Black

by Ted Dekker

  “None.”

  The first call from the authorities had come two hours ago. A courtesy call from his own government, requesting an interview of the highest priority. It meant that they suspected him already. Fascinating. It was Thomas Hunter, of course. The dreamer. Carlos had said he’d killed the man in the hotel room, but the media said differently. Carlos either had lied deliberately or, more likely, had been bested by this man. It was something he would keep in mind.

  The authorities didn’t have enough for a search warrant. He’d granted them their interview, but not for two more days. By then it wouldn’t matter.

  “Everything is ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I will handle the next move. I want you to eliminate the American.”

  He watched Carlos. Not a flinch, just a steady gaze. “I shot the American twice. You’re saying that he’s not dead?”

  The woman glanced up at Carlos. She, too, knew something.

  “He’s alive enough to be in the news. He’s also the source of the antivirus. I want him dead at all costs.”

  Monique turned to him. “Are you aware that your right-hand man is lying to you? One of the men who came for me outside Bangkok was Thomas Hunter. Carlos knows that. Why is he hiding this from you?”

  “Thomas Hunter?” Carlos looked at the woman with some surprise. “I don’t think that’s possible. He may not be dead, but he has two bullets in his chest. And he’s a civilian, not a soldier.”

  Her accusation was meant to sow distrust. Smart. But he had far more reason to distrust her than Carlos.

  The man from Cyprus faced him. “I will leave immediately. Thomas Hunter will be dead within forty-eight hours. On this you have my word.”

  Svensson looked back into the lab. The technicians were huddled over three different work stations now, assessing the information Carlos had reported from Thomas Hunter, this string of numbers.

  Svensson now faced two very significant risks. One, that his operation would be found out. Unlikely, considering all their meticulous planning, but a risk nonetheless. Timing was now critical.

  The second significant risk was that neither his people nor Monique could develop an antivirus in time. He was willing to accept that risk. His name was now out there; sooner or later they would know the truth. If he didn’t succeed now, he would either spend the rest of his life in a prison or die. The latter was more appealing.

  “I will be contacting the others in a few hours. Meet us at the control facility as soon as You’ve eliminated Hunter. Take her.”

  Tom stared at the monitor that displayed what the electron microscope had uncovered. The Raison Strain. He tried to imagine how a sea of these tiny viruses could possibly hurt a flea, much less slaughter a few billion people. They looked like an Apollo lunar-lander, a miniature pod on legs that had landed its host cell.

  “That’s the Raison Strain?”

  “That’s the Raison Strain,” Peter said. “Looks harmless, doesn’t it?”

  “Looks like a tiny machine. So the mutation is sustained even when the temperatures come down?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. It’s terribly unusual, you know. No regulation or protocol even suggests testing vaccines at such a high temperature. No one could have possibly guessed that mutation was even possible at such a temperature.”

  Tom straightened. Jacques de Raison stood by Kara and a half dozen other technicians in white coats.

  “And how can you tell what the virus will do?”

  Peter looked at Raison, who nodded. “Show him.”

  Peter led them to another computer monitor. “We’re basing the conclusions on a simulation. Two years ago this would have taken a month, but thanks to new models that we’ve developed in conjunction with DARPA, we’re down to a few hours.” He tapped several keys and brought the screen to life.

  “We feed the genetic signature of the virus into the model—in this case human—and then let the computer simulate the effect of infection. We can squeeze two months into two hours.”

  “Put it on the big screen, Peter,” Raison said.

  The image popped up on an overhead screen.

  “Hold on . . . there.”

  A single cell appeared.

  “That’s a normal cell taken from a human liver. Lodged on its outer membrane you can see the Raison Strain, introduced through the blood supply—”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “It’s very small, one of the reasons it fares so well as an airborne agent.” Peter stepped up and pointed to the left side of the cell with a wand. “This small growth here. That’s the Raison Strain.”

  “That’s the deadly beast?” Tom said. “Hard to believe.”

  “That’s it on day one, before lysogeny—”

  “Could you explain it in layman’s terms? Pretend I’m a fifth grader.”

  Peter smiled awkwardly.

  “Okay. Viruses aren’t cells. They don’t grow or multiply like cells do. They consist basically of a shell that harbors a little bit of DNA. You know what DNA is, right?”

  “Blueprint for life and all that.”

  “Good enough. Well, that shell we call a virus is able to attach to a cell wall and squirt its viral DNA inside. Think of it as a nasty little bug. The squirted DNA makes its way into the DNA of the host cell, in this case a liver cell, so that the host cell will be forced to make more viral shells as well as pieces of identical viral DNA. Follow?”

  “This little bug can do all that? You’d think it has a mind of its own.”

  “That and more. Viruses are assembled; they do not grow. They take over the host and turn it into a factory for more viral shells, which repeat the process.”

  “Like the collective Borg in Star Trek,” Thomas said.

  “In many ways, yes. Like the Borg. The way they kill the cell is by making so many shells that the cell literally explodes. This is called lysogeny.”

  “Somehow I missed all this in biology.”

  Peter continued. “Some viruses linger and wait until the host is under stress before constructing themselves. That’s called latency. In this case our virus is a very slow starter, but after two weeks it becomes very aggressive, and its exponential growth overtakes the body in a matter of days. Watch.”

  Peter returned to the keyboard and punched in a command. Slowly the image on the screen began to change. The virus injected the host cell like a scorpion. The liver cell started to change and then hemorrhaged.

  “Lysogeny,” Thomas said.

  “Exactly.”

  The view expanded, and thousands of similar cells went through the same process.

  “A human body infected by this virus will literally eat itself up from the inside out.”

  He hit another key. They watched in silence as the same simulation was shown on a human heart. The organ began to break apart as its countless cells hemorrhaged.

  “Quite deadly,” Peter said.

  “How long?” Tom asked.

  “Based on this simulation, the virus will require under three weeks to build enough momentum to affect organ functionality.” He shrugged. “It is then a matter of days, depending on the subject.”

  Tom faced Raison. “I take it we are now in agreement?”

  “Yes. Clearly.”

  “And You’ve informed the CDC?”

  “We’re in the process now. But you must understand, Mr. Hunter: This is a scenario, not a crisis. Outside this laboratory, the Raison Strain doesn’t even exist. It would never occur in nature.”

  “I realize that. But I have it on pretty good authority that someone is going to go around nature. It may be too late, but on the off chance it’s not, we have to mobilize as if it is a crisis. We need to stop Svensson, and we need an antivirus within a couple of weeks.”

  “That’s impossible,” Raison said.

  “So I keep hearing,” Tom muttered. He turned to Peter. “You can’t create an antivirus with all this computing power?”

  “I’m afraid it�
�s an entirely different matter. Two months, best case, but not three weeks.”

  Tom caught Kara’s stare. She had that look. This would be up to him. But he didn’t want it to be up to him.

  “If we had Monique,” Peter said, “we might have a chance. She engineers certain particulars into all of her vaccines to protect them against theft or foul play. It’s essentially a backdoor switch that’s triggered by the introduction of another uniquely engineered virus, which renders the vaccine impotent. If her engineering survived the mutation, her unique virus could also kill Svensson’s lethal strain.”

  “So she may have the key?”

  “Maybe. Assuming the mutation didn’t destroy her back door.”

  The room went silent.

  “You don’t have this switch of hers? She keeps this where, in her head? That seems stupid.”

  “Until a vaccine is approved by the international community, she keeps the key to herself. It’s her way of making sure no one, including employees, steals or tampers with the technology.”

  “And she keeps no records.”

  “It’s not a complicated matter if you know which genes to manipulate,” Peter said. “If there are records, no one here knows where they would be. Either way, it’s a long shot. The switch may have mutated along with the vaccine.”

  “Naturally, we will search,” Jacques de Raison said. “But as you can see, we must find my daughter.”

  “Agreed,” Tom said. “We should also wake up the world.”

  Tom left the meeting exhausted and, worse, powerless. He was still under house arrest for kidnapping. He made a dozen phone calls but was quickly reminded of why he came to Bangkok in the first place. News of this sort wasn’t received well from a source as unlikely as him. Especially now that he was quite famous for kidnapping Monique.

  Fortunately Raison Pharmaceutical commanded far more respect.

  Reports of the potential mutation of the Raison Vaccine hit all the appropriate teletypes and computer screens throughout the massive bureaucracy of health services.

  It did not send the world scrambling for answers.

  It was not a crisis.

  It was hardly even a problem.

  It was only a possible scenario in one of the models held by Raison Pharmaceutical.

  Tom collapsed into bed at nine that night, weary to the bone but frazzled by the knowledge that the probability of this particular scenario was 100 percent.

  It took him a full hour to fall asleep.

  32

  Tanis sat alone on the hill overlooking the village. The events of the morning still buzzed about in his mind. For the first time in his life, he’d actually seen the creature from the black forest, and the experience had been astounding. Exhilarating. Most surprising had been the song. This stunning creature was not the terrible black beast of his vivid imagination and stories.

  He had saved Thomas. That was justification enough for his visit to the black forest. So then, it was a good thing he’d gone.

  Tanis had stayed with Thomas for a short time before leaving. Oddly, he had no desire to be with the man when he awoke.

  He’d returned and spent some time in the village. Rachelle had asked him if he’d run into Thomas, and he’d told her that he had, and that Thomas was sleeping.

  He’d wandered around the village feeling very much in place and at peace. By midday, however, he felt as though he must go somewhere by himself to consider the events continuing to nag his mind. And so he had come here, to this hill overlooking the entire valley.

  Tanis had gone to fetch the sword he’d thrown in the woods yesterday and found it missing. And not only that, but Thomas was also missing. He wasn’t sure why he’d concluded that Thomas had taken the sword to the Crossing—perhaps because this very thought was on his own mind—but after searching high and low for the man, he decided to make another sword and go in search at the Crossing.

  What interested him most was the fact that Thomas had come from the black forest and lived to tell of it. Not just once, but twice.

  The creature . . . now the creature had been something else altogether. He’d never imagined Teeleh as he appeared. Indeed, he hadn’t imagined that such a beautiful being could have existed in the black forest at all. Admittedly, he looked rather unique with those green eyes and golden fur. But the song . . .

  Oh, what a song!

  The fact of the matter was that Tanis wanted very much to meet this creature again. He had no desire to cross into the black forest and drink the water, of course. That would mean death. Worse yet, it was forbidden. But to meet the black creature at the river—that had not been forbidden.

  And Thomas had done it.

  Tanis glanced at the sun. He had been sitting on the hill, turning the events over in his mind, for over an hour now. If he were to leave now, he could reach the black forest and return without being missed again.

  He stood shakily to his feet. The eagerness he felt was odd enough to cause a slight confusion. He couldn’t remember ever feeling such strange turmoil. For a moment he thought he should just return to the village and forget the creature at the black forest completely. But he quickly decided against it. After all, he wanted very much to understand this terrible enemy of his. Not to mention the song. To understand one’s enemy is to have power over him.

  Yes, Tanis wanted this very much, and there was no reason not to do what he so greatly desired. Unless, of course, it went against the will of Elyon. But Elyon had not prohibited meeting new creatures, regardless of where they lived. Even across the river.

  With one last look to the valley floor, Tanis turned his back and struck out for the black forest.

  Tom woke with a start. The sweet smell of grass filled his nostrils. He’d dreamed again. Bangkok. They were running ragged in Bangkok because they’d finally accepted the virus at face value. The Raison Strain now existed, if only in laboratories. He had to find Monique, but he had no idea how. And here—

  He jerked up. Tanis?

  He scrambled to his feet and looked around. “Tanis!”

  The rush of the river drifted from the east. It was midafternoon. Tanis must have left him near the Crossing and returned to the village.

  It took him an hour to reach the valley, fifteen minutes of that retracing his way north after missing the path that led to the village. He had to reach Tanis and explain himself. If ever the man was capable of confusion, it would be now. And the fact that Tanis had made himself another sword after their discussion only yesterday didn’t bode well for the man.

  He was bitten with the bug. His curiosity was turning. His desire was outpacing his satisfaction. He’d gone to the Crossing because he was tired of not knowing.

  Well, now he knew, all right. The only question was, How much knowledge would suffice? And for how long?

  Of course, Tom had gone across as well. But he was different; there could no longer be any question about that. He hadn’t taken any water, but according to Teeleh, he’d eaten the fruit before losing his memory, and he’d managed to survive. It was like a vaccine, perhaps.

  No, that couldn’t be right. Still, Tom was quite sure that he was different from Tanis. Maybe the people from his village far away had more liberties. But that made even less sense. Maybe he was from Bangkok. He might be from Bangkok when he was dreaming, but in reality he was from here. This was his home, and his dreams of Bangkok were wreaking havoc here.

  He should eat the rhambutan fruit and rid himself of these silly dreams. They were meddling with a tenuous balance. If not for him, Tanis wouldn’t have gone to the black forest today.

  “Thomas!”

  A Roush swept in from his right.

  “Michal!”

  The Roush hit the ground hard, bounced once, and flapped furiously to keep from crashing.

  “Michal?”

  “Oh, dear, dear! Oh, my goodness!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Tanis. I think he is headed for the black forest.”
/>   “Tanis? The black forest?” Impossible! He’d just been to the black for-est a few hours ago!

  “He was headed straight for it when I left to find you. And he was running. How is that for being sure?” Michal hopped about nervously as though he had stepped on a hot coal.

  “For the sake of Elyon, why didn’t you stop him?”

  “Why didn’t I stop you? It’s not my place; that’s why! He’s mad! You’re both mad, I tell you. Just plain mad. Sometimes I wonder what the point was. You humans are just too unpredictable.”

  Tom tried to think clearly. “Just because he’s running in that direction doesn’t mean he’s going to enter the black forest.”

  Michal’s eyes flashed. “We don’t have time to discuss this! Even if we go now, you could be too late. Please. Do you know what this could mean?”

  “He can’t be that stupid,” Tom said. He meant to reassure Michal, but he didn’t even believe himself.

  Neither did Michal. “Please, we must go now.”

  The Roush ran along the grass, flapping madly. Then he was in the air. Tom sprinted to catch him.

  An image of the boy at the upper lake filled his mind. That had been two days ago. What had come over them? He suddenly felt suffocated with panic.

  “Elyon!” he breathed.

  But Elyon had grown completely silent.

  “Michal!” he yelled.

  The Roush was preoccupied with his own thoughts. Tom quickened his pace. There was no way he could let Tanis do anything even remotely so unreasonable as talk to Teeleh.

  Not while he was alive.

  The scene that greeted Tanis when he broke onto the banks of the river stopped him cold.

  As far as he could see in either direction, black creatures with red eyes crowded the trees along the edge of the black forest like a dense, shifting black cloud. There had to be a million of them. Maybe many more.

  His first thought was that Thomas had been right—there were far too many to easily dispatch with a few well-placed kicks.

  His second was to run.

  Tanis jumped back under the cover of the trees. He had never heard that so many other creatures shared their world. He held his breath and peered around a tree at the wondrous sight.