Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) (2 page)

1

Liberia

At the top of the low hill overlooking the narrow trail cutting through the rain forest, Nils Van Der Hausen wondered why anyone would choose to build a village in such a place. He understood why settlements and cities sprang up along coastlines or on the banks of a river, but he could not fathom what madness possessed people to hack out an existence in the middle of the jungle, miles from the nearest road.

‘Village’ was too generous a term for this collection of huts that occupied the small clearing. It was a five mile walk to the nearest road and two miles from St. Paul River. There were dozens more just like it scattered throughout the river valley. Hundreds, even. The government in Monrovia was vaguely aware of their existence but made no effort to regulate them or provide even the most basic of services to their inhabitants. The people who called the place home subsisted on bush meat, which included anything that walked in the rain forest. The exact whereabouts of the villages and the names of the families who lived in them were unknown to the outside world.

It had taken him the better part of a day to reach this place, even with his GPS unit pointing him in the right direction. Finding these villages was like a mad scavenger hunt, a lesson he had learned during his first visit to the West African republic during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

A genetic engineer by trade, Van Der Hausen had been part of the World Health Organization’s response team deployed to Liberia to combat the spread of hemorrhagic fever. Once on the ground, he had discovered that the team had little use for his scientific expertise. Instead, they needed people on the front lines, trekking out to the rural villages, isolating the infected, educating the superstitious villagers about quarantine measures and how to safely dispose of corpses. He had spent weeks tramping around the jungle, in constant fear of the deadly virus, wild animals, bandits and ignorant villagers who were suspicious of everyone.

It had been a life-changing experience.

He had come to Africa with a burning zeal to help the afflicted, to make the world a better place. He had left with the realization that sometimes the only way to fix a thing was to burn it down and start over.

That and one other thing. He had also brought a little souvenir of his stay in West Africa: an ampoule of human blood teeming with the Ebola virus.

He could still recall the heady mixture of exhilaration and panic he had felt when smuggling the sample out. It had been much easier than he had anticipated; everyone trusted the scientists. Of course, things had not exactly gone according to his plan after that. His fumbling attempt to sell the sample might have gotten him arrested, if not for the intervention of the man who now stood beside him, staring down at the nameless village.

“That’s the place?” Vigor Rohn asked.

Rohn was Bulgarian—Van Der Hausen recognized the distinctive Sofia accent. His voice was gravelly and irritable, like someone who had woken up with a hangover, except Rohn always sounded that way. He was big—six-foot-two, with the broad-shouldered physique of a footballer—and ugly. His face was pock-marked, like someone who had taken a double-barreled shotgun blast of rock salt. One of his ears looked like a cauliflower floret. Van Der Hausen felt quite certain that the man was no scientist, but Rohn always asked the right questions. He was either more intelligent than he appeared or he was being coached by a remote mentor. Probably both.

Van Der Hausen nodded and waggled his GPS unit. “I tagged the devices, just to be sure that no one tampered with them.”

“And we will be safe here?”

“Technically, we could get a lot closer. This isn’t some run-of-the-mill infectious bio-weapon.” He smiled, recalling how Rohn had used very similar language two months earlier during their first meeting.

Rohn had found him, just five minutes before his first attempt at selling the Ebola virus to a man in the Stockholm underworld. Rohn had appeared out of nowhere, warning Van Der Hausen that the meeting was a set-up. They had left together, narrowly escaping the tightening police dragnet.

“My employer has noticed you,” Rohn had told him. “You are an amateur, playing a dangerous game with no idea of the risks you face. But my employer admires your initiative.”

Van Der Hausen, still in shock, had managed to ask whether Rohn’s employer might be interested in purchasing the virus.

Rohn had laughed. “Ebola is nothing. A run-of-the-mill threat, good for creating a panic, but almost useless for strategic purposes. You should know this better than anyone.”

“Then what—”

“You have something of even greater worth that my employer is willing to pay for.”

“My scientific expertise?”

Another derisive laugh. “There are many scientists in the world. But only a few of them are...” Rohn paused as if searching for the right word, “...unscrupulous enough to sell a deadly virus to the highest bidder. That is what makes you special. My employer is interested in research and development. Genetic engineering is the new frontier. Those who are the first to blaze trails into unexplored territory reap the greatest reward. You want that, don’t you?”

Van Der Hausen most definitely did.

“Then you must continue to impress my employer.”

With a generous advance of seed money, Van Der Hausen had taken a leave of absence from the University of Stockholm and set up his own genetics lab, outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment purchased off the Internet. At first, he had felt like a frustrated artist, staring at a blank canvas, waiting for inspiration to dawn. Then he had remembered his earlier ordeal, and an idea had come to him.

Rohn had been right. Weaponizing infectious diseases by tweaking various gene sequences to increase lethality and communicability was
so
twentieth century. This was the new world, where the old limits of DNA and RNA no longer applied. Genetic engineering was a playground, where men like him spliced nucleic acids together like Lego blocks. The only limit was his imagination, and he had a very vivid imagination.

“Unless you’re standing at ground zero,” Van Der Hausen explained, gesturing toward the village, “within about fifty feet of the device when the spores are released, you could simply walk away and not be affected. If, that is, you knew what was happening.”

Rohn grunted. “And you are ready to demonstrate now?”

Van Der Hausen waggled the GPS again. “Say the word, and I’ll press the button.”

“One moment.” Rohn took out a satellite-enabled smartphone and tapped the screen to place a call. There was an audible ringing—the phone was in speaker mode—and then a voice spoke.

“Yes?”

“It is Rohn.”

“Ah, time to see if our Swedish friend is worth the money we’ve spent.” The voice was high-pitched and wheezy.

An old man
, Van Der Hausen decided.

“Show me!” the man commanded.

Rohn held the device up so that its built-in camera was oriented down toward the cluster of huts. “You may proceed,” he told Van Der Hausen.

The geneticist nodded and then turned his attention to the village as well. At a distance of almost three hundred yards, the villagers were barely discernible.

Like ants
, he told himself.
That’s all they are
.

He felt no remorse at what he was about to do. These were not people, not fellow human beings… They were a plague of insects, breeding and consuming with no regard for the consequences. Ebola was nature’s way of trying to restore the balance, a fact that his fellow volunteers at the WHO had never understood. They had swept in like crusading knights, intent on slaying the dragon without ever stopping to consider that the dragon might have a role to play in the natural order of things.

His only regret was that this was merely a demonstration. One village. A drop in the ocean. Rohn’s employer—his employer, too, he supposed—wanted a product, not wholesale devastation.

A countdown seemed appropriate. He started at five, and when he got to zero, he tapped the transmit button on the GPS.

He thought he heard a distant popping noise, like a balloon bursting or a cork shooting from a bottle of champagne, but it was probably just his imagination. The aerosol devices that disseminated the spores were more like garden sprinklers. There might have been a faint hiss close to the source but nothing audible at such a distance.

The wheezy voice issued from the phone. “Is something supposed to happen?”

“You must be patient,” Van Der Hausen answered. “It may take a few minutes for the first generation of spores to mature. Growth will be exponential once the spores encounter a source of…ah...nutrients.”

Several seconds passed, but still there was no visible change.

The voice spoke again. “I had expected something a little more dramatic, Dr. Van Der Hausen. This is rather disappointing.”

“We may be too far away to see the results,” Van Der Hausen replied, unable to hide his anxiety. They
should
have been able to see something. The outcome of the test in the laboratory had been quite dramatic.

“Rohn, take our friend closer so that we may get a better look.” The voice of the old man on the other end of the phone was noticeably impatient and tinged with sarcasm.

Closer?
Despite his earlier assurance, Van Der Hausen felt a twinge of panic at this prospect. Now that the spores were circulating, moving closer was definitely a bad idea. He looked at Rohn, hoping to see the same apprehension that he now felt, but the man’s face was an emotionless mask. Rohn nodded in the direction of the village and spoke a single word. “Go.”

Van Der Hausen swallowed nervously, forcing down the impulse to protest. “Very well.” He knew what to look for. He would stop at the first sign of propagation.

As they descended the hillside, they were once more engulfed in the jungle thicket. Van Der Hausen scanned the vegetation, looking for any signs of new growth. After just a couple of minutes of pushing through the foliage, they reached the edge of the clearing. Though still a good hundred yards from the nearest hut, Van Der Hausen could hear the sounds of daily village life—children playing and babies squalling in their mothers’ arms.

Something was wrong.

“There may have been a malfunction in the aerosol devices,” he said, his tone more hopeful than disappointed. That explanation was preferable to the alternative. Yet, he had placed four of the devices—one at each corner of the building that had been set aside for use as a clinic—and the likelihood that all of them had failed was marginal at best. Which meant that the problem was with the organism itself. “Or possibly some environmental counter-agent that I didn’t account for.”

“I’ve seen enough,” the old man replied. “Rohn, I have need of you elsewhere. Get to Athens as soon as possible. Kenner believes we may be on the verge of a breakthrough.”

“What about him?” Rohn’s eyes flashed toward Van Der Hausen.

“A bad investment. Cash him out.”

Van Der Hausen was quick to protest. “Now wait just a minute. This is a minor setback. The whole point of a large scale test is to work out the—”

The words caught in his throat as he spied the glint of sunlight on the knife in Rohn’s other hand. He brought his own hands forward in an instinctive gesture of self-preservation, even as the blade slashed toward him. He felt something tugging at his shirt, but then Rohn took a step back and sheathed the knife.

Van Der Hausen sagged in relief. Rohn’s display of menace was only a reminder of the stakes in this dangerous game he had decided to play, nothing more, and unnecessary at that. Van Der Hausen hardly needed an incentive. He wanted to know what had gone wrong even more than Rohn and the old man.

A strange sensation hit his gut, a hollow feeling, similar to the experience of a rapid ascent in an elevator. Then he heard a wet sound as something hit the ground at his feet. He realized Rohn’s slash had not been a mere threat after all. Darkness swelled at the edge of his vision, and pain bloomed in his abdomen. As he crumpled to the ground alongside his entrails, it occurred to Van Der Hausen that his worst fears had caught up with him. He
was
going to die in this horrible place.