CHAPTER ONE

      “What in the name of…”

      Benjamin Dekel collapsed into the wall, aware that God had nothing to do with why he was about to die, had nothing to do with why he was burning up with maybe a 104 degree temperature, and climbing. Or why the pain in his chest was turning to a clenching fire that was seconds away from squeezing off the last bit of air to his lungs. Or why every last drop of bodily waste and liquefied organs was set to burst from both ends as his stomach and bowels caught fire. He was verging, he knew, on the edges of what they called “the liquid state.”

      Complete internal organ meltdown, followed by paralysis.

      His voice struck his ears from a great distance as he heard himself croaking, “Help…someone…”

      There was no answer, and he knew there was little time left now, perhaps down to a mere few minutes, since when the pain and nausea had finally driven him out of a deep sleep and he had heaved himself off the cot. And even if he reached the vault in what was called the Gold Room he was far from certain the Trivalent antitoxin derivative could be administered in time through the 20 ml IV vial, much less combat the effects of the hybrid strain he himself had taken part in creating.

      With a sudden viciousness, he cursed the very day he’d quit Fort Detrick and accepted this post in what would now not only prove the middle of nowhere, but would be his final resting place. More money, they’d pledged, and delivered that much, and with talk among his colleagues about the possibility of a Nobel Prize…

      His vision, he discovered, as predicted during the early stages of testing on African monkeys, was the first of the senses to start collapsing. Within moments, after the initial onslaught of the fractured maze with gray light webbed around narrowing peripheral vision, total blindness would descend. That would prove the least of his concerns, he knew, though it somehow might prove a blessing in disguise.

      He stumbled, limbs turning quickly to boneless rubbery appendages, into the main corridor, gasping for breath, like the drowning man he knew he was. The stark white of the concrete walls seemed to drive hot needles through raw eyeballs, and served only to inflame the fire in his brain. Alternately hugging and sliding down the wall, it occurred to him one of several scenarios had taken place. The agent had either been accidentally released from the Hot Zone—the Black Room—or this was an act of sabotage. The contagion, he knew, could be spread by food, water and air. And he could have been infected as far back as six to eight weeks for all he knew. For that was just one of the insidious natures of the pathogenic mycoplasma they’d spliced and engineered into the whole hellish concoction. It laid dormant, evading the human immune system as the man-made bomb hid—no, vanished—deep inside cell nuclei, the lab-bred microbe near impossible to detect and diagnose as it ticked away, biding its time until it decided when it would strike. Then there was the other batch, able to act within minutes…

      Which one?

      It didn’t matter, as he cursed himself for even entertaining such a foolish thought, as if that alone could bolster vain hope.

      Beyond the terror of knowing he was dying on his feet, Dekel felt the strange vast emptiness stretching out before and behind him. In fact, nothing seemed to move, no sound anywhere, but that could just be his senses on the verge of meltdown as his brain became nothing short of microwaved jelly. Still, near forty personnel between the science staff, security and management and yet someone by now should have appeared. Or…

      Were they, too, dying? Or already dead?

      The vomit shot into his mouth then past lips, spilling off his chin, just as the strange notion struck him that the entire base felt as empty and lonely as an entire lifetime dedicated to the advancement of defensive biological-and-chemical warfare. The very idea there was anything remotely defensive about so-called preemptive advancements in the bio-chem theater of war was something of an obscene joke by itself, but he long since knew the United States had to play the diplomatic charade in accord with the agreement they’d signed with the Russians and their other allies many years back.

      Was he now, thus, an ultimate dupe of what was an ultimate lie?

      Where is everybody? he heard his mind scream. Was there anybody out there?

      Was that a shadow at the deep south end?

      “Hello? Help…me…”

      He struggled to stay on his feet, saw the shadow grow, a figure slowly materializing around the corner. He wasn’t sure what he saw at first, blinking away the sweat burning into his eyes, then…

      The scream was on the tip of his tongue as he recognized the HAZMAT suit, the silver hose in its hand for what it was. The human, safe in his white cocoon, strode straight for him, moving with purpose, he believed was the common military jargon. And the moment was somehow made even more horrifying by the fact he couldn’t see the face hidden by the black shield, as if by eye contact he could communicate the plea for mercy he heard building to a raging crescendo in the furnace of his brain. The distance was ten feet and closing when Dekel felt his eyes bulge in shock and horror, aware of what was coming.

      And the shriek ripped from his mouth an instant before the silver hose burst forth its cleansing fire.

      “YOU CALL THEM WHAT?”

      “The Black Wizards. And that would be ‘called them.’”

      Mark Drobbler shot a sideways glance at what he privately called his tour guide. Despite his cryptic tone, the encrypted e-mails that had detailed their rendezvous and the night’s subsequent jaunt in the Black Hawk helicopters—the first stop less than an hour ago to deal with a local rabble-rouser—the man in black hood and matching one-piece combat suit he knew openly as Infinity wasn’t as much an enigma as the operative wanted him to believe. Drobbler was one of the few recruits of his organization who was a former U.S. government employee—what they called Storm Trackers—for the Department of Defense, but he had a feeling Infinity knew as much, if not more.

      For nearly a decade, before putting in for early retirement following the collapse of his second marriage, he had a sizable hand in collecting and sorting out critical intelligence regarding homegrown terrorists operating under the guise of militias, and international terror cells that had established roots in the Continental United States.

      Another lifetime, that was, without question. These days…

      Well, these days it was a whole different game, a different outlook, an ideology that was in lockstep with the good fight against the signs of the times he and the others believed were leading to the Apocalypse.

      Looking away from Infinity’s penetrating stare, Drobbler felt a moment’s gratitude he was both armed with a shoulder-holstered Glock .40, and was accompanied by two of his own people, but who were right then on-board one of the other four Black Hawks that had descended on the compound. As he had requested an aerial view of the clean-up task, he stood in the open doorway, the gunship hovering about a hundred feet up and to the south of the cyclone fencing.

      It wasn’t much, as far as classified compounds went. The compound sat on about five to six acres, with the squat one-story concrete block grabbing up an area about the size of a football field, the heart of the base tucked back in the dense pine forest of rolling hills. Over those hills, Lake Pend Oreille was the site of longstanding rumors, he knew, about a top secret Navy project named Cutthroat. In the recent past, he had seen from a distance the silver boxes that were set in a triangulation pattern around the second largest lake west of the Mississippi. They were called Horizontal Control Stations and Electronic Sites. The public had been told they were permanent lookout stations for the local forest rangers, but the whispers around these parts was that they were, supposedly, testing the kind of cutting edge satellite and electronic communications equipment that had spawned rumors all over the Panhandle. They ranged from UFO landing sites to technology that could harness and control lightning, which, in recent years, was believed to have been the cause of sudden and inexplicable wildfires that had devastated much of northern Idaho.

      Which