End Zone

by D C Alden

  After a shower and a cup of coffee, Philip removed a white business shirt from the wardrobe. It was a high quality garment, with double-stitched lining, a stiff collar and double cuffs. He sat down at the small writing desk and took a pair of scissors to it, cutting off the collar and cuffs. It took him another hour to pick out the stitching and extract the wafer-thin plastic sachets that had been ingeniously inserted into the garment. The eviscerated shirt went back into Philip’s suitcase. The sachets were held up to the light for inspection. Thankfully they were unmolested and intact, and Philip locked the sachets in the closet safe. He picked up his key card from the sideboard and headed for the door. It was time to go shopping.

  Less than five hundred yards to the west of Philip’s hotel was Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, one of India’s busiest railway commuter hubs. Every day over twelve hundred long-distance and local trains pull in and out of its eighteen platforms, carrying over three million passengers on its main and suburban lines. It was another staggering figure, and Philip bore witness to it as he wandered through the station, skirting the rivers of people that swept past, wary of being sucked into the fast-flowing torrent. The heat, the noise and stench assaulted him; if Philip needed reassurance that he was doing the right thing he found it here, where businessmen hurried past emaciated child beggars, where desperate men competed to survive by shining shoes and cutting hair for sums of money that most Europeans wouldn’t bother to pick up off the ground. And that was just inside the station.

  Philip was relieved to step inside the electronics kiosk and extricate himself from the swirling mass of humanity. The shop sold a wide variety of telecoms and computer accessories, and Philip purchased a mobile phone and a SIM card with plenty of credit. He paid the man an extra two thousand rupees to insert the SIM and test the device by making a call, which the man duly did. Satisfied, Philip left the chaos of the station and strolled back to his hotel along the tree-lined St George Road, admiring the European and Asian architecture of nearby buildings.

  And it was on this shaded avenue that Philip made his first mistake.

  He caught the scent of spiced food and suddenly Philip realised he’d not eaten since the in-flight meal the day before. There was a food stall ahead that appeared to be particularly popular with the locals, and Philip ordered a styrofoam carton ladled with chicken hakimi and white biryani rice. He found a bench in the shade. He had several hours to kill before he made the call, so he took his time over lunch, spooning spiced chicken and rice into his mouth as he watched the world pass by. On the road, cars, buses, taxis, trucks and bicycles competed dangerously for real estate and the air was alive with blaring horns. It was both fascinating and increasingly claustrophobic, a suffocating mix of heat and noise, and Philip soon tired of it.

  He found an overstuffed rubbish bin that was under siege from a mixed flock of sparrows and pigeons, all hopping and fluttering amongst the rubbish. Philip decided their existence was no different from the daily battle their human neighbours endured, and once again he felt justified by his decision. Trash would be the least of Mumbai’s problems in the next few days.

  He walked back to the hotel, his lightweight shirt soaked with sweat. It wasn’t that hot, probably around thirty degrees, but Philip was certainly feeling the heat. Even the air-conditioned lobby did little to stem his discomfort.

  Back in his room, Philip’s started to feel unwell. He turned up the air-con and laid down on the bed. Then his stomach began to churn, gurgling like a drain. He thought back to the spiced chicken, the greasy mess of meat and rice, and he lurched off the bed and staggered to the bathroom. He only just made it, vomiting into the toilet. His bowels gave way at the same time, and Philip cursed his stupidity, his weakness that had well and truly poisoned him. He knew from past experience that this was just the beginning.

  As the nausea receded, Philip stripped off his soiled clothes in the shower cubicle, knowing he had to make two urgent communications. The first one would be a phone call to the hotel manager, to secure the immediate services of a doctor. The second would be an email, an encrypted one that would bounce across several dark web servers until it reached its destination in Flagstaff, Arizona. There the recipient would print out the message, place it in an envelope and transport it to the luxury ranch to the north of the city, located in the Kaibab National Forest.

  There, the man with incurable cancer and a burning desire to leave his mark on the world would open the message, knowing who it came from and what it meant. It would contain only one word.

  Delayed.

  At the same time Philip was succumbing to food poisoning, Marion was conducting her second reconnaissance mission since arriving in China.

  The former intelligence officer had carried out her first recon after checking into the Ritz Carlton hotel in Shanghai, where she’d settled into her room on the forty-eighth floor, one that offered impressive views of the city across the Huangpu River. After a shower and a change of clothes, Marion stepped out of the high-rise building into the chilly mid-morning air, walking the short distance to Lujiazui Metro Station. She’d worn a dark navy coat, a high neck sweater and large sunglasses, even applying a little makeup in an effort to look like the western businesswoman she was pretending to be. She’d pre-purchased a travel pass that allowed her unlimited use of Shanghai’s transport network, and she’d used it to travel one stop to the Metro station at East Nanjing Road. There she’d alighted, and made her way up the stairs onto the busiest shopping street in the world.

  Nanjing Road was the commercial heart of Shanghai, a pedestrianised avenue packed with every fashion, sport and luxury goods store a shopper could desire. It was a spectacular, three-mile-long strip of noise, light and colour. Nanjing Road also boasted over one million visitors a day, a fact that put Shanghai at the top of Marion’s target package.

  Now night had fallen, Marion returned once more, only to discover the street was even busier than earlier. She craned her neck and was staggered by the sheer volume of people packed between the high buildings, an undulating, shifting mass of humanity that stretched into the far distance. Neon lights and digitised signs bathed the crowds in a kaleidoscope of changing colours, adding to the almost carnival-like atmosphere of unbridled consumer joy. Shopping had never been Marion’s thing, but even she felt an unfamiliar lure to what resembled the biggest Aladdin’s cave in the world.

  But Marion wasn’t there to partake in a naked orgy of consumerism.

  She bought a burner phone with international credit and wandered the street, noting the CCTV security poles, the black-clad, stern faced policemen and women watching the crowds with suspicious eyes. Thankfully they were few and far between, and Marion was confident their presence wouldn’t pose a problem. No, Marion had only two issues to resolve; where to trigger the outbreak, and how to make good her escape before Nanjing Road went to hell.

  She’d decided on two targets, just to be certain. The first was the Number One Department Store, a luxury goods emporium built in the nineteen-thirties that had undergone a recent and highly impressive transformation. Marion took the elevator to the ninth floor where the coffee shop and bookstore were located. There was also a public toilet facility. Marion stepped inside, impressed by the subtle lighting and gleaming black-tiled floors and walls. And most of all the cleanliness. It made her think of Philip and she smiled, knowing he would be suffering through the heat and filth of Mumbai.

  There were four empty stalls to her left, four mirrored sinks to her right. She would target the far stall, she decided. She stepped inside and locked the door. She twisted her wrist and started the stopwatch function on her black military G Shock. She mimicked the physical actions, taking the infected wipe from the pouch and swiping the clear solution over the flush button, the seat, the inside door lock. She flushed the toilet and stepped outside, pretending to wipe the door handle on the way out. One drop of H-1 would be enough. Marion would be spreading over two hundred millilitres of the pathogen. Mass infection was gu
aranteed.

  She left the toilet and crossed to the bank of glass elevators, riding one to the ground floor. Shoppers thronged the main hall. Marion swerved and smiled her way across the impressive atrium and exited the building.

  She headed south along Xizang Road towards the People’s Square Metro Station where she stopped at a ticket machine. She faked another swipe of the virus across the buttons and then used her own pass to access the barrier.

  She took the stairs to the platform below. The next train that was due in less than two minutes, and even though she was performing a dry run, Marion still felt nervous. Perhaps targeting the ticket hall was a mistake. Perhaps it was too close.

  The Metro train thundered into the station in a rush of air and a squeal of brakes. Marion boarded, the doors thumping close behind her, and then they were moving. She stopped her stopwatch. Eighteen minutes from first dispersal to evacuation. It would be enough time, she decided. There was a risk to every mission, however she was confident she’d chosen well. The virus would spread down through the department store and out onto the street, likewise the Metro ticket hall. The the virus would spread organically.

  The train decelerated, pulling to a stop across the river at Lujiazui. She left the station and strolled back to the hotel. In her room, she made a coffee and stood at the window, looking out across a true twenty-first century city and knowing that her batch of H-1 would send it back to the Dark Ages.

  She thought of Philip again, and wondered how his preparations were proceeding. She wanted to call him, to hear his voice, but that was simply not possible. Besides, she had work to do.

  She went to the wardrobe and removed a shirt from its hangar, a business shirt, with thick cuffs and a stiff collar. Marion sat down on her bed and with a needle from her small sewing kit, began to pick away at the collar’s stitching, thread by tiny thread.

  Ray Wilson saw them as the taxi took him from the airport to downtown Lubbock.

  He counted four of them, Apache attack helicopters, clattering low over the flat Texas plain.

  ‘They’ve been buzzing around for the last couple of days,’ said the driver, glancing at Ray in his rear view mirror. ‘A buddy of mine saw a huge convoy out on Route Eighty-Four last night, heading towards the city. Must be on manoeuvres or something.’

  ‘Right.’

  Ray watched the helicopters veer away and disappear into the distance. The sky was grey, the temperature outside pretty damn cold. Ray settled back in his seat. It wasn’t the best time of year to be visiting Texas, but Ray was excited nonetheless.

  After the White House press conference, Ray’s phone line at work had been jammed. Much of it was personal abuse from Coffman fans who’d somehow managed to obtain his direct number. A disgruntled employee had probably leaked it on the Internet, Tammy had told him. She wasn’t very happy either. The paper’s owner had been confronted several times since Ray’s grilling of the president, and it was clear that people were upset.

  That had Ray confused. There was the possibility of a cover-up, of serious political wrongdoing, of sudden, unexplained deaths, yet people appeared to be more concerned about the reputation of the president. Ray was starting to believe Americans had lost the ability to know right from wrong. It was all about Blue versus Red now. It made him feel thoroughly depressed.

  ‘Let me ask you a question,’ he said to the driver.

  ‘Sure, go ahead.’ His name was Raul, or so his dashboard ID badge said. He had dark, slick hair and a white smile. A set of wooden rosary beads dangled from the mirror.

  ‘What d’you think about the President? You think she’s doing a good job overall?’

  Raul shrugged his shoulders. ‘I got a sister and three nieces being held in the detention centre down at McAllen. President talked about an amnesty for undocumented migrants during the debate, right? What’s she gonna do about that, man?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Ray said, unwilling to be drawn on such a contentious issue. The truth was, everybody had their own agenda and Washington was a world away from west Texas. People cared about local issues, not what happened months ago in an embassy six thousand miles away.

  Raul dropped him off at the Overton hotel, a three star high-rise that was clearly one of the more upmarket establishments that Lubbock had to offer. Ray’s room was on the eleventh floor and had a distinctly uninspiring view of the freeway that dissected the city. Beyond the freeway the landscape lay flat and grey, the horizon dotted with clusters of distant wind turbines turning lazily in a cold breeze.

  Ray had never been to the South Plains. He’d been to Texas before, to Dallas and Houston, but never this far west. There were no other cities for a hundred miles in any direction. It felt remote, isolated, but Ray was convinced the trip would be worth it.

  He took the elevator down to the lobby and snagged a seat in the coffee shop. He flipped open his laptop and caught up on his mail and social media. More abuse, he noticed, including a few imaginative memes that depicted Ray having intimate relations with a variety of farmyard animals. Some people definitely had too much time on their hands.

  He scrolled to the email that had brought him to Texas, the one that had followed the mystery phone call and had provided confirmation of the whistleblower’s veracity. Ray took a look around the coffee shop. There were a few other guests dotted around, tourists, business people, but no one was taking any notice of Ray. He slipped his ear buds in and played the video file. He’d watched it several times, but the sense of horror and revulsion never dimmed.

  It was drone footage, recorded from above the embassy in Baghdad. Like most people he’d seen the online content, the footage shot by Iraqis, but much of that was just light and noise. What Ray was looking at now was a recording of what went on inside that facility, a series of edits that showed people being hunted down and torn apart, or becoming infected themselves. It showed uniformed personnel opening fire, it showed flames engulfing the Chancery building, people running, falling, dying. And it came with audio too, gunfire, explosions, and the terrible screaming that made the hair stand up on the back of Ray’s neck.

  There’s more, the anonymous email had promised. Meet me in Lubbock, Texas. Email me when you’re there. I can be with you in six hours.

  Ray tapped his reply and hit send, giving the mystery man or woman his location and room number. He’d done the math too; Fort Hood was five and a half hours away by car, and home to almost seventy thousand troops. Fort Bliss was roughly the same distance and another significant installation. His contact was military, Ray was almost sure of it. Whoever it was, they would help him put the pieces together.

  As he sipped his coffee he heard the sound again, and looked out of the window. Shadows flashed across the parking lot outside, and Ray glimpsed a couple of helicopters, Black Hawks this time, thundering low over the city.

  For some odd reason, the sight made Ray feel distinctly unnerved.

  Horror Show

  The C 17 Globemaster bumped and dipped through the cold night air on its final approach into Munich International Airport. Mike Savage, sitting in the jump seat behind the co-pilot, was winding up his radio call with Lando when he heard the low, morse-like beeping of the outer marker.

  ‘Wheels down in seven minutes,’ the captain said, his hands busy with the controls.

  ‘Roger.’

  Mike ended his call and headed back to the cargo bay. He took the seat next to Tapper and strapped in. Lucas was seated in the middle, surrounded by CIA operators and SEALs. Everyone wore civilian clothes, and everyone was armed, their scaled-down rigs hidden beneath their coats. Mike gestured for Finch to come and join them.

  ‘We’ve got a green light,’ Mike told them both, raising his voice above the low roar of the aircraft’s jet engines. ‘Lando’s confirmed diplomatic status for the whole team, including the Brit. We’ve been designated callsign Task Force Zero, and JSOC has given us a blank cheque.’

  ‘What’s the deal with the Austrians?’ Tapper asked.
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br />   ‘One fatality, three serious. They’re justifying the level of force and the White House is backing them.’

  ‘That’s some bullshit,’ Finch said.

  ‘They traced the taxi driver. He confirms he dropped the targets off at Vienna’s main station. He claims he heard the word Munchen twice. Could be a red herring, then again it’s all we’ve got.’

  ‘CCTV?’ Tapper asked.

  ‘The Austrians don’t have facial recognition, and Marion has allegedly changed her appearance, so that’s needle and haystack country. Same for the Germans, but their CCTV systems are fully integrated, which might give us an edge. They’re all set up and waiting.’

  The aircraft vibrated as the landing gear was lowered. Tapper raised his voice.

  ‘How d’you want to play this?’

  Mike glanced over his shoulder at Lucas. The thick beard was gone, his face now smooth, his unkempt hair neatly trimmed. He wore dark trousers and trainers, and an Air Force parka. He could have been one of them, except for the rigid handcuffs that locked his hands in front of him.

  Mike felt the aircraft sink lower, and saw the lights of the terminal buildings through the aircraft window. ‘We have to pray that the Brit can ID either of these assholes quickly. To that end, German security services have a room all set up with feeds into their transport network, including this here airport. Don, I’ll need you to interface their network with our facial recognition hardware. Billy, I want you guys watching and listening. Don’t be afraid to holler if you feel the need. We’re a team now, so if you’ve got something to contribute, speak out.’

  ‘Aye, aye,’ the Navy assaulter said.