2022 (17 page)

“As soon as I can find them,” she replied.
“They’re not where they’re supposed to be. Maybe they’re scared and
hiding out after the fire.”

“The only way that they can leave the complex
is by helicopter or by car. I’ll call security and make sure that
they double up on their inspection of outbound vehicles.”

“I’ll keep looking for them,” she said. “I
see a lot of coverage of the virus outbreak on the news channel in
the cafeteria. Looks like it’s keeping the CDC busy.”

“That suggestion of yours is working well.
I’ve heard from my inside contact that the CDC’s lab is so backed
up it’ll take at least another week to get to our sample. It fits
my timetable perfectly.”

When he got to his office, Mikhail was
pleased to see that his shipment of vaccine had arrived that
morning. This meant that the rest of the vaccines had been shipped
and should be delivered worldwide within a week. “Right on
schedule.” Mikhail thought as he gave himself a dose.

********************

After their conversation, Hope was fairly
certain that she was not going to see Mikhail again. She realized
that time was running short and there were several things she
wanted to do before he executed his plan. She made a call to
arrange for a private helicopter to pick her up and was
disappointed to find that the soonest one available was in two
days. With the only other option of leaving being walking out, she
decided to charter it anyhow. Though the timetable would be tight,
she would still have enough time to get done what she had planned
to do.

********************

Sue sat across from the director’s desk in
his office. “Are you sure this plan of yours is going to work?” he
asked.

“No, I’m not sure. But nobody has come up
with anything better.”

“True— but we have everyone’s attention now
since the preliminary results from the CDC lab finally came in. We
now know that the virus outbreak is the same as the sample from the
foundation. At least it’s only contagious through contact. If it
were airborne, I don’t know what we’d do.”

“The key is Mikhail and Richard. We still
don’t know what their ultimate plan is, and if we hit them now,
they may trigger it early. We need to watch them carefully and make
sure all our pieces are in place. When they make their move, we’ll
make ours.”

“I’ve taken this all the way to the top,” he
said. “Several other countries are informed now as well. I
certainly hope you’re right.”

“Me, too. I know that we have physical
surveillance on both of them, and I have several people monitoring
the Internet for anything related to the foundation and the
virus.”

“Have you seen anything yet?”

“Nothing important—but if there’s anything
out there, we’ll find it. I’m especially impressed with Spencer.
He’s been putting in countless hours on the search.”

She had grown fond of Spencer and started to
think of him as the son she never had. He tried hard to please her
but was still a rookie and made mistakes. Another DIR member
brought to her attention increased network activity regarding
viruses in one country that Spencer had missed. When she pointed
out his mistake, he appeared embarrassed and promised to be more
careful. Several days later, he submitted a detailed report on the
activity and had determined it had lessened in the last couple of
days.

“So you’re going to keep him?”

“Of course. For these first few months on the
job, he’s handled everything we’ve thrown at him very well.”

Richard arrived at Percipience just after
dusk and asked the heliport security guard to point out Olivia’s
trailer.

“That’s the one that burned down last night,”
the guard replied. “Nobody was hurt, but I have no idea where she’s
staying now.”

Richard flipped open his phone and barely
waited for an answer. “Mikhail, why didn’t you tell me there was a
fire at Percipience last night?”

“I didn’t think it was that important. How’d
you find out?”

“I’m in Percipience. Where are you?”

“Back at headquarters. You should have let me
know, and I would have been there to meet you.”
What’s he doing
there?

“Yesterday you told me to be careful about
Olivia, and now her trailer has burned down. Combined with
everything else I’m wondering if you’re able to run this or
not.”

“Richard….”

“Listen, get it together, and I mean
now
. If you can’t, I’ll find someone that can. You’ve got
two weeks.” He closed his phone before Mikhail could reply and went
to his trailer to sleep.

He awoke several hours later with a weight on
his chest and a cloth forced over his mouth and nose. He tried to
open his eyes, but something was covering them. He struggled for a
moment, but that accelerated the effects of the chloroform-soaked
cloth and he lost consciousness.

When he woke up again, he found himself
strapped to a chair in what looked like a storage room off of the
greenhouse cavern. He was about to yell for help until he realized
there was tape over his mouth and his efforts to get out of the
restraints were futile. The back of his body felt damp, and he
figured he had been brought to where he was via the wet wheelbarrow
a few feet away.

From behind him, an unfamiliar female voice
spoke quietly. “He’s awake now.”

The woman came around so that he could see
her and then put several electrodes on his arms and forehead. She
then spent a few minutes apparently adjusting a machine that was
just out of his range of vision. Finally nodding with approval, she
gave him an injection “A little concoction I’ve developed to aid
you in telling me the truth.”

“I’m going to remove that tape from your
mouth now. If you choose to scream or do anything equally stupid, I
think you can figure out what will happen to you.” She pulled the
tape roughly from his mouth.

“Who are you? Are you the one that sent me
the message?” he asked.

“I’ll ask the questions. Depending on your
answers, I will either release you or kill you.” she said without
emotion. For the next thirty minutes, she grilled Richard and with
each response, she paid close attention to the machine behind him.
“Are you working with Mikhail?” “Do you know about Virtuesh-B?”
“Have you ever ordered someone to be killed?”

He was sweating profusely and was glad when
the questions were over and the electrodes were pulled off. He
hoped his answers had been good enough so that she would untie
him.

“I think I believe you,” she said. “But
before I release you, I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

He was shocked to see Olivia walk into
view.

“I want you to meet Diane, a good friend of
mine,” Olivia said, pointing to his interrogator.

“The reason you’re strapped to the chair is
because I’ve no idea who I can trust anymore,” Diane said. “In the
last several months, my brother has been murdered, I think there’s
an assassin after us, and yesterday, Mikhail abandoned us in the
middle of a forest a hundred miles from here. Then there’s this
whole business of Virtuesh.”

They released him. He stood and turned to
look at the machine behind him and saw all the wires from the
electrodes attached to a large sack of seeds.

“I don’t know anything about lie detectors,
but you didn’t know that, and I thought it was worth a shot to
judge your reaction under stress,” Olivia said. “I got the idea
from Spencer. Didn’t you interrogate him in a similar fashion?”

“That wasn’t me, at least not directly. But
what’s all this about your being shipped a hundred miles from here.
How’d you get back?”

“It was Mikhail. I’m not sure what, but he is
up to something,” Olivia said. “Something horrible—with a different
strain of our virus called Virtuesh-B. He didn’t have the guts to
kill us himself, so he had us tied up and then flew us out to the
middle of nowhere. He said we’d be out of the way long enough for
him to finish whatever plan he had in the works. The only reason
we’re back here now is due to the DIR.”

“The DIR? How’d they get involved?”

“They’re keeping a close eye on us, and they
noticed that the flight from Percipience up to headquarters didn’t
take its normal path. They were curious enough to fly out to see
what might have happened during the brief stop the helicopter made
and found us.”

Diane interrupted to say how lucky they were
that they were able to get in touch with Spencer via the
helicopter’s radio. “He and Olivia are kind of close, so she
convinced him to have us brought to a few miles from Percipience.
From there we walked back and arrived unnoticed. Otherwise, it
would have taken weeks to get back.”

He listened and didn’t answer immediately.
Just a few weeks for Mikhail to finish his plan.

“What was in that shot you gave me?” he
asked. “I’m sweating and my heart is racing.”

Olivia told him he had been injected with
sodium pentothal. “Don’t worry, you’ll feel fine in a while.”

“We need to get more information on the
Virtuesh-B strain before we confront him with it,” he said.

She agreed and said she had already created a
small amount of vaccine for Virtuesh-B. There would be enough for
the residents of the villages with some to spare and she would give
it to him to distribute. She asked him if he had been vaccinated
for Virtuesh.

“Yes, a few of us have—Mikhail and the few of
you who were working on it at headquarters. Why?”

She told him the story about the Virtuesh-B
vaccine bottles being coated with the original virus strain.

“Then we need to find that stolen vaccine
right away and get everyone in this village vaccinated at
once.”

”Diane and I will take care of that,” she
said. “You just make sure that the vaccine gets to all of the other
villages, and try to put a stop to whatever Mikhail is
planning.”

Before they left, Olivia gave him a
Virtuesh-B vaccine shot.

It was the middle of the night by the time
she and Diane got back to the lab. “Let me get you vaccinated now,”
Olivia said. “One shot is good for both Virtuesh and Virtuesh-B,
but it’ll take at least ten days to build up enough anti-bodies.
Meanwhile, keep this pack of disposable gloves with you and be
careful what you touch around here until we figure out more about
who stole the Virtuesh-B and where they have been.”

“We could set up the village-wide vaccination
at the cafeteria and catch people in the morning,” Diane said.

Olivia agreed and added that some may already
have been infected and that everyone should be instructed to wash
their hands frequently. They would also be told this would help in
avoiding the flu virus being transmitted around the globe and that
a local case was believed to have been identified.

“That will leave us with a few more hours
tonight to find that missing vaccine,” Diane said, “and I’ll give
you one guess who I think stole it.”

“Hope, naturally, and I’ll bet she’s staying
in Mikhail’s trailer now that ours burned down.”

“Exactly. Let’s stop at my RV before we go
looking for her. I have a handgun there, and I’ve got a feeling we
may need it.”

They collected the gun and headed to
Mikhail’s trailer. There was no answer when they knocked on the
door. No lights were visible through the windows. With her revolver
drawn in one hand, Diane used her other gloved hand to open the
door.

They entered and found Hope lying on a cot.
She was covered with sweat and struggled to open her eyes when they
called her name.

“She’s been infected,” Olivia said in a low
voice. “From what I have read, Virtuesh works fast. She doesn’t
have much time left and there’s nothing that I can do.”

She pulled out two small bottles from her
pocket and gave Hope two shots. “I thought I may need these. One is
morphine to kill the pain, and the other is a very strong sedative
to help her rest.”

“How long does she have?”

“I’m not sure.” Olivia watched as the drugs
took effect. The tension on Hope’s face eased and her eyes closed.
“Maybe less than twenty-four hours.”

Olivia glanced around the trailer and then
picked up Hope’s jacket that lay on the end of the cot. There was a
small box underneath. “This is the vaccine she took,” she said with
relief.

Diane ran her gloved hand over the jacket and
gently patted the blankets around Hope. “There it is,” she said,
reaching under the blanket and pulling out a cell phone. “It‘s
still unlocked. She must’ve been in the middle of a call.”

Fumbling for a few minutes with her gloved
hand, Diane was able to change the setting of the phone so that it
would stay unlocked. “Is there some way we can disinfect this so
that we can use it before the vaccine kicks in?”

“Yes, I can do that. Back at headquarters, we
used to disinfect things with ozone, and I have an ozone generator
still in a crate back at the lab. We could hook that up and
disinfect it.”

Hope’s breathing remained shallow, but she
appeared to be in less pain. They decided to leave and check on her
in a few hours. Olivia placed a makeshift sign on the door.
Quarantined - Do Not Enter
. They then went back to the lab
to uncrate the ozone generator and to prepare for the morning
vaccination program.

*******************

“Damn it, Sue, I‘m not making this up.”
Richard said. During his flight home from Percipience he had made
several calls, and by the time he landed his staff had found the
probable location of the lab that Mikhail was using to make the
vaccine for Virtuesh-B. “I‘m telling you one of my managers has
gone rogue and is now in control of a lethal virus”

“Are you referring to Virtuesh?” she asked.
“Because we’ve known about it for a while—and that the foundation
is behind it. We’re taking action right now.”