The Ares Decision

41

Jon Smith reached into the trunk and dug out an antique doll, complete with prairie dress and yellowing lace bonnet. He laid it carefully next to a pile of black-and-white photos, disintegrating clothing, and leather-bound books.

The temperature in Duernberg’s attic was well over a hundred and the heat was combining with lack of sleep to make his head feel like it was full of gauze. Howell had staged a strategic retreat an hour ago and was now snoring comfortably on a hammock stretched across the front porch.

“Anything?” he said, wiping the sweat from his face before it dripped on Lukas Duernberg’s medical school diploma.

Sarie, stripped down to a tank top and pair of shorts, was planted in the middle of the cramped space surrounded by the loose papers and notebooks they’d found.

“It’s hard not to get bogged down,” she said, tapping the bound volume in her hand. “This is a diary from the midthirties talking about his experience with persecution under the Nazis and his plan for getting his family out. I wonder if Noah’s planning on taking it with him when he leaves. Our library would go crazy for this stuff.”

“Yeah,” he said, digging another stack of papers from the bottom of the trunk and dropping them next to her. “But if I’m up here much longer, I’m gonna melt.”

“Americans…,” she said, setting aside the diary and opening a notebook filled with Lukas’s distinctive script. “All that air-conditioning has made you soft.”

Smith smirked and leaned over her, looking at the detailed drawings of local flora and struggling to read the caption. Having grown up in a former German colony, Sarie was faster and flipped the page.

He felt for Noah Duernberg. This part of Uganda was stunning, and to be forced to leave everything you knew, to have to try to build a new life in an unfamiliar place, was hard to imagine.

What made it so much more tragic, though, was how unnecessary it was. The farmland was fertile, the country was wall-to-wall with natural resources, and people seemed anxious to work. There was no reason that everyone in Uganda shouldn’t be living a safe, rewarding life.

No reason but the inherent darkness of human nature — something that was particularly easy to remember when sitting in Bahame country surrounded by Nazi memorabilia.

“Wait a minute…”

Smith slid in next to Sarie. “Do you have something?”

“I don’t know,” she said, spreading the papers out across the wood floor and pawing through them. “Yes! Right here — a parasite that causes a violent rage and bleeding from the hair. It says that the locals are familiar with it and think it’s a form of demonic possession. It flared up in a village forty kilometers away and appears to have had a one hundred percent mortality rate. None of the locals would go anywhere near the place because they believed they could be tainted by the evil. But Duernberg managed to find it on his own. He describes it as looking like a war zone. Burned-out huts, decaying bodies lying where they fell…”

She went silent for a moment, searching for the next relevant entry. “Okay, this is dated a week later. He corrects himself and says that mortality from the infection wasn’t a hundred percent — not even close.”

“So some of the villagers survived?”

“I said the infection didn’t get them. Apparently, the ones who got away were killed and burned by the surrounding tribes.”

“Like Noah’s family.”

“Exactly. It says there are stories of this phenomenon going back for hundreds of years — maybe thousands. It’s likely that the traditions of isolating, killing, and burning people you suspected could be possessed arose over time because they worked.”

“A primitive quarantine procedure,” Smith agreed.

She continued her search through the papers, finally snatching one from a pile to her right. “Jon! Look at this.”

He leaned closer and examined a neatly drawn map with the house they were in at one corner.

“He talks about a cave system and the fact that he thinks the parasite is dormant in an animal that lives in it. He did some exploring and took samples of some of the insects, reptiles, and mammals there.”

“Did he find what he was looking for?”

She flipped over the next page and then another and another. They were all blank. “Apparently so.”

Smith descended the stairs and went out on the front porch, passing Howell and walking another fifty yards before digging out his sat phone. Fred Klein picked up on the first ring.

“Jon. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. We’ve got something.”

“Go ahead.”

“We’re at Duernberg’s farm going through his diaries and it turns out he believed the infection was centered on a series of caves about twenty miles northeast of here. We’re going to head over there at first light to see if we can get some samples.”

“Is that safe?”

Smith laughed quietly, mindful of the people sleeping around him. “Other than Bahame’s guerrillas, an unexplored and probably unstable cave network, lions, hippos, and the infection itself, it should be a piece of cake.”

Klein ignored his comment. “So you think Duernberg could be right?”

“It makes sense based on what little we know. Years could go by with no flare-up; then someone wanders into one of those caves for whatever reason and comes into contact with a carrier. Look, you need to call Billy Rendell at CDC and get him started thinking about this. If the infection does get out, we need a containment plan and he’s the best in the business.”

“Rendell,” Klein repeated. “Can he be trusted?”

“Billy knows how to keep things quiet. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“I just have to worry about you.”

“Yeah. Look, Fred. If you don’t hear from us in a couple days, we’ve had problems and you’re going to have to consider escalating this thing — sending a military force to create a perimeter and a fully equipped team to go into those caves.”

“I understand, Jon. But we’re in a delicate position — not only with the Iranians and Africans, but with Covert-One itself. It’s safe to say that the CIA suspects there’s a new player in town and we have to be very careful about tipping our hand.”

“If this thing gets out, Fred, that’s going to be the least of our problems.”

“I’m meeting with the president tomorrow. I’ll fill him in and give him your recommendation. But American credibility isn’t that great when it comes to Middle East intel right now — at home or abroad. If we want to come down on the Iranians or send a significant force into Africa, we need something concrete. And then there’s the time it’s going to take to ramp up that kind of operation…”

“I know, Fred. But I can’t stop thinking about that video and extrapolating it out to somewhere like New York or London.”

“Yeah,” he responded quietly. “Me too.”