The Judas Strain - James Rollins [0]
A SIGMA FORCE NOVEL
JAMES ROLLINS
TO CAROLYN MCCRAY
who read all my earliest scribblings
and didn’t laugh too much
The pestilence came first to the town of Kaffa on the Black Sea. There the mighty Mongolian Tartars waged siege upon the Italian Genoese, merchants and traders. Plague struck the Mongol armies with burning boils and bloody expulsions. Struck with great malice, the Mongol lords used their siege catapults to cast their diseased dead over the Genoese walls, and spread plague in a litter of bodies and ruin. In the year of the incarnation of the Son of God 1347, the Genoese fled under sail in twelve galleys back to Italy, to the port of Messina, bringing the Black Death to our shores.
—DUKE M. GIOVANNI (1356), trans. by Reinhold Sebastien in Il Apocalypse (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1924), 34–35
Why the bubonic plague suddenly arose out of China’s Gobi desert during the Middle Ages and slew a third of the world’s population remains unknown. In fact, no one knows why so many plagues and influenzas of the last century—SARS, the Avian Flu—have arisen out of Asia. But what is known with fair certainty: the next great pandemic will arise again out of the East.
—United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Compendium of Infectious Diseases, May 2006
Contents
Epigraph
Note From The Historical Record
Return Journey of Marco Polo (1292–1295)
EXPOSURE
1
Dark Madonna
2
Bloody Christmas
3
Ambush
4
High-Sea Piracy
5
Lost and Found
6
Pestilence
INCUBATION
7
Of a Journey Untold
8
Patient Zero
9
Hagia Sophia
10
Out of the Frying Pan
11
Broken Glass
12
Of a Map Forbidden
OUTBREAK
13
Witch Queen
14
Ruins of Angkor
15
Demons in the Deep
16
Bayon
17
Where Angels Fear to Tread
18
The Gateway to Hell
19
Traitor
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by James Rollins
Copyright
About the Publisher
NOTE FROM THE HISTORICAL RECORD
HEREIN LIES A MYSTERY. In the year 1271, a young seventeen-year-old Venetian named Marco Polo left with his father and uncle on a voyage to the palaces of Kublai Khan in China. It was a journey that would last twenty-four years and bring forth stories of the exotic lands that lay to the east of the known world: wondrous tales of endless deserts and jade-rich rivers, of teeming cities and vast sailing fleets, of black stones that burned and money made of paper, of impossible beasts and bizarre plants, of cannibals and mystic shamans.
After serving seventeen years in the courts of Kublai Khan, Marco returned to Venice in 1295, where his story was recorded by a French romanticist named Rustichello, in a book titled in Old French Le Divisament dou Monde (or The Description of the World ). The text swept Europe. Even Christopher Columbus carried a copy of Marco’s book on his journey to the New World.
But there is one story of this journey that Marco refused to ever tell, referring only obliquely to it in his text. When Marco Polo had left China, Kublai Khan had granted the Venetian fourteen immense ships and six hundred men. But when Marco finally reached port after two years at sea, there remained but two ships and only eighteen men.
The fate of the other ships and men remain a mystery to this day. Was it shipwreck, storms, piracy? He never told. In fact, on his deathbed, when asked to elaborate or recant his story, Marco answered cryptically: “I have not told half of what I saw.”
Return Journey of Marco Polo (1292–1295)
1293
MIDNIGHT
Island of Sumatra Southeast Asia
THE SCREAMS HAD finally ceased.
Twelve bonfires blazed out in the midnight harbor.
“Il dio, li perdona…” his father whispered at his side, but Marco knew the Lord would not forgive them this sin.
A handful of men waited beside the two beached longboats, the only witnesses to the funeral pyres out upon the dark lagoon. As the moon had risen, all twelve ships, mighty wooden galleys, had been set to torch with all hands still aboard, both the dead and those cursed