by Louise Voss
‘Kate, my darling … oh, sweetheart, are you OK?’ Paul hugged her tightly, kissing her hair, inhaling the warm familiar smell of her. She kissed him back. They were both crying.
After a few seconds, she gently pushed him away, and looked into his face. ‘Oh, no. You’re sick. You’ve got Watoto. Oh, Paul …’
‘Mangold,’ he said. All the adrenaline was flowing out of his body. ‘He knows the cure …’
Kate ran over to where Mangold lay on the ground, on his back. The entire front of his shirt was now crimson. But he was still breathing. Kate knelt beside him.
‘Dr Mangold … Charles, you’re going to be OK, we’ll get an ambulance.’
Mangold opened his mouth and groaned. Blood trickled out.
‘The cure,’ Kate urged. ‘Tell me, please!’
Mangold coughed, blood splattering the front of her T-shirt. He rolled on to his side, gasping, his breathing shallow, and raised an arm, pointing to the garden that led down to the woods.
Kate leaned in closer. Mangold was trying to say something.
‘Charles – what is it?’
Mangold’s voice was very soft, rasping with his last breaths.
‘There … there …’ he said, before falling silent.
Kate collapsed into a heap.
Paul looked over. That was it. Mangold was dead. Diaz was dead too. And with them, the secrets of how to stop Watoto. He closed his eyes and let the sickness carry him away.
60
All the mingled hatred and loyalty that had made up Heather’s lifeblood seemed to have frozen, stilled in time and space by the paralysis of her body. Is that it? she thought, as she lay in the heat and dirt.
She waited for Angelica to rush over to her, to stroke the hair back from her sweaty brow, kiss her gently into the next world. But nobody came.
Heather heard more shots and hoped, not that Angelica had taken down Wilson, Harley and Maddox, but that Angelica herself had been killed. Then they could still be together. They would simply go into the Golden Age sooner than they had thought. Hand in hand into eternity. That was how it should be; Angelica and Heather, an eternal partnership, an unbroken chain. Heather wasn’t a poetic woman, but her love for Angelica made her soul sing new and glorious words.
Heather tried to turn her head, to see where Angelica was, but her muscles wouldn’t obey her commands and nothing moved except the slow flow of blood from the hole in her chest.
Sekhmet, she implored, don’t make me go there alone.
And yet even as she said the word, she knew it was all lies. She almost laughed at how gullible she’d been. For she had believed it. She had, because Angelica had.
Heather felt a faint flash of pride. She had been more loyal to Angelica than anybody had ever been to a loved one. She had killed, maimed, fought for her. So what if Sekhmet was a fairy tale? If it had earned her Angelica’s love, then it didn’t matter.
Angelica had loved her too … hadn’t she?
As the heavy shutters of Heather’s brain slowly closed down, and the pain overtook her, she remembered Angelica’s smile, her touch on that hot afternoon in the motel, her kisses.
As she slipped from consciousness, she saw a figure moving towards her. She struggled to concentrate for a final moment. It was a woman with the body of a lion, supple and sinuous. The Goddess! She was real! And she was here to carry Heather into the afterlife. How had she ever doubted?
‘Sekhmet …’ she tried to say, a bubble of blood on her lips.
But as she spoke she realised – oh, such sweet realisation – that the Goddess bore Angelica’s face. Angelica was the Goddess.
‘I love you, Angelica,’ Heather murmured with her last breath, trying to reach for her.
Angelica bared her teeth. ‘But I never loved you, bitch.’
Everything went black.
61
‘Sweetheart …’
Kate bent over Paul, who lay on the sofa in the living room of the Sisters’ ranch, wrapped in a fleece blanket she had found in a cupboard upstairs. He was shivering, his nose streaming, skin so hot you could make toast on it.
‘I’m going to find the cure, I promise, I promise, and then we’ll make you better.’
Paul gripped her hand and attempted a smile. ‘Kate, I …’
She shushed him. ‘Don’t try to talk. You’ve exhausted yourself. You need to sleep.’ She held a cup to his lips, gave him a drink of water. He squeezed her hand again then closed his eyes. She stroked his forehead.
‘Have you … spoken to Jack?’ he croaked, his eyes still shut.
‘I haven’t been able to speak to him for the last couple of days. I’ll try later. It’s been so awful not having access to a phone.’
His lips moved, but no more words came out.
‘In the meantime, I’m going to work on making you better. At least now we know an antivirus exists. Turns out that Mangold had a lab here – I’m sure it must be in there somewhere.’
Harley had found the small but well-equipped lab in the basement, near to where Kate and Simone had been held. While he was busy calling in BIT back-up to deal with the corpses and airlift Paul to a hospital, Kate had started to search the lab, looking for anything that would give her answers, or at least clues to point her in the right direction. But what she hadn’t told Paul was that so far she had found nothing except a few live samples of Watoto-X2 – and some frozen samples of what looked like sperm. No sign of a vaccine or the antivirus that Simone and the other women had been given; she had described it as an antidote, but that must have been a mistake. The existence of this antivirus gave her hope that she could save Paul, but it seemed that Mangold and Angelica must have destroyed it after they had used it, presumably to prevent someone like Kate coming along and finding it. So Angelica had been prepared, despite her conviction, for things to go wrong. She’d been cautious.
Kate laughed bitterly. Yeah – cautious enough to have blown up a hotel full of virologists and massacred the team at the Sequioa lab.
Angelica was locked up now, in the very room where she had kept Kate prisoner, her hands cuffed behind her as Kate and Simone’s had been. Harley had tried to interrogate her, to find out what she knew about the antivirus, but
she refused to say a single word. Kate doubted that her knowledge would be technical enough, anyway.
Kate stood up, massaging the small of her aching back, just as Harley entered the room. She’d have to go back to the lab later and have another look – there was a ton of papers she hadn’t had a chance to skim through yet.
‘How is he?’ Harley asked, his voice muffled through the biohazard mask Kate had made him wear, even though they both feared it was like closing the stable door after the horse had bolted.
She put her finger to her lips, not wanting Paul to hear, and gestured for Harley to follow her out of the room into the front entrance hall. The bodies of Simone, Preeti, Heather, Mangold and Diaz still lay outside on the veranda in the baking sun. Kate had covered each of them with a sheet, but Harley had instructed her not to move or touch the bodies. Kate wished that Angelica was under a sheet on the veranda too. She might be their prisoner, but it was small consolation when the plague she’d unleashed still stood to wipe out most of the Earth’s population unless they could find the cure.
Unless she, Kate, could find the cure.
‘He’s bad,’ she said to Harley, who had the look of a man trying to stay cool when he was trembling inside. She paced the room, weak with exhaustion but determined not to let herself rest until the cure had been found.
She turned on Harley. ‘Angelica and Diaz unleashed this virus, and you and your lot were helpless to do anything about it. Even though Angelica was one of your lot.’
‘Not quite,’ he said defensively. ‘She was ex-CIA.’
‘And Mangold was working for the CIA too, wasn’t he?’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘I need you to tell me everything you know, Jason.’
‘OK. But, listen, I’ve been on the phone to my director
, Nicholas Lepore, and back-up is on the way. More agents, to deal with Angelica. And scientists to help you.’
‘Who are they? The B team? Have you had them in reserve all this time?’
‘Kate, please, there’s no need to take it out on me.’
She took a deep breath. ‘OK. But, come on, tell me what you know. I assume you’ve also been talking to Lepore about the Mangolds?’
Harley perched on the arm of an antique chair. A huge gilt-framed depiction of Sekhmet covered most of the wall behind his head. ‘Yes,’ he said wearily. ‘But you have to understand that there are levels of classification that go deep. It’s not like there’s some central computer system that contains every piece of information about anyone.’
He looked up and, seeing how Kate was looking at him, continued hurriedly. ‘OK, this is what I’ve been able to find out. Back in 1990–91, Mangold and Diaz were carrying out illegal tests at Medi-Lab. At the time, nobody knew about the work they were doing on Watoto – Diaz called it Project Hadza.’
‘Hadza? That rings a bell.’
‘Really? Well, seems like Mangold and Diaz were testing all sorts of nasty stuff. Marburg, Ebola, West Nile, rabies and a whole range of hybrids and designer viruses. A lot like Gaunt at the CRU.’
Kate shook her head.
‘Then in ’91 a lab assistant at Medi-Lab got sick and died, and that’s when the CIA got involved.’
‘But nobody knew about them having a vaccine for Watoto?’
‘No. Not according to what Diaz told us, and not according to what I’ve just been told.’
‘I wonder what else they created in that lab …’
Harley shrugged. ‘I guess we’ll never know. But – all this is highly classified, Kate; I’m only telling you in case it helps in some way – it seems that Mangold did a deal: his freedom in return for signing up to help with a top-secret biological weapons research programme.’
‘And Diaz took the fall?’
‘That’s right. No wonder he was so angry with Mangold – and with this country.’
Kate wracked her brains to try and remember where she knew the word Hadza from. A long time ago. ‘So then what happened? Has Mangold been working for the CIA for the last twenty-odd years?’
‘No. Apparently, he left fifteen years ago. Moved back to his house in Utah and became something of a recluse. That must have been when he and his family contracted Pyrovirus, and Mangold and Angelica became mentally unstable and started worshipping this Egyptian goddess.’
‘If I ever hear the name Sekhmet again …’ Kate said, glaring at the picture on the wall. ‘Hold on.’ She went into the other room to check on Paul. He was asleep. She laid her palm against his forehead, and it came away soaking wet. She kissed him on the top of his head, then crept back out of the room.
Harley looked pensive.
‘What is it?’ Kate asked. ‘You look like you’ve got something on your mind.’
He walked over to her and, to her surprise, took hold of her hand.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I just wanted to say I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
His eyes looked wet over his mask. She had never seen him like this before. Usually, Harley was Mr Straight-down-the-line; unemotional; like a civil servant who happened to work in an interesting government department. ‘For getting you and Paul into this mess.’
‘You were only following orders, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, I know, but … It was me who suggested recruiting you.’
Kate raised an eyebrow.
‘I knew you were an expert. And I guess …’ He stopped himself. ‘After the thing with Gaunt, I was asked to put you and Paul under surveillance. To make sure you didn’t say anything to anyone about the Pandora virus and break the Official Secrets Act. But then I got called away to join BIT and the surveillance ended. And I thought it would be … good to have you over here.’
Kate pulled her hand away.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I could be back in England now,’ she said. ‘Me and Paul, with Jack. Safe.’
‘Nowhere’s really safe …’
‘Everywhere is safer than this.’
Harley looked ashamed. ‘I don’t want Paul to die either, Kate. I never had much time for him before, but I’ve come to respect him. And I respect that you love him.’
Kate’s face reddened with anger. ‘If you don’t want him to die, then stop all this bullshit. Keep talking to me. Help me work this out. It’s in your interest too – you’re the one who spent several hours in a car with him when he was at his most contagious.’
He hung his head. ‘I know. That’s why I wanted to take the chance to say I’m sorry – while I still can.’
‘And stop saying you’re bloody sorry.’
‘OK …’ He straightened up. ‘So, Mangold, he must have kept samples of Watoto-X2 and the means of stopping it all that time. Frozen, I guess?’
Her anger subsided. ‘I don’t know. When I saw Mangold in Angelica’s basement he said something to me … what was it? Oh yes; I asked him if he knew how to stop Watoto, and he said Angelica had been kind enough to bring him the seeds of what he needed. That was all I could get out of him, but it struck me as a strange thing to say when talking about creating a vaccine.’
Harley waited for her to continue.
‘What did Diaz tell you? Didn’t you quiz him on the way down here?’ she asked.
‘We tried, but he refused to talk. He said he wanted to see Mangold first, didn’t want to risk us going back on our promise. He knew that bit of knowledge was his only leverage.’
‘He didn’t say anything at all?’
Harley thought. ‘When we interviewed him at the prison, he mentioned you. He’d read your paper. He said you were getting close.’
She sighed. ‘Another one.’
‘He said something else.’ He furrowed his brow. ‘What was it? Oh … yes, something about how you were going to find the satellite.’
Kate, who had turned away to look out of the window, whipped round to face him. ‘What?’
‘He said—’
‘I heard you. The satellite. That must be …’
She fell silent, her brain buzzing, pathways opening up. A satellite. That must be it. That was the ghost Junko had talked about, the something she had seen beneath the microscope but had never been able to figure out. A satellite virus. But what about it? What did it do?
Surely …?
Excitedly, she returned to the window and looked out at the garden. And it came to her: where she had heard the word Hadza before, and she was thrown back in time to another place, a hot, dark part of her history.
‘Yes! That’s got to be it!’
‘What has?’
She didn’t answer. Instead, she ran over to the door, yanked it open and ran outside, heading straight to where Mangold’s body lay, covered in a sheet. She lay down on the ground beside him, on her back.
Harley caught her up. ‘Kate, what on earth …?’
She was following what would have been Mangold’s line of vision as he’d said his final words. She found herself looking at the garden, at the field of red and white that stretched towards the woods.
‘What did Mangold say right before he died?’ she asked, already knowing the answer.
‘He said, “There, there”.’
She jumped to her feet. ‘Jason, I know what he was looking at. What he was talking about. Get on the phone to your boss. Tell him we don’t need a team of virologists here.’
‘Really? Why not?’
‘We need a botanist.’
62
Before Harley could react, Kate broke into a run towards the meadow, the tiredness in her legs forgotten as she experienced that wonderful sensation that happened so seldom in the lab, always after weeks or months – even years – of creeping towards an answer. She could feel the passageways in her brain opening up, ideas and memories and realisations waving at her, vying
for attention, and another part of her mind crying out, Of course!
She reached the edge of the field of flowers. Thousands of the small red-and-white star-shaped blooms stretched from here towards the edge of the trees. She had seen them whenever she had looked out upon the grounds, had walked past them on her way back to the house with Simone only this morning. And she had thought she recognised them – somewhere, deep in her tank of memories, was an image of plants exactly like these. Instinctively she had known that she was supposed to be afraid of them, that she should steer clear of them – but she hadn’t even stopped to try to remember why.
Harley caught her up and stood behind her, breathing heavily.
She crouched beside the flowers, examining the whole plant. Beneath the crown of flowers, a thick stem led
down to a bulbous pod. ‘Did you call for a botanist?’
‘No, not yet. Kate, I’m completely lost.’
‘Then follow me.’
She stood up and broke into a jog, back towards the house, heading straight for Mangold’s lab.
‘You’ll need to wear a protective suit as well as that mask. God knows what Mangold had lurking in this lab,’ Kate said. She opened a couple of drawers, then spotted a cabinet in the corner and pulled it open. ‘Ah-ha, here you go.’
Harley suited up while Kate rifled through drawers, scattering paperwork across the benches, hundreds of pages of notes scrawled in Mangold’s spidery handwriting. She was about to give up when she found a manila envelope that looked about twenty years old. In it were several black-and-white A4 prints that had been produced from a microscope.
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘You little bastard.’
‘Kate …?’
She gestured for Harley to look at one of the prints.
‘What am I looking for?’ he asked.
‘You won’t be able to see it,’ she said. ‘But the thing that really puzzled me about Watoto-X2 was how quickly it kills compared to the original.’ She paused, thinking about Paul in the other room. How long did he have?
‘Isn’t it simply a stronger strain of the virus?’
‘That’s what we thought. But it looks identical to the original strain, the one I had when I was a child.’
