In this case, Sam was entirely indifferent as to the method his father would use, but he was certain that his father would be able to get him some answers without revealing the fact that Sam was still alive.
His father was an immensely intelligent, mostly self-centered, megalomaniac, who had spent his entire life satisfying his own appetites, but in the few rare times that Sam had needed his help, his dad had been there for him.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Take care of yourself, son.” As an afterthought, he added, “Say hi to your mom for me, will you?”
“Will do, Dad.”
“By the way, how was your sailing trip? Did you find what you’ve been looking for?”
Sam thought about it for a while.
His mind flashed back to the terrifying night with his brother, and then to the more recent night, when he sailed through Bass Strait while it was squeezed between a catastrophic high and low convergence.
The night was rough, that was for sure, but no, it wasn’t the same.
“No, not yet.”
Chapter Nine
Blake Simmonds walked out of his office on the afternoon of the August 26th and strolled up Waldorf Street, in the heart of Berlin. Standing at a height of six foot, five inches, he had always been tall, and found that as he’d aged, it became harder to disguise the fact that he walked with a limp.
At the age of 68, he had begun to hope that he would be long gone before his current problem came to the light of man.
He caught a taxi to a place where he’d worked hard to forget for many years. Before reaching his destination, the taxi slowed to a halt near the site of a recent accident. Paramedics were still at the scene and were attempting to free an injured man from his vehicle.
“I’ll walk from here.” Blake said, as he rapped on the divider which separated the driver from his passengers.
The man pointed at the fare owed, and he paid it in full, without adding a tip.
As he began to walk along the footpath, his cell phone rang.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Blake, its James Reilly here. Can you talk?”
He almost laughed. James never asked for anything, he only ever commanded.
Something’s up.
“Of course,” Blake said. “What I can I do for you?”
“John Wolfgang just fucked me good. He’s stolen it from me, and after we had made a deal! I want it back, and I want him to suffer for his impudence. I don’t care what it costs — just make it happen.”
“Really?” Blake Simmonds kept walking; a broad smile appearing on his face. “Yes, of course. I will fix this for you.”
“See that you do.”
The phone went silent.
It was turning into a much better day than he’d anticipated.
With his cane in his left hand, he walked the three blocks until he reached the new Remington building, and without pausing to admire its futuristic architecture, he entered.
He looked at the receptionist.
Now in her late forties, she had lost none of her youthful looks. She’d been there since the first time he’d been there. She had fair hair, blue eyes, and a slim figure. She was beguiling. Her fingers didn’t pause for a second, he noticed as they danced over the keyboard on one of those old-fashioned typewriters. Her master, Blake knew, was a cautious man by his very nature, and would never allow company records to be placed on anything that a fifteen year old computer whiz could hack into in a matter of minutes. The information collected in this building was far too valuable for that.
She smiled politely at him without saying anything, as if she’d expected him to show up today.
Blake walked past her without saying a word, entered the room behind her, and then closed the door.
The man in front of him didn’t bother to stand up or greet him. His skin was relatively dark, and gave him the appearance of someone of Mediterranean or even Middle Eastern descent.
It had been a long time since Blake had seen the man.
The man sighed, and then finally spoke to him, “We both knew this day would one day come.”
“Yes.”
“Now, what are we going to do about it?”
John Wolfgang looked out the window of his Lear Jet.
It was a never-ending desert in all directions. Then, as the pilot made his approach, and softly set the jet down, until it lightly touched Sheik Abdulla Azzama's private runway, he noticed a large, luxurious building, with an enormous pool surrounding it as if it were an island, like a mirage up ahead in the distance.
He could already see the man’s armored Bentley drive along the runway towards them.
The pilot had stopped the plane, but its engines could be heard idling in the background. He watched as several men rolled a gold-plated set of stairs towards his aircraft. Then, Sheik Abdulla stepped out of his vehicle. Confident from any threat in his own land, he alone walked toward the plane.
John had no love for the man or for his damn holy wars, for that matter, but as he admired the gold-plated stairs, he had to admit that nobody could pay like the oil-rich masters of the Middle East.
Abdulla was escorted into John’s luxurious board room, which was big enough to seat more than a dozen people. Today, it was to be the meeting place of just two men. In so doing, it provided both he and Abdulla a private place to converse with the absolute certainty that no one else was listening.
John had already guessed that a number of intelligence agencies had captured the image of his jet setting down on the Sheik’s runway. He wasn’t worried. There was nothing illegal about that in itself. By all openly accepted and provable facts, the man he was here to meet was simply one of the region's wealthy Sheiks, but it didn’t take a genius to see where his money flowed further downstream. As far as John was concerned, it didn’t matter. By the time they completed their terrifying plan, the most powerful nations in the world would be crumbling and would be unable to harm him.
The man came up to him and shook his hand, warmly.
“So, the Magdalena’s vault has been found?” Abdulla spoke quietly, and animatedly.
“Not quite, but we have the closest thing to a lead which seventy five years of searching for her has ever produced.” John said.
“But, it gives us hope that it really did exist, and after all, hope is all that any of us can ask for?” Abdulla sighed. “It is proof that the Nazis never got their hands on it.”
“Yes, if they’d made such a discovery, the world would have known about it. That’s for certain.”
“And, you believe that you will be able to find her?” Abdulla stared at him, trying to discern whether or not John could actually provide what he had offered.
“Yes, I’m certain of it. We have our best men on the job.”
“But, will it have survived intact, after all this time?”
“Yes.” John wrote something on the small piece of paper before him with his gold tipped Biro and then said, “Influenza A1W5 was designed to survive in environments that would destroy all other microbes, whether: viral, bacterial or fungal. It doesn’t require oxygen to survive, and consequently, it is completely viable in environments where other strains of virus wouldn’t survive. It spreads rapidly through both air and liquid vectors, but has an incubation period of up to three months, followed by an 80 percent mortality rate. With such a prolonged incubation period, the disease will spread globally before the CDC or WHO even knows that it exists. By the time the first horrified scientist examines it, the entire world will be infected.”