Biostorm (Vector Book 1) Read online

  Biostorm

  Vector, Book One

  Anthony J. Melchiorri

  Contents

  Newsletter

  -Acknowledgments-

  -Dedication-

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  -7-

  -8-

  -9-

  -10-

  -11-

  -12-

  -13-

  -14-

  -15-

  -16-

  -17-

  -18-

  -19-

  -20-

  -21-

  -22-

  -23-

  -24-

  -25-

  -26-

  -27-

  -28-

  -29-

  -30-

  -31-

  -32-

  -33-

  -34-

  -35-

  -36-

  -37-

  -38-

  -39-

  -40-

  -Author’s Note-

  -Dear Reader-

  Demon Mind Preview, Prologue

  -1-

  -2-

  -About the Author-

  Newsletter

  Sign up for Anthony’s spam-free newsletter for the chance to receive free books and stories, special offers, and all the latest info on his new releases: http://bit.ly/ajmlist

  Biostorm (Vector, Book One)

  Copyright © 2021 by Anthony J. Melchiorri. All rights reserved.

  First Edition: July 2021

  http://AnthonyJMelchiorri.com

  Cover Design: © Damonza, Damonza.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  -Acknowledgments-

  This book wouldn’t exist without the team of people who have consistently supported my efforts. Their advice, criticism, and conversations helped take the ideas and concepts in this story to the next level. Thank you first and foremost to my fellow cohort of graduate students from my days at the University of Maryland, back when I got my PhD, whose conversations fueled my flights into fiction while we talked about all the most fascinating advances and discoveries in our fields. A big thank you to my editor, Erin Long. She’s been with me since some of my first books, helping to develop my characters, pointing out plot holes, and in general polishing the work I send her. Thank you to Virge and Brittany at Red Adept Editing for helping clean up the manuscript. To Frank and Luis, the first people who set eyes on this thriller. To Nicholas Sansbury Smith, who I owe my career to, and so many conversations as we mix real-world science into our fiction. A big thank you to my wife, Katarina, who listens to all my ideas and serves as a sounding board as I prototype the characters and story elements. To my agent, David Fugate, who has been a champion for my books. A big thank you to the Podium Audio team for bringing this work to life in audiobook format. While all these people have played a part in bringing this book to fruition, any stubborn errors left in this story and its telling are purely my own.

  -Dedication-

  For my good friend, Luis, and all those who dedicate their lives in pursuit of scientific advancement to make the world a better place.

  -1-

  Istanbul, Turkey

  Alex Wolfe searched through a crowd of hundreds for his target. He needed to find just one man hurrying through a busy Turkish marketplace in possession of an engineered pathogen.

  Millions of innocent lives might be at stake.

  And so was Alex’s job.

  The hot June sun soaked into his trim sports coat and matching black slacks. Not the most comfortable clothing for a jaunt through Istanbul in the summer. His blond hair and decidedly Scandinavian appearance weren’t much help, either, if he wanted to blend in with the locals. But that wasn’t the point. Instead, he slipped into the stream of people clad in business attire that had descended on the city for the Biodefense World Summit.

  The timetable his analyst had provided told Alex that the Summit’s scheduled afternoon break had just begun. An ideal time for his target to escape using the cover of the crowd.

  He navigated through the crush of conference-goers with name tags swinging from their necks and tourists leisurely passing over a cobblestone street. Knockoff designer bags spilled from shops where hawkers touted, “The real thing, my friend! Good deal just for you!”

  Merchants accosted people in front of stores with shelves of stone animal statuettes and double-stacked Turkish tea kettles. Children ran through the street and neighboring square. A few kicked a soccer ball between the streams of tourists. Behind the souvenir stands and chaos, the iconic minarets of the historic Blue Mosque speared the sky.

  Alex passed a stand with a man roasting chestnuts and paused near an open-air restaurant where a cook grilled sizzling kebabs over an open fire. Somewhere in the hordes of wily salesmen and hapless tourists was his target.

  Where are you?

  Istanbul marked Alex’s first mission as an operative on the newly formed Vector Team. This was their trial run. Their chance to prove the black-box organization was more than just a discretionary line item on a federal budget. That they could be instrumental in fighting the shadowy war against biological and chemical weapons.

  But only if they found this damned scientist.

  “See our friend yet?” Alex asked through his throat mic.

  “Not yet,” Skylar Cruz called through the receiver pressed into his ear. She was the only other Vector Team member on the ground.

  Cruz was stationed somewhere at the south end of the street, a black-and-pink modesty scarf around her dark brown hair. Loose-fitting khakis and a light sweatshirt completed the ensemble, all to help her masquerade as a sightseeing traveler.

  He wasn’t sure that would be enough.

  Before Vector, she had been a helicopter pilot in the Marines.

  It showed.

  She had a habit of walking with her shoulders back, chin up like the world belonged to her. Not the best way to meld into your surroundings when trying to tail a suspect. But this was Alex’s first time working with her in the field outside of simulations and training exercises. He wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  Problem was, their target wouldn’t.

  “We miss him, that’s it for us,” he said.

  “No pressure.” Cruz paused. “Wait. Think I got him. He lost the beard from the pictures in his file. Should have kept it. Guy’s got a face like a blind carpenter’s thumb. Headed your way.”

  Alex looked over the bobbing heads of other pedestrians.

  “You should see him right about now,” Cruz said.

  There. He spotted their guy walking in front of an art gallery. An older man in his sixties. Black cap. Olive polo tucked into cargo shorts.

  Felix Breners.

  The scientist had come to the conference from Latvia. He was the scientific advisor for EnviroProct. The company had developed a prototype device to detect dangerous contaminants and bioweapons. Intercepted emails from Breners to an encrypted address claimed the company’s prototypes had identified a brand-new—and potentially deadly—microorganism in China.

  Vector Command believed
Breners planned to deliver a sample of that unidentified microorganism to someone in Istanbul. While Alex had every reason to believe this was a dangerous bioweapon, he had no idea who Breners was meeting, what exactly this pathogen was, or why he was meeting someone in secret instead of going to the authorities.

  The most obvious answer was the most frightening: Breners was about to sell it to the highest bidder.

  The scientist cut straight across the street. He stuffed his left hand into his pocket. Alex expected him to pull out a phone. Instead, Breners kept his hand there like he was hanging onto something.

  “The sample must be in Breners’s left pocket,” Alex said.

  “You’re telling me he’s not just happy to see me?” Cruz called back.

  The joke didn’t deserve a reply.

  The target took out his cell from the right pocket and pressed it to his ear. He seemed to be talking to his handler, or maybe the people he planned to meet. Didn’t look happy, in any case.

  Breners was headed straight to a place packed with tourists and vigilant police cradling submachine guns. A place full of winding corridors and tiny shops.

  The Grand Bazaar.

  The scientist reached a security checkpoint with a metal detector and three guards holding automatic rifles.

  Alex could not lose him in that labyrinth.

  But the SIG Sauer pressed against the bottom of his spine meant Alex couldn’t just waltz through the metal detector. Every entrance to the bazaar was secured to prevent a catastrophic terrorist attack like those that had hit Istanbul in 2016. The Turkish police would find his gun, and he would land himself a long-term stay in a musty, hot jail cell with twenty other men.

  As part of Vector’s operational protocols, he and Cruz were not officially employed by the United States government. No intelligence agency would claim them. That gave the US government plausible deniability in case their mission devolved into an explosive scandal.

  Which meant no one would be coming to bail Alex out of that jail cell.

  The security guards waved Breners through the metal detector.

  Alex needed to follow him. But there was no way to get past those guards without going through the detector.

  Screw it. The gun had to go.

  All he needed to do was track Breners. Take a picture or two of the people the man was meeting then steal the sample.

  He didn’t need a firearm for that.

  He turned into a nearby alley. Smashed crates and soggy cardboard boxes lay around overflowing trash cans. Trash bags clawed by stray animals bled puddles of brown, watery goop. The lingering smell of rot was enough to make him gag.

  Good. Not a place people would want to hang out.

  He looked up and down the alley to make sure no one was watching.

  “Cruz, I’m following Breners into the Bazaar.” He slid his pistol out from its holster and pushed it under a pile of particularly rank bags.

  “I’ll go with,” she said.

  “No way to get in carrying hardware.”

  “Then I’ll leave mine too.”

  Alex thought of the kids he’d seen kicking a soccer ball down the street. He could hear more children laughing as they ran between the nearby shops. The last thing he wanted was for one of them to stumble on the weapon. The thought of it repulsed him to his core, reawakening memories he had no time to deal with now.

  “No, you’ve got to pick mine up,” he said. “I’ll follow Breners.”

  “Wolfe—”

  “Cruz, I don’t want anyone stealing it. Or worse, hurting themselves. I got to move.”

  “Damn, you’re stubborn.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Alex muttered.

  He left the alley and walked to the security gate. He handed his phone over to the guard then walked through the detector. Ahead, Breners curved around a corner near a store selling colorful glass lamps. Alex snatched his phone from the guard and took off.

  Voices echoed off the walls from shopkeepers in front of souvenir T-shirts or shelves of faux antiques down the next corridor. The cloying smell of caramelizing sugar drifted from a candy shop next to another store with open wooden boxes filled with colorful spices. People swarmed every one of those shops and the passages between them.

  Alex spotted Breners turning left into a narrower corridor and followed him. Sunlight glowed in from another checkpoint up ahead. Breners marched straight out of the bazaar and stuck his hand in the air, looking down the street.

  Alex’s gut tightened. “Cruz, I think we’re going to need a ride.”

  “I’ll find one.”

  Twenty seconds went by before a cab pulled up. Breners got in.

  “You far?” Alex asked over the comms, wading through the mobs of people.

  “ETA five minutes.”

  Breners’s taxi peeled off.

  “Not going to cut it,” he said.

  Alex waved down his own taxi and slipped inside.

  “Where to?” a man with a graying beard said with a strong accent.

  “Follow that cab,” Alex said, pointing at Breners’s car. “But don’t make it obvious.”

  “Are you serious, my friend?” the cabbie asked, his voice hitching up in excitement.

  “Deadly,” Alex said.

  “I thought this was only in the movies.”

  “Not today.”

  They followed Breners over the Golden Horn River. When the scientist’s car stopped to drop him off, Alex directed his cabbie to halt about half a block away. He handed the driver a wad of lira that would more than cover the fare and, he hoped, buy some discretion then got out.

  Breners joined the crowds walking down a brick-paved pedestrian street. In contrast to the more ancient and lived-in ambience around the Grand Bazaar, this part of the city had a distinctly Western European feel. Ornate couture shops, bakeries, and restaurants lined the street, all of which might appear at home in Paris or Rome. Breners turned left onto a single-lane road next to a coffee shop. As Alex followed him, a multitude of languages collided in an alcohol-induced cacophony.

  The scientist entered one of the many neon-sign-laden bars.

  “He’s at the Squealing Hog Irish Pub,” Alex said. “I’m going in.”

  “Okay, okay.” Cruz sounded distracted, wind blowing over her mic. “I’m about five, maybe ten minutes away. Got your weapon and found a ride. Don’t do anything crazy without me.”

  Alex slipped into the bustling pub. His feet stuck to the floor. The cloying smell of stale beer filled the air, mixing with the sweaty body odor of the happy-hour patrons. A long carved wooden bar stretched to his left. To his right, Breners was climbing a winding iron staircase leading to a second-floor seating area that wrapped above an empty stage.

  Alex needed to buy a little time and cover. He jostled for a space at the bar and signaled the bartender. “A Guinness, please.”

  Once he got the drink, he went up the stairs and acted as if he was looking for a good seat. The second floor was organized in a U-shape, wide enough for a single line of booths and tables around the perimeter overlooking the stage below. Only a few tables were unoccupied. At one end of the U, Alex spotted the back of Breners’s head.

  Two Asian men in suits were at the table with the scientist, one facing Breners, the other sitting beside him.

  He was too late to stop the handoff.

  Alex walked past a couple cuddling in a booth. He chose a seat at the closest table where he could watch Breners from the corner of his eye.

  Conversations and laughter rose around him. He was just near enough to Breners to hear the scientist and the other two men whispering but couldn’t quite make out their words.

  With his cell phone, he snagged a discreet picture of the man sitting across from Breners. He looked to be in his mid-fifties. Maybe Chinese, judging by the snippets of his accent Alex could hear.

  A few curses, the sound of dropped glasses breaking, and angry yells from the first floor dashed any chance he had of eave
sdropping. He turned to see three large men barging up the stairs. All wore black T-shirts. Intricate tattoos coiled around their arms. Each of them had a Cyrillic A emblazoned amid the ink patterns. They talked between themselves in Russian.

  Their demeanor set off every alarm trained by Alex’s decade of service in the CIA.

  “Possible hostile contacts on the scene,” he whispered. “Might need backup.”

  “On it,” Cruz said. The whine of what sounded like a motorcycle engine screamed over the comms. “Just a couple minutes.”

  The first man cresting the stairs reached behind his back and drew a pistol.

  Two minutes might be too long.

  A second passed before the nearest bystanders realized what was about to happen. The first shriek from a woman in a booth set off a chain reaction of screams from the other patrons.

  Time seemed to slow. Adrenaline plunged through Alex’s vessels, his grip tightening around the glass of Guinness.

  Were the Russians after Breners too? Where had they even come from?

  This was not how the mission was supposed to go. Vector had no knowledge of a third party being involved in the handoff.

  The holster where his pistol should be suddenly felt a lot lighter.

  People began rushing down the stairs, the cacophony of panic growing louder.