“This is my guide, Ruiz. Two days ago we came across a village where everyone was dead from this.” Harrison pushed the tube farther in. Ruiz’s chest began rising and falling. “All right. He’s got air,” Harrison said. He reached inside an aid kit and pulled an IV out. “But he’s lost so much blood, he’s going into shock. He’ll be dead if I don’t get something in him.”
There was a horrible tearing sound from inside Ruiz that those inside the conference room could clearly hear.
“What was that?” Turcotte asked.
“His guts,” Kenyon said.
More blood came up out of Ruiz’s mouth, around the tube. There was material mixed in the blood.
“That’s what we heard tearing.” Kenyon might have been discussing last night’s basketball game. “His insides are disintegrating.”
The needle hadn’t taken, and blood was seeping out around the hole. Harrison tried again, with the same result.
“Needle won’t work,” Kenyon said succinctly. “The blood has lost its ability to clot. All he’s doing is opening more wounds.”
Ruiz’s eyes flashed open. It looked to Turcotte as if he was trying to speak, but the tube prevented that. More blood and guts poured out. Then Ruiz’s head flopped back and his eyes rolled up.
Blood had poured out of every orifice, pooling on the deck beneath him. Harrison faced the camera. He seemed unaffected by the other man’s death. “Now you want all I can show you, don’t you?”
He reached into the aid bag and pulled out a scalpel.
“What is he going to do?” Yakov asked.
Kenyon was nodding. “Good, very good.”
Harrison placed the tip of the scalpel on the center of Ruiz’s chest. “Who is this guy?” Norward asked.
“We don’t know,” Duncan said.
“He seems to have an idea of what he’s doing,” Norward commented as Harrison slid the blade through flesh. Ruiz’s stomach was full of black blood with traces of internal tissue mixed in it. Harrison reached through the goo with his hand, pulling up dripping internal organs.
“God,” Duncan whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“His kidneys are gone,” Harrison said to the camera. He pulled something up. “That’s his liver.” It was the color of urine and partly dissolved. Harrison put it back down on top of the mass of blood and guts that had been Ruiz. He looked up at the camera. “I don’t know exactly what killed this man, but I hope the people who might know are watching this.”
Harrison stood and pulled a poncho out of a pack. He draped it over the body, then raised his arms toward the camera. They could see the black welts crisscrossing the skin. “Please hurry.”
The screen went blank.
Norward looked around the room and then focused on his partner. “Ebola?”
Norward knew there were now three varieties of the deadly Ebola virus: Ebola Sudan, Ebola Zaire, and Ebola3. Zaire had a kill ratio of 90 percent of those infected, the Sudan variety not too far behind. It might not be a virus, Norward hoped. It might be nothing — but he knew nothing didn’t kill like that. It had to be something.
“No.” Kenyon was certain.
“South America.” Norward recalled what he had been thinking on the flight to the carrier. “What about Bolivian Fever?”
“No.”
“Venezuelan equine encephalitis crossing over to humans?” Norward desperately wanted it to be an enemy they knew something about.
“No.” Kenyon tapped the computer screen. “Where was this shot?”
“Western Brazil, near the border with Bolivia,” Duncan answered. “The town of Vilhena.”
“Is the town quarantined?” Norward asked.
Kenyon laughed. “Come on, man, get real. We just saw this. They don’t have a clue there, although whoever did the quick autopsy for our benefit, he’s smart. This Harrison fellow definitely has a good idea what he’s got there. The only ones who really know right now are us. And from this, well, we really don’t know too much, either.”
“Have you ever seen this before?” Norward asked, aware that the others were waiting on their words.
Kenyon shrugged. “I didn’t see a damn thing other than a crash and burn.”
A crash and burn was the Institute’s term for the final stages of a victim carrying a deadly agent. The bug had taken over the body and consumed it and was ready to move on, having killed its host.
“Could it be Ebola3?” Norward asked, referring to the fourth of the deadly filoviruses to come out of Africa.
“I doubt it.” Kenyon scratched his chin. “Only way we’re going to find out for sure is to go there.”
“Go there?” Turcotte shook his head. “How do we keep from getting infected ourselves?”
“We go in suited,” Kenyon said. “Let’s go — time’s awasting.”
“How do you work it?” Che Lu stared at the strange piece of machinery. She did not want to ask Lo Fa about the red stains on the radio’s metal.
Lo Fa shrugged. “I do not know.” He pointed. “The instructions are written on it, but they are in Russian.”
“Russian?”
“It was carried by the team of Russians who went into Qian-Ling. The army took it off the bodies. I took it off the army.”
Lo Fa called to one of his men. A young man, barely more than a child, came up.
“Can you read the Russian?” Lo Fa asked.
The boy nodded.
“Can you work the radio?”
The boy ran his fingers over the writing, his lips silently moving. “1 think so,” he finally said. He pulled a small satellite dish out of a canvas pack attached to the radio. He flipped open the leaves, putting the small tripod on the ground. He hooked a cable from the antenna to the radio, then flipped a switch. He took a handset that looked like a phone off the side of the radio and extended it to Che Lu. “You may dial the number you wish to call.”
Che Lu was amazed. “That is all?”
The young man shrugged. “That is what it says.”
Che Lu carefully punched in the numbers that she had been given by Turcotte.
Lisa Duncan took two ibuprofens, washing them down with a swig from her water bottle, trying to tame a pounding headache. Once again, she and Mike Turcotte were going in different directions. While Turcotte and Yakov had just taken off in the bouncer with the two USAMRIID men for South America, she was heading for sunny California.
The pills had barely gone down when her SATPhone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket.
“Duncan.”
The voice on the other end was hesitant and the accent was heavy. “I am trying to find a Captain Turcotte.”
“Who is this?”
“Professor Che Lu. Ms. Duncan, Captain Turcotte spoke well of you and gave me this number to call in case of emergency.” Duncan’s hand gripped the phone tighter. “Where are you?”
“About five kilometers from Qian-Ling. I have Professor Nabinger’s notebook.”
“And Peter?”
“We buried him.”
Duncan let that sink in. Even though there had been little doubt Nabinger had died in the helicopter crash, the reality of the words had a weight she had not expected.
“We paid him as much honor and respect as we could,” Che Lu added.
“I appreciate that.”
“His notebook has some important information in it,” Che Lu said.
“The secret to the tomb?”
“I believe it talks about the lower tomb, but it does not say exactly what is in there. From what he wrote, I guess there may be more Airlia in there. It also talks about power — the power of the sun.”
“A ruby sphere?”
“I do not know,” Che Lu said. “It does mention that a key is needed to enter the lowest level.”
“What kind of key?”