"He doesn't have to know about it," Nick said. "How many times has he turned a blind eye to what we do? Isn't this what he pays us for?"
"Adam never steered us wrong in the past," Selena said. "If AEON killed him, they're getting ready to act."
Nick said, "Adam didn't think there was much time left before they let the plague loose. Director, send us in. We have to recover those samples."
"I can pin down the lab locations," Stephanie said.
They waited in silence while Elizabeth made up her mind. "All right," she said. "If we have a reasonable certainty of the location, you go in. Just don't get caught."
CHAPTER 13
Krivi Dass' office took up half of the top floor of Dass Pharmaceuticals' Zurich headquarters. The room featured a wall of windows overlooking the old city and the sprawling rail yards of the Zurich train station at the junction of the Sihl and Limmat Rivers. Beyond, Lake Zurich was a shimmering mirror of blue under the winter sky. The snow-capped Swiss Alps stretched across the horizon in the distance. It was an amazing view. For all its beauty, Krivi sometimes wished it was of his native city of Mumbai and its jumbled chaos and dirt and disorder, as different from the obsessively clean streets of the Swiss capitol as could be.
Krivi was in his mid-seventies, a thin man, tall for an Indian. His skin was a medium dark brown. He wore a light brown suit of exquisite material, a dark silk tie and polished brown shoes. Gold cufflinks peeked out from the sleeves of a Turnbull and Asher shirt that was whiter than the snow on the distant Alpine peaks. His eyes were dark and impenetrable. He had taken to wearing prescription glasses with tinted lenses and round gold frames. He thought they leant a distinguished look, rather like a professor or doctor. In truth, the glasses made him look like a malevolent Ghandhi.
Sitting across from Krivi was Karl Schmidt, his chief research scientist. Schmidt had classic Nordic looks, blue eyes and close-cropped blond hair. With his athletic build and broad chest, he looked like he'd stepped from an Olympic poster advertising the German games of 1936.
Schmidt was old enough to head up Krivi's extensive research program but he was too young to remember the SS laboratories overseen by his grandfather in Germany during the Hitler years. After the war, his grandfather and then his father had worked for the Soviets in East Germany, looking for ways to make trouble for the West. If Schmidt's grandfather had still been alive, he would have been amazed at the technology and equipment Karl had at his disposal for research into the diseases that existed to savage the human body. And if he had still been alive, he would have been proud of the way in which his grandson was carrying on the family scientific tradition.
Human subjects were not as easily persuaded to participate in experiments as in the days when his grandfather pursued Himmler's medical "research." Even so, there were always volunteers willing to risk their lives for the generous compensation and free medical care Schmidt offered. It always amazed him that people would willingly expose themselves to life threatening disease, but human nature was anything but rational. Greed or desperation often clouded people's better judgement. It wasn't his problem, after all.
Up until now, participation in the tests had been a bad bet for the subject.
"Well?" Krivi said. "Is there any progress?"
"Yes and no," Schmidt said. "The latest vaccine shows promise but I still haven't found a drug to cure the disease. It defeats everything I throw at it. The Koreans managed to make the bacteria more virulent and at the same time more resistant. I can slow it down and keep the septicemia at bay for a day or two but then it comes back stronger than before. Death follows within a day, two at the most. It's rather unpleasant."
"Have there been any issues with the subjects?"
"None. We choose only those with no families or relations we can locate. We are well protected, legally. They all thought they knew what they were getting into and signed the appropriate documents. One of the advantages of working here is the Swiss legal system and body of law. It's a thing of beauty, rock solid and binding. Their deaths would be seen as an unfortunate result of a gamble that didn't pay off for them. But no one will ever know about them."
"Good. What is your projection on the vaccine?"
"I really am encouraged by the latest results. We've advanced from primates to human subjects. There are three, two men and a woman, who were infected four days ago. So far they show no symptoms. It's too early to know if the vaccine will be effective in the long run, but I'm optimistic. If they're symptom free in a week, we'll be ready for the next phase."
"Tell me about the disease."
"Ah," Schmidt said, "the disease. It's not a good thing to contract, let me tell you."
"What are the symptoms?"
"Fever begins within two days of exposure, combined with nasal drainage that causes sneezing and coughing. The lungs begin to fill with fluid. At that point the subject becomes highly infectious to anyone coming near. The fever becomes quite high and is followed by diarrhea and vomiting, much like a viral infection. The progression from exposure to death takes about ten days. "
"Fatality rate?"
"It's always fatal," Schmidt said.
"One hundred percent?"
Schmidt nodded. "The septicemia appears on the fourth day and the fingers and toes become necrotic. Black blotches appear, usually on the torso. One of my lab workers said they look like flowers. It gave me an idea for a codename for the disease. I call it black rose."
"How very poetic," Krivi said. "Plague is bacterial. Why haven't you been able to kill it with antibiotics?"
"It's really very clever, what the Koreans did," Schmidt said, "even brilliant. They used genetic manipulation on samples of the plague recreated from the genomes of plague victims. The result is something that's never been seen before. Every time we hit it with something new, it mutates into a resistant form. So far we've found nothing that will kill it once the subject is infected. But I believe we have a vaccine that works to prevent infection."
"Good," Krivi said.
"It would help to have a larger test population."
Krivi brushed a tiny speck of lint from the sleeve of his brown suit. "Perhaps it's time to initiate a wider trial."
"I've been thinking about that," Schmidt said. "There is a free health clinic operating in Brazil as part of our Corporate PR campaign. It's perfect for our purpose. We could infect some subjects and inoculate others with the vaccine at the same time. No one would suspect anything. It would be put down to natural causes if there was an outbreak and it would provide an excellent field test. But without the cure, it could get out of control."
"Is the test site isolated?"
"Yes. It's a small village on the border of an Indian reservation in the far north of the country. It could be quarantined."
Krivi thought about it. "Go ahead and begin."
"Yes, sir."
"Good work, Karl. Keep me updated."
After Schmidt was gone, Krivi swiveled his chair and looked out toward the mountains. A sudden twinge in his chest made him wince. The twinges were coming more frequently, these last few months. Odd pains, hints of mortality.
It had been years since Krivi had given any serious thought about what might or might not await him in the afterlife. For one thing, he wasn't at all sure there was an afterlife and if there was, he had nothing to say about it. He'd been raised in a culture steeped in the concept of karma and rebirth and endless reverberations of the actions one took in one's lifetime. Krivi had decided long ago that since he couldn't possibly anticipate all the consequences of his actions, he might as well not worry about them.