“Didn’t you say Boardman ran away from the camp because his wife had gone nuts? She was trying to kill and eat him?”

“That’s what Tamzene recounted in her diary.”

There was a pause, during which the only sound was the shrieking of the wind and the pelting of the rain against the tent.

“So Boardman wrote up this death almanac after he reached the other camp,” Corrie said.

“It’s the only possibility.” Nora’s eye fell to the brief, cryptic notes Clive had made in the document’s margin. One said daggers! with a circle around it.

“Odd,” she murmured.

“What?”

“The names notated with little daggers—Clive seems to have thought them important.”

Corrie stirred in her sleeping bag. “Why?”

“All three—Carville and his wife, Widnall—bear the notation ‘anthropgs.’ And Boardman also labeled them as ex insania—insane. His wife’s name is just surrounded by those daggers.”

“Well, unlike the others, he didn’t actually see her die. He was too busy running away from her at the time. It’s a safe bet his wife also went crazy. I think that’s what those daggers by the names stand for—the people he knew went insane.” Corrie sat up, winced, then lay back.

“He was a carrier,” she murmured. “A Typhoid Mary. Maybe that’s what this unknown group digging up all the Parkin bodies was after. It wasn’t something nature had gifted Parkin with. They wanted his skull to get the microbes from a disease.”

Nora shook her head. “Microbes don’t get inherited down the generations. You don’t pass along an infectious disease—not genetically. And genetic diseases aren’t infectious: you can’t get them from eating someone.”

Corrie closed her eyes. “Damn, I hope they bring some morphine.”

Nora checked her watch. “Any minute now.”

Corrie remained a long time with her eyes closed. “Boardman didn’t go mad. Samantha Carville didn’t go mad. The two killers who started in on her leg didn’t go mad. Parkin didn’t go mad—just the people who ate his body. If it wasn’t a disease, what else could it have been?”

It was a drowsy question, more rhetorical than anything else. But it rang a bell in the back of Nora’s mind. Going mad from eating flesh. She’d studied a case like that in college, a famous case.

The story of the Fore tribe in New Guinea.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

Corrie opened her eyes at this sudden change of tone. “What?”

“There’s a case every student of anthropology learns about. There was this tribe in New Guinea, the Fore. Around a hundred years ago, many of them started going mad and dying. It wasn’t until the 1960s that doctors figured out what was causing the epidemic—ritual cannibalism. When a person died, they were eaten by the family as an expression of love. Doctors discovered the deadly agent wasn’t any ordinary disease. It was a prion disease.”

“Prion?”

“Like mad cow, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Prions are not a microbe, like a virus or parasite. They’re not even alive; they’re a protein particle with a very strange property. When you eat them, the prions spread through your body, and when they come in contact with other proteins, those proteins are changed—into something deadly. Prions especially attack the proteins of the brain…and drive people mad.”

“But how did something like this start in the first place?”

“Around the year 1900, a single Fore individual suffered a random mutation and his body began to produce prions. He became the first carrier. When he died and was eaten, the disease started spreading. And spreading.”

Corrie groaned. “So you think Albert Parkin was like that tribesman? A mutant carrier?”

“Maybe. CJD is a horrible disease—there’s no vaccine, no cure, and the protein particles can’t be killed by sterilization or disinfectant. It’s inevitably fatal.” Nora frowned. “But prion disease takes up to fifty years to kill—and the people in the Lost Camp died within a week of eating Parkin.”

“So Parkin carried an incredibly fast-acting form of the disease.”

“It’s possible,” said Nora.

Corrie sat up again, ignoring the pain. “Nora, think about it. Here’s a disease that kills in days, has no vaccine and no cure, and is a hundred percent fatal. Sterilization can’t kill it. What does that describe to you?”

“Something terrible. Demonic.”

“More than that. It describes the ultimate weapon.”

“Holy shit.”

“Holy shit is right. A biological weapon that makes anthrax, Ebola, or smallpox look like a head cold. No wonder it’s worth more than gold, worth killing for—worth any effort. Think about what would happen if you weaponized that prion protein and dispersed it over a city with a crop duster. Or put it in a bomb. Or dumped it in a water supply—”

Suddenly Nora heard a grotesque sound, a gurgling hiccup from Fugit, lying prone across the tent from them. The sound resolved itself into low, ugly laughter. Fugit’s eyes were open and she was staring at Corrie, a trickle of blood dribbling from her mouth.

“So,” Corrie said to her. “You’ve been listening.”

Fugit stared back at them.

“Are we right?”

Fugit’s bloody mouth opened again. But whether she planned to explain or just emit another gibber of laughter, Nora never found out, because the howl of the storm—quite suddenly—was drowned out by the beating of an approaching helicopter.

52

May 27

CORRIE SWANSON PULLED her well-traveled 2002 Camry over to the curb of 7227 North Ninety-Eighth Way and killed the engine. It was a cloudless day, and hot as hell—it took only a minute before the car started heating up like an oven cranked to high. But as long as she was going to be based in Albuquerque, she supposed she’d better get used to it.

She looked up at the façade of the condo before her. Other than the 3-series BMW parked at the end of its walkway, it looked the same as the last time she’d seen it, less than a month before. So what, exactly, felt different?

Me, she thought. It was Corrie herself who was different now.

The Garmin GPS on her windshield—her car was way too old to have such niceties built in—was still on, sucking juice from her battery. As she unplugged it from the cigarette lighter, she noticed on the map that she was no more than a mile from Troon North, the famous golf course. She’d played Troon at least fifty times and remembered the course well, especially the par-five number three, with its brutal dogleg and cactus-fringed rough. Of course, that had been on a PC golf sim during her time at Phillips Exeter. She’d always wanted to learn the real game, with its beautiful vistas and sense of freedom. Maybe she’d find the time for that here.

She realized such reminiscences were just delaying the inevitable.

After she had been discharged from the hospital, Morwood had given her a mandatory vacation that she sure as hell didn’t need. Nora and her team had also been caught in a kind of limbo—between the red tape caused by three murders and the scandal at the Institute following the sudden loss of Fugit. They were waiting to be allowed to go back up to the site to finish removing the artifacts and restoring it to its previous natural state. But none of that enforced delay really explained this day trip Corrie had decided to make. Why exactly had she taken the time to drive all the way here? Was it because she felt somehow it was her duty as an FBI agent to tie off all the dangling threads? Or was it something else?