The Hades Factor Page 10

  Smith was at a dead end.

  Then, in his mind, he heard Sophia gasp. He closed his eyes and saw once again her beautiful face, contorted in excruciating pain. Falling into his arms, struggling to breathe, yet managing to blurt out, “ … lab . . someone … hit …”

  5:27 P.M.

  The Morgue, Frederick, Maryland

  Dr. Lutfallah was annoyed. “I don’t know what more we can find out, Colonel Smith. The autopsy was clear. Definite. Shouldn’t you take a break? I’m surprised you can function at all. You need some sleep …”

  “I’ll sleep when I know what happened to her,” Smith snapped. “And I’m not questioning what killed her, only how it killed her.”

  The pathologist had reluctantly agreed to remeet Smith in the hospital’s autopsy room. He was not happy to have been pulled away from a perfectly good Tanqueray martini.

  “How?” Lutfallah’s eyebrows shot up. This was too much. He made no effort to keep the scathing sarcasm from his voice. “I’d say that’d be the usual way any lethal virus kills, Colonel.”

  Smith ignored him. He was bent close to the table, fighting to keep from breaking down again at the sight of his vibrant Sophia so pale and lifeless. “Every inch, Doctor. Examine her inch by inch. Look for anything we missed, anything unusual. Anything.”

  Still bristling, Lutfallah began to search. The two medical men worked in silence for an hour. Lutfallah was starting to make annoyed sounds again when he gave a muffled exclamation through his surgical mask. “What’s this?”

  Smith jerked alert. “What? What do you have? Show me!”

  But it was Lutfallah who did not answer this time. He was examining Sophia’s left ankle. When he spoke, it was a question. “Was Dr. Russell diabetic?”

  “No. What have you found?”

  “Any other intravenous medications?”

  “No.”

  Lutfallah nodded to himself. He looked up. “Did she do drugs, Colonel?”

  “You mean narcotics? Hell, no.”

  “Then take a look.”

  Smith joined the pathologist, who was standing on Sophia’s left side. Together they bent close to the ankle. The mark was all but invisible—a reddening and swelling so small no one had noticed, or perhaps it had not been there before, a late manifestation of the virus.

  In the center of the reddening was a single, tiny needle mark for an injection, as expertly administered as the page had been cut from her notebook.

  Smith stood up abruptly. Fury enveloped him. He gripped his hands in white-hard fists as his head pounded. He had guessed it. Now he knew it.

  Sophia had been murdered.

  8:16 P.M.

  Fort Detrick, Maryland

  Jon Smith slammed into his office and stalked to his desk. But he did not sit. He could not. He paced the room, back and forth, a wild animal in a corral. Despite the turmoil in his body, his mind was diamond sharp. Concentrating. For him right now, despite the needs of the world … there was one single goal—to find Sophia’s killer.

  All right, then. Think. She must have learned something so dangerous she had to be killed, and all physical evidence of what she had learned or deduced eliminated. So what else did researchers in a worldwide scientific investigation do? They talked.

  He grabbed the telephone. “Get me the base security commander.”

  His fingers tapped a tattoo on the desk like a drummer beating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century regiments into battle.

  “Dingman speaking. How can I help you, Colonel?”

  “Do you keep a record of incoming and outgoing phone calls from USAMRIID?”

  “Not specifically, but we can get one of a call made to or from the base. May I ask what in particular you’re interested in?”

  “Any and all made by Dr. Sophia Russell since last Saturday. Incoming, too.”

  “You have authorization, sir?”

  “Ask Kielburger.”

  “I’ll get back to you, Colonel.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Dingman phoned with a list of Sophia’s incoming and outgoing calls. There had been few, since Sophia and the rest of the staff had been buried in their labs and offices with the virus. Five outgoing, three overseas, and only four incoming. He called the numbers. All checked out as discussions of what had not been found, of failure.

  Disappointed, he sat back—and then shot forward out of his chair. He ran through the corridor into Sophia’s office, where he pawed through everything on her desk again. Checked the drawers. He was not wrong—her monthly telephone log, the one Kielburger insisted they keep faithfully, was also missing.

  He hurried back to his office and made another call. “Ms. Curtis? Did Sophia turn her October phone log in early? No? You’re sure? Thank you.”

  They had taken her phone log, too. The murderers. Why? Because there had been a call that revealed what they were trying to hide. It had been erased along with the Prince Leopold report. They were powerful and clever, and he had hit a seemingly impenetrable wall trying to discover what Sophia had done, or knew, to make someone think he needed to kill her.

  He would have to find the answer another way—look into the history of the victims. Something must have connected them before they died, something tragically lethal.

  He dialed again. “Jon Smith, Ms. Curtis. The general in his office?”

  “He surely is, Colonel. You hold on now.” Ms. Melanie Curtis was from Mississippi, and she liked him. But tonight he did not feel like their usual flirtatious banter.

  “Thank you.”

  “General Kielburger here.”

  “Still want me to go to California tomorrow?”

  “What’s changed your mind, Colonel?”

  “Maybe I’ve seen the light. The bigger danger should get the priority.”

  “Sure.” Kielburger snorted in disbelief. “Okay, soldier. You’ll fly out of Andrews at 0800 tomorrow. Be in my office at 0700, and I’ll give you your instructions.”

  Chapter Eleven

  5:04 P.M.

  Adirondack Park, New York

  Contrary to the assumptions of most of the world, two-thirds of New York was not skyscrapers, jammed subways, and ruthless financial centers. As Victor Tremont, COO of Blanchard Pharmaceuticals, stood on his deck in the vast Adirondack State Park looking west, in his mind’s eye he could see the map: stretching from Vermont on the east nearly to Lake Ontario on the west, Canada on the north to just above Albany on the south, some six million acres of lush public and private lands rose from rushing rivers and thousands of lakes to forty-six rugged peaks that towered more than four thousand feet above the Adirondack flatlands.

  Tremont knew all this because he had the kind of honed mind that automatically grasped, stored, and used important facts. Adirondack Park was vital to him not only because it was a stunning woodland wilderness, but because it was sparsely settled. One of the stories he liked to tell guests around his fireplace was about a state tax chief who had bought a local summer cabin. When the tax man decided his county bill was too high, he had investigated. In the process, he had—here Tremont would laugh heartily—discovered county tax officials were involved in massive corruption. The official was able to get an indictment against the lowlifes, but no jury could be impaneled. The reason? There were so few permanent residents in the county that all were either involved in the illegal scheme or related to someone who was.

  Tremont smiled. This isolation and backwoods corruption made his timbered paradise perfect. Ten years ago he had moved Blanchard Pharmaceuticals into a redbrick complex he had ordered built in the forest near Long Lake village. At the same time, he had made a hidden retreat on nearby Lake Magua his main residence.

  Tonight as the sun faded in a fiery orange ball behind pines and hardwoods, Tremont was standing on the roofed veranda of the first floor of his lodge. He studied the play of the brilliant sunset against the rugged outlines of the mountains and drank in the affluence, power, and taste that this view, this lodge, this lifestyle proved.r />
  His lodge had been part of one of the great camps established here by the wealthy toward the end of the nineteenth century. Built with the same log-and-bark siding as the lodge at Great Camp Sagamore on nearby Raquette Lake, his sprawling hideaway was the only surviving structure from the old days. Concealed from above by a thick canopy of trees and from the lake by a dense forest, it was all but invisible to outsiders. Tremont had planned his restoration that way, allowing the vegetation to grow high and wild. There was neither an address post on the road nor a dock in the lake to reveal its presence. No public nor corporate access was provided, or wanted. Only Victor Tremont, a few trusted partners in his Hades Project, and the loyal scientists and technicians who worked in the private high-tech lab on the second floor knew it existed.

  As the October sun dropped lower, the chilly Adirondack night bit at Tremont’s cheeks and seeped through his jacket and trousers. Still, he was in no hurry to go inside. He savored the thick cigar he smoked and the taste of the fifty-year-old Langavulin he sipped. It warmed his blood and coated his throat with a satisfying burn. The Langavulin was perhaps the globe’s finest whiskey, but its heavy peat-smoke flavor and incredibly balanced body were little known outside Scotland. That was because Tremont bought the entire supply each year from the distillery on Islay.

  But as he stood in the last golden rays of the sunset on the veranda, it was the wilderness rather than the whiskey that brought a smile to his patrician lips. The pristine lake was only a short canoe portage from overpopulated Raquette. The tall pines swayed gently, and their pungent scent filled the air. In the distance, the naked peak of 5,344-foot Mount Marcy shone like a finger pointing at God.

  Tremont had been attracted to the mountains since he had been an unruly teenager in Syracuse. His father, a professor of economics up on the hill at the university, had not been able to control him then any more than the fat-ass chairman of Blanchard could control him now. Both were always insisting upon what could not be done, that no one could do everything he wanted. He had never understood such narrowness. What limitation was there except your imagination? Your abilities? Your daring? The Hades Project itself was an example. If they had known in the beginning what he envisioned, both would have told him it was impossible. No one could do it.

  Inwardly he snorted with disgust. They were puny, small men. In a few weeks, the project would be a total success. He would be a total success. Then there would be decades of profits.

  Maybe it was because this was the final stage of Hades, but he had found himself occasionally drifting off in reverie, thinking about his long-dead father. In a strange way, his father had been the only man he had ever respected. The old man had not understood his only son, but he had stood by him. As a teen, Tremont had been fascinated by the movie Jeremiah Johnson. He had seen it a dozen times. Then, in the dead of an icy winter, he had taken off for the mountains, determined to live off the land just as Johnson had. Pick berries and dig roots. Hunt his own meat. Fight Indians. Pit himself against the elements in a heroic venture few had the courage or imagination to attempt.

  But there had been little that was noble about the experience. He killed two deer out of season with his father’s 30-30 Remington, mistakenly shot at and almost killed some hikers, got violently sick on the wrong berries, and damn near froze to death. Fortunately, because of his missing rifle, parka, and backpack, plus his constant talking about the film, his father had guessed where he had headed. When the forest service wanted to give up the hunt, his father had raged and pushed all the levers of academia and state politics. The result was the forest service grumbled but soldiered on, eventually finding him, miserable and frostbitten, in a cave on the snowy slopes of Marcy.

  Despite everything, he counted it as one of the most important experiences of his life. He had learned from the mountain fiasco that nature was hard, indifferent, and no friend to humanity. He had also discovered physical challenge held little allure for him; it was too easy to lose. But his greatest lesson was the critical point of why Johnson had gone to the mountains. At the time, he had thought it was to challenge nature, to fight Indians, to prove manhood. Wrong. It was to make money. The mountain men were trappers, and everything they did and suffered was for one goal—to get rich.

  He had never forgotten that. The boldness and simplicity of the goal had shaped his life.

  As these thoughts flickered through his mind on the rustic veranda, he realized he wished his father were here for the conclusion of Hades. The old man would finally recognize that a man could do anything he wanted as long as he was smart enough and tough enough. Would his father be proud? Probably not. He laughed aloud. Too bad for the old man. His mother would be, but that was meaningless. Women didn’t count.

  Abruptly he came alert. He cocked his head, listening. The chop-chop of helicopter rotors was growing louder. Tremont knocked back his scotch, left his cigar in a large serpentine ashtray to die a natural death, and strode into the enormous high-beamed living room. Peering down from the log walls were the glass eyes of mounted trophy heads. Adirondack wood-and-leather furniture stood on hand-knotted rugs around the walk-in fireplace. Tremont continued past the crackling fire and along a back hall where the aroma of hot baking-powder biscuits scented the air from the kitchen.

  Finally he stepped out on the other side of the lodge into the cool dusk. The chopper, a Bell S-92C Helibus, was settling down in a clearing a hundred yards away.

  The four men who descended were in their mid-forties or early fifties, like Tremont himself. Unlike Tremont, who was dressed in custommade chinos, pewter-colored bush shirt, Gore-Tex lined safari jacket, and a broad-brimmed safari hat that hung from its chin strap down his back, they wore expensive, tailored business suits. They were smoothlooking men with the sophisticated manners of the privileged business class.

  As the noisy rotors thundered, Tremont greeted each with the broad smile and vigorous handshake of an old friend. The chopper copilot jumped out to unload luggage. Tremont waved toward the lodge and turned to lead his visitors there.

  Moments after the Helibus took off into the twilight, a smaller 206B JetRanger III helicopter settled into the clearing. Two men very different from the occupants of the first helicopter stepped from the JetRanger. They wore ordinary, off-the-rack suits no one would look at twice. The tall, swarthy man in the dark blue suit had a pockmarked face with heavy-lidded eyes and a nose as curved and sharp as a scimitar. The round-faced, bland-looking man with the big shoulders and lanky brown hair wore charcoal gray. Neither had luggage. It was not only the ordinary clothes and lack of suitcases that marked them as different. There was something about the way they moved … a trained predatory manner that anyone who knew about such things would recognize as dangerous.

  The pair ducked under the JetRanger’s flashing rotors and followed the others toward the lodge.

  Although Victor Tremont never looked back, the four other men noticed the last two. They glanced at each other uneasily, as if they had seen both men before.

  Nadal al-Hassan and Bill Griffin showed no reaction to either Tremont’s indifference or to the nervousness of the other four. Silently, their gazes swept all around, and they entered the lodge by a different door.

  At the long Norwegian banquet table, Victor Tremont and his four guests dined on a feast that could have come from Valhalla itself—wild duck confit with shitaki mushrooms, poached local lake trout, and venison shot by Tremont himself, with braised Belgian endive, potatoes dauphin, and a Rhone Hermitage reduction sauce. Flushed and sated, the men chose overstuffed chairs in the vast living room. They indulged in cognac, Rémy Martin Cordon Bleu, and cigars—Cuban Maduros made exclusively for Tremont. After they were settled in around the blazing fire, Tremont finished his status report on the project that had consumed their imaginations, hopes, and lives for the last dozen years.

  “ … we’d always hypothesized the mutation would take place in the American subjects as much as a year later than it did in the non-Americ
an subjects. A matter of general health, nutrition, physical fitness, and genetics. Well …”

  Tremont paused for emphasis and to study their faces. They had all been with him from the start—a year after he had returned from Peru with the odd virus and the monkeys’ blood. There was George Hyem far off to the right, like a wing gunner. Tall and ruddy, in those days he had been a young accountant who had seen the financial potential instantly. Now he was chief accountant for Blanchard while actually working for Tremont. Next to him was Xavier Becker, going to fat, a computer genius who had shortened research on improving the virus and the serum by five years. Opposite Tremont sat Adam Cain, postdoc virologist who had seen George’s numbers and decided his future was with Blanchard and Tremont, rather than with the CDC. He had found a way to isolate the lethal mutated virus and keep it stable for as much as a week. On Becker’s other side was Blanchard’s security chief, Jack McGraw, who had covered all their asses from the start.

  His four clandestine associates were ready and eager for the payoff.

  Tremont held the pause another beat. “The virus has surfaced here in the United States. Soon it’s going to appear across the world. Country by country. An epidemic. The press doesn’t know about it yet, but they will. No way to stop them or the virus. The only recourse governments will have is to pay our price.”

  The four men grinned. Their eyes shone with dollar signs. Big dollar signs. But there was something else, too—triumph, pride, anticipation, and eagerness. They were already professional successes. Now they were going to be financial successes, hugely wealthy, achieving the pinnacle of the American dream.

  Tremont said, “George?”

  George abruptly reset his face. He looked sad, crestfallen. “The profit projection for the stockholders is ready any time.” He hesitated. “I’m afraid it’s less than we’d hoped. Perhaps only five … six at best … billion dollars.” And laughed uproariously at his joke.