Chapter 47

Gamay Trout awoke in darkness so deep she could have been floating in a void in the depths of space. Slowly, she became aware of her body. She was lying on a cold metal grate, her back aching from the unforgiving surface, a grid-like pattern pressed into her skin.

Her first attempt at movement failed. But with a second try, she rolled onto her right shoulder while reaching out, hoping to touch someone. Her fingers brushed a smooth wall. It felt like polished steel.

Getting to her knees, she called out for the others. Paul first and then Chantel. There was no answer. Not even an echo.

Using the wall for leverage, she managed to stand and began edging her way around the room.

“One wall,” she said, sliding along to her left. “And one corner,” she added, arriving at another barrier. Ten feet away she bumped into another right angle. Turning once more, she slid forward until she found the fourth wall. The room was a rectangle, five feet by ten feet. “And,” she said aloud, “this is a prison cell.”

Still, even cells had doors.

She began searching for a seam. She’d gone two steps before catching her shin on something in the darkness. The intensity of the pain surprised her, considering how numb she otherwise felt. She cursed the offending obstruction with a flurry of words her mother would have cringed at while her dad smiled wickedly behind his newspaper.

Reaching down she discovered a metal pipe. It jutted from the wall just below knee level. She imagined it had been put there inadvertently, but it proved to be a painful booby trap in the dark. Her shin throbbed, blood weeping from where she’d split the skin.

Continuing past the pipe, she felt along the flat surface until she discovered a tight seam that ran up to a standard six-foot, eight-inch height, then across for three feet, and then back down: a steel door with no inner handle.

She banged on it with her fist. “Is anyone out there? Can anyone hear me?”

“I can hear you,” a voice answered calmly from somewhere above her.

She looked up into the darkness, searching in vain for a speaker or intercom.

“How about turning the lights on?”

A small light came on directly above her. It was no brighter than a penlight and pointed straight down. It did little to illuminate the room—which appeared to be paneled in black anodized steel. Used to the dark, Gamay squinted against the glare.

“I’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” the voice told her.

“I don’t normally sleep in.”

“You were dosed with ketamine polychloride, a powerful sedative,” the voice told her. “It has side effects. It seems to have impacted you more strongly than the rest.”

“The rest,” she said. “You mean my husband and the crew.”

“Among others.”

There was something disconcerting about the voice. It spoke with perfect rhythm and nothing in the way of inflection or personality, but it seemed to be calculating its responses, as if it were offering subtext.

“Well, I’m awake now,” Gamay snapped. “So why don’t you let me the hell out of here?”

The sound of locks disengaging rang out. Click, click, clunk . Three of them, one after the other. The door—which seemed to be spring-loaded—popped open and slowly swung wide.

Gamay looked beyond it. A hallway beckoned. It was illuminated by two rows of the tiny penlights, and the floor was made of the same metal grating she’d been lying on in her cell, though instead of black it was a raw metallic gray.

She stepped out of the cell and eased her way down the hall, not sure what to make of the situation. “Who are you?”

“I’m your host,” the voice said.

“You sound like a computer,” she replied. “I’ve spoken to enough computers to know one when I hear it.”

“You have a logical mind,” the computer said. “Geometric in its progression.”

“I’m very organized,” Gamay insisted.

“And you’re not afraid,” the voice announced.

Gamay wasn’t sure if that was a question or a statement. But she wasn’t afraid. Years of hunting with her father and on dangerous expeditions with NUMA had taught her to control her fears, to compartmentalize them and act as if they were nonexistent. And yet this seemed different. She wasn’t blocking anything. She simply felt nothing that could be called fear. Only curiosity, irritation, and a desire to find Paul, Chantel, and the rest of the Isabella ’s crew.

“Where are my friends?” she asked. “Where’s my husband? Why did you abduct us and imprison us?”

“So many questions,” the voice replied. “Why don’t you come and see us? You can ask your questions in person.”

“You’re just going to let me walk around unguarded?”

“If we did, where would you go?”

Good question. Not only did she not know where she was, she had no idea where any of the tunnels she was passing led to.

“I assume you control all the exits,” she said. “And the vertical and the horizontal,” she added, referencing an old TV show.

“There are no exits,” the voice said. “There is no path from the labyrinth that would take you to freedom. So you might as well come our way. You’ll end up here eventually, one way or another.”

With that, a band of lighting came on in the floor. It showed a path running ahead and then diverging to the left at a fork in the corridor. “Not exactly the yellow brick road, but I’ll take it.”

She followed the lighting. Turning to the left and then left once more. She passed rows of computer servers sitting on racks. Dim blue lighting illuminated the machines as fans hummed in the background. She stepped toward them and then bumped into a pane of clear glass she hadn’t seen. She touched the glass. It was cold, almost icy.

Looking down the line, the stacks of servers seemed to go on forever. “I’d hate to see your electric bill.”

She came to a stairway. It led downward. She descended the steps one by one until she arrived on what looked and felt like a circular stage.

Windows at the front of the room showed a sweeping view of a developed island and the shimmering bay out beyond. The buildings were geometrically precise, the common areas planted with manicured grass and mowed in perfect cross-hatching like the fairways of a golf course.

Only as her eyes adjusted to the light did she notice two men standing in the room. A tall, bone-white man whom she didn’t know, and the rat bastard that had taken them hostage, sent the Isabella to the bottom of the sea while they watched, and then drugged them into unconsciousness.

The rat bastard spoke first. “Good to see you up and walking, lass. I thought we’d overdosed you.”

“Go to hell,” she said.

“Been there,” he said dryly. “Not much to see.”

“Enough,” the pale man said. “You are Gamay Trout of NUMA, are you not?”

“You know I am.”

“Your husband,” the pale man continued. “He is Paul Trout, also of NUMA.”

“What are you guys, the Census Bureau?” she asked. “Yes, Paul is my husband. We both work with NUMA. You know all this. You stole our IDs, computers, and notebooks.”

The pale man continued the questioning without responding to her outburst. “You were called to the island of Reunion to investigate the stranded whales and other sea life.”

“Yep,” she replied. “And your man over there caused a riot and blew up our lab. Should I assume that was on your orders, Mr….”

“My name is Vaughn,” the ghostly looking man said. “And I’m not interested in what happened on Reunion. I need you to think about the days and weeks before that. You were in Africa, working on a different project. An attempt to use natural, biological methods to eradicate malaria.”

Gamay’s heart rate rose. She felt the hairs stand up on the back of her neck and the first twinge of what might be fear. Why would he be asking about that? she wondered.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Your heart rate and physical responses suggest otherwise,” the computer voice announced. “Please be truthful.”

“There’s no need to deny what we already know,” Vaughn informed her. “We’ve hacked NUMA’s servers. We’ve read your reports. We know what you were working on. What we don’t have is the data you left out.”

Gamay found an edge creeping into her voice. “I didn’t leave anything out,” she insisted. “I’m very thorough.”

“You did indeed,” Vaughn countered. “Now tell us about the mosquitoes. What did you learn from them that put you in such a state of fear?”

Her heart rate jumped again. Pandora’s box. Paul had insisted it was closed and destroyed. But the information remained in one place: her mind. It was data she’d discovered and—after realizing its significance—erased and eradicated. How could these people know about it?

“Tell us,” Vaughn growled. “Or watch your husband die.”

He pointed toward the window, which revealed itself to be a high-definition screen instead of a pane of clear glass. As the screen darkened, an image appeared on it. Gamay saw Paul strapped to a hospital bed in a small operating room. His head was shaved and swabbed with reddish antiseptic. A spider-like machine was poised over him. Gamay recognized the machine as a robotic surgery system. She’d seen them in several hospitals.

“Before we put him under,” Vaughn said, “he was good enough to confirm that you had discovered something terrible in the mosquito study. A way to use the mosquitoes to spread any viral pathogen known to man. An astounding discovery, really. One that even nature has chosen to ignore. We know you tried to hide it by editing your early reports and filing incoherent data. And you’ve succeeded in keeping the most important truth from coming out, but the efforts were too late to hide the possibility of what you’d found.”

Gamay shrank back. She felt an overwhelming desire to flee. “This information will do you no good,” she said meekly. “It can only cause harm.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Vaughn said. “Now please explain the process to us. In what ways did you alter the mosquito DNA to result in such a perfect carrier?”

Gamay fluctuated between guilt and fear. Hit by a wave of anger, she lashed out. “You already have one plague spreading across the world in the locusts you’ve created. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“The God of the Bible didn’t limit Himself to just one,” Vaughn replied. “Why should I?”

Gamay struggled to think. Her mind could see no reason why anyone would be so interested in unleashing chaos on the world. Even the most ruthless dictators avoided using biological weapons for the simple reason that once they were unleashed they could not be controlled. They were doomsday weapons, the kind that circled back and destroyed those who’d created them. She held her tongue and stared blankly at her captors.

Disappointed, Vaughn turned to the screen and spoke a single word. “Begin.”

The machine sprang to life, moving closer to Paul’s head and extending three of its six arms toward him. The first one gripped Paul’s skull, holding it still. A second pulled up and out of the way as if waiting on standby. She saw a gold-plated mesh that looked vaguely electronic in its clutches. The third arm held a drill, which it moved into place above Paul’s forehead.

The bit began spinning, the hideous, high-pitched sound reminiscent of the worst dentistry nightmare Gamay could imagine. It moved downward with mechanical precision, pausing only millimeters above Paul’s head.

“Tell us what we want to know,” Vaughn demanded. “Or I will turn your husband into a thing you no longer recognize.”