“Hello, Andrei,” Ethan said.
The man’s mouth tightened. His nostril’s flared. His hands darted out then and grappled Ethan’s arms in an instant with a grip like iron. He wrenched Ethan around as he searched him. He found the Glock and pulled it from the concealed holster tucked in his back.
“Hello, Ethan Pierce. My comrade admires your persistence. And now his wait for you is over.”
“What did you call him?” Cosmin said as his hands moved in furious gestures. “Who the fuck is this guy? Zmeu does not care. I delivered who you wanted. Everything is good. So, pay us our money, and he is yours.”
“You want payment?” Andrei said with a mocking frown.
The frown disappeared before Cosmin could reply. Andrei raised the Glock to Cosmin’s forehead and the gun exploded. Ethan ducked and raised his hands. From the corner of his eye, he saw Cosmin fall to the shaded street, dead. Two more shots set Ethan’s ears ringing. He felt nothing, no pain. The driver fell as he fled. The shots cut him to the ground where he crawled toward the Range Rover before another shot stopped his pitiable retreat.
To his left, Ethan heard a shout of rage. He turned to see the tattooed Romanian lunge with his knife. The glint of steel arced at Andrei’s left arm where a gout of blood appeared along his sleeve like a crimson seam. Andrei sneered at the man. He dropped the gun to the street, and with both hands he caught the next attack. His arms and torso sprung into motion then. Before the Romanian could withdraw, Andrei twisted his arm. It bent back at the elbow, and a yelp of pain escaped the Romanian. The knife turned like a thing possessed of its own force. Andrei completed his swift motion. With his palm, he drove the knife in just below the Romanian’s chin. The blade stove through his palette, and a macabre grin formed as blood gushed from his mouth and covered the inky tattoos in red. His cries ceased, and Andrei let him fall to the street near his comrades.
Ethan measured the distance between him and the pistol. He had this moment to reach the gun before Andrei. He dove for the pistol on the ground. Andrei moved with him, quicker and more agile. As Ethan wrapped his hand around the gun Andrei’s boot pinned down his forearm. Ethan looked up into the barrel of the other pistol Andrei had concealed all along.
Andrei stood over him expressionless, his breathing barely quickened from the ordeal. He stood still and rigid, his gaze fixed on Ethan, daring him to act. Ethan realized then he remained alive by design.
“Your comrade wants to meet. Is that it?” he asked.
From behind him, Ethan heard an approaching car. Andrei’s eyes widened as he saw the coming threat. From the ground, Ethan saw a blur of black as the sedan hurdled toward them. Russell and Wade had found him. There was still time.
Andrei pinned his knee into Ethan’s back. Ethan squirmed, helpless to move under the man’s surprising strength. Andrei watched the car approach. His mouth moved in a silent chant, counting something Ethan couldn’t see while he held something slim and black in his hand. His serpentine thumb hovered over a grid of gray buttons.
Russell drove closer, and from the passenger’s window he saw the crook of Wade’s carbine spitting fire at them. The shots echoed beneath the concrete roof. A crossfire of bullets tore into the Range Rover’s windows and ricocheted from the concrete incline behind them.
The car roared closer to the Range Rover. Andrei’s chant ceased. His thumb pressed down on the device, and Ethan felt the fires of hell wash over him. A blast from the Range Rover sucked the breath from his lungs. Andrei lay atop him, crushing him down into the gravel as the flames bathed both of them for an instant. He was half blinded and deafened. He heard Andrei cough, then the weight was gone. He gasped for breath and rubbed his eyes, not even realizing the pistol had left his grip.
Flames engulfed the sedan as it slid to a halt.
Andrei pulled him to his feet and dragged him toward the van, past the corpses of the Romanians. He opened the door on the van and gave him a shove.
“Get in.”
Part III
The Black Sea
Chapter 17: Revolution Peddler
Brașov, Romania
11:42 a.m., Friday, June 21
Kamran leaned into his pressure suit’s visor and squinted into the microscope before him. Peering into the lens became a balancing act he had mastered in longer and longer days in the lab. He perched on the edge of a padded stool, his legs spread to maintain his balance. He positioned the pneumatic hose without thinking. It had become an extension of himself. He could reach it without looking, detach and reattach the coupling as he moved about the lab chamber like he had once moved about his childhood home.
He made subtle movements, adjusting the focal length from a gray blur to reveal the sickly pink color of tissue beneath the lens. It was a sliver of human lung. A normal thing for this work, but nothing here was normal. Where did they acquire this tissue? He asked himself the question again, and his mind dismissed the impossibility that the samples were victims of his captors. Perhaps they had stolen them from a research hospital or bribed a staff worker to ignore the missing cultures.
The misshapen lung cells confirmed his fears about the virus’ lethality. He could delay no more. His lady companion had begun to suspect his tiny fits of sabotage, which were explainable for a time but not indefinitely. She was as capable as him in the lab. She had patience and technique, her methods experienced. She asked him questions as selective and sharp as the instruments she wielded. When he explained his delays with clumsiness, she remedied with precision. His insistence on repeating processes and replication met with her stern reluctance. Now she sat meters away preparing her own examination and would identify the same insidious effect of the virus.
Though he viewed the lung, he thought about the true danger to the liver and the patient’s vascular system. The virus destroyed the vessels and produced its notorious hemorrhaging as its victims suffered in fevered agony. This strain was a pantropic nightmare that hijacked the immune system and starved the body’s organs within days. A tiny vial could spread to hundreds of thousands. They now had eighteen such vials. He could see no way to destroy them without forfeiting his own life.
His partner, the woman whose name remained a mystery to him, stood and walked slowly and carefully to his station. “Can you confirm the cytopathic effect?” She shouted. Her voice barely carried between the suits and over the rushing air that filled them.
He nodded his head though the bulbous suit around him barely moved.
“Necrosis,” he said.
He stood and let her peer into the microscope. There was nothing shapely about her in these monstrous suits. In another lab he might have fancied her. She was slim and smaller than he. But here she was cold and distant. He knew almost nothing about her. He stood naked before her every day as they left the lab. It was his ritual of defiance, though he could not measure its effect. Some days she looked at him with disdain. Some she looked away. She never mocked him, never rolled her eyes. She supervised him. She did not share his fear of his captors. She was, like the guards, here out of some kind of duty. But he could not reason why she would foster such a terrible enterprise.
She stood and faced him for a moment, saying nothing. Then she began decontamination. Together they rinsed their utensils with bleach and placed them in the autoclave. They had worked barely an hour, but there was nothing more to do but wait. Kamran dreaded the lonely hours ahead in his makeshift prison. The lab at least occupied his mind. Somehow, he could forget the reality that they had created a kind of torture for him here. He nursed death in a vial to avoid boredom and loneliness, and the work almost made him happy to avoid the extreme solitude of his cell. Loneliness brought him almost physical pain, exacerbated by the guilt of what he concocted in the lab. The cycle continued each day, but each new day he found he could not retreat from it.
“Your work is almost finished,” she told him as he undressed.
“If you say so.”
“He’ll want to speak with you.”
/>
“Who?”
“Dr. Korkolis. He knows we are very close to confirming the virus’ efficacy.”
His ignorance ashamed him more than his nakedness as he stripped. His contact with others for nearly three weeks amounted to a rotation of guards and his lab partner. He knew none of their names.
“Who is Dr. Korkolis?”
“Hector. I expect he’ll want to celebrate, knowing Hector.”
“What is there to celebrate?” he mumbled.
◆◆◆
When the guard came to his room, Kamran reached for his watch where it lay on the cot beside him. Barely two hours had passed since he left the lab. In the stillness, as he stared off at the tile ceiling recalling the snowfall in the illuminated night sky at Koltsovo, he felt the hours pass as though they were days. The guard carried no meal tray. Kamran gaped at him, then stood and followed the man down the hallway, past the laboratory door and restrooms, farther than he had been in the building since his arrival. How many weeks has it been? he wondered.
The guard led him to a cafeteria room with green and cream-colored walls. Long tables surrounded by empty plastic chairs reflected narrow shafts of sunlight that pierced blinds on the windows. He squinted from its brightness after weeks living under the unnatural lights. His aching eyes adjusted, and he recognized the man he now knew as Hector Korkolis sitting at a table in the center of the room reading from a leather-bound folder.
“Dr. Khorasani, I confess it has taken far too long to fulfill my promise to you that we would continue our conversation. But as you will see, I am a man of my word. Please, sit.”
Hector nodded at the guard, and the door closed. Two covered plates steamed on the tabletop, each set with a pair of forks, a knife, and spoon. A bottle of wine wrapped tightly in a folded napkin sat between them and next to it a pair of crystal goblets. Kamran sat, mesmerized by the hint of warm food that rose up from the table. Hector set the folder down and poured a glass of wine for himself.
“Do you drink wine, doctor?”
Kamran rarely drank, but he had no compunction about alcohol. His family often drank wine. It was the savory smell from whatever awaited him beneath the plate cover that set his mouth to water. With his eyes fixed on the plate cover, his mind became preoccupied by the meal before him. He nodded.
“Excellent. I’ve let this warm slightly. I find that is best, though this vintage isn’t remarkable. Happily, the food is much better. I have an arrangement with a local chef.”
Hector poured wine into each glass and removed his own plate cover. The steam welled up around his white beard and dark eyebrows. Kamran did the same to reveal a filet of baked fish covered in garnish and something like a crepe on his plate. He reached for a fork and took a large bite into his mouth which he chewed in haste.
“I’m pleased you like it. Now, we toast.” Hector raised his glass. “To your efforts and your sacrifice, doctor.”
Kamran reached for his glass, but his hand froze and quivered. He could not toast the man who tormented him, who forced him to cultivate that terrible weapon. Hector had shamed him. True, he smiled and treated him with some respect, but then he disappeared and let his people defile and beat him. Kamran wanted to escape now more than ever. He felt still more shame for devouring the food. Again, he was weak. Sitting here before this feast, he felt more confined than he had in the sealed laboratory.
“Please, you have many doubts. I understand. And you think we have mistreated you. This I also understand. Much of it was necessary, and if I may say it, a great deal about the arrangement is fair. So, please. In vino, veritas.”
Hector raised his glass and drank, and slowly Kamran followed. The wine soothed his tongue and warmed his gullet. He would play along and hope for some alternative to reveal itself.
“You speak of truth to me now? After everything you’ve done to me? Your men beat me. You keep me here as your slave,” he said.
“You are no slave, doctor. Indeed, I intend to give you a kind of reward, most of all your survival should you meet our needs. And today, it appears you have. Your work is nearly complete. Though it is true what you say. We keep you here against your will. But for a greater purpose.”
“What purpose could you have for this? The virus will kill thousands. More than that,” Kamran said.
“Yes, the box of Pandora, unleashed upon a helpless world. Again we revisit history and myth together,” Hector said. He leaned back and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “Have I told you I am a physician? But I suppose that you have guessed.
“Many years ago, I worked for a time in Liberia. One night, I treated a man with a terribly infected gunshot wound. I knew this man by his despicable reputation as warlord and puppet of the junta. I knew this, and so I entertained letting him die of sepsis. Instead, I operated. In saving his leg, I saved his life.”
“If you are a doctor as you say, you have an obligation to save lives.”
“In this case, you are more correct than you know. My obligation was to save his life or lose my own. The warlord’s soldiers forced me to perform the surgery with their guns trained on me and my nurse. She was also my wife. For a time.”
Hector’s melodious voice faded. He nibbled a bit of fish and washed it down with the wine.
“Several months later, we came to a remote village devoid of life. Devoid of humanity, you see? Days before, the warlord and his soldiers had gathered everyone into a schoolhouse and burned them alive.”
Hector paused again to chew the seasoned fish. Kamran sat silent and stared at his food as his appetite faded.
“Smoke still rose from the school, and in the center of the building’s remains were the villagers piled on top of one another. Some at the doorway, some near the blackboard. Twisted and charred bodies stacked like charcoal. An awful sight. My wife cried for hours. I have never felt such guilt. These killers were part of the corrupt government, and I had enabled them. In my way. The Americans funded their killing sprees, all to resist the far reach of the Soviets. Madness fueled by insanity, all for the sake of control of the globe. A tragedy of mythic scale, wouldn’t you say?”
Kamran raised his eyes and shrugged. He had no notion of what to say.
“Several days later, we crossed paths again with the warlord’s handiwork. In this village, they shot some of the men and took several women. The rest they spared to terrify the neighboring villages. They did the same across the countryside, village after village buckled under their thuggery. Nowhere else did they burn everyone alive. Why? This puzzle confounded me for weeks.
“I found the answer. Or rather, it came to me. In one of these villages, we treated an older man who had visited his daughter. But he left her, believing her village cursed. He told us a sickness had spread among the villagers in just days. A terrible fever that avenged the wicked and promiscuous, he told us. Though he had not seen it, he believed the dead wept tears of blood. Can you guess?”
“Ebola,” Kamran whispered.
“Precisely. The daughter’s village had perished in the church fire. And with them, all signs of the disease vanished, save one. One of the warlord’s men had contracted the disease, and they brought him to me. My wife and I treated the man, but he died. As did my wife. I pitied them both in the end. As you know, it is a most horrible way to die.”
Hector finished his piece of fish and drank more wine.
“I am not sorry for you,” Kamran said.
Hector sighed and spoke again in his quiet tone. “You are an interesting man, Dr. Khorasani. Your pity is not the point. Answering your question is. I learned something from the warlord—something that you would do well to learn yourself. You are like the warlord, doctor. You are a puppet on a string, though you believe you act for your own sake. You speak of my obligation. What of yours? It is only to others we are obligated. Those who hold power over the world. We fool ourselves into thinking we act for ourselves. But have you not realized you have simply traded one master for another?”
“I h
ave been lied to all of my life. You are no better than any of them,” Kamran said.
“Now you are learning the lesson after all. It may surprise you that I agree. I am no better. But my associates and I offer you a crucial difference. Why is it you think we’ve gone to such lengths to bring you here? Do you think that chance? Our purpose is yours, my friend, though you do not yet accept it. We speak for the silent. Like you, I look at the world and see only those with power over the powerless. The West. The Russians. Your Ayatollah and his clerics. And we have no aims for such power. We seek disruption. We seek the void of power so that others fill it. Others whose time is long overdue. And you, Dr. Khorasani, are the means to that disruption.”
“The means to killing you mean.”
“If you like. You think your judgment makes you a better man, doctor. More principled than us. More merciful, perhaps, than the warlord. I once shared your sentiment until the warlord taught me otherwise. I do not judge you for it. I tell you this truly. Understand the consequences of your position. It is a trick of philosophy, and nothing more. You lift yourself above us, but an ineluctable reality remains. You count yourself among the powerless because you are unwilling to act.”
Kamran’s face twitched at Hector’s words. The rage within him had lingered for weeks after every sadistic thing they had done to him. The beatings distorted his face. He sat in agony, unable to sleep. The only void they had created were the endless hours of solitude where his spirit died again and again until the pain of it became as real as the ache in his back. Hector was right that he was powerless, and for this he had felt ashamed since he could remember. Hector offered him something greater, though not as he intended. Kamran hated Hector and his vile comrades more than he hated himself, and this freed him of the last grasp of his shame.
The Hidden Vector: A Spy Thriller Page 22
