The Ares Decision

70

The only empty seat remaining was at the head of the table next to Omidi. Along each side sat what could be described as her department heads — highly educated scientists with different specialties and backgrounds. While none had degrees specific to parasitology and some were less impressive than others, each was perfectly competent. And that made them dangerous.

“Dr. van Keuren,” Omidi said as she sat. “You’ve had an opportunity to do the initial autopsy on Thomas De Vries. What did you discover?”

She’d never been a good liar, but it was time to learn or die. There would be no white knight or last-minute rescues. She was on her own.

“The parasite has a very fast breeding cycle and is as adaptable as any I’ve seen. That should make it relatively easy to modify. Getting a quicker onset of full symptoms will just be a matter of using lab animals to artificially select the fastest-acting parasites over the course of successive generations.”

She wasn’t telling Omidi anything a second-year biology student couldn’t figure out, but he didn’t seem aware of it. Maybe this was going to be easier than she’d thought.

“Would that also have the potential of decreasing the time to death, Doctor? And if that’s true, wouldn’t the parasite’s ability to spread be compromised as its hosts die off more rapidly?”

The glimmer of hope she’d felt a moment before faded. It was a question that she’d wanted to avoid as long as possible — one that demanded lies that could expose her. Once again, Omidi had demonstrated that while he was as evil a son of a bitch as she’d ever met, he was by no means stupid.

“Attacks on the frontal lobe and related areas of the brain are correlated with blood loss, but only loosely. What I’m talking about here isn’t increasing parasitic load; it’s making it more targeted. It’s actually possible that this would slow the time to fatal blood loss, because bleeding is just a secondary effect.”

“Are you certain that death is from blood loss?”

His question sent a jolt of adrenaline through her that she struggled to hide. Did he know something?

“Injury and exhaustion are probably the number one killers,” she equivocated.

“But barring that?” he said.

“I…I think blood loss is the obvious answer, but I haven’t looked directly into it. I’m not a neurologist.”

“Ah,” he said, gesturing toward the man directly to his right. “Fortunately for us, Yousef here is.”

Dr. Yousef Zarin was the only person on her team that she hadn’t been able to fit into the categories she’d developed. The men she now thought of as the softies were generally clean shaven and round faced — academics and research scientists who appeared to have been plucked from their cushy university jobs by Omidi right before she arrived. Many seemed as frightened as she was and were prone to dropping things if you walked up behind them too quietly.

The second category was the believers. They were men with wiry builds and full beards who had less intellectual horsepower than their softy counterparts. They, too, seemed to fear Omidi, but more in the sense of being awestruck by him. When he talked about the rise of Iranian power and the decline of the West, they tended to get a faraway stare that recalled Soviet paintings of farmers.

Then there was Zarin. He was wiry and wore a rather grand beard, putting himself firmly in the category of believer. On the other hand, he was quite brilliant and, when he thought no one was looking, seemed worried. Clearly softy traits. The final test — his reaction to Omidi — was impossibly enigmatic. He seemed almost dismissive of the man.

“I’d be interested to hear what Dr. Zarin’s found,” Sarie said.

He nodded, fixing dark, controlled eyes on her. “I believe that the victims’ blood loss is exaggerated by their profuse sweating and constant motion. Dr. van Keuren is correct that injury or exhaustion is the most likely cause of death, but if we ignore those factors, it will be damage to autonomic brain functions, and not blood loss, that kills them.”

Sarie realized that her polite smile had been frozen long enough that it was probably starting to look painted on. She tried to relax, but inside she was cursing like her father used to when one of the cows knocked down a fence. If Zarin had already figured that out, what else did he know? What else had he told Omidi?

“And the issue of making it transportable?” a believer whose name she couldn’t remember said. “Faster onset makes using a human host even more difficult.”

“I don’t think it should be much of an issue,” Sarie responded. “I’ve never found a parasite that couldn’t be transported with much more primitive equipment than you have access to. But trying to work out a way to do that now isn’t a good use of our time. There’s no telling what sympathetic changes will occur when we start the selective-breeding process, so any transportation procedure we come up with now may not work later.”

In truth, the likelihood of the modifications they were talking about having any effect on transportability was about zero. But the longer she could keep them from being able to deliver their weapon, the more time she had to carry out her plan to sabotage it.