The Tide (Tide Series Book 1)

by Melchiorri, Anthony J

  “Webb, you know I can’t. Whether or not this turns up as a match, it’s against policy for me to even access such a database in the same room as another person without my security clearance.”

  “Come on, live a little. I won’t tell.”

  Lawson peered over his reading glasses, his bushy white eyebrows raised in annoyance.

  “I’m supposed to oversee all potential bio warfare threats, and I can’t do that if you’re hiding something from me,” Meredith said. “Now, I don’t know what screwed up in your line of communication that this came across my desk, but judging by its contents, this doesn’t appear to be the first time someone in this building has heard something about this lab.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.” Lawson held up his hands. “Maybe...maybe it’s some kind of sick hoax. Maybe someone misinterpreted an encrypted transmission.”

  Too many excuses, too many lies.

  Meredith opened her mouth to protest but stopped. She’d caught Lawson as if he were a child with his hand in the cookie jar. The man routinely faced crises involving everything from scientists taken as hostages to the infiltration of foreign research institutions. Yet his immediate reaction to a single memo had taken him off guard.

  “What’s going on?” Meredith asked.

  “Maybe—”

  “Tell me the goddamned truth.”

  Lawson folded his arms across his broad chest and leaned back in his chair. “You’ve been with the agency for what? Twenty years?”

  Meredith said nothing.

  “You’re intelligent, you’re at the top of your field. We’ve worked closely together for years,” he continued. “Yet you keep certain sensitive topics from me.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I understand it’s for the safety of our nation, for plausible deniability. All the same, there is information that even I, as your superior, am not privy to.”

  She knew exactly what he was referring to. For many of the missions she oversaw, she was the agency’s sole point of contact with private covert contracting agencies like Dom’s and Jay’s. “We need that kind of separation from the groups I work with. You don’t want to be tied with them when they’re operating in Iran or off the coast of North Korea.”

  “And likewise, you don’t want to be tied to this project.” Lawson leaned across the desk. “I urge you to forget you ever saw this memo. If you were another agent, someone with less significant history at this agency, you’d be terminated immediately.” He folded his reading glasses and slid them back into his pocket.

  “I’ve managed operatives in Syria who dismantled chemical weapons undetected. I’ve contracted a team to sabotage a biological weapons research facility in Iran and got another team to subvert the Kremlin’s research on a genetically engineered bubonic plague.” She huffed. “After everything I’ve done for the agency—everything my operatives have done—you can’t trust me with this?”

  “I’m afraid not.” His expression turned dour, a rare moment of seemingly genuine emotion. “This is an issue I am dealing with. And I know where your intentions and loyalties lie. The project at IBSL would conflict with that. Trust me.”

  Without another word, Meredith got up from her seat. She marched to the office’s exit, knowing the obstinate man wouldn’t let her in on his secret.

  “Meredith.”

  She twisted halfway, an ear turned in his direction but her gaze shifting to the hallway.

  “I’m begging you, forget everything about this. If my people find you’ve been digging into it...I won’t be able to protect you. Trust me, Meredith. Leave this one alone.”

  Meredith left his office in silence.

  The last thing she would do was trust Lawson. Everything he’d said sounded like smooth-talking fabrication to obscure this IBSL project. Meredith wasn’t sure who Lawson might be working with, what covert op teams might be contracted to his “project.” If Meredith had learned anything over her two decades with the agency, it was to trust no one. Especially if it was a close colleague keeping secrets from his most lauded employee.

  She had Jay already on his way and Dom on standby. It never hurt to send them in for a little reconnaissance. She hoped they would find something as innocuous as the lab’s mundane name.

  But as she’d said to Lawson, the ones that seemed the most harmless almost always turned out to be anything but innocent.

  -3-

  Undisclosed Location in the Atlantic Ocean

  Jay Perry nudged open the steel hatch with his gloved hand. He played the barrel of his suppressed SCAR across the steel counters, stools, and glassware. “What the hell is this?”

  “A science lab?” Corey Luna whispered. Like Jay, he wore black fatigues and night-vision goggles strapped over his head.

  Their footsteps resonated on the grating, and Jay winced with each step. Stealth was key, and he had no intention of being discovered prowling about the enigmatic oil drilling platform. They were deep enough in the metal behemoth that they couldn’t see without the aid of their night-vision goggles. Someone had cut the lights, and no natural light could penetrate the inky darkness this far below decks.

  With every guarded step, he wondered if there was anybody home. So far, the expedition had been nothing more than a silent meandering through abandoned crew quarters and a mess hall.

  Their handler at the CIA had warned them she could find little intelligence on the aging structure above the crashing waves in the middle of the Atlantic. It had been tucked away, off the beaten path of the shipping lanes. According to Webb, the platform had been commissioned for a drilling operation, but all the paperwork had somehow fallen through. Webb had found it in the satellite images she’d obtained through some coordinates mistakenly delivered to her. She’d told Jay the op might be dangerous, but so far, they hadn’t found anything.

  Jay and Corey were nothing but expendable cannon fodder to her, hired guns with a penchant for secrecy and covert ops. The money was good, the risk was high, and the repercussions of failure were even higher.

  “This is creepier than the mines in Syria,” Corey said.

  Jay nodded, playing the muzzle of his gun across the countertops. He recalled the bomb-making facilities Webb had sent them to investigate in the Middle Eastern country. At least there, they had recognized what the terrorist facilities were used for.

  Here they had no idea. Webb had been especially hush-hush this time around. She wouldn’t even tell them why she wanted them to investigate. Normally, Jay would have been skeptical, but the money Webb had offered them was more than enough to retire on.

  If he and Corey succeeded, Jay could buy a house on the Florida Keys, maybe St. Thomas, or Grand Cayman Island.

  Somewhere tropical.

  A loud blast of thunder rumbled outside. Maybe it was his imagination, but the platform seemed to sway in response. He pictured dark waves outside, crashing against the thick pillars and scaffolding holding the platform above the roiling ocean.

  Hell, maybe living on an island wasn’t such a great idea.

  “You know what the fuck this is?” Corey held up a plastic tube. Jay could see a couple of chemical formulas scrawled across a paper tag attached to it.

  Jay squinted at the label. “No idea. But we should probably snap a couple pictures for Webb.” He slung the strap of his rifle across his back. “Take guard for me.”

  Corey nodded and crept around the hulking lab bench in the center. He nudged the door closed and locked it. The mechanism clicked loudly, and Jay flinched.

  “Sorry, boss,” Corey said.

  Directing his camera over the chemical formulas and unidentified solutions in the lab, Jay snapped a bevy of pictures. He adjusted the second small camera strapped to his head. It provided a constant one-way visual and audio feed back to Webb. He wanted to be sure she saw everything he did back in the States.

  “I wonder if this is what Webb was interested in,” Corey said. He crept toward the rear of the lab and peered through the
porthole. “Shit.”

  Jay’s heart stopped. He dropped the camera and spun, raising his rifle. “What is it?”

  “Come look.”

  Jay joined him and peered through the thick glass of the porthole. Before them stood huge steel drums. Pipes snaked between the drums with gauges reporting pressure, oxygen concentration, and other gas levels.

  “What the hell is that thing?”

  In his mind’s eye, Jay pictured one of the courses he’d taken during his year-long training at the CIA before his first assignment. An image of a similar contraption in his biological and chemical warfare class returned to him. “It’s a large-scale bioreactor.”

  Corey tilted his head. “What’s it for?”

  “Typically, it’s used in the pharmaceutical and research industries. It grows up populations of cells and can be used for the production of antibodies, proteins, chemicals, medicine, maybe.” His breath fogged the window, and he wiped it away. “At least, that’s what I remember.”

  “I’m guessing this bioreactor or whatever isn’t just sitting in the middle of the ocean so some company can make hard-on pills.”

  “You’re right about that,” Jay said. “I’ve seen these things used in the production of chemical and biological weapons.”

  “Webb didn’t tell us to suit up. You think we’re breathing poison shit in here?”

  “Too late now, isn’t it?” Jay thought of his imminent retirement again. Complete this mission, take the cash, and he’d be set for life. He could settle down in Mexico, maybe Ecuador. Beach, not island. “I’m sure Webb’s going to want to see this.”

  Corey nodded and opened the door. “On me,” he said. He angled his suppressed SCAR on the shadows. They scoured the cavernous room, flitting between the looming bioreactors until they reached the opposite end, where another door awaited them. This time, no window offered them a preview of what lay on the other side.

  Jay snapped a few pictures of the bioreactors and joined Corey near the exit.

  Corey pressed his ear against the steel door. “I can’t hear anything.”

  “Then let’s fucking do this.” Jay placed one hand on the handle, and Corey shouldered his rifle. He burst through the door and rushed behind a protruding piece of iron scaffolding.

  Down the corridor, a couple of blue biosafety suits were hung up on pegs. Beside them, a door lay open, revealing clear plastic curtains. Splotches of dark goo marred them.

  Tiptoeing forward, Jay fought to manage his fear.

  “We should go,” Corey said, his voice wavering. “This is fucked up.”

  Jay ignored him. This must be what Webb wanted to know about.

  He pushed aside the plastic curtain and sniffed the air. Something rotten stung his nostrils, but the odor wasn’t strong enough to deter his curiosity. He slipped beyond the filthy plastic curtains into an antechamber of sorts.

  A decontamination chamber, he thought. A second set of curtains hung from the opposite side. Metal pipes laced the ceiling above him with intermittent nozzles to deliver the appropriate disinfecting agents. Corey’s worry that something was in the air, something dangerous, made him pause.

  But the doors had already been opened, and the decontamination chamber hatch had been gaping wide when they’d ventured down here. If there was something in the air, they had already inhaled it. No use going back now.

  A shadow moved beyond the plastic curtain, derailing his thoughts.

  Sweat trickled down the back of Jay’s neck. He pointed at his eyes then at Corey and then at the curtain.

  Jay adjusted the camera strapped to his head. He wanted Webb to have a clear view of whatever lay beyond this partition. With one hand, he peeled back the plastic, and Corey dashed through. Another dark laboratory greeted him. Several biosafety cabinets with enclosed glass chambers stood like hulking mechanized sentinels. Air hoses hung from the ceiling, one with a positive pressure suit still attached. Jay scanned the room as he bent toward the suit. He turned it over, stifling a gag. His stomach lurched at the sight of skeletal remains inside the shredded rubber of the suit. Dried tissue hung off the bones of the corpse.

  “What the fu—”

  “Hands up!” Corey’s voice resounded in the laboratory.

  Jay shot up, his SCAR aimed in concert with Corey’s. On the other side of the lab, a person in a torn biohazard suit stood beyond a rack of glass test tubes and beakers.

  The person turned slowly, no sense of urgency in their movements. A positive air pressure suit draped across them in tatters. A moment later the figure stepped into Jay’s line of sight. In the green-hued darkness of his night vision, he saw a twisted monstrosity.

  Before he could react, the thing let out a rasping scream that echoed throughout the laboratory. A short silence followed before a cacophony of raucous yells answered throughout the platform. The horrible chorus resonated in Jay’s bones.

  The humanoid creature before them opened and closed its mouth, gnashing a set of long, pointed teeth. It drew back a hand, and he saw that each finger ended in a sharp talon. Bony spikes sprouted from its joints. The thing looked like a person whose skeleton was trying to break out from beneath its flesh. A deep growl escaped its cracked lips.

  Then the creature sprinted straight at him.

  -4-

  Reston, Virginia

  Meredith Webb jumped back from her laptop. The screams and cries pierced her eardrums. She threw off her headphones, flinching from the unbearable sound, and focused on the low-quality video. She could make out only the misshapen silhouette of a person in Jay Perry’s video feed, but it was just enough to make her flinch. Acid churned in her stomach.

  The feed had gone dark. She tried the headphones, but the audio too had ceased transmission.

  Meredith stood and paced the studio apartment. A slew of electronic devices hummed and buzzed on the card table she’d set up in the center. Her suitcase lay open, clothes hanging out of it, near the inflatable air mattress. The first night she had slept on the mattress, she’d woken with her back aching. She was forty-five and in no place to venture off on a wild goose chase. But she’d had no choice.

  She knew something was going on and, she feared, this time it wasn’t Syria, North Korea, Russia, or China making the play. If her suspicions proved true, her own country was involved in producing some kind of chemical weapon. The development, production, and use of such weapons were prohibited by almost every single sovereign nation in the world—including, of course, the United States—stemming from the Biological Weapons convention of 1972 that supplemented the Geneva Protocol. Not to mention the United States had taken a strong stance against such weapons after passing the Bioweapons Anti-Terrorism Act in 1989.

  She often came across unusual and terrifying intel from around the world. Reports of previously undocumented genocides, assassinations, terrorists pursuing chemical weapons, foreign governments funding radical groups. She thought she’d seen it all.

  Never from her own government though. Never from the United States, the supposed leader of the free world. Yet the more she had dug into the IBSL case, the more she suspected her government was—or had been—investigating some kind of unsanctioned biological weapon.

  And Lawson might be covering up this mysterious project. The man, known for his stolidity, had told her everything she’d needed to know without saying a single word. His expression when she’d first shown him the telltale memo was more than enough.

  When he had found she’d discovered satellite imagery over the sight of the IBSL oil platform, Lawson had told her again to give it a rest, to stop chasing dragons. Nothing was going on that she needed to worry about.

  Fearing her apartment in Langley had been bugged, she rented out this neglected studio in nearby Reston to set up shop.

  She tried placing a satellite call to Jay Perry, desperate to reach him again.

  No answer.

  It appeared as though she’d lost contact with her first batch of covert contractors. She chec
ked the encrypted messaging equipment she’d set up and then cursed. She knew what all these devices did, but she didn’t know how they did it. She was no techie, no electrical engineer. Meredith typed a couple of commands into the laptop, and the feed flickered back on. She’d done something right. At first, she thought it was just a picture, a still image. She tried to refresh the video, but it remained fixed on the tiled floor. Only the thin steel legs of a lab bench remained in the camera’s focus. Securing the headphones over her ears, she adjusted the volume, wary of the horrendous sounds that had caused her to fling them down before.

  She strained her ears. Distant crackles rang out—gunfire, maybe? Yells, indistinct.

  The camera feed shook and skittered across the floor. Something had kicked it. It came to a rest, tilted toward the ceiling. A face, bathed in shadows, appeared over it. Meredith gasped as she stared at the laptop screen. The person’s face was misshapen, skeletal. His cheekbones seemed to protrude out, the skin stretched taut.

  Then as quick as he appeared, the face vanished. His footsteps quieted as if he was running away from the lab Perry and Luna had discovered.

  She dialed their satellite phones again. Only static.

  She tried again, and again she heard nothing but white noise. She reviewed the video. The pixelated face, the grainy silhouette lunged at the camera again and again as she rewound the footage. She recalled the enigmatic memo that had started her on this hunt for answers: Crew affected by agent. Was this creature, this monstrous-looking person the result of some experimental biological agent?

  Her blood ran cold. Whatever was going on at that oil platform, it eclipsed anything she’d imagined. She needed to know what kind of mad science had led to the carnal scene Perry and Luna had run across.

  And she needed to know if they were still alive. She’d promised Perry and Luna a hefty reward for the mission, and she wasn’t sure she could afford to hire another team of contractors after them. She’d barely received approval for her initial payments to Perry’s and Luna’s secured offshore accounts as it was. Another large financial request might make Lawson more suspicious of her activities than he already was—and his threats warning her to leave this project alone still rang clear in her mind.