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The world shifted beneath Jack’s feet, orbiting on without him. “No…” he whispered. “No.”
She looked away. “I didn’t like it either when I found out. But we can’t change the past.”
“Who is he?”
“Who he is has been lost. I don’t know who he was, or where he came from. His records are gone. Whatever he was before this has been lost. Heisthe project now. But none of that matters.”
“It does matter!” Jack roared. He was on his feet before he knew he’d moved, throwing the pictures down on the table. “Did we do this? Did we kill all those people?”
She held his stare as he stormed across the office, stopping in front of the Resolute desk—his old desk. His lungs hurt, each breath like knives stabbing into his back, twisting into his heart. “I know Lazarus is American,” he whispered. “Was heours?”
She took her time answering. Her lips thinned, and she returned his gaze with a cold glare, the color of deep space, devoid of warmth. “Project Lazarus came from the CIA. The idea was to send in a false defector, one of our biological warfare researchers. He was supposed to throw off their operations. Cause chaos. Industrial sabotage. Set back their biological warfare capabilities so they weren’t a threat.”
“That succeeded admirably.”
“We lost contact with him after eighteen months. We thought the Soviets had found out about him. He was written off as dead. Five years later, those photos were smuggled out.”
Jack’s world spun. He sagged forward, catching himself on the edge of the Resolute, his head hanging between slumped shoulders. “We, the CIA, the United States, created this virus—”
“Lazaruscreated this—”
“But we sent him there!” Jack hissed. “We sent a man undercover who was capable of this!Wedid this!” The mass graves, the piles of bones and skulls. Kilaqqi and his people had been used in human experiments—
Jack closed his eyes. “He murdered hundreds of people.”
“And his virus can wipe out humanity.” Elizabeth faced him, her stare as ferocious as the sun. “We thought he was dead. We had ordered him killed. But you’re saying he’s been living in Siberia for decades—and now he’s missing.”
“Someone abducted him from the Evenki. Probably the same people who murdered General Sevastyanov and his daughter. Someone who knew what he could do, and what was on that satellite.”
“So,” Elizabeth breathed. “Lazarus is God knows where. And those astronauts woke up the virus he created, and now it’s incubating inside all of them—”
“We don’t know that.”
“We can’t take the chance it’s not.”
Frantic worry clawed inside Jack. Sergey’s devastation, Kilaqqi’s quiet affection. Sasha at the cafe in Houston, chuckling softly at Jack’s mispronounced Russian but still beaming, finally happy in his life. “We can help them, Elizabeth. It’s been decades. We can find a cure, something to save them.”
“You saw those photos. It’s too hot. It’s too violent. It kills in days. Anyone who is exposed is dead. No one has ever survived—”
“That’s not true. One person survived.”
“Where is he?”
Jack swallowed. “He was the body on the satellite.”
“Then he’s responsible for bringing the virus back to humanity. The corpse was frozen and so was the virus, but as soon as he was on boardIndependence, he started warming up. That virus came back to life and destroyed him. Houston says the Soviet corpse has disintegrated into a pulp. Hot putrefaction. What does that tell you? A man whohadimmunity has succumbed in days. Who knows how much that virus has mutated after forty years in space? Enough to turn that body into nothing but a mass of virus.” She sighed. “They’re all going to end up that way.”
“We don’t know that. Maybe some of them aren’t infected—”
“How do you tell? Do you wait for them to start seizing? Would you watch them die like the first astronaut up there did? Jim Howland? Or would you try to treat their symptoms, relieve the pressure on their brain? Relieving the intracranial pressure activated the worst of the sickness. Once you show compassion, the virus takes over. It’s one of its darkest facets. It turns treatment into a weapon. You saw it yourself: that woman who had been treated to relieve the pressure in her skull bit one soldier. In three days, the entire platoon was dead.”
“We can’t just give up on our people.”
“Who would you save? Who would you put down? If you’re wrong, the entire world pays the price.”
Jack’s mouth moved. He couldn’t form the words he wanted to say.
“They’ve all been exposed. They’ve all spent more than twenty-four hours on the ISS with the Soviet corpse. They’re already dead.”
