They looked like bizarre, alien reptiles with translucent coiled-snake bodies and multiple heads. Seeing them, Dr. Castro flashed on a primitive jungle village exploding in flames and felt rattled to his core.
How many heads? he thought in a panic. How many?
Castro zoomed in on one of the infected cells and counted five. Then he looked at another and found six.
Six?
Not five? Not four?
He looked and quickly found another six-headed cell, and another.
Oh dear God, this can’t be—
A nurse burst into the lab, cried, “The girl’s crashing, Doctor!”
Castro spun away from the microscope and bolted after her.
“Who’s with her?” he demanded as they raced down a hallway and through a door that led them outside onto a medical campus.
“Dr. Desales,” she said, gasping.
Castro blew by her and sprinted down the street to the institute’s hospital.
He reached the door of the ICU two minutes later. A man and a woman in their thirties stopped him before he could go in.
“No one will tell us anything, Doctor!” the woman sobbed.
“We’re doing our best,” Castro told the girl’s parents, and he dodged into the ICU, where he yelled at the nurses, “Get us hazmat suits. Quarantine the room. Then quarantine the entire unit!”
Castro grabbed a surgical mask, went to the doorway, saw Dr. Desales working furiously on a comatose eight-year-old girl. “John, get out of there.”
“If I do, she dies,” Dr. Desales said.
“You don’t, you could die.”
Various alarms started sounding from the monitors and machines attached to a six-year-old boy in the bed next to the girl. Dr. Castro scanned the numbers, saw the boy was crashing too.
Throwing aside all caution, Castro yanked on sterile gloves and went to work, frantically adding a series of medicines to the IV.
“What the hell is it?” Desales demanded.
“A virus I’ve seen only once before,” Castro said. “We called it Hydra. Goes after the major organs.”
“Transmission?”
“Not certain, but we think body fluids.”
“Mortality rate?”
“Roughly sixteen percent the last time it appeared,” Castro said. “But I think there have been mutations that made it deadlier. C’mon, Jorge, fight.”
But the boy continued to fail. The doctors tried everything that had helped in these cases before, but no matter what they did, Jorge and his sister kept slipping further from their control. Their kidneys shut down. Then their livers.
Eleven minutes after Castro entered the ICU, blood began to seep from the little girl’s eyes. Then Maria was racked by a series of violent convulsions that culminated in a massive heart attack.
She died.
Fourteen minutes later, in the same terrible way, little Jorge did too.
Chapter 3
FOUR HUNDRED YARDS off the shore of Copacabana, Colonel da Silva and I, harnessed and tethered, hung out the side of the helicopter and peered through binoculars.
Tens of thousands of crazed Argentine fans were partying on the famous beach. But my attention was totally focused on Sugarloaf.
“Do you see them, Jack?” Tavia shouted.
Through the shaky binoculars, I kept getting various glimpses of a thousand feet of black rock, but nothing—
“There,” I said, spotting something bright yellow against the cliff several hundred feet below the summit and something red and white below that.
“Jesus,” I said. “That’s bad.”
The pilot flew us beneath the cables of the aerial tram that took tourists to the top of Sugarloaf and hovered a hundred yards from the climbers, a man and a woman dangling by harness, rope, and piton. The man was lower than the woman by twenty or thirty feet.
Neither of them moved their arms or legs, but through the binoculars I could see that the woman’s eyes were open. She was crying for help. The man appeared comatose. His rib cage rose and fell erratically.
“I think we’re looking at possible spinal damage,” I said. “Does Rio have a search-and-rescue team?”
“For something like this?” Tavia replied dubiously.
“No,” da Silva answered. “Not for something like this.”
“Then we need to land on top,” I said.
“And do what?” the colonel demanded.
“Mount a rescue,” I said.
“You can do something like that, Jack?” Tavia asked.
“I had a lot of rope training in my early Marine years,” I said. “If the right gear’s up there, yeah, I think I can.”
Da Silva gave me a look of reappraisal and then shouted at the pilot to find a place to land on the mountain’s top. We spiraled up, away from the climbers. The pilot coordinated with security officers at the summit to clear the terrace, and in a minute or two, we put down.
An off-duty Rio police sergeant who’d been on the summit when the accident occurred led us around to the tram station, where one of the big gondolas was docked and empty.