The Pursuit by Janet Evanovich Read Free Book Online

gave it to Yuri,” Kate said, “who stashed it in his safe-deposit box in the Executive Merchants Building vault and was afraid to touch it after his cousin’s suspicious death.”
    “It was only a theory before, but now we’re certain that’s what happened,” Jessup said. “The Belgian police found some of Sergei’s research notes from Biopreparat on the floor of the vault along with a cigar-sized metal container that could be used to store a vial.”
    “How could the smallpox virus still be alive after all these years?” Kate asked, though she wasn’t sure
alive
was the right word.
    “The temperature in the vault was kept at a constant sixty degrees,” Jessup said. “Even if the temperature wasn’t controlled, we know the virus could still survive. A forty-five-year-old vial of smallpox was found two years ago in Washington, D.C., by a custodian. It was in a cardboard box in an unlocked closet at the National Institutes of Health. Testing of the sample at the CDC revealed it was still viable.”
    Kate was wide awake now. “That’s frightening.”
    “Not as much as Dragan Kovic selling smallpox to ISIS or some rogue nation and what they might do with it. Smallpox is the deadliest virus humanity has ever known. It killed three hundred million people in the twentieth century alone. All you have to do is inhale one microscopic particle and you’re infected. You become a walking chemical weapon that infects everyone within a ten-foot radius.”
    “Nobody is vaccinated for smallpox anymore,” Kate said. “Most of the population has no immunity. The virus could spread at light-speed through a major city.”
    “That’s the nightmare scenario,” Jessup said. “You need to break Nick out of custody. Then the two of you have to retrieve that vial, find out what it was going to be used for, and stop the plot, whatever the hell it is.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And stop threatening to kill Cosmo.”
    Kate disconnected and set her iPhone on the bedside table. She reached down to her purse on the floor, dug around for the new disposable phone that her father had given her in the church, and hit the preprogrammed key that dialed his cell. He answered on the first ring.
    “Jake O’Hare, Man of Action.”
    “I’m ready,” Kate said.
    —
    Early Sunday morning, Kate put on her sweats and jogged into Stadspark, which had once been the site of a Spanish fort. She dashed across the footbridge, over a duck pond that had been part of the fort’s moat, and then followed a paved trail as it snaked into a canopy of trees and bushes. She stopped at a stack of stones that appeared to have once been a man-made waterfall but that was dry and weedy now.
    She made sure she was alone before retrieving blasting caps and a small brick of C4 plastic explosive that had been hidden there the night before by her father’s buddy the arms dealer. She stuffed the goodies into her hidden running belt, jogged out of the park, and went shopping for duct tape, a razor blade, paper clips, and another disposable phone. The Meir, Antwerp’s main shopping street, was lined with renovated medieval buildings shoulder to shoulder with modern re-creations. Every two feet there seemed be another Leonidas chocolate café, the Starbucks of Belgium. The Leonidas cafés were inescapable, so she surrendered and got herself a hot chocolate.
    —
    Kate was halfway across her hotel lobby when she was stopped by a paunchy forty-something man in a rumpled business suit. He had the bloated belly and pained expression of a man who’d been constipated for days, perhaps even months.
    “Miss O’Hare?” the man asked, sizing Kate up from a computer-generated picture of her that he held in his hand.
    Career bureaucrat, Kate thought, smiling politely. American. No doubt clogged up with schnitzel.
    “Conrad Plitt,” he said. “I’m attached to the U.S. embassy in Brussels.”
    “I was expecting to see an FBI legat,” Kate said, referring to the FBI legal