Where Cimil could be waiting.
He went with his gut and headed in. Seconds from the entrance, all sense of light disappeared. He kept going, hands out in front of him feeling the moisture and slime on the stone walls. He didn't want to think about the poisonous spiders and venomous snakes that might wait beyond his fingertips, so he tried to focus on moving forward.
He'd trained for maneuvering in dark and enclosed spaces. He'd done exercises in the dark, primarily designed to teach movement without the sense of sight. Never had he felt the kind of primordial terror conjured by a space like this one. He called on all his past experiences in combat and irregular missions to keep himself from screaming. The chill from the heavy fog only served to worsen his fear.
When he saw a dim light appear in front of him, he felt his chest loosen and a wave of emotion sweep through his head. He reminded himself that Cimil could be waiting in ambush, and forced himself to stop when the outline of the tunnel exit became distinct. He bent down, picked up a rock, and threw it out the opening. Then he listened and watched.
He heard nothing after the rock crashed to the ground. He saw no shadows moving across the opening, so he took out his gun and moved forward one slow step at a time. Three feet from the exit he exploded forward like a sprinter from the blocks.
He burst into a clearing with vegetation torn or flattened down to only a few inches high. He kept moving from side to side, making himself a harder target. He stopped when he saw Cimil running across the clearing.
His former friend didn't look good. Shirtless and favoring his right leg with a substantial limp, he moved no faster than walking pace. Seeing him now, Simon knew that any worries about an ambush had been unfounded. The man was running for his life.
Cimil's obvious destination caused Simon to suck in his breath through pursed lips. A broad pyramid rose about twenty feet in the air. The marines had secured the immediate area after they'd captured Cimil, but their shortage of manpower had limited the perimeter to a couple hundred yards. With trees reaching forty or fifty feet, this structure had not been visible.
Simon estimated that the sides of the square base stretched about fifty yards each. This was not the classic shape of the Giza pyramids, or even the Maya pyramids from the guidebooks. More like a raised courtyard than anything else. In the center, a slab of stone three feet off the ground was surrounded by walls on three sides as well as a partial roof.
Simon had seen something exactly like this before. He closed his eyes and fought the memory. He heard himself yelling out loud. “No!”
He exhaled with a loud grunt and opened his eyes. He didn't have time for this. He needed to ignore the pain of that moment in August 1982 for a few more minutes. Soon he'd have the one thing he needed to put the demons to rest once and for all.
Revenge.
Simon started running again. Cimil had reached the wide steps of the pyramid, but the gap between them closed in a hurry. When Simon hit the steps, he bounded up them with long strides. Cimil reached the top and a few steps later, Simon dived.
His arms encircled Cimil's shoulders like a football player making an open field tackle from behind. They both went down and Simon winced as his knee whacked into the stone. He lost his grip and the Guatemalan rolled away.
They both sprang up and faced each other. Whatever injury Cimil had sustained, he showed no signs of it now as he balanced on the balls of his feet. He grinned, and Simon could see the oozing blood on his lips.
“Just you and me now, buddy. The Fifth World is my destiny. Only a week until the old world ends and you can't stop it.”
Simon said nothing. It was one thing to talk trash during an interrogation, but macho bullshit had no place in combat. He needed all his focus.
Both men rocked on their feet, never staying still. Simon kept one eye on a purpling bruise near Cimil's midsection, knowing that any dangerous moves from his opponent would begin there.
Cimil lunged.
Simon ducked to the side, but couldn't avoid an elbow to his chin, and he felt his lip split open as his bottom teeth jammed into the soft flesh. He whipped his arm around and caught Cimil on the back, sending him staggering toward the stone slab.
Cimil regained his balance and whirled, a crazed anger reddening his eyes. They circled each other a few seconds longer before he leaped at Simon. Both men went down. They fell onto the slab, and Simon wound up on top. He pinned Cimil's arms with his hands, straddling the smaller man's waist.
Cimil spat at Simon's face and hit his forehead. With sweat already dripping from his hair, Simon hardly noticed. Simon stared down into the brown eyes.
“Why?”
“You know why. The Fifth World. We are the chosen people.”
Simon shook his head. “Not that. I'm talking about your sister. I'm talking about Itzel.”
He hadn't spoken the name in three decades, and he fought to keep his emotions under control. Cimil looked confused for a moment, then smiled.
“She made the sacrifice willingly. I let you watch because I thought you of all people would have an open mind.”
“Willingly? She was drugged out of her mind when she was on the altar. She had no idea. You killed her.”
Cimil raised his voice. “Yes, we sacrificed her. She knew exactly what she was doing. She wasn't just a sweet little girl, she was Maya royalty. You're so arrogant, thinking you know what's best for us. That ends in a week's time.”
Simon felt his arms weakening and his eyes teared up. He spoke softly.
“I loved her.”
“Bullshit. She was no different than the art students at Williams, always a different one in your bed. They couldn't get enough of you, like somehow fucking you made 'em feel like they were helping solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You loved it.
“When you came down to visit me after graduation, we were best friends even though we were so different. Back then, I believed it made no difference. Then you started after Itzel. Oh, you pretended to be respectful, but I knew you too well. You didn't love Itzel. You just wanted your little native piece of—”
Simon screamed. A cry of anguish. No hesitation, no holding back. A release of thirty years of pain. He moved his hands from Cimil's shoulders to his neck, thumbs pressed against the carotid arteries. He didn't stop screaming.
Cimil's eyes widened, and he tried to pull Simon's hands away from his throat. His legs started thrashing, knees driving into Simon's back.
Simon held on.
Cimil rocked his shoulders, trying anything he could to break the pressure. Simon head-butted him twice, which slowed the thrashing.
And still he held on.
He felt his fingers slip and something gave in Cimil's throat. A part of his brain recognized that this was the hyoid bone breaking.
Simon stopped screaming.
Ten seconds later, Cimil stopped moving.
Simon let his head drop, so his forehead touched Cimil's, a picture of false intimacy. His breathing was heavy and ragged, and tears streamed down his face. He kept his hands firm on the dead man's neck for a long time.
Finally, he lifted his head, still gripped by the combination of sadness and rage. He had an idea, a way to make his revenge complete. He reached under the altar and fumbled around until his fingers closed around a sharp knife. The black obsidian blade shone in the dying sunlight as he held it over the left side of Cimil's chest.
Cimil had been so wrong about Simon's feelings for Itzel. He'd loved the girl like no other before or after. When Cimil had invited him to witness a sacred ritual, he'd had no idea he was about to see Itzal beheaded as an offering to the gods. He'd tried to stop it, but half a dozen men had held him back. Afterwards, he'd fled on foot into the jungle.
He'd made his way to the embassy in Guatemala City and told his tale to some junior diplomat. The man had informed him that it was an internal matter for the Guatemalans to handle. The State Department would not get involved. Frustrated and angry, he'd flown home.
&
nbsp; Now he'd taken Cimil's life in exchange. He only had one thing left to do.
Take the Guatemalan's heart.
His hand shook as the the dark blade scraped near Cimil's left nipple. He needed to do this. But he let the blade fall and clatter to the ground. Killing was one thing, but he couldn't tear out a man's heart.
He stood up, legs exhausted from the adrenaline. He shuffled back toward the steps, sat down at the top, and buried his head in his hands.
Andrea found him there fifteen minutes later.
“You okay?”
Andrea stood on the top step of the pyramid. The shadows of dusk now joined with the fog to reduce visibility to only a few feet. Simon lifted his chin and looked at her with heavy eyelids. He slowly turned his head and motioned in the direction of the altar slab. His voice trembled when he spoke.
“Cimil's dead. I got my revenge after all these years. It feels …” He shook his head. “Like a fucking waste. I just killed the best lead we had for stopping the virus.”
He sighed and dropped his head again. Out of the corner of one eye, he saw Andrea walk towards the center of the pyramid. She stopped next to the body, hands on her hips. By the time she returned, he'd gotten to his feet, and the difference between his position on the top step and hers on the platform evened their heights.
She cracked a smile. “You strangled him with your hands. Not an easy task, especially against someone who's trained and fighting back. What the hell happened between you two?”
“Umm, well, he …” Simon stopped as he felt the familiar images flood his brain. This time, though, they weren't accompanied by the same level of anguish. Maybe revenge was good for something. Then he remembered the virus.
“Look, it doesn't matter now. Cimil was the only one who knew where the virus came from.”
“That's where you're wrong.”
His eyes narrowed, and he felt the first traces of energy return to his body.
“What do you mean?”
“Check your cell phone. I've been trying to call you for ten minutes.”
Simon reached into a pocket in his fatigue pants and pulled out his phone. Four missed calls. He shrugged, already feeling guilty enough. Andrea often wore a small smile, but her face didn't give much away. He couldn't tell if she looked angry or if she was pulling his leg.
Now she chuckled. “I'm not gonna pretend you didn't screw up. But even though I don't know the deal with you and Cimil, I can understand taking revenge. How about this, I'll tell you a story and we'll see if you can guess who it's about?
“Just before I came to look for you, we got a call from Braxton. You know that mysterious guy Cimil told us about in the Amazon? It's actually a whole group down there, and they have a spy inside the Agency.”
“A spy? So we've been betrayed by more than just Keane? Jesus, that explains some things. Does Braxton know who it is?”
“I'm getting to that. Turns out there's a hidden civilization deep in the jungle in Brazil, living underground in a series of tunnels and caves. It was them pulling the strings all along with the nukes and the virus. They even even met with the Georgians.”
Simon clicked his tongue in disbelief. “Come on, a lost Amazon tribe? That idea was old thirty years ago.”
“Not a tribe, Simon, a civilization. With technology and a very advanced society. They managed to create a virus that could kill most of the world's population.”
“All right, all right. Who is this traitor?”
“The guy has been in place for a long time, waiting for this moment. His job was to provide as much info as possible about the American response to the nukes and the virus. They had to have been planning this since before I was born.”
Her last words triggered the stirrings of an idea. He couldn't quite catch it, though.
“So how did Braxton find him?”
“He didn't. The guy came to Braxton. I guess the bomb in Montana surprised this group in Brazil. They had a big compound out there. With all the militias, no one asks too many questions about people who keep to themselves.
“Anyway, the blast took 'em out. Our spy apparently knew it was coming beforehand but didn't manage to get word to his people. He was feeling the heat for that, and he decided his best option was to come clean with with Braxton.”
The idea hovering in the background crashed into his thoughts. “Wait a minute. In order to have known that Cimil intended to take out Montana, he would have had to do more than just spy on the Agency. He would have had to be monitoring—”
Andrea finished his sentence. “Cimil. That's right. Anyway, this guy knows exactly where we have to go in the Amazon. I'm guessing you've figured out by now who he is.”
Simon nodded, his mouth a grim line. What little light had remained a few minutes earlier was gone, and he could only make out the bare outlines of Andrea's face.
“Yeah, I know who it is. No one else it could be. Jaime Cortez.”
CHAPTER FORTY
December 15, 2012: Los Angeles
Enid Stanley napped for fifteen minutes. She woke up with a cure for the virus.
A theory anyway, one she wanted to share right away. She all but ran the fifty feet down to a station where one of the doctors bent over a chart, almost asleep at his post.
“Doctor Jansen, I think I have a cure.”
The man barely looked up, his lips moving as he perused the words on the paper. Stanley leaned closer and raised her voice.
“I said, I think I have a cure.”
His head drifted up. “A cure? Come on, I'm way too tired for jokes.”
“I'm serious. We need to get the senior medical staff together right now.”
His eyes bore into hers as if probing for a weakness. “Okay, then, tell me what it is.”
“Only if you promise to get on the phone right afterwards and help me organize a meeting, even if you think I'm off-base. Otherwise I'll go bother someone else.”
He didn't say anything, just stared. Finally, he sighed.
“I guess they call you House for a reason. Fine, let's get a few people together and hear what you have to say.”
Fifteen minutes later, half a dozen doctors and the most senior nurse sat in a cramped room hardly larger than a closet. In some hospitals, in some situations, they might have resented Stanley's demanding a meeting. But these doctors knew her knack for coming up with solutions. More importantly, they had never faced a crisis like this one.
“Okay, House, please tell me you're gonna save our asses again. If you do, it'll be a lot more than just us who will owe you big.”
Stanley should have felt nervous, but she was too excited. She always got like this when she tracked down the solution to a problem. She didn't know for sure she had the answer, but something in her gut told her she was onto something.
“Okay, here's the deal. We had a patient who appears to have recovered, Roxanne Manning. I assume none of you have anyone else like that?”
Heads shook and several voices mumbled “No.”
“There's nothing in her chart that jumped out at me to explain it. But there is one thing different about her. Terry accidentally left a heater right next to her head, and Roxanne spiked a fever. Almost a hundred and three. I didn't think much of it, but something nagged at me when I lay down. I woke up thinking of malaria and syphilis.”
Only a second passed before the meaning became clear to her associates. The Chief nodded several times with an energy absent for the past few days. “You're talking about hyperthermia. That stuff what's his name, the doctor in Austria, came up with in the twenties. He cured syphilis, which is uniformly fatal, by introducing malaria, which is almost always survivable. And the reason it worked is that the fever from the malaria killed the syphilis. Didn't he discover it by accident or something?”
She grinned, feeling a rush at how quickly her theory had gained favor. Forget roller-coasters or scary movies, this is what set her adrenals pumping.
“Yeah, he was trying to cure mental ill
ness with it at first. He called it pyrotherapy. A total failure until he recognized what he had. We use penicillin now, but they didn't have it then.”
Someone else said, “Don't some people claim it cures cancer?”
Stanley's eyebrows raised.
“Well, they claim the high fever cures cancer, but you have to do it repeatedly over months or even years. And there's no proof it works. It doesn't matter in this case, 'cause from what I could tell, a few hours of exposure killed the bug.”
The Chief was smiling now as well.
“Jesus, I hope this is it. I'm thinking we use BCG to induce the fever. And we need some test subjects. Make sense to all of you?”
More heads nodded. Stanley could tell everyone felt enough fear of the virus to avoid some of the normal ego-driven objections. BCG was short for bacille Calmette-Guérin, and it was used as a vaccine for tuberculosis in much of the third world and some more developed countries. They didn't have a huge supply available, but it was their best immediate option. They could worry about the larger picture after they determined that their basic concept would work.
“You can start by testing it on me.” The words came from the head nurse. She held out her hands and displayed the sores on her back.
“I have them in my mouth, too.”
Stanley felt a combination of fear and relief. Fear because the possibility of contracting the virus herself now seemed more real. Relief because they might have a solution. She embraced both feelings. That's why she did this work after all, to help people who were suffering. She couldn't pretend it didn't impact her.
“Chief, I think we should also identify everyone who we think is likely to die in the next six hours. By now, we've seen the symptoms enough that we can get a good handle on it. We need to give them the vaccine right away. It's sorta risky, but watching 'em die when we have this good a prospect isn't an option.”
Most of the doctors looked at the floor. Stanley knew this was the toughest situation any of them had ever faced. The chief stood up.
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