Mexico City
Arturo Vela, alias “Paco,” did not worry about the contents of his briefcase as he found a vacant stool at a bar in the airport in Mexico City. He’d done this half a hundred times before and never with difficulty. Colonel Blackman said to handle this specimen carefully, but he always said that about any possibly active germ Arturo picked up from an operative of USAMRIID in foreign countries, as if Arturo might make a cocktail out of the stuff to see if it killed him first before he brought it to Fort Detrick to be tested.
Paco laughed as he hefted his cocktail and took a drink. Blackman was an idiot and a racist, but his money spent as well as anyone else’s. And, Paco thought, raising the glass in a silent toast, he had to admit the bastard wasn’t stingy with it. Another couple of missions and Paco thought he’d be able to retire and spend the rest of his days on a beach drinking and screwing brown-skinned babes day in and day out. He was in this game strictly for the money.
Blackie, on the other hand, was a blood-and-guts soldier, a patriot from the “old school” who still believed in the big Communist threat and a world takeover by some lunatic dictator like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Mussolini, or even worse, some heathen towel-head who killed in the name of his false god.
Blackman lived in a world of his own shrouded in secrecy, which he believed was necessary due to some poorly defined threat he insisted would come from Russia or Europe or China or Japan or the Middle East.
It mattered little to him that these threats were virtually impotent now—his crystal ball revealing the onset of world power struggles would not allow for any discounting of political realities in the twenty-first century.
And more than a few of his superiors lived in the same vacuum, permitting him to continue with biological offensive weapons experimentation despite a presidential order against it. General Cushing, a two-star and Blackie’s titular boss, was every bit as radical as Blackie when it came to fears of germ warfare against the United States. Because of this, secret agents of USAMRIID were in place around the globe looking for “bugs” that had the potential to kill millions of people.
A pretty Mexican girl gave Paco the eye from a tiny table at the back of the club. He nodded, dispatching a waiter to her table to offer her a drink at his expense. She smiled and said something without taking her sultry gaze from Arturo’s face as she placed her order.
He got up after an appropriate interval and sauntered across to the bar. “Buenos días, señorita,” he said in his best Castilian Spanish, hoping she might be well-bred despite her dyed blond hair and low-cut dress revealing a bit more of her bosom than a proper woman should—but then, if she were a proper woman, why was she sitting alone in an airport drinking establishment, giving a total stranger her best come-on look?
Paco placed his briefcase on the floor beside an empty chair when the woman replied, “Buenos días, señor. Your Español is accented. You are an American, verdad?”
“You are as insightful as you are beautiful, pretty lady,” he said, switching to English. “I am indeed, un Americano, educated in the United States. May I sit down?”
“Si como no?” she answered, batting her false eyelashes, a hint of suggestion in her eyes and in the way she rested a nylon-clad leg over her knee, providing Arturo with a breathtaking view of her thighs.
“You were planning to sit down anyway, were you not?”
“I am so transparent,” he said humbly, but with a gesture to the same waiter to bring him another drink.
“My name is Patricio Flores and I am working in cooperation with the Mexican Federal Police,” he said, giving her his current alias. “I am in Mexico City on official business.”
He reached into his coat pocket and showed her his credentials, a skillful counterfeit provided to USAMRIID by technicians at the CIA.
“May I ask your name, señorita?”
He was certain she would be impressed with his phony badge and the identification card bearing an official seal of Distrito Federal. Arturo found he could not keep from looking deeply into her eyes, though his gaze often drifted farther south to her ample bosom and then on down to her thighs.
“I am Rosa. Rosa Morales.” She noticed his stare and made a move to lower the hem of her skirt, raising one leg slightly to tug her dress to a more modest level. With the same motion her foot touched Arturo’s briefcase, the toe of her high-heeled shoe bumping his case ever so lightly. His briefcase fell over on its side and he scarcely noticed, with his full attention on Rosa’s creamy skin where her breasts swelled above the deep slash at the top of her black, sleeveless gown.
“It is an honor to meet such a lovely woman,” Arturo said as he dropped into an empty chair beside her.
Self-consciously, he adjusted his necktie and only then did he notice his briefcase lying flat on the floor beneath the table. He reached for it and placed it upright, thinking only of Rosa, her dark chocolate eyes and the way she stared at him without blinking.
She was a rare beauty, this one, and with two hours to spare before his direct flight to Maryland and the close proximity to the airport of several hotels, he saw distinct possibilities in their chance meeting, as if it were meant to happen.
* * *
He was in the airport restroom washing the heady scent of Rosa off his skin, when he first noticed a damp circle on the tile floor where his briefcase rested beside his foot as he washed his face and hands.
“Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath, glancing around to see who might be watching before he bent down to open his lone piece of carry-on luggage.
What he saw did not disturb him—after several drinks and two hours spent with Rosa little short of a nuclear blast could disturb him.
An envelope surrounding the container from Janus was soaked and he felt sure it was only liquid protecting an inner capsule in which specimens were sent, a jellylike substance insulating the package’s real cargo from a potentially dangerous accidental bump or a trip through airport security’s X-ray and conveyor belt.
“I’ll put it in another envelope,” he said to himself, with little thought given to anything beyond delivering his package to Blackman and then getting the hell away from Fort Detrick in time to meet Diane, a young captain’s wife who discovered her first orgasm when Arturo introduced her to the inherent skills of a Latin lover while her husband was overseas serving his country.
He tore open the ruined wrapping and tightened the capsule lid before placing it in another envelope, convincing himself the dampness clinging to his fingers was only insulating jelly and harmless. He heard his flight number being called. He tucked the newly wrapped package into his briefcase before hurrying from el baño to catch his plane to Baltimore, glad to be out of Mexico despite his enchanting rendezvous with lovely Rosa Morales.
Fort Detrick
Arturo flashed his ID badge to a guard sitting at a desk just inside the second security door to the USAMRIID laboratory building. The guard smiled in recognition as Arturo approached, then frowned as he came closer.
“Jesus, Arturo, you look like shit. You feelin’ okay?”
Arturo sleeved sweat from his forehead and shivered with a sudden chill.
“Yeah, I guess so. I think I must be coming down with the flu. I’ve been on crowded planes for the past two days and in addition had to tramp through fifty miles of jungle so there’s no telling what kind of crap I caught.”
He held his briefcase up and tilted his head toward the inner laboratory down the hall. “I just gotta drop this off, then I’m home to bed.”
The guard waved him through. “Take two aspirins and a hot blond and call me in the morning,” he said with a smile and a wink.
Arturo Vela, code-named Paco, entered the final security door to deposit his deadly cargo on Colonel Blackman’s desk in the lab, thus completing his latest task for the Colonel.
Though he did not realize it, it was to be his last delivery to USAMRIID.