Black Rose

Acknowledgements

As always, my wife Gayle. She soothes the troubled waters when I feel like dumping everything halfway through and starting over.

Neil Jackson, who designs the dynamite covers for the Project series and always goes the extra mile.

Special thanks to Nancy Witt, Susan Blanker, Seth Ballard, Eric Vollebregt and Paul Madsen.

Notes

Bubonic plague is one of the great scourges of mankind, bringing down empires and kings with murderous indifference. Over the millennia there have been several distinct variations, each different from the last. The Plague of Justinian swept through the Eastern Roman Empire in 541-42 CE and devastated the world from the Mediterranean to China.

A characteristic of the Plague of Justinian was blackening of the toes and fingers. It died out, as plagues do, only to reemerge again and again over the next three hundred years until it finally disappeared sometime in the ninth century. It is estimated that over one hundred million people died before it was done. That was in a world with a much smaller population than today. Imagine what would happen now, if a variation were to appear that couldn't be stopped by modern antibiotics.

Victims of the plague were recently unearthed in Egypt and their genomes extracted.