astronaut who'd lost his tether and was doomed to tumble endlessly through the cosmos. Then he felt something bump him and with a start woke up to discover that he was clawing for the gun on the night table.
Smith showered again and dressed quickly. He was heading for the door when he remembered that he hadn't checked his phone messages off the secure cell. Quickly he scanned the list and discovered a note from Peter Howell. Something was waiting for him on his computer.
Smith fired up his machine, ran the encryption program, and downloaded the file Howell had left. Reading it, he was stunned. After making a copy, he saved the text in a secure file and typed in a quick E-mail Howell would get on his mobile phone: Job well done ? and better. Come home. Drinks are on me. J. S.
As dawn broke, Smith left the house and drove through the empty streets to the west gate of the White House. The guard checked his ID against the computerized list and waved him through. At the portico, a marine corporal escorted him through the silent corridors of the West Wing and into a small, cluttered office where Nathaniel Klein rose to greet him.
Smith was startled by Klein's appearance. The head of Covert-One hadn't shaved and his clothes looked as if they had been slept in. Wearily, he indicated that they should sit.
“You did a tremendous job, Jon,” he said quietly. “People owe you a debt of gratitude. I'm assuming you came through unscathed.”
“Bumped and bruised but otherwise intact, sir.”
Klein's wan smile faded. “You haven't heard a thing, have you?”
“Heard what, sir?”
Klein nodded. “Good… That's good. That means the blackout is holding.” He took a deep breath. “Eight hours ago, Harry Landon, mission director at the Cape, was told that there was an emergency onboard Discovery. When he managed to reestablish voice communication, he learned that… that the crew was all dead except for one member.”
He looked at Smith sadly and the tremor in his voice betrayed his loss. “Megan's gone, Jon.”
Smith felt his body stiffen. He tried to speak but couldn't find the words. The voice he heard didn't seem to belong to him.
“What was it, sir? A fire?”
Klein shook his head. “No. The orbiter is functioning perfectly. But something ripped through the craft and killed the crew.”
“Who's the survivor?”
“Dylan Reed.”
Smith raised his head. “The only survivor? We're sure?”
“Reed's gone through the entire craft. Everyone is accounted for. I'm sorry.”
Smith had lost people before to sudden, violent death. He knew that his reaction was typical of a survivor: his mind flashed on the last time he'd seen Megan in that coffee shop near the NASA compound in Houston.
Now she was gone. Just like that.
“Landon and the rest of NASA have been tearing out their collective hair,” Klein was saying. 'They still can't figure out what went wrong.
“How did Reed survive?”
“He was in one of those suits they use on space walks. Apparently he was preparing some experiment.”
“And the rest of the crew were in their normal work outfits, the overalls,” Smith said. “No protection gear.” He paused. “You said there was no fire, that something ripped through them.”
“Jon?”
“Megan told you that she saw someone with Reed just before the launch,” Smith cut him off. “You already suspected a link between Treloar and Reed…” He thought for a moment. “What did the bodies look like?”
“Landon said that Reed described them as bloated, covered with sores, bleeding from the orifices.”
Smith felt a tingle as the connections snapped together in his mind.
“I had a message from Peter Howell,” he told Klein. “He had a long chat with Herr Weizsel. He was so cooperative that he insisted on taking Peter back to his apartment, where he accessed the Offenbach Bank's computers through his laptop. It seems that Ivan Beria had a long and profitable relationship with the bank, especially when one client employed him exclusively: Bauer-Zermatt A.G.”
Klein was stunned. “The pharmaceutical giant?”
Smith nodded. “Over the last three years, Bauer-Zermatt made a total of ten deposits into Beria's account, two of the last three just before the Russian guard and Treloar were eliminated.”
“What about the third one?” Klein demanded.
“That was for the contract on me.”
After a moment's silence, Klein said, “Do you have proof?”
As though he were moving a piece in for checkmate, Smith pulled out a floppy disk. “Proof positive.”
Klein shook his head. “All right. Bauer-Zermatt is ? was ? paying Beria for assassinations. These included the Russian guard and Treloar. That links Bauer-Zermatt to the stolen smallpox. But there are two questions: why would Bauer-Zermatt want the smallpox? And who at the company authorized the hits and the payments?” He pointed to the disk. “Is there a name?”
“No name,” Smith replied. “But it's not hard to guess, is it? Only one man could have authorized the use of someone like Beria: Karl Bauer himself.”
Klein's breath whistled through his nostrils. “Okay… But finding Bauer's fingerprints on the authorization to use Beria, or on the payments themselves, that's another matter.”
“They won't exist,” Smith said flatly. “Bauer's much too careful to leave such an obvious trail.” He paused. “But why would he want the smallpox to begin with? To make a vaccine? No. We can already do that. To play with it? Tweak it genetically? Maybe. But why? Smallpox has been studied for years. It can't be used as a battlefield weapon. The incubation period is too long. The effects are not a hundred percent predictable. So why would Bauer still want a sample? Want it so badly that he would murder for it?”
He looked at Klein. “Do you know how people die from smallpox? The first symptoms are a rash on the roof of the mouth, which then spreads to the face and forearms, then to the rest of the body. The pustules erupt, scabs form, erupt again. Eventually, there's bleeding from the orifices…”
Klein stared at him. “Just like the shuttle crew!” he whispered. “They died the way smallpox victims do! Are you saying Bauer got the stolen smallpox onboard Discovery?”
Smith rose and tried to dispel the image of Megan, how she had died, her last, terrible moments. “Yes. That's what I'm saying.”
“But ??”
“In space ? in microgravity ? you can reengineer cells, bacteria, virtually anything in a way that can't be done on earth.” He paused. 'We wiped smallpox off the planet but we kept two sets of samples ? one here, one in Russia. Ostensibly, we did this because we could not bring ourselves to eradicate a species into extinction. The truth is darker than that: we never knew when we might need it. Maybe years from now we would find a way to convert it into a weapon. Or if someone else did, we'd have enough material with which to produce a vaccine ? hopefully.
“Bauer didn't want to wait years. Somehow he discovered a process he thought would work. Maybe he was fifty or sixty percent of the way there, but he couldn't finish. He couldn't be certain. The only way to prove that he was right was to arrange for an experiment in a unique environment where bacteria grow like lightning. He needed to do it onboard the shuttle.” Smith paused. “And he did.”
“If you're right, Jon,” Klein said tightly, “that means Dylan Reed is his handmaiden.”
“He's the only survivor, isn't he? The director of NASA's biomedical research program. The guy who was conveniently suited up when all hell broke loose.”
“Are you suggesting that Reed murdered his own crew?” Klein demanded.
“That's exactly what I'm saying.”
“Why, for God's sake?”
“Two reasons: To get rid of any possible witnesses, and…” Smith's voice broke. “And to run a controlled experiment on human test subjects to see how fast the virus would kill.”
Klein slumped in his chair. “It's insane.”
“Only because whoever devised it is insane,” Smith said. “Not raving, not foaming at the mouth. But
