by Matt Miksa
Wiping her eyes, Jo watched the door to the Slammer slide open—an automatic safety precaution. She raced out of the cell, down the stairs, through the deserted lobby, into the street. Bent over on the sidewalk, Jo fought for breath, her throat still choking on the smell of Ru’s burning flesh.
CHAPTER
66
Shanghai, People’s Republic of China
TWO BLACK MARBLES fixed inside the horned beast’s eye sockets zeroed in on Olen and then alerted a military sentry with inky flares. A pair of tree-trunk arms wrenched Olen from his burrow.
“Thank God you fellas pulled me outa there,” Olen said, his words slurring from the effects of the drugs. “It was so cold my balls were beginning to tunnel into my abdomen.”
Within moments, olive-clad guards had splayed him facedown on the cabin floor. A thick rubber sole crushed his cheekbone. The staccato of angry Mandarin pelted his body like a hailstorm. The demon-man behind the desk raised a palm to silence the icy deluge.
“You’re the American, yes?” The man spoke English with a Cambridge accent that lacked the slightest hint of trepidation. The shoulder stars, the European education, the plane—it had to be him. General Huang Yipeng, in the flesh.
With the boot grinding into Olen’s jaw, he couldn’t have responded if he’d tried. The best he could manage was a red-faced snort.
“The benzodiazepine should’ve kept you sedated. You have impressive metabolism,” the general went on. “It explains your exceptional stamina, I suppose. As demonstrated by your recent recreations in the InterContinental’s Skyline Suite.”
Olen ground his teeth. He should’ve swept the suite for bugs right away. He would’ve found the microphones. Had there been cameras too? Olen thought of Jo, smashing her lips into his, clawing at his shirt, yanking on his belt, the moment they’d entered the hotel room. They’d both succumbed to the heat of passion and skipped right over standard operating procedures. That meant the PLA had known Olen and Jo planned to infiltrate the Black Egg. They’d heard everything in the suite. Seen everything.
“You sick fuck!” Olen barked. “Did you get off, watching us? I swear to God, I’ll—”
The rubber sole pressed into his cheek flesh, smothering Olen’s words.
“What? Murder me? I shouldn’t be surprised. Even the self-righteous CIA hasn’t dispensed with old-fashioned political assassination.” Huang waved a finger, signaling his soldier to release some pressure. “It’s something I can relate to.” Huang’s timbre vibrated with intensity, his words like heavy velvet. At least five men stood over Olen’s pinned body in menacing poses. “Of course, the strategy often backfires. People underestimate the potency of martyrdom. The influence of the living never quite outshines the imperium of the dead. Don’t you think?”
The soldier sitting on Olen’s spine pulled his arms back against their sockets. His shoulders screamed.
“I wonder, would you have made it look accidental? Or maybe mutinous?” Huang paused, breathing slowly, eyes locked on his captive. “What a tempest that would have unleashed. The gates of Hades unbolted.” The general hissed like a serpent.
Jo was right, Olen thought. He read a hint of delight in Huang’s expression—the satisfaction of a plan unfolding with irreversible momentum. Was anyone in Washington even aware of what Huang had done, that he had released BRV45 on his own people?
Olen stared into the hollow eyes of China’s newest junta. Searing pain shot through his body, muddling his thoughts. Huang barked in Mandarin, and the two soldiers released their maddening grip. They hoisted Olen into a chair bolted to the floor. A black hood flew over his head. Olen heard the high-pitched zip of plastic ties binding his wrists to the armrests.
Enveloped in darkness, Olen could feel the general looming. He pictured Huang glowering from behind his enormous desk. A mahogany desk. With a slick polished top and deep spirals carved into the legs. And an American surveillance device implanted on its smooth surface—the one Olen had installed while on the flight to Lhasa with Jo.
The bug!
“You’re not my first,” Huang continued. The hood’s thick fabric dampened the general’s baritone. “Power attracts men of your trade like fruit flies to the goji berry. Emperor Qing faced down more than a dozen assassins. One even made it into his private chamber.”
“What happened to him?” Olen asked, thinking of the bug and trying to keep the conversation moving. He wanted to agitate the general, get him to talk about the virus.
“He went on to unify the Middle Kingdom. Emperor Qing pulverized his enemies and snuffed out the centuries-old wars tearing us apart. We began our journey as a great power.”
“I meant the assassin,” Olen said. “What happened to him?”
“History remembers only his failure. That, and the shame he brought upon his country.”
“And what will history say about you?”
Silence. Perhaps Huang had more composure than Olen thought. He heard a soft rustling—sheets of loose-leaf paper being pushed into alignment on the desktop, objects being reordered. Olen prayed the general hadn’t covered the bug. Without direct light, its battery would shut off and it would stop transmitting to Maryland.
Then Huang spoke again. “These are difficult times, as I’m sure you are aware. How much money has your country spent over the past decade to fight ideology? How many lives were lost to such foolhardy policy? One cannot repress an idea with fire from the sky. It will only get stronger. Burn hotter. No, an old idea can only be supplanted by a new one, a better one. That’s how to change the course of history.”
“Ruling by fear? Is that how you win hearts and minds?”
“Not really. There will always be brave men who disagree with me and have nothing to lose.”
“Then what makes them toe the Party line, if not fear?”
Huang leaned closer, his voice scraping like sandpaper on cement. “Suffering.”
A chill.
“Let me explain something to you,” Huang said. “Long before you were born, Chairman Mao told us we were powerful, capable people. And we believed every word. We were agrarian then—a nation of simple farmers—but Mao convinced us we could produce glorious amounts of steel. More than Russia! Can you believe that? Every man, woman, and child scoured their homes for anything metal. The activity was compulsory, to be sure, but I remember the look on my father’s face. Pride. He wanted to do his part.
“Cooking pots, pans, knives, bicycles—everything was carried into the center of the village and burned, smelted into an impossibly impure, completely unusable raw material, packed up, and sent to the city. Never mind this left us no tools to plant or harvest our crops. Mao called it the Great Leap Forward. That’s what everyone called it, in fact. Even after sixty million of our countrymen starved to death.
“We eventually fled our home, desperate to find food, traveling on the dirt roads spider-webbing the countryside. I always knew when we were approaching another village. The trees lining the road would suddenly be bare, not a single leaf remaining on their branches, even in summertime. They’d been eaten, you see. Plucked by spindly fingers and digested in the distended bellies of the most miserably loyal peasants you could imagine.”
Olen was mortified. “What could all that possibly accomplish?”
“Mao had to break them,” Huang rasped with delight. “Just like that worthless metal, he needed the people to burn and warp and struggle until their individuality—their very identity—dissolved and melted into a single, solid mass.” Olen pictured the general squeezing his hands into a tight fist. “Then, that mass cooled. Unified. Unbreakable.”
Huang spoke in metaphors, making his point but admitting nothing. Olen needed to force him into the open, get him to confess.
“Is that what you’re doing with Blood River virus? You’ll make the people suffer so you can control them? Like Mao did?” Olen asked bluntly. He could almost hear the smile breaking across the madman’s face.
“The virus is a tr
agedy, but one China can overcome. The disease may weaken our bodies, but never our spirit.”
Enough pussyfooting. “I know your military engineered BRV45 as a bioweapon,” Olen pressed. “I know you used it against your own people. You used the outbreak to seize control of the government.”
“Condemn me as an opportunist, then,” Huang replied.
“Thousands will die when you invade Taiwan.”
“Ah, Taiwan. How one little block of rock has hamstrung our progress for seventy years, I’ll never understand.”
“Isn’t Taiwan the ultimate prize?” Olen asked.
“Prize? If you call war with the United States a prize. You must think I’m truly foolish.”
“Then what is it you want?”
“It’s simple. I want to restore China’s greatness, to compel nations to prostrate themselves and pay tribute to her rightful eminence. I don’t care about Taiwan. I want to rule the Middle Kingdom.”
“You want to be emperor.”
“It’s a start.”
“Then why use a biological weapon?” Olen asked. “Why the elaborate scheme to frame Taiwan for the outbreak if invasion isn’t your end game?”
“American.” Huang sounded eerily placid. “This virus has ravaged our cities, destabilized our countryside, threatened the vitality of our economy. And yet, even Mao once advised, ‘Viruses are bad things, but they sometimes perform a useful function.’ Hmm,” he growled. “Useful indeed.”
After a beat, the general gave another order in Mandarin. Olen could hear the soldiers moving around him. One of them yanked on the drawstring of Olen’s hood. The cord cut into his neck. Seconds later, a hot pinch electrified his thigh. A needle’s prick.
Olen thrashed his head side to side. Was that another sedative? Or the virus? “What did you do? Godammit! What was that?” Olen’s body shook. Fire coursed through his veins.
General Huang ripped off the hood, his face almost touching Olen’s, nose to nose, with a look of demonic intensity. His eyelashes, a hundred venomous snakes, writhed and bared their fangs. At any moment they’d strike, inject their poison, stop Olen’s heart midbeat. Time was running out.
CHAPTER
67
Washington, DC, USA
“CERBERUS IS ONLINE, Mr. President,” General Goodyear reported, indicating the activation of four U.S. nuclear warheads. “We’re go-for-launch on your command.”
James Barlow looked to Sullivan, whose reassuring nod only raised more doubt in the president. Was Nate right about the ethics? Would bombing the PLA’s Ngari launch site save millions of innocent lives? Or would it begin a chain reaction of death and destruction? Secretary Hart seemed to side with Nate. She’d always had impeccable instincts in situations like this. It probably should have been her sitting at the head of this table, giving the command. God knew a woman like Darlene would make a hell of a president, Barlow thought. Tough as Teflon.
Director Cameron, on the other hand, looked ragged, defeated. She’d opposed military intervention from the start. Yet it was her operations officer who had suggested the Chinese military might have been responsible for the Blood River virus outbreak. That meant General Huang had murdered countless people with a bioweapon. Barlow had never known Allyson Cameron to cower before a monster like Huang. What was her agenda?
His decision made, President Barlow stiffened his spine. “Execute,” he ordered, sending the room into a flurry.
Moments later, the big screen in the Situation Room displayed a map of the Pacific. He watched as four blinking green orbs, somewhere above the Montana badlands, inched westerly toward Ngari Prefecture, and toward the Chinese nukes hidden in underground missile silos, encased in tungsten fifty feet thick. America’s ICBMs were in flight.
“Forty-three minutes to impact,” Goodyear reported.
In less than one hour, the world would change forever because Barlow had single-handedly decided to change it. What gave him the right? The president felt a pang deep in his brain, like an ice pick piercing his eyeball.
CHAPTER
68
Fort Meade, Maryland, USA
GABRIEL SNYDER WALKED to the break room closest to his NSA workstation. He relished the little trips to the coffeemaker, even enjoyed the trivial chitchat with a linguist or systems analyst that often accompanied them, but most everyone had left for the day. He trudged through the darkened office, returned to his computer terminal, loosened his tie, and prepared to settle in for a few more hours of signals monitoring—a less-than-oblique euphemism for sitting on one’s ass.
Snyder’s arm jerked when he saw the flashing alert on his computer screen. Piping coffee sloshed over the rim of his mug, nearly scalding his hand. His heart thumped as he read the message.
Intake posted. HVT. Source JX-0056.
One of the NSA’s bugs had picked something up. On its face, this wasn’t abnormal, since most of the agency’s listening devices were switched on permanently. They absorbed everything, most of it useless white noise. That’s why the folks in R&D had developed ultrasensitive voice recognition software to weed out background chatter from the words spoken by known intelligence targets. The system could even distinguish twins with near perfect accuracy. Snyder’s computer screen had lit up because it had detected someone important—an HVT. High-value target.
Snyder wiped his hand on the side of his pants and clicked the blinking alert to get the details. General Huang of the People’s Republic of China had just been heard on his plane for the first time since VECTOR officer Olen Grave planted the NSA bug there four days earlier. And, according to the system, Grave was with Huang. Snyder fumbled with his headphones and clicked the play button.
The computer offered rudimentary translations of most foreign languages—some of them embarrassingly crude, if you asked the linguists—but this latest posting required no such conversion. Huang’s confession was crystal clear, in English, and unequivocally explicit.
Snyder replayed the audio recording three times. He listened for hints of duress in the general’s wispy growl. Nothing. And the system’s polygraph software detected none of the typical vocal indicators of deception.
Snyder felt acidic bile creep up his esophagus and thought he might be sick. He’d never imagined the truth behind the Blood River virus outbreak in Asia could be so wrought with malice. He reached for his desk phone and pushed a button to activate a secure line. A blue light flashed on the cradle, and he punched in a number. He’d memorized it in case of an emergency like this one. Not until the trill of the first ring did Snyder begin to question his decision. He could be making an irreversible mistake, but he didn’t know who to trust anymore.
CHAPTER
69
Washington, DC, USA
ALLYSON STEPPED INTO the vestibule outside the Situation Room to catch her breath. A preemptive nuclear strike—the very idea of it seemed unimaginable. Yet she’d just witnessed the president make a decision equivalent to Truman’s Hiroshima. Sure, bombing the rocky Tibetan badlands wasn’t the same as hitting a dense metropolis, but the ramifications would reverberate just as violently. Barlow had just attacked a nuclear power.
Allyson had known James Barlow since he’d served as the CIA’s Paris station chief. His instincts were generally solid. But this time the man’s calculus was way off, and it made her insides reel. It had to be the migraines. The president was seriously ill. Maybe it was a brain tumor. The pain had clouded his judgment. Or had Sullivan gotten to him? Barlow’s Achilles heel was his bleeding heart. Nate knew the president couldn’t stomach the thought of a million innocent Taiwanese burning in the streets of Taipei. So by all means, declare war on an unstable superpower. Let’s see how that turns out.
A faint buzzing came from the wooden cubbies lining the vestibule. Electronic devices were prohibited inside the Situation Room, so everyone had to leave their phone outside. Allyson pushed her hair away from her face and saw it was her own phone humming.
“Director Cameron,” sh
e answered. Allyson listened carefully to the man on the other end of the line. His message magnified her dread.
“Listen, I’m twenty feet from the president. I need to know you’re one hundred percent confident in what you’re telling me.”
* * *
Moments later, Allyson burst into the Situation Room, gripping her cell phone.
“You can’t bring that in here,” someone yelled.
“Mr. President,” Allyson shouted with pinched urgency. The room fell silent. “We have red-hot ELSUR. It’s Grave, our guy in China. He’s with General Huang right now.”
Barlow turned. “Well, let’s have it,” he said.
Allyson tapped the speakerphone button and held her phone over her head. “Go ahead, Snyder.”
The recording crackled through the phone’s speakers. The members of the National Security Council listened silently to General Huang’s confession. President Barlow felt the blood drain from his face when the general’s voice said, “I don’t care about Taiwan. I want to rule the Middle Kingdom.”
The recording ended with a spit of static.
“What happened?” General Goodyear asked.
“The intake ends there. We don’t know why it cut off. Could be the bug’s battery,” Allyson explained.
“Jesus Christ,” Barlow said under his breath.
“Mr. President,” Bruce Kinsey, director of national intelligence, called out from the back of the room. “This just came in from our clandestine source within China State Construction Engineering, the contractor hired to build the Ngari air base.”
“Since when did we acquire a source in CSCE?” Secretary Hart asked, her voice strained.
Kinsey tapped on his laptop, and an image filled the big screen on the wall. He rotated through a series of photographs.