That was what Lear had believed, and Cole too. A belief that had taken them into the Bolivian jungle, looking for a bunch of dead tourists. A bunch of, as it had turned out, undead tourists—Richards disliked the word but couldn’t think of a better one, undeadness being, in the end, a pretty solid descriptor of the condition—who had killed—ripped apart, really—what was left of the research team, all except for Lear, Fanning, one of the soldiers, and a young graduate student named Fortes. If not for Fanning, the whole thing would have been a total loss.

Lear: you had to feel for the guy. Probably he still thought he was trying to save the world, but he’d sold that dream up the river the minute he’d gotten into bed with Cole and Special Weapons. And truth be told, it was hard to say what Lear was thinking these days; the guy never came off L4, slept down there in his lab on a sweaty little cot and took his meals off a hot plate. He probably hadn’t seen the sun in a year. Back at the start, Richards had done a little extra digging, and come up with a number of interesting tidbits, Exhibit A being Lear’s wife’s obituary in the Boston Globe—dated just six months before Cole had come to see him in Ankara, a full year before the Bolivia fiasco. Elizabeth Macomb Lear, age forty-one. BA Smith, MA Berkeley, PhD Chicago. Professor of English at Boston College, associate editor of Renaissance Quarterly, author of Shakespeare’s Monsters: Bestial Transformation and the Early Modern Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2009). A long battle with lymphoma, et cetera. There was a picture, too. Richards wouldn’t have said Elizabeth Lear was a knockout, but she’d been pretty enough, in a slightly undernourished way. A serious woman, with serious ideas. At least there weren’t any kids involved. Probably the chemo and radiation had ruled this out.

So, really, when it came down to it: how much of Project NOAH was really just one grieving man sitting in a basement, trying to undo his wife’s death?