“You wanted your damn story,” Tango said.
“What?”
“You’ll see,” Doc said, leaving it at that.
Doc led the way inside, Tango following her and carrying her bag with all her stuff in it. She wondered if they’d give her back her sat-phone so she could at least call or text Mike, but she’d fight that battle with them soon enough.
Inside the sparsely furnished house, the living room was filled with boxes and equipment the men were apparently schlepping into the garage. She didn’t know how many men there were, but they all could have been brothers to Tango, Doc, and Papa. Built, most with short hair and muscles, in a variety of skin tones from white to ebony.
“The rest of the Drunk Monkeys?” she asked.
“Yep,” Doc said. “Well, some of them. There are twenty of us altogether. Some are…elsewhere.”
They took her into the kitchen. Here she gasped as she realized who was standing at the counter and looking out the back window.
“Dr. Phe Quong?” she asked.
Tango held his arm out. “You wanted your story. Here he is. You’re welcome.”
The man turned and glared at her. His stooped, thin frame couldn’t put him taller than five nine. Brown hair and brown almond-shaped eyes, he wore wire-rimmed glasses and a grim expression.
“I take it you are the journalist they were telling me about,” he said in heavily accented but clear English.
She nodded.
He set his jaw, the anger in his expression telegraphed through his voice. “You scared my mother.”
“I’m sorry. I just wanted to find you.”
“You succeeded.” He cast a glare toward Papa. “You also have no idea what you have done.”
Her abashment fell away and shattered. Her fists clenched as she stalked over to him and got right in his face.
“What I’ve done? Hello? Were you not one of the assholes that unleashed this crap on the world? Now you’re pissed off because I spooked your mom?” She jabbed a finger at him. “Let me tell you what, buddy, have you ever got a fucking set of balls on you.”
“I meant revealing my whereabouts,” the doctor clarified, holding up his hands to ward her back a step. “There are people who want me and the others, who have no interest in us replicating a vaccine for Kite, because they want it to spread. There are others who want a vaccine they can use against the world.”
“They…” She swallowed and turned to Doc. “What?”
Tango let out a snort. “Sheesh. Some journalist you are.”
“Fuck you,” she shot at him before turning back to Doc. “What does he mean?”
“It looks like there might be a hitch,” Tango said. “It’s possible we’re being set up to bring him and the others in just so they can get thrown in a hole somewhere to do someone’s bidding.”
“That’s stupid! Why wouldn’t governments want a vaccine to be created and widely distributed?”
Everyone else in the room stared at her as if she’d just sprouted either a second head or a third tit.
Heat filled her face. “What?”
“You really are a sheltered snowflake, aren’t you, sugar?” Tango asked. The amusement in his tone cheesed her right the hell off. “Here I thought Chicago was a big city.”
“Okay, quit that shit right now. Just say what you mean.”
Papa stepped forward. “What do you think would happen if someone gained control of the vaccine and the manufacturing process? If they demanded payment or other concessions to allow it to be distributed? Or sold doses off to the highest bidders? Or allowed Kite to wipe out the populations of countries, or even religious or cultural or ethnic populations they didn’t like?”
“You’re crazy. That wouldn’t happen.”
“No?” Papa retrieved a tablet from the kitchen table, swiped through it, and showed it to her.
It was open to an e-mail. She didn’t understand who the sender was, because it was a meaningless jumble of numbers and letters.
HONEYCOMB INSECURE. QUEEN BEE INVESTIGATING. PROTOCOL MOXY8-492OTG
* * * *
Tango had already seen the tablet, knew what the code meant.
Short-term, it meant they were fucked. Or were in the process of being fucked. Papa had explained the code to them already, the men there at the house with the doctor.
Whatever had happened, General Arliss himself had discovered a problem in the food chain below him, likely a mole passing intel to third parties who had no business possessing same-said intel. The code directed Papa to take the whole mission dark until full successful completion, or further notice from him.
They were, effectively, on their own.
Their last standing orders were to locate as many people as they could on The List, after they secured Dr. Quong, get them to the US if possible, and keep them safely hidden until Arliss issued further orders about when and how to bring them in.
It didn’t mean they couldn’t wait until they had as many of those people acquired as they could before attempting to bring them to the US. It also didn’t mean they couldn’t get to the US and keep them hidden there until Arliss gave them the all clear. Regardless, they wouldn’t be giving up Quong or any other scientist until Arliss cleared it.
No matter how they proceeded, the bottom line was they would keep anyone from The List they happened to locate safe and in hiding until they received new orders from Arliss.
Whatever had happened in the food chain, it was bad and ugly enough that Arliss had solely entrusted to them the task of putting together the scientific team that had the best chance of creating a vaccine.
The SOTIF teams were beholden to certain brass in the food chain. Arliss, who’d instituted the SOTIF team program in the first place, still directly supervised their unit, although the other teams fell under leadership elsewhere. Arliss had known Papa since the younger man first enlisted years ago, and had taken great care in handpicking and assembling the team he wanted Papa to lead.
Tango didn’t know or care where the problem lay in the food chain, because that was above his pay grade. He’d suspected in the past that Arliss had pointed them in certain directions for specific off-the-book ops that furthered private agendas for the greater good. Unlike most brass higher up in the food chain, Arliss was well known in military circles as being pretty much squeaky clean and unbreakable. If there was a single stand-up guy in the US Armed Forces, it was four-star General Joseph Arliss.
If Arliss was cutting them loose, he must have realized the danger of doing so was far outweighed by the risk posed by whoever had infiltrated the food chain Arliss used to get them orders and supplies, and the impact of that infiltration.
That meant they really didn’t know whom they could trust, other than their own private contacts scattered here and there throughout the globe and the various branches of the military. Arliss would be inaccessible to them via normal secure channels until the man told them otherwise.
They’d be able to operate independently for a while, because Papa had a wealth of private black accounts available to him to draw from that he’d set up independently with funds funneled to him by Arliss upon formation of their unit.
But they’d have to pick and choose their battles now.
Literally.
It also meant there was now no way they could release the reporter. Not without risking her safety.
Whether or not she’d take kindly to that news was the million-dollar question.
Considering what he’d seen of her temper so far, he suspected she wasn’t going to be happy about it.
Which was a shame, because she really was a cutie. Despite his aching hand where she’d bit him, he’d rather work to convince her it was in everyone’s best interests for her to join them than it was for her to leave.
Well, die, in this case.
But maybe they could make her choose the better option without resorting to threats.
Celia handed the tablet back to Papa. “That means nothing to me
.”
“It will mean nothing to most people,” he said. “But it was sent to me a little bit ago by a trusted source. It means that, somewhere along the military’s command food chain, there’s a problem. A big one. I have my suspicions, which I’ll keep to myself for now. It also means we need to get Dr. Quong and his family off this continent and to some undisclosed location. Also, we’re now OTG until further notice.”
“OTG?”
“Off the grid,” Doc told her. “Total black ops from this point forward. Carry out standing orders until either successful completion, or a confirmed communication tells us otherwise.”
“So how long will that take?” Celia asked.
“As long as it takes,” Papa replied.
Chapter Thirteen
“So what about the others on The List?” Celia asked. “You still going to go after them, too?”
Papa nodded.
Things were happening too fast for her to process. She needed to slow them down a little. “Are you letting me talk to Dr. Quong now?” she asked Papa.
“Yep. Ask all your questions now though, because once we get his lab set up, he’s going to be busy.”
“What about reporting it? This is a huge story.”
“We’ll get to that discussion later. You want to talk to him, or not?”
Hell yeah, she did. She’d fight the other battles later. Right now, she needed to find out all she could before Papa slammed the window of time shut on her.
“Can I at least have my phone to record this on?”
“No. You can’t remember what he says, that’s your problem.”
“Can I at least have my notepad and pen from my bag?”
He finally nodded, rooted through her bag himself, and handed them to her.
Struggling to rein in her frustration, she returned her attention to Dr. Quong. “So they did survive? The others on The List?”
“I have been in contact with them, yes,” Dr. Quong said after glancing around at the other men.
Somehow, she fought the urge to scream I knew it! at the top of her lungs and break out in a happy dance.
That would have been…undignified.
Instead, she nonchalantly prepared to take notes, chewing on the inside of her lip to maintain control and help her focus. “Make with the deets,” she said. When Quong gave her a confused look, she clarified by adding, “How did all this happen? The virus.”
The man deflated, quite a feat considering how thin he was to start with. He removed his glasses and wiped at them with the hem of his button-up shirt. “Because when your family is being held hostage, would you not do anything you could to keep them alive?”
She shoved away a wave of homesickness at the thought of Emily and Roger. “I wouldn’t create a virus to unleash on the world, that’s for sure.”
“You do not understand. We had no choice. Well, some of us thought we did, at the start. We all would have ended up working on it one way or another. Mighty Leader bribed some of the team members from outside of North Korea, appealed to their humanitarian natures, made them believe they were conducting research on preventing zoonotic infections and working on vaccines to help save lives. To help protect our livestock and our people.”
“But you obviously weren’t there for that.”
Quong shook his head. “Once there, we were told another team was developing an experimental drug. Very addictive. We were told it would be used to eventually replace the prison work camps. That people who were to be sentenced would be given the drug, which would force them to return every day to their local penal office for their next dose and keep them in the area. My team’s task was to develop the virus, its vaccine, and then explore using the drug as a delivery system.”
She had to process the horrific connotations of that. It took her a moment to find her voice. “And that doesn’t strike you as horrible?”
“My team wasn’t directly involved in the drug development portion of the research. In the beginning, it seemed to us less distasteful than having people forcibly confined to those camps. They could live at home, with their families, work, support them. Not much different than heroin addicts using the old methadone clinics in the US up until a few decades ago.”
“Except they were trying to help people get off drugs.” Fortunately, ground-breaking research had found a chemical cure for heroin addicts. Scientists were still trying to branch out and widen the scope to apply that same cure to other addictive substances.
“They threatened to rape and kill my daughters before doing the same to my wife and mother,” Quong said. “They threatened to kill my brothers. My father had already been executed decades ago for treason he did not commit, all because someone owed him money and they did not want to repay him. They also threatened to kill all of us on the team. Frankly, while I would prefer to do good in the world, I will admit I was not honorable enough to choose suicide and the torture and murder of my family by refusing to do what they asked. We all thought it better to try to invoke change from within by hopefully sabotaging the project. Do you wish to hear the rest or not?”
Stunned by the force of the man’s anger, Celia shut up and let him continue.
“We were split into two teams, one to work on the drug, and one to work on the virus. Which we found out soon enough was to be combined, to make sure addicts were dosed with enough of the virus to ensure infection and death. The team working on the drug was comprised of scientists loyal to Mighty Leader. We could not trust them.
“In the beginning, before we understood the full scope of the project, we were under the impression that the virus was to be used as population-thinning device and confined to within the existing camps and other problematic regions of the country. A virus that was difficult to spread through the air, unlike influenza or SARS, and that would break down quickly in adverse conditions. We were to develop a vaccine in conjunction with the virus and begin manufacturing it in mass quantities once we were certain of the efficacy.”
“Let me guess who would be first to get the vaccine.”
He nodded. “Mighty Leader and his officials, of course. Those of us with family in North Korea, once we knew the vaccine was safe, we vaccinated ourselves and our families against it.”
She rubbed at her temple, overwhelmed by the information. “This doesn’t make sense. If you have the information on the vaccine, why not publish that all over the world? Put it out there through Anonymous or something, anywhere, enough places that people can’t help but find it and start replicating it?”
“It is not that simple. For starters, there is more than one strain of Kite now. Once it got loose into the wild, as it were, it started replicating and mutating. The latest virus signatures show there are at least three different types now. Who knows how many more might develop?”
He glanced around the room. “I am not sure the original vaccine we developed would be effective now against the current strains. Think about an influenza vaccine. It only guards against certain strains. But there are many strains, and if you are exposed to a strain that was not specifically included in the vaccine, you are still at risk of getting it. Also, the virus mutates.”
“Did you know Kite was going to do that? Mutate once it hit the wild, or whatever you said it did?”
“Dr. Chu was working on trying to figure out how to make it mutate to a harmless state before we fled. Apparently she was only half-correct. We did not have time to complete the process, unfortunately, but it would seem she was on the right track with her research.”
“Meaning all the surprise and none of the bennies.”
He gave her a questioning look.
“How about you back up and fill in the blanks,” she said. “There’s a lot of information you haven’t told me.”
She glanced at Papa to see if he was going to shut her down, but he seemed as interested in what the doctor had to say as she was.
Well, maybe I can reason with him to get my camera or sat-phone back, then.
Fo
r now, she needed to get the story, as much as she could, and in any way she could.
Chapter Fourteen
Doc wasn’t a scientist anywhere close to approaching the level of the man standing before them, but he wanted the “deets,” too, as Celia had put it.
Any information Doc had that could help him keep his team alive as long as possible, he’d take it.
Dr. Quong leaned against the kitchen counter. “We spent two years working in a secret facility in Pyongyang before we were ready for field testing. Then we were sent to the north, to a remote internment camp there, to—”
“Practice on live people.” Celia looked sick to her stomach.
Doc couldn’t blame her. He felt sick to his stomach.
“Yes,” Quong confirmed. “The drug first, then the virus. Then the combination.”
“So much for the Hippocratic oath,” she muttered.
“As I said, Julie—Dr. Chu—was desperately trying to figure out how to make it mutate to a harmless version.”
“You weren’t worried about anyone catching on?” she asked.
Now Doc could imagine Celia in her natural element. She might not be the most streetwise person on the farking planet, but she was tenacious, dogged in her obvious determination to get her story.
He respected her for that.
She hadn’t simply folded and crumbled under the pressure, like most people probably would have done by now.
The more he watched her, listened to her, the more he felt her digging under his skin.
And that was totally alien to him.
He was surprised to find he sort of liked it.
“We were able to limit the number of guards directly supervising us,” Quong said, “because of the nature of our research, and by playing along. Our guards knew nothing of what we were doing, and none of them spoke English, which all of us did. We were desperately trying to stall the project’s progress long enough to reach a point where those of us with families at risk could smuggle them to safety. We knew we could not trust the team working on the drug and kept them out of the loop, as you say, as we obtained forged passports and planned our escape.”