by Sam Masters
A gun?
She takes photographs and wonders if her imagination is getting the better of her. Too many episodes of NCIS, CSI, and Criminal Minds. She opens the closets. Male clothes. Three shirts, a couple pairs of black jeans. Beneath the rail she sees a pair of black boots. Not fashionable. Thick-soled, metal-toe-capped. Maybe for work in the animal shelter. Maybe not. There’s a chest of drawers with virtually nothing in it. A pack of unopened, plain briefs, socks, a rolled-up belt. And an ordnance map of Miami. She’s peaked in guys’ sock drawers before and found hidden literature, but never a map. She opens it up, sees it’s dated this year but seems much older because it’s so worn at the folds. There are no marks on it, no messages, no easy answers to any of her questions.
Zoe’s mind is swimming with thoughts as she goes into the next room. It’s the biggest. A large double bed dominates the floor. It’s been neatly made. There’s no obvious sign of life in here. She pulls back the cover, lifts the pillow. A nightdress. Lemon. Long and cotton. Plain not sexy. She moves it.
Another indentation.
Remarkably similar to the one in the other room.
Did Mr. and Mrs. Chen sleep in separate bedrooms with guns under their pillows? That doesn’t sound like too good a marriage to her.
She checks the closets. They’re almost as bare as the other ones. Two dresses. Two blouses. Three pairs of shoes. Two flats. One high heels.
And a pair of black boots. Nice. So far as she can see, that’s the only thing the couple have in common. There are no photographs in here. No makeup. Nothing personal. The rooms feel like a hostel rather than a home. There is no hint of a relationship, let alone a marriage.
Zoe drops to her knees and looks under the bed. The wooden floor is dusty and there’s nothing there. People stack stuff in closets and under beds, but not the Chens. Maybe they put it all in a suitcase and left for a long holiday. Perhaps she’s grasping at straws. The boots seem sinister, but then again, many people buy hiking or hobby stuff together. There’s probably an innocent explanation for everything.
She walks back downstairs, discounting the ordnance map as just Chen’s desire to get to know the area. To do his job better. Maybe there wasn’t a satellite navigator in his vehicle.
She tidies up in the kitchen before she leaves. Shuts the cupboard doors. Closes the drawers. Puts away the leaflets. As she does, she looks more closely at them. Now she sees more than just a random selection of local attractions:
Disney World
Flamingo Park
Aqualand
Crandon Golf Course
Universal Studios
Key Biscayne
The Everglades
Bill Baggs Park
Cape Florida Park
Her heart jumps when she sees another leaflet. One that might explain why the Chens are not at home.
102
Weaponization Bunkers, North Korea
The remains of the three dead dogs are laid out on the cold gray steel of the draining gurney in the bunker’s makeshift mortuary.
Dressed in full protective suit, Hao carries out rough autopsies while Jihai runs postmortem DNA analysis and toxicology tests.
Rough autopsies because Hao has a very good idea of exactly what he’s after. He drains what’s left of the body fluids, then excises, photographs, and weighs the remaining organs.
He cuts through fur and flesh and retrieves each of the three microchips, the tiny technological and biological bombs that when activated made the animals uncontrollably aggressive.
He cleans and opens them, then carefully siphons off each of the minuscule chambers, putting sample droplets of the aggressor serum on slides.
When he’s done, he calls Tāo to clear the waste away and send it to the surface for immediate incineration.
He washes, changes, and takes the slides back to his laboratory for inspection and toxicology testing.
In the cool, white surroundings of his laboratory, he puts a tired eye to the magnifying glass and expects to see a familiar picture; a chemical painting that has hung in the gallery of his mind since he first started work on the Nian project some three years ago.
He’s shocked.
The canvas is the same. Many of the colors and brush strokes are familiar.
But there are differences.
Huge differences.
Hao sits back from the scope and takes in the enormity of what he’s just seen.
The reason for his failure.
It’s clear now that he hasn’t been able to formulate a pacifier because partway through his experiments the microchips and the chemicals within them were changed.
Without his knowledge.
He thinks through the process of deception. Handlers in the dog pens would have been unaware of any differences when they shot the chips under the animals’ skins. From the outside, the chip canisters looked identical. It is only what was inside that has changed. They’d been filled with a serum dramatically altered from the one he’d been working with.
The new one, probably only introduced in the last few months, doesn’t only enrage the dogs, it makes them poisonous.
He understands now why the North Korean scientist who invented the basic aggressor hadn’t been involved in developing the pacifier. Zhang had already set him to work on creating a second strain.
The poisonous one.
He goes to the tox machine and waits impatiently for the results. Eventually there’s a beep and they come through. He reads it on the screen and then prints out a hard copy to study in detail. As though only having a physical copy will truly confirm what he’s just read.
The dog had excreted a modified form of TTX—tetrodotoxin, a lethal poison that can cause paralysis and death.
He can’t believe it. It’s there in black and white but he can’t believe it.
Hao sets the machine to repeat the testing.
But the nagging doubts that Jihai had raised in his mind are now screamingly obvious and he feels foolish. Foolish and used in the way that only experts of his age and reputation can.
Shameful and angry.
Twice short-listed for Nobel prizes, he had an international reputation as a brilliant and peaceful man.
Zhang has made a mockery of that.
The general no doubt set him to work on finding an antidote to the aggressor solely so he could stay ahead of the West and develop even more powerful and poisonous strains.
He’d been played.
The question now was, what should he do about it?
103
Bicentennial Park, Miami
Downtown residents are used to hearing screams from the massive Big Top that dominates the giant park.
Only they’re usually ones of joy.
They’re nothing like this.
Ten seconds ago more than two thousand animal lovers were excitedly caught up in the annual Dog Breeder’s Fair, a hugely popular event for both members of the public and professional breeders.
Now there’s bedlam.
Dozens of show dogs have gone crazy. They are attacking each other and anyone who’s not been fast or lucky enough to escape from the forty thousand square feet of tent.
Ghost and his team are already there, getting a verbal brief on what the venue is like. There’s a tunneled entrance into a tented circle that contains more than fifty stalls. There are merchandising concessions running around two-thirds of the enclosure and a “backstage” area behind large black drapes where the animals’ cages and organizers’ desks are located.
The lieutenant takes a call from Tarney. “Go ahead, John.”
“Just got a heads-up from Control. They’ve managed to call in a police helicopter from the Everglades to help track any strays that break from the site.”
“Good. Cummings is finally cutting us some slack.�
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From the back of the vehicle that Annie drove over, Ghost hands out HK416s, the close combat rifle developed by the U.S. Delta Force and the German manufacturer Heckler & Koch. “Once we go in there,” he points across to the big canvas, “nothing with four legs comes past us and gets out. We start at the back, then we work down to the middle and front. Don’t get distracted and drawn away. Keep shape and focus. Anything gets out, it will kill, and we can’t allow that.”
His team take their guns and automatically check them. While they’re readying themselves, Ghost heads toward Lydia Andrada, a tough-as-rocks uniform sergeant who is shouting orders to her crowd control teams.
“Lyd. Any chance some of your linebackers can open us a route into the tent and then keep us clean of civilians? The sooner we get in there, the better.”
The thirty-seven-year-old checks him out in his combat black. “Yeah we can do that, but rather you than me, Ghost.” She cups a hand and bawls across to one of her men. “Hey, Bellios, get a unit and come play Moses. You need to part the crowds and walk Lieutenant Walton and his team into the zone.”
A young black sergeant the size of a pro football player nods. “You got it, skip.” He turns to his men. “Kowolski and you guys, follow me.”
Ghost leans close to Lydia so she can hear him above the screaming crowds. “Any idea of casualties, how many dogs, and what to expect in there?”
She leans back. “Eyewitnesses say forty or so dogs. Most of them are fighting each other. Some of the bigger ones chewed on the crowd too. Bit the shit out of people sat out front in the center of the tent. We haven’t got anyone out yet so don’t know numbers.”
“Never sit at the front of anything,” says Ghost ruefully. “A lesson I learned early in life.”
“Agreed. I’m a backseat girl myself.”
He lets the innuendo slide. “Breed of dogs?”
“Everything. Boxers, bloodhounds, even those Labradoodledoers that are all the fashion.”
“You mean Labradoodles.”
“Maybe I do.” She shrugs. “They’re all just wool rugs with teeth to me. I hate dogs.”
He laughs. “Your men ready?”
She locks eyes with her sergeant. “You up, Bellios?”
“I was born up, skip.”
Ghost nods. “Then let’s go.”
Bellios and his uniforms disperse the crowd using megaphones and sheer physical presence. Even in the face of panic, people obey a pack of 250-pound policemen shouting at them.
Ghost halts his men at the entrance, a covered tunnel that leads down into the Big Top, most likely the place where tickets were bought and checked. He divides them into two groups and sounds a final warning. “Do not put yourselves in danger. If necessary, we back out, regroup and go again. No heroics. You can’t warn or negotiate with an animal, you can’t buy time or gain an advantage, so shoot on sight. Okay. Go.”
Rick Diaz, the marksman who killed the dog at Flamingo Park, is briefed to peel left with Max Kweller. Ghost is going right with Zander Stolly, the unit’s rookie.
Dog growls and human moans curdle the air as they walk the last few feet of the dark tunnel.
Red and green spotlights, abandoned mid-show by the tech crew, are crawling back and forth in the shadowy space ahead of them.
Ghost is first in.
He climbs the wreckage of information desks, concession stalls, and broken seats. All the noise is coming from a central show area where banked seating has been arranged to form a performance ring.
Ghost takes steps up to the back row and looks down.
Shit.
It’s like a scene from ancient Rome. Lions versus Christians. Down in the sawdust of the small arena, people stand back-to-back beating away snarling dogs with folding chairs from the front stalls and bits of apparatus from the show.
Ghost counts six, maybe seven dead bodies in the ring, several of them still being savaged by large dogs. There are canine corpses too, small spaniels and terriers that have been torn to pieces.
To the left of him, Diaz’s HK spits out a burst of bullets and takes down two boxers at the back of a pack. Kweller catches a wirehaired pointer with a single shot. A surgical hit that would have won him applause back on the range. Both men instantly move down a row of seats, their eyes never leaving the humans battling for their lives.
On the far right side of the ring the body of a grandmother is being torn apart by two more wirehaireds. Ghost takes out the dog chewing on her face and Stolly picks off the other.
A massive Alsatian jumps from beneath a set of seats in front of Kweller. It bounds over the young male body it’s been biting and heads their way. Diaz tracks it and catches it with his second burst.
Another leaps up the terraces, eyes huge and yellow teeth bared. Kweller drops his HK to waist level and sends a chain saw of bullets across its midriff.
Now there are more of them. Coming from every direction. The gunfire has attracted their attention, like cracking a stick on a hornets’ nest.
Ghost and Stolly sprint along their rows. They’ve got to be careful not to catch their colleagues in a cross fire.
A pointer jumps Kweller.
Just before it hits his chest he gets off a burst from the HK, but the dog still flattens him, cracks him into the seating and jars his back.
A mastiff the size of a horse gallops toward Diaz. He sees it out of the corner of his eye as he tries to help his partner but knows he won’t get his gun up in time.
Ghost shoots it from ten yards away.
Dogs are pouring out of the ring now. Sprinting up the aisles and heading toward his men.
The people who were trapped see their chance and run for the exits.
Run for their lives.
“Stay tight!” shouts Ghost. He turns and pulls hard on the rifle trigger. His 416 can cough out more than eight hundred rounds a minute, and he’s thinking he might need all of them to get out of here alive.
The first wave comes pouring in.
Stolly screams at the top of his voice and rakes automatic fire into the onrushing dogs. A wild release of tension that betrays his inexperience.
Ghost picks off dogs on the right perimeter, ones lumbering in late but every bit as vicious and deadly as the frontrunners.
Kweller and Diaz stand side by side and systematically mow down everything with fur that moves on the left perimeter.
The sound of the guns is deafening. The spotlit air fills with smoke, flying fur, and sprays of blood.
Finally, the shooting stalls to a stutter and Ghost shouts, “Cease fire!”
Stolly can’t stop.
He’s holding the rifle but has no control over it.
It’s jumping in his arms as he relentlessly shoots into the body of a long-dead dog.
“Stolly!” Ghost puts his hands on the youngster’s rifle. “Stop!”
The kid is wild-eyed and traumatized, but loosens his finger from the trigger and lowers his weapon.
Ghost puts an arm around him and pulls him close to his chest. “You did well, Stolly. You did really well.”
104
Weaponization Bunkers, North Korea
The second tox tests confirm the findings of the first. Hao was right. The wild dogs fitted with the new microchips had secreted tetrodotoxin, a deadly and virtually undetectable neurotoxin that blocks the conduction of nerve impulses along nerve fibers and axons.
TTX is essentially a “cork” pushed into the vital channels down which nerves send messages. Once blocked, the body starts to shut down, leading to paralysis, respiratory failure, and death.
The scientist remembers, as a student, learning that creatures such as the Japanese puffer fish can host the toxin without risk to itself, because the protein of the sodium ion channel underwent mutations that changed the amino acid sequence and made the chan
nel insensitive to tetrodotoxin. That single point mutation in the amino acid sequence rendered it immune to the poison.
The same was being done with the dogs.
On his desk are the newly completed DNA profiles that prove as much. There are changes in the base sequencing and clear signs of mutation.
Hao realizes the implications of what he’s uncovered.
Once beta testing has finished, the Nian project would supply General Zhang with the world’s deadliest covert weapon.
One that would be welcomed with open arms into the homes’ of unsuspecting families.
It would be petted. Loved. Trusted.
Then when activated, it will kill with just a single lick.
The thought sickens him.
The toxin is so hard to trace that millions could be killed before scientists discovered it, let alone developed a mass antidote. To the best of Hao’s knowledge, no one in the world has yet developed one. Though he doesn’t for a moment doubt that Zhang has teams secretly working on that as well.
Teams no doubt led by Jong Hyun-Su. The Korean scientist who invented the Nian program but didn’t develop it.
Hyun-Su was linked to Korea’s World Stem Cell Hub and is an expert in theriogenology—the science and practice of animal reproduction. The hub was initially hailed for its brilliance and was thought to have been the first lab in the world to clone a human embryo.
Then the truth came out.
Results had been faked. The hub’s leader had embezzled millions of dollars in funds and grants. As a result the whole enterprise was shut down.
While the WSCH’s claims on cloning people were discredited, their work on animals and the creation of the first cloned dog escaped relatively untarnished, as did the reputation of Jong Hyun-Su, widely regarded as one of the brightest and most maverick talents around.