Black Sunrise

by Brett Godfrey

  One afternoon, Dr. White took Sand and Christie aside and asked them to help, to intervene on her behalf.

  “What do you want us to do?” Christie asked.

  “Encourage Jackie to cooperate. It’s for her own good.”

  “Let’s go talk to her together,” Sand said.

  The three of them stepped into Jackie’s room.

  “Honey,” Sand said. “Doctor White tells me you don’t want to take the pills she’s prescribed. Can we talk about that?”

  Jackie shrugged. “Sure. Whatever.”

  “Now, Doctor White here is trying to help you, honey.” Sand flashed a brilliant smile at the psychiatrist before continuing. “But don’t let yourself get confused about this. No matter what, don’t let anybody talk you into taking psych drugs. You’ve made the right decision, and I want you to know that we’re with you on this. We’ll work through this together.”

  Dr. White glared at Sand.

  “You’ll get better, Jackie. It will take time. But these poisons the shrinks hand out will never do you any good. They’ll just make you stupid and quiet—prevent you from healing. People will think you’re better because you’ll have a dreamy look on your face, but your brain will have just that much more crap to deal with.”

  Dr. White snatched up her clipboard and stomped furiously from the room.

  Jackie smiled for the first time in a month.

  Over the coming days, with constant support from Christie and Robert, Jackie started to brighten up.

  “I want to get out of here,” Jackie said one morning as she toyed with one of the flowers Sand had arranged at her bedside. “I want to be with you. Do you still want me?”

  Sand’s eyes grew moist. “More than ever, baby.”

  Janet invited Robert and Jackie to spend some time on Jensen’s ranch. There would be space for long walks and even longer horseback rides within sight of the beach. “It’s the perfect place for minds and hearts to mend,” Janet told them.

  After a few days, they settled into a comfortable routine. Jackie and Robert spent a lot of time outdoors. At first, Christie spent most of her time with her parents. Janet called a few of Christie’s high-school friends, who dropped by to see her. Most of the visits lifted her spirits.

  But then, one day, Brad Miller came calling. He’d been a high-school sweetheart for a few weeks during Christie’s junior year, but the relationship ended badly when Brad had asked her to marry him and Christie decided it was time to break it off. The Jensen family called him “The Terminator” because he was impervious to pain and never, ever gave up. For a period of several weeks, he’d called every day after school. Janet’s mother would always tell Brad that Christie didn’t want to speak to him, but he would call again the next day, refusing to get the message. It had taken a stern warning from Mark Jensen to end the calls.

  Now, feeling awkward, Christie met Brad on the front porch.

  “Just thought I’d drop by,” he said. “I was worried about you.”

  “I’m fine,” she said coolly.

  “I heard a little bit about what you went through.”

  “Well, that’s over now.”

  Brad plucked a weed from between the posts of the porch rail and stuck it in his mouth.

  Christie wrinkled her nose. He thinks he’s James Dean.

  “I just thought that maybe you needed some support,” he said.

  How could she get rid of him? His neediness was like a loathsome disease. A chill ran up her spine as she pictured him growing older. Sporting a mustache. Living in a fantasy world. Kidnapping a woman to take out all the frustration of rejection he had accumulated over the years.

  She shuddered, pushing the image from her mind.

  “Cold?” he asked, as he moved closer to put his arm around her. Repelled, Christie started to duck under his arm, and he stopped when Janet appeared at the sliding glass door and announced that Christie had another visitor.

  Thank God. “Who is it, Mom?” Christie asked cheerfully.

  Instead of answering, Janet slid the screen aside, and in a stage-whisper clearly meant for Brad’s ears, she said, “Go on out. I’m sure she’ll be more than a little glad to see you.”

  Roady Kenehan stepped onto the porch. He held a gift-wrapped box in his hand. He was a foot taller than Brad.

  “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting anything,” he said. “I can come back later.”

  She went to his side and put her arm around his narrow waist. “Not a chance,” she said. “I thought you’d never come.”

  Mom, please tell me you gave him the lowdown on Brad.

  As if reading her mind, Kenehan gave Brad a look that said, Why don’t you just head on home now? Christie knew he could crush Brad without a second thought. From the look on the younger man’s face, Brad got the message.

  Amazing, Christie thought. Animal magnetism.

  “Guess I’ll be leaving,” said Brad in a dejected voice.

  “Guess so,” Janet said. “Thanks for coming by.”

  Chapter 52

  Perched on the railing, Christie smiled at Kenehan. “Thank you for coming to my rescue once more.”

  “Rescue?”

  “From Brad. He practically stalked me during my senior year in high school. He asked me to marry him, and when I said no, he dropped out. I haven’t seen him in five years. He hasn’t changed a bit. One of my friends told him what happened.” She shook her head. “I guess he thought I’d be vulnerable now, and he’d have a chance to win me over.”

  She cringed as she said it. It made her sound conceited.

  Kenehan noticed her expression. “I think your mom scared him off. Sounds like a creep.”

  “I’ve met worse.” She winced again. “Open mouth, insert foot,” she said.

  Kenehan smiled. “Do I make you nervous?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  Did he just ignore her answer? He could read her. “It’s like being in a room with a panther,” she said.

  “Do I bring back bad memories?”

  “No. What I meant was …” She trailed off and just smiled at him. He smiled back. She realized it was the first time she’d seen him do so, and she liked it.

  Rescuer or not, he really was a very good-looking guy.

  “Aren’t you going to open your present?”

  Christie grinned and shrugged in surrender, grateful for the distraction. Kenehan handed her the package, wrapped in gold-and-blue paper. There was no bow, but it had a card taped to the top. She opened the card and read aloud.

  “Do noble things, not dream them all day long: and make life, death and that vast forever one grand, sweet song.” She looked up. “Wow. Believe it or not, that’s my favorite saying. It’s by Charles Kingsley. Did you know that?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  She tore away the paper and opened the box inside, pulling out a small porcelain seraph. “My God, it’s beautiful,” she cooed, turning it in her hand.

  “It’s your guardian angel,” he said softly.

  “No … it’s just a symbol. You are my guardian angel.”

  Kenehan shook his head. “It just seems that way.”

  “My father told me you work for Mr. Brecht.”

  “I work for the company he started, yes.”

  “The Brecht Group,” she said. “My father says they’re more powerful than the CIA and the FBI combined. He said Mr. Brecht felt he owed an old debt to our family.”

  “Half a century ago, your grandfather saved the Old Man’s life.”

  “How?”

  “It’s quite a story, but I’ll let your father, or your grandfather tell it to you.”

  She set the angel on the table and turned the card in her hands. “It seems you know a lot about my family, Mr. Kenehan.”

  “Your parents have become close friends of mine.”

  “I’ll say. They think you walk on water.”

  “I do,” Kenehan said with a smile. �
��Every time it rains. The streets get wet.”

  “And you’re a comedian to boot.”

  “I just like to see you smile.”

  She stood and walked over to him. “I’m glad you came. If you want to see me smile,” she said, taking his hand, “there’s something you have to do for me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Stay for dinner.”

  “I don’t want to intrude,” he said.

  Jensen slid the screen open and stepped onto the porch. He’d been eavesdropping. “If I have to slash your tires to make sure you stick around, I will.” He held a cold can of beer in each hand. He passed one to Kenehan and one to his daughter. “It’s a long walk back to the city.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Christie said with a twinkle in her eye. She looked at her watch. “We still have some time before dinner. Do you like horses, Mr. Kenehan?”

  “If you don’t start calling me Roady, I will walk home. And yes, I love horses.”

  “Then save your beer for when we get back. Riding will make you thirsty. Follow me.” She skipped down the steps and set out for the corral. They saddled a pair of mares and set out on the trail that led to the ocean.

  When they reached the cliff top that overlooked the beach far below, Kenehan stopped his horse, and Christie did the same.

  “You never answered the question I asked back at the house,” Kenehan said. “Do I bring back memories of the nightmare?”

  Christie shook her head with a sigh. “You remind me that nightmares end.”

  By the time Roady and the Jensen family sat down for dinner, Christie couldn’t take her eyes off him. She knew it was probably a clinical infatuation or some kind of post-traumatic fixation with a hero figure—but she didn’t care.

  Over dinner, Janet asked Kenehan about his plans for the next few days.

  “Well,” he answered, “Actually, I have some time off coming, but I haven’t decided how I’m going to spend it.”

  Christie lowered her fork and beamed at him. “Why don’t you come with me to Denver?”

  Jensen cleared his throat.

  “Dad, Jackie and Robert are going home tomorrow. I was planning to go with them. I’ve got to get back there eventually—to clear out my apartment before school starts. I’ve got to be in Dartmouth in five weeks. Roady has some time off, so he could come along. Is that okay with you?”

  “We still haven’t heard whether Roady actually wants to go with you,” Janet interjected. Jensen rubbed his face.

  Kenehan toyed with his food for a moment, considering the offer. “How would you folks feel about that?” he asked softly.

  Jensen met his eyes, giving him an arch look usually reserved for witnesses just before he eviscerated them on cross-examination. “The four of you? I’ll have Adkins take you in the Phenom.”

  Chapter 53

  “Kim’s real name was Jueng Soon-jae,” Fitch said. “He was second-in-command of the North Korean contingent in the US. It was a small cell, operating off the ship. The North Korean Ministry of Defense denies it’s a state-run operation. The head of the cell died in the gun battle. We’ve found some papers and other odds and ends, but other than your man’s capture of the vial and chip, the intel we’ve picked up is not great. They were being careful in case someone seized the ship.”

  Brecht gazed at the image of Fitch on his monitor. “I doubt they’ll ask for the ship’s return.”

  “Agreed. But they want the survivors back.”

  “The three who were in the engine room during the assault?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you interrogated them?”

  “Before we get to that, Albert, it’s time for total truth between us. How much do you already know?”

  “We accessed DataHelix’s servers; we know about Black Sunrise; we found an email from Beeman to General Harris describing the program, which we assume DPRK hackers also found. Nothing more.”

  “So, you know how bad this can get?”

  Brecht nodded. “We know how bad it could have gotten if we hadn’t recovered the virus and data chip.”

  “Albert, at least two vials are still missing.”

  The words hit Brecht like a fist. In the wake of Kenehan’s successful recovery of the material from the North Korean ship, it seemed the mission had been successful. Disaster averted. Brecht’s meddling in national security forgiven by the DOD, FBI and NSA. But now the crisis was just beginning.

  “What?” Brecht cleared his throat. “How do you know this?”

  Nathan Fitch’s face darkened on the video monitor. “I found out thirty minutes ago. General Harris called to tell me. USAMRIID cross-checked its physical inventory against original DataHelix paper lab records and found the discrepancy. DataHelix claims it didn’t know about the missing vials, which is plausible, in that they didn’t do the verification cross-check. Beeman altered the computerized files, but they had already scanned and sent the paper records to Maryland before he smuggled out the samples.”

  “Are we sure Beeman took the missing vials?”

  Fitch shrugged. “He took the others.”

  “We have to assume—”

  “Right.” Fitch interrupted. He paused before continuing. “We have a national emergency on our hands.” Fitch sat forward and glanced down at something below the field of the camera’s view. “The branching domino theory. Release a single vial of the aerosolized virus in a poorly ventilated area and infect a hundred people. Depending upon how many social contacts occur in each chain of contamination, the casualties at the end of phase 3 would be in the order of a million souls.”

  “Beeman’s gift to mankind.”

  “The missing strain mutates to phase 3 approximately four weeks after exposure of the first-generation carriers. And there is enough in those last two vials to infect several hundred people in a large, poorly ventilated area—a church, theater or commercial airliner.”

  Brecht rubbed his face. “Such destructive power, contained in a tube the size of a pencil stub.”

  “And Beeman is still out there with two of them still in his possession.”

  “He’s completely insane.”

  “Yes,” Fitch acknowledged.

  “Am I correct in assuming we have no way of knowing whether he has already released the virus? Whether infected carriers are already spreading it? For all we know, it could be ‘marching’ as we speak,” Brecht said, referring to the phase of genetic mutation during which the virus spreads without causing symptoms.

  “There’s a test for exposure. The CDC is conducting randomized tests in California and Colorado. Results should start coming in within a day or two, but we doubt they’ll be reliable. It’s hard to guess whom to test in a heavily populated area.”

  “Is there a vaccine?”

  Fitch sighed. “They developed one, but it’s not available in significant quantities. Never tested on humans. It’ll take months to produce enough to make a difference, and even if we could vaccinate the general population, we’d be foolish to try until we’re sure there is a need. If we announce this to the public, we’ll have a global panic on our hands. If this gets out, Albert, the sociopolitical result will be cataclysmic, even if no one is infected. Markets will crash. War could be inevitable—particularly with North Korea and perhaps even China—and millions would die. Maybe tens of millions, or more.”

  “We simply have to find Beeman. We could—”

  “There’s more,” Fitch cut in. “Now to the interrogation of the three prisoners. They know Beeman is a scientist who developed a biological weapon. One of them believes he overheard a conversation between Beeman and Jueng in which Beeman said something about planting a timed-release mechanism somewhere as ‘insurance,’ but that is all he heard.”

  “Why would Beeman do that?”

  “We don’t know. There may not even be a reason. Maybe Jueng put him up to it, as the first wave of an attack on America. Or maybe Beeman wanted something to hold over the North Koreans.”
r />   “Could Beeman still be headed there?”

  “North Korea?” Fitch shook his head. “Doubtful. We believe all of his contacts are dead or in custody. We don’t think he has any way to communicate with them. We’re sniffing for ELINT from the airwaves, but so far nothing.”

  “What are we doing with the Kim regime?”

  “The State Department is pushing hard on Pyongyang, but as expected, they’re denying everything. We’re warning them that if they go near him or the virus, we’ll retaliate militarily. We raised the DEFCON level this morning, so they know we’re serious. The president will be talking to Kim this afternoon. The public doesn’t know it yet, but right now Beeman is the most wanted man in the world.” Fitch sighed, removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “My guess is that Beeman is still in this country.”

  Brecht spoke softly. “I’m very sorry about this, Nathan.”

  Nathan surprised Brecht with what he said next. “I’ll be candid, Albert—you’ve earned it. We were more in the dark than I let on. Before you got involved, we didn’t know Beeman had already smuggled out the vials and data. We didn’t know about the Korean ship. If he’d made it onto that ship without you there … if you hadn’t tracked Beeman, the odds are fair that North Korea would have gotten Beeman and the technology. Now there is at least some doubt.”

  “What would Kim Jong-un do with the virus?”

  “His economy is in tatters. His people are starving and on edge of revolt. The alert status of their military is at an all-time high. We keep saying it, but it’s true: the Kim regime is beyond desperate. We learned from one of the prisoners that they were on a strict timetable.”

  “What about Jueng’s last words?”