Threat Level Alpha

by Leo J. Maloney

  “Yeah, that’s Dobrynin.”

  “I remember him.”

  “He was the one who brought us the original intelligence about the Soviet virus. Bloch didn’t know what to do with him, so she made him my responsibility,” Morgan said. “I was the one who brought him into Zeta headquarters. So I’ll be babysitting for a while. On the plus side, he’s very good at negotiating with suppliers.”

  “Right,” Conley said.

  “It’s not safe for him to go back to Russia.” Morgan added.

  “Yes, I understand he has permanently pissed off the Russian brass,” Conley replied. “Apparently failure to get along with your superiors is a terrible handicap.”

  Morgan ignored the comment. “Have you eaten?” he asked.

  “No, but Bloch’s waiting.”

  “Jenny always makes extra when she thinks you’ll be stopping by.”

  “She made her eggs?”

  “And hash browns,” Morgan added.

  Conley poured himself a cup of coffee, filled a plate, and sat at the table with Morgan.

  Epilogue

  Two weeks later, Spartan showed up at Morgan’s door. She was in civilian clothes and Morgan realized that it was the first time he’d seen her not wearing some sort of tactical gear or protective clothing.

  “Bloch sent me to fetch you for the meeting,” Spartan said.

  “She doesn’t think I can get there myself?” Morgan asked.

  Spartan just stared at him, unblinking.

  “Jenny, I’m going out,” he called behind him.

  He knew they would be early for the nine o’clock briefing but he decided not to argue with Spartan.

  When they arrived at Zeta, he saw why she had brought him early. An attractive Asian woman in her early or mid-thirties was waiting in the lobby with Conley.

  She extended her hand. “Hello, I’m Danhong Guo.”

  Morgan shook her hand and said, “I have heard quite a bit about you.”

  “And I you,” she said, with only the smallest trace of an accent.

  Morgan shot Conley a look. Peter seemed stiff. Not nervous exactly, but not quite himself. And he was watching Morgan and the woman carefully.

  “You can call me Dani—Peter does,” she said.

  There was something going on here, Morgan realized. Conley mentioned that he had briefly gotten involved with the Chinese agent he’d met in Manila. But this was something else, or at least something he had never seen on Peter’s face before.

  “Are you finished with your debriefing?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And she’s been recruited. The CIA and State department were finished with her, and Bloch offered her a place at Zeta,” Conley offered.

  That was not a surprise. From what Morgan understood she was a highly capable agent and her background in the Chinese finance ministry made her invaluable. The big surprise was that State and the CIA had let her go without trying to recruit her themselves.

  Well, he knew that Bloch could be very persuasive and Zeta had just saved the world from a deadly virus.

  “We had better get inside,” Conley said, gesturing to the interior door in a way that was a bit more formal that usual.

  When they reached the war room, O’Neal, Randall, and Shepard were already there. Morgan took a seat next to Conley and Dani and noticed that the room was completely quiet.

  Then Bloch came in and sat down at the head of the table. She was unusually reserved. If he didn’t know better, Morgan would almost think she was nervous.

  They sat in silence for nearly five minutes. Then Mr. Smith entered.

  He was in his indeterminate sixties with thick but neatly combed white hair. He was athletic and slim, dressed in a very expensive business suit.

  “Diana,” he said to Bloch. Then Smith turned his attention to the table.

  “I want to thank you all for your recent work. Manila was bad but it could have been a disaster. And the Berkeley situation could have been even worse,” Smith said.

  “That is an understatement,” Morgan said.

  “True. We had to invent a new threat level designation for it. But thanks to Zeta those situations were mitigated. However, we have seen a disturbing trend. Conley and Ms. Guo’s reports and a further analysis of Manila showed cooperation between two terrorist groups that have never even communicated before. And the Chechen operation depended on knowledge of the original Soviet program that the Chechens should not have had. Moreover, the operation was several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than anything they have done before.”

  “Terrorists are getting smarter, but we have new tools like O’Neal’s threat assessment software,” Bloch said.

  “Valuable indeed, and it may have literally saved the world, but our analysis shows that something else may be going on,” Smith said. He paused for effect and then said, “Aegis suspects that these groups are receiving assistance—or more likely direction—from an outside organization.”

  “What?” Morgan said. “Who could possibly benefit from that sort of manipulation? For crying out loud, if the virus got out…”

  “It would have killed every man, woman, and child on Earth,” Smith said. “I can’t tell you why, but I’m telling you what is happening. We’ve also seen evidence of similar activity in other terrorist groups and rogue states.”

  Morgan spoke next. “That would require an organization with the resources and reach of…Zeta.”

  “Precisely, but in a group committed to terror, destabilization of alliances, war, and chaos. As for the who and the why, I leave that for you to determine. Consider that your new assignment.”

  Mr. Smith gestured for Bloch to remain seated. “I will see myself out. You all have some work to do.”

  War of Shadows

  Don’t miss the next exciting Dan Morgan thriller by Leo J. Maloney

  Coming soon from Lyrical Underground, an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  Keep reading to enjoy a sample excerpt…

  Chapter One

  Dan Morgan’s house exploded.

  It was so sudden and devastating that Morgan’s mind instantly reacted. The husband, father, and classic car dealer part of him went into shock. But the experienced, knowledgeable, veteran operative of the C.I.A. and now the clandestine organization Zeta went into overdrive.

  He had just turned the corner at the end of the Andover, Massachusetts street where he lived, feeling the comforting purr of the green 1968 Mustang GT his team had presented him with during their last mission. Ironically, he had reluctantly just admitted to himself that he was the happiest he’d ever been…that is, since his wedding day and the day his daughter Alexandria had been born.

  For once, everything appeared to be going great, both professionally and personally. Together with his team, and even his family, they had averted a biological apocalypse. The organization he worked for had never been so respected within the intelligence community, his superiors had come to fully appreciate his abilities, and even the skeletons in his closet had been cleared by his coming clean to his family about his previous double life. And now that the extremely capable young lady who was once his baby girl had moved out, he and his wife Jenny were even talking about having another child. Maybe adopting one from Asia or Africa.

  The father and husband in him remembered that he couldn’t wait to get home to her, the love of his life, when the unthinkable had happened. But the seasoned secret agent, to his growing rage, recognized the detonation.

  It was what the experts called a “toothpick explosion”—where fuel and oxygen mix perfectly to render a house into a tearing, shattering, ripping, belching mass of glass, wood, concrete, brick, and metal shards in two blinks of an eye. The husband and father, teetering in shock, stomped on the brake, while the professional military and espionage operative dov
e to the seat, knowing what came next.

  As the walls and windows of his once comfortable, happy home erupted in a million swipes of death’s scythe, more oxygen rushed in to reignite the explosion’s source. Sure enough, less than a second later, a whomp that was both a sound and pressure filled his ears, light blinded his eyes, and a fireball engulfed, then spewed, the house-shaped debris like a horde of maddened wasps.

  In the milliseconds that took, Dan Morgan’s eyes snapped back open. The husband and father inside him prayed that it might’ve been a gas leak accident. The intelligence operative inside him snarled, bullshit.

  Both personas tromped on the accelerator, sending the Mustang screeching down the street, over the curb, across the lawn, and into the flaming hole where his front door had been.

  “Jenny!” he bellowed, certain his voice carried over the detonation’s dying roar. He had just been talking to her. With cellphones, she could’ve been anywhere, but he felt certain she had been talking from home. Even before the car stopped, half on the ruined porch, half in the burning maw that had been his front door, he was vaulting out of the car. “Jenny!”

  The heat hit him like an angry monster’s slap. He felt his eyebrows singe, but he didn’t care. He charged through the conflagration, toward the stairs and the master bedroom. He opened his mouth to call out again, but the heat took that as an invitation and shoved itself down his throat like a hammering fist.

  That stopped him. He stood, staring, at the wreckage of what had once been his beloved home. He couldn’t recognize it. It looked like someone had shredded his life and sprinkled it onto a sizzling volcano crater.

  Dan Morgan had witnessed many an explosion, seen many a dismembered corpse, and smelled many a barbequed victim of fire-bombing. You couldn’t live the life he had lived in the military, the C.I.A., and now the Zeta organization, without having had such memories permanently branded in your brain.

  But this wasn’t some godforsaken hellhole he was infiltrating. This was his home, and if he stayed here he’d join whoever had been caught there when it happened.

  “Jenny,” he managed in a combination of a croak and a gasp as carbon monoxide stuffed his nostrils. He suddenly felt his flesh begin to crawl—not from fear, but from being baked. A combination of anger and remorse drove his spasming muscles.

  Don’t be an idiot, he heard himself bark inside his own head. Hope is not your friend.

  Dan Morgan had gotten angry before. Too many times. But he could honestly admit that this was the first time he had gone blind with helpless rage.

  He staggered blindly until he hit the car with his side. He looked around wildly as his fingers scrabbled for the door handle. He saw that his back porch door window was melting. The living room fireplace was a mound of flame. He heard his adjoining garage workshop collapsing as if Thor himself had just sledgehammered it.

  The sweat and tears that managed to escape his eyes evaporated in less than a second as he fell back behind the driver’s wheel, jammed it into reverse, and tromped on the accelerator. The now battered and bent classic car tore back onto the lawn as if yanked by a steel cable. He only went back far enough so the gas tank wouldn’t explode and his clothes wouldn’t immolate before jamming on the brakes again.

  As horrifying as the last minute had been, the next few were even more surreal. Reeling from shock and exposure, he saw his horrified neighbors all around him like a small squad of concerned ghosts, as burning shreds of what had once been his sanctuary rained down around them like flaming confetti.

  He sat there, staring down the shock that threatened to paralyze him. Oh no, he found himself thinking. Not now. Don’t have time for you now. Somehow his agent’s systematic brain recognized each on-looker…save one. Dan all but vaulted out of the car as his neighbors neared.

  There was a small, shadowy figure near the bushes on the other side of the house, a figure hidden from him by the night’s darkness, the flames’ distorting heat waves, and some sort of black outfit, complete with visored helmet. Dan took a step toward it, a quiet prayer of “Alex” escaping his lips.

  But as soon as he said it, he knew it wasn’t his daughter. As he was about to take another step, he felt the hands and bodies of his neighbors close in on him. The shadowy figure disappeared behind the remains of the burning house.

  Dan heard nothing the concerned citizens said, and felt nearly nothing they did to comfort and check him. Above their anxious, alarmed din, he heard a louder, commanding voice. It was his.

  “Call 9-1-1,” it demanded. “Now! Use your hoses to keep the fire from your roofs and walls. Steve…Steve Richards!” He had called his most trusted neighbor.

  “Here, Dan,” he heard the man say. “I have your dog, Neika. She staggered over seconds before it happened. I think she’s drugged or something.”

  Dan’s rage was about to engulf him again when he spotted an armored, tinted-glass SUV speeding by at the mouth of the street. He knew every vehicle owned by everyone for a mile around him. This was not one of them. And the dead giveaway was that its license plates were obscured.

  “Take care of her, Steve,” he seethed, already hurling himself back into his car. “See…see if they can find…”

  But his wife and daughter’s name was blotted out by the roar of his Mustang’s engine as he reversed back across the already deeply shredded lawn. The neighbors scattered, mouths agape, as the GT squealed back onto the asphalt, did a smoking tire turn, and shot down the street as if fired from a cannon.

  It was late, so the suburban streets were fairly clear, which made the sighting of the unknown vehicle easier. His catching the thing, however, was a different matter. Even from a distance, there was no mistaking it—especially from the mind of an agent whose cover was that of a classic car dealer. It was a black Grand Cherokee Trackhawk—all seven hundred and seven horsepower of it. From the shark-eye glint of its exterior and windshields, it was most likely bullet-proofed as well.

  He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward. As if of its own accord, his left arm rolled down the window, letting the night air help wake him up. It also let in the sound of sirens approaching from the opposite direction. The father and husband part of him wished he could have stayed to help put out the fire and search the wreckage. The agent in him wanted to drive his Mustang down the Trackhawk’s throat.

  What the hell had happened, he thought, and more importantly, why the hell had it happened? His still addled mind tried to rifle through his personal list of enemies, then narrow it down to those who be so sadistic to literally bring it home to him, but he soon decided that was a waste of time. Both lists would be one and the same, and too numerous to whittle down. There was a far more pressing issue to attend to.

  He found his smartphone in his right hand, not completely remembering that he had grabbed it. In the rear view mirror, he saw fire trucks pulling onto his street and the flickering shadows of his demolished home. When he looked back, his eyes searched the dashboard, remembering how his family had all but begged him to have voice-activated, hands-free communication in his car, but no, he had to be the classic car purist…

  His family. Had they been home when it happened? Blinking furiously, Morgan’s thumb stabbed the digital buttons, calling his wife’s number again and again.

  No answer. He remembered Lincoln Shepard, Zeta’s resident communication whiz, telling him that no answer was worse than going to message. Going to message meant the phone still existed. No answer could mean the phone was destroyed…

  The Mustang jumped, then shuddered, as the cars went from Route 42 to I-93. It took all the GT’s five-liter V8 engine and nearly five hundred horsepower to keep up with the Trackhawk’s teeth-shaking roar, even on the sparsely trafficked highway. Dan watched the speedometer rise—a hundred miles an hour, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty…

  The Trackhawk seemed to wiggle its rear at him, doggedly staying a steady
four car-lengths ahead. They stayed that way, mostly hugging the left lane, except for occasionally weaving around a speed limit idiot so closely that the state police would need a hair to measure how near they’d gotten to the slow-pokes.

  A hundred and thirty…a hundred and forty…

  Maybe I’ll luck out, Dan thought. Maybe there’ll be a speed trap or radar surveillance to ensnare us both. No such luck anywhere from Wilmington to Medford. Maybe I should call the highway patrol myself, Dan considered. But, although the smartphone was still in his hand, he had more important calls to make.

  He called his daughter Alex, twice. That went to message. He called Shepard. That went to message. He called Cougar—his best friend and partner Peter Conley. That went to message. He called Lily Randall, he called Karen O’Neal, he even called the numbers he had for his boss Diana Bloch—something he almost never did. All went to message.

  A hundred and fifty…a hundred and sixty…The speedometer trembled at the little red pin where the numbers ended. The Trackhawk was still, stubbornly, deridingly, four car lengths ahead.

  “Idiot,” Dan seethed, shoving the phone down on the seat beside him. Why bother with the phone when he always had the Zeta comm-link in his ear. It was so comfortable and ubiquitous that he had forgotten it in the literal heat of the moment. He pressed his right ear canal to instigate the connection. The resulting shriek deep in his head all but sent the car into the median.

  He managed to regain control of the car in time to avoid a wreck, as well as wrench the tiny hearing aid from his auditory canal. It flew, like a dying bee, into the passenger seat’s well, bouncing on the floor mat beneath the glove compartment.

  What the hell? Dan returned his full attention to catching up to the Trackhawk, only to find that despite the Mustang’s slowing and wavering, the SUV was still almost exactly four car lengths ahead. You damn bastard.