The Genesis Plague

50

Agent Flaherty accelerated the rented silver Dodge Charger and smoothly manoeuvred around a tractor trailer that was moving sluggishly north up Interstate 515. He checked the display on the dashboard-mounted GPS unit the rental agency had provided. Only eight miles to go, he thought.

The GPS software still registered Our Savior in Christ Cathedral as an unknown parcel along North Hollywood Boulevard. So Flaherty chose a random street number that was in the same range as the cathedral. Plenty of signboards along the interstate pointed to another major landmark immediately north of the cathedral, which did show in the GPS’s outdated database: Nellis Air Force Base. Isn’t that convenient for Stokes, thought Flaherty.

In the passenger seat, Brooke held Flaherty’s laptop and was studying an enlargement of one of the pictures transferred from his BlackBerry. Even when they’d driven past the opulent resorts and casinos along the Strip, her focus hadn’t budged. He’d given her his pocket notepad and a pen to jot down her transcriptions. She’d already filled one page and was starting on a second.

‘You’re awfully quiet,’ Flaherty said finally.

‘Sorry,’ she said, giving him a quick, apologetic glance.

‘Anything useful in those pictures?’

‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘Hang on just a minute … almost finished.’

‘The suspense is killing me.’

She smiled. ‘It should. This is really intense.’

He drove on in silence for a solid minute, and just after the GPS’s bland female voice-command prompted him to ‘exit on to Charleston Boulevard in point-five miles’, Brooke exhaled, sat tall in her seat and folded the laptop shut. She rolled her neck.

‘Done?’ Flaherty said. He glanced over at her and saw concern in her eyes.

‘All done,’ she said. ‘My God, Tommy.’ Flipping to the first page, she shook her head in disbelief. ‘You’re not going to believe this.’

‘Try me.’ He hit the GPS’s mute button.

‘Probably best to just read this to you first,’ she said. ‘This is all a bit rushed, so this may not be 100 per cent …’

‘Just let me hear it, will you.’

Brooke cleared her throat. ‘It starts with this passage.’ She began reading:

‘Okayyyy,’ Flaherty said. ‘That is creepy.’

‘Tommy, those skeletons Jason found in that cave were all the men in that village. And this is saying Lilith killed all of them,’ Brooke emphasized.

‘How?’

‘If she didn’t use physical force, then I’d assume she spread some kind of disease that made them bleed to death.’

‘What kind of disease kills everyone in two days? And only males?’ The car interior was silent for a moment as they contemplated what they’d just heard. ‘Whoever wrote that must have been exaggerating,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe they all got food poisoning or something and just didn’t know who to blame.’

‘Food poisoning would have killed the women too,’ she muttered, looking back at her notes.

‘Well, at least it explains why all those teeth found at Fort Detrick all came from males. What good are the teeth, anyway?’ But when he looked over, he saw that she was deep in thought. ‘Brooke?’

Teeth. Pestilence. Males. ‘Oh my God,’ she said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Just recently, in an archaeology journal I read about these excavations of mass graves in France and Germany where plague victims had been buried,’ she explained. ‘In ancient specimens, plague leaves an imprint in the pulp of victims’ teeth. These archaeologists had found perfectly preserved Yersinia pestis DNA in the teeth.’

‘Yur-what DNA?’

‘Yersinia pestis is the bacterium that causes bubonic plague. It gets into your lymph nodes, replicates like crazy, and makes you slowly haemorrhage to death,’ she explained.

‘Pleasant.’

‘During the sixth century, it was called the “Plague of Justinian”, killed a quarter of the people in the eastern Mediterranean and stopped the Byzantine emperor, Justinian, from reuniting Eastern and Western Europe under the Holy Roman Empire. And remember from history class when in the fourteenth century the Black Death killed half the population of Europe?’

He nodded. ‘Actually, I do.’

‘That was bubonic plague too. It became a pandemic and killed over a hundred million people worldwide … at that time, almost a quarter of the world’s population.’

‘Jeez, and we’re worried about the lousy flu,’ he said. ‘But the Black Death didn’t just kill men,’ he pointed out. ‘And you’re saying it might have killed half of them … not all of them.’

‘True,’ she admitted. ‘And the Black Death took a lot longer than two days to spread. It took months.’

‘So you think something like the Black Death killed these guys?’

‘With such a high mortality rate, probably something worse. I’m no epidemiologist. I mean, humans have been fighting these kinds of diseases ever since they started living in sedentary settlements. Since Iraq was home to the earliest cities and gave birth to agriculture, Mesopotamians would have been among the first people to transmit infectious disease. They’d have picked up all sorts of germs from domesticated cows, sheep, chickens, you name it. So it makes sense. And these men that Lilith killed belonged to a sizable, relatively isolated population. If they had no immunity to a disease brought in by an outsider, it would have spread like wildfire.’

Flaherty slowed to make a left on to North Hollywood Boulevard. ‘All right, let’s hold off on this for a little while, because we’re almost there. We need to talk about how we’re going to handle this Stokes character.’

‘He may not even be here, Tommy.’

‘He’ll be here,’ Flaherty replied confidently. ‘Remember: he needs that encrypted phone line to talk with Crawford.’

Nestled at the foot of a desert mountain, the modern edifice of the megachurch glinted in the afternoon sun.

‘Holy cow, will you look at that,’ he said.

‘Wow. It’s huge.’

‘Supposedly seats up to ten thousand.’