Christie doubted it. A sense of dread ran through her, but she was strangely grateful as she sipped her tea, grateful to be alive, to be away from the horrible basement. She didn’t think these men were on the same side as the two who had kidnapped them, but the possibility of some kind of human trafficking kept crossing her mind. Asians on a boat, willing to use violence—what else could it be?
She thought of the Oriental men who had come down into the basement and cut the lock off the cage with a bolt cutter. They hadn’t been interested in her or Jackie’s nudity, but the horrible welts and bruises on Jackie’s face, neck and back concerned them. They’d checked Jackie’s pupils, pulse and blood pressure, and they’d given Christie a soothing ointment to rub gently over Jackie’s battered skin, along with some ill-fitting clothes for each of them to wear.
The mint tea was helping. Her nausea was fading, and she was feeling slightly drowsy. When land became visible, Tom returned and escorted Christie down a steep set of stairs and back to the small compartment in which she and Jackie had slept.
“Did you put something in my tea?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m feeling a little drowsy.”
“It’s the scopolamine. You can sleep if you’d like, but it won’t knock you out. Would you like something to read?”
“Yes, please.”
They reached the door to her cabin. Jackie was still inside, preferring to remain in the dark. She didn’t like to be on deck—it made her feel anxious and exposed, as though she’d developed a case of agoraphobia. Christie was very worried about how the trauma Jackie had endured would affect her in the long run. It might psychologically scar her for life.
Tom unlocked the door to the compartment. After he guided Christie through, she asked for some more mint tea.
“Of course. Please remain in here until we return to sea.” He left the cabin and pulled the door shut behind him.
When he was gone, Christie tried the door. It was locked from the outside.
She sat in the compartment’s only chair rather than climbing up onto her bunk.
Lying on her side on the lower bunk, Jackie looked up, her large brown eyes watering. “Aren’t you scared, Christie?” Jackie’s voice quivered.
Like Christie, Jackie was dressed in baggy jeans and a white oversized tee shirt. She had oversized sandals on her feet.
Still on the verge of losing it, Christie thought. Poor Jackie. I don’t blame her. “It’ll be okay, Jax. I think we’re safe.” Christie had been strong until now, and she would find a way to get her best friend through this.
It still made her feel better to have someone other than herself to worry about.
Last night, thinking it might be good for Jackie to talk, Christie had asked her about what had happened when the men had taken her upstairs two nights ago. The plan had backfired—Jackie had started sobbing, babbling incoherently, and before she could do anything to make her calm, Christie had become dizzy and sick with the motion of the boat. She knew what had probably happened—their captors had violated Jackie in every way imaginable.
“Oh, God, what’re they gonna do to us?” Jackie rose to unsteady feet and began to pace softly around the compartment, walking on her toes, moving furtively, not touching anything, as if someone else she didn’t want to wake were in the room. Her breath came in short gasps. She had balled her hands into fists and pressed them into her ribcage.
“They said there’s more going on than we know about, so they’ll have to keep us in a secret place offshore until they’ve caught everybody. Our parents know we’re safe.”
Jackie sat down and then stood up again. “Do you believe that?”
Christie didn’t, not really, but she had to keep Jackie’s attitude positive for the sake of her sanity. Hope would hold her together. “Why would they lie?”
“Do you think they’re, like, the FBI or something?”
“I don’t know,” Christie admitted. “Maybe.”
“Where are we?”
“Somewhere off the California coast. We’re going back to port for a short stop and then back out to sea for a little while. They don’t want us going ashore yet. They said we’ll be safer on this boat. Some other people are coming aboard; they want to interview us about what happened.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long till we get to shore?”
“I’m not sure. They said we’re pretty close.”
At that moment, the door opened abruptly.
What Christie saw in the doorway made time stop.
One of the Asians roughly shoved a man into the room. He wore no shirt, and his arm was in a sling. His shoulder was heavily bandaged. He stumbled and fell to the floor at Christie’s feet, groaning in pain.
It can’t be! Christie thought, jumping to her feet. It was him. The fucker with the mustache.
Jackie slid down the wall, shaking and crying. “Oh, no! Oh, my God! No, no, no!”
Christie stood frozen for a moment, her mind reeling.
The man in the doorway pulled the door shut. Christie heard the latch slide into place.
Antonio rolled onto his back and looked up at her. His feral eyes glistened with recognition and surprise. He looked to Christie like he was high on something. “Oh, look what they’ve given me,” he murmured, barely coherent. “I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on. Let the good times roll, baby.”
Before she could think, Christie raised her foot and stomped hard on his face with the heel of her flimsy shoe. She felt something turn squishy under her foot. A sickening groan bubbled up from his smashed mouth, disgusting her.
Waves of irresistible rage poured through her.
She raised her leg and did it again.
And again, and again, over and over, grunting with exertion.
Christie would later try to tell herself she hadn’t known what she was doing. But she did. She knew exactly what she was doing. Blood spattered her legs and spread across the floor. The man went still; then he twitched for a while and went still again—very still, with eyelids half open but no one home, the center of his face turned to pulp.
She knew she’d just killed another person.
Deliberately. Stomped. A man. To death.
Her life would never be the same now, no matter how they came out of this.
Jackie began to cry.
Chapter 43
Jensen paced the aisle that ran down the center of the motor coach. He’d been up all night. Cumulative lack of sleep was making him foggy.
“Why not have a seat?” asked Partridge, who sat watching Jensen going back and forth. “No sense wearing yourself out.”
“Sorry. I must be driving you nuts.” Jensen took a seat. “Sneaking past an FBI surveillance team and getting Beeman out right from under their noses? Seems like an awful risk. Seems impossible, actually. What if they caught him?”
Partridge shook his head. “No way.”
“How can you be sure? He’s overdue calling in.”
“Roady Kenehan?” Partridge shook his head. “How much do you know about him?”
“Not much. I know he’s highly trained, and I wouldn’t want him on my bad side, but that’s about it.”
Partridge lowered his voice. “He’s on the short list of heavy lifters. Our best operator.”
Despite Partridge’s muted tone, Sand had overheard. “Where exactly did he get his training?”
“I only know bits and pieces. Like most of us, he was in the Special Forces. Roady was a legend in the mountains of Afghanistan. Speaks a bunch of languages, knows volumes about law enforcement procedures, scuba, skydiving, high-performance driving. He has a master’s in international relations. He’s pretty good with computers. He’s the real deal, a one-man task force, a total professional. Heard he went through some really hard times a few years ago, but I don’t know any more than that.”
“Has he ever been married?” Janet asked.
“Don’t
know.” Partridge shrugged. “I’ve been hearing about him for years, but I’ve only actually known him a couple of weeks.”
Brecht approached. “We’ve got more information,” he said. He held an iPad in his gnarled hand. “We’ve finally penetrated one of the DataHelix servers. What we found was startling. We’re still analyzing it.”
Jensen was fully awake now. “What did you find?”
“We already knew that DataHelix contracts with the DOD to perform biological research. Now we know what program Beeman runs. As Jennifer said, the project’s code name is Black Sunrise.”
“Sounds ominous,” Jensen observed. “What is it?”
“As you know, Beeman is a molecular virologist.”
Janet tipped her head. “Go on.”
“A research scientist,” Thomas responded. “He’s a genetic engineer. He specializes in designing new viruses weaponizable for biological warfare, mass destruction. We’ve got his curriculum vitae and some other background information that’s troubling.” Thomas turned to Brecht, signaling that he was yielding to him to say the rest.
Brecht looked at the iPad screen, swiping at it slowly with his thumb. “He’s had an illustrious career as a researcher. He worked at the CDC and American Type Culture before joining DataHelix.”
Jensen nodded. “I’ve heard of American Type Culture, but I don’t remember much about them.”
“A research company in Rockville. A biological clearinghouse for research institutions, they ship various microbial cultures to research and manufacturing facilities in about sixty countries.”
“What does Beeman do at DataHelix?”
“First, let me say that the facility has a dual-use permit for a hollow fiber bioreactor,” Brecht replied. “From what we can tell, they only use it for one thing.”
“Well, that sounds bad,” said Sand. “What the hell is it?”
“DataHelix manufactures bulk quantities of viral pathogens, something generally prohibited by international treaty, but there are exceptions for research that has peacetime applications. The work started out as cancer research but turned into banned bioweapons development. The Army was interested, so they let the technicalities slide—no obvious oversight and no enforcement of the treaty restrictions.
“Ah,” Sand nodded. “They turned a blind eye, while watching carefully.”
“Sounds like our government,” Jensen said. “They only see what they want to.”
“What do we want with weapons like that?” Janet asked. “We have nuclear missiles. Why make new diseases?”
“Biological weapons have certain advantages, both tactically and psychologically,” said Brecht. “For one thing, some strains have the potential for lethal mayhem that exceeds even nuclear weapons. Also, they can be easier to deploy, particularly if the electromagnetic pulse from nuclear strikes cripples military infrastructure.”
“Poisoning the well is easier than splitting the atom,” Sand observed.
“True that,” Thomas said. “Biological warfare is a whole new kind of global nightmare.”
Janet asked, “What are biological weapons actually used for?”
Brecht turned his crystal blue eyes to the ceiling. “Attrition warfare, strikes against massed troops, breaking down enemy infrastructures, crippling their economies and denigrating the psychological morale of target countries. Deterrent to chemical, nuclear or biological first strikes by hostile nation states. Some of the research is purely for scientific knowledge, but the deployment scenarios are generally destructive and militarily offensive rather than defensive.”
“How can we justify creating new life-forms that are so dangerous?” Janet asked, shaking her head ruefully.
“Is a virus a true life-form?” Mark asked.
“Does it matter?” Sand asked.
“All good questions,” Brecht said. “The wars America has fought so far, as terrible as they have been, are nothing compared to what could happen if we face another global conflict. If we went to war with China, for instance, and Russia took sides against us, not to mention Iran and other Muslim states, we would need massively lethal weapons—but preferably not ones that would destroy the entire planet.”
Thomas chimed in. “Viral weapons are the only way to decimate another superpower without the guarantee of triggering a global nuclear winter. The project Beeman has been developing aimed at finding a virus more deadly than anything on earth, but a controllable one that will burn itself out in a set period of time so that we don’t destroy all life, including ourselves.”
Jensen had a nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Just how dangerous is the Black Sunrise virus?”
Thomas fielded this question as well. “We’re still studying the data we’ve harvested. We do know that it’s a level 4 organism—the deadliest kind.”
“Space suits in the lab, and all that?” asked Sand.
“Yes—but more than that. It looks like a real beauty.”
“A beauty?” Jensen asked. “What do you mean?”
“Modern nuclear weapons render huge areas uninhabitable for decades,” Thomas explained. “Set off a few, and pretty soon they all get launched—man ceases to live on this planet. Chemical weapons break down and dissipate relatively quickly. Biological weapons don’t, because they are contagious and self-replenish each time they infect a new host. Viral agents make better weapons than bacteria because they spread more easily, are much harder to kill and don’t respond to antibiotics. Plus, they’re a lot tougher to filter with gas masks because they’re so small. The problem is that the really lethal ones kill off hosts—carriers—before they can spread very far. The contagious incubation phase of most lethal pathogens is short—typically measured in hours or a few days at the very most. Viruses like Ebola and Lassa take their victims down before they can disseminate very widely. But this baby is specially designed.”
“To do what?” Jensen asked.
“To be especially virulent—easily spread—for an extended period before it activates and starts killing its hosts. And it has a self-limiting feature as well.”
“I’m still confused,” Janet said. “What does all of that mean?”
“Well, if a virus or bacteria kills too quickly, it burns itself out. Victims become immobile, quarantined and then either die or recover. The number of people one person can infect varies inversely with the speed at which the virus kills or incapacitates that person. On the other hand, if a virus kills too slowly it can spread too far and eventually work its way back to the original population or in some other way overshoot the desired level of destruction.”
“Okay, so what else?” Sand asked. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
“We think we found the document discovered by whatever foreign agency has Beeman under surveillance. It was an attachment to an email that should not have been on the server where we—or anyone else with advanced cyberwarfare skills—could find it. It is a draft of a letter to a high-ranking general who works at USAMRIID. The metadata suggests an analyst who worked for Beeman forwarded or copied the document to an unsecured storage location. Her name was Barbara Scheffield; she’s now deceased. It dates from three years ago, and other items we’ve found confirm that what it describes exists and that DataHelix is in a position to produce a lot of it.” Brecht handed his iPad to Thomas. “Put this on the screen so everyone can read it.”
Thomas complied. The email appeared on the large high-definition monitors, and Thomas scrolled past the header to the body of the text:
General Hanson:
You have requested a short, plain-language summary of the research project we now refer to as Black Sunrise. As you know, this research developed from the use of viral vectors to deliver genetic modifications in connection with cancer research, which did not produce clinically viable results. I picked up the pieces of this technology and saw it had military potential; for the past six years, I have been refining it to weaponize it. The Black Sunrise virus is genetically engineered to carry two so-
called “timers,” both of which are adjustable within certain limits.
It is relatively stable in containment or storage at room temperature. DataHelix refers to this dormant stage as “phase 1.”
When it enters human bodies, the virus starts metabolizing certain human proteins, which triggers a mutation process in the genetic structure. This is phase 2. During this stage, all viral offspring from that point on will bear the same genetic mutation, which proceeds on a uniform time-based reference regardless of the ages of the offspring particles. Persons infected by contact with an infected carrier all carry the virus at the same stage of metamorphosis from person to person regardless of when the virus infected them individually.
As the virus spreads, no symptoms are evident in carriers for up to six weeks. The size of the exposed population grows at an exponential rate while the metamorphosis continues to advance. As mentioned above, the metamorphic status of all particles are progressing on the same “master clock” set in motion when the virus first infected the original generation of carriers.
At a predetermined time, ideally between a week and a month later, depending upon the adjustments made to a key segment of viral DNA before deployment, the genetic metamorphosis reaches a point where the metabolic processes change. This produces and sheds lethal neurotoxins that essentially shut down the human respiratory system. At this stage, no known treatment can avert the death of the hosts, who begin to experience difficulty breathing; then over the course of the next 48 to 72 hours, they asphyxiate. Infected populations—ranging in size from tens of thousands to millions—simultaneously fall ill and expire.
The virus remains contagious, but the infected population abruptly becomes immobile, so the spread of the virus slows considerably. Shortly thereafter, the second “timer” activates, and the metamorphosis progresses to phase 4, where the virus breaks down and becomes inert. Until then, the target cities or nations are not yet safe for an invading force or replacement population without the use of level 4 biocontainment equipment. But soon after the mutation of the strain reaches phase 4 (apoptosis), the infected regions are free of the pathogen and generally without much remaining population. This will decimate the war-fighting capacity and social infrastructures of the target areas.
Black Sunrise Page 29
