by John Ringo
Attentive silence met this statement.
“Dr. Curry, over to you.”
Curry was getting into the swing of things. His grin was equal parts enthusiasm and evil genius as he tapped a key on his notebook PC, starting a short clip of an infected secured to a hospital gurney. It couldn’t move, but the gurney shook from the zombie’s struggles. The video froze on a close up the snapping jaws.
“Meet the source of our vaccine.”
* * *
Below the conference room windows, Newark Penn Station provided a gemmed backdrop for the Cosa Nova evening meeting running into its third hour. Matricardi took a last drag and spoke as smoke filtered out from his nose, flavoring the air.
“Joey,” the mob boss said, grinding out the cigarette. “Out of twelve bodies, we only got twenty doses. That’s less than a third of the rate that Bank of the Americas is getting. Or at least, telling us they’re getting.”
Matricardi rolled a little vial around in his hand.
“What’s the deal?”
“It’s harder than the bank instructions made it sound,” Tradittore said, cautiously feeling out his boss. “Getting the spinal cords out without tearing ’em is a finicky job. The job itself, well it’s pretty horrible so our guys tend to hurry through it. Basically, what we’re doing is cutting up people. It takes a…certain kinda guy to be comfortable with that. We don’t got as many people with the right mindset as you’d think. Also, the metering of the radiation used to damage the viral DNA while leaving the virus itself sufficiently intact to provoke an immune response is…well, it’s finicky too. We’ve spoiled some batches because we don’t have a well-trained radiologist. The bank’s got a fuckin’ microbiologist doing this. We got Tony Too-Smart runnin’ our machine.”
Tony, like the rest of the audience, wisely stayed silent.
The gangster looked out the window, listening. Tradittore couldn’t clearly see Matricardi’s face, and paused until his boss waved on hand in a circular “keep going” motion.
“Collecting the zombies ain’t a picnic, either. We lost two guys who got themselves bit during the first week.”
Matricardi looked back.
“What did you do with them?”
“You’re holding it.”
The Aeron Miller clicked a bit as the taller Sicilian leaned back in his chair, contemplating the vial as the lights struck golden highlights from the vial.
“Well, waste not, want not, I suppose,” the mobster said.
He stretched an arm towards the buffet along the wall, and Khabayeva uncrossed her long legs and moved to open the humidor. She held up a Romeo Y Julieta and raised an eyebrow.
“No, no—something else. The Davidoff.”
As she clipped and lit the cigar Matricardi turned back to the table. He set the ampoule of vaccine down on the rich wood of the table with a slight tick.
“You mentioned that the competition is getting stiffer?”
Tradittore’s eyes followed the brunette’s motions as she rolled the cigar in her long fingers, evenly starting the ember and shaking the long wooden match out before handing the lit cigar to Matricardi.
“We gotta couple trucks that we roll after dark, looking for obviously infected people, but usually we listen to the Essex County scanner.” He looked back to his boss. “If we hear a 10-54, we try to beat the cops to the location. Sometimes we do, but even if the cops don’t get there first, there’s an even chance that Overture’s guys, a team from the Triads or some other freelancers are laying claim.”
Overture was the emerging power in New York. His Afro-Caribbean organization had consolidated power in Queens and Brooklyn and now vied for ascendancy with the Triads in Manhattan. The smart money seemed to be on Overture.
Matricardi blew smoke across the room and ruminated on the cigar.
“Nice.” He glanced at the only woman in the room. “What do you think, Risky? You always tell me that you’re more than a pretty face. So, fine, show me that I don’t keep you around just because you’re gorgeous.”
“What we need are some specialized skills and to tighten up the organization.” She recrossed her legs. “Reduce the wastage of, what did Joey call them?”
“Assets,” Tradittore volunteered, his eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly.
“Assets.” If the topic made Khabayeva queasy, it certainly didn’t show. “We need to utilize them efficiently—no waste. Also, we need stop wasting collection opportunities by competing with cops and other organizations. The first one is simple. The second one is harder. Who can talk to cops, to other competitors and be believed by all? The bankers.”
Tradittore leaned forward.
“Wait a second: Simple?” he asked with a smirk. “This I got to hear. You know a better way to cut off some poor stiff’s head and pull his spinal cord out without snapping it or getting infected yourself?”
Matricardi eyed them both.
Khabayeva first met his glance and then looked back to the younger man.
“Is simple,” she said, waving a hand dismissively. “Find butcher. A doctor. A coroner. A funeral home director. All of them would have a better understanding of how to extract the spinal cord. So, hire them, or bribe them, or…encourage them some other way.”
“I like the funeral home director idea the best.” She tapped the table with a long burgundy nail. “They have ways to dispose of the bodies—is one less thing.”
Tradittore sat back slightly, deflated.
His boss looked first at his deputy and then at Oldryskya.
“That’s not half bad,” Matricardi said with a grunt. “Okay—Tradittore, set it up. I’ll call Smith and see about the second thing.”
He looked appraisingly at the woman again.
“Not half bad at all.”
Without moving his eyes away from her he addressed the rest of the room.
“Meetings over. Beat it.”
Khabayeva stayed seated.
* * *
“If this works, then perimeter security issue gets much easier!” Durante exclaimed, examining his new toy.
The patch test kit resembled a single use diabetes monitor. Blood from a fine catheter passed through a membrane and then was introduced to a color sensitive paper patch. If the antibodies for H7 were present, it turned red. The failure rate was unhelpfully high—it would have never passed FDA testing—but it was better than nothing. Different models of varying degrees of accuracy were proliferating across the country.
“Will it get so much easier that you’ll catch the next infected employee that wanders into the HVAC room,” Smith asked, barely bothering to coat the steel in his words with a bare minimum of humor. “And thereby prevent my niece from having to beat it to death with a K-11?”
Faith Smith, having been thoroughly disarmed—who gives a Saiga to a thirteen-year-old, really!—and a building engineer named Schmidt who had been assigned as tour guide tasked to give her a familiarization tour of the skyscraper’s infrastructure had found a zombie feeding on a recent kill. Inside his bank. She’d brained the afflicted former bank employee with a security baton that she’d been surreptitiously lent by a sympathetic guard. Then she had to deal with the emotional consequences of her first kill—not to mention, her uncle then had the pleasure of explaining the event to her parents.
Tom Smith wasn’t going to let his new head of building security forget it.
Dr. Curry was demonstrating the kit and testing everyone present at the daily Plan Zeus team meeting. He moved to Tom Smith’s side.
Wincing, the tall Australian held out a hand and looked in the other direction while Curry wielded the test.
He couldn’t see Durante from this angle, but he could hear the grin.
“Boss, are you still scared of an itsy-bitsy needle?”
“Answer in the first part,” Tom said, looking across the table. “It’s a well-known fact that needles are the source of all that is evil in the world. So, yes. Answer in the second part. Find something els
e for Faith do. Something safe. Filing. Hand folding pull-outs. Temp admin work. Something that keeps her in secure areas. Hell, spin it off to Rune.”
At the end of the table, Rune winced. He had heard about the…challenges of reining in the younger Smith girl.
“Also, answer in the third part,” Tom continued. “Gravy, thank you for volunteering to escort Brad on a little trip! You must remember to send us a postcard from picturesque Eastern Europe.” Smith dabbed at his finger with a Betadine patch, his eyes glinting.
“And…this one is negative too.” Curry was personally reading each kit and then dropping them into a bin proffered by Sophia Smith, before the pair moved onto the next person.
“Eastern Europe?” Durante looked over to their financier, who was looking unhappy but no real help, then returned his gaze to Tom. “How far east? Belgrade, Budapest…?”
Mostly blank looks answered his sally. However, Tom made a little “come on” gesture.
“Sofia…Kiev…” Durante continued, “Tbilisi…”
“Warmer…” Tom said, holding up his palm. “Your job, once you have read the packet is to figure out the details.”
He slid a thick folder down the table.
“If we don’t either dramatically increase asset collection, or per-asset realization, we aren’t going to make our numbers for the planned courses of H7D3 vaccine,” Tom said, turning serious. “I’ve no desire to buy from Overture or Matricardi—their Q and A isn’t anything like ours. For that matter, Overture is starting to run his own coordination with some of the police precincts. If he gets tight with them, he can squeeze the banks. I’m going to try to head that off, but you and Brad are going to see if we can buy what we need.”
Durante was still grinning. Big adventure! His erstwhile travel partner wasn’t happy.
“Are we certain that the samples we collected from the London office came from this group?” Depine asked, reading an e-mail on his tablet.
“Not sure,” Tom shrugged but stabbed a map of eastern Europe with his finger. “We know that there is a large-scale production center of pharmaceutical grade vaccine at least as good as the best we are manufacturing. We are confident that it is originating in Eastern Europe, but not Russia or Belarus. Current intel points to a semiautonomous region of the country of Georgia…And we think that the actual producers didn’t start out as a pharmaceutical operation…”
“The beer company?” Durante asked. “Didn’t they mix it up with the Chechens a while back…?”
“The same,” Tom said. “Also mercenaries for hire according to our NatSec intel group. And now believed to be producing high-quality vaccine in saleable quantities. Part of the background data on them is they have a long-term relationship with a former Russian/Soviet bioweapons expert. Presumably he’s the one in charge of vaccine production. Fly to Tblisi, make delicate inquiries, find the wholesalers, get us that vaccine.”
“Why send me?” Depine didn’t quite whine. “I’m not a biologist. Besides, air travel right now isn’t safe!”
“Simple math,” Smith replied, his tone hardening even further. “The board approved a global vaccination plan that will support up to thirty-thousand staff and dependents. We aren’t confident that we’re going to get to that number—so we need to buy more. If we buy from Overture or one of the others we run the risk of subpar quality as well as giving up leverage that we can’t afford to sacrifice just yet. So, it’s the two of you against potentially another few thousand courses of vaccine. I’ll take that bet. You’re a deal maker. Durante finds the wholesale source, you make the deal. Cause, admittedly, Gravy can’t negotiate for shit.”
Durante looked hurt. Depine opened his mouth but Tom cut him off.
“Lastly—you started off weeks ago by bitching about the costs when I wanted to initiate Zeus,” Tom said, his eyes cold behind his smile. “So, while all your fat-ass buddies stay here nice and safe in New York, you get to go haring off into the wilds to be the bag man and negotiator. The G6 is over at FBO. Three pilots, all vaccinated, just like yourself. Mr. Bateman has authorized five hundred kilos of bullion and another twenty million in specie. We need that vaccine. Make the best deal you can make, Brad. You screwed up my well-laid plans for just such an emergency once. Do it again, you won’t like the consequences.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Kaplan’s nose itched. He wasn’t certain which of Smith’s guests wore the offending scent—it seemed to be more sandalwood than floral, but that didn’t really refine the possible suspects. The OEM director wore a uniform every bit as formal as the visiting cops’ blues or his own boss’s tailored suit. It certainly was less colorful than the Cosa Nova boss’s white lapel carnation. The former operator carefully refrained from scratching his nose and concentrated on the principals while still keeping a careful eye cocked at their security.
The visitors had arrived in three parties. The NYPD contingent included several plainclothes cops, two of whom had rather obvious and unnecessary briefcases which they carefully sat down to the right of their respective chairs. A suspicious mind might note that they were the right size and shape for a shortened carbine or subgun. A second group consisted of only two gray-suited OEM functionaries, a bearded man and a hatchet-faced woman, each carrying a leather folio and multiple phones. The last group included a squad of what looked like private military contractors, albeit ones with an excess of spray tan and styling gel. Their equipment included double pistol rigs, hung low on the same thigh. That didn’t count the knockout of a brunette who sat behind the head gangster.
The tone of the meeting wasn’t…warm. Both Dominguez, now informally representing the entire Department, and Kohn, providing the same service for the remaining city government, were unhappy that they were sharing a room with a known criminal like Matricardi.
It had taken fifteen minutes to get past the obligatory pleasantries and onto the real business. Smith wanted everyone to turn their cards face up before he popped the question.
“You may need thirty-six thousand doses for the bank, but the department numbers twice that, plus dependents.” Dominguez’s voice was even but intense. “At the rate we are manufacturing, we might have full coverage for the officers in two more months. Probably three. But only if we don’t have to constantly referee the banks, the criminals and independents who are, incidentally, going after the same raw materials that we are. And this asshole”—he jerked his chin towards the Sicilian—“is selling to whoever can meet the price, even as we protect him.”
Matricardi smiled but refrained from comment.
Tom Smith didn’t rise to the bait, but he still replied.
“I’ve got a couple of informal ways to determine how bad things are outside,” Tom said, gesturing to the broad window overlooking the East River. “I measure how long it takes our trucks to fill up every day. Takes rather less nowadays.”
Bank of the Americas, like other interested parties, had been collecting zombies for vaccines for weeks. Smith had labeled the units Biological Emergency Response Teams, or BERTs for short. The name stuck, and the various competing BERTs patrolled, ready to tase and bag zombies for use in vaccine manufacture. That the official PD policy appeared to be “live and let live” strongly suggested that they needed the teams collecting infected rather more than they needed to assert their own primacy.
“But I have been looking out this window since the Fourth of July,” Tom continued. “I check to see how many smoke columns there are, which corresponds to the number of fires not being promptly contained by FDNY. I check the number of reported arrests and detentions, which apart from infected, are way, way down. I look at the amount of traffic on the FDR Parkway. It’s getting a lot lighter. All those things correspond to how many LEO and emergency services we have left. And I can tell that the number is going down, fast. You don’t have fifty thousand cops anymore. After your precinct consolidation, you might have half of that, optimistically.”
The top cop was getting visibly agitated.
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br /> “Understand, Captain Dominguez, I intend no disrespect, but I can’t bring you options if we don’t share the same set of facts,” Tom added placatingly. “And the fact is that the police department is fading.”
“There are plenty of cops,” Dominguez said, standing up abruptly. “Enough to lock the city down. If we get turned loose, we can clear out the five boroughs of the criminals that are profiting from this disease, instead of getting bled dry while they turn a buck.”
He pointed at the New Jersey leader.
“If that happens, then your organization is next. I know that after Overture, you are the second largest illegal vaccine operation in the City.”
“News to me, Captain,” Matricardi said, spreading his hands disarmingly. “But I’m interested in finding more vaccine.”
“We are the NYPD, and you think that you can dictate terms to us?” Dominguez looked angrily towards Smith. “If I think that you’re holding back vaccine that we need, I’ll arrest you here and now. I’m refraining from shooting this asshole,” he added, flinging a hand at the Sicilian, “out of hand only because we have an arrangement with Bank of the Americas—but only with you!”
The tension in the room, which had been inching upwards, shot up several notches.
Tom looked around the room. Three different groups of security guards had gone from tying to out-bland each other to being fully alert, weight on the balls of their feet and hands close to their weapons.
The banker looked to the head of OEM.
“Ms. Kohn, before you allow this to escalate unhelpfully, perhaps you want to hear the entire proposal?”
Ding began to reply but Kohn forestalled him with a raised hand.
“Just before Independence Day weekend, we were running at half the pre-Plague numbers,” she replied. “Last Monday, the number of sworn officers reporting for duty was at thirty-nine percent of pre-Plague levels and dropping.”
The bright light filtering through the skyscraper’s tinted windows drew her face into sharp relief, severe but determined. She regarded Smith steadily.
