Read The Pursuit for Free Online Page B

you’re ready.”

K ate walked back to her hotel. She needed some sleep to clear her head. She needed to make sure that whatever the plan, her dad wouldn’t end up in a Belgian jail too.
    She went to her room, found her iPhone, and left her boss, Carl Jessup, a voicemail that said only “What was in the vault?”
    Kate flopped facedown on the bed fully clothed and fell asleep almost instantly. It felt like she’d closed her eyes for only a second when she was awakened by the electronic trill of her iPhone. The time on the clock radio, next to her phone, was 3  P.M. , and the caller ID on her phone read “Jessup.”
    Kate grabbed the phone. “O’Hare,” she said.
    “How much of the story that you told the Belgian police is true?” her boss asked. His Kentucky drawl was disarmingly low-key. It was as if he was casually asking about the weather, or the price of turnips, and not about an international incident that was likely to end Kate’s career with the FBI.
    “Ninety percent,” she said. “What I left out was that Nick was kidnapped by the Road Runners to pull off the heist and that I came here to rescue him.”
    “Then you did the right thing going to Antwerp without telling me,” Jessup said. “You gave us plausible deniability.”
    “That was the idea.”
    “I sincerely doubt that.”
    “How much trouble am I in?” she asked.
    “That depends on if you get caught,” Jessup said.
    “I think they bought my story.”
    “I’m not talking about that,” Jessup said. “I’m talking about you breaking Nicolas Fox out of jail.”
    “Excuse me?” Kate could feel beads of panicked sweat appearing on her upper lip. How did Jessup know she was planning a jailbreak?
    “I’m expecting the Belgians to throw you out of the country within forty-eight hours, so you don’t have much time to free Nick, and you need to do it without hurting anyone. If you get caught, we’ll say it was a desperate act by a crazy FBI agent who fell in love with the man she was chasing.”
    It wasn’t that far from the truth, but even if Jessup knew it he wouldn’t sanction a jailbreak for it. There had to be another reason.
    “I can’t believe you’re asking me to do this, sir. I expected you to tear my head off and order me to forget about Nick.”
    “I would have, and I’d still like to, but we believe one of the safe-deposit boxes in that vault contained a vial of smallpox,” Jessup said. “Now the Road Runners have it. The smallpox was probably their target all along.”
    “How is that possible? Smallpox was eradicated decades ago, and the only samples that exist are at the CDC in Atlanta and a lab in Russia.”
    “Yes, that’s been the general assumption.”
    “ ‘Assumption’?”
    “Well, it’s not like somebody went around to every lab in the world and verified that each smallpox sample ever collected was destroyed. However, since nobody has been infected in forty years, the accepted belief is that the virus was wiped out and the only samples of the virus are secured.”
    “You’re telling me that isn’t true.”
    “In the early 1990s, a Soviet defector revealed to MI5 that the Russians were secretly developing a super-virulent strain of smallpox, in blatant violation of international agreements, through a civilian drug company called Biopreparat. After that came out, the U.S. and NATO threatened an all-out bioweapons arms race, so the Soviets caved, ended the program, and destroyed the smallpox.”
    “But not all of it,” Kate said.
    “They were in the midst of complying with international demands when the Soviet Union collapsed and descended into chaos. One of the bioweapons scientists, Sergei Andropov, fled Moscow with a vial of smallpox in his pocket to sell to the highest bidder. Sergei settled in Antwerp, where his cousin Yuri Baskin was a diamond merchant. But before Sergei could make a deal with anyone, he was killed in a car accident. The vial was never found.”
    “But you think Sergei