The Seventh Plague

by James Rollins

  11:50 P.M.

  “Go, go, go!” Gray hollered, doing his best to empty the canyon, moving everyone over the wall and into the shelter of the dark fissure.

  Seichan had radioed two minutes ago, panicked and breathless.

  “Get out of there now!”

  The call had come as he regrouped with the others in the main canyon. With helmet lamps blazing, everyone now worked to get the remaining herd moving in the same direction. Seichan sought to help by sending a drone she had commandeered over the valley, both to confirm the threat and to hassle the bigger bird with her smaller one.

  Seichan radioed again, her voice in his ear. “Cessna closing on your position. Hellfires are hot.”

  “You gotta buy us more time,” he urged.

  “Working on that.”

  Kowalski fired his shotgun into the air to urge the last few stragglers in the right direction. “Move your wrinkly asses!”

  Noah took a gentler approach with a pair of elderly elephants, touching and encouraging them to follow, leaving Roho to do his best imitation of a sheepdog.

  Ahead, Derek and Jane manned the wall, waving fronds, compelling the herd over the ramp.

  Luckily the earlier stampede had already cleared a number of head, but there remained one stubborn holdout.

  Gray stared across the dark canyon. The shadowy figure of the large bull stood vigil by the back wall, having appeared from the crack ten minutes ago, indicating the great matriarch had passed. A handful of the adults still in the canyon had wandered over, entwining trunks, sharing their grief.

  The bull now refused to budge.

  Jane suddenly called from the rampart, pointing, “A calf! Over in the grass!”

  They all turned, but from their low vantage, they couldn’t spot the youngster.

  Kowalski headed over, running hard. “Where?” he hollered back.

  Jane yelled directions, guiding him.

  Then Seichan was in his ear again, her voice rife with panic. “Gray! Drone’s damaged. Cessna’s almost on top of you.”

  Gray looked up, hearing a faint rumble of an engine.

  Not good.

  He cupped a hand around his mouth. “Kowalski, get back here!” He waved to everyone else. “Over the wall. Get as far back as you can!”

  “I see the tyke!” Kowalski ran faster.

  He ducked into the grass, vanishing for a breath, then hauled back up, carrying the baby elephant in his arms. It had to weigh two hundred pounds. He ran with it in his arms. The baby wailed plaintively.

  He’ll never make it.

  Confirmation appeared in the sky, sweeping past the stars. A small plane banked on a wing, preparing for a bombing run over the canyons.

  Then came the sound of thunder.

  From the back of the canyon, the bull came charging forward—whether stirred by the calf’s trumpet of fear or out of some altruistic recognition that Kowalski was struggling. The bull reached the big man, plucked the child from his arms, and continued toward the wall.

  Unburdened, Kowalski put his head down and ran.

  Past him, the Cessna dropped over the smaller canyon. Fire shot from under one wing. The missile screamed, then a deafening blast shook the ground. Flame and smoke shot up, spiraling for a breath, before collapsing into a dark pall.

  The bull reached the ramp and charged over the ancient dike.

  Kowalski followed, and Gray ran with him. They cleared the wall as the world exploded again behind them. The concussive force channeled up the chute and sent both men flying and rolling across the ground, nearly under the bull’s trampling legs.

  Once they came to a stop, Kowalski stayed on his back. “Remind me to listen to you next time.”

  Gray stood up with a groan. The others joined them, and together the group hobbled back over to the wall and climbed to its top.

  Off to the left, a loud, splintering crash sounded, coming from the jungle on top of the canyon wall on that side. A moment later, an oily black cloud of smoke rose against the stars.

  Seichan whispered in his ear. “Gray?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good. Just wanted to let you know I got the drone working again.”

  He stared toward the column of smoke, knowing it must be the Cessna, brought down by Seichan. “Better late than never, I suppose.”

  Jane and Derek joined him, both looking forlornly across the ruins of the valley. The back half was rubble and smoke. As they watched, more of the canyon wall to the right collapsed, further burying the former grotto.

  “It’s all gone,” Jane said. “Now we’ll never find the cure.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gray murmured.

  Derek gave him a hard look. “It bloody well matters to me. I took a header into that pond.”

  “I just meant that the cure was never here . . . at least not for us.”

  Neither of them looked any happier with this news.

  Gray sought to reassure them. “I know where the cure is.”

  “What?” Jane gasped. “Where?”

  Gray turned and headed away. “Right back where we started.”

  28

  June 18, 10:23 A.M. BST

  Mill Hill, England

  Two weeks later, Gray stood at the window overlooking a small surgical suite at the Francis Crick Institute, outside London. He stared down at the draped figure on the table of the sealed room.

  We all owe you a great debt.

  Finally cleared medically after a battery of testing, Gray was scheduled to return to the States tomorrow. And while Seichan and Kowalski also passed their tests and would be on the same flight, neither of them had any interest in joining him here. As Kowalski had said, I’ve had my fill of mummies.

  Gray smiled, doubting the man realized how apt his words were in regards to this situation. He pictured the macabre dead faces found inscribed inside the stone stomach of the buried goddess.

  That had been one of the more obvious clues. He even remembered thinking at the time: Everything here is a lesson.

  And it had been, but not the only one on this journey.

  He pictured the old matriarch taking Jane by the hand and sharing her knowledge, teaching her like a child. There truly was no cure to be found in those canyons.

  Only another lesson to be learned.

  What Jane had been shown—what they’d all been taught—was a recipe for making the cure, not the cure itself.

  The door opened behind him, and two familiar faces who were fighting the pandemic came to join him, to honor the man while they had this last moment.

  Monk smiled and gave him a bear hug, while Dr. Ileara Kano simply shook his hand.

  Monk looked into the next room, his face lined by exhaustion. “Seems we’ve come full circle, you and I. From one mummy to another.”

  That was certainly true.

  In another wing of this very same medical complex, Professor McCabe’s mummified body had been destroyed in an arson attack. Gray remembered standing on the street outside, learning for the first time about this strange microbial disease.

  Full circle indeed.

  Only it wasn’t Professor McCabe on the table this time.

  Ileara gazed sadly at the figure draped out there. “His work is done,” she said. “He’s scheduled to be reinterred at Westminster Abbey tomorrow morning.”

  Monk attempted a British accent—and failed. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”

  Gray cocked an eyebrow. “Exhume, you mean.”

  “Good one.” He jabbed his elbow into Gray. “I’m going to use that at the next meeting.”

  “Feel free.”

  Shortly after Gray’s team had arrived from Rwanda, David Livingstone’s body had been disinterred from his crypt at Westminster Abbey, where he had lain undisturbed for more than a century. The poor man’s remains had had so many tissue samples collected that Gray was surprised there was still anything left under the drape.

  Still, all that was truly important was hidden in his
skull.

  The cure.

  Monk frowned at the mystery before him. “I’ve heard it in bits and pieces,” he said, “but never the whole story.”

  Knowing his friend wanted him to fill in those blanks, Gray turned to him. “Where do you want me to start?”

  “How about with Moses.”

  Gray smiled and sighed. “If you really want to understand, we may have to start even earlier. Back to when a thirsty group of elephants discovered a challenging water source, one toxic to most life.”

  He remembered Noah’s admiration for the great beasts. “Being such profound problem solvers, they learned a method to drink it safely. How this accommodation came about we may never know, but I suspect it had something to do with the respect they had for their ancestor’s bones.”

  Ileara nodded. “Nature is full of examples of these odd biological relationships. Sometimes we never know how they truly formed and lump the explanation into the category: Life finds a way.”

  Gray rubbed his chin. “Regardless, the elephants eventually found a method. They learned to store their remains under piles of branches from the Mobola plum tree, in order for the bark’s tannins to effect a chemical transformation in the dead body, turning what was toxic to curative.”

  “We’ve confirmed this in the lab,” Ileara added. “After someone dies, the microbe goes into a dormant stage, as it’s no longer being fed electricity from a living brain. It is only then that the microbe becomes sensitive to the bark’s tannin. A chemical in the tannin basically turns off a handful of genes, making the microbe nontoxic, but better yet, if this nontoxic microbe runs into its toxic cousin in living tissue, it neutralizes it there, too.”

  “The cure,” Gray said.

  Monk scratched his head. “So the recipe for making the cure is to let an infected body mummify under the effects of that bark’s tannin, then wait a year or two and harvest the transformed good version.”

  Gray pictured the mother elephant cracking the skull of the tannin-soaked remains of an ancestor and showing her child how to chew it, to extract the curative version of the microbe.

  “But this method is species specific,” Gray stressed. “It’s why the elephant bones are useless to us as a cure. We have to do it to ourselves. Elephant bones for elephant bones.”

  Monk grimaced. “And human for human.”

  “And skulls work best,” Ileara added. “As that’s where you’ll find most of the microbes. Of course, now with modern methods we can simply culture the cure, but back then that was the only way of getting it done.”

  Gray knew the labs at Francis Crick had been doing just that, using samples of the curative microbe found in Livingstone’s skull.

  “So when do we get to Moses?” Monk asked.

  Gray checked his watch, happy to skip ahead. “The plagues. Yes. That part of the story starts when a spectacularly wet season—possibly due to atmospheric changes from a volcanic eruption—flooded the elephant’s source and spread the organism up the Nile Valley, triggering the chain reaction of biblical plagues. After that, a group of Egyptian explorers went looking for the source and discovered the elephants. Shocked that the beasts could safely drink the water, they studied their behavior and learned how to make the cure.”

  Gray recalled Noah’s story of the Kenyan tribesmen who had learned from elephants how to induce labor by chewing on leaves. He gave a small shake of his head at both man’s ingenuity and nature’s resilience.

  Life finds a way.

  He continued, sensing the press of time. “The explorers returned north with this cure, where this knowledge was preserved by a sect that worshipped a feminine version of Tutu, the god of sleep and dreams.”

  “Why feminine?” Monk asked.

  “I think because the original explorer who discovered the cure was possibly a woman, maybe a Hebrew scholar who came with a lion. At least that’s who I think led the Egyptian explorers, from the way the old matriarch reacted to Jane and Roho. Or it could be a female goddess because this microbe causes genetic damage to male offspring of those afflicted.” Gray shrugged. “Either way, I’m guessing they picked a god of dreams because of the strange hallucinations this microbe triggers in the brain.”

  Gray decided to skip over his theories about how this microbe might be able to record strong memories and repeat them. Instead, he continued with its historical trail.

  “During a tumultuous time of war in Egypt around 1300 BC, over a century after the plagues, the sect feared this knowledge could be lost, so they built the tomb to their goddess to serve two purposes. They first carved lessons into the tomb to record the recipe, then left a sample of it, a mummified and preserved body holding the cure.”

  “Where it was buried for millennia,” Monk said.

  “But nothing stays buried forever, and no secret is perfectly kept. Some locals knew about the tomb—possibly the descendants of the original Nubian servants who helped the sect, passing their secret from generation to generation. Until eventually a British explorer came through looking for the source of the Nile, a man whom the natives came to revere.”

  Gray stared over at the draped body, knowing how much good David Livingstone had done during his time in Africa, both helping tribes and fighting the slave trade across the continent.

  “To honor him, they revealed all of this to Livingstone, even gifting him with artifacts. Afterward, perhaps wanting to preserve this knowledge himself, yet keep it secret, he locked the mystery away in coded messages to his friend Stanley. And upon his death—either with his consent or as part of a tribal ritual—his body was transformed into the same vessel as the enthroned woman. When his body arrived in London, it was found to be mummified, wrapped in a coffin made of Mobola plum.”

  Ileara gave a sad shake of her head. “Then late in the nineteenth century, somebody had to go and open one of Livingstone’s artifacts, unleashing the plague into the British Museum.”

  Gray checked his watch again.

  I’m late.

  He faced Monk. “That’s right, but Painter and Kat know more about that part of the story than I do, involving Tesla, Twain, and Stanley. So you might want to ask your wife about those details. Or Painter. I heard he’s out of quarantine.” He rubbed his hands. “I have to get going. I have a lunch date with a certain woman who gets very impatient if I’m not punctual. And I’d hate to tell her you were the cause.”

  Monk lifted his hands. “Hey, go, I don’t want to get on Seichan’s bad side.”

  Gray headed away, content to have acknowledged the great explorer and happy to leave him to his well-deserved rest. He wound his way through the sprawling medical complex, bustling with the ongoing battle against the plague, and out to the sunshine of a bright new morning.

  He hailed a taxi and gave the driver the directions Seichan had left him. She had been very mysterious about this lunch, which, considering the woman, was a tad worrisome.

  When the cab pulled up to the curb, there was a large crowd queued up outside. He climbed out, shading his eyes. Where was—

  A hand grabbed his elbow, fingers digging deep. “You’re late.”

  “Monk can be a bit gabby.”

  Seichan drew him through the crowd and around the corner. He gaped at what loomed ahead. It was the London Eye, a giant Ferris wheel towering over the Thames, each car a large clear spherical compartment able to hold a couple dozen riders.

  She dragged him to the front of the line. “Do you know how much it cost to hold this up? Why do you think I said be on time?”

  “What’re we—?”

  “Shut up.”

  She dragged him up the ramp to a waiting car of the great wheel. Inside, a private table had been set up with fine linens and crystal stemware. On a neighboring serving cart, domed silver cloches hid culinary mysteries, while a bottle of champagne chilled in an ice bucket.

  She pushed him inside and waved to the waiting operator.

  Her face flushed, she turned to Gray. “You are a hard man
to surprise.”

  He smiled. “A trait that’s kept me alive.”

  As the car began to move, she stepped forward and slipped her arms around him. “Then I’ll have to try harder tonight.”

  “I’m certainly up for the challenge.”

  “You’d better be.”

  She drew him to the table, where a small bench on one side faced the Thames. They settled together before considering the food. The car slowly arced up, offering an ever-widening view of the sprawling city of London.

  “Why all this fuss? I’d be happy with a burger and a beer.” He scooted her closer. “It’s the company that matters.”

  “I thought we deserved this.”

  “Where did you get the idea to—?” He looked harder at her. “You stole this from when Derek and Jane rode that Ferris wheel in Khartoum.”

  She smiled. “You truly don’t let anything get past you.” She pulled him closer this time. “Who says those two should get all the fun?”

  He sighed, realizing how few moments the two of them got like this. He suspected that might be part of the intent here, one not purposefully contrived by Seichan, but still there, hanging in the air between them like an unspoken question. Did they dare recognize the forces that kept them from more moments like this—and did they dare shed them?

  With no answer, they both remained silent, having to find contentment in this moment.

  Seichan stirred, turning slightly toward him. “I heard from Kat earlier. She thought I should know.”

  “What?”

  Seichan gazed out over the river. “Yesterday, up in Canada, at the gravesite of Anton Mikhailov, somebody left a single white rose.”

  He knew her worry. After events in Africa, the pale assassin had vanished, escaping through the forest, a woman whose name they now knew.

  Valya Mikhailov.

  Gray touched Seichan’s hand. “You can’t know for sure it was—”

  She turned her palm and wrapped her fingers around his. “The white rose had a single black petal.”

  11:38 A.M.

  “You’ve got a couple of visitors,” Kat said as she entered the room.

  Painter sat up in his hospital bed.

  Finally.