Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) (20 page)

Augustina Gallo.

That was what she had been waiting for, hoping for.
And now I really, really have to go
.

Still, she did not move.

She had visual confirmation that Gallo was alive and a hostage. She had established that Kenner and Rohn were bound for some destination in the Amazon. She had even managed to find a way to track the helicopter so Pierce would be able to follow when he arrived in Brazil. Realistically, there was nothing more she could do.

I’m on my own here,
Dourado thought.
It’s not like I can rescue her all by myself.

Or can I?

She glanced back at the box where she had hidden her phone, and all the other cargo stacked up behind it, and she made her decision.

30

Over the Atlantic Ocean

Pierce rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked around the dimly lit cabin of the Herculean Society’s Gulfstream 550. He had not expected to sleep, but according to his watch, they had been in the air for over five hours. He had slept for most of the flight.

Lazarus was seated on the floor in the center of the cabin, between the inward facing passenger couches. The big man’s eyes were closed, and his legs were folded up in the lotus position. Pierce assumed he was meditating, but he might have been asleep. Further back, Carter sat in front of an open laptop, studying the results of the SMRT sequence of the DNA taken from the Nemean Lion.

Pierce rose and stretched, then skirted around Lazarus to join her. He jerked a thumb in the big man’s direction. “Does he do that a lot?”

“We both do,” Carter replied, without looking away from the screen.

Pierce took a seat next to her and watched. Every few minutes, she would click the touch pad and the display would change, though Pierce would have been hard-pressed to explain exactly what was different. It was like looking at a Magic-Eye puzzle made up entirely of the letters A, G, C and T, each a different color. But one thing was obvious: she hadn’t found any answers yet.

So much for ‘twenty minutes to four hours,’
he thought. He fought down the urge to ask Carter why it was taking so long. Pestering her would not produce results any faster.

As if sensing his growing frustration, she said, “In case you’re wondering, the read is finished. I’m comparing the sequence to samples in the database.”

“That must be a tedious process,” he said, phrasing it almost like a question.

“That’s only part of the problem. We’re dealing with hybrid DNA, so there isn’t going to be an exact match.”

“There can’t be that many species of lion to compare it against.”

“The lion part was easy. Your Nemean Lion is actually
Panthera leo atrox
, better known as the American lion. They’ve been extinct for eleven thousand years, but were once a top-tier predator in the Americas.”

“American?” Pierce asked, incredulous. “Not European?”

“The European lion was the next closest candidate, probability-wise, but I’d say
atrox
is the likeliest match.”

“How did an American lion wind up in the Greek isles?”

“An extinct American lion,” Carter emphasized. “
How
is a question that DNA sequencing can’t answer. With today’s technology, it’s conceivable that someone could extract genetic material from preserved remains—maybe a tooth. Several
atrox
skeletons have been found in the La Brea Tar Pits in California. They would wander into the tar and get trapped there. Not exactly flies in amber, but pretty close. The Koreans are working on cloning woolly mammoths. The major obstacle now is ethical, not technological. But three thousand years ago…” She shrugged, helplessly.

“I suppose we’ve both seen stranger things.”

“That we have.” She stared at the endless rows of letters for a few seconds. “One way to create a transgenic hybrid is to introduce genetic material into an embryonic stem cell. We can do that using a retrovirus, but I suppose it could happen in nature. That could be what Cerberus is after. The retrovirus that made your Lion and all those other mythological monsters possible in the first place.”

“An American lion. And Cerberus is on its way to Brazil. I doubt that’s a coincidence.” He checked his watch. Unless something had changed, the Cerberus jet was already on the ground in Belem, and had been for nearly two hours. “Cintia should have called by now.”

“The sample is a ninety-eight percent match for the
atrox
,” Carter said. “It’s going to be a lot harder to isolate the other contributing organism, but if we come up with another match from the Western Hemisphere, then I’d say it’s a slam-dunk.”

Pierce nodded, but his focus had already shifted. He checked his phone for missed calls or messages. Nothing, but there was a notification for new e-mails. He opened it and discovered two messages from Dourado.

He read the first and nearly exploded. “Damn it!”

Lazarus’s eyes fluttered open. “What’s wrong?”

“Cintia. I told her to keep a safe distance.”

Lazarus rose to his feet and moved to join Pierce and Carter. “Details. What’s happened?”

Pierce read the e-mail again, gripping the phone so tightly that the edges of the LCD screen began to darken from the pressure. “Cerberus had a helicopter waiting in Belem. Cintia decided to sneak aboard and stash her phone so that we could track the helicopter.”

“That’s good,” Lazarus pointed out.

“It’s not. Cintia’s a computer geek, not a spy. She’s going to get herself…” He trailed off. The message was almost two hours old. Cintia might already have been captured. He opened the second message.

“‘Only Gallo here,’” he read aloud, each word deepening his despair. “‘Hiding on helicopter. Will try to help her escape. Come find us.’ Damn her.” He hit the reply button.

“Stop.” Lazarus’s voice was barely louder than a whisper, but the command was as forceful as a punch to the gut.

“She’s going to get herself killed.”

“If she hasn’t been discovered yet, any attempt to contact her might put her in danger.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do? Cintia’s practically a shut in. She’s not up for this.”

“Is the tracker working?” Lazarus asked.

Pierce went back to the first e-mail and clicked on the hyperlink. After a few seconds, a map opened up and showed the location of Dourado’s satellite phone. He had to zoom out to establish the exact location, a spot near the Brazilian border with Venezuela and Guyana.

“It’s still transmitting,” Lazarus said, “so she probably hasn’t been discovered yet.”

Pierce felt a glimmer of hope, but it faded almost as quickly. “This is the middle of nowhere. It will take hours for us to get there. Days.”

Lazarus studied the tiny screen on the phone for a moment then shook his head. “Open that link on the computer. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

Carter made room at the table and a few minutes later, they were looking at a larger satellite photo of the same region. A yellow dot marked Dourado’s phone amid a background of green and brown. “It’s not moving,” Pierce said. “They must have reached wherever it is they were going.”

“Mount Roraima.” Carter tapped a nearby spot on the screen. “These plateaus—they’re called
tepui
—are some of the most isolated and pristine ecosystems in the world. They’re so remote that they may still support primeval life forms. Maybe that’s what Cerberus is after. Some unique organism that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.”

“There have been rumors of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures living there for more than a century,” Pierce added. “Mount Roraima was the inspiration for
The Lost World
by Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

“Conan Doyle wrote
The Lost World
,” Carter said, offhandedly. “You’re probably thinking of
The Land That Time Forgot
.”

He blinked at her. Ordinarily he would have let it slide, but he was tired and cranky. People that he loved were in danger, and his nerves were raw. “Burroughs,” he insisted. “It was my favorite book growing up.”

“If it was your favorite, I’m surprised you don’t know who wrote it.”

Lazarus cleared his throat, quashing the pointless debate before it could escalate into something uglier. “Gallo is an expert on Greek mythology, right? Why would Cerberus need to take her along to Roraima?”

“I don’t know.” Pierce closed his eyes, searching his memory. “Kenner is on the trail of our old friend Hercules. And we know Alexander traveled around much of the ancient world. It’s possible he came here, too.”

Thanks to his prior association with Jack Sigler, Lazarus knew all about Alexander, and he didn’t need Pierce to elaborate. “So it’s not just about rescuing your people. We also have to stop Kenner and Cerberus from getting their hands on whatever it is they’re after?”

“Pretty much.”

“What about Fiona?”

Pierce shook his head. “Cintia said they only had Gallo.”

“So we also need to find out where they’re keeping Fiona,” Lazarus said. “Now we just need a plan.” He studied the satellite imagery for several seconds. “No roads. The nearest airport is hundreds of miles away.”

“If we go in by helicopter, they’ll hear us coming from miles away.”

Lazarus stared at him thoughtfully. “You could get us a helo?”

“Sure.” Pierce recalled that Lazarus’s diverse skill set included knowing how to pilot a helicopter. “If there’s one available that is. Short notice might be a problem, but I can afford one if that’s what you’re asking.”

Lazarus considered this for a moment, but then he shook his head. “You’re right. A helicopter would make too much noise. There is another way for us to get there fast and undetected, but…” He cocked his jaw sideways. “I don’t know if we could pull it off.”

“We’ve got to get them back, no matter what. Tell me what you need, and I’ll write the check.”

Lazarus let out his breath in a sigh. “For what I’ve got in mind, money will be the least of our problems.”

31

Cerberus Headquarters

Fiona jolted awake, and she was greeted by a spike of pain that threatened to split her skull. She reached up, probing the spot where the ache was most concentrated. There was a lump the size of a golf ball on the side of her head, and a rough crusty substance in her hair. Dried blood.

She managed to sit up, the pain nearly blinding her. Although the initial agony subsided after a moment, the assault on her vision continued without any let up. The room was nothing but white surfaces lit by intensely bright overhead lights. Across the room, she saw a pair of seated figures on what appeared to be examination tables—not like the padded and papered kind used in doctor’s offices, but the hard stainless steel kind used for autopsies. She shuddered at the thought, and the two people across the room shuddered, too.

A mirror
, she realized.
And I’ve got double-vision. Probably a concussion. Great
.

She blinked several times until her focus returned and her eyes adjusted to the harsh light. The full length wall mirror created the illusion of a larger space, but in reality, the rectangular room was barely large enough to accommodate the table on which she sat. She surveyed the room in the mirror, noting that there were no doors, then she stared at her own reflection. The mirror had to be one-way glass, an observation window, which meant someone was probably watching her from the other side. She stared hard, squinting a little, as if by doing so, she might be able to see through the reflective surface and look her tormentor in the eyes. After clearing her throat to make sure her voice wouldn’t crack, she said. “Can I have my old room?” She managed her sweetest smile and added, “Please?”

The lights in the room dimmed, and the reflected Fiona vanished as the glass became transparent, revealing a room of similar dimensions on the other side. There was no examination table in the observation room, just an old man sitting in a wheelchair.

Not just old
, Fiona thought.
Ancient.

His wispy white hair could not hide a map of veins and liver spots on the papery-thin skin that clung to the skull. His eyes were sagging with age, but were still sharp enough that she could tell they were different shades of blue. One almost slate gray, the other a pale cornflower shade, like the eye described in Poe’s classic
The Tell Tale Heart
—the eye that had driven the narrator to madness. Yet, despite the man’s age and those weird, disconcerting eyes, Fiona saw something familiar in the face. It was the same man that had appeared in the pictures in the trophy case.

The thought sent a shiver down her spine, but as she stared back at him, she resolved that she would never beg for her life. Not from this man.

“Hey. I recognize you,” she said, pointing at him like he was the one on display behind the glass and not her. “You’re Mr. Burns from
The Simpsons
, right?”

The cadaverous face split in what she could only assume was meant to be a smile, and then an electronically amplified voice—the same wheezy voice that had taunted her earlier in her room—filled her little cell. “What are you, child?”

She stared at him in consternation. “What am I? What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Your appearance is somewhat mongoloid, but the facial structure is all wrong. Are you an American aboriginal? A red Indian? Yes, that must be it. But not pure-blooded. You’re what my friends in Sao Paulo would call a
mestizo
.”

The halting manner of his speech—he could only get a few syllables out between gasping breaths—and the almost clinical detachment in his voice did not make the obsolete terminology any less offensive. “What I am,” she countered, mustering all the bravado she could, “is a human being. And an American citizen, I might add, with some very powerful and dangerous relatives. You really don’t want them to show up on your doorstep, but if you don’t let me go, that’s what’s going to happen.”

The death’s head grin did not slip. “Aside from your diabetes, and of course that little bump on your head, are you in good health? I understand that red Indians are often drunkards. How is your liver function?”

Fiona was tempted to make an obscene reply but restrained herself. It seemed unlikely that she would be able to talk her way out of this fix, but insults would definitely not improve her chances.

“Listen, I’m sorry about the Mr. Burns crack. Would you prefer me to call you by your real name?” She paused a beat and then added, “Dr. Mengele?”

Although her studies were focused mainly in Antiquity, Fiona was not unaware of modern history. She had studied World War II and the Holocaust; she knew who the major players were in that terrible chapter of history. And while his role in the rise of the Third Reich had been incidental, Josef Mengele had come to symbolize the worst sort of perversion of science and medicine. Viewing the Nazis’ intention to exterminate the Jews, Romani and other so-called inferior races as an opportunity to conduct research on living human subjects, he had requested an assignment at the Auschwitz death camp, where he subjected thousands of people to unspeakable experiments, earning the nickname
Todesengel
—the Angel of Death.

After the war, Mengele had escaped to South America, and despite the best efforts of Nazi hunters, he had eluded capture until his death in 1979. That was the official version at least, but by all accounts, Mengele’s remains had been positively identified through DNA testing.

Fiona had recognized Mengele’s name on the various citations and diplomas displayed in the trophy case, but it was the lovingly preserved photographic record of atrocities in the gallery that had brought her knowledge of the man to the surface.

Although there was not a doubt in her mind that the man in the wheelchair behind the glass was the same man in the pictures, his reaction confirmed her accusation. His gap-toothed smile grew bigger. “You know of me? Why, that is outstanding. I would have thought people of your generation would have forgotten about me. Especially those of your particular….” He sniffed disdainfully. “Caste.”

“What can I say? You’re famous. I should say ‘infamous.’” Instead of succumbing to despair, Fiona was feeling bolder with each passing second. Mengele might be able to torture and kill her, but she would not give him the satisfaction of breaking her spirit. “Can you clear something up for me? You’re supposed to be dead.”

The old man waved a gnarled hand. “It was not my intention to indulge you in conversation, child. I have work to do. Do you have any other medical conditions that I should know about?”

“Oh, come on. You’re going to kill me anyway, right? Use me as a lab rat in some experiment? That’s what you do, isn’t it? The least you could do is answer a couple of questions. Besides, you’re like the original mad scientist. Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. They made movies about you, you know. Don’t you want to brag a little?”

“Mengele is dead,” the man said. “I am Tyndareus now.”

“Tyndareus.” That name was more familiar to Fiona than even Mengele. “King of the Spartans, father of Castor and Clymenestra… Oh, of course. Twins.”

The old man’s smile slipped, but his strange eyes seemed to grow sharper. “You are remarkably well-informed.”

“Because I know who Tyndareus was? Or because I know that you’re obsessed with twins?” She was not exaggerating the latter point. During his time at Auschwitz, Mengele had fanatically tracked down twins for his experiments. Yet, something about the alias nagged at her.

In Greek mythology, Tyndareus’s wife, the beautiful queen Leda, had been seduced by the god Zeus, who appeared to her in the unlikely form of a swan. The offspring of that union had been a pair of eggs, each one containing a set of twins—Castor and Pollux, the famed Gemini twins, and Helen of Troy and Clymenestra. But only one twin in each set—Pollux and Helen—were sired by Zeus. Castor and Clymenestra were the natural children of Tyndareus.

The twins angle seemed the likeliest reason for Mengele to choose his new name, but it did not explain his other connection to Greek mythology.

She peered at him through the glass. “Tyndareus. Cerberus. And you’ve got Kenner chasing after Hercules. That can’t be a coincidence. What are you really after?”

Tyndareus brought his fingertips together in front of his face, which made him look exactly like the cartoon villain from
The Simpsons
. Fiona had to fight to stifle a laugh, but there was nothing amusing about the old man’s next utterance. “As diverting as explaining this to you might be, it would be a waste of time for both of us. If you will not answer my questions, I will simply proceed with the experiment.”

“Hey, wait—”

Tyndareus lowered his hands to the tablet computer resting on his lap and tapped the screen. Fiona heard the hiss of pressurized air, and glimpsed movement in the corner of her eye. She turned in the direction of the sound and saw that a section of the wall to her left had opened. It was not an exit however, only a small recess, like a cupboard at floor level.

Several small beige shapes darted out, the suddenness of their movement startling Fiona. She let out a yelp and drew her legs up onto the examination table, even as the rational part of her brain realized there was no threat, or more precisely, no obvious threat. The little shapes were mice, and not nasty mutant killer mice either. Just regular little mice, like Stuart Little. There were at least half a dozen of them still in the recess. Three or four had scurried out when the door opened, scouting the room, but showing no signs of hostility.

But she doubted Auschwitz’s Angel of Death was interested in gauging her reaction to a rodent infestation. Mice were often a disease vector. Had Tyndareus infected them with plague or Hanta virus? Was he going to watch to see how long it took her to die?

Tyndareus’s voice filled the room again. “An associate of mine was working to create a plant-based organic bio-weapon. The field tests were rather disappointing, but the concept is promising, and as I’ve already invested substantial resources, it only seems prudent to salvage what I can.

“There is an aerosol delivery system in the ceiling that will deliver the spores. You may feel free to take cover. In fact, I would prefer it if you did. It will provide me with a better understanding of how this organism spreads, if you are able to avoid initial infection.”

Fiona had only just begun to digest what the old man was telling her when she saw his hand reach for the tablet again, and before she could utter a single word of protest, his finger touched the screen. A hissing sound filled the air, and Fiona felt drops of liquid, like a light mist, falling onto her exposed skin.