The Ajax Protocol

CHAPTER 2

Nick Carter took one look at Director Elizabeth Harker and knew it was going to be a long day. Harker headed the Project, an intelligence agency few Americans knew existed. Nick ran the Project team in the field.

Nick tugged on his left ear, where a Chinese bullet had ripped off the earlobe a few years back.

"Director, why do I have the feeling you’re about to tell me something I don’t want to hear?"

Elizabeth swiveled toward him in the big executive chair she liked. The chair dwarfed her petite frame. She wore her favorite combination of a black pantsuit and simple white blouse. Nick thought her closet was probably a study in black and white. An emerald pin on her jacket picked up the color of her eyes.

"Take a look at this."

Harker touched her keyboard. A monitor on the wall of her office lit with a video of soldiers armed with assault rifles, hunched down behind concrete barricades stretched across a wide boulevard. Ominous columns of black smoke rose from a city in the background. A mob of people was running straight at the barriers, their faces distorted with rage and fear. Nick watched a young woman holding a baby trip and fall and vanish under the trampling feet of the mob. No one paid any attention.

The soldiers began firing as the mob clambered over the barriers. Then the soldiers disappeared under the sea of screaming people.

"Jesus," Nick said. "Where is this happening?"

"Novosibirsk. This is from Russian television, about a half hour ago. We picked it up before Moscow shut down the feed."

She touched another key. The picture switched to an overhead satellite. The cameras on the bird could read a newspaper from 80 miles up.

The center of Novosibirsk looked like a war zone. The streets were deserted. Hundreds of bodies lay where they had fallen. Wrecked cars littered the roads. It looked as though some of them had tried to ram each other. All the shop windows were smashed. The sidewalks and pavement were covered with broken glass.

"What happened?" Nick said.

"I don't know. Whatever it was, it happened fast. Everything was normal. Then it's as if someone flipped a switch. The time stamps on the sat transmissions show less than a half hour from normalcy to that." She gestured at the screen.

"That's impossible. It takes time for a riot to spread."

"Nonetheless, there it is. Something happened, and we need to know what it was."

"You don't think this is just a Russian problem?" Nick said.

"No. Anything that can turn a modern city into a lunatic asylum is a threat. Maybe it was something in the water. Maybe the Russians are experimenting with something and it got out of hand."

"Like what?"

"The Vector Institute is in Novosibirsk. Vector is Russia's bio warfare center. It's possible something got loose."

"A virus that makes people go nuts? It would have to be airborne to affect everyone at once."

"I have a bad feeling about this," Elizabeth said. "Go find Ronnie and Selena and get them up here."

Ronnie Peete and Selena Connor were two of the members of Nick's team. Lamont Cameron was the third. Lamont was in Bethesda Hospital, recovering from a bullet he'd taken in Jordan. He'd been shot through the lung and had almost died.

"They're downstairs on the range." Nick rubbed his chin, where he'd nicked himself shaving that morning.

Harker looked at him. "Well? What are you waiting for?"