Plague Ship

Bugs? This whole country’s crawling with them. Oh, electronic bugs. Damnit! Sorry.”

Cabrillo heard the sound of drawers opening and closing again as Martell looked for something, and then came the blast of static. Martell had turned on an electronic jammer to defeat any listening devices that might have been left behind.

Hali killed the recording. “I can keep working at it, but I don’t know how much good it will do.”

“Whatever you can find in all that static will be worth the effort.” Cabrillo rubbed his tired eyes.

“You ought to get some sleep,” Hali suggested needlessly. Juan was dead on his feet.

“Do you have someone looking into this Zelimir Kovac?”

“I Googled him, but there wasn’t anything there. When Eric comes back on duty, he’s going to try to find out about him.”

“Where’s Eric now?”

“Wooing our young charge down in medical. He’s bringing her breakfast, and taking advantage of Mark being asleep in his cabin.”

Juan had forgotten all about Ja

Unfortunately, they would have to suffer awhile longer. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to delay a

The people responsible for the attack on the cruise ship believed they had succeeded in killing everyone.

There was an advantage in knowing something they did not, even if Juan didn’t yet recognize what it could be. For the time being, Ja

He turned away from Kasim. “Helm, what’s our ETA in Iraklion?”

“We’ll be there around five o’clock this afternoon.”

They were diverting to the capital of Crete, where Chuck Gunderson would be waiting with their Gulfstream to take Max, Eddie, and Kyle to their rendezvous in Rome. Juan had until then to reconsider keeping the young woman aboard. He went to his workstation and typed out some instructions to Kevin Nixon down in the Magic Shop to prepare a passport for her, just in case. He also made a mental note to consult with Julia Huxley before making his final decision. By keeping Ja

Ten minutes later, Cabrillo was sprawled across his bed, sleeping so soundly that, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t need the mouth guard to keep him from grinding his teeth.

CHAPTER 16

ZELIMIR KOVAC ENJOYED KILLING.

He hadn’t discovered this particular interest until civil war erupted in his native Yugoslavia and he had been drafted into the military. Prior to going into the army, Kovac had been a construction worker and amateur heavyweight boxer. But it was in the military that he found his true vocation. For five glorious years, he and his unit of like-minded men had torn a swath through the country, killing Croats, Bosnians, and Kosovars by the hundreds.

By the time of NATO’s intervention in 1999, Kovac, who had been born with a different name, heard rumblings about trials for people who had committed crimes against humanity. He was certain he would head the list of those sought by the authorities, so he deserted, fleeing first to Bulgaria, eventually to Greece.

Standing at six feet eight inches, with the build of a wrestler, it hadn’t taken him long to find a niche in the Athens underworld as an enforcer. His street cu

During his first few years in Athens, he began reading books in English to learn the language. The material itself was unimportant to him, and he read biographies of people he’d never heard of, histories of places he had no interest in, and novels whose plots he didn’t care about. The fact that the books were in English was all that was important.

That is, until he found a dog-eared book in a secondhand shop. The title intrigued him: We’re Breeding Ourselves to Death, by Dr. Lydell Cooper. He mistakenly thought it was a book about sex and bought it.

Between the covers was a rational explanation for everything he had believed since the war. There were too many people on the planet, and, unless something was done about it, our world was doomed. Of course, Dr. Cooper didn’t single out any ethnic groups in his treatise, but Kovac read the book with his own racist perspective and was certain Cooper meant the inferior races, like the ones Kovac had slaughtered for so long.

With no natural predators, there are no limits to our burgeoningpopulation, and the hardwiring in our DNA to procreate means we will not stop ourselves. Only the lowly virus stands in our way, and each day we draw closer to eradicating this threat as well.

He took this to mean that mankind needed predators to cull the weak so that the healthy could thrive.

This wasn’t Cooper’s point at all. He wasn’t espousing violence of any kind, but that didn’t matter to Kovac. He had found a cause he could truly believe in. Man needed predators again, and Kovac wanted to be part of that.

When he discovered that the Responsivist movement had opened a facility outside of Corinth, he knew finding that book was providential.

Thomas Severance himself was at the compound the day Kovac had shown up to offer his services, and the two men talked for hours, discussing fine points of Dr. Cooper’s work and the organization it had spawned. Severance subtly made Kovac understand the true philosophy behind Responsivism but never once tried to blunt the Serb’s rough edges.

“We ourselves aren’t violent, Zelimir,” Severance had told him, “but there are others who don’t understand us, who want to ensure that our great founder’s message isn’t spread. No one has tried to hurt us yet—physically, I mean—but I know it’s coming, because people don’t want to be told they are part of the problem. They are going to lash out at us, and we will need you to protect us. That will be your function.”

So Zelimir Kovac would continue his role as an enforcer, only this time he did it for the Responsivists and himself rather than for drug lords and dictators.

Gil Martell looked sleek behind his desk, his bronze hair slicked back and his capped and bleached teeth shining when Kovac strode in. Martell could only hold the pose for a second before his smile faded.

Hooking up with Thom Severance had been good for him. It got him out of L.A. before the police closed in on his auto-theft business again. He had a huge house facing the ocean just down the road from the compound and any number of willing women for his bed from the transient population of Responsivists who came to Greece on retreat. Part of him even believed that there were too damned many people on the planet. He didn’t believe any of that garbage about alien membranes, but he was a consummate salesman and could feign belief better than the most devout.

As for Thom and Heidi’s master plan, what did he care about a bunch of rich people on cruise ships?

It was only around Kovac that his façade cracked. The big Serb was a psychopath, plain and simple. Gil didn’t know the man’s background but could only assume he’d been involved in the ethnic cleansing he’d read about in Yugoslavia back in the late nineties. The rescue of Kyle Hanley had been a disaster, but Martell felt he could handle the fallout. He didn’t need Kovac watching over his shoulder and reporting every little detail back to Thom and Heidi. He admitted he should have anticipated his office had been bugged, but he’d said nothing substantive before turning on the jamming device. It was a minor lapse that didn’t warrant Thom calling in his creepy lapdog.