Toxic Prey (Prey Novel, 34, Band 34) - Softcover

Buch 34 von 36: Prey (Lucas Davenport)

Sandford, John

 
9780593714515: Toxic Prey (Prey Novel, 34, Band 34)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593714512 ISBN 13: 9780593714515
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTELLER

Lucas Davenport and his daughter, Letty, team up to track down a dangerous scientist whose latest project could endanger the entire world, in this latest thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford.

Gaia is dying.

That, at least, is what Dr. Lionel Scott believes. A renowned expert in tropical and infectious diseases, Scott has witnessed the devastating impact of illness and turmoil at critical scale. Society as it exists is untenable, and the direct link to Earth’s death spiral; population levels are out of control and people have allowed disarray and disorder to run rampant. While most are concerned about deadly disease, Scott knows that it is truly humanity itself that will destroy Gaia. It’s only by removing the threat that the planet can continue to prosper, and luckily, Scott is just the right man for the job…


When Scott then disappears without a trace, Letty Davenport is tasked with tracking down any and all leads. Scott’s connections to sensitive research into virus and pathogen spread has multiple national and international organizations on high alert, and his shockingly high clearance levels at various institutions, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, make him the last person they’d like to go missing. As the web around Scott becomes more tangled, Letty calls in her father, Lucas, help her lead a group of specialists to find Scott as soon as possible. But as Letty and Lucas begin to uncover startling and disturbing connections between Scott and Gaia conspiracists, their worst fears are confirmed, and it quickly becomes a race to find him before the virus he created becomes the perfect weapon.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of thirty-three Prey novels; two Letty Davenport novels; four Kidd novels; twelve Virgil Flowers novels; three YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook; and three other books.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Letty Davenport's apartment complex had a swimming pool filled with discouraging numbers of square-shouldered men with white sidewall haircuts-even on the black guys, unless they were called black sidewalls; who knew?

They all had big bright wolf teeth, gym muscle, and questionable sexual ethics; and their female counterparts were much the same, the major differences lying in how much butt-cheek was exposed, which, in one case, when the young woman climbed out of the pool, was like watching the moon come up over the Potomac.

They were soldiers, mostly, attached to the Pentagon, just a couple miles away.

Five o'clock on an August afternoon, too hot to be inside, where the barely adjustable air conditioning blew cold damp air on everything; so Letty dozed in the webbing of her recliner, a copy of The Quarterly Journal of Economics covering her face. Beneath that, pressing against her nose, was a paperback version of J. D. Robb's Celebrity in Death, which Letty estimated was the fortieth of the In Death novels she'd read.

While not as prestigious as the Journal, the Robb novel was distinctly more intelligent and certainly better written; but, a girl has to maintain her intellectual status with the D.C. deep state, so the Journal went on top.

Some passing dude she couldn't see made a comment about legs, which she suspected was directed at her, but she ignored him, and was still ignoring him when the phone on her stomach vibrated. She groped for it, and without looking at the screen, pressed the answer tab and said, "Yeah?"

Her boss said, "This is your boss. I'm putting you on speaker." Other people were listening in; a modicum of respect was required.

"Yes, sir?"

"Can you get out to Dulles in the next three hours and forty-one minutes?"

"Uh, sure. Where am I going?"

"London. Well, Oxford. A guy will meet you at Dulles's United gate with a packet including the job, your tickets, and a hotel reservation. The return ticket's open, probably won't take you more than a day or two."

"How will he know who I am?"

"He'll have seen a photograph."

"Can you tell me more than that?" Letty asked.

"Not really. You know, the phone problem." He meant that that phone call wasn't secure, so whatever the problem was, security was an issue.

"How about dress? Standard business casual?"

"That will do. You can't take your usual equipment." He meant, gun. "I'm told by one of the gentlemen here that Oxford has some nice places to run, so you might take running gear."

"Thank you," Letty said.

"Three hours and thirty-nine minutes, now, according to my infallible Apple Watch," said Senator Christopher Colles (R-Florida), who was actually, if not technically, Letty's boss. He hung up.


Letty technically worked for the Department of Homeland Security, but in practice worked for Colles, who was chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He claimed to have the DHS secretary’s nuts in a vise, possibly because of the secretary’s governmental affairs. However that worked, when Colles spoke, the DHS listened.

Letty didn't exactly have what preppers called a bug-out bag, but she had something close: selected clothes in her closet hung in dry-cleaning bags, waiting to be packed, and a man's large dopp kit containing the cosmetic and medical necessaries, ready to go. She added her running gear, passport, and the Robb novel.

She traveled with a forty-liter Black Hole duffel from Patagonia and had learned to roll her dressier clothes into tube shapes, still wrapped in the dry-cleaner plastic, so they'd be fresh-looking and unwrinkled when she got to her destination. Frequent travel does teach you things, mostly about packing.

Forty-five minutes after Colles's call, she was out the door to a waiting cab; twenty-five minutes after that, they rolled up to Dulles, and five minutes after that, she ambled through security with her DHS credentials and passport and made her way to the United gate. A young man, but older than she was, with a spray of acne across his forehead and an annoyed look on the rest of his face, walked up to her and asked, "Davenport?"

"Yes."

He handed her a manila envelope, thick with the paper inside, said, "Don't lose it," and walked away. Far too important to be sent with an envelope to meet a woman younger than he was, and it showed in his body language. Nothing to be done about that.

Letty found a seat, opened the package, extracted a thin business envelope with her air tickets. She put that in the front pocket of the duffel bag and moved on to a much thicker report on a Dr. Lionel Scott, a British subject now somewhere in the United States; exactly where, nobody knew.

Under the binder clip that held the report together was a folded piece of notepaper with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of three of Scott's friends in Oxford. She was to inquire as to what they might know about his whereabouts and activities, and whether any of them were in touch with him. A final instruction from Colles was scrawled at the bottom of the sheet: "Wring them dry."

Letty checked her watch: she had time before the flight, so she settled down to read.


Lionel Scott was a doctor, first of all, a graduate of the Oxford medical school. After graduation, he’d done two foundation years, somewhat the equivalent of American medical residencies, then three more years studying viral and bacterial diseases in humans. Later, he’d joined Médecins Sans Frontières-Doctors Without Borders-and had spent nine more years working in Bangladesh and Myanmar in Asia, and Uganda, Guinea, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa.

He'd left Médecins Sans Frontières for health reasons, had returned to England, where he spent a year at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, then moved again, this time to the United States, where he'd worked at for a year at Fort Detrick in Maryland, at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Although still technically employed at USAMRIID, he was temporarily working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and had been for almost a year.

He had gone missing from there.

The mention of both USAMRIID and Los Alamos rang alarm bells with Letty, and she thought, Uh-oh.

She checked the time again and took the iPad out of her duffel, read about the Fort Detrick installation and about Los Alamos. Detrick was known as the primary research facility into diseases that might be weaponized by an enemy, which was why it was run by the Department of Defense. That job made sense; Scott was an infectious disease specialist with a lot of time in the field. She couldn't pin down why he would be at Los Alamos, which was known for creating the plutonium pits from which thermonuclear weapons were manufactured.

She read further into Scott's biography: he'd been treated for what was called nervous exhaustion after his last assignment at Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh with its refugee camp Kutupalong, home to nearly a million occupants. He'd also been treated for a recurrence of malaria that he'd originally contracted in Africa, and tuberculosis.

A note from a Médecins executive credited ". . . Dr. Scott with saving quite literally thousands of lives though his work with TB patients."

Altogether, Letty thought, an admirable human being. Now, just past forty, and apparently recovering from his various health problems, he'd vanished. Since he'd had extensive contacts with scientists developing atomic weapons, and other scientists doing what was called "gain of function" research on viruses-a euphemism for "making more deadly"-a number of high-ranking functionaries further up the bureaucratic ladder...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593714512
ISBN 13 
9780593714515
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
416
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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