Plague Ship (Oregon Files 5)

“You know what?” the man continued. “I don’t think you feel good about it at all. In fact, I think you’re reeling inside because I know something that would surprise a lot of people.”

Somehow, Cooper knew what was coming. He sat heavily on a couch, his artificially youthful face ashen.

“Even if you hadn’t been overheard bragging to Kovac on Eos Island, I think I would have figured it out. You were the only person who could have betrayed us in Rome. We thought Kyle might have had an embedded radio tag, but now we know he didn’t. He had no idea where he was being taken, so there was no way he could get a warning out to Kovac to snatch him back.”

Now that the truth was out, Cooper sat straighter on the sofa. “That’s right. I did make the call, getting Kovac to Rome and then telling him which hotel, once I had arrived and was left alone with that kid. You were behind the attack on Eos?”

The stranger nodded. “And we discovered the virus in the Golden Sky’s and all forty-nine other cruise ships’ laundries you tampered with. The fifty containers are at a level-four biohazard lab in Maryland.”

“Don’t you understand that the world is doom

ed? I could have saved all of humanity.”

The man laughed. “And do you know how many crackpots have been saying the world is doomed over the past couple hundred years? We were supposed to run out of food in the 1980s. We were supposed to run out of oil in the 1990s. The population was supposed to hit ten billion by the year 2000. Every one of these predictions was wrong. Heck, they wanted to close the U.S. Patent office in 1900 because everything that could be invented had been invented. I’ll let you in on a little secret: you can’t predict the future.”

“You’re wrong. I know what is coming. Anyone with half a brain can see it. Fifty years from now, civilization will be swept away in a tidal wave of violence, as nations realize they can’t support their populations. It will be anarchy on a biblical scale.”

“Funny you should mention that.” The man removed a pistol from behind his back. “I’ve always liked biblical justice. An eye for an eye, and all that.”

“You can’t kill me. Arrest me. Put me on trial.”

“And give you a stage to spout your demented ideas? I don’t think so.”

“Please!”

The gun spat. Cooper felt the impact, and when he moved to touch his neck he could feel something sticking in his flesh, but his clawlike hands lacked the dexterity to remove it.

Cabrillo watched for ten seconds as the tranquilizer from the dart gun coursed through Cooper’s body. When Cooper’s eyes closed and he slumped over, Juan brought a radio to his lips. Moments later, a big ambulance pulled up the drive, and two paramedics burst out the back doors, pushing a gurney.

“Any problems?” Eddie asked, wheeling the stretcher into the study with Franklin Linclon.

“No, but after talking to him I feel like I need a shower. I’ve seen some loons in my life, but this one beats all.”

Linc gingerly lifted Cooper off the couch and set him on the gurney. As soon as Cabrillo found Cooper’s passport and a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro in a kitchen drawer, they rushed out of the house. A neighbor had come out of her house to see what was going on.

“He’s had a heart attack,” Juan told her, as he held open the ambulance doors so Linc could slide the gurney inside.

Forty-five minutes later, the ambulance arrived at LAX, and, ten hours after that, the Corporation’s Gulfsteam touched down at Gardermoen airport, thirty miles north of Oslo, Norway.

They had a brief reunion at an airport lounge with Jannike Dahl. She had permitted Eric Stone to escort her home. When Eric declined her invitation to show him the sights of Oslo, saying he had to return to the ship, Juan had taken him aside and explained that she wasn’t that interested in him seeing her home-town. Eric had asked what she really wanted, and the Chairman had to explain it further. Red-faced with embarrassment and unbridled enthusiasm, Eric quickly accepted her offer.

It took another jet flight to Tromsö, in the far north of the country, and a helicopter ride, to finally arrive at their destination. Cooper was kept sedated the entire time and was closely monitored by Julia Huxley.

The glacier sparkled in the bright light of a summer afternoon, glittering as though it was the finest lead crystal. Outside the valley, the temperature hovered in the mid-fifties, but on the ice it was just above freezing.

George Adams had flown them in on an MD-520N, the replacement for the little Robinson. This chopper was larger than the previous one, and required some modifications to the hangar elevator, but it was also much more powerful and faster. And because it vented engine exhaust through the tail, to counter the main rotor’s torque rather than rely on a second, smaller rotor, it was significantly more quiet. The Oregon was positioned just off the coast, and Adams would fly them out once they were finished.

Cooper was half conscious by the time they touched down but didn’t fully comprehend where he was until another fifteen minutes had elapsed.

“Where are we? What have you done?”

“Surely you recognize where we are, Dr. Cooper,” Juan said innocently. “But, then again, maybe not. After all, it’s been more than sixty years since you were last here.”

Cooper stared blankly, so Cabrillo continued. “The one thing that kept nagging at me this entire time was how a virus discovered by the Nazis and later given to their Japanese allies ended up in your hands. There was no record of its discovery, or of its transfer to the Philippines, nothing to give any indication of what was found here.

“Only one thing made sense to me. You discovered it yourself. There are quite detailed records of the Nazi occupation of Norway, and my team found something rather interesting. A four-engine Kondor reconnaissance plane was shot down on this very glacier on the night of April twenty-nine, 1943. Every member of the crew was killed save one, a gunner named Ernst Kessler.”

Cooper winced at the mention of the name.