«The Judas Strain», James Rollins

THE JUDAS

STRAIN

From the high seas of the Indian Ocean to the dark jungles of Southeast Asia, from the canals of Venice to the crypts of ancient kings, Sigma Force must piece together a mystery that threatens to end all life on our planet—a mystery that goes back centuries in time.

But this challenge may be too daunting for the elite members of Sigma Force alone. With a worldwide pandemic growing, Director Painter Crowe and Commander Gray Pierce gamble on a diabolical foe who has thwarted them in the past. Will this enemy prove to be trustworthy this time ... or another Judas?

JAMES Rollins has a doctorate in veterinary medicine and his own practice in Sacramento, California. An amateur spelunker and a certified scuba enthusiast, he'll often be found either underground or underwater.

PRAISE

FOR JAMES ROLLINS

"Edge-of-your-seat excitement." —San Francisco Chronicle

"This is Cussler and Ludlum territory with a dash of Dan Brown."

—Publishers Weekly

"Rollins is one of the most inventive storytellers writing today."

—Lincoln Child "Rollins delivers fantastic tales of action and adventure."

—Booklist

NOTE

FROM THE HISTORICAL RECORD

Herein lies a mystery. In the year 1271, a young seventeen-year-old Venetian named Marco Polo left with his father and uncle on a voyage to the palaces of Kublai Khan in China. It was a journey that would last twenty-four years and bring forth stories of the exotic lands that lay to the east of the known world: wondrous tales of endless deserts and jade-rich rivers, of teeming cities and vast sailing fleets, of black stones that burned and money made of paper, of impossible beasts and bizarre plants, of cannibals and mystic shamans.

After

serving seventeen years in the courts of Kublai Khan, Marco returned to Venice in 1295, where his story was recorded by a French romanticist named Rustichello, in a book titled in Old French, Le Divisament dou Monde (or The Description of the World). The text swept Europe. Even Christopher Columbus carried a copy of Marco's book on his journey to the New World.

But there is

one story of this journey that Marco refused to ever tell, referring only obliquely to it in his text. When Marco Polo had left China, Kublai Khan had granted the Venetian fourteen immense ships and six hundred men. But when Marco finally reached port after two years at sea, there remained but two ships and only eighteen men.

The

fate of the other ships and men remain a mystery to this day. Was it shipwreck, storms, piracy? He never told. In fact, on his deathbed, when asked to elaborate or recant his story, Marco answered cryptically: "I have not told half of what I saw."

The pestilence came first to the town of Kaffa on the Black Sea. There the mighty Mongolian Tartars waged siege upon the Italian Genoese, merchants and traders. Plague struck the Mongol armies with burning boils and bloody expulsions. Struck with great malice, the Mongol lords used their siege catapults to cast their diseased dead over the Genoese walls, and spread plague in a litter of bodies and ruin. In the year of the incarnation of the Son of God 1347, the Genoese fled under sail in twelve galleys back to Italy, to the port of Messina, bringing the Black Death to our shores.

—Duke M. Giovanni (1356), trans. by Reinhold Sebastien in Il Apocalypse (Milan: A, Mondadori, 1924), 34-35

Why the bubonic plague suddenly arose out of China's Gobi desert during the Middle Ages and slew a third of the world's population remains unknown. In fact, no one knows why so many plagues and influenzas of the last century—SARS, the Avian Flu—have arisen out of Asia.

But what is known with fair certainty: the next great pandemic will arise again out of the East.

—United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Compendium of Infectious Diseases, May 2006

Midnight

Island of Sumatra

Southeast Asia