by Alex Ryan
The remaining 90 percent of the collection was for creating nanobot “vaccines.” Inoculations would be reserved for Commander Zhang’s Snow Leopard commandos, who were presently canvassing the city for Chen Qing, and for emergency first responders, who would be conducting lifesaving operations at “Ground Zero” in the event Qing launched a bioterror attack in Beijing. When Major Li asked her how many doses she thought could be harvested, she’d said she estimated around two hundred.
Her plan had offered Li a solution for both his short-term and long-term agendas—giving him the opportunity to be the savior of Beijing but also control over a powerful new weapon on which to build his career. She’d sold the lie so effectively that she almost convinced herself of the plan’s merits.
Almost.
In reality, she used all the harvested nanobots to make two vaccine doses—a primary and a backup. Even with the higher concentration, she did not know if the population of good nanobots was sufficient to counteract an infection. Hell, she wasn’t even sure her idea would work at all. Hers was not a “vaccine” in the conventional sense of the word. Her vaccine was simply a collection of nanobots that had already made the transition from infection mode to apoptotic phagocytosis mode. Simply put, the nanobots she planned to inject were those carrying out their final program mode of finding and killing other nanobots. Her plan was to wage a nanobot war, and the battlefield was the human body. The invading army would be met head-on by an identical defending army. The soldiers in both armies were the same mass, moved at the same speed, and would be equipped with the same armor. Unfortunately, her army of defending nanobots possessed one major disadvantage compared to the invading nanobots: the infecting nanobots replicate, while the defending nanobots consume indiscriminately . . . including themselves.
Victory was a numbers game.
For her vaccine to work, the inoculating dose would need to be orders of magnitude larger than the exposure dose. To further complicate matters, the injection would need to be administered immediately prior to exposure—early enough to circulate the bots through the body but not so early that they would have time to consume each other to extinction before the infection occurred. Ordinarily, she would test her hypothesis by performing dozens, if not hundreds, of computational simulations. If the simulations demonstrated proof of concept, next she would conduct bench-scale testing in media. After that, she would conduct rodent trials . . . and so on and so on. But these were not ordinary circumstances, and instead of months to prepare, she had only hours. This was simply the best she could do.
Am I just as crazy as Qing? she wondered.
Hopefully, none of this would be necessary. Qing would be captured and arrested before getting the chance to do the unthinkable. The city would be safe, and she could go back to her old life . . . no, not her old life. Her old life was over.
There is no going back. There is only tomorrow.
To get to tomorrow, she had to make it through today. To make it through today, she had to stop Qing. As much as she wanted to place that burden entirely on the very capable shoulders of Commander Zhang and his elite squad of Snow Leopards, her gut told her that to do so would be a mistake. They would not find Qing unless he let them. If he let them find him, then it would be a trap, and a lot of very brave men would die agonizing, gruesome deaths. No, she knew what she had to do. One final deception to set things right.
Only hours ago, she had confessed to Li and Zhang that she didn’t know her husband—that the real Chen Qing had deceived her for years. But that was only a half truth. The whole truth was that she had deceived herself. All the signs had been present, but she had chosen to ignore them. She had chosen to minimize, rationalize, or excuse every disturbing behavior and belief that Qing exhibited. Somewhere along the way, she had subconsciously decided that being married to a lie was better than being married to a monster. Divorce had never been an option with Qing. He was a sociopath—a charming, brilliant, cruel, obsessive megalomaniac. For him, life was a game of seduction and domination, obedience and punishment. With time, she’d learned the tools to coexist as his wife: appeasement, flattery, and submission. Stroke Qing’s ego and stay out of his business affairs, and he was happy to leave her to her own pursuits. Over the past few years, Qing’s workload and responsibilities as CEO at INI had skyrocketed, just as her own workload and responsibilities had at the CDC. Seventy-hour workweeks were not uncommon for both of them. Add travel on top of that and, well, they practically never saw each other anymore. That separation had given her a false sense of security. Qing was still Qing, and the power and wealth he had accumulated were only fueling his pathological tendencies. Yet, despite everything he had done over the years to dominate and manipulate her, she would never have thought him capable of murder. He was a sociopath, yes, but a psychopath? Four days ago, she would have said no, but now the evidence was damning.
She checked the time. Li would be arriving to collect the vaccines within the next twenty minutes, which meant it was time to leave now. She packed the inoculation canisters in a cryogenic container and then sent a text message to Nick:
Wake up. Time to go.
His response came in seconds:
Ready here. What’s the plan?
She exhaled with relief. That was the response she had been hoping for. With Nick Foley at her side, she could do this. Hopefully, when she told him her plan, he would understand.
She typed her answer:
The plan is simple. Stop Qing and save Beijing.
Chapter 35
Guangao Railway Station parking lot
Two miles east of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
0930 hours local
Rage yielded to tedium and tedium to exhaustion. Lankford had been swimming against the current over the last twenty-four hours, and now the undertow was beginning to drag him down. His head bobbed with microsleep. He slapped at his cheeks, but it only helped for a minute before the fog of sleep settled back in.
He had never been a stakeout kind of agent. He had spent most of his time with the CIA hunting Muslim terrorist wack jobs across the desert with the US Special Forces, not in the cloak-and-dagger world that had lured him to the Agency in the first place. Ironic that only now, when he was too old to care, would he finally get a taste of the cold war surveillance game. Doubly ironic, he mused, that his surveillance target was a product of the very US Special Forces he had come to respect and depend on during the breadth of his career.
He yawned and glanced at his watch and then over at the screen on his tablet computer, where the blue dot of Nick Foley’s phone still pulsed on a map in the Chinese CDC complex two miles away. He looked out the window at the nearby train station terminal building and wondered if there was a coffee kiosk inside. A jolt of espresso might revitalize him, but to get it, he would have to leave the tablet behind. The tablet was his only lifeline to Foley, so he reminded himself not to break the cardinal rule of modern espionage.
Thou shalt not be separated from one’s tech.
He was just so damn tired.
Screw coffee, he decided. I’m gonna start smoking again.
He checked the glove box for cigarettes, but then he remembered how Jamie Lin had rummaged through all his possessions and thrown every pack away. She’d even found all his supersecret hidden stashes.
He couldn’t help but smile at the memory.
He tried moving his legs to get the blood circulating. He pinched the skin on the side of his thighs and squeezed the pressure point between his thumb and index finger, but it didn’t help. Finally, he did what he told himself he would not do—he let his thoughts drift back to Jamie Lin’s naked, eviscerated corpse abandoned on the bathroom floor. The poor kid’s parents would not even be given the closure of a proper burial. When Jamie Lin’s body was discovered by the Chinese authorities, it would be cremated.
He clenched his jaw and sat up tall in his seat.
Anger always trumps drowsiness.
He s
tared at the blue dot: blink, blink, blink, blink . . .
That was the only possible explanation for the ex–Navy SEAL being here—at the Chinese fucking CDC—mere hours after Jamie Lin’s gruesome murder and autopsy. Nick Foley was a traitor. Lankford had asked the boys at Langley to make poignant inquiries around the independent contractors to see if anyone wanted to claim a prodigal son, and still the answer that came back was a big fat fucking goose egg. In Lankford’s mind, this confirmed the SEAL’s traitor status. Foley had gone off the reservation and was now working with evil forces inside China on something terrifying. Now he, Chet Lankford, was the only one who could stop him. While the thought of blowing his nonofficial cover on an American operator gone rogue was not something he would normally risk, the stakes in this case were too high. Time was running out, and he was the only one close enough to the situation to do anything about it. Was there a chance that he was wrong about Foley? Yes. Was there a chance that Foley was so black within the community that even the director of the CIA did not have knowledge of his task force or his mission? Yes. There was always a chance, but it was a candle burning in a fucking hurricane chance. And now it was too late. If someone important wanted to keep their guy safe and in play, then that someone should have spoken up.
No one did.
Lankford had his marching orders from Virginia: confront Foley and decide whether to assist or eliminate. The split-second, life-or-death decision was Lankford’s to make. God pray his instincts were right. But nothing could happen while Foley was inside the Chinese fucking CDC. Lankford assumed Foley was with the female Chinese doctor. No new information had returned on her either—no surprise there, since Jamie Lin had been the one running her.
Nothing about this entire situation made any damn sense.
His tablet computer beeped.
He glanced at the screen and watched as the blue dot flashed three times and then became brighter. Lankford’s pulse jumped, and he relished the adrenaline surge that followed. Better than caffeine, better than nicotine, better than rage—he was amped up and ready to go. Foley was on the move. Lankford started the engine.
The tracking parameters were set at a tight five-meter radius; that way he could track Foley easily whether he was in a vehicle or on foot. Based on the speed of movement, Lankford knew Foley was in a car. He watched the dot for several seconds to verify the heading. If the blue dot headed east on the government extension of Fuxue Road or south on Longshui Road, he would wait and then fall in behind. If it headed west to pick up the Province Road 216 south back into downtown or north to God only knows where, he would have to haul ass to catch up. He waited a moment and the blue dot paused, then it headed toward the CDC exit north of the complex and then . . . headed west.
Shit!
Lankford moved the gearshift into low and accelerated out of the train station parking lot. He was going to fall behind and would need to catch up. He wanted to ID the vehicle while Foley was still outside downtown, ideally on the highway. He needed to get close enough to make a visual and verify that the blue dot was really Foley. That was the problem with tracking phones instead of targets: decoys and diversions could mean game over at any second. Unfortunately, in this case, Lankford had no choice. It was follow Foley’s phone or go home.
If Foley was still carrying the phone he had made contact on, the guy was either arrogant or sloppy. Or maybe, just maybe, he wanted Lankford to find him. The thought made the CIA agent purse his lips. Was it possible that Foley was under duress? Perhaps he was a prisoner and was counting on Lankford to track him. In his tired and emotional state, he had not even considered that possibility. Different scenarios began playing out in his mind. What if in his haste to mete out retribution for Jamie Lin’s murder, he killed an innocent man? Or what if in stopping Foley, he prevented a deeply embedded black operative from stopping another bioterrorism event? He better be damn sure he got this right, because the truth was he had no idea who all the players were, nor what objectives they were working to accomplish. An error in judgment could cost thousands—hell, maybe even millions—of lives.
No pressure, he thought, shaking his head. Just another day at the office.
Gripping the steering wheel with his left hand, he adjusted the tablet on the seat beside him. The blue dot was merging onto the expressway and turning south, back toward downtown Beijing. He had closed the gap a little, but he needed to make up more ground. Lankford merged onto the highway and accelerated cautiously. He glanced frequently at the tablet as he sped south, the distance between his red icon and the blue dot getting shorter and shorter. As they passed the exit for Shahe, the highway changed names from Province Road 216 to Badaling Highway. The tablet chirped and a note box appeared, informing him he was now five hundred meters from the target.
Minutes later, he had closed within thirty meters.
Lankford scanned the vehicles ahead. The traffic was heavy, but he managed to narrow the field of possibles down to five vehicles. He slowed and matched speed with the group: two trucks, two sedans, and one black SUV. If he were Foley, he’d have picked the boxy, silver sedan that was in the lead. Low profile and ubiquitous. The silver sedan was moving faster, pulling away from the other four vehicles in the cluster, but a glance at his tablet showed the blue dot holding steady at about forty meters, so he could nix that car. He also nixed the two semitrucks, as they were unlikely candidates.
That left the green sedan and the black Mercedes SUV.
He moved into the far left lane and accelerated slowly past the two trucks. The sedan—a faded-green four door that in the States would be a very 1970s color—occupied the far right lane, and the SUV was just ahead of it and in the center lane.
The rising sun in the east put a wicked glare on the rear window of the sedan, making it impossible for him to make out anyone in the car. He inched forward until the flash disappeared, and he made out two adults riding in the front seats. He pursed his lips. He had expected Foley to be alone, but maybe the CDC doctor had decided to tag along. He shifted his attention to the SUV. The windows were tinted—too dark to see inside.
He needed a clear look inside the green sedan, but he was already too close for comfort.
He eased up on the gas, drifted back, and moved into the center lane. Over the next few minutes, he strained to catch a glimpse of the sedan driver in the side view mirror, but it was no use. In a few more minutes, they would be coming into downtown, and already the traffic density was picking up. A fast-moving BMW, weaving through traffic, passed him and then moved into the right lane behind the green sedan, blocking his view.
“Shit,” he mumbled under his breath.
As they approached North Wuhuan Road, the expressway gained an exit lane and the sedan moved right into the new fourth lane. Lankford worried the car would take the exit. The BMW accelerated, moving even with the green sedan, blocking his view of the turn signal.
His pulse jumped as he debated what to do. Braking and changing two lanes would call attention to himself. With a single glance, Foley would recognize him. Just being the tall white guy in a car on Badaling Highway was enough to get a double take from most of the other drivers. Most Western tourists and businessmen did not drive themselves around in Beijing. He took his foot off the accelerator and changed lanes, moving into the right lane behind the BMW. He glanced right and saw that the green sedan was now behind him. The exit was less than two hundred meters away. He still had time to take the exit by swerving in front of the sedan.
He glanced in his rearview mirror, looking through the windshield of the green sedan.
Driver male. Passenger female.
That’s gotta be Foley and the doctor.
He jerked the steering wheel right, swerving into the exit lane.
He glanced at the tablet just to be sure.
The blue dot was ahead of him—thirty meters according to the message box.
Shit! It’s the SUV.
He jerked the wheel back to left, barely missing the exit
guardrail. His palms were sweating. He smirked and shook his head.
Jesus, that was close.
Foley, or at least his phone, was heading into downtown Beijing.
With the target identified, Lankford opened his range and followed at a safer distance. At Madian Park, Badaling Highway ended and became Deshengmenwai Avenue—the main artery into the city. Traffic slowed to a crawl. Following Foley’s SUV while maintaining adequate separation was easy now; he would only need the tablet in the unlikely event he lost visual contact. They inched through the city and then headed southeast toward the business district.
I’ve got you now, you son of a bitch.
He tapped the nine-millimeter in his belt and smiled.
Twenty minutes later, they were back in the familiar Chaoyang district. To Lankford’s surprise, Foley appeared to be heading to Grandma’s Restaurant—a popular hang-out for Western expats in Beijing, especially Americans and Brits. Over the past year, Lankford had become a regular—stopping in whenever he had a craving for bacon and eggs, cheeseburgers, or fried shrimp. He paused at the south corner of the parking lot that served the restaurant and several other businesses on the block and watched the SUV. It would be torture sitting in his car and smelling breakfast wafting out of Grandma’s.
What the hell was Foley doing?
Instead of pulling into the one of the many empty spots in front or on the south side of the restaurant, the SUV swung west to the rear of the building. They parked twenty meters away and the taillights clicked off, but no one exited the vehicle. Were they meeting someone? Was Foley watching someone else?
