Plague Ship

“I’m set up in the boardroom. Eric and Murph are here already. We’re just waiting for you, Max, and Julia.”

“Hux is with me,” Cabrillo said. “Last I saw Max, he was in his cabin, arguing with his ex-wife again.”

“I’ll send Eric to go get him. I’m ready anytime.”

“Be there in a minute.” Juan turned to Julia Huxley. “Go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.” She thrust her small hands into the pockets of her lab coat and stepped onto the elevator that would take her down to the Op Center, the most direct route to the boardroom.

Juan walked onto the bridge wing, the wind ruffling his light cotton shirt. He could taste the distant desert in the back of his throat as he drew a deep breath. Though drawn to the sea since he was a boy, the desert also held a similar fascination. Like the ocean, it was an element that was both inhospitable and indifferent, and yet, since time immemorial, men have ventured across it both for profit and exploration.

Had he been born in a different time and a different place, Cabrillo could see himself leading camel caravans across the trackless Sahara or through Saudi Arabia’s Rub’ al-Khali, the Great Empty Quarter.

It was the mystery of what lay beyond the next wave, or the next dune, that drew him.

He didn’t yet know where delving into the deaths on the Golden Dawn would lead. But the mass murder of hundreds of people was an injustice he couldn’t let go unpunished. His crew had been working tirelessly on gathering background material, and, in a few minutes, they would have their plan. Once their strategy was set, it would be executed with military precision. It was what they did best. Standing at the rail, his hands gripping the hot iron, Juan could allow himself the last moments of unrestrained emotion.

When the briefing began, he would direct his feelings, use them to drive himself onward, but for now he let them boil inside his skull—the rage, the rampaging anger at the senseless deaths.

The injustice of what had happened to those i

The knuckles of Juan’s index fingers popped, and he relaxed his grip on the railing. The metal had scored lines across his palms. He shook blood back into his hands and took another deep breath. “Showtime.” The conference room was filled with the aroma of spicy food. With Africa such a short distance away, Maurice had laid out an Ethiopian meal. There was a stack of injera—unleavened sour-dough bread—and dozens of sauces, some cold and others steaming hot. There were chicken, beef, and mutton stews, lentils and chickpeas, and spiced yogurt dishes. A diner eats the meal by tearing off a section of bread, ladling on some stew, and rolling it up like a cigar, to be chewed in a couple of quick bites. The affair could get messy, and Juan suspected Maurice had served these dishes intentionally for the comic relief of watching Linda Ross, a notorious chowhound, stuffing her face.

As a veteran of the Royal Navy, Maurice strongly believed in the English tradition of grog aboard ships, or, in this case, amber bottles of an Ethiopian honey wine called tej, whose sweet flavor could cut the strongest spices.

Cabrillo’s brain trust—Max Hanley, Linda Ross, Eddie Seng, and Dr. Huxley, as well as Stoney and Murph—sat around the table. Juan knew that, down in the armory, Franklin Lincoln was holding a meeting of his own with the Ops team. Juan didn’t have much of an appetite, so he charged his glass with the wine and took an appreciative sip. He let his people fill their plates, before calling the meeting to order by leaning forward in his seat.

“As you know, we are facing two different but possibly related problems. The first is rescuing Max’s son from the Responsivist compound in Greece. Using satellite images and other information that Mark and Eric put together, Linc is working with his gundogs on a tactical assault plan. When they’re finished, we’ll go over it separately. What do we need to do on our end, once we’ve gotten Kyle?”

“Will he need to be deprogrammed?” Hux asked, wondering if Kyle would require specialized psychiatric help to break the mental grip Responsivism had on him.

“By all indications, yes,” Mark replied.

“So they are a cult?” There was heaviness in Max’s tone, sorrow that his directionless son had fallen in with such a group.

“They fit all classic parameters,” Eric said. “They have charismatic leaders. Members are encouraged to sever relationships with friends and relatives who do not belong. They are expected to live by a certain code laid out in their founder’s teachings, and when someone drifts away from the group other members will try to stop him.”

“Stop them how?” Juan asked. “Physically?”

Eric nodded. “There are reports of lapsed members being abducted from their homes and transported to facilities run by the group for, uh, reeducation.”

“We know about the compound in Greece,” Juan said, looking around the burnished table. “And they replaced their old headquarters in California with that estate Murph showed me pictures of this afternoon.

What else do they have?”

“More than fifty health clinics in some of the poorest third world countries in the world—Sierra Leone, Togo, Albania, Haiti, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and several in China—where they receive a lot of government support, as you can well imagine.”

“That’s an interesting case,” Mark Murphy interjected, with his mouth half full of food. “The Chinese hate cults with a passion. They crack down on practitioners of Falun Gong all the time, seeing it as a threat to the central party rule, but they allow the Responsivists because of their whole population-control thing.” Under a ragged denim shirt, Murph wore a T-shirt that had an arrow pointing up with I’M WITH STUPID below it.

“Beijing knows they could be a threat but are willing to risk it because the Responsivist presence gives a little Western legitimacy to their draconian one-family, one-child policy.” Eddie said. Given his experience inside China, no one doubted his assessment.

“Back to helping Kyle,” Juan said, to move the meeting along. “Have we been in touch with a deprogrammer?”

“We have,” Linda Ross replied. “Technically, we are kidnapping Kyle, so we need to get him out of Greece as quickly as possible to avoid any problems with local police. The counselor will meet us in Rome. Tiny’s repositioning the Gulfstream from the Riviera to the Athens airport to fly him to Italy. We have rooms reserved at a hotel near the Colosseum. The shrink’s name is Adam Je

“Was he a member himself?” Juan asked, knowing it was common for deprogrammers to have once been held sway by the group they fight against, much like recovering alcoholics helping others overcome their addiction.

“No, but he’s made it his life’s mission to bring the group down. He’s helped more than a two hundred people escape Responsivism in the past ten years.”

“And before that?”

“A private-practice therapist in L.A. Not that it matters, but his fee is fifty thousand dollars, plus expenses. He guarantees, however, that, when he’s finished, Kyle will be back to normal.”

“He damned well better be,” Max grumbled.

“For someone to make their living deprogramming, the group must be pretty big,” Eddie said. “How many members are there?”

“On their official website, they claim there are more than a hundred thousand worldwide,” Linda replied.