The Seventh Plague Read online

  “But how bad?” Gray asked.

  Ileara tried to answer. “The CDC has developed a Pandemic Severity Index, used to rank the levels of risk from various pathogens, ranging from Category 1 to 5.”

  “Same as with hurricanes.”

  “That’s correct. And in this case, it’s estimated we could be facing a Category 5 superstorm.” She turned and focused her attention onto Jane. “This is why it’s vital that we discover what your father might have learned about the outbreak in the past—when that artifact of Dr. Livingstone was opened at the British Museum.”

  Jane glanced to Derek, as if urging him to answer.

  Gray pressed the man. “Do you know something?”

  “Not about any potential cure,” he said hesitantly. “But I think I know where Professor McCabe might have gone when he disappeared.”

  Gray could not keep the shock from his voice. “What? How?”

  Derek turned to the scatter of papers sharing the tabletop. “I’ll show you.”

  9:55 A.M.

  I hope I’m right . . . for Jane’s sake.

  As Derek pulled out the book that Professor McCabe had stolen from the Glasgow library, he saw the hope shining in her eyes. He knew her thoughts were on her brother, Rory, and on the possibility that he was still alive. Derek didn’t know if the theories he had discussed with her a moment ago were valid or only a path to more disappointment. Still, he knew he couldn’t keep silent any longer, not if what Dr. Kano had revealed about this pathogen was true.

  He placed the book on the table and rested his palm atop it. “You have to understand that Professor McCabe was determined to ferret out any evidence that could verify the story in the Book of Exodus. It’s likely how he stumbled across Livingstone’s account of an artifact given to the explorer by a local native.”

  Derek opened McCabe’s field journal to the page depicting a sketch of the aryballos, the oil vessel bearing the face of a lion on one side and the profile of a woman on the other. He also showed them where the Egyptian name for the Nile had been inscribed in hieroglyphics on the jar.

  Ileara leaned closer. “So this is the artifact that was unsealed and led to the death of those in attendance at the museum?”

  “It is,” Derek said. “Or so the story goes. Though keep in mind the same tale also states that the contents preserved in the aryballos were collected from the Nile, back when it had turned bloody.”

  “But whether that’s true or not,” Jane added, “such a story would have intrigued my father.”

  “Enough so that it led him to an exchange of letters between Livingstone and the man who rescued him, Henry Morton Stanley.” Derek opened the compilation of old correspondences. “Professor McCabe seemed particularly interested in a handful of those letters, specifically those that contained some of Livingstone’s biological drawings.”

  He opened to the page containing the sketch of the scarab beetle. “At first I thought the professor had tabbed this letter because it was another connection to ancient Egypt. But then I noted something off about the drawing, so I took a picture of it that I could manipulate.”

  He pulled out his iPad and opened it to the photo he had taken of the old sketch. “I had just begun to work on it when you all arrived.”

  The others gathered at his shoulder as he used a stylus to rotate the image of the beetle until it was positioned vertically, balanced on its wingtip.

  “What about it?” Monk asked, scrunching up his nose.

  “The veining of the wings suddenly struck me as wrong, not that I’m an expert on insect morphology. But watch when I do this.”

  Derek used the pad’s art program to erase most of the wings away, until only the strange veining was left.

  Gray stood straighter. “My god . . .”

  Derek glanced to the American, surprised that the man seemed to already glom on to what he was trying to show.

  Jane encouraged Derek to continue with a measure of pride in her voice, which stoked a fire inside him. “Go on,” she urged him. “Show them the rest.”

  He rubbed away the remainder of the scarab’s body, then drew the two halves of the veining together, connecting one to the other.

  “It looks like a river,” Ileara said, squinting at the image.

  “Not just any river,” Derek said. “Note what looks like a delta at the top and a set of lakes—one small, one large—at the ends of two tributaries.”

  “It’s a map of the Nile,” Gray said, his eyes glancing to Derek with a measure of admiration.

  To further support this assertion, Derek brought up a satellite scan of the region, where he had highlighted the river’s watershed. He positioned one next to the other.

  “As you can see, they’re almost a perfect match,” he said.

  Still, Gray raised a valid concern. “But could Livingstone have produced such an accurate map of the Nile back then on his own?”

  It was Jane who answered. “Certainly. Livingstone had already successfully mapped large swaths of Africa, including much of the Zambezi River. He even earned a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society for his work.”

  “So it’s indeed possible,” Derek said. “In fact, much of the Nile’s route had been charted before his death.”

  “But why hide it?” Monk asked. “Why sketch the river into the wings of a beetle?”

  Ileara offered an answer. “Such subterfuge had been done in the past, by British spies around the same time. Take for example, Robert Baden-Powell. He was an officer in military intelligence who posed as an entomologist and used hand-drawn illustrations of bugs, leaves, and other natural elements, wherein he hid details of military installations and army forces. He did all of this under the very noses of the enemy.”

  Gray frowned. “Why does his name sound familiar?”

  Ileara smiled. “Maybe because the man went on to found the Boy Scouts.”

  Monk snorted. “Talk about being prepared.” He pointed to the iPad. “Still, it doesn’t tell us why Livingstone hid a map of the Nile in a beetle’s wing.”

  Derek sighed. “I believe he was trying to secretly share something of great importance with his friend Stanley, showing him where to find it.”

  “How?” Seichan asked.

  Derek returned to the first image of the scarab. “Look how Livingstone split the river’s course into two halves, with the body of the beetle positioned between them. The beetle itself would have been highly significant to Stanley.”

  “Because it was an Egyptian scarab,” Gray said.

  “That’s right. Both men had an interest in ancient Egypt. I believe Livingstone was using the scarab’s body like a big X, marking on the course of the Nile’s flow where something of importance lay waiting to be found, something with a tie to the ancient Egyptians.”

  “If my father came to the same conclusion,” Jane said, “he could have been tempted to lead a search party to find it.”

  Derek drew an X on the drawing, at the place where Livingstone had divided the river. The mark rested near where the Nile split into its two main tributaries: the Blue Nile and the White Nile.

  Derek pointed to the X. “This site is not far from where the new hydroelectric dam is being built in the Sudan. I can easily see Professor McCabe using the engineering survey as a cover story to go search this region.”

  “And from the state of his body,” Gray said, “he clearly must have found something.”

  “Or something found him,” his partner Monk added.

  Ileara had stepped over to stare down at the professor’s journal, at the sketch of the double-headed aryballos. “Either way, he returned infected with the same contagion preserved in Livingstone’s artifact.” She turned to face the others. “We don’t know if any of the other members of the survey party are still alive, but if these clues could lead us to the source of the disease, it could shed more light on its nature . . . and a possible cure.”

  “Then we go look,” Gray decided firmly.

  Ever
yone murmured an agreement, except for one holdout.

  “This is all fine,” Seichan said, “but there’s still one mystery that we’re no closer to solving.”

  Gray’s expression sobered as he voiced aloud that mystery. “What became of Safia al-Maaz?”

  Derek felt a stab of guilt at having forgotten about his friend’s abduction in all the excitement.

  Jane crossed her arms in concern. “What can we do?”

  “For now, nothing,” Gray admitted. “The investigation at the museum hasn’t turned up any new leads. Until that changes, we go where we can.”

  Derek stared toward the window, fearful of abandoning Safia like this, but Gray was right. Resigned to this decision, he did the only thing he could and cast out a silent prayer.

  Please be all right.

  8

  May 31, 10:04 A.M. EDT

  Arctic Archipelago

  Safia placed her palm against the window, feeling the bitter cold through the triple-paned glass. While there were no bars, her accommodations were no doubt a prison cell. Beyond the window, a frozen landscape spread to the horizon, the skies socked in with low clouds. Near at hand, a stretch of glacier-scarred black granite was painted in swaths of white snow, while in the distance, cliffs dropped toward a sea caked in broken ice.

  Where am I?

  The question had plagued her since waking aboard a helicopter. She had been strapped to a stretcher and had only a hazy recollection of events, fleeting images as she slipped into and out of consciousness. Someone had attacked her in her office at the museum, drugging and kidnapping her. While out, they had stripped her and changed her into a set of gray coveralls. She crossed her arms, hugging herself, feeling violated. She turned back to the cement-block room, which was barely large enough to hold a bed, a toilet, and a washbasin.

  Thankfully, her captors had left her with her wristwatch, a gift from her husband on their third anniversary. She found her hand clutching it, holding on to this piece of herself. From the time, she knew that less than twenty-four hours had passed since her abduction.

  Over the past four hours, she had slowly regained her faculties, though her head still throbbed and her mouth was cotton-dry. From the camera bolted to the ceiling, they surely knew she was no longer sedated. Yet, no one had come for her; no one had even spoken to her.

  What do they want with me?

  The cell door was bolted steel with a small vent at the bottom where she imagined a food tray would be shoved to her—though that had not happened. There was also a tiny hatch at eye level, presently sealed closed.

  She returned her attention to the frost-etched window. The view afforded her the only clues to where she might be. She studied the frozen tundra, the ice-strewn sea.

  Somewhere in the Arctic, she imagined.

  She had no idea of her time zone, but she had followed the sun’s path over the past four hours. It had barely moved above the horizon, like it had been sitting there all day, which she suspected it had. If she was right, that would mean she was somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, in the land of the midnight sun.

  She clenched a fist at her throat and studied one other feature of the landscape. It looked like a steel forest sprawling across the tundra for hundreds of acres. Each tree was a ten-story antenna, its branches X-shaped crossbeams near the top. Cabling ran across the granite linking everything into a massive networked web.

  She squinted at the complex, guessing it must be some type of antenna array.

  But for what purpose?

  In the center of the complex, a massive man-made crater had been excavated into the rock, its mouth a good quarter-mile across. The dig appeared to be far older than the antenna installation. The hole had a hoary-edged appearance of an obsolete mining pit.

  Safia knew the Arctic region was an important geological resource for oil, rare minerals, and precious metals. And with more of the northern hinterlands becoming accessible due to warmer winters and thawing permafrost, mining activities had been increasing throughout the region. It was becoming a veritable gold rush in the Arctic, straining international tensions.

  Yet, despite the evidence here of prior mining, she knew this site had become something much different.

  But what? And why was I brought here?

  She heard a soft whirring behind her and turned.

  Overhead, the camera swung its glass eye toward her.

  Safia stared belligerently back, bottling up her fear.

  Looks like I’m about to get those answers.

  10:22 A.M.

  “It will be difficult to get her to cooperate,” Simon Hartnell decided.

  He stood with his hands folded behind his back, fingering the cuffs of his Armani suit, rubbing the worsted silk fabric. It was a contemplative habit whenever he faced a challenge. He had lorded over many boardrooms in this same pose. But now he studied the video feed displayed on the wall monitor, noting the stubborn set to the prisoner’s face, and sizing up his adversary.

  A voice, frosted with a Russian accent, spoke behind him. “Perhaps we employ the same leverage used against Professor McCabe.”

  Simon turned and faced his head of base security. Anton Mikhailov had a whip-slim, muscular build, accentuated by a snug set of black track pants and matching jacket. His white-blond hair was trimmed and gelled flat, his hairline coming to a sharp V between his brows. After months up in the Arctic, his skin was pale, bordering on translucent, not that days under an equatorial sun would have improved his complexion. Anton, like his older sister, Valya, suffered from albinism. Yet both siblings defied the stereotypical assumption that all albinos had red eyes; instead, their irises were a pristine blue.

  The only blemish to Anton’s features was a black tattoo on the left side of his face. It depicted a half sun, with kinked rays extending across his cheek and shooting above his eye. His sister, Valya, carried the other half on her right cheek.

  Simon had tried to discover the meaning behind the pair of symbols, but he never got a satisfactory answer from either of them, only some veiled reference to their former occupation. Simon had recruited the two mercenaries after they’d been orphaned, at no fault of their own, following the breakup of their prior employer’s organization.

  The pair had proven to be ruthless, cunning, and, most important of all, loyal. He expected nothing less, especially considering what he was paying them. Then again, such expenses were negligible, considering his net worth fluctuated between four and five billion dollars, depending on the daily stock valuations of Clyffe Energy. He had founded the company after dropping out of Wharton, anxious to pursue his true passion—the end goal of which was now just beyond his grasp.

  I’m so close . . .

  His fiftieth birthday was next month, and he was determined to make a milestone of it, even if it meant shaking the foundations of the world. He intended to prove his naysayers wrong, those who dismissed his ambitions as those of an eccentric billionaire, someone indulging in a personal vanity project.

  A familiar anger stoked inside him at this thought.

  Those were the same idiots who had ridiculed Richard Branson for his exploration into private spaceflight or who cast a derisive eye toward Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire who sought to answer the fundamental question: Is there other life in the universe?

  In the past, such visionaries had changed the course of humankind. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the American government was gridlocked and unable to deal with rising global threats, it was wealthy entrepreneurs—great barons of industry like Howard Hughes, Henry Ford, and John Rockefeller—who wrested control from complacent politicians and faced those challenges head-on, ushering in the technological age.

  Yet the world had turned round once more, with governments again stultifying. Politicians had become deadlocked, mired in one-upmanship, incapable of attending to a plethora of new dangers. It was high time for a new set of forward-thinkers to step in, to advance new technologies.

  The N
orwegians coined a phrase for such projects, calling them stormannsgalskap, or “the madness of great men.” While the term was meant to be disparaging, Simon took it as a badge of honor. As history showed, stormannsgalskap often proved to be the true engine for change. And now more than ever, the world needed such pioneering innovation. It needed great men who were willing to defy governments and do what was necessary, to make the hard, bold choices.

  I intend to be one of those men.

  But there remained an obstacle.

  He stared at the video feed on the monitor, at the determined glint in the British woman’s eye, and came to a decision.

  “While your sister failed to secure Jane McCabe in the U.K.,” Simon said, “she did send us this gift. We cannot let it go to waste.”

  “I understand.”

  Simon faced Anton. “Now make her understand. Let Dr. al-Maaz know what is at stake—and the cost if she refuses.”

  10:38 A.M.

  Safia heard the scrape of the door’s bolt being pulled and braced herself for the worst. Still, she was unprepared as a slim figure was shoved into the room. The young man stumbled across the threshold, dressed like her in nondescript gray coveralls.

  The shock of recognition drew her a step forward. “Rory?”

  It was Harold McCabe’s son. He was paler than the last time she had seen him, his cheekbones more pronounced, his eyes sunken. His auburn hair, normally neatly kept, had grown shaggy to his collar, curling in a way that made him appear boyish.

  She also read the fear in his green eyes.

  “Dr. al-Maaz, I’m so sorry.” He glanced to the man who had pushed him into her cell.

  The stranger remained in the doorway, blocking any means of escape. He also rested a hand on a holstered pistol at his waist, but it was his steely-eyed stare that frightened her more. The dark tattoo shadowing his face only compounded her fear.

  This was a man who had killed before.

  Still, Safia ignored him and stepped to Rory’s side, grasping his shoulder. “Are you okay? What is going on?”