Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) Read online

  “That’s the place?” Vigor Rohn asked.

  Rohn was Bulgarian—Van Der Hausen recognized the distinctive Sofia accent. His voice was gravelly and irritable, like someone who had woken up with a hangover, except Rohn always sounded that way. He was big—six-foot-two, with the broad-shouldered physique of a footballer—and ugly. His face was pock-marked, like someone who had taken a double-barreled shotgun blast of rock salt. One of his ears looked like a cauliflower floret. Van Der Hausen felt quite certain that the man was no scientist, but Rohn always asked the right questions. He was either more intelligent than he appeared or he was being coached by a remote mentor. Probably both.

  Van Der Hausen nodded and waggled his GPS unit. “I tagged the devices, just to be sure that no one tampered with them.”

  “And we will be safe here?”

  “Technically, we could get a lot closer. This isn’t some run-of-the-mill infectious bio-weapon.” He smiled, recalling how Rohn had used very similar language two months earlier during their first meeting.

  Rohn had found him, just five minutes before his first attempt at selling the Ebola virus to a man in the Stockholm underworld. Rohn had appeared out of nowhere, warning Van Der Hausen that the meeting was a set-up. They had left together, narrowly escaping the tightening police dragnet.

  “My employer has noticed you,” Rohn had told him. “You are an amateur, playing a dangerous game with no idea of the risks you face. But my employer admires your initiative.”

  Van Der Hausen, still in shock, had managed to ask whether Rohn’s employer might be interested in purchasing the virus.

  Rohn had laughed. “Ebola is nothing. A run-of-the-mill threat, good for creating a panic, but almost useless for strategic purposes. You should know this better than anyone.”

  “Then what—”

  “You have something of even greater worth that my employer is willing to pay for.”

  “My scientific expertise?”

  Another derisive laugh. “There are many scientists in the world. But only a few of them are...” Rohn paused as if searching for the right word, “...unscrupulous enough to sell a deadly virus to the highest bidder. That is what makes you special. My employer is interested in research and development. Genetic engineering is the new frontier. Those who are the first to blaze trails into unexplored territory reap the greatest reward. You want that, don’t you?”

  Van Der Hausen most definitely did.

  “Then you must continue to impress my employer.”

  With a generous advance of seed money, Van Der Hausen had taken a leave of absence from the University of Stockholm and set up his own genetics lab, outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment purchased off the Internet. At first, he had felt like a frustrated artist, staring at a blank canvas, waiting for inspiration to dawn. Then he had remembered his earlier ordeal, and an idea had come to him.

  Rohn had been right. Weaponizing infectious diseases by tweaking various gene sequences to increase lethality and communicability was so twentieth century. This was the new world, where the old limits of DNA and RNA no longer applied. Genetic engineering was a playground, where men like him spliced nucleic acids together like Lego blocks. The only limit was his imagination, and he had a very vivid imagination.

  “Unless you’re standing at ground zero,” Van Der Hausen explained, gesturing toward the village, “within about fifty feet of the device when the spores are released, you could simply walk away and not be affected. If, that is, you knew what was happening.”

  Rohn grunted. “And you are ready to demonstrate now?”

  Van Der Hausen waggled the GPS again. “Say the word, and I’ll press the button.”

  “One moment.” Rohn took out a satellite-enabled smartphone and tapped the screen to place a call. There was an audible ringing—the phone was in speaker mode—and then a voice spoke.

  “Yes?”

  “It is Rohn.”

  “Ah, time to see if our Swedish friend is worth the money we’ve spent.” The voice was high-pitched and wheezy.

  An old man, Van Der Hausen decided.

  “Show me!” the man commanded.

  Rohn held the device up so that its built-in camera was oriented down toward the cluster of huts. “You may proceed,” he told Van Der Hausen.

  The geneticist nodded and then turned his attention to the village as well. At a distance of almost three hundred yards, the villagers were barely discernible.

  Like ants, he told himself. That’s all they are.

  He felt no remorse at what he was about to do. These were not people, not fellow human beings… They were a plague of insects, breeding and consuming with no regard for the consequences. Ebola was nature’s way of trying to restore the balance, a fact that his fellow volunteers at the WHO had never understood. They had swept in like crusading knights, intent on slaying the dragon without ever stopping to consider that the dragon might have a role to play in the natural order of things.

  His only regret was that this was merely a demonstration. One village. A drop in the ocean. Rohn’s employer—his employer, too, he supposed—wanted a product, not wholesale devastation.

  A countdown seemed appropriate. He started at five, and when he got to zero, he tapped the transmit button on the GPS.

  He thought he heard a distant popping noise, like a balloon bursting or a cork shooting from a bottle of champagne, but it was probably just his imagination. The aerosol devices that disseminated the spores were more like garden sprinklers. There might have been a faint hiss close to the source but nothing audible at such a distance.

  The wheezy voice issued from the phone. “Is something supposed to happen?”

  “You must be patient,” Van Der Hausen answered. “It may take a few minutes for the first generation of spores to mature. Growth will be exponential once the spores encounter a source of…ah...nutrients.”

  Several seconds passed, but still there was no visible change.

  The voice spoke again. “I had expected something a little more dramatic, Dr. Van Der Hausen. This is rather disappointing.”

  “We may be too far away to see the results,” Van Der Hausen replied, unable to hide his anxiety. They should have been able to see something. The outcome of the test in the laboratory had been quite dramatic.

  “Rohn, take our friend closer so that we may get a better look.” The voice of the old man on the other end of the phone was noticeably impatient and tinged with sarcasm.

  Closer? Despite his earlier assurance, Van Der Hausen felt a twinge of panic at this prospect. Now that the spores were circulating, moving closer was definitely a bad idea. He looked at Rohn, hoping to see the same apprehension that he now felt, but the man’s face was an emotionless mask. Rohn nodded in the direction of the village and spoke a single word. “Go.”

  Van Der Hausen swallowed nervously, forcing down the impulse to protest. “Very well.” He knew what to look for. He would stop at the first sign of propagation.

  As they descended the hillside, they were once more engulfed in the jungle thicket. Van Der Hausen scanned the vegetation, looking for any signs of new growth. After just a couple of minutes of pushing through the foliage, they reached the edge of the clearing. Though still a good hundred yards from the nearest hut, Van Der Hausen could hear the sounds of daily village life—children playing and babies squalling in their mothers’ arms.

  Something was wrong.

  “There may have been a malfunction in the aerosol devices,” he said, his tone more hopeful than disappointed. That explanation was preferable to the alternative. Yet, he had placed four of the devices—one at each corner of the building that had been set aside for use as a clinic—and the likelihood that all of them had failed was marginal at best. Which meant that the problem was with the organism itself. “Or possibly some environmental counter-agent that I didn’t account for.”

  “I’ve seen enough,” the old man replied. “Rohn, I have need of you elsewhere. Get to Athens as soon as possible.
Kenner believes we may be on the verge of a breakthrough.”

  “What about him?” Rohn’s eyes flashed toward Van Der Hausen.

  “A bad investment. Cash him out.”

  Van Der Hausen was quick to protest. “Now wait just a minute. This is a minor setback. The whole point of a large scale test is to work out the—”

  The words caught in his throat as he spied the glint of sunlight on the knife in Rohn’s other hand. He brought his own hands forward in an instinctive gesture of self-preservation, even as the blade slashed toward him. He felt something tugging at his shirt, but then Rohn took a step back and sheathed the knife.

  Van Der Hausen sagged in relief. Rohn’s display of menace was only a reminder of the stakes in this dangerous game he had decided to play, nothing more, and unnecessary at that. Van Der Hausen hardly needed an incentive. He wanted to know what had gone wrong even more than Rohn and the old man.

  A strange sensation hit his gut, a hollow feeling, similar to the experience of a rapid ascent in an elevator. Then he heard a wet sound as something hit the ground at his feet. He realized Rohn’s slash had not been a mere threat after all. Darkness swelled at the edge of his vision, and pain bloomed in his abdomen. As he crumpled to the ground alongside his entrails, it occurred to Van Der Hausen that his worst fears had caught up with him. He was going to die in this horrible place.

  2

  Heraklion, Crete

  The black-clad figure scrambled up and over the top of the six-foot high, metal fence, dropping down into an isolated corner of the wooded courtyard behind the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. He crouched there for a moment, concealed in the shadows, where the glow of streetlights did not quite reach. Then he extended a hand in a beckoning gesture.

  On the other side of the fence, eighteen-year old Fiona Sigler took a deep breath, glanced around to make sure there were no witnesses and then launched herself into motion. Two seconds later, she was hunkered down in the shadows beside the first intruder, her uncle, George Pierce.

  He was not really her uncle, just the best friend of her father, Jack Sigler…who was not really her father either, but such distinctions meant little to someone whose life to date was as screwed up as hers.

  “See,” Pierce whispered from behind his black ski-mask. “That wasn’t so hard.”

  “Climbing the fence? Piece of cake,” she replied, with just a hint of sarcasm. “It’s the trespassing that’s going to take some getting used to.”

  “Don’t worry,” he promised. “It gets easier.”

  “And so begins my life of crime.”

  Strangely enough, she was enjoying herself. Her heart hammered in her chest. She was terrified that a policeman or security guard would appear from out of nowhere, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other. But the fear was oddly exhilarating, like the thrill of a roller coaster ride. Given the sort of life she had led, a little late-night breaking-and-entering was actually pretty tame. If getting busted in the Greek Isles was the worst thing that happened to her tonight, she could deal. She had been through a lot worse.

  They stole across the courtyard to the back of the building. The museum was housed in an unremarkable modern-looking structure at odds with the rest of the picturesque port city. They had spent the last two days in Heraklion, familiarizing themselves with the museum. ‘Scoping the place out,’ was the phrase Pierce had used. Being in the town was like traveling back in time. There were statues and fountains, old fortresses, churches and mosques, crumbling ancient walls sitting side-by-side with modern high-rise buildings.

  Fiona thought the museum—which had been designed to withstand the frequent earthquakes that rocked the region—was ugly by comparison to the rest of the city. It had all the charm of a high school campus. But what did she know? Architecture really wasn’t her forte. She was fascinated by languages, and while she was by no means fluent in Greek, she could read the Greek alphabet almost as easily as traditional Latin letters. The best part about the walking tour had been trying to decipher the signs, though surprisingly, many of them were in English.

  She wondered which language would be on the signs in the local jail.

  Pierce led her to an unmarked metal door, then he knelt before it, illuminating the doorknob with a flashlight clenched between his teeth. The intensely bright LED bulb in the MagTac tactical flashlight was muted to a warm red glow by the addition of a snap-on filter lens. Enough light to work by, but much harder to detect from a distance. Pierce produced a slim black wallet and took out a strip of metal that Fiona recognized as a lock-pick. He held the pick up to the keyhole, but then stopped and raised his eyes to her, mumbling something around the flashlight. “Awn oo eye?”

  It was not a foreign language, but she had no trouble interpreting. Want to try?

  Hell, yeah, she thought, but she merely shrugged, worried about appearing overly eager to engage in this criminal act, even with his approval. “Sure.”

  Pierce passed over the tool set and then moved aside, removing the light from between his teeth and holding it low, to illuminate the lock.

  “Tell me about the Herculean Society while you do it,” Pierce said, flashing a grin.

  “What? Why?”

  “Since tonight is an initiation of sorts, your first field mission, I want to be sure you know what led us here.”

  “You want a history report while I pick a lock?”

  “Mind and body on separate tasks.” He nodded. “It’s an important skill.”

  Fiona inserted the pick. “The Herculean Society was formed in 800 BC, maybe earlier, by Hercules, hence the name. But he wasn’t a demi-god. He was a man who used science to extend his life, tapping ancient secrets—and DNA, long before modern scientists even discovered it—to make himself immortal.”

  She raked the pick’s tip along the keyway, feeling the pins move against the springs. She then removed a small tension lever from the kit and placed it in the cylinder, applying gentle but steady pressure, just enough to hold the pins in place as she teased them up, one by one.

  “Over time, Hercules witnessed how mankind abused certain powers, and he realized that most of us couldn’t be trusted with certain knowledge, artifacts or creatures. So he created the Society to hide, alter and protect history from humanity, and sometimes humanity from history. And he protected his own existence by exaggerating the truth about his life until it reached mythological proportions.”

  Each move of the lock-pick was second nature. One of her father’s friends had taught her how to do this years ago. She had practiced until it was drilled into her muscle memory, along with hand-to-hand combat, shooting and some simple computer hacking techniques—all useful skills for cat burglars and government agents. Her father and his friends were the latter, all members of an elite paramilitary special operations team.

  “In more recent years, Hercules went by the name Alexander Diotrephes, who I first met four years ago, under...interesting circumstances. Not long after that, he passed leadership of the Society on to my father, and he passed it on to you, what, six months ago? With that turnover rate, I’ll be in charge by the time I’m nineteen.” The cylinder rotated. The bolt slid away with a click. She grinned. “So are we here to protect history from people, or people from history?”

  Pierce returned her smile. “It’s usually a little of both.”

  She reached for the door knob, but Pierce shot out a restraining hand. “Alarm,” he whispered.

  She grimaced. Of course there’s an alarm. Stupid.

  Pierce reached into a pocket and took out a black plastic box that looked like a cross between an ohmmeter and an electronic stud-finder. It wasn’t the kind of thing the average professor of archeology carried, but he wasn’t the average professor of archeology. Not anymore. Those calm days were long behind him now. He missed the quiet sometimes, but he had no regrets. He was living every archeologist’s dream, which sometimes included breaking into a museum. He held the device close to the door and moved it along the edge of t
he frame. As he swept the device across the top of the door, a red LED began to blink, and then it remained steadily bright. Pierce gave a satisfied nod and pressed a button on the device. When he lowered his hand, the device remained in place, magnetically affixed to the door.

  “Open it,” he said. “Slowly.”

  She turned the knob and eased the door open an inch, then another. There was no clangor of bells or sirens alerting the world to their unauthorized presence. The door was equipped with a contact-circuit—the idea was that when the door was opened, the circuit would be broken, triggering the security alarm—but the electromagnetic induction field generated by the black box ensured that the circuit remained unbroken, even though the contacts were no longer touching. Of course, the alarm was not the only security measure they would have to worry about. The museum also employed a night watchman.

  Pierce pressed his face close to the gap. “All clear.”

  He gripped the door and slipped inside. Just before he disappeared completely, he waved her forward. Once she was inside, Pierce reached up to the top of the door and carefully slid the black device around to the inside of the door frame. With the door firmly shut and locked, he deactivated the box and removed it, slipping it back into his pocket.

  The service door opened into what appeared to be a supply room. Pierce shone his red flashlight around until he found a door leading deeper into the museum. He motioned for her to follow.

  They entered a corridor lined with several more doors, but Pierce passed all of these by and went to the double doors at the end of the hallway. After a quick check to ensure that the doors were not rigged with an alarm, he cautiously opened them to reveal a dimly lit room.