Plague Ship (Oregon Files 5)

“What is it?”

“I found something.”

“Can it wait? They’re holding a chopper for us to take us to the airport in Nice.”

“Hold on a sec.” Eric climbed over the rail and awkwardly descended the ladder while clutching a laptop computer. He noticed Donatella for the first time when he reached the boat but barely gave her a first, let alone a second, glance. Obviously, he was distracted by whatever news he had.

Juan nodded to her and she eased forward on the throttles. He went aft to let Linc chat her up while he pushed aside their luggage so he and Eric could sit. They had to raise their voices over the rush of the wind and the throb of the powerful motor.

“What do you have?” Juan asked.

Eric opened his computer. “I’ve been checking for any unusual incidents that may have occurred on ships where the Responsivists were holding their Sea Retreats.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Did I? Oh yeah. Do you remember recently how there have been reports of viral outbreaks on cruise ships, usually a gastrointestinal norovirus?”

“Seems there have been a lot more in the past couple of years,” Juan remarked.

“It’s not a coincidence. At first, I was checking passenger manifests from the cruise companies.” Juan didn’t need to ask how Eric obtained such confidential information. “I cross-referenced those to Responsivist membership lists. When I started seeing a pattern, I switched my focus to cruise liners struck by unusual illnesses. That’s when I hit pay dirt. Of the seventeen outbreaks I’ve looked into in the past two years, sixteen of them occurred when Responsivists were on board. The seventeenth wasn’t a norovirus and was traced back to E. coli found on lettuce grown on one specific far

m in California. That strain also hit people in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“It gets worse. Mind you, there’s no pattern to cruise lines or ports of call. But there is one definite pattern we could see. During the first incident, only a handful of passengers were sickened, and most of them were elderly. The second one saw forty people showing symptoms. But by the time we get to the seventeenth, which happened two months ago aboard a ship called Destiny, nearly every passenger and crewman was infected. The cruise line had to chopper in a medical team and a healthy group of officers to get the ship back to port.”

Juan leaned back in the soft leather seat, feeling the engine’s vibration trying to loosen the knotted muscles in his back. In the cockpit, Linc towered over their driver, and he could tell she was delighting in his company. Her laughter carried through the air. He suddenly leaned forward again. “They’re perfecting disbursal methods.”

“That’s what Mark and I think, too. They got better every time until they achieved a near one hundred percent infection rate.”

“How does the Golden Dawn fit into the pattern?”

“Once they worked out how to infect an entire shipful of people, they needed to test the lethality of their toxin.”

“On their own people?” Cabrillo was shocked.

“They could be the ones who developed the agent in the first place. Why take the risk of one of them having a change of heart?”

“Good God! Why?” The pieces of the puzzle were there before him, he just didn’t know how they fit together. What could the Responsivists possibly gain by killing people aboard cruise ships? And the answer that kept coming back to him was, absolutely nothing.

He could see other terrorist organizations jumping at such a chance, and he considered one of them had paid for such a weapon-and-delivery system, but the Responsivists were flush with money from their Hollywood believers.

They espoused population control. Did they think killing fifteen or twenty thousand retirees who were blowing the children’s inheritance on Caribbean cruises would make a difference to the world’s overcrowding? If they were that insane, they would go for something much bigger.

The puzzle hung tantalizingly close in the front of Juan’s mind, but he knew it was incomplete. “We’re missing something.”

The speedboat slowed as it entered the inner harbor and made its way to a pier next to an elegant restaurant. A waiter was hosing off the wooden jetty in anticipation of a breakfast crowd looking to lessen the effects of their hangovers.

“What are we missing?” Eric asked. “These whack jobs plan to infect people on cruise ships with a toxin that shows to be one hundred percent fatal.”

“It’s not one hundred percent. If they released it on the Dawn, Jannike shouldn’t be alive.”

“She was breathing supplemental oxygen,” Eric reminded him.

“Even with cannulas in her nostrils, she was still inhaling air pumped through the ship’s ventilation system.”

“Wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t airborne. It could have been in the water or food. Maybe she didn’t eat or drink.”