The Judas Strain - James Rollins [167]
The tropical island of Natuna Besar served the tourist trade with its abundant snorkeling reefs and excellent sport fishing. But it had been evacuated with the threat of the typhoon. The place looked deserted.
Most of the islands they had flown over had been in a similar state of shambles.
From the air, Ryder had spotted the airport on Natuna Besar. “Surely someone down there has a sat-phone we could borrow,” he had said. “Or a way to repair our radio.”
Needing to fuel anyway, they had made a landing in the sheltered bay. Lisa now waited with Susan.
Worried, Lisa placed a hand on the woman’s damp brow. In the dimness of the cabin, Susan’s face shone with a deeper glow, seeming to rise more out of her underlying bones than her skin. Lisa felt a burn under her palm as she rested it on Susan’s forehead.
But it was not a fever.
Lisa lifted away her hand. It still continued to burn.
What the hell?
Lisa frantically rinsed her palm with water from a canteen and dried it on the fire blanket. The smolder subsided.
Lisa stared at the sheen of Susan’s skin, rubbing the sting from her fingertips. This was new. The cyanobacteria must be producing a caustic chemical. And while it burned Lisa’s skin, Susan remained resistant or protected.
What was happening?
As if reading her thoughts, Susan squirmed an arm out from under the blanket. Her hand stretched toward the square of weak sunlight flowing through the hatch window. The glow in her flesh vanished in the brighter light.
The contact seemed to settle Susan. She let out a long sigh.
Sunlight.
Could it be?
Curious, Lisa reached to Susan’s hand and brushed a fingertip across her sunlit skin. Lisa yanked her arm back, shaking her fingers. Like touching a hot iron. She again doused her skin with water, the fingertip already blistering.
“It’s the sunlight,” Lisa said aloud.
She pictured Susan’s earlier outburst, when she’d first set eyes on the rising sun. Lisa also remembered one of the unique features of cyanobacteria. They were the precursors to modern plants. The bacteria contained rudimentary chloroplasts, microscopic engines to convert sunlight into energy. With the rise of the sun, the cyanobacteria were ramping up, energizing in some strange manner.
But to do what?
Lisa glanced to the navigation chart on the floor. She remembered Susan’s earlier outburst, pointing down to a spot on the map.
“Angkor,” Lisa mumbled.
Lisa had attempted to convince herself it was just a coincidence. But now she was less sure. She remembered eavesdropping on a conversation while strapped to a surgical table. Devesh had been on the phone, speaking in Arabic. She had made out only one word.
A name.
Angkor.
What if it wasn’t a coincidence?
And if not, what else did Susan know?
Lisa suspected one way to find out. She shifted over and cradled Susan’s shoulders in her arms, keeping the blanket between them. Lisa lifted Susan into the shaft of sunlight flowing through the front windshield.
Susan shuddered as soon as her face touched the brightness. Her eyes fluttered open, black pupils shifted toward the weak light. But rather than constricting in the brightness, Susan’s pupils dilated, taking in more light.
Lisa remembered the bacterial invasion of the woman’s retinas, centered around the optic nerve, direct conduits to the brain.
Susan stiffened under her. Her head lolled—then grew steadier.
“Lisa,” she said, thick-tongued and slurred.
“I’m here.”
“I have to…must get me there…before it’s too late.”
“Where?” But Lisa knew where.
Angkor.
“No more time,” Susan mumbled, and swung her face toward Lisa. Her eyes twitched from the sunlight, shying from it. Frightened. And not just because of the danger to come. Lisa saw