The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  He went to his supply of BX 104 biological detonator. This was one of his little treasures. Biological detonator, or bio-det, is a military low explosive. It is used in biological bomb cores. It’s a biological dispersant. One kilogram of viral glass shattered and dispersed in a fine cloud the size of a city block would plume out nicely in the city.

  He tucked a lump of bio-det into the large tube full of viral glass, pushing it in with his thumb. The glass cracked and creaked. He added a blasting-cap detonator, with wires attached to it. You wanted to use about one part explosive to three parts dry virus. That was the standard ratio in bomb design of an explosive bioweapon. The explosion would kill some of the virus particles—he knew that, of course—but since each pane of viral glass contained a quadrillion virus particles, it hardly mattered. Plenty of virus would survive the explosion. Many of the particles, embedded and protected in the glass, would merely fly into the air, traveling outward in a fog of viral glass—a viral glass laydown that would grow into a cloud, diffusing like gas.

  The blasting cap would set off the bio-det. For a timer, he used a microchip clock. And there was a nine-volt battery. He could set the timer for any length of countdown. It would set off the bio-det, and a kilogram of viral glass would balloon into the air. Three hours was enough time for him to get upwind and well out of the city. New York was about to send a new disease into the world. Of course, it might be two days before the city truly realized that it was sick, and in the meantime perhaps quite a few people who had been in the city would be somewhere else. Including him, Archimedes. He would stay in Washington for a few weeks and observe the situation while considering his next move. Then he would repeat the trouble in Washington. Maybe. It was good to remain unpredictable.

  He set the timer, which started to run. He pushed everything into the large glass tube and sealed it with a metal end piece.

  He repeated the process with a second large glass tube, so that he had two mother bombs. He would put them in different places. That was a fail-safe.

  Next he armed his bio-det grenades. They were smaller than the mother bombs. He had two plastic lab jars, and he filled each of them with a mixture of viral glass and pieces of broken bottle glass. Each grenade contained almost half a pound of explosive. Anyone hit by the shock wave would have a skinful of broken real glass mixed with virus. The grenades operated on a simple push-button timer.

  He carried the bombs out of Level 3 into the staging area, where he sprayed his external suit with bleach, and then unzipped his suit and stepped out of it. Deconning was easy. He removed the bombs from the plastic bag and washed them in bleach to sterilize their outside surfaces, and then placed them in a black doctor’s bag—my little joke, he thought. I am the greatest public health doctor.

  Now he went into his bedroom, carrying the black bag. From his bureau drawer he took out a ten-millimeter Colt Delta Elite semiautomatic handgun. He slid a magazine into it. The Colt Delta Elite was a slim, high-tech version of the classic Army Colt .45. It had a laser-beam sight. The sight threw a spot of red light on the target. That made it extremely accurate. He carried the gun for safety, in case he had to defend himself. Now he was ready to move into the bloodstream of the city.

  AUSTEN AND HOPKINS boarded a Lexington Avenue train bound uptown. Austen, reading her subway map, led them off at the Bleecker Street stop. They walked east toward Bowery and over to First Avenue, where they entered the station for the F train on East Houston Street. This led to the tunnel where the homeless victims had lived.

  They walked to the eastern end of the platform and down to the tracks, where they picked their way through piles of debris, edging around steel columns that were almost hairy with black steel dust. They went through the hole in the metal wall to the unused tracks, the stub-end tunnel, which extended under Houston Street.

  “It smells bad in here,” Hopkins said.

  Austen didn’t say anything.

  “I hate tunnels,” Hopkins said.

  “Some people call them home.”

  They arrived at Lem’s place, the chamber. It had been washed rather casually by a city cleanup crew. Hopkins took out his Mini Maglite, and they looked around. There did not seem to be any way in and out of here, except through the subway station.

  They continued walking down the tunnel. They were going deeper into the stub tunnel, farther away from the tracks that were in use.

  “We must be almost in the East River,” Hopkins remarked.

  It grew quieter. The sound of the trains was farther away. They picked their way past a mattress and chair. Finally the tunnel ended with a concrete wall and a steel door. The door was locked. A sign on it said HIGH VOLTAGE—DANGER—NO ENTRY.

  Hopkins tried the door. It rattled. “Anyone in there?”

  The only sound was a faint humming from electric current.

  They retraced their steps and went up onto the street. People were flowing along the sidewalks, crossing the streets. Many of them were young, students or people in their twenties. There were gay men, the occasional homeless man or woman, and there were people who might be fashion models. Austen and Hopkins blended into the crowds. They walked slowly along Houston Street, watching the faces, studying people. Hopkins pulled the piece of paper from his pocket and looked again at the face of Archimedes. It was early evening, and people were going to restaurants, to movies, or wherever people go on a Saturday night.

  At a small park on Houston Street, Austen sat on a bench. Hopkins was restless, pacing. He hovered over her. “Are you feeling all right, Alice?”

  “Stop staring at my eyes.” She looked up at the buildings, around at the people in the streets, and the city seemed to dissolve in her imagination. The buildings became empty bones, like a dead coral reef. The people vanished. The city had gone stinking and silent.

  Hopkins finally sat down next to her. On the adjacent bench a drunk was asleep. Hopkins studied the color photocopy of Tom Cope’s face.

  “Did you ever read about Jack the Ripper?” Austen asked him.

  “He was a pathologist, I thought. He cut up women.”

  “I don’t know what he was,” she said. “He walked to his killings, and he walked away from them. I think Tom Cope is like that. The guy is a walker.”

  They kept moving. They headed uptown, into the East Village. They looked left and right, staring into people’s faces. Occasionally someone would notice Austen and Hopkins staring, and would look annoyed. They walked east until they reached Avenue B, and they passed the apartment building where Hector Ramirez’s family had been living. They went into a bodega. Hopkins showed the photograph to the grocer; he didn’t recognize the face.

  “This is hopeless,” Hopkins said. “There are nine million people in this city.”

  “Maybe we should go back into the tunnel,” Austen said.

  “He’s not in a tunnel. He’s blending in. Up here is the place to hide.”

  They searched the East Village in a back-and-forth pattern, walking along numbered streets, turning up avenues. They went past the old Marble Cemetery, where celebrities from the time of Herman Melville are buried, and they crossed through Tompkins Square Park, while Hopkins, the F.B.I. agent, felt an odd pang of envy watching the kids hanging out on the benches with nothing to do but waste time and talk their talk about nothing in particular—it looked like fun. He glanced over at Austen, and he realized that he had stopped thinking of her strictly in professional terms, and it bothered him.

  They debated heading into Greenwich Village, but instead walked down the Bowery, past several restaurant-supply stores, most of which were closed. A Chinese man wrestled with a giant used bread-dough mixer that he’d had on display on the sidewalk, trying to move it in through the door of his shop so that he could close. They crossed below Houston Street and started to cruise through SoHo, but the neighborhood seemed too bright and full of tourists from out of town, not really a Cope kind of place. They debated walking around Little Italy, but thought they were moving to
o far afield, so they turned north and crossed Houston Street again, and found themselves back in the East Village.

  It was a transitional moment in the day. A lively Saturday afternoon had tapered off, but the club scene had not gotten going. The people in the street on this spring evening seemed relaxed, their bodies moving gently as they walked, not in much of a hurry to get anywhere. Hopkins and Austen found themselves in the less fashionable part of the East Village, close to avenues C and D, where no trees grew on the streets, giving the neighborhood an empty look. This had always been a poor part of Manhattan, and the residents had never had much heart for planting trees. In the distance they heard the banging of a hammer, and a cat looked at them from a doorway. In a small repair garage, a man lay on a pallet underneath a sports car, and his hand dropped a tool, which clanked beside him. The cross streets were almost deserted; later at night things would be livelier. Hopkins stopped and looked around. “Where are we now?”

  “I don’t know,” Austen said. “We’re close to Avenue C.”

  “Kind of a so-so neighborhood,” he said.

  “Not so bad.”

  The area had a funky look. The buildings were mostly nineteenth-century tenements. Some of them had been renovated, and others had been torn down, leaving empty lots where sumac bushes grew around broken-down trucks covered with graffiti. Some of the lots were surrounded by chain-link fences topped with razor wire. Others had been turned into gardens. They passed a fence that opened into a vacant lot where children’s play equipment was scattered among raised beds of flowers. The little park extended between two buildings. Hopkins wandered in and sat down on a children’s merry-go-round. Austen sat next to him.

  “They’re going to nail us to the wall for doing this,” he said. He scraped his feet in the dirt. A stray cat walked past. It was a dirty brown and white cat, and it had found a can of food someone had left out. It crouched over the food, watching them while it ate. Traffic sounds and flickers of moving cars came through gaps in pieces of plywood that lined one side of the park.

  Hopkins planted his feet on the ground and pushed, causing the merry-go-round to turn. It gave off a creak. “Huh,” he said, and pushed harder, and he and Austen turned around. Creeaak!

  “Cut it out, it’s bothering me,” she said.

  Slowly they came to a halt.

  Austen found herself facing a row of bushes. They had been recently planted behind a railroad tie. They had yellow horn-shaped flowers, now shriveled and fading with the coming of May.

  “See, Will, that’s forsythia…” She raised her eyes. The back of a brick building rose beyond the flower bed, a four-story building that had been renovated. Fairly new double-paned windows with metal casings had been installed on all the floors. On the third floor, the windows were covered with brilliant white shades, and there was a small, high-tech fan whirring in one of them.

  They sat on the merry-go-round, stunned with surprise.

  “Oh, my,” Hopkins said, “oh, my.”

  He stood up slowly. “Don’t stare. Walk casually.”

  They walked out of the park, moving like two people with nothing to do. They crossed the street and turned back, and looked at the front of the building. It was a small turn-of-the-century apartment building, faced with yellowish brick, with a heavy cornice running along the top. All the windows on the third floor were covered with white shades. It was a well-kept building, but it did not have an elevator. “You’d have to carry equipment up and down the stairs, but it’s doable,” Hopkins remarked. “Let’s check the buzzer.” They went up the steps and looked at names on the buzzer. None of them was Cope. The button for apartment number three said “Vir.”

  They crossed the street again and stood facing the building. Hopkins put his hands in his pockets and slouched.

  “Vir means ‘man’ in Latin,” Austen commented.

  The front door of the building suddenly opened.

  TOM COPE WAS carrying his black leather doctor’s bag, his little joke. He saw them as he was going out the front door. A woman and a man standing across the street and staring intently at him. Instantly he changed his mind. He turned around and went back into the hallway. Am I imagining things?

  Hopkins saw the door open, and he locked eyes with a modest-looking man wearing eyeglasses, with hair going thin, pale skin, and a face that was burned into his mind. He reached under his jacket for his gun and started to glide for the door, no pause between the identification of the suspect and the movement toward an arrest.

  Austen grabbed him. “Dammit. Don’t. He was carrying something.”

  Hopkins stopped. She was right. If a guy has a bomb, you don’t just try to arrest him. “Get off to the side,” he said to her. He half-pushed her back into a doorway. He pressed her into the corner of the door and kept his body over her, shielding her. “He may be armed,” he told her. “It’s time for you to leave.”

  “No.”

  “Then sit down on the steps, Alice. Keep your body mass close to the wall.” He sat down next to her. “Okay. We’re waiting for a friend who lives here. We’re just sitting on the steps, hanging out, okay? Blah, dee blah, blah, we’re talking, okay? Smile. That’s it, smile! I need to use my radio.” Hopkins twisted his body and hunched over. He switched his Saber radio to the emergency channel and got an F.B.I. dispatcher. “It’s Special Agent Will Hopkins. Get me Frank Masaccio! This is extremely urgent!”

  Then: “Frank! We’re in the East Village, near Houston Street.” He looked around, gave the address. “We’ve got him! Cope. We saw him carrying some kind of bag. We have him under surveillance. He seems to be going under the alias Vir. V-I-R. I need massive backup. Massive! He may have a bomb. I’m sitting in a doorway here with Dr. Austen.”

  “Hopkins. Number one: you’re fired. Number two: you’re a better street agent than your old man.” Frank Masaccio was standing in the Command Center of the F.B.I. offices in the Federal Building. “I’m sending you everything I’ve got.”

  Surveillance

  TOM COPE raced up the stairs to his apartment, lugging his bag. He bolted the door and sat down on a couch in the living room, with the bag resting on the couch beside him. They were staring at me as if they knew. They just looked federal. They cannot possibly be the F.B.I. There’s no way they can have found me. But why were they staring at me like that?

  He stood up and went over to a shaded window. Do I dare look? He pulled back the shade an inch or so and looked out onto the street. Did they leave?

  He saw them. They were sitting in a doorway across the street. They seemed to be talking.

  He returned to the couch. This is crazy, he thought. I’m going crazy. Get ahold of yourself, you’re being paranoid.

  Oh, shit. The timers in the bombs were running. He should disarm them. To do that, he had to go back into Level 3. Damn! Several minutes later, inside the hot lab, all suited up, he opened the bombs and removed the timers and disconnected the wires. Then he went out of Level 3, carrying the bombs. He washed his suit and the bombs with the bleach sprayer in the staging-area hallway before he took off the suit and discarded it in a plastic bag.

  He sat down again on the couch to try to gather his thoughts. He placed a bomb tube full of viral glass on a coffee table in front of him. He removed the Colt Delta Elite from the bag and placed it where he could reach it in an instant.

  Outside, Hopkins and Austen continued to sit in the doorway. A woman came along and had to practically step over them to get inside her building. “Why don’t you sit somewhere else,” she said.

  Hopkins said to Austen, “Don’t look at Cope’s apartment.” It was getting dark.

  HE DREW BACK THE SHADE slightly, and looked up and down the street. He couldn’t see the man and the woman now. Why do I feel so afraid? He debated whether to make his move downward through the emergency exit. He needed to go to ground. If he could get into the subway system he could disappear.

  Still, he couldn’t bring himself to move. If he failed, he wo
uld fall into the hands of either the F.B.I. or BioArk. He began to hope it was the F.B.I. He would rather go to federal prison than meet some of those people from BioArk. How can I have allowed myself to be trapped in my building? he thought. Am I trapped? Again he pulled aside a shade, and looked out the window. The man and the woman had moved. They were sitting in a different doorway. Why wouldn’t they leave?

  FRANK MASACCIO had called the Washington headquarters of the F.B.I. He explained that Agent Hopkins had gone AWOL from Governors Island but had apparently found the terrorist. “He and the doctor are on site.” He said he was rushing a Surveillance Operations Group into the area. The Reachdeep operations people and additional Hostage Rescue Teams were moving into place. Essentially the entire New York field office was joining the operation, and he called for extra help from Quantico. At the same time, some of his agents were starting to run checks on people who lived in apartments near Cope. The agents were trying to get a sense of who the neighbors were and what the neighborhood was like. “We’re going to try to gain access to a common wall with Cope’s apartment,” Masaccio said to the Washington SIOC group.

  A cable television repair van pulled up on the corner of Avenue C. The driver looked straight at Hopkins, and nodded slightly. Hopkins and Austen stood up from the doorway. They walked to the corner, the back of the van opened, and they climbed inside.

  Oscar Wirtz was sitting in the back of the van. He was dressed in a gray sweat suit. The van pulled away.

  Simultaneously, an old pickup truck full of junk furniture stopped in front of Cope’s building and double-parked on the street. A Hispanic man and an African-American woman were sitting in the cab of the pickup. They were shabbily dressed. The woman had something in her ear that looked like a hearing aid. She was talking with Frank Masaccio, and her voice was carrying live into SIOC in Washington. “There’s no activity on the third floor,” she said.