The foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains
Northern New Mexico
3:55 p.m., Eastern Standard Time
“We’re scheduled to arrive in Tennessee at 5:00 p.m. tomorrow,” Kincaid told the video screen. He saw Theodore nod at him from the living room of the house on Larchmont Street in Asheville, North Carolina. “We’ll drive in from there.” He didn’t want to arouse suspicion by flying into an airport in the same state as the luncheon.
“I’ll meet you at the airport with the van,” said Theodore. “Everything is set.”
“And have there been any more problems?”
“No, Father.”
“I need to tell you something.” There was a stiff reprimand in his voice. “The second girl wasn’t dead when you left her.”
Theodore shifted in his seat. “I’m sorry, Father.”
“I sent you the case files, even found a copy of the right kind of chess set, told you how to tie the ribbon, gave you all the details about the crimes. All you needed to do was make the scenes look like those of the other girls.”
“I’m sorry, Father. I did my best-”
“We’ll discuss it further when I arrive.”
A slight hesitation this time. “Yes, Father.”
Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid ended the video chat and walked through his library to the main entrance hall.
Over the years the ranch had shifted from an artists’ colony in the sixties, to a guest ranch that catered to movie stars in the seventies and eighties, to the home of Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Olivia Brine in the early nineties-and even served a two-year stint as the weekend getaway for software designer and billionaire Rex Withering, the man Kincaid had purchased it from a decade ago. But as diverse as all of the owners had been, they’d had one thing in common: all sought a place of solitude and inspiration here at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Spanish for “blood of Christ.”
Kincaid found it ironic that he and his family lived in the shadows of mountains named for the blood of a savior.
He’d originally acquired the four thousand acres of land to use as a corporate retreat for PTPharmaceuticals, but after selling his drug company four years ago for $650 million, he’d made the ranch his home and turned it into the living quarters for his family.
He stepped outside and drank in the desert scents of juniper and pinion. The sandy ground crunched underfoot as he headed toward the building on the edge of the corral. He stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. At this altitude, October was a brisk and frosty month beneath the lonely, windswept skies of New Mexico.
Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid had chosen this part of New Mexico because out here in the Enchanted Circle, the government let you do your own thing. Yes, officially, the Enchanted Circle got its name from an eighty-four-mile stretch of road that encircled Wheeler Peak, the highest mountain in the state. But all the locals knew that the region really got its name for another reason. Even though the area had originally been settled by Catholic missionaries, over the years it had become the home of a blend of various flavors of spirituality combining Native American beliefs with whatever parts of eastern mysticism were in vogue at the moment. Crystals. Reincarnation. Wiccan rituals. Whatever.
None of that mattered to Kincaid. He didn’t believe any of it. He was just glad the region provided a place where his family could disappear for a few years while the plans were put into place.
In addition, for some reason, cattle in this region were often found mutilated in the fields. Some people said it was just the locals doing it to give the tourists something to talk about. Others said it was from extraterrestrial encounters. For Kincaid it was simply a matter of added convenience since he and his family needed to perform certain tests on the livestock. The rumors made it easier for them to dispose of the leftover carcasses.
Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid walked over to the specially constructed building on the edge of the meadow. It was there that the test room had been set up. It was there that Rebekah and Caleb were dying of tularemia.
Even though at times the ranch and outbuildings had been the home of more than eighty people, Kincaid’s group had never numbered more than fifty or so.
Currently, counting Rebekah and Caleb, along with the thirteen children, there were twenty-eight family members.
Bethanie and Alexis would have made it thirty.
It was family. His family.
And since they were family, they would do anything for each other.
Rebekah and Caleb were sitting together on the sofa in their quarantined room. And, just as Dr. Andrei Peterov had promised, there’d been no visible signs of the bacterial infection until about twelve hours ago. “They’ll be contagious almost immediately,” Dr. Peterov had explained in his nearly impeccable English. “Though they might feel a little nauseous, the true effects of the infection won’t be evident until after the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours. By then, of course, it’ll be too late to reverse the effects-even if the doctors were somehow able to correctly identify the agent.”
After the Cold War it hadn’t been tough to find Russian scientists who still sympathized with communism, who still believed in the cause. Many had been devastated in the months following November 18, 1978, when they saw what the capitalistic Americans had driven a small colony of communists to do. Nearly a thousand comrades were dead, and the world remembered them not as believers dedicated to a cause, to each other, to compassion-but only as lunatic members of a killer cult.
That was the fault of the media.
And that’s why the media leaders of the world would be the first to pay.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, most of the Russian scientists doing research in biological and chemical weapons fled to the Middle East or North Korea. However, a handful had defected to the United States. Kincaid discovered it wasn’t all that difficult to find just the right scientist. Not for someone with money. You’d be amazed what $28 million in cash could buy.
And Dr. Peterov had proven more than worthy of his salary.
Kincaid’s pharmaceutical labs had provided the ideal place to perfect the process-all in the name of research and development. Of course, after selling the company he’d brought that research with him to his private labs here in New Mexico.
But for everything to work out as planned, he needed just the right agent. Bacterial or viral, it didn’t matter to him. Just something contagious, airborne if possible. Silent for a few days; deadly from the start. And Dr. Peterov had delivered the perfect little bug.
Rebekah and Caleb were holding each other now, struggling for breath. Reading the sacred scripts aloud, bowing in rhythm to the words.
It was Dr. Peterov’s idea to use the gram negative bacillus called Francisella tularensis. He’d pioneered ways of weaponizing it in Russia before the end of the Cold War. “It’s versatile, able to be spread either through ingestion or as an aerosol, fatal about 35 percent of the time, and very tough to identify symptomatically,” he’d told Kincaid. By splicing in some genes from Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, he and his team had created something nearly impossible to diagnose. Very exotic. And very deadly.
“What about a cure?” Kincaid had asked him.
“There is no known vaccine for CCHF, and the vaccine for tularemia, the disease caused by Francisella tularensis, isn’t available to nonmilitary personnel. Of course we developed a way to treat it in case we were exposed, but without our research the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will never find a cure in time.”
It’d taken six years to find a way to make the bacteria contagious human to human and to make it virulent enough to raise the death toll up to 85 percent-a satisfactory percentage to Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid. After all, when you know you’ll most likely die, it’s a thousand times more terrifying than if you know for certain that you will-in which case you might find peace; or if you discover the odds are actually in your favor -in which case you can survive relatively well on denial.
No, the most terrible thing of all is to face life without the possibility of either peace or denial.
With no place to run or hide.
Distribution seemed to be the primary problem. At first he’d thought about using inhalers to spread it-after all, his drug company produced some of the most popular asthma medicine currently prescribed, but his goal wasn’t to indiscriminately infect children, so he gave that idea up almost immediately. No, he needed a more focused distribution system. He’d considered replacing fire extinguishers with an aerosol version of the bacterium and then starting a fire in the Stratford Hotel, but that seemed too elaborate. Besides, the place was built out of solid rock.
Finally, he’d landed on a simple plan. Nearly infallible. Completely unstoppable.
Kincaid looked at Rebekah and Caleb.
The effects of the genetically altered CCHF tularemia were quite evident by now: the trembling limbs, skin ulcers, swollen lymph nodes, orifice bleeding. It was actually rather disturbing to watch.
But, the couple didn’t look disturbed or frightened. After all, they’d volunteered for this job. To go ahead of the rest.
A test had been necessary, after all, and this was the easiest way to control it, here at the ranch.
They were holding hands, eyes closed, perhaps in prayer to their Father, Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid. As they mouthed their petitions, Caleb’s eyelids started hemorrhaging, seeping blood.
Kincaid spent all afternoon consumed with thoughts of the jungle, watching them die. The babies. The syringes, and of course, Jessie Rembrandt and the whirlpool and the hunting knife twisting slowly to the bottom of the bloody water.
And then, at last, his thoughts turned to Sebastian Taylor, the governor of North Carolina, the one responsible for it all.