Apparently the woman had been involved in the bombing and The Fallen Angels had planted her identification there to convince the authorities that she was dead.
The Fallen Angels seemed very adept at this, she reflected. She found the report concerning Nadia Kosov’s former job to be vague. Computer programmer for the government. She wondered which branch of the government she had worked for — if she had worked in computer espionage or cryptography. The very vagueness of the report pointed to a high level of interest.
She tucked the report away and glanced through the notes on the safe house. She saw that the management company that owned the building and presumably accepted rent checks from Irina Khournikova/Nadia Kosov, had not been open during the night and they had no known open computer access.
Irina checked the address, realized the office was a place to start, though she worried that the FBI would be all over it as well. She left the diner, glancing at her watch to see that it was only eight o’clock in the morning. She found the Taurus, studied a map of the city and drove to the three-story brown brick building that housed the offices of Delecourt Facilities Management, Inc.
For the second time in twenty-four hours she found luck swinging her way. They weren’t open. Their hours didn’t start until 9:00, the sign on their frosted glass door said.
She didn’t think she would have much time. Using the butt of the Glock she broke the glass of the door, shoved her arm through and unlocked it, rushing in.
The receptionist’s office was crammed with filing cabinets. A quick search verified what she had suspected — DFM, Inc. was a dump. A steel desk, a Dell computer system, filing cabinets. She began to quickly go through the filing cabinets, looking for anything under the name Irina Khournikova, Nadia Kosov, Richard Coffee, Surkho Anderbek… and then found it under the address of the building, a file of each tenant.
She took the one for Irina Khournikova, leafing through it quickly to see that Irina had paid by check on an account with the Fifth Third Bank.
Irina had been in the DFM offices for less than ten minutes, and by the time she was in the white Taurus she was on the phone to her contacts asking them to do a financial records search on the account number she gave them.
She could smell it, she thought. The trail.
54
Derek rolled away from the body of Kim Pak Lee, now lying in a pool of blood, vomit and sulfuric acid. His eyes watered from the acrid fumes and he gagged, barely able to avoid vomiting. Staggering over to the second scientist, he removed his spacesuit helmet, then decided to go the whole way. He awkwardly removed the suit, donning it himself and hooking himself to the air hose system, which the scientists had momentarily disconnected themselves from when they came to check on him.
With relief his suit flooded with air and he took in deep breaths, fighting not to think about the madness that would cause a man to kill himself by drinking concentrated sulfuric acid.
He took in the lab for the first time, really took it in. Was there contact with the outside world? He knew that outside this double-wide trailer were terrorists who would kill him without a second thought. But if there was an Internet connection or a telephone or a cellular phone…
A search of the laboratory revealed the computer to be disconnected from the Internet and there to be no cell phone. There was a one-button telephone and he was sure that it only connected somewhere within the warehouse.
He perched on a stool in front of the computer and read the files there. They were mercifully written in English and detailed the work Kim Pak Lee had done based on the “blueprints,” the black patent records they had stolen, and the further work he had done in the last day. Their vaccine worked well on animals. So well that they had gone ahead and injected it into all their members.
Madness, Derek thought. Lee had been nuts to make that leap.
And then The Fallen had given him permission to inject Derek Stillwater, a human subject, with Chimera M13 and the vaccine. A real-live human test.
Derek skimmed through the vaccine information, knowing he had to get this to USAMRIID. If Kim Pak Lee was to be believed, Richard Coffee, armed with Chimera, was at an airport heading for France with a Coke can filled with an aerosolized version of Chimera. Soon the rest of The Fallen Angels would be heading to other points around the world. Could they be stopped?
Time was racing away from him.
But he couldn’t leave this information here.
He couldn’t leave this laboratory stocked with live Chimera.
He scrounged through the drawers until he found computer disks and transferred Lee’s records to disk. Opening the spacesuit, he slipped them into the pocket of the scrubs he wore.
Searching the lab, he found a cabinet filled with Clorox bleach. Perfect. Opening each incubator, he removed everything in them and moved all the flasks and test tubes to the hoods. Systematically, carefully, he sterilized the cultures by filling them with bleach, then transferred the now dead containers to what he recognized was an autoclave in one corner. It was taking way too damned long, but he couldn’t leave viable cultures of Chimera here.
It was in a locked cabinet that he found the real weapons — a case of Coke cans that had been labeled:
PRESSURIZED AEROSOLIZED CHIMERAL
HANDLE WITH CARE
He removed the cans to the hoods and began the sterilization procedure again, opening each can with a hiss and fizz that was not releasing carbon dioxide like real Coke, but was spraying virus particles into the hoods.
He sterilized every single one of them with bleach, then cleaned the hood.
In a refrigerator he hit pay dirt — a dozen glass vials labeled vaccine.
Now, he thought, I’ve got to get the hell out of here. But how?
His gaze landed on several large cylinders of compressed gas — nitrogen and carbon dioxide — that were used in the incubators. Growing cells needed heat, usually close to 98.7 degrees Fahrenheit, high humidity, and sources of nitrogen and carbon and oxygen. All were supplied by the gases, which were pumped into the incubators to create an atmosphere of about five percent gas.
The cylinders stood almost five-feet tall and were about ten inches in diameter. Each container held thousands of pounds per square inch of pressurized gas.
Which, Derek knew, if released all at once, acted very much like a torpedo. With a small smile, he went to work.
55
Liz Vargas was unconscious. In her spacesuit, Sharon Jaxon sat by her bed for a moment, watching her. They had tried what the Michigan State University professor, Leslie Hingemann, had suggested. Because the original Chimera M13 had been constructed of bits and pieces of other infectious agents, a mix consisting mostly of viral genetic material and a bit of bacterial genome, Hingemann had quickly analyzed the possibility that Chimera’s outer surface might hold antigens similar to Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that caused Bubonic plague. His theory was that if they then infected Liz with Yersinia, essentially infecting her with plague, her immune system would start to create a defense against the plague.
Of course, the vast majority of people infected with plague over the last nine hundred years died of it.
What had changed in the last century was the advent of antibiotics. Although plague was resistant to many antibiotics, it was susceptible to a narrow spectrum of antibiotics like tetracycline. So Hingemann had suggested that by introducing a bacteria like Yersinia into Liz’s immune system, triggering an immune response, then shortly afterward treating her with antibiotics to kill the Yersinia, it just might be possible to kick-start her immune system into fighting Chimera M13.