The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  “That’s a big hope, Hopkins,” Masaccio said.

  Down

  IT WAS NOW three o’clock in the morning. Alice Austen had been watching Cope on the screens of the thermal imaging cameras. He had not gone to sleep. When he stood up from the couch and began to move across the room, she made a tentative diagnosis. Cope seemed to be making some involuntary gestures. Jerky movements. He was talking to himself. And moaning. “I’m not sick. Not sick.”

  “Listen, Will. I think he’s infected,” Austen said.

  They studied his body movements, but Austen couldn’t be sure.

  Then Cope seemed to make up his mind. “Option two,” he said.

  “What was that?” Hopkins said.

  “He’s losing it,” Littleberry said.

  The blurry thermal image showed Cope bent over the object in his hands. They heard a sound. It was the sound of the metal end piece being unscrewed from the glass bomb tube. He fiddled with something. They heard a dry, rustling, cracking sound. It was the sound of wires being pulled through a packed mass of viral hexagons in the tube. He was re-arming the bomb.

  Hopkins stood and put his hand up. “Wirtzy! He may blow something! Get ready!”

  Everyone put on Racal hoods, which took a few seconds. They zipped up their suits and started their air filters running. If the building goes hot with that bomb, Hopkins thought, it could kill all of us, space suits or not. The air near bioground zero would be so thick with virus, it might overwhelm the suit’s protection. Quick as cats, Oscar Wirtz and five Reachdeep operational ninjas positioned themselves against the thinned wall, on either side of the charges. The master breacher, Wilmot Hughes, readied his controls. Everyone was wearing full space-suit battle dress with body armor. The ninjas were carrying flash grenades and Heckler & Koch assault weapons.

  In Washington, as it dawned on the SIOC group that Reachdeep was getting itself poised to move, a number of people began shouting contradictory things at the same time.

  “What the hell’s Hopkins doing?”

  “Masaccio! Answer us!”

  Cope replaced the cap on the cylinder. The bomb was now armed. He slid it inside the carry-bag.

  Hopkins stared at the thermal image, trying to read Cope’s body language. Was this a man who was getting ready to blow himself up? Hopkins didn’t think so. But what was he doing?

  Carrying the bag, Cope walked into the corridor that led to the laboratory. He did not put on a protective suit. He opened the door of the lab. Now, in the fish-eye lens, they saw him clearly for the first time. He stood by the door, looking across the room toward the bioreactor, and suddenly he picked up a heavy glass beaker and hurled it.

  The bioreactor, which was itself made largely of glass, exploded, its blood-warm contents splashing through the air in a spray of droplets. The pink contents poured out and flooded across the floor in a warm running meltdown of amplified liquid Cobra virus.

  “It’s gone hot!” Hopkins yelled.

  “Go!” Masaccio responded.

  Everyone pressed flat against the wall, and the master breacher detonated the charges.

  The wall went down as if it were made of gravel, and an oval hole opened up. Wirtz and the ninjas poured through.

  Austen, who was lying on the floor, couldn’t look. She tucked her head down under her arm, and her stomach lurched. There were brilliant flashes at her back, from the flash grenades. The flash grenades blinded the thermal cameras.

  Wirtz had led his team through the hole. They kept their guns ready but held their fire. Hopkins saw the screens go white when the flash grenades went off. Then the screens came back to normal. He saw Cope’s thermal image, running across the field of view.

  “Oscar, he’s moving to your left!” he shouted over the radio link.

  He saw Wirtz and his people moving through the apartment. Two of them detached leftward.

  “Wirtzy, he’s in the kitchen!” Hopkins shouted. Suddenly he saw the form of Tom Cope curl up in a ball—and, unbelievably, Cope dropped straight down through the floor and out of sight. “He’s going down!” Hopkins yelled. They pointed the imagers down through the floor. They saw Cope’s form descending straight down through the building, until his image faded away.

  TOM COPE had smashed the bioreactor, and he had backed out of the room and shut the door. An instant later, the apartment had filled with shocking explosions and flashes of light. He raced into the kitchen. Figures in black space suits were tumbling into his living room.

  Many old buildings in New York City have dumbwaiter shafts that are no longer used or are used for trash disposal. The dumbwaiter was Cope’s planned escape route. He had not dared to try it because he was afraid they would be in the basement waiting for him. Now he had no choice.

  Carrying his doctor’s bag, Cope had climbed through an opening in the wall of the kitchen and curled up on the dumbwaiter platform. He let the ropes go and the platform went down fast, the ropes singing in the pulley. He came to a halt with a bang in the basement, inside a closet. He flung himself out the door. No one around. He raced through a heating tunnel and came to a small opening in the brickwork covered with a sheet of plywood. He tore the plywood off. There was his crawl space, his escapeway. He went through it, scraping his knees on broken concrete. He cut his knee, ripping his pants. The crawl space was black with dust. Ahead, he heard the rumble of a subway train.

  The F.B.I. Hostage Rescue Team coming in through the front door of the building was in a rush to get to the third floor, and they formed a strung-out deployment, team members stopping on every floor to cover the next wave. They had reached the third floor when they heard on their radio headsets that the suspect had gone down through the building, and was presumed to be hiding in the basement.

  IN THE APARTMENT, Oscar Wirtz and some of his team headed for the kitchen, where Hopkins was telling them that Cope had disappeared. In the kitchen they found the dumbwaiter shaft.

  Seconds later, Hopkins entered. He was carrying a spray tank full of Envirochem, a powerful antibiological liquid. Austen followed behind him, and Littleberry after that. They headed for the bioreactor room, where Hopkins did his best to spray Envirochem all over the floor and walls, making a mist inside the room. Soon bleach would be pouring into the building from the fire trucks.

  On his radio, Hopkins heard Wirtz calling to him. He headed for the kitchen, Austen and Littleberry behind him.

  “He’s gone down a shaft,” Wirtz was saying. “We’re heading after him.”

  They followed Wirtz down the stairs, through tremendous confusion. The other H.R.T. teams in the building were wearing respirators but not space suits, and they were evacuating the building’s residents. The elderly woman who lived below Cope had to be gotten out fast now, since the reactor was in a room above her.

  Leaving these problems to the other teams, the Reachdeep group focused on getting Cope. Wirtz and his ninjas spearheaded a sweep of the basement, with the scientists hanging back but unable to stay out of the operation. Wirtz was swearing to himself about this, vowing that next time he would make sure the scientists were put in a box. For the moment, he could do nothing about it.

  It didn’t take him long to find the crawl space and the sheet of plywood lying on the floor. “Cope! Are you in there?” he shouted.

  No answer.

  Wirtz noticed a spot of blood on the concrete floor of the crawl space, and near it were drops of some kind of moisture that was not blood. Hopkins swabbed the blood and jammed the swab into his Boink. The biosensor beeped. “Cobra,” he said.

  What now?

  They shouted again into the crawl space. Silence.

  “Scientists back off,” Wirtz said. “Operations people in first.” He vaulted up into the crawl space. One by one his people followed him, squirming on their hands and knees, pushing their weapons ahead of them. They barely fit. They did not have flashlights; this was an unforeseen development.

  Wirtz, the first in line, came to the end of the crawl sp
ace. It opened out into darkness and dropped down into a low, narrow passage running at right angles. He could still see a little.

  “What’s happening down there?” Frank Masaccio asked. He was sitting at his command post, listening to the audio feed, and he was quietly losing his mind. He did not feel as if he was in control of the team.

  “What’s happening in New York?” These words were spoken by Steven Wyzinski at SIOC in Washington.

  There was a rumbling sound, a roaring, and it grew louder. It was being picked up by Wirtz’s mike.

  They heard Wirtz’s voice over the sound, saying, “That’s a subway train you’re hearing. We’re near the subway. I’m behind some kind of wall here.”

  Cope had gone into the subway. He had slipped through the grasp of a huge F.B.I. operation, and he was carrying a biological bomb or bombs.

  “This is fucking terrible!” Masaccio yelled.

  “Maybe we can biocontain him,” Hopkins said into his headset.

  “What do you mean?” Masaccio asked.

  “The subway tunnels are a natural biocontainment area. If he blows a bomb in there, maybe we can seal the tunnels off and stop the trains. Maybe we’d rather have him down there than up in the open air. Let’s try to trap him in the tunnels. Frank, you need to shut down the air-circulation fans in the subway. You don’t want tunnel air being vented outdoors, and you don’t want air being drawn in, either.”

  Masaccio put through an emergency call to the Transit Authority Operations Control Center on West Fourteenth Street. This is a large control room, manned by dozens of subway system operators. He got a system supervisor on the line. They began stopping the trains. They turned off all the air blowers and fans.

  Masaccio went into a flurry of shouting and orders. The bottom line was that F.B.I. agents and New York City police officers were to seal off all the subway entrances in the neighborhood of East Houston Street, and then go down into the subway and sweep the tracks, to find Tom Cope. Almost none of these forces were equipped with any kind of biohazard masks or protection. If Cope’s bomb went off, many of them would die. Masaccio was throwing in his reserves, but they were not prepared. He had no choice.

  REACHDEEP TEAM MEMBERS followed the crawl space that Cope had entered underneath his building. It led to the door at the far end of the Houston Street subway stub tunnel. The door was supposed to be locked, but what appeared to be a secure catch was in fact a mechanism that snapped open if you knew how to operate it. This was Cope’s route of escape. The route went directly past the places where Harmonica Man and Lem had lived. They had died because they had seen Cope using the door.

  Oscar Wirtz led the way, then five ninjas, and then, bringing up the rear, came Hopkins, Austen, and Littleberry. It is true that Mark Littleberry, or any man his age, did not belong in an operation of this kind, but no one could control Mark Littleberry; the man was fundamentally uncontrollable.

  The tunnel was silent. The subway trains had stopped running.

  Faintly, they heard Masaccio’s voice on their headsets: “What are you doing? Report?”

  “I can’t hear you, Frank. You’re breaking up,” Hopkins said. “We’re coming into the Second Avenue station. You’ve got to seal it off.”

  “We’re doing it now, we’re sending police into all the stations,” Masaccio replied.

  They moved forward, running at a jog trot.

  F.B.I. communications specialists told the Reachdeep group to switch their radios over to a frequency used by the Transit Authority. This improved the reception, which depended on wires strung inside the subway tunnels. When the Reachdeep people came up onto the Second Avenue platform they found it deserted.

  Cutoff

  HE HAD COME OUT onto the Second Avenue platform a few minutes ahead of his pursuers. Should he wait for a train? At three in the morning, he might have to wait a long time.

  Don’t wait for a train, that would be stupid. And the street up there will be crawling with agents. Don’t go up to the street here.

  Keep moving. He now believed that he might be infected, but he could still move. Perhaps he had developed some kind of resistance to the virus. Perhaps he could survive an infection.

  He hurried along the length of the platform, carrying his doctor’s bag. He climbed down the stairs at the end of the platform and got back on the tracks, heading west now, following the route of the F train toward the center of Manhattan. His feet pounded along on the ties. He noticed something that he did not like. The tunnels were silent. The power was off in the rails, and he couldn’t hear any fans, although the lights in the tunnel were still on. Then he heard a sound behind him. He looked back. He saw five or six people in black space suits moving across the platform of the Second Avenue station, in the distance.

  He broke into a run, his feet splashing through puddles, stumbling on the ties. They don’t have me yet. He felt a cool determination sweep over him. Have courage. You will be remembered by future ages as a man of vision and heroic will.

  Heading westward through the main subway tunnel, he saw that he was approaching another subway station. He knew it was the Broadway-Lafayette stop. He wanted to get out onto the street there. Or did he? What to do?

  Set off the bomb right here? He had a better idea.

  He had explored this tunnel before, on foot—part of his research into the body of the city, looking for places to do a biological release.

  He was looking for a side tunnel that he remembered, a little-used cutoff. He knew that it doubled back. He could circle around his pursuers, if he could just remember where the tunnel was. Here it was: a switch in the tracks, and a single-track tunnel breaking to his left. It headed south, toward the Lower East Side of New York City.

  AT THAT MOMENT, Frank Masaccio was learning about the side tunnel. He was talking with subway system operators in the control room on Fourteenth Street. Masaccio had sent an F.B.I. team into the Broadway-Lafayette subway station, and that team was now moving east toward the Reachdeep team, which was moving west. They were attempting to trap Cope in a pincer between the two stations.

  “There’s that BJ 1 tunnel,” a system operator told Masaccio. “If you’re trying to trap the guy, and he finds that BJ 1 tunnel, that will be his only way out.”

  “Where’s it lead?” Masaccio asked.

  The BJ 1 tunnel led to a station at the corner of Delancey Street and Essex Street. Masaccio ordered a police or F.B.I. team—whichever was closest—to deploy there fast.

  Meanwhile, the Reachdeep team arrived at the entrance of the BJ 1 tunnel. It was a curving tunnel, poorly lit.

  “We think he’s gone in there,” Masaccio told them. His voice was crackly and distant.

  “You’re breaking up,” Wirtz said to him.

  “Turn left into that tunnel,” Masaccio said.

  The Reachdeep team turned into the BJ 1 tunnel, moving quickly. They were in a rarely used tunnel that ran south and east under the Lower East Side. It was illuminated by lightbulbs at intervals, and it was coal black with steel dust. As they went deeper into the BJ 1 tunnel, their radio contact with the F.B.I. Command Center broke up and finally vanished. The team, at this point, consisted of six heavily armed ninjas, including Oscar Wirtz, and three scientists—Will Hopkins, Alice Austen, and Mark Littleberry. Reachdeep was on its own.

  Essex-Delancey

  TOM COPE moved along cautiously but quickly through the BJ 1 tunnel, carrying the black bag with its explosive assemblages of crystallized Cobra virus—dispersal bombs. The Delta Elite handgun was also in his bag. The tunnel stretched out ahead, the single set of tracks gleaming in the occasional lights that burned in niches. He stopped every now and then to listen. At one point he thought he heard them coming behind him, but he wasn’t sure.

  The tunnel went down a slope, turning south. It passed underneath a parking lot and then underneath Bowery Street, and headed downtown along the Sara Delano Roosevelt Parkway, a strip of greenery and playgrounds on the Lower East Side. It was 3:20 o
n a Sunday morning, and when police cars and F.B.I. cars suddenly began pouring into the neighborhood, and police teams began running down into subway entrances, there were not too many people around to notice, although patrons of nearby clubs were drawn to the activity and stood out in the street wondering what was going on. Since reporters listen to the police radio, television news trucks soon headed for the Lower East Side, tracking reports of a possible terror incident. The Cobra Event had been kept a secret, but the moment Cope slipped away, and the operation turned into a chase, it started to blow into the media.

  The BJ 1 tunnel was going deeper underground, and Cope followed it. At first it headed south, but then it curved eastward, away from the Sara Delano Roosevelt Parkway, and it passed in a swooping curve under the old heart of the Lower East Side, under Forsyth Street, Eldridge Street, Allen Street, under Orchard Street, and then it headed due east under Delancey Street.

  Cope knew where he was going, in a general sense. He had explored these tunnels on foot, and he had memorized a variety of routes of escape. This route was perhaps his best bet, he thought. He was heading for the Williamsburg Bridge, which rises from Delancey Street, connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn. He felt that he could hide his explosive devices either somewhere in a tunnel, or perhaps he could leave them in the open air where they would blow and plume into the city. He did not want his pursuers to find the devices. That was the problem. If he left them here in the tunnel, the devices would be found and perhaps disarmed. His leg hurt, and it was slowing him down. He had cut his knee while scrambling out of his building.

  The tunnel began to rise, and it curved to the northeast. He saw lights ahead. It was the platform of the Essex-Delancey Street subway station, a complicated station at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.