Biowar

64

Dean looked away from the small computer screen, his eyes starting to cross with the bad light. The Art Room had downloaded information about the target they were heading toward, along with instructions on how to operate the spectrometer and other gear that had met them at the airport in Italy. The tech manual seemed to have been written in Chinese, then translated into Russian before being put into English.

Lia claimed to already know it all. Which confirmed for Dean that he’d better struggle with the instructions.

She was sitting two rows in front of him. They had different covers for the mission. He was supposedly a Canadian archaeology professor; she was a French tourist with a shadowy past linking her to arms dealers. His was by far the more dangerous cover.

Their target was a prep school favored by foreigners in the northern area near the coast of the Mediterranean, about five miles from Latakia. Dean would visit the school as a prospective parent. According to his back story, he was working on a book on hunter-gatherers, which included the Nafutfians, who’d inhabited Syria somewhere around 10,000 B.C.

How could Keys have done this? And where was he?

“Something to drink, sir? Wine perhaps?”

Dean looked up into the smile of a stewardess.

“Sure,” he said, but when he felt his stomach rumble, he changed his mind. “Maybe just some water,” he told the young woman. “Or better, coffee.”

He’d need some sort of artificial stimulation to get through all this reading material.