Operation Thrall by M.A. Rothman

Author:M.A. Rothman [Rothman, M.A. & Diamond, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter

Fifteen

“Uhh… Torres? Can you take a look at this?”

Lara Torres suppressed her desire to murder Mason. She was tired of dealing with these pendejos.

The Outfit’s the premiere clandestine agency, he’d said. We only recruit the finest from around the world, he’d said. I’ll send word to the task force leader and tell him to give you free rein on following this line of investigation, he’d said.

Why did I ever leave the CIA?

She blamed herself. Being good at her job and aggressive had consequences. She once heard it said that the reward for success is getting the added work others failed at.

Now she clenched her jaw to keep from unleashing a string of profanity at the other analyst who’d been assigned to help her. Crystal Howard. Supposedly Crystal had been poached from the NSA, but Lara had serious doubts whether the woman could even tie her own shoes without someone showing her how. Crystal was older than Lara by more than a decade, yet always needed a second opinion. On everything.

And worst of all, she dyed her hair blue.

Never trust someone who dyes their hair a strange color, Lara’s grandmother used to say. It poisons their brain.

Lara used to laugh off the old woman’s crazy advice. Not anymore.

“Sure,” Lara said, forcing a smile. Crystal flinched. I need to work on that fake smile. Lara rolled her chair around to the other woman’s cube.

“You had me looking for weird communications in Heilongjiang?” Crystal said.

“That’s right.” It was like speaking to a toddler. Lara wondered if she should get a sticker sheet of gold stars and put them on this lady’s forehead when she managed to do something right.

“How weird is ‘weird’?”

Lara let out a long, slow breath—struggling to filter what she wanted to say into something that wouldn’t turn into an HR event. “Good lord, Crystal, just tell me what you have. There aren’t enough street tacos in the world to prevent me from… just spit it out, please.”

“Oh! You like street tacos, too?”

Lara’s hand strayed to her waist, where she’d begun appendix-carrying her pistol. But she’d locked it in the gun locker upon entering the facility. A small blessing for Crystal.

“Crystal,” she said as calmly as she could. “Tell me what you have?”

The woman nodded. “Reports of people going crazy and attacking other people. Lots of biting. Kids are chasing everyone and tackling them.”

“Sounds like a normal day at day care.”

“It’s not a day care. It’s a Chinese city called Yichun. And it’s not isolated incidents. There are hundreds of reports in the last few hours.”

She turned to her screen and ran a query on all messages with the words bite, attack, and chase in all their variations. Hundreds of text messages and phone calls scrolled past, the transcriptions translated to English.

Lara gestured for Crystal to move aside, then sat in front of the monitor and scanned through it all. It seemed a group of kids—the number varied from report to report—was running through the streets like a pack of jackals, attacking people at random.

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