Free The Atlantis Plague by A. G. Riddle

she was. The frantic escape from the Orchid District and sleeping on the hard wooden pew had taken a toll on her. For the first time since Martin had brought her to Marbella, she missed the tiny bed in the spa building and the quiet life of isolation she had lived there.
    She sat up and looked around. The church was dark except for two candles burning in the center aisle and the glow of a laptop screen illuminating Martin’s face. Upon seeing her, he quickly closed the laptop, grabbed something out of the backpack, and edged over to her. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
    Kate shook her head. She searched the dim cathedral for the boys. They were curled up beside each other on the next pew, wrapped in several layers of the white sheets the helicopters had dropped. They looked so peaceful. Martin must have gone back out to get the sheets after she had passed out. She focused on him. “I want to finish our conversation.”
    Dread filled Martin’s face, and he turned away from Kate and drew two more items out of the backpack. “Fine, but I need something first. Two things, actually.” He held up a blood draw kit. “I need a blood sample from you.”
    “You think I’m connected to the plague somehow?”
    Martin nodded. “Yes. If I’m right, you’re a significant piece of the puzzle.”
    Kate wanted to ask how, but another question nagged at her. “What’s the second thing?”
    Martin extended a round plastic bottle filled with brown liquid. “I need you to dye your hair.”
    Kate stared at Martin’s outstretched hands—the plastic-wrapped blood draw kit in one, the salon product in the other. How much weirder could her life get? “Fine,” she said. “But I want to know who’s looking for me.” She took the blood draw kit, and Martin helped her with it.
    “Everybody.”
    “Everybody?”
    Martin glanced away from her. “Yes. The Orchid Alliance, the Immari, and all the dying governments in between.”
    “What? Why?”
    “After the explosions at the facility in China, Immari International released a statement saying you carried out the attack and unleashed the plague, a weaponized flu strain—the product of your research. They had video footage—which was real of course. And it was consistent with the previous statement from the Indonesian government naming you for your involvement in the attacks in Jakarta and in performing unauthorized research on autistic children.”
    “It’s a lie,” Kate said flatly.
    “Yes, it’s a lie, but the media repeated it, and a lie repeated becomes perception, and perception is reality. Perception is also very hard to change. When the plague went global, everyone wanted someone to blame. You were the first story and, for many reasons, the best story.”
    “The best story?”
    “Think about it. A supposedly deranged woman, working alone, creating a virus to infect the world and accomplish her own delusional goals? It’s a lot less scary than the alternatives: an organized conspiracy, or the worst possibility—a natural occurrence, something that could happen anywhere, anytime. All the alternatives are ongoing threats. The world doesn’t need an ongoing threat. They need a crazy lone gunman, presumed dead. Or better yet, captured and punished. The world is a desperate place; catching and killing a villain puts a win on the board and gives everyone a little more hope that we might get through this.”
    “What about the truth?” Kate said as she handed him the tube with her blood.
    Martin dropped the tube into the top of the thermos. “You think anyone would believe it? That the Immari dug up an ancient structure, hundreds of thousands of years old, below Gibraltar, and that the device guarding it unleashed a global pandemic? It’s the truth, but it’s farfetched, even for fiction. Most people have a very limited imagination.”
    Kate rubbed the bridge of her nose. She had spent her adult life doing autism research, trying to make a difference. Now she was public