Kurt stepped from the control panel. Joe and Edo stood in front of a sealed door like the ones in the lab beside the burial chamber. A keypad on the side was glowing a dull-red color.
“This is what we’re looking for,” he said.
“Now, how to get in?” Joe asked.
“I wonder,” Kurt said, stepping forward and typing in the same code he’d watched Golner use in the lab below the Pyramids.
The keypad went dark for an instant. Brad Golner’s name appeared on the display, but the door didn’t open. The keypad flashed red once again.
“It was a good try,” Joe said.
“Looks like he’s in the system but not cleared for access here,” Kurt said.
As Kurt spoke, the keypad turned green and the door hissed and opened slowly. Two men and a woman came out. They wore lab coats. The first man in the group was shorter, with bushy eyebrows that loomed over his eyeglasses like a hedgerow.
“Brad?” he asked, looking around.
“I’m afraid he’s not with us,” Kurt said.
They stared, transfixed, at Edo’s uniform, quickly grasping the answer to their own question. “You’re with the military.”
Edo replied, “Why were you hiding in there?”
They glanced around at one another. Their downtrodden look showed that they had been bullied and threatened into doing what they had done.
“When the men at this station heard that there was an attack on the Osiris building, they became very nervous,” the one with the bushy eyebrows said. “They kept calling for orders and updates, but no one was answering. Then the pumps reversed and they couldn’t counter the command. They heard on the radio news of the raid. They panicked and left. They wanted to destroy the lab, but we locked ourselves in. We know what they’ve used our work for. We didn’t want the antidote destroyed.”
“So you do make it here?” Kurt asked.
The man nodded.
“How does it work?”
“It comes from the bullfrogs,” the man said.
“Something in their skin,” Kurt said.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Brad Golner tried to tell me,” Kurt said. “Shakir shot him before he could finish explaining. But he felt the way you do. He wanted to set things right. And he gave us all the information he could before he died. He said the frog skins were packed in sealed containers and shipped out.”
The technician nodded. “When the skin that the frog has cocooned itself in is finally exposed to rain, it releases a counteracting agent that signals the frog’s nervous system to wake up. For the frog, it’s the end of hibernation. For humans, we’ve had to modify the signal, but it works the same way, I assure you.”
“How much of the antidote do you have?”
“A large supply,” the man said.
“Enough for five thousand people?”
“For Lampedusa?” the technician replied. “Yes, we know what happened. There should be enough for five thousand patients.”
“Hopefully, enough for five thousand and one,” Kurt said. He turned to Edo. “Can you fly them and the antidote back to Cairo?”
“Does that mean we’re staying behind?” Joe asked.
Kurt nodded. “I don’t think we’ll be lonesome for long.”
E