The Ares Decision (29 page)

S
ARIE VAN KEUREN MOVED
carefully in her hazmat suit, constantly glancing back at the poorly maintained tubes supplying her with fresh air. The lab had the look of something slapped together over the course of a few weeks, with containment protocols that were well below one hundred percent functionality. And anything less than one hundred percent might as well be zero.

She could credit Omidi with one thing, though. He’d been incredibly diligent in making certain that the lab—and virtually every other room she used—shared a glass wall with the cell where he kept his parasite victim. A constant reminder of where she would end up if she didn’t behave.

The man Omidi had called a rapist and murderer was fully symptomatic now but hadn’t yet started to weaken. Every move she or the people working in adjacent rooms made attracted him, and he went back and forth in a mindless frenzy, slamming into the glass barrier over and over in a desperate attempt to find the parasite a new host.

She tried to forget about him, but it didn’t do much to calm her. A few feet away, De Vries’s corpse was lying on a table with the top of his head missing and an expression of rage frozen into his face. Blood had pooled on the floor beneath him due to a backed-up drain that probably just emptied untreated into the ground. Overall, better than Bahame’s cave, but only just.

The slide in her microscope contained one of many cross sections of his brain, which combined with a heavily monitored Internet connection, had been useful in confirming some of her guesses about the infection and providing some surprising refutations of others.

The initial targets of the parasite were the frontal lobe and anterior cingulate cortex, virtually shutting off any complex reasoning that would allow the victim to control base emotions such as rage or to understand the potential consequences of their actions.

Even more interesting was the damage to mirror neurons that had a hand in giving humans empathy and a connection to others. The pattern of damage was very specific, though, and she wasn’t sure why. A compelling hypothesis was that it destroyed victims’ ability to identify with uninfected humans while allowing them to continue to identify with infected humans—thus explaining why they didn’t attack each other.

Most interesting, though, was the bleeding. The capillaries in the head burst due to high concentrations of the parasite in that area and not necessarily because the infection was targeting them specifically. It was similar to sneezing or coughing or diarrhea—a symptom that evolution selected because it allowed for the spread and survival of the pathogen. In the end, though, the bleeding from the hair was nowhere near as bad as it appeared. Victims did
not
die of blood loss as everyone assumed. They died as a result of brain damage.

The parasite multiplied unchecked and seemed to have a frighteningly slippery genetic code that adapted quickly. As crowding in the targeted areas got worse, parasites with a mutated taste for other parts of the brain became increasingly successful. Eventually, they began going after areas controlling autonomic functions such as heart rate, thermoregulation, and respiration.

The good news was that it was far more than she’d expected to learn in such a short time. The bad news was that she wasn’t sure what she was going to do with the information.

T
HE 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.

S
EPEHR MOURADIPOUR PEERED THROUGH
his scope at the line of men partially obscured by blowing snow. The shallow draw they were traveling along was nearly flat, and the easier terrain had, as anticipated, allowed their formation to tighten.

He was wearing a white hooded jumpsuit and was partially buried, lying on an inflatable mattress to keep him insulated from the cold. Even his face was streaked with greasy white paint, breaking up its outline and transforming it into just another exposed area of earth and rock.

The group he was tracking appeared to consist primarily of his own countrymen—followers of Farrokh, according to his information. Traitors and atheists. It would be a pleasure to kill them, but that was just an unplanned bonus.

He finally found the men he was being paid to take out near the middle of the column. Both were wearing light gray Western ski clothing, the one in front broad shouldered and dark complected, with black hair poking out from beneath a wool hat. His companion was thinner and had fair skin burned red behind ski goggles.

Mouradipour pressed a button on the side of his rifle, sending a signal that the targets were two hundred meters out. An LED built into his sunglasses flashed seven times in response. His men were ready.

It took a little longer than expected for the column to cover the distance, but speed was notoriously hard to predict in this kind of terrain and he was confident that his team would make any necessary adjustments without his involvement. He demanded nothing less than perfect discipline from his men and had dug many graves for those who didn’t live up to that standard. The group he was working with now had completed nine missions of this type without a single material error.

Mouradipour waited until the middle of the column was even with a cliff band that he was using for perspective, then sent out three clicks in quick succession.

It was over almost before it started.

His men burst from their buried positions and snipers appeared along the ridge across from him. A few of Farrokh’s men made awkward grabs for their weapons, but most were hung on packs out of reach or were incompatible with the bulky gloves they seemed to favor. In less than five seconds, everyone in the column was on their knees with hands laced on top of their heads.

Mouradipour snowshoed down the slope and approached the first of the Westerners, ripping his hat off and comparing his face to the photo he’d burned into his memory. The coloring was right, as were the high cheekbones, but the eyes were not the intense blue he’d been expecting. A trick of light? Contacts?

When he dragged the broad goggles off the second man’s face, Mouradipour was horrified to find the unlined skin of someone in his early thirties.

“Trap!” he screamed in Persian, clawing for the rifle on his shoulder.

The intermittent crack of controlled gunfire sounded and his men began crumpling around him. Their prisoners, who had seemed so awkward and exhausted a moment before, dove to the icy ground so as not to block their hidden compatriots’ line of fire and pulled weapons from beneath their jackets.

Mouradipour had barely managed to get a hand around his rifle when his feet were swept from under him. Before he’d even landed, a thin strand of wire was looped over his head, cutting through the insulated collar of his jumpsuit and tightening around his neck. Every move he made now caused the icy metal to dig a little deeper.

A lone skier became visible down canyon, moving stiffly through his dead and dying men. The outline was inexplicable—strangely curvaceous and willowy despite heavy clothing. He squinted upward, his confusion growing when the figure stopped in front of him and pushed back a thick hood, revealing the short blond hair and perfect skin of a young woman.

“Make your phone call,” Randi Russell said, gritting her teeth and adjusting her rifle into a slightly less excruciating position on her shoulder.

The flight from America crammed into the cargo hold of a C-141B Starlifter, the clandestine crossing of the Iranian border, and nineteen hours tracking these bastards hadn’t done much for her mood.

Fred Klein had been so enamored with the body armor he’d provided her—waxing rhapsodic about how the genetically modified silk was four times stronger than Kevlar and how it tipped the scales at only ninety-eight pounds including the fake blood packs duct-taped to it.

In the end, though, her reluctance to stand in front of an Afghan assassin’s bullet wearing something made of the same thing as her lingerie had been entirely justified. The bruise across her back was almost a foot in diameter and radiated over her spine in roughly the color scheme of a Miami sunset.

“Phone?” Mouradipour said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Randi retrieved a bottle of ibuprofen and shook five into her mouth, swallowing hard before speaking again. “You don’t want to screw with me today, Sepehr. I swear you don’t.”

He didn’t answer immediately, instead watching the bodies of his men sink into snow melted by the heat of their blood. “And what if I agree to make your call?”

“Then we’re going to hold you long enough to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid like use some sort of code word to indicate you’d been caught. Then, if everything works out, we’ll let you go.”

“What assurances do I have?”

“How’s this: I
assure
you that if you don’t get on that damn phone in the next five seconds, I’m going to have my friend here cut your head off.”

The wire around his neck tightened, and after a brief hesitation, he reached slowly for his pocket.

Randi took a step back and squinted into the distance. All the maps, satellite photos, and coordinates Mouradipour had been working with were elaborate fakes—carefully altered to hide the fact that Jon and Peter were actually a hundred miles to the north. That is, if they hadn’t frozen to death, run into an Iranian border patrol, or been shot in the back of the head by the notoriously unpredictable Farrokh.

She pulled out her own sat phone and sent Covert-One a notification that Mouradipour’s call was about to go through so they could begin tracking it. Unknown to Klein, Charles Mayfield would be doing the same thing at CIA headquarters—a little independent verification to help her sleep at night.

Randi turned and skied slowly away, feeling the anger building inside her but also an unfamiliar sense of despair that wasn’t as easy to deal with. Only when the voices of her men had been swallowed up by the wind did she stop and reflect on how much she’d hoped to find nothing out here but snow. How much she’d wanted Klein to be wrong.

But there was no way to nurse that illusion anymore. In her gut, she knew that call was going to go exactly where he said it would: to a man whose orders she’d risked her life countless times to carry out. To a man she’d respected and admired.

To Lawrence Drake.