The Eden Prophecy by Graham Brown

an assassination attempt against an Iranian exile who happened to be there. But we know differently now. Ranga was on that deck.”
    “You’re sure?”
    She nodded. “Eyewitnesses and video from the site show two men being captured and hauled off by the Parisian police. Only the police reported no one in custody.”
    “I don’t understand,” he said.
    “Last night the bodies of four officers were found in an abandoned house on the outskirts of the city. Someone had killed them the day before and taken their place in the tower patrol.”
    “Someone who needed access to the tower.”
    She nodded. It was clear the officers had been targeted and taken before the incident. Their uniforms, IDs, and even their cars had been used.
    “Any idea who?”
    She shook her head. No one had a clue. Certainly no group had claimed responsibility.
    “What about Ranga?” Hawker asked.
    “They found him this morning,” she said. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but he’d been tortured and mutilated in some way.”
    Understandably she could sense the anger rising in Hawker. “Tortured.”
    She nodded slowly. “I don’t have all the details. I’m hearing it was pretty bad. He was left tied up in another vacant property for the police to find.”
    After a deep breath, Hawker held out his hand. She passed him the file. It contained everything they knew, including the fact that an Iranian, confirmed to be a member of the Green Revolution and a dealer in stolen antiquities, was still missing, that a large sum of cash was found at the site, and that something had been thrown from the deck. Analysis showed the object to be made of dried clay, but the destruction was so complete it was impossible to determine just what had been destroyed.
    She pointed to the file. “There’s background information in there,” she said, referring to Ranga’s profile. “Some of it you may know, some of it maybe not.”
    Hawker began to read. She could see the tension in his face, could sense him battling the frustration and anger.
    “I hate to say this,” she added, “but that’s not the worst of it.”
    Hawker looked up.
    “The day before Ranga’s disappearance, a letter was received at the UN. It carried a rather bizarre rambling threat and also some form of unknown virus.”
    “I heard about an anthrax scare,” he said. “Is that what we’re talking about?”
    “That’s just the cover story,” she said. “To keep people calm.”
    “Anthrax is the cover story?” he repeated. “What the hell is the real story then?”
    “It’s bad,” she said. “It’s like nothing anyone has seen before. It may be close to one hundred percent infectious. The threat indicates it is designed to cause a plague.”
    By the look on his face, Hawker had already guessed where this was going. “And the source?”
    “The letter was anonymous, but on an impermeable layer inside the envelope they found fingerprints pretty much everywhere. The prints are Ranga’s.”
    Hawker looked up at the ceiling and exhaled. It wasn’ta look of disbelief but a look of frustration, as if something long feared had just been confirmed.
    “He said he’d done something unforgivable. I’m guessing this is it.”
    “He was your friend,” Danielle said, “so I don’t expect this to be easy. But I need you to tell me anything about him that we might not already know.”
    “You know more than I do,” he said, holding up the file.
    “We don’t know what happened in Africa. We have pictures, guesses. You were with him.”
    He closed the file but held on to it. She sensed a reluctance to talk on his part, but he spoke anyway.
    “I met Ranga in ’05. I spent fourteen months with him and his daughter, providing protection. First he was looking for funding and then he took a job in the Republic of the Congo in central Africa, studying drought-resistant crops or something like that. I went with them.”
    He put the file down, pushed it away.
    “It didn’t take long for