13 Days to Die

by Matt Miksa

  The general patted himself dry and tossed the towel onto a chair. “Report, Lieutenant,” he barked, slicking back his hair with both hands.

  “Dr. Zhou Weilin and the American journalist are no longer in the Quarantine Zone.”

  “And I suppose you are not here to tell me they’re roasting in some merciless netherworld, along with our dear President Li,” Huang said.

  “They’re in Shanghai.”

  The general appeared genuinely surprised. “Source?” he asked tersely.

  “Project TALON,” Wang reported.

  Huang turned. “Really?” he said curiously.

  When China hosted the Olympics in 2008, the Ministry of Public Security had taken extreme measures to ensure public safety. With the entire world watching, China couldn’t afford any embarrassing incidents. As part of an initiative named Project TALON, the domestic spy agency had installed pinhole cameras and ultrasensitive microphones in the suites of hundreds of luxury hotels throughout the city—especially the foreign-operated ones.

  After the Games’ closing ceremonies, the MPS hadn’t seen any reason to dismantle the valuable network of electronic surveillance. Instead, they’d expanded the program to include more major cities. Through Project TALON, the Chinese government had learned which of the world’s political and business leaders engaged in drugs, prostitution, and a whole host of other odious acts. Beijing exploited the intelligence mostly for blackmail and coercion. A growing collection of trade accords and corporate mergers owed their just-under-the-wire agreements to Project TALON’s strategically positioned cameras.

  Wang knew the most salacious videos went viral among the PRC’s top-secret personnel. A recent clip from the Skyline Suite at the Shanghai InterContinental Hotel had generated quite a buzz for its particularly pornographic content. Over the last few hours, it had bounced around China’s intelligence community. Wang had gotten the video file from his contact in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who had gleefully noted the “chick’s hot rack.”

  The sex tape was indeed graphic, but Wang wasn’t at all surprised by Grave’s libertine recklessness. The doctor, however, was another matter. Wang hadn’t pegged her as so injudicious. Moreover, Wang was stunned that the pair had evacuated Dzongsar alive. And there was only one reason Grave would suddenly surface in Shanghai.

  “Project TALON picked them up in the Pudong district, at the InterContinental,” Wang added.

  “I see.” General Huang paced along the edge of the pool.

  “We assume they’re headed to Institute 414.” Wang used the official military designation for the Black Egg. He knew the general found its nickname trivializing.

  General Huang shot Lieutenant Wang an intense glare. “Well?” he asked, hands on hips.

  “Yes, sir,” Wang responded, spinning on a heel, heading for the exit. Huang’s unspoken orders were clear.

  “And Lieutenant,” Huang called after him. “I want a copy of that video in my in-box within the hour.”

  CHAPTER

  54

  Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

  FORGET ANBAR PROVINCE. A biosafety level four laboratory was a far more inhospitable place to spend an afternoon. BSL-4 was reserved for the study of exotic diseases with no known vaccine or effective treatment. A crucible for some of the nastiest plagues, the Black Egg was home to Ebola, Lassa, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever—Jo had said—but those bugs didn’t really concern Olen. Like Blood River virus, they were transmitted only through direct contact. The airborne viruses—H1N1, SARS, anthrax—scared the snot out of him. The atmosphere inside the building could be swarming with invisible killers.

  For protection, the scientists working inside the Black Egg wore tangerine biosafety suits. The suits were clumsy, but more importantly, they were airtight and offered a supply of clean, pathogen-free oxygen.

  Not until zipping into a paper-thin wetsuit did Olen fully register how exposed he’d be when entering the laboratory. Jo had continued to try to talk him out of it, but Olen saw no other way. Through the embassy cutout, he’d already reported everything he’d learned from Jin to Allyson—that patient zero was a double agent working for the PLA—and just as expected, the boss wanted something more concrete. Olen could only imagine how the situation had escalated in Washington, especially after General Huang’s coup. Undoubtedly, decisions were being made. Irrevocable decisions. President Barlow would demand more than the word of a semiretired Chinese spy with zero history of reporting. And time was running out. Allyson couldn’t order Olen to infiltrate the laboratory, but she didn’t have to. Olen knew the woman would deep fry his balls if he backed out.

  Now, gliding silently twenty feet below the surface of the Huangpu River, Olen had passed the point of no return. Jo was already inside the Black Egg.

  The mouth of the drainage pipe looked like a perfect circle floating in the murky water—a portal to another world. Suddenly, it glowed bright teal. Olen heard a faint rumble. It was low, like an engine turning over. The brilliant color lasted a few seconds before dying out, returning the cloudy water to near darkness.

  Olen tapped his waterproof Suunto watch, and big digital numbers began counting down. It would take two full minutes for the chambers to cool off. Olen hovered at the mouth of the pipe while high-powered jets sprayed liquid nitrogen onto the walls of the shaft, dropping the interior temperature to a safe level. Once inside the portal, he’d have precisely eighteen minutes before the incinerators flamed up again. In that short amount of time, he’d need to swim through the pipe to the pumping station and then make the hundred-foot vertical climb up the shaft. Then it was up to Jo to open the hatch at the top. Otherwise, he’d be a cooked goose.

  * * *

  For six years, the Black Egg had been Jo’s home away from home. Plucked from China’s roster of top virologists, she’d always felt honored to oversee her own lab within the nation’s most advanced research facility.

  A decade ago, her country had lagged behind the industrialized world when it came to preventing the spread of infectious diseases. The SARS epidemic had caught everyone off guard. The Chinese government was wholly unprepared for the threat posed by microbial outbreaks. The Politburo naïvely thought it could keep secret the most serious epidemic of the twenty-first century. But it wasn’t so easy to convince a billion people to just look the other way. News of the government cover-up had spread faster than the disease itself. Rumors flew that Zhongnanhai had intentionally released SARS as a draconian form of population control. At the time, Jo had thought the idea utterly delusional—the result of mass paranoia. She hadn’t believed anyone could be so blackhearted. Now, after learning the truth behind BRV45, she felt differently.

  The Black Egg was Beijing’s insurance policy against another microbial threat. For eighteen months, construction crews had worked around the clock to erect a state-of-the-art laboratory to rival America’s Centers for Disease Control.

  Jo had been thrilled when the MSS selected her to lead an elite team of research scientists. Her mission was one of national security, and she was proud of her work. When she wasn’t in the field, she spent most of her waking hours inside the lab’s sealed walls, fighting to protect her country from another public health disaster. How could it be that the very threat she’d worked tirelessly to suppress had been spawned within the Black Egg itself?

  She would find those responsible. She would hold them accountable for their crimes against her people.

  Jo had never imagined she’d secretly collaborate with the CIA, but her mission to expose Huang was too much to take on alone. Did that make her a traitor against her government? Arguably, her government no longer existed, not after the coup. Huang was a bullheaded military junta. He would never represent China. Not legitimately. Jo would oppose him vehemently. She would reveal to the world the devil that he was. No, she wasn’t a traitor, she kept reminding herself. She was a patriot.

  Even though the Black Egg housed three fully equipped biosafety level f
our laboratories, it also doubled as an administrative office for the Ministry of Health. Wrinkled lab coats flapped behind waves of distressed scientists scuttling in all directions. Some of them looked completely lost—a familiar sight within the mazelike corridors. After the first cases of BRV45 appeared in Tibet, researchers from all over China had converged on the facility. Jo passed twenty people without recognizing a single face. She hoped to keep it that way as she swiftly made her way to the second-floor lab. That was where she’d find the incident chambers.

  Jo didn’t want to bump into a colleague on the elevator, so she took the stairs. As far as everyone knew, she was still in Dzongsar searching for the origins of BRV45. By now some people would’ve heard about the destruction of the Q-Zone. People would wonder if she’d evacuated in time. If they saw her at the Black Egg, they’d have a million questions—ones she didn’t have time to answer.

  Jo looked at her watch, which she’d synchronized to the incident chambers’ incineration cycle.

  Seventeen minutes.

  * * *

  The air inside the incident chamber was muggy but tolerable. The temperature gauge on Olen’s tactical Suunto watch read ninety-six degrees, but a powerful heat still emanated from the walls. The incinerator’s cooling process had lowered the temperature of the lead only to about five hundred degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to dissolve skin on contact. If he touched the chamber’s casing, Olen’s wetsuit would probably ignite, charring his entire body in a matter of seconds. So, he’d have to climb the elevator cables straight up the middle of the narrow chamber.

  Olen secured a heavy-duty cable ascender to the elevator’s thick cord. A nylon rope wrapped around his waist and under his crotch hooked into the aluminum carabiner attached to the U-shaped ascender. The device would support his weight as he used both hands to inch up the cable. Rock climbers used similar gear to take short rests during challenging climbs. Olen wouldn’t have that luxury. By the time he reached the top, his biceps would be Jell-O.

  Olen cracked a couple Cyalume light sticks, and the chamber glowed lime green. He looked up. The top of the chamber was a speck. Now accessing the difficulty of the climb in person, he knew he’d never make it with fifty pounds of diving gear weighing him down. Olen stripped off the tank, respirator, gauges, and mask. He kept his tactical vest to carry a few supplies, and a small switchblade.

  Olen’s stomach sank. Jo had given him strict instructions to breathe through his scuba mouthpiece once inside the lab. It wouldn’t fully protect him, but at least the oxygen in his tank would be untainted. Ditching the heavy equipment meant he’d have to enter the level four lab without clean air. He imagined those nasty pathogens floating invisibly, searching for new hosts to infect, flowing directly into his lungs.

  Pushing the thought from his mind, Olen focused on the climb. He locked the ascender, gripped the cable, and tugged his hundred-ninety-five-pound body straight up.

  * * *

  Entering a level four laboratory the correct way took a lot of time and patience. The main entrance to the lab marked the beginning of a complex, multistep process to ensure the safety of the scientists and prevent cross-contamination from the outside. After waving a security badge over a sensor and staring into a retinal scanner, visitors with the proper clearance stepped into a reception area. From there, men went left and women went right into separate locker rooms. Every scrap of clothing, jewelry, even contact lenses had to be removed. Lab workers called that area the Dirty Room.

  The walls of the Dirty Room were fire engine red—a not-so-subtle reminder to stop and remove anything from the outside world that could pollute the lab. Jo stripped and stuffed her clothes into an empty locker. She didn’t bother spinning the combination dial. No one did. Her colleagues at the Black Egg held the nation’s highest-level security clearance. Petty theft wasn’t a problem.

  Naked, Jo walked through a double-door air lock into a dressing room, where she donned a pair of powder-blue medical scrubs made of coated paper. Everyone hated the disposable underwear. They bunched and scratched after a few hours of work. Most just skipped the paper panties and went commando.

  Jo pulled a set of surgical gloves from a cardboard box. She grabbed a roll of masking tape, peeled off two long strips, and wrapped them tightly around her wrists to seal the cuffs of her scrubs. Next, Jo passed through a second set of airtight doors—one of many intentional redundancies—into a bleak room with glacier-white walls and shiny tile. The Clean Room.

  Bright-tangerine hazmat suits hung from steel hooks. Nicknamed “space suits” for their airtight seals, bubble-domed helmets, and built-in life support systems, the cumbersome apparatuses were tough to put on without help. Nevertheless, Jo was relived to find the Clean Room unoccupied. Then, she noticed three empty hooks at the end of the row and frowned. A few of her colleagues were getting an early start to the day. With any luck, Jo could avoid them inside the sprawling facility.

  A soft hissing sound, like a punctured tire deflating, came from the double doors to her left. A cool breeze rushed past her—the effects of the Clean Room’s negative pressure, which sucked in air to prevent microorganisms from escaping. The air lock to the men’s dressing room slid open. Jo spun to see the stunned face of a young microbiologist on her team. He looked at Jo, his bug eyes growing wide.

  CHAPTER

  55

  Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

  VECTOR OPERATIONS OFFICER Marc Chen—known to some as Lieutenant Wang, Hudson Reece, and a handful of other names—despised Shanghai more than any Chinese city. His deep-cover assignment rarely included trips to the coastal metropolis, but whenever his duties required it, he felt the same disgust.

  Marc had good reason for such visceral antipathy. Three summers ago he’d arrived in Shanghai carrying an American passport. The document’s photo was authentic, but it matched to the name Dr. Vincent Wu, a midlevel executive for a Seattle-based biotechnology start-up. The fictitious Dr. Wu was a real go-getter, and as such, he’d come to Shanghai to kick off three weeks of whirlwind meetings with prospective Chinese investors.

  The op had almost gotten Marc killed. He’d studied his alias meticulously, as he did before any mission, but he’d underestimated one man’s compulsive curiosity into the spurious life of Dr. Wu.

  It began with the usual cable traffic. The analysts believed the Chinese military had established a private biotechnology company as a means of quietly acquiring sensitive technology. The CIA’s East Asia desk even peddled a wild theory about experiments with human genetic enhancements—supersoldiers with sharper intelligence, greater resiliency, even certain forms of extrasensory perception. It was the typical Langley melodrama that spooked everyone in Washington.

  Director Allyson Cameron sent Marc to Shanghai, where, as planned, he represented himself as a doctor of genetic engineering. He’d earned a PhD from the University of Washington in the late 2000s, so the story went. His reputation in America had helped him clinch a string of confabs with leading Chinese firms. It was a simple fishing expedition. Marc would strike up conversations about cutting-edge genetic research—the type that could be repurposed for military application—and see who took the bait.

  Marc’s op hit a snag when a particularly skeptical director of R&D at the Chinese-owned Heliogen Corp. had asked a barrage of very specific questions about the University of Washington. The man claimed that his nephew had studied electrical engineering around the same time Dr. Wu supposedly attended. Perhaps they knew one another, the Heliogen director suggested. But, of course, they did not. No one at the university had ever heard of Vincent Wu—a fact easily obtained with a few phone calls. Officer Chen was in handcuffs before lunch.

  Facing some of the world’s most stringent antiespionage laws (with punishments to match), Marc did the unthinkable. He demanded to speak with the Shanghai station chief of the Ministry of State Security. Marc’s captors—two Heliogen security guards with cannonball biceps—brushed off the absurd request. Then h
e asked again, but the second time, he asked for the station chief by name.

  Marc knew the guards would never contact anyone from the MSS. No chance in hell. Heliogen Corp. was most certainly the PLA shell company he’d been searching for. The entire security detail likely comprised active-duty soldiers. Heliogen wouldn’t report Marc’s capture. They had something else in mind. The guards stripped him of every scrap of clothing—as if spies still walked around with cyanide pills sewn into their collars. For three nights Marc slept naked on the concrete floor of a cell no bigger than a coat closet. He drank dirty water from a small bowl like an animal.

  Heliogen’s chief of security visited daily. He was a fat man with a thick neck covered in black moles. The obese misanthrope taunted his new prisoner with a bowl of steamed rice, only to eat it himself while Marc looked on ravenously. By the fourth day, Marc was convinced he would die in that room.

  That’s when another visitor arrived. She was the complete antithesis of the security chief—polite, well dressed, hair swooped into a silver flame. Her blouse, with its gleaming gold buttons and scarlet floral pattern, looked like something from the London Times style section. When two fire-engine lips spread across her perfect, gleaming teeth, Marc’s belly filled with warmth.

  The woman perched regally on the edge of an aluminum chair that she’d carried into the cell. She crinkled her nose at the smell but graciously concealed her repugnance at the sight of the nude, half-dead prisoner curled up in the corner. She offered Marc a cup of black coffee and a generous drag on her lipstick-stained Baisha cigarette.