Genesis Plague Read Online Free PDF

didn’t know if I would ever be able to afford bigger rocks, and
she assured me that what mattered was the size of the gesture, not the size of
the diamond. It sounded like she had been practicing that line for a while.
    Her shoulder-length
brown hair was in a tight bun, and she was wearing the bright pink bikini she
knew drove me crazy. I had on my flower-print Hawaiian board shorts, but they
never got as much attention Cassidy’s bikini.
    She finally made it
into my chair and I moved over willingly, then put my arm around her and
clanked my bottle against hers.
    Cass reached up and slicked
back my dark hair. Then I felt a pinprick of pain and she showed me a single
strand of gray she had just plucked. “Got this guy out of there before he could
infect the others.”
    “Gee, thanks,” I said,
rubbing my scalp.
    She took a swig of her
champagne. “This tastes expensive.”
    “It is,” Pierre said as
he limped over. He had his own bottle and studied the label. Then he drained
the last few drops and tossed it to the deck. “Twelve hundred a bottle. Worth
it if you’re celebrating a treasure worth millions.”
    “But the treasure is
lost,” I said.
    “For today, yes.”
    “So what are we
celebrating now?”
    “Life!” he exclaimed
passionately. He groaned with pain as he sat on the chair Cassidy just vacated.
He leaned back and put his hands behind his head. His left foot and thigh were heavily
bandaged. Blood was already seeping through the gauze around his upper leg, but
Pierre didn’t seem to pay it any attention.
    I took another swig of
my champagne. “Life might not seem so great a prize to someone who has been
looking for that treasure as long as you have, Pierre.”
    “We tried to warn you,”
said Cass.
    “It would have been
lost anyway,” said Pierre with a shrug. “Even if we weren’t there, it would
have fallen into the pit. But to have been so close…this is a victory by
itself! And of course I ignored you. I am stupid this way. But this is
also why I am very, very rich. Because of the risks I take.”
    I considered it a
moment. “Perhaps I should try it sometime.”
    He grinned. “I think you
would find it liberating, Dr. Nassai. Besides, I know where the treasure is
when I want to try again. That pit is over five hundred meters deep, mon ami .
I need different equipment, and a bigger ship. But now I have a story, perhaps
the greatest story of my life. And I have you to thank for it.”
    “All I did was shoot
you in the leg.”
    He thought about it for
a moment. “It could have been my face.”
    There was a sharp
ringing from somewhere below deck. A moment later, a steward hurried out to the
lounge area holding a satellite phone in his hands. He babbled quickly in
French to Pierre, then handed him the phone and scampered away without looking
at the rest of us.
    Pierre sighed. “My
sister’s boy. Too shy for his own good, but what can I do?” He spoke into the
phone, pulled it away from his ear to look at it with confusion, then handed it
to me. “It’s for you.”
    “Who could possibly
know we’re out here?” asked Cassidy.
    “Just the university,”
I said as I stood up. “I had to leave them a note in case something, you know,
went wrong.”
    “You mean more wrong?” said Flint, smiling drunkenly.
    I held the phone to my
ear. “This is Paul.”
    “Paul, it’s Roger.”
    I already knew some of
what he was going to say before he said it. When the regional director of one
the most prestigious university labs in the nation hunts down your research
team when you’re supposed to be on vacation, you can bet he isn’t asking for
advice on what kind of diamond ring to buy for his sweetheart.
    “Look,” Roger said,
skipping right over the pleasantries, “I know I approved your days off, but I
need the three of you back in the States, pronto. The Pacific plate is shifting
and it’s playing all kinds of hell in Hawaii.”
    I turned to Cassidy and
mouthed It’s Roger . She