"This place is expensive."
"So? It's not like that place you're in now. We'll take out a mortgage like everybody else. That way it will be ours. I think it's important."
Stubborn, Selena thought. Why not just let me handle it? But she knew why. It would never work between them if she paid for everything.
"What about your apartment?" she asked.
"The lease runs for another year. I have a sublet clause. There's not going to be a problem finding someone to take it over."
He put his arm around her. She leaned against him and looked out over the water.
"It's a beautiful space," she said. "It will be fun to decorate it."
"Too bad there's no furniture here now."
"What do you mean?"
"I was thinking of the bedroom."
"I'm thinking about couches and rugs and you're thinking about that? The bed?"
"Who said anything about a bed? I was thinking about the Klee you gave me, the one in my bedroom. It will look great over the fireplace."
She looked at him. He was grinning.
"Liar," she said.
CHAPTER 24
The clinic was in an impoverished village named Sao Benedito, a tiny dot located on the edge of the Raposa Serra do Sol Indian Reservation in the northernmost tip of Brazil. The village consisted of about forty houses built from mud, wood and palm leaves. Behind the houses were garden plots and a few animals kept by the villagers for milk and food. Most of the villagers eked out a minimal existence as farmers. The clinic treated a variety of infections and injuries brought on by work, nature and too much cachaca at the local bar on a weekend night.
The Indians lived on a vast tract of tropical forest, rivers, broad savannahs and tall mountains. It was a beautiful place, a hunting and fishing paradise. With the beauty came danger and the possibility of sudden, unpleasant death. Poisonous snakes and insects, giant spiders, vampire bats and the occasional jaguar made life interesting. The people who lived on the reservation came to the clinic for emergency treatment when the traditional healing ways had failed. The government stayed away from the area as much as possible and the village was remote. In short, it was perfect for Karl Schmidt's needs.
Schmidt loved field work. He was an avid outdoorsman, hiking the mountains near Zurich as often as possible. Krivi indulged him with a month's holiday each year, a European tradition that Schmidt used to book travel to exotic locations. He'd never been to Brazil and had been looking forward to it. The beauty of the land was better than he'd hoped for. It was secondary, of course. He hadn't come to sightsee.
He'd come to kill.
The destruction of the laboratory in Zurich had speeded up Karl's schedule. Backups of the modified plague and three hundred doses of the trial vaccine had been stored at Krivi's corporate headquarters, where several floors were given over to research labs developing new products for Dass Pharmaceuticals. More samples of the vaccine and the plague had been shipped to Krivi's manufacturing labs in Mumbai.
All the bureaucratic details required by the Brazilian authorities to begin the inoculation program had been completed before the Zurich attack. In a way, the destruction of the lab had acted as a spur to move forward. Karl would have preferred a few more weeks of testing but the raid took the decision from him. Krivi and Gutenberg had become impatient after the explosion. Schmidt was in Brazil only to supervise the start of the trial. Even though he'd been injected with the vaccine, he intended to be far away by the time the plague showed itself.
The first signs were fever and a severe headache. Then came high fever, sneezing and coughing as the disease attacked the lungs and entered the contagious stage. By day six after exposure, the patient was unable to stand or eat and the internal organs were breaking down. The characteristic flower-shaped black blotches appeared. By day eight, most who'd been infected were dead. No one had ever lasted longer than ten days. But for three days after exposure, everything would seem normal.
It was possible the disease would spread beyond the village and the reservation, but the place was remote enough that it was unlikely. Even if it did, access to the area was limited. A quarantine wouldn't prove difficult. If it did go out of control, a Brazil destabilized by an epidemic wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
Outside the clinic the first patients of the morning waited. It was a gorgeous day.
"We're ready, Herr Schmidt."
The speaker was Doctor Silva, a stocky man with honey-colored skin and a high pitched voice that didn't seem to go with his body. He gestured at a table laid out with neat rows of disposable hypodermic syringes filled with clear fluid.
"It's a wonderful thing, what you are doing for our people, " Silva said.
"It's nothing," Schmidt said. "Our company believes in giving something back. This is our way of doing it."
Doctor Silva believed he was injecting a new product that would be effective against a deadly, drug resistant strain of malaria that had found its way to the region. That part was true. Every tenth dose also carried the plague bacilli. Schmidt had made sure Silva received the vaccine. He needed the doctor to survive and report the results.
"Shall we get started?" Schmidt said.
The first patients were a woman from the reservation and her two children. Schmidt had something of a soft spot for children. It was too bad so many of them would die, but it couldn't be helped. Besides, life expectancy was short here. Better an early death than years of poverty and misery. And what did these people have to look forward to? A primitive life of disease and isolation. They contributed nothing. By dying, they would prove useful.
Their deaths would fertilize the seeds of the new world order.
CHAPTER 25
Elizabeth had mixed feelings about the Zürich raid. On the surface, it looked like a success. The team had been in the right place. The plague-ridden corpses in the disposal room, the files they'd recovered and pictures of the lab proved that. The international papers were calling it a terrorist attack, although no one seemed to know why a pharmaceutical research lab had been targeted. The Swiss police were baffled and angry. Such things didn't happen in Switzerland. It was disorderly.
Although the samples in Zürich had been destroyed, she had a bad feeling that the plague was still in play. There was no firm evidence to make her believe that. It was a matter of intuition and years of experience. AEON was too clever to put all their resources in one place. The raid might have eliminated the threat but what if it hadn't?
The files recovered from the lab contained hard data and summarized research notes. The research notes weren't signed, but Elizabeth thought they were probably done by Karl Schmidt. She'd passed the file on to CDC in Atlanta. The file on the test subjects was gruesome and proved that human subjects had been used as guinea pigs. Twenty-seven had died before a new test batch of vaccine showed promise. Detailed autopsy reports and notes described the grim progress of the disease and it's inevitable outcome.
Things had moved past her resources and responsibility. She had proof that the plague was a genuine national security threat. She was on her way to the White House to brief the president.
Elizabeth's driver turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue and passed through new security barriers installed since the last time she'd been here. Secret Service agents met her at a side entrance and relieved her of her pistol. They gave her a visitor pass to hang around her neck and escorted her to the Oval Office, where President Rice was expecting her.
Rice was behind his desk. He was an average looking man at first glance. It was only on closer inspection that people were captured by the intensity in his eyes. They were blue with a hint of green and conveyed a sense of total attention when he looked at you. Like all who had held this office, he seemed surrounded by an intangible aura of power. Elizabeth had felt it before with other presidents. His face showed the strain of his job, here where there was no need to look good for the cameras and the public eye wasn't upon him.