"It's insane," Selena said, "immoral."
"But necessary. War has nothing to do with morality."
"Why did Vysotsky go after AEON?" Nick asked.
"It's not hard to understand," Elizabeth said. "It was Vysotsky's men who lost the samples in the first place. As far as the Kremlin was concerned, it was his fault and it was up to him to correct the problem. I think there was another element as well. From what I know of him, Alexei would take the deaths of his men as a personal insult. He's not a man to let an insult go by. He wanted revenge. Not to mention the fact that AEON posed a direct threat to the Federation."
"Does the president know about Senator Mitchell?"
"I intend to brief him later today. He needs to know so he can discover what Mitchell was doing. Whatever it was, you can be sure it wasn't in our interests."
"What are we going to do about Vysotsky?" Selena asked.
Elizabeth looked at her.
"Nothing. What would you have us do?"
"He sent my sister over here to kill an American senator. I know Mitchell was part of AEON but…"
"Selena. There's nothing we can do."
Selena opened her mouth to speak and closed it again.
Elizabeth reached into a drawer and took out several file folders.
"Nick, these are service records. Lamont's made it official. He's leaving at the end of the month and we need to replace him. I want you and Selena and Ronnie to look at possible candidates."
Nick reached over and took the files from her.
"It's not going to be the same without Lamont."
"No, but we don't have a choice."
"We'll get on it."
"That's all for today," Elizabeth said. "I just want to say that I'm glad you all made it back. Good work."
"We get a break?" Ronnie said.
"Count on a week unless something comes up."
Nick stood. "Come on, Selena. Let's go buy some furniture."
Elizabeth watched them leave and wondered how much longer the team would hold together. They were old for the kind of missions she sent them on. Ancient, by the standards of modern combat. Somehow they kept pulling it off. Lamont had been lucky, if you could call being left with a permanent limp lucky.
She got up and walked over to the counter with the coffee. It was the fuel that kept her going. She poured a cup and watched steam rise from the surface. She blew on the hot liquid to cool it and looked out through the bulletproof glass of the French doors at the patio and flowers that provided an illusion of normalcy.
AEON was finished, at least she hoped it was. Everything indicated that it was. But Elizabeth had learned that when one threat was finished, another waited in the wings. She opened the patio doors and took the coffee outside into the sunshine.
There would be time enough tomorrow to worry about what would come next.
Acknowledgements
As always, my wife Gayle. She soothes the troubled waters when I feel like dumping everything halfway through and starting over.
Neil Jackson, who designs the dynamite covers for the Project series and always goes the extra mile.
Special thanks to Nancy Witt, Susan Blanker, Seth Ballard, Eric Vollebregt and Paul Madsen.
Notes
Bubonic plague is one of the great scourges of mankind, bringing down empires and kings with murderous indifference. Over the millennia there have been several distinct variations, each different from the last. The Plague of Justinian swept through the Eastern Roman Empire in 541-42 CE and devastated the world from the Mediterranean to China.
A characteristic of the Plague of Justinian was blackening of the toes and fingers. It died out, as plagues do, only to reemerge again and again over the next three hundred years until it finally disappeared sometime in the ninth century. It is estimated that over one hundred million people died before it was done. That was in a world with a much smaller population than today. Imagine what would happen now, if a variation were to appear that couldn't be stopped by modern antibiotics.
Victims of the plague were recently unearthed in Egypt and their genomes extracted.