Uganda, escape one of the cruelest terrorists in the world, and then travel forty miles into the mountains of Iran. You’re killers. Born and bred for it.”
He skied away and Smith just let him go.
“Making a new friend?” Howell said, coming up behind him. The next closest man was more than fifty yards back, struggling to incorporate the Brit’s advice into his skiing technique.
“Actually, I’m getting the distinct impression he doesn’t like us. Based on what he just said, though, I think we found the people we were looking for.”
“And that means we’re supposed to trust them?”
“Don’t have much choice.”
“I used to have a mate who liked to say, ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’”
“
“IED. We never managed to scrape up enough of him to put in a box. I guess he finally answered his own question, though.”
Smith didn’t respond, taking off up the canyon at a pace that once again brought him up behind the man breaking trail. “I think we need to remember that we’re on the same side here.”
“Are we?” he said without looking back. “Like we were in 1953 when the CIA deposed our democratically elected leader and replaced him with a dictator?”
Smith knew he should just remain silent — this man was their only chance to find Farrokh. On the other hand, it wasn’t in his nature to just roll over when his country was insulted.
“Am I mistaken, or was that in response to him nationalizing British Petroleum’s holdings in Iran?”
“Ah, yes. Your oil. The most important thing in the world — more important than the lives of innocents. More important than the democracy you want to force on everyone. That is, everyone but the Saudis, where women aren’t even allowed to operate a car.”
“All we ask is that you send us a relatively stable supply of fuel and don’t harm our citizens. In return, we agree to keep a gigantic money hose aimed at the entire region.”
“And if we don’t want your money? If we want to pursue a nuclear deterrent against your government, which has publicly threatened us with annihilation?”
“That was never our government’s position — it was just a few congressmen shooting their mouths off.”
“But regimes and circumstances change, do they not?”
“I don’t think we’re going to resolve the world’s problems today,” Smith said as the sun dipped behind the mountains. “So why don’t we just say that both of our countries have been very naughty and focus on what’s ahead instead of what’s behind?”
69
Sarie 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
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.
70
The 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
