Janus held up a hand. “There’s one other thing we need to discuss first.”
Maris braced herself for more bad news. “Go on.”
“Just as you instructed, I analyzed every fragment of flesh from Hazor’s team and compared it with the DNA records on file with the army. Hazor’s body was not among the dead.”
“But those bodies were practically vaporized. You can’t know for certain—”
“I’m just telling you my findings, sir.”
Maris wondered if the information had any serious ramifications. It was hard to see how. If Hazor was alive, he was on his own. They didn’t have the resources to try to find him.
The computer dinged. The test results were finished. Janus swiveled around in his chair, looked carefully at the screen, and exhaled the words, “HERV-Kde27. Does that mean anything to you?”
Maris squeezed her eyes closed for a second, before she rose to her feet. “Human Endogenous Retrovirus K. The ‘de’ signifies that it’s a Denisovan retrovirus.”
Janus frowned at her. “HERV-K? Isn’t that the virus that causes a bunch of cancers and other diseases?”
“Yes, it is. Cancers, but also things like schizophrenia and autoimmune diseases, as well.”
Over the long hours at the microscope, her legs had gone to sleep. She had to wait until the tingling stopped before she could walk across the floor to stand over the corporal.
Janus twisted to look up at her. “The first question Cozeba is going to ask is how you’ll create a vaccine against this. What are you going to say?”
She exhaled the words, “I don’t know. If I had a top-notch lab, I suspect I’d focus on the geometry of the capsid.”
“What’s a capsid?”
“HERV-K is a spherical virus. I mean there’s a sphere, a shell, called a capsid that serves as the container for the deadly virus.”
“Just like each cell in our bodies serves as a container for our DNA, right?”
“Yes, and each capsid has a unique geometry. For example, the human papillomavirus has a pentagonal structure; it’s a bunch of oddly shaped pentagons stuck together to form a sphere. A different virus may be a bunch of hexagons stuck together to form a sphere. The point is the geometric shapes allow the virus to lock on to the human cell. It’s like fitting puzzle pieces together. When the geometry of the sphere locks with that of the human cell, it creates a doorway that allows LucentB to insert itself into the cell. That’s how the virus enters our DNA and kills us.”
“So we need to find a way to prevent the puzzle pieces from locking together, right? That’s how a vaccine, or an antiviral therapy, might work?”
“Correct.” Maris squinted at the equations and DNA sequences displayed on the computer screen. “But that’s not going to be as easy as it sounds.”
“Guess not.” Janus swiveled around in the chair to join her in staring at the screen. “Or somebody would have already done it.”
CHAPTER 35
ANNA
As dawn neared, the scent of the sea grew more powerful. She drew it into her lungs and looked northward up the coastline at the town of Nahariyya. Though candles flickered in a handful of windows, the dark rectangles of buildings appeared still and lifeless, as though under some dread enchantment. A sporadic series of echoes carried. Hammer falls? Someone chopping wood?
As she knelt upon the sand dune, the weight of the pistol tugged at her hip. She adjusted the holster to a more comfortable position and studied the rain that continued to fall. Brilliant moonlight filled the gaps in the clouds, scattering the ocean and shore with an incandescent mosaic. Occasionally, orange glares from exploding plague ships lit up the distance. Once, when the sound of the waves died down, she thought she heard screams drifting on the sea breeze, then she realized the soft cries were coming from Micah Hazor. Over and over in his sleep, he’s been repeating his name, rank, and serial number in Russian.
Listening to him brought back the feelings of helplessness and despair that she had suffered only six months ago. Her own inner wounds had not healed. Apparently, Micah Hazor’s hadn’t either. When had he been held captive in a Russian prison?
Her gaze moved over Martin where he slept beside the drowned beach fire and back to where Hazor rested propped against the packs.
Thinking about Hazor was a good distraction. All night long she’d been desperate to decipher James’s maze, but hadn’t succeeded. Part of her problem was probably nutritional. Though it filled their stomachs, the dried backpacker’s food they’d been eating did little else for the human body. The other factor was certainly terror. James had once told her that while he’d identified the most dangerous viral mutation that would emerge, not even he could know for certain how many strains would suddenly appear. He’d feared it would arise just like the ordinary flu virus. Every year several strains of the flu virus developed simultaneously. Researchers did the best job they could to guess which strain, or strains, posed the greatest potential for a global pandemic, and then committed resources to developing millions of doses of vaccine for a few strains, but on occasion they guessed wrong. Instead, another strain went global, a strain for which there was no vaccine, and no time to develop one before the entire world was infected. James had told her that was why he was searching for the cure—the true Marham-i-Isa.
But not even James could have foreseen the sheer magnitude of LucentB, or the rapidity with which it spread. LucentB was much more virulent than any virus in the past.
Hazor cried out, then gave his name, rank, and serial number again.
Anna clamped her jaw to still the tremor that started in her arms. There was a chamber deep inside her that she kept locked and barred. Inside that chamber, she was also giving her name, rank, and serial number in Russian. It never stopped. She couldn’t stop it. But she could force it down, so that she could barely hear it.
Tonight, it was loud and clear, like an echo reverberating just beneath Hazor’s voice.
What had Hazor been doing in Russia? Assassination? Rescue? Perhaps just reconnaissance of some sort.
As the clouds parted overhead, she scanned the starlit sky for drones, then pulled out her satellite detector and checked it. Clear. For now.
Hazor cried out, and she held her breath. He was panting. She could hear him above the waves. Was he running? Being tortured?
“Nyet! Nyet!” he cried and bolted upright with his AK-74 clutched in both fists, aimed vaguely at the place where Martin slept.
Anna rose to her feet, carefully surveyed the shoreline for any sign of intruders, then walked across the sand toward him. The ocean had quieted. The water spread before her like an enormous pewter disk, enameled with moonlight, and striped with curling ribbons of sea foam.
When she got to within ten paces, Hazor’s gaze darted over her and along the dunes, as though he expected the demons of his dreams to come striding out of the darkness.
“Captain? It’s Anna. You’re on a beach in Israel. Hear me? You’re safe. Micah? Wake up.”
He shoved his black canvas hood back and tipped his face to the rain, letting the cold drops drench his skin. “I’m awake.”
She continued toward him. “Do me a favor? Flip the fire control up to the safe position and take your finger off the trigger.”
He looked down, pulled his finger from the trigger guard, and expelled a breath as he clicked the safety up. “Sorry. I didn’t realize—”
“I know.”
When she crouched beside him, he blinked at her, as though still trying to convince himself she wasn’t the enemy.
Anna gestured to the AK. “Given your flashbacks, I’m not sure it’s safe for you to sleep with a rifle in your hands.”
He clutched the gun more tightly. “You shouldn’t give advice, Anna. You sleep with your pistol buckled around your waist.”
“True, but I don’t have the kind of flashbacks you do.”
“Oh, yes, you do. You’ve never watched yourself sleep. It isn’t pretty.”
&nb
sp; She sank down on the sand to his right and watched the fog blowing along the shore. As the clouds shifted, the wisps alternatively glistened with starlight, or appeared to be an army of dark phantasms marching across the sand. “When were you in a Russian prison camp?”
He gave her a sidelong look. A look she knew. People who’d stared into the abyss—and had it stare back—rarely wanted to discuss the experience. But there was an unspoken question in his eyes.
She explained, “You’ve been giving your name, rank, and serial number in Russian all night.”
“Have I? Did I say anything else?”
“You wept the name of a woman.”
Hazor swallowed hard. His gaze seemed to fix upon the candlelit windows in Nahariyya. “Irayna?”
She nodded. “Lover?”
“Russian intelligence.” Hazor pulled up his hood again; the canvas waffled gently around his handsome face. He had the darkest eyes she’d ever seen, like shining black wells.
Near the fire pit, Martin rolled to his belly. Their voices must have awakened him. The rain had become a windborne mist, drifting over the beach in silvery veils.
“She’s dead,” Hazor said matter-of-factly.
“Sorry.”
The candles in Nahariyya started to wink, as though the last living things in Israel passed back and forth before them. Anna had already assumed Irayna was dead. When Hazor had wept her name, his voice had been utterly hopeless, as though he were watching her die.
“I’ve been a prisoner a few times.”
Hazor gave her a deadpan look, as though that was old news to him. “How does an air force cryptographer get captured by the enemy?”
“Field research. Cryptography isn’t just staring at a computer.”
He granted himself the right to let go of the AK for long enough to roughly massage his forehead, then grabbed hold of it again. “How did you get through it?”
She smiled that he had not asked when, or where, or even why she’d been captured. He was a good soldier. He knew she was in Intelligence, and assumed it was classified. “Oh, I tried a lot of methods, but in the end, I followed the advice of an old friend. I chose to go home in my mind.”
“Home?” He frowned.
“Yeah, the only way I could stand it was to live inside the memories of the small ranch where I was born. When the torture became unbearable, I remembered sounds: the wind through the pines, the shrieks of redtailed hawks, buffalo hoofs clacking on stone as the herd climbed the steep hill toward my house. When my captors beat me, I focused on the songs of the birds at dawn, and the languid warmth of the autumn air. The memories allowed me to wall out the rest of the world.”
Which was a partial truth. For weeks, she had huddled in her dark cell with her face buried in her hands, trying to cover the wrenching sound of sobs that would not stop.
“Was Irayna captured at the same time you—”
“Leave it be, Anna.” The words landed like lead weights.
“All right.”
Post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, was a combat soldier’s constant companion. She could tell him that rewriting the memories was the only way to survive, but he wouldn’t listen. Eventually, he’d figure it out himself. Over time he would learn every moment by heart and, at some point, discover he could short-circuit the sequence. Instead of watching Irayna die, she would kill her attackers and live, or he would manage to escape and save her. Or they would walk up a different alley altogether and have a wonderful lunch in the sunshine while the men who originally captured them walked off in the wrong direction. At some point in his dreams, he would allow himself to be her lover again instead of her savior, and then Micah Hazor would be able to move on. Deep inside, he’d know there was something wrong with that memory, but he would not search for the original. He’d leave it buried. Pray it stayed there. As the clouds sailed through the starlight, their bellies gleamed with an icy brilliance. Anna looked up, searching for movement in the sky overhead.
Hazor said, “You’re clearly worried about the facial recognition software in the satellites and drones. What did you do? It’s time for you to tell me why the military is after you.”
As Anna fluffed her rain slicker out, emptying the pools that had collected in the furrows of the plastic, it crackled, then resettled around her tall body and began collecting new raindrops. The last thing she wanted to do was bring Micah Hazor completely into the fold. If they were captured, and she expected to be, they were all much safer if he knew nothing more than she’d already told him. But …
“As part of my cryptographic duties, I discovered an encrypted message that kept repeating. I pursued it. My research requests alerted my supervisors. For the past six months the CIA and the FBI have both been watching me, tracking me, hoping I’d find what I was looking for.”
Rain pattered the sand around them.
“You mean they let you continue your research?”
“They never denied me access to any file. They never locked my computer. They never picked me up, not even for questioning. What would you call it?”
“Permission. What were you researching?”
Over the past few days, a sense of futility had possessed her. The dead that filled the sea, the empty cities and towns, the utter quiet in a sky that had always had planes, all had left her feeling as though she was being stalked by a nameless terror.
To make matters worse, she’d never felt this useless or lonely. For over a decade, she had lived in a community of men and women whose sole purpose was to understand and combat the enemy. She missed the morning conversations and laughter, the sound of soldiers going about their duties. Most of all, she missed her friends in D.C. Those people had become as much a part of her as her arms and legs. If she admitted the truth to herself, she’d realize she didn’t know quite what to do without them.
But, of course, they were no longer her friends. By now, they all believed she was a traitor … the woman who’d gone AWOL with information vital to stopping the plague.
“Micah, the Marham-i-Isa I’m interested in is not an ancient medical cure.”
He jerked around to stare at her. “Nadai thinks it is.”
“I’ve already told him it may not be.”
“Bet that annoyed him. He wouldn’t have come with you if he’d known the truth, would he?”
“Doubtful.”
Micah smiled. “Okay, so if it isn’t an ancient healing ointment, what is it?”
“I don’t know. That’s the truth.”
“But it’s a threat to national security, right? They would not have allowed you to continue your research otherwise.”
Her memory traced the places she had traveled to searching for that answer over the past three years. So many places.
“It’s a cure, Micah. Just not an ancient one or maybe an ancient one that’s been reengineered. I—I don’t know for sure.”
He seemed confused. He’d probably thought she’d uncovered a plot to kill President Stein, or bomb the White House, or something equally important.
“A cure for the plague?”
“At least that, yes. Maybe far more.”
Beneath her slicker, she propped her elbows on her knees. Micah was smart. The more fragments of the maze he knew, the more likely he was to eventually put it all together. She couldn’t let that happen. There were too many mysteries about him that she had not solved. If a man like Garusovsky ever got his hands on …
“By the way, I asked Martin about the Angels of Light.”
“Really? That must have been a lengthy discussion. Ancient Christian myths are his favorite topic.”
“Pretty short, actually. He said it would take too many semesters to educate me.”
She suppressed a smile. “He’s actually not a bad guy. I know at times he sounds like an arrogant professor, but what he meant is that he personally teaches several semesters on the subject.”
“I know he’s not a bad guy, Anna.”
Unspoken words hung in the air
between them.
She said, “He’s just not like us, is he?”
“No.” Hazor hesitated before he continued, “It’s none of my business, of course, but I’ve seen how Nadai looks at you when your back is turned. Is that the reason you won’t let him get close to you? He wants more than you’re willing to give?”
“Be realistic, Micah. Do you really think I have a future with a professor?”
A smile warmed his face. “You might. How do you know if you don’t try?”
“People like you and I can’t have normal lives. You know that.”
“I suspect that’s true, but, frankly, I’d like to try for a normal life.”
“Wife? Kids? A backyard with a dog?”
“I’d give anything for that.”
The tide had come in. The shoreline was swathed in foam. “Well, I’m not sure either of us is going to have that luxury.”
Their boat tugged against its stake. She needed to keep an eye on it or it would slip away in the darkness and leave them on foot.
“Did your friend, Hakari, talk about the Angels of Light?”
“Often. He spent the last months that I knew him poring over ancient documents for prophecies about them. He said their role in the last days would be as the bringers of disease.”
“Did you work in the lab with Hakari?”
“Yes, but my job was primarily computer programming. I was good at designing three-dimensional figures to display genetic realities. He always had us work in teams of two. My partner, Yacob, was far better at the actual genetics than I was, and brilliant at vaccine research. Each team member had a specific task to complete.”
“Is that what this is? Your task?”
The wind gusted, flapping her wet slicker around her. “Before he went into hiding he gave each of us a problem to solve, yes. This is mine. Find and decrypt the Marham-i-Isa.”
“But if you worked in teams of two, how can you work out the maze without knowing your partner’s results?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing. Not sure I can.”
Lightning flashed out over the ocean, bleaching the air around them. Hazor’s gaze drifted to the sea where the invisible plague ships floated. He must be thinking about the desperate passengers. Distance filled his eyes. He looked iconic, like some dark warrior peering out across tomorrow’s battlefield, planning his strategy.
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