The Seventh Plague

by James Rollins

  “It’s all gibberish,” she said.

  Rory worked across the table from her, laboring over the same puzzle on his laptop. “It can’t be. Why would this woman go through so much effort to tattoo her entire body and have it all be nonsense?”

  “They could simply be decorations. I’ve heard of people getting Chinese letters inked on them without realizing that what was written was pure twaddle.”

  “I’m not buying that.”

  She sighed. “I’m not, either. There must be something important she was trying to preserve.”

  But what?

  “Then maybe we start fresh tomorrow,” Rory said. “It’s late and we’re both tired. We can try to fill in more of the gaps in the morning.”

  She nodded, frustrated. “It’s like trying to read a book where every other word is missing and those that are left have half their letters erased.”

  “And with the mummy’s rear side burned beyond recognition,” he reminded her, “we’ve also lost the back end of the book.”

  “True.”

  Rory tried to suppress a yawn but failed.

  She smiled. “We’ll try again when we can hold our eyes open.”

  “Maybe not this one.” Rory pointed to his bruised and swollen eye, a painful reminder of the cost of failure.

  The source of that injury sat near the door. Anton’s gaze seldom shifted away from them.

  “We’ll figure it out,” she promised Rory.

  They both began to close up shop, collecting their laptops. While her computer was mostly locked down, she could still use it to communicate via e-mail or video chat with Rory, in case either of them had any insight during the night.

  “One last question,” Safia said. “There was that rectangular strip of missing skin. You said you believed your father cut it out for tests.”

  “To try to discern the exact nature of her mummification. He thought it was odd.”

  “Odd how?”

  “He believed there was something unique about the ritual she had undergone prior to being entombed, but he never elaborated. We were only allowed to talk for one hour each week.” He glanced back to Anton. “That is, if we both did what was asked of us.”

  She pictured the corresponding blank section of hieroglyphs on the reconstruction. “Did he ever copy down what might have been written on that excised piece?”

  “I have no idea. But if he did, it was likely destroyed with everything else.”

  “What was your father trying to hide?” she mumbled to herself.

  Rory heard her. “Apparently something worth dying for.”

  Safia winced and touched his arm. “I’m sorry.”

  He looked down at his feet, his voice edged with bitterness. “And he left me to pick up the pieces.”

  Rory strode toward the door. She hurried to catch up, seeking some words to console the young man. She could not imagine what it must be like. Not only must Rory be struggling with the grief of losing his father, but clearly there was some resentment toward Harold for abandoning him. His father had chosen to risk his life, while leaving his son in their captor’s clutches. And now Rory was being forced to follow in his father’s footsteps.

  Safia wondered about that final act of Harold’s.

  Was it done out of selfishness or desperation?

  As she reached Rory, there was a knock on the library door. Anton waved them back. He opened it, while blocking the view inside with his body. After a short exchange, a file was passed to him.

  Anton closed the door and held out the folder. “Test results.”

  Safia was momentarily confused, but she took what was offered. She opened it and saw it was a DNA analysis on their subject. It was just one of a battery of tests, from tissue samples to carbon dating. She had not expected to get these results so fast, but she should have known better, considering who was financing this endeavor.

  She stepped away from the door, drawing Rory with her. She didn’t expect anything particularly surprising. She had asked for a genetic analysis of the mummy’s autosomal and mitochondrial DNA in an attempt to trace the woman’s ancestry. She hoped it might give them some clue as to where in ancient Egypt this woman might have lived.

  The file held more than thirty pages of detailed results, including graphs and charts, but the summary was on the top page. She read aloud from the last line. “ ‘Subject carries several corroborating alleles and markers, but the most significant is the presence of Haplogroup K1a1b1a, suggestive of a Levant ancestry, while lacking any presence of the I2 subclade expected of an Egyptian origin.’ ”

  Rory frowned. “Archaeogenetics was never my cup of tea. What does that mean?”

  Safia swallowed, picturing the ravaged body of the woman on the throne. “It says she’s not Egyptian.”

  “What?”

  She read the most significant line to herself again: suggestive of a Levant ancestry.

  “I think . . .” She turned to Rory. “I think she’s Jewish.”

  11:55 P.M.

  Simon climbed naked out of the ice-cold plunge pool. With his body quaking from the frigid dip, he grabbed a towel from the heated rack and buffed his skin dry.

  It was his ritual before retiring each night. His personal pool was only a yard wide and twelve feet deep, filled with water kept at a steady 55 degrees. Each night he jumped in and dropped down to grab a stainless steel ring bolted to the bottom. He held tight to that anchor for as long as his breath would last, then shot back out.

  Already he felt the anxiety-ridding effect of the cold plunge, one of many benefits from this ritual. It was also said to improve lymphatic circulation, strengthening the immune system, while activating brown fat to help with weight loss. If nothing else, it obviously had a cardiovascular effect, as his heart hammered in his chest.

  His whole body shook once more, then he pulled on a thick robe.

  He found he slept much better after shocking his system with this bit of cryotherapy, a ritual that helped stave off his body’s confusion in this land where months could be sunk in darkness or bright all day.

  He could also think clearer, shedding the day’s aggravations.

  Like this surprise visit from a pair of DARPA inspectors.

  Why now of all times?

  An important experimental trial was scheduled in less than forty-eight hours. The conditions were perfect. Not only was the pending storm a warm one—a rarity up here, where conditions were considered to be desert-dry—but it coincided with a geomagnetic storm from a powerful solar flare recorded two days ago. Everything was in place, and he hated the thought of delaying.

  With his mind running through the variables, he abandoned his plunge pool and headed barefoot to his library. His suite of rooms encompassed the entire breadth of a private fifth sublevel, where access was limited to only a handful of station personnel. He entered his library, appreciating the radiant heat rising from the hand-scraped plank flooring. The room was a mix of the old and the modern. Three walls were encased in mahogany shelves, holding books and volumes dating back centuries, along with glass-encased artifacts and treasures.

  One entire wall was devoted to Nikola Tesla. It was a veritable museum to the inventor. Even the plasma screen that bloomed to life as he entered presented a view of Manhattan from the vantage of Tesla’s old suite at the Hotel New Yorker—Room 3327, which still bears a memorial plaque to the man on its door.

  It was in that room that his life ended and my life’s passion began.

  He gazed upon his most prized possession. A thick black book rested under glass, softly illuminated from above.

  The morning after Tesla passed away in 1941, his nephew Sava Kosanovic rushed over to the hotel, only to find his uncle’s body had already been removed and the room ransacked. Volumes of technical papers were missing, including a notebook of several hundred pages that Sava was told by Tesla to preserve upon his passing. The FBI investigated and confiscated all the remaining work and technical papers, with the government
declaring it a matter of national security.

  And no wonder.

  Simon glanced to a framed copy of the New York Times on the wall, dated from July 11, 1934. The headline read: TESLA, AT 78, BARES NEW DEATH BEAM. The article described a particle-beam weapon that could bring down ten thousand planes from hundreds of miles away. But rather than a weapon of war, Tesla believed his invention could bring about world peace, stating that when all countries possessed this beam, all fighting would stop. He also envisioned using this same invention to transmit power wirelessly, even to use it to heat up the upper levels of the atmosphere, creating a man-made aurora borealis to light the night skies around the world.

  Simon smiled.

  The man was a visionary, ahead of his time.

  But now that time had finally come.

  He stared at the black notebook, each page carefully inscribed in Serbian, the language of Tesla’s birthplace. Simon had discovered it while helping to fund the renovation and expansion of the Tesla Museum in Belgrade. Back in 1952, the government finally released Tesla’s papers to his nephew, which were preserved at the museum. But even Sava knew a large portion was kept by the U.S. government, specifically by the National Defense Research Committee, which was run at the time by John G. Trump, the uncle of a certain New York real estate magnate.

  In the end, Sava was proven right.

  Simon spent millions looking for those missing documents. Then he learned that when John Trump died in 1985, he bequeathed a massive cache of scientific papers to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Simon sent a research investigator over to MIT to comb through that truckload of documents, specifically looking for anything related to Tesla.

  It wasn’t a haphazard request on Simon’s part. Later in life, John Trump founded the High Voltage Engineering Corporation, which produced Van de Graaf generators, a current-producing device not all that dissimilar to the Tesla coil. Trump was even declared by the National Academy of Engineering to be a “pioneer in the scientific, engineering, and medical applications of high voltage machinery.”

  An acclaim that could easily describe Tesla.

  Suspicious—especially since John Trump oversaw the shuttering of the NDRC—Simon sent that investigator poking around. Buried deep in that cache, the man found an unmarked notebook, scrawled by hand in the Serbian language.

  Simon stared at that book under glass.

  Tesla’s lost notebook.

  It was no wonder that the NDRC considered it of little value. The journal was not a treatise on building a particle-beam weapon—at least, not entirely—but rather told a wild tale going back to 1895. Later, Tesla would hint at the secrets found within his notebook in an interview, declaring he had discovered the true nature of power “from a new and unsuspected source.”

  And indeed he had.

  While Trump and the NDRC might have dismissed the book as a work of fabrication and fancy, Simon took it for the truth. To verify the book’s claims, he poured millions into charitable work in Africa, including funding construction and housing projects along the Nile, which in turn meant financing archeological surveys of such regions. With universities scrabbling to endow research projects, especially expensive fieldwork, it had not been hard to co-opt such efforts to serve his own ends.

  Then two years ago—after a decade of searching, guided by the vaguest of clues—Simon found what Tesla had sworn never to reveal.

  It was a true wonder, but one that came with great risks.

  The ongoing pandemic was testament to that.

  Simon frowned at the book, understanding why Tesla and his two companions had made a pact to keep silent. What they had discovered was beyond their abilities to harness, the risk of failure too great.

  So they kept it buried in the desert—until the world was ready.

  Simon formed a determined fist.

  I will do what Tesla could not.

  For the sake of the world.

  No matter the cost.

  A chime sounded behind him. He turned to the one wall not covered in bookshelves. It held a bank of monitors, serving as his digital eyes upon the station. He crossed over and accepted the incoming video call. He took this same call at midnight every day.

  Anton’s face appeared on the center screen, ready to pass on his final briefing for the day.

  “Have you put your charges to bed?” Simon asked.

  “Dr. al-Maaz is locked back in her room,” he reported. “She made good progress today, including a discovery I believe even escaped Professor McCabe’s attention.”

  “Concerning what?”

  “The subject in the lab—the mummified woman—she’s not Egyptian, but rather of Jewish descent.”

  “Jewish?”

  Anton shrugged. “The significance is unknown, but work will continue tomorrow.”

  Simon sat down on the chair before the monitors, contemplating this news. After discovering Tesla’s notebook and the plans found within it for the electrical microbe, Simon had sought a means of taming such a virulent organism—through both scientific means and historical.

  Tesla had hinted at such a solution in his book, but the answer seemed to disturb and frighten him—enough so that he refrained from elaborating on it.

  It was the one piece holding Simon back from the final stage of his work. From a theoretical standpoint, everything made sense. But any failure risked an ecological disaster, one that would make the Exxon Valdez oil spill look like an overturned cup of milk.

  Still, the world faced an even greater threat.

  Here on Ellesmere, warming conditions were already changing the chemical conditions of ponds and wetlands, resulting in the loss of species and habitats. And that was only the tip of the proverbial melting iceberg. Researchers estimated that, if unchecked, the global biosphere could collapse within this century.

  Unless a true visionary steps in.

  Simon considered the challenges before him. The test slated to commence in two days was the first phase, a localized trial. It would serve as a real-world proof of concept. But did he dare risk it, especially now with the station under watch?

  “What about our guests?” Simon asked. “Our friends from DARPA?”

  “Last I checked they were in the cafeteria, chatting over coffee.”

  “And you’re confident in your background check?”

  Anton nodded. “They work for DARPA, going back nearly a decade.”

  Good.

  Simon didn’t need any more problems. “We’ll give them the official tourist tour tomorrow, then send them packing as soon as possible.”

  Still, something bothered him about them, something he couldn’t put a finger on. And he trusted his intuition. As Tesla once stated, instinct is something which transcends knowledge.

  “Anton, let’s keep an extra eye on them.”

  “Of course.”

  “And what of the news from the Sudan? How is your sister faring with that other problem?”

  “All is on schedule. That matter should be settled soon.”

  “Very good.”

  After a final few details were discussed, he ended the connection.

  He sat for a moment, then toggled up a new feed from another secure section of the station. A view into a cave appeared, illuminated by bright halogens. It was part of the old Fitzgerald Mine, which once operated on the island, digging for nickel and lead. The cavern had flooded half a century ago and remained unfrozen at those insulated depths. He remembered seeing it for the first time when Aurora Station was being built. The waters had been a perfect blue, as if a memory of the sky.

  In the end, this old bore pit had served as the perfect holding tank.

  He studied the lake. Its flat surface mirrored the steel catwalk spanning its length. But the waters were no longer a crystalline azure but a dark ruby, like so much spilled blood.

  He felt a shiver of apprehension, remembering another quote from Tesla, wondering if the visionary was foretelling what might happe
n if the secret in his journal ever came to light.

  You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

  Simon prayed for once that the man he admired was wrong.

  THIRD

  THE DREAMING GOD

  ∑

  15

  June 3, 6:18 A.M. EAT

  Sudan Desert

  Sunrise struck like a sledgehammer.

  Gray swore under his breath, yanking down the visor, squinting as the leading edge of the sun crested the rocky dunes to his right. The skies had been steadily brightening for the past hour, but he hadn’t been prepared for the fiery arrival of the new day.

  While Gray took his stint behind the wheel, the others slept or drowsed. In the backseat, Jane nestled against Derek, whose head was lolled back, his mouth open. Kowalski sat with his chin on his chest, snoring loudly, challenging the throaty growl of the truck’s engine. Seichan shared the front seat, her head resting against the window.

  The only member of the party still awake raced ahead of the lumbering Unimog. The boy Ahmad rode an old Suzuki Tracker sand bike, cutting expertly back and forth, the rear wheel’s thick tread chewing across the treacherous terrain. Ahmad had grabbed his bike before the group left Rufaa. Kowalski had helped him haul it into the truck’s back bed, where Ahmad’s dog, Anjing, now slept in a nest made of their packs.

  Three hours ago, Ahmad had guided them to the spot where his cousin’s family had found Professor McCabe in the desert. They had stopped and examined the site, but it had offered no clues. What hadn’t been trampled over by local search crews, the strong winds and blowing sands had washed away. Those same shifting sands had also erased the professor’s tracks leading there.

  So they set off, aiming for the coordinates marked by an X on Derek’s map. Ahmad had unloaded his bike and led the way onward, searching for any remaining footprints or signs of Professor McCabe’s passage. He swept in wide arcs, far in the lead, running dark with his headlamp off. He claimed he could see best with just the light of the moon and stars.

  Gray followed throughout the night, doing the same, but he didn’t have the eyes of a desert nomad, so he kept his headlights blazing a path before him. Over the past hour, they had been climbing into a region of rolling hills, worn low by the sun and wind.