Black Rose (The Project Book 9)

by Alex Lukeman

  "What about the plague?" Selena asked.

  "Better put the masks on now. Anyone we meet could be infected. Make sure you're bloused up tight. There could be fleas and fleas carry plague."

  Selena bent down and checked that her pants were pulled tight around the tops of her boots.

  "If Schmidt's here, he must have heard the plane," Ronnie said. "He'll know something's up."

  "He won't know what it is," Nick said. "Anyway there's nothing we can do about it. Let's get the masks on."

  They pulled on the masks. Lamont helped Selena adjust the straps until the mask was tight against her face.

  "All set." Lamont smiled at her.

  "Whenever this is made of, it stinks."

  Lamont laughed, the sound muffled behind the mask. "You'll get used to it."

  "I feel like the creature from the black lagoon," she said.

  "Yeah, you kind of look like it too. You like those old sci-fi movies?"

  "I love them. All those tacky rubber creatures. My favorite is The Attack of the Crab Monsters."

  "Mine's The Attack of the Giant Tomato," Lamont said. "It's gotta be the worst movie ever."

  "The Blob," she said

  "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman."

  "How about The Incredible Shrinking Man?"

  "That was cool," Lamont said. "The scene with the spider was really creepy."

  "Are you guys about done with the film review?" Nick said.

  His words were clear, with an odd mechanical quality caused by the voicemitter and mike on the front of the mask.

  "Sorry," Lamont said.

  "What's this indicator do?" Selena asked.

  "If it turns blue it means the filter is no good anymore," Ronnie said. "We should be out of here long before that happens."

  "Weapons hot," Nick said. The safeties on the MP-5s clicked off.

  "Everyone ready? Let's go."

  They set off along the edge of the trees toward the trail.

  CHAPTER 36

  Schmidt heard the roar of the plane as it passed overhead and knew it meant trouble. He stepped outside in time to see it disappearing over the trees. It had American markings.

  Transport, he thought. Military. There's no reason for them to be in the area or to be flying low like that. They must be coming here. It's time to leave.

  Schmidt went back inside the clinic building. There had always been a chance someone would discover what was happening and attempt to intervene. Schmidt had anticipated the possibility of government interference, but he hadn't anticipated that it would come from the Americans.

  There couldn't be any evidence left behind. He'd been getting ready to leave but he'd thought there would be more time to remove all traces of what he'd done. Now that wasn't possible. Fortunately, he'd prepared an alternative scenario.

  Just in case.

  The inside of the clinic looked like a medieval painting of hell, dark and full of suffering. Every place where someone could lie down was filled. The floor was covered with victims of the plague. More lay outside in a makeshift, open shed. The room stank of vomit and feces and old blood.

  Schmidt picked his way carefully through the dead and dying, ignoring clutching hands and pleas for water. He walked to a tall cabinet next to a sink and opened the doors. The lower part was taken up by a small refrigerator powered by a generator outside the shack. That was where the remaining plague inoculations and vaccine were stored. He took out the glass vials and emptied them into the sink.

  The upper part of the cabinet contained supplies on one side and a large, locked wooden box on the other. Schmidt took the box down and opened it. Inside was a steel gray cylinder attached by colored wires to a battery-powered digital timer. The cylinder contained enough explosive to obliterate the shack and everything else in the vicinity.

  How long before they get here?

  Schmidt set the timer and activated the device. Cries for water followed him as he hurried out of the clinic. He got into his truck and drove away. In two hours he would be out of the country. He never looked back as the dying village disappeared behind him.

  A few minutes later, Nick and the others reached the edge of the town where it butted up against the Indian reservation. They'd seen no one on the trail. Nick held up his hand to signal a stop. The shack housing the clinic was fifty yards away, across a field of grass. It was made of wood with a rusted tin roof. Next to the clinic was a hastily constructed open shed of thin poles holding up a thatched roof.

  "There are people over there," Selena said.

  "Plague casualties," Nick said. His voice was hard. "There must be seventy or eighty people lying there."

  "I don't see anyone taking care of them," Lamont said.

  "Probably too scared to get near," Ronnie said.

  "This is awful." Selena batted away an insect buzzing around her face. "What shall we do?"

  "We can't do anything for them," Nick said. "We have to try and find evidence of what caused this and Gutenberg's involvement. We'll go over there. Selena and I will go inside while you two keep watch."

  "What if Schmidt's in there?" Ronnie asked.

  "I kind of hope he is," Nick said, "but I seriously doubt it. He's probably long gone."

  "What are we looking for?" Selena asked.

  "Papers, lab equipment, samples of the plague, anything that might point a finger at Gutenberg and Krivi. Schmidt, too. I'll photograph anything we don't want to take with us."

  They started across the grass toward the shack. They heard moans and cries from the plague victims as they neared the clinic. The sound sent chills up and down Selena's spine. Some of the people lying outside under the makeshift shelter weren't moving, with the kind of stillness on them that made her think they were dead. In their fever and delirium, many had torn off their clothes. Even this far away, she could see black blotches on the bodies.

  "Everyone check your mask," Nick said. "Make sure you're good. All those people are infectious."

  "I'm glad we can't smell this," Lamont said.

  "It must've been like this when the black death hit Europe," Selena said.

  "I saw a movie once that was set in the time of the black death," Nick said. "It was about this knight who traveled around Sweden, playing chess with Death. It was bleak as hell, filled with skeletons and piles of bodies and people whipping themselves. Depressing."

  Selena was walking just behind Nick. "I know the one you mean," she said.

  Nick reached up to scratch his ear. She was about to say more when the shack disappeared in a violent clap of sound. The shock wave hit her with a blast of heat and wind that knocked her backward onto the ground. Fragments rained down all around. A spear of flying glass drove itself into the ground close to her leg.

  Nick climbed to his feet, shaking his head to clear it. Ronnie lay unconscious in the dirt. Lamont was on his knees. Nothing remained of the shack or the shed. A thick column of black smoke rose cloud-like into the sky from a deep crater in the ground.

  "Everyone all right?" Nick said. His voice sounded dead, muffled. The blast had shocked his hearing.

  Selena was dazed. She looked at the shard of glass sticking out of the ground. It had just missed her.

  I could have been killed. If that had cut me, I'd be infected now.

  Ronnie sat up and rubbed his forehead. Lamont stood on unsteady legs next to him.

  "You two all right?" Nick asked.

  "Yeah," Lamont said. "Good thing we weren't any closer." He looked down at his uniform. There were red spatters on it.

  "Oh, man, this is blood."

  "It's on all of us," Selena said. "It must be from the people in the clinic."

  Nick didn't want to think about plague infected blood.

  "Lamont, you've got stuff on you," Ronnie said.

  A piece of tissue had landed on Lamont's shoulder. He looked at it. It was an eyeball, a squashed human eyeball. He made an odd sound.

  "Lamont, don't," Nick yelled. "Keep it down, don't lift your
mask."

  It was too late. Lamont pulled his mask away from his face and vomited a yellow stream onto the dirt. He lifted his hand toward his lips and stopped as he realized what he was doing. He dropped the mask back down over his face.

  Nick used the tip of his knife to brush the eyeball off Lamont's shoulder. He shoved the knife into the dirt and left it there.

  "You okay now?"

  "Yeah."

  "We'll go back and call for extraction. We're not going to find evidence now."

  "Nick, we could be infected." Selena's face was pale.

  "We're probably all right, " he said. "Unless blood got in an open cut or in your eyes, you should be okay."

  He didn't know if that was true or not but it sounded good. Plague wasn't like ebola. At least he hoped it wasn't.

  "Get out the medical kits. They were covered up and won't be contaminated. Use antibacterial wipes to clean off your hands and give yourself a shot of antibiotics. They might not help, but it's better than nothing. Make sure you sterilize the area before you do a shot. The first thing we'll do when we get on the ship is head for sick bay. They'll quarantine us until they get test results."

  Lamont looked like he might be getting ready to throw up again.

  "There's no point in worrying about it," Nick said. "They'll run tests. Come on, we're wasting time."

  They went through the ritual of giving themselves shots and started back the way they'd come. Back at the drop zone, Nick opened the comm link to Virginia.

  "Director, get us out of here."

  Elizabeth could hear the stress in his voice. "What happened?"

  "It's a mess. We saw a lot of people who were sick or dead. Schmidt left a bomb that went off and destroyed the clinic. There's nothing left. We won't find any proof of what he did."

  "Was anyone hurt?"

  "No, but tell the extraction team to bring new BDUs for us. The ones we're wearing have been contaminated. We can't get on a chopper wearing them."

  Elizabeth felt her stomach tighten.

  "Copy that," she said. "Extraction should be there in half an hour."

  "Copy. Out," Nick said.

  It was a little more than half an hour before a tilt rotor Osprey with Marine markings settled into the clearing. Three men and a woman wearing nothing but air waited for them. A pile of clothes and equipment smoldered nearby. It was a story that would become legend in the fleet.

  CHAPTER 37

  Stephanie stretched her arms out to the side and yawned and rubbed her eyes. She'd been searching through the archived files of the East German secret police for more than three hours. Even with the high level translation program she was using, it was tough going wading through the stilted prose of the East German bureaucratic mind. She'd found nothing about Joseph Connor. She decided to give it another half hour before she quit for the day.

  Ten minutes later, she got a hit. The first reference led to another and then another, and soon she was looking at the STASI file on Selena's father. The first entry was dated from 1985. Connor had been posing as a businessman interested in taking advantage of cheap East German labor. In the beginning there was only routine surveillance, automatically kept on any Western foreigner. About six months after the first entry, everything changed.

  Someone in the West had betrayed him. Connor was identified as a high-level CIA agent.

  The East Germans decided to compromise him. If they succeeded, Connor would be given the option of cooperation or a bullet. They decided on a classic plan used by every intelligence agency in history. A female operative was assigned to seduce him.

  Stephanie's tiredness was forgotten. The file read like a novel written by Frederick Forsyth. But it wasn't a novel. It was the story of a man being drawn into a trap baited with his own weakness.

  Stephanie came across the first mention of the KGB. The East Germans knew who their masters were. Because Connor was a potential high level asset, the Russians took over the operation.

  Stephanie nodded to herself. She was on the right track, she could feel it.

  The KGB chose an experienced agent named Sofia Antipov for the seduction. Antipov was inserted into West Berlin and introduced to Connor by a deep cover East German who was a member of the West German Parliament. Within a month, Selena's father and Antipov were sleeping together. Two months after that, the KGB dropped the hammer.

  Joseph Connor was well and truly hooked. He began feeding information back to the Germans and their Russian bosses. It was described in the file as being of significant value. From time to time, deposits of American dollars were transferred into an offshore account in Connor's name. Regular reports were forwarded directly to the chairman of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov.

  That's unusual, Stephanie thought. Shows how important they thought Connor was. It's beginning to look like he really was a traitor.

  Abruptly, Sofia Antipov was taken out of the picture. Shortly after that, Connor went back to the United States.

  I wonder what happened? Stephanie asked herself.

  She found out in the next section of the file. Sofia Antipov had gone back to Moscow under a cloud, pregnant with Connor's child. Six months later she'd given birth to a child named Valentina.

  Holy shit. Stephanie sat up straight in her chair. Selena has a half-sister.

  CHAPTER 38

  "Are you sure?"

  Elizabeth stared at Stephanie.

  "I'm sure," Stephanie said. "There are more files to look at but I thought it was best to let you know what I'd already found out."

  "How are we going to tell her?" Elizabeth asked. "Should we?"

  "I don't know, but she doesn't have any other family. It will be really important to her."

  "But her sister is the product of a classic honey trap," Elizabeth said.

  "Half sister. I don't think that's the point. What's important is that she's family, even if she is the product of an affair set up by the KGB."

  "I wonder why their agent didn't just abort the child?"

  "Something else I don't know. There's nothing in the file about that, at least not so far. Maybe she had moral considerations."

  "A KGB agent with moral considerations, who behaved like an alley cat in heat?"

  Burps the cat was lying nearby. When he heard Elizabeth say cat, his ears perked up. He looked at her, yawned, and went back to sleep.

  "Burps is listening," Stephanie said. "You should watch your language."

  "Very funny, Steph. But this is dynamite. How is Selena going to feel about learning that her father was unfaithful with a Russian spy?"

  "You have to tell her what's in this file," Stephanie said.

  "I know."

  "Selena isn't going to be happy about it."

  "Is the sister still alive?"

  "I checked. She's alive, all right. There's more. You won't like it."

  "More?"

  "Not only is she alive, she followed in her mother's footsteps. She works for SVR. Take a look at this."

  Stephanie touched a key and a picture of Valentina Antipov appeared on the monitor. It was an official photo from SVR files.

  "Good Lord," Elizabeth said. "She looks like a younger version of Selena."

  "Take a guess at who her boss and mentor is. I'll give you a hint. His initials are A.V."

  "You're kidding," Elizabeth said. "Vysotsky?"

  Stephanie nodded. "He's been keeping an eye on her since she was five years old."

  Elizabeth reached into her drawer, took out a bottle of aspirin and shook three into her palm. She reached for her coffee cup and washed them down.

  "Selena is stubborn," she said. "If she knows the Russians killed her family, she's not going to let it go."

  "What if we have to work with the Russians again?" Stephanie asked.

  "That could be a problem. Try and find anything that explains why Vysotsky's been so interested in Selena's sister all these years. Look for connections to Selena's father."

  Stephanie nodded again. "I'll see what
I can do."

  Elizabeth looked at her empty coffee cup. "I was about to buzz you when you came in. It didn't go well in Brazil."

  "What happened?"

  "Schmidt booby-trapped the clinic building and it blew up just as they were approaching. Nick said there was nothing left. They were exposed to infected blood. Right now they're in quarantine on board the carrier. We won't know if they're okay until the ship's medical officer runs tests."

  "Elizabeth, that's awful."

  "Nick said they saw a lot of people with the plague. They were covered with black blotches and open sores."

  "What are you going to do next?"

  "I'm going to brief DCI Hood and President Rice and tell them what Nick found," Elizabeth said. "Someone has to tell the Brazilian authorities. That entire part of the country has to be quarantined. It's best if Rice handles it."

  "I guess Gutenberg got what he wanted."

  "What do you mean, Steph?"

  "He proved the plague is effective. Schmidt must have been protected or he wouldn't have been around to set that bomb. They must have a vaccine, which means Gutenberg can move on to the next phase of his plan. I wish we knew what that was."

  "I think we're probably going to find out soon enough, " Elizabeth said.

  CHAPTER 39

  Ilya Yezhov and his sergeant stood a few feet away and looked at the man who liked to think of himself as the most powerful man in Russia. He was naked and sweating. Konstantine Kamarov was clamped immobile into a hard wooden armchair, in a dark room lit only with a single, bright lamp. His huge body bulged out the sides of the uncomfortable chair. The odor of his fear filled the air with a sour, unpleasant scent.

  Next to Kamarov's chair was a small metal table on wheels, placed where he could see it. A white towel covered the top of the table. Two rows of polished steel dental and surgical tools gleamed in the light, laid out on the towel in meticulous order. The array of tools was rounded off by a battery-operated electric drill. There was a second chair next to the table. At the moment, it was empty.