The Venetian Betrayal
Page 13
And millions would die.
A vibration in his pocket startled him.
He located the cell phone, glanced at the display, and answered, his stomach clenching into a familiar knot.
“Viktor,” Zovastina said. “I'm glad I found you. There's a problem.”
He listened as she told him about an incident in Amsterdam, where two Sacred Band members had been killed while trying to obtain a medallion. “The Americans have made official inquires. They want to know why my people were shooting at Secret Service agents. Which is a good question.”
He wanted to say it was probably because they were terrified of disappointing her, so their better judgment had been overridden by recklessness. But he knew better and only noted, “I would have preferred to handle the matter there myself.”
“All right, Viktor. Tonight, I'm conceding this one. You were opposed to the second team and I overruled you.”
He knew better than to acknowledge that concession. Incredible enough she'd offered it. “But you, Minister, want to know why the Americans just happened to be there?”
“That did occur to me.”
“It could be that we've been exposed.”
“I doubt they care what we do. I'm more concerned with our Venetian League friends. Especially the fat one.”
“Still, the Americans were there,” he said.
“Could have been chance.”
“What do they say?”
“Their representatives refused to give any details.”
“Minister,” he said in a hushed tone, “have we finally learned what we're actually after?”
“I've been working on that. It's been slow, but I now know that the key to deciphering Ptolemy's riddle is finding the body that once occupied the Soma in Alexandria. I'm convinced the remains of St. Mark, in the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, are what we're after.”
He'd not heard this before.
“That's why I'm going to Venice. Tomorrow night.”
Even more shocking. “Is that wise?”
“It's necessary. I'll want you with me, at the basilica. You'll need to acquire the other medallion and be at the church by one A.M.”
He knew the proper response. “Yes, Minister.”
“And you never said, Viktor. Do we have the one from Denmark?”
“We do.”
“We'll have to do without the one in Holland.”
He noticed she wasn't angry. Odd considering the failure.
“Viktor, I ordered that the Venetian medallion be last for a reason.”
And now he knew why. The basilica. And the body of St. Mark. But he was still concerned about the Americans. Luckily, he'd contained the Denmark situation. All three of the problems who'd tried to best him were dead and Zovastina need never know.
“I've planned this for some time,” she was saying. “There are supplies waiting for you in Venice, so don't drive, fly. Here's their location.” She provided a warehouse address and an access code for an electronic lock. “What happened in Amsterdam is unimportant. What occurs in Venice…that's vital. I want that last medallion.”
THIRTY-ONE
THE H A G U E
1:10 A.M.
STEPHANIE LISTENED WITH GREAT INTEREST AS EDWIN DAVIS AND President Daniels explained what was happening.
“What do you know about zoonosis?” Davis asked her.
“A disease that can be transmitted from animals to humans.”
“It's even more specific,” Daniels said. “A disease that normally exists harmlessly in animals but can infect humans with devastating results. Anthrax, bubonic plague, ebola, rabies, bird flu, even common ringworm are some of the best-known examples.”
“I didn't realize biology was your strong point.”
Daniels laughed. “I don't know crap about science. But I know a lot of people who do. Tell her, Edwin.”
“There are about fifteen hundred known zoonotic pathogens. Half sit quietly in animals, living off the host, never infecting. But when transmitted to another animal, one for which the pathogen doesn't harbor any paternal instincts, they go wild. That's exactly how bubonic plague began. Rats carried the disease, fleas fed on the rats, then the fleas transmitted the disease to humans, where it ran rampant–”
“Until,” Daniels said, “we developed an immunity to the damn thing. Unfortunately, in the fourteenth century, that took a few decades and, in the meantime, a third of Europe died.”
“The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was a zoonosis, wasn't it?” she asked. Davis nodded. “Jumped from birds to humans, then mutated so it could pass from human to human. And did it ever. Twenty percent of the world actually suffered from the disease. Around five percent of the entire world's population died. Twenty-five million people in the first six months. To put that in perspective, AIDS killed twenty-five million in its first twenty-five years. ”
“And those 1918 numbers are shaky,” Daniels noted. “China and the rest of Asia suffered horribly with no accurate fatality count. Some historians believe that as many as a hundred million may have died worldwide.”
“A zoonotic pathogen is the perfect biological weapon,” Davis said. “All you have to do is find one, whether it be a virus, bacteria, a protozoa, or a parasite. Isolate it, then it can infect at will. If you're clever, two versions could be created. One that only moves from animal to human, so you'd have to directly infect the victim. Another, mutated, that moves from human to human. The first could be used for limited strikes at specific targets, a minimal danger of the thing passing beyond the person infected. The other would be a weapon of mass destruction. Infect a few and the dying never stops.”
She realized what Edwin Davis said was all too real.
“Stopping these things is possible,” Daniels said. “But it takes time to isolate, study, and develop countermeasures. Luckily, most of the known zoonoses have antiagents, a few even have vaccines that prevent wholesale infection. But those take time to develop, and a lot of people would be killed in the meantime.”
Stephanie wondered where this was headed. “Why is all this important?”
Davis reached for a file on the glass-topped table, beside Daniels' bare feet. “Nine years ago a pair of endangered geese was stolen from a private zoo in Belgium. At about the same time, some endangered rodents and a species of rare snails were taken from zoos in Australia and Spain. Usually, this kind of thing is not that significant. But we started checking and found that it's happened at least forty times around the world. The break came last year. In South Africa. The thieves were caught. We covered their arrest with phony deaths. The men cooperated, considering a South African prison is not a good place to spend a few years. That's when we learned Irina Zovastina was behind the thefts.”
“Who ran that investigation?” she asked.
“Painter Crowe at Sigma,” Daniels said. “Lots of science here. That's their specialty. But now it's passed into your realm.”
She didn't like the sound of that. “Sure Painter can't keep it?”
Daniels smiled. “After tonight? No, Stephanie. This one's all yours. Payback for me saving your hide with the Dutch.”
The president still held the elephant medallion, so she asked, “What does that coin have to do with anything?”
“Zovastina has been collecting these,” Daniels said. “Here's the real problem. We know she's amassed a pretty hefty inventory of zoonoses. Twenty or so at last count. And by the way, she's been clever, she has multiple versions. Like Edwin said, one for limited strikes, the other for human-to-human transmission. She operates a biological lab near her capital in Samarkand. But, interestingly, Enrico Vincenti has another bio lab just across the border, in China. One Zovastina likes to visit.”
“Which was why you wanted fieldwork on Vincenti?”
Davis nodded. “Pays to know the enemy.”
“The CIA has been cultivating leaks inside the Federation,” Daniels said, shaking his head.
“Hard going. And a mess. But we've made a li
ttle progress.”
Yet she detected something. “You have a source?”
“If you want to call it that,” the president said. “I have my doubts. Zovastina is a problem on many levels.”
She understood his dilemma. In a region of the world where America possessed few friends, Zovastina had openly proclaimed herself one. She'd been helpful several times with minor intelligence that had thwarted terrorist activity in Afghanistan and Iraq. Out of necessity, the United States had provided her with money, military support, and sophisticated equipment, which was risky.
“Ever hear the one about the man driving down the highway who saw a snake lying in the middle of the road?”
She grinned. Another of Daniels' famed stories.
“The guy stopped and saw that the snake was hurt. So he took the thing home and nursed it back to health. When the snake recovered, he opened the front door to let it go. But as the rattler crawled out, the damn thing bit him on the leg. Just before the venom drove him to unconsciousness, he called out to the snake, 'I took you in, fed you, doctored your wounds, and you repaid that by biting me?' The snake stopped and said, 'All true. But when you did that you knew I was a snake.'”
She caught the message.
“Zovastina,” the president said, “is up to something and it involves Enrico Vincenti. I don't like biological warfare. The world outlawed it over thirty years ago. And this form is the worst kind. She's planning something awful, and that Venetian League, of which she and Vincenti are members, is right there helping her. Thankfully, she's not acted. But we have reason to believe she may soon start. The damn fools surrounding her, in what they loosely call nations, are oblivious to what's happening. Too busy worrying about Israel and us. She's using that stupidity to her advantage. She thinks I'm stupid, too. It's time she knew that we're on to her.”
“We would have preferred to stay in the shadows a bit longer,” Davis said. “But two Secret Service agents killing her guardsmen has surely sounded an alarm.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Daniels yawed and she smothered one of her own. The president waved his hand. “Go ahead. Hell, it's the middle of the night. Don't mind me. Yawn away. You can sleep on the plane.”
“Where am I going?”
“Venice. If Mohammed won't come to the mountain, then by God we'll bring the mountain to him.”
THIRTY-TWO
V E N I C E
8:50 A.M.
VINCENTI ENTERED THE MAIN SALON OF HIS PALAZZO AND READIED himself. Usually, he did not bother with these types of presentations. After all, Philogen Pharmaceutique employed an extensive marketing and sales department with hundreds of employees. This, however, was something special, something that demanded only his presence, so he'd arranged for a private presentation at his home.
He noticed that the outside advertising agency, headquartered in Milan, seemed to have taken no chances. Four representatives, three females and a male, one a senior vice president, had been dispatched to brief him.
“Damaris Corrigan,” the vice president said in English, introducing herself and her three associates. She was an attractive woman, in her early fifties, dressed in a dark blue, chalk-striped suit.
Off to the side, coffee steamed from a silver urn. He walked over and poured himself a cup.
“We couldn't help but wonder,” Corrigan said, “is something about to happen?”
He unbuttoned his suit jacket and settled into an upholstered chair. “What do you mean?”
“When we were retained six months ago, you wanted suggestions on marketing a possible HIV
cure. We wondered then if Philogen was on the brink of something. Now, with you wanting to see what we have, we thought maybe there'd been a breakthrough.”
He silently congratulated himself. “I think you voiced the operative word. Possible. Certainly, it's our hope to be first with a cure–we're spending millions on research–but if a breakthrough were to happen, and you never know when that's going to occur, I don't want to be caught waiting months for an effective marketing scheme.” He paused. “No. Nothing to this point, but a little preparedness is good.”
His guest acknowledged the explanation with a nod, then she paraded to a waiting easel. He shot a glance at one of the women sitting next to him. A shapely brunette, not more than thirty or thirty-five, in a tight-fitting wool skirt. He wondered if she was an account executive or just decoration.
“I've done some fascinating reading over the past few weeks,” Corrigan said. “HIV seems to have a split personality, depending on what part of the globe you're studying.”
“There's truth to that observation,” he said. “Here, and in places like North America, the disease is reasonably containable. No longer a leading cause of death. People simply live with it. Symptomatic drugs have reduced the mortality rate by more than half. But in Africa and Asia it's an entirely different story. Worldwide, last year, three million died of HIV.”
“And that's what we did first,” she said. “Identified our projected market.”
She folded back the blank top sheet on the pad affixed to the easel, revealing a chart.
“These figures represent the latest incidents of worldwide HIV infections.”
REGIONS
NUMBER
North America
1,011,000
Western Europe
988,000
Australia-Pacifica
22,000
Latin America
1,599,000
Sub-Saharan Africa
20,778,000
Caribbean
536,000
Eastern Europe
2,000
Southeast Mediterranean
893,000
Northeast Asia
6,000
Southeast Asia
11,277,000
Total
37,112,000
“What's the data source?” Vincenti asked.
“World Health Organization. And this represents the total current market available for any cure.” Corrigan flipped to the next page. “This chart fine-tunes the available market. As you can see, the data shows roughly a quarter of worldwide HIV infections have already resulted in a manifestation of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Nine million HIV-infected individuals now have full-blown AIDS.”
REGIONS
NUMBER
North America
555,000
Western Europe
320,500
Australia-Pacifica
14,000
Latin America
573,500
Sub-Saharan Africa
6,300,000
Caribbean
160,500
Eastern Europe
10,800
Southeast Mediterranean
15,000
Northeast Asia
17,600
Southeast Asia
1,340,000
Total
9,306,900
Corrigan flipped to the next chart. “This shows the projections for five years from now. Again, this data came from the World Health Organization.”
REGIONS
ESTIMATE
North America
8,150,000
Western Europe
2,331,000
Australia-Pacifica
45,000
Latin America
8,554,000
Sub-Saharan Africa
33,609,000
Caribbean
6,962,000
Eastern Europe
20,000
Southeast Mediterranean
3,532,000
Northeast Asia
486,000
Southeast Asia
45,059,000
Total
108,748,000
“Amazing. We could soon have one hundred ten million people infected, worldwide, with HIV. Current statistics indicate that fifty percent of these individuals will eventually develop AIDS. Forty percent of that fifty percent
will be dead within two years. Of course, the vast majority of these will be in Africa and Asia.” Corrigan shook her head. “Quite a market, wouldn't you say?”
Vincenti digested the figures. Using a mean of seventy million HIV cases, even at a conservative five thousand euros per year for treatment, any cure would initially generate three hundred and fifty billion euros. True, once the initial infected population was cured, the market would dwindle. So what? The money would be made. More than anyone could ever spend in a lifetime. Later, there'd surely be new infections and more sales, not the billions the initial campaign would generate, but a continuous windfall nonetheless.
“Our next analysis involved a look at the competition. From what we've been able to learn from the WHO, roughly sixteen drugs are now being used globally for the symptomatic treatment of AIDS. There are roughly a dozen players in this game. The sales from your own drugs were just over a billion euros last year.”
Philogen owned patents for six medicines that, when used in conjunction with others, had proven effective in arresting the virus. Though it took, on average, about fifty pills a day, the so-called cocktail therapy was all that really worked. Not a cure, the deluge of medication simply confused the virus, and it was only a matter of time before nature outsmarted the microbiologists. Already, drug-resistant HIV strains had emerged in Asia and China.
“We took a look at the combination treatments,” Corrigan said. “A three-drug regimen costs on average about twenty thousand euros a year. But that form of treatment is basically a Western luxury. It's nonexistent in Africa and Asia. Philogen donates, at reduced costs, medications to a few of the affected governments, but to treat those patients similarly would cost billions of euros a year, money no African government has to spend.”
His own marketing people had already told him the same thing. Treatment was not really an option for the ravaged third world. Stopping the spread of HIV was the only cost-effective method to attack the crisis. Condoms were the initial instrument of choice, and one of Philogen's subsidiaries couldn't make the things fast enough. Sales had risen in the thousands of percent over the course of the last two decades. And so had profits. But, of late, the use of condoms had steadily dropped. People were becoming complacent.
Corrigan was saying, “According to its own propaganda, one of your competitors, Kellwood-Lafarge, spent more than a hundred million euros on AIDS-cure research last year alone. You spent about a third of that.”