Black Rose by Alex Lukeman

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.
     

CHAPTER 25
     
     
    Elizabeth had mixed feelings about the Zürich raid. On the surface, it looked like a success. The team had been in the right place. The plague-ridden corpses in the disposal room, the files they'd recovered and pictures of the lab proved that. The international papers were calling it a terrorist attack, although no one seemed to know why a pharmaceutical research lab had been targeted. The Swiss police were baffled and angry. Such things didn't happen in Switzerland. It was disorderly.
    Although the samples in Zürich had been destroyed, she had a bad feeling that the plague was still in play. There was no firm evidence to make her believe that. It was a matter of intuition and years of experience. AEON was too clever to put all their resources in one place. The raid might have eliminated the threat but what if it hadn't?
    The files recovered from the lab contained hard data and summarized research notes. The research notes weren't signed, but Elizabeth thought they were probably done by Karl Schmidt. She'd passed the file on to CDC in Atlanta. The file on the test subjects was gruesome and proved that human subjects had been used as guinea pigs. Twenty-seven had died before a new test batch of vaccine showed promise. Detailed autopsy reports and notes described the grim progress of the disease and it's inevitable outcome.
    Things had moved past her resources and responsibility. She had proof that the plague was a genuine national security threat. She was on her way to the White House to brief the president.
    Elizabeth's driver turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue and passed through new security barriers installed since the last time she'd been here. Secret Service agents met her at a side entrance and relieved her of her pistol. They gave her a visitor pass to hang around her neck and escorted her to the Oval Office, where President Rice was expecting her.
    Rice was behind his desk. He was an average looking man at first glance. It was only on closer inspection that people were captured by the intensity in his eyes. They were blue with a hint of green and conveyed a sense of total attention when he looked at you. Like all who had held this office, he seemed surrounded by an intangible aura of power. Elizabeth had felt it before with other presidents. His face showed the strain of his job, here where there was no need to look good for the cameras and the public eye wasn't upon him.
    Rice was not alone in the room. DCI Clarence Hood was present as well.
    "Mister President, thank you for seeing me."
    "Please take a seat, Director. I thought it best if Clarence sat in on this."
    She nodded to him as she sat down. Clarence Hood had become a personal friend.
    "Sir, I requested this meeting because I