The 6th Extinction (Sigma Force 10)

“Okay,” Kowalski said, “now the goddamned name makes sense.”

18

April 30, 7:20 A.M. AMT

Boa Vista, Brazil

It’s like tracing the steps of a ghost . . .

Jenna followed Drake and Painter down the sweltering streets of Boa Vista, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Roraima. The temperature was already climbing toward ninety degrees, but the humidity had to be a hundred. Her lightweight blouse clung to her armpits and stuck to her ribs under the backpack slung over her shoulders. She had to keep tugging her shirt down as it tried to ride up from her shorts. She also wore a cap against the bright sun, her ponytail hanging out the back.

Drake and Painter were also dressed casually, as were the two Marines—Schmitt and Marlow—who trailed them, passing themselves off as tourists, a not-uncommon sight in the city. Apparently Boa Vista was the jumping-off point for any adventurous traveler who wished to visit the northern Brazilian rain forest, or the neighboring tablelands of Guyana or Venezuela.

The fact that Boa Vista was a gateway city also complicated their search for Amy Serpry’s last steps. From the forensics on the saboteur’s phone, they knew Amy had received a call from this city. Jenna heard the ringing of that phone in her ears. She flashed back to the woman’s ravaged body in the bed . . . and to Nikko.

She shied away from this last thought. She hated to abandon her partner in California, but her best chance of helping him was out here, hunting for answers to that monstrous disease.

The team had landed an hour ago, just as the sun was rising. From the air, the city was laid out like the spokes of a wheel. They had traveled by taxi down one of those radiating spurs and were now on foot to reach a small guesthouse off the main road. It lay nestled amid a quiet treelined neighborhood.

“That should be it,” Painter said, pointing toward a quaint colonial-style clapboard hotel midway down the street.

As they crossed toward the guesthouse, Drake silently signaled for the two Marines to drift to either side of the road, to covertly secure a perimeter.

Jenna headed with Drake and Painter toward the hotel steps. A wooden porch ran along the front, supporting flowerboxes bursting with blooms. There was even a small swing, currently occupied by a fat orange tabby, who stretched upon seeing them and paced along its length.

“Must be the proprietor,” Drake said, pausing to give the cat a scratch under the chin.

Caught off guard, Jenna let slip a small laugh, but quickly stifled it, blaming her outburst on the tension.

The hotel was their only concrete lead. While they knew Amy’s last call had originated from this city, they could not isolate it any further. Painter believed the caller had employed a crude satellite mirroring system to hide his or her exact location.

So that meant they had to put boots on the ground in Brazil, employing good old-fashioned footwork, which was fine by her.

Sometimes old school is best.

As Painter pulled open the door to the guesthouse, she adjusted her backpack, running her palm over the grip of the Glock 20 holstered on the underside of her bag. Painter had supplied them with weapons shortly after landing, found hidden in an airport storage locker. He never told her how that had been arranged, and she didn’t care to ask.

Though armed, she still felt naked without Nikko at her hip.

Jenna followed Painter inside, while Drake remained on the porch with the cat. As they approached the reception desk, which was little more than a raised bench, Painter scooped an arm around Jenna’s waist.

An older Brazilian woman, wearing a housecoat and a welcoming smile, stood up from a cushioned chair before a small television and greeted them. “Sejam bem-vindos.”

“Obrigado,” Painter thanked her. “Do you speak English?”

Her smile widened. “Yes. Mostly I can.”

“This is my daughter,” Painter said, drawing Jenna forward. “She is looking for a friend of hers, someone she was supposed to meet in the city. But they never showed up.”

The woman’s face grew more serious, nodding her head at their concern.

Jenna felt a slight pressure on her lower back as Painter urged her to continue. “Her . . . her name is Amy Serpry,” she said, putting as much worry into her voice as possible, which wasn’t hard.

I am worried . . .

“My friend has been traveling in the area for the past month, but when she first came here, she stayed at your beautiful hotel.”

With no way to trace the call in any greater detail, Painter had tried to track the last steps of the saboteur, searching bank records, tracing additional phone calls from her home apartment in Boston, even mapping the GPS log recovered from her Toyota Camry. It was like filling in the life of a ghost, bit by digital bit, constructing her steps over the past months.

The investigation also revealed more about the woman’s volatile youth, before she settled into her postdoctoral program and was hired by Dr. Hess. In her late teens, she had been part of a radical environmental movement called Dark Eden, which advocated for a natural world beyond humankind, promoting acts of ecoterrorism to make their point.

Then shortly after 2 A.M. last night, Painter had received a call from D.C. Jenna had been in Painter’s office with Drake at the time, both of them just released from quarantine. Painter had put the call on speakerphone. The woman on the other line—Kathryn Bryant—had made a breakthrough.

We found no hits on her U.S. passport, so we thought she was stateside all of this time. But then I found out she still kept her French passport.

Apparently, Amy had become a U.S. citizen seven years ago, but having been born in France, she still maintained a dual citizenship. Tracing that original passport, Bryant discovered that Amy had taken a flight five weeks ago, paid for in cash, from Los Angeles to Boa Vista. The timing and location couldn’t be a coincidence.

It hadn’t taken long to discover that Amy had used a French credit card, issued from Crédit du Nord, to pay for Internet services at this hotel in Boa Vista.

That thin lead led them to be standing here now, hoping for some additional clue to follow the steps of their ghost.

“I have a picture of her,” Jenna said.

She took out a copy of Amy’s driver’s license photo. Again, Jenna had difficulty looking at that smiling face, knowing the horrors the woman would unleash, remembering the state of her body at that Yosemite cabin.

The proprietor studied the photograph, then slowly nodded her head. “I remember. Very pretty.”

“Did she come with someone?” Jenna pressed. “Or meet someone here.”