The Hidden Vector: A Spy Thriller

by Mathew Snyder

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  Ethan lost all direction as a pair of men dragged him down the tiled hallways. He had no memory of how he left the room. His vision blurred, and he focused only on the throbbing in his head. His feet dragged along the floor as they passed door after door in the sprawling facility. He had to get out. He heard the voice of the bearded man somewhere ahead of him, but the words joined the keening between his ears in a senseless jumble of noise and pain.

  They passed a door that was unlike the others, all brushed steel and framed in black rubber. There they turned one last time into the hallway of laboratories where they kept him earlier. At least he knew where he was.

  With effort he lifted his head and found staring back at him through a narrow pane of glass an emaciated man with dark hair and whiskers. The man’s breath bloomed on the window as he watched intently from behind the closed door. Ethan blinked to clear his vision, but the man vanished. Only the fading fog of the man’s breath remained on the door’s tiny window.

  The guards left the man in the next room, just a few paces from where he’d caught sight of the fellow prisoner. Ethan lay with a grunt on a cot with his arms and legs dangling over the side. He wanted to throw himself against the laboratory door that locked him away. They were going to kill Sarah, and there was nothing he could do. He groaned at the thought, unable to move from the pain in his head and his back. He needed a minute to breathe. Then he would get out of there.

  He awoke hours later in the darkened room to a tapping sound. Forgetting where he was, he squinted at the speckled tiles in the ceiling above trying to make sense of his surroundings. Somehow, he had turned over in the cot. His head swam. The pressure on his back reminded him of the interrogation. He sat up to find the noise ticking somewhere outside of the hornet’s nest buzzing in his brain.

  Out the door’s narrow window, he saw a sliver of one guard’s profile leaning against a perpendicular wall. The portly guard wore a dark, nondescript uniform. At his belt dangled a plastic badge and a sidearm holstered tight above his black pants. Ethan backed away from the window and turned to find the tapping that seemed to echo from overhead.

  He climbed on top of a counter along the side wall and followed the sound. He crouched along the bare wall where the tapping continued in an unsteady metallic rhythm. Near the back wall he found its origin. The ticking sound came from a vent set high in the wall. He pressed himself into the corner, his ear inches from the vent. A thin, high whisper accompanied the tapping.

  “Are you there? Hello?” said the voice.

  “Who are you?” Ethan whispered.

  “You are there? You are American?”

  Ethan heard a pinched voice, and he knew its owner.

  “Yes, I’m American. Are you Kamran Khorasani?”

  The tapping ceased, and the voice stopped. Ethan waited for the response as his muscles strained to hold his head up to the vent. He watched the door and listened.

  “Yes,” Kamran said. “What is your name?”

  “Ethan.”

  “It is you. They tell me you are with the CIA. Is this true?”

  Ethan considered the consequence of telling an Iranian bioweapon expert the truth, a consequence that he would realize only if he lived and escaped.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then your CIA men will come for us. I will give myself up to them.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Ethan said. No one knew where he was. Wade and Russell could be dead. And none of them knew about the virus.

  “Then they will kill both of us. It is almost over now,” Kamran said.

  “What do you mean over? Do they have the virus?”

  “It is too late. They took the samples today. I think they will use these. I mean to say on people. Many will die.”

  Ethan strained to hear him through the duct work like a child’s game of tin can and string where Kamran pronounced every syllable in his unpracticed English from the other side of the wall and he deciphered the signal.

  “Kamran. About the virus. I need to know everything you can tell me about it. How much do they have?”

  Ethan waited for answers but heard nothing. In the suspended moments that followed he heard tiny sobs echo from the vent, a sad and human sound very different from the tapping that woke him.

  “You still there?”

  “You are the first person to say my name since I can remember,” Kamran said. He became quiet again for a time. “What day is today?”

  “Friday,” Ethan answered. He looked for the watch that no longer wrapped his wrist. They took it from him along with his belt. “It’s June twenty-first.”

  “It seems much longer than that,” Kamran said.

  “I need you to tell me about the virus.”

  “If it will help.”

  “Anything will help. What is it? How does it spread? Can it be treated?”

  “It is a specialized virus. A strain of Marburg the Russians built. You know Marburg?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “It is like Ebola. Everyone knows Ebola. But this virus is special. Very deadly and also very quick. But it is not so easy to spread around. This is very difficult. And they do not have much of it. Eighteen vials. No more. But it is enough.”

  “Can it be treated?”

  “No. That is, yes. That was my job. Before I came here. I made a treatment. It is effective. But I have no more of this. I have taken all of it myself.”

  “You had the virus? And you survived?”

  He recalled his blurred view of Kamran through the door’s window. He may have survived, but the disease had taken its toll in flesh. He had a cadaver’s face.

  “Yes. I injected myself. To hide it. But I destroyed the rest at VECTOR. No one should have this.”

  “So that’s how they got their hands on it? Through you?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. I did not bring it to them. I thought there was a journalist. Someone who could help me prove what we had created. But these people. They … what is the word? They stole me.”

  “Kidnapped.”

  “Yes, kidnapped. That is what they did. You must believe me.”

  “Can you make more treatment? If we get out of here, can you make more?”

  “Yes. But this takes much time. Many months.”

  Sarah didn’t have months. How did it come to this, the entire operation outpaced by something so impossible to hide? Yet Scorpio remained ahead of him at every step, and now when it mattered most to him he could do nothing. He saw her face and the twin corners of her smile. He heard the little laugh she reserved for him when they were alone. She saved that laugh for someone else now. He remembered her in their bed sleeping in her green pajamas the last time he left the country before it all went wrong. He punched the wall. The flesh on his knuckles slapped with a dull thud.

  “Mr. Ethan?”

  “Months is too long, Kamran. They are going to kill someone I care about.”

  “I am sorry for this. I would make this right. Who is it you care about?”

  “My wife,” he said. He shook his head, though Kamran could not see it. “Ex-wife.”

  “I do not know what it is to have a wife. But I know what it is like to watch someone you love die. Killed by people you hate. I … I am very sorry.”

  “I have to help her. What else can you tell me? How will they use the virus?”

  “I do not know. But I think I know where they will take it.”

  “Where?”

  “A ship. With many people.”

  “Like a cruise ship?”

  “Yes, a cruise ship. I saw a catalog, and I thought this a very strange thing for Dr. Korkolis to have.”

  “Korkolis?”

  “Yes, the man with white hair.”

  He had a name, which meant he once again had a target.

  “What ship?”

  “I cannot remember the name. It was like Asia. Or Astra? Aria? Yes, Aria.”

  Ethan clung to his words, desperate for any chance he
could find her.

  “Kamran, we have to get out of here. To do that, we have to work together.”

  “I will try,” Kamran said.

  Chapter 20: Shed Blood

  Brașov, Romania

  7:00 a.m., Saturday, June 22

  Despite everything he told himself, Kamran feared his own death. Hector used this fear against him. Kamran wanted more than anything to flee from this place and the stale stink of his little prison. He shed blood for them, then shed his pride. He committed a deed too terrible to admit, and he hated himself for this even more now that it was real. A woman would die, and more after her. This was a debt he could not repay. But more than any of these things he wanted to run from everyone and be free of his fears.

  He sat on his cot and ignored the familiar pain in his spine. On the other side of the far wall, this man named Ethan urged him to escape. They would do it together, Ethan told him. He had listened to Ethan explain how the magnetic locks worked and how they were built to keep intruders out, not keep prisoners in. If Kamran could sneak something in his cell to wedge between the electromagnet and the door plate he could get out.

  But the guard stood outside his door day and night. Sometimes the heavy man stood watch, sometimes it was others. Kamran couldn’t overpower any of them. They had guns. He needed Ethan’s help to break free.

  Perhaps Ethan was just another of Hector’s tricks. But he could do nothing about that. It served no purpose for Hector to fool him now. Kamran had nothing more to offer. They could take his life now that he’d outlasted his usefulness in Hector’s plan. No, he had to trust the American. He was the only way out.

  Kamran stood at the door and inspected the lock. It was as Ethan had described to him. A box of steel as long as his forearm hung from the top of the door frame. In forty-four days, he had never bothered to look. He hadn’t even pressed hard against the door. He ran his fingers along the lock and wondered if he had the strength to wedge something into a seam so tight.

  Just outside his room, the guard rubbed his eyes and stared at the floor while he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Kamran was no threat to the guard. For weeks they saw him only as a coward too afraid to resist. Day after day their senses dulled, awaiting his demise. For weeks he played this part. Now their complacency was his only weapon against them.

  The morning hour arrived. The guard shook his head from his drowsy vigil and escorted Kamran to the toilet. On the return Kamran stopped at the containment lab doorway and waited for the guard to open the door.

  “What are you doing? You are not working there today,” the guard said.

  They had different plans for him then. Through the circular window he saw his lab partner’s things hanging from her usual spot. Hector had said she was his daughter, and he wondered which parent taught her such predictability. She hung her white lab coat on the hook second from left along the back wall, then draped her scarf so that the tips hung at the same length on either side. Every day the arrangement was exact. She was in the lab now, but he had to risk it.

  “I am to help Dr. Korkolis cleanse the lab,” he said.

  “She said nothing to me.”

  The guard confirmed it. She was Hector’s daughter.

  “Yes, but,” he stammered. “They said I did not have to. But the risk for contamination is lower. I mean if I help her. Perhaps she thought I would decline. I am sorry. I did not understand I had to inform anyone. I was waiting.”

  Kamran lowered his shoulders and looked to the floor.

  The guard peeked inside and scowled. Kamran had grown used to his grunts of disgust. He waited for the guard to act next. The guard waved his badge over the gray panel to enter the lab. The panel chirped, and Kamran watched as the card retracted on a string to the guard’s belt where it dangled above his right hip next to his pistol.

  “Do what you want. For now,” the guard said.

  The door sealed behind him and he moved to his usual spot. The guard did not follow, a bit of fortune he didn’t expect. His fingers faltered as he hurried to undress and step into the same jade green scrubs he’d worn for weeks. Overhead, the black orb that concealed a camera recorded his routine.

  In the shower he lingered under the hot water to build his nerve. Here was one place the cameras did not reach, a respite from Hector’s watching eyes. This was an advantage if he could manage it. For now, the water calmed his tingling skin as he inhaled the steam and cleared his sinuses to breathe deeper.

  With effort, he donned the blue containment suit. Once within, it drowned out the incessant hum of the facility with its hiss of pressured air. The sound had come to comfort him these weeks. Like a Pavlovian creature, he associated the rushing air with solitude and a kind of peace. Within the suit, they could not yell at him. Inside the lab, he had no fear of their torture or the unbearable boredom of his makeshift cell. He retreated into a place his tormentors dared not go. Except for her.

  He found her in the alpha lab. Seated at one of the hoods she arranged a series of plastic vials, each unpacked from a cylinder container. More than a dozen packages filled her station in uniform rows across the steel counter. Kamran stood and watched her prepare the miniature assembly line where she would soon bottle up the last of his viral samples and place them in the latched cooler at her feet.

  He stepped closer. Dr. Korkolis sensed him then. She jumped and pressed herself against the counter, knocking askew the small vials and boxes with her arm.

  “What are you doing here?” she shouted over the white noise within her suit. Her eyes flared at him, startled and angry.

  “I came to assist you.”

  She crimped the hose to her suit to deaden the noise. “I gave no instruction for that. Grigore should not have let you in.”

  “Yes, I realize. I thought I could assist you. Please. It gives me something to do. I can help you.”

  Her scowl softened. She considered his offer, looking around the lab.

  “Very well. Cleanse the hood over there. The instruments as well.” She pointed to a station where he had worked many times. “I will handle the samples. You will not touch them.”

  “I understand.”

  He snagged the nearest dangling umbilical hose to maintain the pressure in his suit and sat at the station. With a disinfectant rinse, he wiped away any microscopic traces of his work. Her directions could only mean they were leaving the laboratory and moving the last samples. They never meant to destroy them as she once suggested to him. He felt foolish for ever believing the idea. They could move them with ease for more terrible plans, or even sell them to high bidders seeking even worse.

  From a panel under the hood, he transported the instruments to the autoclave. In a small plastic tray, he divided the forceps and spatulas from the scalpels. He needed only one. With one slim piece of surgical steel he could escape. He could even defend himself with its razor edge. He placed the tools in the autoclave and spun the door clamp shut.

  At her station, Dr. Korkolis returned with the virus samples. She placed each of the plastic vials into a cylinder, six at a time. Kamran moved closer to observe her.

  “What are you doing?” She focused on the vials as she spoke, her voice barely audible between their suits.

  “So, you are moving them?”

  She did not answer. He moved closer to her.

  “Why did you not tell me you are his daughter?” he asked.

  “As I said then, our work here would be easier if you did not know. He should not have told you.”

  She turned her stool to face him.

  “I am very like my father,” he said. It was true in most ways, though he lacked his father’s temperament. “But you are nothing like yours. You must be very like your mother.”

  Her scowl returned.

  “How dare you. You know nothing about me. I am like him in every way. My father is a great man. Far greater than a pathetic creature like you. Return to your work and keep silent.”

  “Or what? You will hurt
me? Kill me here? Mock me when I undress as you have every day since I came here? You can do nothing more to me that is not already planned. I am right. I know it.”

  She stood and pointed with the whole of her hand.

  “Return to your work.”

  He wanted to hurt her. He could think of no reply for her stern words, and his arms tensed as resentment surged through him like a wave of heat. He imagined taking the scalpel and tearing her suit or severing its umbilical hose. He could use the scalpel on her even, if it came to it. He could do this because he hated her in that moment. She was like every woman he had worked with. All of them thought him pathetic. It was the same in Koltsovo. Their pity was worse than the contempt the guards had for him. He hated them for it.

  But it wasn’t true. He could not hate them. He desired them. He wanted to be with them, to possess them and they him. They had such intelligence. How could a woman like her be part of infecting thousands? Perhaps she was like him, swayed by the words of her father. Hector brainwashed her, just as his own father’s tirades had made him like he was now. Don’t let her do this, he thought.

  He could say nothing to stop her. He could only escape. Let someone else stop her. He obeyed her command and returned to disinfect the other areas of the lab while the instruments sterilized in the autoclave. He needed only twenty minutes more while she bundled up the last of the vials into innocuous little boxes labeled as insulin.

  The autoclave’s timer counted away the minutes while he disinfected another hood’s workspace. Overhead he felt the watching lens of the camera that seemed to domineer the sterile whiteness of the laboratory. He kept his eyes from the camera. Just a few minutes more. Once the instruments cooled, he could hide the scalpel in his hand. But if they left the lab together, she would see. He hoped whoever manned the cameras would not notice the thing in his hand. The timer moved too fast for his thoughts.

  He had to leave before her. She would never leave him alone in there, not after what he had said to her minutes earlier. Even if she did, she would wait for him. He could conceal the scalpel if he was alone.