OUTCAST Ops: The Poseidon Initiative

TEN

Tanner disconnected the call and grinned like a Cheshire cat. Unbelievably, it had worked. He had plied his web of contacts — some of them frighteningly tenuous — but he had managed to get through to a mid-level operator within Hofstad and set up a rendezvous for the antidote. There was no doubt that they truly desired the STX antidote, though, to be willing to jump through such hoops for it, and that in itself concerned Tanner greatly. They were planning something big. The football attack was just the beginning.

Next, Tanner placed calls to Liam and Danielle. He and Danielle would pose as reps from the biotech company and actually meet face-to-face with the Hofstad contacts. Liam would be dropped in the vicinity of the drop ahead of time, ready to forcibly intervene should things head in a wrong direction.

The meeting was set for tonight at 8pm, in four hours time. The next day would see the expiration of the threat window, so Tanner knew that this was likely the only chance they would get at climbing sufficiently high on Hofstad’s hierarchy ladder to be able to make a difference. He knew that they wouldn’t be careless enough to send high ranking members. The possibility of a trap would not escape them. Militia-wise, they’d send lower level sleeper cell jihadists. Men who were trained to kill but who didn’t know too much about how the organization was run, should they be captured and tortured.

But they would need a scientist, or at the very least a highly experienced lab technician. This person, Tanner had a hunch, would be no more than one or perhaps two intermediaries removed from Hofstad’s brass. He could be physically tailed, electronically traced or both in an attempt to find his superiors. But the first thing they would have to do is to convince him that they did, in fact, have a functioning antidote for STX, else there was no reason for him to even contact Hofstad’s inner circle. Tanner had no idea how to accomplish that, but he knew who did.

Jasmijn looked up from her microscope to see Dante engaged in conversation. He wasn’t talking to Nay, who catted around the room on patrol, and he wasn’t talking to Jasmijn. Nor did he hold an obvious device like a cell-phone or radio in his hand, either, so she assumed he must be listening with his earbud and talking through a tiny mic, perhaps a clip-on. She decided not to get too distracted by it, and got back to her work on the antidote.

It was slow going. Progress was excruciating. The work was a vexing combination of tedious complexity and visual acuity with a microscope that mentally ground her down at an unrelenting pace. But with untold lives at stake, Jasmijn knew that resting was not an option. She sipped from a Diet Coke as she worked. She had almost lost herself in the protocols once again when she heard Dante calling her name.

She looked up from the microscope. He was walking toward her, arm extended, holding a smartphone he must have produced from a pocket since the last time she’d looked at him.

“Tanner wants to talk to you.” He handed her the phone and she put it to her ear.

“How are you? Everything okay? Line is secure, no one listening but me. You can talk freely.”

She recapped their travel and told him everything was fine so far. “I’m working on the antidote right now. Slow going, but it’s going.”

“I wanted to ask you about that. Do you think you can create a fake antidote that might pass inspection by a scientist for at least a few hours, even though it ultimately doesn’t work?”

Jasmijn pursed her lips as she watched the pair of OUTCAST spooks case the room.

“That’s easy. You could take a glass of Kool-Aid and say it’s an antidote. Unless they’re willing to test it on a live subject whose been infected with STX, it’d take several hours at least to confirm the chemical composition. But this is Hofstad we’re talking about, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they used it on an infected lab animal. Or person.”

In Maryland, Tanner frowned. He hadn’t considered this. Still, his goal was only to gain access to whoever it was that was calling the shots for the next attack. In his mind, all he had to do was get close to them and he would take it from there.

“I just want them to agree to a meeting where I’ll be posing as a biotech rep with an STX antidote for sale. Can you email me some information about an antidote that would sound legitimate?”

“Well yes, I–I can do that, but…” Jasmijn stammered as she comprehended Tanner’s meaning. “I thought you wanted the real thing, though? If you try to bluff them with a fake, what happens when — if— I have the real deal? They won’t believe it.”

“They’ll be the ones contacting you for an antidote, remember? In this case, we’re going to them. They won’t connect the two different sources.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“We don’t have much choice, Jasmijn. Another attack is coming tomorrow. If we’re going to stop it, I need to get to them. I don’t see how else to get to them but to lure them to me.”

“I’ll send you some convincing-sounding info along with a simple recipe you can use to make something in the kitchen that looks authentic at first glance.”

“Great. I’ll let you get back to work.”

“Tanner!”

“Yeah?”

“Please be careful.”

Jasmijn handed the phone back to Dante, who resumed his patrol with Naomi. Jasmijn shook her head at the audacity of the OUTCAST leader’s plan and set about concocting his bogus antidote.