Black Rose (The Project Book 9)

by Alex Lukeman

  "No. No message."

  Nick and Ronnie waited for her outside the lobby entrance.

  "The desk clerk is a creep," Selena said. "Kurtz isn't there. He's gone to the Met."

  "The museum?" Nick asked.

  "Is there another Met in New York?"

  "The opera."

  "Mets. Baseball team," Ronnie said.

  Selena ignored him. "I don't think Kurtz is here to go sightseeing."

  Nick stepped into the street and waved for a cab. Three ignored them before one stopped. They climbed in. The driver wore a full, bushy beard and a wool watch cap in rainbow colors. The car smelled of spicy takeout food and sweat. Nick rolled down his window.

  "The Met."

  The driver grunted, started the meter and turned out into traffic. They were on Lexington Avenue at forty-ninth. The museum was blocks away at seventy-fifth, across from Central Park on Fifth Avenue.

  Shocks in the taxi were a thing of the distant past. The car crawled through the Manhattan traffic, jolting Nick's spine with every pothole.

  "What's the plan?" Ronnie asked.

  "Find Schmidt and get him somewhere private."

  "The museum is a big place and it's going to be crowded," Selena said. "He could be anywhere."

  "That's what worries me," Nick said. "The Koreans were working on an aerosol delivery system for the plague. What if Schmidt is here to release it? All he has to do is find a crowded room and spray it into the air. Everyone would be infected. In a few weeks half the city would be down with it."

  "That's a terrible thought," Selena said.

  The taxi let them off at the foot of the broad steps leading up to the museum. Huge banners hung on the front of the building, announcing a special exhibition in Impressionist art. They climbed the steps and Nick handed over seventy-five dollars for three tickets. Inside, the cavernous entrance hall echoed with footsteps and voices. An octagonal marble information desk with literature and maps sat front and center. The many wings and galleries of the museum lay beyond.

  Nick got maps from the desk and a handout on the Impressionist exhibition. He kept one of the maps and handed the others to Selena and Ronnie.

  Ronnie looked at his map. "There are hundreds of rooms in here. How do we find him?"

  "We can't look in every room," Selena said. "It would take all day."

  "You have any ideas where to start?" Nick said.

  "Where are the most people going to be?"

  "Probably at that special exhibition."

  "Then let's start there."

  Nick consulted the handout. "It's on the second floor."

  They took the stairs to the second floor. Signs pointed to the left for the exhibition. They passed through a room displaying drawings and prints from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The next gallery was hung with photographs. They turned right through another gallery of photographs and entered the special exhibition hall.

  "How are we going to take him, if he's in here?" Selena asked. "The room's full of people."

  "Carefully," Nick said. "Very carefully."

  They scanned the room.

  "I don't see him," Selena said.

  "Let's check out the far side."

  They worked their way through the crowd.

  "I think that's him," Ronnie said. "In front of that painting over there."

  Schmidt stood in front of a large canvas by Vincent van Gogh. His hands were out of sight, clasped in front of him. The painting was alive with inner light. There wasn't much on the canvas. A few dark lines suggested a plowed field. Dark birds circled in the sky. A vibrant sun blazed down with white heat from an endless sky.

  Nick came up to Schmidt and stood next to him, looking at the canvas. Ronnie and Selena were a few steps away on either side.

  "Beautiful, isn't it?" Schmidt said. "This is one of van Gogh's last paintings. He was mad by then, almost at the end. The crows in the sky tell you that. I know who you are, Carter. I saw you and the others come in."

  Nick suppressed his surprise. "Then you know why I'm here."

  "You're here for this."

  Schmidt held up a silver aerosol canister he'd been concealing in his hands. His thumb covered a red button on the side of the can.

  "You can't stop me, you know. The contents of this can are under extremely high pressure. If I press the button or drop the can it will discharge. You know what happens when someone coughs or sneezes? Microscopic droplets explode from the nostrils and mouth at over two hundred miles an hour. This is more powerful than that. Everyone in this room will be exposed."

  "So will you," Nick said.

  How do I get it away from him?

  "But I'm protected. You aren't."

  He held the can up.

  "Mister, are you going to make graffiti on that picture?"

  The disapproving voice came from a young girl, about ten years old.

  For just an instant, Schmidt was distracted. It was long enough. Nick delivered a hard upward chop to Schmidt's wrist. The lethal can flew high into the air, tumbling in a lazy arc as it started down toward the floor. Ronnie dove headlong and caught it just as it was about to land.

  Schmidt cursed and drove his elbow into Nick's gut, doubling him over. The girl screamed.

  Selena moved in. Schmidt launched a kick toward her hip. He caught her off balance and knocked her down. Around them, people backed away. Schmidt ran for the door and Selena bounded to her feet and ran after him. She caught him at the entrance with a sweeping kick that took his legs out from under him. Schmidt rolled, pulled out a pistol and fired at her. She swept the gun from his hand with her leg and kicked the side of his head with the steel toe of her shoe. Something cracked, the sound loud and ugly. Schmidt's eyes rolled back. Blood trickled from his mouth.

  People were screaming and running out of the hall.

  Nick ran up to her. "You all right?"

  "He missed. I'm all right, but he isn't."

  On the floor, Schmidt's body convulsed. His feet beat a short tattoo on the floor. He let out a gurgling sound and died.

  "I wish you hadn't killed him," Nick said.

  "I didn't mean to. I went on automatic."

  "Don't worry about it."

  Ronnie came over, holding the canister as if it were a bomb about to explode.

  "Nice catch," Nick said.

  "I used to play center field."

  "You haven't lost the touch."

  "He was really going to let that stuff go, wasn't he?" Selena said.

  "He was. If that little girl hadn't come up, I don't think I could've stopped him."

  The vast exhibition hall was almost empty, except for museum guards watching them and keeping their distance. The guards weren't armed. It would be only minutes before the police arrived.

  "We better get out of here while we can," Ronnie said, "unless you want to answer a lot of questions."

  "Too late," Selena said. "The cops are here."

  "FREEZE!" The shout echoed in the empty hall. Half a dozen police had their guns out and pointed in their direction.

  "Harker is going to hate this," Ronnie said.

  CHAPTER 59

  "Can't you ever do something without making a public spectacle out of yourselves?"

  Elizabeth looked cool and efficient in her tailored black pants suit and white blouse. Her cat-like green eyes flashed with annoyance.

  "We didn't have much of a choice, Director," Nick said. He rubbed his chin, feeling a two-day stubble. There hadn't been time to shave.

  They were back in Virginia. It had taken serious pressure and the invocation of the magic words National Security before the NYPD would let them go.

  "I sent the canister down to CDC in Atlanta. Now that they have a sample it will be easier to find a way to defeat it. That's the good news. The bad news is that Gutenberg is still out there. He's not going to quit just because Schmidt didn't succeed."

  "I can guess what you're going to say next," Nick said.

  "He must
have more of the plague stashed somewhere and we need to find it. You're going to Switzerland. Gutenberg is holed up in his château. "

  "Here are the satellite shots," Stephanie said. The wall monitor lit.

  "Fancy digs," Ronnie said.

  The château was four stories high, set on a bump of land sticking out like a thumb into the Rhône. Tall, pointed towers and spires gave it a fairytale quality. It looked as if it belonged in a movie about arrogant nobles and men with plumed hats and long swords.

  A tree-lined drive led to a high, stone wall and an iron gate that opened into a large, paved courtyard. There was a guardhouse outside the gate and a large fountain in the middle of the courtyard. The wall was topped with jagged pieces of glass and ran all the way around the building. In the back, the wall descended past ground level to the river's edge. A heavy retaining wall foundation kept the château from crumbling into the river.

  "It was built early in the eighteenth century," Stephanie said. "There are over a hundred and fifty rooms."

  "Perfect for that casual weekend get-together," Ronnie said.

  "Here are the original plans," Stephanie said. She touched her keyboard and architectural drawings filled the screen. "I found them in the archives of the local city hall. The Swiss are obsessive about keeping records."

  The drawings showed three separate chapels, a grand ballroom, a large room that was probably for dining, a drawing room and library and many smaller rooms on the ground floor. A sweeping staircase led to the upper stories. Servant's stairs were hidden away out of sight of the main rooms. A maze of concealed passages went behind the walls, allowing servants to move about the house unobtrusively, where they wouldn't annoy the nobility. Steps led down from a huge kitchen to arched vaults of stone built under the château.

  "You can see how they built that wall to keep the river out." Stephanie used a laser pointer to indicate what she was talking about. "The vaults are perfect for storing wine and food. The temperature would be cool, constant in summer or winter."

  Stephanie tapped a key. The monitor switched to a moving video in color.

  "This is a video taken by a cruise ship line that goes up and down the river. Gutenberg's château is ideal from an advertising point of view because it's a beautiful example of old European architecture. I thought you might see something useful."

  They watched as the video moved past the château. The remains of a crumbling dock stuck out into the river from a narrow shelf next to the wall. Set in the wall at the end of the dock was a rusted metal door. The door looked old and immovable. The château looked romantic and picturesque.

  "That door doesn't look like it's been opened for a hundred years," Nick said.

  "Where does it go?" Selena asked.

  Stephanie brought up the drawing. "Into the vaults. They would have used it to unload fresh produce and goods from the river."

  "That's our way in," Ronnie said. "We can't go in through the front. The fake delivery or repairman bit won't fly here."

  "I wish we had more Intel," Nick said.

  "There's never enough Intel. Besides, think of all the times when the Intel we had was wrong."

  "Yeah, but that doesn't stop me from wishing we had more. Run the video again, will you Steph? I thought I saw something."

  They watched as the château started to slip by.

  "Hold it there," Nick said. The picture froze. "There. On top of the wall."

  "I see it," Ronnie said.

  "What are you looking at?" Selena asked.

  "See that shiny line? The sun must've caught it just right when they were filming. You have to look close, it's really hard to see."

  A shimmering, hair thin line ran along the top of the wall a few inches above the tips of the broken glass.

  "Trip wire," Ronnie said. "If he's got that, he's got cameras and some kind of backup alarm system as well."

  "I wonder how many guards he has," Selena said.

  "More than we'd like," Nick said.

  "There's always one guard at the gate," Stephanie said. "There's the chauffeur. Probably a dozen staff inside, but some of those would be noncombatants. Cooks, housekeepers, people like that."

  "All that tells us is that we don't know how many are in there. With Krivi and Mitchell and the others gone, he has to be paranoid as hell. If I were him, I'd have armed men all around me."

  "How do you want to play it?" Elizabeth asked. "We need to move before he sends someone else out with one of those canisters."

  "Ronnie's right," Nick said. "We'll never get through that front gate."

  "You want to try that door?" Ronnie asked.

  "Right now it looks like the best shot," Nick said. "But if we have to blow it open it will alert everyone inside."

  "We could go over the wall," Selena said. "That wire shouldn't be much of a problem."

  "We could, but we'd be exposed on top. Gutenberg must have security cameras. We'd be sitting ducks up there and when we drop down, there's no cover until we reach the house. Time enough to send out the goons. It's a kill zone."

  Ronnie said, "I can use the plasma cutter. It will go right through that old metal."

  "How soon can you leave?" Elizabeth asked.

  "Give us an hour to put our gear together," Nick said.

  CHAPTER 60

  The raft was a rental from a company in Geneva that specialized in supplying whatever was needed for tourists with a yen for seeing the Rhône up close and personal. Clouds covered the moon. The château was a dark mass looming out of the night. In their black gear, the three of them were just one more bit of darkness.

  The raft bumped up against the rotting remains of the old dock. Ronnie tied off and they climbed up onto the flat area next to the wall of the château. Nick shone a light on the rusted metal of the ancient door. A metal plate in the center held a large keyhole.

  "Can pick that lock?"

  Ronnie peered into the keyhole. "It's solid rust. Be quicker if I cut it away."

  He took the plasma unit from his pack. It was compact and self-contained, good for about twenty minutes, long enough for most uses in the field. Ronnie donned goggles, turned it on and began cutting. The torch made a bright, blue flame, showering sparks as he cut. The metal glowed red on either side of the cut as he moved the beam around the lock plate. After a few minutes he shut down the torch and took off his goggles.

  "That should do it."

  He stood and used his knife to pry the plate away from the door. It fell onto the ground.

  "Give me a hand," Ronnie said.

  Nick and Ronnie pulled on the door. Flakes of rust broke away but it didn't move.

  "Again," Nick said. This time they felt movement. "Once more should do it."

  They pulled. The door came open with a screeching sound of tortured metal.

  "They must've heard that in Geneva," Nick said.

  "As long as they didn't hear it up top," Selena said. "Are we going in or not?"

  They stepped into the lowest vault of the château and brought out their flashlights. The arched ceiling of the vault was made of fitted stones. The floor was of stone. Old barrels and crates and pieces of lumber littered the floor. A thick layer of dust lay over everything. A narrow flight of steps rose at the far end to the next level.

  "No one's been here in a long time," Nick said. "I wonder if they even know that door is there."

  "They will after we leave," Ronnie said.

  "Let's climb. Weapons free."

  They charged their MP-5s. The sound of the bolts going home echoed in the stone space.

  The steps led to a closed wooden door. Nick pushed against it until it showed dim light from the room beyond. They opened it further and stepped into another vault. This one had been converted into a furnace room. Three low wattage bulbs hung from the ceiling, shedding light enough to see a modern gas fired boiler positioned against one wall. A four inch gas main descended from the ceiling to a large, spoked valve and then over to a meter and control console on the
side of the boiler. The panel held more valves and several gauges. They could hear the low sound of the pilot light burning. Pipes rose from the boiler and branched out along the ceiling.

  "That's a serious furnace," Ronnie said. "Look at the size of that gas line. I'd hate to see the heating bill."

  "Gutenberg can afford it," Nick said. "The next level up should be the ground floor. I don't see steps."

  "There's another vault through there," Selena said. She pointed at an open archway on the wall opposite the furnace. They headed over to it. Nick held up his hand.

  Wait.

  He took a quick look into the next room and signaled them forward.

  They entered a wine cellar lit by dim, overhead bulbs. On one side, racks of wine and liquor bottles stood in dusty rows, five shelves high. A wide aisle ran down the middle of the vault, toward another set of steps leading upward. On the other side of the aisle stood a dozen round, steel cylinders, each about four feet high. Nick had seen cylinders like that before. They were the kind used by crop dusters.

  He walked over to them. Each one was marked in red.

  SR

  Selena came up beside him. "SR. I'll bet it's short for Schwarze Rose, Black Rose. These are full of plague."

  "Son of a bitch," Nick said.

  "The bastard means to spray that stuff from the air," Ronnie said.

  "This ends tonight," Nick said. His lips were pulled into a tight line.

  He looked at the steps leading up from the wine cellar.

  "If I remember those plans right, those steps lead to the kitchen."

  "That makes sense," Selena said.

  "Once we're inside it won't take long before they discover us. Anyone that's armed, shoot them. We don't know if there's any more of this stuff except what's down here, so don't kill Gutenberg. We have to try and take him alive."

  The muffled sound of automatic weapons came through the closed door to the kitchen.

  "What the hell is that?" Ronnie said. "Sounds like a firefight up there."

  "Only one way to find out," Nick said.