by Saul Herzog
The Asset
A Lance Spector Thriller
Saul Herzog
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Afterword
Foreword
I’d like to take a moment to thank you personally for buying this book. A lot of time and work has gone into it and I truly hope you enjoy the story I’ve come up with.
If you have any concerns at all about this story, if you spot any typos or errors, or if you’d just like to get in touch to say hello, please feel free to contact me at any time.
I can always be reached by email at:
[email protected]
Alternatively, you can sign up for updates from me at:
https://www.authorcontact.com/saulherzog-1
I am always thrilled to hear from readers so please stop by, say hello, let me know what you think of Lance Spector and the world he inhabits.
God bless and happy reading,
Saul Herzog
1
Sofia Ivanovna looked out over the vast tundra with a feeling of foreboding. In those parts, the locals had a saying. The better the vehicle, the farther you had to walk back when it failed. The permafrost was unforgiving at the best of times. Now that it was thawing, it was downright treacherous.
She was at the head of a convoy of eight Russian-made, Trekol all-terrain six-wheelers. They’d been plowing through the endless Siberian waste in a straight line due east for six days.
Seven of the vehicles carried fuel, supplies, and laboratory equipment. The eighth held the tools and parts necessary to equip the entire convoy with heavy-duty caterpillar tracks. That hadn’t been necessary, yet.
Just a few years ago this ground was frozen solid, and had been for thousands of years.
That was changing.
She leaned her forehead against the window.
The president had called her personally the night before they set out. It was meant as a show of support, but it only added to her unease. No one, whatever they said, wanted a call from the Kremlin. She felt like Frodo under the eye of Sauron.
“Our tundra’s warming at twice the rate of North America’s,” the president said.
Sofia was well aware of the fact. It seemed global warming was one more war in which Russia would have to fight as the underdog.
As head of the Permafrost Pathogen Institute, a secret laboratory headquartered in the military industrial compound in Yekaterinburg, she was one of the Motherland’s secret weapons on this new front. A wild card that would level the playing field.
“My little Katyusha,” the president called her.
She didn’t know what to say to that.
“What is it our American friends say?” the president told her. “When life treats you like shit, drink lemonade?”
That wasn’t exactly right, but she got the point.
“Are the sat phones still working?” she asked Vasily.
“Sofia, relax,” he said.
Vasily Ustinov was her second in command at the institute, though he didn’t look it. He wasn’t the type who lived in his lab coat, nor did he sport the brown-corduroy-with-elbow-patch look other senior government scientists were fond of.
He’d grown up in the Caucasus and had an unruly mane of black hair and an even more unruly beard. It made him look like a cross between Che Guevara and Jack Sparrow. He gave the impression of knowing his way around a Kalashnikov. Traveling with him to a climate conference in Sweden a few years earlier had been a lesson in airport security profiling.
Despite all that, he was the best anthrax specialist the country had produced in a generation.
“We’re sixteen hundred miles from the nearest airfield,” Sofia said.
“And if anything goes wrong, they’ll come right for us. We’re their top priority,” he said.
She nodded.
The truth was, it wasn’t the remoteness that was bothering her. It was the nature of the mission. No one became a doctor because they wanted to kill people.
She and Vasily were in the front vehicle, and behind them were four more scientists from the institute, along with twelve armed soldiers who’d been assigned as their security detail. She had no idea what the soldiers were supposed to be protecting them from. Neither did they, it seemed.
“They’re watching us,” Vasily said when he first saw them. “Making sure we don’t do anything … unpatriotic.”
Sofia knew he was right.
From Yakutsk, they’d been ferried north along the Lena River on a military barge, the hull of which could withstand impact with ice three feet thick. That was reassuring. For someone in charge of daring scientific expeditions, Sofia was surprisingly timid around open water.
And the river was vast even by Siberian standards. Over five miles wide at places, it was unspanned by any bridge. The barge took them north as far as the Vilyuy tributary, where Sofia was glad to plant her feet on the solid, shaley beach of the river’s east bank.
They were deep in the territory of the Sakha Republic, one of twenty-two republics recognized within the Russian Federation. It covered more than a million square miles, about a third the size of the contiguous United States, and in all that space there was only a single city, Yakutsk, which battled with Norilsk for the title of coldest on earth.
The terrain was continuous permafrost, land that, unlike the rest of Eurasia, hadn’t thawed at the end of the last ice age. For centuries, trappers and explorers had been finding the remains of strange, long-extinct creatures there. In the thawing permafrost, they found perfectly prese
rved steppe ponies, mammoths larger than any living land animal, and wooly rhinos with horns over a meter long.
Sofia squinted through the windshield and imagined a herd of mammoths lumbering across the ice. On the remote islands of the Latpev, the enormous creatures had survived until surprisingly recent times. Long after druids built Stonehenge, and all the major pyramids had been completed in Egypt, mammoths were still roaming Wrangel Island far to the north.
“What I wouldn’t do for a hot shower,” Vasily said.
Sofia nodded. “And a real bed.”
They’d been gaining altitude at an almost imperceptible rate since leaving the river. The effort of it kept the engines straining and the sound and vibration added to her fatigue.
“What’s he doing now?” Vasily said, looking in the rearview mirror.
Sofia turned back. Petrov, the commander of the military escort, was flashing them from the vehicle behind.
Vasily stopped and Sofia opened her door. Apart from the idling engines, she doubted there was a sound other than the wind for a thousand miles. That kind of isolation was a force all its own. It pressed against her.
When she was a child, her parents took her on a cruise of the Black Sea. At night, when they were out of sight of land, she terrified herself by imagining jumping off the ship and being left alone in the water. Who knew what lurked in those depths?
The tundra gave her the same feeling.
Alone in her tent at night, she had nightmares of the convoy leaving without her. No matter how cold it got, she had to look outside and make sure the rest of the tents were still there.
“Doctor Ivanovna,” Petrov called through the comms.
“What is it?”
“We’re at the geotag. This is my marker.”
She jumped down from the vehicle and her boots sank six inches into slush. This was the moment she’d been waiting for. She reached into the vehicle and pulled out her backpack. Inside was an envelope bearing the seal of the president.
She carried it to Petrov.
“What’s this?”
“What does it look like?”
His eyes widened when he saw the seal. He opened it and read the orders. Sofia knew what they said. The scientists were to go on alone.
“We’ll set up camp here,” Petrov said, “and wait for you.”
“Very good,” Sofia said.
He climbed back into his vehicle and returned with a polymer gun case. He put it on the hood of his vehicle and opened the latch.
Inside were six government-issue side-arms.
“What do we need these for?” Sofia said.
“Protection.”
“Protection from what?”
Petrov shrugged. “Monsters?” he said.
Sofia rolled her eyes and grabbed the case. She signaled the four other scientists to follow her and they trudged together to the lead vehicle.
“This is it,” she told them. “This is what we trained for.”
Vasily opened a special storage compartment containing hazmat gear and they suited up. Then they went back to their own vehicles and fired up the engines, covering the last part of the journey without the soldiers.
When Sofia saw the massive rib cages sticking out of the snow, the sight took her breath away. They looked like the hulls of sunken boats.
“It’s a graveyard,” Vasily said.
Sofia’s heart raced. The satellite imagery from the military had been given to them almost a year before, and they’d had to wait for what seemed like forever before the conditions were right for an attempt.
She’d initially suggested flying in by chopper but the generals were against it.
“We can’t take that risk,” Yevchenko said. “If there’s any contamination, I don’t want it flying back to Yakutsk on a chopper. I want a slow, overland convoy.”
What he meant was that if Sofia and her crew didn’t contain the samples properly, he wanted them to die alone on the tundra, and any risk of contamination with them. She couldn’t blame him. At these temperatures, anthrax spores could lie dormant for thousands of years. If there really were some primordial strain of the bacillus among these carcasses, as the herds of dead reindeer in the satellite imagery suggested, there was every reason to be afraid.
What no one else on the team knew, and what was making her so uneasy, was the president’s suggestion, which had originally come from some madman at the GRU lab in Moscow, that the carcasses might also harbor an ancient virus strain.
Finding a previously unknown anthrax bacterium could be the beginning of a formidable new Russian bioweapons program. That was the official purpose of their mission and something that made Sofia uneasy to begin with. But what really made her lose sleep at night, what made her wake up soaked in sweat, what made her consider taking some sort of drastic action, was the last minute call from the president.
“Tell no one,” he said.
“But, sir. A virus, it would be communicable. It jumps from person to person. There’s no way we could ever use it on the battlefield.”
“You leave those details to the generals,” the president said. “I don’t need to remind you what’s at stake.”
“No, sir.”
“Let the team search for the anthrax bacillus. But you, Sofia, you’re the secret weapon. I want you to search for a virus.”
“A virus requires a host, sir. There’s no way one would survive out here all these centuries.”
“Just run the tests, doctor. When it comes to this thawing ice, anything is possible.”
As the next vehicle crested the rise, the voice of her lab technician came loudly over the comms.
“An entire herd,” he said excitedly.
There were hundreds of them.
“We could reconstruct the entire genome from this,” Vasily said.
Sofia nodded grimly, she would have liked nothing more, but this was a military expedition.
“Everyone double check your suits,” she said. “They won’t let us back on the barge if there’s even a hint of contamination.”
As they neared the site, the bones of the mammoths rose higher and higher. Shifting, thawing permafrost deep below had pushed them to the surface after millennia of perfect preservation.
Vasily brought the vehicle to a halt a hundred yards from the closest carcass and the others pulled up next to him. Everyone looked out in awe. The sun shone obliquely through the site, casting macabre shadows of the rib cages and tusks as flurries of snow whipped around them like dust devils.
A primordial graveyard.
Harboring primordial germs.
To a microbiologist, it was hard to imagine a more sinister sight.
2
A seven-foot tall, three hundred pound beast of a man with muscles the size of Yukon potatoes and a neck as thick as a hubcap swung a wild punch.
The man he was aiming for took an easy step backward out of range.
“You little bitch,” the big man said.
The other man was nimble, fast on his feet. He wore a green army t-shirt and moved like someone who’d received more than his share of combat training.
He had a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses clipped to his shirt and he placed them on the bar for safekeeping.
“Lance,” the bartender said, “don’t do it.”
Lance looked at the bartender for a second, then back at the big guy.
“Come at me, buddy,” he said, beckoning him with his hands. “Come at me.”
“I’m going to make you wish you’d never been born,” the big man said, lunging forward.
Lance dodged.
“Please, Lance,” the bartender said.
Lance turned to him. “Watch those sunglasses,” he said.
The big man swung again. Lance sidestepped, then pushed him in the direction his momentum was already taking him. He slammed face-first into the bar, sending bottles of Budweiser crashing to the floor.
“That’s enough,” the bartender yelled.
Lance shrugge
d as the big man got back to his feet and took another lunge at him. At the same moment, the man’s companion swung a pool cue at Lance’s head.
Lance caught the cue and pulled it toward him. The swinger held on and came with it. Lance hit him in the face and stepped back in time to avoid the big guy.
“Lance, come on,” the bartender said. “I’m the one’s got to pay for all this.”
“I didn’t start it,” Lance said, as the big man came at him again, this time knocking over a table and sending more drinks flying.
“The hell you didn’t.”
“All I did was talk to her,” Lance said.
He glanced at the girl for the first time since the fight started. She looked like she always did. He knew because he’d been watching her for weeks, driving by her house, going into bars she was at. She’d noticed him, she might even have known who he was, but they never spoke.
She was wearing fishnet stockings that went all the way to her ass and leather boots that looked like they’d come off a BDSM fetish site. On her wrist was a tattoo of a red spearhead with a black dagger and the word Airborne above it.