The Ares Decision

18

So you’ve got nothing, Barry?”

Jon Smith cradled the phone against his shoulder and looked around the office Klein had set him up in. Beyond a chair, a desk, and a pad of paper, it was completely empty — reflecting the utilitarian nature of the man who ran Covert-One.

“I dunno, Jon. Bleeding from hair follicles is pretty unusual. Scurvy is the only thing that comes to mind, but it wouldn’t create the kind of flow you’re talking about. Are there any related symptoms?”

“Not that I know of,” Smith said, irritated that he had to lie. Science was about the free exchange of ideas, and keeping the big picture from one of Harvard Medical School’s top people wasn’t the way to get answers.

“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Thanks anyway. If anything comes to mind, you know my number.”

He hung up and marked the man off the long list of scribbled-through names representing luminaries in every field from toxicology to infectious disease to psychology. And what did he have to show for it? A bunch of guesses. Incredibly educated guesses, but guesses nonetheless.

There was a quiet knock on his doorjamb and he glanced up from the pad. “Tell me you’re here with good news, Star.”

Her training was as a librarian but her look leaned more toward outlaw biker. It drove Klein crazy, but there was nothing he could do — she was to paper what Marty Zellerbach was to the cloud.

“I think I may have found everything,” she said, sounding strangely despondent.

“Thank God. I knew you’d come through.”

“Yeah…The problem is that when I say ‘everything,’ I mean this.” She held up what looked depressingly like two sheets of paper.

“That’s it?”

“Sorry, Jon.” She slid one of the pages onto the desk. “Did Mr. Klein tell you about the German doctor who mentioned attacks like this sixty years ago?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t give me any details.”

She tapped the document in front of him. “This is a note from a Stanford professor who spent a few months working with the late Dr. Duernberg on a project in Uganda. Skip to the highlighted part — the rest is just a bunch of yada yada yada.”

The passage was only a few lines long and discussed a possible parasitic infection that caused insanity in humans. It went on to say that the transplanted Jewish doctor was looking into the phenomenon. And that was it.

“If Duernberg’s dead, what about the good professor?”

“’Fraid not. Shark attack.”

“Seriously?”

“Swear to God.”

Smith leaned back in his chair. A parasite. Interesting, but improbable. He pointed to the sheet still in her hand. “What’s that?”

A smile spread slowly across her face. “The pièce de résistance. You ready to be impressed?”

“Always.”

She laid the black-and-white photocopy on his desk with a flourish and Smith leaned over it, reading an elegant longhand description of a tribe of fierce warriors who fought covered in blood and didn’t use weapons. Local villagers believed them to be possessed by demons.

“Flip it over,” Star said.

He did and found a fuzzy photo of a dead African male in traditional dress. His hair was thick with dried blood and his torso was streaked black.

“Where did you get this?” Smith asked excitedly.

“The National Geographic archive.”

“Can we get in touch with the guy who wrote it?”

Her expression turned a bit pained. “You didn’t read as far as the date, did you?”

He ran a finger quickly down the page, stopping at the bottom. October 3, 1899. Great. The trail of dead scientists and explorers continued to lengthen.

“Any progress?”

Fred Klein had taken a position in the doorway, his arms crossed tightly in front of a tie that had seen better days.

Star immediately turned nervous. “I’ll just take off and let you two talk.”

She went for the door but Klein didn’t move, instead pointing to the gold ring in her nose. “New?”

“No, sir. But I only wear it on Fridays.”

To his credit, Klein managed to not grit his teeth when he responded. “Very becoming.”

She flashed him a broad smile and ducked past, escaping to the relative safety of the hallway.

He frowned at her retreating figure for a moment and then closed the door behind him. “Thoughts?”

“No intelligent ones,” Smith said. “Star found a brief mention of a possible parasite that causes insanity, but no details. And there’s this hundred-year-old picture of a warrior who appears to be in a similar condition to the people who attacked our ops team. Doesn’t prove anything, though. It could just be a forgotten ritual that Bahame brought back to life.”

“People dropping dead for no reason? Women setting land-speed records? It’s starting to look like more than a ritual to me.”

Smith nodded. “Incredibly strange, I agree. But not completely unprecedented. Think of the berserkers, for instance.”

“The what?”

“They were the most feared of the Vikings. There are a lot of theories about where they came from, but it seems likely that they were carefully selected for their personality traits — maybe including mental illness — and that was combined with elaborate rituals and alcohol or drugs. The bottom line is that they displayed very similar characteristics to the people in Uganda: superhuman strength and speed, imperviousness to pain, fearlessness, and so on.”

“So you’re saying Bahame’s just filling them full of cocaine and religious imagery, then setting them loose?”

“It’s not the only explanation, but it’s sure as hell the most straightforward.”

“What about the parasite angle?”

Smith shrugged. “I’m not ready to rule it out. You could have a carrier that doesn’t present symptoms and lives somewhere humans don’t go very often. Then, every hundred years or so, someone gets bit or eats some undercooked bush meat and they contract the infection.”

“So maybe it cropped up again recently — Bahame’s men tend to hide out in remote, unpopulated areas. He saw it, and now he’s figured out how to use it as a weapon.”

Smith opened a drawer and pulled out a file containing everything they had on Caleb Bahame. He was unusually intelligent and, despite being born in a tiny, out-of-the-way village, had spent two years at Makerere University in Kampala. He had been academically eligible for a scholarship to study in London but became prone to ecstatic vision and increasingly violent. Eventually, he’d been expelled.

After that, he’d spent some time as a drug trafficker, switching sides a number of times during his two-year stint in the business. Then he’d fallen off the face of the earth, reappearing five years later as the brutal terrorist and cult leader that he was today.

Smith dug through the pages and turned up Bahame’s college transcript. “He started out as a biology major, but he only got through a few basic classes before he started focusing on religion. Straight As, though…”

“Would it be enough?”

“Bahame’s psychotic, but he’s not stupid. I don’t doubt that he’d know what he was looking at if some kind of biological agent cropped up in his own backyard. But it’s just as likely that he found some natural hallucinogenic in the jungle — particularly in light of his background in the drug trade. In the end, though, I’m just speculating. The behaviors we’re talking about are pretty sophisticated.”

“Sophisticated?” Klein said incredulously. “They acted like a bunch of animals.”

“Maybe, but they were all violent animals going in the same direction and not attacking each other. Think about the chaotic behavior you’d expect from a group with rabies or who had been dosed with LSD. By comparison, these people’s behavior was incredibly well organized and predictable. If I had to bet the farm, I’d say mass religious hysteria enhanced with some locally produced narcotics.”

Klein tossed him the folder he’d been holding. “You’ll be happy to know that the agency analysts agree with you. This is a copy of what Larry Drake gave the White House.”

Smith set aside the information on Bahame and opened the CIA report, paging through a detailed analysis that ranged from African rituals to Pol Pot to Nazi Germany.

“I can’t say that there’s a lot in here I disagree with, Fred. Did the president ask about the possible Iranian connection?”

“Yup.”

“And?”

“Larry was aware of it and gave him perfectly reasonable explanations for the chatter we picked up. Castilla’s satisfied and he left a message calling us off.”

“That’s good news, right? It’s what you wanted?”

“Before I heard your friend’s analysis of the video, yes. Now I’m not so sure. If there’s even a one-in-a-million chance that this is something the Iranians could get their hands on and use, I feel like we’re obligated to take a look.”

“And the president?”

“I’m meeting with him later this afternoon to go over Zellerbach’s conclusions and I’m going to ask him to give us a little leeway.”

Smith closed the report and looked up at his boss. “Then I guess I’m about to take an all-expenses-paid trip to Africa. But I’m going to warn you, Fred: what I know about parasites would fit on a postcard. I’m going to have to bring in help.”

“When you get a name, give it to Maggie to check out.”

“And I want to take Peter.”

Klein grimaced. “We have people in Africa I can set you up with.”

“I know, and I’m sure they’re very talented. But Peter’s got something they don’t.”

“What?”

“A perfect track record of keeping me alive.”