a rule. Only the nine of us even know where this place is.”
“Shit,” said Bunny.
“Why?” asked Mahao.
Before I could answer, lights flashed through the window as the first of the Humvees swung onto the property outside the Lab.
I hurried to the window, and my heart sank. Men were scrambling out of the two Humvees. A lot of them. They were dressed in black, with body armor and weapons. Two of them dragged out a man who wasn’t dressed for combat. He was a chubby blond guy wearing only boxers and a bloody undershirt. Had to be Gunter, and suddenly the whole story began falling into place for me. Gunter goes to Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, to pick up chemicals and seeds. Either he said something to the wrong person, or our bad guys had people paying attention to anything out of the ordinary because they were conducting their own science experiments out here. I’m not good enough at math to figure the odds on how the Silentium goons wound up testing their cocci bioweapon in the same part of the goddamn Sahara as these earnest kids with their Lab. Million to one? People have bought scratch-off lottery tickets and become millionaires with worse odds.
From the damage I could see on Gunter’s face, it was clear they’d worked him over. The kid was a scientist, not a soldier. He wasn’t hardened to endure torture, and though idealism is often a sword, it is not a shield. They broke him, and I can only imagine how the Silentium cultists reacted to the news that a group of young nerds was cooking up something that would make a total joke of their entire argument. With a superabundance of food, overpopulation became a completely different thing. With deserts being turned to arable farmland, eight billion people weren’t as firmly cheek by jowl. There was no substance, then, to a belief that enforced population reduction was necessary. The Silentium was about to become pointless.
And so they forced Gunter to betray his friends, and the cult sent a bunch of goons out here to kill everyone and burn it all down.
So . . . want to hear some more funky math? Work in these variables . . .
What if we’d gotten here an hour earlier or an hour later?
What if that Nat Geo journalist hadn’t taken photos of a jet spraying something and tied it to inexplicable deaths . . . and had just enough of a conspiracy theory twitch that he thought he ought to tell someone about it?
What if the person he told dismissed it?
What if the story had not been told to the right person?
What if, what if, what if?
What if Top, Bunny, and I were not here?
I glanced at Top and Bunny. They nodded at me.
Here are some more numbers. There were twelve Silentium shooters and three of us.
Those odds?
Well, I like those odds.
7.
THE LAB
TéNéRé
SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA
They swarmed the building.
Three of them kicked in the back door and entered fast, the barrels of their Kalashnikovs leading the way. They walked right past Bunny, who rose up from behind the big dining table. He opened up on them with the shotgun, firing 12-gauge buckshot from ten feet and cutting them in half.
Another group burst in through the front door. I don’t know if they ever saw the grenade that Top threw. He timed it right, though, because it arced down between the lead guy and two on his rear flanks and detonated in the air. It blew parts of them out onto the driveway.
I had four come in through the shattered side windows of the rec room. They had to know something was up because the glass was already broken, but they came anyway. The Lab crew were in a storeroom and, I hoped, barricading the door.
I’d pulled the fridge out and turned it into a shooting blind. As the four climbed into the room, Bunny’s shotgun and Top’s grenade went off at almost the same moment. The shooters turned left and right. I was in the middle. Their guns