“That will take time. I need someone now.”
Karl’s nose flared into a sneer. “You will have to do without until we can hire another.”
“What about the girl in the room next to mine? Is she available? Perhaps she could be my assistant until you can hire someone else.” Marta knew she was pushing the man’s limits, but it didn’t hurt to ask. He could only say no.
Again, his eyes narrowed, and he stared at her for a long moment. “That might be arranged. If you will excuse me, I have important work to attend to,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. “My name is Herr Schmidt.”
Marta wanted to tell Karl she needed both the assistant and internet access sooner rather than later. Her time to complete the antiviral was impossibly tight. Instead, she bit her tongue, afraid that pushing too hard would make him suspicious.
What she’d told him was true. She needed all the data she could get, whether to redesign the virus to release more slowly or to complete the antiviral. She also needed an assistant to help her work more efficiently. If she couldn’t access Vasquez’s database to check the status of his new scientist’s work, completing the antiviral was imperative. The best-case scenario would be to stop Vasquez from releasing the virus at the summit.
An hour later, Herr Schmidt returned. “Follow me.” He led her to his computer terminal, logged in, opened a browser, and stepped aside. “Retrieve your data on the virus. I will watch. Do not attempt to contact anyone or download a computer virus, or this session will end, and you will have to recreate your research.”
With Herr Schmidt looking over her shoulder, she entered the CDC database through the backdoor she’d created, copied the files she needed, loaded them into her designated work area on the network, then exited the database and erased the history of her access.
“Now you have the data, go back to work,” Herr Schmidt said, logged off the computer, and left the lab.
Thirty minutes later, Schmidt returned to the lab with a smaller person, possibly a woman, fully outfitted in PPE. He marched her over to where Marta was working. “This is your assistant. If either of you causes trouble, you lose your assistant, and she goes back to her room. Do you understand?”
Marta and the young woman nodded.
Herr Schmidt spun on his booty-covered heels and left them to work.
“Cate?” Marta asked, wanting to be sure the woman Schmidt had brought was the one from the cell next to hers.
She nodded and held out her hand. “I’m Cate Marsh, and you must be Dr. Hale.”
Marta smiled and shook the woman’s hand. “It’s nice to put a face to the voice. Well, what I can see of it under the hood.” She chuckled. “Please, call me Marta.”
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am that they got what they wanted by kidnapping me.” She sighed. “However, I’m glad to have someone to talk to. I was getting lonely, sitting in my room day after day. There are only so many push-ups, sit-ups, and squats I can do each day. What exactly do they want you to do?”
Marta gave Cate a short, quiet version of what she’d been tasked to do for Teuling and what he planned to do with the virus once she’d engineered a slower infection rate. She also told her about the small communities in the three countries the WHO had identified.
“The bastard,” Cate said, her lips pressing in a tight line. “Teuling needs to contract this virus and suffer all the way to the end.”
Marta couldn’t agree with her more. “No one should be allowed to play God with other people’s lives.”
Cate followed Marta around the lab as Marta explained what everything was and the safety protocols they’d need to follow to keep the virus contained. In between explaining how things worked, Marta whispered, “What do you know about this facility?”
“Not a lot. They haven’t let me out of my cell except to shower,” Cate said. “While I’m out of my cell, they have a janitor come in and clean.”
“Can we trust the janitor to pass a message to the outside to let people know we’re here?” Marta asked.
Cate shrugged. “I’ve never actually talked to the man. He times his cleaning for when I’m not in the room.”
Marta nodded. “Then maybe we need to disrupt that timing.”
“You could leave a notepad in your room and send me back to retrieve it,” Cate said.
“That could work. We can aim for tomorrow morning.”
“How long do you think it will take to finish the project?” Cate asked.
“As long as necessary for Teuling’s population-control virus, with a slow burn.” Marta leaned closer. “As for the other, we have only three days.”
Cate’s eyes narrowed. “I thought antivirals took months or years to perfect.”
“They do. We had gone through all the trials and just needed to wrap up and document them. But all of that was done at the CDC before they laid off most of the staff. The actual antiviral is there. I have to recreate it from the notes I kept. It won’t take as much time as the research and trials did, since that was all done and well documented. But it still takes time to create the antiviral using virus samples, similar proteins, or chemical compounds. At the same time, I need to appear to be working on Teuling’s project.”
