The Pandora Deception--A Novel

by David Bruns

  Rachel’s instincts flared an alert. He was toying with her. Something was wrong.

  “You’re hurting me,” Rachel said, trying to extract her arm from his grip. With her free hand, she fumbled with her clutch, trying to get at the tiny syringe inside. One quick stab of the needle and the bastard’s heart would stop for good.

  Wenje ignored her. Midway along the block, between streetlights, he paused at the opening to a dark alley and gave a low whistle. There was a dragging sound; then a man stepped out of the shadows. He threw something at Wenje’s feet that made a wet, slapping sound as it hit the pavement.

  It was a body. Rachel looked down, focusing on a yellow glow in the dark. With horror, she realized she was looking at Neema’s neon-yellow halter top.

  She sensed more than saw Wenje’s fist swinging toward her. Rachel ducked and jammed the spike of her high heels into his instep, causing him to release her. With the second man, she wasn’t so lucky. He tackled her, driving her body back into the brick wall.

  Rachel felt all the air leave her lungs and saw stars as her head cracked into the wall. She dropped both elbows onto his back as hard as she could, then launched a knee up into his face. His grip weakened, and she hammered her knee up in another strike. He slid to the ground.

  Frantically, she ripped open the clutch purse, her fingers seeking the two-inch syringe hidden inside a tampon.

  But Wenje was back in action. The big man loomed before her, his shadowed face a mask of fury. He gripped her throat with both hands and pressed her back against the wall. The clutch purse slipped from her hands as she tried to free herself.

  She felt the skin on her back scrape away as he pressed her flat against the bricks and slid her upward. Rachel kicked at his chest, but it seemed to make no difference. She tried to claw at his eyes, but the big man had a longer reach and all she did was scrape at the flesh of his upper arms.

  She gasped for breath, feeling her vision starting to tunnel. She tried to kick at his chest with her heels, but she had no leverage …

  Heels. High heels.

  Rachel twisted her leg up, clawing at the clasp on her shoes. She felt the blood vessels in her eye start to rupture. The clasp came free and she tore off the shoe.

  Her strength was draining away. With all her remaining might, Rachel drove the tip of the four-inch heel into Wenje’s eye.

  He screamed as he let her drop to the ground. The damp, foul air of Mozambique was the sweetest breath she had ever drawn. Rachel stripped off the other heel and clawed herself upright. A weeping Wenje staggered down the street. She stalked after him, feeling stronger with each step, the shoe still in her hand.

  Wenje stopped, turning to face her, his fists up. “Who are you?” he yelled at her.

  Rachel moved with a speed and fluidity born from years of training. She rushed him, seeing him telegraph his punch and ducking under it. She used the spiked heel to dig into his ribs, then stepped away.

  Wenje lowered his hand to clutch the injury, and she struck again—this time delivering a roundhouse kick that dropped the big man to his knees. He jabbed out a fist. She let it slip past her, then kicked him in the teeth. He fell backwards and she leaped onto his chest.

  “Who are you?” he said again. His right eye was a deep hole of welling blood, his left glassy with tears.

  Rachel positioned the point of the heel under his chin.

  “My name is Death,” she said in Hebrew. She used her fist to jam the heel up into Abdul Wenje’s skull.

  Rachel rolled off the corpse, lying flat on her back in the dirty street. With a grunt, she got to her feet and went back to the alley.

  Neema was dead, beaten to death. Wenje’s accomplice was unconscious. She felt along the ground for her lost clutch purse. The syringe hidden in the tampon was still there, as was the infrared flashlight. She needed that to signal her extraction team, waiting for her offshore.

  Rachel drove the tip of the needle into the unconscious man’s neck and waited for his heart to stop.

  Then Rachel got to her feet and walked toward the sound of the surf.

  CHAPTER 5

  Khartoum, Sudan

  Just like every morning, the Muslim call to prayer woke Jean-Pierre Manzul before sunrise. He swung his feet to the tile floor.

  “JP,” said a sleepy voice beside him. A slender hand with red-painted fingernails snaked out from under the covers and snagged the waistband of his underwear. “Come back to bed.”

  JP chuckled. “I’m a good Muslim man. I need to get up for the call to prayer.”

  “Bullshit. You’re going for a run.”

  JP removed the fingers and stood. He leaned over and rooted his face into the covers until he found soft flesh. He deposited a loud kiss. “I’ll be back soon—and I’ll make it worth your while.”

  The woman pushed his face away and rolled over. “You do this to make me feel bad about myself.”

  JP changed into the workout gear that he had laid out the night before and quietly left the penthouse apartment.

  The desert air was chill in the early morning. He could see the sky lightening behind the distant mountains as he stretched. He began at a walk, then a slow trot. These days, his body needed time to warm up.

  He jogged two blocks east to the promenade overlooking the Nile River and turned south. The streets at this hour were mostly deserted except for a few stragglers making their way to the mosque. This was the way he liked the city. Quiet, empty, cool. In a few hours, the heat from the sun would bake the streets. The din of cars and crush of bodies on the sidewalk would choke the magic out of the setting.

  He picked up the pace, letting the sound of his own breathing set a rhythm in his head. He felt a flush of heat in his face, and a sheen of sweat broke out on his forehead, evaporating in the dry air almost immediately. His breathing evened out and he settled into a solid pace.

  JP squinted into the distance. The first rays of the new day touched the Victory Bridge, his turnaround point. He picked up the pace, passing a fruit seller and his donkey cart along the street.

  Although born and raised in France, Jean-Pierre Manzul was a man of Africa, the land of his father’s birth. His mother, a Parisian woman to her core, fell in love with JP’s father when he came to the Sorbonne to study medicine at the Pierre and Marie Curie University. Their marriage didn’t last, but young JP came away from the union with an everlasting love for his father’s native land. At university, he studied languages and medicine like his father, but after undergrad, his life took a different turn.

  JP was approached by the French Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, better known by the acronym DGSE, the French equivalent of the CIA. With his mixed heritage and facility with languages, JP was a cultural chameleon. His first posting was to central Africa, where he supported DGSE operations against the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front.

  In Rwanda, JP’s field skills were noticed and he was recruited to the counterterrorism branch. There he immersed himself in the murky world of covert operations.

  In the pre-9/11 era, JP trained agents to infiltrate al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the resulting military actions, JP’s operation was crushed in the American military onslaught. His men were lost—all of them.

  After he was called back to France, his frustration only grew. He had been to the front lines, lived with the local operators risking their lives for their country. He knew the only way to get to the real masterminds behind the terrorist movements was to get men on the inside, operations requiring close coordination of small teams of highly skilled agents.

  In contrast, the French government painted a picture of a terrorist bogeyman that could only be defeated through military might. He watched the destructive forces of radical Islam creep across his adopted homeland of Africa and filter back into Europe. Again and again, he witnessed careful operations crumble under the weight of political expediency … and he lost faith in the system.

  Retiring
from his specialty in the DGSE was never an option, so JP Manzul did the next best thing.

  He disappeared.

  Breathing hard now, he passed a bakery, plowing through the mouthwatering aroma of freshly baked croissants. The shopkeeper raised his hand in greeting, and JP waved back. For the last half kilometer, he picked up the pace to a sprint.

  He paused at the bridge to savor the new morning and to stretch. Morning prayers were over and the streets were coming alive with men in business suits and women in robes and head scarves. A gaggle of children in school uniforms paraded by with book bags under their arms.

  JP set a brisk pace for home.

  For three years, JP wandered across the African continent. For six months, he volunteered at a Doctors Without Borders medical mission, using his language and first-aid skills as a triage specialist. There he met Talia Tahir.

  JP paused at the coffee seller outside his apartment building and purchased two cups in to-go containers before taking the elevator up to the penthouse.

  As he entered the apartment, JP called out, “Get up, my sweet, I have coffee for you.”

  To his surprise, Talia was in the living room curled up on the couch, coffee in hand already. His lover was still wearing her silk nightdress, and the shoulder strap had slipped down her arm, exposing the creamy warm brown of her upper breast. She was staring at the eight-by-ten pictures on the whiteboard they had set up in the living room. Strewn across the coffee table were piles of résumés and technical papers from each of the final five candidates.

  Talia smiled absently at his good-morning wishes. Tucking her feet under her haunches, she gestured with her coffee at the board.

  “That’s the final cut,” she said. “We need them all to make this work.”

  “And you shall have them all, my dear,” JP replied. “Saleh has given me all the money we need. Every man—and woman—has a price. We just need to find it.”

  He sat down next to her and leaned over for a kiss, but she pushed him away. “You’re all sweaty and you smell. Go take a shower.”

  “Only if you join me,” he said with a wink.

  “Go!” She rolled her eyes. “If you’re a good boy, I might join you.”

  JP laughed as he entered the bedroom and stripped off his workout gear. Their shower was a large glass-and-tile affair with four showerheads. He turned on the water and inspected his naked body in the mirror as he waited for the water to heat up.

  He pinched the loose skin around his waist. Not bad, but he could stand to drop a few pounds. JP sighed and stepped under the steaming jets of hot water. As he rinsed shampoo from his hair, he felt Talia’s fingers snake around his waist and pull him close.

  She planted a kiss on the nape of his neck. “You smell much better now.” He turned to face her.

  Even after years together, she still took his breath away.

  Whereas JP’s heritage left him with lighter skin, Talia’s mixed Egyptian, Sudanese, and British parentage left her with tawny skin and eyes the shade of a brilliant blue sky. He first met her when Talia was only twenty-five, a graduate of the University of Khartoum with a doctorate in microbiology. She was a product of the region, orphaned at the age of twelve, her parents taken by violence.

  Talia, an only child, returned home to Sudan to live with her aunt. She emerged from that emotional crucible with two guiding principles: the continent of Africa belonged to the African people and real power was not awarded for good behavior. It was seized by the bold.

  Her education and her job with the World Health Organization addressed the first principle. Her partnership with JP would address the second.

  Talia stepped under the shower jets and raised her face. JP slipped behind her and ran his hands over her slick body. She pressed back against him and JP responded.

  * * *

  Dressed in matching white terry cloth bathrobes, JP and Talia reconvened in front of the whiteboard. Five pictures had been tacked to the board with magnets. A sixth photo stood apart from the others.

  “Take me through them one at a time,” JP said.

  Talia began with the headshot of a dark-haired Indian woman. “I’ll handle Lakshmi. We were roommates in undergrad and she’s got a solid microbiology background.”

  JP frowned. “Are you sure we need her? You’re a better scientist and—”

  “I trust her.”

  JP shrugged. “As you wish. Next?”

  Talia held up the photo of a young Scandinavian woman. “Greta Berger. We’ll need her for the CRISPR work on the paleo samples.”

  “Assuming I can get paleo samples, my dear,” JP said.

  Talia ignored him, instead moving a picture of a bearded Saudi next to an attractive brunette woman. “Synthetic biologists are key to developing the combination. It would be best to have both Faraj and Katie McDonough, but in a pinch, we can do without one of them.”

  JP shook his head. “They will both join.” He grinned and waggled his eyebrows. “I can be very persuasive.”

  Talia tapped the photo of an Asian man, mid-fifties, square eyeglasses. “The key to the genetic component of the weapon is Lu Xianshan. He’s a must-have. No substitute.”

  “I’ll get him,” JP said. The Chinese researcher was studying a recent plague outbreak on Madagascar. His research on the epidemiological patterns of an outbreak would be essential to the later stages of their work.

  Talia pointed to the sixth photo and made a sour face. “And that leaves the Nazi.”

  “Now, now, dear. I believe the socially acceptable term these days is ‘white nationalist,’” JP said, as he plucked the photo of Jason Winslow off the board. As with all of their potential recruits, they had researched the backgrounds of their marks extensively.

  The University of Washington researcher had an active alter ego on social media that sprayed a steady stream of bigoted invective. While that made him unsuitable for the research team, he was still their best resource to procure the delicate paleopathogenic samples.

  Luckily for JP, Jason Winslow could be bought.

  JP tossed Winslow’s picture onto the coffee table and took a seat next to his lover. He slid his arm around Talia and drew her close. It was all falling into place: the money, the research facility, and now the personnel to bring their project to fruition.

  It would take at least a year to build the most sophisticated targeted bioweapon in history, but once it was finished …

  Talia took his hand and pressed it to her lips.

  “This is how we change the world.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Navy–Marine Corps Memorial Stadium, Annapolis, Maryland

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Janet Everett hurried across the stadium parking lot, already sweating into her summer white uniform. The cool breezes of her home port in Groton, Connecticut, had made her forget about the heat and humidity of Annapolis in June.

  She popped a salute to an admiral and entered the welcome shade of the tunnel underneath the stadium. Janet had considered wearing civilian clothes to Michael’s graduation ceremony, but pride had intervened. She glanced down at the brand-new gold dolphins insignia over the left pocket of her white uniform shirt. The qualification pin felt heavy and conspicuous, but she’d worked over two years to qualify as a US Navy submarine officer and she wanted the world to know it.

  As she emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, the sight of the football field made her stop.

  Arranged on the green of the field was a solid block of empty chairs facing a stage with the trident seal of the United States Naval Academy. Strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” played in the background as the first graduates began to file in on each side.

  She paused to drink in the familiar sight. The young men and women were outfitted in service dress whites, their most formal uniform, consisting of a long-sleeved white tunic with gold buttons down the front, white trousers, and white shoes. They all looked tanned and healthy, strong and vital. Mixed in the sea of white was the occasional dark blue of the US Marine
Corps dress uniform jacket.

  This was their last moment as a class. After today, they would disperse all over the world. Marching onto the field were future pilots, surface warfare officers, cybersecurity officers, Marines, and of course submariners. Janet sneaked another look at her warfare pin and swelled with pride.

  Her ticket was for the upper deck. She spun around and began to climb the concrete steps, thankful that Michael had scored tickets in the shade.

  The stadium around her was packed with celebrating family and friends. Women in bright summer dresses, men in suits and ball caps, grandmothers sporting parasols against the sun. Graduation from one of the service academies was an all-family affair. By the time the ceremony started, not a place in the thirty-five-thousand-seat-capacity stadium would be empty.

  “Janet!” She heard her name shouted above the excited murmur of the crowd.

  Don Riley waved at her with both arms. He was wearing a blue blazer with a white shirt and a blue-and-gold bow tie. His pale skin was flushed in the heat, but he looked healthy and fit. She climbed the rest of the steps and sidestepped her way down the aisle, where Don crushed her in a bear hug.

  “Janet, it’s been too long.” Don spied the submarine warfare pin. “And you completed your quals! Well done.”

  Janet checked her ticket and found a stately black woman with iron-gray hair in the seat between her and Don.

  “I want you to meet someone very special to Michael,” Don said. “Janet, this is Miss Eustace Jenkins, Michael’s guardian.”

  The woman stood and extended her hand. She wore a conservative dark blue business suit with a high-necked white blouse, but she appeared cool despite the heat. Janet found the woman’s palm dry and her grip firm.

  “Ms. Janet Everett.” The woman’s voice was soft and modulated, but with a hint of steel in the tone. “I am so honored to meet you. My Michael speaks so highly of you, I half expected you to fly up here on angel’s wings.”

  Janet blushed. “I think a lot of your son,” she managed to say over Don’s hearty laughter. “I’m so glad you could make it out here for the ceremony.”