Page 63 of Jacob

The Colonel tipped his head to one side, looking at her curiously, as if she were an unusual specimen. “What do you think I am trying to do?”

She blinked. “Well, it’s obvious. You’re going to try a terrorist attack somewhere using smallpox. But it will get completely out of hand. Millions will die, it will make Covid look like a picnic in the park. The world economy will come to a grinding halt…”

He put his hand up, stopping her.

“No,” he said with a faint smile. “There will be terrible consequences for a limited geographic area. Then the epidemic will stop.”

“How do you make an epidemic stop?” she began heatedly, then her mouth snapped shut.Ohmygod, she thought. She hadn’t thought it through. What had merely been theory was now reality.

“What is Dr. Field an expert in?”

Her head pulsed with pain and dismay. “A—a kill switch,” she said reluctantly. Which would change the equations, make the unthinkable possible.

He gave a chilling smile. “Exactly, Dr. Hethering. A kill switch. So you have a deadly virus, made even more deadly and fast acting by bioengineering and which has a built-in kill switch. Why, it would be like a precision tool. Slashing and cutting exactly when you want, stopping exactly when you want.

“Biology doesn’t work that way. It won’t be as precise as you think. There will be slip ups.”

“Of course. But they won’t be that important. The important thing is to spread the disease where we want for the length of time we want. And we are almost there. We have the virus we want. We just need an active and precise kill switch. Which your colleague Dr. Field is refusing to give us.”

She glanced over at Elias, whose eyes were closed in pain. For the first time, she noticed the bruises on his neck, a swelling along his jaw. Painful movements. Signs of distress everywhere except his hands. He’d resisted.

Good for him. She honestly didn’t think he had it in him.

She turned back to the monster. “I’m sorry, you have the wrong person. I couldn’t possibly replace Elias. He is an expert on kill switches, though he hasn’t perfected one. No one has. Genetically engineered microbes or viruses programmed to self-destruct when certain parameters are met. It’s a rewriting of genetic code utilizing a lethal effect, and it’s dangerous and incredibly difficult. Almost impossible, in fact. The scientific community has almost given up on the idea of a kill switch until we get better tools.”

It wasn’t impossible. She knew of several instances in which kill switches had been successfully created to shut down certain expressions of cell reproduction. But not in contagious diseases. And certainly not in genetically engineered cells.

The Colonel tipped his head back and examined the ceiling, then brought his head back down. “We were almost there, thanks to the work of a talented scientist, Dr. Dima Obolensky. All you or Dr. Field would have to do is complete his work. Perfect and replicate in a lab what Obolensky has done.”

She gasped. “Dr. Obolensky is alive? I thought he died in 2011. He was a pioneer in bioengineering.”

“Indeed, he was. Very talented. And no, he did not die in 2011. That was a useful lie because it was an open secret what Dr. Obolensky was working on. The news of his death stopped the speculation. But he unfortunately—how is this notion expressed in your comic books? Crossed the rainbow bridge. Yes. He crossed the rainbow bridge before his work was completed. He continued working for me and was very close to a breakthrough when he chose to end his own life. Very annoying and inconvenient. I had to find another scientist who could finish Obolensky’s work.”

“Elias.” Alex shot her colleague a poisonous look. He hung his head, longish greasy hair falling around his face.

“Exactly so. We courted him in Budapest and he showed great interest in being courted. But then he has proven to be remarkably stubborn and useless.”

His head swiveled to her like a gun on a turret. “Thus, you. We used Dr. Field’s phone to scatter breadcrumbs leading here. We didn’t think you’d come with a security team.”

Her heart knocked against her chest, though she kept all emotion from her face. They knew about the guards and Jacob and Nick. He couldn’t be allowed to know what Jacob meant to her.

“Did you kill the guards outside my room?”

“No.” The Colonel yawned. “That would not be cost effective. But we did put them out of commission for a couple of hours. They will have a lot to answer for to their employer. They conspicuously failed at the first task of a bodyguard—keeping you safe.”

“What did you use?”

“Fentanyl.”

Oh, God. Fentanyl was so dangerous. “Is that what you used on me? Because I felt like hell when I woke up. Still do.”

“I used a lower dose on you. Your guards will still be out.”

Alex sent up a prayer to the god of soldiers that her two guards would indeed wake up and that there wouldn’t be permanent damage.

“Fentanyl is extremely dangerous.”

“You should be very grateful that we didn’t use carfentanil. It’s very easy to administer a lethal dose. Requires a careful hand. Now.” He clapped his hands on his knees, clearly bored with the conversation. “Let us get back to what we need from you. The insertion of the kill switch gene using CRISPR-Cas9, into a new formulation of the smallpox virus. Dr. Field is refusing. So either we hurt you, Dr. Hetherington, to get Dr. Field to do what we ask of him, and for which we have paid him well over a million dollars, or if hurting you isn’t a lever that moves him, we will hurt him to get you to engineer the gene. I suspect you have a softer heart than Dr. Field does. Either way, the work will get done. The work must get done.”

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