Viator

Over the fifty-nine days of his confinement in a military hospital, Wilander pieced together a story that, like any story, had its flaws, its holes, but sufficed to encompass more or less the facts of which it was made. Viator’s cargo, unlisted on the manifest, consisted of two containers of a virus as yet unnamed (It’s a lentivirus, actually. Maybe we’ll name it for you, huh?), a Russian bioweapon, one of which had cracked open in Lunde’s storm and polluted the hold. Perhaps it had been intended to be destroyed with the ship, but this was thought unlikely; more likely, it had been meant for terrorist hands. The lentivirus bonded with DNA in brain neurons, gradually driving the host mad (You’re going to have to put up with this bad boy for a while, but we’ll keep him calm with drugs). Halmus and Arnsparger had been dead for weeks and days respectively when he happened upon them. Everything he had seen and experienced on the ship was, after a certain point, fantasy. The gigantic lentivirus of his dreams, his madness? They mumbled some business about impingement on the optic nerve and told him not to worry about it.

—But what about Mortensen? he asked. And Nygaard…what about him?

—Who knows? I guess they ran off in the woods somewhere, was the answer.