The Guide Parker pulled the cellular phone connection off his laptop. Wind blew sand into the keyboard, but he didn’t care. He stood up. The Chosen were gathered around him. The time had come and passed. The Prophecy was unfulfilled. He felt a spike of pain in his left temple.
“The time is not now!” His voice was taken by the wind and whipped away. “But it will be soon. We must go back and prepare once more!”
Turcotte made a fist with his right hand and pumped his arm. There was already swelling where the needle had gone in. Next to him, Lisa Duncan did the same. “Will Kenyon be able to stop it?” she asked.
Turcotte nodded. “He thinks so. He’s sending samples of the cure to every disease-control agency on the planet, as well as the World Health Organization. The governments may have their heads buried in the sand, but he’s confident that if the Black Death shows up, the agencies and WHO will deal with it. He’s pretty sure he can contain it in the Amazon and help those already infected.”
“Several thousand are already dead,” Duncan noted.
Turcotte grimaced, whether from the soreness in his arm or the subject, Duncan couldn’t tell. “It’s like when people in the States read about a flood in India or a landslide in Mexico killing a bunch of people. Very few people really care if it’s not happening in their hometown.”
“This came very close to happening in everyone’s town,” Duncan said. “At least we stopped The Mission.”
“The Black Death has been stopped.” Turcotte amended. “The Mission is another matter.”
“Yes, it is,” Yakov said. The Russian had been unusually quiet the past hour, since Kenyon had taken off in the bouncer with the case of vials containing the cure for the Black Death. Yakov had dragged Hemstadt’s body out of the tunnel and thrown the old man into the sea, letting the sharks have him. “We are going to have to find out about The Mission on our own.”
“We’d better find it and take care of it,” Turcotte said, “because we just won a skirmish in a long line of battles here. I’ve got a feeling the war really hasn’t started yet.”