The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (42 page)

How many have there been in his lifetime?
I wonder.

I pull back the hammer of the gun.

Now my hand is trembling, with rage.

I cannot see Dante Giordano. I can only see Lawrence Naden. I can only see the man whose gang warfare killed my son, Christopher, sixteen years ago.

I can shoot him between the eyes. Right now. My aim is true. I know it is true because I have rigorously trained myself. I have envisioned this moment for sixteen years.

And when I am finished, after I have finally snuffed out the source of my hatred, I can walk away from this Cairo park, and nobody will ever know, or care, what happened to this drug runner from Naples.

I move toward him. I am practically shoving the gun into his face, and he does not move. I begin to weep sixteen years worth of furious tears. They pour from my blackened heart.

And then I lower the gun and collapse onto the grass in front of Dante.

“
You… are right
,” I sob. “Killing you… won’t bring back Jeff. It won’t bring back John. It won’t bring back… Christopher, either. It will only make me a killer. And I don’t want to be a killer again.”

Dante looks at me intently, and I realize that we understand each other.

She took one earring off, and dropped the pearl in the vinegar, and when it was wasted away, swallowed it.

-Natural History

Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

What he wants is in this lab…

Is it because women do not make war, as men do?

… We make our own medicines, Katrina…

When the sky opened and the gods cast their anger upon our enemies, the wine soured and the nardos by the bedsides turned from green to red.

It is too late. At last, I understand how to generate the isotope, but it is too late. John is dead, and only Rossi remains in my laboratory in Naples.

With Dante, I return to the bench I had been sitting on. My phone is still upon it, and the video call is still connected. I cannot look at the screen.

The image is in my mind nonetheless. I envision John lying on the floor of a laboratory in Naples. His head is blown open.

But Dante picks up my phone. He gasps. “What—? Who are you?”

He turns the phone around to show me the image on its screen, and I have no choice but to see it.

“Oh, my God,” I whisper fiercely as the creased, bearded face of Aldo de Luca smiles up at me. It is the first time I have seen him smile.

De Luca steps away from the camera, and behind him John is waking up again.

“What happened to Rossi?” I ask.

“Oh,” de Luca says casually. “This piece of shit?” He retrieves John’s smartphone from the lab bench and turns the video screen toward the floor. The camera’s field of vision falls upon the body of Rossi. He is lying almost peacefully, having fallen onto one arm. There is a single gunshot wound through his back. Aldo de Luca kicks him.

“I… I don’t understand…” I trail off.

“Thank you,” I say then, and tears are streaming down my face once again.

Aldo de Luca smiles. “You don’t promise someone a hundred thousand euros and then expect them to just disappear, do you? You showed me this place. You told me you were in trouble. And…”

His smile widens.

“What?” I ask.

“Do you remember that day when we came to these labs?” he asks. “Do you remember taking me through the tunnels, walking past the corpses in the underground chamber?”

I cast my mind back, but I cannot comprehend where he is leading.

“I looked at that pregnant woman, and I looked at you. And I knew then what you know now.”

He knew I was pregnant before I did. And he was looking out for me all this time.

“Thank you” is all I can say, again, through my tears.

“I did what anyone would have done for a pregnant lady who has just lost her husband,” he says. “And besides, Naples is my city.”

I can only stare at the screen of my phone, confused.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” de Luca says. “I am where I am in life because of my own mistakes. But Naples is not easy on people like me. It is not easy for someone like me to improve his own situation. And that is because of people like this piece of shit.” For emphasis, he kicks the body of Rossi one more time. “I guess you can say I have had enough.”

When John is awake, I tell him I now know how to generate the isotope.

“I don’t get it,” he says. “We tried everything. We put the two plants together. We mashed parts of them up. We put parts of them in water. We even set parts of them on fire. Nothing happened.”

“Try acetic acid,” I say.

“The legend of Cleopatra and the pearl is true,” I say. “It was true in her day, it was true when it was documented by Pliny the Elder, and it is true today. Cleopatra dissolved a pearl in vinegar and drank it.

“She obviously kept vinegar around for personal use. Possibly for experimentation. It is, after all, an acid. And it exists in hospitals and laboratories everywhere.

“I don’t know if the phenomenon she observed in the nardo was accidental or deliberate. Maybe there was an earthquake—maybe that was the sky opening—and a bottle of acetic acid tipped over onto a bouquet of lotus and papyrus like the bouquets I have seen decorating almost every temple in Egypt. Maybe someone walked by and bumped something. Or maybe she was really experimenting.

“All I know is that, in the nardo document, she describes how to generate the isotope. Soured wine is vinegar. She speaks of it. She speaks of the nardo—the lotus—and she uses the medium of papyrus.

“Try acetic acid,” I repeat. “Try dropping a small sample of each plant into acetic acid, just as Cleopatra did with the pearl.”

John does as instructed, and nothing happens.

“God damn it!”

I throw the iPhone as far from myself as possible and begin pacing through the park. I am vaguely aware that I am waving a semi-automatic pistol randomly.

What are we missing?

Nothing.

The obvious answer is upon me, and I bury my face in my hands, the hard metal of the pistol smashing into my cheek.

The isotope was never real. It was a myth all along. And I, a scientist all my life, have just been desperate enough to believe in magic.

“Katrina?”

I hear a voice behind me, and I turn.

“Try using the document.” It is Dante.

“Huh?” For a moment, I just stare at him in disbelief, but then my heart jumps. I clasp a hand over my mouth.
What if?

I run to retrieve my discarded phone from the dirt beneath a tree. A large, jagged crack now runs down its screen, but the video is still running. John sits with one hand on his forehead, staring absently at the floor.

“John!” I say, and he looks up. “There’s one more thing we can try. Try ripping a corner from the nardo document itself. Because that document is composed of Cleopatra’s papyrus, the papyrus from two thousand years ago. Just like the lotus I pulled from the base of the Aswan Temple of Isis is Cleopatra’s nardo. Spikenard. S N. Lotus, in ancient Egyptian.”

One more time, John follows my suggestion, and I watch intently. Aldo de Luca watches intently. Dante, now standing beside me, is watching intently. And a flush of red passes momentarily through the nardo.

The battery on my phone is dying as I leave John with last minute instructions. He is to gather patients into the largest groups he can because the ancient papyrus in the nardo document is finite. And the effect of the isotope lasts only minutes.

The patients must be there when it occurs.

John leaves Naples with a logistical nightmare on his hands as he reaches out to the long list of people who need to come into contact with the transient superheavy isotope we have just named Vesuvium.