Plague Ship

by Clive Cussler

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no. This can’t be happening.” The voice, Gil Martell’s, was panicked, but managed to retain its California charm. Then came the sound of drawers opening and closing, presumably Martell checking to see if he’d been robbed. A chair creaked as he sat. “Okay, Gil, get ahold of yourself. What time is it in California? What does it matter?” A telephone handset rattled, and, after a long pause, Martell began to speak. “Thom, it’s Gil Martell.”

  Juan knew that Thom would be Thomas Severance, who headed the Responsivist movement with his wife, Heidi.

  “Someone broke into the compound about fifteen minutes ago. It looks like a rescue operation. One of our members was abducted from his room . . . What? Ah, Kyle Hanley . . . No, no, not yet. He’d only been here a short time. . . My security guys tell me there were a dozen of them. They were all armed. They’re chasing them now in jeeps so there’s a chance we’ll get the kid back, but I wanted you to know.” There was a long pause while Martell listened to his superior. “That’ll be my next call. We’ve thrown enough money around to the local authorities so they won’t dig too deep. They can claim the local cops stopped arms traffickers or al-Qaeda or something . . . Could you repeat that? The connection’s terrible . . . Oh yeah. They first broke into my office and then went . . . Hold it!” Martell’s voice rose defensively. “You don’t need to send Zelimir Kovac. We can take care of this ourselves. . . Bugs? This whole country’s crawling with them. Oh, electronic bugs. Damnit! Sorry.”

  Cabrillo heard the sound of drawers opening and closing again as Martell looked for something, and then came the blast of static. Martell had turned on an electronic jammer to defeat any listening devices that might have been left behind.

  Hali killed the recording. “I can keep working at it, but I don’t know how much good it will do.”

  “Whatever you can find in all that static will be worth the effort.” Cabrillo rubbed his tired eyes.

  “You ought to get some sleep,” Hali suggested needlessly. Juan was dead on his feet.

  “Do you have someone looking into this Zelimir Kovac?”

  “I Googled him, but there wasn’t anything there. When Eric comes back on duty, he’s going to try to find out about him.”

  “Where’s Eric now?”

  “Wooing our young charge down in medical. He’s bringing her breakfast, and taking advantage of Mark being asleep in his cabin.”

  Juan had forgotten all about Jannike Dahl. He knew she had no immediate family, but there had to be some people back home, believing she had been lost with all the others aboard the Golden Dawn. Unfortunately, they would have to suffer awhile longer. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to delay announcing her rescue, but the sixth sense that had served him so well over the years was telling him to keep her survival a secret.

  The people responsible for the attack on the cruise ship believed they had succeeded in killing everyone. There was an advantage in knowing something they did not, even if Juan didn’t yet recognize what it could be. For the time being, Janni was safe with them aboard the Oregon.

  He turned away from Kasim. “Helm, what’s our ETA in Iraklion?”

  “We’ll be there around five o’clock this afternoon.”

  They were diverting to the capital of Crete, where Chuck Gunderson would be waiting with their Gulfstream to take Max, Eddie, and Kyle to their rendezvous in Rome. Juan had until then to reconsider keeping the young woman aboard. He went to his workstation and typed out some instructions to Kevin Nixon down in the Magic Shop to prepare a passport for her, just in case. He also made a mental note to consult with Julia Huxley before making his final decision. By keeping Janni on the ship, there was a chance Hux could discover something about her physiology that had helped the young woman survive the toxin, if Mark and Eric were wrong about acute food poisoning.

  Ten minutes later, Cabrillo was sprawled across his bed, sleeping so soundly that, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t need the mouth guard to keep him from grinding his teeth.

  CHAPTER 16

  ZELIMIR KOVAC ENJOYED KILLING.

  He hadn’t discovered this particular interest until civil war erupted in his native Yugoslavia and he had been drafted into the military. Prior to going into the army, Kovac had been a construction worker and amateur heavyweight boxer. But it was in the military that he found his true vocation. For five glorious years, he and his unit of like-minded men had torn a swath through the country, killing Croats, Bosnians, and Kosovars by the hundreds.

  By the time of NATO’s intervention in 1999, Kovac, who had been born with a different name, heard rumblings about trials for people who had committed crimes against humanity. He was certain he would head the list of those sought by the authorities, so he deserted, fleeing first to Bulgaria, eventually to Greece.

  Standing at six feet eight inches, with the build of a wrestler, it hadn’t taken him long to find a niche in the Athens underworld as an enforcer. His street cunning and ruthlessness were rewarded with promotions within the organized-crime world, and he cemented his reputation by killing an entire gang of Albanian drug dealers trying to horn in on the heroin trade.

  During his first few years in Athens, he began reading books in English to learn the language. The material itself was unimportant to him, and he read biographies of people he’d never heard of, histories of places he had no interest in, and novels whose plots he didn’t care about. The fact that the books were in English was all that was important.

  That is, until he found a dog-eared book in a secondhand shop. The title intrigued him: We’re Breeding Ourselves to Death, by Dr. Lydell Cooper. He mistakenly thought it was a book about sex and bought it.

  Between the covers was a rational explanation for everything he had believed since the war. There were too many people on the planet, and, unless something was done about it, our world was doomed. Of course, Dr. Cooper didn’t single out any ethnic groups in his treatise, but Kovac read the book with his own racist perspective and was certain Cooper meant the inferior races, like the ones Kovac had slaughtered for so long. With no natural predators, there are no limits to our burgeoning population, and the hardwiring in our DNA to procreate means we will not stop ourselves. Only the lowly virus stands in our way, and each day we draw closer to eradicating this threat as well.

  He took this to mean that mankind needed predators to cull the weak so that the healthy could thrive. This wasn’t Cooper’s point at all. He wasn’t espousing violence of any kind, but that didn’t matter to Kovac. He had found a cause he could truly believe in. Man needed predators again, and Kovac wanted to be part of that.

  When he discovered that the Responsivist movement had opened a facility outside of Corinth, he knew finding that book was providential.

  Thomas Severance himself was at the compound the day Kovac had shown up to offer his services, and the two men talked for hours, discussing fine points of Dr. Cooper’s work and the organization it had spawned. Severance subtly made Kovac understand the true philosophy behind Responsivism but never once tried to blunt the Serb’s rough edges.

  “We ourselves aren’t violent, Zelimir,” Severance had told him, “but there are others who don’t understand us, who want to ensure that our great founder’s message isn’t spread. No one has tried to hurt us yet—physically, I mean—but I know it’s coming, because people don’t want to be told they are part of the problem. They are going to lash out at us, and we will need you to protect us. That will be your function.”

  So Zelimir Kovac would continue his role as an enforcer, only this time he did it for the Responsivists and himself rather than for drug lords and dictators.

  Gil Martell looked sleek behind his desk, his bronze hair slicked back and his capped and bleached teeth shining when Kovac strode in. Martell could only hold the pose for a second before his smile faded.

  Hooking up with Thom Severance had been good for him. It got him out of L.A. before the police closed in on his auto-theft business again. He had a huge h
ouse facing the ocean just down the road from the compound and any number of willing women for his bed from the transient population of Responsivists who came to Greece on retreat. Part of him even believed that there were too damned many people on the planet. He didn’t believe any of that garbage about alien membranes, but he was a consummate salesman and could feign belief better than the most devout.

  As for Thom and Heidi’s master plan, what did he care about a bunch of rich people on cruise ships?

  It was only around Kovac that his façade cracked. The big Serb was a psychopath, plain and simple. Gil didn’t know the man’s background but could only assume he’d been involved in the ethnic cleansing he’d read about in Yugoslavia back in the late nineties. The rescue of Kyle Hanley had been a disaster, but Martell felt he could handle the fallout. He didn’t need Kovac watching over his shoulder and reporting every little detail back to Thom and Heidi. He admitted he should have anticipated his office had been bugged, but he’d said nothing substantive before turning on the jamming device. It was a minor lapse that didn’t warrant Thom calling in his creepy lapdog.

  Kovac held a finger to his fleshy lips in a shushing gesture before Martell could speak. When Kovac reached the desk, he shut off the jammer, then took a small piece of electronics from the inside pocket of his black leather jacket. He systematically swept the room, his small eyes never leaving the electronic readout as he moved the device over bookshelves, furniture, and the carpet. Satisfied, he slipped it back into his pocket.

  “So there weren’t any—”

  The weight of Kovac’s stare pressed Gil Martell farther into his chair.

  Kovac upended the desk lamp and peeled the tiny eavesdropper from the base. He wasn’t familiar with the particular brand, but he recognized its sophistication. Because the bug was so small, he knew that somewhere within a mile or so of the compound a booster transceiver retransmitted whatever the bug heard to a circling satellite. Searching for it would be futile.

  “End transmission,” he said into the microphone, doing his best to mask his accent. He then crushed the bug between his thick fingernails, grinding it until it was as fine as particles of sand. He finally looked to Martell. “Now you may speak.”

  “Was that the only one?”

  Kovac didn’t bother answering such an inane question. “I will need to sweep everywhere the intruders penetrated.” It would be tedious but necessary. “Have the guards draw up a map of the possibly infected areas.”

  “Of course. But I can tell you that they only entered my office and the dorm.”

  Feeling his head throb at Martell’s utter stupidity, Kovac had to physically calm himself. When he spoke, his English was heavily accented but clear. “They had to breach the perimeter wall and cross the compound to this building and then make their way to the dormitory. They could have dropped bugs along the paths, thrown them into bushes, stuck them to trees, and even left some on top of the walls.”

  “Oh. I didn’t understand.”

  Kovac gave him a look that said: You are right. You don’t understand. “Was there anything on your computer pertaining to the upcoming mission?”

  “No. Absolutely not. All that stuff is in my safe. It’s the first thing I checked after getting off the phone with Thom.”

  “Give me that material,” Kovac ordered.

  Martell considered defying the Serb and calling Severance, but he knew that Thom trusted Kovac on all matters concerning security and that his protests would fall on deaf ears. The less he had to do with their scheme the better. In fact, maybe it was time to move on from here. The break-in might be a sign telling him to cash in while he could. He’d skimmed almost a million dollars from the Greek retreat. It wasn’t enough to live on for the rest of his life, but it would certainly establish him well enough until he found something else.

  He got up from behind his desk and strode across to his office sitting area. Kovac did nothing to help him move the furniture off the Oriental rug or fold it back to reveal a trapdoor and, below, a midsize safe embedded in the floor.

  “The chairs and tables were in their exact position when I came in, so I know nothing was moved,” he explained as he worked. “And look, the wax seal over the keyhole is intact.”

  Kovac didn’t bother telling Martell that a professional team, like the one who’d entered the retreat, would know to replace the furniture in its correct position, and, while a wax seal was a good touch, it could be duplicated if they’d had enough time. But he wasn’t all that worried that the safe had been their objective. He’d glanced at the file they had on Kyle Hanley, and he suspected the young Californian’s family had hired a hostage-rescue team to return their son. No doubt they would have hired a deprogrammer as well. Most likely Adam Jenner.

  The very thought of the man’s name balled Kovac’s hands into fists.

  “Here we go,” Martell said, and pulled a strongbox out of the safe. There was an electronic keypad on its lid. The facility’s director tapped a numerical sequence and smirked at Kovac. “According to the box’s memory, it hasn’t been opened in four days, which is when I got the latest updates from Thom.”

  A child could have reprogrammed the strongbox with a UBS cord and a laptop, but, again, Kovac held his tongue. “Open it.”

  Martell entered his pass-code numbers. The box beeped and the lid lifted slightly. Inside was a three-inch-thick manila folder. Kovac stretched out his hand for Martell to hand him the file. He glanced through the pages quickly. It was lists of names, ships, ports of call, schedules, as well as short biographies of crew members. Completely innocuous to anyone who didn’t know their significance. The dates mentioned weren’t too far in the future.

  “Close the safe,” Kovac said absently as he thumbed the file.

  Martell complied, settling the lockbox back into its niche and securing the door. “I’ll put on the wax seal later.”

  Kovac glared.

  “Or I’ll do it now.” Martell’s tone was flippant. He kept the wax in his desk, and the seal was the prep school ring he wore but had never earned. A few minutes later, the kilim rug was back down and the couch, chairs, and coffee table in their places.

  “Did Kyle Hanley know anything about this?” Kovac held up the file like a zealot proffering a holy book.

  “No. I explained it to Thom. Hanley had only been here a short time. He’d seen the machines but knew nothing of the plan.”

  Martell’s casual response triggered a look of suspicion on Kovac’s face. The room seemed to chill a few degrees. Gil made his decision. As soon as Kovac left, he’d head to his house, pack up a few things, and hop the next plane to Zurich, where he kept his numbered account.

  “It’s possible he might have heard rumors,” he amended.

  “What sort of rumors, Martell?”

  Gil didn’t like how Kovac said his surname and swallowed. “Ah, a few of the kids here are talking about a Sea Retreat, like those that went on the Golden Dawn. They make it sound like a big party.”

  For the first time, Kovac’s cool veneer seemed to slip. “Do you have any idea what happened to that ship?”

  “No. I don’t let anyone here watch the news or use the Internet. I haven’t either. Why, did something go wrong?”

  Kovac recalled Mr. Severance’s words when he’d phoned from California this morning: Do what you think is right. Now he understood what the Responsivist leader had meant. “Mr. Severance doesn’t trust you much.”

  “How dare you. He put me in charge of this retreat and the training of our people,” Martell blustered. “He trusts me as much as he does you.”

  “No, Mr. Martell. That is not the case. You see, two days ago I was on the Golden Dawn and participated in an experiment. It was glorious. Everyone on that vessel died in ways I haven’t imagined in my worst nightmares.”

  “They what?” Martell shouted, sickened by the news and the reverent way Kovac said it, as though he were talking about a favorite piece of art or the peacefulness of a sleeping ch
ild.

  “They are dead. All of them. And the ship scuttled. I had to secure the bridge before releasing the virus, so nobody could report what was happening. It swept through the ship like wildfire. It couldn’t have taken more than an hour. Young and old, it didn’t matter. Their bodies couldn’t fight it.”

  Gil Martell backed around his desk, as if it could act as a barrier to the horror he was hearing. He reached for the phone. “I have to call Thom. This can’t be right.”

  “By all means. Call him.”

  Martell’s hand hovered over the handset. He knew that if he made the call Thom would verify everything the twisted thug had said. Two things flashed through his mind. The first was that he was in far over his head. And the second was that Kovac wasn’t going to let him out of his office alive.

  “Just what did Mr. Severance tell you about the operation?” Kovac asked.

  Keep him talking, Martell thought frantically. There was a button under his desk that buzzed his secretary in the outer office. Surely Kovac wouldn’t attempt anything with witnesses.

  “He, ah, he told me that our team of researchers in the Philippines had engineered a virus that causes severe inflammation of the reproductive ducts in both men and women. He told me that three out of every ten people exposed who are infected will become sterile and will never be able add to the earth’s population, even if they tried in vitro techniques. The plan is to release it on a bunch of cruise ships, where everyone is basically trapped, so they all become infected.”

  “That’s only part of the story,” Kovac said.

  “So what is the truth?” Where is that damned woman?

  “Everything you said about the effects of the virus is true, only there is something you don’t know.” Kovac gave a triumphant smile. “You see, the virus is highly contagious for about four months after infecting a host, even though it shows no symptoms. And, from a handful of cruise ships, it will spread around the globe, infecting millions upon millions, until every man, woman, and child on the planet has been exposed. That three-out-of-ten sterility number is closer to five in ten unable to breed, once the infection has run its course. This isn’t about preventing a few thousand passengers and crew from having children. It’s about stopping half the world.”