Eden's Gate

by David Hagberg

  “Speyer and Baumann are not with them,” Hughes said.

  “Neither is Speyer’s wife,” Frances said.

  Lane sped up around the curve. “Did they pay any special attention to us?”

  “They didn’t seem to be,” Hughes said. “Should I give ASSAF the heads-up?”

  “Not yet. I want you to follow them. My guess is that they’re going to the Baltimore Airport to get out of the country. Which means that this is going down today, not tomorrow night.”

  “Why?” Frances demanded.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he thinks we won’t pay him.” Lane made a U-turn about fifty yards from the driveway to Speyer’s farm. “It leaves the airplane,” he told them, pulling over to the side of the road. “It’s either still here with Speyer and Baumann, or his troops are heading to wherever it’s hidden.”

  He got out of the Rover and Frances slid over to the driver’s side. “Be careful, William.”

  “You, too,” Lane said. “As soon as you find out where they’re headed call in the Special Forces. But Speyer’s people mustn’t be allowed to reach the plane, if that’s where they’re going. And it’d be better if we could avoid a firefight in or around the Baltimore Airport if that’s where they’re headed. A lot of innocent people could get hurt.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around these days,” Frances said.

  Lane slammed the door, stepped back, and waved them off. As Frances headed away he crossed the road and entered the woods, drawing his pistol as he went.

  Baumann drove along an old horse path at the base of the hill behind the house that led down to the shallow creek and up the other side to the Hansen farmstead. The summer morning was delightful; warm, bright, only a few puffy white clouds in the sky, a gentle breeze and the smells of the country in the air. He decided that he could have been happy here. Far happier than in Montana or even in Germany. This was good land. He could have been a farmer.

  He glanced over at Speyer. Staying here was not possible, of course, no matter how right the area felt.

  “We’ve been through a lot together, old friend,” Speyer said, completely misinterpreting Baumann’s expression. “Now we’ve just about made it to the payoff.”

  Baumann nodded. “No more casualties then.”

  Speyer’s expression darkened. “Don’t be tedious, we’ve already covered that.”

  “No, sir. I mean Carl and Hans.”

  “They’re dead men—”

  “Only if you send them the code red and they release the virus. We don’t have to do this. Send the code blue and we can all walk away from this with clear consciences.”

  Speyer laughed. “Only a fool has a conscience, Ernst.” He shook his head. “You know the consequences in the German army for not following orders.”

  Baumann looked away. “Yes, sir,” he said. He automatically scanned the treeline above the farmstead for any sign that Browne had come back and was up there watching them. In a way he wished that it were so, and that this insanity would end.

  “You worry too much,” Speyer said. “Leave that part to me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Baumann replied. He drove up from behind the ramshackle old house and parked in front, out of sight from the creek. They would wait here until the agplane appeared above the trees on its way to Washington. Speyer would push the button and they would drive immediately to the airport at Frederick, about twenty-five miles west, where a charter bizjet and pilot were waiting for them.

  Nothing could be simpler, Baumann thought, than to follow orders. Except he couldn’t shake the vision of tens of thousands of people filling the hospital emergency wards, too weak even to stand, dying horrible, painful, bloody deaths.

  Speyer set up his laptop computer on the SUV’s open rear hatch. He made the telephone link through the equipment in the upstairs bedroom and was connected with the first of his off-shore banks in less than three minutes. A minute later, after entering the proper identification code, he came up with his account, which showed no new transactions.

  His lips compressed. He looked up at Baumann watching him.

  “Nothing yet, Herr Kapitän?”

  Speyer shook his head and brought up the next account. There had been no deposits to it in seventeen months. He tried a third and a fourth account with the same results.

  “They have more than twenty-four hours to act,” Baumann said.

  “They’re not interested in dealing with me, Ernst,” Speyer said. He backed out of his account search, and brought up the White House number. “Sending Browne and that woman here after me proves that much, so before we give the code red we’ll supply them with a little misdirection.”

  From where Lane crouched just within the woods he had a good view of the farmhouse, barn, and outbuildings. Nothing moved, which didn’t mean a thing. At the very least Speyer and Baumann were down there and could be waiting out of sight. The airplane, if it was here, could be locked away in the barn. And there could be one or more of Speyer’s men left behind to watch over it.

  He was to the east of the driveway, the house one hundred yards directly below him, and the barn and other buildings on the other side. Keeping low, he emerged from the woods on the run, zigzagging left and right in an irregular pattern in case a marksman was trying to take a bead on him. He had run out of time for not taking chances. If they saw only one man coming they might not release the virus just yet, thinking instead that they could take care of him.

  He reached the back corner of the house without shots being fired, however, and he stopped to catch his breath. The morning was very quiet. Only a few birds were singing, and if he held his breath and listened hard enough he thought that he could hear the gurgling of the small creek.

  His eyes fell on a rutted track through the grass that led down the hill away from the house. The grass had been flattened very recently. As he watched, some of the taller blades started to spring back. Someone had gone that way just minutes ago. Speyer and Baumann, to the next door farmstead where the telephone equipment was set up.

  Whatever they had planned was starting now. But he had to make sure that no one had been left behind. He didn’t want to take a bullet in the back.

  Around front he mounted the porch and tried the door. It was unlocked. He opened it, held up for a moment to see if he was going to draw any fire, then slipped inside, sweeping his pistol left to right.

  Everyone was gone. The house was deathly still, though he could still smell the lingering odors of breakfast. If anyone was left at this farm they would probably be in the barn. He turned and started for the door when he heard a noise from somewhere upstairs. He spun around, his pistol at the ready, all of his senses alert. He held his breath.

  It sounded like a kitten mewing, perhaps a small animal crying weakly. Whatever was making the noise, he decided, was in pain. As he started up the stairs he had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that he might know what it was.

  Gloria, the side of her head beaten to a bloody pulp, a big pool of blood on the floor between her legs and smeared back across the floor to the middle of the bedroom, lay curled in a fetal position halfway out into the hall. Somehow she had managed to get the door open and crawl this far. Now she could only lie there and cry.

  Lane holstered his pistol and dropped down beside her. Her eyes were open and when she saw who it was, she reached out for his arm.

  “Who did this to you?” Lane asked, keeping his voice soft. A very hard knot had formed in his stomach. “Was it your husband?”

  She blinked her eyes and managed to give a very slight nod. Her grip tightened on Lane’s arm. “Is he gone?” she whispered.

  “I think he went next-door with Ernst. Where is the airplane? Do you know?”

  She blinked furiously as a spasm of pain hit her, and she coughed up a big glob of blood and mucus.

  “I don’t know how soon I can get you help, Gloria,” he told her. “I think that they’re going to use the virus soon, maybe even this morning. You’ll
have to hold on.”

  “Here—” she whispered.

  He leaned closer to her. “I’ll try to do what I can for you, but we have to stop them.”

  “Here,” she whispered again. “The airplane is here.”

  “Where?”

  “In the barn. Heide and Rudolph are with it.” She panted, trying to catch her breath, but even more blood welled from her nose and mouth, and the pool of blood on the floor beneath her was growing.

  Lane wiped her mouth with his handkerchief and gently stroked her face. He took his time with her, although he wanted to race down to the barn. She was only one woman dying here. There were tens of thousands of potential victims in Washington.

  “He’s crazy,” Gloria said. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “But I loved him—” Her eyes went unfocused, came back and then went blank, her body sagging loosely in death.

  Lane sat back on his haunches, and studied her face. She had been a woman who had made bad choices all of her life. But they had been mostly innocent decisions, until she met Speyer.

  He removed her hand from his arm and got to his feet. He took one last look at her, then pulled out his pistol and headed downstairs, his heart harder than it had ever been in his life.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The Oval Office was filled with the president’s advisers and most of his National Security Council, everyone talking at once when Leslie Newby’s voice rose over the others.

  “Mr. President, it’s him on the computer.”

  The president’s advisers had been arguing all morning to no avail for the president to leave Washington. The room abruptly fell silent.

  The president went to the computer on the coffee table in front of Newby and sat down at it. The message on the screen was simple and to the point.

  “There are less than 34 hours remaining. Why have no deposits been made as instructed?”

  A good deal of discussion amongst the president’s advisers had been about the issue they were facing right now. Tell the bastard that he would never get any money from the U.S. government and that he would be hunted down like a rabid animal, or try to stall him by promising him whatever he wanted in order to give Lane and the ASSAF time to do their jobs?

  The president typed his reply. “Why are you doing this? You know that you will get caught.”

  “That is my concern. Yours is the safety of the people who voted you into office. Where is my money?”

  “We need more time.”

  “You have already wasted more than half of the generous amount of time that I allowed you, without so much as a token payment. WHERE IS MY MONEY?????”

  The president glanced up at the expectant faces all watching him. He typed: “You will have your money before the end of your deadline. I hope you rot in hell.”

  This time the president broke the connection as everyone started to talk at once.

  WEST FRIENDSHIP, MARYLAND

  Lane approached the barn from the back where he could look through the cracks between the uneven boards. Speyer had beaten his wife to death with the heel and toe of his boots, by the look of the marks on her head and on her clothing. The woman had been a twit and a lush but nobody deserved a death like that, especially not at the hands of someone she loved. “You’ll be dealing with me before this is over, pal,” he said softly.

  The agplane was parked in the middle of the barn, its nose pointed toward the big double doors, its canopy open. A pair of compact Steyr AUG 9mm Para submachine guns were propped against a tool case a few feet away. A cylinder about the size of a scuba tank was connected under the wing on the left side, and even in the imperfect light Lane spotted the plumbing connections attaching it to a bell-shaped set of three spray nozzles.

  At first it appeared that the barn had been deserted, but then two men came into view from the front of the plane. He recognized both of them from the Kalispell ranch. This time they were dressed in civilian clothes, and they both looked angry, as if they had been arguing.

  They spoke in German, most of which Lane could pick up.

  “We can turn our backs on this, Carl, and you know it,” Rudolph said.

  “We would be on the run for the rest of our lives.”

  “Better than dead.”

  “You heard the Kapitän. We’ll be long gone before the effects are felt in Washington. By the time they know what hit them we will be in Havana.”

  “You dumb bastard, look at the nozzles,” Rudolph shouted. “The entire side of the airplane will be contaminated. No one will be coming for us. We’re dead men.”

  Heide studied the spraying arrangement under the wing, and after a few moments he nodded. “You could be right, unless the Kapitän has brought a neutralizing agent. Something to clear the way for us.”

  Rudolph turned away in disgust, his eyes falling on the crack in the boards where Lane was watching. He hesitated for just an instant before he turned away nonchalantly. Too nonchalantly. “Maybe you’re right after all,” he said, moving toward the weapons.

  Lane sprinted to the front of the barn, flicking the Beretta’s safety catch to the off position. He looked cautiously through a crack in the main doors. Heide and Rudolph, both armed now with the assault rifles, stood covering the rear wall.

  Lane eased one of the doors open just wide enough for him to slip inside. He reached the side of the airplane before they heard anything, and Rudolph turned around.

  “Nobody needs to get hurt here,” Lane said.

  Heide turned around, too, his eyes narrowed, obviously calculating the odds. There were two of them, trained soldiers armed with submachine guns, up against only one civilian armed with nothing more than a pistol.

  “A prison cell is preferable to a slab in the morgue,” Lane said.

  Rudolph glanced at Heide. “Let’s give it up, Carl—”

  Heide started to bring his rifle up and Lane shot him in the chest just below his breast bone, driving him backward off his feet.

  Committed now against his will, Rudolph was bringing the submachine gun to bear when Lane switched aim and fired two shots, one catching him in the groin and the second in the chest in almost exactly the same spot Heide had been hit. He went down on one knee, an almost apologetic look on his face, and then toppled over.

  Lane quickly checked to make sure that both men were dead, then checked the front to make sure that Speyer and Baumann across the creek hadn’t heard the shots and were on the way to investigate. For the moment no one was coming.

  Holstering his pistol, he went back to the airplane and inspected the plumbing and control connections to the tank. It was possible that by trying to disconnect it from the wing he might inadvertently allow some of the virus to escape. The CDC antiterrorist team would be better equipped and qualified for the job. In the meantime, he would make sure that the plane would not be flying any time soon.

  He found a Zeuss fastener tool and quickly undid the twelve fasteners holding a section of the engine cowling in place. When he had it off, he found a pair of wire cutters and began cutting ignition wires and fuel lines and electronic wiring bundles. The job took less than five minutes, but it would take hours, perhaps days, to put the airplane back into flying condition.

  When he was finished, he took one of the submachineguns, slipped out of the barn, and headed to the rear of the house and the path that led across the creek.

  “The president said that we would get paid,” Baumann tried to argue.

  “He was lying,” Speyer said. “Put yourself in their shoes. What would you recommend to the president? That he tell us to go to hell?” Speyer shook his head. “If they were going to pay us anything, they would have started the transfers by now. They’re stalling for time.”

  “Then let’s drive back to the farm, pick up Hans and Carl and leave. We can take both cylinders.”

  “You still don’t understand, do you, Ernst,” Speyer said tightly. It was almost impossible to keep on track, to keep from exploding with rage. How
easy it would be to pull out his gun and put a couple of rounds into Sergeant Baumann’s complaining face.

  “You want to demonstrate the weapon, yes, I know this, Herr Kapitän. But those are innocent people in Washington. Women and children. And the sample we sent to the White House has been analyzed by now. They know what we have. No need for us to take any more risks.”

  “There will be no further risks to us,” Speyer replied. “The weapon will be delivered, Carl and Hans will die, and we will be long gone before anyone is the wiser. Then, in a few months, we will open the bidding on our weapon from a position of safety.”

  “You’re forgetting Browne—”

  “If it was actually him, something I’m starting to find hard to believe, why hasn’t he returned with the authorities?”

  Baumann had no immediate answer.

  Speyer keyed the walkie-talkie. “Unit one, code red. I repeat the message. Unit one, code red, code red.”

  Baumann shuddered, but then the moment passed and he looked down toward the line of woods where they would be seeing the airplane take off in a few minutes. “Jetzt, er ist fertig,” he mumbled. Now it is finished.

  Speyer was suddenly in good spirits. He packed up his laptop and put it and the walkie-talkie in the back of the SUV along with their luggage and scuba equipment. A little diving vacation. It was just what the doctor ordered, they would tell anyone who asked.

  Baumann went into the house to get the telephone equipment while Speyer got out a pair of binoculars and scanned the tree line across the creek. He took out the detonator control and laid it on the open tailgate, and then checked the tree line again.

  Patience was not one of his virtues. He had fought the problem all of his life. Most of the time he had been surrounded with stupid, dull people who were always a couple of steps behind him. He had learned to control himself, to slow down, to let them catch up. But it wasn’t easy.