Dragan wanted to smash Kate’s head against the wall until it splattered like a ripe melon. Nobody talked to him like that. This wasn’t a hotel and he wasn’t her bellboy. But instead of acting on his impulse, he’d walked away. It wasn’t her gun that had stopped him but some practical considerations. He needed her alive. Nick would remain cooperative as long as he was under the delusion that Kate guaranteed his security and eventual vaccination.
But in two weeks, once Nick was sick enough that a nice, virulent sample of virus could be taken from him, then Dragan would kill Kate and take the time to thoroughly enjoy the experience. Maybe he’d use her to try out the lye. That would certainly be entertaining. The thought made him smile. Now he had another good reason to wait.
Kate closed the door and surveyed the room. It was a dungeon decorated like a bed-and-breakfast. The four-poster bed and armoire were hand carved, very old, and rich with vintage charm. She went to the window, barely more than a slit in the wall. It looked out over the moat and the lawn, where the helicopter was still sitting. She turned back to the room. There was a set of scrubs neatly folded on the bed, but Kate chose to check out what Litija had in the armoire instead. She couldn’t holster her Glock on scrub pants.
“How are you holding up?” Kate asked Nick via the earbud.
Nick put his head in his hands so that Kate could hear him without the cameras in his room seeing him talk. “I’m trying not to fall asleep. I’m in position to take decisive action once you find out exactly where the virus is. It must be in one of the rooms or labs within this biosafety area.”
“But it’s a high-security area and you don’t have the card key.”
Kate opened the armoire. It was stuffed with Chanel ready-to-wear. Silk dresses, embroidered blouses, miniskirts, and lambskin slacks that were extremely colorful and meant to stand out. Whatever Kate picked to wear would make her an easy target to spot.
“You’re forgetting something,” Nick said. “I’m already past security. Dragan graciously escorted me in.”
“But you’re locked in a lab.”
“Actually, I’m not. The biosafety area is designed to lock people out, not to lock them in. I have complete freedom of movement within these labs, once you tell me where to go.”
“You make it sound so easy.” Kate grabbed a multicolored silk blouse with a busy design, cream lambskin slacks, and a large black belt and tossed them on the bed. The only shoes in the armoire were high heels, so she decided to stick with the mud-caked boots she’d worn in the sewer. “How am I supposed to find out that information? I don’t have time to sneak around.”
“Ask Dragan where it is.”
She slipped out of her filthy jumpsuit and left it on the floor. “Why would he tell me?”
“Because he likes to show off,” Nick said.
“It’s one thing to brag about his villa and his castle, but there’s no reason for him to tell me what he’s done with the smallpox.”
“So give him one,” Nick said.
She tossed her underwear on the bed and stood naked in the middle of the room. “I’ll think about it in the shower.”
“I’ll think about you taking a shower.”
“I’d rather you thought of a plan for destroying the smallpox and escaping,” she said.
“I’m on it,” he said.
Nick got up from his cot, went to the intercom on the wall, and pressed the button.
“I have needs,” Nick said.
“What can I get for you?” a man’s voice answered.
“A box of cigars. The best Dragan has. And bring me bottles of vodka, scotch, and rum. The highest proof you’ve got. I intend to get smashed.”
“Completely understandable,” the man said.
The dining room was huge with a long table under two elaborate chandeliers that resembled upside-down Christmas trees. A large window overlooked the moat and the forest beyond.
Kate was admiring the chandeliers when she spotted the fresco on the ceiling. It was a copy of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel, with a robed, bearded God reaching out from the heavens to touch the outstretched hand of a lounging, naked Adam. But unlike the original, this Adam had Dragan’s pockmarked face and an enormous penis. She was still staring at the disturbing image, not really believing what she was seeing, when Dragan walked into the room.
“What do you think?” Dragan asked.
“I’m surprised that your face is on Adam and not God.”
“God doesn’t have a dick,” Dragan said.
“God doesn’t need one,” Kate said.
“It’s not necessary if you’re going to rule the heavens, but it is if you’re going to conquer the world,” he said. “Metaphorically speaking, of course. That’s the point this painting is making.”
“I wish I could see that painting,” Nick said in Kate’s ear.
She almost replied No, you don’t.
Dragan waved her to a seat at the end of a table that was set with smoked fish, sausages, fruit, and an array of pastries, along with coffee, juice, and water.
“Is that the point of the smallpox, too?” Kate asked. “Metaphorically speaking?”
“I suppose it is,” he said.
“To pull off your biological attack, you’re going to need someone who can slip into the United States to plant the device. You’re going to have a hard time doing that with one of your Serbian Army buddies. But it would be no problem at all for an American citizen born and raised in California. Lucky for you, here I am.”
“Brilliant,” Nick said. “I knew you’d come up with something.”
“You would do that for me?”
“I would do it for the twenty million you’re going to pay me now and that I’m going to use to bet against the market,” Kate said as she chose a croissant and poured herself a cup of coffee.
“That’s the same amount Litija demanded as ransom for Nick.”
“Yes, I know,” Kate said. “Right amount, wrong play. You’ll be glad to pay for this.”
“You have no qualms about launching a terrorist attack against your own country?”
“My country is wherever I happen to be at any given moment,” Kate said. “Right now it’s Germany. In a few months, it will be the private island in the Bahamas that I am going to buy with my windfall.”
Dragan smiled. “You didn’t accompany Nick here to protect him. You came to strike a deal for yourself.”
“You’ve hooked him,” Nick said. “Now slowly reel him in.”
She took a bite of the croissant and almost swooned. It was unbelievably flaky and buttery. She licked her lips and nibbled off another piece.
Dragan rapped his knife against his water glass. Clang, clang, clang. “It’s just a croissant,” he said. “We eat them every day. Can we move forward?”
“Yes, but this is a really great croissant,” Kate said. “It’s flaky and buttery. How do they get it to taste like this?”
“Focus!” Dragan said.
“Jeez,” Kate said. “I was enjoying a moment, okay?”
Dragan looked like he was running out of patience, but Kate could hear Nick laughing at his end. She put the croissant down, took a sip of coffee, and dragged herself back to the task at hand.
“Having me around makes Nick feel like he’s got some control in this situation, that he’ll get his vaccine and his money. But we both know that’s a fantasy. You’re going to kill me as soon as you can get the virus out of him, and then you’re going to let him die naturally because it’ll be fun to watch.”
“If you know that,” Dragan said, “why are you still here? Why haven’t you left?”
“Because it won’t change anything. I know too much. You’ve got to kill me. You already tried once, and you’ll keep at it until you get it done. I’m giving you a better option, one that benefits both of us. Or I can shoot you now and probably get myself killed trying to get out of here.”
She took another sip of coffee and looked at him over the rim of her cup as if they were casually discussing a change in the weather and not her life expectancy.
“I can see why Nick is so fond of you,” Dragan said. “Killers are easy to find but you’re almost as good a talker as he is.”
“He still thinks he can talk his way out of this,” she said.
“He’s wrong. However, you make a convincing argument for your life. I won’t kill you. I believe you’re too valuable a resource to waste.”
“I knew you were a man of reason.”
He was also a man without a woman now that Litija had got her brains blown out, and he’d gotten hard watching Kate eat her croissant. He thought she might be of short-term use to him.
“We can use the couple weeks or so that we’re waiting for Nick to die to figure out the operational details of the attack,” he said.
“That’s fine, but there’s only so much we can accomplish from a castle in Germany,” Kate said. “After Nick is dead, and while you’re cooking up batches of the virus, I can make a dry run into the U.S. and work out the kinks in the field. Nothing beats boots on the ground. I’ll come back with what I’ve learned and we can fine-tune the plan.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” Dragan said. “Would you like to see how the virus is coming along and the delivery system you’ll be using to spread it?”
“Why not?” she said and finished her coffee. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”
Dragan and Kate entered the biosafety corridor as a scientist passed them pushing a cart that carried a box of cigars and bottles of vodka, rum, and whiskey. The scientist went through the air lock with the cart.
“Looks like the reality of the situation is sinking in for Nick,” Dragan said.
“It had to happen eventually,” Kate said. “Be glad he didn’t ask for a gun or a bottle of sleeping pills.”
Dragan led her past the closed blinds of Nick’s lab window to the next window down the hall. Inside, she saw four men in positive pressure suits diligently engaged in their scientific tasks at various workstations.
“This is our second lab, where we’re using an old-school method to grow enough smallpox to create a weapon. You see those chicken eggs?” Dragan pointed to a scientist sitting at a table in front of dozens of eggs resting in a tray that looked like the bottom of an egg carton. The man was using a syringe to inject a milky substance into the eggs. “We inject the virus into live chicken embryos. I won’t bore you with the science, because frankly I don’t understand it all, but the virus thrives in that goop. What you’re looking at is our smallpox production line.”
Kate desperately wanted to take a step back from the window. There was something unnerving about being that close to something so unbelievably deadly, no matter how many safety protocols were in place. She watched as another scientist, a Chinese man, took a tray of eggs to an incubator and opened it. There were four other trays in the oven-like machine.
“If you’re already producing virus from what you got in Antwerp,” she asked, “why did you need to steal another sample?”
“The one from Antwerp was small, and production would have dragged on,” Dragan said. “The additional virus we’ve just acquired will speed things up exponentially. Plus the virus in Nick’s system is derived from a more recent, and far deadlier, strain smuggled out of a weapons lab near Novosibirsk, Siberia, by a rogue microbiologist in the late 1990s. The smallpox Nick carries is a chimera.”
“What’s a chimera?”
“It’s from Greek mythology. A fearsome monster made of parts of many different animals. In this case, it’s a pathogen composed of more than one deadly virus. The smallpox that Nick is infected with is mixed with Ebola. You could call it ‘big pox.’ It embodies the worst of smallpox and Ebola. It’s one hundred percent fatal and incurable.”
“You neglected to mention that detail to us before,” she said.
“Oops.” Dragan shrugged. “My mistake.”
“What was the institute in Paris doing with a smallpox chimera?”
“They’re studying it to find a cure,” Dragan said.
“In the center of a densely populated city?”
“There are level-four biolabs in major cities all over the world,” Dragan said. “The institute is just one of many secretly hired by governments to find cures for the worst possible bioweapons in case an army, a terrorist group, or an enterprising investor like me decides to unleash a plague.”
“So how do we do this?” Kate said. “I presume we aren’t just going to throw those eggs at people.”
“Once the eggs are teeming with new virus, we extract the goop and turn it into an aerosol spray.” Dragan led her to the next window. Inside that lab, she saw more workstations and freezers. “This is lab number three, where we will be creating the spray and storing it for the weapon.”
“Where’s the weapon?”
Dragan reached into his pocket and took out a small breath freshener dispenser. It was roughly the same shape and size as a keychain thumb drive.
“It will look like this, only it will be equipped with a small timer,” Dragan said, admiring the device. “It releases a mist of micron-sized virus particles. One of these placed in an inconspicuous spot in an airport terminal will infect thousands of people in just a few minutes and spread ‘big pox’ all over the globe. But I prefer a more targeted approach.”
“That shouldn’t be hard to smuggle into the U.S. or to hide in a movie theater or an enclosed shopping mall,” Kate said. “But you’d have to prove to me that the timer works before I set one up. One spritz and I’m dead, too.”
“We’ve created some harmless mock-ups that you can test.”
“How many scientists do you have here?”
“Six scientists in the labs and two engineers who run the air filtration and decontamination systems.”
“Where do the scientists come from?”
“England, China, Russia,” he said. “There’s no shortage of disillusioned, underpaid, ethically challenged scientists out there who aren’t getting the respect or salary they want from their country or their profession.”
“How many Road Runners are here?”
“A dozen,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m wondering how many people we have to kill to cover our tracks.”
Dragan smiled. He liked her answer. “Then you also have to include the two maintenance workers who run the castle’s heating and electrical system.”
“That’s a lot of killing,” Kate said.
“There’s enough gasoline stored in this castle to power a small town, not to mention the oxygen tanks in the filtration system,” Dragan said. “With a few well-placed explosives, we can kill them all on our way out the door.”
“I’m glad we’re good buddies now.”
“Me, too,” Dragan said. In fact, he was getting hard again at the thought.
“I haven’t slept in over twenty-four hours. Now that we’re friends, I can take a nap without worrying you might slit my throat as I sleep.”
“I doubt that you ever sleep without worrying about that,” Dragan said, leading her back to the air lock. “I certainly never do.”