The Wuhan Mission

by Irving Waters

  Copyright

  © Irving Waters

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including printing, photocopying or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of Irving Waters, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to Irving Waters, addressed “Attention: Permissions” at the email address below.

  NYvid@me.com

  MISSION COVID-X

  AKA:

  “The Wuhan Mission”

  This is an identical book under a new name:

  ‘The Wuhan Mission.’

  This publisher expressed to me that this book, with its original title, did not comply with their guidelines. As a result they did not wish to offer the book for sale.

  “Due to the rapidly changing nature of information around the COVID-19 virus, we are referring customers to official sources for health information about the virus. Please consider removing references to COVID-19 for this book.”

  Section 1

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, descriptions of those characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  Xue Lin

  The morning smog over Wuhan was worse than usual as Xue Lin biked through the spiderweb of streets to work. It had been four months since she had arrived here and begun working as a lab assistant at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was dull work, mostly repetitive data entry, but she didn’t care too much as she had other things on her mind.

  Her boss, Doctor Wu had made numerous passes at her but she had always let them slide. His thinly veiled advances showed her his weakness. It made him malleable, easily manipulated. Dr. Wu was in charge of the Biosafety Level IV Facility which was guarded by two armed members of China’s Ministry of State Security. None of the lab assistants were allowed into that section of the building. Only Wu had clearance to get through that particular door.

  Her bike’s brakes squealed as she stopped at the traffic light next to the Exotic Food Market. She always felt so disgusted as she passed the market because the stall on the corner was a dog vendor. She loved dogs, and the appalling scene of caged dogs and steel drum cookers and welding torches often made her gag.

  After two more sets of lights, she arrived at the Institute. She parked her rusty bike and entered the building, greeting no-one on the way in, as was her way. She had managed to stay relatively anonymous despite her good looks. She always tied her hair up in a bun with steel chopsticks and she wore thick rimmed glasses, no makeup, loose fitting black cargo pants and running shoes. Her appearance of course was not enough to put off her boss Dr. Wu who liked to lean over her and smell her hair as she worked. She neither encouraged, nor put a halt to his subtle but clumsy moves. Always in control, she knew just how much to allow before swiveling her chair to face him, throwing him off balance.

  Xue Lin had been orphaned at the age of five, but as she was a very cute little girl, she had soon been adopted by an American couple who had been working in Beijing in the nineties.

  Doctor Wu had been running the Biosafety Level IV Facility for nearly a year, and was obviously making good money as he drove a nice car and had sent his twenty year old daughter to New York City to study. He talked about her often: ‘what shopping she had done and how much her education was costing’. He was clearly very proud of her.

  As the head honcho, each day he patrolled the whole Institute of Virology checking on everyone’s work, but his office and lab were in the Biosafety Level IV Facility deeper into the building. He never mentioned his own work to anyone. All that anyone knew was that he was experimenting on mice and primates that were occasionally replaced, as the dead subjects were incinerated.

  This morning, as Dr. Wu arrived at the Institute building, Xue Lin appeared to be working diligently in her cubicle. He eyed her suspiciously. He was quite surprised to see her there before any of the other lab assistants, it was only 8:15am.

  He passed by Xue Lin’s cubicle, and he greeted her informally standing behind her, placing a hand on her shoulder. She swiveled into him slowly, without pulling him off balance, and looked up at him with a coy smile.

  “Good morning Doctor Wu! How are you feeling today?”

  “I am fine, Xue Lin. Your smiling face always gives me hope for a better world.”

  Xue Lin drew his attention to her computer where there was an administrative botch-up that she had made. He bent over her, even closer than usual. She winced a little at the stale smell of cigarettes and his night’s drinking binge. She used her scissors to snip his lanyard and slid his security pass into her lab coat pocket.

  “I’m just going to make a cup of tea. Would you like one?” she asked Dr. Wu as she stood up and offered him her desk chair, so that he could more comfortably work on the administrative bungle that she had made especially for him.

  “Yes, Xue Lin, that would be wonderful, thank you honey.”

  Xue Lin went out past security to her locker and grabbed her backpack, throwing it on, then moved back up the hall to the metal detector. The metal detector beeped as she walked through it. The security guard came around the machine towards her.

  Xue Lin pulled her chopsticks out of her hair and took two large strides launching herself at him, taking him to the ground with her legs around his torso, pinning his arms to his sides. He tried to reach for his pistol but she plunged the chopsticks into his neck, and then with both hands she gripped the two chopsticks together and drove them into his heart.

  *

  Chapter 2

  The Chairman

  One Year Earlier

  China had experienced many rebellions and uprisings throughout the centuries. The Communist Government was still poised ‘with military hammer lifted’ waiting to crush any opposition from the enormous population it wished to control. The number of ‘mass incidents’ had been growing almost exponentially over the past three decades. In 1989 the Tiananmen Square protest had been successfully crushed with military force, killing thousands of protesters, but the Government’s hard-line methods caused an international uproar, and public dissent was still high.

  The Communist Party was struggling to control the flow and content of information. The internet was full of reasons for the population to rise up. In 1997 when Hong Kong was being handed back to China by the British after 100 years of capitalistic freedom, the population fell suddenly under the rule of the Communist Party. A bold population was a dangerous force. Mass surveillance was now in play, but control needed to be absolute. The Government debated new tools to intimidate, scare and potentially lock down the people and possibly even cull parts of the growing mass of people living on its soil.

  The Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Xi Jinping deeply desired a new way to control the vast ocean of people. His predecessor, Chairman Deng Xiaoping had brought down martial law like a sledge hammer, and incredibly, the detail that the foreign devils remembered was the ‘tank man’ citizen standing in front of a tank column, stopping them in their tracks. The photo that went around the world embarrassing the Chinese Government. Clearly something new was needed.

  Dr. Wu’s terrifying meeting with Chairman Xi Jinxing happened in January 2019 when Dr. Wu was summoned to an empty restaurant by a party official and made to wait an hour nursing a cup of hot water with just a few green tea leaves in it. Dr. Wu smoked half a packet of cigarettes while waiting, a
nervous wreck. He knew that the Chairman was one of the most powerful men in China and could have him put in a cell for the rest of his life, or worse.

  Chairman Xi Jinxing was responsible for the disappearance of dissidents and wayward lawyers, and he’d had parts of history wiped from the books. He had even banned pictures of Winnie the Pooh after the character was used to mock him.

  The Chairman walked into the restaurant with six guards in black suits. Dr. Wu pulled himself to his feet, stubbing out his thirteenth cigarette, and bowed deeply, stammering a weak greeting. The Chairman sat himself down heavily in the chair opposite him at the large ornate table and indicated to the staff to bring food and the usual dangerous beverage in small shot glasses that they were both accustomed to drinking on such occasions.

  “You are a man of strength. You are clever. Brilliant. Healthy!” said the Chairman.

  “Men like you and me do not celebrate getting older. We celebrate getting better. Am I correct?”

  “Yes, yes” smiled Dr. Wu nervously, looking with embarrassment at the ashtray he had completely filled to overflowing.

  “I believe,” continued the Chairman, “that lessons often appear in the form of mistakes or failures. And yet the only real mistake is ‘not learning the lesson.’

  We know that we have learned the lesson when our actions change.

  “Tiananmen Square was such a mistake. Chairman Deng Xiaoping taught us a great lesson that day: ‘Brute force cannot create lasting peace. You need willing cooperation.’”

  “Very wise sir, very wise” Dr. Wu nodded, wondering where he was going with his obtuse line of conversation.

  “Death is not sad. The sad thing is that most people do not really live at all”

  The Chairman’s eyes were piercing. Dr. Wu was quite terrified.

  “The party needs you! The party requires you to do a job for the good of China. Your success in this endeavor will change the history of our great country! Do you wish to know what it is that am asking you to do?”

  “Yes of course, sir” replied Wu, not wanting to know in the least.

  “The party needs two things from you:

  You must build a question...and an answer!” The Chairman smirked at Wu knowingly. Dr. Wu looked quizzically back at him.

  “The question you will build must ask: ‘are you strong enough to survive?’

  The answer that you will build: ‘Yes, but only with the help of the Communist Party.”

  Dr. Wu felt his shirt sticking to his back. He already had an idea of what the Chairman was asking.

  “But I am m-merely a scientist” stuttered Wu.

  “You are much more than that. You are a famous virologist and a genius!

  I merely want you to continue the work that was done in the lab in recent years; work that was funded by a wealthy American. The final product that we were hoping for was never perfected.

  You must pick up where the scientists before you left off. You will build a new virus and a vaccine.

  This virus must kill only the weak and the elderly.

  The vaccine will protect others from falling sick from the virus. We will need a cure; an ‘antidote’ to give those of us who must not under any circumstances fall ill.”

  “Yes sir, a virus and a vaccine and an antidote, I understand sir”

  The food began to arrive in quantity and the Chairman began to eat skilfully from a plate that contained slices of succulent duck.

  “You see Dr. Wu, the people have forgotten that the party protects them, both from the outside world and from themselves, and we must remind them of this! You will remind them!”

  “Yes sir, I will do that. It may take me twelve months to accomplish the tasks. There have been failures in the past. I will not fail, but I need time” said Dr. Wu, regaining some composure. He knew what a task like this required.

  “Dr. Wu, you will have everything and everyone that you need at the Wuhan laboratory. I trust that it will take less than a year. We have other projects of a technological nature in the pipeline that will be depending on your success.”

  “Will you please eat something Dr. Wu?” spluttered the Chairman as he slurped up a soup dumpling.

  “Gan Bei!” He held up his rice wine, and their little glasses clinked.

  “To your success and the glory of the Chinese Communist Party!”

  Dr. Wu drank the strong alcohol, hoping that it would stop his hands from shaking.

  The Chairman spouted a random collection of pointless parables as he chewed, often spitting as he spoke. Doctor Wu was extremely relieved when the meal finally came to an end and the Chairman left the restaurant with his guards.

  Once seated in the back of his limo, the Chairman pulled out his phone and made a call.

  “Mister Secretary!”

  “Hello Mr. Chairman”, the Secretary of the Communist Party answered, his phone on speaker. He was in his limo on the way home from a business dinner.

  “Mr. Secretary, have you ever heard the saying: ‘You do not DO anything,

  You SEE it done and it IS’ the Chairman said, dramatically overemphasizing words.

  “Yes Mister Chairman, I have heard that saying.” he lied, assuming that the Chairman had made it up.

  “We now have the best virologist in China working at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan taking China towards the Party’s goal.” Stated the Chairman, proudly.

  “That is very good news Mister Chairman. You refer to Doctor Wu I presume.”

  “Indeed I do!” boomed the voice of the Chairman over speakerphone.

  “It’s beginning to come together” he continued,

  “Any man has the capacity to find the gate and pass through.

  Very few are moved to do so, and fewer are interested” finished the Chairman.

  We shall talk soon Mister Secretary”.

  “Zài Jiàn” they both said, handing up.

  The driver, Jimmy, smoothly pulled the limo into the Secretary’s driveway, smiling to himself. The CIA would pay for this information. He needed to feed the monster if he was to keep getting paid.

  Chapter 3

  Jimmy Chin

  Jimmy Chin had been working as a Central Security agent in Beijing, assigned to the Secretary. He had been a sergeant in the People’s Liberation Army and had been moved to the Government ‘plain clothes’ branch by a General who once knew Jimmy’s father. Conditions were much better than in the army, but the pay was still quite low. He’d undergone extra training before crossing over. They taught him to disarm all manner of assailants with any kind of weapon. He’d memorized a new manual of operation protocols and verbal codes, and had run countless drills with other trainees. He was extremely well qualified for all kinds of work in the field.

  Jimmy had no wife, no kids, no girlfriend. He was a solid agent as far as the Government branch of the PLA were concerned.

  Jimmy loved all things Western. He loved American music, the movies, the way the girls looked. He wanted to live there one day. He had been learning English in his spare time, mostly by watching movies.

  The first time he was contacted by the American, Marcus Roet, an officer from the CIA, was after he’d been given the job of guarding the Secretary. Roet had offered him a hundred thousand a year in a US bank account just to keep his ears open and to report back to him every week. Jimmy was all about the dollar signs, and wanted a better life. He hadn’t been sucked in by all the Chinese propaganda and he’d seen all those Chinese industrialists get rich while he risked his life for a crappy salary. The rich little Chinese princesses were not interested in a guy like him. No money, no nice clothes. He had never traveled. Jimmy felt like he had a lot to offer a girl. He was being held back. Marcus Roet offered him a leg up and he grabbed the opportunity and at every possible chance he turned that opportunity upside down and shook it to see what more he could get out of it.

  Jimmy was one of the Secretary’s special forces guard team, and was also his driver. He drove a Hongqui Sedan, or as
it was known in unofficial circles, a ‘Red Flag Limo’. Jimmy was privy to all kinds of conversations, particularly of interest to Marcus Roet were those between the Secretary and the Chairman.

  Roet occasionally would ask Jimmy to do some physical jobs, including a couple of ‘wetwork’ jobs. When he had extra work from Roet, there would appear an extra deposit in his US bank account, negotiated in advance of course.

  The Secretary was paranoid about cell phone radiation. It was possible that he knew something that no-one else did. In any case, the Secretary always used speaker-phone and held the phone away from his head. This meant that Jimmy could always hear both sides of the conversation.

  Tonight, as he drove the Secretary home from a restaurant in Beijing, he overheard the Chairman telling the Secretary about some virus that a Doctor Wu was working on. It seemed like valuable intel, so Jimmy called Marcus as soon as he got home to his modest Government apartment in Beijing. Marcus had provided Jimmy with a secure phone that he hid under the fridge. He had to jack the front of the fridge up with a crowbar to get it out.

  “Yo! My brother! It’s Jimmy.”

  “Yes, I can tell, Jimmy, you have a bit of an accent” said Roet sarcastically.

  “The Chairman told my boss over the phone that some Doctor Wu was working on a new a virus.”

  “Thank you Jimmy. I shall look into it. If you can find out in what city this Doctor Wu lives and works, that would be helpful. I’ll be in touch soon. Anything else interesting?”

  “New iPhone coming out soon!” Jimmy said, rather stupidly.

  “Ok Jimmy, you take care.”

  Roet hung up abruptly and scratched his head.

  “Another virus. It was going to be like 2003. SARS again” he thought to himself, concerned.

  He picked up the phone on his desk: “It’s Marcus. Can you look up Chinese passports that have entered the country with the surname Wu within the last ten years. Run it against known scientists in China. See how many names come up. We can narrow it down from there.