The Atlas of Shadows will be published in May, 2020.

1

Kachin State, Burma, June 22, 2017

THE MEN REMOVE THEIR bandannas. Their work is done: thirteen bodies lie before them.

The woman crouching behind the building watches as they circle her co-workers. One of the men draws a pistol and fires into the prone crowd. They consult in low voices and scan the surrounding compound. Through wet eyes she can see the mouth of the path leading into the brush a dozen yards away. She runs. She comes upon the first turn, taking her out of their sight into the thicket of vines. A shout. Boots smash. She zigzags and manages a single glance. One man is behind her about thirty yards. He is jogging casually and concentrating upon the terrain beneath his feet as if some training has taken over: his head is down, the rifle held close across his chest like a parading soldier. The others fire blindly into the jungle. A single shot splits a branch less than a foot from her head. The trail inclines. Her legs move faster than she ever thought possible as she flies off the trail. She tops the hill and begins descent down the other side. She comes upon the tree that she knows well, the one that looks centuries old, its root system washed open by monsoon, dozens of arms willing to embrace. She circles and finds the gap big enough for her thin frame. She jams herself inside amongst the ants and spiders and raw smell of slow mulch in the black womb. She quiets herself, stifles her sobbing.

She is certain the man could not have seen her enter. She waits for footfall on the twigs. Brilliant green slivers and a blue sky, the membrane of the dark chamber through her tears. The jungle cackles outside. She thinks of her parents, four thousand miles away in New York—and her father’s warning to her about working in this lawless pariah nation-state. She had been here nine months. Monsoon was about to begin and she and her co-workers were packing up to leave the endangered animal reservation to the rains, having released some of the monkeys back to the wild.

She spits bile. The memories of what had happened succeed one another with no obedience to the reality. When the bandits appeared she had been inside the kitchen hut filling the milk formula bottles. From the door she had seen her co-workers huddled together in the main yard before the four men, holding their machine guns straight and standing before a truck. She knew instantly that they were not Burmese Tatmadaw troops. They were mercenaries. Three more prowled around the truck’s rear. She heard one of them call out orders in a hoarse voice across the compound—with a rolled R and dropped articles, the sound of a Russian trying out limited English. The three at the rear began to fan out across the compound. She’d thrown herself beneath the table and glimpsed the large silver satellite phone on the countertop. She switched it on and scrolled through the numbers: the Green Globe headquarters in New York, the US charge d’affaires in Yangon and the American embassy numbers in Delhi and Shanghai…Finally she found it: Tatmadaw Myitkyina, the junta army’s headquarters here in Kachin state.

The Burmese military official’s voice was clear over the line. She stuttered in her rudimentary Burmese, her breath swallowing whole words. He listened and was puzzled and stopped her attempts. The man was patient, and knew English. He asked for coordinates and she gave them. Abruptly he hung up.

She rose from the tiling to watch. Her companions had been emerging from the brush, carrying cages full of the golden snub-nosed monkeys and ascending a ramp into the truck, the three rifles focused upon them. Her co-workers were hurrying and they were sloppy. The rifles replied spitting on their mistakes, kicking up geysers of dirt around them.

She again dived beneath the table and tried the Green Globe headquarters and the charge d’affaire but the calls failed.

Seven times the mercenaries forced them to march the monkeys’ cages into the truck. The animals were rare, worth a fortune on the black market, and they were stealing hundreds of them.

Then the god-awful noise of three machine guns firing at once. It was not a burst into the sky, not a warning. She heard the screams of her co-workers, then silence.

She’d slipped to the rear door and crept outside toward the path behind the compound. With one glance at what lay before the killers, their crumpled bodies, red and scattered, she had thrown up.

Then she ran.

The tree is cool around her. She reduces the volume on the satellite phone and sends the Tatmadaw number again. It is the same junta Colonel and she whispers this time. She gives coordinates again and tells him: a massacre.

When she opens her eyes she sees the dark metal barrel, the hand bracing against the bright ovoid passage, its skin inked across the back in a black, webbed tattoo. Just a hand with a gun, disembodied here two feet in front of her. She hears the crunch of leaves, a shifting of weight. And a voice accompanying it: a curse, a blessing, she doesn’t know. She remains silent.

The pistol recoils, its muzzle aflash. One, two, three times. Her head snaps to the left, a punch through the jaw, burning, cold blood across her breath. She feels blood reverse itself in her veins, a starving of her brain, and loses consciousness.

2

St. Johns County, Florida, July 19

The old man slows his truck on the hot asphalt and squints at the sky.

“She’s in trouble, Hester,” he murmurs to his German shepherd on the seat beside him.

He soaks his forehead with a cloth and plucks his cellphone from his breast pocket.

“Look at that, girl,” he murmurs in awe.

The white cross high up there is descending rapidly in a long arc and has begun to seesaw wildly.  He can just hear a distant stuttering grinding that Dopplers lower in pitch—then ceases.

“Oh, lord.” He punches the three digits and waits. The plane accelerates in freefall towards the swamp and he hits the call button just as it disappears.

------------------

The plane’s broken shell angles towards the sky amongst the banyan trees with its nose-cone driven deep into the earth. Trees dance in the helicopter’s downdraft as National Guardsmen climb up between seats, checking each body for life, however faint. The two National Transportation Safety Board officials caught the first glimpse of the wreckage and knew there could be no survivors. The plane had departed from St. Augustine just three hours ago and disappeared off the radar within five minutes. It had been a chartered flight, its destination Newark, New Jersey. It is difficult terrain and they immediately knew it would require deforestation teams and the Chinook helicopter to extract and tow the wreckage to open ground.

The clock is ticking, the fuselage visibly sinking. The senior NTSB man jams his handkerchief tight to his face to block the kerosene fumes. Twice his legs sink to his knees, the muck topping his boots. He grabs at vines to steady himself. Thirty yards away, the swamp is digesting the Cessna’s tail section in a flurry of bubbles. Thankfully there had been no fire. The tree line is shredded in points, sliced and hanging. An entire cypress has been halved and sent a wing spinning sixty yards east. There are suitcases and briefcases, torn luggage. A mud-caked laptop, open, half-submerged.

The lead NTSB man cannot see the other officials’ eyes behind their shades and he is grateful for it.

Then something dark catches his eyes far out there in the tangled greenery: Six figures in dark blue tee-shirts and one windbreaker slogging towards them in the northern distance. He needn’t even read the yellow acronym emblazoned on their shirts to know they are FBI, with the shoulder holsters and dark glasses and uniformity to their movement. He sees one of the Agents remove a cellphone from his pocket and has a short conversation as they slosh towards the wreck.

“Hell is this,” the FAA man shouts. “How could they’ve—”

“Beats me,” the Safety man replies. “You call the Bureau?”

“Hell no.”

They are approaching from the north, indicating they had crossed the largest bulge of the swampy lands. Such would have required at least a forty-five minute head-start than they themselves had had in preparation—and the NTSB had been notified about the crash at the same time as FAA had reported it to the Transportation Safety go-team.

The Safety official slaps at a mosquito and shakes his head in disbelief. His team is silent as the FBI agents wend towards the wreckage stumbling and sinking with each step. The tallest one, beefy and moustached, holds up his ID.

“Something we should know?” the FAA man barks.

The moustache props a boot on a mass of roots and introduces himself. “Your ‘faces’?” he shouts.

The Safety team pulls out their credentials. The FBI man glances and hands them to a young Agent behind him who efficiently photographs each ID with a tiny digital camera.

Incredible.

“This site is a matter of national security,” the FBI Agent yells, “under classified orders of the Defense Intelligence Agency.” HE nods at the wreckage. The young photographer Agent unzips a leather pouch and extracts two laminated pages. “These people were DoD employees. We have orders to cache every piece of their personal effects. The transponder box too.” He nods at the card in the Safety man’s hands and hands him the two papers. “Call that number for mandate.” He holds out a secure satellite phone. “And you’ll have to use this baby.”

The FAA man reads the orders and indignantly punches the number. “We don’t know what kind of a scene this is yet.”

The FBI man stares into the rainbow-slick water at his ankles and replies, “Doesn’t matter. We’ve taken it. Call your superior. Mr. Haas. He has the interdiction order as well.”

Already the Agents are peering into the fuselage. One of them turns away and retches.

The helicopter above has begun disgorging National Guardsmen two at a time on tethers, their radios crackling in the haze. The FAA man plugs his other ear and hears the strange buzz of a secure phone ringing. The answerer identifies himself as FBI Deputy Director Peter Wilkins and rattles off National Security Memorandum Order numbers and speaks of pre-investigation jurisdiction. “Passengers of your crash there are—or were—contract employees of the DIA and are as such to be considered active Army assets.  I’ll route you now to the Pentagon duty officer in this matter.”

Before he can even question there was more electronic buzzing. A stern voice seconds the orders.

The FBI man lights a cigarette and looks on the FAA man’s expression in approval. “How long before you get the tree line cleared and the tow in?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, earliest,” the FAA man shouts, regarding the cigarette with alarm. “And you’ll put out that goddamn smoke right now. Are you fucking crazy? You know how much kerosene is in this water?”

The FBI man takes another drag and elaborately stubs the cigarette on the notch of a tree. “Is there any way you can get the transponder and box out, here on scene?”

“Absolutely not,” the Safety man replies.

“We will leave a squad here to escort it, then.”

The FAA official regains his footing and voices what they had all been wondering. “You guys must’ve had an hour’s head start on us, to come from the north. Unless…How did you get word? And when?”

The moustached FBI officer seems to consider it a philosophical question. In the distance a second wave of his Agents are now invading the scene, taking pictures and holding their IDs high. A nice little clambake. He folds his arms and shifts his weight and replied, “It’s classified.”

 

THE ARGUING WENT on throughout the afternoon with charges of site contamination, but the Agents complete their mandate. From Land Rovers to loading dock to the St. Augustine field office each item is processed, the laptops drained and dried, the wallets and purses bagged and labeled. There are four attachés, five travel cases, a large ancient Samsonite suitcase which had protected its contents well. The Agents open each case and remove reams of documents and place them beside their parent objects. Printed across each page’s corner is the legend TZGENOA, CLASSIFIED L5. Some are stamped TOP SECRET/CI—even a few EYES ONLY. Hands shuffle through the arcane pages, eyes taking in typescript and impenetrable charts, abstracts, technical papers.

“So what do we do with all this stuff, just sit on it?”

“Some team from DIA is gonna pick it up,” the Special Agent in Charge replies. “Flyin’ down here. Sometime tonight. They’ll take over the crash scene out there and get the transponder.”

Rumor has gained momentum over the following hours: It had become a yellow-tape site on the swamp. The tower-to-plane audio tapes had been reviewed by the FAA and revealed something odd about the plane’s malfunction.

The Special Agent in Charge calls the field team into his office: The FBI’s presence was to be denied, and a special national security classification gag order has been issued directly from the Department of Justice and DIA and applied to every FAA, NTSB, and National Guardsman on the scene.

“Why us?” an Agent asks, scratching at a mosquito welt. “This was bullshit.”

“Why us, because we were only forty minutes from the site.” The SAIC explains how it is just another symptom of the bureaucratic erasures between the domestic intelligence services and the Pentagon, the work of Counter-Terror Center Director Peter Wilkins’s iron hand. He straightens his tie and evens his cuffs. “But I’ll tell you. I’ve been thinking.”

Uh-oh, his deputy sighs.

“If we turn these docs over to DIA and it turns out the Safety Board and Federal A needs this stuff, who’s gonna get the shaft? Suppose there’s material evidence of some kind in those documents. We’re talking a scrum-down between NTSB, the FAA, and the Pentagon. But we’re the chumps who’ll get the hot lights, all because Wilkins got his mandate and put us out there on scene with authority to confiscate. You better believe it. And further, you know that when DIA picks up all this stuff we collected, it’ll get black-holed. We’ll never hear of it again. They’ll deny it all.”

“So…Better safe than sorry?”

The chief nodded and made a dismissive gesture. “Get to work. Everything.”

And so throughout the night the stacks of documents went sliding beneath flashes of light, photographed and digitally deposited into the FBI’s Sentinel crime database. When the three DIA officers show up, not a word is said of the Bureau’s capture.

3

Frederick, Maryland, July 26^th

We'll give those bastards a great leap backward, Danes had said.

Now the time was upon him; it was up to him and him alone.

Dr. Richard Stableford squints at the refrigerator suitcase resting on his Jeep's leather seat beside him. The Route 270 traffic is light this late rush hour, but still he pays scrupulous attention to the highway in the summer dusk.

Arriving home, he watches his street for Fort Detrick security. Carefully he brings the freezer device into his rancher and sits down at his kitchen table, where a Macintosh Powerbook circa 1991 sits with its back plate removed; he’d tried a dozen laptop models but this relic was the only specimen thick enough to house his own refrigerator unit. He keys open the machine. He slips on gloves to protect his fingers against the suitcase's biting surface and with precision extracts a cold metal vial from the unit and inserts it into the portable chamber within the laptop. He enters the code on the unit and switches it on.

Within minutes the laptop's surface temperature plunges, stings his fingertips. He affixes its underside and screws it tight.

He lights a cigarette and pulls on his thick graying beard and gazes at the Powerbook. The small freezer within it, which he’d designed, patented and built, is no bigger than a stuffed wallet; it has a 72 hour operational limit away from socket power. Over the next twelve hours it will reach room temperature and will be ready to make it through the Frankfurt airport security for his flight to Myanmar. He will recharge the unit in Mandalay, refreeze the sample, then use the four spare batteries for his trip into the country's northernmost mountains on the Chinese border, where the team will meet him--and the monkeys, close to four hundred of them, that he will induct.

If the animals are in good health the infection procedure will take less than an hour.

He retires to the bathroom with scissors and three disposable razors. A half-hour later his beard is gone. It takes ten years off his appearance: A fortyish scholar on Buddhist temples credentialed as "Ian Chauncey Smith" gazes back at him.

He gathers the last of his toiletries, his malaria pills, socket converters, and packs the satellite phone in his suitcase. He lights another Camel, carelessly picks up the phone and dials. It rings three times. Madelyn answers. Stableford's voice rises to a strained pitch at the sound of her voice. “You picked up…”

“What do you want, Rick?”

“Am I making progress here?” There is silence. “You got the last check?”

“I’m going to ask you again to stop with that.”

“Maybe I should send them directly to Julia.”

“Do what you want. I don’t know why you call us.”

“Just want to make her life better? That’s all I’m interested in? You know, just keep the checks, Maddie. Y-you’ll need them someday. Rest assured they’ll clear.” He knows what is coming, and he needs pre-emption against it. His job the past decade as Project GENOA head civilian microbiologist has paid him $150,000 a year, with additional bonuses on his patent; the financial security, so hard won, has already become just another fact about the world to her. 

But she is silent now. He balls a fist but restrains himself from slamming the tabletop. He is the sole maker of the new world they will soon inhabit, but here he is treading softly, expending precious energy just to communicate the simplest information to a woman with whom he’d spent twelve years of his life. The absurdity of it enrages him. If only she knew what he was about to do. If only she knew. “Well, look," he snarls, "I’m going on a goddamn vacation for a month.”

“That’s great, Rick. You have fun. You relax yourself. And stop calling us.” She hangs up.

Us. Stop calling us.

The inchoate memories succeed each another. Anger vibrates through his body. She had married a K Street lawyer less than a year after their divorce. It is a forty minute drive south to her house, in which they both live, in Chevy Chase.

He quashes the desire to show his face to her one last time before the course of world history swerves.

No, he has something important and meaningful to do.

He pours himself a shot of whiskey and throws it back. He comforts himself that the Qammi matter has been resolved. Dr. Amir Qammi, his deputy at Fort Detrick on developing the vaccine, had been out sick with a supposed "summer cold” the past few days. Stableford had seen him only once, last week, in the campus parking lot. Qammi looked like hell, unshaven and glass-eyed, all subtle departures from the diplomatic presence the staff at Fort Detrick had come to know. It was obvious that Qammi's recent accidental discovery of the eleven deaths of their GENOA colleagues had been giving him sleepless nights.

You received my last email, Richard? he’d rasped.

Yes…But those aren’t our people. And even if they were, Amir, you know it would be a breach if I were to say a single goddamn word.

Qammi had replied, They most certainly are 'our people,' Richard.

Amir Qammi's curiosity wouldn’t be a bother for long.

The clock chimes in the other room: his transport to Andrews Air Force Base is now due. He eases the laptop into the travel case and zips it shut. He turns off all the lights, unplugs everything in his house and sits in the darkness until the knock comes at the door. He signs the clipboard manifest and heaves into the unmarked dark van. As they pass Connecticut Avenue he curses Madelyn beneath the Beltway's smudged lights.

He runs his hands over the computer case as they pull into the airbase complex. The device within is now frosty; the case’s surface still feels like it has been steeped in snow. He passes his Fort Detrick ID and passport through the machine. He alights in the humid night.

Major-General Kenneth Danes nods to him from the waiting jeep. Stableford climbs into the passenger seat, not bothering to offer his hand; he intuits that it won’t be taken by the large man. If the pathogen in the laptop was hot and active in the air right now, Danes wouldn’t stand a chance at this distance. “I’m clean,” Stableford chuckles.

“We have to take care of your creds,” Danes murmurs. There will be no paper trail for Stableford’s trip to the Myanmar. He has a passport, drivers license and a single credit card identifying him as “Ian Chauncey Smith”, and Danes had erased “Smith” from all government watch-lists long ago. To all official appearances, Stableford will be under cover on a classified intelligence mission to investigate the activities of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in northern Myanmar. The microbiologist had traveled undercover on commercial flights to the South Asian country four times, dry runs, establishing a familiarity with the land and the officials of the Kachin state government around the mountainous China border. He’d read books on Theravada Buddhism to help feign his interest in the remote monasteries and plied the Kachin officials, spending expansively and offering discreet bribes. He’d also become acquainted with two pilots of small aircraft in Mandalay who could fly him into any one of a dozen makeshift airstrips in upper Kachin state near the Chinese border to meet the team and complete the mission.

Danes produces three pieces of paper. “These are three-week tourist visas for the north. Everything is taken care of. Michelin will meet you at the coordinates in Yunnan. He’ll get you into Arunachal Pradesh, out on a transport from there.”

Danes saves the special package for last, producing a strongbox and unlocking it. Stableford watches in amusement as the major-general trembles like a novice burglar. What is within had taken three years’ work to perfect in the Directorate of Science and Technology at the CIA headquarters: It appears to be a diabetic’s insulin kit, but three of the syringes contain cyanide gas. On his aiming and pressing the plunger it would kill any target in seconds. Danes had amply trained and cautioned him on the singular circumstances warranting their use. 

They set off for the plane. Even in the open air, Danes leans away from him, driving carefully, his flattop bristling. Stableford smirks: man can’t help the fear. He is in the virus’ presence. The terror soon to issue from this small black case is without precedent, and Danes knows it.

The jeep rolls amongst the terminals into the airbase’s infrastructure—cameras and gates and guards, hangars and airstrips, the night air rumbling with plumes. They pull to a stop and get out. Danes beats the manila flight orders rhythmically against his thigh, his pace quickening. The sentries salute. Beyond the fences they command another jeep and approach the lumbering shapes beneath the concentrated light, C-130Js with their ramps deployed, refueling and loading. Danes hands Stableford's pass to the flight captain and nods goodbye. The scientist tramps upward into the rows of cargo, the interior’s cold air which feels apiece of the stratosphere the plane will soon navigate. Stableford inserts wax balls into his ears and straps himself in the transport seat.

He closes his eyes and recalls the first demonstration of the virus to Powell Chemical CEO Charles Marck, the man who had initiated Project GENOA twelve years ago. Stableford had shown him a videotape: the simians’ skin had turned a bright red, then crimson, and on to black as uncontrolled bruising hollowed the skin from within. In the last stage, paralysis set in as they bled from their noses and eyes. Some choked to death on their own blood. Marck was ecstatic, and expressed the desire to witness it firsthand. They put on the decontamination suits and descended to Fort Detrick's Level IV facility beneath the earth where three of the monkey specimens were about to peak and bleed out. By the time they reached the underground complex, two of the remaining animals had already expired. They watched the last golden snub-nosed monkey feebly reach for its feed bar, his fur sticky with freshly purged blood. The animal had been infected at a distance of fifteen feet some thirteen months earlier.

Stableford and his team had successfully miniaturized and altered the virus into an airborne form, created twelve separate strands, and developed a vaccine for them all.

The scientists had seen hemorrhagic virulence before—the crashing and blood-venting of the Ebolas and Lassa fevers—but nothing like this. It was the most corrosive biological agent he or any of the microbiologists at Fort Detrick had ever seen. Later that night over beers he'd assured Marck and Danes both: Villages and cities and entire provinces over there could be swept clean. They were watching Asia’s future in those subterranean cages. Stableford savored General Danes’s words to him that night as Marck cut their celebratory cigars: We’ll give those bastards a great leap backward: half a billion gone...

 

ON ARRIVAL AT RAMSTEIN airbase in Germany he mails his Fort Detrick IDs to Danes’s home in Arlington.  The vial’s coldness has subsided as the army van makes the Autobahn to Frankfurt International. At the airport he exchanges dollars for Euros and buys a Lufthansa ticket to Mandalay. He sucks down a final cigarette before the Frankfurt terminal’s huge revolving door as families part around him. He pops three milligrams of alprozolam. With effort he fixes the image of success in his mind: It will be the only outcome to the next forty minutes. In some obscure sense he will be sitting in a 747 bound for Myanmar within an hour, if all the intervening seconds conformed to his plan. He’d been through Frankfurt four times on his dry runs for this mission and once been subjected to a random search near the gate. If that happens he would be done for, the worst possibility imaginable: Thus erase it from the mind. Danes asserted that he would be covered if the airport Frankfurt security discovered the device: The German inspectors and military officials would be brought together for an emergency debriefing on how they had interrupted a deep-cover American operation testing international biohazard safety measures. They dubbed the test Operation JZ-SLIPKNOT in their planning scenarios and applications to the Joint Chiefs; it had called for a fake biological weapon to be transported through several airports using Stableford’s laptop device. The plan had never been approved. Nor was it meant to. It was purely cover. Were Stableford caught, there would be a lot of prevarication, and a certain international dustup, The device would instantly be confiscated by the DIA security team Danes was to bring over, so no German microbiologists would be allowed to test the contents of the vial.

The boarding announcements sound once again. His plane not amongst them.

The line splits into three channels as the guards motion passengers forward. The Buddhist philosophy he’d studied provisionally now comes to his aid: It is a simple act, the picking up of that bag. He feels the first warm touch of the tranquilizer.

It is finite, localized in space-time.

It is an action which doesn't even need a doer--no Richard Stableford, no Ian Smith...

It is an action without significance.

The line dwindles rapidly.

He will be free the moment his hand touches his computer bag beyond the metal detector and black blazers and wands. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. He snorts and exhales noisily. Sudden, unwelcome adrenaline surges through his limbs. His skin tingles, the sweat beading on his face.

Jesus. Just like a terrorist.

He hands over the passport and Myanmar visa to the inspector. The guard motions him forward, where he picks up the shallow plastic bin and places into it his paperwork and the contents of his pockets and the carry-on bag. He lays it all evenly on the conveyor and watches the rubber-strip curtain swallow it. He passes through the gate, eliciting no beep. The X-ray screener sits impassively. He jerks over to the conveyor as a dizziness overtakes him. The case emerges.

“Sir? It is that one.” The inspector waves to his tray. He swings the computer case over his shoulder and scoops up his things with a barely audible thanks. Sweat is dripping from his bare chin. There is still a slight delay in the machine’s imaging, he knows, still a chance they will call him back.

Involuntarily he glances back at the X-ray inspector. She blinks, yawns.

He is free.

His Mandalay flight is on time. Security, Uzis, dogs. He scuttles through a sparsely populated boarding area: A few American tourists, fresh college students ready to liberate the Burmese people, a Tatmadaw officer, an entourage of American businessmen in suits hoping to crack open the remaining sanctions which are strangling Myanmar’s economy. Stableford is disgusted by them all.

He wanders to the newsstand and buys two magazines. His gut rumbles. The tranquilizer is coming on strong. His hand touches the computer case at his hip—Christ, is it riming again? He still has a half-hour before boarding. He slings the bag over his shoulder and sets off quickly for the small bathroom on the upper concourse. From his past explorations of the airport he knows it is the least used rest room in this part of the terminal. Polizei lounge against the walls to the right and left. He makes eye contact with one of them and looks away. He can sense the man’s gaze lock upon him, taking in his paleness, the sweat now in rivulets on his face.

Stableford continues on towards the restaurants and then glances over his shoulder. 

The cop is looking at him.

Coming upon the food court he finds the isolated bathroom, picking up his pace in the last strides. Brilliant whiteness inside, the travelers’ echoes scuffing the tiling. No security cameras in bathrooms, not yet, and he is grateful for it. He picks the stall on the end, locks the door and sits down. A thin, cold film rimes the case, a dark patch of moisture. He gathers a handful of toilet paper and soaks the condensation from its surface. The scuff of shoes fade in the room. He is alone beneath the brilliant tiling. How the hell will he get this through customs at Mandalay? It would take Danes a day to get there to clear up the misunderstanding…He sits for a few minutes breathing, waiting if anything might suddenly come up from his stomach.

“Sir—are you okay?”

A burst of static from a walkie-talkie. Everything vanishes in an sudden adrenal haze. The drift of the drug evaporates in his body. The voice is just outside the door, a hulking official presence. Stableford says nothing, his heart racing, until the man repeats the question. His voice strains: “There’s no problem. Thank you.”

Another person enters the bathroom. He can see the man's dark security uniform through the thin gap at the stall’s edge. Stableford waits through the sounds of washing hands at the sink, an Airblade's blasts. Instinctively he reaches into the bag and his fingers tear the plastic sheath evenly over the syringes. Another traveler enters. Still the guard is hovering there, his transceiver sputtering. The exit door whistles shut again. Stableford pulls the rubber gloves over his hands. He intuits no-one lingering in the other stalls.

The guard bangs upon the metal, the dark uniform appearing and disappearing at the crack. Each syllable staccato, tentative in the foreign tongue it speaks: “Sir, I shall pliss have to ask you to ex-it at dis mo-ment.”

Damn Nazi. “I have diabetes a-and I need to take a shot. I am okay.”

“Do you need medical assistance, den, of physician?”

“N-no. I am, I’m okay.” He grips the syringe in his right hand like a knife and attempts to discern the man’s position through the crack. He stands to the right of the door. With a smooth motion Stableford rises, unclips the lock and opens the door. “You see?” he croaks, attempting a smile, holding the syringe. It is fluttering wildly in his fingers. Sure enough, the man is the young German cop he’d seen moments earlier, mid-twenties, crew cut—and he is alone. “I’m t-taking an insulin shot. Do you understand me? Everything is, is okay.”

The man studies the syringe. “Again. Sir. You will pliss exit wiss your belongkings, sir?”

Stableford closes the door, stuttering. He must do it now, before the man calls for backup--he has seconds here.

“Open the door,” his voice loud now, threatening, “and carry your items here, sir.”

Stableford opens the door, raises the syringe, aims, and presses the plunger. The fine mist blows tornadic from the silver needle and directly into his face. Eyes widen, a shout. Stableford retreats into the stall and listens as the man’s attempt to engage the transceiver ends abruptly in choking, the hand-transmitter clattering on the tiles.

Stableford has seconds and he retches. He takes a deep breath. He opens the door. He kicks open the next booth and drags the body onto the toilet and props it up. He extinguishes the volume on the walkie-talkie. He turns his head away from the corpse and exhales, stops his lungs at the bottom of his breath. The dead man's body could easily have a lingering spasm and blow forth a cloud of the cyanide and kill him. Imagine: being killed by the final breath of a corpse. Stableford locks the stall from within and drops to the floor and belly-wiggles over into his own cell, thrusting forward tightly beneath the metal that rakes his back.

He replaces the deadly cargo, removes his gloves, jamming them deep into the computer case. He shoulders his bags. He fights to control the retching.

He races from the restroom. His plane is boarding. He hurries through the crowds. The decisiveness of the action he has just taken supplanted the unknowns. 

He knows he will succeed.

 

IN NO TIME HE floats through the accordion passageway into the plane. He inspects the laptop once more before stowing it above him. He settles in the seat and opens the Newsweek he’d bought, its pages slick in his trembling fingers. The tranq is only half-there in his mind, a dull presence. On the cover is a photo of Dr. Charles Marck with his familiar lop-sided smirk above the caption: REMARCKABLE. The former Powell CEO and Vice-President for the past eight years has gained a comfortable edge over Senator Nathan Churchill in the polls. Stableford hasn’t spoken with the man in years, since demonstrating the virus, when the Pentagon merged management of the project under Fort Detrick.

The plane departs the gate and queues for takeoff. Somehow he stays awake as the 747 climbs. By now, surely, the body of the cop has been discovered. It is a seven-hour flight to Mandalay and that is not enough time to review security footage and identify him. He takes another pill. As the plane rises, he finds himself reading the same paragraphs over and over, trying to immerse himself in an article about rising rates of methane leaching from the permafrost beds the world over. His mind focuses on the information; here is something related to his purpose. Marck and Danes had discussed it exhaustively: Reducing the world’s population by a sixth would give America time to conquer energy and resources problems, reaping the patents and reward, finally and unequivocally.

Once again he feels the power of his special mission, and it eradicates his lingering anxiety.

He is free. Danes will not be pleased at what he had done. It will surely make the news, possibly even the front pages in Germany.

In some wider sense, it hadn’t been the first time he'd taken a human life. The covert human trials they'd conducted had been necessary.

With that cop's death, the world was now free of one less monkey.

If he succeeds, there will a billion more to come.

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THE ATLAS OF SHADOWS is an espionage thriller that concerns our surveillance society, the perils of biological weapons research, the power of secret networks to orchestrate and influence world events, and some cunningly hidden echoes of the countercultural 1960s.

A decade after a Pentagon project has succeeded in weaponizing a 12,000-year old virus found in the Greenland ice, a small plane carrying six of its scientists has crashed, killing them. The project’s leader, Dr. Amir Qammi, breaks protocol to contact fringe journalist Jason Bernstein to tell him of this event—and that he has discovered an additional 6 “suicides” and "accidental" deaths in his bioweapon program over the past month. Jason thus begins a dangerous journey into the world of assassins and very real conspiracies as he travels to Burma in a bid to investigate Qammi's assertions—and discovers on the way traces of a shadowy counterforce within the national security apparatus that appears bent on preventing the very plot he has uncovered to cause a terrible pandemic and consequent world war.

Publication, May, 2020