by Matt Miksa
Patient zero was becoming more and more interesting.
“No,” Jo finally answered. “It’s not a cross. It’s the Chinese character for the number ten.” She moved closer until her nose nearly touched the bark. She traced the carving with the jagged end of the key. It slid smoothly through the crevice. “In China, ten symbolizes rebirth. It marks the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next. You can count to ten on your hands before you run out of fingers. Then you must start over from the beginning.”
“That means—”
“Patient zero had reached the end of his cycle here on earth. He knew he was a dead man.”
“But why mark this tree?” Of course, Olen thought he already knew the answer. But did Jo?
“He was communicating with someone,” Jo said. She fixated on the marking. Her eyes refused to break contact.
“Maybe he hid something?”
“That was my thought exactly. Look in the trees, on the ground. Whatever he hid, it would have to be big enough to have a locking mechanism.”
The pair split up to cover more ground. Olen cleared clumps of fallen leaves with sweeping kicks. A few clung to his muddy boots. Examining the forest for an unknown object—and in the dark—seemed futile. Besides, a dead drop required two people. Patient zero’s contact had probably emptied the drop days ago. They could be searching for something that was long gone. He should come back in the morning when—
“He buried it,” Jo announced.
Olen couldn’t see her—she’d wandered too far into the thicket—so he headed in the direction of Jo’s voice. Gnarled roots grabbed at his feet. When he reached the doctor, she’d already begun scooping handfuls of mud from an unnatural depression in the earth.
“He didn’t pack the soil enough,” Jo explained. “The rain condensed it. I spotted the sinkhole right away.”
Olen crouched and helped the doctor scrape out the backfill. The ground was saturated beneath the surface, and a pool of brown runoff filled their hole. Finally, Olen’s knuckles knocked against something hard and flat. Jo heard the thud, too, and stopped scooping. Olen pushed into the earth, feeling around for the edges, grunting from the exertion.
“Move, Kipton. Let me do it,” Jo insisted. She pressed against his shoulder and slipped her hands over his forearms.
“Hang on. I can feel the sides.”
Olen pushed into the mud to get his hands underneath the object and work it free. Murky water dribbled off the metal box as he lifted it out of the pit. It looked like a steel cashbox. Jo snatched the box and wiped the muck from the top and sides. She found the lock and used her finger to clean out the keyhole.
The instant Jo lifted the lid, everything changed. She revealed an object sealed inside a plastic bag, neatly wrapped in a piece of cheesecloth.
A syringe with a long hypodermic needle.
CHAPTER
29
Dzongsar Village, Tibetan Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China
OLEN AND JO backtracked through the clearing at a quickened pace. Their discovery of the needle in the cashbox would redirect the entire investigation. Olen could sense Jo’s mind churning. The doctor held her arms tightly across her body, gripping the steel box against her chest.
When they returned to the monastery, Olen said he planned to head to his room to organize his notes. It seemed like a logical activity for a journalist who wanted to record the details of the evening while they were fresh. Olen didn’t like lying to Jo. He’d grown fond of the doctor, and they worked well as a team. Under different circumstances, they might have made a decent couple. Olen imagined the hot nights, wrestling in sweat-soaked bedsheets (ideally without the wire cutters).
He shook away the thought. Jo was a government official of the People’s Republic of China, not some weekend hookup. He needed to contact Fort Detrick, and so far he’d spotted only one working telephone in the entire village.
Before Olen left Vienna for Beijing, analysts across the intelligence community had created a laundry list of hypotheses for what might have caused the outbreak. Bioterrorism seemed too farfetched, too risky. More likely, a sick monkey had ended up on some poor fuck’s dinner table. That was how these things normally happened. But a hypodermic needle, hidden in the woods, pointed to something much more nefarious, something premeditated. Dzongsar Village had been purposely attacked. But why? By whom? Who the hell was patient zero?
* * *
Olen didn’t have to break into Sumati’s home. The front door didn’t have a lock, and even if it had, the PLA would’ve already smashed it. The army required unfettered access to Sumati’s miracle blood. Olen, however, was more interested in the woman’s phone. During his visit to Sumati’s home earlier that day, he’d noticed a landline in the kitchen. He planned to use it to send an urgent message to his boss, Allyson.
The house was quiet and dark, its occupants tucked into bed. Olen padded toward the phone, shifting his weight from one foot to the next to minimize creaking from the floorboards. The phone looked ancient. It had a long, curling cord, and part of its plastic base had chipped off. He hoped it still worked.
* * *
In the provisional lab, Jo examined the syringe, squeezing the plastic cylinder gently between her double-gloved fingers. The piston wasn’t fully pushed in, leaving a small amount of solution pooling at the tip of the nozzle.
Jo depressed the plunger, ejecting a single drop onto a glass microscope slide. She added a fluorescent stain and overlaid a thin cover slip to prevent contamination. The limpid bead spread into a wide circle. She deposited the remainder of the sample into a test tube and placed a rubber cap over the tube’s mouth to seal it in. She’d eventually need to examine the fluid with an electron microscope in her state-of-the-art lab in Shanghai. That examination would reveal much more than what she’d see with the field lab’s basic optical equipment. Regardless, she had to take a peek.
Jo flicked on the microscope’s base light and peered into the ocular lens. She’d left the overhead lights off to enhance the resolution of the specimen through the lens. Working in the dark was a safety violation, but the lab was deserted, so Jo wasn’t concerned about protocols.
Jo’s pupils contracted at the bright light in the eyepiece. Tiny oblong shapes speckled the field of view, ablaze with vivid color. Cells. They weren’t smooth and round like healthy cells. Their edges had collapsed to form grotesque morphologic aberrations. Dark plaque collected in inky splotches, indicating the unmistakable cytopathic effect—the unique fingerprint of a nasty viral infection.
Jo’s heart thumped. Her team had tried unsuccessfully for a week to generate a viable culture and isolate the virus. The illusive particle was a hundred times smaller than a typical bacterium, so Jo couldn’t visually examine its biological structure using the simple light microscope, and she’d have to run antibody tests to confirm it. But in her gut, Jo already knew the truth. She was staring at Blood River virus.
The image in the eyepiece confirmed the searing fear Jo had felt after first discovering the hypodermic needle. The epidemic wasn’t a spontaneous occurrence, not Mother Nature defending herself against the scourge of deforestation. There was no rare primate or bat species harboring BRV45 deep within its tissue. Someone intended for this vicious infection to spread. Someone knew the disease would massacre thousands, if not millions. Someone wanted China to suffer. There was no denying it now. BRV45 was a weapon, and patient zero had been its human delivery mechanism. Chang Yingjie: the Taiwanese spy.
Had he acted alone? Not likely. Jo recalled her briefing to the Standing Committee. General Huang’s concerns had seemed like paranoid delusions. Could it be true? Was Taiwan responsible?
The doctor twisted the knobs on the compound microscope to sharpen its focus. Staring, sometimes for hours, into a droplet the size of a single tear had strange side effects. Some people felt painfully confined, imprisoned within the small circle of light. Jo felt liberated. The microscopic world was a wondrous terrain.
The detail of her specimen absorbed her. She dove into it, climbing towering mountain ranges, sliding down rocky cliffs, washing away in silvery rivers. She lost touch with her physical surroundings, at the desk, in the lab.
Perhaps that was why Jo didn’t notice the silhouette materialize in the shadows of the second-floor balcony overlooking the work space.
Leaning into the microscope, Jo studied every facet of the sample’s rugged landscape. She blinked to moisten her eyes, and the puzzle pieces snapped into place, one by one.
The truth about Blood River virus was worse than she’d ever imagined.
* * *
Sumati’s phone was bugged, Olen assumed. A team of MSS linguists, holed up in a dark room thousands of miles away, were probably waiting for someone to lift the handset. The voice of an American, or anyone speaking English for that matter, would light their hair on fire. That’s why Olen’s prearranged signal didn’t require him to speak at all.
He reached for the phone and held his breath so he could tune his ears to the slightest noise. If anyone discovered he’d returned to Sumati’s home without his escort, he’d have a difficult time avoiding a PLA prison cell.
The house was dead silent.
* * *
Jo jerked back from the microscope. Her lungs tightened. She pulled the surgical mask from her mouth and swallowed gulps of air with her eyes squeezed shut. She opened them just as the microscope burst apart. Flying metal and plastic crashed into a rack of empty test tubes and beakers. A shard of glass clinked against Jo’s safety goggles. She yanked them from her face and tossed them aside. Had the rogue fragment come from the virus-tainted slide? Jo dropped to her knees and tucked in her chin, keeping her head low.
Microscopes didn’t just spontaneously explode. There was a shooter in the lab.
CHAPTER
30
Dzongsar Village, Tibetan Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China
THE BULLET HAD smashed the microscope’s LED bulb and extinguished the lab’s only light source. Jo’s eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness. She crawled across the floor. Glass shards cut her knees, and somewhere buried among the debris was a needle laced with a hellish virus. Even the smallest puncture could expose her to a fatal infection.
Arms outstretched into the abyss, Jo felt her way to the nearest wall. Her pupils soaked up the ambient moonlight seeping in from the narrow windows in the roof. She paused to listen for her attacker’s footfalls. The wind moaned outside the monastery’s fortified walls. Where was the shooter? Where was Kipton?
Jo crept across the lab toward the animal containment center—the room Amy had called “the Zoo.” A curtain of thick plastic strips hung in the doorway. The translucent slats refracted blue beams in a thousand directions, creating a kaleidoscope of geometric shapes. The patterns of color and shadows were disorienting, and Jo couldn’t tell if someone was waiting on the other side of the curtain. She reached out and made a gap in the strips. The plastic felt slick. She pushed through and almost slipped on a puddle. Catching her balance, Jo felt all the air rush out of her lungs when she saw the body sitting on the floor, slumped against the wall. Amy.
The bullet had entered just above her right eye, ripped through her brain, and blown out the back of her skull. A dark starburst glimmered on the stone wall just above Amy’s head. Jo looked down at her own feet. Fresh blood coated the soles of her shoes. Horrified, she tore them off. She didn’t want to leave a trail of bloody footprints.
Jo heard the attacker crunching through broken glass in the lab. She stepped over Amy’s splayed legs, careful to avoid the pooling gore. She wanted to get out of the building, just start running, but someone could be waiting for her outside. Another gunman. Jo’s best option was to hide inside the monastery until the intruder found whatever he’d come for and left.
* * *
Olen was preparing to lift the phone’s handset from the cradle when it screamed under his fingertips. It was ringing. He froze. Any second, Sumati or the girl would emerge from the bedroom to answer the call. The spy leapt behind the sofa and crouched low. Even with the lights off, he could see the bloodstain on the wood floor under Sumati’s rocker. Large, circular smears.
The phone rang three more times. Olen’s pulse returned to a normal speed. If someone had spotted him, called the phone to knock him off-balance, a team of security guards would’ve already stormed the house and shoved Olen into a sack. Phones rang. People called sick relatives. It was nothing.
The house fell silent, and Olen rose from his hiding spot. Something wasn’t right. Even if Sumati and the girl had decided to ignore the late-night call, the shrill ringer should have stirred them. Olen heard no movement at all coming from the back of the house. No rustling of bedsheets. No footsteps.
Olen considered aborting his plan. Surely there were other landlines in Dzongsar, in other homes. He should leave, make contact with VECTOR some other way. Instead, he fought back his better judgment and headed deeper into the house.
* * *
The animals shrieked and rattled their aluminum cages. The gunshot had agitated them, especially the Tibetan macaque, its fiery orange eyes blazing, head whipping side to side. Running on adrenaline, Jo pushed through a swinging door to the decontamination chamber, leaving the Zoo and its unnerving soundtrack behind. The assailant would follow her. Jo had only a few seconds to hide.
The illuminated control panels of the decontamination pods washed the room in an eerie cobalt glow. Jo rushed to the farthest pod and sealed herself inside. If the killer discovered her hiding place, there would be nowhere to run.
* * *
The door to the first bedroom was ajar. Olen could see only blackness through the cracked opening. With the light touch of his fingertips, he nudged the door, and its hinges squealed. He paused and listened. Nothing. He’d managed to expand the gap between the door and the jamb about two feet. Enough to squeeze through.
Hugging the wall, Olen examined the room. The bed was a nest of ruffled sheets. A torn pillow leaked tufts of cotton. The bedroom was in complete disarray. Moreover, it was unoccupied.
Possibly the teenager and Sumati were together in the other bedroom. Olen checked it with equal caution. In stark contrast to the first, the second bedroom was barren. A tin chamber pot sat on the floor, and a small cot, like the ones used in shelters after a natural disaster, was pushed up against the wall. The cot was empty.
A draft prickled the skin on Olen’s forearm. The night air seeped in from a broken window. Glass glittered on the floor like diamond dust. A line of blood trailed from the cot to the windowsill. Sumati and the girl had been taken, possibly killed. Someone did not want the outbreak’s sole survivor talking.
Olen feared his instincts about the Dzongsar investigation were right. He couldn’t ignore the mounting evidence: the absence of a full-scale emergency medical response team, the utter lack of biohazard safety equipment, and now, Sumati’s abduction.
He rushed back to the phone and dialed a number from memory. In a few seconds, the kitchen phone in a noodle house in Lhasa’s Chengguan District would ring, but only once before Olen promptly hung up. He waited thirty seconds and then dialed a second number, this one belonging to a low-end hotel in Dagzê County. He disconnected after two short rings.
The signal was simple. The guys and gals at NSA kept a close watch on certain predesignated phone lines in Tibet. A multimillion-dollar computer at Fort Meade would intercept and log the two incoming calls. The quick succession of the calls, both with the same origin, created a unique transmission pattern that the system would flag. Any moment, an NSA analyst in Maryland would see a blip on his computer monitor. In less than sixty seconds, Olen had covertly communicated a critical message to his chain of command: Get me the hell out of here.
Olen left the house and jogged back to the monastery. An exfiltration from the TAR was a long shot—and it would probably take days for his message to get to Allyson—but he had limited options and it didn’t
hurt to try. In any case, it would inform Allyson that he’d uncovered critical intelligence and needed to debrief as soon as possible. In the meantime, he needed to find Jo. She’d become a pawn in someone’s vicious plot. The thought of her in danger stirred feelings of raw anger. Jo was tough, not a damsel in distress, but Olen flooded with a desire to whisk her away, sweep her into his arms. The brave knight. He hoped he wasn’t too late.
CHAPTER
31
Fort Meade, Maryland, USA
SENIOR INTELLIGENCE ANALYST Gabriel Snyder reached for his desk phone the moment he saw the alert flashing on his computer screen. After a single ring, a gruff voice answered.
“Grave just checked in,” Snyder explained. “TRIDENT registered two blips. It’s a code six. He’s requesting exfiltration.”
TRIDENT was the NSA system that monitored signal lines all over the world, like the two Lhasa-based landlines Officer Grave had dialed. The billion-dollar surveillance platform functioned as a vital covert communications tool for field officers who needed to preserve cover.
“Location?” the gruff voice asked.
“Tibet. Lhasa.” Silence. Did the connection drop? “Hello?” Snyder said.
“Has NSA disseminated anything yet?”
“No, I placed all of Grave’s lines under restricted access, just as you instructed. I’m the only one who can see the alert.”
“I see.”
“You asked me to notify you of any activity. I’ll need to fire this off to the emergency exfiltration team, get our boy out of there,” Snyder explained.
“No,” came the sharp reply. “Do not disseminate.”