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?”
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CHAPTER
TEN
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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 ate. The guard saluted sadly as he passed. He had parked in his usual of 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 everything, 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.