“I thought you were dead,” he said.
“Did Fink throw me a nice going away party?”
“Fink’s gone, sir. Someone on the FEMA team brought it in and infected everyone.”
“What about Evers?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are you now?”
“At the Six, in the situation room.”
“Anybody with you?”
“No, sir. Just me.”
“Feel like giving me a hand with something?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
I gave him the address of Research Voorhoede and told him to meet us there. I told him to bring vests and guns. Big guns.
When we came over the bridge, Philadelphia was deserted. I’ve never seen anything like it. A city of a million and a half people, and we didn’t see a single one. Smoke from fires burning out of control in neighborhoods throughout the city made it look like a factory in full swing. The lights were still on, but nobody was home.
It took us a few hours to get to Birot’s. Izzy wasn’t talking, and I had nothing good to say. When we pulled off to the side of the road out of view of Research Voorhoede, Travis was waiting for us. I gave him the rundown while we suited up. I told him we were going to take down the guy who had taken out the world.
We piled into the SUV and headed into the parking lot. This time, I was driving. When we approached the main entrance, there was no guard outside. I stepped on it, drove up onto the sidewalk and crashed through the front doors into the lobby. We bailed out of the car. The place was empty.
“Where is everyone?” Travis said.
“I don’t know. Maybe we’re too late.” I unlocked the elevators from the guard station. “Travis, you’ve got the lobby. Stay on the radio. No one gets out, understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You take the lower floors, Bam. I’ll go up,” Izzy said.
“We should stick together.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Look, I know you want paybacks. I do too, but now is not the time to get stupid.”
She stepped onto one of the elevators and checked her weapon. “I’ll start at two and work my way to the top. We’ll rendezvous outside Birot’s office. Radio check on every floor. Good enough?”
“Okay,” I said, “but you get on that radio at the first sign of trouble. Got it?”
“Got it,” she said.
I got on the other elevator and pressed S1. The doors closed and opened again, and I was looking at the room full of plants. Nobody was around, and it looked like someone had been picking tobacco. Half of the rows were gone. Izzy called in that two was clear, and was on her way up to three. I went down to S2. That floor was a lab of some sort that looked like it hadn’t been used in a while, so I kept going. S3 was the floor with the chimps. No one was there. The glass tunnel doors were wide open, the cages were empty, and the door to the fire tower stairs was propped open by a chair.
“Travis,” I said into the radio.
“Here, sir.”
“Still secure?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you see any monkeys, do not let them get out of the building and do not let them anywhere near you. They’re infected. Shoot to kill. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Izzy? Status.”
“On my way up to four, Bam. The building is empty.”
“Hold on three. I’ve got two more floors to check, and I’ll join you there. We’ll hit his office together.”
“Understood,” she said.
I stood back from the doors when the elevator got to S4, but no one was there. It was just another clean room, some sort of manufacturing facility by the looks of it. It looked like someone had left in a hurry. I kept going down. The bottom floor, S5, was a chilled storage room. There wasn’t much down there except an empty vial rack with a shipping container marked EB-25 on the floor beside it.
“Izzy, I’m on my way,” I said, getting on the elevator. “Izzy, come in.” I listened to dead air for what seemed like forever before paging Travis. “Travis? Status. Travis, come in.”
I punched the button for the lobby. When the doors opened, I found Travis lying against the SUV with a bullet in his skull.
“Izzy?” I said into the radio again. “God damn it, answer me.”
There were three ways out of that building from the upper floors. Two were down the elevators. The other was a locked emergency fire exit. I brought both elevators back to one, jammed a couple of cement planters between the doors to keep them open, and shot out a sprinkler on the ceiling to set off the fire alarm. That released the lock on the fire tower doors. I wasn’t sure what had happened to Izzy, but I was damned sure Birot was not going to get past me.
I propped the fire door open and went up to three, checking the offices there. Not finding her, I took the stairs to four and came out of the fire tower behind the barrel of my shotgun. The reception area was quiet, too quiet. I worked my way over to the door to Birot’s office and nudged it open. He was sitting at his desk, pointing a snub nose .38 at me.
“Hello, Agent Matthews. I’ve been expecting you.”
“Drop the gun, Birot. It’s over,” I said.
“Is it?”
“That’s right, unless you want to see who’s got the bigger weapon in this pissing contest.”
“Well, since this isn’t the O.K. Corral, and you seem to have me outgunned, I’ll defer to your judgment,” he said, setting his piece down on the desk.
No one drops his piece that easy without something up his sleeve. I stayed in the doorway with the shotgun leveled at his head and scanned the room. “Where’s Izzy?”
“I believe you would say she is indisposed.”
“What have you done with her, you bastard?”
“Don’t you have to read me my rights before asking me to answer incriminating questions?”
“You’ve got no rights, not after what you did. Now, start talking.”
“Or what?” he said. “Does the cowboy have an itchy trigger finger? Is he going to shoot me right between the eyes with his 12-gauge shotgun? Go ahead. Be a hero.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Perhaps he is waiting for me to tell him why I did this before he kills me in cold blood? After all, I am responsible for his partner’s death.”
“I know why you did it. Revenge. Ebola didn’t kill your wife. They did.”
“Very good, Agent Matthews. You do understand to some extent.”
“Oh, I understand all right. What I don’t get is why take it out on the world?”
“Isn’t it obvious? A U.N.-sanctioned mission destroyed that village. The United Nations represents the world, does it not? Therefore, by simple deduction, it was the world that murdered my wife.” The smug son of a bitch smiled at me. “Surely, one in your position would agree that justice demands that a killer pay for his crime.”
“And you picked Ebola as the payment method. Nice touch.”
“Yes, but Ebola is not a proper instrument for a pandemic. It is too difficult to spread. Therein lay my problem.”
“You’re pretty good at solving problems, aren’t you?”
“I’ve made a career of it.”
“How did you get your hands on the classified documents?”
“Agent Matthews, please. Don’t insult my intelligence. Everyone has his price, even people of high principles. Even you.”
“So, when you got hold of the classified documents detailing the mission that killed your wife and saw that it was Ebola-B, an airborne form of the virus, you jumped on it.”
“Precisely. I formed a shell company and had its CEO, Ronald Albers, God rest his soul, contact Dr. Champion, telling the good doctor that he knew everything.”
“You blackmailed the U.N.?”
“Not exactly. We provided a valuable service in return for payment. We offered to eradicate the bonobo, the natural reservoir for the deadliest virus known to man, for the paltry sum of twenty m
illion dollars and our silence. It was what you Americans call a win-win.”
“But you took back a few souvenirs in the process.”
“Excellent detective work, Agent Matthews. I assume you also know that the airborne mutation of Ebola-B is quite rare. None of the bonobo we brought back had it. That was the most difficult problem to solve. To encourage the proper mutation of the virus, I had to do terrible things to those poor apes. I’m afraid they took quite a disliking to me, but you saw that in our little tour, didn’t you?”
“Where are they now?”
“Their reward for their longsuffering contribution to science was to be released into the wilds of Pennsylvania. It only seemed fair.”
“You are one sick fuck, Birot. You used the U.N. delegates as the perfect delivery system for the deadliest weapon of mass destruction in history.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Where’s Izzy?”
“First things first. I have a proposition for you.”
“Not interested. Where is she?”
“Hear me out. I know you think me a monster, but there is a larger picture here that you are missing.”
“The only picture I see is that your wife went on a humanitarian mission, died under tragic circumstances, and you got pissed off about it.”
“I didn’t want her to go on that trip, but the U.N. assured me they were taking the utmost precautions with the outbreak. So much for assurances.”
“Your wife and everyone in that village were going to die anyway. She would have understood that.”
I struck a nerve. I’m like that with people. Birot picked up the gun and pointed it at me. “She would have understood that they lied to us, and to cover up their lie they murdered her.”
“Put the gun down, Birot. Now.”
He put it down, but never took his hand off it. “Maryann was a dear, sweet person. She was my life, Agent Matthews. Can you understand that? I died with her that day, and after my death, I lived only for revenge.”
“I figured that part out already.”
“Not entirely. In death, I saw the opportunity for a chance to not merely exact justice but to cleanse the world.”
“Spoken like a true mass murderer.”
“Your attitude is so typical of our race. We think we own this planet. We think we can do anything we want to it because we can kill anything that stands in our way. But we were destroying it. Don’t you see? If we let this go on, life would become unsustainable. Not just human life. All life. Humans were spreading to every corner of this world like a virus, killing everything in our path. We were the Blacker Death, not Ebola, and we had to be stopped before it was too late.”
“So, you’re saying you did the world a favor?”
“I gave the world another chance.”
“You call this another chance?”
“For the survivors, there will be hope and a new world order, but we will need dedicated people like yourself to maintain that order. I’m offering you the chance to put aside our differences and join us.”
“A new world order with you as der Führer? I’m guessing your son didn’t agree with you on that.”
“My son was a good soldier who gave his life willingly for the cause. He died with honor.”
“He died coughing up blood on a sidewalk because his father is a maniac. You infected him and sent him back to the U.N. to infect everyone else. Did he know, or was it a little surprise from daddy dearest?”
“Of course, he knew. He was a hero.”
“He was a whack-job, like you.”
“Be reasonable. Your world is gone. Join us in the new one, or die with the others.”
“Go to hell, Birot.”
Birot stood up with the gun in his hand.
“Sit down, hot shot,” I said, “and drop the piece.”
“Killing me gains you nothing, Brian.”
I pointed my shotgun at his shit-eating grin. “Don’t call me that. Ever. Last chance before I blow your head off. Where is she?”
I heard footsteps behind me in the reception room. “Izzy is that you?”
“Yes, Bam. It’s me.” She sounded out of breath.
“What the hell happened? Where’ve you been?”
“I had few things to take care of,” she said, as the butt end of her 12-gauge smacked against the back of my head.
Chapter 13
I came to in a chair in Birot’s office with a headache that would put my best hangovers to shame. My hands were cuffed behind my back. Izzy was sitting across from me, talking in Dutch into her cell. She hung up and looked at me.
“I’m sorry, Bam. I hope I didn’t hit you too hard.”
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m just making sure the refueling station is ready. We have a long trip ahead of us.”
“No, I mean what the hell are you doing?”
“You haven’t guessed?”
“I guessed you’re on the wrong side. Just not why.”
Birot walked into the room. “My dear, the EB-25 is loaded and our carriage awaits. Please say your good-byes and be quick about it. I’ll be upstairs.”
“Yes, Father.”
As the pompous prick left the room, I looked at Izzy. “Father?”
She shrugged my surprise off like an old coat she was donating to the Salvation Army, one that kept her warm when she needed it, but didn’t mean a damn thing to her when it was time to throw it away.
“Aimée is my married name,” she said. “I’m divorced, naturally, or we wouldn’t have… well, you understand…”
“No, I don’t think I do.”
“I gave you a chance to back out. I didn’t want this to happen, but you are so stubborn.”
“What about the retired cop back in Belgium, the farm with the turnips and flowers, the acting career?”
“I’ve always been a good actor. Mother was right about that.”
“Christ, Izzy.”
“Come on, Bam. To have a younger woman pay attention to you, to have a real partner who knows what she is doing in and out of the bedroom? Admit it. It was more fun than you’ve had in years.”
“You used me.”
“You were a means to an end.”
“So, it was all an act?”
“Not all. That first night at Pico’s I found you attractive, interesting, a worthy conquest. I like older men who are strong and a little rough around the edges, especially when they know how to give me such pleasure, as you do.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that?”
“It’s true.”
“Just like I’m supposed to believe you hung around because you wanted to?”
“I admit, Father had something to do with that. You were obsessed with your partner’s death. You had to know why even though it was none of your affair. You were getting too close, and you are just too good a detective. He suggested I remain with you to make sure there were no surprises before it was time for us to leave.”
“I should’ve seen this coming. I knew it was too good to be true.”
“I know it’s small consolation, but you are very, very good, Bam. You forced us to leave ahead of schedule. Father was not entirely pleased.”
“Sorry I screwed up your plans.”
“I will miss you, Bam.”
“Then, give it up. There’s still time.”
“To do what? Save the world? Say I’m sorry? It’s gone too far for that.”
“Where will you go?”
“Someplace warm.”
“Taking a boat and heading south?”
“Our retirement plans are a bit more complex than yours.”
“You can’t run from the Blacker Death. It’s everywhere. You Birots made certain of that.”
“We won’t have to. Did Father ask you to join us, by the way?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“And you said no.”
“That’s right.”
“I told him you would. He was convinced you
were a practical man who could be reasoned with, but you are too stubborn, like a bulldog. I wonder if you would have answered differently had you known about me.”
“I might have. Take these cuffs off and ask me again. Maybe I’ll say yes.”
“And you would be lying. I know you too well, lover.”
I turned away from her when she put her hand on my face and tried to kiss me.
“It’s too bad about your brother,” I said. “I guess his death wasn’t part of the master plan.”
“François did not have to die. He chose to. He was a brave soldier who gave his life for the cause.”
“The cause? You mean the extermination of the human race? You’re as crazy as daddy.”
She pointed her gun at me.
“I guess this is it,” I said. “Good-bye, Izzy.“
“Close your eyes, sweetheart. I promise, you won’t feel a thing.”
“No can do. You’re going to have to pull that trigger looking me right in the eyes. I want you to remember this moment when you’re sitting on the beach somewhere drinking your Chimay, trying to forget what you really are.”
There were two shots from somewhere beyond the reception area and then what sounded like a baby howling. Then there was a scream. It was Birot. Izzy turned and made a move for the door. I guess it was a reflex action on my part. I don’t know, but I stuck out my foot and tripped her. She came down hard on the sharp corner of the coffee table.
Birot screamed bloody murder while something else out there howled like a banshee. I kicked the gun away and started searching through Izzy’s pockets for the key to the cuffs. I found it. The screaming stopped. The howling got louder, closer. Izzy came to, threw me off her, and reached for her gun as three angry monkeys came through the doorway. They took her down before she could get a shot off and started tearing her apart. When I stood up and shed the cuffs, one of them jumped me, pounding and scratching like an angry whore. Its teeth clamped down hard on my arm and I screamed.
I don’t remember much about what happened next, just bits and pieces. I remember Izzy screaming, begging me to help her. I remember getting one hand free and knocking the bonobo off me. I remember finding my knife in my pocket and jamming the blade so far into that monkey’s ugly puss that it would never get another chance to bite anyone else again. I remember seeing my shotgun on Birot’s desk and emptying it into the apes on top of Izzy. I remember the blood… everywhere…
The Blacker Death: An Ebola Thriller Page 18