“That’s not what I meant. I’m talking about casual spread from one person to the next with minimal contact. Patients dying despite antibiotics. All of them from overwhelming pneumonic plague.”

“You’re thinking it might be something else?”

“Possibly.”

“Bioterrorism?”

“I don’t know what this is, Byron. And neither do you.”

“I suppose if all you have is a hammer, then all you see are nails.”

“Bullshit! I’m saying we should consider everything. Including that this could be man-made. After all, the Soviets weaponized the plague in the seventies and eighties. So did the U.S. government. Maybe one of those strains of Yersinia got loose somehow?”

“How would that happen?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she admits.

Byron eyes her skeptically. “We’ll keep the possibility in mind. Meantime, I need to see the construction site where Vittoria Fornero worked.”

“Then go see it.”

“I would, but I also want to speak to Marcello Zanetti, and he hasn’t returned my calls.” He hesitates. “I hear Nico is friends with Zanetti.”

“Okay. I’ll ask Nico if he can put in a word.”

He looks as if he has something else to say, but instead he just nods. “Thank you.”

“Byron, the other patient in the ER just now. The one they were performing CPR on . . .”

“He died.”

She nods, unsurprised. “Where did he work?”

“We’re not sure yet. He was unconscious when he arrived.”

“He’s not medical?” She tenses.

“No. He was Sonia Poletti’s neighbor.”

The words are as jarring as a slap. “Oh, Christ, it’s already spreading in the community.”

Chapter

Thirteen

Today, on this fourth day of February, I, Rafael Pasqua, trudged through hell. What I saw there bore no resemblance to the paintings of inferno by the master artists that adorn the walls of the grand cathedral. No, as God is my witness, it was far worse.

I had not visited the market in the main square for ten days. I ventured there this morning in need of food and supplies. Even from a distance of a hundred paces, the air was thick with the stench of decay more foul than any slaughterhouse. There were men and women lying in the streets, some already dead while others lay suffocating on blood and unholy secretions. Not even the children were spared. Many of them died alone, abandoned by parents, through cowardice or death, and seemingly by God Himself. All the while, starving wild dogs struggled to drag corpses from open pits and mass graves that were too shallow.

Far worse than these spectacles was something which could not be seen at all. It came to me at first as a howling, as though baying wolves had gathered in the heart of Genova. But then I recognized the noise for what it was: voices, young and old, man, woman, and child, melded into a horrible cacophony. The cries came from a row of houses that lined the northern edge of the marketplace.

The market itself was immune to the horrors enveloping it. Merchants hawked their wares of meats, skins, wine, and spices as usual, while visitors haggled over the cost as if it were a day like any other.