to a flood could be instead referring to a kind of devastating plague. And that’s when the penny dropped, as you say.” He turned to Ryan. “Should have stuck with me, kid.”
“Drop dead,” Ryan said.