The JUDAS ViRUS
PROLOGUE

KAZAKHSTAN:

This shouldn’t be happening, TR thought as the truck hit a big pothole in the ruined highway. I’m not supposed to be here.

The truck dropped into another hole, throwing him against a crate. He struggled to his feet and banged on the cab window with his fist. “Watch where the hell you’re going.”

He could hear the two members of the French team in the cab laugh at him. Then the truck hit another hole, probably on purpose.

Laugh it up boys, TR thought. Soon, things won’t be so funny.

How he hated those two. They called him Le Boucher, the butcher, because they thought his mouse dissection technique was too aggressive and careless-their way of diminishing him. As though they were so damned superior. Well, it wouldn’t be long now and it’d be their turn.

But this was not the plan. By now, he should have been in Tselinograd with Bill Lansden, his leader. He wasn’t there because Lansden’s wife had been in a bad car wreck back in the States and Lansden had to depart early with the truck, leaving TR to finish packing the equipment and take it and himself out with the French.

And after nine weeks, was he ever glad to be going. He looked out the back of the truck at the endless prairie, unbroken by any living thing except green wheat, stretching endlessly to the horizon. It was a hell-hole even without the epidemic they’d all come to fight.

What a fiasco. Fly eight thousand miles, bring in a ton of medical equipment and supplies, only to discover that a French team had arrived for the same purpose the day before.

The damn Kazakhstanis had sent out pleas to the U.S. and France and didn’t tell either country about the other.

The two teams had combined forces and had traced the strange illness that had killed fourteen of the villagers to a microbe carried by the local mice, which had overrun the place after a big snowstorm had buried a bumper wheat crop the previous year. The snow hadn’t melted until spring, giving the furry little monsters more food than they could consume. So they’d done what all animals do under those circumstances; they’d created a population explosion, which had led to infestation of even the wheat thatch on the village roofs.

The teams had determined that the disease organism was expelled from infected animals in their urine. Invariably, some of this urine made its way through the thatch into the villager’s homes, and when the floors were swept, microbe-laden dust was inhaled by the home’s occupants. That much they’d established for sure. But they didn’t have the equipment to determine much about the bug except that it was completely destroyed in infected individuals within an hour after death, and it was a virus belonging to the hanta genus. To learn more would require sophisticated equipment neither team had brought.

The truck banged into another pothole, bouncing TR into the air and jarring his spine so hard when he came down that his teeth clicked.

Jesus, doesn’t this thing have any springs on it?

The two teams had agreed to publish the results of their work together. And when the French had proposed that they take all the blood samples and do the molecular biology work, that dope Lansden had agreed. He’d paid no attention when TR suggested dividing the samples and giving each team a set-too much trouble, Lansden had said. His position on this was crazy. So TR had taken charge. And for all their insulting behavior and their attempt to dominate the study, he’d decided that the French should go home empty handed.

The truck suddenly slammed to a stop. Three men dressed in camouflage fatigues, all of them armed with machine guns, materialized out of the wheat twenty yards back.

TR leaped up and looked over the cab, where he saw a jeep containing more armed men blocking the road. They’d apparently been hiding in the ravine to the right.

The ones behind the truck began screaming at TR in Russian and motioning for him to get out. He jumped to the pavement and was spun around so he was facing the field flanking the road. A foot in his back sent him sprawling onto the shoulder. He tried to get up, but was held on his knees by a gun behind his ear. As he realized that this was the traditional Russian method of execution, the contents of his stomach turned rancid.

The men from the jeep pulled the Frenchmen out of the truck and forced them to their knees beside TR.

“You don’t understand,” TR whined. “I’m not with these other men. I’m-“

The guy with the gun at TR’s head shouted at him and pressed the pistol harder against his skull. To his right there was a gunshot and the Frenchman who’d been driving the truck let out a faint grunt as though he’d been hit in the gut. In his peripheral vision, TR saw the man fall face forward into the wheat.

Then, beside him, not three feet away, another shot sent a bloody aerosol and pieces of the remaining Frenchman’s skull flying before he, too, crumpled onto his face.

An instant from his own death, TR rolled onto his back and yelled, “Nicolai Butuzov! Nicolai Butuzov! Americanski! Amerikanski!” Expecting to be shot in the face, TR raised his arms as if they could protect him.

A burly guy dressed like the others, but wearing a military beret had been inspecting the contents of the truck. He turned now and barked an order in Russian. He left the truck and walked over to TR. In heavily accented English, he said, “How do you know Nicolai Butuzov?”

TR had suspected from the start that the name his contact had used was probably an alias, but shouting it had done the trick. “I’m the one who hired you, for Christ’s sake.”

The burly Russian gave another order and the assassin looming over TR stepped back. The Russian extended a hand to help him up. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

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