Dourado climbed inside the Sikorsky and looked around. The rear of the cabin behind the passenger seating area was filled with cargo containers and cardboard boxes. The containers had been stacked up to within eight-inches of the ceiling, and they were secured in place by a cargo net that stretched between grommets in the floor and walls. Supplies. For an expedition, perhaps?
She stifled her curiosity and focused on accomplishing the task she had set for herself. “Where are the fire extinguishers?” she asked, only to discover that the crewman was no longer there. She turned to find him walking across the tarmac in the direction of a small jet aircraft that was taxiing toward the hangar. The Cerberus plane had arrived.
Dourado looked away quickly. She was nearly out of time, and yet instead of triggering a panic attack, the ticking clock only served to further sharpen her focus.
“I can do this,” she told herself again, and this time, she actually believed it. What she was attempting was not much different than hacking a secure server. The only difference was that she was doing it in the real world.
It took just a few seconds for her to compose a brief e-mail with a link to a phone-finder app and instructions on how to use it. She hit send, and after a surreptitious look around to make sure that she was still unobserved, she slipped the phone into one of the boxes. It would be found eventually, but not until the helicopter reached its final destination.
She returned to the open hatch and peered out. The Learjet had pulled into the empty hangar, and its side hatch was deployed. The crewman stood at the base of the fold-down steps, waiting to greet disembarking passengers.
Dourado held her breath, but in anticipation rather than anxiety. Strangely, she was not the least bit fearful now.
She easily recognized the first man off the plane. He looked a little older than the most recent photographs she had found, but it was unmistakably Liam Kenner. That single revelation made everything she had risked and endured worthwhile. If Kenner was here, then whatever he was looking for was also here, somewhere nearby, or at least somewhere that could be reached only by helicopter from Belem. The link she had sent to Pierce would allow them to pinpoint that final destination, and finally give them an advantage in the battle with Cerberus.
The next passenger off the plane was likewise unmistakable. Though she had never seen him before, the big brutish looking man matched Fiona’s description of Kenner’s hired muscle, Vigor Rohn. Kenner and Rohn began conversing with the crewman from the helicopter, gesturing excitedly toward the aircraft, no doubt discussing the particulars of the impending next leg of their travels.
Time to go, Dourado thought.
It was a basic rule of hacking. Always be long gone before anyone realized something had happened. She could walk right by Kenner and Rohn without fear of being recognized. If they inquired about her, the crewman would be able to vouch for her, but the longer she waited, the more suspicious her presence would become to them.
I need to go.
Yet, she did not move. Her eyes remained fixed on the open hatch in the side of the Learjet. Someone else was coming out, three people — two large men, both cut from the same cloth as Rohn. Bracketed between them was a woman with long black hair.
Augustina Gallo.
That was what she had been waiting for, hoping for. And now I really, really have to go.
Still, she did not move.
She had visual confirmation that Gallo was alive and a hostage. She had established that Kenner and Rohn were bound for some destination in the Amazon. She had even managed to find a way to track the helicopter so Pierce would be able to follow when he arrived in Brazil. Realistically, there was nothing more she could do.
I’m on my own here, Dourado thought. It’s not like I can rescue her all by myself.
Or can I?
She glanced back at the box where she had hidden her phone, and all the other cargo stacked up behind it, and she made her decision.
30
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.”