Alex wasn’t feeling very docile but knew she knew she had to bide her time.
The man collecting the phones took hers and a few others, and then headed over to one of the lab tables. The only sound in the room was his footsteps, Dr. Spellman’s moans of pain, and some soft whimpers from the students.
“In a moment you will be escorted to our transportation. You will not speak.”
There was a loud crack and Alex saw the terrorist who had taken their phones smashing one with a large hammer. Then another. Then another. When all of the phones and watches were in pieces—and now untraceable—the man collected the pieces and brushed them into the canvas bag.
Two of the terrorists dragged Dr. Spellman to his feet and Alex could see that the right side of his face was bleeding pretty freely under his hand. But he stood, and with a shell-shocked expression allowed himself to be led toward one of the outer doors.
“Follow,” the leader shouted at them. Together, the students got up and headed after their professor.
* * * *
“Do you have a minute?” the message on her screen said.
Before Diana Bloch could respond, Shepard was knocking on her open door.
“Come in,” she said, though she had the feeling that if she had hesitated, he would have entered anyway.
Shepard was wearing his usual uniform: jeans, t-shirt, and a hooded sweatshirt. But gone was his usual carefree expression. That look and one of intense concentration were the only ones he wore in public. This new demeanor said he was worried.
“Yes,” she said.
“I haven’t heard from Karen. Just wondering if you knew anything. Or if you’ve heard from her or Alex,” he said. Shepard was trying—and failing—to make the request sound nonchalant.
“She isn’t due to report in until tonight,” Bloch said.
“Yes, but she missed our lunch,” he said.
“Your what?”
He shuffled and then said, “When we’re apart, we sometimes schedule these lunches, where we eat at the same time when we’re on the phone.”
Bloch knew they were seeing each other and it took some effort not to smile at that. Well, they were young.
“And she missed one?”
“Yes, but the real problem is that she didn’t call or message me. That’s never happened before,” he said.
“She is undercover, Shepard,” Bloch said.
“Of course, so I thought I would just check to see if you knew anything.”
“Have you checked her GPS?”
“I can’t ping it, or Alex’s.”
That, by itself, didn’t signify an emergency. Zeta-issued phones would transmit their location even if they were turned off, thanks to modifications made by Shepard. But they still had limitations. If the young women were in a basement lab, or deep inside a large building, there might not be signal.
And the two women were on a mission, so they could very well be together and out of range. It was all perfectly logical, particularly when you factored in the nature of the mission. They were hardly in a hot zone. There was virtually no chance of physical danger from the mission itself—no more than either woman would face in daily life.
“Are you monitoring campus security?”
“We’ve been in their system since Karen’s software flagged the campus. Once Alex and Karen arrived we started monitoring and recording all security camera footage.”
“No indication of trouble?” Bloch said.
“Not really,” Shepard said, embarrassed.
“I do understand that O’Neal missed your lunch date, but all we really have is that and the fact that their phones aren’t showing on the system for…”
“About forty-five minutes,” he said.
“And there are half a dozen reasons why that might be,” Bloch said.
“Yes,” he conceded.
“There’s only one problem,” Bloch said. “I don’t like it, not one bit.”
Shepard shot her a surprised look.
“Stay on it. Pull whomever you need. You have my authorization to hack into local law enforcement, traffic cams. Whatever you have to do. Assume we have a problem until you hear otherwise from Karen herself, or Alex. I’ll make sure we have local resources in place and a Tach team ready to go if we need them. I wouldn’t worry, Shepard, but I’d rather be safe.”
Bloch watched Shepard stand there, dumfounded. He’d come in, embarrassed to say that he hadn’t heard from his girlfriend, and now he’d just gotten an all-access pass to whatever resources he needed.
“Don’t dawdle, Shepard,” Bloch said.
The young man snapped to and practically sprinted out of her office.
She had learned a long time ago that it was better to be safe than sorry. As a practical matter, Bloch knew that there was no way to ensure absolute safety for her agents here or in the field.
But there was no rule that said she couldn’t try.
Chapter 16
“Okay, Dobrynin, what is it? Understand that we’ll need to do this quickly,” Morgan said. He gestured to Jenny who was standing right next to him. He noted that while she had lowered her gun, she hadn’t put it away. “We have plans for the afternoon.”
Dobrynin hesitated. “This may take some time. And perhaps we could speak privately.”
“Anything you want to say to my husband, you can say in front of the woman,” Jenny said.
The Russian turned to Morgan for help but he just shrugged. Dobrynin then turned back to Jenny and said, “Mrs. Morgan, I am sorry for this interruption. I am also sorry for this…misunderstanding.”
“You sent men after my husband,” Jenny said.
“Just to watch him until I could get here. They were sloppy and your husband properly…chastised them. This is very important. It requires that Morgan and I speak. We used to work together and something has come up that is in our mutual interest to prevent.”
“Dobrynin—” Morgan began.
“Wait, are you Valery Dobrynin?” Jenny asked.
That surprised Morgan.
“Yes I am,” the Russian said.
“My husband has mentioned you,” Jenny said.
“To be fair, we were rivals more than once,” Dobrynin said.
“And you have helped him in the past,” Jenny said.
“This is also true,” the Russian said.
His wife shot him a look and he shrugged. The chances that Dobrynin was on the level were better than their chances if they decided to shoot it out with the Russian gang. The odds weren’t much better, but any improvement was something.
“Have you eaten?” Jenny asked.
“What?” Dobrynin asked.
“Lunch. Have you and your men had lunch?”
Twenty minutes later Jenny and Morgan sat across a diner table from Dobrynin, while his five men sat at another table nearby. One of them had a bandage over what Morgan had no doubt was a broken nose.
“This is very serious, Cobra—I mean, Morgan,” Dobrynin said, shooting Jenny a glance.
“It’s all right, I know my husband’s code name,” Jenny offered.
The Russian continued. “In the late eighties the KGB and Soviet military had a germ warfare program.”
“More than one,” Morgan said.
“Yes, more than one. But this was a special program that dealt with only the most dangerous viruses and bacteria, ones that had the potential to create massive loss of life.”
“You’re referring to Project Drakon,” Morgan said.
That startled Dobrynin. “You’ve heard of it? Few people who didn’t work directly on the project heard more than whispers, or even know that name.”
“East German records were made public after the wall fell. We picked up a lot of our best intelligence simply by asking for it,” Morgan said.
>
“A chaotic time,” the Russian agreed. “There was no control over information.”
“We didn’t get much on that one. Just that you had a project called Dragon that was shut down in 1989. Our analysts assumed it was a failure.”
“If only that were true. It was shut down, but not because it was a failure. In the old stories, the stories from the villages, the Russian drakon breathes fire to repel foreign invaders. In this project, it was to be a weapon of last resort. In the event that the Soviet empire was lost to your nuclear bombs it would be released to destroy you. However, the dragon was too dangerous. If it was released even by accident, its fire would likely devour the world.”
“You mean it would kill everyone? Everywhere?” Jenny asked, genuinely shocked.
The Russian nodded.
“I presume you destroyed it,” Morgan said.
“Yes, even the most committed members of the Party did not want the great Soviet Experiment to be responsible for…”
“The end of the world,” Jenny gasped.
“All samples were destroyed. The scientists who worked on the project were silenced. There was much discussion about what to do with the KGB agents who worked security for the project. The decision was split and a few of us are still alive.”
“So what’s the problem?” Morgan asked.
“All of samples of the virus were destroyed, and most of the data,” Dobrynin said.”
“Most means not all,” Morgan said.
“There was a storage facility in the Caucasus Mountains that had some old computer equipment, some old hard drives. My team thought we had destroyed everything, but the Party kept a backup. And then things got sloppy in the early nineties. I received a message a few days ago that there had been an attack.”
“If your storage facility was in the Caucasus Mountains, that means Chechnya,” Morgan said.
“Yes, Chechen terrorists hit the facility and killed the soldiers. They left all of the military hardware and spare parts. The only things they took were pieces of computer equipment,” Dobrynin said.
“Can I assume that equipment was about twenty-five years old?” Morgan said, and the Russian nodded. “How bad is it?”
“If the data is intact, it would give them everything they need to re-create the virus. With the right people and equipment they could go into production immediately,” Dobrynin said.
“Why would anyone, even terrorists, want a weapon that could kill everyone?” Jenny asked, aghast.
“It would be an effective threat. A group could hold the world for ransom, demand whatever they wanted,” the Russian said.
“There are other groups who actually want to bring about the end of the world. In Iran there is a Shia sect that believes that if they cause enough chaos it will usher in the twelfth Imam, their messiah, to Earth,” Morgan said.
The Russian shook his head. “This new way of doing things…”
“I know what you mean. We played hard, but there were rules,” Morgan said.
“Yes, and the first rule was not to destroy—”
“Stop it!” Jenny said. It wasn’t quite a shout—they were in public—but her tone stopped both men cold. “You’re not talking about a game, something where one side wins for a while, then the other side wins. You’re talking about the end of everything, the end of the world. And just to be clear, my daughter lives in the world! I live in the world! And my husband lives in the world! I want you to fix this and I want you to do it now.”
“What can you give me?” Morgan asked.
“Photographs of the Chechens, some video. I have everything that was in the KGB file, but we lost track of the men when they entered the United States.”
Morgan asked, “How long before they could re-create the virus?”
The Russian shrugged. “I have no idea. It took years to create even the small samples we had. Today, with modern equipment, who knows? It would also depend on the skills of the people involved. My job was security, not science.”
“We’ll have to bring this to my people. There is someone I need you to tell this story to.”
“I will do whatever I can. I was part of it and bear some…responsibility,” Dobrynin said. Then he turned to Jenny and added. “And I live in the world too.”
Gesturing to the table of Russians, Morgan said, “You’ll have to leave them.”
“My cousin’s boys and comrades. They have little loyalty to me. And this trip has already been more trouble than they bargained for,” Dobrynin said.
Turning to Jenny, Morgan said, “We really should go straight in.”
“Of course,” she replied.
“It will be a little cramped in the back but you can ride with us,” Morgan said.
Dobrynin stared out of the window, his gaze lingering on the Mustang. “It will be my pleasure.”
* * * *
“What have you got, Shepard?” Bloch said into her phone.
“Nothing conclusive but…there is something going on there. I can…”
“I’m coming down,” Bloch said.
Less than two minutes later she was peeking over Shepard’s shoulder at his screen, which was flashing images and documents almost faster than she could follow.
Bloch could see that he had also put Spartan and the rest of the tactical personnel to work. They were all sitting at terminals. From what she could see they were manually reviewing many hours of security camera footage.
That was actually a clever idea. As tactical agents they didn’t have much computer experience, but they were trained operatives. And part of their training required them to see what was really there, not what they expected to see. Their experience had trained them to see dangerous situations where most people saw nothing but everyday life.
“No word from Karen or Alex, and their phones haven’t shown up on the grid, any grid for that matter,” he said.
That was bad, it had been hours. Even if they didn’t call in, neither Karen nor Alex would allow themselves to be electronically invisible for so long.
“So I started looking for other people on campus that might be…” Shepard paused, as if he was afraid to utter the word. “Missing,” he said.
“Professor Spellman didn’t show up for a doctor’s appointment,” Shepard said. “Once I saw that, I ran a check on email messages to any of his bio-chem students and about a dozen of them aren’t where they are supposed to be. I mean, they have friends looking for them. Nothing conclusive, so I’m checking cell phones for all students in the bio-chem department. This will take a minute, I’m looking at recent calls, texts to and from…Wait,” Shepard said, looking at the screen as if he couldn’t understand what he was seeing.
“What is it, Shepard?”
“They’re gone,” he said flatly.
“Who? Who’s gone?”
“Professor Spellman and twenty of his students. Their phones have disappeared. They don’t show up on any system. No GPS signals. It’s like all of their phones were turned off at once…or destroyed.”
The room was silent as the Tach agents who were helping out stopped to listen. “Could be a classroom protocol, or if they’re at a secret meeting,” Bloch said, knowing how weak it sounded. It was possible, but not likely, especially if students were starting to be missed by their friends.
But, then again, if it was foul play someone would know something. This was twenty people we were talking about. That many college students didn’t drop off the face of the Earth without leaving a trail—or making a splash.
“Local PD? Fire? Campus security?” she asked.
“Nothing. No flags anywhere,” Shepard said, genuine nervousness creeping into his voice. “Except…there are a few security cameras out; a bunch, actually.”
“Location?”
“All over, it’s almost random, but there is a cluster nea
r the biochemistry labs,” he said.
That was it. Something was going on. Even if the students had all voluntarily turned off their phones and—somehow—her agents’ location beacons weren’t working, that wouldn’t explain why security cameras would start going out, especially near the labs.
“When was the last time the campus lost this number of cameras at one time?” she asked.
“Never,” he replied.
Bloch straightened up. That was it. She had two agents in trouble.
“Find them. Do whatever you need to but find them,” she said. Then to the room, “Tach team personnel. Help Shepard with whatever he needs but be ready to ship out. I’ll get us a command center out there.”
Of course, that depended on where “out there” was and what they were dealing with. Had the radical professor and his merry band gone underground to fulfill their dream of killing everyone on the planet? Had they been kidnapped? Or was something else going on, something she hadn’t thought of?”
If they had run or been kidnapped they wouldn’t necessarily stay nearby. In fact, the further away they got from campus, the better.
As she left Shepard’s section she called out, “Check the airports, run our missing people through facial recognition and look for any last minute charters or unscheduled flights at small airfields.”
In the hallway, her phone buzzed. It was her assistant.
“I have Dan Morgan for you,” the young man’s voice said.
Morgan, she thought. She didn’t want to talk to him when they still knew nothing. Morgan the agent was enough trouble; the last thing she wanted to do was set off Morgan the father. But she wouldn’t keep this from him. If this situation turned into a mission—rescue or otherwise—she would need him.
“Bloch here,” she said.
Chapter 17
“I have an asset with a story to tell. And believe me you are going to want to hear it,” Morgan said.
“An asset? Aren’t you on vacation?”
“Yeah. We found this one on the beach,” he replied.
Threat Level Alpha Page 14