The Pandora Deception--A Novel

by David Bruns

  “What do you mean?” Liz watched Tahir’s face closely.

  “There was another doctor, the one who survived from the research-lab assault.” Don was talking so fast his words started to jumble together. “She may be—could be—a double agent. Dre thought she saw her on video. We’re running facial rec right now.”

  “What’s the other woman’s name?” Liz asked, watching Tahir’s reaction.

  Tahir’s face shifted. Her eyes grew wide and she bared her teeth. With a scream, she threw herself at Liz.

  Liz pulled the trigger. The suppressed nine-millimeter barely sounded above the background roar of the air systems. Tahir stopped like she’d been punched. Liz shot her again, center mass. Tahir went down.

  “Where is she?” Liz pressed the muzzle of the weapon against the woman’s forehead. “Your accomplice, where is she?”

  Tahir hissed at her. “You’re too late. You won’t stop her.”

  “We have her!” Don said in Liz’s ear. “Dre’s on the way to intercept her.”

  “Andrea? No, tell her to stay away. I can handle this.”

  Liz pulled the trigger again. A neat round hole appeared in Tahir’s forehead, just below the line of her hijab.

  “I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  Dre fought her way through the crowd to the employee entrance on the south side of the Jamkaran conference center. The security guard at the blockade was barely older than her. He was standing on his toes, trying to see over the heads of the crowd for a glimpse of the president.

  Dre tried to walk past him, but he grabbed her arm and launched a torrent of unintelligible Farsi at her.

  She fought down the growing sense of panic. Lakshmi had passed this way less than three minutes before. There was no time to lose. She scanned the people around them to see who was paying attention as she reached for her knife.

  Her hand brushed a thin plastic card in her pocket.

  She thrust the visitor badge from the tour the previous day into his face and dredged up the only Farsi phrase she could remember.

  “Bayad dastshouie beram!” she said. I need to use the bathroom!

  With a disgusted look, the security guard waved her on.

  Dre ducked her head as she walked. “Where is she, Janet?”

  “Lakshmi went into a service hall on this side of the building that leads to the kitchens. Liz is on the way.”

  Dre fast walked through the back entrance. The long hallway was empty.

  “Where is she?” Dre whispered.

  “There’s a room at the end of the hall, on your right, outside the kitchens.”

  At the end of the hall was a women’s bathroom. “It’s a restroom. I’m going in.”

  “Wait for Liz!”

  Dre eased the door open to find a long line of wooden stalls facing a row of white sinks. The room was empty, but in the very last stall, a pair of hands was pushing up a ceiling tile.

  The plan was obvious to Dre: Lakshmi was going to crawl into the ceiling over the kitchen and dispense the virus through the air vents, contaminating the staff and the food.

  “Dre! Report!” Don’s voice was like a shout in her ear.

  She didn’t dare even whisper a reply in the echoing bathroom.

  Knife drawn, Dre moved silently across the tiled floor until she was in front of the last stall. Just as she reached for the handle, the door burst open. Lakshmi plowed into Dre full force.

  As she went down, Dre’s head cracked against the edge of the sink. Her vision exploded in a burst of color. Her body slammed into the ground, Lakshmi’s knees on her chest.

  Dre stabbed up with the knife. Lakshmi screamed and fell off her.

  Dre rolled to her side, unable to catch her breath from the force of the impact. She lashed out as hard as she could with a foot. The kick connected with some soft part of the other woman.

  Then Dre saw it: a silver canister, about the size of a can of soda, sitting on the floor beside the commode. She shot a look at Lakshmi as she struggled onto her hands and feet. The woman had both hands on the knife sticking out of her thigh. As Dre watched, she ripped the blade out of her flesh.

  Dre lunged toward the steel canister, but not before Lakshmi reacted. The other woman jumped onto Dre’s back, driving her face into the tile floor.

  Lakshmi crawled over Dre and grabbed the canister. Dre rolled over in time to see Lakshmi standing over her, knife in hand.

  Lakshmi’s body stuttered. The white wall tiles behind her shattered into a spray of ceramic and blood. Even with the suppressor on Liz’s weapon, the sound of the gunshots in the small space was deafening.

  Liz advanced across the tiled floor, weapon never moving from Lakshmi’s body. Dre ripped the silver canister from Lakshmi’s death grip.

  “Hurry!” Liz reached a hand down to Dre. “We need to get out of here!”

  “No…” Dre showed the top of the canister to Liz. The red LED lights were counting down.

  30 … 29 … 28 …

  Dre struggled to her knees in front of the toilet. She jammed the silver canister as far into the commode as she could. Then she flushed the toilet. The bowl filled up but the canister was too large to get swallowed by the pipe. The water line in the bowl stopped just below the rim, then started to recede.

  Another gunshot. Liz ran back to the stall with white plastic bottles in each hand.

  “I shot the lock off the janitor’s closet.” She tossed Dre a plastic bottle. “Bleach. Cover it in bleach.”

  Dre dumped in an entire bottle, then ripped off her head coverings, stuffed them into the bowl, and dumped the second bottle on top. The chemical stung the open cuts on her hands.

  She got up and backed away from the stall.

  “Don,” Liz said from behind her. “The package is secure. Call off the air strike.”

  “Roger that,” Don replied. “Can you make it to the extraction point?”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Liz replied. “We’re going off comms now.”

  She took out her earpiece and handed it to Dre. Her fingers gripped Dre’s for a long moment. “Flush these. Lock the door behind me and don’t open it unless I tell you to.”

  Dre nodded woodenly, staring at the earpiece in her palm. “What are you going to do?”

  Liz pulled the door open. She gave Dre a faint smile.

  “I’m going to tell them the truth.”

  * * *

  There were security guards at the far end of the hall, running full tilt at Liz. Staff stood in the kitchen doorway, staring at her.

  “Go inside,” Liz said to them in Farsi. “Lock the doors. Now.” The staff disappeared.

  She faced the advancing security guard and got on her knees. She placed her handgun and knife on the ground in front of her. She took off her chador and head scarf and pulled up her sleeves.

  Liz spread her arms wide.

  “My name is Elizabeth Soroush,” she shouted in Farsi. “I am a United States FBI agent. There has been a biological-weapons attack on this facility…”

  CHAPTER 52

  An undisclosed location in Iran

  It was a week before Dre saw Liz again. At least it felt like a week; she wasn’t really sure how much time had passed.

  The day of the attack, it took nearly six hours before the door to the women’s restroom at the Jamkaran conference center opened again. She’d heard Liz shouting in Farsi outside the door, heard the heavy tread of men’s boots, the rattle of weapons—but no gunshots—then hours of silence.

  For a long time, Dre huddled on the tile floor next to the body of Lakshmi and the toilet that reeked of bleach.

  Her brain refused to work. She was a spy. All this had been explained to her before she agreed to come to Iran. If she was caught, the United States would not acknowledge her existence. She was on her own.

  Finally, Dre got to her feet and ran water in the sink. She washed her face and hands and dressed her injuries as best she could. She had a raging headache, a hu
ge black eye, and bruises all over from the fight with Lakshmi.…

  And possible exposure to a bioweapon.

  She stared at her reflection. Other than that, she was in decent shape.

  Dre took a seat on the floor as far away from the contaminated toilet and Lakshmi’s body as she could get. And waited.

  She heard someone working on the door lock. When the door finally opened, the two men who entered were dressed in biohazard suits. One of them had a gun. He spoke English.

  “Get up,” he said, his voice muffled through the suit. He motioned with the muzzle of the weapon for emphasis.

  “Strip,” he said when she was on her feet.

  “Pardon?”

  “Take off your clothes.” He held up a hospital gown. “Put this on.”

  Dre took off her clothes until she was in her bra and panties.

  “Everything.”

  She shut off the part of her mind that felt embarrassment and stripped naked. She had signed up for this. She was on her own.

  Clad in the paper-thin hospital gown, she stepped into booties outside the restroom with the two men’s help. They escorted her outside, where they had a shower set up in the parking lot.

  “Strip,” said the one with the gun.

  Dre shed the gown and booties and stepped into the ice-cold spray of water. Under their direction, she soaped and washed every square inch of her flesh with a harsh disinfectant. Her teeth chattered. They gave her a blanket and bundled her into the back of an ambulance.

  At the hospital, Dre was placed in a room with no windows, white walls, a glass door, and a camera high in the corner. She had a bed and a toilet and the lights were on twenty-four hours a day. All the twenty-first-century means of spending time—TV, books, phone, internet—were absent.

  The only interruption in her solitude was two meals and two blood draws each day. She found she longed for someone to walk through the door and stick a needle in her arm just to break the boredom.

  Dre slept when she was tired, ate when food arrived, and stuck out her arm when the doctor came in for blood. In between those fleeting moments, she sat cross-legged on the bed and stared at the opposite wall.

  Fourteen meal–blood draw cycles passed before a doctor pushed through the glass door. He was not wearing a face mask. “You were not infected,” he said in halting English.

  Dre felt like a great weight had been lifted from her chest. She had suspected as much, but confirmation was still a relief she had not known she was seeking.

  “What happens to me now?”

  The doctor shrugged and left.

  She got her answer an hour later when two armed policemen in bulletproof vests walked through the door. They shackled her hands and feet to a chain around her waist, and she followed them, still wearing hospital pajamas and sandals. It was cold outside and she shivered, but neither of the men cared. She was put in the back of a police van without windows.

  The vehicle moved through stop-and-go traffic, and then there was a long stretch of highway during which she fell asleep. Dre woke up when the van began to jounce along a bumpy road. When the doors opened, she saw a flash of snow through an open doorway. The men hustled her down a gray-painted damp hallway and into a cell.

  Liz was there.

  Liz had a bruise healing on her face and she held her arm close to her body in a protective way. She hugged Dre with her good arm.

  “You’re okay?” Liz said.

  “I was in a hospital for a few days. They said I was not infected, then they brought me here.” Dre looked around the cell. A bunk bed, a toilet, a sink. “Where is here?”

  “I don’t know. They took me west—I think. It’s been ten days—I think. If they kept us alive this long, they must have plans for us.”

  “Like what?”

  Liz put her hand behind Dre’s neck and pulled her close until they touched foreheads. “It could get bad. They could use us against each other. Just … you know your training. Just do your best. That’s all anyone can ask for.”

  Despite the cloud of doubt over her situation, it was a relief to have someone to talk to. They huddled together on the bottom bunk and spoke in whispers. Dre talked about her mother and the farm where she grew up. Liz told her funny stories about her kids and how she let Brendan know she was pregnant the first time.

  In those moments, Dre never felt closer to another human being.

  They marked time by the appearance of meals twice a day, two plates of rice and a stale flatbread to share. No matter the meal, the menu was unchanged. If they were lucky there was some meat or other sauce on the rice, but that was rare.

  Every few days, the door would open, and a new set of guards would move them to a new location.

  “My guess is they’re moving us so that anyone who’s looking for us can’t find us,” Liz said with a tinge of hope in her voice. “That might mean somebody in the US is trying to locate us, but … who knows.”

  Liz got thinner. The circles under her eyes deepened and darkened as the days passed. After their fifth move, she developed a hacking cough.

  Neither woman was surprised when the door to their cell opened and a new set of guards strode in. Dre noticed immediately that these were military men and they wore a different type of uniform.

  “Revolutionary Guard,” Liz whispered.

  The bigger guard slapped Liz across the face, yelling something that Dre took to mean shut up. They were hustled outside, their thin shoes slapping against the frozen ground. It was nighttime.

  The transport vehicle was different, too: an army transport with the insignia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard emblazoned on the side. They were placed in the rear seat and hoods were drawn over their heads.

  The big diesel engine roared to life and the transport shot away.

  Liz leaned her head next to Dre. “I don’t like this,” Liz whispered. “All the other changes were done by police. The Revolutionary Guard … this is … not ideal, Dre.”

  The men in the front spoke in low tones and smoked constantly. The vehicle left the paved road, bounced along for what felt like an hour, then began to climb.

  When they stopped, the men left them in the back for a long time. She could hear one of them on the phone outside talking and walking, his voice fading in and out.

  “What’s he saying?” Dre asked.

  “He’s waiting for some kind of authorization, I think.” Liz’s voice was tight with emotion.

  The doors to the vehicle opened on both sides and chill night air rushed into the cab. One guard grabbed Liz, the other Dre. Dre was force-marched across rocky, uneven ground, a hand clamped on her elbow.

  They stopped. Dre felt the wind whip past her bare legs.

  The guard ripped the cover off her head.

  Liz was next to her, her head uncovered, blinking. A half-moon hung in the sky, illuminating a mountain vista all around them. Dre looked down. They stood on the edge of a precipice, the depths below them lost in shadow.

  The breeze raised gooseflesh across Dre’s skin.

  The lead guard barked out an order. Liz whispered, her voice shaking. “He says to get on your knees.”

  Dre felt the rocky ground bite into the skin of her knees. The dirt scuffed under the thin soles of her prison sandals. The second guard unlocked their shackles, dragging the chains away. He said something to the first one and they both laughed.

  She heard the rack of a slide on a handgun and closed her eyes. Liz reached across the space between them and laced her fingers into Dre’s. Her hand was ice cold.

  “Remember what I told you: Don’t cry and don’t beg.”

  Dre took a deep breath of the clean, thin air and closed her eyes. She tried to think of a prayer, but nothing came to mind.

  She took another breath, feeling as if time had somehow stopped. Would this be the last breath? Or would there be one more?

  The slam of the car door made her jump, her hand convulsively clenching Liz’s.

  The vehicle roar
ed to life and spun out in a cloud of dust.

  Seconds passed. They knelt on the edge of the precipice. Fingers together, hearts beating. Breath being drawn.

  Liz sagged back on her heels. “I—I think they’re gone.”

  The words had no sooner left her mouth than headlights stabbed the darkness.

  Dre lunged to her feet, pulling Liz up with her. Together, they got their first clear look around. They were on top of a mountain. There was nowhere to go.

  The vehicle raced into the open space, skidding to a halt. Billows of dust floated toward them.

  The door slammed shut. A flashlight beam cut through the darkness, pinning them in place.

  “Dre? Liz?” Don Riley’s voice.

  Dre felt herself falling. Strong arms caught her.

  “I got you, Dre,” Michael said. “You’re safe now.”

  Janet’s face appeared in the moonlight. She swooped in for a hug, leaving fresh tears on Dre’s cheek.

  Don had Liz wrapped in a bear hug, weeping on her shoulder. “We’ve been back-channeling for weeks with no response and then today, they just called and gave us these coordinates on the Iran-Iraq border. No trade, no demands, just a place and time.”

  In the shadows beyond the headlights of the Humvee, Dre saw the shapes of soldiers moving. An army captain stepped into the light. “We need to move, Mr. Riley. We’re exposed here.”

  Don, his arm still around Liz, reached for Dre’s hand.

  “Let’s get you home.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  Noam sat alone at a café table that looked comically small next to his bulky body. An umbrella shielded him from the hot noonday sun, but he also wore a floppy sun hat and a pair of cheap sunglasses. The combination made him look like a European businessman unhappily on holiday.

  Rachel hiked her sunglasses up into her hair. “Is this seat taken?”

  Noam made a who-cares gesture with his hands.

  Rachel drew out the chair, feeling the muscles twinge in her core. She no longer had to wear a sling on her arm, and the headaches were mostly gone, but her side still bothered her.