Part 43 (1/2)

Who was she selling the DNA to?

Polly Larenski's phone numbers--her home number and the one for the pay phone near her house--they were the thread to the answer.

Gannon studied them.

He knew what to do.

He was closer now, closer than he'd ever been.

53.

Deus Island, Exuma Sound.

Dr. Sutsoff's island lay among a chain of uninhabited cays stretching for a few hundred miles southeast of Na.s.sau.

It was a square quarter mile, ringed by white beachfront that slid into warm turquoise water and was lush with palm trees hissing in the breezes.

Aided by her investors, Sutsoff had purchased Deus Island from a Dutch drug dealer for eight million dollars in U.S. cash. Legend held that the island's name originated with Spanish pirates who, after a storm, thought they'd died and arrived at G.o.d's doorstep.

Geographically, it was within the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. But through forgotten treaties between Spain, France and Portugal, it had disappeared into a legal nether-world, giving the island's owner the unique ability to claim citizens.h.i.+p with the Bahamas and the other countries.

Sutsoff held a number of counterfeit pa.s.sports under aliases.

Nearly two dozen people lived in the huddle of houses on the northern side. Sutsoff employed them to maintain her home and research facilities on the southern side, which included several dishes linked to advanced satellite systems, and a small biosafety containment lab.

Dr. Sutsoff had the lab constructed in an isolated area. Through her trusted intelligence connections, she'd bought components from Malaysia, Indonesia and India, and hired experts to build it.

The structure was made with specialized ceilings, walls and floors that formed a sealed internal sh.e.l.l within the facility. It had airlocks and airtight double-door containment entrances, dunk tanks, showers and fumigation chambers. It also had sophisticated ventilation, exhaust and decontamination systems.

The lab had its own energy sources, powered by long-life batteries, in addition to wind, solar and diesel generators, whose mechanisms were reinforced to withstand hurricanes.

Sutsoff had trained her island staff on the safe handling, storage and testing of sample materials. Because they worked with agents for which there was no known cure, they had to be skilled at decontamination, containing spills, proper immunization and reducing the risk of infection.

Sutsoff reminded them that she'd lost a member of her African research team and that even the world's best micro-biologists had been infected during their experiments. A top Russian military scientist working with the Marburg virus had died hours after a lab accident.

Sutsoff's staff wore the newest positive pressure suits and had been well trained in decontamination showers and the removal and disposal of all clothing after working in the lab. They respected procedures for decontaminating materials such as tubes, scalpels, syringes and slides.

In the days since Sutsoff had returned from Africa with her samples, she and her staff had been working around the clock.

Now, hunched over her table where she was checking the results of refining her agent with the new material from the pariah bats Sutsoff knew success was within her grasp.

She had monitored news reports concerning cruise s.h.i.+p pa.s.senger Roger Tippert. Elena and Valmir, who had offended her with their mistakes and insolence, managed to do their job. Investigators had failed to identify the mystery illness that had killed Tippert.

And they never will.

Looking through her microscope, Sutsoff imagined how the linear-thinking eggheads at the CDC and in the labs in Maryland must be c.r.a.pping in their knickers wondering, What the h.e.l.l is this?

Just a teeny harbinger of the shape of things to come.

Sutsoff took pride in what she'd achieved. Her mind raced through the images from her years of struggle to accomplish the impossible.

She thought back to the crude work of Project Crucible.

The truth was, she had carried the other CIA scientists on that entire a.s.signment. They'd gotten petty and had invoked Nuremberg when she told them what they all knew had to be done, but were too afraid to admit.

Those fools will be an asterisk in the history books.

Her work on Project Crucible was merely a first step. Sutsoff had corrected and advanced North Korea's misguided a.s.sumptions on File 91. Her cutting-edge research on molecular manipulation led to her discovery of a new pathway. Her work on remote-controlled nanotechnology was theoretically implausible, but if applied properly in the field, would work.

And it did work.

Very well.

Ask Roger Tippert's widow.

And Sutsoff's experiments on pathogens, which were aimed at developing the most effective lethal agent known, had progressed. She'd created a concoction using characteristics of Ebola and Marburg. Her study had shown a fatality rate in humans of 70 to 75 percent.

It worked beautifully in the Tippert trial.

But that rate soared after her team discovered Pariah Variant 1 in the African pariah bats of Cameroon. Sutsoff determined that the new lethal microbe must have arisen out of the deadly carbon dioxide explosion at Lake Nyos. Her team had first observed that Pariah Variant 1 would have a fatality rate in humans of 95 to 97 percent. Now, after a little more work her in the lab, Sutsoff had pushed that rate to 100 percent.

One hundred.

Behold the most lethal agent the world will ever know: Extremus Deus Variant 1.

The perfect killer.

Unstoppable. And completely under her control.

The delivery mechanism had always been the tricky aspect. Sutsoff had grappled with it until she decided to refine nature's delivery system, human-to-human transmission.

But with a twist.

Subjects with certain DNA characteristics would be the perfect vessels for initial delivery--the younger the better. She'd worked out the calculations, factoring in failures and unforeseen challenges. A successful operation would require seventy subjects who met the criteria, a support system to nurture the operation and a security system to protect its covert development.

Sutsoff had known Drake Stinson through old agency connections and he'd shared her fears, her philosophy regarding Extremus Deus and her desire to see the operation to its successful conclusion.

Stinson had connections to human traffickers, illegal adoption rings, fertility clinics and various underworld networks around the globe. These resources would fulfill her requirement of finding seventy children with the DNA coding she'd required.

Money and methods were not a concern.

The only criteria were secrecy and invisibility.

The criminal networks used bribery, abductions and even murder to obtain the seventy children whose DNA was tested and retested. The children were held by others posing as adoptive parents while they awaited Sutsoff's instructions.