by Matt Miksa
“Fuck a duck, Karl. I thought we were pals,” Big Tex replied with melodramatic indignation. “Well, tell you what. You know as well as I do, my client has done pretty well for himself lately. He’s been ridin’ a gravy train with biscuit wheels ever since crude hit ninety-seven bucks a barrel. But what good are deep pockets when you’ve got short arms? Ya know what I mean, Karl?”
He didn’t.
“So, let’s not sit here beating our sticky dickies just to see who blows first,” Big Tex continued. “Christ knows that would take an eternity, and my nut sack is beginning to feel like a fried egg.” The man’s tiny paper napkin was now hopelessly soaked. “Fourteen million, but we make the exchange right here, right now. Put up or shut up, my German friend.”
“Austrian,” Gassinger corrected.
“For Chrissake, Karl! I don’t give a flying fig if you’re Finlandian. I’ve gotta get on a plane in one hour. What’s it gonna be?”
The scientist gritted his teeth. “The money?” he snapped impatiently.
Big Tex reached into his pocket and produced a Starbucks gift card. On the front was the word Congratulations underneath a cartoon cake. He handed the plastic card to Gassinger like a proud uncle.
Panic swelled in Dr. Gassinger’s chest. He’d carefully vetted this buyer, but the whole arrangement was beginning to feel like a setup. Genetix must have discovered he’d removed proprietary research from the company’s databases and sent this fool to catch him red-handed. The scientist shot a look over his shoulder, eyes darting from face to face, searching for gray-suited Genetix security thugs.
Don’t be a damn fool, he thought. This hunched slob was no corporate puppet—and certainly not the polizei. Just a sloppy thief and an amateurish negotiator.
“There must have been a mistake,” Gassinger said. “When you contacted me, I believed you were a serious buyer, but now I see you are just another American clod. I am putting everything on the line here.”
Big Tex straightened his hat. “Now, just cool your pits, amigo. Nobody lugs around briefcases full of cash anymore. This little do-si-do has to be discreet. So, here’s how it’s gonna work. Go inside and use this card to buy a cup of joe. The magnetic stripe contains metadata. Most of it’s run-of-the-mill stuff—info for the banks and marketing geeks, ya following me?—but this bad boy’s got a bit more under the hood.” He tapped the card. “When the cashier gives it a swipe, the register connects to a server, and a little extra code sneaks out and triggers a wire transfer to a confidential UBS account in Zurich. Your account, Karl.” Big Tex leaned in. “Go buy yourself a latte,” he growled, before flashing a wide, yellow smile.
Dr. Gassinger stood gruffly and headed into the café.
“I recommend the caramel Frappuccino,” Big Tex called after him cheerfully.
* * *
Operations Officer Olen Grave removed the cowboy hat to let his scalp breathe. He shifted his weight, eliciting a foreboding groan from the flimsy bistro chair. Through the café’s storefront window, he saw the Austrian scientist queue up behind a skinny hipster with a nose ring. Olen whispered under his breath, his lips barely moving, “Looks like he took the bait.” His southern drawl evaporated. “After the swap, execute Exfil Beta One.”
The hushed command referred to a predetermined exfiltration procedure designed to get Olen off the street as fast as possible while ensuring that he stayed black, free of hostile surveillance. After the swap, Olen would head straight to Handelskai station and take the subway west two stops to Spittelau Bahnhst, where a van would pick him up on the southbound side of Heiligenstädter Strasse. If Olen wasn’t there, shuffling along the uneven sidewalk, in under twelve minutes, the cleanup crew would proceed to the next location—a simple leapfrog technique to give him another opportunity to check for shadows.
Olen watched Dr. Gassinger step up to the counter inside the café. The doctor was speaking on his cell phone. Calling his bank, presumably. A moment later, the irascible Austrian emerged looking almost delighted.
“The transfer is confirmed,” Gassinger reported. He held two glistening drinks and handed one to Olen. “I suppose this one is on me.”
“Well, lookee there. Pals after all,” Olen responded gleefully, the phony accent restored.
The geneticist removed his Aerowatch and handed it to Olen. “This is everything,” he said. “Start a company, start a war. I do not give a damn.”
“This is it, Doc?” Olen asked, pinching the watch face between two stubby fingers.
“There is a chip hidden in the battery compartment. You can download the data via Bluetooth. No one carries around test tubes of live virus anymore,” Gassinger retorted, his thin lips spreading into a pained smile. “And you can keep the timepiece. I can afford a replacement.”
Olen set the watch on top of his phone. “Well, then let’s wrap things up.”
Seconds later, a soft voice in Olen’s earpiece whispered, “It’s good.”
Olen extended a plump, sweaty palm, which Gassinger took, looking bewildered. “Pleasure doing business with you, my friend,” Olen said, and got up to leave.
“That’s it?”
“Like we say in Texas, you can’t get lard unless you boil the hog. And I’ve got a few more hogs that need a-boilin’ before sundown.” Olen tugged at the brim of his hat. A cowboy’s salute.
“I am an artist, you know,” Gassinger said. “Not even God could create what I made.”
Olen felt a flash of hot rage. This grinning turd had just sold the blueprints of a designer bioweapon to the highest bidder.
“See ya around, Karl,” Olen said through a tight jaw. A God complex mixed with a genius IQ was an explosive combination. The Austrian was clearly delusional. Olen imagined putting a bullet in the back of his head. He pictured that brilliant mind splattered all over the patio.
Another day. The Pentagon brass wasn’t finished with the good doctor just yet. Gassinger’s rare talents made him valuable, and his bruised ego made him easy to manipulate. The United States government would permit Dr. Karl Gassinger to live, so long as the geneticist remained useful.
* * *
The gunshot made virtually no noise, only the whisper-spit of compressed air. But when the bullet struck the café’s window, the glass shattered with an earsplitting crack. Heads jerked around to see a man in a spotless oxford shirt crumple to the pavement. A teenage girl shrieked when a gooey blend of Frappuccino and bright blood splashed across her linen sundress. Dr. Gassinger’s lifeless body lay in a tangle of arms and legs at Olen’s feet. A perfectly round hole above the scientist’s left eyeball marked the bullet’s entry point.
Olen reacted instantly, diving over a small planter and rolling onto the street. The hard impact with the cobblestone might have injured his shoulder if not for the padding stuffed into his clothes.
“Jesus! Who has eyes on the shooter? Talk to me, fellas,” Olen shouted. He found his footing and sprinted down the street with no trace of the beleaguered gait.
The voice crackled in his ear again. “Hang on, bud. We’re changing position, heading north. Get to the flower shop two blocks south on the corner. We’ll exfil you there.”
“For fuck’s sake!” Olen said, exasperated. Gassinger was supposed to have confirmed the deposit and come back out. Who had he called? Not his bank, that was for damn sure.
The fat-man disguise had been Olen’s idea—he’d known it would play into Gassinger’s sense of superiority—but the bulky suit was unbearably cumbersome. Olen hadn’t anticipated dodging sniper fire with forty extra pounds weighing him down. It felt like running underwater.
“Head into the bookshop on your left. No, wait. Hang on. It’s on your right,” the voice instructed. “There’s a rear exit leading into an alley. Follow it east for about fifty yards, and you’re there.”
Olen whipped his body sideways and lunged into the bookshop, vaulting over a bicycle someone had abandoned in the doorway. Dusty volumes with titles in French, Italian, and German li
ned the walls, stacked to the rafters, giving off a distinctively musty odor. A few reclusive bibliophiles peered over faded hardbacks, visibly appalled at the hefty man charging through the entrance like a wild rhino.
Olen scanned the room, creating a precise mental image of its floor plan. He navigated a gauntlet of puffy armchairs and tables stained with coffee mug rings, weaving his way to the rear exit. Once outside, he could see the flower shop at the mouth of the alleyway. The exfiltration point. There he’d find Jason and Dante, two of the best operations support specialists in the business. Total pros. Olen had first learned this after a little misunderstanding with a Hezbollah bomb-maker in downtown Beirut. Vienna should be a cakewalk.
“We’re almost there. Ten seconds, my man,” Jason said.
Olen forced himself to slow his approach. He wasn’t being followed, and no sniper would have a clear shot. The high walls of the narrow alleyway provided excellent cover. Once on the street, he would blend into the throng of forgettable folk going about their mundane morning errands.
A moment later, Olen spotted the red brake lights of Jason and Dante’s van, parked beside a basket of white lilies. The van’s rear double doors sprang open just as Olen emerged from the alleyway, waddling with urgency. He gripped Jason’s hand and hopped inside before the unmarked vehicle pulled away from the curb and melted into traffic.
Jason grinned ear to ear at the sight of Officer Grave’s comical disguise. “Welcome aboard, Olen.”
“‘Hotter than a donkey’s taint’?” Dante teased from behind the wheel. Wheezing, trying to catch his breath, Olen flicked up both middle fingers. Dante coughed up a belly laugh. “You’re welcome, you ungrateful bastard.”
“We need to get you outa Vienna,” Jason said. Olen agreed. Someone had monitored the trade, and whoever it was wanted the virus badly enough to assassinate Dr. Gassinger in broad daylight. They’d come for Olen next.
Dante’s phone rattled in the cup holder. He tossed it to Olen. “It’s the boss.”
“The exchange was compromised,” Olen said into the phone, speaking rapidly as he pieced together his next moves. “Someone knew about the trade and they took Gassinger out. I need to get out of Austria tonight. I’ll cross into Slovakia and regroup at the safe house in Bratislava.”
“Olen, relax,” said a female voice, smooth and deep. “It’s over. The op was a success.”
Director Allyson Cameron was famously cool headed, but her indifference under the circumstances was offensive. Olen was a marked man.
“Cam! I’m still wiping brain matter off my boots, and you’re calling this a success?”
“You’re not in danger,” Allyson responded confidently. “It’s true, Dr. Gassinger didn’t call his banker from inside that café. The NSA was monitoring his cell phone. The man played us. He arranged to make the same trade with a Ukrainian arms dealer later this evening. The Ukrainians will sell to anyone. Iran. Al-Qaeda. You name it. We couldn’t let that virus get into the hands of terrorists. Or the Russians, for that matter.”
“You’re telling me you—” Olen started, but Allyson cut him off.
“Yes, Olen. Our sniper put Gassinger down.”
“Christ, Cam! A foot to the left and …”
“Our guys are the best. You know that.”
“You could’ve just had Interpol pick him up,” Olen argued.
“I don’t like red tape. Besides, we don’t know how many buyers Gassinger had lined up. Letting him leave that café alive was not an option,” Allyson said with finality. “Now we have his research and no one else does.” The line crackled. Allyson puffing cigarette smoke into the phone, no doubt. “Shame about the boots,” she said.
Olen understood Allyson’s logic, but he resented her decision to order the hit. She’d put the mission before his safety, and not for the first time. “You could’ve at least warned me,” he said.
“It would’ve caught you off guard. You might have spooked Gassinger.”
“I’ll contact you from Bratislava,” Olen replied, his voice laced with frustration. “The Viennese polizei will be searching for me in connection with the shooting. Even if I’m not running from an assassin, I should get out of Austria.”
“I agree, but you’re not going to Slovakia,” Director Cameron responded. “There’s been a viral outbreak in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of western China. I need you to report in for a full briefing. I’ll meet you at the Hotel Imperial in one hour. It’s at the corner of—”
“I know where it is,” Olen interrupted.
“Suite five-oh-four. I’m sending you instructions now.” The director ended the conversation abruptly, as was her habit.
Olen rested his head against the side of the vibrating van. He took a moment to process the information. Cam was in Vienna?
“Fellas, forget Bratislava,” he called out to Jason and Dante. “Drop me at the Hotel Imperial on Kärntner Ring.” Olen tugged the wig of thinning blond hair from his scalp and laid it across his padded midsection. “But we need to make a stop first,” he added. “I’m not spending another minute in this damn Halloween costume.”
CHAPTER
4
Beijing, People’s Republic of China
“PATIENT ZERO,” DR. Zhou Weilin said, stabbing the air with her laser pointer. “It began with him.”
On the screen beside the briefing table was a fuzzy image of a twentysomething Asian man. Dr. Zhou’s voice, though raspy from sleep exhaustion, echoed formidably in the Great Hall of the People. The nine men seated behind the elevated dais wriggled uncomfortably. She imagined the sound of amplified female confidence had that effect on them.
It was Dr. Zhou’s first time addressing the Politburo Standing Committee—China’s most powerful body of political and military leaders. Many of her brownnosing peers would’ve considered the opportunity a great honor. More like an epinephrine shot to their languishing careers, she thought. However, there were innumerable reasons Dr. Zhou would’ve preferred to spend the afternoon in her lab. Explaining rudimentary epidemiology to a shadowy league of geriatric men—and of course they were men—was torture.
Despite the reams of written briefs and strings of working-group meetings, the top leaders still had questions, and they’d demanded that someone appear before them with answers. Naturally, the task fell to the woman Wired had once called “The Flu Ninja.” Last fall, Dr. Zhou had genetically engineered a synthetic antiviral for H5N1 and became an overnight science celebrity, if such a thing existed. She’d argued for sending someone else to brief the Standing Committee so she could focus on doing more “ninja” science, but the suggestion hadn’t flown with the bureaucrats in Beijing. They needed a heavy hitter to deliver the odious news.
Turned out, these men didn’t care for odious news, especially when delivered in high heels. No surprise there. Dr. Zhou had received an education on the fragile male ego during her emergency medicine rotation after an elderly man wheeled himself into the ER with his own severed foot bobbing in a cooler. Dr. Zhou had promptly removed her sweater and tied it around the man’s thigh to stop the blood gushing from his wound. Meanwhile, the male residents had gone banging around in the supply closet, looking for a tourniquet. They raced back, only to discover that the girl doctor had already saved grandpa with a cardigan. After that, Dr. Zhou ate most of her lunches alone in the hospital cafeteria.
President Li Bingwen, seated in the center position of the sickle-shaped dais, glowered uneasily. Dr. Zhou kept rolling.
“His name was Chang Yingjie,” she continued. “Government health officials stationed in the Tibetan Autonomous Region confirmed Chang as the first known victim of the outbreak. We’ve worked continuously for a week now, but we don’t have all the answers. It’s some kind of hemorrhagic fever. That much is obvious from the epistaxis and hematemesis.”
More glowers. She searched for politician-friendly language.
“The disease starts with killer headaches, joint pain, vomiting,” Dr. Zhou continued.
“Then comes all the blood. It oozes from the nose, eyes, ears, even the anus. Essentially, the patient bleeds to death from every orifice.”
“So what is it? Ebola?” President Li asked.
“My first guess too. New cases occasionally crop up in West Africa. But no. We ran antibody tests for Ebola, yellow fever, Marburg, and Lassa fever. They all came back negative. This virus is something completely new.”
General Huang, a boulder-faced soldier with shoe-polish hair and expertly plucked eyebrows, cut in. “Where is it now, Doctor? We’ll have men on the ground by tomorrow morning. Anything you need to sort this out.”
Unbelievable. Dr. Zhou had forgone sleep for the last thirty-six hours as she worked to decode the virus’s genome, hunting for vulnerabilities at the genetic level. This army man thought he could just pulverize it with tanks. “The epidemic originated in Dzongsar,” she answered. “It’s a remote village near the Tuotuo River.”
“Tuotuo? Never heard of it.” The general snorted.
Dr. Zhou displayed a map of Tibet onscreen. “The Tuotuo River cuts through the upper region of Tibet, snaking south along the western border of Sichuan Province.”
General Huang looked unfazed. “Looks like the middle of nowhere.”
“A fair point. The Tuotuo River isn’t widely known, as rivers go,” Dr. Zhou said. “Probably because it’s less of a river, strictly speaking, and more of a tributary. It’s formed by a melting glacier forest in the Tanggula Mountains.”
“We didn’t call you here for a geography lesson,” Huang snapped. “This doesn’t sound very relevant, Doctor.”
Dr. Zhou paused for a beat, waiting for the man’s brain to catch up. “General Huang, sir, the geography is extraordinarily relevant. You can see here”—she traced the river with the beam of her laser pointer—“the Tuotuo is the source of the Yangtze River.”
A murmur rumbled across the dais. General Huang rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. Dr. Zhou didn’t have to explain how a viral outbreak at the headstream of China’s most vital waterway would wreak havoc throughout the country. The world’s third-largest river, the Yangtze traversed nearly four thousand miles, from Tibet to the East China Sea. It was China’s original superhighway, its life force. The Yangtze moved billions of renminbi in commerce and provided potable water to countless farms and villages. One third of the nation’s population depended on the river’s currents.