Catacombs (37 page)

Jade touched the lapel of the sheepskin-and-denim jacket she was wearing. Raun jerked away from him, trembling.

"There is nothing I hate about you more than your–relentless efficiency."

"I just never felt your loyalties were all that consistent, Raun."

"Fine. Fine! I ran away tonight because I saw you slaughter two helpless men. Yes. Slaughter. You're so proud of your Hopi brothers and teachers. But you're nothing like them. Hopis are good and gentle–the People of Peace, Lem called them."

"That's why there aren't many of them left. Don't waste sympathy on those two I shot. Every one of their kind is a killer. You were living on borrowed time when I got there. As soon as they decided you weren't of any more use to them, they'd have opened your throat. You might ask about Lem."

Raun held her head, feeling scared again. "Oh dear Jesus. Yes. How is he?"

"He's sleeping off the heavy load of junk they shot into him. Ken and Lee and Andy had lesser doses. They're up and around, but Lem won't be right for another twenty-four hours. Unfortunately we can't wait. I've already wasted enough time tracking you down. We're leaving in an hour."

"Going where?" she asked tonelessly.

"Torrejon, near Madrid. From there to Nigeria. Then southeast to the Makari. To the Catacombs."

She almost screamed at him. She bit her tongue. She bit down on the emotion and tasted blood, cold blood, the proper coldness of her desire to see him, finally, defeated. Raun waited until she was certain her heart was steady, and like a stone. Then she looked up with a thin-lipped smile.

"Did you bring a horse for me?"

"No. Get up on Rimfire, I'll jog along."

"All right," Raun said.

Dar es Salaam &

Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

May 18

D
r. Robeson Kumenyere, wearing a white hospital smock that might have been tailored by Saint Laurent to go with his striped shirt and red silk tie, stood behind his desk and extended a hand to Michael Belov.

"Good morning, Bwana Lundgren. Let me apologize immediately for postponing our interview so often. I have no excuse except for my lack of judgment in budgeting my time."

Belov glanced at the terrace doors, which stood open despite the fact that the air conditioning was turned up high. Exotic birds croaked and trilled in the trees of the small walled garden behind Kumenyere's office. Two tall, heavily armed mercenaries wearing the berets and green-and-blue uniforms of Jumbe Kinyati's Praetorians were on the terrace, their backs to the room.

"One can't help but be aware of the soldiers, Dr. Kumenyere. The tight security. There are rumors in Dar of attempted sabotage at the hospital two nights ago."

Kumenyere shrugged. "A minor incident. Unfortunately our generator was rather severely damaged. It will take weeks to repair, and in the meantime we are now forced to draw power from the not-always reliable national grid."

"Do you think it was an act of war? Or could the attack on the hospital have had something to do with your decision to become deeply involved in the politics of Tanzania?"

Kumenyere gestured economically at a comfortable chair in front of his desk, turned, and went to close the terrace doors. He came back and sat down in a swivel chair and passed a hand wearily over his eyes.

"I'm a socialist, of course, but not a politician. I've lately acted on Ndugu Jumbe's behalf, at his request; a matter of friendship and love, an attempt on my part to lighten the load on his shoulders. He is not, as we know, getting any younger. But my. interests are now, and always will be, humanitarian. I'm a man of medicine. I welcome this opportunity to inform our benefactors and friends in Sweden of the progress we're making in epidemiology and genetic diseases such as xeroderma pigmentosa, almost as much of a scourge as hunger. I had thought medical research was to be the subject of this interview. Perhaps I should excuse myself."

"Not at all, Dr. Kumenyere. My apologies. As you know, we've planned to devote much of the winter issue to you and your hospital. And of course your photograph will be on the cover of the magazine."

Kumenyere brightened somewhat and turned to face Belov.

"We have the only arbovirus laboratory in East Africa. It's still primitive by modern standards, but a recent grant has enabled us to order more equipment. I've persuaded some gifted young virologists to join our staff. Perhaps after your questions we'll take a tour, then have lunch at my home."

The telephone intercom on his desk buzzed. Kumenyere picked up the receiver, listened, spoke in Swahili, glanced at his visitor, and hung up. "Something of a coincidence. Our laboratory has been working on a fever of unknown origin, an isolated outbreak in the bush near Mbeya. A number of the victims have died, and their bodies have been flown to us by helicopter. There's a body on the way now, packed in dry ice. Perhaps you'd like to see how we handle this. I must warn you, despite all of our precautions there is some risk of infection."

"I'm fascinated," Belov said. "May I take photos?"

Kumenyere looked startled. "Of the victim? No. It isn't a pretty sight. The ravages of the fever are quite severe."

"Who is he?"

"A member of a UN geophysical survey team. Belgian, I think."

Belov was given a smock to wear, and a surgical mask. He waited with the team from the virology lab at the helicopter landing pad near the big inverted pyramid in which the morgue was located. Mercenaries carrying Kalashnikov rifles completely ringed the area.

The helicopter, an Alouette II, appeared in the sky, circled the hospital grounds and came in. The body of the fever victim was carried on one of the skids. It had been wrapped securely in polyethylene. Condensation from the vapors of the dry ice gave the polyethylene a milky cocoon-like quality; the body inside could barely be distinguished, but Belov could see that he'd been a tall man, perhaps six and a half feet tall.

The medical team untied the corpse from the helicopter and carried the litter quickly inside the pyramid. Belov followed Kumenyere as the helicopter took off again.

In an isolation room on the ground floor the virologists slit the heavy polyethylene and peeled it back, unpacked some of the dry ice. Kumenyere and Belov watched through a port in one wall. It was a bit of good fortune that the victim's emaciated face was turned toward them long enough for Belov to get a good look.

The victim had a brown beard brittle with granulated vomit, but death had only paled, not disfigured him. Belov easily recognized Chips Chapman from the photos Toby had shown him. He felt a stirring of pity for the tall English boy, whose tenacity and courage he had admired. Now Toby would never see his father again. Belov wished he could break the news to him, but of course that was out of the question. Someday Toby would know; in the meantime he must continue to wait, and suffer, and grow much too bitter for someone of his years.

"No idea what's causing the fever?" Belov asked Kumenyere.

The doctor shook his head. "We've made some progress in isolating and analyzing the virus. Our main hope for the present is to contain the outbreak, so it won't turn into a plague. Always a possibility in such a dry year."

Belov was given a tour of the pyramid, from the morgue to the operating room equipped for laser surgery. It was unused; surgeons with the skill to make use of such instruments were unavailable in Tanzania. He was shown computerized scanning equipment worth half a million dollars, electron microscopes, a big IBM 370 computer idle for lack of experienced programmers.

The arbovirus center on the top floor was busier; Kumenyere currently had a staff of five. There a much smaller computer had been installed to keep track of experiments and procedures running simultaneously in the lab, procedures requiring almost split-second timing for optimum results. A scoreboard with closed-circuit TV monitors advised researchers of their progress.

Kumenyere dimmed the fluorescent ceiling panels until the cold and sterile room was in near darkness. Then he activated all areas of the board.

Twenty-four oval red lights flashed on. They had a surprising depth, brilliance, and luminosity, like the stars as they appear only to those few travelers who have escaped, or almost escaped, the shrouding envelope of earth's atmosphere.

"I thought you said your lab was primitive," Belov remarked, trying to look more closely at the red lights. Each appeared to be microscopically whorled, like a living brain swimming in fire.

Kumenyere put the room lights back on. He tapped his forehead with a finger.

"Technology at best is only a tool. We are poor in brainpower. Inspiration. Genius. But they will come to us, I'm confident of that. We have the machines that will help them achieve breakthroughs in their research and, unfortunately, the plagues at our doorstep."

A
t one o'clock they were escorted to Dr. Kumenyere's seaside villa by a heavy guard in Land Rovers.

The chauffeur of Kumenyere's Mercedes had a Skorpion on the seat beside him, a Czech-made 7.62 automatic that fired 850 rounds a minute and was ideal for close-in shooting. Belov also was certain that Kumenyere himself carried a gun. But he made no mention of the armament and the bodyguards, as if he assumed they were a normal part of the doctor's workaday routine. They made small talk about the social whirl in Paris, London, Rome, and all the elegant watering holes in between.

The villa, Moorish in style, was surrounded by an ugly unpainted concrete block wall that looked like a recent addition. There were broken bottles cemented into place along the top of the wall. Kumenyere seemed to have prepared himself for a period of public scrutiny and, perhaps, unpopularity. The driveway gate was just wide enough for one vehicle to squeeze through. Belov had noticed deep scratches on the sides of the Mercedes, and now understood that the chauffeur's depth perception was faulty. This time he made it without mishap, and the car drove up a semicircular drive to the house. The Land-Rovers stayed outside on the-sandy road.

There were other guards in the yard, and a scruffy Alsatian that looked as if it had been starved and whipped to a peak of craziness. The dog was on a stout leash.

There were three other cars in the drive, including a blue Toyota hatchback that Belov recognized. He had seen Henry Landreth's mistress drive up in it at the hospital two nights ago.

The captain of Kumenyere's guard came trotting down the steps from the house to open the door for him. He spoke to the doctor in Swahili, but Belov also heard Landreth's name.

Before the captain was halfway through the speech he'd obviously primed himself for, Kumenyere went into a rage. Belov climbed out on the other side of the car and was ignored by everyone but the maddened barking dog. Belov had with him the thousand-dollar gift he'd brought for Kumenyere, which was packed inside a custom-made case.

He studied the scene Kumenyere was making, which he could make no sense of, and looked toward the house. The screen door opened slowly. Nyshuri came out and stood on the verandah in the deep shade twirling a large flower like a parasol in her hands.

Kumenyere became aware of her and broke off his tirade. He started up the steps in a bound, remembered his guest and his manners, swung around to Belov, and flashed a smile, though his brows were packed with woe.

"Please excuse me, Bwana Lundgren–some inexcusable stupidity–I must straighten out this depressing matter before we–you do understand? How kind. Please wait for me here."

Kumenyere indicated the verandah with a welcoming sweep of one hand, then snapped his fingers at a houseboy. He pointed to Belov and issued instructions before turning his attention back to Nyshuri. Then he nipped up the remaining steps, took her by the elbow–her head came up defiantly at that–and shoved her into the house.

Belov placed a drink order with the houseboy and wandered up to the verandah trying to appear that he was minding his own business.

Through the screen door he glimpsed Nyshuri and Kumenyere standing halfway down a long hallway, the blue sea beyond them. Kumenyere raised his voice again; it was childishly shrill. She answered back, turned away with a flippant, contemptuous shrug. Kumenyere grabbed her and spun her into a flat open-handed smash of one hand to the face; it nearly took her head off. It cost her a tooth, perhaps: Belov saw something white and shiny fly out of her mouth. She sat down in a heap on the floor and held her head and didn't complain.

Kumenyere yanked her up again and thrust her through a doorway. The door banged shut. Silence. Belov sat down in a vinyl sling chair and waited for his drink.

The houseboy served him from a bar cart he wheeled from another part of the house. Then from a pocket of his smock he produced a deck of grimy, well-thumbed playing cards, which he began to shuffle in midair, demonstrating his dexterity. He did cardtricks for Belov's amusement, smiling ear to ear and revealing blighted gums.

Belov sat back with a haze over his eyes, watching the cards but not seeing them, nodding at appropriate times while he tried to piece together what was happening at the villa.

If Nyshuri was in residence, then it made sense that Henry Landreth had also been here, under Kumenyere's protection. But now, Belov surmised, Henry was gone, a circumstance that had inflamed the normally tranquil doctor. How had Landreth talked his way past the captain of the guard? A more crucial question: If Landreth was afraid for his life, as he had every reason to be after the aborted abduction attempt by the South Africans, why had he rejected the security which the villa offered? And where was he going?