Black Rose (9 page)

CHAPTER 20

"What? Destroyed?"

Krivi had been called out of a sound sleep to answer the phone. He held it close to his ear and pulled his silk bathrobe around him as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. The green numerals on the clock by his bedside read 3:21. The voice repeated what it had said. Krivi rubbed his chest and took a deep breath.

"All right. We'll put it out that it was a terrorist attack. That always satisfies everyone's need to know who was behind something. There must be plenty of evidence to support the idea. Look for anything that might tell us who did it. Anything at all."

More noise on the telephone.

"No. Stall the police. Access has to be controlled. Get our people there now. I'll talk to the commissioner and get his cooperation. Call me if there are problems."

He hung up and thought for a moment. It was a secured line, no one would have intercepted the conversation. He picked up the phone and dialed a number known only to six others.

"Yes." Gutenberg's voice was alert, though Krivi knew he'd been asleep. A call on this line at night meant trouble.

"We have a problem."

"Go on."

"Someone raided the lab where we had the Korean samples. It was a professional operation. They eliminated my security team and blew up the building."

"A military op?"

"Possibly. My team was the best. The Russians, perhaps."

"I would have been warned. It couldn't have been them," Gutenberg said.

"Then we'd better find out who it was."

"What about the vaccine? The test?"

"I'm going to talk with Schmidt after we're done here," Krivi said. "He has backups of his research and more samples of the bacteria stored in another location. This is a setback, nothing more. It will delay implementation, but in the end it won't make any difference."

"What about the police?"

"They won't be a problem."

"Let me know if you find anything to tell us who did it."

"Of course."

After a few more words, Krivi broke the connection. He leaned back in his chair and knew he'd never get back to sleep. He was offended that someone would dare to attack him. Eventually he'd discover who had done it and when he found out who they were, they were going to regret the day they were born.

CHAPTER 21

The snow was letting up by the time they got back to the safe house.

"Man, I'm beat," Lamont said. He sat down on a couch.

"You're getting old, Shadow," Ronnie said.

"I wouldn't talk about old if I were you," Lamont said. "You look a little worn out yourself."

Ronnie's face showed the strain of the raid. It hadn't been that long since he'd been lying in a hospital, near death.

"How you feeling, Ronnie?" Nick said.

"I'm fine."

"Get some sleep. Unless the snow closes the airport, we're out of here in the morning."

In their room, Selena helped Nick take off his vest.

"Ow," he said.

He unbuttoned his shirt. Selena helped him take it off, then worked his tee shirt up over his head. His side was a massive blotch of bruised color.

"Rainbow man," Selena said. "Very impressive. Any ribs broken?"

"I don't think so, but it feels like I got hit by a truck. Everything's stiffening up."

"It will feel better in the morning," she said.

"No it won't, but thanks for the thought."

"You could have been killed."

"That's what the vests are for. Good thing it was only one round, though."

"Do you think we stopped them tonight?"

"I don't know," Nick said. "We sure as hell slowed them down."

"People like them shouldn't be allowed to exist," she said. Her voice was touched with anger.

"There's always someone like them."

"That's the problem, isn't it? There's always someone who wants to run the world their way and who'll do anything to get what they want."

"At least this time we know who they are and where they live. We didn't stop AEON before, but we didn't know as much. Maybe this time around we can finish it."

"Adam and his group tried to stop them for centuries," Selena said. "They couldn't do it."

"They didn't have us to help them out," Nick said.

Selena laughed.

"Ah, hell, I'm tired," Nick said. "All I want is to get under that nice warm quilt on the bed over there. With you."

"That's all?"

"Well, maybe not."

He leaned over and kissed her. They held it for a long minute. She reached up and pulled him closer.

"Ow," he said again.

"You sure about the bed? I thought you said you were tired. And you're hurting."

"What's a little pain between friends? And I'm not that tired."

Later, after he was asleep, she stared at the ceiling for a long time. Next to her, his body radiated heat like a furnace. She thought about what he'd said about Adam, about his group not having the team to help in the past.

He was serious
, she thought.
People have been trying to bring down AEON for a thousand years and he thinks that we're the ones to do it. He meant it, it's how he thinks of himself, of the team. He means to take them down.

Outside the window of the bedroom, the wind was dying out. They'd be able to leave tomorrow and it couldn't be soon enough for her. She'd always loved the Alps, but after tonight she didn't think Switzerland would ever feel the same.

How did I get here?

She stared up at the ceiling for a long time.

CHAPTER 22

Valentina Antipov waited until Gutenberg's snoring was in full flower before she got out of bed. She looked at him with distaste. He'd been particularly clumsy tonight and it had taken all her considerable skills to convince him of his romantic prowess. She picked up a red silk nightgown from the floor by the bed, slipped it on and padded softly into the other room.

Gutenberg's laptop computer sat on a desk by the window. It was password protected, of course, but Valentina had long ago discovered the key, a combination of his wife's name and his birth date. For all his power and intelligence, Gutenberg was naive about things like passwords. It would never occur to him that his not-so-intelligent mistress would even look at his computer, much less be able to access the files on it. He should have been using a biometric security lock, but he'd once told her he didn't trust them. Biometrics had been known to fail.

Valentina enjoyed making a fool of him. It was one of the pleasures of her job.

Something had happened to upset him. She didn't know what it was, but she knew it was important. Johannes had flown in to Paris unexpectedly and ordered her to be ready for him later in the day. A business meeting, he'd said, but then he'd be free. He'd sounded strained over the phone, even worried, angry. She had never known him to be worried about anything.

Valentina had decided to look at the laptop and see if she could find out why Gutenberg was here, or who it was he'd met with. There was little risk she'd be discovered. His snores echoed loudly in the other room.

Half a bottle of cognac will do that to you
, she thought.
Pig.

An ornate iron street lamp cast soft, yellow light over snow dusting the cobbled street outside the window. This part of Paris still had the feel of the old city, the Paris of van Gogh and Matisse, of Voltaire and Moliere. Valentina loved Paris. As much as she missed the sounds and nightlife of her native Moscow, she had to admit it was nothing like the city of light.

The sounds in the other room stopped and Valentina froze where she was. A moment later, they started again. She took a deep breath and opened the computer. She entered the password. The screen filled with fifty or sixty file icons, like miniature file folders. Gutenberg was obsessive about records. There was probably a psychological term for it, but she didn't know what it was. He always kept a record of anything he thought important.     

If there was something that could tell her what had upset Gutenberg, it would be a recent entry. There was no time to look into each folder. Most of them would be business files, of interest but little use to her. She wanted something recent.

She moved the cursor over the folders, pausing only to see the date of entry. She came to a folder marked K. The entry date was the night before. She clicked on the file. Flashing red letters appeared on the screen.

ENTER CODE

Damn!

That had never happened before.

Her purse lay on a chair nearby. She went to it and took out a high speed flash drive given to her by SVR's technicians and went back to the computer. She inserted it and copied Gutenberg's entire drive without trying to crack the code on the file. She shut down the computer, withdrew the device and put it back in her purse.

Let Moscow worry about it,
she thought. She'd arrange for it to get to the embassy tomorrow, after Gutenberg was gone.

Her work done, Valentina slipped back into bed. She looked over at the man sleeping next to her.

Men are such fools
, she thought.

CHAPTER 23

"I like it," Nick said.

"You do?"

Nick and Selena stood in the empty space of a converted loft building overlooking the Potomac and Robert E. Lee's beloved Virginia.

The loft was on the top floor of an eight story brick warehouse that had been a clothing factory at the turn of the 20th century. The machines, cutting tables and bales of raw cloth were long gone. No one from that time would have imagined the change that had come to the building.

The original floors of oak had been sanded smooth, stained and finished to perfection until they glowed with warm light. A row of tall, paned windows faced out onto the river. The bricks had been exposed and finished along one wall. Light poured into the loft through skylights placed along the high ceiling. The space had been partitioned with an architect's skill into a great room, master bedroom, a large study/library and two guest rooms. There were two and a half bathrooms. There was a gas fireplace in the living area and the master bedroom. Overhead lights were recessed into the ceiling.

The walls were painted off-white. The loft was a blank canvas, ready for whatever imagination its new owners could bring to it.

"What do you think?" Nick asked. He walked over to one of the windows. His footsteps echoed in the empty space. A line of barges was passing on the river, shepherded by two large tugs.

"I like it too," Selena said.

"Then let's take it."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Then we should go see the agent."

"We need to talk about how we pay for it," Nick said.

It was a conversation Selena knew was coming.

"Nick..."

"Hear me out," he said. "I know you can pay for it. I don't want you to."

"Why not? I have more than enough, you know that. What good is money if you can't spend it on what you want?"

"There are plenty of things you can spend it on here, if that's what you want," Nick said. "But this has to be a 50/50 deal. You cover half, I cover half."

"This place is expensive."

"So? It's not like that place you're in now. We'll take out a mortgage like everybody else. That way it will be ours. I think it's important."

Stubborn
, Selena thought.
Why not just let me handle it?
But she knew why. It would never work between them if she paid for everything.

"What about your apartment?" she asked.

"The lease runs for another year. I have a sublet clause. There's not going to be a problem finding someone to take it over."

He put his arm around her. She leaned against him and looked out over the water.

"It's a beautiful space," she said. "It will be fun to decorate it."

"Too bad there's no furniture here now."

"What do you mean?"

"I was thinking of the bedroom."

"I'm thinking about couches and rugs and you're thinking about that? The bed?"

"Who said anything about a bed? I was thinking about the Klee you gave me, the one in my bedroom. It will look great over the fireplace."

She looked at him. He was grinning.

"Liar," she said.

CHAPTER 24

The clinic was in an impoverished village named Sao Benedito, a tiny dot located on the edge of the
Raposa Serra do Sol
 Indian Reservation in the northernmost tip of Brazil. The village consisted of about forty
houses built from mud, wood and palm leaves. Behind the houses were garden plots and a few animals kept by the villagers for milk and food. Most of the villagers eked out a minimal existence as farmers. The clinic treated a variety of infections and injuries brought on by work, nature and too much
cachaca
at the local bar on a weekend night.

The Indians lived on a vast tract of tropical forest, rivers, broad savannahs and tall mountains. It was a beautiful place, a hunting and fishing paradise. With the beauty came danger and the possibility of sudden, unpleasant death. Poisonous snakes and insects, giant spiders, vampire bats and the occasional jaguar made life interesting. The people who lived on the reservation came to the clinic for emergency treatment when the traditional healing ways had failed. The government stayed away from the area as much as possible and the village was remote. In short, it was perfect for Karl Schmidt's needs.

Schmidt loved field work. He was an avid outdoorsman, hiking the mountains near Zurich as often as possible. Krivi indulged him with a month's holiday each year, a European tradition that Schmidt used to book travel to exotic locations. He'd never been to Brazil and had been looking forward to it. The beauty of the land was better than he'd hoped for. It was secondary, of course. He hadn't come to sightsee.

He'd come to kill.

The destruction of the laboratory in Zurich had speeded up Karl's schedule. Backups of the modified plague and three hundred doses of the trial vaccine had been stored at Krivi's corporate headquarters, where several floors were given over to research labs developing new products for Dass Pharmaceuticals. More samples of the vaccine and the plague had been shipped to Krivi's manufacturing labs in Mumbai.

All the bureaucratic details required by the Brazilian authorities to begin the inoculation program had been completed before the Zurich attack. In a way, the destruction of the lab had acted as a spur to move forward. Karl would have preferred a few more weeks of testing but the raid took the decision from him. Krivi and Gutenberg had become impatient after the explosion. Schmidt was in Brazil only to supervise the start of the trial. Even though he'd been injected with the vaccine, he intended to be far away by the time the plague showed itself.

The first signs were fever and a severe headache. Then came high fever, sneezing and coughing as the disease attacked the lungs and entered the contagious stage. By day six after exposure, the patient was unable to stand or eat and the internal organs were breaking down. The characteristic flower-shaped black blotches appeared. By day eight, most who'd been infected were dead. No one had ever lasted longer than ten days. But for three days after exposure, everything would seem normal.

It was possible the disease would spread beyond the village and the reservation, but the place was remote enough that it was unlikely. Even if it did, access to the area was limited. A quarantine wouldn't prove difficult. If it did go out of control, a Brazil destabilized by an epidemic wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

Outside the clinic the first patients of the morning waited. It was a gorgeous day.

"We're ready, Herr Schmidt."

The speaker was Doctor Silva, a stocky man with honey-colored skin and a high pitched voice that didn't seem to go with his body. He gestured at a table laid out with neat rows of disposable hypodermic syringes filled with clear fluid.

"It's a wonderful thing, what you are doing for our people, " Silva said.

"It's nothing," Schmidt said. "Our company believes in giving something back. This is our way of doing it."

Doctor Silva believed he was injecting a new product that would be effective against a deadly, drug resistant strain of malaria that had found its way to the region. That part was true. Every tenth dose also carried the plague bacilli. Schmidt had made sure Silva received the vaccine. He needed the doctor to survive and report the results.

"Shall we get started?" Schmidt said.

The first patients were a woman from the reservation and her two children. Schmidt had something of a soft spot for children. It was too bad so many of them would die, but it couldn't be helped. Besides, life expectancy was short here. Better an early death than years of poverty and misery. And what did these people have to look forward to? A primitive life of disease and isolation. They contributed nothing. By dying, they would prove useful.

Their deaths would fertilize the seeds of the new world order.