"Seventeen years in the FBI and I’ve left the Bureau. I'm one of those guys who saw the private security sector's greener pastures...Now I’m hired to do what amounts to janitor work for your corporate CEOs, but I don't care. The money's good.
So on my last assignment, Boss sends me out on a false passport to track the theft of a ton of surface-to-air missiles in a country you won’t find on a map. Then it gets fuzzy—I recall the gold sands of the Sahara and the Indonesian surf and discovering a series of prostitutes who all ended up working at the same travel agency in a brutal country, holding the dirtiest secret our goddamn Elites ever have concocted...
So how did I end up as a picture on some top-secret government milk carton?"
Qaanaaq, Greenland, 1993
THE DISCOVERY HAD been preceded by five routine months of excavation as the machines trawled about the retreating ice sheets and small detonations loosened the soil beneath. As one descended through the slush to rock and permafrost untouched by sunlight for many millennia, the temperature hovered at -39 degrees. The best samples were transported for examination under an array of equipment.
As the engineers wandered amongst the shadows of cranes and Caterpillar 797s, examining the trailer-sized chunks of earth and ice lifted from the pit, one man paused and rubbed his eyes at the crystalline block before him. Jet-black shapes reposed just inside its surface—onyx forms embedded in the dirty calcifications and brown crystals, looking out of place, yet resonant, familiar. They touched off a deep intuition in him. He padded closer to the enormous ice slab. His breath pulsed over the twisted ebony shape just inches before his face; he wiped at the cloudy ice and rough slivers obscuring it. Another black shape lie wedged with the first. A third reposed as if floating a few feet away in the dirty ice-milk, sprouting four shoots like appendages.
He called out to his colleagues to verify this miracle. Heartbeats quickened in the far dimming white sun.
TWO WEEKS LATER, the pressurized coffins laid inside a room whose temperature had risen by two-degree increments until the ancient water was collected beneath the floor meshing, exposing in relief the three twisted forms. Two of them were in an embrace, the third spread-eagled where it had fallen long ago. Black voided eye sockets, skin ice-burnt and shrunken. Ultraviolet light poured upon the tiny forms. The full thaw revealed simian articulation and cracked skin.
First would come the carbon-14 team, then tissue sampling and bone marrow extraction, then DNA sequencing. It was surely the greatest discovery since the Swiss Otzi and the Tollund Man, but under the jurisdiction of the United States of America’s Department of Defense and the Danish government, whose millions had gone into the search for oil deposits and ancient flora beneath the melting ice sheets.
The Army shipped the three figures to a Pentagon laboratory in Maine, where newly-contracted paleo-biologists took infinite care with the bodies as if priceless works of art, and more; it required weeks of discussion as to where they would make the incisions with their scalpels and needles.
Within a month, their extraction work was done and the genetic investigations begun.
A WEEK LATER one of the biologists began to sneeze. His head ached and his throat burned. He was surprised to find himself with a temperature of 101 and oncoming chills. A summer flu. A trip to the hospital emergency room netted a prescription for antibiotics. Within three days it was apparent this was something else: the fever increased to 103 and he was admitted to a local hospital. Tests for swine and avian flu were negative.
Yet the blood showed something they have not seen before.
A second scientist fell ill with a fever of 102 and a bruising around the eyes and extremities. His skin burned as if it was on fire; the slightest touch produced agony. His nose bled. Soon a bead of blood appeared at the corner of his right eye, then another.
In the hospital's critical care unit, the biologist’s hands grew dark and swelled with fluid. His fever increased. Three days after admission, he died convulsing.
The second man’s skin continued to bruise, first in his hands and feet, then at his joints. A red suppurating rash appeared. His bleeding continued, until he began to vomit black blood.
A third scientist with the project, a geneticist, had been sneezing and running a fever.
Word reached the CDC and Pentagon of the deaths and the geneticist’s entry into the hospital: possible Marburg or Ebola outbreak in the government lab that examined the three bodies. The third ill man was quarantined. The remainder of the examination team and the twelve adjunct researchers were escorted from their homes with their families, symptomless though they were, to a Level V quarantine facility at the Portland Army Hospital.
One of them had been fighting off a cold for 48 hours, and was placed in a solitary plastic space.
FOR A MONTH the forty-two people lived in laminar flow and were tested for every possible pathogen but only the five who had extracted, handled, and examined the thawed bone marrow had been exposed to the terrible virus.
In the burn of panic it had become a superfluous fact that the corpses had been carbon-14 dated at 10,740 years BCE: the oldest known human remains ever discovered. It would not be in the news.
And what had slumbered within the corpses’ tissue was at least as old, but probably many more millennia so—what for epochs was an inert viral fossil, now had been resurrected from the deep past.
CHAPTER 1
IT WAS ONLY after FBI Agent Kuan-Yin Chang had been paired with August Scott that his associates noticed sparks of humanity infiltrating Chang’s stolid manner. Scott was a man of opposite temperament from Chang—irascible, sarcastic, reckless. Scott, who spoke fluent Russian, embarked upon a year-long undercover stint as a mafiya wannabe in Brighton Beach as Chang managed the operation and led the study of the bank accounts and wiretap transcripts. Their work formed the core of a major case: two groups of pimps and a cocaine ring were arrested, two mafiya laundering networks were abolished, and $26 million in cash had been discovered hidden in barrels on the Brooklyn docks.
Thus, at 31, Chang was given charge of three Field Intelligence Groups in the Russian-Baltic financial division. He began world tours, monitoring the cases of the FBI Legal Attaches in Moscow and Prague. On Chang’s recommendation, August Scott was posted as well. For the next seven years they worked closely together, assembling organizational charts of the mafiya hierarchies and associated institutions.
For Chang, the marrow of the job was analyzing financial records and obtaining the next Title III wiretap warrant. But August Scott had grown impatient—and terminally irritated. The eyewitness accounts of torture he’d heard while undercover haunted him, fueling a mounting rage towards what he described as the Big Con: his suspicion that the major mafiya players they sought had been offered protection through some convoluted chain, probably originating in at the highest levels of the CIA or State Department, that encompassed the DEA and Europol.
Scott’s obsession continued for a year until his disgusted resignation in 2014. Shortly after, he was hired by a private intelligence company called Global Security, Inc. where, he snarled, “I won’t have to log every piss I take.”
THE MOMENT AUGUST Scott was declared a missing person on the FBI database, his former partner didn’t hesitate to mention the existence of an apartment Scott rented in Shanghai and he immediately booked a flight to assist the investigation. Curious, he thought, that such an event should occur now—when Chang’s financial counter-terror task force had just begun secretly auditing Scott’s boss Richard Chubb for a Federal felony: the non-disclosure to the Justice Department of a 4 million dollar transfer to a suspect Dubai lawyer from a dummy Virginia bank account Chubb owned. Scott's boss was in serious trouble and, to Chang’s knowledge, hadn’t a hint a hammer was about to drop.
THE INVESTIGATING AGENTS WERE aware of Scott’s fascination with counterfeits, but nothing prepared them for the hoarder’s chaos within his Shanghai apartment. It is a boxy cityscape of still-packaged knock-off televisions, DV cameras, stereo systems, cellular phones, MP3 players, toys, DVDs, books, board games, kitchenware—like a microcosm of the Yuyuan Bazaar where the items had undoubtedly been purchased. Their foul plastic deterioration so saturates the air they are compelled to don surgical masks. Hundreds of clipped newspaper articles and photographs flake across the dining room’s walls, where two crushed velvet paintings of Mao-Tse Tung and Barack Obama grin in self-satisfaction towards each other. Posters of Lei Feng, the “Chinese Paul Bunyan” whose resurrection by the Party had failed a few years back, hang flanked by pirated ads for Hollywood blockbusters.
One of the Agents photographs everything. Another carefully vacuums the available walking space then removes the bag from the machine. The third applies fingerprint adhesives to the light switches and doorknobs. Although August Scott had only used the apartment for vacationing here in Shanghai to buy his counterfeit oddities, the potential clues to his disappearance could be anywhere.
WHEN CHANG APPEARS the Agents exhume a few chairs, open the windows and hand him a mask. He senses their instant guardedness and mild surprise at his countenance; he can see it in their startled eyes. Chang is tall, his square jaw and buzz cut giving the impression of a doll, especially his own eyes, which are an odd shade of violet that seems more appropriate peeking out from a garden bed. The humorless man had long been aware of the epithets with which his fellow Agents had christened him—“Lurch,” “Super-G-man,” “the Scout Leader”—but they were never of consequence to him, nor that he was known, even by FBI standards, to be a martinet with his subordinates. In a trued baritone Chang explains his current mandate: “I’m Deputy Assistant in Charge from Joint Terrorism TF, Eurasian Section. I’m with FinCen TF for the foreseeable future. We’re working on this Faisal al-Hibn case…We’re also digging Scott’s boss Richard Chubb, as a matter of fact. His name has appeared on a screen where it shouldn’t have.”
“I’m Special Agent Willis,” a thick man announces, “liaison to State and the press. We appreciate your coming here today, sir.”
Car horns and the Old City street chatter outside fill the apartment. The blonde officer identifies himself as Special Agent Eric Drake and announces that none of August Scott’s personal identification has been found in the apartment. This doesn’t surprise Chang. Assisted by his prodigious memory, Scott had always been scrupulous about leaving as little a paper trail as possible in all his activities.
“As far as we’ve been able to ascertain,” Drake comments, “His last whereabouts was in Prague. Jan Dubcek, the head of Prague police, told us Scott claimed to be working freelance and supposedly took off for Bulgaria from the Czech Republic, but there are no travel records indicating that. He was supposed to meet up with Dubcek on May 8, in Dresden, but Scott never showed.” He sweeps a hand at the hundreds of photos on the wall. “An arrest warrant with Interpol was booked this morning.”
Anxiety crests inside Chang. “Arrest warrant? For Augie?”
The Agents are surprised. “You weren’t notified what happened?”
Chang maintains his composure and fixes his peculiar gaze fixes upon Drake and ignores the question. “August Scott called me on May one. Told me the GSI case he was working on involved a bogus travel agency. Scotty believed it was a front company for part of Faisal al-Hibn’s network or something even bigger. Chubb refused to investigate it, so Augie went for it on his own…He overstepped his contract and was fired.”
Willis snorts. “That’s one version of what happened.” The large man leans back towards the wall but the cheap chair protests and he steadies himself.
Drake chuckles. “Okay. Here’s what happened, sir: You’re right, Chubb fired him from Global Security on 27 April. But on the 30th April, he entered their London HQ and assaulted a guard with a fire extinguisher. Why he went ape like that, we have nothing. Neither GSI nor Chubb’s talking.”
Willis asks Chang if he can smoke and Chang waves in deference; anything is better than the effluvia of plastic chemicals that permeate the room. Willis removes his mask and lights the cigarette and smirks at Drake. “Yeah, Eric, but you left out the juicy part. Scott had a run-in with an American contractor in Jakarta on 25 April. This guy was NYPD-affiliated. Scott broke the guy’s leg with a lead pipe. That’s why Chubb fired him in the first place.”
Willis hands over his PDA that shows the INTERPOL red notice warrant: August Scott had assaulted another Global Security private contractor named Francesco William Rizzo. The warrant lists Scott as armed and dangerous. Chang manages to shrug. “August didn’t mention it when I talked to him. I’ve tried calling him every day since we talked. No answer.”
Willis looks around for a suitable ash receptacle then uses his hand. Chang notices a ring on Willis’s finger—a tiny red, white and blue shield, the symbol for Charles Marck’s burgeoning Presidential campaign. Chang wonders how much of a lecture it warrants; Agent Willis should know better. Willis booms, “May 8th was the last day anyone saw Scott here in Shanghai—23 days ago. The super and a neighbor thought they’d seen him here with a woman. I’ve gotten a description of her. They saw him leave with her in a hurry. They got into a cab which honked for them out there,” he nods at the open windows. “He must have called for it.”
Chang says, “Well, you guys gotta find that cabbie.” He dissolves the offending ring out of mind. He stands and senses his friend’s presence in the chaos of artifacts around them: Two old ribbonless Remington typewriters. An ice blue-colored can of Coca-Cola with blurry labeling that would probably kill a person if consumed. Michael Jackson and Lady Ga-Ga and Barack Obama dolls, their faces all bearing Asian features. A lopsided shelf contains blister packages of VIACRA and a dozen bottles labeled ZOLOFT, a set of syringes shouting BOTAXX. Scott picked up most of these artifacts at Yuyuan Garden, Yei Wu and Shenzhen, where the bogus items poured forth to Dubai, and thence Africa and beyond. He strides over to the galaxies of print taped across the wall: photos of “Big-Eared” Du Yuehsheng, Triad and yakuza bosses. Nearby hang recent Wall Street Journal clippings on the Powell Chemical Corporation’s purchase of a pharmaceutical company called NeuScience. Chang’s trepidation surges. He indicates the article and says flatly, “He asked me about this when I talked to him. He mentioned a Russian named Cherkin who was a part-owner of a company called NeuScience.”
“What of it?”
Chang shrugs. “What of it? Nothing.”
“Nothing is ever nothing,” Willis replies cautiously.
The Special Agent is beginning to show the guarded manner Chang’s stiff demeanor evinced in people.
Well, good.
Surrounding the articles are a dozen time-coded photos of men exiting limousines. “Look,” Chang taps the picture, trying to modulate the monotone of his voice. “That’s Lev Malkin, isn’t it? It’s dated a month ago.”
Drake grunts and photographs the wall. “Scott must have had a hell of an assignment, to get that close to the crown prince of the Baltic mafiya.”
FOR THE NEXT HOUR THEY scour the apartment for the housing reports, instead finding romance paperbacks with cut-and-paste covers featuring Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie, cigarette packs bearing Che Guevara’s iconic image, a brick of $100 bills—North Korean counterfeits, for certain. Here is a new, unknown Harry Potter novel about the child wizard’s adventures with the Hogwart Academy’s new headmaster, Mao Tse-Tung: Amazing things that had filled August Scott with equal measures ironic wonder and outrage.
While searching the kitchen, Chang finds a taxi company flier on the refrigerator. He tells Willis, “Try it.”
In the bedroom he discovers a framed photograph of a beautiful Indian woman: Mita Chaudhury, Scott’s ex-girlfriend in London with whom he’d split ten months earlier.
Sadness gnaws at him.
“Look at this.” Willis holds out a postal receipt for four packages mailed on May 8th. One is addressed to Chang at the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington; the second had been posted to Richard Chubb’s London office; the third, to Kenneth Dunham, the CEO of the Powell Chemical Corporation.
A fourth had been sent to Mita Chaudhury’s London address from a post office in Paris, on May 2nd.
“I never received it, whatever it was,” Chang replies wearily. “That’s Augie’s ex-girlfriend, Mita. I’m flying to London tomorrow to interview Chubb, so I’ll talk with her while I’m there.”
The grieving sensation grows within him and seems to saturate every molecule in his body. He drifts back into Scott’s disordered bedroom to be alone. He closes his eyes and creates a space within himself into which a particular kind of energy flowed. Had an MRI been done, it might look as if a crimson serpent had come alive within his skull to make its way down his spine to flood his nervous system; had a doctor examined him, she would note a placid retreat of pulse and a lessened galvanic activity in the skin and a poised alpha-wave motion to his brain’s electrical activity. His body responds to the ancient prayer his mentor had taught him long ago. The physical aspect of the distress has vanished, but the cognitive part that triggered it remains—but now it is a detached, neurolinguistically inert set of propositions that could not affect his nervous system:
Augie knew about Faisal al-Hibn before any of us at the Bureau. And Sunny Day Travel Agency. He asked me for everything available at the Bureau on it all. How was I supposed to know…
I trusted him and complied, against all the rules.
Told him of my knowledge that Lev Malkin was throwing a bachelor party for his son in Prague.
Very possible that he paid for it with his life….
Grief, and the pain of his divided loyalty. Chang couldn’t tell Drake or Willis about any of it—the Faisal al-Hibn terror case was still restricted at this point.
Chang’s eyes open and fall upon an area of discoloration on the wall, cross-shaped and many shades lighter than the surrounding paint, where a crucifix had hung at some point in the past. He returns to the dining room to study the wall of photographs. At one of the pictures’ edge something instantly unsettles his regained calm: Three quarters into the frame in the background and blurred is an enormously obese elderly man, being hoisted along by three men in suits. He wears a white cloak and large white tasseled cap and sunglasses. Several large amulets dangle around his neck.
Willis has lit another cigarette and is preoccupied with his PDA, so Chang carefully extracts the photo from the wall. “You ever hear of the legend of the Pharmacist? The Fat Man?”
“The Pharmacist?” Willis frowns. “You mean Robert Cooke?”
Chang nodded. “Yeah.”
“The Black Zodiac?” Willis smirks, draws a drag and puffs. “S’what we call a post-urban legend.”
Kuan-Yin Chang knows that Willis is wrong. And in capturing that single image, August Scott had taken part in a perverse miracle: To have photographed Robert Elias Cooke, to have gotten that close to him, had a pernicious karma to it—to any law officer. Such proximity could only mean death.
“That Marck campaign ring?” Chang says finally. “A lot of good it does you over here in the People’s Republic. Make you feel good to wear it, Agent?”
Willis looks confused, then jerks. His right hand drifts to his left and touches it. He gives an apology.
“I’ll take it.” Chang puts out his hand. “You buy it here in Shanghai, Willis?”
The man sheepishly hands it over. “Airport…”
“I hope you wouldn’t dare wear it in a field office, Agent. Or the Legat.”
Willis defers in silence.
“These rings are being made by the millions over here,” Chang snarls. “If you’re stumping for Charles Marck on Bureau time, the least you could do is buy American.”
LONDON, ENGLAND
MITA CHAUDHURY LIVES with her parents in a semi-detached house on Milford Road in the Southall neighborhood of Ealing borough. The next day Chang’s FBI Lincoln idles in the muted morning light as he scopes the two surveillance cameras at either end of the street, two out of the million electronic eyes that capture everything in public London. Earlier, he had called the house and gotten the answering machine, on which Mita’s father announced that he and his wife were away in India. Chang had then called Air India at Heathrow where Mita worked, and was told she was off work today.
HE PUSHES ASIDE the gate and climbs the steps. The sound of Juggy D drifts from a house down the block. He rings the bell three times before she answers, dressed in a lilac tank-top and white skirt, her long black hair pulled back.
“Mita Chaudhury?”
“Yes?”
“I am FBI Agent Kuan-Yin Chang,” he holds up his identification. “I was—”
Her eyes widen. “Have you heard from Scotty?”
“That’s what I’m here for. May I come in? I have a few questions for you about him.”
“I’m sorry. Hello. Of course.” She glances back into the foyer. “Excuse me, yes, but the flat is a mess at the moment.”
Chang had heard that statement many times on field interviews but it couldn’t have applied less in this instance. The place is immaculate, minimally furnished and tastefully designed. Bookcases occupy half the wall space. Mita slips on a pair of flats and excuses herself. When she returns a few minutes later she is wearing a purple blouse and waves a Federal Express box in her hand. “Would you like tea, sir? This I am to give to you. I received it last week.”
Kuan-Yin Chang studies the label. It is the package Scott had sent her on the 8th of May, but the return address is not the old town apartment; it is another Shanghai address. “I have not heard from him in three months. Look—inside, it has a note.”
“Did he tell you of a flat he rented in the Old City in Shanghai?”
She shakes her head: “No.”
Chang extracts a digital photo, printed on cheap paper, showing one of Scott’s culturally mangled artifacts: it is a crucifix. Hanging there, his arms extended, is not Jesus, but Santa Claus, in full red suit and tasseled cap, his enormous belly spilling out between outstretched limbs. Chang smiles grimly and says, “Augie told me about this thing—the ‘Santa Cross,’ he called it…Or ‘Jesus Claus’. It’s what got him started collecting all that counterfeit stuff in the first place. This one was his favorite. He couldn’t believe such a thing could exist. He even tracked down the factory where they made these things. They didn’t make many before some smart guy noticed the, uh, mix-up.”
He recalls the cross-shaped patch on Scott’s apartment wall in Shanghai—the spot where it had probably resided. He turns over the piece of paper and reads Scott’s scrawl: My dear Mittens-Give the enclosed manuscript to my old friend Mary if you see her. Give it to her only. And be safe and put this package into a post office box or at your bank. Please do this. It couldn’t be more important.
Give Mary this card.
The Drunken Tower
There is much more writing beneath, but it has been smeared into a single aqua-colored swath. Chang taps the area and says, “Do you know what this said?”
“No, sir, it was wet and marked like that when I received it.”
“Augie told you about my, uh, nickname?”
“Yes.”
He chuckles bitterly. Scott had called him “Mary” for the last two years of his tenure at the FBI after discovering that his Han Chinese name was that of the female Buddhist saint of compassion, the equivalent to the Mother of God. Although Chang had been called many unflattering things over the years at the Bureau, only from Scott could he accept a ribbing over that. “Mita, Augie was supposed to meet with Prague police about a case he was working. He’s not been seen since the 8th of May, just after he mailed this to you. He called me from London on the first of May.” He waves the picture. “The ‘Drunken Tower’…Have you ever heard of it before?”
“No, sir,” she replies plaintively. “Maybe he went on holiday…He’s crazy, we know. Was he working?”
“Yes, he had been on assignment out in the field but Global Security dismissed him four weeks ago.”
“GS sacked him?”
“Yes. Over what is not exactly clear.” He refrains from telling her about the arrest warrant and Scott’s rampage. Methodically he opens the package. It is a manuscript, single spaced and double-sided, a first-person account written as a narrative. He grunts in interest, then says, “Mita, I need to ask you…”
“Yes, sir?”
His face goes stone. “No, it’s no matter. Forget it.” He replaces it in the box and checks the time. He needs to join his deputy Alexander Stalk for their interview with Richard Chubb at Global Security’s headquarters. Chang slips the card into the manuscript, thanks her and bids her good day.
THE THREE MEN wait in the red Peugot. Another car would follow Chang for the remainder of the day. The men watch closely the windows of the nearby houses. The security cameras on Milford Road have been deactivated for “maintenance,” as their patron requested. Seeing the FBI officer exit with a package has confirmed their suspicions: The manuscript had been sent here as well. Chang must have just now received the original and only remaining version. They had already intercepted three copies at the Shanghai post office; the slow postal system there had been a blessing.
Their patrons have already analyzed the text closely, and found it a supreme annoyance, containing damning information about halfway through
But Scott’s narrative ended before the truly compromising events had occurred.
If Chang were to get possession of the vast archive of information the Global Security operative had stolen and embedded in that Chinese artifact—the two micro-drives and memory sticks—it would be irretrievably done.
They could not move on Chang. Not yet.
TWO MEN EXIT the Peugot. They approach the door and knocked, showing Security Service Department 5 IDs. “Good day to you, Miss. Officer Chang from FBI was just here?”
“Yes?”
They pass worried expressions. “We have questions for you as well about a missing man, Mr. Scott. We think we can help find him. Are you alone? Is this a good time for you?”
“Yes. He just left.”
“May we come in, then? It will take only a moment.”
As she opens the door wider one of the men pushes past her and presses the stun-gun against her neck. They bump shut the door. They slip on tight translucent gloves. Quickly they tie her hands behind her back, then place her on the living room floor. The charge lasts less than a minute. Her eyelids flutter and her screaming becomes a continuous whimper as one of the men clamps her mouth with a palm. He talks soothingly. “Listen to me, Mita. You will answer questions truthfully and you will not die. Understand? Chang left here with a box.”
“Scotty wrote it,” she sobs.
“Yes, yes—this we know. Have you read it?”
“No,” she cries, gasping. “Scotty told me not to read it. Told me to give it to, to give it to Chang…”
“Scott told you?” he chuckles. “When did he tell you this?”
“In a letter. He sent it, he sent it to me from Shanghai.”
“Where is letter? Did you give this to Chang as well?”
“Yes, yes,” she nods, straining. “Please, don’t…”
The two men speak in Russian. Then, “What else did he tell you in this letter?”
“Give it to Chang.”
“Why would he want Chang to have it?”
“They worked at FBI together.”
“Where is fat man on cross?”
“Don’t know what that is. Please.”
“Did Scott send you the Christmas cross?”
She shakes her head convulsively and cries.
“So Scott gave Chang his writing. And you have not read it?”
Her hair is sticking to her tear-slick cheeks as they untie her. “That is good, you have not read it.”
He nods and the other man withdraws the stun gun from her neck—and raises a small plastic pistol that puffs out a length of mist before her nostrils. They watch in mild fascination as the substance takes effect, her rapid choking, the chirping sounds, as it instantly paralyzes her respiratory system.
Her last breath rakes dust from the carpet before her lips.
The man replaces the small weapon and feels for a lack of pulse and nods. They depart back into the Southall morning.
"Matrioshka": Publication date November, 2019