The Genesis Plague (2010)

this she carries in her hands?’ Karsaz said, scrunching his eyes. ‘And why does it glow like this?’
    ‘I thought you might know, cousin.’
    Karsaz shook his head. ‘This is like nothing I have ever seen.’ He studied the images a few moments longer, considering the connection to the American woman. ‘The woman in the photo … did she find these things in the mountains?’
    Perceptive, as always, thought Hazo. ‘It would be best that I not say too much about it.’
    ‘I see,’ Karsaz said. ‘There are many secrets in those mountains. I suppose if anyone were to know about them, it would be the monks. The Chaldeans know many secrets. After all, they profess to be direct descendants of the ancient Mesopotamians who once inhabited those mountains.’
    ‘I think you’re right.’
    ‘There is that monastery in the mountain north of Kirkuk …’ For three seconds Karsaz spun his hand to conjure the name, but came up blank. ‘You know the place I speak of?’
    ‘I do.’
    Karsaz neatly arranged the photos, handed them back to Hazo. ‘I would suggest you go there. See if the monks might answer your questions.’

14
LAS VEGAS
    Stokes punched his security code into the keypad and the mechanical jamb bolts disengaged. He cranked down on the handle, gave a push, and the door whispered open. The fowl stench of excrement drifted out at him. ‘Good lord,’ he gasped, holding back his gag reflex. He set the air filtration system to the max. Then taking the handkerchief from his blazer’s breast pocket, he covered his mouth and tentatively proceeded into the vault.
    At the room’s centre, Roselli was sprawled face up on the carpet in a spread eagle, blue complexion, murky eyes opened wide and frozen to the blank ceiling. Whatever he’d had for dinner and breakfast, both liquid and solid, had found its way into his trousers. Post-mortem bowel release; Stokes had seen it many times in the killing fields.
    ‘Oh, Frank. Why couldn’t you just keep your cool, like the old days?’ he said, crouching down and rummaging through the corpse’s pockets until he found a key ring and Roselli’s PDA. ‘All right fellas,’ he called back to the door. ‘Get in here.’
    A broad-shouldered man came in wearing a sour expression. Behind him a second man, shorter by at least five inches, came in pushing a heavy duty Rubbermaid tilt truck. Both men were wearing periwinkle baseball caps and coveralls embroidered with a crisp logo for a fictitious company whose speciality was document shredding. The truck parked near the service entrance bore the same insignia, along with a slogan: ‘YOUR SECURITY IS OUR SPECIALTY’.
    Stokes stood and stepped aside. ‘It’s not pretty. I’ll throw in extra for your trouble.’
    ‘How do want to do this?’ the taller one asked, all business.
    ‘Let’s go with heart attack at the wheel.’ Stokes tossed the keys over.
    ‘Like a telephone pole … something like that?’
    ‘Sure. Just nothing too dramatic,’ Stokes reminded. On a previous assignment to eliminate a pesky senator who’d been poking around into the project’s financing, this same duo had roughed up the body enough to raise a coroner’s suspicion. An investigation ensued, which luckily led only to dead ends.
    ‘And no witnesses, you hear me?’ Stokes warned. He slipped Roselli’s PDA into his inside breast pocket.
    ‘No witnesses,’ the taller man replied.
    ‘All right. Get him out of here.’
    The shorter man wheeled the tilt truck closer.
    The two men each claimed a spot on opposite sides of the corpse, hooked an armpit and a knee, hoisted the body up on a three-count, then dropped it into the tilt truck with a thud. The taller man folded down the stiff legs while his partner got back behind the handles.
    Stokes stared down at the wide brown stain left behind on the rug. A call to housekeeping would raise too many questions. He settled on cleaning the mess himself.
    As he made his way out from the vault, a small ring tone chirped inside his jacket. Stokes paused in confusion and pulled out Roselli’s PDA. A confirmation flashed on the display: ‘2 MESSAGES DELIVERED.’
    Liberated from the vault’s thick walls, the PDA had finally caught some airwaves.
    ‘Great,’ Stokes huffed.
    Navigating the BlackBerry’s menus, he hunted for the draft copy of Roselli’s first message. But he found nothing. Almost immediately, however, ‘undeliverable’ error messages started bouncing back from the intended