This was moving way too fast. Christa knew Donohue’s type, over-confident, hero complex compulsion to save others, recovering adrenaline junkie perpetually on the edge of a relapse. She was one, too. “We don’t need a battle plan,” she said. “We need the ransom.”
“You got your sister’s findings on the poison?” Donohue asked.
She had no answer for that. “We have until six before he calls,” she said.
“Wait. Gabby’s botanical sketches,” Percival said. He flipped up the corner of the satellite photo. “From last summer’s expedition.” He gestured towards the sketches on the desk. “She left her work scattered about. That’s not like her. I thought it was because she thinks she found a new species. But even then she acted more frightened than excited. She must have left them here on purpose, for me to find.” He picked them up and searched through them. He pulled one out. “In case something went wrong.”
He handed the sketch to Christa. The plant had a central stem, with oval, pointed, deeply veined leaves, an occasional green tendril and delicate, white flowers with four petals. Most distinctive, however, was the cut-away drawing of the underside of the leaf. It was colored a deep purple. The sketch was labeled in Gabriella’s neat print. Plant X, South American adaptation of Atropa belladonna? How/When introduced? Possibly indigenous?
“Belladonna,” Christa said. She looked up from the sketch, her stomach roiling at the thought of that capful of liquid Contreras made her drink at the playground. “Belladonna is a deadly poison.”
Donohue gestured for her to hand him the sketch. She did. “Can this poison be weaponized?”
“It already has,” she said. “Macbeth used the belladonna poison. The real Macbeth, from eleventh century Scotland, not the legend from Shakespeare’s play. During a truce, he poisoned the enemy’s troops. They grew so sick that they had to retreat.”
Percival snapped up her translation of Salvatierra’s letter. “Whole villages were destroyed, every savage dead,” he read. He jabbed his finger at the words. “A mother had strangled her infant child. An old man had bashed in the heads of young women.”
“So this form of belladonna poison drives people mad,” said Donohue, “then kills them.” His face flushed with barely controlled rage. “This is the ideal weapon for a terrorist.”
“But it says in the letter that Alvaro Contreras had an elixir,” said Percival, “the antidote, presumably. He had promised to return to the village and cure them. He lied to them of course. He was a conquistador.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance. A storm cloud rolled over Gabriella’s house, pitching the library into an even thicker gloom. Christa’s stomach spasmed. Stress? If only that’s all it was. “At the playground, Contreras had a flask in his pocket. He poured me a capful of the liquid it contained.”
Percival clasped her shoulder. “You didn’t drink it, did you?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“It may have been this poison.”
“It wasn’t Scotch,” she said. She crossed to the wet bar. “Speaking of which.” She reached down the bottle that Gabby kept on hand for Dad’s rare appearances.
“How do you feel?” Donohue asked.
“Scared to death, not to use the term lightly,” she said. “Other than that, I don’t feel any reaction to the liquid at all. We’ve got to find Gabriella’s research on this new plant species, fast.”
“You need to get to a doctor,” Percival said.
“No time,” she said, “not until Lucia and Gabby are home safe.” She poured two fingers of Scotch. “Salvatierra writes that Contreras tempted him to put on the Breastplate. Stand upon this platform and call God’s light to shine upon you and you will hold the powers of the Heavens in the palm of your hand.” God’s light. The powers of the Heavens. “He’s talking about the power of life over death.”
“He’s talking crazy,” said Percival.
“Dad would figure it out,” she said, “if we could reach him. Contreras wants that Breastplate, to complete his ancestor’s mission. He wants to stand on that platform, and conquer a new world.” He wanted to redeem himself, for his family.
“A modern-day conquistador,” Donohue said.
“And look how that ended,” said Percival. “But Baltasar Contreras is only one man. He has no army at his command.”
“Forty million people were killed in the new world,” said Christa, “most of them not by an army, but diseases for which they had no defense. Smallpox, measles and bubonic plague, all easily spread. It was a deadly battle against an enemy they could not fight.”
“Because they did not know how,” Donohue said.
Christa picked up the glass of Scotch, the golden liquor swirling with the clear water. “Contreras told me that people should be afraid of something that connects all of us, every day. He used the words l’eau de vie.”
“The water of life,” Percival said.
“He used the examples of Princeton and New York City,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense. Contreras wouldn’t poison me. He’s gone through a lot of trouble to get me to track down what he needs.” She raised the glass to her lips.
Donohue knocked it away. “He didn’t give you a poison,” Donohue said. “He gave you an antidote. You’ve already been poisoned. We all have.” Donohue slammed his fist on the desk. “He’s infiltrated the cities’ water systems.”
“Contreras said the poison intensifies primitive emotions, paranoia, violence and delusions,” she said. “In one week, everyone goes stark, raving mad and murders anyone they think is out to get them.”
“Like the villagers,” Percival said. “They relied on the river systems of the rain forest. They still do.”
“That’s why Contreras is after Gabriella’s findings,” said Donohue. “She was working on the antidote. Contreras thinks that she found it. But she knew about Contreras’s scheme. She’d never let him have the antidote and she could hold the only way to stop him.”
“He doesn’t want to find Gabriella’s journal,” said Christa. “He wants to destroy it.”
“Mission priority number one,” Donohue said. “Retrieve that journal. Think like her. Where would she keep it?”
“It might be at her greenhouse,” Christa said, “where she conducts most of her research.”
Donohue checked his watch, worn military-style, clock face on the inside of his wrist. “Christa, double time it to Gabriella’s greenhouse,” Donohue said. “We’ll keep searching here. I’ll get my contact at CDC to test the water and call in my team. Hunter and I will strategize a plan to extract Lucia. If the world was created in seven days, we can certainly save it in that time.”
She didn’t point out that those were the words Contreras used only a few hours ago.
CHAPTER 25
Braydon peered out of his Impala’s window at the Hunter home. His blackberry vibrated in his pocket. Percival Hunter’s front door opened. Christa emerged, slung her pack over her shoulder, and hurried down the walk. The pack was the same one she had in Arizona, but it didn’t bulge out. She wasn’t taking the armillary sphere wherever she was going. She climbed into the Volkswagen, pulled away.
He could tail her or stick with the sphere and this new player, the ex-military guy. He pulled away from the curb and followed her. She turned the corner onto Winslow.
He glanced down at the text message. It was from Torrino. Prophet kidnapped LH. I quit.
Damn. He was too late. Contreras had his talons on the little girl. Braydon punched the contacts button for Torrino’s phone, risking that Torrino was in a position to talk, or at least answer the call. This might be one of the few times he could catch him alone.
Torrino picked up on the first ring. “What are ya doin’, calling me?” He sounded scared.
“I take it you can talk,” he said. “Where are you?”
“Question is, where am I going? Answer is, outta here.”
“Are you badly hurt?”
“Like you care. I to
ld you. The Prophet, he’s crazy. I’m not going back.”
“What do you know about the kidnapping?”
“Nothing,” he nearly shouted, then lowered his voice back to an angry whisper. “I had nothing to do with hurting no little girl. And I want nothing to do with any of it, no more.”
Christa turned onto Elm Street. Did Christa know Lucia had been kidnapped? Had they been contacted? Braydon could try forcing her to pull over, insist she tell him what they know, but she was the type to clam up rather than give in. Stubborn. A loner. Like him, damn it.
Christa’s bug turned onto Dickinson Street, headed right for the heart of Princeton campus. What was she up to? Had Contreras been bold enough to set up a ransom drop in his own back yard? He was practically a de facto landowner considering how much money his pharmaceutical corporation had donated to the University. NewWorld paid for most of the clinical trials at the University medical center. What better venue to try out new drugs? No doubt Contreras sent his “employees” there, as well, to keep track of their healthcare. Contreras liked control. Torrino was Lucia’s best chance. He couldn’t risk letting him go.
“Torrino,” he barked into the phone. “You’re at the University Medical Center, right?”
A hesitation, then, “Yeah, I’m here.”
The bug turned right on Dickinson, away from the medical center. She wasn’t headed there. Two choices, work the case from the outside or from the inside. “Just stay put, Torrino,” he said. “I’ll be there in five minutes.” He pressed end before Torrino could answer.
He floored the accelerator; inciting an angry horn blare from the car he nearly sideswiped rounding the next corner. The Volkswagen continued straight. He slid into the drop-off only spot on the curb.
The emergency room was buzzing. Patients moaned and rocked, doubling over their stomachs. The nurses’ worried chatter centered on food poisoning, but it seemed to be affecting a surprising number of people and an odd range of ages. Down the hall, a woman argued with her husband, her cheeks red, as if he had slapped her. Torrino sat in the waiting room, a Sports Illustrated that he wasn’t looking at clutched in his beefy hands. A splint was taped to his left pinky finger.
Braydon scanned the room. Although the crowd, two dozen or so, of sick people and their companions packed into the small clinic was alarming, he saw nobody from the Contreras entourage besides Torrino. Braydon nodded at him. Torrino put down the magazine, then stood and brushed by Braydon, heading for the men’s room down the hall. Braydon waited a beat and followed. In the men’s room, an acne-faced teenager in torn jeans washed his hands at the sink.
Torrino shot him one glance. The kid left without bothering to dry off. Torrino turned to Braydon. “The Prophet will kill me if he sees me talking to you,” he said. “Kill you, too.”
“He’ll do worse if we don’t stop him.”
“You don’t know how crazy he is.” He held up his injured hand. “Broke my finger for screwing up at Hunter’s house. Twisted it with a nutcracker. Enjoyed it.”
“So you screwed up the kidnapping.”
“Not the kidnapping, I’d never do that, not for nobody. The Hunter kids were in school. Contreras sent me to get Gabriella Hunter’s journal.”
“A journal? What for?”
“You think the mastermind lets minions like me in on his plans?”
Contreras was after his chief botanist’s journal. This could connect to some new miracle drug after all. “What about the artifact Christa Devlin found in Arizona, the armillary sphere?”
“Armillary what? That’s what was in Devlin’s pack?” He thrust his splinted finger at Braydon. “This is what I got for holding back with that Devlin girl and not grabbing that pack this morning. I figured she had the Turquoise, one of these sacred stones the Prophet says is going to change the world or something. You don’t know how crazy he is.”
“I do know how crazy he is,” Braydon said. The Turquoise, Gabriella Hunter’s journal, the Abraxas stones, the Lux et Veritas sword, he couldn’t see the link, but couldn’t shake the feeling that it was something utterly dangerous, potentially catastrophic. And the immediate threat was to a little girl’s life. “That’s why you’ve got to go back.”
“I’m done.”
“Lucia Hunter is just a year older than your little girl,” he said. He didn’t need to add that Torrino’s daughter would never have been born if Braydon hadn’t taken that bullet for him and killed the bad guys before they shot his pregnant wife, who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then Braydon gave him a chance to come clean. Torrino was a good man at heart, deeply damaged by a very bad upbringing.
“If I went back, I couldn’t just stand by and let him hurt her,” said Torrino. “I wouldn’t care much about blowing my cover.”
“Exactly why she needs you.”
Torrino’s phone buzzed in his sport coat pocket. He pawed it out and studied its small screen. “Text from The Prophet,” he said. “He expects me back in ten minutes.” He shoved the phone back into his pocket, leaned his hands on the edge of the counter. He assessed himself in the mirror, looking deep, frowning. “I’ll probably get myself killed.”
“You can’t,” Braydon said, allowing himself a sardonic smile. “It might get Lucia killed, too.”
CHAPTER 26
Daniel Dubler hated the heat, humidity and putrid fecundity of Gabriella’s greenhouse. It made him nauseous, the same queasiness he felt when he was forced to attend the football match-up between Princeton and Harvard in the suffocating student section. He considered congesting spores and contact sports freaks of nature whose goal was to overtake and strangle civilization.
His cell phone chimed Beethoven’s Fifth from his tweed jacket pocket. The screen read Private Caller. Those two words identified no one more acutely than Baltasar Contreras. Fine. He was ready, in a sense.
“We are out of time, Dubler,” Contreras said.
“I’ll find Gabriella’s journal for you,” he said. “Then I insist on telling Christa the truth.” That sounded lame, as his students at Washington Prep would say. Besides, he shouldn’t have to get approval to talk to the woman he loved.
“The truth,” Contreras spit it out, as if the word repulsed him, “will reveal that you are a liar. You became friends with her sister because of a lie. You became close to her because of a lie. You’ve been building towards this endgame for six months. One stupid move now and you’ll lose your queen.”
Contreras treated the Princeton community as his fiefdom. The only reason that Gabriella’s greenhouse was on the Princeton campus was because Contreras, and his generous donations to the university, waved a hand and made it so, staking out a prime if diminutive piece of property within a stone’s throw of the Merick Rehabilitation Center. The greenhouse was tucked away in a sunny, quiet corner in the back, seldom visited and often overlooked. Nobody would guess that it could change history.
Daniel, too, had been seldom visited and often overlooked, and he was primed to change history. The Breastplate would be the find of the millennium. More than that, it was a direct conduit to God. He believed that. Yes, he believed that. Those fools at the seminary. They had no idea what he was capable of, given the opportunity. “This isn’t a game,” he said. “Not since she told me about her father’s obsession with finding the Breastplate of Aaron. It took a lot for her to open up to me about that.”
“That was the moment you should have thrust forward. That was the moment to lay bare her soul. To learn what she knows. Two weeks have passed since you told me this revelation. And you have done nothing with it.”
“You mean I haven’t continued to lie to her.” He couldn’t. He couldn’t even talk to her. He pretended to have never heard of the Breastplate. Him, with his dual degrees in theology and history. Lame. She had to have seen right through it. He stopped calling and sending emails.
“Deception molds a relationship, not truth,” said Contreras. “She didn’t tell you about the Breastplate. You
manipulated it out of her. Bravo, by the way. But doesn’t it make you wonder, Daniel, what other truth she is hiding from you?”
For a man who only understood human nature through books, not actual experience, Contreras was a master. “Christa is afraid to trust anyone. With good reason, obviously.” Daniel yanked at the right-hand desk drawer. Locked.
“Or is it because she fears that someone else will find the Breastplate and wield its power? Daniel, I did not choose you by random chance to join Hunter’s Colombian expedition last summer as the historian. You are an integral part of the Lord’s divine plan. You must embrace that, not fear it.”
Daniel hadn’t been with anyone this crazy since his days at the soup kitchen, putting in service hours as stepping stones on his path to priesthood. People had looked to him to calm down the drunks and druggies, but he was much better at theology than psychology. Now, he found a new calling. Christa Devlin. He grabbed a trowel from the shelf next to the desk and wedged it into the drawer to force the lock open. “I got in tight with Gabriella over these last months, just like you wanted.”
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