13 Days to Die

by Matt Miksa

  “It was a scramble. He didn’t appreciate tardiness, if memory serves.”

  “Right. Everyone lined up on the dock, necks braced, good to go,” Sullivan said. “Except one of us was missing—still out in the bay, trying to right-size his overturned Laser, his lanky arms tugging at the keel.”

  “I thought Slaughter’s eyeballs were going to pop out of his head.” Barlow laughed hoarsely.

  “You didn’t hesitate. You catapulted your body into the water like a torpedo and swam out to help him. No one else moved an inch, but you mounted the hull to counterbalance the mast and helped him flip the Laser over.”

  “You’d never have been able to do it alone, Nate. No one really could,” Barlow said.

  “I know. Not to mention I was a pencil-thin teenager from Phoenix who didn’t know piss about sailboats. Here’s my point, Jim. You’re hardwired to stick up for the little guy, to restore some sense of fairness to this messed-up world. It’s part of what makes you a good person, and a damn great president.”

  Barlow rubbed his chin. “You think I have a moral obligation to stand up for Taiwan. Even if it means a preemptive strike? Even if it means war?”

  “You read Allyson’s report,” Sullivan said. “Her VECTOR officer in the field finally sent some useful intel from Beijing. Grave claims that patient zero was actually working for the Chinese army. The biological attack was a false-flag operation, orchestrated by the PLA and designed to incriminate Taiwan. It makes sense. General Huang gained justification for his coup and for a hostile takeover of the island. If VECTOR’s reports are true and Huang is to blame for the outbreak, then the Taiwanese are innocent, Jim. They don’t deserve to be bullied by Beijing.”

  “You may have a point,” Barlow agreed. “Huang has ratcheted up his rhetoric, threatening a full-scale invasion. And then there’s the new Chinese missile site in Ngari. The evidence is certainly mounting.”

  “East Asia is about to erupt. Russia, North Korea—they’ll all get pulled in. Forget the virus. This will be a bloodbath,” Sullivan warned.

  Barlow slapped a hand on his friend’s shoulder and smiled warmly. The men had arrived at the door to a Senate conference room. “Let’s see what the Committee thinks.”

  “She doesn’t appreciate the role of military power in statecraft,” Sullivan warned. “A preemptive strike will be totally out of the question. Not to mention, it’s going to take one hell of a missile to penetrate those underground silos. The entire Ngari region is basically tungsten, which they tell me is almost as hard as diamond. A standard bunker-buster won’t work. We’d need a nuclear-tipped Minuteman III. She’ll never go for it.”

  Barlow twisted the handle and opened the door to reveal nine exhausted, dour faces.

  “Won’t go for what, dear?” An impeccably dressed Secretary Darlene Hart grinned from the head of the conference room table.

  CHAPTER

  51

  Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

  THE HOTEL INTERCONTINENTAL shimmered against the Shanghai cityscape. Jo had reserved rooms for her and Kipton, but the reservations weren’t showing up in the hotel’s computer. The front desk manager couldn’t stop apologizing. He had only one vacant room, but it was a suite with a knockout view, he said consolingly. The Skyline Suite. Jo didn’t care if the room had a gold-plated toilet; she only wanted a quiet place to think. Her mind was a swirling stew of emotions: confusion, sadness, rage. Her government had murdered thousands of people, and she was an unwitting accomplice. General Huang had used her, and she’d played the fool.

  The suite had a midcentury vibe. Purple lounge chairs made from crushed velvet encircled an oval coffee table with flared legs. A massive TV sat inside a boxy, wooden media cabinet that swiveled to face either the living area or the kitchenette. The walls were floor-to-ceiling windows, offering a stunning panorama of the glittering city.

  Kipton swaggered down a hallway, kicking his boots into a corner like he’d lived there for years. He oozed confidence. The man’s mission was clear: uncover the truth, stop the bad guys. He hadn’t just learned that he worked for the bad guys.

  For decades, Jo had tirelessly served her country, the same country now behind the deadliest bioattack in history. Her identity, her life’s purpose—it had all been torpedoed in the span of an afternoon. Now she was adrift, bobbing in a wide ocean while cold waves crashed over her. Jo needed to grasp something solid, something she could feel and know was real.

  Kipton found the bedroom and called over his shoulder. “Looks like there’s only one bed, so I guess I’ll sleep on the—”

  Jo grabbed Kipton’s shoulder from behind and whipped him around. Impulsively, she lunged into him, kissing him roughly.

  “We can’t! I mean, it wouldn’t be right for me to—” Kipton stammered.

  Jo breathed heavily into his mouth. “And why not? Don’t you trust me?”

  “Of course I trust you. It’s just … I’m a—”

  “You’re a spy,” Jo finished. “We’ve covered that already. It doesn’t matter.”

  It was a lie. Going to bed with an American intelligence officer would raise a great deal of suspicion with her MSS comrades. But she was going to take it even further, wasn’t she? She was going to help him. Jo had never considered turning against her government before tonight. Partnering with a foreign spy was practically treasonous. To hell with it, she thought. Maybe the situation called for a little treason.

  Jo clawed at Kipton’s shirt. Buttons chattered on the floor as she stripped it from his body. She raked her nails down his biceps, over the ridges of his abs, following the thin trail of hair below his navel.

  “Technically we’re adversaries,” Kipton protested, his confidence waning as Jo lit a fire of temptation. The man’s breathing grew ragged, and he gasped when Jo slid a palm down the front of his pants.

  “Do I look like an adversary, Kipton?” Jo bit her lip, and with a sudden, firm grip, she’d won.

  Over the next hour, Jo felt her spirit returning. Waves of heat flowed between her and the American spy, throbbing inside her core, circulating through her like electric current. Kipton was a skilled lover, but Jo didn’t lust for pleasure; she craved control. Kipton’s body was rough, masculine, powerful, and she had complete command of it.

  She mounted Kipton and ground her hips in tight circles, harvesting his virility. For balance, Jo pressed both palms into the windowpane above the headboard. Fifty-six stories below, red taillights streaked the pavement. The glass pulsated, creaking ominously, threatening to crack open and send her plummeting to the ground. Below her, Kipton’s eyes flashed a look of concern, but Jo only grinned and rocked faster.

  Dr. Zhou Weilin would decide her own fate tonight, and every night thereafter. She was a doormat for no man. She’d bring them all down, one by one, even if it killed her. And she’d start with General Huang.

  With a terrific shudder, Jo threw back her head and released a guttural scream of unrestrained, honest freedom.

  DAY 13

  CHAPTER

  52

  Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

  OLEN’S SKIN RADIATED heat. He swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, his feet landing in a jumble of discarded clothing. Jo stood at the hotel room’s panoramic window, clutching a sheet loosely around her body.

  Outside, Shanghai’s skyline hummed like a neomodern opus—a neon kaleidoscope with the hypnotic allure of a fever dream. Nightmarish blades, slippery and smooth, slashed sheets of gray smog with serrated edges.

  “I like how the tower lights up at night,” Jo said.

  Olen looked down at his exposed body and smirked.

  Jo rolled her eyes and pointed to an ashen structure across the river. “There,” she said. “That’s the Black Egg.”

  Her gaze zeroed in on an unremarkable building among the forest of steel and glass. The structure was easy to overlook. Upstaged by its soaring, dazzling neighbors, the edifice was extraordinarily plain. It rose a mod
est fifty-five stories—a dwarf among giants. Its exterior was painted the same pallid gray as the viscid haze encircling its cap. Only a crown of red, blinking lights—necessary beacons to warn low-flying aircraft—drew attention to the otherwise lifeless tower. Its dull sides looked thick and impenetrable, and they were completely featureless. No windows, balconies, ridges, or ledges interrupted its rigidly geometric shape. In a city famous for hyperbolic architecture, the Black Egg’s prosaic facade made it nearly invisible among the glittering skyscrapers—a colorless shadow, cloaked by its own banality.

  “China built a biosafety level four facility in the middle of downtown Shanghai?” Olen asked.

  “Look around, Kip. This city is blossoming. The last five scientific breakthroughs happened right here, in Shanghai. It’s got more brainpower per square inch than Silicon Valley in the nineties. That’s why the greatest minds of our time are flocking to this city. Shanghai is the epicenter of modern human advancement. Building the Black Egg here made perfect sense.”

  Olen turned back toward the austere building, shrouded in urban camouflage. It reminded him of the blocky cement citadels of the Soviet era. There was nothing outwardly modern about the Black Egg.

  “Besides,” Jo added, “we took precautions.”

  “What do you mean, ‘precautions’?”

  “The Ministry of Public Security maintains a perimeter around the base of the building. There are only two entrances—at the north and south ends—both lined with concrete barriers and guarded by men with assault rifles.” Jo traced the outline of the building on the window. “And as you probably noticed, there are no windows or doors on the exterior.”

  “So, we go in through the rooftop ventilation,” Olen suggested.

  “Not a chance. The vents are completely inaccessible. Any air coming in or out of the facility travels through a network of filters designed to capture anything smaller than zero-point-three microns. They catch even the smallest airborne microbes. And the vents are monitored with extremely responsive sensors. If the air pressure inside the ductwork drops suddenly, the sensors trigger an alarm and the whole place goes into lock-down.”

  “Sounds like the Black Egg is unbreakable,” Olen mused. “How are we supposed to infiltrate a facility designed to keep out microscopic particles? Last time I checked, I’m larger than zero-point-three microns.”

  “There’s only one way I know of,” Jo began. “Constructing a facility to study dangerous microbes in the heart of our most populated city was, admittedly, controversial. If a pathogen stored inside that building were to escape, it would have a near-unlimited supply of victims. The army’s biggest concern was a bomb or missile attack. The PLA insisted on safeguards.”

  “Like what?”

  “The Black Egg was erected on top of four narrow shafts that burrow deep into the ground. Each shaft is lined with lead, so they are capable of withstanding a nuclear explosion. In an Alpha Five emergency—if the facility’s vital containment systems are somehow compromised—all microbial samples are to be loaded onto small elevators, like dumbwaiters, and lowered into the shafts. They’re called incident chambers.”

  “The shafts are the way in,” Olen said. “But if they’re lead lined, how do we—”

  “The engineers couldn’t have bored into the ground this close to the coast without installing pumps and drainage pipes at the base of the shafts. Otherwise the chambers would fill with water.”

  “Where do the drainage pipes lead?” he asked.

  “They dump into the Huangpu River,” she answered. The river ran directly through downtown Shanghai. The Hotel InterContinental butted up to its eastern bank.

  “We’ll need diving gear,” Olen said, beginning to think through the operation. “We can use the ropes and clamps we got from Jin to climb the elevator’s steel cable. It’ll be dark down there, so we’ll need to pick up a few waterproof lights. Any idea where we can score a couple scuba tanks?”

  “We only need one.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I’m not going with you,” Jo said. “Not through the incident chambers. They’re sealed at the top. They have to be. It’s the only way to prevent contamination of the laboratory. I’ll have to open the access door from the inside.”

  “And how do you plan to get past the guards?” Olen asked.

  “With this.” Jo held up her Ministry of Health security badge. “I’m a high-ranking government scientist with level four access.”

  “Timing will be crucial,” Olen said. “With all the security precautions, I won’t be able to stay inside the shaft undetected for very long. You’ll need to go straight to the incident chambers. Once you’re inside, how will you find them?”

  “My lab is in that building,” Jo replied. “The Black Egg is my office.”

  Olen blinked.

  Jo pointed to the gray block. “I have a team of a hundred scientists working for me behind those walls.”

  “So, Blood River virus was engineered in the same building where you went to work every day? You traveled three thousand miles to hunt for the virus’s origin when you could’ve just taken the elevator?”

  “Now you see why they wanted me out of the way. The bastards knew I’d figure it out.” Jo turned away from the windows. “But forget it, Kip. The incident chambers won’t work either. It’s insane to go in that way. We’ll have to think of something else.”

  Olen picked through the pile of tangled clothing and recovered his boxers, slipping them on. “It sounds like our best option, Jo.”

  “Maybe if you like the idea of being burned alive.” Jo turned back to the window, causing the sheet to fall off her shoulders and reveal her smooth back. “In an emergency situation, the biological samples are placed into the shafts, and then they’re incinerated. The air in the chamber must be kept as antiseptic as possible at all times. Incineration isn’t only triggered in an emergency. A two-second burst of superheated gas sterilizes the shaft every twenty minutes, like clockwork.”

  “The whole freaking chamber is an oven?”

  “If your oven reaches a thousand degrees Celsius, then yes.”

  “Fuck me,” Olen mumbled, rubbing his face.

  “So, like I said, Kip, the incident chambers are out. I’ll go in alone and retrieve the data that we need to prove—”

  Olen raised an open palm to cut her off. He knew his boss, Allyson, would never believe intelligence this hot coming from an MSS officer she’d never met. Hell, Olen didn’t trust Jo either, not completely. She’d only recently come clean about her affiliation with the Chinese intelligence service. It was a good start, but there were procedures, vetting protocols, operational tests to conduct. It took months to establish a pattern of reliability with new double agents.

  And he shouldn’t have made love to her. But was that what he had done? No, not really. She had seduced him. The FBI counterintelligence division would assume Jo was an MSS honey trap, assigned to bed an American spy, feed him misinformation, pump him for secrets. The fellas back home would scrutinize the hell out of everything she reported. They’d cross-check and triple-verify every detail, and it would take an eternity. By the time the techs authenticated Jo’s data, God only knew what General Huang would have done.

  Olen scratched the back of his head. Breaking into the Black Egg would be dangerous, possibly fatal. But if he succeeded—if he exposed the true origin of the virus—he could save millions.

  “No. I’ve got to collect the evidence myself,” he announced firmly. “There’s no other option.”

  Jo paused, then nodded. They both knew he was right.

  Olen finished dressing, pulling on a T-shirt. “You said the incident chambers only unseal in the event of an Alpha Five emergency, right? So, how do we plan to make ’em pop?”

  “That part’s simple,” she said, pushing a loose strand of hair from her face. “I’ll just have to initiate an Alpha Five emergency.”

  Jo let the bedsheet slip away fully from her body, revealing
her taut silhouette, still glowing from the night’s activities. She drifted sensuously toward the bathroom, her back to Olen.

  “I’m going to detonate a bomb inside the laboratory,” she added casually, pausing in the doorway, eyebrow arched invitingly. Looking over her shoulder, Jo mouthed the word pop and disappeared into the bathroom.

  Olen coughed into his fist, waited a beat, drummed his fingers on his thighs. Then, cursing under his breath, he ripped his T-shirt over his head, scrambled out of his jeans, and followed Jo into the shower.

  CHAPTER

  53

  Beijing, People’s Republic of China

  GENERAL HUANG’S HEART squeezed into a tight knot. He ignored the familiar sensation and concentrated on sucking in sharp breaths each time his mouth rose above the water’s surface. He chopped and kicked to propel himself from one end of the pool to the other.

  The general preferred to exercise before sunrise. He never needed much sleep, and now more than ever, his veins burned with red-hot energy. He felt as if every cell in his body was evolving as he physically transformed into the supreme leader he’d always aspired to be. The leader China cried out for.

  With a smack, Huang’s palm slapped the wall of the pool. He paused, fingers grasping the tiled edge, before submerging his entire body. He swished weightlessly in the lingering undercurrent. Even the ineluctable force of gravity had no domain over his formidable being.

  Peering up through glassy ripples, Huang saw a dark figure materialize at the edge of the pool. The general thrust upward, shaking beads of water from his hair and onto Lieutenant Wang’s trousers, making dark polka dots on the fabric.

  “Sir, we have a problem,” Wang said.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Wang handed his boss a towel as the general climbed out of the pool. For a man in his midsixties, Huang kept fit. A decade of lavish state dinners might have softened his waistline, but the general’s torso was otherwise solid. Routine waxing stripped every follicle of hair from his chest, stomach, even his armpits. From a distance, Huang appeared much younger.