carrying.
The doctor caught it, tore off the wrapping paper, and ripped open the candy box. Manila folders full of documents tumbled out across the corpse.
He scanned through them quickly and nodded in satisfaction. “These are the photocopied case records from the hospital,” he confirmed. “Every last one of them.” He smiled. “We can report a success.”
The blond-haired man frowned. “No. I do not think we can.”
“What do you mean?”
“Where are the blood and tissue samples he stole?” the blond-haired man asked pointedly, narrowing his cold gray eyes.
The doctor stared down at the empty box in his hand. “Shit.” He looked up in dismay. “Kiryanov must have had help. Someone else has the samples.”
“So it seems.” the other man agreed. I le pulled the phone out of his oxer-coat again and punched in a pre- coded number. “This is Moscow One. I need an immediate secure relax to Prague One. We have a problem….”
PART ONE
Chapter One
Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan “Jon” Smith, M.D., paused in the shadowed arch of the ancient Gothic tower at the eastern end of the Charles Bridge. The bridge, nearly a third of a mile long, had been built more than six centuries before. It crossed the Vltava River, linking Prague’s Stare Mesto, the Old Town, with its Mala Strana, the Little Quarter. Smith stood quietly for a long moment, carefully scanning the stone span before him.
He frowned. He would have preferred a different location for this meeting, one that was busier and had more natural cover. Wider and newer bridges carried the Czech capital’s motorized traffic and its electric trams, but the Charles Bridge was reserved for those crossing the Vltava on foot. In the dreary half-light of late afternoon, it was largely deserted.
For most of the year, the historic bridge was the centerpiece of the city, a structure whose elegance and beauty drew sightseers and street vendors in droves. But Prague now lay shrouded in winter fog, a thick cloud of cold, damp vapor and foul-smelling smog trapped along the winding trace of the river valley. The gray mist blurred the graceful outlines of the city’s Renaissance and Baroque-era palaces, churches, and houses.
Shivering slightly in the frosty, dank air, Smith zipped up his leather bomber jacket and moved out onto the bridge itself. He was a tall, trim man in his early forties with smooth, dark hair, piercing blue eyes, and high cheekbones.
At first his footsteps echoed faintly off the waist-high parapet, but then the sounds faded, swallowed by the fog rising from the river. It flowed slowly across the bridge, gradually hiding both ends from view. Other people, mostly government workers and shop clerks hurrying home, emerged from the concealing mists, passed him without a glance, and then vanished back into the haze as quickly as they had come.
Smith walked on. Thirty statues of saints lined the Charles Bridge, silent, unmoving figures looming up out of the steadily thickening fog on either side.
Set in opposing pairs on the massive sandstone piers supporting the long crossing, those statues were his guides to the rende7.vous point. The American reached the middle of the span and stopped, looking up at the calm face of St.
John Nepomnk, a Catholic priest tortured to death in 1393, his broken body hurled into the river from this same bridge. Part of the age-blackened bronze relief depicting the saint’s martyrdom gleamed bright, polished clean by countless passersby touching it for good luck.
Moved by a sudden impulse. Smith leaned forward and rubbed his own fingers across the raised figure’s.
“I did not know that von were a superstitious man, Jonathan,” a quiet, tired-sounding voice said from behind him.
Smith turned around with an abashed grin. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Valentin.”
Dr. Valentin Petrenko came forward to join him, holding a black briefcase gripped tightly in one gloved hand. The Russian medical specialist was several inches shorter than Smith and more solidly built. Sad brown eyes blinked nervously behind the pair of thick glasses perched on his nose. “Thank you for agreeing to meet me here. Away from the conference, I mean. I realize this is not convenient for you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Smith said. He smiled wryly. “Believe me, this beats spending another several hours rehashing Kozlik’s latest paper on ty-phoid and hepatitis A epidemics in Lower Iamsodamnedlostistan.”
For a moment, a look of amusement flickered in Petrenko’s wary eyes. “Dr. Kozlik is not the most scintillating speaker,” he agreed. “But his theories are basically sound.”
Smith nodded, waiting patiently for the other man to explain why he’d been so insistent on this surreptitious rendezvous. He and Petrenko were in Prague for a major international conference on emerging infectious diseases in Eastern Europe and Russia. Deadly illnesses long thought under control in the developed world were spreading like wildfire through parts of what had once been the Soviet empire, breeding in public health and sanitation systems ruined by decades of neglect and the collapse of the old communist order.
Both men were deeply involved in confronting this growing health crisis.
Among other things, Jon Smith was a skilled molecular biologist assigned to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. And Petrenko was a highly regarded expert in rare illnesses attached to the staff of Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital. For several years, the two men had known each other professionally and had developed a respect for each other’s abilities and discretion. So when a plainly-troubled Petrenko pulled him aside earlier in the day to request a private conversation outside the confines of the conference, Smith had agreed without hesitation.
“I need your help, Jon,” the Russian said at last. He swallowed hard. “I have urgent information that must reach competent medical authorities in the West.”
Smith looked closely at him. “Information about what, Valentin?”
“The outbreak of a disease in Moscow. A new disease … something I’ve never seen before,” Petrekno said quietly. “Something I fear.”
Smith felt a small chill run down his spine. “Go on.”
“I saw the first case two months ago,” Petrenko told him. “A small child, a little boy who was just seven years old. He came in suffering aches and pains and a persistent high fever. In the beginning, his doctors thought it was only a common flu. But then, and quite suddenly, his condition worsened. His hair began falling out. Terrible, bleeding sores and painful rashes spread across most of his body. He became severely anemic. In the end, whole systems?his liver, kidneys, and ultimately, his heart?simply shut down.”
“Jesus!” Smith murmured, imagining the horrible pain the sick boy must have endured. He frowned. “Those symptoms sound an awful lot like high-level radiation poisoning, Valentin.”
Petrenko nodded. “Yes, that is what we first thought.” He shrugged. “But we could not find any evidence that the boy had ever been exposed to any ra-dioactive material. Not in his home. Not at his school. Not anywhere else.”
“Was the kid infectious?” Smith asked.
“No,” the Russian said, shaking his head emphatically. “No one else around him became ill. Not his parents or his friends or any of those who treated him.” He grimaced. “None of our tests turned up signs of a dangerous viral or bacterial infection and every toxicology exam came back negative. We could not detect any traces of poisons or harmful chemicals that might have done so much damage.”
Smith whistled softly. “Very nasty.”
“It was terrible,” Petrenko agreed. Still clutching his briefcase, the Russian scientist took off his glasses,
