“Sounds good to me.” Fiona tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle another yawn. “I feel like I’ve been up forever. Oh, wait. I have.”
Gallo checked the GPS map on her phone, plotting the most direct route to the nearby city of Argos, where she had made hotel reservations earlier in the day. Although it was only a few miles away, in typical Greek fashion, getting there would require them to follow a circuitous route through the Peloponnesian hills, in this case, backtracking almost halfway to Corinth before turning southwest toward their destination, but navigating to the highway would be the trickiest part. She drove with one eye on the phone and one on the road.
Beside her, Fiona made a humming noise. Gallo glanced over and saw that she was looking back through the rear window. “What?”
“That car. It wasn’t there a second ago.”
Gallo felt a twinge of worry, but shouted it down. Fiona was just being paranoid. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Nevertheless, she pressed down on the accelerator a little harder. A moment later, she reached the intersection with the highway, but on a whim she decided to ignore the guidance from her phone and turned in the opposite direction.
A few seconds later, a pair of headlights appeared in the rearview mirror. “Is that the same car?”
“Yep.” Fiona’s voice grew more anxious.
Gallo took the next right turn, dipping back into the maze of old Nemea, trusting her GPS to lead her back to the highway again. If the trailing car stayed behind them, there would be no doubt.
“He’s following us,” Fiona confirmed.
A cold numbness flooded into Gallo’s extremities, fear and adrenaline, but there was another emotion in the mix. Guilt.
Pierce had warned her, made provisions for her safety and Fiona’s, but she had ignored him. She had chalked his caution up to jealousy and over-protectiveness. And now both of them were in danger.
She made another turn without slowing. The Fox’s tires squealed. Gallo fought the steering wheel to maintain control.
She could just make out the silhouette of Doric columns against the moonlit sky. The Temple of Zeus. They had come full circle. At least now she knew where to go without consulting the GPS.
Their pursuer made the turn a moment later, his headlight beams filling her mirrors.
“Okay,” she said, trying to put forth a tone of calm determination. “They’re just tailing us. Maybe they’re hoping we’ll lead them to something.”
“Except now they know we know,” Fiona said.
“Damn.” I’ve made a mess of things, Gallo thought. One bad decision after another. So how do I keep from making this worse?
The answer was practically staring her in the face. Her phone.
She handed the device to Fiona. “Call the police.”
The European emergency services number was 1-1-2. Did Fiona know that?
“Uh, you’re getting a call.”
Wonderful. What else could go wrong? “From whom?”
“Unknown number. Should I answer it?”
Gallo felt the chill return. Kenner. Who else could it be?
She steered onto the highway, left this time, but suddenly she had no idea where to go. Part of her wanted to take her chances on the road, drive like hell and try to elude the pursuer. If she had been alone, she might have tried it, but she was not alone. She had to think of Fiona’s safety. She had to come up with a better solution.
Without letting off the gas pedal, she nodded. “Answer it.”
17
Cooper regarded Pierce with a grave expression. “We ought to go, bossman. Dark soon.”
Pierce ignored him and headed after Carter, who was already striding away. “Five minutes, Dr. Carter.”
“I can’t guarantee your safety out here for five minutes, Mr. Pierce.”
“It’s Dr. Pierce, actually.”
That stopped her. “You’re a doctor?”
“Archaeologist. Not an MD,” he added. “But if you’ll give me five minutes, I’ll explain.”
He could see that she was intrigued but not enough to get her to lower her defenses. “Well, Dr. Pierce, I’ve no idea what the consequences of long term exposure to this plant might be, so I strongly suggest that you head back now, take a long shower…with some bicarbonate of soda if you can find it. I’ll be back in the office later this week. You can call for an appointment.”
Pierce was sorely tempted to follow that advice, but he had come too far to turn back. He decided to try a different tack. “Are you staying here tonight? Do you have a camp?”
“There’s no room at the inn, if that’s what you’re asking. Your man is right. It will be dark soon. If you hurry, you might be able to make it back to the road.”
“But you are staying here? In the middle of all this…” He waved a hand around. “Whatever this is.”
Carter stared back, hands on hips. “Let me show you something that might help you understand the urgency of this situation.” She gestured for him to follow, but went only about twenty yards before stopping at a veritable wall of the greenery. She carefully pulled some of the vines aside to reveal a dark opening, like a cave entrance. Pierce balked until she unclipped a flashlight from her belt and shone it inside. That was when he realized that it was not a cave, but a house.
The structure was just a one-room, cinder block shack, but the plants had intruded here as well, with vines snaking through the doorway and window openings, and even through cracks in the mortar. The ceiling was crowned with an eruption of green where the vines had crawled through the gap between the wall and the corrugated sheet-metal roof. For the most part, the floor was clear of growth, but there were a few clusters where the plants had grown like crazy. Carter directed her light to the nearest of these and Pierce could see bits of color — synthetic fabrics, something that might have been the sole of a shoe.
A shoe?
“Was that…a person?”
“The entire village was consumed by this plant,” Carter said.
“That’s…” He was going to say impossible, but he knew better.
Carter took something from a belt pouch and passed it over to him. It was a slim booklet bound in red leatherette, which Pierce recognized as a European Union passport. Many of the pages within had partially dissolved, but the laminated photograph of the document’s owner was still intact, along with a name.
“Nils Van Der Hausen.”
“There was a health worker with that name here during the worst part of the outbreak, but as far as I know, he returned home. It’s not unusual for foreigners to visit these isolated areas. Missionaries and relief workers.” She paused a beat. “We found that on the trail coming in, along with some other items. Synthetic materials only. Just like this. The plant consumes anything organic. But what we can’t figure out is why the victims just let it happen. My hypothesis is that the plant releases a narcotic or some toxic substance that subdues or kills its victims. Then it converts their remains into organic nutrients.”
“A carnivorous plant,” Pierce said. “Like the Venus Flytrap.”
“That’s right. Only instead of catching flies in its leaves, this plant wraps its prey in vines and secretes a digestive enzyme.” She sighed. “It’s not native. No one here has seen anything like it before.”
“How large is the affected area?”
Carter shook her head. “We’re still mapping it, but the epicenter appears to be here, in this village. It wasn’t here a week ago. Whatever it is, it happened fast.”
Something clicked. “This is why you’re out here. The plant. It’s not an Ebola outbreak at all.”