back in her holding room, obsessing over the photos of her father in Dagestan. Something that caused her to break out of American custody, to impersonate an active SVR officer to reboot a defunct asset to help her get out of the country.
Something that forced her to travel to London. Now.
She’d been so mission focused since the moment she’d sat up in her bed in her holding room, the realization of what she’d seen in the file Brewer handed her only then occurring to her, that she had barely stopped to think about the deeper meaning of what she’d learned. But facing over fifteen hours in the air, her thoughts returned to the photos.
And now, just like in the holding room, an icy chill shot down her back.
Zoya Zakharova was thirty-three years old, but she fought against emotions that brought her back to her childhood. She tried to shake them off, but the ramifications of all this for her were just too big.
She didn’t know how everything, how anything, would play out in the coming days and weeks on this quest she had begun late last night. The odds were long, to be sure. But she had to push forward because she knew one thing now that she did not know before she saw the file on her father.
She now knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that her father did not die fourteen years ago in Dagestan. He was alive in the photo, it had been staged, she assumed he was alive now, and she knew where to go to find out answers about where he was and what he was doing.
Her emotions threatened her mission; this she warned herself of as she watched the nose of the Cessna break out of the clouds and into sunshine over the Chesapeake Bay. She’d have to fight to keep those emotions in check. But as she evaluated herself right now, taking notice of how she felt, she realized her main reaction to what she had learned, that her father was alive, was telling.
She felt no elation. She felt no excitement. She felt no hopefulness.
No. She’d just learned her father was alive, and right now she found herself fighting against an overpowering sense of dread.
CHAPTER 21
FOUR MONTHS EARLIER
Janice Won moved to the United Kingdom, using the same name she used in Stockholm, and through David Mars and Terry Cassidy, she started a company, on paper, at least. Her firm, Biospherical Research Labs, specialized in laboratory research of infectious diseases, ostensibly under contract with the National Health Service. Mars purchased a real firm under Won’s offshore corporation name, then sold it for parts, although the firm retained all its licenses and contracts so it could purchase items without raising eyebrows.
Won spent the first couple of weeks in an office in Soho, London, not a laboratory, and here she drafted a list of items she needed and a list of requirements for a lab to grow and weaponize the Yersinia pestis bacteria she’d successfully taken from the lab in Sweden. She also read through résumés of lab assistants Mars had selected as suitable, trying to find one or two people to help her, although they would think they were working for the front company, and they would never see the weaponized version of the spores.
Won was busy, but she was frustrated at the pace of one element of her preparation. To date she had not been given the information she requested from her new employer. She didn’t yet know the size and scope of the attack David Mars had in mind, or the distribution of the intended victims. She didn’t know if she would be attacking a football stadium, a sprawling metropolis, or a single building with her spores.
She found it ridiculous that she was having to base her needs on wild guesses about her objective, but Mars took her requests and went to work finding her a laboratory without giving her any more information.
It only took him a few days before he met with her in Soho. “Your lab will be in a private building next to Edinburgh University in Scotland. There is an existing facility there, no longer in use. It was built for medical research, but with some work it can be turned into a suitable lab for you. I have contacts in the local police; you will be well protected there, just as long as you use good operational security and don’t ever let out what is going on.”
“I have