The Hades Factor Read online

  So he offered her the bone that wagged this dog’s tail: “You can start fresh. I wipe away your debts. No one ever knows, and I give you enough to start over. Sound good?”

  “A fresh start?” An excited flush appeared above Lowenstein’s collar. For a moment, her eyes were bright with excitement. But just as quickly, she frowned. She was in trouble, but she was not an idiot. “That depends on what I have to do for it, doesn’t it?”

  In his military intelligence days, Griffin had been one of the army’s best recruiters of assets behind the Iron Curtain. Lure them with the personal advantages, the moral principles, the rightness of the cause until they were compromised. Then when they balked at what you asked them to do, and they always did sooner or later, drop the carrot, tighten the screws, and lean. It was not the aspect of his job he had liked most, but he had been good at it, and it was time to lean on this woman.

  “No, not really.” His voice dropped thirty degrees. “It depends on nothing. You can’t pay me off, and you can’t be exposed. If you think you can do either, get up and walk out now. Don’t waste my time.”

  Lily turned red. She bristled. “Now you listen to me, you arrogant—”

  “I know,” Griffin cut her off. “It’s hard. You’re the boss, right? Wrong. I’m the boss now. Or tomorrow you’ll be out of a job, with no chance of getting another. Not in the government, not in D.C., probably not anywhere.”

  Lily’s stomach turned to stone. Then to mush. She started to cry. No! She would not cry! She never cried. She was the boss. She …

  “It’s okay,” Griffin said. “Cry. Get it out. It’s hard, and it’s going to get harder. Take your time.”

  The more he spoke compassionately, the harder Lily wept. Through her tears, she watched him lean back, relaxed. He waved to the waitress and pointed at his glass. He did not point at her or ask what she wanted. This was not social; this was business. Whoever he was, she realized suddenly, it was not he who was blackmailing her. He was only the messenger. Doing a job. Indifferent. Nothing personal.

  When the waitress brought his beer, Lily turned her head away, ashamed to be seen red-eyed and crying. She had never had to deal with anything like this, anyone like this, and she felt terribly alone.

  Griffin sipped his beer. It was time to produce the carrot again. “Okay, feel better? Maybe this’ll help. Think about it this way—the ax was going to fall someday. This way, you get it over with, wipe the slate clean, and I give you a little extra, say fifty thousand, to get you started again. All for a couple of hours’ work. Probably less time, if you’re as good at your job as I think you are. Now, that’s not so bad, is it?”

  Wipe the slate clean … fifty thousand … The words burst into her brain like a blaze of sunshine. Start again. The nightmare over. And money. She could really start over. Get help. Therapy. Oh, this was never going to happen again. Never!

  She dabbed her eyes. She suddenly wanted to kiss this man, hug him. “What … what do you want me to do?”

  “There, right to the point,” Griffin said approvingly. “I knew you were smart. I like that. I need a smart person for this.”

  “Don’t try to flatter me. Not now.”

  Griffin laughed. “Feisty too. Got the spirit back, right? Hell, no one’s even going to get hurt. Just a few records erased. Then you’re home free.”

  Records? Erased? Her records! Never. She shuddered, and then she took hold of herself. What had she expected? Why else would they need her? She was a record librarian. Chief of Federal Resource Medical Clearing House. Of course, it was medical records.

  Griffin watched her. This was the critical moment. That first shock of a new asset knowing what he or she was actually going to have to do. Betray their country. Betray their employer. Betray their family. Betray a trust. Whatever it was. And as he watched, he saw the moment pass. The internal battle. She had gotten a grip on herself.

  He nodded. “Okay, that’s the bad part. The rest is all downhill. Here’s what we want. There’s a report to Fort Detrick and CDC and probably to a lot of other places overseas, too, that we need deleted from all the records. Wiped out, erased clean. All copies. It never existed. The same with any World Health Organization reports of virus outbreaks and/or cures in Iraq in the last two years. Those, plus all records of a couple of telephone calls. Can you do that?”

  She was still too shocked to speak. But she nodded.

  “Now, there’s one other condition. It must be done by noon.”

  “By noon? Now? During office hours? But how—?”

  “That’s your problem.”

  All she could do was nod again.

  “Good.” Griffin smiled. “Now, how about that drink?”

  Chapter Ten

  1:33 P.M.

  Fort Detrick, Maryland

  Smith worked feverishly in the Level Four lab, pushing against a wall of fatigue. How had Sophia died? With Bill Griffin’s warning ringing in his head, and considering the lethal attacks on him in Washington, he could not believe her death had been an accident. Yet there was no doubt how she had died—acute respiratory distress syndrome from a deadly virus.

  At the hospital, the doctors had told him to go home, to get some sleep. The general had ordered him to follow the doctors’ advice. Instead, he had said nothing and driven straight to Fort Detrick’s main gate. The guard saluted sadly as he passed. He had parked in his usual spot near USAMRIID’s monolithic, yellow brick-and-concrete building. Exhaust ventilators on the roof blew an endless stream of heavily filtered air from the Level Three and Four labs.

  Walking in a semi-trance of grief and exhaustion, carrying the refrigerated containers of blood and tissue from the autopsy, he had showed his security ID badge to the guard at the desk, who nodded to him sympathetically. On automatic pilot, he had continued walking. The corridors were like something in a hazy dream, a floating maze of twists and turns, doors and thick glass windows on the containment labs. He paused at Sophia’s office and looked in.

  A lump formed in his throat. He swallowed and hurried on to the Level Four suite where he suited up in his containment suit.

  Using Sophia’s tissue and blood, he worked alone in the Hot Zone lab against advice, orders, and the directives of safe procedure. He repeated all the lab work she had done with the samples from the three other victims—isolating the virus, studying it under the electron microscope, and testing it against USAMRIID’s frozen bank of specimens from previous victims of various viruses from around the world. The virus that had killed Sophia reacted to none. He ran yet another polymerase-chain-reaction-driven DNA sequencing analysis to identify the new virus, and he made a preliminary restriction map. Then he transmitted his data to his office computer and, after seven minutes of decon showering in the air lock, removed his space suit and scrubs.

  Dressed again, he hurried to his office, where he checked his data against Sophia’s. At last he sat back and stared into space. The virus that had killed Sophia matched none he had ever heard of or seen. It had been close here and there, yes, but always to a different known virus.

  What it did match was the unknown virus she had been working on.

  Obsessed as he was with Sophia’s death, he still felt horror at the potential threat to the world from this new, deadly virus. Four victims might be only the beginning.

  How had Sophia contracted it?

  If she had had an accident in which she had any possible contact with the new virus, she would have reported it instantly. Not only was that a standing order, it was insanity not to. The pathogens in a Hot Zone were lethal. There was no vaccine and no cure, but prompt treatment to bolster the body’s resistance and maintain the best possible health, plus normal medical steps for any virus, had saved many who all but certainly would have died untreated.

  Detrick had a biocontainment hospital where the doctors knew everything there was to know about treating victims. If anyone could have saved her, it would have been them, and she knew it.

  On top of everyth
ing, she was a scientist. If she had thought there was the remotest possibility she could have contracted the virus, she would have wanted everything that had happened to her recorded and analyzed to add to the body of knowledge about the virus and perhaps save others.

  She would have reported anything. Anything at all.

  Add to that the violent attacks on him in Georgetown, and Smith could draw only one conclusion: Her death had been no accident.

  In his mind, he heard her gasping voice “ … lab … someone … hit …”

  The tortured words had meant nothing to him in the horror of the moment, but now they reverberated in his mind. Had someone entered her lab and attacked her the way they had attacked him?

  Galvanized, he read again through her notes, memos, and reports for any clue, any hint of what had really happened.

  And saw the number in her careful printing at the top of the next-to-last page of her logbook. Her logbook detailed each day’s work on the unknown virus. The entry number was PRL-53-99.

  He understood the notation. “PRL” referred to the Prince Leopold Institute in Belgium. There was nothing special about that, simply her way to identify a report from some other researcher she had used in her work. The number referred to a specific experiment or line of reasoning or a chronology. What was important about this reference and number was that she always—always—wrote them at the end of her report.

  At the end.

  This notation was at the top of a page—at the beginning of a commentary concerning the problem of three victims separated widely by geography, circumstances, age, gender, and experience dying from the same virus at the same time, and no one else in the surrounding areas even contracting it.

  The commentary mentioned no other reports, so the log number was in the wrong place.

  He examined the two last pages carefully, pushing apart the sheets so he could study the gutter where the paper was sealed into the book’s spine. His magnifying glass revealed nothing.

  He thought a moment and then carried the open logbook to his large dissecting microscope. He positioned the book’s exposed gutter under the viewing lens and peered into the binocular eyepiece. He slid the spine under the viewer.

  He inhaled sharply when he saw it—a cut almost as straight and delicate as a laser scalpel. But although very good, it was not good enough to hide the truth from the powerful microscope. A knife-edge showed, faintly jagged.

  A page had been cut out.

  Brig. Gen. Calvin Kielburger stood in the open doorway to Jon Smith’s office. His hands clasped behind his back, legs spread apart, beefy face set firmly in a severe expression, he looked like Patton on a tank in the Ardennes inspiring the Fourth Armored.

  “I ordered you to go home, Colonel Smith. You’re no good to anyone out on your feet. We need a full, clear-thinking staff on this effort. Especially without Dr. Russell.”

  Smith did not look up. “Someone cut a page from her logbook.”

  “Go home, Colonel.”

  Now Smith raised his head. “Didn’t you hear me? There’s a page missing from the last work she did. Why?”

  “She probably removed it because she didn’t want it.”

  “Have you forgotten everything you know about science since you got that star? No one destroys a research note. I can tell you what was cut out was connected to some report she had read from the Prince Leopold Institute in Belgium. I’ve found no copy of such a report in her papers.”

  “It’s probably in the computer data bank.”

  “That’s where I’m going to look next.”

  “You’ll have to do it later. First I want you to get some rest, and then I need you to go to California in Dr. Russell’s place. You’ve got to talk to Major Anderson’s family, friends, anyone and everyone who knew him.”

  “No, dammit! Send someone else.” He wanted to tell Kielburger about the attacks on him in Washington. That might go a long way to making the general believe that he had to keep trying to find out how Sophia had contracted the virus. But Kielburger would want to know what he had been doing in Washington in the first place when he was supposed to be back at Detrick, which would force him to reveal his clandestine meeting with Bill Griffin. He could not expose an old friend until he knew more, which meant he had to convince the general to let him go on. “Something’s wrong about Sophia’s death, I know it. I’m going to find out what.”

  The general bristled. “Not on the army’s time, you’re not. We’ve got a far bigger problem than the death of one staff member, Colonel, no matter who she was.”

  Smith reared up from his seat like a stallion attacked by a rattlesnake. “Then I’m out of the army!”

  For a moment Kielburger glared, his thick fists clenched at his sides. His face was beet red, and he was ready to tell Smith to go ahead and quit. He had had enough of his insubordination.

  Then he reconsidered. It would look bad on his record—an officer unable to command loyalty in his troops. This was not the time to deal with Smith’s arrogance and insubordination.

  He forced his face to relax. “All right, I suppose I don’t blame you. Continue working on Dr. Russell’s case. I’ll send someone else to California.”

  2:02 P.M.

  Bethesda, Maryland

  Even though she had rushed, it took Lily Lowenstein the entire morning to do what the nameless man had ordered. Now she was finishing a celebratory lunch at her favorite restaurant in downtown Bethesda. On the other side of the window, the city’s tall buildings, reminding her again of a mini-Dallas, reflected the bright October sunlight as she sipped her second daiquiri.

  Surprisingly, tapping into WHO’s worldwide computerized medical network had turned out to be the simplest of her tasks. Nobody had thought it necessary to put stringent security on a scientific and humanitarian information network. So it had been child’s play to erase all trace of a series of reports from WHO records concerning the victims and survivors of two minor viral outbreaks in the cities of Baghdad and Basra.

  The Iraqi computer system was five years out of date, so going in to remove the originals of the same reports at the source was almost as easy. Oddly, Lily had found most of the original information from Iraq had already been erased by the Saddam Hussein regime. Not wanting to reveal any weakness or need, no doubt.

  Clearing the single Belgian report from all electronic records of her own FRMC master computer, from USAMRIID and CDC’s databases, and from all the other databases worldwide had been more time consuming. But the hardest task proved to be erasing the item from the telephone log at Fort Detrick. She had been forced to call in favors from high-level phone company contacts who owed her.

  Curious, she had attempted to comprehend the reason behind the blackmailer’s demands, but there seemed to be no common ground among the items she deleted except that most dealt with a virus. There had been hundreds of other research reports flying back and forth over the electronic circuits among a dozen Level Four research institutions worldwide, and her blackmailer had shown no interest in those.

  Whatever he had wanted, her part was successfully completed. She had not been discovered, had left no trace, and would soon be free of her financial problems for good. She would never get in so deep again, she promised herself. With fifty thousand dollars in cash, she could go to Vegas or Atlantic City with enough to recoup everything she had lost. With a carefree smile, she quickly decided she would begin with a thousand on the Capitals to win tonight.

  She almost laughed aloud as she left the restaurant and turned the corner toward the bar where her favorite bookmaker had his private booth. She felt a fiery surge that told her she could not lose. Not now. Not anymore.

  Even when she heard the screams behind her, the screech and rumble of rubber and metal, and turned to see the big black SUV careening along the sidewalk directly at her, she had a wide smile on her face. The smile was still there when the SUV struck her and swerved back onto the street, leaving her dead on the sidewalk.

  3:16 P.
M.

  Fort Detrick, Maryland

  Smith pushed away from the computer screen. There were five reports from the Prince Leopold Institute, but none had arrived yesterday or early today, and none reported anything but more failure to classify the unknown virus.

  There had to be a report with new information in it—at least one fact important enough for Sophia to be inspired in some new line of investigation she had chronicled as a full-page note last night. But he had searched Detrick’s database, CDC’s database, and tied into the army’s supercomputer to search every other Level Four lab in the world, including the Prince Leopold itself.

  There was nothing.

  Frustrated, he stared at the uncooperative screen. Either Sophia had made a mistake, put the wrong code on her designation, and the report had never existed, or—

  Or it had been erased from every database in the world, including its source.

  That was difficult to believe. Not impossible to do, but hard to believe someone would go to such trouble over a virus when it was in everyone’s best interests to investigate. Smith shook his head, trying to dismiss the idea that there had been anything critical on that missing page, but he could not. The page had been cut out.

  And by someone who had gotten on and off the base unseen. Or had they?

  He reached again for the phone to find out who else had been in the lab last night, but after speaking to the whole staff and Sergeant Major Daugherty, he was no closer to an answer. All of Daugherty’s people had gone home by 6:00 P.M. while the scientific staff had stayed until 2:00 A.M., even Kielburger. After that, Sophia had been here alone.

  On the night desk, Grasso had seen nothing, not even Sophia’s leaving, as Smith already knew. At the gate, the guards swore they had seen no one after 2:00 A.M., but they had obviously missed Sophia staggering out on foot, so their report meant little. Besides, he doubted anyone skilled enough to cut out the page without leaving a trace to the naked eye would have drawn attention to himself as he entered or left.