Chapter 45
Chapter Forty-Five
It was then that reality hit home.
There was no need to find a moment to discuss what his bosses wanted. Robert had gotten there first.
Dammit, the profiler was right.
John wanted to throw up. He’d never have believed in a million years that the gentle professor he’d encountered back in 2012 could be calmly discussing how he was going to scythe through the population of the earth.
He needed to check in with his superiors, find out how they wanted this scenario to play out. And that meant reacting with the same degree of calm.
That was it. When this was over, he was out of there. For good.
“Let’s cut to the chase.” John fixed Robert with a hard stare. “Where do we come in?”
“I need to conduct some experiments. Basically, a series of tests. And when the data from them can be analyzed, then we can move forward. Your job will be to see that no one discovers what I’m doing and to oversee the experiments when they’re conducted on foreign soil.
I’ll develop the delivery system—all you have to do is make sure it reaches its destination safely and is deployed. ” He stood so still. “Are you with me?”
Rich’s frown hadn’t disappeared. “We wouldn’t be put in harm’s way?”
“You’d be inoculated. I’d make sure of that.”
John met Robert’s steady gaze. “You think it’ll work?”
“It has to.” Robert grimaced. “Because the alternative is unthinkable.”
Saturday, October 27, 2018
“So you both did as he asked,” Gary concluded.
“I don’t think we had a lot of choice once my superiors got wind of it.
Of course, he never knew our job was to ensure the pathogen wasn’t deployed.
Well, my job—Rich didn’t know that part.
Like I told you, there was never any chance of this going down for real.
My instructions were to collect the pathogen from Gerber, secure it, then give Rich an identical—but harmless—vial to pass to Michelle. ”
Nathan frowned. “There’s something I don’t understand. Why the tests? Because it doesn’t matter how you look at it, this was something a child could’ve come up with.”
“I can answer that.” Sam’s clear voice rang out.
“Robert’s a scientist, like me. To a scientist, methodology is not necessarily that important.
It’s a means to an end.” She rested her chin on her laced fingers, her elbows on the table.
“What matters is the data gleaned from it. That will show up the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology so the next time whatever he develops will be tailored to those strengths and weaknesses.” Her face grew somber.
“Robert said it himself. This was an experiment, conducted out in the field. So was Florida. So was Atlanta in 2016.”
Winter blinked. “You know about that too?”
“EV-D68?” She nodded. “I saw Robert’s notes.” She tilted her head to one side. “That was you or Powell, wasn’t it? You let the enterovirus loose for him.”
Winter shuddered, then gave a single nod. “Yes, that was Powell.”
“And the goal of this experiment was to see how X amount of pathogen affected Y number of people.” Sam’s face was hard. “He wanted to map the spread. Then he’d sit back and watch the CDC crunch the numbers.”
“Seriously?” Warren’s jaw dropped. “All those people in the stadium—they were just his fucking lab rats?”
Sam nodded. “And when the CDC was done, he’d analyze the data, because they would log everything.
He’d look at where each infected person was originally from, then look at the correlation between the high incidences of mortality and a particular region of South Africa.
When he had that, he could design his next field test and plan for a larger number of multiple outbreaks. ”
“Multiple?” Something turned over in Gary’s stomach.
“And before you all throw your hands in the air in horror, may I remind you that the same sort of modeling took place during the development of atomic weapons.” Sam’s eyes were cool.
“Scientists sitting around, asking questions… ‘What if we had this sort of blast? This size of radius? How many would it kill?’ The US teams that went into Hiroshima after the bomb? They weren’t there to help, but to study.
And from that they were able to design bigger and better weapons.
” She gazed thoughtfully at Winter. “The Democratic Republic of Congo….”
Winter’s jaw dropped. “How do you know about that?” Then he shook his head. “Don’t answer, I already know. It was in those damn notebooks.”
“So there were going to be planned outbreaks there?”
“Yeah, but that was in the future. My bosses were very keen for those to take place, although their motivation was financial.”
Nathan snorted. “Cobalt mining. I told you.”
Winter stared at him. “But Robert knew nothing about that.”
“What about Florida?” Dan inquired. “The monkeypox outbreak. What was that for?”
“To see the spread on US soil.” Sam gazed at him. “Remember the graphs he plotted in the notebooks? That was his analysis of the data.”
“We didn’t know about the monkeypox test until after he’d done it, by the way,” Winter informed them. “He didn’t tell us because he didn’t need our help—until Leo Deakins called him to try his hand at a little blackmail, that is.”
Dan glanced at Gary. “Damn, we’re good.”
“He’d gotten it all wrong, of course, but Robert didn’t want to leave any loose ends. So Rich loaded his gun and went to pay a call on Mr. Deakins.”
“Leo didn’t go to Jamaica Plain, did he?” Gary asked. “The drugs bit was all staged for the police.”
“Rich contacted Leo to set up a meeting—told him he was Robert’s boyfriend, and Robert didn’t want this to leak out.
Leo believed him, the sap. So they met for coffee, Rich slipped something into whatever Leo was drinking, then bundled him into his car, drove him to Jamaica Plain in the middle of the night, planted the drugs, and shot him. ”
“And Jonathon Wilmer?” Dan frowned. “How could Robert have known about him?”
Winter drank some more wine, then leaned back in his chair. “That job was much more complicated. Robert met Wilmer when he interviewed him and Sam. We’re talking a couple of years ago. Then he learned Sam was meeting with Wilmer again—without him.”
“But that was about Jonathon’s piece on the fertility clinic,” Sam protested. “That had nothing to do with our work.”
“But he didn’t know that.” Winter shrugged.
“I’m guessing Robert was becoming a little paranoid.
By then he would’ve begun work on the monkeypox virus, so he asked us to keep an eye on Wilmer.
To be honest, we didn’t have a whole lot to report, but I think Robert read a lot more into our discoveries than was actually there.
He’d gotten it into his head that Wilmer was going to write some piece revealing Robert’s little secret, and as the months went by, that paranoia worsened.
Not surprising, really. It must have been preying on his mind all the time.
” He paused. “Then he had his heart attack last month, and we got a call to go visit him in the hospital.”
“When was this?” Sam asked.
Winter frowned. “September twenty-second, I think.”
She gasped. “But… he had his heart attack on the twentieth. He was in no state for visitors, surely.”
“I’m only telling you what happened. We flashed our badges, and the next thing we knew, we were at his bedside.
He’d stabilized by then, but he wasn’t thinking clearly.
That didn’t stop him telling us we needed to plan something to eliminate Wilmer, something that couldn’t be linked back to either him or Sam. ”
“I take it Michelle wasn’t there. She wouldn’t have let you within two feet of that bed.”
Winter rubbed a hand over his bald head. “She’d gone home to grab a few hours’ sleep. She’d been there all night. We timed it really carefully.”
Sam laughed, and the sound sent shivers through Gary. “Lord, the irony. She’d gone home to help me find those notebooks.”
“So you came up with a plan,” Gary surmised.
Winter nodded. “We were ready to roll the twenty-fifth. I had set up Eddie Ray. We already knew from previous surveillance what time Wilmer got home each night. Then the morning of the twenty-third we got another call. Robert learned Sam had been to the house, and his paranoia kicked in again, but big. He told us to watch her.” Another shrug.
“So we did. The next day she met up with Wilmer. We reported back to Robert, and he got into a real panic. Said we were to go ahead with the plan to take out Wilmer.”
“That was Rich again, right?” Gary asked.
Winter nodded. “He did all three jobs. I know that’s easy for me to say—I have no proof and he can’t speak for himself now, but—”
“That’s okay,” Gary told him. “We know you’re telling the truth.” He glanced at Dan.
“How come your facial recognition software didn’t identify Powell?” Dan directed the question to Nathan. When Nathan didn’t respond, he let out a slow breath. “It did, didn’t it? But you couldn’t tell us that because you were watching Powell.”
“Neither Rich nor myself will show up on any database,” Winter told him. “Not while we were working on this.” A glance to Nathan. “But you recognized him, didn’t you?”
“That wasn’t Eddie Ray who went into Wilmer’s house with Powell, was it?” Gary wasn’t about to let that particular loose end go untied.
Winter’s mouth fell open. “How… how do you know that?”
“We wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for Dan.” Gary smiled. “And to be truthful, he picked up on it the day after the shooting.”
“But they were in the same kind of clothing. They were a similar height and build.”
Dan gazed at him with a look that was almost serene. “In the end, what clinched it was mud, a piece of chewing gum, and the fact that I knew Eddie was no killer, the same way I knew Rich most definitely was.”
Winter hadn’t lost that wide-eyed stare.
“Back to Eddie’s death. Who was the other guy?”
“Another operative Rich picked out. Again, he wouldn’t show up on any database.”
“So what really happened?”