Biowar

91

There was a guard in the hall and another on the door. Karr decided his best bet was the window.

The only problem was the window was twenty stories above the ground.

He knocked on the door of apartment 22D, directly above the one where Bai had told him Kegan was holed up. To his surprise, the door opened immediately.

“Hello,” he told the old woman who answered. “I’m here to wash the windows.”

He walked inside as the woman stood at the door looking at him, dumbfounded — obviously she didn’t speak English, much less need to have her windows cleaned.

Karr pulled off his backpack and pointed to the window.

“Got to take a look at it,” he told her.

The woman began talking to him in Thai. Karr ignored her, walking to the large plate glass window at the far end of the living room.

“Double-insulated. Figures.” He nodded at her, then took out the souped-up RotoZip cordless drill from his pack. The diamond tip on the bit quickly made it through the glass; he moved down as if he were working with a piece of plasterboard. He reached the bottom and turned left.

“Torque on these suckers makes it hard to get a perfect straight line, you know?” he said cheerfully. “But we’re in a little bit of a hurry here.”

As he turned the comer up, the bit broke.

“I hate that,” he said, pulling the drill out. “Don’t you hate that?”

The woman reached and picked up the phone.

“You got the phone, right, Rockman?”

“Cho’s taking the call right now.”

“Yeah, well, double-check, okay? You told me there was no one in this apartment.”

“Sorry. The image from the Kite looked clean.”

“You check on our guy?”

“I’m looking at the thermal image right now,” said Rockman. The feed was coming from a Kite robot aircraft Karr had launched before coming upstairs.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Smile.”

Karr waved out the window at the Kite, then went back to work. He intended on using a suction gripper to pull the glass piece inside and left the right comer intact. But before he could put the gripper on — the device looked like the plunger end of a plumber’s helper — the glass broke and fell, fortunately into an open courtyard.

The old woman was now talking into the telephone to a translator at the Art Room, who was telling her that the “odd white giant” who had invaded her house was looking for marauding insects. Karr, meanwhile, set an anchor in the wall. He tugged, then tugged again.

“Ready for me?” he asked Rockman.

“Let’s go for it.”

Tommy edged through the window space, holding on to the ledge. The Kite, meanwhile, swooped below, zooming against the window of 20D. As it hit, the small charge of explosive in its nose exploded. Karr dropped the twenty feet or so to the window so quickly that he found himself in a cloud of dust as he kicked out the rest of the window and dropped inside.

“Your right, your right,” Rockman coached in his ear.

Karr swung up his A-2 as the door opened. The guard got off one shot before the fusillade of bullets from Tommy’s gun carried him back out into the hallway, dead. By the time Karr got out there, the other man had fled.

“He’s in the apartment, on the left. Alone,” said Rockman. But Karr had already seen Dr. Kegan, sitting with a blanket pulled around him in the large chair at the side of the room.

“Who are you?” asked Kegan calmly when Karr returned.

Karr stretched his arms and shoulders and began pulling off his knapsack. “Name’s Kjartan Magnor Karr. Most people, though, call me Tommy. Kind of a long story why.”

“How’d you find me?”

“I had some help. You missed your meeting, Doctor. CDC and FBI guys were worried about you.”

“Couldn’t be avoided.”

“That go for the rat-bite fever, too?”

Kegan frowned.

“Why’d you sell it?” asked Karr.

“I ran out of money.”

Karr pulled over a chair and sat down.

“Want to talk to me about it?” asked Karr.

“Not really.”

“Might as well, though.” Karr pointed at his stomach. “Pancreatic cancer?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Well, a friend of yours mentioned it. But he was under the impression it was cured.”

Kegan gave him a funny smile.

“You really don’t cure that, do you? One of our doctors mentioned there really isn’t a cure. Sooner or later you die. Sooner, right? You’ve lasted a long time.”

“I’m right in the probability curve,” said Kegan. “Funny how those things work.”

“You found out eighteen months ago.”

“Twenty-four. At first I did the treatments, you know? Not really because I thought they would work. Just because I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You came here for a cure?”

“No. Not really.”

Karr nodded. “So you wanted to take care of the people who’d killed your girlfriend in the seventies. Long time to hold a grudge.”

“They changed my life. They ruined it.” Kegan shifted in the chair, drawing his legs up under him. He’d lost a great deal of weight recently; the skin hung off his face. “Though I suppose it’s at least spared her this, seeing me waste away.”

“Sucks.”

“You don’t know the half of it. I can’t eat. I can barely drink.”

“Actually, I do know the feeling. Or at least something like it. I caught your disease.”

Kegan stared at him for a moment, trying to see if he was telling the truth or not. “You caught it?”

“From your cat.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“It’s all right. The old lady’s penicillin cured me. That cured the guerrillas, right? Or some of them, anyway. That’s what screwed up your plan — they got better.”

“I didn’t mean for anyone else to get hurt. I took precautions. The disease wasn’t that easy to spread.”

Karr pulled out his handheld computer. “Would you mind telling me exactly what you did?”

Slowly, the doctor began to tell his story.

Thirty years before, as a young medical volunteer, Kegan had met the love of his life while a volunteer with the World Health Organization. She was killed by one of the rebel groups; he’d told the story many times to Dean.

Over the years, as the fortunes of the group had varied, Kegan had kept track. He’d gone to Thailand several times in fact, to gather more information and to consider how to take revenge. Once he’d even hired a Burmese gangster to make a hit, but by then the leader of the guerrilla group had once more fallen from grace and was in the hills.

The work on germ warfare, though he’d stopped working in the field, suggested the possibility, and his early experience with the disease had made him familiar with the organism. Still, he had worked on it off and on for many years before discovering precisely how to do it.

And then he had hesitated. Not until the cancer did he decide. He had needed help, however, to get the disease to the guerrilla camp. He was fortunate that many of those who had known him when he was a young man owed their lives or their loved ones’ lives to him. Mr. Bai had been one.

Kegan had not told Bai or anyone else what precisely he was doing. Yet somehow the Pole found out. When he contacted Kegan, he panicked and alerted the FBI and CDC.

“He had someone with the people Bai sent to the camp before you arrived,” explained Karr. “He simply watched what was going on. He could tell from some of the items you ordered through Bai the nature of things. I mean, what’s a hotel need petri dishes for, right?”

Kegan nodded and continued. He came to Thailand himself; posing as a sympathetic member of Amnesty International, he visited the guerrillas and poisoned them, lacing their food and drinking water. He was gone before the disease took hold.

He had to make sure it had worked, and so he sent his assistant there to check on rumors of disease.

“It worked, but you didn’t get everyone because of the cure. So you had to go back. But your money was spent; you needed connections. So you talked to the Pole,” suggested Karr.

Kegan nodded.

“I had already begun to negotiate when the guerrilla arrived to kill me,” said Kegan. “Fortunately, he stood out rather starkly in Athens, New York.”

“The man who came to your house—”

“They found my assistant here and probably tortured him. I’m not sure what’s happened to him, but I’m sure he must have been the link, not Bai.”

“Wait — you were negotiating?” asked Karr. “You were talking to the Pole, the guy with the company UKD, right?”

Kegan nodded. “I had no other way of getting money. I had already put two mortgages on my house.”

“You sold him the bacteria in exchange for his help.”

“I gave him one of the strands that had failed. I promised the medicine as well,” said Kegan. “The Pole can’t kill anyone. The strains are useless. They cause slight stomach discomfort. They show up in subjects, but they’re not fatal. I’m not a fool, Mr. Karr. I don’t hate the human race. I just hated the people who killed Krista.”