“This is a remote station,” Kurt said. “The pump direction was switched in the main command center. They must not be able to override that order out here unless someone with enough authority types in the proper password.”
They agreed and continued exploring the station.
“Look at this,” Joe said.
Kurt stepped from the control panel. Joe and Edo stood in front of a sealed door like the ones in the lab beside the burial chamber. A keypad on the side was glowing a dull-red color.
“This is what we’re looking for,” he said.
“Now, how to get in?” Joe asked.
“I wonder,” Kurt said, stepping forward and typing in the same code he’d watched Golner use in the lab below the Pyramids.
The keypad went dark for an instant. Brad Golner’s name appeared on the display, but the door didn’t open. The keypad flashed red once again.
“It was a good try,” Joe said.
“Looks like he’s in the system but not cleared for access here,” Kurt said.
As Kurt spoke, the keypad turned green and the door hissed and opened slowly. Two men and a woman came out. They wore lab coats. The first man in the group was shorter, with bushy eyebrows that loomed over his eyeglasses like a hedgerow.
“Brad?” he asked, looking around.
“I’m afraid he’s not with us,” Kurt said.
They stared, transfixed, at Edo’s uniform, quickly grasping the answer to their own question. “You’re with the military.”
Edo replied, “Why were you hiding in there?”
They glanced around at one another. Their downtrodden look showed that they had been bullied and threatened into doing what they had done.
“When the men at this station heard that there was an attack on the Osiris building, they became very nervous,” the one with the bushy eyebrows said. “They kept calling for orders and updates, but no one was answering. Then the pumps reversed and they couldn’t counter the command. They heard on the radio news of the raid. They panicked and left. They wanted to destroy the lab, but we locked ourselves in. We know what they’ve used our work for. We didn’t want the antidote destroyed.”
“So you do make it here?” Kurt asked.
The man nodded.
“How does it work?”
“It comes from the bullfrogs,” the man said.
“Something in their skin,” Kurt said.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Brad Golner tried to tell me,” Kurt said. “Shakir shot him before he could finish explaining. But he felt the way you do. He wanted to set things right. And he gave us all the information he could before he died. He said the frog skins were packed in sealed containers and shipped out.”
The technician nodded. “When the skin that the frog has cocooned itself in is finally exposed to rain, it releases a counteracting agent that signals the frog’s nervous system to wake up. For the frog, it’s the end of hibernation. For humans, we’ve had to modify the signal, but it works the same way, I assure you.”
“How much of the antidote do you have?”
“A large supply,” the man said.
“Enough for five thousand people?”
“For Lampedusa?” the technician replied. “Yes, we know what happened. There should be enough for five thousand patients.”
“Hopefully, enough for five thousand and one,” Kurt said. He turned to Edo. “Can you fly them and the antidote back to Cairo?”
“Does that mean we’re staying behind?” Joe asked.
Kurt nodded. “I don’t think we’ll be lonesome for long.”
Edo understood. He turned to the technicians. “Do you need any special equipment to pack the antidote?”
“No,” their leader said. “The antidote is stable at room temperature.”
“Then we’ll leave as soon as possible,” he said.
The technicians began loading plastic crates onto a wheeled cart. The crates were filled with individual vials of the antidote.
Edo turned back to Kurt and Joe. “I’ll be sure your friend Renata gets the first dose.”
“Thank you,” Kurt said.
Kurt and Joe watched from the shadows of the blockhouse as Edo and the scientists lifted off with the supply of the antidote and the raw materials to make more. At Kurt’s request, the helicopter climbed to a higher altitude than normal before tracking to the east and back toward Cairo.
“You think Hassan will have seen that?” Joe asked.
Kurt nodded. “If he’s within ten miles of this place, he can’t have missed it. I’m hoping it’ll make him think the place is empty once again.”
“Do you really believe Hassan is going to come here?”
“If you were Hassan and you had only two chips left to play, both of which were in this building, what would you do?”
Joe shrugged. “Personally, I’d retire to the French Riviera. But Hassan doesn’t strike me as the vacationing type.”
“He won’t quit,” Kurt said assuredly. “And the only option left to him that would create any leverage is to reverse the pumps and continue the drought. If he manages that, he might yet swing this defeat into some kind of victory. But he’s not counting on the two of us waiting for him. Now let’s find ourselves a place to hide.”
They entered the building, took the elevator down and studied the setup.
“Each time we’ve tangled with them, they’ve had a man in high-cover position,” Kurt said.
“Scorpion,” Joe said.
“If Hassan brings him down here, he’ll probably want him in a cover position just as he’s done before,” Kurt said.
“The only real point of danger is the elevator,” Joe said. “But from a place on the scaffolding surrounding it, you could cover this entire room.”
Kurt looked up and began climbing the scaffolding. It went up into the rock above, but there was enough space around it to hide and not be crushed as the elevator went past. “Send the car back to the top,” he said, taking up a spot where he could brace his feet. “We wouldn’t want to be rude and make them wait.”
Joe pressed the up button and the machinery came to life. The elevator car began its long, slow climb passing Kurt with a foot to spare.
“I’ll go hide in the control room,” Joe said. “If he’s going to reverse the pumps, that’ll be his first stop.”
65
Scorpion drove the Land Rover across the same desert he’d been forced to walk in the blazing sun. Brief flashbacks of the pain and anger that had sustained him on that trek intruded on his thoughts. Occasionally, he saw mirages in the shape of men, who vanished like ghosts.
His mind switched to the Americans, the men from NUMA, who had all but destroyed the organization in a matter of days. He would hunt them. Even if Osiris was finished and Hassan’s last-ditch effort had failed, he would hunt them — until the end of his days, if necessary.
Hassan sat in the passenger seat, staring at the monotonous terrain, in silence. From time to time, the wind gusted, pelting the SUV with fine grains of sand, as the sun baked the land from high overhead.
As the pumping station came into view, Scorpion brought the Rover to a halt.
“Why are you stopping?” Hassan demanded.
“Look.”
Hassan pulled out a pair of binoculars and trained them on the low-lying building. His older eyes weren’t as sharp as Scorpion’s, but through the binoculars he could plainly see the Gazelle helicopter sitting on the pad.
“It’s ours,” he said.
“What is it doing here?”
To think others had escaped and come here was too good to be true. He pulled a transceiver from the glove box and dialed up the Osiris frequency. He was about to call it when he saw the lab technicians come out of the cinder-block building with a cart. From it, they transferred crates of plastic boxes to the helicopter. A man in Egyptian military fatigues directed them.