Synbat

Chapter 1

The BMW sprinted through the storm-lashed darkness, its headlights glinting off the wet pavement and the rows of trees blurring by on either side. Enjoying the sensation of speed, Doctor Glen Ward caressed the steering wheel. Military police cars were rarely out on this stretch of road so early in the morning, which is why he chose this route across the sprawling training areas of the Fort Campbell Military Reservation to get from his home in Clarksville to the lab. At this time of day, the only other traffic on the two-lane road was the few soldiers who lived on the western side of the reservation driving to their jobs in the opposite direction.

Ward tapped on the brakes as the edge of the military reservation slipped by and he was back on county road. He slowed further as he passed through the sleepy town of Bumpus Mills. He cruised along Route 139 until the road hit the tiny hamlet of Linton (population seventy-eight), on the banks of Lake Barkley, and then followed the road's sharp right turn to the north. The route now shadowed the shoreline of the lake.

After following the shore for four kilometers, Route 139 turned back east and climbed up into the low forested hills. The lack of people in this area had been one of the key reasons for building the lab here. Ward would have preferred someplace closer to Washington, D.C., since he seemed to spend most of his time there begging for funds, or even Nashville, where he lectured occasionally at Vanderbilt University, but he'd reluctantly accepted what he was given. The isolated site allowed him and his assistants to concentrate on their work with few distractions. The nearby Fort Campbell military reservation also gave them convenient access to restricted training areas to field-test their project.

When Ward's headlights touched the small sign that indicated the private turnoff for the lab parking lot, Ward expertly spun the wheel and the BMW fishtailed onto the driveway. He rolled up the short incline toward the parking lot, satisfied with the trip. He wasn't as content with the thought of another day of writing up classified reports to justify the continued existence of his work.

It seemed to Ward that he spent more time on foolish paperwork than on his research. The few people in Washington who knew the true extent of the Synbat project — and the success it had already achieved — were behind Ward and his efforts. Unfortunately, the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, and subsequent head-hunting for peace dividends, put the Biotech Engineering project high on the list of classified projects heading for the chopping block.

General Trollers, head of the Pentagon's sixty-eight-billion-dollar-a-year secret Black Budget, which funded Biotech, was afraid to let even the congressmen on the intelligence oversight committee know what was really happening in the Biotech labs. Trollers felt that the project was much too sensitive and would never survive even classified scrutiny in Congress.

During the brief meeting the two had had in Washington three months ago, Trollers had indicated that it would be better for all if the project was simply dropped unless there were some immediate results, for both financial and political reasons. He had given Ward a final six-month extension on the research grant. That time was more than half over and the pressure for results was increasing correspondingly.

Ward shook his head as the car glided across the parking lot, past the night security guard's pickup truck. The tremendous advances he had achieved here in the last two years could all go for naught if the project was dropped. Just when things finally seemed to be going right, too, Ward thought bitterly.

Ward grabbed his briefcase as he unfolded from the car. He ran a practiced hand through his blown-dry hair. Ward prided himself on his appearance. His tanned face, framed by silver hair, made him look distinguished, in his own not-so-humble opinion. Fitting, he felt, for one of the top genetic engineers in the country, if not the world. His six-foot frame didn't show the wear of time to be expected in a man of fifty-eight years. An hour every day working out with Nautilus equipment in the basement of his house helped ensure that.

As Ward turned toward the building he froze at the red-streaked glass facing him. His eyes traveled down, coming to a halt on the mangled body lying just inside. His heart rate picked up and a trickle of sweat ran down his back.

The doctor threw his briefcase on the hood of the BMW and opened it, pulling out a Smith and Wesson 9mm automatic pistol. He inexpertly worked the slide, loading a bullet into the chamber and cocking the hammer. Gun held with both hands in front, the doctor made his way to the front door, unaware that the gun's safety was still on.

The fact that the front doors were unlocked barely registered as Ward stepped inside and his eyes flickered over the carnage in the lobby. He couldn't recognize the ravaged body, but he was certain from the tattered remnants of clothing that it wasn't the night guard.

Ward headed directly for the security console and halted in dismay at the smashed computer. He looked over the video screens. No sign of the guard. He knew that the screens covered the entire first floor. That left two places for the guard to be — either outside the building, beyond range of the external cameras, or on the basement level. Who, then, was the dead man up here?

Ward abandoned the security console and went to the first office behind the lobby. He unlocked the door and sat down at the desk inside. Flipping on the power to the computer terminal, he anxiously waited while the machine booted up.

Finally getting a cursor prompt, Ward typed in his override code word, accessing all data in the computer. Fingers flashing over the keys, he opened up the security status folder. The cursor was replaced with a message that confirmed Ward's worst fears:

Ward took a second to compose himself, then went back out to the hallway leading to the elevator. He keyed the elevator doors and stepped in. He punched B and the elevator descended. Just before the doors opened, he pressed up against the back of the elevator, pistol pointing at the doors. He took a deep breath and held it as the doors slid open.

The operating room had been ransacked. Equipment was strewn about the floor and several machines were overturned. After carefully scanning the room, Ward focused his attention on the open doors on the far side. He could see through both sets of containment doors. That confirmed the message on the screen. This was bad. Very bad. According to lab standard operating procedures, the two doors were never to be opened simultaneously.

Ward slowly made his way across the operating room, sliding around the tables and equipment. Broken glass crunched under his feet. When he was close to the outer containment doors, he saw a red slick of blood that had washed out into the short connecting corridor. Ward edged his way through the corridor, carefully avoiding the blood. Pistol first, he entered the containment area.

Two bodies lay just inside, staring sightlessly at the fluorescent lights. He recognized neither man, although their mothers would not have either. Their necks were severed almost halfway through from the front. Both had been eviscerated, and their entrails looped out onto the floor. Limbs had been torn down to the bone. Ward looked up; the doors to both Cube One and Cube Two gaped open. The square cells inside were empty.

Taking a deep breath, Ward made a conscious effort to slow his heart rate. He knew that there was only one thing that could make this situation worse. He crossed to the right side of the room to a large box freezer. The metal doors on top were flung open. He felt his stomach plummet. The two metal brackets inside were empty; the equipment they had held, gone.

Ward rapidly retraced his steps, securing the containment doors behind him. He rode the elevator up, ran down the hallway to his office, and grabbed a portable computer off his desk. He carried it to the security console, disconnected the damaged computer, and hooked up the laptop. Before doing anything else, he glanced out into the parking lot. Just his BMW and the old pickup truck. Luckily no one else had shown up yet. Biotech employed ten people, most of whom didn't arrive until the normal work hour of eight.

Flipping open his wallet, Ward pulled out the card he had been given two years ago and had never used. Grabbing the phone, his fingers rapidly punched in the designated numbers.

The other end was picked up on the third ring. "Site and code, please."

Ward followed the instructions on the laminated card. "Site seven. Code three alpha eight six."

"One moment, please."

Ward licked his lips as he waited. His mind went into overdrive as he tried to figure out a way to salvage his research from this disaster. Then it leapt to a more immediate issue — where were they? Nervously he glanced out into the parking lot again. For all he knew they were watching the building at this minute. He pulled the pistol closer on the desktop.

A deep voice came over the phone. "This is Agent Freeman. I'm the station chief here. Who am I talking to?"

Ward remembered Freeman from the man's few inspection visits to the lab. "This is Doctor Ward from site seven. I have a class-one security violation here."

There was a slight pause on the other end. Ward could barely hear the man talking to someone else in the background, then the voice came back on the phone. "Go secure."

Ward punched the red button on the STU III phone. "I'm secure."

He heard a hiss and beep as the other end went secure. Now, even if the phone line was tapped, the conversation would be unintelligible to anyone except himself and the man on the other end.

The agent's voice was calm. "All right. I'm going to ask you some questions so I can do an initial assessment. Please answer as succinctly as you can."

"All right, I'm ready," Ward said. He heard a rustle of paper on the other end.

"What's the status of the Synbats?"

"Gone. Present location unknown."

"How many other cleared people are aware of this incident?"

Ward looked out into the parking lot again. "Just me so far. No one else has shown up for work."

"Good. Is there anyone else, unauthorized that is, who is aware of this incident that you know of?"

"No."

"What's your best estimate of when this happened?"

"Sometime last night. I just discovered them gone a few minutes ago."

"What about the security guard? What does he report?"

Ward glanced about the lobby. "He's missing. I've got three other bodies here."

There was a pause on the other end. "Three bodies? Who killed them? The guard?"

"I think the Synbats did it."

Another pause. "Have you identified the bodies?"

"No. Just three males. One in the lobby and two inside the outer containment doors."

"Were they trying to steal the Synbats?"

Ward rolled his eyes. "How the hell am I supposed to know? If they were, they certainly didn't do a good job of it."

"Unless there were more than three, or the guard was involved."

Ward wasn't interested in this line of thinking right now. "Maybe they tried to steal the Synbats and underestimated what they were up against. I don't know, but the bottom line is that the Synbats have either been taken or have escaped."

Freeman obviously decided to stick with the immediate problem. "All right. Here's what I want you to do. First, secure the inside of the building."

Ward looked down at the computer screen and called up the building security program. All external alarms indicated that the building was secure except for the front door. He rapidly punched in instructions, electronically relocking that door, and was rewarded with a secure status on the external alarm. "I've done that."

"OK. Next, is there anyone on your staff you'll need to help in the search for the Synbats? Try to keep it to a minimum."

Ward considered that quickly. "Yes. I'll need my primary assistant, Doctor Merrit."

"There's one last thing you need to do. Abort the Synbats."

Ward stared at the phone. He'd been afraid that would be the decision. Actually, he knew that it wasn't a decision made by Freeman. It was required. "Can we hold off on that until we get a chance to track them down?"

"They've already killed. If they've been stolen, we need to get them terminated immediately. If they escaped we can't have them wandering around the countryside. According to standard operating procedure, termination is the next step. You agreed to it when you got your security clearance. It's right here in black and white in your project response plan."

Ward knew he needed to stall. Two years of his work couldn't be destroyed like this. "They're probably holed up somewhere right now. Or whoever took them has them secure. They couldn't have gotten far. Once we get the direction finder running, we can track them down in no time."

The voice on the other end didn't bend. "Blow the collars. I'll be there in forty minutes. I've got a chopper en route to my location right now to pick me up. I want you to send everyone else home as they arrive. Tell them there's a federal security inspection shutdown and they'll be called when it's over. Don't go downstairs again. Keep everything the way it was. My people will need to go over it all."

Ward wasn't overly worried about what had happened. He was more concerned with what was going to happen. "How about if I access the direction finder and run an azimuth on them? If I find they're in an area where they aren't likely to run into people, I really believe we should hold off on termination. We've invested more than two years and sixty million dollars in this project."

Ward glanced nervously toward the parking lot again. For all he knew the Synbats could be right out there in the tree line. They might even come back on their own. He didn't want to face that by himself, but he also didn't want to lose the results of his efforts.

Freeman was implacable. "I repeat, Doctor Ward: Get an azimuth on them and terminate now. I've got an alert started at Fort Campbell to get us some help tracking the bodies. Just hope they didn't run into anyone else before now. Hold in place and do as instructed. I'll be there shortly."

There was a click on the other end. Ward stared at the dead phone for a long time. He realized that he hadn't told Freeman about what had been taken from the freezer. Time enough for that when the government man got here. Ward glanced up. The rain had finally stopped and a car was pulling into the lot. He rose and scurried across the foyer. He recognized the driver as the day shift security guard. Ward ran out into the parking lot and waved him over.

The car pulled up next to Ward and the guard rolled down the window. "What's up, Doctor Ward?"

Ward stood between the guard and the building. "The feds have called a security shutdown. They've got people en route now to do one of their unannounced inspections. I'd like you to park over at the entrance to the lot and tell everyone to return home. We might be shut down for a while — today at least. Tell everyone I'll call to let them know when we're open again."

The guard frowned and tried to look around Ward at the building. "Security shutdown? What happened, sir?"

"Nothing happened," Ward snapped. "They're just running one of their damn tests and it's our turn to be checked. You can go home, too, after…" Ward glanced at his watch and estimated."…after eight-thirty. Everyone should have come by then."

"Yes, sir." The guard could see the pickup truck. "What about Stan? Are you going to relieve him?"

Ward nodded. "Yes, I'll let him go once the test team from the feds are here." He started to head back and then remembered something. "By the way, let Doctor Merrit in. I'm going to need her to get the paperwork ready for the inspection."

"Yes, sir." The security guard drove off, back to the entrance of the parking lot.

Ward returned to the building and the security console. He accessed the security historical file and read the initial messages with growing concern. Using the cursor key, he scrolled the messages backward. The last message disappeared at the bottom of the screen as the previous ones appeared at the top. He ran through the file until he had a complete listing of everything the computer had logged the previous night. Then he went through once more in chronological order.

Ward shook his head as the import of the messages sorted out. Had the men who'd come into the lab cut the power? Was that why the guard had opened the cubes? Did they come in and open the inner containment from the computer and the outer containment when they went downstairs? But that didn't make any sense. Why not just come in and do everything from the computer themselves? Unless they had cut the power to get to the guard, Ward reasoned somewhat doubtfully. The computer controlled everything in the building, from security to power. When it went down, everything went down.

Ward cleared the screen and opened the termination program. Accessing the program automatically switched on the long-range antenna located on the roof. New words appeared on the screen:

Ward typed in his personal password:

Ward licked his lips. Two years of painstaking work would be destroyed by typing one word. He slowly tapped in the code word, filling the eight spaces, and poised his finger over the ENTER key. It hung there for half a minute while a fierce internal debate raged in Ward's mind. Finally the doctor shook his head. Instead of the ENTER key, he hit the BACKSPACE key, erasing the code word.

Bradford Freeman ducked his head as the Bell Jet Ranger helicopter descended onto the landing pad that crowned the federal building in Nashville. He ran forward and entered the aircraft, settling into the left front seat. Freeman was a big man, almost six and a half feet tall. A former defensive lineman for Vanderbilt, Freeman still carried his weight well, fifteen years after his last tackle on the field. The light reflecting off the puddles on the landing pad highlighted the small beads of perspiration that glistened on the black skin of his face despite the morning's chill. The phone call from site seven had shaken him.

As Freeman buckled his seat belt, the pilot lifted the aircraft. The helicopter was from a local civilian company — one of several that Freeman's office kept on file for contract work and the one that had responded this morning in the shortest amount of time. Freeman was using the helicopter as the quickest means to go the sixty miles to site seven. Once there, he would have to go secure and use the military for any further transportation.

"Where we heading, sir?"

"Head north for Land Between the Lakes. I'll direct you once we get closer."

Freeman switched attention to his briefcase, opening it and pulling out the contingency plan for site seven. Freeman was the only man in the regional office who really knew what went on at the site. His position as head of the Nashville Regional Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) section meant that he had to be a jack-of-all-trades. Not only was he the man responsible for emergency responses to any security problems at military installations in a four-state area surrounding Tennessee, but he had also been burdened with the immediate security response for thirteen classified federal research facilities in those four states.

The DIA was tied heavily into the security and operation of all of the Pentagon's Black Budget research projects. Since the DIA's inception in 1961, it had been involved in much of the shadowy work that appeared to be a requisite for maintaining national security. There were numerous DIA-supported research projects being conducted at the behest of the Pentagon, some more sensitive than others.

Freeman knew that the DIA had earned a bad reputation over the years when word about some of those classified projects had leaked. The use of LSD on human subjects to test its effectiveness as an interrogation device was one of the more glaring examples. From what Freeman was presently reading in the file, this could be another potentially embarrassing episode. There were two critical aspects to Freeman's job — prevention and then reaction. This was the first time he was in the reaction mode.

Fifteen years ago, there wouldn't have been a contingency plan for either mode. In a weird twist, it had been a Russian disaster that had spurred the development of this arm of the DIA. In 1979 an outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet Union was widely suspected in the intelligence community to have come from a breach in containment at the Sverdlovsk biological weapons facility. The specter of any such occurrence in the United States had driven the requirement for both tighter containment plans at all research facilities, regardless of the type of research, and the writing of DIA response plans to limit collateral damage for every facility funded by the Black Budget. An overall national DIA damage-control response force had also been formed and was headquartered in D.C.

Despite the plan, Freeman didn't like the present situation at all. His area of expertise was counterespionage. Who were the men who had entered the installation and how had they found out about the Synbat project? His predecessor had prepared the required contingency plan for reaction to a compromise at site seven, and Freeman had made the required quarterly inspection visits there, but reacting was uncharted territory, especially since Doctor Ward sounded as though he wasn't really sure what had happened.

From what Freeman had seen when he'd visited site seven, the escape of the Synbats could turn into a major disaster. Fortunately, with termination accomplished, it was now simply a case of tracking down the remains and then doing cleanup. The means to accomplish the first were already in motion due to a quick phone call that Freeman had made to the post staff duty officer at nearby Fort Campbell prior to departure. The means to the second had required a phone call to Washington.