He didn’t reply.
The voice said, “Listen to the lady.” He added, “You have five seconds before you never see the light again.” He counted, “One.”
Brodie got himself—or the other guy deep inside him—under control and moved in the dark toward Taylor and Kim.
The light came on and the voice said, “Sit.”
Brodie sat near Taylor, who had her hand on Kim’s wrist, checking his pulse. She looked at Brodie and shook her head.
The voice said, “Do not move from there.”
Brodie shouted, “Get a doctor here!”
The voice replied, “Mr. Kim has already seen a doctor—Dr. Dorn.” There was a laugh, and the speaker was silent.
Kim went into a violent coughing fit and blood foamed up on his lips.
Brodie pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to Kim, who wiped his mouth.
Taylor said, “We’ve been exposed to something.”
Which, thought Brodie, was not too hard to believe. Harry Vance hadn’t been carrying that microscope slide of plague around as a good luck charm. Also in that slideshow were Stefan Richter, Storkow, David Katz’s lab report, and Reinhard Dorn’s cool, clinical lecture.Plague.
He looked at David Kim, who was in pulmonary distress. Brodie took a deep breath. His lungs were clear. He looked at Taylor, who also seemed to be breathing normally.
Taylor said to Kim, “David, you may have been injected with something.”
David Kim, who had been thinking about all of this and apparently had some acquired knowledge of the subject, shook his head and said, “It’s… airborne. Probably… pneumonic plague.”
Brodie looked at the canister in the middle of the room. Was this possible?
Kim continued, “Not like bubonic… attacks the lungs… and it’sprobably delivered as an aerosol… or…”—he nodded toward the empty canister—“… crystal form that vaporizes in the air…” He had another coughing fit and wiped his mouth with Brodie’s handkerchief.
Taylor said to Kim, “But we—Scott and I—we feel okay.”
Kim caught his breath, then looked at Taylor and Brodie, who seemed in much better shape than he was. “What’s the difference… between me… and the two of you?”
Brodie and Taylor looked at each other. Taylor appeared shaken. “That’s… Is that possible?”
David Kim, who had spent his career imagining and planning for all the horrifying weapons a terrorist might invent or acquire, nodded. He was silent a moment, then said, “Biogenetic weapon. Targets gene profiles. Like… ethnic markers. In theory. No one thought it was possible. But if anyone could pull it off… it would be these bastards.” He went into another coughing fit, and leaned over as blood ran out of his mouth and pooled on the floor between his legs. He stared at the splatter of blood-red sputum and said, “Genocide…”
Brodie and Taylor were silent. Brodie thought again about the specimen slide that Harry Vance had had in his pocket and about the Stasi bio and chemical facility at Storkow. And he also thought about Reinhard Dorn asking David Kim about his ancestry. But most of all, he thought about neo-Nazis—they could drop the “neo”—and about the multicultural society that Berlin and Germany—and Europe—had become.Muslims Out. And, while they were at it, everyone else out too, except the white race. He looked at David Kim, who was clearly very sick—and he and Taylor were not.
Brodie tried to wrap his mind around all this. An ethnic bioweapon—a genetically engineered bacteria that was only pathogenic to people with a specific gene signature. Or… the other way around—it was pathogenic to everyoneexceptpeople who had certain genetic markers that were common to the Caucasian race… Was that really possible? Well… in an age when the genetic code could be manipulated down to the finest detail—or even printed into existence from base components using the kinds of laboratory machines that Brodie had seen at Hyperion Lab—then, yes, maybe it was possible. In fact, such techniques were used every day for good purposes: cures for disease in humans, animals, and plant life… Brodie thought of thebowl of apples on Dorn’s desk. He thought, too, of the Nazis and their Aryan racial programs, which were bogus science, and dependent on breeding, which was unreliable, and also dependent on genocide by bullets and poison gas, which were messy, inefficient, and time- and resource-consuming. The new Nazis, however, had gene-splicing. He recalled the Titan Genetics PR video:The applications for this technology are as infinite as the human imagination.
Holy shit.
He looked at FBI Special Agent David Kim, who was now a live specimen in a grotesque laboratory experiment. Brodie had no doubt that Dorn and his mad scientists had already used human beings to see if their bioengineering worked. But live human specimens were not that easy to come by, so these experiments must have been limited and maybe the results were not conclusive. But then along come Scott Brodie, Maggie Taylor, and David Kim, wanting to see Herr Doktor Reinhard Dorn, and lucky them, they’re admitted to the sanctum of the head honcho, who sees an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: getting rid of three nosy American criminal investigators, and logging in another experiment.
Reinhard Dorn was out of his fucking mind. A total head case. But… never underestimate the insane; they may be crazy, but they’re not stupid.
Another thought was that Dorn must know that the authorities were getting close to him. Brodie, Taylor, and Kim hadn’t shown up at Titan Genetics on a hunch or a whim. And the three Americans must have told their supervisors where they were going. They hadn’t, actually, but Dorn didn’t know that.
The only conclusion Brodie could come to was that something was going to happen. Soon. And whatever that was, it would be big enough and bad enough to give Dorn and his co-conspirators all the cover they needed to avoid the consequences of their lunatic plans.
A sound came from the door, and it swung open.
A man in his twenties stepped into the room. He wore green camo fatigues and boots and carried an assault rifle. He stepped to his left and stationed himself next to the door, holding his rifle across his chest. After him came a woman, also in her twenties and in full camo, pushing a metal cart with equipment. She was attractive, but dead-faced, and wore a whitearmband with the red cross of a medic. The door shut behind her, and Brodie heard someone slide a bolt lock.
