Plague Ship (44 page)

He gained some distance when they climbed a flight of stairs. He was able to take the steps three at a time to Linda’s two. They raced past startled workers. Linda wished more than anything that she could call out for help, but that would leave her explaining her illegal presence on the ship.

The man flashed through a doorway, and when Linda reached it a moment later she scraped her arm cutting it so close.

She never saw the fist. He coldcocked her right on the point of her chin. Even though the man was no trained fighter, the blow was enough to snap Linda’s head back and slam her into a wall. He stood over her for a second before running, leaving Linda struggling to clear her mind.

Before she was certain she was up to it, she was on her feet and after him again, swaying dizzily with each pace.

“Hit a girl, will you,” she grunted.

They broke out onto Broadway, the long central corridor that ran nearly the length of the ship and was used by the crew to get from their cabins to their duty areas. Some artistic crew member had even made up theater-style marquees like those along the famed New York street the hallway took its name from.

“Coming through. Emergency.”

Linda could hear the man calling out, as they dashed through the congestion of workers either heading to their posts or hanging out and socializing. He moved through the crowd like a snake, weaving around people and gaining precious ground, while Linda felt like her head was going to explode from the growing ball of cotton that had been her brain.

He twisted through another door and started climbing more stairs. Linda pounded open the door five seconds after him. She used the handrail to launch herself up each flight of steps, throwing her body around the corners because she knew that they were fast approaching the passengers’ accommodations area. If the guy was smart, and if he knew the ship, they could emerge close to his cabin. If Linda didn’t see which one, she’d never be able to find him again.

He burst through the door at the top of the stairs, bowling over an elderly woman and knocking her husband out of his wheelchair. He lost precious seconds disentangling himself from the couple. Linda flew through the door before the automatic mechanism could close it. She gave a savage grin. They’d emerged on the upper level near the atrium.

The man looked back to see Linda only a few paces behind. He quickened his stride, running for the elegant stairs that curled around the twin glass elevators. There was very little for passengers on the top level of the atrium. The shops were one level down, and the lower levels would certainly be more crowded. Linda had seen guards outside the ship’s exclusive jewelry store earlier, and she couldn’t gamble being stopped by security.

They were almost to the stairs when she leapt, her arms outstretched. Her fingers caught on the cuffs of the man’s jumpsuit, which was enough to trip him up. They had been running flat out, so his momentum propelled him headfirst into the glass-panel railing. The panel was designed for just such an impact, but a weld that held a bracket in place popped and the entire panel broke free. It tumbled four stories before hitting the floor in a tremendous explosion of flying fragments. Startled screams filled the atrium.

Linda had lost her grip as soon as she made contact and sprawled on her chest, sliding on the slick floor after the Responsivist. He managed to grab on to a brass banister as he tumbled over the edge and, for a moment, he looked up at her as she tried to reach his hand. She imagined the look in his eye was that of a suicide bomber the instant before detonation—resignation, fear, pride, and, most of all, defiant rage.

He let go before she could clutch his wrist and didn’t turn from her gaze as he plummeted. He dropped the forty feet, flattening himself out so he hit the tile floor on his back, his head turning to the side at the last second. The sound was a wet slap, and slivers of shattered bone burst through his clothes in a dozen bloody patches. Even from this height, Linda could tell his skull had lost half its width.

Giving herself no time to digest the horror, she sprang to her feet. The elderly couple was still struggling to get the old man back in his wheelchair and hadn’t seen a thing. She moved behind an enormous potted palm and stripped off the overalls and stuffed them into her bag. There was nothing she could do about the damp stains under the arms of her blouse.

The library was well forward, near the ship’s movie theater, but Linda turned aft. There was a bar that overlooked the pool near the stern, and she knew that if she didn’t get a brandy in the next two minutes her breakfast was going to make an encore appearance.

She was still sitting there an hour later when a Turkish ambulance pulled away from the ship, its lights off and siren silent. Moments later, the ship’s horn gave a trumpeting blast. The
Golden Sky
was finally leaving port.

CHAPTER 27

EVERY TIME JUAN BLINKED, IT FELT LIKE HE WAS scraping his eyes with sandpaper. He’d had so much coffee it had soured in his stomach, and the painkillers he’d swallowed hadn’t made a dent in his headache. Without looking in a mirror, he knew he had a deathly pallor, like his body had been drained of blood. Running a hand over his head, even his hair hurt, if such a thing was possible.

Rather than refresh him as it usually does, the wind streaming past the windscreen of the water taxi made him shiver despite the balmy temperatures. Next to him on the rear bench, Franklin Lincoln sprawled in a relaxed pose. His mouth was slack, and an occasional snore rose above the engine’s rumble. The lithesome driver who’d brought them into Monte Carlo from the
Oregon
forty-eight hours earlier had the day off, and Linc had no interest in her substitute.

Anger was the only thing keeping Juan going now, anger at Linda and Mark for disobeying Eddie’s order to disembark the
Golden Sky
before she left Istanbul. The pair of stowaways was continuing to search for evidence of the Responsivists’ plan to hit the ship with their toxin.

Cabrillo was going to throw them in the brig when he saw them again and then give them raises for their dedication. He was fiercely proud of the team he’d assembled, and never more so than now.

His thoughts returned to Max Hanley and Cabrillo’s mood became more foul. There still hadn’t been any reply from Thom Severance, and every minute that ticked by made Juan think there never would be, because Max was already dead. Juan wouldn’t let himself say that aloud and felt guilty even thinking it, but he couldn’t shake the pessimism.

With Ivan Kerikov’s megayacht
Matryoshka
returned to the inner harbor, the
Oregon
lay at anchor a mile off shore once again. When he studied his ship, Juan could sometimes glimpse what a beauty she must have been in her prime. She was well-proportioned, with just a hint of rake at bow and stern, and her forest of derricks gave her a look of commerce and prosperity. He could imagine her with fresh paint and her decks cleared of debris, facing a backing sea off the Pacific Northwest, where she’d had a career as a lumber hauler.

But as they now approached, all he saw was the rust-streaked hull, the patchwork paint, and the sagging cables draped across her cranes like disintegrating spiderwebs. She looked forlorn and haunted, and nothing shone on her, not even the propeller of the lifeboat hanging off its amidships davit.

The sleek taxi nosed under the boarding stairs, the waters so calm and the driver so deft at the controls that she didn’t bother setting out rubber fenders.

Juan tapped Linc’s ankle with his foot and the big man grunted awake. “You’d better hope I return to the same spot in the dream I was just having,” he said, and yawned broadly. “Things were just getting interesting with Angelina Jolie and me.”

Juan offered a hand to lift him to his feet. “I’m so damned tired I don’t think I’ll ever have a carnal thought again.”

They each hefted their bags, thanked the young woman who’d piloted them out, and stepped onto the boarding ladder. By the time they reached the top, Juan felt like he’d just scaled Everest.

Dr. Huxley was there to greet them, along with Eddie Seng and Eric Stone. She was beaming at Juan with a high-wattage smile and nearly hopping from foot to foot. Eddie and Stoney were smiling, too. For an instant, he thought they had news about Max, but they would have told them when he’d called from the airport following the flight from Manila.

As soon as he was firmly on deck, she threw her arms around his shoulders. “Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, you are a bloody genius.”

“Far be it from me to disagree, just remind me what feat of brilliance I performed this time.”

“Eric found an online database of cuneiform from a university in England. He was able to translate the tablets from the pictures you e-mailed with your phone.”

Cabrillo had sent those as soon as they reached the Manila airport.

“The computer was able to translate,” Eric corrected modestly. “I don’t speak a word of ancient Sanskrit.”

“It’s a virus after all,” Julia gushed. “From what I’m able to deduce, it’s a form of influenza, but unlike anything science has ever seen. It has a hemorrhagic component almost like Ebola or Marburg. And the best part is that I think Jannike Dahl has natural immunity because the ship where it first broke out landed near where she grew up, and I believe she’s a descendant of the original crew.”

Juan could barely keep up with the rapid flow of words. “What are you talking about? Ship? What ship?”

“Noah’s ark, of course.”

Cabrillo blinked at her for a moment before reacting. He held up his hands like a boxer begging for the fight to be over. “You’re going to have to start this from the top, but I need a shower, a drink, and some food, in whatever order they come. Give me twenty minutes, and meet me in the conference room. Tell Maurice I want orange juice, half a grapefruit, eggs Benedict, toast, and those potatoes he does with the tarragon.” It was nearly dinnertime, but his body was telling him it wanted breakfast. He turned to go but glanced back at Julia. “Noah’s ark?”

She nodded like a little girl dying to tell a secret.

“This I’ve gotta hear.”

Thirty minutes later, his meal gone, the sourness in Juan’s stomach had been replaced with a contented glow, and he felt he had just enough energy to listen to Julia’s report.

He looked to Eric first, since he had done the translation. “Okay, from the top.”

“I won’t bore you with the details of enhancing the pictures or finding an online archive of cuneiform, but I did. The writing you found is particularly old, according to what I was able to learn.”

Cabrillo recalled thinking the same thing. He motioned for Stone to continue.

“I turned the problem over to the computer. It took about five hours of tweaking the programs to start producing anything coherent. The algorithms were pretty intense, and I was bending the rules of fuzzy logic to the breaking point. Once the computer started to learn the nuances, it got a little easier, and after passing it through a few times, adjusting here and there, it spat out the entire story.”

“The story of Noah’s ark?”

“You may not know this, but the epic story of Gilgamesh, which was translated from cuneiform by an English amateur in the nineteenth century, chronicles a flood scenario a thousand years before it appeared in Hebrew texts. Many cultures around the globe also have flood myths as part of their ancient traditions. Anthropologists believe that because human civilization sprang up in coastal areas or along rivers, the very real threat of catastrophic flooding was used by kings and priests in cautionary tales to keep people in line.” Eric adjusted his steel-framed glasses. “As for myself, I can see tsunami events being the genesis for many of these stories. Without written language, stories were passed down orally, usually with added embellishments, so, after one or two generations of retelling, it wasn’t just a giant wave that wiped out your village, it was the whole world that had become inundated. In fact—”

Cabrillo cut him off. “Save the lecture for later and stick to what you’ve discovered.”

“Oh, sure. Sorry. The story starts out with a flood, but not a sudden swell of water or a heavy rain. The people who wrote the tablets describe how the water of the sea they lived by rose. I believe it rose about a foot a day. While nearby villages simply moved to higher ground, our folks believed the rising would never stop and decided the only way to survive was to build a large boat. It was in no way as large as the boat described in the Bible. They didn’t have that kind of technology.”

“So we aren’t really talking about Noah and his ark?”

“No, although the parallels are striking, and it is possible that the people who remained behind and described what happened laid the foundation for
Gilgamesh
and the biblical story.”

“Is there a time frame for this?”

“Fifty-five hundred B.C.”

“That seems pretty precise.”

“That’s because there is physical evidence of a flood just as it’s described on the tablets. It occurred when the earthen dike at what is now the Bosporus collapsed and flooded what had been, up until that time, an inland sea that was some five hundred feet lower than the Mediterranean. We now call this area the Black Sea. Using underwater ROVs, marine archaeologists have confirmed that there were humans living along the ancient shoreline. It took more than a year for the basin to fill, and they estimate the falls at the Bosporus would make Niagara look like a babbling brook.”

Cabrillo was amazed. “I had no idea.”

“This has only been confirmed in the last few years. At the time, there was a lot of talk that this catastrophic event could be the origin of the biblical flood, but scientists and theologians both agreed that it wasn’t.”

“Seems, with what we’ve discovered, that the debate isn’t over yet. Hold on a second,” Juan said as a thought struck him. “These tablets were written in cuneiform. That comes from Mesopotamia and Samaria. Not the Black Sea region.”