Catalyst (Breakthrough Book 3) (14 page)

22

It took six hours before the convoy of trucks was finally moving.  In tight formation, they headed due south past Tucurui, crossing its half-mile-wide river.  From there, their route turned northwest over highway BR-230, also known as Brazil’s infamous Trans-Amazonian Highway.

Extending more than 4,000 kilometers through the heart of northern Brazil, the highway was conceived in the 1970s as a means of integrating the northern states with the rest of the country.  However, the project came to an abrupt halt when later in the same decade the Brazilian Financial Crisis left behind a devastated economy and vast stretches of the new highway completely unpaved. 

Salazar’s lead car, a deep-green painted Humvee, was followed by Otero and Russo in a white Land Rover, driven by one of Russo’s men and another ex-military type named Dutra.

One by one, the stream of powerful belching trucks bounced over the rough dirt road, attracting little attention as they passed through increasingly smaller towns.  Trains of military vehicles had become almost commonplace with yet another deteriorating economy.  And like many floundering governments desperate to retain control of their populations, various aspects of martial law were already common throughout much of Brazilian life.

The convoy was headed for the northwestern forests of Pará.  It was Brazil’s second largest state, second only to Amazonas, and spanned a massive 1.2 million kilometers.  More importantly, it was the state which provided Salazar’s company the only clear route into the Acarai Mountains of southern Guyana.

Otero relaxed in the back seat, checking his email and messages on a small tablet.  The device finally lost connection as they pushed deeper into the jungle, which was fine with him.  He preferred no one know where he was, or better yet, where he was headed.

He slowed to read the last of his downloaded emails carefully.  It was from the lead contact for an international genetics team.  A team he paid to have flown quietly into Belem.  In the email, his contact confirmed the team and their equipment had left Munich and were due to arrive in seventeen hours.  They would be waiting when Otero and his team returned.

In a growing world of scientific privatization, the German team
Genetik Jetzt
was one of the best in the world.  They were confident they could not only isolate whatever genes Otero brought back within a few weeks, but could also have a prototype retrovirus designed within three months.

The team agreed to then test the prototype on human subjects, provided they were outside any medical regulations protecting Brazilian citizens.  Subjects that were in no position to complain should something go awry, which it always did.  And Otero knew exactly who those subjects would be.  During his years backing some of the largest mining giants in South America, there was one group he had truly come to despise.  The Kayapó.  A group of indigenous tribes who had been sabotaging his efforts for decades.  Tribes who continually waged war against the machines they insisted were destroying their native lands.  Most were cooperative, but some small pockets of the Kayapó proved to be devastating to people like Otero.  But individually, they could be captured and used for a far greater good than anything their simple minds could have fathomed.  One of the most incredible leaps in human development.  A leap now miraculously within his own reach.

Yet despite his materialistic and opportunistic flaws, Otero was still a patriot.  Even without a sense of basic compassion, he remained a man deeply rooted to his nation and its former glory.  His mighty country was destined to rise again, but this time it would not be through iron ore, oil, or even soybeans.  Instead, it would be through the control of perhaps the greatest evolutionary achievement in man’s history.  An achievement that would drive every powerful government to align with Brazil, through either desire or desperation.  And he would be the one to control it all.  He would be the one to help his once proud country return to greatness.

Sitting directly in front of Otero, in the Land Rover’s passenger seat, Russo had a very different thought.  He could clearly see the change taking place in his boss’s thinking.  He was growing paranoid and obsessed, with thoughts becoming more linear and one-dimensional over what may or may not lie in the mountains.  It was sheer folly as far as Russo was concerned.  He’d seen more than his share of desperate, aging men pursuing big dreams only to have their spirits crushed by reality in the end.  Dreams forever promising to deliver a miracle to change the world.  The details were different, but the quest and the conclusion were always the same.

Otero’s obsession was some kind of magical DNA stored in the bones of a monkey now hiding in the jungles of Guyana.  Something Russo wasn’t all that worried over.  He had a much more practical concern.

Someone was watching Otero, which meant they were also watching him.  One of his men was dead with another still in the hospital.  Both were ordered to eliminate the rest of Miguel Blanco’s bloodline, but instead his men had found someone even deadlier waiting for
them
.  And that someone appeared to be an American.

Russo’s man in the hospital claimed they barely saw the attacker before he pounced.  But how did he know?  How did he know either of the men was coming?

Even worse, Russo was convinced the man waiting for them had been a U.S. Navy SEAL.  The marking he left on Carlos’s jacket was clear.  But was it a warning…or an invitation?

The obvious link was the CIA, but Otero’s attention was waning quickly as this new obsession slowly consumed him.  Otero could no longer see the more pressing threat before them, nor could he conceive that it might just be the beginning.  If the threat were confirmed, all the DNA in the world wouldn’t help either of them in a war with the CIA.

Yet while Russo remained concerned, he was far from vulnerable.  He still had contacts within Brazil’s intelligence agency, the ABIN.  A group who was utterly ruthless when it came to tracking down information.  Eventually, they would find out who the American was.  And then the predator would become the prey.

23

Russo was just approaching the Guyanese border when the man who both he and Brazil’s ABIN agents were searching for stepped off a plane in Puerto Rico. 

For the second time in a week, Steve Caesare hailed a cab from outside the small airport.  This time, however, his team remained to supervise the transfer of their equipment aboard a Beechcraft C-12 Huron.  Based on two older Beechcraft variants, the C-12 was a thirteen seat, multi-use aircraft with primary duties of general transport and small-scale medical evacuations in other countries.  It was the aircraft’s latter reputation that Caesare was counting on to help avoid undue attention while flying over a few unfriendly countries in South America. 

Now resting on a private corner of the Mercedita Airport’s tarmac, the C-12 was quickly being refueled and prepared for its nonstop flight to Iquitos, Peru.  The fifth largest city in the country by size, Iquitos was the largest city inside Peru’s tropical and seemingly endless rainforest.

Caesare knew their options still hadn’t gotten any better as he watched the palm trees zip past him from inside the taxi.  He was deliberating the best time to break things to DeeAnn and decided it was too soon, knowing they still had another seven hours before reaching Iquitos. There was still a chance another scenario could present itself, but he was no longer holding his breath.  Especially when the problem was neither DeeAnn nor Juan.  It was Dulce.

He reached the research center in less than fifteen minutes and found DeeAnn exactly where he expected her to be.  In Dulce’s man-made tropical habitat.

She was sitting with her back against the glass wall, playing a simplified game of tic-tac-toe with the gorilla.

In her hand, Dulce held a stick of bright green chalk and studied a large blackboard on the ground between them.  The grid lines were preprinted on the board with X’s and O’s drawn inside.  Not surprisingly, Dulce’s X’s looked like anything but X’s, when compared to DeeAnn’s.  Her O’s were drawn as perfectly as possible as an aid for Dulce, who was practicing her manual dexterity.

Dulce heard Caesare’s footsteps first and tilted her small furry head, peering curiously down the concrete walkway.  When she saw Caesare appear from under the shadowed overhang, the small gorilla immediately leaped to her feet and ran excitedly to the clear door.

Steve here!  Steve here!

When he reached the door, Caesare smiled down at her and turned to punch the entry code into the keypad behind him.  After a loud click, he pushed the heavy glass door open just in time to catch Dulce in his arms.

“There’s my sweetheart.”  Caesare suppressed a muffled groan from the strain in his side and gingerly raised his left arm to rub her head. 

The word
sweetheart
no longer produced the familiar rejection tone after Lee Kenwood had manually programmed the unknown word into IMIS’s vocabulary.  The giant computer now translated the literal definition of Dulce’s own name as the word, but Dulce still managed to pick up on the affection in Caesare’s voice.

Under his dark black hair, he glanced down at DeeAnn, who was still seated on a patch of grass.  “Everything okay?”

She stood up and forced a grin.  “As okay as we’ll ever be.”

We go find friend.
  Dulce announced.

Caesare tilted his head back from Dulce’s wide smile.  “You need a breath mint.  How much celery have you eaten?”

Dulce looked at him curiously when IMIS failed to translate.

Caesare laughed and gave her a squeeze.  “I’m joking.”  He then winked at DeeAnn.  “Kind of.”

DeeAnn’s grin seemed to grow more sincere.  “She’s been practically jumping up and down since I told her.”

“I bet.”

She checked her watch.  “Juan should be down in a few minutes.  He’s bringing some equipment.”

“I figured as much.”  Caesare glanced down at Dulce, who fell silent once again comparing the hair on her lanky forearm with his.  “You look more Italian than I do,” he said to her.

DeeAnn watched with amusement and then answered his next question before he could ask it.  “I’m not sure how she’s going to do, but so far so good.”

“Listen, Dee.  I really appreciate you coming.  I know it’s not easy.  Considering your last trip, I-”

“I told you I hate it when you call me Dee.”

“What can I say?  I have bad manners.  My father seems to think I was born in a barn.”

DeeAnn reached down and depressed a button on the front of her vest, muting the microphone.  “I suppose it just took a little time for me to come around.  But I get it.  This isn’t about us.  Ali told me about what you guys found, and she’s right, there has to be a link to Dexter.”

“Let’s hope so.  And let’s also hope he’s easy to find.”

She watched pensively as Caesare dropped his gaze briefly back down to Dulce and gave her a quick peck on the top of her head.

“Well, even if he is hard to find, he won’t be hard to
spot
when we do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you hear how Alves and his men came across Dexter?”

“I thought it was your researcher friend that found him.”

“It was.  But it was
how
they spotted him that made them realize there was something unique about Dexter.  It was at a poacher’s camp.  They’d caught dozens of capuchins and were packing them in cages, getting ready to ship them to the coast.  Capuchins fetch a high premium on the black market.”

Caesare continued listening.

“You see, Dexter wasn’t caught with the others.  He was caught after the fact when they spotted him in the darkness trying to get the ropes securing the cages undone.  And apparently he’d almost succeeded.”

“What?”

DeeAnn caught herself smiling.  “That’s when they knew.”

“He was trying to
spring
the others?”

“Evidently.  Don’t get me wrong, primates are smart, but not like that.  This monkey is
damn
smart, which is what I meant when I said you’d notice him when you saw him.  There’s something different in his eyes.  Something almost eerie.”

“How is it eerie?”

“More like he’s watching
you
.  Even more than you feel it with Dulce.”

“That should help.  And hopefully we’ll have a little luck on our side.”

DeeAnn grinned and reached out for Dulce.  “Let’s hope.  Alves was lucky to find Dexter,
twice
.  I helped him the second time, but I’m sure this time is going to be much harder.  It isn’t just his smarts that make him special.  It’s his age.  He’s older than he’s supposed to be, a lot older, which has only added to his intelligence.”

Caesare watched DeeAnn, noting a momentary change in her eyes.  “What is it?”

She blinked and looked back at him.  “I’ve been thinking.  It’s the DNA we’re after here…but we also need to find Dexter for a very different reason too.”

“And what is that?”

After a quiet moment, she continued with a question.  “Do you know who Lucy is?”

Caesare thought about it and grinned.  “Like from Peanuts?”

“I mean Lucy as in the nickname for Australopithecus.  The skeleton found in Ethiopia in the 70's.”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Lucy is the skeleton of the first bipedal, small-brained hominin that lived about three million years ago.  The first one found with a small brain like primates but one that walks like us.  It’s pretty well accepted now, at least genetically speaking, but the fact is that it’s still technically a hypothesis.  Of course, a lot of scientific hypotheses were like that; theories that weren’t proven correct until years later.  Sometimes decades.”  She took a deep breath.  “But here’s the thing.  To many, Lucy is the missing link.  The link in our own evolutionary path where things…changed.  She represents an important threshold, a time and place where the most significant leap in human history took place.  The
catalyst
.”

DeeAnn paused momentarily, a thoughtful look on her face.  “What I’m saying is that Lucy is arguably the most important thing to have happened to us.  All of us.  Imagine how profound it would have been to have witnessed that incredible evolutionary moment.  The single lifespan of a primate that changed
everything
.”

Caesare’s face was serious as he listened intently.

“Steven,” she said.  “Dexter is that moment!  Or at least a re-creation of it.  Dexter is the modern Lucy.  A primate who’s made the same leap across an evolutionary gap.  We’ll never know exactly how it happened with Lucy, but we
can
watch it unfold with him.”  She watched the expression change on Caesare’s face.  “Do you see what I’m getting at?  We have a chance to witness the equivalent of our evolutionary birth firsthand!  It’s a scientific opportunity of almost unimaginable significance.”

Caesare was staring at her.  This went way beyond anything he’d even considered.  “Wow.”

DeeAnn grinned.  “Wow is right.  But that’s not all.  It’s not just that we have the opportunity to observe this…but now we also have the technology to actually communicate with him
as it’s happening
!
”

Caesare’s jaw suddenly dropped.  If he had been surprised by her last point, he was now completely stunned.  It was a moment Clay and Borger would have given anything to witness.  Steve Caesare was…speechless.

DeeAnn continued staring at him while he processed it all.  The moment reminded her of why, deep down, she liked him so much.  Inside, beyond his gruff and boisterous exterior, Caesare was
smart
.  Smart enough to appreciate such an earth-shattering possibility.

As they stood together in silence, the sound of voices approached from the main hallway leading out from the lab.  Dulce immediately jumped from DeeAnn’s arms and ran several steps back to the glass wall.  She turned and spoke excitedly but nothing could be heard with the vest’s speaker still off.  A few seconds later, Juan Diaz and Lee Kenwood emerged into the warm sunlight.

Caesare turned and watched them approach.  He spoke to DeeAnn in a lowered tone.  “I take it that’s why Juan agreed to go back too?”

“No,” she replied.  “Juan agreed to go back for a very different reason.”