by Matt Miksa
The encounter lasted three hours, after which the woman departed, dragging the chair behind her. Another day or two passed—tracking time was impossible inside the windowless cell—before she returned with a tray of hot food, a robe, and an irresistible offer.
Marc was no fool. After the vile, dehumanizing treatment he’d received, he knew the elegant woman hadn’t materialized spontaneously. But she’d made him feel important, worthy, even courageous. His fairy godmother. In truth, she was an intelligence officer specializing in the fine art of developing turncoats. The Chinese knew they had captured an American spy, and they intended to flip Marc’s loyalty. The bastard Heliogen security chief had gotten nowhere, so they’d brought in a professional. She had one task: convince the prisoner to spy for China, and then disappear. Marc doubted he would ever see the woman again. She probably had a long list of other men to inveigle. Fortunately, she’d bought Marc’s well-rehearsed story. She believed he wanted to betray the United States.
Within an hour, Marc was barreling down the runway at Pudong International Airport, showered, clean-shaven, and fully clothed. The Chinese army was taking him to Beijing. After eighteen months of fastidious planning, Officer Marc Chen was finally going to meet General Huang, chairman of the People’s Liberation Army.
* * *
Now, three years later, Marc found himself once again at the doorstep of Heliogen Corp.’s headquarters, but the company had a new address. Its sensitive mission—exploiting stolen intellectual property—required a more advanced laboratory and military-grade security. Only one building in Shanghai fit the bill: Institute 414, the Black Egg.
Wang presented his PLA credentials to a sentry posted outside the Black Egg’s main entrance. The sentry scanned the document carefully, taking note of the embossed gold seal that identified Lieutenant Wang as a member of General Huang’s staff. The guard nodded sharply and stepped aside.
“Take me to Heliogen’s chief of security,” Marc ordered. “Immediately.”
CHAPTER
56
Shanghai, People’s Republic of China
“DR. ZHOU!” THE young microbiologist shouted.
Jo stopped dead.
“The Q-Zone. We thought you … We were told everyone …”
“I left Dzongsar before the sanitization,” Jo responded bluntly. “It doesn’t matter. I’m here now, and I’ll need a full report on your progress. We’ll wait until the entire team arrives to regroup, but since you’re already here, I suggest you begin pulling together the data from the past week.”
The man tensed up. He’d have to work fast. Synthesizing a week’s worth of data before sunrise would keep him thoroughly occupied. And completely out of Jo’s way.
“Well, don’t just stand there, Doctor,” Jo barked. “Help me into this space suit, and let’s get moving.”
* * *
It was difficult to hear much of anything inside the airtight protective suit—the built-in breathing system generated persistent white noise. Pure, HEPA-filtered air flowed through a thick gray tube, like a vacuum hose, connected to the back of her bubble helmet, feeding in from a heavy pack strapped around Jo’s waist. People complained about the fan’s constant whooshing. Like most peculiarities of working within a level four laboratory, Jo had acclimated to the minor annoyance long ago.
The lab’s interior looked exactly as Jo had left it a little more than a week ago. Rows of workstations positioned under ventilated hoods striped the cavernous space. The counters, tables, and chairs all had rounded edges to prevent accidental tears in the space suits. There were no knickknacks, family photos, house plants, or personal items of any kind. To an outsider, the facility probably felt cold and impersonal. To Jo, the level four environment offered more comfort than any other place on earth. She knew every square inch of that lab, including where to find the incident chambers. However, Jo had to make a quick detour first, to the chemical storage cabinet.
She had a bomb to build.
The Black Egg wasn’t only home to some of the planet’s deadliest pathogens. It also housed a collection of some uniquely hazardous chemicals. Corrosive acids, highly reactive metals, combustible gases—these were everyday tools of the modern biochemist.
Jo didn’t have time to prepare anything elaborate, and she couldn’t risk mishandling unstable substances and blowing off her fingers. Instead, she turned to a simpler solution—triacetone triperoxide, known in Al-Qaeda shorthand as TATP.
The bomb’s key ingredients could be found in nearly every sorority girl’s medicine cabinet. TATP was nothing more than a careful mixture of nail polish remover and hair bleach. To be fair, most bottle blondes couldn’t get their hands on hydrogen peroxide potent enough to make a decent explosive—the drugstore version was only 3 percent concentrated—but in the Black Egg, Jo had a range of options. A 30 percent concentration would give her a pop just big enough to trigger the lab’s emergency protocols without punching a hole in the side of the building. That bit was important.
Working quickly, Jo filled an Erlenmeyer flask halfway with acetone. Then she dropped in a corked test tube containing twenty milliliters of the concentrated hydrogen peroxide. She capped the conical flask, careful not to slosh its contents.
Jo examined her homemade bomb, lifting it to eye level. The sealed test tube clanked against the inside of the glass flask. The makeshift bomb was safe to carry, as long as the test tube didn’t have any cracks or leaks. Separately, the two liquids were harmless, but when combined, they would spark a violent chemical reaction. The simple concoction was the reason travelers could no longer bring liquids over three ounces on board commercial flights.
She checked her watch. Jo had six minutes to get to the incident chamber and open the hatch before the next incineration cycle. She just hoped Kipton had made it to the top of the shaft.
* * *
Inside the wetsuit, Olen dripped with sweat. His forearms burned with each hoist up the cable. Even through his rubber grip climbing gloves, he could feel the skin on his palms starting to blister. At least the ascender was holding firm. Olen sank into the harness and momentarily relaxed his arms to let the blood recirculate through his hands. He’d climbed about seventy feet up the elevator cable. The green glow from the light stick at the bottom of the chamber looked like a faint speck. Olen tapped his Suunto and used its light to scan the space. The underside of the elevator was less than thirty feet up. With six minutes remaining, he could easily finish the climb, but something else on his watch’s digital display worried him. Just under the large digits indicating the time were smaller ones that read 110°.
The temperature inside the chamber was rising.
* * *
Marc Chen recognized Heliogen’s chief of security from the man’s grotesque neck moles. At first, the chief didn’t react upon seeing his former captive. He couldn’t see past Marc’s uniform. He likely assumed the olive-clad visitor was just another army prick trespassing on his turf. Marc got within ten feet before the torpid creature’s jaw went slack.
“How did you—” The words spilled from the security chief’s grease-covered lips just before the butt of Marc’s QSZ-92 pistol cut them off with a thwack across his mouth. The chief toppled from his chair and fell face first to the floor. A tooth rattled underneath his chair. The man was out cold, his paunchy abdomen bulging. He looked like a beached whale.
Marc holstered his weapon and smoothed the front of his shirt. The other security personnel in the room sat frozen at their posts.
“Gentlemen,” Marc said politely. “There’s been an intrusion. A foreign spy has penetrated this facility. He’s working with someone on the inside, I’m afraid. One of our own. A female doctor. We believe they’re both somewhere in this building.”
A fresh-faced technician wearing a headset microphone spoke up. “It should be easy to find them, sir. If she’s an employee, we can look up her access badge and see where she last coded in.”
Marc gave the doctor’s name, and Fresh
Face turned to his computer screen, his fingers flying across the keyboard. Heliogen’s central command post was the nerve center of the Black Egg. A building housing such sophisticated laboratories required 24/7 systems monitoring. Careful management of the negative pressure inside the air locks, temperature controls, ventilation procedures, and a complex network of surveillance cameras all happened from this room. Now that the chief of security lay unconscious in a smear of blood, Marc Chen—as Lieutenant Wang—had swiftly asserted dominance.
“Dr. Zhou entered the main security checkpoint twelve minutes ago,” Fresh Face reported. “She’s currently in the BSL-4 on the second floor.”
“Give me your badge,” Marc ordered.
“Sure, but you can’t just walk into level four. There are protocols. Besides, that lab is gigantic. She could be anywhere. Let me check the cameras.”
A red warning box blinked on the terminal monitor. A moment later, the command center erupted in beeps and flashing lights.
“What did you do?” Marc hissed.
“It wasn’t me! It’s the alarm. The systems on the second floor are shutting down.” The security tech typed frantically. “Oh God. It’s an Alpha Five. There’s been an explosion in the BSL-4.”
“Initiate lock-down. Secure all floors. No one leaves this building,” Marc commanded.
“Sir, we need to evacuate! The situation has become extremely dangerous. You don’t mess with level four. There’s some seriously bad stuff in there.”
“The explosion is a diversion. Send a security team to investigate, and keep searching for the doctor on the surveillance feeds.”
“It’s pointless. The feed’s crap.” Fresh Face swiveled his monitor for Marc to see. The screen had filled with smoke. Marc couldn’t make out a thing.
* * *
“Dammit,” Jo cursed, ducking around a corner. Had she miscalculated the volume of hydrogen peroxide? Had someone mislabeled its concentration? Whatever the case, the explosion had been bigger than she’d anticipated. It had rocked the floor and torn the door off a utility closet.
The homemade bomb had worked like a glass grenade. She’d thrown it down the hallway, and upon impact with the tile, the Erlenmeyer flask and the test tube floating inside it had both shattered, mixing the two volatile chemicals.
Luckily, Jo had flung the grenade far enough to avoid the brunt of the blast. The air turned gray, but no one was hurt. She checked her space suit for tears. Even one small breach in the material could lead to fatal exposure.
An alarm squealed. Strobing red lights reflected off thick swirls of smoke. Jo heard shouting and footsteps pounding down the corridor. Within seconds, the pristine laboratory had transformed into a war zone.
* * *
Olen heard a low-pitched boom echo through the chamber.
Jo’s bomb.
The explosion had sounded big. A little too big. The taut cable running down the center of the incident chamber vibrated violently, threatening to snap. The two-ton elevator car, hanging just a few feet above Olen’s head, groaned as metal scraped against metal.
Olen squeezed his hands tighter around the cable, pushing into raw blisters, but the thick wire shook too much to maintain a solid grip. His hands slipped. He lost his balance and felt his body falling backward, into the black abyss.
CHAPTER
57
Washington, DC, USA
GABRIEL SNYDER ENTERED his pitch-black apartment. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been home in the daytime, and that was probably for the best. In the dark, he couldn’t see the water stains on the ceiling or the chipped Formica counter tops. There was nothing he could do about the odor, though. The whole place smelled like cigarette smoke and sweat.
Coming home to this repulsive unit only reminded Snyder of the spacious two-story colonial on the tree-lined street in Alexandria now enjoyed by his ex-wife and her spiffy new husband. Snyder imagined his old walk-in closet now stuffed with the man’s fitted polo shirts and freshly creased size-thirty-two chinos.
Snyder ambled down the hallway to his bedroom, unbuttoning his shirt. His soft belly sagged over his waistband. Against his better judgment, he flipped on the light.
“Hello, Gabriel,” said a woman’s voice. She stood in the corner, her hands concealed inside a camel overcoat.
Snyder jumped. He reached into his closet for the 9mm he kept hidden in a shoe box.
“That won’t be necessary.” The woman revealed her empty palms. “I’m only here to talk.”
The retired FBI agent felt his heart pounding. His lungs tightened briefly, but luckily the sensation dissipated.
“You know who I am,” Director Allyson Cameron said. It wasn’t a question.
Snyder just nodded.
“Don’t be embarrassed. Your surveillance technique was exemplary, for the most part. You could teach my guys a thing or two.” She lit a cigarette.
“You can’t smoke in here.”
“Are you going to turn me in?” Cameron took a long drag. “Listen, Gabriel. We’ve both been in this business long enough to know our friends can be just as dangerous as our enemies. In the end, we’re all driven by self-preservation.”
“Director Cameron, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Snyder said.
“Cut the bullshit,” Cameron barked. “It’s Nathan Sullivan. He ordered you to follow me.” She approached Snyder slowly. “He’s bad news, Gabriel.”
“Worse than you?”
Cameron frowned.
“What do you want?” Snyder asked.
“Information,” the director said.
“That, I don’t have. My job is to follow orders, not to go on some self-righteous quest for truth,” Snyder said.
“Who said anything about the truth? I’d rather know what lies Sullivan has told you to make you suspect me, a career intelligence officer, of treason.” Director Cameron was now inches from Snyder’s face. “So, Gabriel. Friend or enemy?”
CHAPTER
58
Shanghai, People’s Republic of China
OLEN TWISTED AND kicked, trying to regain control of his swinging body. The ascender remained locked in place, so he’d fallen only a few feet after losing his grip on the elevator cable. He hung upside down, still tethered by the harness, swaying side to side like an animal ensnared in a hunter’s trap.
His elbow grazed the scalding interior casing of the chamber, singeing his wetsuit and searing the skin underneath. He slapped the charred material to keep the suit from igniting. The burn hurt like hell, but the pain wasn’t the worst part. He’d now have to enter a level four laboratory with no protective suit and an open wound.
The chamber stopped vibrating, and Olen paused to catch his breath. Blood rushed to his head. His heartbeat pounded in his eardrums.
The glowing light sticks at the bottom of the shaft began to fade. Olen couldn’t see beyond a few feet. He slipped a fresh stick from his tactical vest. With a sharp snap, the chamber illuminated in electric lime. He watched the stick fall to the bottom of the shaft. It bounced off something hard.
The scuba tank.
Olen cursed under his breath. He’d forgotten about the tank. The container of highly combustible, compressed oxygen sat inside an oven that was heating up. If it exploded, the force would thrust straight up the narrow chamber—a scorching fireball rushing directly into his ass.
The temperature gauge on Olen’s Suunto now read 117 degrees. Heat alone wouldn’t detonate the oxygen, but a single spark from the incinerators could be catastrophic. Olen probably had less time to get out of the chamber than he’d originally thought. Maybe two minutes max.
Squeezing his abdominal muscles, he pulled himself up and grabbed the cable. With an outstretched arm, he could touch the underside of the elevator car. It was warm, but not blisteringly hot like the chamber’s walls. A thin seam traced the perimeter of a rectangular panel. Olen pushed firmly, and the panel lifted with a squeal. He pulled himself through the cutout and into the t
iny car. He had to crouch on his hands and knees to fit inside the confined space, but he was relieved to have made it to the top of the shaft. His back burned from the strenuous climb.
As expected, the elevator door was sealed. Jo had explained that it could be opened only from inside the lab. Olen settled into a low squat, peering through the opening in the bottom of the car, down into the deep chamber. Heading back the way he’d come wasn’t an option. He had no choice but to wait. His life was in Jo’s hands. She was committed and capable. Olen trusted her. Then again, he’d only known the woman since Friday.
* * *
A tinny voice instructed all personnel to evacuate the building. Jo knew the security detail would be slow to respond. The guards would require biohazard suits to enter level four, and many of them wouldn’t know how to put them on. They’d take their time figuring out the zippers and the breathing apparatuses. No one would want to take chances with what lived behind the air lock. The delay would buy Jo some time to open the incident chamber and let Kipton crawl out. She had less than two minutes before the incinerators fired again. Everything had to go perfectly as planned, or Kip would be roasted alive.
Jo reached the incident chamber. The Alpha Five emergency would allow her to open the elevator door, but she still needed a code to unlock it. She began to punch it into the keypad with her thickly gloved hand.
“What are you doing?” a voice shouted over the wailing alarm.
Jo whirled around to see the young microbiologist waving wildly. Through his fogged-up bubble helmet, his faced looked panicked.
“Dr. Zhou, we’ve got to evacuate. There’s been a terrorist attack!” the man yelled, his voice muffled by the airtight space suit.