Black Sunrise

by Brett Godfrey

  “No time, no choice,” Kenehan barked. “Almost there. Seconds could make the difference. Smoke and virus, Dave. This could be the end of the world.” Kenehan hit the brakes again, grateful for the car’s nimble handling.

  Red lights flashed behind them. A police cruiser was trying to pull them over.

  “Look for a smoke machine. You said this was a ball?” Thomas asked.

  “A costume ball,” Christie chimed in. “Maybe they have a smoke-effect generator set up.”

  “You’re going to have to move fast. If you haven’t found it by eight-fifty-five, I want your asses out of there.”

  The police car behind them turned on its siren.

  “Try to get the cops off my ass,” Kenehan said, flooring the accelerator as he rounded a corner. “We’ll call you when we have a chance.”

  “It’s right there,” Christie pointed. “Stop over by that pole, and we’ll run the rest of the way.”

  “Put your hands on the dash,” Kenehan ordered.

  She did as he told her. “Why?”

  “When we stop, the cops are going to be on top of us. I don’t want them getting edgy and doing something stupid. If we run from the car, they might fire on us. I have to deal with them fast.” He brought the car to a stop along the side of the boulevard, stabbed the button to lower his window and placed his hands back on the wheel where they would be in plain sight.

  Within seconds, a uniformed officer approached the car with his automatic in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

  “Sir, step out of the car.”

  “Yes, officer. I’m stepping out now.”

  The light shone in his eyes. The officer didn’t ask for Kenehan’s license. “Turn around and place your hands on the roof of the car.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kenehan turned and put his hands on the car, spreading his feet as he knew the cop would demand. “Check my identification, officer. Back pocket, right side. CIA. Matter of national security. Literally life and death, sir. Seconds matter. Let us go and come with us.”

  “First things first,” said the cop, keeping his distance and raising his gun slightly. “Reach slowly into your pocket and pull it out for me.”

  Kenehan stood upright and withdrew his wallet. There was no CIA identification card, but he had to put the officer at ease by degrees so he could get closer to the man. They were wasting valuable seconds. He pulled out his driver’s license and held it out for the officer, who holstered his weapon to take the card.

  As the officer reached out to take his license, Kenehan grabbed his wrist, yanking him forward with sudden force, then stopping the man’s momentum with the back of his opposite arm across the officer’s throat, pulling him to the side, tripping him with his leg. Pencak silat—an Indonesian martial art. In a single smooth motion, he drove the officer to the ground. Kenehan landed with a knee in the man’s chest and one hand at his throat, tripping the retention lever on the holster and pulling his gun free.

  “Now listen to me,” Kenehan said. “More lives are at stake than you can count. We’re going up to the Seawell Ballroom to try to find a biological weapon. Hazmat teams are on their way. Get back into your car and call for backup.”

  Keeping the man’s pistol trained on the downed officer, Kenehan scanned behind him for his partner, but saw no one. The officer patrolled solo. Kenehan picked up his license and flicked it onto his chest. “There’s my license. Have your dispatcher call your SWAT team leader and ask for a level 4 biological containment team. Give them my name and tell them where we are going. The main ballroom. Seawell, it’s called. You got that?”

  The cop nodded as Kenehan rose to his feet.

  “Then get in your car and stay there. If you try to slow us down, I’ll shoot you dead. Make your call now. Understand?”

  The cop nodded again, climbing to his feet as well.

  Kenehan picked up the officer’s flashlight. “I’ll give you back your gun and light later. Now get moving.”

  As the officer headed back to his patrol car, Kenehan ran up the flights of concrete steps to the entrance of the main ballroom.

  Only when he reached the door did he realize Christie was still with him.

  The dance floor of the massive Seawell Ballroom was awash with color. Tuxedos and gowns capped with garish masks and feathers gyrated to the sound of live jazz. A ten-foot-tall clown teetered above the crowd on stilts, his conical wizard’s hat nearly scraping the ceiling. Upon the stage at the far end of the capacious hall, a jazz band played loudly, and a woman sang in low, smoky notes.

  Christie darted ahead of Kenehan, pushing through the crowd toward the stage. She stepped up onto the platform, waving her arms and shouting something lost in the din. No one seemed to take notice of her until she snatched the singer’s microphone from her hand. As if someone had pulled a plug, the band stopped playing.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” Christie shouted into the microphone, “I must have your attention.” The din of the crowd diminished quickly. “Please! I have something very important to tell you!”

  After several seconds, the buzz of the crowd faded and went silent.

  “Thank you,” she said, softening her voice. “I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, but we’ve had a small fire in the kitchen. We’ve extinguished the fire. You’re perfectly safe, but we really need you to make an orderly exit from the building as quickly as possible. Please remain calm but leave the building immediately. Police will be waiting for you outside with further instructions.”

  As he slipped the police officer’s automatic into his waistband under his shirt, Kenehan admired Christie’s presence of mind. Without causing a panic, she’d infused the crowd with sufficient reason to clear the room. People herded toward the doors at the opposite end of the ballroom.

  “Thank you for your cooperation, ladies and gentlemen. Please don’t worry about your belongings. It’s a beautiful night outside. This should only take a few minutes—then we’ll have you all back in. It’s important to let the fire department confirm the building is safe, so please get moving now.”

  As Christie droned into the microphone, encouraging the crowd’s rapid exit, Kenehan scanned the ceiling.

  His heart sank when he saw the intricate rolls of molding impregnated with thousands of tiny built-in lights and dozens of recessed panels for larger spotlights. The intricate array of lights and fixtures merged into a visually complicated inverted landscape.

  And then he saw it.

  A smoke detector lay at an odd angle along one of the undulating rolls of paneling that formed the ceiling. He craned his neck to look for others like it, but there were none. Normally no one would notice it, but if you were looking for something irregular, it stood out like a sore thumb, as though someone had slapped it onto the ceiling as an afterthought.

  Virus. Smoke.

  An idea struck Kenehan.

  “You there,” Kenehan called out at the top of his lungs. The clown “giant” was preparing to climb down from his stilts, having rolled his freakishly long pantlegs up to his human knees, revealing the metal of the stilts. Kenehan waved his arms.

  “Yes, you. On the stilts. Over here. I need you to help me.”

  The clown shook his head. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “No—it’s alright. I’m with the fire department. I need you to pull down this smoke detector for me. It may have been a false alarm. We need to check this thing out.”

  With a shrug of his shoulders, the man lumbered to the center of the room, looming over Kenehan, who pointed at the smoke detector. The clown reached up, but he could not quite grasp it, even on stilts. His hand fell short by mere inches.

  Kenehan pulled two chairs together. “Can you step up if I hold them?”

  The clown looked down and nodded with a demonic smile, the paint on his face making him look like an apparition from hell.

  He stepped up, first onto one chair, then the other. As his hand closed around the smoke detector and he
began to pull it free, he lost his balance and teetered backward. Kenehan reached for one of the stilts to hold him upright, but it was too late. The clown toppled backward. Like a tall pine felled by a lumberjack, he swayed farther and farther away from the base that held him aloft before crashing down with a terrible crunch onto a table, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass and splintering wood.

  The smoke detector fell from his hand and rolled across the floor, coming to a stop under another table. On his hands and knees, Kenehan crawled to it. He saw a red light blinking on the base. It was odd that the light was on the underside—on a normal smoke detector, the light would be on the outer shell so it could visibly confirm the unit was operating. As he watched, the speed of the blinking increased.

  So did his pulse.

  He looked at his watch. Four minutes until nine.

  He crawled out from under the table and stood beneath a halogen spotlight. The plastic of the casing looked melted around the edges of the small red light, as if someone had poked the hole with a soldering iron. There was no label on the unit. Double-stick foam pads on the base had fastened it to the ceiling. No wires emerged from it to connect it to anything else. There was no way anyone would use a battery-operated smoke detector in a commercial facility such as this.

  He knew for sure he had found Beeman’s device. On the top of the unit, vents in the plastic that would normally allow air to flow into the machine for testing would spew aerosol when the device triggered.

  One-way tamperproof screws held the unit together. He thought of smashing the case to get to the circuitry inside. But he realized he might break the container within and cause the release of the virus, particularly if it were in a glass vial like the one Beeman had given to the North Koreans.

  It may have already detonated.

  Christie appeared at his side. In her hands, she held a carton of plastic trash bags. “Found these in the kitchen.” She started yanking bag after bag from the box.

  Kenehan slipped the smoke detector into a bag. He twisted the top and then put it into another bag, twisting that closed as well. Christie continued feeding him trash bags. He stuffed the growing blob of plastic into one after another, working frantically until two men in white environmental suits appeared at his side.

  By now his package looked like a giant black beach ball.

  He handed it to one of the spacesuit-clad men; then he took Christie by the arm, and they ran out of the building.

  When he next looked at his watch, it was 9:03.

  More men in hazmat suits guided Kenehan to a large silver-panel truck with the words “Mobile Isolation Unit” stenciled on the side.

  He climbed in, taking a seat on a bench next to Christie. He put his arm around her. The injured clown lay on the bench on the opposite side of the space. He looked up in pain.

  The men slammed the door shut, and the truck pulled away.

  Chapter 56

  Deep within the DataHelix facility several stories below ground, Jensen paced the hallway outside Lab 7. The harsh neon light made his grave features resemble an Inca carving. Janet glanced up at him as he strode past, too distraught to speak.

  His mind was whirling. He could not accept the notion that after all that had passed, he might still lose his daughter to that bastard Arthur Beeman.

  He imagined what Christie would go through if she tested positive for exposure to the Black Sunrise virus. They would quarantine her; she’d endure a six-week nightmare, waiting for a horrible death unless the experimental vaccine proved effective.

  They had never tested it on human subjects.

  The door to the lab opened. An elderly woman emerged wearing a white lab coat. Jensen stopped in his tracks and glared at her, waiting for her to speak.

  “Hello, I’m doctor Tanya Murphy. Please, come in,” she said.

  Mark and Janet stepped into what appeared to be an anteroom. A large laboratory filled with gleaming steel equipment loomed beyond a glass wall at the opposite end of the massive room. The unpleasant neon glare enhanced the sterile, artificial sense of unreality that crept into Jensen’s pores.

  “The virus hasn’t infected them,” Dr. Murphy said without preamble.

  Jensen’s legs nearly buckled out from under him. So powerful was his sense of relief, it nearly brought him to his knees. Reaching out, he put his palm against the glass wall to steady himself. Janet came to his side. He took her in his arms for a moment, kissing her forehead.

  The scientist gestured for Mark and Janet to sit at a workbench. They did so. Before seating herself, she removed her glasses, folded them and slipped them into a pocket of her lab coat.

  Jensen cleared his throat. “And the smoke detector?”

  A frown crossed Dr. Murphy’s face. “Your daughter’s insight is commendable,” she said. “That device was not a smoke detector. It contained a vial of the Black Sunrise virus, with a solenoid-powered steel chisel to break the vial open and a fan connected to a digital timer. The vial was broken. The timing mechanism triggered at exactly 9:00 p.m. The fan started spinning, circulating the virus outward through the vents in the casing.”

  “And?” Janet prodded.

  “We’ve analyzed the disposal bags. Not surprisingly, the inner plastic bag was contaminated.” She stopped and sighed. “None of the outer twenty-nine bags were. The blood tests for everyone we’ve tested, including your daughter and her friend, came back clear.” With a shrug, she added, “They were very lucky.”

  “We all were,” Janet corrected.

  The woman nodded sincerely. “That’s true.”

  “When can we see her?” Jensen asked softly.

  “Follow me.” She guided them into the inner laboratory. Christie and Roady stood behind yet another glass wall. Christie had crossed her arms in front of her chest. A sad smile crossed her face when she saw him. Her brows rose, as if to acknowledge that bad news might be coming.

  Jensen locked eyes with her and stabbed both thumbs into the air.

  She dropped her arms, and her shoulders sagged with relief.

  Kenehan mouthed the words “thank you” and embraced Christie tenderly from behind.

  “Use the intercom, here,” the woman said, pointing to a panel mounted in the glass.

  Jensen pushed the button. “Christie? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” the speaker clearly projected her voice.

  “You saved a million lives tonight, Kissy,” Jensen couldn’t resist using his daughter’s early childhood nickname, which arose from her earliest efforts to say her name. “From now on, whenever you look up at the night sky, I want you to think of each star you see as a person who is still alive because of you. Your mother and I are so proud.” Jensen locked eyes with Kenehan. “Of both of you.”

  “Thank God this woman knows her way around a kitchen,” Kenehan said.

  Christie smiled. “And Daddy? Don’t give me any more crap about reading the society pages.”

  “You think she knew all along?” Nathan Fitch asked.

  “No,” Brecht replied, shaking his head. “She would have said so earlier.”

  “Remarkable,” Fitch mused. “She’s what? Twenty-four? And she solved a code that had stymied the NSA.”

  “You’ve made up for that,” Brecht said. “You found the last vial.” Brecht was referring to the fact that the NSA had pieced together disparate fragments of physical evidence and electronic intelligence to discover Beeman’s purchase of a plane ticket using a credit card he’d acquired under a false name.

  “We’re about to alert the FBI. They’ll be waiting for Beeman when he comes for the last vial. We know what flight he’ll be on, and we know when and where he’ll show up. We’ll have them there in time.”

  “So you folks are good for something after all.”

  Fitch looked down for a moment before speaking.

  “Albert,” he said at last, shaking his head slightly, “Once again, we owe you. But we can’t allow this to go public. Even among our o
wn intelligence agencies and the upper echelons of government, the details of Beeman’s virus and North Korean spying, its invasion plans—and the rest of it—must never get out. The risk is too high—if these matters were to go public, the world outcry and political fallout would be globally destabilizing, damaging American interests at home and abroad.” By “the rest of it,” Fitch was alluding to the fact that they’d fed the press a story about the rescue raid on the Korean ship. It described Christie Jensen and Jackie Dawson as human-trafficking victims and the Asians on the boat as members of a South Korean organized crime syndicate.

  “Your secrets are always safe with us, Nathan. But you’re right—you do owe me. And that debt is about to grow.”

  “Oh, really?” Fitch raised his eyebrows. “Do tell, Albert.”

  “Nathan, you can’t take Beeman into official custody. A trial would have to be public, and even if it were not, the media would eventually catch wind of it. Too many details are in the open; a persistent investigative reporter would piece them together. On the other hand, the legal consequences of his arrest on US soil would prevent imprisonment without a trial. Beeman is a citizen. The US can’t keep him indefinitely under the law of habeas corpus. He doesn’t meet the legal definition of an enemy combatant. The military can’t intervene under posse comitatus. The US simply can’t risk skirting those laws in the aftermath of this situation. The public outcry for truthful disclosure would be like a tsunami. If you take Beeman in, the entire story will get out, and as you so aptly put it, the upset across the globe would have repercussions that would last for decades. The political pressure on the president would be just the beginning—it could even spark a war with North Korea. It would draw the Chinese in, and everything would spin out of control. When Beeman goes for the last vial, the FBI won’t be there and won’t take him into custody.” Brecht looked directly into the camera. “No one will be there.”