“One hundred sixty three out of two hundred.”

“Yes, but those secondary subjects would have—if they were in an uncontrolled population—caused tertiary infections in others.” Won smiled. “It is hard to predict what the mortality rate would be in that population, but it is also difficult to overestimate the danger of plague when released.”

Filotov said, “I will level with you. I am an intelligence officer. I am no scientist. But my organization would like to know one thing. Do you have everything you need to weaponize this on a larger scale?”

She nodded. This filled her with excitement, although she still took this conversation as theoretical, because Filotov had not mentioned any specifics.

“Is there any question that your weapon will work?”

“There is one gap in my knowledge on the subject, which prevents me from answering that question with specificity.”

Filotov sat up straighter, obviously surprised to hear this from the woman who seemed so completely self-assured about her expertise. “And what would that be?”

“The DPRK knows very little about existing biodefenses set up by the West. Do Western nations have security measures intact to respond to an attack, are hospitals in major cities prepared, are enough oral and IV drugs staged to combat a mass casualty event, are there protocols to identify the origin of a devastating plague outbreak? I simply do not have as much of this information as I require.”

“And where could you go to obtain this information?”

Won shrugged. “Two places that I know of. Stockholm and Atlanta. Stockholm is the location of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, is the location of the CDC, America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Filotov took some notes. “If we could help you obtain a position at either of these locations, would you be able to fill in these knowledge gaps you speak of?”

Won replied with a little confusion. “I don’t work for Russia. I work for—”

Filotov waved a hand. “Our two nations have shared interests in the knowledge you could obtain. We could speak with officials in your country, and work on this together.”

She thought it over. “I do not want to go to America.” Won smiled now, and she did not smile often. “But I will go to Sweden if you can arrange it, both with the center there and with my leadership back home.”

Within months Won left Russia and moved to Stockholm, taking a job as a researcher at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The Russians secured the job for her, secured her cover identity, secured the money she needed to set herself up in the European capital. The North Koreans, for their part, allowed Won Jang-Mi to go.

The Russians and the North Koreans both wanted to know everything about biosecurity in the West, and Won had the same goal as her masters.

She needed to understand the protective measures in place, so that she and her plague could find a way around them.

Two years to the month after wading ashore on a moonlit beach in Japan, she sat down at the desk in her new office in Stockholm.

CHAPTER 11

PRESENT DAY

The abandoned hospital just south of the hamlet of Rauceby had originally been built in the 1890s and served as a mental asylum until World War II, when it was employed as a “crash and burns” unit for the RAF. After the war it reverted to its original role, run by the National Health Service, serving until the 1990s, when it was shut down for good.

Now the wards, halls, offices, laboratories, treatment rooms, and nurses’ quarters were abandoned, suffering mightily the decay of time. Vines snaked in through windows and mold grew along the tile flooring. Some furniture and fixtures remained, but everything else was rotting or rusted, mildewed or broken.

Graffiti adorned the walls, mice and bat shit were piled everywhere, and green newts clung to the walls.

It was an empty, hollow shell, with dusty shafts of light beaming left and right through broken windows along the long corridors and high-ceilinged rooms.

Anthony Kent stood in one of these shafts in the large and hazily lit dining hall, itself in the center of the massive former sanitarium. A rotting wooden stage loomed at the far end of the hall, and in front of that three men stood around in light jackets with weapons slung over their shoulders. In the center of the group was a man seated on a chair, with a black bag over his head.

Kent knew absolutely nothing about the prisoner, other than the fact that he was a big prize that someone had paid a lot of money to recover, and thus many poor sods had died in the process.

The Englishman looked at his watch. He was waiting for a call, and he prayed it would come soon, so he could be done with this wretched day.

Anthony Kent was a highwayman for the Nottingham Syndicate, a family-run criminal firm that specialized in extortion, shipping and transportation theft, and prostitution all across the East Midlands. The majority of his work involved hijacking trucks, usually in brazen but straightforward armed robberies, stealing everything from beer and liquor to medical supplies to be resold on the black market. In addition to this he also served as one of the Nottingham Syndicate’s chief enforcers, abducting enemies of the group and beating them back into line.

And this was how he knew about the abandoned hospital.

This building in which he now stood had been home to some of his most brutal actions as a mob enforcer. While not officially a safe house of the group—Kent knew he’d be killed by his boss for taking this prisoner to some actual safe house and connecting the Nottingham Syndicate with the attack on MI6—this ruined building had served for years as something of a torture chamber. Certain that he and the survivors of tonight’s attack would be safe here, he’d made the decision to drive across the middle of the island nation to be back on his own turf, where he knew the lay of the land.

All six of the other survivors of the airport shootout were members of different gangs across England, and like Kent, sent on this job by their employers, who had been hired to provide crewmembers for the operation. Kent had heard a rumor that this entire affair had been set up by a shadow man in London, and his boss had been paid a quarter of a million pounds. Kent himself would be paid seventy-five thousand for all this . . . but at the moment he felt that he’d drastically undercharged for his services.

The one good thing that had happened since they opened fire at the airport was the arrival of more help. When Kent called his boss, the man who’d sent him on this mad endeavor, and told him they’d lost six of their number and he was heading to this abandoned hospital to lay up, his employer told him he would have reinforcements waiting for him. And, true to his word, when Kent and his men arrived they found six armed men, many of whom Kent had worked with in the past. He’d wasted no time in positioning the new arrivals around the building for security, and this allowed him to breathe his first sigh of relief in hours.