The Venetian Betrayal (18 page)

Stephanie wondered where this was headed. "Why is all this important?"

Davis reached for a file on the glass-topped table, beside Daniels' bare feet. "Nine years ago a pair of endangered geese was stolen from a private zoo in Belgium. At about the same time, some endangered rodents and a species of rare snails were taken from zoos in Australia and Spain. Usually, this kind of thing is not that significant. But we started checking and found that it's happened at least forty times around the world. The break came last year. In South Africa. The thieves were caught. We covered their arrest with phony deaths. The men cooperated, considering a South African prison is not a good place to spend a few years. That's when we learned Irina Zovastina was behind the thefts."

"Who ran that investigation?" she asked.

"Painter Crowe at Sigma," Daniels said. "Lots of science here. That's their specialty. But now it's passed into your realm."

She didn't like the sound of that. "Sure Painter can't keep it?"

Daniels smiled. "After tonight? No, Stephanie. This one's all yours. Payback for me saving your hide with the Dutch."

The president still held the elephant medallion, so she asked, "What does that coin have to do with anything?"

"Zovastina has been collecting these," Daniels said. "Here's the real problem. We know she's amassed a pretty hefty inventory of zoonoses. Twenty or so at last count. And by the way, she's been clever, she has multiple versions. Like Edwin said, one for limited strikes, the other for human-to-human transmission. She operates a biological lab near her capital in Samarkand. But, interestingly, Enrico Vincenti has another bio lab just across the border, in China. One Zovastina likes to visit."

"Which was why you wanted fieldwork on Vincenti?"

Davis nodded. "Pays to know the enemy."

"The CIA has been cultivating leaks inside the Federation," Daniels said, shaking his head. "Hard going. And a mess. But we've made a little progress."

Yet she detected something. "You have a source?"

"If you want to call it that," the president said. "I have my doubts. Zovastina is a problem on many levels."

She understood his dilemma. In a region of the world where America possessed few friends, Zovastina had openly proclaimed herself one. She'd been helpful several times with minor intelligence that had thwarted terrorist activity in Afghanistan and Iraq. Out of necessity, the United States had provided her with money, military support, and sophisticated equipment, which was risky.

"Ever hear the one about the man driving down the highway who saw a snake lying in the middle of the road?"

She grinned. Another of Daniels' famed stories.

"The guy stopped and saw that the snake was hurt. So he took the thing home and nursed it back to health. When the snake recovered, he opened the front door to let it go. But as the rattler crawled out, the damn thing bit him on the leg. Just before the venom drove him to unconsciousness, he called out to the snake, 'I took you in, fed you, doctored your wounds, and you repaid that by biting me?' The snake stopped and said, 'All true. But when you did that you knew I was a snake.'"

She caught the message.

"Zovastina," the president said, "is up to something and it involves Enrico Vincenti. I don't like biological warfare. The world outlawed it over thirty years ago. And this form is the worst kind. She's planning something awful, and that Venetian League, of which she and Vincenti are members, is right there helping her. Thankfully, she's not acted. But we have reason to believe she may soon start. The damn fools surrounding her, in what they loosely call nations, are oblivious to what's happening. Too busy worrying about Israel and us. She's using that stupidity to her advantage. She thinks I'm stupid, too. It's time she knew that we're on to her."

"We would have preferred to stay in the shadows a bit longer," Davis said. "But two Secret Service agents killing her guardsmen has surely sounded an alarm."

"What do you want me to do?"

Daniels yawed and she smothered one of her own. The president waved his hand. "Go ahead. Hell, it's the middle of the night. Don't mind me. Yawn away. You can sleep on the plane."

"Where am I going?"

"Venice. If Mohammed won't come to the mountain, then by God we'll bring the mountain to him."

Chapter
THIRTY-TWO

VENICE

8:50 A
. M
.

VINCENTI ENTERED THE MAIN SALON OF HIS PALAZZO AND READIED himself. Usually, he did not bother with these types of presentations. After all, Philogen Pharmaceutique employed an extensive marketing and sales department with hundreds of employees. This, however, was something special, something that demanded only his presence, so he'd arranged for a private presentation at his home.

He noticed that the outside advertising agency, headquartered in Milan, seemed to have taken no chances. Four representatives, three females and a male, one a senior vice president, had been dispatched to brief him.

"Damaris Corrigan," the vice president said in English, introducing herself and her three associates. She was an attractive woman, in her early fifties, dressed in a dark blue, chalk-striped suit.

Off to the side, coffee steamed from a silver urn. He walked over and poured himself a cup.

"We couldn't help but wonder," Corrigan said, "is something about to happen?"

He unbuttoned his suit jacket and settled into an upholstered chair. "What do you mean?"

"When we were retained six months ago, you wanted suggestions on marketing a possible HIV cure. We wondered then if Philogen was on the brink of something. Now, with you wanting to see what we have, we thought maybe there'd been a breakthrough."

He silently congratulated himself. "I think you voiced the operative word. Possible. Certainly, it's our hope to be first with a cure--we're spending millions on research--but if a breakthrough were to happen, and you never know when that's going to occur, I don't want to be caught waiting months for an effective marketing scheme." He paused. "No. Nothing to this point, but a little preparedness is good."

His guest acknowledged the explanation with a nod, then she paraded to a waiting easel. He shot a glance at one of the women sitting next to him. A shapely brunette, not more than thirty or thirty-five, in a tight-fitting wool skirt. He wondered if she was an account executive or just decoration.

"I've done some fascinating reading over the past few weeks," Corrigan said. "HIV seems to have a split personality, depending on what part of the globe you're studying."

"There's truth to that observation," he said. "Here, and in places like North America, the disease is reasonably containable. No longer a leading cause of death. People simply live with it. Symptomatic drugs have reduced the mortality rate by more than half. But in Africa and Asia it's an entirely different story. Worldwide, last year, three million died of HIV."

"And that's what we did first," she said. "Identified our projected market."

She folded back the blank top sheet on the pad affixed to the easel, revealing a chart.

"These figures represent the latest incidents of worldwide HIV infections."

REGIONS

NUMBER

North Americ
a
1,011,000

Western Europ
e
988,000

Australia-Pacific
a
22,000

Latin Americ
a
1,599,000

Sub-Saharan Afric
a
20,778,000

Caribbea
n
5

Eastern Europ
e
2,000

Southeast Mediterranea
n
89

Northeast Asi
a
6,000

Southeast Asi
a
11,277,000

Tota
l
7,112,000

"What's the data source?" Vincenti asked.

"World Health Organization. And this represents the total current market available for any cure." Corrigan flipped to the next page. "This chart fine-tunes the available market. As you can see, the data shows roughly a quarter of worldwide HIV infections have already resulted in a manifestation of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Nine million HIV-infected individuals now have full-blown AIDS."

REGIONS

NUMBER

North Americ
a
555,000

Western Europ
e
20,500

Australia-Pacific
a
14,000

Latin Americ
a
57

Sub-Saharan Afric
a
6
,
00,000

Caribbea
n
160,500

Eastern Europ
e
10,800

Southeast Mediterranea
n
15,000

Northeast Asi
a
17,600

Southeast Asi
a
1
,
40,000

Tota
l
9
,
06,900

Corrigan flipped to the next chart. "This shows the projections for five years from now. Again, this data came from the World Health Organization."

REGIONS

ESTIMATE

North Americ
a
8,150,000

Western Europ
e
2
,
1,000

Australia-Pacific
a
45,000

Latin Americ
a
8,554,000

Sub-Saharan Afric
a
,609,000

Caribbea
n
6,962,000

Eastern Europ
e
20,000

Southeast Mediterranea
n
,5

Northeast Asi
a
486,000

Southeast Asi
a
45,059,000

Tota
l
108,748,000

"Amazing. We could soon have one hundred ten million people infected, worldwide, with HIV. Current statistics indicate that fifty percent of these individuals will eventually develop AIDS. Forty percent of that fifty percent will be dead within two years. Of course, the vast majority of these will be in Africa and Asia." Corrigan shook her head. "Quite a market, wouldn't you say?"

Vincenti digested the figures. Using a mean of seventy million HIV cases, even at a conservative five thousand euros per year for treatment, any cure would initially generate three hundred and fifty billion euros. True, once the initial infected population was cured, the market would dwindle. So what? The money would be made. More than anyone could ever spend in a lifetime. Later, there'd surely be new infections and more sales, not the billions the initial campaign would generate, but a continuous windfall nonetheless.

"Our next analysis involved a look at the competition. From what we've been able to learn from the WHO, roughly sixteen drugs are now being used globally for the symptomatic treatment of AIDS. There are roughly a dozen players in this game. The sales from your own drugs were just over a billion euros last year."

Philogen owned patents for six medicines that, when used in conjunction with others, had proven effective in arresting the virus. Though it took, on average, about fifty pills a day, the so-called cocktail therapy was all that really worked. Not a cure, the deluge of medication simply confused the virus, and it was only a matter of time before nature outsmarted the microbiologists. Already, drug-resistant HIV strains had emerged in Asia and China.

"We took a look at the combination treatments," Corrigan said. "A three-drug regimen costs on average about twenty thousand euros a year. But that form of treatment is basically a Western luxury. It's nonexistent in Africa and Asia. Philogen donates, at reduced costs, medications to a few of the affected governments, but to treat those patients similarly would cost billions of euros a year, money no African government has to spend."

His own marketing people had already told him the same thing. Treatment was not really an option for the ravaged third world. Stopping the spread of HIV was the only cost-effective method to attack the crisis. Condoms were the initial instrument of choice, and one of Philogen's subsidiaries couldn't make the things fast enough. Sales had risen in the thousands of percent over the course of the last two decades. And so had profits. But, of late, the use of condoms had steadily dropped. People were becoming complacent.

Corrigan was saying, "According to its own propaganda, one of your competitors, Kellwood-Lafarge, spent more than a hundred million euros on AIDS-cure research last year alone. You spent about a third of that."

He threw the woman a smirk. "Competing with Kellwood-Lafarge is akin to fishing for whales with a rod and reel. It's the largest drug conglomerate on the planet. Hard to match somebody euro for euro when the other guy has over a hundred billion in year gross revenues."