Riptide

The professor's brows contracted. 'Malin, you were always too hasty to accept defeat.'

Bonterre picked up the printout and began flipping through it. 'I can not make foot or head of this medical jargon,' she said. 'What are all these horrible-sounding diseases?'

Hatch sighed. 'A couple of days back, I sent off bone sections from these two skeletons to the Smithsonian. I also included a random sampling from a dozen of the skeletons you uncovered in the dig.'

'Checking for disease,' Professor Horn said.

'Yes. As more and more of our people began to get sick, I began to wonder about that mass pirate grave. I thought the skeletons might be useful in my examination. If a person dies of a disease, he usually dies with a large number of antibodies to that disease in his body.'

'Or her body,' said Bonterre. 'Remember, there were three ladies in that grave.'

'Large labs like the Smithsonian's can test old bone for small amounts of those antibodies, learn exactly what disease the person might have died from.' Hatch paused. 'Something about Ragged Island—then and now—makes people sick. The most likely candidate to me seemed the sword. I figured that, somehow, it was a carrier of disease. Everywhere it went, people died.' He picked up the printout. 'But according to these tests, no two pirates died of the same illness. Klebsiclla, Bruniere's disease, Dentritic mycosis, Tahitian tick fever—they died of a whole suite of diseases, some of them extremely rare. And in almost half the cases, the cause is unknown.'

He grabbed a sheaf of papers from an end table. 'It's just as mystifying as the CBC results on the patients I've been seeing the last couple of days.' He passed the top sheet to Professor Horn.

                       COMPLETE BLOOD COUNT

TEST NAME   RESULTS          UMTS

               ABNORMAL          NORMAL

WBC             S.50                        THOUS/CU.MM.

RBC                                                   4.02    MIL/CU.MM.

HGB                                                 14.4       GM/DL

HCT                                                 41.2      PERCENT

MCV                                                81.2      PL

MCH                                                34.1       PG

MCHC                                              30          PERCENT

RDW                                                14.7       PERCENT

MPV                                                  8          FL

PLATELET COUNT  75                                 THOUS/CU.MM.

DIFFERENTIAL

POLY                900                                 CU.MM.

LYMPH            600                                 CU.MM.

MONO                  10                                 CU.MM.

EOS                          .30                            CU.MM.

BASO                       .30                            CU.MM.

 'The blood work's always abnormal, but in different ways with each person. The only similarity is the low white blood cells. Look at this one. Two point five thousand cells per cubic millimeter. Five to ten thousand is normal. And the lymphocytes, monocytes, basophils, all way down. Jesus.'

He dropped the sheet and walked away, sighing bitterly. 'This was my last chance to stop Neidelman. If there was an obvious outbreak, or some kind of viral vector on the island, maybe I could have persuaded him or used my medical connections to quarantine the place. But there's no epidemiological pattern among the illnesses, past or present.'

There was a long silence. 'What about the legal route?' Bonterre asked.

'I spoke to my lawyer. He tells me it's a simple breach of contract. To stop Neidelman, I'd have to get an injunction.' Hatch looked at his watch. 'And we don't have weeks. At the rate they're digging, we've only got a few hours.'

'Can't he be arrested for trespassing?' Bonterre asked.

'Technically, he's not trespassing. The contract gives him and Thalassa permission to be on the island.'

'I can understand your concern,' the professor said, 'but not your conclusion. How could the sword itself be dangerous? Short of getting sliced open by its blade, I mean.'

Hatch looked at him. 'It's hard to explain. As a diagnostician, sometimes you develop a sixth sense. That's what I feel now. A sense, a conviction, that this sword is a carrier of some kind. We keep hearing about the Ragged Island curse. Maybe this sword is something like that, only with a real-world explanation.'

'Why have you discarded the idea of it being a real curse?'

Hatch looked at him in disbelief. 'You're joking, right?'

'We live in a strange universe, Malin.'

'Not that strange.'

'All I'm asking is that you think the unthinkable. Look for the connection.'

Hatch walked to the living room window. The wind was blowing back the leaves of the oak tree in the meadow. Drops of rain had begun to fall. More boats were crowding into the harbor; several smaller craft were at the ramp,