Page 11 of The Team (The Milvus Files #3)

SIX

Rhett left the bathroom, a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. He walked out to the room where his team had been asleep. They were all now sitting up, waiting for him.

“You’ll have the council’s heads on plaques on your living room wall, huh?” Coyote asked with a grin. “Bet King loved that.”

Then Coyote noticed Rhett’s expression.

“What’s wrong?” Jay asked, standing up. “Did they find Kowalski and Myles? Jesus, Rhett, what is it?”

Rhett shook his head. “Not yet. The pizza box,” he said, nodding to where it still sat on the small table by the window. “No one touch it. Has anyone else touched it? Yin? Sid?”

They both shook their heads.

“Okay, Captain, you’re scaring the kids,” Sid said. “What the fuck’s going on?”

“Possible pathogen contamination,” Rhett said. “There’ll be a specialist crew turning up any minute to take the box and to test me and Yin. We went into the apartment and could’ve been exposed to something.”

“You what?” Azrael looked at Rhett, then to Yin. “You went over there?”

Rhett nodded. “At zero two hundred. I made the call to go.”

Jay shook his head, his face pale. “Rhett,” he whispered. “What pathogen? What exposure risk? Airborne? Contact?”

“I don’t know. Contact, I think,” Rhett answered. “I could have exposed you all. Yin and Sid, I’m sorry.”

Oh god. He’d touched Jay’s arm . . .

“Jay,” Rhett whispered, his breath short.

“Okay, we got incoming,” Sid said, looking out the window. “White van.”

Jay rushed to the window.

“They’re wearing full PPA,” Sid said. “Jesus Christ.”

“Okay, everyone over to the far wall,” Rhett said. “Except for Sid and Yin. And Jay. Come over here.”

They stood by the window, the table, the pizza box.

Rhett hated himself for this. For putting his team at risk. If there was even the slightest chance he’d put Jay at risk... Ruining this operation was secondary.

And it shouldn’t have been.

He went to the door and opened it as two men in full protective gear came down the hall. One carried a toolbox, the other one carried a handheld reader of some kind. “Captain Ouston,” the first guy said with a nod as he walked in.

Rhett didn’t recognise him.

The first guy slid the pizza box and contents into a clear plastic bag with yellow tape and sealed it shut while guy number two pulled out some vials and swab sticks.

Christ.

“Who handled the contents?” he asked, looking at Rhett.

“I did,” he replied. “No one else touched the box or the flyer, or the contents. I wore gloves. Time, approximately four hours ago.”

The guy took a mouth swab from Rhett’s mouth and nose and then shoved it directly into a vial of blue solution and shook it. The second guy swabbed Rhett’s vest, his sleeve, his gloves.

“Blue is good, purple is bad,” the guy said.

Guy number two began packing up his kit.

What the hell?

“Agent Yin was with me in the apartment,” Rhett said.

“Agent Ritchie sat next to the box for the four-hour duration. The longest out of all of us. And I touched Medic Lin’s arm, without my glove.

I slept on the floor beside him for three hours.

If this pathogen is airborne, then you should test them too. ”

Guy number one, still holding the vial, looked Rhett dead in the eye. “If it was airborne, you’d all be contaminated, and this would be an exercise in futility.”

Rhett seethed with anger. “Agent Yin was with me. Direct contact. In the apartment. I demand he be tested?—”

“We don’t take our orders from you,” he said.

Rhett took a breath in and exhaled slowly, trying to calm down. “I respectfully request you monitor the health and safety of my men.”

The man looked at Rhett as if he were speaking to a child. “That won’t be necessary, Agent Ouston,” he said, shaking the vial like a prize. “Blue is good. You’re all clear.”

Then, like Rhett wasn’t even there, guy number one spoke into a radio. “We are all clear. Negative swab on Ouston.”

And that pissed Rhett the fuck off. “I was not the only one who came into contact with?—”

The guy cut off the radio comms, and it took every ounce of self-control for Rhett to not grab that fucker and squeeze his windpipe like Harrigan did to that piece of shit back in the bunker.

Jay grabbing the back of Rhett’s shirt was the only thing that stopped him.

“What can you tell us?” Jay asked as they got to the door. “About the pathogen.”

“Nothing,” guy number one said as he opened the door.

“Director King will be in touch directly,” guy number two said before walking out, the door latching closed behind them.

Rhett’s hands were fists. “Motherfuckers,” he seethed at the door, still too mad to say much else. “They treated me like I’m the only one of us who fucking matters and that just fucks me off so bad.”

“No,” Jay said. “You’re the only one who touched the articles, and that tells us something about what they’re dealing with. It’s direct contact only; skin contact only, maybe ingested. Not airborne. They know that much already. Because, like he said, if it were airborne, we’d all be dead.”

Rhett turned to look at him and his anger flared again, though not at Jay, but inward. At himself .

“I shouldn’t have gone,” he said quietly. “I put us all at risk.”

“You disobeyed a direct order,” Echo added. Then he cracked a smile. “You’ll be off King’s Christmas card list now, for sure.”

“No,” Azrael said with the hint of a smile. “He’ll be off his favourite list because of the ‘fucking heads on plaques on his living room wall’ comment.”

“You all heard that?” Rhett asked.

“Pretty hard not to,” Coyote said with a shrug.

“And look, Captain, I’ll tell ya something straight.

Is disobeying a direct order ever a good idea?

Probably not. But I’da done the same thing.

We’ve got two members of this team missing, abducted, kidnapped, held hostage, we don’t fuckin’ know.

Because they ain’t telling us shit. If they hadda kept you in the know, you wouldn’ta had to break protocol.

So fuck ’em. I’m standing with you. Because I’m telling ya, if I ever get abducted or go missing and they withhold information, you bet your ass I’d want you to break every rule to find me. ”

“Same,” Azrael said. “Till the end, right?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” Sid added.

“Right,” Echo agreed with a nod.

Chen looked somewhat confused, but he shrugged. “I not know what we agree to.” He looked to Yin for some kind of clarification.

Jay said something in Mandarin, and that made Yin smile. “Rule-breaking is team-building, huh?”

“Something like that,” Jay said.

“Never broke a rule back home?” Coyote asked Yin.

Yin snorted as if that was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. “Absolutely not. If I told my superior officer that I’d put his head on my living room wall, death would be a mercy.”

“Well,” Sid said, going back to the window. “There’s a bakery two blocks up, and I volunteer Captain Rule Breaker and his not-contaminated wallet to go get us breakfast.”

“That’s fair,” Rhett said.

Then, of course, his phone buzzed. He knew it was Director King without even looking.

Fuuuuuck.

He answered the call and put it on speaker. “You’re on speaker,” Rhett said. “There’s no privacy in this room, and it’s best if they hear the science-speak for themselves.”

Director King made an unhappy sound. “Ouston, when you get back, I think you and I are going to have a little chat.”

“When I get back, I will have Kowalski and Myles with me, and you can rip me a new asshole all you like.”

Sid grinned, Jay sighed quietly, and Yin shook his head in disbelief.

“With a bit of luck,” Rhett added, “I will have slept and eaten something by then, unlike the last twenty-four hours, so I’ll probably be more amicable. Now, tell us about the contamination, the pathogen, or whatever it is. And tell us what the hell my two team members have to do with it.”

King sighed. “Agents Kowalski and Myles were in Armenia scoping intel on a man named Aram Gordian. It was supposed to be a simple op, as you know. But then Gordian met with a man by the name of Sadiq Askerov. Askerov is a biochem engineer with BioMed Laboratory in Baku that has, up until now, specialised in fungal toxins. Now, as you know, Gordian has been on our watchlist for some time. A person of interest, someone who appeared on our radar a year ago after the whole Istomin case got blown open. We’d never heard of him before that, and he went underground when the ZBK faction was ended last year. ”

Jesus Christ.

King continued as if this was not the first time he had relayed the entire case.

“Kowalski and Myles were sent to Albania after information for possible evidence, and nothing else. But then Askarov turns up, we start digging into what they could possibly be discussing. Kowalski and Myles get close, we get direct audio of a confirmed clinical trial and a deal brokered, and our focus shifted to BioMed, and that’s where shit went sideways.

Because a week ago, two hundred kilograms of methylphosphonyl dichloride went missing in Iran. ”

“Fuck,” Jay whispered, eyes wide.

Before Rhett could ask, King continued. “Kowalski and Myles were to rendezvous in Baku. Contact was not made, as you know. They were seen being escorted into vehicles near your current location with canisters we first assumed were oxygen. What you don’t know is that we believe the canisters may contain a new bioweapon. ”

Rhett felt the colour drain from his face. “What the... a bioweapon?”

“We’ve been trying to join the dots, involving experts and scientists who know a lot more about any of this than me,” King went on. “These are technically a type of trichothecene mycotoxin?—”

Rhett shook his head. “Dumb it down for me, Director. Like really fucking dumb. ”

King sighed. “It’s bad. It’s like they put every bioweapon known to man into a petri dish and let it spawn. It’s a mycotoxin on super steroids, similar to anthrax, which reacts like sarin, presents like Ebola. Think of the worst death imaginable and multiply it by ten.”

The air left Rhett’s lungs in a rush. “So it’s really fucking bad.” Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. “And Kowalski and Myles have been subjected to it?”

King answered quietly. “We cannot say with certainty because we do not know.”

“But it’s not airborne,” Jay said, clearly confused. “When you swabbed Rhett, you were looking for contact, not ingestion?”

King was quiet for a second. “Correct. That doesn’t mean our two men were contaminated with this particular agent. They could be trialling something else entirely. We have every available person on this. Our Alpha Two has been reeled in and will be available in approximately two hours.”

What?

The other Milvus team? Weren’t they in South America?

“What for?” Rhett snapped. “If you’d give us something to do, we could get it done. We wouldn’t need the second team.”

“This is bigger than you,” King said. “This is... bigger than all of us.”

Fuck.

Rhett looked up then, at the faces of his team. They watched him, faces serious and silent.

“What’s the deal, Director King?” Rhett asked. “And spare me the bullshit. What is BioMed doing? This pathogen—bio fucking chemical warfare agent, whatever—they’re making, who the hell is buying it? Is it Gordian? Or is he a middleman for a bigger player?”

Director King was quiet for a moment. “We believe he’s a middleman.”

“And who hired him?”

“We’re looking into that.”

That was bullshit, and Rhett knew it. King knew. The powers that be fucking knew but weren’t ready to say.

Fine.

Rhett had more pressing concerns. “Kowalski and Myles,” he asked flatly, “where are they?”

“We believe they were taken into Iran. There’s a laboratory compound outside Tehran.”

Rhett held his breath, eyes darting to Jay. Sid scrubbed a hand over his face, Coyote sighed, and Azrael clenched her jaw. Chen looked at Yin, and Yin’s eyes never left Rhett’s.

Rhett remained outwardly calm, focused now, and serious. “When do we leave?”

“Two hours. Get cleaned up and fed, ready to roll out. Just so you know, we’re working with the Iranian government on this and will have the full cooperation of their police and military.

You will be escorted over the border by their Armed Forces, and you will be briefed when you arrive at the base in Tehran. I will meet you there.”

Rhett couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and he knew... he knew then, this was bad.

“Director,” he said, quieter this time, more subservient. “What’s the objective? What are we trying to stop? You’re talking biological warfare terrorism, right?”

A long beat of silence .

“Designed for mass carnage,” King replied.

Rhett shook his head.

Fucking hell.

“It can be detected early, like the swab tests done on you, Captain Ouston. Something to do with an elevated protein, but by then it’s already too late. One hundred percent fatality rate.”

“We believe the attack will be airborne, not contact or ingestion,” he said, his voice low and tired.

“Airborne?” Rhett said, confused. “You said it wasn’t?—”

“We believe that’s what they’re working on. Mass civilian casualties.”

Jesus Christ. Rhett’s head was spinning. “The target? Do you know that yet?”

King sounded more defeated now. “We believe the intended target is Dubai airport. A highly infectious, contagious, unstoppable virus through that airport is 260,000 infected passengers going to 250 destinations in a hundred countries in one day. It would spread around the world in twenty-four hours. Indiscriminate, unstoppable, uncurable, no known antigen. It will be many millions dead in a matter of days. Health systems decimated, economies and governments ruined. The world will be on its knees.”

Rhett’s blood went cold, his humanity and training warring in his head. Eventually, his training won. “Tell me what you need me to do.”