Whiteout
Chapter One
TWO tired men looked at Antonia Gallo with resentment and hostility in their eyes. They
wanted to go home, but she would not let them. And they knew she was right, which
made it worse.
All three were in the personnel department of Oxenford Medical. Antonia, always called
Toni, was facilities director, and her main responsibility was security. Oxenford was a small
pharmaceuticals outfit-a boutique company, in stock market jargon-that did research on
viruses that could kill. Security was deadly serious.
Toni had organized a spot check of supplies, and had found that two doses of an experimental drug
were missing. That was bad enough: the drug, an antiviral agent, was top secret, its formula priceless. It
might have been stolen for sale to a rival company. But another, more frightening possibility had
brought the look of grim anxiety to Toni's freckled face and drawn dark circles under her green eyes. A
thief might have stolen the drug for personal use. And there was only one reason for that: someone had
become infected by one of the lethal viruses used in Oxenford's laboratories.
The labs were located in a vast nineteenth-century house built as a Scottish holiday home for
a Victorian millionaire. It was nicknamed the Kremlin, because of the do ... read full excerpt from: Whiteout ebook
