The Seventh Plague

by James Rollins

  With a collision imminent, Seichan dropped her bike and skidded tires-first toward the crash. She tumbled away at the last moment as the two bikes struck each other. Without waiting for a breath, she used the momentum of her last roll to leap to her feet and dive into the cover of the neighboring forest.

  Seichan put her back against the bole of a heavily bowered ash tree. The chase had ended at the small glade she had spotted from the hill above the cemetery.

  But where was the enemy?

  Her ears strained for any telltale sign: a rustle of leaves, the crack of a branch. Somewhere deeper in the woods, water tinkled and burbled. She remembered Jane mentioning that these parklands surrounded a set of natural springs that fed the River Cam.

  From that same direction, a louder splash sounded, then another.

  The enemy must be attempting to flee.

  Seichan headed toward the splashing. She could not let the survivor call for reinforcements or circle back and set up another ambush. Still, she proceeded cautiously, suspicious that the noise might be a decoy, one intended to lure her into a trap. She moved with great stealth, breathing evenly through her nose, taking care with each step.

  As her eyes adjusted to the deeper shadows under the bower, she spotted a gravel path that must lead to the springs. She moved parallel to it. Ahead of her, a soft sparkling shone through the trees. After a few more yards, a wide expanse of water appeared before her, its black surface reflecting the stars and moon. It was a spring-fed pond, about half the size of a football field. A few park benches lined its wooded shores.

  Movement on the far side drew her attention.

  A shadowy figure ran across the water’s surface, moving without raising even a ripple.

  How—?

  Seichan looked closer and noted a row of square stepping-stones, almost flush with the pond’s surface. They ran in a line across the water. The unusual path must offer visitors a way to cross the pond.

  Nearby, a helmet floated in the water. Her target must have tossed it aside while crossing, likely aggravated by its limited range of view.

  Seichan raised her pistol, but by now the figure had reached the far side. Before vanishing into the dark woods, her target turned. The moon’s reflection in the pond illuminated the enemy’s features.

  Surprise made Seichan pause.

  It was a young woman, her shoulder-length hair as white as snow. Even from this distance, Seichan noted a map of tattoos darkening half her face. Then the figure spun away and vanished into the shadows.

  Seichan weighed the risk of crossing the stepping-stones, of pursuing the stranger, but she would be too exposed out there, an easy target for a sniper in those woods. She considered circling around, but she knew her target would be long gone before she reached the far side.

  Still, she hesitated.

  Then a new noise intruded.

  The peal of bells rose from the church tower behind her, echoing far and wide. The ringing sounded raucous and wild, no melody, just alarm and discord.

  She stared in that direction, knowing the likely source of that cacophony.

  Kowalski . . .

  10:04 P.M.

  “Hurry it up back there!” the hulking American demanded.

  Kowalski crouched at the top of the tower staircase and fired his strange shotgun, blasting a load of sparking crystals down the steps.

  As he reloaded, he cast Derek a grim look and lifted a pair of fingers.

  He was down to his last two shells.

  Knowing they couldn’t hold out much longer, Derek dug in his toes and rolled the bronze bell across the floor. Anxiety clutched his throat, making it harder to breathe—or maybe it was the fact that he was pushing an unwieldy bell that weighed over four hundred pounds.

  After winding around and around the tower stairs, their group had finally reached the belfry a few minutes ago. The room encompassed the entire top floor. A large timber bell frame filled most of the space overhead. It housed the church’s six bells, the oldest of which dated back to the seventeenth century. The bells were of various sizes, each hung with ropes that fell through holes in the plank flooring.

  While Kowalski had exchanged fire with the gunman hidden below, Derek and Jane had followed his instructions to free one of the bells.

  His explanation was terse.

  I have a plan.

  So Derek grabbed a ladder, while Jane found a maintenance toolbox in a corner of the belfry. With sweat stinging his eyes and blood dripping from his broken nose, Derek had unbolted one of the smaller bells from its wooden arch. It fell heavily to the floor, clanging loudly.

  He and Jane now fought to roll it toward the American.

  Another rifle shot echoed up from the stairwell. Kowalski returned fire with a dazzle of scattering crystals.

  One shell left.

  Kowalski turned and ran over to join them. Together they all manhandled the bell to the threshold and toward the first step.

  The plan was now obvious.

  “Time to get out of here,” Kowalski grumbled next to Derek.

  As one, they shoved the bell down the stairs. It tumbled and bounced along the steps, ringing loudly off the walls, the peal of its descent nearly deafening.

  Kowalski pointed after it. “Go!”

  The big man set off, taking the lead. Jane followed. Derek paused only long enough to snatch his leather satchel from the floor, then he gave chase. He understood the urgency. The plummeting bell might succeed in chasing the hunter out of the tower, but the bastard could still lay in wait below.

  Kowalski clearly had other plans.

  They raced around and around, following the riotous clanging of the bell. Then at one turn, Derek caught sight of the bell and a glimpse of a darker shadow fleeing from its path. Kowalski fired his final round. A blast of scintillating crystals shot over the bouncing bell and sparked off the curve of the wall. But some struck their target in the back, raising a sharp scream of pain.

  Another turn of the stairs revealed the gunman, stunned and compromised now, stumbling forward. The assailant managed to turn his face upward—just in time to see four hundred pounds of beaten bronze rebound off the stony wall and crush him flat against the steps.

  Undeterred, the bell tumbled ever onward.

  “Don’t look,” Derek warned, scooping an arm around Jane.

  He led her past the broken body, skirting the smear of blood.

  Kowalski collected the gunman’s rifle and waved the weapon forward. “Keep going!”

  Derek read the concern in the man’s face. He was worried about what could be waiting for them below. They followed the bell the last of the way. At the bottom, the bell shot free of the tower and barreled out into the church’s nave. It crashed into the pews, breaking through the first row until it finally came to a rest against the next.

  Their group remained sheltered in the tower. Kowalski held back Derek and Jane, his gaze sweeping the church for any sign of a threat. On the far end of the nave, several terrified members of the choir huddled behind the pipe organ.

  Sirens echoed from outside, while smoke wafted in from the south porch through the open doors. Derek turned in that direction. The fire must be spreading. In a village of thatched roofs and timber-framed homes, the windswept spread of fiery embers threatened all.

  A piercing whistle drew all their attentions in the other direction. A figure stepped from the shadows of the north porch.

  It was Kowalski’s partner.

  “If you’re done making a bloody racket,” she called out, “let’s haul ass out of this damned town.”

  Jane pushed forward and stalked into the open. “Smartest thing I’ve heard all night.”

  6

  May 31, 7:22 A.M. BST

  Mill Hill, England

  Someone sure as hell’s cleaning house.

  From beyond a police cordon, Gray scowled at the fiery ruins of the medical lab. The Francis Crick Institute—a part of the British National Institute of Medical Research�
��was located in Mill Hill, on the outskirts of London. From the center of the sprawling complex rose a towering brick building with four large wings. Smoke poured from the guttered windows on its northwest side, where a bevy of fire engines cast flumes of water at the smoldering structure.

  Painter had alerted Gray and Monk of the lab’s firebombing as their jet landed at a British air base. They had been instructed to come straight to Mill Hill, to meet someone who the director believed could provide useful intel.

  They had been waiting for over thirty minutes, which only exacerbated Gray’s frustration. He wanted to keep moving, to pursue those involved not only in this attack—but also the assault up in Ashwell. Painter had informed him of the attempted abduction of Jane McCabe. Seichan and Kowalski had managed to secure the professor’s daughter, along with a colleague. Their group was currently holed up in a nondescript hotel in central London. Gray was anxious to join them.

  Monk lowered his prosthetic hand from his radio earpiece.

  “What’s the latest from Sigma command?” Gray asked.

  “Not good. Kat confirms what everyone feared.” Monk nodded toward the smoking ruins. “The body, the samples . . . they were all incinerated.”

  Gray shook his head. Professor McCabe’s body had been quarantined at one of this institute’s biohazard labs. Staff had been tasked with isolating and identifying the contagion found within the man’s mummified remains.

  Monk frowned. “But why go to all this effort to burn the guy’s body? Others are already sick with whatever disease he was carrying.”

  And according to Kat, many of them had died.

  Gray squinted at the smoke choking into the morning skies. “I don’t think the arsonists were worried about the pathogen. I wager their real intent here was to burn bridges.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Besides getting a handle on the disease, the game plan had been to analyze the dead man’s stomach contents—like the strange tree bark—and use those clues to identify the possible location where he was held all of this time . . . and maybe where the rest of his survey team could still be.”

  Including the professor’s son.

  Monk sighed. “So we’re back to square one.”

  “And not only here. We’re still no closer to discovering who abducted Safia al-Maaz.”

  According to initial reports, whoever had raided the British Museum had left behind no clues. Similarly the bodies of the assault team in Ashwell had been searched by local authorities. No IDs were found. Fingerprints and photos were already being circulated, and a manhunt was under way for the one assailant who escaped on foot.

  Still, Gray did not hold out much hope. Whoever was behind all of this had ample resources and considerable knowledge of their targets. The strikes had been performed with a surgical precision, all intended to erase any clues to the mysteries surrounding Professor McCabe.

  But why? And why kidnap Dr. al-Maaz? Was it just to interrogate her? To discover what she knew about all of this?

  Gray sensed he was missing something important. It buzzed at the edge of his senses, struggling to come into focus. One of the reasons he had been recruited into Sigma was his ability to piece puzzles together, to discover patterns where no one else could, but even his considerable skill had its limits.

  Like now.

  He shook his head, knowing he needed more pieces before he had any hope of solving this particular puzzle.

  The potential source for those pieces came striding across the street from the institute. Kat had forwarded a picture of the woman: Dr. Ileara Kano. As Sigma’s intelligence expert, Kat had developed a network of contacts across the globe. Gray had tried to find out how Kat knew the British woman, but Kat had answered cryptically: I’ll let her explain.

  Dr. Kano was in her midthirties, the same age as Gray. She wore jeans and a half-zippered white jacket, revealing a prominent necklace of coral beads. Her dark hair was cut in a close crop, and her features were fine, almost stately. According to her bio, she had emigrated from Nigeria with her parents when she was twelve and eventually went on to earn a PhD in epidemiology, a discipline that focused on the pattern of disease outbreaks. She currently worked for a British unit called the Identification and Advisory Service.

  Though the woman surely had been up most of the night, she showed no exhaustion. Her dark eyes shone brightly, though her lids narrowed slightly as she took in the two Americans.

  “You must be Commander Pierce,” she said, her accent distinctly British, then she turned with a slight smile to Monk. “And the infamous Dr. Kokkalis. Kat has told me much about you.”

  “Is that so?” Monk held out a hand. “Sounds like I’ll have to explain the word confidentiality to my wife when I get back home.”

  Her smile broadened as she shook his hand. “Don’t worry. It was all good.” She gave half a shrug. “Well, mostly.”

  “It’s the mostly part that worries me.”

  Gray directed the conversation to the matter at hand. “Kat said that you might have some insight about all of this.”

  Ileara sighed, casting a worried glance at the blasted lab. “Insight might be too strong a word. I have some answers, but unfortunately most of those only raise more questions.”

  “At this point, I’ll take any answers.”

  Monk grunted his agreement.

  Ileara waved for them to follow her. “My car is parked in a lot around the corner.”

  Gray kept to her side, matching her long-legged stride. “Where are we going?”

  “Didn’t Kat tell you?” She frowned over at him. “It’s urgent I speak with Jane McCabe.”

  “Why?”

  “Kat informed me that Ms. McCabe managed to secure some of her father’s old papers, particularly pages that suggest this is not the first time that this disease has reached British soil.”

  Gray had been similarly briefed about the outbreak at the British Museum over a century ago, and while he was anxious to join the others, years of fieldwork had taught him to be guarded. While Kat trusted this woman, she was a stranger to Gray. He pressed her for clarification as they reached her car. Gray placed a palm on the door, barring her from opening it.

  “Why is the history of the disease so important?”

  Ileara gave him an exasperated look, as if he should already know the answer. “I don’t know if you’ve heard. I only got word myself within the past hour. Scores of new cases are being reported throughout Cairo and neighboring Egyptian cities. Here in London, we’re scrambling to avoid a similar pattern, but we may already be too late. And now we’re hearing anecdotal reports of new cases, people who traveled through Heathrow or Cairo’s airport. They’re showing the same spiked fevers, the same disturbing hallucinations.”

  Monk interrupted. “Hallucinations?”

  Ileara nodded to him. “It’s a new clinical sign, seen in patients close to death. We believe it’s secondary to advancing meningitis.”

  Monk stepped closer. With his background in medicine, he was clearly intrigued by this news and wanted more details.

  Gray interrupted this line of inquiry. “That’s all good to know, but again how does this old outbreak from the eighteen hundreds bear on today’s events?”

  Ileara began ticking off items on her fingertips. “We’ve got cases now in Berlin, in Dubai, in Krakow. Even three cases in New York City and one in Washington, D.C.”

  Gray cast a worried look at Monk.

  “But the worst conditions are still in Cairo, where panic is beginning to spread, which is further exasperating efforts to control the situation.” Ileara pulled Gray’s hand from the car door and faced him. “Why my interest in the past outbreak? Because my nineteenth-century colleagues somehow stopped this plague from spreading. If there’s any clue in Professor McCabe’s papers about how they accomplished this, we need to discover it straightaway before matters get worse.”

  “She’s right,” Monk said.

  Gray stood pat. “But why you?
” he pressed. “Why are you looking into this by yourself?”

  Ileara sagged a bit, but she waved toward the column of smoke in the sky. “Because the people on the Medical Research Council who are overseeing the analysis of the pathogen have their heads up their asses. They’ve put their full faith in modern science, in electron microscopy, in DNA analysis, in genome mapping. They’ve no trust in the work of scientists from a century ago, which is daft.”

  Monk nodded. “I’ve met plenty of those types myself. And not just in the scientific field. That old adage—those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it—falls too often on deaf ears.”

  “Precisely. It’s one of the reasons I joined the Identification and Advisory Service,” Ileara explained.

  “Which does what?” Gray asked.

  “It’s a unit connected with the British Natural History Museum. We’re tasked with investigating unexplained phenomena, specifically scientific mysteries that baffle conventional study. Our unit searches museum records and files, while employing modern methodologies to look into enigmatic cases.”

  Monk lifted a brow. “Let me guess. You have someone named Mulder or Scully working for you.”

  Ileara smiled and pulled the car door open. “Trust me. The truth is out there—if you’re not too afraid to look.”

  Gray rolled his eyes as she hopped behind the wheel.

  Monk grinned. “No wonder Kat likes her.”

  Gray glanced to him. “Why?”

  “She’s as much a crackpot as any of us.”

  8:39 A.M.

  Derek rubbed his eyes with one hand, while suppressing a yawn with his other fist. Spread before him across the kitchenette’s table were all of the books, journals, and papers he had managed to shove into his leather satchel before fleeing the McCabes’ cottage with Jane.

  There’s gotta be something important here.

  It was his mantra that kept him up all night, not that he could have slept anyway. After last night’s escape from Ashwell, he had arrived in London still on edge, his nerves frazzled with adrenaline. Of course, his nose, which had been crudely set and taped, throbbed and ached, defying the handful of pain relievers he had downed.