Midnight Fever (Men of Midnight #5)(42)

"That," Nick said. "That's what I had to do first."

And he started moving inside her.





Portland



There were always bumps in the road. Oliver Baker understood that. But this was a major hurdle, and potentially very dangerous. So far no one had noticed the engineered H1N1. No one. The absolutely perfect murder weapon, like in that story where the wife killed her husband with the frozen leg of lamb she roasted and served to the police inspector.

A weaponized super-fast version of the Spanish flu linked to the victim's DNA. You could be right next to the victim, dying fast and dirty, and not get so much as a cold. And you could extend the range of the DNA. You could kill the person, the person's kids or parents. You could wipe out a family or even a tribe. At least in theory.

That theory was going to be tested in four weeks' time. A tiny inbred tribe in the heart of the Congo was sitting on one of the world's largest deposits of coltan, essential to the manufacture of computers. The tribe would be made to disappear. A gallon of the liquefied DNA-edited virus would be sprayed over their hunting area. Baker had thousands of hours of footage of the tribe's movements and had mapped out their territory exactly. Half an hour after spraying, the tribe would be no more. Give it a week for the jungle to reclaim the dead, and Collux Mining could move right in and start extracting. 

Superdeath, Frank Winstone called it. He should know. As head of the CDC, he dealt with death daily, only he was famous for defeating it. As a young researcher, he'd developed a vaccine for a rare hemorrhagic fever disease and had saved hundreds of thousands of lives. And would save millions over the years to come.

And hadn't earned a dime from it.

It was why he'd come to Oliver last year, because he knew-everyone knew-that Oliver was King Midas. Whatever he touched turned to gold. Though Oliver had never actually quite had something so … remunerative, so golden in his hands before. He'd started life as a lawyer and had done well. Knowing the law helped you navigate its outer reaches. He became the go-to guy. If you had a problem, Baker would get you out of it. Whatever you needed, Baker could get it for you.

He'd done a stint at the CIA and had an ad hoc team of former Clandestine Service agents who liked earning money. A roster of fifty kickass operatives on retainer ready to go at any time. It was perfect. He made them enough money to earn their loyalty but they weren't employees and weren't on the payroll. What they did in their downtime was their business. He didn't pay salaries. He paid fees.

Baker had made his first twenty million before Frank approached him with the most perfect weapon ever, guaranteed to solve any problem that was human. Just eliminate it.

Frank had developed it, but didn't know how to use it. But Baker did. Oh yeah.

Baker made his second twenty million in the first six months he had access to Superdeath. And this year, he was going to double that. There was, almost literally, no limit to what he could earn, to what he could do, as long as no one understood what had been created.

Sometimes he had to take a little risk, like the De Haven bitch. Normally Oliver let a little time go by between a threat to a client and the elimination of the threat. But Offutt had been adamant. He wanted her dead yesterday, and so Oliver had been forced to act right in the middle of a congressional investigation, with the spotlight turned on De Haven.

So far no one had shown any interest in the sudden death of a woman in late middle age. The newspapers universally spoke of a heart attack.

Baker understood Offutt completely, even though he despised the man. De Haven was trying to take Offutt's very lucrative business away from him. And it was De Haven's own fault she was targeted. She wasn't happy with damaging just some of Offutt's business, oh no. She wanted Blackvale's total destruction, and the only response to that was total war. Why couldn't she have been susceptible to a bribe? Even a big one, like a million dollars? Would have saved everyone a lot of trouble and would have saved Offutt fifteen million. But no.

She had signed her own death warrant.

There would be no fallout, no investigation. De Haven died a natural death. There probably would not even be an autopsy. And if there was, nothing would emerge. And if by some stroke of terrible luck, the ME wasn't happy, Baker had an envelope full of unmarked bills to give to the medical examiner. Shocking what they paid MEs these days for doing a nasty job. And if the ME wasn't amenable to a little persuasion, well, Baker's operatives could arrange a car accident, a mugging gone wrong, a dog attack while he was out running, electrocution at the building site of his new home. All sorts of things could happen.

Not Superdeath, though. He was careful not to shit in the same place twice. So far, use of Superdeath had been spread out geographically and over time. There wasn't even a hint about it. He should know, he kept his ear close to the ground.