The Pandora Deception--A Novel

by David Bruns

  This is a dream.

  But the scene was so real. She remembered the lady in a bright red floppy hat walking by like it was yesterday. But her name wasn’t Rachel on the op, and Levi was supposed to be with her, not calling her on the phone.

  “Where are you?” she whispered into the phone.

  He hung up.

  “Wait.”

  But he was gone.

  The dead phone felt heavy in her hand. Outside the open window, the tourists laughed, holding hands, calling to children.

  It was the height of summer, she remembered, a hot summer. The smell of hot pavement and melted ice cream, the wail of a child, the lady in the red hat—

  The phone rang again. She stabbed at the screen to silence it.

  Rachel startled awake in a dark room, heart racing, throat dry, chest heaving.

  Was she really awake now? She pinched the tender skin on the inside of her arm.

  The other side of the bed shifted with the weight of a body, and she remembered where she was.

  JP’s bed, for the third night in a row.

  A wave of conflicting emotions washed over her. The deep ache of muscles unused to lovemaking, the guilt surfacing in her brain, the survival instinct of being deep undercover where forgetting who you were for even a second might be the difference between living and dying.

  But JP didn’t seem to notice her outburst. It was his phone she’d heard. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, a mobile phone pressed to his ear.

  “Now?” he said, his voice still groggy. “We just met a few days ago. What’s happened?”

  There was a long pause as he listened. Rachel closed her eyes and strained her hearing, but all she could make out was the sound of a man’s voice on the other end. Rough, agitated, throaty.

  “Where?” A pause. “I’ll be there in the morning.”

  He ended the call and threw the phone across the room. He leaped out of bed and paced in the darkness, cursing to himself in one long continuous stream.

  “Is everything okay?” Rachel asked.

  JP stopped suddenly, as if he had forgotten she was there. He came back to bed and sat close to her.

  “It’s okay. Just a setback, nothing more.”

  He grazed his fingers over her naked breast, and she felt her skin prickle with anticipation. She hated herself and reveled in the feeling, like wanting to giggle and weep at the same time. He nuzzled her neck, licking the spot behind her ear. Rachel let out a little sigh.

  JP pulled back. “We need to go. Right now. Get the car and call the pilot. Tell him I want to be wheels up as soon as we can get there.”

  “Where are we going?”

  JP switched on the bathroom light; his form was silhouetted in the brightness, forcing Rachel to squint her eyes.

  “Alexandria first, then … I’m not sure yet.”

  He started to shut the bathroom door, then turned back. “You called out in your sleep. A man’s name, I think.”

  Rachel used the bright light to squint her eyes closed, covering the shock she felt. JP walked back to the bed. Rachel forced herself to appear calm while at the same time scanning the room for potential weapons.

  At the edge of the bed, he reached for her. She did not flinch. He cupped her cheek with his hand. “A lover?”

  Rachel lowered her gaze. The lamp on the nightstand had a sturdy cast-iron base, a good weapon. “A real lady doesn’t talk about her past.”

  “Is it over?”

  “A long time ago. For good.”

  JP turned back to the light. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, Africa

  They were back to waiting.

  Dre huddled deeper into the extra-large sweater she had purchased at the PX and wished they sold earmuffs to guard against the bone-chilling blast of the air-conditioning in the tactical ops center. The muted TV monitor was tuned to Al Jazeera, where the nonstop coverage alternated between Egyptian army units gathering on the border with Sudan and Sudanese forces mobilizing north of Khartoum. There were reports of Egyptian commandos spotted near the Ethiopian border as well. Every hour or so, they switched to an update on the increasingly frantic negotiations in Geneva as the UN tried to head off a ground war.

  She yawned, her jaw cracking as her mouth stretched open. She’d been woken up at 4:00 A.M. Sheba was on the move.

  The only thing they knew about the Israeli asset traveling with Jean-Pierre Manzul was that she was a woman and her code name was Sheba.

  To Dre’s imagination, the name sounded dark and mysterious, but she guessed reality was a lot different. Being an undercover operative was probably a lot like being a coder. It sounded sexy, but the day-to-day was just hard work, sometimes exciting, mostly mundane.

  She rubbed at her eyes and stared at the wall screen along with everyone else. The door to the secure room constantly opened and closed, the magnetic lock clacking as someone came in to give Don an update or he left to call Washington. In addition to Shira, their number now included Noam, who sat on a chair at the back of the room, staring at a spot on the floor. They were all waiting with bated breath for something—anything—to happen. The dot circled the Alexandria airport, lining up for a landing.

  “Definitely Alexandria,” Janet said. She was seated at the next workstation and looked as tired as Dre felt.

  Tension went out of the room like a deflated balloon. Their tiny SCIF enclosure smelled like coffee breath and sweat—and now disappointment. Someone bumped the back of her chair and Dre resisted the urge to snap at them. She hiked the loose material of her sweater up to her ears.

  “Probably just a business meeting,” Shira muttered. “False alarm.”

  “All right, people, we’re going to stand down until we see new movement,” Don said. “Dre and Janet, you can go off shift. Get some sleep, something to eat, and come back in four hours.”

  The humid heat of the morning sun was a welcome relief to Dre. She uncrossed her arms and turned her face to the sky.

  “It’s so bright,” Janet said with a grin. “But not for long. I’m hitting the rack.”

  Dre followed her friend back to the shipping-container bedroom they shared. The housing at Camp Lemonnier reminded her of a giant LEGO set. Three rows of two dozen shipping containers each had been stacked on top of each other to form an apartment building. At one end of each room a door opened onto a walkway that stretched the length of the structure. They climbed the steps together, their boots ringing on the metal tread.

  The single door to their shared housing unit had a two-foot-square pane of glass, but like most occupants, they’d taped a piece of cardboard over it to block out the blazing African sun. Once the door shut behind them their room was like a cave, the only illumination coming from a few light leaks around the cardboard.

  Dre stripped off her clothes and slipped under the covers, but sleep eluded her. Almost immediately, Janet’s breathing evened out into a long, slow rhythm.

  After two hours of sleeplessness, Dre slipped out of bed, gathered fresh clothes, and went back to work.

  Michael was alone in the TOC, his face gray with exhaustion, head bowed over his workstation.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Couldn’t sleep.” She forced a smile and set her coffee down next to her workstation. “Thought I’d give my little brother a break.”

  Michael hugged her. The simple act of gentleness sparked tears for Dre. Yet another sign that she was walking near an emotional edge.

  “You okay?” Michael said.

  Dre rolled her eyes and punched him on the shoulder. “Dude, I’m here two hours early. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  He grinned at her. “Don said to text him if the target moves, but don’t call the whole team unless they stop at a new location.”

  “Got it,” Dre replied. “Go get some sleep. And ‘Shira’ is not the Hebrew word for sleep. Preserve your strength, c
owboy.”

  “The Hebrew word for sleep is ‘yashan,’” Michael said. The door closed before she could think of a snappy retort.

  Dre pulled the cuffs of her sweater over her fingers and tucked her hands under her arms. She paced the room. There was literally nothing for her to do except watch a dot on the wall screen.

  Noam from Mossad had given them the identifying information for Manzul’s mobile phone. Don’s request to the NSA on the target’s phone yielded nothing useful. His communications—apart from a few calls to burner phones—were typical for his business, and he kept the GPS function on his phone turned off.

  But the cloning process from the Israeli asset had overridden the GPS switch. They could track him even if the phone was switched off. Now all they had to do was hope Manzul led them to his secret bioweapons lab.… Correction, she reminded herself. The secret bioweapons lab they suspected he had built. The evidence certainly pointed toward Manzul.

  Dre wondered about Sheba. What did she look like? How did she become a spy?

  An alert interrupted Dre’s thoughts. Manzul was on the move again, back to the Alexandria airport. She texted an update to Don and got an immediate acknowledgment.

  It took the better part of an hour before Manzul’s jet took off and began to head west.

  The aircraft crossed into Libyan airspace. Another meeting?

  Manzul’s jet took a new heading, southeast. Another hour slipped by and Janet joined her, but still Dre stayed. The infinitesimal progress of the dot on the large-scale map was hypnotic.

  The plane headed due east.

  “Back to Khartoum?” Janet said.

  “Seems like the long way home,” Dre replied. Forty-five minutes later the plane passed south of Khartoum and made a sudden tight turn north. Dre and Janet automatically checked the map. Open desert. The aircraft was still fifty miles from Khartoum.

  “I’ll let Don know,” Janet said.

  The plane made a series of turns that brought it closer to Khartoum, but still well into the desert. Finally, the aircraft stopped moving at a spot twelve miles south of the nearest small town.

  “This has to be it,” Janet said, excitement evident in her tone. She threw an unclassified Google Earth image onto the wall screen. “Let’s see what’s there.”

  The overlaid images were poor quality, representing years of compiled unclassified data. She used a laser pointer to highlight a strip of lighter-colored earth on the image. “That could be a landing strip,” she said. She moved the image to show a dark block on the map about a half mile away. “Maybe a warehouse?” She zoomed out. On some of the images, she could see cultivated land, on others just brown desert about five miles west of the warehouse.

  “Let’s get to work,” Janet said. She pulled her chair close to her workstation. “I’ll focus in on NGA’s higher-resolution images, see what we can find. You see if you can figure out who owns that land.”

  Dre felt the lack of sleep wash away as she accessed property records in Sudan. She called up the in-house translator function on her workstation and prepared for the worst. To her surprise, she was able to enter in a latitude and longitude and gain access to a land title within minutes.

  The magnetic lock on the door clacked and Don entered, followed by Michael, Shira, and Noam.

  “What have we got, Janet?” Don said.

  Janet threw an NGA map onto the wall screen. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency map was much more detailed than Google Earth, showing the airfield and accompanying hangar in crisp relief and the warehouse nearby. While the warehouse and airfield were clearly surrounded by desert, less than five miles away the dark green of irrigated land began. Khartoum was less than fifty miles away by car.

  “The aircraft stopped at this small airfield. The presumed destination is this building here.” She used her laser pointer to highlight the detail on the image. “It appears to be a warehouse. Dre is looking up property records now.”

  The attention in the room turned to Dre. She passed the just-discovered land deed to the wall screen. “The property was gifted to a Saudi national over ten years ago. Total land grant was just over half a million hectares along with water rights for cultivation. This structure is on the eastern edge of the property. Maybe the start of a business park?”

  She turned in her chair to find Don, Shira, and Noam staring at the wall screen.

  “What?” Dre said.

  “The name,” Don said. “The name on the deed is Saleh bin Ghannam. He was the head of Saudi intelligence for almost a decade. Retired about ten years ago.” He looked at Noam. “I think we found it.”

  “Shira?” Noam said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This matches with what Sheba told me. Find out everything you can about that building.”

  An hour later, the mystery deepened.

  “The warehouse and the private airfield sit on a piece of land which was leased to a different company,” Shira said. “Long-term lease to a shell company called ZH Agriculture. Headquartered in Panama.”

  Dre clocked a glance at Janet, who shrugged back. “Give it a shot,” she whispered.

  Using her secure JWICS connection, Dre logged into the CIA database and searched for “Panama Papers.” A few years ago, a trove of thousands of shell companies set up by a law firm in Panama had been released to the public. A few shell companies related to international political figures made sensational headlines, but there were thousands more that remained shrouded in anonymity.

  “I’ve got it,” Dre said. “ZH Agriculture is a shell company with two properties. One in Sudan and one in Switzerland. Business purpose is listed as agricultural research. One shareholder, named Haim Zarecki.”

  She heard Noam make a choking sound, and then the big man was hunched over her shoulder, staring at the screen. He reeked of cigarettes and breathed in her ear like a bull. His eyes were wide. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Who is Haim Zarecki?” Don asked.

  “Ultraright Israeli nationalist,” Shira said. “Owns a shipping line, but his real money came as an arms dealer.”

  “So, a hard-right Israeli nationalist is leasing land from the former head of Saudi intelligence?” Janet said. “What am I missing?”

  Noam pointed his thick finger at Dre’s screen. “Find out everything you can about this company.”

  “Let’s give these four time to work,” Don said with a meaningful look at Noam. “I think we should talk outside.”

  With input from Shira, Dre, Janet, and Michael worked as a team, accessing databases at CIA and Treasury to piece together a picture of ZH Agriculture. When Don and Noam returned an hour later, Michael delivered the brief.

  “ZH Agriculture has—or more accurately, had—two sites, one in Switzerland, one in Sudan.” He flashed a newspaper article on the screen with a picture of a smoking warehouse. “Three years ago, the site in Switzerland burned to the ground. The site was declared a total loss and a hundred-and-forty-seven-million-dollar insurance payout went to ZH Agriculture. The policy was with a company called SAICO.”

  “Acronym for Saudi Arabian Insurance Company,” Janet added.

  Noam grunted. “The Swiss site. What did they do there?”

  “According to Swiss interviews in local newspapers, the site was a state-of-the-art bioresearch facility, the best in Europe at the time. There’s a whole article about how it was built in modules and trucked in to be assembled like an erector set. We’ve got a complete list of the modules purchased from the original contractor.”

  “Good work,” Noam said. “What was the highest level of biocontainment the facility was able to handle?”

  “According to the records, the building was capable of being upgraded to biosafety level four,” Michael said, “but that’s not the most interesting thing we found.”

  Michael threw a purchase order up on the wall screen. “Ignore the fact that it’s in German. Look at the quantity.”

  “They bought two of everything,” Don
said.

  “Exactly. From their website, the Swiss site was only large enough to accommodate one facility.”

  “So, this one was a replacement after the fire?” Don asked.

  “No,” Noam said. “The second set of modules went to Khartoum.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Project Deliverance, undisclosed location in Sudan

  “We’ll be landing in ten minutes, Mr. Manzul.” The pilot’s voice was crisp and professional over the loudspeaker.

  The plane began a slow turn. JP touched the control console and undimmed the windows. In the light of the setting sun, Rachel saw open desert reaching to the horizon.

  “So, you trust me now?” she said. Rachel made her tone playful.

  JP was seated in a leather captain’s chair directly across from her. Their knees almost touched underneath the fold-down wooden table between them.

  “Can I trust you, Zula?” JP said. He followed her gaze out the window toward the reddened landscape. “I think I’m going to need your help.”

  Rachel covered his hand with her own. “It’s the woman, isn’t it?”

  For a long time, JP just stared out the window. When he finally met her gaze, his eyes had a haunted look.

  “She—we—had a plan,” he said. “A vision for a new world. I’m not sure how she will react when I tell her we’re not going to get there.”

  “What’s going on in that lab, JP?”

  “It’s best if you don’t know.” The plane started to descend. In the last light of the day, Rachel could make out the outline of the airstrip in the desert.

  “What you need me to do?”

  JP’s lips bent at the corners. “Just be ready. For anything.”

  The jet touched down softly, reversed engines, and drew to a halt. When Rachel got up to lower the steps, she saw Kasim through the window, leaning against a black SUV.

  As she came down the steps, the big black man grinned widely, as if he was glad to see her. “Zula is back!” He clapped his hands together. “I can’t wait to tell Rocky that he has to give up his room again.”

  JP appeared in the doorway. “Enough, Kasim,” he snapped. “Just drive.”