The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (the dot read aloud .txt) 📗

me to speed? Run red lights? Perhaps you want some music. I have satellite. Two hundred channels.”

Ben resisted the urge to jab the prongs into his liver. “Follow the rules of the road. Other than that, shut up and drive. Got it?”

“Yes, yes. Okay.”

The scientist looked sufficiently cowed, and he didn’t seem to be driving them into danger. A warehouse district south of the port had given way to an empty coastal forest, but Ben saw luxury beach villas ahead. He glanced at Giselle in the mirror again. “What about your cottage?”

“I told you. Part of the severance.” Her expression darkened, and she took on an exaggerated suburban couple tone. “Do you really want to keep discussing our private business in front of your new friend?”

“Fine. We’ll talk later.”

“You bet we will. I must hear about this mysterious woman with the blue hair, yes?”

Now he felt like Kidan—a man under interrogation. “Yes. Of course.”

After five minutes of awkward silence, Kidan pulled into the garage of a two-story condo overlooking Pobles del Sud Beach, south of Valencia proper. Giselle kept the Glock glued to his ribs until they reached his home office on the second floor.

Moonlight glittered on the black water of an infinity pool outside on the balcony, and beyond the pool, Ben could see the port, with the Behemoth brightly lit, still at its berth. “Nice place for a man who’s only a scientist,” he said, clamping a hand down on Kidan’s shoulder. He steered the scientist to the desk. “We’re here. Now show us what you’ve got or I give this nice lady the cattle prod again and we go back to square one.”

“Yes.” Kidan shook his head, smiling. “No problem. I have the drive here in my top drawer, as promised.”

Ben watched the scientist work his way around the desk. The smile seemed forced. The as promised sounded rehearsed. Ben lowered his gaze to Kidan’s fingers, opening the drawer, quivering with anticipation. Was Kidan dumb enough to pull a gun?

The scientist raised his eyes, watching them both, and dipped his hand into the drawer.

“Giselle! Hold fire!” Ben lunged, putting his body between her and the threat.

55

Ben stabbed the crux of the scientist’s arm with the cattle prod. Kidan yelped and convulsed, smashing his flailing wrist through a glass double-helix sculpture. He dropped into his chair and clutched the arm. Red stains spotted his lab coat.

“Don’t move,” Ben said, threatening him with the cattle prod. He opened the drawer all the way. No gun. A remote with a single red button lay in an organizer among the papers and pens. He inclined his head, motioning for Giselle to look.

She seethed. “A silent alarm. Toi idiot. You tried to call the cops?”

Kidan growled back at her. “Private security. A man in my position cannot be too careful.”

“I guess paranoia and death merchant go hand in hand.” Ben kneeled to yank the wires from the button. As he worked, he felt Giselle’s glare boring into him.

“And you,” she said. “You should have kept out of the way. I might have shot you through the back, jumping between us like that.”

“We need him.”

“For now.” Her lips flattened, and she shifted the menace of her gaze to Kidan.

The scientist swallowed.

Ben opened the laptop in front of him. “Show me the data, Dr. Kidan.”

“But my arm, it—”

“Data first. Medical attention later. I’ll make it easy and do all the typing and clicking for you. Give me the password.”

Kidan complied. He’d saved everything.

For all his failings as a man, Kidan’s record-keeping deserved high marks. His notes rivaled those of the most meticulous researchers on the planet. Ben scrolled through page after page of data. Most of it made no sense—not to him. He wished Tess was there to translate. Now that he and Giselle had the data, they’d make sure she got the chance.

A few phrases stood out. Asymptomatic contagion phase. Predicted infection rate. And he kept seeing the same R0 symbol over and over again, followed by increasingly large numbers.

“What is R zero?”

“We pronounce it R naught,” Kidan said. “R0 is a measure of a disease’s potential using the number of people each host infects. It combines the duration of pre-symptom contagiousness with the ease of transmission. For instance, the virus causing the measles has an R0 of eighteen, meaning one host will infect eighteen others before being quarantined.”

“And this R0 figure increases in cities, right?” Ben shot a glance at Giselle, remembering the pandemic and the impact it had on the world’s larger cities, especially New York.

Kidan nodded. “Climate and population compression are most important. A disease in London has far more potential than the same disease in the Gobi Desert. In urban areas, our modeling for PB2 shows incredible promise.”

Potential. Promise. A parental pride showed through the strain in Kidan’s features caused by his wound.

“A high R0 is bad. Got it.” Ben scanned the pages. Each progressive cycle of Kidan’s experiments boosted the figures until the R0 reached into the hundreds. A hundred hosts could each infect another hundred before showing symptoms. Each of those could infect a hundred more, and so on.

The exponential math boggled Ben’s mind. “We should kill you right now.” He sensed Giselle’s finger tightening on the trigger again and raised a hand. “Hang on. Figure of speech.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.” Ben scrolled on. The file included diagrams—CAD-style drawings of the bacteria plus the layout of the ship-turned-weapon. One showed the stacks of forty-foot-long tanktainers on the cargo deck with a sketch of the tanks and hose system in the margin. “It looks like one big bioweapon. How does it work? What’s inside the tanks?”

Kidan clamped a hand over the growing bloodstains on his sleeve, and Ben saw glossy red on his fingers. The glass had cut deep. The scientist stared down at his wound as he answered. “The bacteria propagate during transit, populating the water vapor in the tanks. When the cranes lift the tanktainers from the ship upon arrival, the hoses