The person who had placed the Neandertal bones with the old woman’s bones had made the LucentB connection. He knew the plague was tied to Neandertals or Denisovans. It had to be Hakari.
Latham turned to stare at Maris. “Do you believe in God, Bowen?”
Maris involuntarily took a deep breath. After the thoughts she’d been having, the question struck her hard. She lifted a shoulder. “I was raised Catholic, but I’m agnostic. I don’t think you can prove it either way. So, I guess not.”
“My prayers have just made everything worse. My entire crew died before my eyes.”
How did a person respond to a statement like that?
“The ways of God are mysterious, Admiral.” She mouthed the words from Sunday school lessons. They sounded trite, even to her ears.
“But why would God spare me?” he asked angrily.
“I can’t answer that, Admiral, though”—she searched for something to say—“I’ve heard that God puts you in the place you need to be.”
The black-haired monk gave her a frail look, but said nothing.
Latham shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think my sins have finally caught up with me. This is divine punishment.”
Maris shivered. The small oil heater to Latham’s left staved off the cold, but just barely.
“A loving God forgives, Admiral.”
“God isn’t loving. If He was this plague would not exist.”
Wind buffeted the flap, and Maris noticed that sunset had turned the cloudy sky a bruised shade. The camp looked bleak. On the other side of the fence, Father Ponticus had started to stagger. The crucifix he carried trembled in his hand. He’d been ill for two days. His skin had lost all color and turned shiny like the translucent scales of fish. How much longer could he stay on his feet? When he collapsed would all the souls awaiting final rites be doomed to perdition?
Will mine?
Ponticus braced his knees, lifted the crucifix, and made the sign of the cross over a woman with short blond hair. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.” In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The soldier didn’t move or speak. Maris listened hard for the sound of her voice.
The increasing chill in the air told her that a cold front was fast approaching, probably associated with the debris cast into the air by the bombs. As it filtered the sunlight, the surface of the earth cooled. For a short time, they’d probably have violent weather.
“I heard you tried to run away, Admiral.”
“Of course. Didn’t you?”
“No. I … I don’t know why I didn’t. I suppose I thought the effort would be useless.”
Latham nodded. “You accepted damnation. That was noble. I couldn’t.”
“Damnation?”
Latham’s eyes glittered. “You must have known that being placed out here was a death sentence. No one walks away from the Garden.”
“That’s not true … is it?” She tried to think of the name of a single person who had, and couldn’t.
The monk sat forward, and whispered, “I heard the s-soldiers talking about her. Is she really here?”
Maris and Latham stared at him. The comment had no context. What did he mean?
Latham said, “Who are you?”
“Brother Ben Adam. I must speak with her. Please?”
“What are you doing here? This is an American military facility. You shouldn’t be in here with us.”
“I came here to wait.”
“To wait? Wait for what? What kind of an answer is that?” Latham asked testily.
Maris said, “He’s not right, Admiral.” She tried to subtly gesture to her head. “He may be here because someone found him wandering the city and didn’t know what else to do with him.”
“They should have left him out there. At least he would have been free to die in a place of his choosing.”
“True, but in here he’s fed and warm. That’s something.” She turned back to the monk. “Brother Ben Adam, don’t you have a home or family on the island? Maybe in hiding? Someone we could send a message to?”
He extended a hand to Maris, then Latham, and finally to the soldiers in the Garden. His eyes blazed. “My home is out there among the spirals carved into the megalithic temples. My family is in here, looking for God’s Word.”
“But I mean—”
“Split the wood. I am beside you. Lift the stone. I am among you.”
Latham cast another glance at Brother Ben Adam and went back to staring at the warships visible through the narrow opening between the ties of the tent flap.
The monk gave Latham a haunted look. “You are not damned.”
“Yeah? Believe me, I’ve killed thousands in my life.”
Maris said, “You’re a military officer. Obeying orders isn’t a sin. It’s—”
The monk raised his voice. “Did you see her? The soldiers said she came in the helicopter.”
Confused, Maris said. “Who?”
“They said she landed up there.” Ben Adam turned to point at the tent roof, probably trying to indicate the towering wall of Fort Saint Elmo outside. Helicopters came and went constantly. “I’m sure she brought the Divine Word with her. Don’t worry.”
Now that he’d started talking, Maris wished he’d stop. She’d had a bellyful of thinking about God and His minions today. Besides, Brother Ben Adam was just spouting nonsense, not that she had anything better to do than listen to a crazed monk. She could always go back to counting the letters on the crates.
Ben Adam said, “To destroy the house of the powerful, you must defeat the arms that protect it.”
“You mean American arms?”
Ben Adam’s teeth showed in the midst of his black beard. He reached up and used both hands to shove his dark curls behind his ears. His eyes appeared even wider and curiously glossy in the dark smudges of fatigue.
As though speaking to a child, Maris gently asked, “Brother, did you live in Valletta? Were you in a monastery? What happened? Why did our soldiers bring you here?”
He sat perfectly still, staring at her. “To wait.”
Her throat tightened with restrained emotion. “For death?”
“No, no.” He gave his head another violent shake. “To wait for my turn. If you look into your own heart and see nothing wrong there, your eyes are closed. That’s why I came here to wait for her.”
“To see if your eyes are closed?”
His swarthy face transformed into a luminous vision. In a deep and loving voice, he answered, “Yes. That’s right. She will know. She always knew when my eyes were closed.”
Maris heaved a sigh. Scents of cooking and woodsmoke kept gusting through the flaps. Days ago, Colonel Logan had ordered the troops to tear down the town and stockpile whatever wood or other supplies they could scavenge. It smelled like red meat roasting. Maris wondered if it was one of the hundreds of stray cats that roamed Malta. The aroma made her surprisingly hungry. The MREs all tasted like salt mixed with mud.
Admiral Latham untied the door flaps and shoved them aside enough that he could look up at the fortress outside. The towering gray walls of Fort Saint Elmo shone wetly above the dark band of dead bodies stacked against them. “Everyone else is dead, you know.”
“You mean on the ships? Yes, I heard you were the last—”
“I mean everywhere. We’re the only human beings in existence in the world.”
Maris adjusted the blanket over her shoulders and held it closed with both hands. “Didn’t you hear about the bombing campaign? Somebody still has planes and is flying them, Admiral. There must be pockets of survivors in every country. I’m a microbiologist. I can tell you that humans are the most adaptable animals alive. Don’t give up.”
A small cry erupted outside, and Latham jerked the flap aside just in time to see Father Ponticus crumple to the ground like a rag doll. The guards beyond the barbed wire rushed up to stare into the fenced camp. Muttering filled the air. They never went inside.
That wasn’t their duty. They only made sure no one left.
One of the dying men struggled to roll to his side, then reached out and gripped Father Ponticus’s arm. As he dragged the priest close to him, he wrapped his arms around him, and his lips moved against Ponticus’s ear. She suspected that was how he would die, clutching the elderly priest who had comforted him.
“I don’t know where the bombers came from. They’re a miracle. Before we saw them, I kept dispatching recon parties,” Latham said softly. “They did flyovers all across Europe and Asia, as far as our fuel supplies would take the planes.” He turned to give Maris a sober appraisal. “There was no one alive, Bowen. No one.”
Ben Adam quietly sobbed.
“Admiral,” she replied in an apologetic voice, “if that were true, governments would not need to drop bombs. There wouldn’t be any enemies left to kill.”
He laughed. “You just don’t get it, do you? They weren’t killing their enemies, Major. Don’t you know the story of Masada? It’s a required chapter in military history classes. The last soldiers manning the walls passed out the weapons and killed their own families to save them from the Romans. That’s what the bombing was. The last countries with functioning planes and bombs used them to kill their own people to save them from starvation and suffering. The plague must have breached their last defenses. They had nothing left but the love in their hearts.”
When she could, she said, “Dear God, I hope you’re wrong.”
Brother Ben Adam staggered to his feet with a clatter. He’d knocked over two boxes of syringes and spilled the contents across the canvas floor where they lay like tiny spears. He wobbled slightly before he managed to steady himself. “It’s my turn now.”
The monk smoothed the wrinkles from his black robe, and then bowed his head. For a long time, he stood with his eyes squeezed closed, as though nerving himself to do something unthinkable.
“Call out if you need me. I’ll be here for as long as God allows it.”
He purposefully strode to the tent flap, ducked beneath it, and stepped outside into the cold. Latham held the flap back to watch Brother Ben Adam as he walked to the guards and, smiling, asked them to open the gate to the Garden. He spoke to them softly; Maris couldn’t hear the words. The guards looked shocked, but they opened the gate.
Brother Ben Adam walked inside and carefully made his way through the blanketed bodies to reach Ponticus. He stroked the elderly priest’s head and talked with him. When he pulled the crucifix from the dying priest’s hand, Ponticus sobbed the words et Filii, et Filii. Ben Adam made the sign of the cross on Ponticus’s forehead, then took up his duties of moving among the plague victims, giving last rites, comforting the dying.
Maris turned away, and her gaze drifted over the waffling walls of the tent. The wind had grown stronger.
“Admiral?”
He wiped his eyes on his blue woolen sleeve before he turned to look at her. “What is it?”
“Do you think Masadas went on all around the world? In every country?”
Latham studied her for a time, then he blinked and turned back to watch Brother Ben Adam. “Our long-distance pilots reported seeing cities filled with dead bodies that went on for miles.”
“That was never made public, was it?”
He let the tent flap fall closed and took a breath before turning to Maris. “Telling the troops would have been an act of cruelty.”
CHAPTER 48
Martin sat in the dark corner of the room with his back pressed against the cold stone wall and his head in his hands. He only knew one thing for certain: They had not been rescued. They were prisoners.
A swath of candlelit floor lay between him and the door. He stared at the ceiling. The candlelight reflected from the stones like slips of foxfire. The room had no furniture, not even a chair, and sitting on the floor with the stones leaching cold into his legs and back had left him in agony.
He ought to be sleeping, to build up his strength, but given the number of soldiers, an escape attempt would be suicide.
Where’s Anna? Have they hurt her?
Martin frowned at the walls; they had to be ten or even twenty feet thick. No sounds penetrated from outside, except occasionally he heard one of the guards talking in the hallway beyond the massive antique door. The stones held the salty fragrance of the sea, so he suspected the water must be right outside. Which meant he was not being held in an interior chamber, but along the external wall of the fort. Not that such information did him any good. He just liked to think he’d concluded one valuable thing about where he was.
“Why haven’t they questioned me?” He thought about it. “They must be occupied with Anna and Hazor.”
By now, the soldiers had undoubtedly gone through Martin’s pack and found the jar. Did they open it? “Of course they did.”
Surely the military was smart enough to have opened it in a controlled environment so they wouldn’t contaminate the contents? Right?
“What did they find?” He’d give anything to know.
Martin was so wound up about the possibility of death, torture, and eternal damnation that he felt vaguely feverish—surely his imagination conjuring up the worst of the worst.
He got to his feet and started pacing as he always did when teaching a class. Across the room, a dark stain appeared in a crack between the stones and proceeded to spread outward, leaving black streaks as gravity pulled it toward the earth. Wind must be driving a torrent of rain into the wall. But he heard nothing.
Martin had the powerful urge to write a letter to someone, anyone. He longed to tell his mother where he was and what had happened to him. And he dearly wanted to announce to the world that he’d found the legendary Jesus Ointment. If only he knew for certain that he had found it.
He folded his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. If Anna were here he could nestle into her warmth and fall asleep smelling the fragrance of her hair. And if the Marham-i-Isa actually cured the plague, maybe next year they’d be lying in each other’s arms laughing about being heroes for saving humankind.
The room was so quiet.
He opened his eyes, aching at the realization that humanity was being wiped from the face of the earth, and he was dwelling on empty dreams of a future where his name was a communion wafer.
Feeling dejected, he went to the wall and slumped down again.
As he drew up his knees and propped his forearms on them, he wondered where Hazor had been taken. Given military protocols, they hadn’t executed him, had they?
CHAPTER 49
OCTOBER 22. 1100 HOURS.
Zandra Bibi walked down the corridor with the printouts clutched to her chest. Wind battered the walls. The storm had struck like a hurricane, flattening the tents outside and snatching away the blankets of the dying out in the Garden. She was worried about Maris, Private Madison, and Colonel Logan. Since they’d been taken away, she hadn’t heard a word about their fate. She rounded the corner and resolutely marched down the hallway toward the guard posted outside the chamber.
The man came to attention and saluted. “Good evening, Major Bibi.”
“Good evening, Private Wesson. Please open the door. I’d like to speak with Captain Asher.”
Wesson’s gaze darted around, as though trying to figure out what to do. “But, Major, no one told me that I could allow visitors.”
“I’m not a visitor. I’m here on official business at Colonel Logan’s request.”
The man remained standing at attention, but his dark gaze slid sideways to connect with hers. “Major, I heard that Colonel Logan was taken—”
“That’s correct, Private. I received the orders prior to his coming down with the plague. Now open the door.”
Wesson hesitated just a moment, then apparently figured, correctly, that if there was going to be hell to pay, Zandra would pay it, for he was just obeying the orders of a superior officer.
“Yes, sir.” Wesson pulled the keys from his pocket, unlocked the door, and s
hoved it ajar.
“Thank you, Private. While I’m speaking with Captain Asher, I do not wish to be disturbed. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
Zandra pushed the door open, stepped into the candlelit chamber, and closed the door behind her.
Asher stood across the room. When she saw Zandra, she came to attention, which intrigued Zandra.
“At ease, Captain Asher. I’m Major Bibi. May I speak with you?”
Asher eyed her suspiciously. “Of course, Major. What can I do for you?”
Zandra walked toward the small table to the right. “A mutual friend said you might be able to help me. She said that in the cryptography department you were known as the Magician.”
With no expression at all, Asher asked, “Who is our mutual friend?”
Zandra carefully laid out the sheets of paper in the proper order. “Maris Bowen.”
Asher took a quick surprised step toward Zandra, then stopped. Her voice went soft. “Maris? Is she here?”
Zandra smoothed the sheets she’d inadvertently crumpled in her haste. “The last I heard she was still alive, but my information is a few hours old.”
“You mean she has the plague?”
“No, but she was exposed. So she was taken to the monitoring tent just outside the perimeter of the quarantine camp.” Zandra straightened up and turned to face Asher. “Captain, I don’t have much time. My specialty is architectural photonics. I’m going to speak frankly with you, which my superiors will consider treason. No one knows I’m here.”
“Okay.”
“Since we arrived on Malta, I’ve been receiving a strange transmission. I have no idea where it’s coming from or who’s sending it.” She gestured to the table. “These pages represent a fragment of the vast message I’m receiving. It could be a Russian or Chinese code, but I don’t think so. Let me be clear. There’s nothing I can offer you to help me, but as a former officer in the United States Air Force, I’m hoping you will—”
“Of course I’ll help. If I can. You didn’t even have to ask, Major.”
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