Zhuang ran up to them, hefting a Glock 18, a fully automatic with an extended magazine. “Your mother,” he gasped to Seichan. “She ran after that biaozi.”

  Seichan glanced at Gray.

  “Go,” he ordered her, then passed the director to Zhuang. “Take him down the elevator. Get him help.”

  Seichan took off, and Gray sprinted after her. They could not leave Guan-yin chasing after Valya. Not alone. Seichan’s mother could not comprehend the lethality and cunning of the Russian assassin.

  They fled past the offices and burst out into the stairwell. Gray listened for any sound of gunfire below, but all was silent. With pistols in hand, they raced around and around.

  As they reached the third floor, voices echoed up to them, sounding furtive. Gray knew Valya had more men. He overheard when she had ordered another group to lock down the security control room in the museum’s basement.

  “Careful,” Gray warned.

  Seichan barely slowed, anxious to reach her mother, too furious for caution. She swept down the next turn, only to be met by a torrent of automatic gunfire. She stumbled back. Rounds gouged into the concrete wall near her. Boots pounded up toward them, coming fast.

  “This way!” Gray called to her.

  She ran back to him.

  He turned off the stairs and rushed to the door that led out onto the third floor. They ducked through it. Gray had barely closed it behind them when gunfire erupted. The door shook under the barrage.

  He pointed across the breadth of this level. “Run!”

  They fled, knowing they had only seconds before the men, armed with assault rifles, burst inside and caught them in the open. The far door looked an impossible distance away. A few rooms opened on the left, but if they sought shelter inside, they’d be trapped with no place to hide.

  Gray placed his hope on what lined the other side of the third floor.

  The wet collection.

  Thousands of bottles packed the rows of shelves.

  Gray pointed his pistol and fired as he ran, shooting down the length of the shelves. Each round shattered scores of bottles, splashing their contents to the floor. Pools of ethanol spilled and spread in a widening lake.

  The door slammed open behind him.

  As she ran, Seichan fired back to discourage entry.

  “Your lighter,” Gray called to her.

  With her free hand, she tugged out an antique silver lighter and tossed it to him. He thumbed it open, while still firing at the shelves. He flicked a flame and tossed it low at his heels.

  It landed in the pool of ethanol as a pair of gunmen dashed through the doorway and splashed into the pool’s far edge.

  The lake of alcohol ignited with a whoosh of red flames. The heat washed Gray’s back. The fire swept across the room in seconds, engulfing the two men.

  Their screams chased Gray and Seichan.

  But Valya’s team were not fools.

  Another two men kept a post at the door, well away from the flaming lake. They fired after the fleeing pair. The unfortunate problem with alcohol fires was that they burned smokeless, leaving Gray and Seichan still exposed.

  But Gray also knew the standard fire suppression for such conflagrations. Plain water would not work. From the hundreds of sprinkler heads, an alcohol-resistant foam sprayed across this level. The thick jets frothed a heavy lather through the air, immediately obscuring the view.

  As deafening fire alarm bells rang out, Gray pulled Seichan low and to the side. He ran and skidded over the slippery floor, shading his eyes from the downpour. Gunfire blasted after them, but the rounds found no targets through the thick wall of foam.

  Gray struck the far door, shoved through it, and slammed it behind him. He breathed heavily, catching his breath. They had reached the elevator lobby, but with the fire on this floor, no cage would stop here.

  Instead, they dashed to the emergency stairs that ran alongside the shaft. They sprinted down, leaping steps. Gray counted on Valya only guarding the main stairwell on the other side, the one she had retreated down. With a limit to her manpower, she would use the last of her resources to protect her back, to aid her escape.

  Gray was proven right when they safely reached the bottom of the stairs and exited out onto the main exhibition floor. The space had mostly cleared out. An intercom cut through the bleats of the alarm, warning everyone to evacuate in multiple languages.

  Gray and Seichan ducked into the last of the crowd, hiding their weapons.

  They hurried outside, where sirens added to the cacophony of shouting and alarm bells. They searched for the others.

  Zhuang found them first, shoving through the crowd to join them.

  “How’s Kwong?” Gray asked him.

  Zhuang stared down at his bloody hands. “I got him to an ambulance. But know no more.”

  “And my mother?” Seichan asked.

  “I’ve not seen her,” Zhuang answered, his voice sharp with panic.

  Seichan looked at Gray.

  He had no words to offer her hope. They both knew the truth. Either Valya had her mother, or Guan-yin had died on those stairs.

  Gray didn’t know which fate was worse.

  13

  January 23, 3:20 P.M. ICT

  Phsar Réam, Cambodia

  Standing inside the airlock, Dr. Luo Heng stared into the morgue. Min crowded next to him. Junjie pointed his camera between their shoulders.

  A loud klaxon rang out in the hall behind him. Heng had struck the emergency alarm as they fled the morgue. He had also used the phone in the airlock to alert Captain Tse.

  “Keep filming,” Heng ordered Junjie when the sublieutenant started to lower his camera. Heng wanted every second to be recorded, not trusting his eyes to take it all in.

  Inside the morgue, the length of brain and spinal cord still lay in the saline bath. Only now the cord writhed in the solution. From the brain’s gyri and sulci, hundreds of foot-long tendrils thrashed the air.

  The neurological tissue had burst to life after Heng had shot a strong jolt of electricity through it. Heng had immediately driven everyone into the airlock, putting glass and steel between them and the horror inside.

  “What’s happening in there?” Min gasped out.

  Heng glanced to the portable EEG. It was still operating inside. Its leads remained attached to the implanted electrodes. On the monitor, the waves and troughs of its lines swung wildly. He had never seen such violence, not even in a patient in the midst of an epileptic seizure. The brainwaves overlapped and ran roughshod over one another, as if the EEG were registering a legion of readings.

  Footsteps pounded out in the hall. Heng looked past his shoulder. Captain Tse appeared in the window behind him, her face stern and reddened. She carried a pistol in her hand. She was flanked by two men, a gray-haired gentleman in a crisp suit and a young man in a PLA uniform with the double stripes and single star of a major.

  “What’s wrong?” Tse called to him.

  Heng pushed Min aside to open the view into the morgue.

  Junjie also shifted a step, then flinched. “Look!”

  Heng turned back. Inside, nothing had changed. The brain and cord continued to contort in the tub. It took him another breath to realize what had alarmed the sublieutenant.

  Beyond the wire-draped table, the other two calcified bodies now trembled atop their steel gurneys. The skull of the closest fractured like a ripe melon. Tendrils writhed through the cracks, waving and battering. The fissures widened. Chunks of calcareous pieces fell to the floor.

  From within, the brain pushed out of its casing, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. The gray lump toppled free and fell over the table’s edge, but it remained hanging, still attached by the rooted spinal cord. More tendrils unfurled, frilling over the brain.

  The other body also cracked open, tremoring its length on the table.

  Closer at hand, the violence worsened in the tub. The spinal cord lifted from the saline solution like a cobra. With a final wrench, its length split into three pieces that tangled and whipped against one another.

  “Get back!” Captain Tse shouted into the airlock.

  Still transfixed by the sight, Heng could not move. Min retreated, and Junjie grabbed Heng’s shoulder and tugged him away from the window. The motion snapped Heng’s attention around.

  Realizing what Tse intended, he shouted, “Don’t!”

  Tse ignored him. She punched a large red button outside. A low whoosh sounded from the morgue, followed by an explosive roar. Flames shot from nozzles across the roof. The heat, trapped by the cement block walls, seared past the airlock’s inner door.

  Heng shielded his eyes from the blaze and backed with the others. A fire door lowered over the window, transforming the morgue into a crematorium. The roaring inferno raged for several long minutes.

  When the incineration ended, the morgue remained sealed.

  Heng panted through his respirator. The airlock had turned into an oven. Before exiting, he had his group strip out of their biohazard suits. They abandoned their gear inside, and Heng closed the door behind them.

  He then glared at Captain Tse in the hallway. “There was no need for that overreaction. The morgue was well contained.”

  “You don’t know that. The safety of this installation is my responsibility. Until we better understand what we’re dealing with, I will proceed with utmost caution.” She pointed a finger at him. “Any loss here is due to your ineffectiveness, for failing to offer any insight into what happened to these men.”

  One of the newcomers—the young man in a uniform—fixed Heng with his gaze. The PLA major looked to be in his late twenties. His dark hair had been buzzed short. His eyes had an intensity that was hard to stare at for long.

  “Not everything was destroyed by the fire,” the man reminded Heng. “There remains another subject for study. Petty Officer Wong.”

  “My son is right,” the older gentleman said. “With all that we’ve witnessed, the submariner has become critically important. We must see him.”

  Heng glanced between the two men, recognizing now the family resemblance in their strong jawlines and sharp cheekbones. “He remains in a coma,” Heng warned. “But you can view him from the main lab.”

  As Heng led the party into the next room, introductions were made. The young man—Major Choi Xue—stayed beside him. Tse whispered with the man’s father, a former lieutenant-general with the PLA Strategic Support Force and now a consultant with a Chinese space agency.

  Heng struggled to understand what members from such groups were doing here. Min shared a worried look with him, too. He gritted his teeth, again panged by guilt for involving her in a matter that had grown more tense and involved. It felt as if they were falling deeper into quicksand that had no bottom.

  Xue must have noted his consternation. “We will explain as best we can,” the man promised with a solemnity that felt authentic. “Perhaps first you could share what you’ve learned about the strange affliction.”

  Heng nodded. He still had trouble meeting the man’s eyes. He sensed a brilliance behind that intensity. This assessment grew clearer as Heng related all that his team had learned. Xue listened with his head tilted, as if memorizing every syllable. Unlike Tse, the man asked pointed questions, inquiries that required intuitive leaps of understanding.

  Xue leaned over the computer and studied the various polymorphs of carbonate on the monitor. “The afflicted bodies are infiltrated by aragonite.” He pointed at the orthorhombic crystal on the screen. “And carbonate crystalizes into aragonite in the presence of seawater. To me, that suggests that whatever afflicted the men likely came from the seas versus a biotoxin loosed upon the crew prior to them shipping off.”

  Heng lifted a brow. “That’s my current hypothesis, too. A seaborne pathogen. Nothing else makes sense.” He grabbed the mouse and shifted through files. “Let me show you this. I performed a punch biopsy on Officer Wong’s skin, then vacuum desiccated the cells to getter a better view of the pattern of calcification. This is what scanning electron microscopy revealed.”

  On the screen, a grayish layering of the crystallization appeared. It formed distinct thin crinkled sheets.

  Heng started to explain, but Xue nodded.

  “It looks like the layering of aragonite found in seashells,” the major said.

  Heng glanced quizzically at the man. “That’s what I thought. Mollusk shells or maybe the calcareous skeletons of corals. They’re all comprised of aragonite.”

  “Which would further support a seaborne source of this disease.” Xue looked in the direction of the morgue. “It’s as if the process is using our body’s raw materials—our salty blood, our calcium-rich bones—as a means of propagating itself. Turning bone into an exoskeleton of aragonite, while simultaneously preserving the neurological tissue as a media to grow . . . something else.”

  “But what? And what’s causing it?” Heng stared pointedly at the man. “I’ve shared all that I know. What haven’t you told me?”

  Xue met his gaze for a long breath, then dipped his chin as if settled on some manner. “A moment please.”

  The major shifted higher and lifted an arm, trying to get his father’s attention. The older man stood with Captain Tse. The two had been talking together, studying the prone form of Petty Officer Wong through the window.

  Inside the med ward, Nurse Lam continued her monitoring and care of the comatose patient. The black hardening had continued its inevitable spread across the patient’s body, a black tide that would fully consume the man in another day or two.

  Xue winced at the sight. “Why do you allow him to linger in such a state?”

  “Not by my choice. We’ve had to resuscitate him five times. On the orders of Captain Tse.” Heng shook his head. “The transformation process will continue whether the man lives or dies. We can observe it just as well without putting Wong through all of this.”

  The elder Choi finally turned to his son. Xue removed a thumb drive from a pocket and held it up, clearly asking permission to share what they had kept secret up until now. Aigua nodded, trusting his son’s judgment on the matter.

  Xue turned to Heng and pointed to the computer. “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  Xue popped in the drive and opened the files it contained. He searched rapidly through until he settled on a folder marked 嫦娥五号.

  Heng frowned. The file was labeled with the name of a Chinese lunar spacecraft, the Chang’e-5.

  Xue pulled up an image from the file and displayed it on the screen. It was a crisp photo of a sharp-edged crystal in an orthorhombic shape.

  Heng noted the size of the specimen. Five microns. It was the size of a dust particle. “The microcrystal? It’s aragonite?”

  Xue nodded. “Shì. With the same unusual crystalline matrix that you just showed me from your samples.”

  “Where did you find it?” Heng girded himself for the truth, already guessing the answer from the name on the file folder.

  Xue confirmed his fear. “The microcrystal came from particles isolated out of a lunar rock sample.”

  Heng swallowed. He wanted to declare it impossible, but he knew what he had witnessed next door. “What are we dealing with?” he mumbled.

  Xue simply shook his head.

  Min approached, drawing both their attention. She kept her voice low. “Something is wrong with Sublieutenant Junjie.”

  Both men looked over to where the team’s videographer was uploading the morgue recording into the system. He shook one of his hands and rubbed it on his trousers. Even from here, it was easy to see the graying hue to the man’s index finger.

  Heng hurried over. Min and Xue followed.

  Once there, he grabbed Junjie’s wrist and brought the sublieutenant’s hand more fully into the light. The man’s finger was clearly discolored.

  “What are you doing?” Junjie asked.

  “Did you damage your suit when we were in the morgue?”

  Junjie tried to pull his arm away. “Just a pinprick. On one of the electrode needles.”

  “Did you handle one of the bodies afterward?”

  The sublieutenant’s eyes took on a wild look. “I . . . no, I’m sure. Maybe I touched the table where you cut the body up. But that’s all.”

  Xue backed away, as if fearful of being near the man. “He could’ve come in contact with particulates that were cast off during your dissection.”

  Heng rolled the finger, examining it from all angles. The tip was distinctly darker, nearly black around a point that could be a needle prick.

  By now, Captain Tse and Aigua had been drawn over by the commotion.

  “What’s wrong?” Tse asked.

  Heng continued to study the finger. “Sublieutenant Junjie may have contaminated himself. Through an open wound. But it makes no sense. Others have handled the bodies without getting sick.”

  Before arriving here, Heng had watched the video of recovery of the sub’s jettisoned pod. When the men’s corpses had been removed, the rescuers had not even been wearing gloves. Still, the disease had not spread among them.

  Afterward, Heng had performed a battery of tests on lab mice, exposing them to blood, saliva, and tissues from both Wong and the dead men. None of the animals had become ill. This stubborn lack of transmission made it harder to determine the cause of this affliction.

  So why is Junjie sick now?

  He pictured the horror in the other room. Had the bodies become contagious once the process had advanced enough to cause the neurological malformation? Had Junjie come in contact with a splattering of cerebrospinal fluid, allowing something pathogenic to enter his body?

  Xue pushed past his father. Focused on the medical mystery, Heng had failed to note that Xue had crossed the lab and returned. He now carried a fire axe in hand.

  “Hold his arm to the tabletop,” Xue ordered.

  Heng understood and gripped the sublieutenant’s wrist tighter.

  “No, no, no . . .” Junjie moaned.

  “Better to lose your finger than . . .” Heng nodded to the next room. “The contaminated digit must be removed.”