Read The Moses Virus for Free Online Page A

passed through, giving him a smile and a wave. There was a beautiful, ancient wooden table in the middle of the kitchen/dining room.
    Tom walked up a narrow spiral stairway. Alex stood at the landing in the living room, waiting for him to arrive. Off the living room was the small balcony containing planters filled with geraniums and ivy. The plants spilled over the edge of the balcony and swayed with the slightest breeze. Alex described the floor above as a bedroom, bathroom, small study, and a second terrace over the first, also filled with planters. “I guess you passed Ana, my cleaning lady, in the kitchen. She doubles as a cook when she has the time, and I’ve asked her to make soup for tomorrow. It’s always better when it rests overnight.”
    There was a pitcher of flowers on a sideboard in the living room as well as two glasses and a carafe of red wine and a bottle of white wine. “Would you like some white or red wine, or, perhaps, something else?” she asked Tom.
    “Some white wine would be fine,” he replied. Tom watched her as she moved to the sideboard to fill their glasses. She was dressed informally in a loose red blouse and jeans that fit her well.
    “I was sorry to see your name in the paper this morning,” she said, handing him his wine. They sat down on the sofa. “Now the reporters will never leave you alone.”
    “Yes, but forewarned is forearmed. Caroline is handling the press. So far I’ve been able to avoid them.”
    “Are there any more developments?”
    “Lieutenant Gabrielli called the Academy this morning to say the authorities are putting a lid on further publicity. They sealed the passageway and stopped excavation. Then they handed the case over to Pulesi. At the moment, we know nothing else.”
    “There’s got to be more to it,” Alex said. “Sealing the passageway and stopping excavation—very unusual. And assigning someone from the Communicable Substances Lab? It may be that what killed Doc and Eric was not only very lethal but highly contagious. Remember the green moss that Greg mentioned? Maybe it’s involved somehow.”
    “Killer green moss? It all sounds more like a sci-fi movie,” Tom said. “Doc was an archaeologist, not a terrorist.”
    “If Gabrielli or Pulesi is worried about contagion, there may be some real danger.”
    “Still, it doesn’t fit,” Tom said. “Traces of a deadly virus in a Roman emperor’s palace buried for two thousand years? How could that be?”
    “Epidemics are frightening and hard to control. Viruses or plagues—periodically, they appear and do cause horrendous destruction.”
    “You seem to be quite interested in this.”
    “I’ve made human plagues a specialty,” Alex replied, “particularly ones that had devastating impacts on society. Some plagues, like the black death, wiped out huge numbers of people. There was widespread panic. Even powerful institutions like the Catholic Church were affected. Think about it. If death kills most of your family and most of your neighbors, just how mighty would you think God is? Or, His Church? I could talk about this for hours, but I don’t want to bore you.”
    “This isn’t boring to me,” Tom said. “When was the first plague?”
    “You’ll find the earliest recorded plague in the Book of Exodus. Ten plagues fell on the Egyptian people sometime around 2000 BC during the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses II. The plagues nearly destroyed Egypt, though we don’t know the numbers of people killed.
    “You could say Moses was the first leader to use plagues as weapons against his enemy. Essentially biological warfare.” Alex paused, embarrassed because she was doing all the talking. “I told you I could go on for hours. You must be hungry. Let’s go to dinner.”
    “Yes, let’s go,” said Tom, laughing. “We can finish this discussion later.”
    Passing through the stone archway, Alex turned left onto Via del Pellegrino heading away from the Campo dè Fiori. Almost immediately, she