The Last Oracle: A Sigma Force Novel

by James Rollins

  As Konstantin handed out the quilts, he pointed to Monk’s discarded pack. Monk glanced over. The boy indicated his radiation monitor. No longer white, it now had a pink hue to it.

  “Radiation,” Monk mumbled.

  Konstantin nodded. “The processing plant that poisoned Lake Karachay.” He waved toward the northeast. “It also slowly leaked down into the ground.”

  Contaminating the groundwater, Monk realized. And where did all the runoff from the local mountains end up? Monk stared toward the shuttered window, picturing the bog outside.

  He shook his head.

  And he thought all he had to worry about was man-eating tigers.

  7:04 P.M.

  Pyotr sat naked, huddled in a thick quilt before the fire. Their shoes were lined up on the hearth, and their clothes hung out to dry on fishing line. The line was so thin it was as if his pants and shirt were floating in the air.

  He enjoyed the flickering flames as they danced and crackled, but he didn’t like the smoke. It swirled up into the chimney as if it were something alive, born out of the fire.

  He shivered and shifted on his backside closer to the bright flames.

  The matron at the school used to tell them stories of the witch Baba Yaga, how she lived in a dark forest in a log cabin that moved around on chicken legs and would hunt down children to eat. Pyotr pictured the stilts he’d seen outside that held up their cabin. What if this was the witch’s cabin, hiding its claws deep beneath the ground?

  He eyed the smoke more suspiciously.

  And didn’t the witch have invisible servants to help her?

  He searched around for them. He didn’t see anything move on its own. But then again, the flames danced shadows everywhere, so it was hard to tell.

  He moved closer again to the warmth of the flames. Still, he kept his eyes on the swirling curls of smoke.

  He rocked slightly in place to reassure himself. Marta came up and slid next to him, curling around him. He leaned into her. A strong arm pulled him even closer.

  Do not fear.

  But he did fear. He felt it itching over the inside of his skull like a thousand spiders. He watched the smoke, knowing that was where the danger truly lay as it swept up the chimney, possibly warning Baba Yaga that there were children in her house.

  Pyotr’s heart thudded faster.

  The witch was coming.

  He knew it.

  His eyes widened upon the smoke. He searched for the danger.

  Marta hoo-hoo-ed in his ear, reassuring him, but it did no good. The witch was coming to eat them. They were in danger. Children in danger. The fire popped, scaring him into a small jump. Then he knew.

  Not children.

  But child.

  And not them.

  But another.

  Pyotr stared hard at the smoke, pushing through the darkness to the truth. As the smoke curled to the sky, he saw who was in danger.

  It was his sister.

  Sasha.

  11:07 A.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  “D.I.C.,” Lisa explained at the bedside of the girl.

  Kat struggled to understand. She stood with her arms tight to her belly as she stared down at the tiny slip of a girl, so thin-limbed in her hospital gown, lost amid the sheets and pillows of the railed bed. Wires trailed from under her sheets to a bank of equipment against one wall, monitoring blood pressure and heart rate. An intravenous line dripped a slurry of saline and medicines. Still, over the past hours, her pale skin had grown more ashen, her lips a hint of blue.

  “Disseminated intravascular coagulation,” Lisa translated, though she might as well have been speaking Latin.

  Monk, with his medical training, would have known what she was talking about. Kat shook this last thought out of her head, still rebounding from seeing the child’s picture. She had plainly drawn it for Kat. They had formed a bond. Kat had seen it in the child’s eyes when she read to her. Mostly the girl’s manner was flat and affected, but occasionally she would turn those small eyes up at Kat. Something shone there, a mix of trust and almost recognition. It had melted Kat’s heart. With a new baby herself, she knew her maternal instincts and hormones were running strong, her emotions raw with the recent loss of her husband.

  “What does that mean?” Painter asked Lisa.

  He stood on the opposite side of the bed beside Lisa. He had just returned after taking a call from Gray in India. His team had been attacked and was now headed to the northern regions. Painter was already investigating who had orchestrated the ambush—the assassination attempt on the professor could not have been coincidence, someone knew Gray had been flying out there. Despite needing to follow up on the mystery, the director had taken time to come down here to listen to Lisa’s report.

  Dr. Cummings had finished a slew of blood tests.

  Before Painter’s question could be answered, Dr. Sean McKnight entered the room. He had taken off his suit coat and tie. He had his sleeves rolled to the elbow. He had gone to make some calls following Gray’s debriefing. Painter turned to him, an eyebrow raised in question, but Sean just waved for Lisa to continue. He sank into a bedside chair. He had kept a vigil there for the past hour. Even now he rested a hand on the bedsheet. Kat and Sean had talked for a long while. He had two grandchildren.

  Lisa cleared her throat. “D.I.C. is a pathological process where the body’s blood begins to form tiny clots throughout all systems. It depletes the body’s clotting factors and leads contrarily to internal bleeding. The causes are varied, but the condition arises usually secondary to a primary illness. Snake bites, cancers, major burns, shock. But one of the most common reasons is meningitis. Usually a septic inflammation of the brain. Which considering the fever and…”

  Lisa waved to the device attached to the side of the child’s skull. Her lips thinned with worry. “All tests confirm the diagnosis. Decreased platelets, elevated FDPs, prolonged bleeding times. I’m certain of the diagnosis. I have her on platelets, and I’m transfusing her with antithrombin and drotrecogin alfa. It should help stabilize her for the moment, but the ultimate cure is to treat the primary disease that triggered the D.I.C. And that remains unknown. She’s not septic. Her blood and CSF cultures are all negative. Might be viral, but I’m thinking something else is going on, something we’re in the dark about, something tied to the implant.”

  Kat took a deep, shuddering breath. “And without knowing that…”

  Lisa crossed her own arms to match Kat’s pose. “She’s failing. I’ve slowed her decline, but we must know more. The initials—D.I.C.—have another connotation among medical professionals. They stand for Death Is Coming.”

  Kat turned to Painter. “We must do something.”

  He nodded and glanced to Sean. “We have no choice. We need answers. Maybe with time we could discern the pathology here, but there are certain individuals who know more, who are current with this biotechnology and know specifically what was done to this girl.”

  Sean sighed. “We’ll have to tread carefully.”

  Kat sensed a discussion had already occurred between Sean and Painter. “What are you planning?”

  “If we’re going to save this child”—Painter stared at the fragile girl—“we’re going to have to get in bed with the enemy.”

  11:38 P.M.

  Trent McBride strode down the long deserted hallway. This section of Walter Reed was due for renovation. Hospital rooms to either side were in shambles, walls moldy, plaster cracked, but his goal was the mental ward lockdown in back. Here the walls were cement block, the windows barred, the doors steel with tiny grated cutouts.

  Trent crossed to the last cell. A guard stood outside the door. They weren’t taking any chances. The guard stepped to the side and offered a jangling set of keys to Trent.

  He took them and checked through the small window in the door. Yuri lay sprawled fully dressed in the bed. Trent unlocked the door, and Yuri sat up. For an old man, he was wiry and spry, plainly he had been juicing up on a
strong cocktail of androgens and other anti-aging hormones. How those Russians loved their performance-enhancing drugs.

  He swung the door wide. “Time to go to work, Yuri.”

  The man stood up, his eyes flashing. “Sasha?”

  “We shall see.”

  Yuri crossed to the door. Trent didn’t like the resolute cast to the man’s expression and grew suddenly suspicious. Rather than beaten, Yuri had an edge of steel to him, like a sword’s blade pounded and folded to a finer edge. Maybe all the old man’s strength didn’t just come from injections into his ass cheeks.

  But resolute or not, Yuri was under his thumb.

  Still, Trent waved for the guard to follow with his sidearm. Trent had planned to walk Yuri back himself. Well over six feet and twice the man’s weight, Trent hadn’t been worried about needing an escort. But he did not trust the cast to Yuri’s eye.

  They headed out.

  “Where are we going?” Yuri asked.

  To put a final nail in Archibald Polk’s coffin, he answered silently. Trent had orchestrated the death of his old friend, but now he was planning on putting an end to one of Archibald’s shining successes, his brainchild, a secret organization that the man had dreamed up while serving the Jasons.

  A team of killer scientists.

  Basically Jasons with guns.

  But after murdering the professor, Trent must now destroy the man’s brainchild. For his own work to continue, Sigma must die.

  12

  September 6, 7:36 P.M.

  Punjab, India

  As the sun sank into the horizon, Gray admitted that Rosauro’s choice of vehicle proved to be a wise decision. In the passenger seat, he kept a palm pressed to the roof to keep him in his seat as their SUV bumped along a deeply rutted muddy road. They’d left the last significant town an hour ago and trekked through the rural back hills.

  Dairy farms, sugarcane fields, and mango orchards divided the rolling landscape into a patchwork. Masterson had explained that Punjab was India’s abundant breadbasket, the Granary of India, as he described it, producing a majority of its wheat, millet, and rice.

  “And someone has to work all these fields,” Masterson had said as he gave them directions from the backseat.

  Kowalski and Elizabeth shared the row with him. Behind them, Luca sat in the rear, polishing his daggers.

  “Take that next left track,” Masterson ordered.

  Rosauro hauled on the wheel, and the SUV splashed through a watery ditch, almost a creek. Small downpours had dumped on them throughout the trip up here. Punjab was Persian for “land of five rivers,” which was one of the reasons it was India’s major agricultural state.

  Gray checked the twilight skies as night approached. Clouds rolled low. They’d have more rain before the night was over.

  “Up ahead,” Masterson said. “Over that next hill.”

  The vehicle slogged up the slope, churning mud. At the top of the rise, a small bowl-shaped valley opened, ringed by hills. A dark village lay at the bottom, a densely packed mix of stone homes and mud huts with palm-thatch roofs. A couple of fires glowed at the edge of the town, stirred by a few men standing around with long poles. Burning garbage. A bullock cart stood beside one fire, stacked high with refuse. The single horned bull stirred at the approach of their vehicle down the hill.

  “The other side of India,” Masterson said. “Over three-quarters of India’s population still live in rural areas. But here we have those who live at the bottom of the caste system. The Harijan, as Gandhi renamed them, which means ‘people of God,’ but they are mostly still derided as dalit or achuta, which roughly translates as untouchable.”

  Gray noted Luca had sheathed his daggers and turned a more attentive ear. Untouchables. These could be the same roots as his clans.

  Lit by flames, the village men gathered with scythes and poles, wary of the approaching strangers.

  “Who are these people?” Gray asked, wanting to know more about whom they faced.

  “To answer that,” Masterson said, “you have to understand India’s caste system. Legends have that all the major varnas—or classes of people—arose from one godlike being. The Branmans, which include priests and teachers, arose out of the mouth of this being. Rulers and soldiers from its arms. Merchants and traders from its thighs. The feet gave rise to laborers. Each has its own pecking order, much of it laid out in a two-thousand-year-old collection known as the Laws of Manu, which details what you can and can’t do.”

  “And these untouchables?” Gray asked, keeping an eye on the gathering men and boys.

  “The fifth varna is said not to have risen from this great being at all. They were outcasts, considered too polluted and impure to mix with regular people. People who handled animal skins, blood, excrement, even the bodies of the dead. They were shunned from higher-caste homes and temples, not allowed to eat with the same utensils. Not even their shadows were allowed to touch a higher caste’s body. And if you should break any of these rules, you could be beaten, raped, murdered.”

  Elizabeth leaned forward. “And no one stops this from happening?”

  Masterson snorted. “The Indian constitution outlaws such discrimination, but it still continues, especially in rural areas. Fifteen percent of the population still falls into the classification of untouchable. There is no escape. A child born from an achuta is forever an achuta. They remain victims of millennia-old religious laws, laws that permanently cast them as subhuman. And let’s be honest. Like I said before, someone has to work all these fields.”

  Gray pictured the vast rolling farmlands and orchards.

  Masterson continued, “The untouchables are a built-in slave class. So while there is some progress made on their behalf, mostly in the cities, the rural areas still need workers—and the caste system serves them well. Villages such as this one have been burned or destroyed because they dared to ask for better wages or working conditions. Hence the suspicion here now.”

  He nodded to the welcoming party carrying farm instruments.

  “Dear God,” Elizabeth said.

  “God has nothing to do with this,” Masterson said sourly. “It’s all about economy. Your father was a strong advocate for these people. Lately he was having more and more trouble gaining the cooperation of yogis and Brahman mystics.”

  “Because of his association with untouchables?” she asked.

  “That…and the fact that he was looking for the source of the genetic marker among the untouchable peoples. When word spread of that, many doors were slammed in his face. So much for higher enlightenment. In fact, after he disappeared, I was convinced he’d been murdered for that very reason.”

  Gray waved Rosauro to stop at the edge of the glow from the burning garbage fires. “And this village? This is where Dr. Polk was last seen?”

  Masterson nodded. “The last I heard from Archibald was an excited phone call. He’d made some discovery and was anxious to share it—then I never heard from him again. But he sometimes did that—would vanish for months at a time into the remote rural areas, going from village to village. Places that still have no name and are shunned by those of higher castes. But after a while, I began to fear the worst.”

  “And what of these people?” Gray asked. “Do we have anything to fear from them?”

  “On the contrary.” Masterson opened his car door and used his cane to push to his feet.

  Gray followed him. Other doors opened, and everyone exited. “Stay near the truck,” he warned them.

  Masterson traipsed toward the fire with Gray in tow. The professor called out in Hindi. Gray understood a few phrases and words from his own studies of Indian religion and philosophy, but not enough to follow what the man was saying. He seemed to be asking for someone, searching faces.

  The men remained a solid wall, bristling with weapons.

  The ox lowed its own complaint beside the wagon, as if sensing the tension.

  Finally Masterson stood between the two smoking pyres. The air ree
ked, smelling of fried liver and burning tires. Gray forced himself not to cover his mouth. Masterson waved back to the truck and continued to speak. Gray heard Archibald Polk’s name followed by the Hindi word betee.

  Daughter.

  All the men turned their gazes toward Elizabeth. Weapons were lowered. Chatter spread among them. Arms pointed at her. The wall of men parted in welcome. A pair of the boys, their voices raised in a happy shout, ran back down a narrow alleyway between two stone houses.

  Masterson turned to Gray. “The achuta in this area hold Archibald in high esteem. I had no doubt the presence of the respected man’s daughter would be met with hospitality. We have nothing to fear from these people.”

  “Except for dysentery,” Kowalski said as he reached them with the others.

  Elizabeth elbowed him in the ribs.

  Gray led them into the village, sensing they had more to worry about than just upset bowels.

  8:02 P.M.

  Elizabeth crossed between the two fires. Beyond their glow, the village roused. Someone started to clank loudly on a makeshift drum. A woman appeared, her face half covered in a sari. She motioned them toward the village center.

  As she turned, Elizabeth caught a glimpse of scarred, sagging flesh, hidden under the thin veil. Masterson noted Elizabeth’s attention.

  She leaned toward him. “What happened to her?”

  The professor answered softly and nodded to the woman. “Your father mentioned her. Her son was caught fishing in a pond of a higher-caste village. She went to scold him off, but they were caught. The villagers beat the child and poured acid on the woman’s face. She lost an eye and half her face.”

  Elizabeth’s body went cold. “How awful.”

  “And she considers herself lucky. Because they didn’t rape her, too.”

  Shocked, Elizabeth followed the woman, galled by such an atrocity, but at the same time, awed by her strength to survive and persevere.