Black Rose

CHAPTER 24

The clinic was in an impoverished village named Sao Benedito, a tiny dot located on the edge of the Raposa Serra do Sol Indian Reservation in the northernmost tip of Brazil. The village consisted of about forty houses built from mud, wood and palm leaves. Behind the houses were garden plots and a few animals kept by the villagers for milk and food. Most of the villagers eked out a minimal existence as farmers. The clinic treated a variety of infections and injuries brought on by work, nature and too much cachaca at the local bar on a weekend night.

The Indians lived on a vast tract of tropical forest, rivers, broad savannahs and tall mountains. It was a beautiful place, a hunting and fishing paradise. With the beauty came danger and the possibility of sudden, unpleasant death. Poisonous snakes and insects, giant spiders, vampire bats and the occasional jaguar made life interesting. The people who lived on the reservation came to the clinic for emergency treatment when the traditional healing ways had failed. The government stayed away from the area as much as possible and the village was remote. In short, it was perfect for Karl Schmidt's needs.

Schmidt loved field work. He was an avid outdoorsman, hiking the mountains near Zurich as often as possible. Krivi indulged him with a month's holiday each year, a European tradition that Schmidt used to book travel to exotic locations. He'd never been to Brazil and had been looking forward to it. The beauty of the land was better than he'd hoped for. It was secondary, of course. He hadn't come to sightsee.

He'd come to kill.

The destruction of the laboratory in Zurich had speeded up Karl's schedule. Backups of the modified plague and three hundred doses of the trial vaccine had been stored at Krivi's corporate headquarters, where several floors were given over to research labs developing new products for Dass Pharmaceuticals. More samples of the vaccine and the plague had been shipped to Krivi's manufacturing labs in Mumbai.

All the bureaucratic details required by the Brazilian authorities to begin the inoculation program had been completed before the Zurich attack. In a way, the destruction of the lab had acted as a spur to move forward. Karl would have preferred a few more weeks of testing but the raid took the decision from him. Krivi and Gutenberg had become impatient after the explosion. Schmidt was in Brazil only to supervise the start of the trial. Even though he'd been injected with the vaccine, he intended to be far away by the time the plague showed itself.

The first signs were fever and a severe headache. Then came high fever, sneezing and coughing as the disease attacked the lungs and entered the contagious stage. By day six after exposure, the patient was unable to stand or eat and the internal organs were breaking down. The characteristic flower-shaped black blotches appeared. By day eight, most who'd been infected were dead. No one had ever lasted longer than ten days. But for three days after exposure, everything would seem normal.

It was possible the disease would spread beyond the village and the reservation, but the place was remote enough that it was unlikely. Even if it did, access to the area was limited. A quarantine wouldn't prove difficult. If it did go out of control, a Brazil destabilized by an epidemic wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

Outside the clinic the first patients of the morning waited. It was a gorgeous day.

"We're ready, Herr Schmidt."

The speaker was Doctor Silva, a stocky man with honey-colored skin and a high pitched voice that didn't seem to go with his body. He gestured at a table laid out with neat rows of disposable hypodermic syringes filled with clear fluid.

"It's a wonderful thing, what you are doing for our people, " Silva said.

"It's nothing," Schmidt said. "Our company believes in giving something back. This is our way of doing it."

Doctor Silva believed he was injecting a new product that would be effective against a deadly, drug resistant strain of malaria that had found its way to the region. That part was true. Every tenth dose also carried the plague bacilli. Schmidt had made sure Silva received the vaccine. He needed the doctor to survive and report the results.

"Shall we get started?" Schmidt said.

The first patients were a woman from the reservation and her two children. Schmidt had something of a soft spot for children. It was too bad so many of them would die, but it couldn't be helped. Besides, life expectancy was short here. Better an early death than years of poverty and misery. And what did these people have to look forward to? A primitive life of disease and isolation. They contributed nothing. By dying, they would prove useful.

Their deaths would fertilize the seeds of the new world order.