Legends

At a loss for a response, Martin mumbled “Uh-huh.”

From the back of the auditorium, a girl’s voice translated. “He insists to know for what reason you come to Kantubek.”

Martin stole a glance behind him. Almagul was standing inside the auditorium door, an armed scavenger on either side of her. She smiled nervously at him as he turned back to the warlord and saluted him. “Explain to him,” he called over his shoulder, “that I am a journalist from Canada.” He produced a laminated ID card identifying him as a wire service reporter and waved it in the air. “I am writing an article on the philanthropist Samat Ugor-Zhilov, who is said to have come to Vozrozhdeniye Island when he left Prague.”

When Almagul translated Martin’s reply, the warlord bared his teeth in disbelief. He snarled something in a high-pitched voice to the men standing behind the throne, causing them to titter. The warlord kicked over the ammunition box so that his feet danced in the air as he raged at the girl standing in the back of the auditorium. When he ran out of breath he slouched back into the throne. Almagul came up behind Martin. “He tells you,” she said in a low, frightened voice, “that Samat Ugor-Zhilov is the governor of this island and the director of Kantubek’s experimental weapons programs.”

The muffled voices talking to each other in an unintelligible language had worked their way into the texture of Martin’s dream; he decided he was Lincoln Dittmann at Triple Border, listening to the Saudi he’d later identified as Osama bin Laden conferring with the Egyptian Daoud. When he finally realized that the men weren’t speaking in Arabic, he forced himself through the membrane that separated sleep from wakefulness and sat up. It took a moment for his eyes to become accustomed to the dim light cast by feeble bulbs burning in sockets on the stone walls of the vaulted basement. He reached out and touched the cold bars and remembered that the guards had forced him into a low cage, the kind used to house monkeys in laboratories. He could make out Almagul curled up on a pile of rags in the cage next to his. Beyond her cage were other cages—more than he could count. Eight of them contained prisoners sleeping on the floor or sitting with their backs to the bars, dozing with their bearded chins on their chests.

Near the stone staircase, three men in white lab coats stood around a high stainless-steel table talking among themselves. Martin could hear their voices. Gradually a migraine mushroomed behind his eyes and he felt himself being sucked into another identity—one in which the language the men were speaking seemed vaguely familiar; to his astonishment he discovered that he understood fragments.

… very stable, even in sunlight.

… the advantage of anthrax over plague. Sunlight renders plague stock harmless.

… should concentrate on anthrax.

… I agree … especially pulmonary anthrax, which is extremely lethal.

… Q fever persists for months in sand.

… What are you suggesting? … bombard New York with sand and then attack America with Q fever?

… still think we are making a mistake focusing on bacterial agents, which are, in general, difficult to stabilize, difficult to weaponize.

Of course! The men were speaking Russian, a language Martin had studied in college in what seemed like a previous incarnation. He remembered the shrink at the Company clinic telling him of a case where one alter personality was able to speak a language that the other personalities didn’t understand. It was a perfect example, she’d said, of how compartmented legends can be in the brain.

… not going to make the case for nerve agents over bacterial agents again, are you? Samat himself decided the question months ago.

… Samat said we could revisit the issue at any point in our program. Nerve agents—VX in particular, but Soman and Sarin also—can be deadly.

… they have serious manufacturing problems.

… I want to remind you that tabun is relatively easy to manufacture.

… Tabun is only moderately stable.

… we are turning in circles … try one of the hemorrhagic fevers—the Ebola, for instance—on one of our clients.

… Ebola is taking us down a dead-end street. I grant you it is lethal but it is also relatively unstable, which makes an ebola program problematic.

… still, we have the spores Konstantin developed in his laboratory, so we might as well test them on one of the guinea pigs.

… only eight guinea pigs left.

… not to worry … two new ones.

The three scientists, if that’s what they were, fitted on Russian army gas masks equipped with enormous charcoal filters. One of them selected a test tube from a cluster in a refrigerator and, removing the wax seal with a pocket knife, carefully poured a single drop of yellowish liquid onto a wad of cotton in a petri dish and quickly covered it with a glass lid. The scientists pulled a low table up to the cage at the far end of the basement and positioned a small ventilator so that it would blow over the petri dish into the cage. The bearded giant of a man sitting with his back to the bars in the cage rocked forward onto his knees and began to shout at the men in the language of the scavengers. His ranting woke the other prisoners. Almagul climbed onto her knees and, grasping the bars, yelled at the men in lab coats in Uzbek. The prisoner in the cage next to hers began raging at them, too. Almagul looked at Martin, her face contorted with terror. “They are experimenting on one of the scavengers,” she cried, pointing toward the men in white lab coats.

In the last cage, the bearded man sank back onto his haunches and, covering his mouth with the tail of his shirt, breathed through the fabric. One of the scientists brought over a Sony camera attached to a tripod and began filming the prisoner. Another scientist checked the time on his wristwatch, noted it on his clipboard, then removed the cover on the petri dish and stepped away from the cage.

Martin’s thoughts went back to the trial that had landed him and the girl in the monkey cages. The court martial—the warlord’s term for the proceedings—had started after the lunch break and lasted twenty minutes. Presiding from the makeshift throne on the stage of the auditorium, Hamlet had acted as prosecutor and judge. Martin, his wrists secured with the dogs leash, had been charged with both high and low treason. Almagul, accused of aiding and abetting, had stood behind Martin, nervously whispering translations in his ear. Hamlet had opened the proceedings by announcing that he was absolutely convinced of the guilt of the accused; that the sole purpose of the court martial was to determine the degree of guilt and, eventually, the appropriate punishment.