Target Zero

by Jack Mars

  Sirens wailed in the distance; it was the police, either on their way to the Athens Grand or to their location. Maybe both.

  “Let’s go,” Watson said. “Cops and Interpol will be all over that hotel any minute, if they’re not already. We’ll need to see if Maria and Carver came up with anything.”

  Reid didn’t argue, even when Watson climbed behind the wheel. The three of them were silent as they headed back to the Athens Grand. Once they were within radio range again, Reid tried Maria. “Johansson? You copy?”

  “I’m here,” she said quietly over the radio. “So is Interpol, and Greek authorities. They’re not happy. They said there was a car crash…?”

  “In a manner of speaking. We’re fine. Did you find anything?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, but her voice sounded tight and anxious. “We found something. Get back here as fast as you can.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Are you nearly finished yet?” the Syrian asked irritably. The thin, wiry man—the one that Khalil had labeled a “specialist”—had been sharpening a wickedly curved hunting knife for the past thirty minutes, rubbing the blade back and forth on the edge of the rough-surfaced worktable, much to Adrian’s irritation.

  “Nearly,” Adrian told him. Both men wore decontamination suits in the basement of the tailor’s shop in Marseille, Adrian Cheval’s makeshift laboratory, as he completed the necessary containment of the smallpox samples.

  “You told Imam Khalil you would need only until morning. It is nearly ten a.m. What is taking so long?” The man spoke much better French than his partner, the one who was holding Claudette hostage. Adrian wondered if she had been taken somewhere, if she was okay in the hands of that monster.

  “I said at least morning,” Adrian replied sharply. “Impatience is a fatal shortcoming in my line of work.”

  “And restlessness is one in mine,” the man grunted.

  Adrian looked up from the RNA model displayed on his laptop screen. “You must know that this is not the way. What Khalil is planning to do with this is an abomination—”

  “It is none of my business,” said the man brusquely. “As long as I am paid.”

  Adrian scoffed. “And what happens when your friends and loved ones are dying around you? When you feel yourself growing nauseous? When you cough and there is blood in your hands? What will your money do then to save you?”

  The man simply shrugged. “It will get me to Borneo.”

  “Borneo. You think you will be safe there?”

  “I suppose we’ll see.” The wiry man returned his attention to his knife.

  Adrian could see there would be no changing the man’s mind. It was not the first or even the second time during the night and morning that he had tried, but it would be the last. He typed away on the computer’s keyboard, attempting to look busy, but really he was only feigning progress. The samples had been ready for hours—in fact, they had been prepared even before Imam Khalil’s men had returned and taken him and his beloved Claudette hostage. But the sadist standing guard did not seem to have a clue what Adrian was doing, so he pretended to still be at work.

  He was wasting time in an effort to come up with a plan.

  The longer they remained down in the lab, the more time Adrian had to think, and he had come to some conclusions that had previously been muddled by his emotions and concern for his misguided love.

  The most important of his conclusions was also the simplest. There was no reason for Khalil and his people to keep Adrian alive once he was done.

  He had argued the usage of the virus. He had told them that the lethality and virulence was unintended. He had begged Khalil against using it. He had, effectively, doomed himself and probably Claudette already. He put himself in the shoes of the Syrians; if he were them, he would fear that as soon as they left with the virus he might call the authorities, even anonymously, and report it.

  Any way that he considered it, any angle at which he took the facts, it was clear that he had outlived his usefulness as soon as the virus was prepared. And Claudette, his dear, sweet beautiful Claudette, she knew too much.

  And so Adrian delayed for as long as he could, pretending to work while his captor grew more and more impatient. Soon, however, he would have to act. The problem was that while he knew the virus had to be destroyed, even if it meant his life, he refused to subject Claudette to the same fate.

  But maybe I don’t have to. The Syrian sadist had a knife and a gun. The knife hadn’t left his hands since they had put on the clean suits. The gun, the silver pistol he had stuck in Adrian’s face in the alley, sat upon the far edge of the long wooden workbench, within arm’s reach of the man.

  If he could distract the Syrian long enough to get the gun, he could shoot him. But the report would be loud—loud enough not only to alert those upstairs, but also the Syrian’s partner. Adrian would not have enough time to kill the man and then destroy the virus; it would have to be the other way around.

  He had a failsafe for destroying the virus, if necessary, and as most things go, the simplest answer was generally the best one. High on a shelf to the right of the workbench was a glass bottle filled with a yellowish fluid—pure chlorine in liquid form. It would kill the virus the instant it was exposed to the toxic chemical, but was also incredibly dangerous; to open the bottle in an enclosed space like the basement without the aid of the respirator would cause unconsciousness in seconds, and death in under a minute…

  That’s it , Adrian thought. The chlorine. It would be, as they say, two birds with one stone. He quickly formulated a new plan in his mind: Distract the Syrian. Open the chlorine. Tear the man’s mask from his face. Confirm he is dead. Destroy the virus. Take the gun. Kill the other Arab, and free Claudette.

  It was remarkably simple—but again, he realized, the right answer often was.

  Even so, it took him another ten minutes to gather his courage and remind himself that he was capable, intelligent, and strong-willed. “I need assistance,” he told the sadist.

  The man raised an eyebrow. “Doing what?”

  “I cannot manipulate the strain and watch for the proper mutation at the same time,” Adrian said. That was, of course, a pseudoscientific lie, but the Syrian would not know that. “All I need you to do is look through the microscope as I alter the RNA sequence, and describe what occurs.”

  The sadist groaned irritably and made a big show of rising from his stool. “And then you will be finished?”

  Adrian nodded. “Yes.”

  “Fine.” The man bent at the waist and put his face to the lens of the microscope. What he was seeing was a slide of inert variola major . He could stare for decades and nothing would happen. “That is what it looks like up close?”

  “Yes,” Adrian confirmed, “and I want you to watch the leftmost edge of the cells, the bubble-shaped end of what looks like a barbell. Do you see that?”

  The man hesitated a moment, but nodded. “I see it.”

  “Good.” Adrian tapped a few useless keys on his computer, pretending to influence the virus in some way (and hoping that the man did not realize that a laptop computer could not, in fact, mutate a virus). “Anything?” he asked.

  “No,” said the Syrian. “Not a thing. What will it do? Will it move?”

  “You’ll know when you see it.” He tapped a few more keys. “It may take just a bit of time… don’t take your eyes from it.” As soon as he said it, he twisted and reached up over his head for the bottle of chlorine on the shelf to his right.

  There was one thing that Adrian Cheval did not account for. Ordinarily, with his face pressed to the microscope lenses, the Syrian’s entire field of vision would have been obscured. But with the respirator mask over his face, he had a small margin of periphery, and he saw Adrian’s movement.

  At the same time that Adrian turned for the poisonous gas that would destroy the virus, the Slav twisted as well, away from the microscope with the hunting knife still firmly in his fist. As Adrian reached, h
e knelt, and in one fluid motion he slid the knife into the meaty back of Adrian’s thigh and out again.

  The Frenchman’s fingers grazed the glass bottle of chlorine as a pain like a thousand angry wasps seized his thigh. He cried out sharply as his leg crumpled beneath him and he collapsed to a heap on the floor, bleeding amply.

  Both his hands clamped desperately around the wound as blood eked between his fingers. His sliced thigh stung acutely, but even more worrisome was the hole in his decontamination suit. Desperately he realized that he would not be able to open the hermetically sealed vials of smallpox to destroy them, or he would risk putting himself at jeopardy.

  The Syrian sadist stood over him, the blade of his knife wet with blood. He shook his head sadly. “The Imam was right,” he said in French. “You are brilliant. But that is the flaw with people such as yourself; you assume everyone else is an idiot.” He chuckled lightly. “I assumed you would make a move. But to do so in such glaring fashion, Adrian, it’s just… well, honestly, it’s just disrespectful.”

  Adrian sucked sharp breaths through his gritted teeth, through the burning pain in his thigh. The Syrian knelt beside him.

  “Move your hand. Let me see,” he instructed.

  Adrian did so, sliding one hand just slightly from the wound. As soon as he did, a thin stream of blood spurted forth. He gasped and quickly clamped down on it again.

  He knew precisely what that meant.

  The Syrian clucked his tongue. “Hmm. It looks like I nicked your femoral artery. That’s not a good sign. One moment.” He rose and crossed the basement, where the tailor stored old clothes with stitching errors and suits that customers had never returned to retrieve. He picked out a white shirt and tore the sleeve from it.

  “Lucky for you,” said the Syrian, “I am ex-military. A field medic, if you can believe it.” He tied the sleeve around the bleeding thigh in a tourniquet. Adrian yelped as he yanked it tight. “There. Now, that will curb the blood loss, but it won’t stop it. I imagine you have about thirty minutes at most—probably less—to finish your work. If you do, I will take you to the hospital. If you don’t, I will let you die here.”

  Adrian breathed hard. His hands were sticky with blood and his leg throbbed angrily. “You won’t,” he said quietly. “You won’t take me anywhere. We both know I die down here.”

  The Syrian nodded. “Like I said. Brilliant. You’re right; you will never see the light of day again. Since you understand that, let me put it another way. If you don’t get up and finish, then I will have my associate bring your girlfriend down here. We don’t have a suit for her, but that won’t matter, because she will not live long anyway. I will remove both her eyes in front of you.”

  Adrian’s lower lip trembled, the terror of Claudette’s death washing over him anew.

  “And this… oh, what is it called?” He pointed vaguely at his own throat. “The thing that hangs, I’ve lost the word… ah, uvula! The uvula. It is completely unnecessary, did you know that? But if you cut it off, it bleeds and it bleeds. Claudette will drown in her own blood. Would you like that to be the last thing you see before you die, Adrian?”

  “Don’t,” Adrian stammered. “Don’t. Please don’t.”

  “Calm down now,” the Syrian said. “An elevated heart rate will only decrease your remaining time.” He took Adrian by the arm and hauled him to his feet. “These samples… they are finished, aren’t they?”

  Adrian leaned on the workbench, keeping his weight off his leg. He closed his eyes and said nothing. I could tear off this tourniquet. Let myself bleed to death. It would be over fast. Like falling asleep.

  “All right then. I will retrieve Claudette.” The Syrian moved toward the stairs.

  Adrian lurched forward, leaping on his one good leg, and grabbed up the man’s gun. It was still sitting on the end of the workbench, unattended. He lifted it in his shaky fist, smearing blood on the grip as he aimed and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  He tried again. Nothing. He turned the gun over in his hand. There was no clip. It was not loaded.

  The Syrian grinned wide. “I’ve been waiting for you to do that for the last nine hours.” He turned back toward the stairs.

  “No!” Adrian cried out. “Wait… wait. Yes. They are done. The virus is done.”

  The Syrian paused. “Good.” He approached Adrian, holding his hand out expectantly. Adrian slowly handed him the gun again. The sadist reached under the workbench and pulled out the clip that he had ejected earlier. He pushed it into the gun and cocked it. “For what it is worth, I missed your femoral. I was bluffing. It would take a very long time to bleed out from that cut.” He twisted a suppressor onto the end of the pistol.

  Adrian closed his eyes. He thought of Claudette. He thought of the very first morning with her, waking in her bed with filtered sunshine framing her perfect face as she smiled down at him and told him, “I know exactly what you need.”

  I’ll see you in the next life , he thought, right before the bullet entered his forehead.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Reid was astonished to find the Athens Grand Hotel completely barricaded by the time they returned. Their pursuit of the Syrians had taken no more than twenty minutes, yet in that small window of time the five-star hotel had turned into an absolute madhouse.

  Greek authorities had shown up in force, no doubt tipped off by Interpol about the suspected presence of the virus and Syrian terrorists. Several police cars choked the valet parking area, lights flashing. A WHO containment unit was on-site, donning containment suits as police evacuated angry guests out of the building and ushered them across the street.

  “Well,” said Dr. Barnard quietly from the back seat, “I suppose the proverbial cat is out of the bag now.” He pointed; several members of the media had already shown up, reporting on the incident.

  Watson double-parked the SUV and the three of them hurried to the entrance to find it swarming with bodies. It took three minutes to find Maria and Carver, the former of whom seemed to be in a heated discussion with a man in a blue suit. Interpol , Reid assumed. They likely wouldn’t be happy that the CIA had somehow made it here first.

  “They showed up just minutes ago,” Carver told them as they approached. “The police right after them.” The voices of frustrated guests nearly drowned him out. All of Europe had temporarily shut down international travel, and there seemed to be plenty of irate people wondering where they were supposed to go if not home or the evacuating hotel.

  Maria stormed over to them, obviously irritated. “So much for cooperation between agencies,” she muttered. “Interpol charged in here and took over the place like we were nobodies. I tried to tell them we found no evidence of the virus, but they’re insistent on sweeping the entire hotel.”

  “I’m betting they’re not too happy with us right now,” said Watson, shooting a glance Reid’s way.

  He ignored it. “Did you get into the room? What did you find?”

  “Let’s get out of here first.” Maria started toward the waiting SUV.

  “So you found something?” Reid pressed.

  “Tell you on the road.”

  “And what about sharing what we know with Interpol?” Watson asked.

  Maria paused, annoyed. “We’ll share with Baraf. We know him and we trust him. Look around you. Interpol shows up with the WHO in hazmat suits? There won’t be any misconceptions about what this is or what it could be, and I don’t want to be standing here when this crowd becomes a mob.”

  Reid hurried after her. She was right—and, he had to admit, so was Cartwright. This was why he wanted to keep the op small and quiet. People tended to start asking questions, if not panicking, when a dozen agents showed up… let alone the police and the WHO.

  Watson drove, with Barnard between Reid and Carver in the rear. “What’d you find?”

  “There wasn’t anyone else in the room,” Carver told them. “And I checked the guest log at the front desk; there were only two peopl
e registered for the suite.”

  “The two we went after,” Reid guessed.

  “And?” Carver asked.

  “They’re dead now,” he replied flatly.

  If Carver had anything to say about it, he kept it to himself. He was Watson’s former partner, so Reid had few misgivings that they might share the same mentality.

  “But I got this.” Reid pulled the Syrian’s phone from his pocket. It was a simple flip phone, no internet connectivity or GPS—likely a burner, but that would hardly be a hindrance. He flipped it open and navigated the menu with a thumb. “There’s nothing saved in here, no contacts or names or messages… but there’s a number. Just one, and it looks like it called them once a day for the past eleven days.”

  “The student from Stockholm, Renault, was murdered eleven days ago,” Barnard noted.

  “Exactly.” Reid passed the phone to Carver. “Send that number to Langley to trace.” If the caller was also on a burner phone, they wouldn’t be able to get a name—but they could trace the last call to a location, and as long as the phone was on, they could find it using cell tower relays.

  Reid almost smirked. Ordinarily he could hardly figure out how to program a new contact into his cell phone, but a working knowledge of call-tracing was suddenly there when he needed it. Curious , he thought. He would have to test the returning knowledge when he had a moment. After we find the virus, and the jihadist behind it, of course .

  “So we’ve got two dead Syrians and a cell phone number.” Watson sighed. “It’s not much, but I guess it’s something.”

  “We also have this.” Maria reached for the small of her back and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “We tossed the room before anyone else got there. There was hardly anything out of the ordinary—but there was one thing that stood out. Here, take a look.” She passed it behind her to Reid.

  The page was folded in thirds, well-worn and crinkled as if it had been opened and closed several times. Barnard peered over Reid’s shoulder as he unfolded and scrutinized it.