Shadow Page 22

Following the corridor she had taken after they split up took Lucy into a section of the blockhouse that was cordoned off into more sub-areas, each one containing a computer server module on a vibration-resistant plinth. Ducts channeling in the wintry air from outside through massive dehumidifiers gave the space a dry, oppressive chill, and there was little sound in there except for the humming of the fans and the soft chitter of electronics. The Brit would have been able to give her chapter and verse on the capabilities of the computer rigs, but even Lucy’s limited understanding of the tech made it clear to her that this was a lot of computing power. She kept out of the server rooms themselves, spotting cameras watching the machines from shadowed corners, and after taking snapshots of the layout, she retreated back the way she had come.

  The quiet and the lack of any opposition were preying on her mind. Was the Lion’s Roar really complacent enough to rely on the facility’s remoteness alone to protect it? So far, what she had seen of the group didn’t give her a coherent picture. Their tactics were strong and well thought out, but their operational security was lacking.

  Dangerous, she concluded, but not professional.

  The Lion’s Roar was not a hard-core terrorist group in the mold of top-tier threats like Al Sayf, more along the lines of a criminal gang or a rogue militia. That didn’t make them less of a threat, however—if anything, it made them unpredictable, and an enemy you couldn’t predict was the worst of all foes.

  Marc appeared around the corner up ahead and beckoned her to him. He looked worse for wear, and when she came closer she knew something was up. There was a puddle of coffee on the floor and nearby, a few spots of blood. She looked around and saw where paint had been chipped off the far wall.

  “I miss something?”

  “Nothing to worry about.” Marc showed her the side of Irish beef sleeping off a double-dose of tranks. “I checked his ink,” he went on, indicating his neck. “More of the same faction tattoos—lions, lightning bolts, crooked crosses, the whole lot.”

  “You upload them?”

  He nodded. “What did you get?”

  She told him about the computer stacks, showing him the images she had taken of the servers.

  “I guess this confirms SR’s suspicions.”

  Marc nodded again, scrutinizing the pictures.

  “Yeah, that’s some serious heavy iron there. Way more than an industrial biolab would need.”

  “Let’s keep up the momentum.”

  Lucy pocketed her smartphone and set off again. Marc kept pace with her, and together they pushed open the doors into the next sector of the blockhouse.

  There were more labs here, but this time they were bigger and in active use. Through windows alternating strips of frosted and clear glass, Lucy saw two figures in white coats moving around inside a compartment off to the right. She spotted a too-big cold-weather jacket hanging on a coat hook, and heard a woman’s voice.

  Marc shot her a questioning look and she returned a nod.

  “In here,” she whispered. “On three.”

  Lucy counted up with her fingers, and on the mark, she shouldered open the door and surged inside, with Marc a step behind her.

  Two East Asians in lab coats, a man and a woman, were standing around a computer workstation, and Lucy saw she had interrupted them in the middle of a disagreement.

  She raised her tranquilizer rifle.

  “Step back from the keyboard, hands where I can see them.”

  Behind her, she heard a crunch of plastic as Marc smashed in a security camera watching the compartment from over the doorway.

  “What is going on?” The male scientist demanded an answer, blinking furiously at their intrusion. “This is a restricted area!”

  Lucy only half-heard the man. Her attention was on the woman, whose face became a complex mix of ambivalent emotions as recognition dawned in her eyes.

  “Katelyn?” said the woman. “Is that you?”

  Marc shot her a questioning look, and it look Lucy a second to remember that “Katelyn” had been the cover name she’d operated under during the Pyongyang mission.

  “Hello, Ji-Yoo.”

  “You know her?” The man almost shouted the question at Park, but she didn’t hear him.

  “Are you the reason they abducted me?” Park’s expression hardened and she took a step toward Lucy. “Is this because of what we did? You told me they would never find me!” She spat the last words at her, fearful and venomous.

  “Ji-Yoo, move away from these people!”

  The man in the lab coat grabbed at her arm, but Park angrily shook off his grip.

  “Don’t touch me, Kyun!” she snapped. “You’re the worst of them!”

  “How dare you!” The man recoiled at the accusation, and began to rant. “I am only trying to help, you foolish sow! Can’t you understand that? I am your one chance to get through this alive!”

  “Do we need this bloke?” said Marc, out of the side of his mouth. “He’s starting to piss me off.”

  Lucy gave a terse shake of the head, and the Brit put a dart in him.

  “Wha—?” The man called Kyun staggered backward, looking down at the barb that had suddenly appeared in his chest. “Oh…” he managed, before slumping against the workstation and folding to the floor.

  The guy’s name rang a vague bell in Lucy’s thoughts, recalling something from the Pyongyang mission briefing.

  There was a man named Kyun on Park’s team, back in the North. What are the odds this is the same person?

  Park didn’t seem that upset that Marc had tranked him. She was still set on Lucy, her fear and despair warring with the need to trust someone.

  “I don’t know what is happening to me.”

  Tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “We’re here for you,” Lucy told her. “Just like before. I told you then, I would get you out, and I did.” She extended her hand. “Come with me. It’ll be okay.”

  “I can’t go.” Park shook her head, as Marc slipped past her to run his eye over the workstation. “I can’t go with you. Not this time. I have too much to lose.”

  Lucy and Marc exchanged a loaded glance. On the drive out from Reykjavík, they had talked over what their approach would be if they had to get Park on their side. The easy way would be to put her out with another dart and carry her to safety, but there were too many variables, too many unknowns in play.

  “Ji-Yoo, we know what is going on here,” said Lucy, reframing her approach. “We know these people are pressuring you into helping them. If we get you out of here, we can stop them.”

  “No.” She kept shaking her head. “You don’t know, Katelyn. You really don’t.”

  Marc turned back toward her.

  “This is like the other rooms,” he said. “There’s no lab gear, nothing for culturing, no microscopes and centrifuges, no Petri dishes. Just a computer running a molecular simulator program.”

  “What are you working on in here?” said Lucy. At length, she let her rifle drop on its sling, closing the gap between her and the scientist. “Tell me.”

  Park looked at the floor, wiping the tears from her face.

  “They made me … improve the virtual genetic model.” She gestured at the workstation. “We enhanced a synthetic infective agent. It’s a crossbreed, it’s the weapon we were making, back then before everything changed.” She let out a sob. “It’s Geulimja.”

  “Shadow,” said Marc.

  A crawling chill marched up Lucy’s spine, and she took Park’s hand. She could see the other woman was trapped by her panic, and she had to snap her out of it.

  “We’ll just go, all right? And once you’re someplace safe, we’ll get this place and everyone in it wiped off the map.”

  “It’s too late,” insisted Park. “It’s already done. They were almost finished. They needed me to take it to completion. The French woman, Axelle … She said they’re going to hold us until they have proof it works as expected.”

  “We’re talking about
a bioweapon,” said Marc, in a dead voice. “In the hands of a bunch of ultra-right-wing extremists. That’s going to end badly.” He turned to Park. “Look, you must help us stop this. We still have time! There’s another day before—”

  “No!” Park screamed the word and snatched back her hand from Lucy, as if she had been scalded. “I don’t care what happens to me, but if I cross them, my family is dead, don’t you see?” Her shoulders shook with emotion. “They’re all I have. The only good thing that has come out of my life.”

  She pulled a small digital tablet from the pocket of her lab coat, tapping shakily at the screen. It displayed a series of video files. The videos appeared to show Simon Lam and his son Michael, in a space that looked a lot like the basement of the warehouse in Singapore.

  Lucy gave Marc a look and he came close, gently taking the device so he could examine the footage.

  “These are time-stamped,” he said. “Uplinked every twelve hours. The last one came in forty-five minutes ago.” He took a moment to frame his next words. “Have you … spoken to them?”

  Park nodded. “They don’t let us say much.” She pointed at the screen. “Last time, Michael was sleeping. Simon said he was being brave.”

  Marc met Lucy’s gaze and the weight of the terrible truth they both knew hung there between them. It was as if the room shifted around her, a dreadful certainty coming into sharp and unforgiving focus as Lucy saw the stark choice that lay in front of her.

  “Ji-Yoo, tell us where the bioprinters are,” said Marc. “Tell us what we’re dealing with here. If we don’t stop these people, hundreds, thousands of families like yours could be in danger.”

  “I won’t, I can’t! I don’t care about that.” Park’s voice became plaintive. “I only care about them.”

  On some level, Lucy had known this moment was coming ever since she had stood in that room in the warehouse basement, seeing the dried blood on the floor, the looted watch and the silver ring. The crushing inevitability was inescapable, and every way around it was a false hope, built on deceit after deceit. If she didn’t tell Park the truth, if she didn’t shock her out of this lie that was imprisoning her, they would fail.

  Lucy reached into an inner pocket of her jacket, removing the burden she had been carrying since Singapore, and did something terrible. She took Park’s hand and placed Simon Lam’s bloodstained wedding ring in her open palm.

  The woman’s eyes widened.

  “This … This isn’t mine. They wouldn’t let me wear my ring, it’s safe in a locker in the other building with the rest of…” She faltered and the color drained from her face.

  “Your husband and your son are dead,” Lucy told her. “They were killed a few hours after you were abducted.” She took a deep breath. “We found them.”

  “These videos are fakes.” Marc held up the digital pad. “I think you know that, don’t you? You knew something wasn’t right about them. But you didn’t want to think about it.”

  Ji-Yoo Park looked up and met Lucy’s gaze.

  “No,” she managed.

  “Yes,” said Lucy, her voice thick with emotion.

  Her heart broke as the other woman saw the truth in her eyes, and Park collapsed against her, falling into racking, shuddering sobs.

  TWELVE

  Marc watched the Korean woman’s world imploding and he felt an aching stab of empathy. He knew first-hand what it was like to lose someone you cared about in a moment of senseless violence.

  Now he and Lucy had taken away everything that mattered to Ji-Yoo Park in the space of a few breaths, as surely as if they had killed her family themselves. He reminded himself that it was Verbeke’s men, the Lion’s Roar, who had done this to Park, but it didn’t make the revelation feel any less hurtful. He hated himself for being a part of it.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy was saying. “You had to know the truth. These people are using you, and when they’re done with you, you’ll be killed too.”

  “I know,” managed Park. Breath by breath, the woman dragged herself back from her racking, sobbing sorrow. “I have accepted that. It’s punishment. For what we made, back in the North.” She took a shuddering breath. “I wouldn’t have tried to stop them … As long as my family…” She choked as she tried to say the words.

  Marc knew they had to keep her focused.

  “Tell us about Shadow.”

  “It was … It was the codename for the military’s attempt to create a tactical bioweapon for battlefield use.” Park shot a look at Kyun’s unconscious form. “We were never able to assemble the complete viral matrix. I defected before the terminal phase was perfected. Without me they couldn’t do it.”

  “The modified Marburg strain?” Marc prompted.

  Park pointed at the computer workstation.

  “A hemorrhagic fever with a programmable duration was the goal. To make a disease that could infect a target city, eradicate the populace and then burn itself out before the army moved in to take over. Marburg was chosen as the core for the weapon not only because is it extremely lethal, but also because the effects are so terrible, the mere threat of it would cause enemy forces to surrender.”

  “That’s pretty fucked up,” he muttered.

  “Why do you think I defected?” she replied.

  “Where is it?” Lucy squinted through the gaps in the lab’s frosted glass window, checking the corridor. “Where are they keeping the materials?”

  Park took another shaky breath.

  “Not in here,” she began. “They haven’t allowed me anywhere near the actual cultures.” She nodded toward the door. “The fabrication lab is in the next section, that’s where Kyun works.”

  Marc knelt and took the unconscious man’s RFID card from his pocket, before offering it to Park.

  “Show us.”

  “Follow me.”

  Park took a moment to compose herself, then set off.

  Lucy readied her weapon and Marc did the same. He’d been caught off guard once and had no desire to take another beating. The pain from the still-healing wounds inflicted in Singapore was a steady burn across his chest.

  “You okay?”

  He put the question to Lucy, quietly so that Park wouldn’t hear. The stricken look Lucy wore when she told the other woman of the deaths of her family had faded, replaced by the operative’s usual stoic professionalism.

  Lucy didn’t look at him.

  “She had to know.”

  “You had no choice.”

  He wanted to say more, but now wasn’t the time. In the end, he just gave a nod.

  They fell in line behind Park as she used Kyun’s key-card to tap them through the next set of doors and into an airlock antechamber. The secure doors opened out into the largest space yet, a work area stocked with industrial lab gear. Most of the systems were automated machines inside clean boxes, locked into environmentally secure mini-chambers to keep out any potential contaminants. Robotic armatures moved back and forth in jerky, repetitive dances as they dosed sample trays with liquid-filled pipettes or agitated the contents of conical flasks. Some of the compartments were big enough for a person to enter, the entrances festooned with columns of garish caution labels warning against toxins, biohazards and other dangers.

  “Nobody home,” noted Lucy. “Again.”

  “Yeah.” The ghost town nature of the Frigga facility was preying on Marc’s mind. “Is it usually this quiet?”

  “There should be others in here,” Park said warily. “I have seen a few technicians. Security staff, as well as Axelle and the others.” She found what she was looking for and led them to it. “Here. This is the secure storage unit.”

  The unit resembled a decompression chamber, with a bank of controls on the outside for setting and monitoring the internal temperature. Marc looked it over, checking for any alarm systems or countermeasures.

  “Open it,” said Lucy.

  She covered Marc with her weapon as he stepped up and grasped the twin twist-handle latches to open the he
avy, pressurized door.

  He hesitated.

  “This is safe, yeah?”

  “Anything within will be sealed,” Park said glumly. “That is the only place in this lab where any kind of active culture could be held securely.”

  Despite himself, Marc still held his breath when he turned the latches, and the secure unit’s heavy door opened with a pop-hiss sound. White vapor gusted out from inside and he eased it open.

  Inside there were racks upon racks of metal shelves, and every last one of them was bare. Gingerly, Marc examined the interior, making sure there was no hidden compartment, no unseen container he missed on the first glance.

  “What the hell is this?” Lucy turned on Park. “Why is it empty?”

  Park’s hands rose to her mouth.

  “That’s not … That doesn’t make any sense.” She shook her head. “This is the seed store. Any assembled viral stock would be held in there!”

  The chill wafting out from the unit made Marc’s skin prickle, as the beginnings of an unpleasant possibility occurred to him.

  “Ji-Yoo, did you actually see it? The stock, I mean. Since they brought you here, did you actually see any physical materials?”

  “I…” Park’s gaze turned inward. “No. Not any live samples. I was told they were limiting exposure. Kyun told me it was for security and safety. He told me other people were working on the culturing and fabrication, in here.”

  “He was lying to you.” Marc slammed the door shut. “You were working on a molecular model where we found you, right?” Park gave a nod and he continued. “That’s a virtual version of the Shadow virus vector. Like you don’t have the architect laying bricks on a building site, do you? They work on the plans, someone else does the heavy lifting.”

  “You’re losing me,” said Lucy, with a frown.

  “We’re in the wrong bloody place!” Marc snapped, the explanation falling out of him in a sudden rush. “There never was any of the actual bioweapon here, just an incomplete digital model of it—which they forced Park to finish up for them.” He began to pace, thinking aloud. “It’s no different from one of those guns made in a plastic milling machine … The thing is just a program, ones and zeros until you turn the data into a physical object.”