THE BEIJING CONSPIRACY Read online

  Penguin Books

  THE

  BEIJING

  CONSPIRACY

  Adrian d’Hagé graduated from Duntroon into the Intelligence Corps in 1967. He served in Vietnam and had a distinguished army career. In 2000, he was Head of Defence Planning for security of the Sydney Olympics, including defence against chemical, biological and nuclear threats. Adrian left the army to pursue a writing career. His bestselling first novel, The Omega Scroll (Penguin 2005), was voted one of the top 50 books of 2006 (Booklovers Guide) and has been published in over ten countries. The Beijing Conspiracy is his second novel.

  ADRIAN

  d’HAGÉ

  THE

  BEIJING

  CONSPIRACY

  Penguin Books

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2007

  This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2008

  Text copyright © Adrian d’Hage 2007

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228370-8

  For Robyn

  BOOK ONE

  TOWARDS THE FINAL SOLUTION

  CHAPTER 1

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON DC

  ‘We will strike you when you least expect it, beneath Eternity where the windmill has been stolen. This is the first of three warnings. If you do not heed these warnings and if Allah, the Most Kind, the Most Merciful wills it, we will be forced to implement the final solution.’

  The mood in the White House war cabinet was tense. The briefing had been hastily convened in the cramped Situation Room beneath the Oval Office in the West Wing. The video being viewed was grainy, but the features of sixty-year-old Dr Khalid Kadeer were clear enough. Like the Hydra of Greek mythology, al-Qaeda had grown another monstrous head, and the terrorist mastermind was calm and chillingly confident. Unlike his thinner and more familiar colleague, Osama bin Laden, the Muslim Uighur from the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in western China was powerfully built. He was tall and his demeanor was menacing. His dark, oval face was etched with the lines of a lifelong Islamic struggle against the West and the Han Chinese, and his narrow, hooded eyes were black and coldly calculating. An elegantly embroidered doppa, the traditional headgear of his Uighur people, covered his fine, grey hair.

  Kadeer spoke quietly, inviting President Denver Harrison and the members of his war cabinet, the most powerful group of men and women in the world, to dismiss the warning attack as nothing more than rambling Islamic bravado. Agent Curtis O’Connor wasn’t so sure. Kadeer was a brilliant microbiologist who had trained at Harvard University. O’Connor knew Kadeer was very focused.

  Curtis O’Connor, an expert on bioterrorism and one of the CIA’s most knowledgeable agents on Islam, Central Asia and al-Qaeda, was seated in one of the advisor’s chairs that were placed along the dark panelled wall of the White House Situation Room. He was forty-three, fit, with a solid physique and tall, standing at 178 centimetres. His thick, dark hair was roughly brushed into place. His face was tanned and his blue eyes were mischievous, although looks could be misleading. Originally from Ireland, Curtis O’Connor was very much his own man, and he had one of the sharpest minds in the CIA. Some time ago he’d concluded that the President and his advisors were in a state of denial over the war in Iraq. Somehow, he thought, he would have to influence a change to the dangerous and arrogant course the Administration had charted for his adopted country and for the wider western world. O’Connor had little time for presidents and prime ministers who started wars on false premises, or for sycophantic advisors and generals who did their bidding, and he had even less time for religion and the fundamentalists who misused it, whatever their creed.

  ‘The West is increasingly using this so-called war on terror to persecute Muslims all over the world,’ Kadeer continued. ‘Innocent women and children are being slaughtered in Iraq, in Lebanon, and in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel. Other government authorities, like those in Beijing, have followed the lead of the United States, Britain and Australia, using the war on terror to eliminate Muslim Uighurs they perceive as a threat. You don’t see this in the West, but China executes more people every year than the rest of the world combined. Torture and imprisonment is at the whim of the communists in Beijing, as is the blocking of the internet. Freedom of speech is non-existent, yet you will flock to the Beijing Olympics and show support for a murderous regime. It was the same in 1936,’ Kadeer said, a touch of sadness in his voice. ‘The Berlin Olympics were opened by Hitler and the Third Reich used sporting teams and the Nazi salute to glorify their regime. You seem to have forgotten that the Olympic charter is concerned with the harmonious development of man and the promoting of a peaceful society and the preservation of human dignity.’ With stunning irony, Kadeer warned, ‘If you do not change course, where Hitler failed, Islam will succeed.’

  Curtis O’Connor wondered if the first attack might be biological and if the athletes and the Games might be the target. ‘Beneath Eternity where the windmill has been stolen’ didn’t sound like a bacteria or a virus, but O’Connor knew that among the terrorists on the United States’ most-wanted list, the Muslim scientist and philosopher had few peers, and no one was in a better position to exploit the dark, microscopic world of bioterrorism. Despite the disdain on the faces of President Harrison and the rest of his cabinet, O’Connor had a feeling that somewhere within the coded first warning was a real and present danger that the West would ignore at her peril.

  As the video drew towards to its conclusion, President Harrison fidgeted with his expensive gold pen. He’d not long returned from his ranch on the banks of the Bitterroot River in Montana, and it was clear that he would rather be back there. Instead he was being forced to sit through a video of threats from some two-bit Muslim terrorist. Harrison’s square face was tanned and his jaw was set stubbornly. The constant criticisms levelled at his Administration for favouring the rich, instead of looking after the poor and an increasingly cash-strapped Middle America, hadn’t bothered him in the least – but the disaster that was Iraq and the war on terror was taking its toll. His once dark hair was now noticeably grey. President Ha
rrison glared at the figure on the screen.

  Kadeer’s demeanor softened, and he appeared almost reasonable as he directed his remarks towards the ordinary citizens of the West and China. ‘The people of the West and the people of China are in mortal danger. I wish it wasn’t so, but your leaders are arrogant and stubborn, and they refuse to negotiate with many of the key states in the Muslim world, such as Syria and Iran. In Iraq, the invasion by the West has resulted in the deaths of over 400,000 innocent Iraqi citizens. Your leaders dismiss these figures, but they come from your own prestigious Johns Hopkins University. Beijing maintains very tight controls over the media and the internet and many in the West are unaware of what is happening, but hundreds of my people in Xinjiang province have been murdered by ruthless Han Chinese government soldiers,’ Kadeer continued, his dark eyes now flashing with anger as he remembered the slaughter of his own family. ‘The Beijing government has been persecuting the Muslim Uighur people in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region for decades, and the West’s war on terror has provided those in authority with the excuse they need to legitimise murder and imprisonment without trial. Beijing is only doing what the West sanctions at Guantanamo Bay.’

  The President’s thin mouth turned down as he struggled to comprehend Kadeer’s message. He seemed to be taking the threat to a sinister new level.

  ‘The Prophet, peace be upon him, predicted that the end times would be very near when you, the Mushrikeen, and the Jews amongst you “swarmed against Islam from every hill”. You are swarming against us today from every hill in all the four corners of the earth. If your leaders persist with the destruction of the Muslim people; if you continue to humiliate the Prophet, peace be upon him, your civilisations will be destroyed in the final solution, as it is predicted in the noble Qu’ran.’ The Muslim microbiologist closed his holy book.

  ‘September 11 was the forerunner of much worse to come. Very soon you will be given your first warning and we will attack you beneath Eternity. This will be followed by a second and a third warning, and if you do not heed these warnings from Allah, the Most Kind, the Most Merciful, you will perish when the single strand meets its double.’

  CHAPTER 2

  THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL, ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  naked beneath her sterile surgical gown, Dr Kate Braithwaite was protected by a blue biosafety spacesuit. When anyone left a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, nothing was allowed past the decontamination showers. Although it was already after 9 p.m., Kate was not ready to leave yet, and she moved towards the door at the far end of the deadly hot-zone laboratory, shuffling in the galoshes that protected the soles of her spacesuit from any wear from the floors.

  Only thirty-four, and Australian-born, Dr Kate Braithwaite was one of the most respected biochemists and virologists in the United States and she was one of the few scientists in the world who could claim to be an expert on Variola major, otherwise known as smallpox. Her long, blonde curly hair was held in place with a hairnet to keep it from falling across her eyes behind the heavy plastic face mask. Her lightly freckled face was tanned and, even behind a visor, Kate Braithwaite was clearly a very attractive young woman, although on this night her normally sparkling green eyes smouldered with anger. Kate was usually based in Maryland at USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, but a week ago she’d received a top-secret directive ordering her to divide her time between Maryland and the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Dr Braithwaite had been instructed to prepare some of the most dangerous experiments ever conducted in the history of biological warfare.

  CDC’s main Biosafety Level 4 laboratory in the western sector of the complex was one of the deadliest laboratories in the world. The floors and walls were tiled and kept immaculately clean. There were dozens of red, coiled air hoses hanging from the ceiling. The air in the lab was at negative pressure and was constantly replaced. Telltale banks of chimneys on the roof expelled micro-filtered air that was also super-heated to make doubly sure any pathogens like Ebola and Marburg, for which there was no known cure, were well and truly destroyed before they reached the outside world. Alone in the lab, Kate had put in an exhausting fourteen hours hunched over Petri dishes that contained India-1, one of the most lethal strains of smallpox known to man, but she wanted to check on her beloved chimpanzees before she left for home.

  To go ahead with these experiments was utterly irresponsible, she thought angrily, as she eased open the heavy steel door to the animal room. The world had already seen enough horror without risking another outbreak of smallpox. Kate knew there were only two repositories of smallpox left on the planet. One was in the Russian laboratories in Koltsovo in Siberia and no one was really sure that the Russians could account for all of their lethal stocks. The other repository was here at CDC, which was surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent anyone driving a truck bomb into the building. The smallpox was kept under the tightest laboratory security found anywhere in the world.

  Kate’s thoughts turned briefly to Professor Imran Sayed, her immediate boss from her home base in Maryland. She had supported both her Professor and the old Colonel Commanding USAMRIID, the three of them arguing passionately for the destruction of the world’s two remaining stockpiles of the deadly virus, but each time they had been firmly rebuffed by those in power. They had argued just as passionately that experiments on the great apes should not proceed, but last week a new Colonel Commanding had been posted in – Colonel Walter C. Wassenberg III; and it was he who had issued the orders for the experiments. She would no doubt get to meet him when she returned to Maryland, but she had already heard enough from her colleagues back at ‘the RID’, as USAMRIID was known to the inmates, and the news was not good. Wassenberg was a stickler for military discipline and a staunch supporter of White House policy, and Kate had a terrible feeling that neither she nor Professor Sayed would be successful in getting the dreadful experiments stopped.

  Kate closed the heavy steel door behind her and reached for one of the red air hoses, plugging it into her regulator. The cool air pres-surised her suit with a loud hiss and she shuffled over to the first of the cages that held the small family of chimpanzees brought in from Gabon for the research.

  None of the chimps had settled into their new homes; half-eaten persimmons, bananas and paw paws were scattered among the green leaves on the floors of the cages. Kate had named the alpha male Maverick and as she looked into his soulful brown eyes, her anger softened. He was sitting at the far end of his cage thoughtfully stroking his chin. His big, black nose was squashed onto his wrinkly old face, and his powerful arms and the rest of his body were covered in black hair, although there were grey touches on the top of his head. As Kate continued to hold eye contact, he got up and ambled over to the bars of the cage, pressing his face between them, looking at her quizzically. Although he was well built, the alpha male wasn’t the biggest in the group. In many ways, families of chimpanzees mirrored their human communities. In Maverick’s case, he was the most politically astute and he had ascended to the position of alpha male because he possessed the best social skills and was the most capable of maintaining order within the group. He had the respect of all the others, which gave him first feeding rights, as well as mating rights.

  Kate felt a strange connection to the big primate. It was not the first time she had wondered about DNA and the inter-connectedness of life. She knew that, unlike gorillas, chimpanzees’ DNA differed from human DNA by only 1.6 per cent, but that didn’t mean she agreed with the Administration’s view that chimpanzees provided the best chance of success in the deadly experiment. The gentle primate seemed troubled, Kate thought. She could see the sadness in his eyes. It was almost as if he had some inkling about what was going to happen to him and his family, and Kate shared his concern. As skilled as she was in handling Variola major, the experiments she had been ordered to conduct had never been tried before and she had no way of knowing how they might turn out or how dangerous they might be
come.

  CHAPTER 3

  GEORGIA SPORT SHOOTING ASSOCIATION, ATLANTA

  President Denver Harrison’s emergency war cabinet had been scheduled less than two hours after Dr Kadeer’s video had been aired by al-Jazeera. As yet unaware of either the video or the war cabinet meeting, Vice President Charles ‘Chuck’ Bolton had been addressing a meeting of the National Rifle Association in one of the big conference rooms at the Georgia International Convention Center. Vice President Bolton was driven by just two forces: power and money. He was the principal attack dog for the GOP or ‘Grand Old Party’ as the Republicans had been known since The Boston Post had dubbed them that in the late nineteenth century. The Vice President was feared by GOP Republicans and Democrats alike for his ‘take no prisoners’ approach to politics. Chuck Bolton was slightly built and of medium height; his oval face was pale and his fine grey hair was thinning. His blue eyes were hard and metallic, and his pencil moustache was greying above needle-thin lips. Vice President Bolton’s demeanor held not a scintilla of warmth. The Vice President was one of the most powerful men in Washington, and although the top job had so far eluded him he was widely acknowledged as being the real power behind the Presidency. No one was in any doubt as to what the Vice President stood for, be it his abhorrence of homosexuals, his unflinching support for bans on abortion and stem cell research, or his conviction that America was destined to reshape the world; and for Bolton, that world was defined by a projection of American power. As he concluded his address an aide approached him and whispered in his ear.

  ‘al-Qaeda have released another video and there’s an emergency meeting of the war cabinet scheduled for the White House Situation Room. We’re arranging for you to view it down at Atlanta’s FBI Headquarters with secure video conference facilities. It’ll be a bit more comfortable than the back of the communications van.’ Like the President, the Vice President’s convoy included a communications van bristling with state-of-the-art equipment that could connect both men anywhere in the world.