Prime

PROLOGUE: ZERO

The most beautiful city in the world was dying.

Nasir al-Tusi sat astride his horse at the edge of the River Tigris and wept.

As an advisor to the Great Hulagu Khan, he should have rejoiced at this victory, but he felt only bitter sadness in his heart.

He couldn’t believe what he was seeing — not just the horror of the city’s destruction, the smoke and the blood, and the absolute ruin everywhere he looked, but what defied belief was that this had been allowed to happen in the first place. The Khan’s quarrel was with the rogue Nizari Muslims, not the Abbasid Caliphate. Yet, seemingly against all reason, Caliph Al-Musta’sim had refused to pay tribute, in the form of military support, to the Mongol ruler. As a result, he had also become the Khan’s enemy.

The Caliph had bragged that if the Khan tried to attack Baghdad, the women of his city would drive the Khan off. Indeed, when the Mongol army arrived at Baghdad, they found a city barely ready to repel an invasion. No army had been summoned. The walls had not been fortified to withstand the Mongol artillery. Even when Hulagu deployed his forces on both banks of the Tigris River and began preparations for the siege, the Caliph barely took note.

Too late to accomplish anything, the Abbasid ruler eventually sent out 20,000 horsemen to engage the enemy. Hulagu’s forces, led by the cunning Chinese general Guo Kan, had destroyed several dikes, flooding the plain and drowning the cavalrymen, obliterating the Caliph’s forces in a matter of hours. Instead of sending a fraction of his military force and paying a token tribute to the Khan, the Caliph had chosen instead to sacrifice his entire army in a futile display of arrogance.

The siege had been brutal and brief. The Mongols encircled the city with a palisade and commenced an artillery assault that shattered the city walls. Thirteen days after the Mongol army assembled on the banks of the Tigris, the Caliph signaled his surrender.

Hulagu was in no mood to negotiate. “Now that I have beaten him, the fool wishes to make peace? His treasury overflows with gold, yet he did not spend even a dinar to defend it. I will shut the fool up in his treasury. If he prizes his gold so highly, let him eat it.”

As a scholar, al-Tusi cared nothing for the fate of the Caliph or his wealth, but there was something of inestimable value inside the walls of the defeated city that did interest him. Baghdad’s greatest treasure was not its gold, but rather its scholars and its libraries, foremost of which was the House of Wisdom.

“You rule all the Earth now, Great Khan,” al-Tusi had told Hulagu as the siege began. “With the knowledge in the House of Wisdom, you and your sons will rule Heaven and Earth for a thousand years…no, a thousand times a thousand years. You must preserve it.”

Hulagu however had been unmoved. “Knowledge is like anything else that may be lost and found again. The Caliph’s arrogance cannot be excused, and if it means the destruction of every book in the city, then so it will be.”

Al-Tusi knew better than to argue with the Khan, though he knew of one book kept in the House of Wisdom that could never be replaced.

“However,” Hulagu had continued, “there is truth in what you say. I appoint you, Nasir al-Tusi, as the protector of this great trove of learning. When the city falls, you will gather whatever remains, and then use it to establish a new House of Wisdom.”

Despite the concession, al-Tusi had not expected the siege to end so quickly or so dramatically. Already, Guo Kan had led his forces into the city to ‘prepare’ for the Khan’s arrival.

Al-Tusi wiped the tears from his eyes and urged his mount to continue toward the ravaged shell of Baghdad. The Tigris was running red with spilled blood, but there were pools of a black, oily substance on its surface, which al-Tusi recognized immediately. It was ink, the ink of thousands of scrolls and books that had been thrown into the river by the marauding invaders.

The destruction of the House of Wisdom had already begun.

I’m too late, he thought, and the tears began flowing again. But perhaps they haven’t found the Book yet.

In his despair, he thought he could hear his father’s voice, echoing from out of Paradise. Inshallah, my son. If Allah wills it, you will save the Book. If it has been destroyed, then it is because Allah does not will you to possess it again.

The sentiment brought him no comfort.

As he reached the city gate, the vast destruction became almost too much to bear. He wrapped his turban tightly around his nose and ears, a futile attempt to keep out the stench of death and muffle the screams of the dying. The streets were slick with blood, and the marketplaces that lined them were filled with what looked like heaping mounds of meat, swarming with black flies. In the distance, bands of infantrymen were methodically searching houses, a process which seemed to involve tearing them down to their foundations.

Al-Tusi felt a growing apprehension. The Khan had assigned an arav—ten horsemen — to serve as his escort, but in the mayhem and in the grip of bloodlust, it might be difficult for the marauders to distinguish friend from foe. After more than an hour of negotiating the ruins and circumventing the larger concentrations of victorious invaders, al-Tusi reached his destination.

Even from a distance, he could see that the House had not escaped harm. Pillars of smoke ascended from its courtyards. Soldiers stood on its open terraces, pitching manuscripts into the river, competing with each other to see who could throw them the furthest. Fighting an urge to shout at them, al-Tusi rode right up to the main entrance, where he was confronted by a group of Turkish soldiers.

“Let me pass,” he ordered. His voice was weak, barely audible through the cloth he’d bound over his face. “The Khan commands that this place be spared.”

“We don’t take orders from you, Persian,” the leader of the group sneered at him. Then the man cocked his head sideways as if contemplating something humorous. “But General Guo is waiting for you inside.”

Guo Kan is waiting for me?

The Chinese general was aware that Hulagu had ordered al-Tusi to preserve the House of Wisdom, so why was he there, in the House, personally overseeing its destruction?

The Turk led him inside, following a route that seemed purposefully designed to make al-Tusi bear witness to the cruelty of the victorious army. Everywhere he looked, there was blood and ruin. Scores of scholars and scientists, the most learned men in the Islamic world, had been pinned with lances to the walls of the enormous reading rooms. The tables, where these men had read, translated and copied the scrolls in the House’s collection, had been hacked apart to make a path for mounted archers, who were taking turns riding up and down the halls using the impaled men, some of whom were still alive, for target practice.

At last, he was brought to the highest tower of the House. He recognized this place, one of the many observatories where astronomers studied the heavens and mapped the stars. Although the din of the city’s destruction was still audible, the observatory was, for the moment at least, still untouched. Shelves of scrolls and books lined the walls, all arranged according to the orderly filing system employed by the House’s librarians. Tables, with every manner of machine and scientific apparatus, had been arranged in a ring around the center of the circular room. Guo Kan waited there, casually inspecting the devices as if they were wares in the marketplace.

“Ah, Persian. Come to pick the bones of the dead?”

Al-Tusi bit back a retort. He could ill afford to offend Guo Kan. The Chinese general was highly regarded by the Khan, and if Guo Kan decided to simply execute al-Tusi on the spot, Hulagu would probably not even take notice. Instead, al-Tusi simply inclined his head in a gesture of deference. “The Khan has ordered me to preserve as much of the library as is possible.”

“The Khan is very wise.” Guo offered a cryptic smile and gestured to the tables. “The treasures in this place are greater than anything in the Caliph’s vaults.”

Al-Tusi chose his reply carefully. “Unfortunately, ink and parchment is not so durable as gold. I fear much has already been lost.”

The general seemed not to have heard. “With enough gold, one man can buy an army of ten thousand, but with knowledge…ah, with knowledge, one man can destroy an army. You are a man of learning, Persian. Tell me, what do you see here?”

“These are scientific instruments for taking the measure of the heavens.” Though his answer had been immediate, reflexive, al-Tusi now scrutinized the machines and devices arrayed on the tables. Some were quite familiar — astrolabes, clocks and planetary models — but many of the others had nothing at all to do with astronomy.

“Are they indeed?” Guo watched him carefully for some hint of duplicity. “There is a scroll here that purports to hold the secret of Greek Fire. Over there—”

He gestured across to a table, upon which lay several enormous dome-shaped objects that looked like the lids of cooking pots. “Polished mirrors that can focus the rays of the sun and start fires, even at a great distance. I think these scientists—” Guo spat the word like a curse, “were trying to give the Caliph the victory of which he boasted.”

Then he smiled again. “But, I am no scholar. I might be mistaken. Some of these machines do, indeed, appear harmless. Take this one, for example.”

Al-Tusi’s breath caught in his throat as he saw the apparatus Guo was inspecting. It looked at first glance, like a large basket or a pot — al-Tusi reckoned he could not have encircled its circumference with his arms. Instead of clay or woven straw, it was constructed of lacquered wood, a flawless joining of curved panels that resembled the shape of a gourd, resting on a rectangular base from which sprouted a number of metal levers, each engraved with a distinctive symbol — symbols al-Tusi himself had created, and which only a handful of other men had ever seen.

By all that is holy, they actually built it.

Now he understood why the Caliph had been so defiant.

Six years earlier, al-Tusi had been part of an unparalleled scholarly experiment. A group of intellectuals, scientists and visionaries from every part of the civilized world had set out on a quest to discover the source of life. They had originally thought to name the object of their search after the paradise described in the holy writings of the Jews and Christians, but their goal did not lie in Mesopotamia, where Eden was thought to have existed. Besides, even if the sacred writings were to be taken literally — something that none of the scholars truly believed — scripture explicitly stated that God planted his garden after the Creation was complete. Life could have begun anywhere. Instead, they named the thing they sought prima materia, the name Aristotle had used in antiquity, and the place where they eventually found it, they had called ‘the Prime.’

For more than two years, they studied the Prime, unlocking its secrets and recording their discoveries in a book—The Book—written in a language of al-Tusi’s devising. They knew the world was not ready for what they had learned. The Christian kingdoms lived in perpetual fear of scientific learning; the possession of knowledge was a dangerous thing, an affront to God, and anyone possessing such a book would be labeled a heretic and summarily executed. Even in the enlightened Islamic world, possession of such information was dangerous, but the men had agreed that the House of Wisdom, which had endured for nearly five hundred years, would be the best place to safeguard the Book. Al-Tusi himself had borne the manuscript, along with a second document, a parchment roll that contained instructions on how to unlock the secrets of the Book, to Baghdad, en route to his home in Persia. When he had entrusted it to the keeper of the House, he had given the man explicit instructions to keep the Book secret until the world was ready for such profound knowledge.

The fools, al-Tusi thought. These discoveries were never meant to be used as a weapon; they cannot be used that way. It is an impossibility.

He felt the general’s eyes upon him, and he knew that he’d already given too much away by his reaction. He did his best to affect an expression of indifference, as he pretended to study the device. “It is an urghan. A musical instrument.”

Guo pressed one of the levers experimentally, and a low note resonated from the wooden body of the urghan. The sound continued to echo in the room for a moment after he released the lever. “How does it work?”

Al-Tusi laid a hand on the wooden body of the instrument. He saw that several bowls also occupied the tabletop, each of them containing lumps of powder — ash, sulfur, salt and other substances that he did not immediately recognize. All of them were arranged in a circle around the urghan, just as he and his fellow scientists had done years before, along with leaves of vellum and paper, the latter inscribed with diagrams and notations in Arabic. Then he saw something else on the table. It was the parchment he himself had written, which explained, among other things, how to construct and use the machine. It lay unrolled and open for all to see.

But where is the Book? Surely they would be together.

Through a supreme effort of will, he maintained his neutral demeanor. “There is a bladder of air inside. It is filled with a bellows.” He indicated another lever, which he began pumping with the heel of his hand. “There is a ney inside — a hollow reed with many different holes — and when you press one of these levers, it releases the air and covers one of the holes.”

He demonstrated its operation with a few random notes, finishing with a discordant combination that, he noted with some satisfaction, caused the general to wince. “Not very useful as a weapon,” al-Tusi continued. “I suppose with several of these you could make the enemy drop their swords and cover their ears.”

“A musical instrument? It is nothing more than that?” Guo continued to watch him, as if he could read in al-Tusi’s eyes the truth about the device. “I shall take it with me then. Perhaps I will learn its mysteries.”

Al-Tusi shrugged, but this time he wasn’t trying to hide anxiety. Guo had overestimated the urghan’s importance.

Now if he will just get out of the way, I can find the real prize.

“Yes,” the general went on. “Perhaps you will teach me how to play it.”

“I am no musician,” al-Tusi replied, staring at the urghan, surreptitiously searching the surrounding tabletop for the Book. “And I have the Khan’s business to attend to here. I must try to preserve what little of the library you have not already destroyed.”

With what he hoped was an air of casual disdain, al-Tusi turned away and started gathering scrolls and codices from the tables. He purposely ignored the parchment on the table with the urghan, hoping that Guo would lose interest, or more accurately, that he would be deceived by al-Tusi’s apparent disinterest.

“I leave you to your task,” Guo said, after a long silence. He strode toward the exit, pausing at the threshold. “I think I would like that instrument, though. I’ll send some men to collect it. Please make sure nothing…untoward…happens to it.”

As soon as the general was gone, al-Tusi let out the breath he had been holding, and he hastened back to the table. With barely restrained urgency, he began sorting through the papers arranged around the urghan.

Where is it? It has to be here.

His fingers lit upon the parchment. He was surprised at the memories a simple touch evoked, but he tucked the nostalgia away, along with the roll, which disappeared into the folds of his robes.

Let Guo have the urghan; without this, he will never begin to grasp its true importance.

But securing the parchment brought him scant comfort. The Book was nowhere to be found.

He searched every document in the room, and when he was done, he searched the other observatories and reading rooms. Over the days that followed, he would inspect every scrap of paper or parchment that Guo’s soldiers had not destroyed — setting aside more than four hundred thousand unique documents — but the one book he sought most continued to elude to him.

There was a simple explanation, of course. The Book, that singular, irreplaceable chronicle of the experiments conducted at the Prime…the tome that, quite literally, contained within its pages, the secrets of life itself…was gone.

Destroyed.

Pitched into the Tigris like so much waste.

At first, al-Tusi was inconsolable, but as the days and weeks passed, he realized that perhaps his father had been right about such things. Allah had seen fit to remove the knowledge from the world.

The Caliph had tried to use the discovery as a weapon of war. No doubt, men like Hulagu and Guo would have attempted to do the same, and if they had somehow succeeded…

Al-Tusi didn’t want to contemplate what that might mean.

Perhaps it was best that the Book was gone.

Inshallah

Katherine Geller stared at the endless emerald-green tea plants covering the distant hills, with a mixture of nostalgia and contempt. She was a coffee drinker and had been since her late teens, imbibing mug after mug of the beverage, sweet but without milk, as she studied and crammed to get through her university courses, and subsequently her PhD in Biology, along with Masters degrees in molecular biology, organic chemistry and epidemiology, respectively. Coffee was a drink she associated with ambition and the drive to succeed; tea just made her think of Richard.

They’d been good for each other, even if they hadn’t been terribly successful as a couple. Richard had also been driven to succeed, and with the nearly limitless resources of his inheritance, his only limiting factor was the scope of his vision. She had helped him articulate his grandiose schemes, and he in turn had opened doors for her that she hadn’t even known existed. They had pushed each other to new heights, competed with and dared each other, and in the end, extended their reach well beyond what either of them had thought possible to grasp. Perhaps because their personalities were so much alike, the intimate relationship that had started it all — which they both recognized from the outset as nothing more than a diversion — had withered on the vine. Not surprisingly, they were both better for it. He had gone on to pursue his ambitions, and she had returned to her true passion: research.

They were still close. His company was discreetly funding her current endeavor. She called every day on the Qualcomm satellite phone he had insisted she take along, but their conversations rarely evoked any kind of emotional response. The sight of the hills covered in tea however, reminded her of the god-awful fresh-cut peppermint tea that he was always trying to get her to drink, and that took her to more intimate places in her mind.

“Dr. Geller!”

Katherine shook her head to clear away the memories of her former lover. She turned toward the person shouting her name. Bradley Stafford, one of her graduate students and her chief research assistant, was hastening in her direction, waving a sheet of paper she knew would contain the raw data from the latest batch of samples. If Stafford’s enthusiasm was any indication, the news was good. She took the report with a patient smile, and gave it a cursory once-over.

Good news indeed — excellent in fact.

“We found him, didn’t we?” asked Stafford. “Patient Zero.”

Katherine cast him a reproving glance. “We’re just collecting samples, Brad. We’ve got half a dozen more sites to visit before we can even begin parsing the data.”

Although her statement was accurate, she had a more compelling reason to be hesitant about declaring victory. In a lower voice, she added: “The last thing we need right now is for Han to get all excited and shut us down.”

Dr. Han Li was their official liaison with the Chinese Ministry of Health, or to be more precise, their government-appointed babysitter. Although Katherine’s team nominally had the full support and cooperation of the Ministry, implicit in that agreement was the expectation that they would find nothing to upset the status quo, and certainly nothing that might reinforce the idea that the People’s Republic of China was the birthplace of catastrophic infectious diseases. The Ministry had granted them access to archaeological sites in Yunnan Province only in hopes they might find clues that would lead them elsewhere, perhaps to India or one of the other hypothesized origination sites for the pandemic.

Katherine didn’t want Han to know all the evidence pointed to the unarguable conclusion that the most devastating outbreak in the history of the world had begun right here in Western China.

Bradley wasn’t wrong; they were closing in on Patient Zero — the source of the Black Death.

The Black Death.

The name wasn’t just dramatic hyperbole. The outward symptoms of the plague that had swept across the known world during the fourteenth century were black pustules on the skin and a darkening of the fingernails as the tissue underneath began to necrotize. There was debate about how many had died from the plague, which reached its peak between 1348 and 1350, but it was generally believed that the pandemic had killed half the world’s population. Estimates of the death toll ranged from 75 million to 200 million, making it even deadlier than the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918. Katherine imagined that the survivors must have felt like they were living through the tribulation prophesied in the Bible: “Then two shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.”

In the big picture of infectious disease, the Black Death was a statistical anomaly — a flash fire that had done a lot of damage in the short term, and then more or less burned itself out.

The strangest thing about the Black Death was that no one was really sure what it was. Common wisdom held that the plague organism was Yersinia pestis—the bacteria responsible for bubonic and pneumonic plague — which had jumped from rodent populations to humans through flea bites. Forensic evidence tied the bacterium to the Black Death, but some historians believed the evidence had been misread. Many of those who contracted the plague lived in climates where transmission by flea bites would have been extremely unlikely. Some scientists — and Katherine was among their number — believed that bubonic plague was coincidental with the actual cause of death, or that the agent responsible was either a unique strain of Yersinia or something that worked in tandem with the plague bacterium to enhance its lethality.

Katherine’s team was trying to identify the original source of the pandemic, to find its earliest victims and hopefully to gather samples of DNA from the plague organism that would provide a definitive answer. But unlike viruses, which were really nothing more than chains of protein that could remain dormant for years or even centuries, bacteria were living cells that needed sustenance. When an infected person died, the bacteria in their body died soon after and began to degrade. Sometimes though, traces of bacterial DNA remained in the bones and teeth of victims long dead — traces that could be extracted in the mobile laboratory and sent off for analysis using a satellite Internet connection.

Archaeologists had identified several sites in Asia where the plague had ravaged the population. Entire villages had died and been reclaimed by the earth. It was in these places that Katherine hoped to find Patient Zero — figuratively at least — and to answer two questions: what really was the cause of the Black Death, and why had it appeared, seemingly from nowhere, to nearly wipe out humanity?

She tucked the report under her arm, and with Stafford in tow, she headed for the dig. This particular site, a village that had completely vanished from history during the early fourteenth century, had been a godsend. They had found dozens of remains in small clusters, families that had died in their homes with no one left to bury them. Over the years that followed, seasonal rains had caused the earth to swallow them up where they lay.

Satellite imagery and ground-penetrating radar had given them a rough map of the village, and now strips of engineer’s tape showed where houses had once stood. Several of these had already been excavated, the remains catalogued and removed, but there were a few more at the north end of the village that were still being probed. Katherine walked between these, monitoring the progress of her graduate students and the archaeologists that were working with them, curious to see what new discoveries would be made, but any excitement she might have felt was tempered by the fact that Han Li was hovering nearby.

The Chinese doctor glanced up as she approached. “Dr. Geller, good morning.”

His English was perfect, his manner as quiet and dutiful as always, but Katherine thought she detected a hint of agitation. She wondered if the data in the report had already reached him, but a moment later she realized that his anxiety arose from another source. Several of the team members were working in a new area, outside the map of the village. A new grid of tape was being laid out just beyond the eastern perimeter, and several of the team members were eagerly watching the proceedings.

“What’s going on over there?”

“A discovery has been made,” Han explained.

Katherine pushed past him and approached Bill Smythe, the ground-radar technician who was overseeing the new operation. “Bill, why are you setting up here?”

Smythe made no effort to hide his excitement. “We found something. There’s a large void here, less than two meters down.”

It took a moment for her to process. The void could be a root cellar, not the likeliest of places to find the bodies of plague victims, but if there were remains inside, they would have been shielded from the elements — possibly even mummified. Katherine made an effort to quell her rising enthusiasm. It was better to be surprised with success than with disappointment. “Find a way in. The rest of you have work to do.”

Fifteen minutes later, Smythe reported back that he had found what appeared to be the original entrance to the cellar, a staircase that descended into the void. Laborers used picks and shovels to loosen the earth, and in short order, they created a hole large enough to accommodate a person.

Before descending into the dark space, Katherine donned a HEPA respirator mask and latex gloves — the same bio-safety level-two equipment worn by the team as they dug up the village. It was a precautionary measure, and not just because of the very remote chance of exposure to Yersinia; there were other pathogens — bacteria, viruses, fungal spores — that might be lurking in the sealed environs of the cellar. Thus equipped, she lowered herself into the opening, with Han and Stafford right behind her, the latter recording everything with a handheld video camera equipped with a brilliant LED spotlight.

The descending staircase was uneven, littered with fallen dirt and rock from the excavation, but the space beyond was untouched by time. Katherine directed the beam of her flashlight into the dark depths of the enclosure, and realized immediately that this was no root cellar.

It was a tomb.

The chamber was filled with statuary — dogs, dragons, traditional representations of the Buddha — but there were also elements that, to Katherine’s uneducated eye at least, did not appear to be Chinese in origin. Weapons of war — swords, lances, bows and quivers full of arrows — were prominently displayed, along with life-sized ponies, saddled but riderless. The pieces appeared to have been arranged with feng shui—Chinese geomancy — in mind; the statues formed a maze designed to confound evil spirits who preferred to travel in straight lines.

Han placed a restraining hand on Katherine’s shoulder. “Dr. Geller, I must insist that we withdraw until I can advise the Ministry. This is a significant archaeological find, and has nothing to with your research.”

Katherine gazed back at him. He was right; this tomb had probably been laid long before the outbreak of the plague, and it was unlikely that it would yield any clues relating to their search.

Nevertheless, her curiosity was burning. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity. “We should collect environmental samples as a baseline. And while we’re at it, we can make sure it’s safe for the archaeological team.” She patted his arm in what she hoped was a comforting gesture. “Don’t worry; I won’t touch anything.”

Katherine felt his hand slip away, and realized that he was as eager to plumb the tomb’s depths as she.

They moved through the maze, leaving a trail of footprints in the layer of dust on the earthen floor but otherwise disturbing nothing. The path wound around the outer edge of the enclosure, then spiraled in toward the center where they found a bier, upon which lay an ornate sarcophagus with a terra cotta effigy, presumably the occupant of the funerary container. Han played his light across the familiar looking ideograms inscribed on the sarcophagus, but shook his head signaling incomprehension. Then he turned his beam to an object that had been conspicuously placed alongside the bier.

“This doesn’t belong here.” He reached out and placed a gloved hand on it, as if to confirm its solidity.

Katherine directed her light onto it as well. It didn’t look like a Chinese artifact; the symbols on its exterior were vaguely familiar, but definitely not in the style of the ideograms on the sarcophagus. It showed considerable decay and looked like it might have been damaged prior to its placement, so a positive determination of its purpose was impossible. Like the identity of the tomb’s occupant, the object would be something for the experts to figure out, but it was a mystery that had no bearing on her own research.

She was about to turn away when her light fell on Han’s fingers. She gasped behind her mask.

A black film clung to the latex membrane of his glove. He saw it as well, and his face twisted into a perturbed frown.

It was probably nothing, just centuries old dust. Nevertheless, Katherine felt her pulse quicken. “Let’s get out of here.”

They negotiated the maze back to the entrance where the rest of the team had gathered, eagerly awaiting a report on their discoveries, but Katherine gestured for them to stay back and called for a specimen kit.

Both of Han’s gloves were now almost completely covered in the black film. Using forceps, she peeled them off his hands and dropped them into a plastic bag, only then allowing herself a small sigh of relief. Whatever the substance was, it was now safely sealed away.

“Dr. Geller!” It was Stafford. The graduate student had been recording her activity with his video camera, but now he seemed to have forgotten all about this task. He had one hand extended toward her, and she saw the same black film on his gloves. But he wasn’t showing her — he was pointing at her. “Your face.”

She reached up reflexively but caught herself before making contact. Not that it would have mattered; she knew what she would find. Damn it. This isn’t happening.

But it was. They’d been exposed to something in the tomb.

“Isolation protocols,” she said, the words barely getting past the lump in her throat. “Everyone stay back.”

There was an emergency wash station in the lab tent; all three of them would need to be disinfected, their clothes and shoes destroyed…

Suddenly, Han let out a choked gasp and collapsed to the ground.

Katherine stared in disbelief at his motionless form. Han’s cheeks bore several dark smudges and the rims of his eyelids were encrusted with the black substance, but this wasn’t the cause of his distress. The doctor’s skin was cyanotic; he was suffocating.

It wasn’t possible. He couldn’t have inhaled it, she thought. He’s still wearing his mask, for God’s sake.

His mask!

The filter cartridges on Han’s respirator were weeping beads of a fluid that looked like crude oil. The substance had clogged the filters; that was why he’d passed out.

She frantically ripped the mask away, revealing the doctor’s blue-tinged lips but also a scattering of black blemishes around his mouth and nose.

Han still wasn’t breathing.

Katherine discovered that she was also having difficulty drawing breath, and against her better judgment, she removed her own respirator. She was trying to figure out what to do next when a cry sounded from the gaggle of onlookers.

Like some biblical miracle, the crowd parted, the team members retreating in a panic from one of their own. A female archaeologist — Katherine couldn’t remember her name — was gazing in stunned disbelief at her hands, and even from a distance, Katherine could see that the woman’s fingernails had turned completely black.

Then another shriek went up, and pandemonium erupted.

My God! What have we unleashed?

Stafford abruptly fell to his knees and pitched forward, face down and unmoving, but Katherine made no effort to loosen his mask.

She felt a rattle in her lungs with her next breath, like the beginnings of a chest cold.

Whatever it is, it’s fast.

Something about that realization soothed her. Her fear receded, replaced by a calm that was clinical but at the same time, almost reverential.

She had discovered something new, something unique, and that was what she had lived for. So what if it killed her?

She unclipped the satellite telephone from her belt and hit the redial button.

The call connected almost right away, but there was a momentary delay as the signal traveled into space and then back down to its destination. “Katherine? I wasn’t expecting you to call so early.”

She tried to answer, but there was no breath in her lungs to form the words. Her only reply was a mewling sound that turned into a coughing fit. Black phlegm sprayed across the backlit display of the phone handset.

There was another maddening pause, and then the tiny speaker erupted with a strident: “Katherine!”

Dark clouds gathered at the edge of her vision, but the coughing spasm had cleared some of the fluid from her lungs. She managed to draw a shallow breath and willed herself to speak one last time.

“Richard. I’ve found something.”