They followed him and the mate into the dimly lit warehouse. Crates and pallets of boxes and what looked like machinery were stacked in long rows, sometimes all the way up to the rafters twenty-five feet overhead. One corner of the warehouse was screened off from the rest as a bonded holding area, secured by a heavy mesh door that was padlocked. Inside they could see crates and boxes marked with the brand names and logos of expensive products; Her-mès, Cristal, Baccarat, Louis Vuitton.
Captain Kato unlocked the door and the mate stepped inside and brought out an olive drab duffel bag stamped U.S. ARMY. A customs clearance tag was attached to it. He set it on the floor, opened it and pulled the bag down around the metal box with the skull and crossbones and the single German word VORSICHT!
“This is what I believe you want returned to you,” Captain Kato said.
“Yes, and this is yours,” Speyer said, handing the leather bag to the captain.
The first mate stepped back so that Baumann could inspect the box, and then resecure the duffel bag as Kato opened the leather bag and checked the money.
“Everything is in order?” Speyer asked.
“Yes. And it would be to our mutual benefit if this transaction were never to be spoken of again.”
Speyer nodded to Baumann, who hefted the duffle bag and slung it over his shoulder. It weighed one hundred pounds, but Baumann didn’t let the effort show. The first mate had tossed the duffle bag around with one hand as if it were a loaf of bread.
“You cannot know how correct you are, Captain,” Speyer said. “Give us a couple of minutes to get out of here. It wouldn’t do for us to be seen together.”
“As you wish.”
MANHATTAN
Thirty minutes later they were across the Manhattan Bridge and had picked up East River Drive heading north. Almost all the traffic at this hour were trucks.
“Are we being followed?” Speyer asked.
Baumann, who was driving, had been checking the rearview mirror since they’d left the docks. He shook his head. “You were right about the money.”
“Yes, I was, Ernst. But you were just as right to be cautious. It could have gone either way.”
“They didn’t tamper with the seal. I checked.”
Speyer chuckled. “Kato wouldn’t have answered his phone had they opened the box.”
Baumann shot him a sharp look. “Do you know that for a fact, Herr Kapitän?” No one knew what the box actually contained except for Speyer, though Baumann had guessed some of it.
Speyer was too keyed up to let Baumann’s tone of voice irritate him. “If you would like to check it out we can pull over and you can open the box. Only you’ll be good enough to let me get upwind of you first. Three or four miles, perhaps.”
“No thanks,” Baumann said.
They took 79th Street west through Central Park, coming out by the American Museum of Natural History, and drove up to West 86th where they got lucky with a parking spot in front of a fashionable four-story brownstone a half block west of Columbus. The only thing moving was a garbage truck in the next block.
Baumann shut off the car and started to open the door.
“Wait,” Speyer said.
They sat for a full five minutes. The garbage truck finally turned left a couple of blocks away. A cab cruised past, and the street was quiet.
“It would be good to have Browne with us now,” Baumann said softly.
“He asked too many questions.”
“He had a conscience.”
“Yes, it was too bad,” Speyer said, missing Baumann’s meaning.
They locked up the car and went inside. Speyer dropped their overnight bags in the front stairhall, and went with Baumann, who carried the duffle bag down into the basement.
Speyer had arranged to buy this place and have it remodeled three years ago for this operation. He and Gloria had come out here a few times since then to shop and see some Broadway shows, so the neighbors were used to the place being empty most of the time.
He unlocked the steel door at the end of a short corridor, flipped on the lights, and stepped aside. Baumann brought in the duffle bag and set it on a bench in the middle of the small room, which was no more than twelve by twelve with a low ceiling. It was crammed with state of the art scientific equipment, including a powerful microscope connected to a computer via a CCD, or charge-coupled device, so that whatever was being studied could be manipulated on the computer monitor. There was a mass spectrometer, a powerful centrifuge, a cryogenic unit that used liquid nitrogen to quick-freeze and hold samples, and a very sophisticated laminar air flow glove box in which samples could be isolated from the outside air, and yet be safely manipulated by the operator.
All of it had been purchased at various times by dummy labs and research institutions and shipped here over the past eighteen months. No matter how thoroughly any one checked the records, none of this equipment could ever be traced here.
Knowing about the disassembled agplane heading east by truck, listening to Speyer’s comments and now seeing this set-up, Baumann put it all together.
“This will be worth more than three hundred million dollars, if we can pull it off,” he said, awed.
Speyer smiled with pleasure. “A whole lot more. But you haven’t seen everything yet, because when you do you won’t be asking if we can pull it off, but when we’ll do it.” He clapped Baumann on the shoulder. “Let’s have something to eat, and then get a few hours sleep. The next twenty-four hours are going to be busy.
Speyer, dressed in a dark tweed sport coat, polo shirt, and tan slacks, headed on foot down Columbus behind the museum. It was four-thirty in the afternoon and he was well rested. Despite his tension he’d managed to sleep most of the day. Baumann stayed behind to keep watch. Everything was proceeding according to his plans.
There were a lot of shops on this street, restaurants, small specialty grocery stores, and a few bars, some with apartments above and others with private clubs in the basements, holdovers from the speakeasy days of the twenties and thirties. Below a shop selling German cookware and foodstuffs was the German-American club that the locals called the Bund. Speyer was well known here, stopping by whenever he was in New York. Six months ago he’d asked the manager, Rudi Steiner, to keep his eye open for a guy with the right background for a little job of work that would pay very well.
Three months ago Steiner had come up with a good possibility and he’d begun working the mark. It was his call that had allowed Speyer to start on the final stages of his operation: finding a diver, setting up the German end of the mission including finding the ex-KGB officers, and finally arranging for the two ships to get him and the box back to the States.
The barroom was dark. Four men played cards at one of the tables. In back someone was playing Füssball; he could hear the click of the ball and the thumps as the paddle handles were slapped sharply. Four men were scattered at the bar, drinking beers while watching the German television program Deutsche Welle.
Rudi Steiner had worked undercover for the Stasi at the United Nations before the Wall came down. He looked like a character from a movie about the Afrika Korps, blond, blue-eyed, with craggy, weather-beaten good looks. “Willkommen, Herr Kapitän,” he said as Speyer took a seat at the bar.
“Not too busy this afternoon.”
“Sometimes it’s for the best.” Steiner nodded toward the end of the bar. “That’s him at the end. Name’s Bernhard Metzler. Associate professor of molecular biology at New York University.”
Metzler was a stoop-shouldered man with long gray hair in a ponytail. He was hunched over his beer.
“What’s his story?” Speyer asked.
“He should have made full professor five years ago, but he’s been passed over every year.” Steiner smiled. “He’s a bitter man.”
“What’d you tell him about me?”
“That you’re a wealthy eccentric, and you need some work done by a competent man. He practically jumped over the bar trying to get me to giv
e him your name and address.”
“What’s he drinking?”
“Weiss Bier.”
“Send us down a couple.” Speyer got up, walked down to the end of the bar and took a seat next to Metzler.
“What the fuck do you want?” Metzler demanded, looking up.
“The right man for a difficult assignment,” Speyer said. Steiner came with their beers, and he gave Metzler a nod.
“There I go with my big mouth again,” Metzler said, sheepishly. “Sorry about that.”
“No problem. Rudi tells me that you’re a molecular biologist and that you’d be willing to take on a little job for the right price.”
Metzler eyed him speculatively. He was hungry. “How little a job, and how much money?”
“The work might take you a couple of hours, and I’d be willing to pay you fifty thousand dollars. For your discretion as well as your expertise.”
Metzler practically fell off his stool. “Where and when?”
“About two blocks from here and right now if you’re sober enough to do the work. It’s delicate.”
Metzler shoved the beers aside and held out his right hand. It was as steady as a rock, and Speyer nodded.
“Very well. We’ll see if we can’t get you home in time for dinner a richer man than you are right now.”
Speyer had been gone less than a half hour when he returned to the brownstone with Metzler. Out of old habits he scanned the street for the out of place car or pedestrian, the rooftops for the glint of binocular lenses, and the windows of the houses for surveillance. He spotted Baumann at a second floor window. The curtains had been drawn aside, and when Baumann stepped back the curtains remained open. It was the signal that all was well.
He mounted the stairs, opened the door with his key, and showed Metzler inside. Baumann was just coming down.
“Ernst, this is Bernhard Metzler. He’s come to do the work for us,” Speyer said, locking up.
“Pleased to meet you,” Baumann said, shaking hands with the biologist. “Rudi Steiner gave you high marks.”
“He said you guys were okay, too.” Metzler was looking around the stairhall. “I’m going to do the work here?”
“Yes. We have a small laboratory set up in the basement. I think that you’ll find it’s more than adequate.”
“Well, if I’m going to get home by dinner like you promised, let’s get started.” A crafty look came into his eyes. “How about the money?”
Speyer opened a small leather bag on the hall table and showed Metzler the money. The man practically licked his lips.
“It’s downstairs,” Speyer said. “I’ll show you what I want you to do for us.”
Speyer and Baumann waited in the doorway while Metzler inspected the laboratory equipment. He was impressed by what he saw, but he kept glancing nervously at the metal box with the skull and crossbones and warning in German.
“This is first-class stuff. Looks like it’s never been used.”
“We tried to think of everything that you might need,” Speyer said.
“So what’s in the box? Obviously a biohazard of some sort, but what?”
“It’s a virus. But I’m not really sure what kind, or even if it’s deadly or not. But I don’t want to take any chances.”
“What form is it in? Gas, liquid, powder?”
“I don’t know. That’s one of the things I want you to find out.”
“What else?”
“The money I’m paying you is just as much for your discretion as anything else,” Speyer warned.
“Look, I don’t give a shit if you dump the lot into the reservoir. Once I get paid you can color me gone, because I’m getting out of this shithole of a city before the sun comes up again.”
“What about your wife? Your family?”
“I don’t have any. I was a hatchling.”
Speyer gave Baumann a look. Metzler’s situation was better than he’d hoped it would be. No one would miss him.
“I need to know exactly what we’re dealing with for starts. Then I want a sample prepared for shipment and the rest of the material placed into the two air tanks next to the cryogenic unit.”
Metzler looked at them. “Nitrogen. It’s inert so no matter what form the material is in the gas won’t affect it, and yet when you want it released all you’ll have to do is open the valves.”
“That’s the plan.”
Metzler gave Speyer a hard look. “One hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “For my discretion, because the work isn’t going to be all that tough.”
“Very well. Ernst will see to it when you’re finished.”
“Then it’s settled,” Metzler said, rubbing his hands. He took off his jacket and had Baumann help him place the metal box into the chamber of the glove box. He put the two nitrogen tanks inside along with a half-pint air bottle for the sample, a battery-driven cutting tool, a pry bar and some wrenches, as well as the CCD microscope.
As the unit pressurized, he switched on the computer that was connected to the microscope, then pulled on the crisp white biohazard suit with a small air bottle. He sat in front of the box and placed his hands in the gloves, the sleeves coming all the way up to his shoulders.
“Are you going to tell me where this came from?”
“No,” Speyer said. “I believe that you already have enough information.”
“Just curious,” Metzler said. He had the seal cut and the cover removed in less than ten minutes. The box was divided into four sections, each containing what looked like a small air cylinder with a standard high pressure metric laboratory valve. Each section was filled with a clear liquid.
“Feels like oil or maybe glycerine,” Metzler said, removing the bottles. He used a small wrench to crack the valve on one of the cylinders and held a glass slide in front of the nozzle opening for a second, before closing the valve again.
He mounted the slide on the microscope’s stage, then as he adjusted the focus he looked over his shoulder at the computer. The screen was filled with thousands of hook-shaped stick figures. Even as they watched, the figures started to come to life, twitching and moving after lying dormant for nearly sixty years.
“Jesus Christ,” Metzler said softly. He looked at the bottles in the glove box and then back at the computer screen.
“What is it?” Speyer asked.
“I don’t know,” Metzler said, shaking his head. “I mean I don’t know the strain; you need to have an infectious disease expert look at this. But it’s an arbovirus, you know. It’s got RNA and it’s usually transmitted by a bug; mosquitoes or ticks. And it’s damned active.”
“Deadly?”
“Give you hemorrhagic fever. All the capillaries in your body start blowing out and you bleed to death internally. Kidney failure. It’s not pretty.”
“Do you have to get bitten by a bug to get it?”
“No,” Metzler said. “My guess is that this was engineered, like a vaccine. Infect a host, then reproduce the virus from their blood. In this form spraying it into the air would work.” He gave Speyer another hard look. “This came from a military lab somewhere. It’s a goddamn weapon.”
“Do you have a problem with that?” Speyer asked.
Metzler shook his head. “No, but I think that two hundred fifty thou might be a little closer to the mark.”
“I can give you one hundred fifty; that’s all we have here. But you may have this equipment.”
“Not a chance. I’ll take the money and run, but I wouldn’t touch this stuff with a ten foot pole.”
“How do we proceed?”
“I’ll need a meter or so of high pressure hose and the valve caps that match the nitrogen tanks, the virus bottles, and the sample bottle.”
“I think we have everything that you’ll need here.”
“I’ll empty one of the nitrogen bottles, transfer all the virus material into it, then mix the gas from the second nitrogen bottle. When we’re done both bottles will be charged with the virus and eno
ugh nitrogen to release it. I’ll transfer some of that mix into your sample bottle.” He shook his head again and glanced at the computer screen. The virus was very active. “I hope that whoever you send that little bottle to knows what the hell they’re doing. Because it’d probably be enough to wipe out a couple city blocks if it got loose and the wind was right.”
“Won’t the outside of the bottles be contaminated?” Speyer asked.
“We’ll wash everything down first,” Metzler said. “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing, and believe me, I will be careful.”
It was after ten by the time Metzler finished the job and the inside of the glove box was washed clean with an extremely powerful virus-killing antiseptic. He removed his hands from the gloves, took off the biohazard suit, then sat back and lit a cigarette as Speyer came to the doorway.
“Are you finished?”
“Finally,” Metzler said. “Two of the old valves were stuck and I nearly stripped them.”
“Is it safe to handle the bottles now, without having to wear a suit?”
“Completely.” Metzler stood up and got his jacket. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll take my money and I’ll get out of your hair.”
“I want you to open the glove box first.”
Metzler chuckled. “I guess I can’t blame you.” He stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, depressurized the cabinet, and opened the front cover. He took out the sample bottle, laid it on the table, and then took out the nitrogen bottles and set them on the floor. He dusted off his hands and held them out. “Germ free. But before you move this shit around I’d suggest you put some tape on the valves in case they get jostled.”
“You’ve done good work here,” Speyer said.
Metzler’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly. “Aren’t you going to give me the speech about forgetting that I ever met you or you’re going to send big Ernst to break my legs or something?”
“You’re a bright man. I don’t think a warning is necessary.”
Baumann appeared in the corridor behind Speyer. He was not carrying the leather money bag.
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