The Anthrax Protocol Read online

  THE ANTHRAX PROTOCOL

  JAMES THOMPSON

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Copyright Page

  To my soul mate of thirty-three years.

  The bravest, most courageous person I know,

  Terri Ann Thompson.

  Prologue

  Tlateloco, Mexico, July 5, 1520

  Bernal Díaz del Castillo stumbles over some unseen object and falls. He lands on his hands and knees, his face mere inches from the pustule-covered body of one of his soldiers. “Aiyeee,” he cries, pushing the ghastly corpse away, scrambling over dusty soil to escape the stench of putrefying flesh.

  The effort causes him to begin to cough again. He crawls on hands and knees in the dirt. A boiling tropical sun bakes his back while he coughs and retches, vomiting blood until he collapses, exhausted.

  Scarlet tears, tinged with blood, fill his eyes and run down his cheeks, forming slender rivulets until they begin to clot in his coarse beard. Raising his head, he peers across a clearing surrounding the temple. The place is littered with bodies, lying where they fell. Indian workers lying next to and, in some cases, upon his soldiers like rotting flotsam on a grassy sea of heat, humidity, and death.

  He rolls over on his back, momentarily blinded by the sun, and shakes his fist at a muggy blue sky. Muttering incoherently, he curses God for allowing this plague to decimate their command.

  As he squeezes his eyes shut to block out a fiery furnace from above, his thoughts return to the preceding week when the terrible sickness began.

  * * *

  Hernán Cortés, supreme commander of Spanish forces in Mexico, had badly miscalculated the gentle nature of natives here. Upon their arrival in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital city, Chief Montezuma welcomed them, believing them to be representatives of his pagan god, Quetzalcoatl. Hernán, too arrogant to use guile, took the Aztec chief prisoner. He thought to use Montezuma as a hostage to ensure the Indians’ good behavior. Hernán was supremely confident in his military judgment, and he ignored his lieutenants’ suggestions to go easy on the natives.

  For a time it looked as if he was correct. Initially, the Indians were docile, almost friendly. Then his overconfidence betrayed him. Hernán left on a tour of surrounding villages looking for more gold and jewels to send back to Spain as proof of their expedition’s success. When he returned, thousands of Aztec tribesmen, stirred into action by shouting priests, accosted his soldiers and began rioting.

  Hernán and Bernal had gone to Montezuma’s cell, finding him seriously ill. He was being guarded in a small stone room with a few of his favorite pets. When Hernán arrived, he found the chief slumped in a corner, near death. Montezuma could only be revived by pouring cold water on him, which also served to wash dried blood off his face and robes.

  Again seeking to intimidate the Indians, Hernán dragged a chained, weakened Montezuma to a stone platform in front of the largest temple overlooking the city. He had one of the missionaries who had taken time to learn the Aztec language, Father Bernardino Sahagún, explain that he would have their chieftain killed if they did not disperse at once.

  His threat, and Montezuma’s obvious illness, infuriated the Aztecs even more. They responded by hurling stones and pieces of wood at soldiers on the platform, wounding Chief Montezuma severely in the process when misguided rocks went astray. Everyplace on the chief’s body where he was struck by stones and sticks began to bleed copiously, inciting the villagers even further into a furor bordering on madness.

  Finally, with the crowd out of control, Hernán withdrew, taking Montezuma back to his cell. The Indian leader looked as if he might not survive the night. He had a raging fever and blood was seeping from his eyes, nose, and mouth. He was coughing and vomiting blood and had dark, purple bruises on his skin. Hernán summoned Bernal and a squad of soldiers, instructing them to take the Aztec chieftain and his shrieking pet monkeys to a neighboring city, Tlateloco, and if Montezuma died, to have his corpse and his monkeys prepared for burial in the traditional Aztec way. He pulled Bernal aside and ordered him to entomb the emperor and his pets where none of his followers would find the bodies. Hernán knew he would be unable to control a full-scale revolt if the Indians discovered their leader was dead. He was already making plans to try to bribe the priests to convince the natives to follow his orders and to bring him more gold and jewels as an offering to the new gods from Spain.

  * * *

  Díaz struggles back to his hands and knees, thinking, Hernán has sentenced me to die in this pit of hell. He has gone back to Spain with boatloads of riches for the king, leaving the rest of us to perish from this hellish pestilence.

  Too weak now to stand, he crawls a circuitous route, weaving among bodies rotting slowly in the tropical heat, toward the temple at the edge of the clearing. Sweat runs from his pores and drips on barren ground beneath him, even as fever chills cause him to shake and quiver in the jungle’s oppressive humidity. He must find shade, a cool place of refuge to await his inevitable death.

  His journey seems to take hours, although it is only a distance of forty yards. Finally, his strength waning, he manages to push aside a reeking corpse blocking the entrance to Montezuma’s tomb and crawls into a tunnel carved through heavy blocks of stone. Laboriously, overwhelmed by increasing pains in his chest, he makes his way deeper into the shadows. The air grows noticeably cooler as he enters the shaft.

  At the end of the passageway, when he reaches the entrance into the inner burial chamber, he stops and sits with his back propped against the rocks. He takes a journal from his waistband and rests, panting, with the diary in his lap. For a moment he wonders if he has time to complete his writings before death claims him as it has all the others.

  The leather covering of the journal shakes and becomes slick with sweat from his trembling hands. Cooler air in the tunnel has exacerbated his chills and he spasms and quivers, muscles jerking in a continuous ague.

  Leaning to one side, he empties his stomach in a gout of blood, scarlet liquid appearing black in the darkness. He chokes and begins to cough again, knifelike pain coursing through his lungs, making him dizzy.

  After a moment the spasm passes and he is able to withdraw a sharpened piece of charcoal from his trousers to begin what he knows will be his final entries. He gave up on quill and ink two days ea
rlier when constant tremors made his writing all but indecipherable.

  As he opens his journal, he rests his head against the cool stones of the tunnel, letting them take the fever from his body.

  He wonders how he, Hernán Cortés’s scribe, can be so cursed by God. He always says his prayers and gives his tithe to Mother Church—he doesn’t deserve to end his life in this miserable, stinking jungle.

  Another sudden, hacking cough brings him upright and bends him over, pain exploding in his head and blinding him momentarily. He knows with certainty his time is very short. He must finish this final duty to his commander. A warning of the terrible curse Montezuma and his heathen gods have cast upon this place must be given to the others who will return from Spain. With a mighty effort, he wills his arm to obey him and he begins to write:

  They are all dead. I am the last left alive. Hundreds of bodies lie where they fell, covered with sores, the hungry earth drinking their blood. At the end, they were too sick and weak to bury others, dying in agony from the plague our intervention has wrought.

  The illness we first observed in Emperor Montezuma has now claimed every life in this village. It begins as a simple cough, with fever and chills. After a day or two it somehow passes, and the victim is thought to have recovered. This Black Plague seems to wait in the body to reappear, gathering or rebuilding its evil strength for a final assault to bring death to the sufferer. The illness returns rapidly. Victims become fevered and weak and begin to cough up blood. Even the mouth and eyes bleed until the sick are too weak to move, and they die in an agony too terrible to contemplate.

  There is no one left here alive, no one. Even the animals are not spared, but are also succumbing to the curse. Our horses are dying as we are, bleeding through their muzzles until they grow too weak to carry us.

  As he writes, Díaz’s nose and eyes begin to drip blood on the parchment pages of his journal, partially obscuring some of his words. He is too ill to care. He glances down the tunnel leading to the inner tomb. At least, he thinks, the workers had managed to seal off the grave before they became too weakened by illness to move heavy stones blocking the entrance. He writes, again with a trembling hand:

  Montezuma was correct in his prophecy. He foretold that all who desecrated the honor and sacred places of the Aztecs would face the wrath of his gods and die in horrible pain.

  Díaz looks up from his writing. A large jaguar is dragging a villager’s body into the jungle, while a smaller animal, a panther, is eating another corpse where it lies. Soon there will be little evidence this plague ever existed.

  He grows dizzy for a moment, darkness invading his vision, pulling him into unconsciousness. When he awakens, blood has caked on his eyelids and he must pry them open with his fingers, causing fresh tears to flow.

  He knows his time is at hand and manages to scribble a few last words:

  Montezuma has had his vengeance. Heed this warning and leave this land of strange gods to the jungle, lest all who come here are doomed. . . .

  The charcoal falls from his fingers as his muscles contract and his back arches. With a mighty spasm, he coughs out his life onto the dusty floor of the tunnel.

  The ground begins to tremble. Trees sway back and forth, while jungle animals screech and howl across a tropical forest. Dead bodies in the clearing move as if they had been resurrected for one last mad dance. A small earthquake ripples through the region. In a final frenzy of geologic activity, as if nature is not yet through with Cortés and his Spanish soldiers, the earth heaves and tilts. Large cracks appear in the ground, swallowing corpses the scavengers have not yet carried off, a quake filling the air with dustlike smoke from hell’s fires.

  Blocks of stone in the small temple collapse, tumbling down to cover the lifeless body of Bernal Díaz del Castillo and seal the tunnel leading to the emperor’s tomb.

  It will not see the light of day again for almost five hundred years.

  Chapter 1

  Tlateloco, 2014

  Charles Adams groaned, his patrician features drawn into a grimace, his teeth bared against pain, as he squinted into a boiling tropical sun. His wavy, silver hair lay plastered against his skull; his safari shirt was wrinkled, stained with blood and vomit, clinging to him like a second skin.

  Adams clutched his chest, doubling over as pain blazed between his shoulder blades like a hot knife. A cough started deep in his thorax and exploded from his mouth, wracking his body with spasms. Blood, mucus, and bits of lung tissue sprayed onto the cracked leather cover of an ancient journal lying in his lap.

  His colleagues and all his associates were dead. Some were lying in a tunnel leading to a deep inner chamber beneath the ancient Aztec village known as Tlateloco, struck down where they stood by a mysterious illness. Others died more slowly, suffering in makeshift tent hospitals his staff erected or in campsites near the dig. Many died so suddenly there hadn’t been time to summon medical help, literally bleeding to death in a matter of hours—hemorrhaging through their noses and mouths and ears, bleeding internally, dying so quickly they rarely uttered a coherent word before a vacant stare dulled their eyes.

  A number were graduate students whose young lives had just begun, an elite group of the best candidates in the University of Texas’s archaeological doctoral program. And now they were dead, all dead, and he knew in a short while he would join them.

  Sweat poured off his face, soaking his khaki shirt as he was shaken by an almost continuous chill, his teeth chattering and muscles twitching beyond his control. He leaned back against the cool, rough stones of the tomb and shut red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. He knew he was dying and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  Strangely, thoughts of his death did not terrify him as they once would have. In spite of his physical agony he felt an inner peace, an almost mystical rightness about his dying here in this place where the body of the chief of the Aztecs lay.

  He chuckled around a wrenching, hacking cough. It was true, he thought. Nothing focuses the mind like the knowledge of imminent death.

  He used his sweat-drenched sleeve to wipe blood and gore off the journal and opened it with weakened, trembling hands.

  It was all here in the diary, he thought, resting against a tunnel wall near the outer door to the tomb. Warnings had been given, yet he and the others ignored them in their haste to solve an historical mystery. It read like sixteenth-century superstition, those writings by Díaz. Rambling notes in archaic Spanish about ancient curses and what Díaz called the Black Plague. Cortés’s men and the Aztecs were dying from unknown causes, their skin turning black as they bled out, choking on their own blood. A curse, Díaz wrote, cast by Aztec gods who were angry over the looting by Hernán Cortés and by his disrespectful treatment of Emperor Montezuma.

  But that was in the year 1521, when no one understood infectious diseases or how germs were spread. It would have been nonsense to heed some vague warning written more than four centuries ago and overlook the possibility of making a discovery like this, the burial chamber of fabled Aztec Chief Montezuma—a tomb that was filled with priceless artifacts and implements and perhaps much more that could reveal so many of the Aztecs’ undecipherable secrets.

  Now, as Dr. Charles Adams lay dying at the door of a cleared passageway into Montezuma’s tomb, he knew he should have heeded Díaz’s warning. Some ancient disease, some fungus or a germ of unknown origin, had lain dormant in this burial chamber for hundreds of years only to awaken and kill all of the interlopers to this sacred tomb.

  He chuckled again, delirious, thinking an ancient curse could not have been more deadly than whatever hellish disease had felled him and his students.

  Adams’s head lolled to the side, peering in the semidarkness down a long passage to the dig outside the emperor’s tomb. Through an opening in the tunnel, he could see several of his friends’ and colleagues’ bodies lying where they fell, baking in a blistering tropical sun. A small jungle cat of some sort was pulling on a bloated corpse’s leg, attempti
ng to drag the body into the forest where it could be consumed in safety.

  He glanced down at Díaz’s tattered diary, remarkably preserved in its leather bindings, protected from time and the elements in a sealed tunnel. An incredible find in itself, a record of Cortés’s expedition to the New World and its first contacts with the Aztec Empire. Scribbled notations near the end of his diary had seemed out of character for a meticulous chronicler like Díaz was known to be.

  His rambling, almost senseless descriptions of curses and Black Death and his repeated warnings not to enter Montezuma’s tomb almost read like the ravings of a madman. Then the written record ended suddenly, a few final pages spattered with faded bloodstains. Too late, Adams now believed he understood the significance of the blood. He glanced down and saw similar blood spatter on his trousers and shirt.

  Too late, he realized he had solved not only the mystery of Díaz’s death but also the mystery of what had caused the Aztec civilization to vanish completely without a trace.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it of a fog creeping into his vision, numbing his mind, making him incoherent. Another cough coursed through his lungs, digging its razor-like claws into his brain. He blacked out for a moment, his vision narrowing to a fine point of light surrounded by darkness.

  When he awakened, skies were darkening outside. Tropical dusk was rapidly descending, elongating shadows and blurring most details of the forest. Adams knew with a certainty chilling him to the bone that he would never see the dawn. His halogen work light grew dim. He followed its beam with his eyes into the chamber, to Montezuma’s mummified corpse reposed on a stone slab.

  The mummy was flanked by the bodies of two monkeys, decayed flesh pulling away from flinty white bone, curled in fetal positions. One wore a jeweled collar, a wrinkled deerskin band decorated with rows of emeralds and bits of hammered gold. The other monkey’s collar was missing—it had been around the shriveled creature’s neck when Adams first opened the tomb. A local workman had surely stolen it before everyone started to get sick.