Encrypted (23 page)

“I don’t know…”

“Get out here!”

She was nervous
about
exit
ing
.
Not because they might like it, but because they might not
.
Ronnie never pictured herself as the type of woman to fill out a dress like this
.
Dresses like this were reserved for the
über
-pretty.
The ones
who
didn’t dream of electric sheep.

Opening the door, she was met with a rumbling of
“
ahs
.
”
Even the women nodded
approvingly.

“We’ve got a winner,” Quirk said then guided her back to their seats
.
“Now for some makeup.” Before Ronnie could ask exactly what he had in mind, Quirk signaled to the
flight attendant
.
“Yes,
señor
ita
, could you please have the pilot announce that everyone
should
close their shades
,
and have him turn off the cabin lights
?
”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Lights-o off
.
Shades-o down.”

Even though her words were accent
ed
, she made it very clear that she was fluent in English
.
“I understood your words,
señor
.
I just did not believe you were saying them.”

Ronnie tried to quiet him down, but Quirk would have none of it
.
“How else can I apply makeup worthy of a goddess in this harsh lighting?”

The
flight attendant’s
eyebrow shot up
.
“Genius is always a burden,
señor
.
Make do
,
like the rest of us.”

Quirk seemed ready to go another round, but Ronnie pulled him down into his seat
.
“I just want some eyeliner and mascara
,
anyway.”

Her assistant gave her one of those looks, then pulled out a case that would put
Estée
Lauder
to shame
.
“I’m thinking
that
we
should
start with the gold.”

Ronnie gripped Quirk’s wrist
.
“If I end up looking like a transvestite, so help me…”

* * *

Francois remain
ed with his hea
d
against the wall, listening to the room with his eyes blissfully closed
.
N
ews report after news report covered the growing panic
that spread from New York outward
.
Another dozen victims had been hospitalized
,
and they were not all from the same flight
.
The first case was not an anomaly
.
The Black Death was here
.
He had failed
thrice
.

When the front door opened, Francois cracked an eyelid open
.
But he could not have seen what he thought he had seen
.
Jerking upright, Francois stared straight ahead
.
He could not believe his luck
.
There it was
.
The painting
.
He had thought it beyond his reach
.
Stored in some dim evidence locker
in
downtown
El Paso
.
How could it be in the same room as he
?

Not ten feet from the bars that held him was the scorched canvas, sealed in plastic,
and carried
in by an older agent
.
But as much as he wished to rush forward and press his claim, the Frenchman knew he could not
.
They did not understand why he must have it
.
They did know what it held
.

“Dude, get over it,” the younger agent said to the older.

The gr
a
y-haired agent shook his head
.
“I’m telling you
.
They made me sign my life away.”

The sandy
-
blond man shook his head
.
“
The
El Paso P
olice
D
epartment
just doesn’t want to be responsible if anything happens to it.”

“My point
,
exactly
.
I
was looking forward to my retirement benefits.”

Francois couldn’t help that his brow furrowed
.
Why
would the local authorities release the painting to the Federal Bureau of Investigation
?
Why, in fact, was he in the Bureau
’s
custody
in the first place
?

After the rapture of the fire, all was a blur until this morning
.
Francois
had not questioned in whose custody he was in, only that he had failed
.
He had known it
was
a risk to set the painting
on fire
in the museum, but he sensed that time was constricting
.
Francois should have been at a local jail
.

Why had the Federal G
overnment taken an interest in a crazed old man?

* * *

Amanda studied the readout until her eyes almost bled. Every bit of data streaming in from New York and a dozen other cities only wors
ened her initial prognosis.

“
Amanda
?” a voice
,
seeming
ly
distant and unimportant
,
spoke.

Startled back to reality
,
she found Dr. Henderson standing over her. “You said you had something to report?”

Wiping a tear from the corner of her eye, Amanda nodded, signaling Jennifer to bring up the latest information.

“We’ve got a problem.”

“Just one?” the director said as he sat down.

She grinned at his attempted joke, but the theory Amanda was about to present was absolutely no laughing matter.

“The plague is definitively
not
natural.”

Henderson stretched, yawning like a man who hadn’t gotten any sleep in a very long time. “That is what you keep insisting.”

“Now I have proof.”

The director sat up. “You have my attention.”

“And mine,” Devlin said as he joined them near the monitor.

Good. She might need a little encouragement to get through this presentation.

“As you are aware,” Amanda started, “the current theory for the New York flight victims is that they were all exposed in Venice.” She waited until they nodded. “The only problem with that is the timeline doesn’t add up.”

Jennifer called up a listing of all the passengers on the red
-
eye flight. “You are also aware that quickest incubation period for the bubonic plague is twenty
-
four hours.” Amanda pointed to the map showing where each of the passengers had been
twenty-four
hours from
when
the first victim became clinical. The dots were spread all over Europe, Russia
,
and even Africa. “How did all of these people come into contact with the plague in all of these desperate locations
,
then somehow all board the same plane?”

Devlin snorted, but Henderson nodded. “It would be statistically impossible.”

“But what does that mean?” Devlin asked.

Her assistant fast-forwarded the passenger’s trek to Venice until all the dots were clustered at the airport. “It means that someone infected them with a strain of
Yersenia
pestis
that is much more virulent, moving through the latency phase faster, attacking the body with more force.”

“That would imply a level of bioengineering
that
we are years away from,” Henderson noted.

Normally the director would have been spot
on, except for the fact
that
he wasn’t. “Just look at how quickly our first New York victim became stricken and sought medical care.” Jennifer brought up the medical record. “I mean
,
the problem with the
plague is the fact
that
the first wave of symptoms seem to be nothing more than the average flu. It isn’t until day two or three
,
when the lymph nodes in the groin and neck begin to swell
,
that people head to the hospital.”

Henderson stood up and read the report aloud. “Upon admission
,
patient complained of high fever, 102 Fahrenheit, muscle cramping and flushed skin
,
especially on the extremities.”

“If we agree that the infection must have occurred at the Venice airport, those
symptoms occurred within nine
hours.”

Devlin looked from Amanda to the director
, and
then back at the screen. “I am no epidemiologist…” That was an understatement. “But if I were going to bioengineer a bug, wouldn’t I want people walking around for longer not showing symptoms? Wouldn’t it spread wider that way?”

Henderson looked
Amanda’s
way.

“It would if you were relying on natural spread of the disease,” Amanda explained.

“And if you weren’t waiting for Mother Nature?”

Amanda looked
at
the new map that Jennifer displayed. Cases were spring
ing
up all over the country, Canada, and even Latin America. “Then you would be spreading the disease manually. Getting it onto as many airline passengers as you could and have it come on as quickly as it could...”

She nodded for Jennifer to hit the fast-forward button again. Red shot out across the United States, infecting nearly every corner of it. “So that the plague would spread like wildfire.”

“I understand how that would augment the exposure to the plague, but you said the bacterium itself was weaponized?
That this plague was creating symptoms and death far quicker?
”

Amanda nodded for Jennifer to bring up the 1347
Yersinia
pestis
alongside the current plague. Her assistant had even colorized the protein markers
—
making the tremendous increase in them all the more stark.

Devlin looked clueless
,
but by Henderson’s frown
,
he understood
the implications
all too well.

“The increased protein markers are a huge red flag to the immune system,” Henderson said
,
although it seemed like it was more to himself than to anyone else.

“Um,” Devlin said
.
“Isn’t that a good thing? The faster this plague is recognized the faster the body can fight it?”

The director seemed
lost
in a world
of
his own
,
so Amanda answered. “Normally yes, but due to
the ability of
Yersenia
pestis
to invade and even kill the white cells, these markers are accelerating the plague
’
s ability to destroy the host’s immune system.”

Everyone turned back to the screen.

“This isn’t o
ur ancestors
’
plague,
” Amanda stated as her assistant brought up a slide of U
.
S
.
patient
zero’s
neck
—
where a large
,
dark-
s
tained boil already brewed
under the skin. “This is a modern
-
day apocalypse.”

Not even Devlin argued.

CHAPTER 9