“They've got anti-aircraft missiles!”
“Take us out!” David shouted.
He grabbed Kate and held her. She was almost listless, her eyes absent.
Kate opened her eyes. Another shockwave hit her, but this was a different one—not a tidal wave. She was back in the helicopter, with David. He looked down at her.
What was happening to her? She felt different now. The things she had learned, the memories, they had changed her in some indescribable way. Humanity was… an experiment. Was he part of it?
“What?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
“Are you okay?” he demanded.
She closed her eyes and shook her head, not wanting to confront reality.
David strapped Kate into the helicopter’s bench seat and held her as it banked and swerved, the bombs exploding around them. Malta was guarded, as it had been in the past, quite heavily.
They were accepting refugees by boat, but no one could reach it by air.
He picked up the satellite phone. “Dial Continuity,” he said to Kate. “Tell them we’re in an Immari helicopter, but we are friendlies. Instruct Malta to stop firing on us. We need to land.”
He watched as Kate opened her eyes, eyed him briefly, then fought to dial the numbers. A second later, she began conversing quickly with Paul Brenner.
Paul Brenner hung up the phone. Kate and her team were in Malta.
“Get me the director of the Valletta Orchid District,” he said to his assistant.
Dorian watched the explosions in the distance. Valletta was firing on any incoming aircraft.
He activated his helmet’s mic.
“Find us a refugee boat.”
“Sir?”
“Do it. We can’t access the island by air.”
Ten minutes later, they were hovering above a fishing trawler.
Dorian watched the rope lines descend. His men fell to the boat’s deck and raised their weapons. The ship’s crew and passengers retreated back into the boat’s cabin.
Dorian landed on the deck and glided to the huddling group of people.
“No harm will come to you. We just need a lift to Malta.”
David felt the helicopter touch down on the pad. He brushed Kate’s hair out of her face. “Can you walk?”
He thought she was so warm, not burning up, but… too warm. What’s happening to her? I can’t lose her. Not after all this.
She nodded, and he helped her out of the helicopter, then wrapped his arm around her and ushered her away from the platform.
An enemy was behind them: Chang, Janus, or Shaw. David didn’t know which. But he knew Kamau was behind him as well and that he would watch David’s back. Kate was his concern now.
“Dr. Warner!” A man wearing designer glasses and a slept-in suit greeted them. “Dr. Brenner has informed us about your research. We are here to help—”
“Take us to the hospital,” David said. He didn’t know what else to say. Kate needed help.
David couldn’t believe his eyes. The hospital was state of the art, yet dying bodies were everywhere, and no one seemed to be interested in helping them.
“What’s going on here? Why aren’t you treating these people?” David asked the district director.
“There is no need. Refugees arrive here sick, and they rise from it in hours.”
“Without treatment?”
“Their faith saves them.”
David looked at Kate. She was getting better. The sweat had stopped pouring off her brow. He took her aside. “Do you believe this?”
“Of course not. I’m a scientist. It’s… something else. Get me something to write on.”
David took a legal pad from one of the bedside tables.
Kate sketched quickly.
David looked back at the Orchid District director, who seemed to be watching them like a hawk. In a corner of the hospital wing, Janus was setting up Kate’s computer and the sample collector, the thermos-like device he had seen before. Kamau and Shaw stood beside them, eyeing each other as if they were waiting for the bell to ring and a fight to begin.
Kate handed her rough sketch to the director. “We’re looking for this. It’s a stone box—”
“I—”
“I know it’s here. It’s been here for a very long time. A group called the Immaru hid it here thousands of years ago. Take us to it.”
The director looked away from them, swallowed, then led them away from the people, out of earshot. “I’ve never seen it. I don’t know what it is—”
“We just need to find it,” David said.
“Rabat. The rumor is that the Knights of Malta have retreated into the catacombs there.”
Dorian flowed with the barbarian hordes of people coursing into the Maltese capital. God, they stank. They carried their sick, pushing and shoving, hoping to rush them to safety.
He held the scratchy blanket around his head, hiding his appearance, trying not to breathe in the putrid odor that assaulted him. Talk about suffering for your cause.
In the distance, beyond the hospital, he saw an Immari helicopter lift off the ground and move further inland.
Dorian turned to the Immari special ops soldier beside him. “They’re moving on. Find us a helicopter. We need to get out of here.”
CHAPTER 83
Malta
From the helicopter’s window, David could see the entire small city of Rabat below. It was nothing like he expected.
Rabat was deserted, utterly abandoned, as if every soul had fled the tiny town with only the clothes on their backs. Of course. When the plague had hit, the people here would have flocked to one of Malta’s two Orchid Districts, either Victoria or Valletta.
Across from him, he scanned Janus’s and Chang’s faces. Blank. Impassive. Through the split in the helicopter’s seats, he could see Shaw’s and Kamau’s faces reflected in the glass. Blank. Hard. Focused. The six of them would be alone in Rabat, and Martin’s killer would make his move—for Kate, or for the cure, or for whatever his endgame was.
David glanced out the window again and his mind drifted to history, to safety, to what he knew best.
Rabat lay on the other side of Mdina, the old capital of Malta, a city historians believed had been settled before 4000 B.C. The city sat at one of the highest points on the largest island of Malta, far from the coast.
Malta itself had first been settled by a mysterious group that had migrated down from Sicily around 5200 B.C.
In the twentieth century, archaeologists had found megalithic temples all over the two islands of Malta: eleven in total, seven of which had since been declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites. They were true wonders of the world. Some scientists believed them to be the oldest freestanding structures on the planet. Yet, no one knew who built them or why. They dated back to 3600 B.C., or possibly even earlier. The age of the structures—the history of Malta itself—was an anomaly, a fact that didn’t fit into the current understanding of human history.