“You talk too much.”
“Alexander did not allow confusion to affect his thinking.”
“Viktor,” she called out.
“Of course,” Thorvaldsen said, “there are many tales to that knot’s story. One says Alexander withdrew a pole connected to the wagon yoke, found the rope ends, and untied it. So who knows?”
She was tiring of this man’s rambles.
Head of state or not.
She pulled the trigger.
FIFTY-FOUR
SAMARKAND
Vincenti remembered the first indication of a problem. Initially, the malady possessed all the characteristics of a cold, then he thought it the flu, but soon the full effects of a viral invasion became apparent.
Contamination.
“Am I going to die?” Charlie Easton screamed from the cot. “I want to know, dammit. Tell me.”
He dabbed Easton ’s sopping brow with a damp rag, like he’d done for the past hour, and quietly said, “You need to calm down.”
“Don’t bullshit me. It’s over, isn’t it?”
Three years they’d worked side by side. No sense hedging. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“Shit. I knew it. You’ve got to get some help.”
“You know I can’t.”
The station’s remote location had been selected by the Iraqis, and the Soviets, with great care. Secrecy was paramount. And the price of that secrecy was fatal when a mistake occurred, and a mistake was exactly what happened.
Eastonjerked the cot with his restrained arms and legs. “Cut these damn ropes. Let me out of here.”
He’d tied the idiot down knowing their options were limited. “We can’t leave.”
“Screw policy. Screw you. Cut these damn ropes.”
Eastonstiffened, his breath grew labored, then he succumbed to the fever and relaxed into unconsciousness.
Finally.
Vincenti turned from the cot and grabbed a notebook that he’d started three weeks back, the first page labeled with his partner’s name. Inside, he’d noted a progressive shift in skin color. Normal, to jaundiced, to such ashiness that the man now appeared dead. There’d been an incredible weight loss, forty pounds all told, ten over one two-day period alone, the intestinal intake dwindling to an occasional gulp of warm water and a few sips of liquor.
And the fever.
A raging torrent of a constant one hundred and three, sometimes peaking higher, moisture escaping faster than it was being replaced, the body literally evaporating before his eyes. For years they’d used animals in their research, Baghdad providing an endless supply of gibbons, baboons, green monkeys, rodents, and reptiles. But here, for the first time, the effects on a human being could be accurately gauged.
He stared down at his partner. Easton’s chest heaved with more labored breaths, mucus rattling deep in the throat, sweat beading off the skin like rain. He noted every observation in the journal, then pocketed the pen.
He stood from the cot and tried to work some feeling into his rubbery legs. He lumbered outside into a crisp night. He wondered how much more Easton ’s ravaged tissues could take.
Which raised the problem of what to do with the body.
No protocol existed for handling this type of emergency, so he’d have to improvise. Luckily, the station’s builders had thoughtfully provided an incinerator for disposing of the animal carcasses used in experimentation. But making the oven work on something as large as a human body was going to take ingenuity.
“I see angels. They’re here. All around,” Easton cried from the cot.
Vincenti walked back inside.
Eastonwas now blind. He wasn’t sure if the fever or a secondary infection had destroyed the retina.
“God’s here. I see him.”
“Of course, Charlie. I’m sure you do.”
He took a pulse. Blood snapped through the carotid artery. He listened to the heart, which pounded like a drum. He checked blood pressure. On the verge of bottoming. The body temperature was a steady one hundred and three.
“What do I tell God?” Easton asked.
He stared down at his partner. “Say hello.”
He pulled a chair close and watched death take hold. The end came twenty minutes later and seemed neither violent nor painful. Just a final breath. Deep. Long. No exhale.
He noted the date and time in the journal, then extracted a blood and tissue sample. He then rolled the thin mattress and filthy sheets around the body and carried the stinking bundle out of the building into an adjacent shed. A scalpel was already there, sharpened to the degree of broken glass, along with a surgeon’s saw. He slipped on a pair of thick rubber gloves and sawed the legs from the torso. The emaciated flesh cut soft and loose, the bone brittle, the intervening muscle offering the resistance of a boiled chicken. He amputated both arms and stuffed all four limbs into the incinerator, watching with no emotion as the flames consumed them. Without extremities, the torso and head fit easily through the iron door. He then cut the bloodied mattress into quarters and quickly stuffed it, the sheets, and gloves into the fire.
He slammed the portal shut and staggered outside.
Over. Finally.
He fell to the rocky ground and stared up at the night. Against the indigo backdrop of a mountain sky, silhouetted as an even darker shadow, the incinerator’s brick flue reached skyward. Smoke escaped, carrying with it the stench of human flesh.
He lay back and welcomed sleep.
Vincenti recalled that sleep from over twenty-five years ago. And Iraq. What hell. Hot and miserable. A lonely, desolate spot. What had the UN Commission concluded after the first Gulf War? Given their mission, the facilities were wholly archaic, but within the frantic atmosphere of the time they were thought state of the art. Right. Those inspectors weren’t there. He was. Young and skinny with a head full of hair and brains. A hotshot virologist. He and Easton had eventually been detailed to a remote lab in Tajikistan, working in conjunction with the Soviets who controlled the region, at a station hidden away in the Pamir foothills.
How many viruses and bacteria had they searched for? Natural organisms that could be used as biological weapons. Something that eliminated an enemy yet preserved a culture’s infrastructure. No need to bomb the population, waste bullets, risk nuclear contamination, or put troops in jeopardy. A microscopic organism could do all of the heavy lifting-simple biology the catalyst for certain defeat.
The working criteria for whatever they found had been simple. Fast-acting. Biologically identifiable. Containable. And, most important, curable. Hundreds of strains were discarded simply because no practical way could be found to stop them. What good would infecting an enemy be if you couldn’t protect your own population? All four criteria had to be satisfied before a specimen was cataloged. Nearly twenty had made the grade.