Black

by Ted Dekker

  You’ve heard about the critical raves,

  but here’s what real readers are saying about

  The Books of History Chronicles

  (Black, Red, White, Showdown, Saint)

  on Amazon.com

  This trilogy is a MUST READ! Suspenseful, insightful, fast-paced, and certainly life-impacting. Ted Dekker is a master of bringing Truth close to home, in a way that causes us the readers to see and feel it in a fresh way.

  D. Guimaraes (Pittsburgh, PA USA)

  Whew, ok I’ve read all three books in the Circle Trilogy back to back and all I can say is man what a ride. Ted Dekker has to be one of our generations great story tellers, this story of Thomas Hunter’s fight to save mankind from a terrible virus intended to destroy the world is sure to become a Christian fiction classic much like Lewis’s “Narnia” Series and Frank Perretti’s “This Present Darkness” .

  Todd Sullivan (Mount Vernon, WA)

  This was the first book by Ted Dekker that I’ve ever read. It was all I needed to be hooked for life! Ted Dekker has a way with words and storytelling that not many authors have anymore. He draws you in and you have to make yourself stop for daily functions such as eating and occasional breathing!

  J. Hosmer (South Carolina)

  I cannot say enough good things about this book and series. It can change how you think. If a book can do that it is an amazing thing. I recommend it without reservation. The Circle Trilogy was my first Ted Dekker book, but it will not be the last.

  Teresa L. Wilkinson (Parkersburg, WV USA)

  This guy is truly amazing. He’s written straight novels, romance thrillers, psychological suspense, and now a fantasy thriller. He stretches and stretches, yet never becomes distorted, uneven, or sloppy. I suspect that a generation from now, Dekker’s writings will be essential reading for those who wish to study spiritually motivated literature.

  Tommy C Ellis (Federal Way, WA United States)

  Absolutely a terrific trilogy! I got the first book, “Black” from the library, and when I finished it and realized it was a trilogy, ordered all three books the same day...next day! Incredible book full of drama, mystery, and beautiful love stories...both for people and God. You won’t regret reading them...

  June A. Halladay (Florida)

  This may be one of my top 5 books of all time. The whole thing was engaging and outstanding. There was no lull anywhere. Each page and each chapter had interesting things happening. I’ve since read other’s of Ted’s including Red, White, Heaven’s Wager, and Three. All awesome.

  Sgun73 (Carmel, IN)

  This is the first of a trilogy - but don’t be intimidated by the fact that you must read three books to journey through all of Dekker’s tale. This is an incredible fantasy, written with such a furious pace that it is hard to put down. I was wise enough to not start any of the three books until I had all of them - unfortunately for my wife I did have all of them when I started reading them, and I just went from one to the next to the final one. Incredible!

  Zachary Jones (Wake Forest, NC)

  I am addicted to great story telling. Ted Dekker is now my main drug dealer. I’m halfway through Red, the second book of the Circle Trilogy, and have now put Mr. Dekker in my pantheon with Robert Jordan, Stephen Lawhead, C. S. Lewis and Professor Tolkien. This guy writes literary heroine.

  Mike Vickers (Centreville, Alabama)

  BLACK

  teddekker.com

  DEKKER FANTASY

  BOOKS OF HISTORY CHRONICLES

  THE LOST BOOKS

  Chosen

  Infidel

  Renegade (MAY 2008)

  Chaos (MAY 2008)

  THE CIRCLE TRILOGY

  Black

  Red

  White

  PROJECT SHOWDOWN

  Showdown

  Saint

  Sinner (OCTOBER 2008)

  Skin

  House (with Frank Peretti)

  DEKKER MYSTERY

  Blink of an Eye

  MARTYR’SONG SERIES

  Heaven’s Wager

  When Heaven Weeps

  Thunder of Heaven

  The Martyr’s Song

  THE CALEB BOOKS

  Blessed Child

  A Man Called Blessed

  DEKKER THRILLER

  THR3E

  Obsessed

  Adam (APRIL 2008)

  ©2004 Ted Dekker

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc. titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, organizations, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dekker, Ted, 1962–

  Black: the birth of evil / by Ted Dekker.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-8499-1790-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-8499-1833-9 (international)

  ISBN 978-1-59554-136-9 (mass edition)

  ISBN 978-1-59554-433-9 (repackage)

  I. Title.

  PS3554.E43B57 2004

  813'.6—dc22

  2003020542

  Printed in the United States of America

  07 08 09 10 11 RRD 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Switzerland

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  For my children.

  May they always remember what lies behind the veil.

  Switzerland

  Carlos Missirian was his name. One of his many names.

  Born in Cyprus.

  The man who sat at the opposite end of the long dining table, slowly cutting into a thick red steak, was Valborg Svensson. One of his many, many names.

  Born in hell.

  They ate in near-perfect silence thirty feet from each other in a dark hall hewn from granite deep in the Swiss Alps. Black iron lamps along the walls cast a dim amber light through the room. No servants, no other furniture, no music, no one except Carlos Missirian and Valborg Svensson seated at the exquisite dining table.

  Carlos sliced the thick slab of beef with a razor-sharp blade and watched the flesh separate. Like the parting of the Red Sea. He cut again, aware that the only sound in this room was of two serrated knives cutting through meat into china, severing fibers. Strange sounds if you knew what to listen for.

  Carlos placed a slice in his mouth and bit firmly. He didn’t look up at Svensson, although the man was undoubtedly staring at him, at his face—at the long scar on his right cheek—with those dead black eyes
of his. Carlos breathed deep, taking time to enjoy the coppery taste of the filet.

  Very few men had ever unnerved Carlos. The Israelis had taken care of that early in his life. Hate, not fear, ruled him, a disposition he found useful as a killer. But Svensson could unnerve a rock with a glance. To say that this beast put fear in Carlos would be an overstatement, but he certainly kept Carlos awake. Not because Svensson presented any physical threat to him; no man really did. In fact, Carlos could, at this very moment, send the steak knife in his hands into the man’s eye with a quick flip of his wrist. Then what prompted his caution? Carlos wasn’t sure.

  The man wasn’t really a beast from hell, of course. He was a Swiss-born businessman who owned half the banks in Switzerland and half the pharmaceutical companies outside the United States. True, he had spent more than half his life here, below the Swiss Alps, stalking around like a caged animal, but he was as human as any other man who walked on two legs. And, at least to Carlos, as vulnerable.

  Carlos washed the meat down with a sip of dry Chardonnay and let his eyes rest on Svensson for the first time since sitting to eat. The man ignored him, as he almost always did. His face was badly pitted, and his nose looked too large for his head—not fat and bulbous, but sharp and narrow. His hair, like his eyes, was black, dyed.

  Svensson stopped cutting midslice, but he did not look up. The room fell silent. Like statues, they both sat still. Carlos watched him, unwilling to break off his stare. The one mitigating factor in this uncommon relationship was the fact that Svensson also respected Carlos.

  Svensson suddenly set down his knife and fork, dabbed at his mustache and lips with a serviette, stood, and walked toward the door. He moved slowly, like a sloth, favoring his right leg. Dragging it. He’d never offered an explanation for the leg. Svensson left the room without casting a single glance Carlos’s way.

  Carlos waited a full minute in silence, knowing it would take Svensson all of that to walk down the hall. Finally he stood and followed, exiting into a long hall that led to the library, where he assumed Svensson had retired.

  He’d met the Swiss three years ago while working with underground Russian factions determined to equalize the world’s military powers through the threat of biological weapons. It was an old doctrine: What did it matter if the United States had two hundred thousand nuclear weapons trained on the rest of the world if their enemies had the right biological weapons? A highly infectious airborne virus on the wind was virtually indefensible in open cities.

  One weapon to bring the world to its knees.

  Carlos paused at the library door, then pushed it open. Svensson stood by the glass wall overlooking the white laboratory one floor below. He’d lit a cigar and was engulfed in a cloud of hazy smoke.

  Carlos walked past a wall filled with leather-bound books, lifted a decanter of Scotch, poured himself a drink, and sat on a tall stool. The threat of biological weapons could easily equal the threat of nuclear weapons. They could be easier to use, could be far more devastating. Could. In traditional contempt of any treaty, the U.S.S.R. had employed thousands of scientists to develop biological weapons, even after signing the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972. All supposedly for defense purposes, of course. Both Svensson and Carlos were intimately familiar with the successes and failures of former Soviet research. In the final analysis, the so-called “superbugs” they had developed weren’t super enough, not even close. They were far too messy, too unpredictable, and too easy to neutralize.

  Svensson’s objective was simple: to develop a highly virulent and stable airborne virus with a three- to six-week incubation period that responded immediately to an antivirus he alone controlled. The point wasn’t to kill off whole populations of people. The point was to infect whole regions of the earth within a few short weeks and then control the only treatment.

  This was how Svensson planned to wield unthinkable power without the help of a single soldier. This was how Carlos Missirian would rid the world of Israel without firing a single shot. Assuming, of course, such a virus could be developed and then secured.

  But then, all scientists knew it was only a matter of time.

  Svensson stared at the lab below. The Swiss wore his hair parted down the middle so that black locks flopped either way. In his black jacket he looked like a bat. He was a man married to a dark religious code that required long trips in the deepest of nights. Carlos was certain his god dressed in a black cloak and fed on misery, and at times he questioned his own allegiance to Svensson. The man was driven by an insatiable thirst for power, and the men he worked for even more so. This was their food. Their drug. Carlos didn’t care to understand the depths of their madness; he only knew they were the kind of people who would get what they wanted, and in the process he would get what he wanted: the restoration of Islam.

  He took a sip of the Scotch. You would think that one, just one, of the thousands of scientists working in the defensive biotechnological sector would have stumbled onto something meaningful after all these years. They had over three hundred paid informants in every major pharmaceutical company. Carlos had interviewed fifty-seven scientists from the former Soviet bioweapons program, quite persuasively. And in the end, nothing. At least nothing they were looking for.

  The telephone on a large black sandalwood desk to their right rang shrilly.

  Neither made a move for the phone. It stopped ringing.

  “We need you in Bangkok,” Svensson said. His voice sounded like the rumble of an engine churning against a cylinder full of gravel.

  “Bangkok.”

  “Yes, Bangkok. Raison Pharmaceutical.”

  “The Raison Vaccine?” Carlos said. They had been following the development of the vaccine for over a year with the help of an informant in the Raison labs. He’d always thought it would be ironic if the French company Raison—pronounced ray-ZONE, meaning “reason” —might one day produce a virus that would bring the world to its knees.

  “I wasn’t aware their vaccine held any promise for us,” he said.

  Svensson limped slowly, so slowly, to his desk, picked up a piece of white paper and scanned it. “You do remember a report three months ago about unsustainable mutations of the vaccine.”

  “Our contact said the mutations were unsustainable and died out in minutes.” Carlos wasn’t a scientist, but he knew more than the average man about bioweapons, naturally.

  “Those were the conclusions of Monique de Raison. Now we have another report. Our man at the CDC received a nervous visitor today who claimed that the mutations of the Raison Vaccine held together under prolonged, specific heat. The result, the visitor claimed, would be a lethal air-borne virus with an incubation of three weeks. One that could infect the entire world’s population in less than three weeks.”

  “And how did this visitor happen to come across this information?”

  Svensson hesitated.

  “A dream,” he said. “A very unusual dream. A very, very convincing dream of another world populated by people who think his dreams of this world are only dreams. And by bats who talk.”

  Now it was Carlos’s turn to hesitate.

  “Bats.”

  “We have our reasons for paying attention. I want you to fly to Bangkok and interview Monique de Raison. If the situation warrants, I will want the Raison Vaccine itself, by whatever means.”

  “Now we’re resorting to mystics?”

  Svensson had covered the CDC well, with four on the payroll, if Carlos remembered correctly. Even the most innocuous-sounding reports of infectious diseases quickly made their way to the headquarters in Atlanta. Svensson was understandably interested in any report of any new outbreak and the plans to deal with it.

  But a dream? Thoroughly out of character for the stoic, black-hearted Swiss. This alone gave the suggestion its only credence.

  Svensson glared at him with dark eyes. “As I said, we have other reasons to believe this man may know things he has no business knowing, regardless of how he
attained that information.”

  “Such as?”

  “It’s beyond you. Suffice it to say there is no way Thomas Hunter could have known that the Raison Vaccine was subject to unsustainable mutations.”

  Carlos frowned. “A coincidence.”

  “I’m not willing to take that chance. The fate of the world rests on one elusive virus and its cure. We may have just found that virus.”

  “I’m not sure Monique de Raison will offer an . . . interview.”

  “Then take her by force.”

  “And what about Hunter?”

  “You will learn by whatever means necessary everything Thomas Hunter knows, and then you will kill him.”

  1

  It all started one day earlier with a single silenced bullet out of nowhere.

  Thomas Hunter was walking down the same dimly lit alley he always took on his way home after locking up the small Java Hut on Colfax and Ninth, when a smack! punctuated the hum of distant traffic. Red brick dribbled from a one-inch hole two feet away from his face. He stopped midstride.

  Smack!

  This time he saw the bullet plow into the brick. This time he felt a sting on his cheek as tiny bits of shattered brick burst from the impact. This time every muscle in his body ceased.

  Someone had just shot at him!

  Was shooting at him.

  Tom recoiled to a crouch and instinctively spread his arms. He couldn’t seem to tear his eyes off those two holes in the brick, dead ahead. They had to be some mistake. Figments of his overactive imagination. His aspirations to write novels had finally ruptured the line between fantasy and reality with these two empty eye sockets staring at him from the red brick.

  “Thomas Hunter!”

  That wasn’t his imagination, was it? No, that was his name, and it was echoing down the alley. A third bullet crashed into the brick wall.

  He bolted to his left, still crouching. One long step, drop the right shoulder, roll. Again the air split above his head. This bullet clanged into a steel ladder and rang down the alley.

  Tom came to his feet and chased the sound in a full sprint, pushed by instinct as much as by terror. He’d been here before, in the back alleys of Manila. He’d been a teenager then, and the Filipino gangs were armed with knives and machetes rather than guns, but at the moment, tearing down the alley behind Ninth and Colfax, Tom’s mind wasn’t drawing any distinction.