Pierce rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked around the dimly lit cabin of the Herculean Society’s Gulfstream 550. He had not expected to sleep, but according to his watch, they had been in the air for over five hours. He had slept for most of the flight.
Lazarus was seated on the floor in the center of the cabin, between the inward facing passenger couches. The big man’s eyes were closed, and his legs were folded up in the lotus position. Pierce assumed he was meditating, but he might have been asleep. Further back, Carter sat in front of an open laptop, studying the results of the SMRT sequence of the DNA taken from the Nemean Lion.
Pierce rose and stretched, then skirted around Lazarus to join her. He jerked a thumb in the big man’s direction. “Does he do that a lot?”
“We both do,” Carter replied, without looking away from the screen.
Pierce took a seat next to her and watched. Every few minutes, she would click the touch pad and the display would change, though Pierce would have been hard-pressed to explain exactly what was different. It was like looking at a Magic-Eye puzzle made up entirely of the letters A, G, C and T, each a different color. But one thing was obvious: she hadn’t found any answers yet.
So much for ‘twenty minutes to four hours,’ he thought. He fought down the urge to ask Carter why it was taking so long. Pestering her would not produce results any faster.
As if sensing his growing frustration, she said, “In case you’re wondering, the read is finished. I’m comparing the sequence to samples in the database.”
“That must be a tedious process,” he said, phrasing it almost like a question.
“That’s only part of the problem. We’re dealing with hybrid DNA, so there isn’t going to be an exact match.”
“There can’t be that many species of lion to compare it against.”
“The lion part was easy. Your Nemean Lion is actually Panthera leo atrox, better known as the American lion. They’ve been extinct for eleven thousand years, but were once a top-tier predator in the Americas.”
“American?” Pierce asked, incredulous. “Not European?”
“The European lion was the next closest candidate, probability-wise, but I’d say atrox is the likeliest match.”
“How did an American lion wind up in the Greek isles?”
“An extinct American lion,” Carter emphasized. “How is a question that DNA sequencing can’t answer. With today’s technology, it’s conceivable that someone could extract genetic material from preserved remains—maybe a tooth. Several atrox skeletons have been found in the La Brea Tar Pits in California. They would wander into the tar and get trapped there. Not exactly flies in amber, but pretty close. The Koreans are working on cloning woolly mammoths. The major obstacle now is ethical, not technological. But three thousand years ago…” She shrugged, helplessly.
“I suppose we’ve both seen stranger things.”
“That we have.” She stared at the endless rows of letters for a few seconds. “One way to create a transgenic hybrid is to introduce genetic material into an embryonic stem cell. We can do that using a retrovirus, but I suppose it could happen in nature. That could be what Cerberus is after. The retrovirus that made your Lion and all those other mythological monsters possible in the first place.”
“An American lion. And Cerberus is on its way to Brazil. I doubt that’s a coincidence.” He checked his watch. Unless something had changed, the Cerberus jet was already on the ground in Belem, and had been for nearly two hours. “Cintia should have called by now.”
“The sample is a ninety-eight percent match for the atrox,” Carter said. “It’s going to be a lot harder to isolate the other contributing organism, but if we come up with another match from the Western Hemisphere, then I’d say it’s a slam-dunk.”
Pierce nodded, but his focus had already shifted. He checked his phone for missed calls or messages. Nothing, but there was a notification for new e-mails. He opened it and discovered two messages from Dourado.
He read the first and nearly exploded. “Damn it!”
Lazarus’s eyes fluttered open. “What’s wrong?”
“Cintia. I told her to keep a safe distance.”
Lazarus rose to his feet and moved to join Pierce and Carter. “Details. What’s happened?”
Pierce read the e-mail again, gripping the phone so tightly that the edges of the LCD screen began to darken from the pressure. “Cerberus had a helicopter waiting in Belem. Cintia decided to sneak aboard and stash her phone so that we could track the helicopter.”
“That’s good,” Lazarus pointed out.
“It’s not. Cintia’s a computer geek, not a spy. She’s going to get herself…” He trailed off. The message was almost two hours old. Cintia might already have been captured. He opened the second message.
“‘Only Gallo here,’” he read aloud, each word deepening his despair. “‘Hiding on helicopter. Will try to help her escape. Come find us.’ Damn her.” He hit the reply button.
“Stop.” Lazarus’s voice was barely louder than a whisper, but the command was as forceful as a punch to the gut.