Fatal Sting

Opening Chapter

MICK PIERCE was shadow boxing under a palm tree when an excited shout carried up from the small island's turquoise lagoon. The youthful cry drifted through grass huts in the surrounding Maldive village.

An islander had made a discovery.

Within seconds, the pristine white sandpit was filled with brown-skinned fishermen. Their feet carried them swiftly under their full-length calico sarongs.

Square-shouldered with lean bellies, they flashed beautiful smiles and large eyes as they ran toward the water's edge.

Ah, they began holding their noses.

They stopped abruptly, their smiles disappearing. Some men waded into the milky-white froth, jabbing downward with long, pointed sticks. In their native Divehi language, they warned one another of each new wave.

At their feet, lapping water washed three bloated bodies ashore. The human corpses tumbled, limbs akimbo, and came to rest on the warm sand.

Mick took a few steps forward for a better look, then broke into a trot.

Glistening under a torrid sun, the deep brown skin of the dead trio had stretched tight and smooth over their turgid bodies. After several days adrift in salt water, their hair had thinned, leaving pitted, burnt scalps. Their eyes had been pecked clean by scavenger birds.

Beyond the lagoon, brilliant sunlight played on the Indian Ocean's choppy blue surface. Few rays penetrated the palm fronds that rimmed the tropical Maldive atoll. Squinting in the reflected light, women in brightly colored wraps stood by their huts and held their thin hands over their faces.

Tanned, muscular, and bared to his waist, Mick dashed from the eastern end of the island toward the fishermen. A former CIA operative, he ran with the graceful movements of his Native American forefathers, a black ponytail trailing behind him.

Halfway down the gentle slope, he encountered Dr. Simon Yates, who was stumbling out of his open-air laboratory. Clutching a worn medical bag under one arm, the doctor tugged his faded Bermuda shorts over the wide expanse of his bare stomach.

From a distance, the recovered bodies resembled polished sculptures or mummified museum specimens. As he skidded to a stop beside them, Mick realized otherwise. They reeked of noxious gas.

"Jesus," he said, turning away from the stench. "I'll let you perform the examination."

Simon stared at the bodies for a long time.

Mick averted his face, and studied the doctor. "I'm sure you're more used to this sort of thing than I am."

Simon removed his straw hat and scratched his shiny head. "Forensics is not my trade," he said with his Louisiana drawl. "And I'm nobody's mortician."

Two years earlier, for some reason unknown to anyone on the island, this esteemed American medical researcher had staggered drunk onto the beach like a shipwrecked soul. He had brought with him medical skills sorely lacking in the Maldive Islands. Since his arrival, the balmy surroundings had seemed to heal him as much as he healed others with his rudimentary medical practice.

"What's it look like to you?" Mick asked.

"Could be anything. Exposure. This last cyclone."

Despite the grisly scene on the beach, the final summer cyclone had left behind a cornucopia of life on the tropical atoll. Natives had already gathered fallen coconuts into small pyramids. They had woven downed palm fronds, like green threads, into the brown mesh walls of their huts. A musty smell emanated from damp thatched roofs. Glimmering raindrops fell from bamboo leaves, palms, and breadnut trees. Another successful monsoon season had come and gone, helping to sustain life through the upcoming dry tropical winter.

He glanced down at the incongruous sight. The three bodies lay sprawled side by side. "Curious," he said. "They must have floated a long way."

"Why's that?"

"I can tell from their loincloths," he said. "They're Koli fishermen from India's west coast."

"Huh," Simon said. "I guess I won't second guess you. They say you know your India."

Mick staggered away from the corpses that were already blackened by flies. He could only take so much.

Funny how the doctor's story was not unlike his own. Having failed to anticipate India's nuclear tests earlier that year, Mick had become the pariah of the Bombay consular community as well as the scapegoat at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He had almost been too devastated by his run of bad luck to notice his daughter's health slipping away.

His eyes fell on his lone hut where Mariah lay isolated at the tip of the crescent-shaped island.

"They're Indian all right. I wonder if they picked up what Mariah has," he mused.

"Hard to tell," Simon said, joining him several meters up the beach, and away from the gathering. "I'd need an autopsy to establish the cause of death."

Mick ran his hands through his thick black hair. He was well aware that tufts of gray had recently emerged at his temples. He grimaced as he remembered his tussle over Mariah's tiny, comatose body in Bombay, which ended in his wrenching her away from Natalie, her mother, and taking her to Dr. Simon Yates in the nearby Maldive Islands. He wouldn't wait for an autopsy to find out what disease was wracking his poor child's body.

And he had done the right thing. Mariah would have died had she remained in Bombay. No doctor there had been able to make a definitive diagnosis, and the State Department doctor would never have arrived in time to attend to her. It was Dr. Simon Yates who had stabilized Mariah.

Simon tilted his large head toward the bodies lying at the fishermen's feet. "Sure hope that isn't what your daughter has," he said.

"Why?" From the peaceful look on the dead men's faces, they must have died unexpectedly with little pain.

Simon cleared his throat and gave a loud sigh. "Because it means the new malaria may be far more prevalent than we originally thought."

The word "malaria" carried down to the fishermen. They repeated it in local dialect, and turned to hurry back to their hovels. Unconfirmed reports of a recent outbreak of deadly cerebral malaria over a hundred miles to the east on the Indian subcontinent had already left the villagers nervous.

"Do they still avoid you?" Simon asked with a wry smile.

"Pretty much. They tolerate me, but not a single one has approached my house."

"I will, for one. I haven't seen Miss Mariah in over a day."

Mick's gaze drifted up from the blinding white sand, across thirty feet of thick, hand-cropped grass to the open window of a hut.

Outside, the hut appeared primitive. Inside, high-tech medical equipment pumped and hissed.

Simon ordered several villagers to carry the bodies on their long poles up to his laboratory. The outdoor lab consisted of a set of wooden tables under a Banyan tree fifty meters up the beach toward the island's tourist resort.

"They think they'll come down with fever and chills, too," Mick said. "It's only superstition."

"Pity. Malaria is not contagious, except through mosquitoes, which the World Health Organization eradicated from these islands years ago, and through blood transfusions, which I assume none of these villagers would require from your daughter."

"Tell them that," Mick said, squinting at the turned backs.

"Let me take another peek at our little patient."

Mick nodded.  The further from the foul odor, the better.

They trudged in silence through the whispering sand. Fishermen dispersed behind them into the rainforest, leaving an empty, welcoming beach.

With thin, encompassing arms, the wishbone-shaped island protected the mile-wide lagoon. A covered outrigger floated on the water that was stretched taut over the coral.

Mick stooped under his doorway, and looked at the tranquil scene inside. Too damned tranquil to disturb.

Just below the far windowsill, a respirator tube ran into Mariah's mouth and down the preschooler's porcelain-white throat. An IV bag dripped down another tube into a needle that was taped to her slender arm. A catheter drained off the young girl's urine.

Her curly red hair was carefully combed. Her round face already showed some of her mother's classically pretty features. Her eyelashes remained shut as if she were fast asleep. Dr. Yates had termed her condition "stable." She was so stable, in fact, that she hadn't moved, spoken, or reacted to external stimuli for over a month.

She didn't react, but did she sense anything? She might have been listening to surf crashing against the windward side of the atoll. Or she might have been catching the sharp smell of the chugging gasoline-powered generator outside her wall. Perhaps she concentrated on the disapproving grumbles of her brown-faced housekeeper or the methodical sweep of the woman's broom chasing sand off the floorboards. She might have noticed the swish of her father's footsteps approaching in the yard. Or she might have sensed nothing at all.

No one knew what damage, if any, her brain had suffered from the mysterious, devastating disease. No one might ever know. She was in a deep malarial coma.

"What's your prognosis, doc?" Mick asked with a whisper.

"We've been through all this before. I'll take her temperature again." He dug into his bag.

"You saw those dead men on the beach. That malaria kills people instantly. I want you to be honest with me. What are her chances?"

"I'm not a betting man. I can't say what will happen in her case."

Mick nodded at the thermometer in Simon's hand. "What happens if she gets another fever?"

Simon rubbed the back of his neck with a painful grimace. "Eventually, the parasite will wake up within her. Malaria parasites hide in the liver, and then burst out to attack cells and cause a bout of symptoms. I haven't killed the parasites completely in Mariah, just kept them at bay. We can tell when they leave their dormant stage. Her temperature will shoot up. Short of finding a cure, I expect her to have another acute attack someday."

Mick frowned. "She's not strong enough."

Simon looked him directly in the eye. "I'm afraid she wouldn't survive another attack."

Mick felt his heart beating uncontrollably. "How soon could all this happen?"

Simon's eyes shifted from the thermometer to the cool autumn sky. "Anytime, Mick. Most likely before Christmas."