“Thirty years ago, we spotted a virus in the bloodstream of green monkeys. Our knowledge of viruses at the time was rudimentary, considering what we know now. We actually thought it a form of rabies, but the shape, size, and biology of the organism was different.
“It eventually was labeled simian immunodeficiency virus—SIV. We now know SIV can live in monkeys indefinitely without harming the animal. We first thought the monkeys had some kind of resistance, but we later learned the resistance came from the virus, which chemically realized that it couldn’t ravage every biological organism it contacted. The virus learned to exist within the monkeys, without the monkeys knowing they even carried it.”
“I’ve heard this,” she said. “And the AIDS epidemic started with a monkey bite.”
He shrugged. “Who knows? Could have been a bite or a scratch, could have been ingested. Monkeys are a regular part of many diets. No matter how it happened, the virus left monkeys and found humans. I saw this firsthand with a man named Charlie Easton, where the virus changed inside him from SIV to HIV.”
He told her more about what happened decades ago, not all that far from where he stood, when Easton died.
“HIV harbored no parental instinct for humans, the way SIV did for monkeys. It went to work, quickly cloning cells in lymph nodes into duplicates of itself. Charlie was dead in a matter of weeks.
“But he wasn’t the first. The first case that can be definitively diagnosed was a man from England. In 1959. A frozen serum sample tested in the early nineteen-nineties showed HIV in his blood, and medical records confirmed the symptoms of AIDS. Most likely SIV and HIV have both been around for centuries. People dying in isolated villages, nobody noticing. Secondary infections like pneumonia actually killed the people, so doctors routinely mistook AIDS for other things. Originally, in the United States, it was labeled ‘the gay pneumonia.’ The best guess now is that in the nineteen-fifties and-sixties, when Africa started to modernize and people began congregating in cities, the disease spread. Eventually, an outsider carried the virus off the continent. By the nineteen-eighties, HIV had made it across the globe.”
“One of your natural biological weapons made good.”
“We actually thought it lousy for that purpose. Too hard to contract, too long to kill. Which isn’t bad. Any easier and we’d have a modern-day black death.”
“We do,” she said. “It’s just not killing the right people yet.”
He knew what she meant. Presently, there were two main strains. HIV-1, prevalent in Africa, while HIV-2 remained strong within intravenous drug users and homosexuals. Lately, new variant strains had started appearing, like a nasty one in Southeast Asia, recently acquiring the label of number three.
“Easton,” she said. “Did you think you’d been infected by him?”
“We knew so little about how the virus passed back then. Remember, any offensive biological weapon is useless without a cure. So when that old healer offered to take me up into the mountains, I went. He showed me the plant and told me the juice from its leaves could stop what he called the fever-disease. So I ate some.”
“And didn’t give Easton any? You let him die?”
“I gave him the juice from the plant. But it did nothing for him.”
She looked puzzled and he allowed her question to hang.
“Once Charlie died, I cataloged the virus as an unacceptable specimen. The Iraqis only wanted to know about successes. We were told to leave the failures in the field. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, when HIV was finally isolated in France and the United States, I recognized the biology. Initially, I didn’t give it much thought. Hell, nobody outside the gay community was all that concerned. But by 1985 I heard the talk among the pharmaceutical community. Whoever found the cure was going to make a lot of money. So I decided to start looking. By then I knew a lot more. So I went back to central Asia , hired a guide to take me up to the high ground, and found the plant again. I brought back samples and tested it and, sure enough, the damn thing wiped HIV out almost on contact.”
“You said it didn’t work on Easton.”
“The plant’s useless. By the time I gave it to Charlie, the leaves were dry. It’s not the leaves. It’s the water. That’s where I found them.”
He held up the syringe.
“Bacteria.”
Malone 3 - The Venetian Betrayal
SIXTY-ONE
VENICE
“EVER HEARD OF A SCYTALE?” MALONE ASKED.
None of them had.
“You get a stick, wrap a strip of leather around it, write your message on the leather, then unwrap the strip and add a bunch of other letters. The person who you intend to get the message has a similar stick, same diameter, so that when he wraps the strip around it the message is readable. Use a different size stick and all you get is jumbled letters. The ancient Greeks used the scytale all the time to communicate secretly.”
“How in the world do you know these things?” Davis asked.
Malone shrugged. “The scytale was fast, effective, and not prone to mistakes—which was important on the battlefield. A great way to send a concealed message. And, to answer your question, I read.”
“We don’t have the right stick,” Davis said. “How are we going to decipher the thing?”
“Remember the riddle. Life provides the measure of the grave.” He held up the medallion. “ZH. Life. This coin is the measure.”
“Be wary, for there is but one chance of success,”Stephanie said. “That gold foil is thin. No way to unravel and wrap it again. Apparently, you get one shot.”
Malone nodded. “That’s my guess, too.”
He led the search as they left the basilica and headed back to the diocese offices with the foil and the elephant medallion. He estimated the decadrachm to be about an inch in diameter, so they started looking for something that would work. A couple of broom handles found in a storage closet proved too large, a few other items too small.
“All the lights are on,” Malone said. “But nobody’s around.”