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.
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.
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.