The Agent (An Isabella Rose Thriller Book 3)

by Mark Dawson

  ‘I don’t have a problem with that,’ Pope said. ‘I had a woman half my weight throw me around in Italy. Isabella watched her jump off a third-floor balcony and walk away. Neither of those things should have been possible. And then the shooter in Shanghai ran flat out after us for half a mile. That shouldn’t have been possible, either. You could say that my horizons have been broadened in the last few weeks.’

  ‘That’ll all make this a little easier, then.’ Atari took a moment, as if thinking where best to start. ‘None of this is new,’ he began. ‘Science has been trying to improve the human body for a hundred years. Hitler tried. Stalin tried. The US. The Chinese, most recently. They’ve all tried to push the boundaries of what the human species can do. Some of those programmes have been hidden within legitimate research. Twenty years ago, gene therapy was used to cure a child with severe combined immunodeficiency; you introduce a virus to replace a faulty gene with a healthy one. Or kids who can’t produce the enzymes we need to regulate the toxicity in white blood cells. You harvest stem cells from their bone marrow, add a working version of the enzyme, inject them back in. Presto: the kids are cured.’

  ‘Why would anyone have a problem with that?’ Isabella asked.

  Atari looked askance at her, as if annoyed that she had the temerity to interrupt him, especially with such a foolish question. ‘We don’t. But that’s not even the half of what’s happening. It’s the secret projects that concern us. The ones where the aim is “metabolic dominance”.’

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  They heard a knock on one of the neighbouring doors and the call of ‘Room service.’ Atari paused, tensing, and waited until he heard the clatter of the trolley as it was pushed away again.

  ‘Metabolic dominance?’ Pope repeated.

  Atari nodded. ‘Stalin had a hard-on for it. Go back to the twenties. The Red Army suffered nearly two million deaths in the First World War; then they were sent to fight in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Georgia, on and on and on. They were on their knees. Stalin was ready for the first Five-Year Plan and he needed a new labour force to make it happen. He ordered the Soviet Academy of Science to produce a “living war machine”. He had a vision of half-man, half-ape super-warriors. His orders were for, and I quote, “a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat”.’

  Atari got up, went back to the window and peered through a gap in the blinds.

  ‘Stalin had a man called Vladimir Ivanosky. He was at the cutting edge in embryology, mostly concerned with breeding racehorses. He established the world’s first centre for artificial insemination, but Stalin told him to change focus. The Russians sent Ivanosky to West Africa with $200,000 and orders to conduct experiments in impregnating chimpanzees. And when they were done with that, they built a centre in Georgia, where they tried to impregnate human volunteers with monkey sperm. It failed, of course, but they made marginal gains. And then they built on them.’

  He let the slats of the blind close again and started to pace.

  ‘There’s another man: Nikita Ivanosky. Vladimir’s grandson. He was born in Leningrad seventy-five years ago. His father was a functionary in the Soviet political apparatus and his mother was a scientist. Nikita was identified as a prodigy. Fast-tracked through school and university. Do you know about Biopreparat?’

  Pope shook his head.

  ‘The Soviet biological weapon project. Dozens of labs, all working on individual pathogens. Ivanosky was invited to participate. This was back in the seventies. He was initially concerned with the breeding of primates so that they had enough subjects to test their new toys on. But then he branched out. Started looking into their DNA. Tampering with it. What he did got buried within the larger project for political expediency. They gave him a laboratory in Sverdlovsk until they had an outbreak of the pulmonary anthrax they were messing with and they moved him to Vozrozhdeniya in the Aral Sea. It’s an island. They use it to test bioweapons. Ivanosky started to make progress. They saw potential. They called his programme “FACTOR”, showered it in roubles and gave him five hundred scientists and technicians. And then they started to make real progress: bacterial gene-tagging trials on human subjects, somatic treatments that produced permanent genetic changes, work to make the packaging vectors more efficient. Unfortunately for them, Ivanosky was having second thoughts. Not about the research, but about what he stood to gain from it. He wasn’t a very good communist. He has always been a greedy man. He knows that if he pulls off what he’s planning, Homo sapiens will have more in common with the Neanderthals than what comes next. He’s building Homo superior. Homo deus. And he wants to get paid.’

  ‘So he defected?’

  ‘Just after the Wall came down. He told Biopreparat that the project had failed and they swept it up along with the bioweapons programmes when Gorbachev let Western inspectors in. They were all over the show back then, and no one noticed when Ivanosky reached out to the CIA, told them that he had made much more progress than he was admitting to the Russians and basically told them how much it would cost to get their hands on his brain. They got him and his family out through Albania. He’s been working for the American government ever since. He’s been passed around a lot. Not always treated right. The CIA put Daedalus together as a front, said it was working to improve efficiencies in gene transfer, but that was only half of what they were doing.’

  Atari scrubbed his eyes and suddenly looked very tired.

  ‘The Department of Defense poured money into the programme and Ivanosky started to make very significant gains. The difficulty was always keeping his test subjects alive. He ran cycle after cycle to try to make it stick. Each cycle was given a letter to mark it out. A dozen embryos in each cycle. Each embryo was given an internal codename. The first cycle had Atlas and Apollo. The third had Charon and Calypso. The eighth had Hades and Hera.’

  Atari sat down again.

  ‘The early ones all failed. Some died before they were born. Others were born with mutations. A few lasted a month or two before they developed cancer. The K cohort was the first that showed real promise. Kratos lived until he was four. The L cohort improved on that. The progress was fast enough now that they decided it was better to hide what they were doing. They packaged up Daedalus with a new division of Manage Risk.’

  Isabella leaned forward. ‘The private security contractors?’

  Atari turned to her. ‘You know about them?’

  ‘Isabella’s mother had dealings,’ Pope explained neutrally.

  The mention of that name brought back unpleasant memories. The five men and one woman who were responsible for the murder of Isabella’s father and her separation from her mother had all gone on to work for Manage Risk. Isabella had shot two of their guards before she completed Beatrix’s unfinished work and murdered Pope’s predecessor as Control of Group Fifteen. Her first three murders. She had commemorated the last with the tattoo of the rose on her shoulder, completing the set that her mother had been unable to finish.

  Atari went on. ‘Manage Risk saw what Ivanosky had developed and they went all-in. They created a secure laboratory in an old agency black site in Macedonia and ran the project from there. And they did it. The M cohort has been stable.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Ivanosky did what he said he would do. The technology is proven. You met one of the Ms. In Italy. The woman who took your family and tried to kill the two of you – that was Maia.’

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  How does Litivenko fit into this?’ Pope asked.

  ‘She was at Daedalus for a decade,’ Atari said. ‘She worked with Maia for all of that time. They started when the girl was ten and they were confident that the genetic improvements were stable. Litivenko was effectively Maia’s personal physician. That means she had access to every last bit of data about her: everything from her physical limitations to the precise sequencing of her genome. That’s the data.
That’s what we agreed to purchase. That’s why it’s so important. And it’s all on the stick.’ He took another swig from the bottle of water and then got up from the bed. ‘Is there anything else you want to know?’

  ‘Plenty,’ Pope said. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Why am I involving myself?’

  ‘What’s in it for you?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that I’m on your side.’

  He scoffed. ‘So what are you saying? This is because of altruism?’

  ‘No,’ Atari said. ‘Of course not. There are several reasons, none of which are relevant to our relationship.’

  ‘Of course they’re relevant,’ Pope snapped. ‘How do you expect me to trust you when I don’t know your motives?’

  ‘My goals are in opposition to the goals of our mutual antagonists. Neither of us – you and I – want them to succeed. We have that in common.’

  ‘No. I need more than that.’

  Atari sighed impatiently. ‘I have ethical concerns about the work that is being done. There needs to be proper oversight for this kind of research and there isn’t. There needs to be informed debate. And there’s nothing. The consequences of allowing Daedalus to continue unchecked are potentially catastrophic. The data will catalyse the controls that need to be put in place.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘There is going to be a congressional hearing. Soon. We’re gathering evidence for it.’

  ‘So you work for a politician?’

  He laughed. ‘No. Far from it. But we have a tame senator who’s been persuaded that he should share our view. He will ask the questions we want him to ask. The data is the evidence he needs to back up his allegations.’

  Pope reached into his pocket. ‘You’re banking a lot on this,’ he said, holding the stick up. ‘But Wheaton said it was encrypted. If you can’t get at it, how can it help you? Wheaton is dead.’

  ‘But his wife isn’t.’

  ‘What if she can’t decrypt it?’

  Atari didn’t pause. ‘There’ll be a failsafe. We just have to get it from her.’

  ‘That might be possible if you knew where she was.’

  ‘We do,’ he said. He reached into his bag and took out a tablet. He activated it and turned it around so that Pope and Isabella could see the screen. It was a map of China. A pulsing red dot followed the unbroken line of a railway as it skirted the city of Shenyang. ‘We’ve got a little malware on her phone. She switched it on an hour ago, probably because she wanted to see if her husband had left her a message; then she thought she’d switched it off. But she didn’t. The phone’s on, and it’s telling us where she is.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘The train from Beijing to Harbin. She must know her husband is dead. We don’t know what they were going to do if they pulled this off, but they must have had a plan B if it went wrong and this must be it. There’s no reason for her to go to Harbin. It’s a hole. There’s nothing there. But Harbin is a gateway for Sino–Russian trade. It’s also the interchange for buses that go to Vladivostok. Litivenko is Russian. Her parents live in Ussuriysk. That’s where she’s going. That’s her plan B. She’s going to defect.’ He collected his jacket and put it on. ‘Come on, then. Are you coming?’

  ‘You want us to go to Vladivostok?’

  ‘Unless you’re willing to give me the drive to see if we can unencrypt it without her?’

  ‘I told you. Not until you give me something I can use about my family.’

  ‘Exactly. So you need to come with me.’ He paused and added, ‘That reminds me.’ He reached down and collected the tablet. ‘Your wife and children were taken to Riga in Latvia. They were held there for three weeks. We don’t know where – a safe house, no doubt. We picked them up again two weeks ago at the airport. A Gulfstream registered to a Bahamian corporation flew them to Atlanta.’

  He tapped on the screen until he had the application he wanted and then handed it to Pope. The screen showed a paused video. It looked as if the footage had been filmed from a security camera beneath the canopy of a gas station. Pope could see the pumps and a single vehicle parked on the forecourt. He pressed ‘Play’ and the footage spooled. The vehicle was a big SUV with blacked-out windows. As he watched, the passenger-side door opened and a man in a suit stepped out. He opened the door behind him and stood aside as a woman got out. Her back was to the camera, but, even before she turned, Pope knew that it was Rachel. The man shut the door and held on to her arm as the two of them moved off, out of shot.

  ‘Scrub through it,’ Atari advised.

  Pope did as he was told, dragging his finger across the time bar until his wife reappeared. The man stayed close at hand as she opened the door and stepped aside to let Clementine, Pope’s daughter, get out. Rachel got into the car and the man in the suit and Clem walked out of shot.

  ‘Where’s Flora?’

  ‘We think she’s in the car. No reason to think otherwise.’

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘Decatur.’

  ‘And where are they now?’

  ‘They were taken to a compound in the woods south of Stone Mountain. We’re investigating it now. Farmhouse, outbuildings, nothing out of the ordinary, save that it’s registered to a company in the British Virgin Isles. We know where they are now, Control.’

  ‘So give me the address.’

  ‘I can do better than that. I can take you there.’

  ‘Just give me the address.’

  ‘You’ll need help. It’s a safe house, and your family is an important asset for them. They are guarded. We think there’s a team of five or six, well trained and heavily armed. You won’t be able to take them out yourself.’

  ‘I’ll take my chances.’

  ‘They’ll kill you. And the fact that you are still alive is the only reason your family hasn’t been shot. If they don’t have to worry about you, there’s no reason to keep them. I understand your impatience. I’d feel the same way. But you need to do this right.’

  ‘And how would I do that?’

  ‘We can fly you into the country. We can get you in without anyone noticing. We can arm you. And we can run interference to give you a better chance.’

  ‘In return for what?’

  ‘Come with me to meet the doctor before she can do something stupid like hand herself over to Putin.’

  PART EIGHT:

  Boston

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Dzhokar Khasbulatov clocked out and rode the bus out of Boston to Arlington. He took a seat at the back of the bus, fished his phone out of his pocket and plugged in his earbuds. He had downloaded the new Jay Z album that morning and he had only had the chance to listen to half of it during his lunch break. He had enjoyed what he had heard and was keen to listen to the rest.

  Arlington was six miles to the northwest of Boston. He had lived here with his parents and his sister ever since they had arrived here from Kyrgyzstan twenty years ago. Dzhokar had been little more than a babe in arms when they had arrived. His parents had made a point of teaching him to respect his heritage whilst always reminding him that he was an American citizen and that he should be grateful to the country for the opportunities that it had afforded his family. He had agreed with them for almost the whole of his life. He had enjoyed his years at school and he had considered himself fortunate to find a job as a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  He had a little money, security and a small collection of friends. It should have been enough, but it wasn’t. He had come to the conclusion that something was missing.

  Dzhokar got off the bus on Massachusetts Avenue and walked the rest of the way along Court Street until he reached Khasan’s house. It was a large property, clad in clapboard and with colourful panels on either side of the windows on the ground and first floors. The front door was beneath a porch; he pulled the screen door back and knocked. He waited for a minute, unable to stop himself from self-consciously checking up and down the
street to see if he was being observed.

  They all worried about it, the possibility that the police or the FBI might have been investigating them, even though they had been as careful as they could be to ensure that they did not leave digital footprints that might be traced back to them. They communicated via WhatsApp, relying on its end-to-end encryption to keep their messages private. Khasan had sent a message to the group yesterday evening to say that they should gather here tonight. Dzhokar had been excited and had allowed himself the hope that events were drawing on. They had been together for six months. Khasan had told them that they would have to be patient. Now, perhaps, their patience was to be rewarded.

  Dzhokar heard footsteps and then saw the glow of a light through the stippled glass. The door was unlocked and opened a crack; he saw Khasan’s face through the gap.

  The door closed so that the security chain could be unlatched and then it was opened again.

  ‘Hello, brother,’ Khasan said.

  Dzhokar stepped inside.

  Dzhokar removed his shoes. There were four other pairs of shoes there already, lined up neatly inside the door. He recognised them: Khasan’s white sneakers, Imad’s Nikes, Hasan’s leather brogues, Abdul’s prissy loafers with tassels. They were all here before him. He put his shoes next to Abdul’s, hung his coat on the edge of an open door and went through into the large room at the back of the house.

  The others were there. Abdul and Hasan were watching TV, a rolling news channel that was still leading with the attacks on London. Imad was staring intently at his phone, probably on Twitter, just like he always was. The three of them and Khasan could trace their heritage back to the Middle East. They were all first-generation Americans, their families emigrating before they were born. Dzhokar couldn’t claim the same background, and he sometimes felt as if the others made light of his Chechen blood, as if the quality of his piety was somehow different from theirs. There had been arguments before, and he knew they liked to prod and poke him for their sport. He had learned to ignore it, even to play along, but it still stung. He knew, though, that Allah would treat him the same as he treated them. His sacrifice would be every bit as good as theirs.