Lauren nodded. “That is true, Maria. And if you and the villagers will permit us to take samples of your blood that may make an even better medicine to not only cure the sickness but to prevent it from ever infecting anyone again.”
“This taking of the blood . . . is it painful?”
Lauren smiled, shaking her head. “No worse than the sting of an ant, or a small bee.”
“Then I will explain to my people the need for this and I am sure they will agree.”
Chapter 29
Bear lay on his stomach, observing the village through high-power binoculars. He was on the crest of a small hill a couple of hundred yards from the village, hidden by a clump of thorny bushes.
Blade sat about ten yards behind Bear. He slowly moved the blade of one of his knives over a sharpening stone, while his eyes glared at Bear’s back. He was thinking it wasn’t going to take many more smart-mouthed comments from Bear before he was going to slit him from crotch to gullet.
Bear felt Blade’s eyes on him and he had already loosened his 9mm Glock semiautomatic pistol in his shoulder holster, just in case the idiot finally got the courage to act on what Bear knew he was thinking.
Bear knew that being the leader of a group of men as dangerous as his crew was like walking a tightrope. On one hand, you had to be tough and not take any shit from anyone, or soon discipline would be lost and all of their lives wouldn’t be worth spit. On the other hand, you had to rule with a little bit of flexibility because these men needed to cut loose occasionally. By definition, as mercenaries they weren’t real good at following orders. That’s why they’d all been kicked out of the military—an organization that valued following orders above all else.
Bear knew that Blade thought he could run the crew as well as or better than he could. But what Bear knew was that Blade, while tough as skull-steak, was dumb as a pole. Tough wasn’t enough in this new world of electronic surveillance. You had to be smart as well, and that’s where Blade fell far short of leadership material.
Bear also knew that after this mission, he was going to have to do something about Blade. Either cut him loose or kill him, and it didn’t make much difference to Bear which it would be.
* * *
Mason finished taking pictures of the plants and flowers in Maria’s baskets and stepped outside the shack to use his sat-phone to message the pictures back to their camp. While none of his team were experts in botany as such, he felt that Suzanne Elliot would be best to send the flower pictures to. With her experience in epidemiology, she’d probably spent the most time of any of the team checking out indigenous species of plant life in previous cases she’d handled.
He added a text message:
Suzanne, here are the plants the curandera says will cure the plague if given soon enough in the course of the disease. Will check with her about specific order of use and different dosages if there is such. Will get back with you shortly. Mason.
He turned the phone off to save its battery and went back into the shack.
“Maria,” he said, “Do you know which of the plants is the most important one in curing the sickness and are they all given in the same way?”
She shook her head. “I am sorry, Dr. Williams, but I always give all of the plants at the same time. They are ground up as I showed you and the pulp is mixed with boiling water to make a ‘tea,’ which is then given two times a day until the sickness is cured or the patient dies.”
Mason nodded. “That’s okay, Maria. When the samples arrive back at our lab we can do an analysis of them to see which of them has the active ingredients that will fight the infection.”
Lauren picked up her backpack and motioned toward the door. “Mason, Maria has spoken to the villagers and they have all agreed to have their blood drawn so we can take samples back to the lab.”
He rubbed his hands together. “Good, then let’s get started. I’d like to be able to head back toward the lab early tomorrow morning.”
“Regarding that,” Lauren said, a hopeful look on her face. “How about checking by phone to see if we might be able to get the Mexican Army to allow a helicopter to pick us up? It would save us several days in getting to work on the samples.”
“That’s a great idea, Lauren. I’ll get right on it while you set up the blood-drawing equipment in the center of the village.”
He stepped aside to send another text to Suzanne:
The curandera says all of the plants are used equally, plants ground into a paste, boiled in water to make “tea,” and the dosage is twice a day. Also check with Mexican authorities to see if helicopter is available to pick us up and get us back to the lab sooner.
As soon as Suzanne got the pictures on her phone, she forwarded them to a botanist she knew back in the CDC and asked if he could identify the plants and send her a list of their names and all of the places where they might be found.
Just as she finished sending the message, Shirley Cole stuck her head into the room. “Suzanne, come in here right away. There’s something I want you to see.”
Suzanne followed Shirley back through the corridors of the Bio-Lab building until they came to the intensive care unit room that housed Dr. Matos.
Shirley stepped to the side and ushered Suzanne through the door with a “Voilà!”
A much thinner but clear-eyed Dr. Matos smiled up at her from his bed.
“I can’t believe it!” Suzanne said. “You were as close to death as anyone I’ve ever seen.”
In heavily accented English, Matos said, “Like your Mark Twain, the rumors of my death were much exaggerated. . . not to mention premature.”
“Isn’t it wonderful,” Shirley said. “The magical tea that Guatemotzi provided enabled him to fully recover. There is absolutely no trace of the infection in his blood whatsoever.”
“But, the curandera said that the tea had to be given early in the course of the sickness for it to work.”
Shirley nodded. “Yes, but that is in people who are receiving no other treatment. Evidently, the tea worked in conjunction with the antibiotics we were pouring into Eduardo’s blood and either enhanced their effect or worked with them somehow to completely defeat the bacterial infection.”
“That’s . . . that’s wonderful, Eduardo. I am so happy for you,” Suzanne said, though her eyes were focused far away as if she were thinking about something else.
“Have you heard from Mason recently?” Shirley asked. “I can’t wait to tell him the good news.”
“Yes, but he’s been keeping his sat-phone turned off to conserve the battery life, since there is no way to recharge it out in the jungle. I’ll be sure to let him know if he calls me back.”
“Well, I wish he’d hurry up and get us some more of those magical plants. The world is waiting.”
“Yeah,” Suzanne said absently, “me too. I guess he’ll let us know as soon as he has something to report.”
* * *
Bear felt his phone buzzing in his pocket. He rolled to the side to check on Blade’s position before he lowered his right hand and pulled it from his pocket.
“Yeah?”
Janus said, “What is your situation?”
“They’ve got the plants and are now in the process of drawing blood from all the villagers. It’s getting late here now and it doesn’t look like they’ll be able to break trail until tomorrow morning.”
“Okay, tonight I want you to break into wherever they are keeping the plant samples and blood specimens and bring them back here as fast as you can.”
“What about the doc and the lady? If we leave them alive they’ll just collect more samples and beat feet back to the lab, and we’ll only have delayed them by a few days at most.”
“Like I said, I don’t care what happens to the lady, but I don’t want Williams killed. You can steal his phone and break his leg or something so he can’t travel, but don’t do anything permanent to him. Once you have his phone, let me know and I’ll make up some story to the others on the team about him
traveling on foot back to the camp, that way it’ll be five or six days before they realize he’s late. By then our mutual boss should be way ahead of anything the CDC can do as far as a cure is concerned.”
Bear chuckled. “You got a soft spot for the doc, Janus?”
“That is none of your concern. But he is a hero who has risked his life many times to help protect people from many different diseases, and he doesn’t deserve to die for no reason.”
“Okay, okay,” Bear replied, feeling relieved for some reason that he was not going to be forced to choose whether to kill the doctor or not. He was still undecided about the lady, but he was sure he would figure something out when it was decision-making time.
“By the way, Janus, how do you feel about all the people who are going to die because we interfered with the doc and held up the world getting a cure for this plague?” he asked.
There was a pause of almost thirty seconds, and then Janus replied, “People die every day, Bear, for all sorts of reasons. I can’t think of a better reason than giving my country a leg up on all of the other countries in the world, most of whom would just as soon kill us as look at us. So forget the cheap moralizing and do your fuckin’ job!”
Bear grinned ruefully. So, he thought, Janus was having trouble dealing with what they were doing, too, in spite of the rationalization he’d just heard.
He checked on Blade one more time and then he rolled back over and continued his surveillance of the village below.
* * *
Mason was in the midst of drawing samples of blood from the villagers when Motzi’s father Fernando pushed his way through the line to gesture to Lauren.
She handed her rack of blood-filled tubes to Maria and eased her way through the crowd and followed him back to the small house he shared with Motzi and his younger brothers and sisters.
“What is it, Fernando?” she asked, stepping through the door.
He moved to a small handmade table and picked up a black, circular device with a pin affixed to the back of it. “You know what is this?” he asked, holding it out to her.
She took it and shrugged. “No. Where did you get it?”
He held up the shirt Motzi had been wearing on their journey, which was still wet from being washed in a basin next to a window in the room used as a kitchen. “It was here,” he said, pointing to a small hole in the upper back of the shirt.
Lauren turned the thing over and over and still could not figure out what it was or what its purpose was. Still, she thought, the very fact it was pinned to Motzi’s shirt was highly suspicious. The only way she could imagine it got there was for someone on Mason’s team back at the dig site to have put it there.
“I will ask Dr. Williams what this is, Fernando, and we will let you know as soon as we figure it out.”
Putting the device in her pocket, she walked back out to the table where Mason sat drawing blood.
“Hey, boss,” she called. “How about taking a short break and drinking some water?” She glanced up at the burning tropical sun. “You don’t want to get dehydrated since we have a long trip tomorrow.”
Mason sighed and wiped his sweating brow with a small towel on the table. “You’re right, Lauren.” He turned to Maria, “Maria, if you would continue to label these tubes with the person’s name I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Of course, Doctor,” she said.
Lauren led Mason to the shade of a large banyan tree and handed him bottled water.
As he tipped it up and began to drain it, Lauren whispered, “Look what Fernando found pinned to Motzi’s shirt when he took it off to wash it.”
Blocking the view from the village, she slipped the small device into his hand. As he replaced the cap on the bottle of water, he glanced down at the device and gave a low whistle.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I think it’s a state-of-the-art GPS transmitter.”
“You know it could only have been put on him by someone at the lab.”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “That’s what bothers me.” He pocketed the device and looked around the village. “Why would a member of my team want to do that? They knew where we were going, and they knew I’d stay in touch with them by sat-phone.”
“They knew generally where we were headed, but we and they didn’t know exactly where Motzi’s village was. Maybe they were afraid we’d get lost and they could use this thing to help us find our way out of the jungle.”
He wagged his head. “That doesn’t make sense, Lauren. My sat-phone has a GPS finder function in it so this thing is superfluous.”
He thought for a moment. “Unless one of them is working at cross-purposes to the rest of us, perhaps for someone else, and they wanted to be able to track us without the other members of the team knowing about it.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Remember that wood smoke we smelled the other night? What if the GPS unit was used so that someone else could track us? That way they could follow us without having to stay so close that we would notice them behind us.”
“Of course, that must be it,” he said. He used the motion of taking another drink of water to mask his glance at the surrounding jungle.
He started and immediately looked down at the ground. “Holy shit, Lauren! I just saw the glint of sunlight off of a glass in the jungle on that ridge over there,” he said, casting his eyes toward a ridge a couple of hundred yards from the edge of the village.
Resisting the urge to glance in that direction, Lauren asked, “Do you think someone has us under surveillance?”
“I hope so,” he said. “It’s either binoculars the sun reflected off of or it’s a rifle scope.”
“It’s got to be binoculars,” she said. “Whoever it is has had plenty of opportunities to kill us if that’s what they had in mind.”
“What do you think they want?” he asked, trying his best not to look up at the jungle again.
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “Do you have any idea what a cure of the anthrax plague would be worth? Heck, it’d have to be worth billions at least.”
He shook his head. “I just can’t believe any member of my team would become a traitor for money.”
She shrugged, “Okay then, maybe it’s not for money. Maybe it’s political, or to settle a grudge against America, or hell, I don’t know. It could be anything, and without more data to go on we could guess all day and still might not get it right.”
“You’re right, the reason doesn’t matter right now. What matters is what are we going to do about it?”
“They’ve got to be following us hoping to get their hands on the plague cure, for whatever reason. So what we have to do is figure out how to get back to the lab and get our results to the right people without being stopped.”
He glanced around at the jungle-covered mountains surrounding the village and frowned. “Any ideas on just how we might be able to do that?”
She smiled grimly. “I just might have, but I’m going to have to talk to Motzi first. Now, you get back to drawing blood as if nothing has happened and let’s continue to play dumb and try not to look up at that ridge anymore. Whoever they are they’ve got to be thinking that we’re not going to leave until morning, and they’ve got to believe that we’ll be heading back the way we came. If I’m right, I think we’ll be able to use those beliefs against them.”
Chapter 30
While Mason went back to his blood drawing, Lauren searched out and found Motzi surrounded by a group of smaller boys. He was in the midst of regaling them with stories of his heroic journey back from the dangerous El Norte and how he’d outwitted the treacherous soldados.
“Motzi,” she called, beckoning him to join her as she ambled down the path toward the river.
“Sí, señorita?” he asked, scrambling to keep up with her as she wound her way through the jungle that rimmed the river.
She turned to face him and waved her hand at the river. “Motzi, do you know the river well?”
He glanced at the rapidly flowing water and shrugged. “Sí, I think so.”
She knelt before him and took his shoulders in her hands. “Motzi, I need to tell you something, but it is a very important secret, and you must promise not to tell anyone else in the village . . . not even your father. Okay?”
“Sí,” and Motzi solemnly crossed his heart as she’d seen American kids do when they made a serious promise.
“Good. Dr. Williams and I have discovered that some very bad men have been following us and are going to try to take the medicine and the blood samples from us when we head back down the trail tomorrow.”
Motzi’s eyes grew large and he hit a fist into his palm. “I knew it!” he exclaimed. “I . . . I felt like when big cat in jungle is watching Motzi hunt, but I no tell you ’cause I feel you make fun of Motzi.”
“Your feelings were right, Motzi. We think they followed us all the way from the lab to your village.”
He frowned. “Bastardos!” And then he winced and said, “I sorry, señorita. Not mean to say bad word.”
Lauren laughed. “That’s okay, Motzi. I agree with you. They are bastards, and Dr. Williams and I are counting on you to help us escape them.”
Motzi stuck out his chest and grinned. “Hokay.”
Lauren stood and looked up and down the banks of the river. Every so often, small skiff-like flat-bottomed boats were pulled up on the sandy shores. Most were pretty ragged but there were a few that looked to be well-cared-for and in good shape for what she had in mind.
“Do you know where the river goes?”
Motzi thought for a moment, and then he nodded uncertainly. “Motzi never go all the way downriver, but I been told goes around big mountain and comes out in big water near village of Tehuantepec.” He frowned, “But Señorita Lauren, that many, many miles away.”
“That’s okay, Motzi.” She smiled, “We’ll be riding, not walking.”
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