The Pursuit (18 page)

Dragan was staring at an iPad that Joe, the alarm and video expert, had given him. Joe had already hacked into the institute's surveillance system, and Dragan was watching the lab in real time. He had the sense that the scientists were working on something highly critical today, and that the man in charge was riding them to quickly produce results.

“I think this woman wants to kill her boss,” Dragan said, pointing to his iPad screen. “You can see it in her body language.”

Litija looked over his shoulder. “That suit doesn't do anything for her figure. You can't tell she has a body at all.”

“See how the man in charge keeps looking at the wall clock,” Dragan said. “They are racing against time on something.”

“Or maybe he just wants to go to lunch,” Litija said.

Dragan handed the iPad back to Joe. “Very impressive.”

“Joe still has work to do,” Nick said. “He has to do the hardwiring he talked about. We'll do that, and the underground prep work, on Friday night disguised as utility workers. We begin the dig on Saturday afternoon, and finish in the predawn hours on Sunday. I'll stroll into the lab, pick up the sample, place it in a secure, temperature-controlled container, and bring it up to the street.”

“We'll take it from there,” Litija said.

“And then what happens?” Kate asked.

“We celebrate our success,” Dragan said, well aware it wasn't the answer Kate was fishing for. “I have to commend you all on your brilliant planning.”

The expertise and swift action that Nick brought to the scheme was beyond Dragan's wildest expectations. Now the smallpox outbreak in Los Angeles could happen within a few weeks instead of months or years. Zarko's death was definitely a worthwhile sacrifice.

“My men will arrive tonight,” Dragan said. “You'll have the equipment and vehicles you requested by the end of the day tomorrow. You'll all be working out of this apartment until the job is complete. Litija will see to anything else that you might need.”

Dragan would talk to her later to work out the details of transporting the smallpox to his lab. He gestured to Nick to join him by the front door of the apartment, away from the others.

“I want Litija in the van with Joe so she can keep an eye on everything,” Dragan said.

“You mean on me,” Nick said.

“She will work with the lookouts and be an extra set of eyes on the institute security cameras,” Dragan said. “Her job will be to keep you safe and assure the success of the robbery.”

“Kate thinks that's her job.”

“It's her job underground and Litija's job above.”

“I've always wanted two women to stay on top of me,” Nick said. “When do I begin betting my savings against the market?”

“On Monday,” Dragan said. “The attack will happen in six weeks or so in Los Angeles.”

“Why L.A.?”

“It's Hollywood. Celebrities are America's royalty. It will be much more terrifying to see the bodies of famous people than complete strangers. On top of that we kill two for the price of one.”

“I don't understand,” Nick said.

“When a famous actor dies, so do the beloved characters that he plays. But it gets even better than that.”

“We'll kill some adorable puppies, too?”

“We won't just be killing actors, but the hopes and dreams embodied in the movies they made. That's certain to terrify and depress the market worldwide, not just in the U.S. We'll be sure to short a lot of entertainment industry stocks.”

“You've really thought this out,” Nick said.

“And you're making it all possible,” Dragan said, clapping Nick on the back. “You're even better at this than you say you are.”

“I don't like to brag,” Nick said and rejoined his team.

Nick and his people were very talented, and if this wasn't going to be Dragan's final crime, maybe he wouldn't have decided to have them executed immediately after the robbery. He was already feeling a twinge of regret as he left the apartment, and they weren't even dead yet. Dragan went down the spiral staircase and thought about his decision.

If he spared them, could he take the risk that one of them might talk before or after the smallpox outbreak in L.A.? No, of course he couldn't, and he was angry at himself for even considering the notion. It was ridiculous and stupid. Did he feel anything for the thousands of people, perhaps
tens of thousands,
who would perish in Los Angeles? Absolutely not. So what difference did a few more corpses make?

None at all.

Dragan stepped outside, walked across the sidewalk, and got into his black Maserati GranTurismo Sport parked at the curb. It was a good thing that he was becoming a billionaire and retiring soon, he thought. He was beginning to get soft.

T
here were three snipers watching Dragan drive off on avenue du Maine. Two of the snipers were Road Runners in a sixth-floor apartment in the building directly across the street. Their names were Daca and Stefan, and their job was to protect Dragan while he was in the apartment. Now that Dragan was gone, Daca and Stefan began dismantling their weapons and packing up.

The third sniper, on the rooftop of the same building, was Walter “Eagle Eye” Wurzel. He'd also had his eye on Dragan while Jake O'Hare, standing beside him with binoculars, watched the others in the room. Walter and Jake knew about the two snipers on the floor below them and would stay on the rooftop until Antoine Killian, in the shadows somewhere on the street, alerted them that they were gone.

“I hope I don't regret that I didn't kill Dragan when I had the shot,” Walter said, lifting his eye from the scope as the Maserati drove off.

He wore large square-rimmed glasses with thick lenses balanced on a bulbous nose covered with red squiggly capillaries. The glasses magnified his eyes and made them look unnaturally large. He lay on his stomach, the rifle balanced on a tiny tripod.

“If you'd killed Dragan,” Jake said, “the snipers would have killed Nick and Kate.”

“Maybe, but you're talking about saving two people instead of thousands,” Walter said. “At a certain point, we may have to choose between our team and our mission.”

“There is no choice,” Jake said. “I believe in Kate and Nick, but if their con fails, we take down Dragan and stop the attack, no matter what.”

“Let's pray it never comes to that,” Walter said. “In the meantime, do we have any croissants left?”

Jake reached for the bag next to him and looked inside. “One chocolate and one butter.”

“I'll take 'em both,” Walter said. “I'm hypoglycemic. My vision gets blurry when my blood sugar crashes.”

On Saturday afternoon, Kate parked a sewer department van on boulevard Raspail. It was just north of place Denfert-Rochereau, beside a bus stop shelter that had a large advertisement featuring Johannes Vermeer's painting
Girl with a Pearl Earring.
The ad read
Atelier Vermeer. Apprenez à peindre comme les ancien maîtres. Copies de tableaux.
It was the first thing Nick saw when he emerged from the rear of the van wearing a sewer worker's jumpsuit. “Vermeer Workshop. Learn to paint like the masters. Copy the paintings.”

He figured that spotting an advertisement for a school that taught art forgery, at the outset of faking the robbery of a level-four biolab, was probably a very good omen.

He walked to the manhole and used a crowbar-like tool to remove the cover while Road Runners Dusko, Vinko, and Borko unfolded a chest-high yellow canvas pedestrian barricade around the opening. The four men transferred the equipment from the van to the manhole and down into the sewer while Kate remained in the driver's seat with the engine running and watched for trouble. This was the first time they'd entered the sewers so close to the institute and place Denfert-Rochereau, a high-traffic area for cars and pedestrians. Being so visible was a necessary risk, since it was the largest manhole close to where they'd be digging, making it the best place to deliver the heavy equipment. But it was also the moment when they were the most likely to attract unwanted attention.

Once they were done, Nick disassembled the tripod while Dusko and Vinko removed the barricade and put it back in the van. Then the two Serbians went down into the sewer to join Borko. Nick followed them in, slid the manhole cover back into place, and Kate drove off. The operation had taken less than ten minutes.

In the sewer, each man picked up a piece of equipment, and Gaëlle led them single file through several IGC access tunnels to the lighted utility corridor where they would be working. The corridor was about six feet high and six feet wide, and the concrete ceiling and walls were lined with scores of pipes and conduits.

There was a big
X
written chest-high on the wall where they would be drilling three twelve-inch circular shafts, one right next to another, in a tight cluster to create one tubular tunnel large enough for a man to crawl through.

Vinko placed the diamond coring tool on the track. Dusko attached the coring bit and water line to the machine. Borko plugged the rig into the electric line. Nick powered up a twelve-inch flat-screen TV that Joe had mounted on the wall and that was hardwired into the institute's video surveillance feed. Several angles on the lab came up on-screen. There were four scientists working in their inflated suits.

“They are putting in some overtime,” Nick said.

Vinko came up beside him and looked at the screen. “Is that a problem?”

“No. They can't hear us digging and will be long gone by the time we punch through the wall at two or three in the morning.”

Vinko watched them working with their pipettes of plague for a moment.

“I'm glad you're going into that room and not me,” Vinko said. “The air is full of death.”

“The room will be clean when I go in,” Nick said. “It'll be a lot more sanitary than the sewer we just walked through.”

Huck took out the tablet device that operated the computerized coring tool and typed in some data. “I'm ready.”

Nick shut off the monitor. Everyone put on their goggles and ear protectors. Huck tapped a key on the tablet, starting the drill. The diamond core bit began spinning, the water-moistened circular face cutting into the concrete with a noise amplified so much by the confines of the tunnel that it became a physical sensation. The men shook with the sound, and the wall wept slurry under the spinning bit as the core driller made its slow progress.

A panel van from Orange, the French telecom company, was parked on a nearby side street that ran along the ivy-covered walls on the southeastern edge of Montparnasse Cemetery. Litija and Joe were sitting in the back of the van at a console watching two monitors.

One monitor showed dozens of thumbnails representing the views of all security cameras inside and outside the institute. The other monitor showed a full-screen picture of the lab they'd be breaking into.

Litija closely watched the scientists in the lab to see if any of them appeared to notice the sound or rumble of the drilling outside their walls. Nothing seemed to break the concentration of the scientists on their experiments. The only thing she sensed was the urgency and seriousness of their work. She glanced at the other monitor. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening elsewhere at the institute either.

“So far so good,” Joe said, looking to her for agreement. But she didn't give it to him.

She picked up the radio and called her lookouts.

“Daca, what do you see?” she asked in Serbian.

He was stationed atop a building that overlooked place Denfert-Rochereau so he'd be able to see any police vehicles approaching from any of the intersecting boulevards.

“Ni
Å¡
ta se de
Å¡
ava,”
he replied. Nothing is happening.

“Stefan, what do you see?” she asked.

He was positioned atop a building one block further north, where avenue Denfert-Rochereau intersected with place Ernest Dennis. Between the two men, she'd know if authorities were coming from any direction.

“Isti,”
he replied. The same.

Litija set the radio down and gave Joe the nod he was looking for.

“So far so good,” she said.

That was true for now. But she knew with absolute certainty that it wouldn't last.

By midnight, Huck had drilled through the limestone and was close to cutting his first hole into the concrete wall of the laboratory. In the hours leading up to that, Nick and the three Road Runners had lugged a dozen cylindrical cores of solid concrete and limestone out of the utility corridor and into the sewer, lining them up along the wall. Nick and Vinko had just brought out the last two limestone cores and were drenched with sweat.

“Here you are, working for Dragan Kovic, the man who kidnapped and then betrayed you,” Vinko said to Nick. “That makes no sense to me.”

“Dragan didn't betray me,” Nick said. “Zarko did.”

“We both know that's not true. Zarko always followed orders. He took a fall for you.”

“A very long one.”

Vinko got in Nick's face. “Zarko and I grew up in the same village. We served side by side in the war. He was like a brother to me. He's not a punch line for a smart-ass remark.”

“I didn't push him off the cliff. If you have a problem, it's with Dragan, not me.”

Vinko shook his head and poked Nick's chest hard with his finger. “Dragan did it for you.”

Kate stepped out of the adjoining IGC tunnel. “Huck is about to punch through into the lab. Do you guys want to be there for it or is it interrupting your tea time?”

“We're on our way,” Nick said.

Vinko walked away, brushing past Kate into the tunnel. She turned to Nick.

“Do we have a problem?” she asked.

“No, but Dragan might.” Nick rubbed his chest. He was lucky he didn't have a collapsed lung. “Tossing Zarko off a cliff probably wasn't a great move for employee morale.”

They made their way back to the utility corridor. Huck was crouched outside the four-foot-diameter opening and held the tablet controller for the diamond core driller. The core driller was twenty-two feet further down and digging through the concrete wall of the lab under remote control.

A brownish slurry, from the water that kept the drill bit wet, spilled out onto the floor. Dusko was trying to suck up as much slurry as he could with a workshop vacuum.

“We're close,” Huck said. “Any second now.”

Nick turned on the monitor, showing several views of the empty lab. One angle showed the back wall of the control room. Kate, Borko, Vinko, and Gaëlle huddled closely around Nick for the big moment.

The first thing they saw was a circular seam opening up in the wall, then water seeping through. An instant later, the diamond-serrated edge of the core bit cut through, looking like the wide open mouth of a metal snake that had just swallowed a huge chunk of concrete. They were in.

The drilling went very fast after that. The remaining two bores were cut in less than two hours, making the hole wide enough for a man with a pack to crawl through. The drilling tool was removed and the track was pulled up. It was time for Nick to go inside. He picked up the small backpack that contained the titanium case for the vial of smallpox and went to the mouth of the tunnel.

“Good luck,” Kate said.

“The hard part is already over,” Nick said.

He gave her a smile, their eyes met and held for a long moment, and he crawled inside.

In the van, Litija and Joe sat at their console and stared at the image of the empty control room and the hole in the wall. Nick crawled out, his white SAP jumpsuit smeared with wet slurry, and wiped his gloved hands on his suit.

They watched him take off the muddy work gloves, set them on the counter, and pull out a pair of white surgical gloves from his pocket. He put the rubber gloves on, took off his backpack, and removed the container for the vial from inside the backpack. His lips were pursed and he seemed to be moving to a jaunty beat.

“Is he whistling?” Litija asked.

“It's ‘Whistle While You Work,' ” Joe said. “From
Snow White.
”

“How do you know?”

Because Joe could hear him. Now that Nick was in the basement of the storefront, the signal from his earbuds wasn't blocked anymore by tons of limestone and concrete. Nick could hear Joe and Litija, too. But, of course, Litija didn't know that.

“That's what he always whistles when he goes in solo on a break-in,” Joe said.

Nick looked up at the camera and pointed to the keypad that operated the air lock.