The Devil's Game (The Game Trilogy Book 2)

by Sean Chercover

  A feral dog, all ribcage and shoulder blades and hip bones, sniffed around the edges of the pit and, beginning to drool, stalked tentatively down the muddy slope to claim a place at the table. But the nearest vulture was having none of it. The vulture let out a piercing screech and launched itself at the dog, talons forward, beating its wings wildly. The dog yelped and ran away, ears down and tail between its legs. It looked back once over its shoulder with resentful eyes, then disappeared into the trees.

  Better to go hungry.

  They stood silent for a few moments, taking in the macabre scene.

  In his years traveling as a Vatican investigator, Daniel had been in war zones and refugee camps, places where ethnic cleansing had taken place, but he’d never been on scene so soon after an atrocity. He knew how to remove himself from the horror of it, how to step back and watch himself watching the horror. But directly below him there was a dead little girl lying with her head resting on a woman’s breast, their limbs intertwined, and it reminded him of the skeletal remains he’d seen in the cave in Norway. Of course, it wasn’t an embrace, it was just the way their bodies had come to rest after falling into the pit. But there was a tenderness to it that moved him just the same.

  Daniel turned away, to Kara’s glistening and troubled face as she brushed wet hair behind one ear. Still looking into the pit, she said, “After years in the ER, I thought I’d seen every savagery imaginable. Babies murdered by their mothers, women tortured by their boyfriends, stabbings, shootings, beatings . . . but nothing like this. There was no passion to this slaughter, just . . . efficiency. Brutal efficiency.” She repeated the words that had come to her in the field outside the cave in Norway: “The work of men who strive to become gods.” She looked to Daniel. “Describes this as well.”

  “Yeah.” He’d been thinking the same thing. “How long have these people been dead?”

  “In this heat, it’s hard . . .” She looked back to assess the degree of putrefaction. “One or two days, not more. That’s the top layer. There are older bodies beneath.”

  Pat had already turned to their left and was lensing the large metal Quonset hut near the river. “Look like nobody home. Stay sharp.”

  Pat took point again, gun held out in front of him, Kara about six feet behind, Daniel again covering their rear as they crossed slowly to the Quonset hut. The massive generator and air conditioners stood silent and Daniel could hear no other mechanical sounds as they approached.

  He squatted down at the metal door on the north-facing wall and examined the lock as Pat swiveled to cover the area.

  “Not so bad,” he said, plucking his soaked shirt away from his chest, drawing some air in between, then wiping the sweat out of his eyes.

  He tucked the pistol behind his belt in the small of his back, and dug a black leather lock pick case from his leg pocket. He selected a couple picks—a long hook and a jag snake—and a tension tool, and he went to work.

  It took almost two minutes.

  It seemed much longer.

  When the last tumbler clicked home, Daniel turned the knob and opened the door an inch. He put his ear to the opening and listened hard.

  Nothing.

  He stepped inside.

  37: SPLITTING THE ATOM

  It was cooler inside the Quonset hut, somewhere in the mid-nineties. Daniel wiped sweat out of his eyes again and searched the wall beside the door. He found the light switch and flipped it up, hoping there was enough solar power stored in the battery array to run the interior LED lighting system.

  There was.

  It was a medical facility. Evenly spaced rows of hospital beds separated by curtains hanging from stainless-steel rods. Carts with monitors, trolleys full of bedpans, a hamper overflowing with white lab coats . . .

  The place smelled antiseptic. Daniel counted the beds as they walked deeper into the facility. He stopped counting at fifty.

  Pat waved him over to one of the beds. “Look at this.”

  Hanging from the chrome rails of the bed were wide leather restraints, just like those Daniel had seen on the soldier in West Virginia. He walked down the row—every bed was fitted with restraints. And hanging above each bed was a boom microphone and a video camera.

  They’d been recording the patients. Just as they had the soldier in West Virginia.

  Daniel snatched a medical chart off the railing at the foot of a bed, handed it to Kara. “What can you tell us?”

  Worry lines deepened between Kara’s eyebrows as she read the chart, flipped the top sheet over, ran her finger down the page.

  “Daniel, this doesn’t make sense.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Give me another.”

  Pat grabbed one from another bed, handed it over. She read it.

  “Same thing. It says these people had Y. Pestis—the plague—but . . . they weren’t being given proper treatment. I mean, it’s the right medication—Cipro—but the dosage is far too low, maybe a fifth of what any qualified doctor would prescribe.”

  Dozens of them, restrained, held somewhere between life and death, allowed neither to die nor to live . . . no mercy . . . and no relief.

  Kara’s forgotten dream made terrifying sense now. Daniel said, “If you had patients with the plague and you administered just enough Cipro, could you keep them alive indefinitely, without curing them?”

  Kara nodded. “I don’t know about indefinitely, but for a while you could. It would be an incredibly cruel thing to do. Why would you?”

  “Okay,” said Daniel, “we know the man in West Virginia had the plague—a new strain—and we know he had AIT. There’s some evidence from the historical record—scant, it was pre-scientific times—but there’s evidence an ancient strain of the plague triggered AIT in a small percentage of people, maybe one or two percent. What if this new strain does as well? Whether it was genetically engineered or a natural mutation, let’s say you cultured a sample and grew it. Then you administer it to people, say, in an isolated village in Liberia, and you’d have a test group. You could learn to harness AIT.”

  “Are you saying this entire village was wiped out in some proof-of-concept experiment?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Daniel gestured to the camera hanging above the bed. “You infect the village, then record the patients to determine who has AIT. You run the recordings through software to scan for keywords and phrases, like the NSA does with our phone calls and e-mails. The few who manifest AIT stay here and are given just enough antibiotic to keep them alive and suffering, the others you take outside and dump in the pit. Jacob said this was a village of about three hundred, so maybe you get six positives, but what if you repeated the experiment on a larger scale? Imagine the flood of information you could tap into if you could give people AIT at will. Information about the future, the past, about events taking place across the world.”

  Kara’s face darkened. “You could practically control the future.”

  “Information truly is power,” said Daniel.

  “C’mere,” said Pat from the other end of the Quonset hut, “you wanna check this out.”

  It was a glass-windowed laboratory, a room about twenty feet wide, sectioned off from the main area. On a counter along the lab’s back wall were four blood spinners—centrifuges to separate plasma from blood, or various components from other solutions. Two desktop computers and two petri-dish incubators the size of small refrigerators. Beside the counter, a large steel freezer like you’d find in a restaurant kitchen.

  And hanging on the wall, dozens of gas masks.

  Gas masks.

  Daniel turned to Pat. “Descia was right.”

  “Holy shit,” said Pat.

  “Who’s Descia?” said Kara. “And what was she right about?”

  “She’s a microbiologist in London,” said Daniel. “She saw the blood work on the sol
dier in West Virginia, said this new strain of the plague was probably pneumonic.”

  Kara stared at the wall of gas masks. “So . . . they could give it to anyone. They could contaminate asthma inhalers, or—”

  “Hell,” said Pat, “they could release it into the ventilation systems of commercial aircraft. Passengers get sick, disperse at their destination and start coughing all over families and friends and coworkers. They could set off a pandemic if they wanted to.”

  Daniel said, “And look at the size of that freezer. How many test tubes could you fit in there?”

  Pat said, “Didn’t leave the generator on, so I’m betting they took the critters with them.”

  Kara was looking at something inside the lab. A small smile formed on her lips. “But they left their computers behind.” She strode to the door, Daniel and Pat close behind, opened it, and stepped inside.

  A loud metallic click echoed through the room.

  “Stop!”

  Kara froze in place and looked down at her feet. She was standing on a square steel pressure plate about three feet wide, placed so anyone entering the room had to step on it. Two wires snaked out from the corner of the steel plate and across the floor and up the leg of a desk, disappearing beneath it.

  Daniel said, “Don’t move.” He didn’t go into detail about pressure plate switches and improvised explosives. Kara knew she was standing on a bomb; any further detail was unnecessary.

  She looked up at him, her eyes wide.

  “I got this,” Pat went prone on the floor and crawled under the desk. He rolled onto his back and looked up. Then he reached into his pocket and unfolded a multitool with wire cutters built into the pliers.

  With a slight tremor in her voice, Kara said, “It can’t really be as easy as just cut the red wire, can it?” She reached a hand forward and Daniel held it in his.

  “It can,” said Pat from under the desk, “but sometimes it’s the blue wire, or the green wire, or . . .”

  “Not helpful,” said Daniel.

  “It’s okay,” said Pat, “I’ve seen this setup before. Have ya outta here in a jiffy, sister.” Pat raised the wire cutters, reached up with his other hand, then stopped. “Uh-oh.” He shimmied out from under the desk, stood up.

  “What?” said Daniel.

  “Second set of wires, runs through a seam in the wall. Hang tight, I’ll be right back.”

  Pat left the room and disappeared around the corner.

  Kara said, “Whatever happens, you and Pat have to stop these people.”

  “Don’t talk like that.” It came out sharper than he’d intended. “You good here for just a minute? I’m gonna grab the hard drives from those computers.”

  She let go of his hand. “I’m good.”

  Daniel crossed to the desktop computer on the left side of the counter. When he touched the computer tower, the shell fell away. He spun the tower around. Where the hard drive should’ve been, there was nothing but a gaping hole. He checked the other computer and found the same thing.

  Pat came back into the lab. His normal swagger was missing and his expression was grim. “Wires lead to a control box in the ceiling—can’t get to it. And there’s enough C-4 up there to bring the whole place down on our heads. It’s on a timer—could be ten seconds or ten minutes, no way to know. If I cut the wires from the pressure plate, it’ll defuse the bomb under Kara but it’ll start the timer in the ceiling. If Kara steps off the plate, she goes boom and the timer starts anyway.”

  “No choice,” said Daniel. “We cut the wire and run.”

  Kara said, “No. You have to get out of here. I meant what I said. You have to stop these people.”

  Pat said, “Kara’s right.”

  “What, are you kidding me?”

  “Use your head, brother. If we all die here, nobody stops them. And then how many people die?”

  “Fine,” said Daniel. “You go. I’ll cut the wire and run with Kara.”

  Kara said, “Daniel, no. Just go.”

  Pat said, “Dude, when Carter sent me on this mission, he made it clear my primary task, above all else, was to get you back safely. He thinks you’re essential to solving this thing. And I agree with him. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Enough.” Daniel snatched the wire cutters from Pat’s hand. He turned to face Kara. “I am not leaving you behind. End of discussion.” Then to Pat, “Just show me which wire to cut and get out of here. We’ll follow once you’re clear.”

  Pat sighed and held out his hand for the cutters. “You’d probably cut the wrong wire anyway. Screw it, we’ll run together.”

  Daniel handed them over and Pat slid back under the desk. “We go on three.”

  Daniel tightened his grip on Kara’s hand, and they looked at each other and time just about stopped, the moment stretching out…

  From under the desk, Pat said, “Everybody ready?”

  Daniel nodded to Kara.

  She nodded back. “Ready.”

  “Ready,” said Daniel.

  “One . . . two . . . THREE!”

  Daniel took off running, pulling Kara along as fast as she could go.

  Two strides outside the lab, Pat caught up, grabbing Kara’s other hand.

  Two more strides and a rapid series of explosions ran along the curved support beams above, a deafening roar, and then lighting fixtures and chunks of steel rained down, crashing to the floor all around them, smoke filling the space above their heads.

  Three more strides, dodging debris, now twelve paces to the door.

  Another series of explosions, and the entire building shuddered, right down to the foundation.

  Ten paces to the door.

  A low, agonized groan now reverberating through the metal structure as it deformed and began twisting against itself. The ground below them quaking.

  Eight paces—

  Something heavy struck Daniel on the back of his left shoulder, knocking him to the ground. Muscle memory from the dojo kicked in, and he rolled with it and came back up still running.

  Five paces to the door.

  The groaning louder, coming from everywhere at once, joined in harmony by the high screech of shearing metal.

  Three paces to the door.

  The roof of the Quonset hut gave way, curved sidewalls collapsing into each other.

  It all came thundering down behind them as they burst through the door and out into the blinding sun.

  38: LITANY AGAINST FEAR

  Sprinting through the clearing and into the trees as the world imploded behind them . . . maintaining a fast jog the quarter mile back to the Land Cruiser . . . Pat driving a bit wild for a few miles, then settling into a speed that showed at least marginal respect for the slippery red mud, once it was clear nobody was giving chase.

  For the next twenty minutes, they just sat without speaking, listening to their ears ring.

  Pat broke the silence. “Well, that happened.”

  “That it did,” said Daniel. He reached for the sat phone.

  It was then Kara told Daniel his shoulder was bleeding. He got his shirt off and she examined the cut from the backseat. She grabbed the first-aid kit and told him it wasn’t too bad. Daniel chewed a couple Percodan, and she poured alcohol over the cut and sewed it up.

  Thus repaired, Daniel called New York and got Raoul on the phone. He reported what they’d discovered and how they’d escaped, and using Kara’s estimated time of death for the bodies in the pit, he told Raoul to check all charter flights out of Monrovia for the previous twenty to forty-eight hours. Destinations, registrations, passenger manifests, whatever they could access. Raoul said Gerald would get right on it.

  Daniel said, “Dillman’s crew obviously bugged out in a hurry, took only what they needed, but they invested the time to booby-trap the place instead of just burning it to the ground
. Which means Dillman and Conrad know I’m breathing down their necks. They know if I find the place, I’ll investigate, set off the implosion. But it’s more than just a booby trap—it’s a burglar alarm. They can hack into satellite feeds just like we can. They’ll know we found it and they’ll move faster. We’re running out of time.”

  “Listen to me, Grasshopper,” said Raoul. “You’re on an adrenaline rush right now, all three of you, and you’re no good to us until you get some rest. There’s a suite waiting at the Cape—Pat knows the place. Go. Chill out. We’ll keep working it on our end, and I’ll have a plane pick you up in the morning.”

  Within five minutes of checking into the Cape Hotel, Pat was snoring on the living-room couch. He could just turn it off like that. But the adrenaline didn’t shut off completely for Daniel and Kara, so after a few hours’ nap, they both bounced back with an unnaturally perky second wind.

  Seemed a shame to waste it.

  Daniel and Kara sat across from each other at an outdoor table along the railing of the Cape Hotel’s dining-room veranda. On the other side of the railing, the beach at Mamba Point stretched out below them, waves gently lapping the shoreline, moonlight shimmering on the surface of the Atlantic under a canopy of numberless stars. Kara’s lips—painted red and wet with wine—sparkled in the candlelight.

  Such beautiful lips.

  She said, “A business consultant I once knew told me a shared brush with death can cause an intense feeling of intimacy between two people.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Daniel.

  “It can be a very difficult feeling to resist.”

  “So let’s not. Resist, that is.”

  Kara reached forward and clinked her glass against his.

  The waiter arrived and took their dinner order. This close to the ocean, they agreed it would be stupid not to have fish, and they both took the leap, ordering it with spicy garlic sauce.

  Intense flavors for an intense day.