CHAPTER 23: KILL ALL SUSPICION

The data didn’t make sense.

Elias leaned forward, his elbows on the metal desk, as the glow of three separate monitors cast harsh shadows across his face. His fingers tapped the table in quiet rhythm as a row of immunoresponse charts failed to align for the third time.

The results were too clean. Too cooperative.

That wasn’t how viruses behaved.

One of the things that had attracted him to biochemical weapons was the fact that nothing went the way you expected it to. If a trial was done on a particular pathogen or virus, you would hope that one out of twenty results corresponded with the desired outcome. Especially in the early stages. For every last result to be exactly what they wanted meant that someone had already planned for every contingency. And that wasn’t likely.

He exhaled slowly as he stared at the scan from Subject G12. Instead of the usual cytokine storm they expected from a Type-4 immune reaction, there was suppression. Perfectly controlled, elegantly done...suppression.

There were no fever spikes, no inflammation as a result of a bad reaction. The immune system folded around the intruder as if it had been... trained to.

"Show me the baseline," he muttered, his eyes narrowing on the screen in front of him.

The system flicked through the comparative data. His brow furrowed deeper. The numbers were correct. The program ran without flags multiple times, but every instinct he had screamed that something was being missed, skipped over. Or maybe fed to them.

The Government of Country N didn’t trust the vaccine that Country M was mass producing simply because there shouldn’t have been enough time to have developed one from scratch after the spread of the virus.

Instead, they wanted a vaccine fully generated from their own labs to prove it was exactly what it was supposed to be. That was the point of taking Dr. Orhan. They wouldn’t have to start from scratch, per se, but at least one of their own was going through the process at the same time to make sure that nothing untoward was added.

Behind him, the lab door slid open.

"I see you’ve buried yourself in your work again," came a voice—calm, dry, faintly amused.

Commander Jules stood with a coffee in hand, half a smirk tugging at his lips. The man always looked like he belonged somewhere between a boardroom and a bunker, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, a gun never far from reach.

"You said you’d deliver results, Elias," Jules continued, walking toward the desk. "This looks like progress to me."

Elias didn’t look away from the screen. "It’s progress," he agreed before his brows furrowed for a split second. "It just isn’t ours."

Jules raised an eyebrow, the smile on his face quickly disappearing. "Meaning?"

"Meaning this immune pattern didn’t come from us. Not organically. This isn’t how immune systems respond to new viral structures. It’s how they respond to rehearsed ones."

Jules took a slow sip. "You’re suggesting someone’s run this trial before."

"I’m suggesting," Elias said, glancing over his shoulder, "that someone handed us the solution before we finished asking the question."

That earned him silence from the other man. Then Jules shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. "Let the girl keep running it."

Elias straightened slightly. "She’s not a girl. She’s a scientist."

Jules chuckled. "A scientist who defected from the country that designed the mutagen we’re trying to neutralize."

"She didn’t defect. We brought her here," reminded Elias, never looking up from his computer.

"Exactly."

------

Hours later, Elias was still thinking about it.

He stood alone in the bioclean lab, his arms folded across his chest as he watched a sequencing machine finish another round. The air hummed with sterile energy, too white, too bright.

"Doctor?" a voice called softly behind him.

He turned.

Layla Orhan stepped into the room with a tablet in hand and her long black braid twisted neatly down her back. Her face was as unreadable as always...serene but never warm. She wore her coat open, with her ID badge clipped to her chest just below a row of capped syringes.

"I’ve been running Tier-2 adjustments on the antiviral clusters," she said. "There’s a small chance of metabolic instability in males aged forty and up, but I’ve isolated it to a defective batch from Facility B."

Elias nodded once. "And your solution?"

"A sequencing hardware upgrade," she replied. "Thermal balancing’s still too slow. I’ve already submitted a request."

Of course she had. Layla never asked before moving. That was her strength, and the thing that made him the most uneasy.

"I can run it past the board," he said slowly. "But it’ll take a few days."

"No need," she said smoothly. "I’ve got Jules’ signature."

Elias blinked. She smiled—just barely—and held up her tablet to show the clearance.

He scanned it with his badge and handed it back without a word.

As she turned to leave, something caught his attention.

Her footfalls were too light. Too precise. She glanced around for a second, not at him, but at the corner camera mounted above the glass cabinet. It was so quickly done that if Elias wasn’t as confident as he was, he would have second guessed himself as to what he actually saw.

He waited until she had left his space before he walked over to the control console. Camera log. Corridor 7. The feed was offline and the label said "under maintenance."

He didn’t raise the alarm.

He just downloaded the system logs to an encrypted drive and slid it into his pocket.

-------

Later that night, he pulled a random sample from the secured cold storage unit.

It was tagged "Tier-3 Novaclin Trial – Batch 11D." Beneath that, a silver sticker gleamed under the lab lights. A stylized emblem that made it look like random lines drawn in a circle. However, if he squinted, he could have sworn that he saw something with seven heads curled around a red apple.

He didn’t recognize the logo at first. While it mimicked that of the Hydra Industries, it wasn’t the exact same. Shaking his head, he ignored the nagging feeling. It was probably a subcontractor. Some of Country M’s labs had been torn apart and scavenged before anyone could make full sense of them.

Still...

He held the vial up to the light. The fluid inside moved like oil—thicker than plasma, darker than anything that should’ve come from a human sample.

But the system classified it as antiviral.

And Layla had signed off on every stage.

He placed the vial back into the tray, double-sealed the container, and left it where it was.

-----

The next morning, Elias approved the request to move to human trial simulations.

He told himself it was because the data held up.

Because the system flagged no abnormalities.

Because the woman they’d taken from Country M had proven herself every step of the way.

He didn’t tell himself that it was easier to believe her.

Not yet.

Not when her vaccine might be the first hope they’d had in months.

And certainly not when he was already preparing to administer it to his own team.