Black Rose (The Project Book 9)

by Alex Lukeman

  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 ne
ver 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.

  CHAPTER 25

  Elizabeth had mixed feelings about the Zürich raid. On the surface, it looked like a success. The team had been in the right place. The plague-ridden corpses in the disposal room, the files they'd recovered and pictures of the lab proved that. The international papers were calling it a terrorist attack, although no one seemed to know why a pharmaceutical research lab had been targeted. The Swiss police were baffled and angry. Such things didn't happen in Switzerland. It was disorderly.

  Although the samples in Zürich had been destroyed, she had a bad feeling that the plague was still in play. There was no firm evidence to make her believe that. It was a matter of intuition and years of experience. AEON was too clever to put all their resources in one place. The raid might have eliminated the threat but what if it hadn't?

  The files recovered from the lab contained hard data and summarized research notes. The research notes weren't signed, but Elizabeth thought they were probably done by Karl Schmidt. She'd passed the file on to CDC in Atlanta. The file on the test subjects was gruesome and proved that human subjects had been used as guinea pigs. Twenty-seven had died before a new test batch of vaccine showed promise. Detailed autopsy reports and notes described the grim progress of the disease and it's inevitable outcome.

  Things had moved past her resources and responsibility. She had proof that the plague was a genuine national security threat. She was on her way to the White House to brief the president.

  Elizabeth's driver turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue and passed through new security barriers installed since the last time she'd been here. Secret Service agents met her at a side entrance and relieved her of her pistol. They gave her a visitor pass to hang around her neck and escorted her to the Oval Office, where President Rice was expecting her.

  Rice was behind his desk. He was an average looking man at first glance. It was only on closer inspection that people were captured by the intensity in his eyes. They were blue with a hint of green and conveyed a sense of total attention when he looked at you. Like all who had held this office, he seemed surrounded by an intangible aura of power. Elizabeth had felt it before with other presidents. His face showed the strain of his job, here where there was no need to look good for the cameras and the public eye wasn't upon him.

  Rice was not alone in the room. DCI Clarence Hood was present as well.

  "Mister President, thank you for seeing me."

  "Please take a seat, Director. I thought it best if Clarence sat in on this."

  She nodded to him as she sat down. Clarence Hood had become a personal friend.

  "Sir, I requested this meeting because I believe we are facing a threat unlike any we've dealt with before."

  "That sounds ominous, Director," Rice said.

  "You already know what we discovered from the papers of North Korea's defector. I followed up on that."

  She briefed the two men on everything that had happened, ending with the raid on the Zurich laboratory.

  "So that's why you wanted the safe house," Hood said.

  "Why wasn't I told about this operation?" Rice said.

  "Sir, that's why I'm here now. Until I had definite proof of what these people were doing, I felt you had no need to know."

  "If the Swiss find out we're responsible, they'll make a lot of trouble."

  "They won't find out, Mister President. I guarantee it."

  "They better hadn't. You are certain it was the Russians that took the samples from the North Koreans?"

  "Yes, sir, I am. We determined that through satellite surveillance. Then our source verified our finding before he was killed."

  "This Adam person?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Mm. Go on."

  "Sir, there can only be one reason AEON subjected human subjects to this terrible disease. They are working to create a vaccine against it or have already done so."

  Hood sighed. "You think they intend to release it."

  "That's right," Elizabeth said. "It's a perfect terrorist weapon. There's no cure that we know of and it's always fatal."

  "I can understand one of the fundamentalist groups wanting to do something like that," Rice said. "They hate everyone who doesn't believe as they do and they justify it as God's will. But why would a group of successful business men do such a thing? It doesn't make sense."

  "I can only speculate on that," Elizabeth said. "AEON seems to want a world they can dominate and control. They've demonstrated that they have no concern for the cost in human life. I don't think they have any agenda beyond dominance."

  "Amoral," Hood said.

  "Totally. They have no ethical or moral considerations."

  "Who else is part of this organization besides Gutenberg and Dass?" Rice asked.

  "I
can't answer that," Elizabeth said. "But we do know those two are leaders. Sir, the resources at my disposal aren't enough to tackle this by myself."

  "I can set up full surveillance on Gutenberg and Dass, Mister President," Hood said. "They might lead us to the others."

  "Do it," Rice said.

  "Yes, sir."

  "We could look into Gutenberg's finances," Elizabeth said. "Whatever else is going on, money must be part of it. Terrorist acts require funding. If we find a money trail, we can follow it. Dass is the one with the facilities to handle the samples and develop any vaccine or cure. We need to know what he's doing as well."

  They waited as Rice considered what they'd said.

  "All right," he said. "I want this kept between the two of you. Spying on foreign nationals influential in finance and industry is a mine field, politically speaking. We get enough flak about surveillance as it is from our supposed allies. They don't like us finding out when they act against our interests."

  "If they don't like it, perhaps they should stop doing it," Hood said.

  "Make sure the media never hears you say that," Rice said. "I'd hate to lose you."

  CHAPTER 26

  The windows of Alexei Vysotsky's office looked out across the Yasenevo District outside of Moscow, all the way to the golden onion domes of the Kremlin. In summer, hundreds of trees made a sea of leafy green stretching all the way to the river. In the winter, as now, the bare branches revealed the grimy urban sprawl surrounding the modern office building that housed Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service.

  The sun cast watery light from a thin curtain of high, cold sky. Outside, the temperature hovered somewhere below zero. Vysotsky's office was hot and stuffy. He sat at his desk with his collar open and cursed the engineers who had designed a system that roasted you or left you in freezing cold.

  The temperature of the room was the least of Vysotsky's concerns. He'd just finished reading a summary of the contents of Gutenberg's encrypted drive. Valentina had sent him a headache of the first order. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, took out the vodka and poured a drink. He downed half, topped off the glass, and put the bottle back. Then he opened the report on Gutenberg's computer.