“Basically,” Moore said.
“The parts that go up the side are called nucleotides; the molecules that go across the middle — the rungs in the ladder if you want to think about it like that — they’re called bases or base pairs.”
“Right,” Moore said. “Go on.”
“In standard DNA there are only four types of bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. We abbreviate them A, C, G, T.”
“You’re saying someone coded a message in these base pairs,” Moore guessed, trying to jump ahead and hoping that it would be something they could use.
Yang nodded. “The primary parts of the virus are designed as we would expect, but the inert section is different. Successive rungs show a repeating pattern. You see this in certain sections of DNA. Often the telomere sections are the same over and over again: TTAGGG. But I found something different here. The repetition starts, stops, and then restarts.”
“How is that a message?” Moore asked. He felt the clock ticking.
“Because the pattern is neither consecutively repeating nor sufficiently random. That means it has to be purposeful. In this case, I found fourteen consecutive rungs of one type of base pairing, eighteen consecutive rungs of a second type, nine consecutive rungs of a third type. Then the pattern started over again. Fourteen, eighteen, nine. Fourteen, eighteen, nine. It seemed odd to me.”
It seemed odd to Moore, mostly because it seemed odd to his geneticist. “But what the hell does it mean?”
“Genetically it means nothing,” Yang said. “But then I remembered what you said about Ms. Gonzales working for the NRI years ago and the connection hit me. N is the fourteenth letter in the alphabet, R is the eighteenth, I is the ninth. Fourteen, eighteen, nine, three times in a row. NRI, NRI, NRI. In a virus sent to a former NRI employee.”
Moore felt the hair on his neck stand up.
“Could there be any other reason?” he asked, feeling the claws of panic pulling at him. “Any reason at all for such a pattern?”
Yang shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Using the same logic, I ‘read’ the rest of the inert strand,” Yang said. “The next seventy-eight base pairs are arranged as follows, repeating patterns, eighteen in a row, then five in a row, then twenty-two, then five, fourteen, seven, and then five again. If you take those as letters they spell out one word: REVENGE.”
Moore felt the room spinning. Someone was after them. Whoever it was wanted them to know it at some point. Perhaps they’d been meant to discover this earlier, or perhaps well after the fact. But who and why?
Moore ran through the facts in his head. Ranga’s involvement brought Hawker in. The letter to Gonzales tipped the NRI and brought Moore and Danielle into the fray. All along whoever they were dealing with had been one step ahead of them, to the point where they’d even found or guessed the location of the safe house in Kuwait where Hawker had stashed Savi and the little girl.
Ranga.
Hawker.
Danielle.
Information that no one outside the NRI should have known.
Revenge.
The answer hit Moore like an anvil.
Each of them had plenty of enemies, plenty of people who might want to see them suffer or die, but Moore could think of only one person with reason to hate them all.
He grabbed his phone and hit the button to autodial Danielle’s satellite phone.
“Pick up!” he shouted to the air. “Pick up.”
A British voice came on the line. “This is Keegan.”
“Keegan, put Danielle on the line,” Moore said.
The response brought added pain.
“It’s too late,” Keegan said. “They’re already on the island.”
It was too late. And if Moore was right, Hawker and Danielle were walking into a death trap.
CHAPTER 53
A board the USS Shiloh, Captain Petrie watched as his men ran through the prelaunch sequence for the Tomahawk missiles and reported back in. Guidance was confirmed, warheads were armed, safeties removed.
“Preparation sequence complete,” an officer at the tactical station said. “Vertical launch system ready. TLAM four, seven, eight, and eleven ready to fire. TLAM units twelve, fourteen, fifteen, and nineteen on standby.”
Captain Petrie looked at the ship’s clock, watching as the second hand swung across the bottom of the hour and up the side. The ship was prepared, the board was green.
“Safeties off,” Petrie ordered.
The fire control officer flipped up the plastic guard on the launch trigger, uncovering the Fire switch. The second hand continued to sweep higher, passing the 11 and closing quickly on the vertical position. Precisely as it hit 12, Petrie gave the order.
“Commence firing.”
The weapons officer pressed the switch. A flaring sound was heard and the black night was lit up by blazing white flame as the first Tomahawk launched from its tube and lit its booster.
The missile fired off the ship at an angle, leaving a trail of smoke that the next missile blasted through only seconds later.
Somewhere in the Persian Gulf, two other cruisers were doing the same thing. And sixty miles north of the Shiloh’s position, whatever existed on the small rocky island had approximately four minutes to live.
CHAPTER 54
Leaving the missile crates behind, Hawker continued his search. A chart room, a room filled with welding equipment, a room filled with moldy stores of flour and rice. Finally, at the heart of the lowest deck he found a door that looked different from the others. In fact, it looked like an airlock with rubber sealed edges and a handle that would have been at home on the inside of a commercial aircraft door.
He glanced in through a small window above the handle. It looked like a lab in terms of styling and modern equipment. He saw movement in the corner. Sonia sitting in a chair, sobbing, covering her face.
Left to die, he guessed.
He threw the handle open and rushed toward her.
“Hawker, no!” she shouted.
A shot echoed through the room. Hawker felt an explosion hit him in the back and he flew forward, slamming into the wall face-first. He fell and his rifled clattered out of his hand.
Rolling over, he looked back toward the doorway. A man with jaundiced-looking eyes, sunken into a narrow, hatchetlike face, stared at him. A snake tattoo coiled around his right arm, and a dark scar lay hidden beneath a block of ink that curled around his neck.
“Welcome to my parlor,” the man said, raising a Chinese-made SKS rifle to a resting position.
The SKS fired the same slug as the AK-47. A heavy 7.62 mm shell. The blast had thumped Hawker hard. Part of it had penetrated the vest.
Now on the ground, Hawker felt as if he couldn’t breathe, as if the vest weighed a ton. He could feel blood flowing down his side. The only sound that came through the ringing in his ears was Sonia’s muffled screams.
She dropped down beside him as another man came in the door. This second man was a hulking brute, with a different tattoo on his forearm, a knife dripping with blood. He stood a step behind the first. He guessed the snake man was the leader of the cult. Their prisoner, Yousef, had called him Draco.
Sonia reached Hawker’s side. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Get away from him,” Draco ordered.
Tears streamed down Sonia’s face. “I’m sorry,” she whispered again. “I’m so sorry.”
The hulking man stepped forward, grabbed her by the arm, and dragged her back.
Hawker tried to rise but the wind had been knocked out of him. Based on the sudden shortness of breath he felt and the immense pain on his right side, he guessed he might have a punctured lung.