The China Dogs (47 page)

Ghost and Jude virtually jump from their chairs and follow her a short stretch down a doglegged corridor to a sign saying
ICU.
“She isn't conscious, but her vital signs are stable again. So don't expect too much.”

“Is the surgeon coming back?” asks Jude.

“I think so.” The nurse stops as they reach a small single ward just a few yards from an operating room. “Here you go.” She pushes a blue door and holds it for them as they enter the darkened room.

Jude's eyes fall on the vital signs monitor. Systolic 129. Diastolic 75. They're okay. Not perfect but fine for someone in her condition. Her heartbeat is high, though: 110 . . . 112 . . . 110. She looks from the screen to the drips, the stands, the ventilator, and the other monitors—all the paraphernalia of critical illness.

Her friend is lying on her back, head turned to the right, black hair on the pillow, mask to her mouth, tubes plastered to her arms. Sodium, potassium, and sugar are dripping from bags into tubes and then needles into veins. A Foley catheter runs discreetly from the bladder, a nasogastric tube from her stomach.

Ghost stands at the foot of the bed feeling empty. It breaks his heart to see Zoe like this. The stitches on her arms and legs, the dressing to her skull where they cut to release the swelling. This is not the vibrant, full-of-life woman he fell in love with. As he walks down the opposite side of the bed to Jude and takes Zoe's tiny, pale hand in his, he has an acute sensation that he's losing her. Her fingers feel lifeless. Corpselike. He's picked up the limbs of enough cadavers to know the sensation. Instinctively, he slides his thumb and forefinger down her wrist and feels for a pulse.

He's tired and his lack of expertise means he finds it and then loses it again.

It was so faint.

He searches once more and this time seems unable to locate it.

A monitor in the corner of the room lets out a loud warning bleep.

Jude has been watching the screens and is already a move ahead of him. She hits a red button by the bed.

A green jagged line on a screen near Ghost goes flat. Numbers disappear and hit zero.

The doors burst open.

The surgeon rushes in, concern etched into his brow. “Out. Out. Get these people out.”

Nurses push Ghost back to the door. He sees Jude asking questions. Overhears someone say, “She's crashed. Her heart has stopped.”

178

Beijing

T
he bank of video monitors in the Nian Operations Room shows coast-to-coast chaos in the United States.

Xue Shi's tired but vigilant eyes take in the live feeds and the glowing maps on his computer showing the devastation the dogs are wreaking. He'll be glad when this mission is over. When he can grab precious sleep and the rewards for helping Zhang take over the presidency.

The Chinese satellites show that the U.S. Army's lead teams are still trying to round up and kill the last of the attack dogs in New York's Central Park, Wall Street, and downtown areas. In Los Angeles, Bel Air and Glendale police are pursuing a mix of pointers, labs, and boxers that have killed more than a dozen of the wealthy residents and injured close to twenty.

Across the monitor bank, the lieutenant general watches the National Guard fight a rear-guard action through Burleson Park in the north of Dallas. The bodies of dozens of locals and tourists are strewn across the grass, playgrounds, and picnic sites as marauding dogs rampage eastward toward the North Central Expressway.

In Dallas itself, shoppers are under attack in the Main Street area and the Historic and Arts districts. Traffic is at a standstill and paramedics are caught in the gridlock.

In Houston, four Alsatian guard dogs have been activated at the Mission Control center and have already killed two members of the International Space Station ground crew.

A pack of strays is attacking visitors leaving an antiques show in the George R. Brown Convention Center.

In Seattle, the first of a whole series of planned attacks has just begun. Sniffer dogs down at the dockside are attacking port workers. Across town, two kennel maids are being savaged to death by Labradors at a nearby animal shelter.

A message flashes on his computer. An alert he's been waiting for. He picks up the phone and dials General Zhang's private cell phone.

“Yes.”

“I have the results from the laboratory. The glass capsule that Luo Kai had in his mouth contained polonium.”

“Polonium-210?”

“Yes, General. The specially coated glass would have contained it, but once broken, the uranium would have proved deadly.”

179

Beijing

T
omorrow he will deal with Geng Chunlin. Until then the odious man can sweat and rot in a dark cell full of cockroaches and rats.

The world will be a very different place in twenty-four hours.

President Xian will have returned from making a fool of himself in Hawaii. The Americans will be broken. And he—Fu Zhang—will be assuming the presidency and total control of the People's Republic of China.

It will be his world.

His in the way that only the great emperors of bygone China have ever known.

Absolute rule.

Not only of China, but soon, also of the other biggest superpowers in the world.

Starting with America.

True power.

Global power obtained through global fear.

Fear is the energy of power, like that uranium they tried to poison him with. Maintain the fear, and the power is regenerated over and over again. And once started, it only needs a little here and there to keep it running.

He slips off his robe and steps into the bathwater.

It is not as he wished.

He'd asked the private butler at the Raffles Hotel to run a tub that was tepid and filled with soothing herbs and oils. Any hotter and it inflames the scars on his chest.

But this is not tepid.

Far from it. When he sees the old fool he will hold him down in it and teach him what tepid is.

The anger rouses him. Acts as a perfect pick-me-up for the playmates that his soldierly contact is bringing around for him.

Special playmates.

Ones he needs to relieve all the excitement that's been building tensely inside him. His desires need to be met. The anger and rage need to be vented through his sexual potency. Women need to understand him and fear him just as much as men.

He runs cold water until it is the perfect temperature and slides into the bath. He thinks for a moment of what he will do with Luo Kai when the bigger issues are settled.

Maybe he will have him fight some dogs.

That really would be something to watch.

The young soldier was so fast and powerful, Zhang knows he could easily have killed him. But then he'd have been arrested. Or even shot. Hence the ruse with the poison. In war the clever moves often turn out to be the clumsiest.

Yes, he'll have him fight the dogs.

One at a time.

Until gradually he is worn down. Then he will send in the tiniest Chihuahua to finish him off.

The thought is delicious.

Zhang steps out of the deep tub and pulls on a terry-cloth robe. He is ready for his playmates now. Ready to rip at their bodies like a Nian dog.

180

CIA HQ, Langley, Virginia

D
anny Speed is dead on his feet.

There doesn't seem a moment when he isn't being asked a question by a code breaker, geneticist, analyst, scientist, or fellow CIA operative.

Chris Parry catches the young New Yorker falling asleep in front of a screen at a hot desk terminal. He slides a chair alongside him and offers words of encouragement. “We're close, Danny. Really close. You've done a brilliant job and the linguists have completed 80 percent of the translations. We already have enough to have sent the scientists wild, and plenty for the strategy teams to build patterns, models, and mapping software.”

Danny can tell this isn't the start of a backslapping pick-me-up. “But you have a ‘but,' sir?”

“Yeah, I do. You're a smart kid, so I think you know what it is, don't you?”

He nods. “I do. But I can't explain it. The walls just came down. For less than an hour the normal security barriers just dropped, like someone deliberately opened up the master computer in North Korea and let us rifle through their safe.”

“That's the problem. If this is false information and we act on it, then they win. And I mean, end game win, not slight loss in a bigger battle win. This would be the kind that there's no coming back from.”

Danny runs things through in his head. Just as he'd been doing for the past twenty-four hours. “I didn't change capture codes. Didn't do anything different than I had been doing. The only real change in practices was me relocating from New York to Breezy Point.”

“That wouldn't have done it.”

“Sometimes a reboot on hacking codes has an effect.”

“Not like that.”

Brad Stevens wanders their way and joins them. He looks even more tired than he normally does, and that was never a good place to start from. He waggles a piece of printout paper. “This is interesting.”

Parry smiles. “I'm always interested in interesting, Brad.”

“There was an outgoing coded message, nonmedical, not scientific, and incomplete, so it didn't get top priority from our team. One of the linguists has just completed the translation and now the fragments take on greater impact. It says, ‘I am Hao Weiwei. My son Jihai and I are scientists but first and foremost we are men of honor and peace. We were told Nian was a defensive project, dedicated to discover an antidote to an evil invention of the West. Only when I discovered tetrodo—'
That's where the message was cut off.”

Parry takes the piece of paper, and as he reads it for himself, puts some of the pieces together. “Jihai was the scientist who caused the standoff in the DMZ.” He looks at Danny. “And both he and Hao had administrator access to the terminals, right?”

“Right. We've been through that connection, though, haven't we?”

“Not in quite this light.” Parry gets some of the bigger picture now. “It's an honor thing. Hao found out that the dogs' program was going to be an offensive operation so he disabled the firewalls during the time his son tried to escape, that's how you got the data burst that you did.”

“Makes sense,” says Danny.

“They'd have picked it up in Beijing,” adds Stevens. “Then they'd have shut him down double-quick.”

“Probably.” Parry puts a finger on the printout. “That's why he never finished the message.” He turns to Danny. “What's tetrodo? Does that mean anything to you?”

“Not a thing.” Danny types it into a search engine on the computer in front of him. “There are some hits here. It's the name of an iTunes podcast on e-learning. There's a rock band by the same name. And . . .” He pauses. “Shit. You'd better see this. There's a thing called tetrodotoxin. It's a deadly neurotoxin that is regarded as undetectable unless you are looking solely for it, and even more worryingly, it's incurable.”

181

Air Force One

T
he pilot announces that the presidential plane has been cleared for landing and they expect to be on the ground in Hawaii in ten minutes' time.

Clint Molton is deep in thought, mentally rehearsing his conversation with Xian and trying not to think about his children and how they will have taken the news about Emperor being destroyed.

Don Jackson picks up the flashing phone and takes a call from the leader of the CIA's cyber squad. “I'm hoping this is good news, Chris.”

“The best you'll have had today.” The former Delta Force commander looks back at the teams of code breakers, translators, geneticists, scientists, and operatives who have been toiling relentlessly on the data streams that Danny Speed captured.

Jackson sees clouds hit the windows of the 747 and swallow the plane in their strange foam and dulled light. “Give me the headlines, we're coming in to land.”

“We have a complete decode. One that actually makes sense to linguists and scientists. We have the chemical composition of the adrenaline booster, we have the antidote—what they call a ­pacifier—and most important of all, we have the full range of RDIF frequencies for all the weaponized dogs.”

Jackson feels elated. He touches Molton's arm to break him from his thoughts and switches to speakerphone. “Chris, I've just conferenced in the President. You were saying that you believe you now have the full collection of parts, everything there is on Nian?”

“We think so. We've got computer programs up and running. The batch codes and ID numbers of the dogs' RDIF transponders tally with activated dogs.”

“We need teams on the nonactivated ones, the ones that could still do damage.”

“Already on it. National Guard and Army have their intel people digging into our data and are redirecting as we speak.”

Molton feels something he's not felt for a week. Optimism. “That's great work, Chris. Don will talk to you when we land. I'm going to need certain data sent to me so I can show Xian he's a busted flush. Can you have someone prepare key and conclusive extracts that will leave him in no doubt?”

“I'll look after it personally, Mr. President.”

“Thank you. And tell the team, well done.”

“I will, sir.”

Jackson hangs up and turns to the President. “For the first time we can be proactive. We can literally go get these bitches and sonsofbitches before they so much as snarl at anyone.”

182

Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami

G
host takes a call from Annie Swanson. She's done everything he asked. Dealt with all the paperwork and made the calls he told her to. Now she's in the hospital reception with the change of shirt and other stuff he wanted.