Unfortunately, with the sun now down, evening shadowed most of everything. Only a scattering of lights dotted the place. A bonfire lit the center of the square, where a few guards stood limned against the flames. Clearly, their captors wanted this place to look like some hunting lodge from the air. Even the rows of generators humming a constant rumble were hidden under the forest canopy.
Monk rubbed at his prosthetic. He had risked much to be captured with Frank, hoping to leave a line of electronic bread crumbs for Sigma to follow. But he had no way of telling if he had been successful. He was especially suspicious of a wooden pole he had spotted from the air near the riverside pier when they had first arrived. The crownlike cluster of the rectangular plates at the top looked suspiciously like a radio-jamming tower.
For now, Monk would have to assume he was on his own. Strategies played through his head, but they all ended with his recapture. Even if he and the others could escape and cross the river, there were still miles and miles of trackless jungle.
Still, at least his captors had left him with his prosthesis. He might be sleeveless in his blue scrubs, but he still had an explosive trick or two hidden from sight. Buried under his synthetic palm was a hidden knot of C4 wired to a detonator. But it was a weapon of last resort. He only had the one charge, and it would destroy his prosthetic, leaving him with no hope of broadcasting his location.
Better hold off on that for now.
Nolan finally reached a cinder block building and escorted them all through a door. Monk kept a wary eye on the Congolese soldier still guarding them. The man followed them into what appeared to be an animal pen. Stainless-steel cages climbed the walls on either side. Birds battered against bars. Monkeys screeched. Something leonine yowled in fury. The cacophony was deafening inside the windowless space. But even worse was the stinging reek of feces and urine.
At Monk’s side, Charlotte covered her mouth and nose—likely less from the reek and more from the shock. Nolan guided them to a steel door that closed off the back section of the kennel.
“Through here!” he shouted.
He lifted a bar to open the door. They all hurried across the threshold to escape the noise and stench. The next room held only a single cage, a pen that filled the back of the space. The bars ran from concrete floor to roof. A shadowy shape lurked at the back of the pen. It pulled farther away from the light flowing through the open door.
Ngoy crossed to a wall switch and flicked it. An LED lamp ignited brightly overhead, revealing what was caged here.
Charlotte gasped, and Frank swore.
A huge cat—easily two hundred pounds—crouched in a savage hiss, its back arched, hackles high. A tail slashed back and forth. It looked like a jaguar or maybe a cheetah, but it was striped instead of spotted. Even in the bright light, its fur appeared to swirl darkly with every contraction of its muscles. But most frightening of all were its fangs. The snarled lips framed a pair of curled canines. They extended below its jaws, like those of some saber-toothed tiger.
“What is it?” Charlotte eked out.
“That’s a good question,” Nolan admitted.
It lunged at the sound of their voices, crashing into the bars and bouncing off. A paw slashed back in frustration, scraping bars and floor as it retreated. Hooked black claws gouged the concrete, leaving a wet crimson trail behind. At first, Monk thought the creature was bleeding, but Nolan corrected this delusion.
“Keep well back. There’s poison in those claws. A neurotoxin. Similar to what’s found in the venom of puff adders. We learned that the hard way.”
Frank actually drew closer, cocking his head. “Is it infected with the virus?”
“Definitely,” Nolan agreed. “It was trapped by a group of hunters last month. I had sent out teams, to try to discern how much of the jungle might be affected. This is not the first such aberration brought back. You were right to be concerned about what you saw in that newly hatched ant.”
Frank nodded to the cat. “How old is it?”
It was a strange question considering what they were facing, but Nolan nodded. “We guess a year at best.”
“So, it was likely infected while in utero, altered during embryonic development.”
“Like with the ant pupa,” Monk said.
Jameson kept near the door. “Still, what the hell is it?”
“It’s genetically a cheetah,” Nolan answered, confirming Monk’s initial guess. “At least 99.8 percent the same.”
“So, something changed that other 0.2 percent,” Frank said.
Monk knew they all suspected the virus. Still, he gaped at how such small changes could result in this beast. Then again, the difference between the DNA of humans and chimpanzees was less than one percent.
Charlotte drew closer to Frank. “How could that be possible? Random genetic mutations should have ended up with something monstrously disfigured, not a creature so perfectly fit.”
“Who says the changes had to be random?” Frank countered. “If Ngoy’s genetic studies are correct, this virus is carrying genes going back to our earliest evolutionary history. Most of which—like in many giant viruses—we’ve never seen before. The virus may have honed a genetic mechanism to perfectly pair a known DNA sequence with that of another species. To know what fits. What keys fit what locks.”
“And maybe how to lockpick everything else,” Monk added.
Frank nodded. “With every generation, we think we understand the mechanism for evolutionary changes. Yet surprises and exceptions abound. Certainly, many changes in species occurs incrementally, one tiny step at a time. A giraffe’s neck grows a little longer. A beak alters in a flycatcher. But then there are those cases where there appears to be no middle ground. As if the change occurred spontaneously out of whole cloth, a new species created in a single bound. Much still remains unknown or poorly understood. To this day, there remains no grand unifying theory for evolution.”
Monk remembered Frank expressing his belief in the Virus World Theory, how viruses might not be degenerate escapees from living cells, but were far older, possibly the precursors to modern animals and plants. He had even hypothesized how viruses could be the very engines of evolution.
Is that what this virus is demonstrating?
All eyes were on Frank—even the monstrous cat in the cage glared at him. The man finally slumped under the weight of their attention.
“I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “It’s just conjecture at this point. But I do know one thing with absolute certainty.”
“What’s that?” Charlotte asked.
Frank kept his gaze fixed on the cat. “No one should be out in that jungle.”
15
April 24, 6:55 P.M. CAT
Tshopo Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Gray wrestled with the wheel of the huge all-terrain vehicle as it bounced and jostled down the muddy, weed-choked jungle road. Twin beams pierced the dark track ahead.
He had obtained their transportation—a Russian-made Shatun ATV 4X4—from the FARDC military who had commandeered the U.N. camp. It was the perfect jungle trekker, more of a two-ton tractor than a typical ATV. The narrow vehicle towered atop sixty-eight-inch tires. The four-wheeler could climb over tall obstacles, and even float on its giant tires, becoming an unwieldly duck to ford rivers. Also, the Shatun’s front compartment articulated independently of the enclosed rear cargo bed, allowing it to navigate tight bends, even do a U-turn on the spot.
“How much farther?” Gray shouted over the rumble of the diesel engine.
Faraji rose from the passenger seat and leaned out the windshield that had been flipped open. He searched ahead, then sat back. “Not far,” he concluded.
Gray fought not to roll his eyes. That had been the kid’s answer for the past several miles. They had left the camp by this jungle road four hours ago. While the ATV had a maximum speed of thirty miles per hour, Gray had never approached that limit due to the difficult terrain. Still, they had to be a good sixty miles from the camp by now.
Gray drove another painstaking mile into the night—then Faraji jerked straight and pointed. “Ni huko! There, there!”