Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  Madison’s work had vastly enlarged the pool of potential vectors. The new strain would mutate faster, and in more likely adaptive directions, than any natural bacillus. It would seem as though it were adjusting its own DNA to accommodate the different protein profiles of hundreds of families of animals, not just primates. B. czerwicki could jump the species barrier again and again, back and forth, throughout the biosphere. Ordinarily epidemics become less virulent as they spread—since otherwise there wouldn’t be any vector animals left—but with so many species susceptible to the Goat, it would be a long time before that happened. Some of the CDC projections said it could probably kill off all species of primates and all or most other mammals. Which just tells you what an angry little weasel Czerwick was. People is one thing, but when you go after Bonzo you know you’re really fucked up.

  Like its ancestors the Goat could probably be treated by intramuscular injections of streptomycin. But with timed, simultaneous symptomaticity, there wouldn’t be enough antibiotics to go around even if there were still people who were able to administer them. And of course, the CDC was already working on a vaccine, but it would take another week or so to finish developing it and more than a year to produce it in anything like medical quantities. The CDC’s projections, or at least the ones we’d gotten reports on, suggested that some people in polar areas might survive. But with the Goat’s resistance to cold, it wouldn’t be many. The species-jumping geneware would keep the subarctic world too hot for humans for decades. At least.

  “How much of the stuff do they think he has in there?” A2 asked. I realized she was standing on tiptoes to get close to my ear. I guess she was too polite or uptight to grab my shoulder and drag my head down. I crouched down a bit.

  “Ana thinks it’s about two gallons,” I said. “He’s been going through bovine colloid like it was bean dip.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “You mean, like, enough to do the whole planet?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, you have to figure that’s about three point four trillion microbes per gallon,” I said. “So say you had, like, a ten-percent-per-day division rate, even with a twenty-percent die-off per day you’d get around, uh, two times ten-to-the-eighteenth bugs in one week, and that’s more than most diseases that are, you know, considered epidemics.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Yeah. Yeah, depending on the number of added vectors … in a month or so it could be as common as, like, say, Staphylococcus.”

  “Gesundheit,” Michael Weiner said in my other ear.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Yeah, there’s no humor like gallows humor.” He nodded.

  “At least it sounds like they know everything, anyway,” A2 said.

  “One hopes,” I said. Actually, she was right, or righter than I was. From what I’d seen, at least, the U.S. and Canadian detectives had, amazingly, done a good job. I’d have thought they’d take weeks to build a case against him, but they were ready in couple of days. Although I guess you could get probable cause off the Web site. In fact, he’d dropped enough hints in his blog that you’d think I’d have spotted it right away all that time ago. The way he’d been going on about the Disney World thing had been more like somebody who was afraid he was going to get scooped, that some slant teenager was going to steal his place in history, than like somebody who actually cared about the problem. Should’ve made him then, I thought for the nth time. Idiot. Could have avoided this whole thing. Except it’s not so easy, is it? Especially for somebody like me, for whom empathy requires some effort. Anyway, cut yourself some slack. Hell Rot wasn’t a big page, but thousands of people had seen it, including DHS profilers, and none of them had flagged it, despite the fact that it included such gems as this:

  People have been making movies and games and stories about the END TIME

  for FOUR THOUSAND YEARS. The Reason is that they KNOW it is the RIGHT THING TO DO. And finally Now it is achevable [sic].

  Maybe it hadn’t gotten singled out simply because Madison hadn’t put up anything specific. He hadn’t mentioned any names, places, or dates. Speaking of which, one odd thing was that from the blog, at least, it looked like he’d chosen December 21 arbitrarily. There was no mention of the Maya calendar, or pre-Columbian stuff, or anything. It was like he’d just pulled it out of his paper hat. Although I was sure he hadn’t.

  “Two hundred seconds,” Ana said.

  Everyone in the room straightened up a little. Michael Weiner started to cough and then didn’t follow through. Nobody threw up, though. Somebody turned on the general operations audio and we listened to the CO running through the final checklist.

  “Hazmat Unit A,” his voice said.

  “In place,” a lady from Hazmat Unit A said.

  “Hazmat Unit B,” the CO said.

  They covered a lot in the next sixty seconds, a chemical hazard team, a poison specialist, a biohazard reduction team that used antiviral and antibacterial sprays, two inhalation specialists, two gas compression trucks, a truckful of tracking dogs, a bomb squad, a bomb-disposal robot, and a bomb-disposal robot wrangler. Next, the three five-person assault teams checked in. Or, rather, they called them “elements,” not teams. Each element had a captain, two assaulters, a spotter, and a rear guard. Two elements would go in the front door and the front ground-floor rooms and the upstairs. The other would go in the back, check the kitchen, and then head to the basement.

  “High Man A,” the CO said.

  “In place,” High Man A’s voice said.

  Six other spotters, or high men, checked in after him. Each one had a different perch on a rooftop or a telephone pole. Normally, some of them would be snipers, but today they were unarmed. In fact, the Goat Operation differed from most raids in that there were no guns anywhere near the assault zone. It wasn’t just because there was no real chance of return fire—who cared about that when we were all screwed anyway?—but because “delivering the suspect alive and coherent over[rode] officer survival.” Last of all, the marked vehicles came into view. Two ambulances pulled into Marguerite and stopped a block short of the house. An ordinary fire engine stationed itself on Emerald. About twenty regular police cars materialized out of nowhere and formed a four-block-wide perimeter centered on 820.

  “Any issues?” the CO’s voice asked. “Right. We’re at T minus seventy seconds. I want to check prep on Eight twenty.”

  “All target preps are in,” a British-sounding voice said. He meant that they were ready to turn off the main electricity just as the assault teams breached the doors so that there wouldn’t be any lights flaring in anyone’s night vision, that the Czerwicks’ door alarm had been turned off at the service provider, and that Mrs. Czerwick still had two cats but no dog. Ana’d said that six neighbor dogs who’d been judged overly vigilant had all been lightly sedated. It wasn’t quite clear how, but they hadn’t wanted to tip off anyone in any of the surrounding houses, so probably they’d sent in burglars with bacon-wrapped diazepam. Target prep also included what they called a wire delay. That is, at about two A.M. they’d moved the whole house sixty seconds back in time. They’d reset the link to the atomic clock on Madison’s computers, they’d put a sixty-second delay on the Internet and on the cell phone readouts, and they were even sending new, delayed signals to the TV satellite dish on the roof and to old-fashioned radios that anyone might turn on. Of course, any watches or unattached clocks or watches would be off, but who looks at those things anymore? So if some blabbermouth noticed any of what was going on—and to me it seemed like enough of a buildup to invade a whole country—and started talking about it on the Net or TV, they’d catch it.

  “All right,” the CO said. “Brown team, I want—”

  The audio cut out. There was silence.

  There was a sense of everyone—that is, everyone in our conference room—stirring uncomfortably. It was the aural equivalent of watching a black marker redact a line of text on some CIA document.

  “I bet he’s checking the FAEs,” Ana’s voice said.

  She meant fuel-air explosives. And she was referring to a bit
of information that we, and probably the folks in the VIP trailer, and probably even Lindsay Warren himself—who was undoubtedly watching the same array of windows in his pathogen-proofed safe room in the Hyperbowl—weren’t supposed to have.

  Early in the Goat Op discussions, more than one person had mentioned the possibility of eliminating the entire town. Apparently, these days that sort of thing got done with a ring of fuel-air explosives that were positioned to incinerate any living particle in the area. Ana’d said that the U.S. had done it twice in Afghanistan, and each time, no biohazards had gotten out of the targeted factories. Anyway, as far as the Goat Op went, this option had gotten rejected pretty quickly, not out of any moral qualms, but because, despite a psychological profile that said it was doubtful, it was still possible that Madison was working with others, or that others knew about him, or that he knew about others, or that he’d mailed some of his research work to others, or that others had sent stuff to him, or, most nightmarishly of all, that he’d already started the dispersal. It wasn’t quite clear how he planned to handle it, but it could be as easy as sending small packages to addresses around the world.

  Two days ago Ana’d told us she was guessing that there were still FAEs fused and positioned outside the city and that somebody in Victoria would detonate them if they determined that there was an uncontrollable release in progress. She said part of the giveaway was that the real big shots from D.C. and Ottawa—the directors of the CSIS and FBI, for instance—hadn’t wanted to be on the scene. If the biowarfare experts said there was a noncontainable release in progress, we should expect the whole place to disappear, and then we should all just hope that the heat had got most of the bugs. During the conference call, Michael had asked her why she was still there, in the blast zone, but Ana blew off the question. I guess she was just too butch to think about girly issues like personal survival.

  The CO’s voice came on again.

  “… nus twenty seconds,” it said. “All ready?”

  Our conference room was silent. On Ana’s speaker the room she was in was silent. On the video windows 820 Marguerite looked like peace on earth itself. Someone had opened an audio channel to one of the parabolic mikes on Marguerite, and you could hear mourning doves and a little rush of breeze in the bare branches but nothing else.

  “Wait, hold up,” the CO’s voice said. “We’re holding the count.”

  There was a pause. It was uncomfortable at the beginning, and then it got more uncomfortable, and then unbearable. People shifted around me. I could smell sweat in the room. There was an odd little sound next to me and I realized it was A2’s teeth chattering. Put an arm around her? No, don’t. If anything touches her she’ll probably have a stroke.

  “Window six,” Ana’s voice said. “It’s nothing, it’s a neighbor.” Her cursor pointed at someone with big puffy red hair in a gray bathrobe. It was a lady from 818, the house next door. She toddled out to her car, which was in the driveway as always, slowly and deliberately opened the door, rummaged in the front seat for something, didn’t find it, and minced around to the driver’s side. I thought I was going to tear off my own scalp. Twelve seconds away from the earth’s most critical moment since the Chicxulub meteorite and we’re waiting for Endora to find her Dulcolax. The lady opened the driver’s-side door, found whatever it was she wanted, closed it, and, shuffling in her puffy slippers, made her way back toward her house. By now I was sure one of us was going to vomit, or lose control of his or her bowels, or at least faint. Nobody did, though. I guess we were all just rock-hard. Or sufficiently medicated.

  The door of 818 eased itself shut.

  “All right,” the CO’s voice said. Even he sounded a little wobbly. “Everyone still in place? Right. Resetting to T minus twenty seconds.”

  A drop of something fell on my cheek and I realized it was sweat from my forehead. I wiped my face on the sleeve of my jacket—it was that same gray Varvatos thing I’d had in that Jeep ride with Marena and Max about seventy million years ago—peeled off my hat, ran my hand through my hair that still wasn’t there, and put the hat back on. Whew. De todos modos.

  “Seven, six,” the CO’s voice said. “Ready. Three, two, go.”

  On window number five the ten members of Elements A and B crossed the lawn like the shadows of crows flying over the roof. They seemed to have working keys for both doors, the doors opened without any sound that we could hear, and the elements were already inside. It took all of four seconds for them to pour through the hall, spread into the living room and dining room, and dash up the acrylic-carpeted stairs. On one of the helmet cameras there was a glimpse of gilt-plastic-framed photos on the wall, old graduations and older weddings and Madison accepting a trophy at a grade-school science fair. Ordinarily, SWAT teams make as much noise as possible when they go in, but this raid had been designed to assume that Madison might have a finger on a detonator. So there was just the creaking of the floorboards and the wheeze of the old refrigerator in the kitchen, and the darting shadows, as though the house were an aviary and the crows were all flying into their own little nests. Assaulters burst simultaneously into each of the three bedrooms. Oh, Christ. A face. It was a horrible fanged predatory face, lunging at us on helmet cam #6. There were gasps around me and Lisuarte, for one, visibly recoiled. It was one of the Czerwicks’ attack cats. It vanished from the frame. By the time we got over that, we could see on two other Element A helmet cams that Mom and Pop were being gently held down in their bed. There was one good, steady shot of a Kevlar-gloved hand covering Mrs. Czerwick’s mouth. On helmet cam #9 you could just see that they’d gotten a restraining hood on Madison’s little brother—who was twenty-eight—and that he was kicking and wriggling but not getting anywhere. And on #6, the one that had dealt with the cat, which was now in Madison’s room, on that one—

  Hmm. Madison wasn’t in his bedroom.

  “Oh, cońo,” Tony Sic said.

  “It’s number sixteen,” Larry Boyle said. His voice was unnaturally high. “Number sixteen.”

  We all looked at window #16. It was the helmet cam of one of the assaulters in Element C. There was a glimpse of what might be basement stairs, then a glowy bunch of shapes in the center of a dark field, and then, for a few frames, less than a half a second, there was a sofa. There was a pudgy naked torso on the sofa. There was a face on top of the torso. There was a big gawking mouth in the middle of the face. It was Madison’s face. There was a sound like a big old woofer popping its voice coil and the element’s windows grayed out.

  “That was an NFDD,” Ana’s voice said over some kind of squealing or whimpering in the background.

  “Which is what?” Michael Weiner asked. The video processors of the helmet cams had started readjusting and a few inchoate images drifted back into the windows.

  “Noise and flash diversionary device,” she said. One of the assaulters had tossed what they called a double whammy into the basement. The thing looked like a pair of yellow squash balls yoked together. One ball was a regular flash-bang grenade with an eight-million-candela flare and a 180-decibel report. The other was a sting grenade, which releases about two hundred tiny hard-rubber balls. It was more reliably debilitating, especially if the suspect had managed to close his eyes and cover his ears during the explosion.

  “Righto,” Michael said.

  “Shhh, we want to hear this,” Larry Boyle said.

  We listened, but all we could hear was a hircine squeal. It faded into heavy panting, and then, suddenly, Madison seemed to have gotten his voice back.

  “What’s the charge?” he asked. His high tenor was familiar from the wire-taps, but it felt creepy hearing it in real time, especially since it sounded oddly calm. On the helmet cams the assaulters had switched on their flashlights for the first time and we got another unflattering close-up of Madison’s jowls. I think he started say the word officer, but by the middle of the word there were Kevlar-gloved hands over his mouth. The assaulters weren’t supposed to let him say anything, just in case he might have a voice-activated switch somewhere. There were another two seco
nds of abstract scuffling shapes on the windows, and then helmet cam #13 resolved itself into a pair of hands holding open Madison’s mouth and a third hand grubbing around under his tongue, as though he were a SMERSH agent from the 1960s about to bite down on a cyanide pill. Finally they hustled him up the stairs. Back on window #5 the Czerwick lawn and Marguerite Avenue had, with a suddenness that made me remember the jungle gym scene in The Birds, filled up with a flock of black-uniformed officers. Someone had switched the audio back to an outdoor feed, and you could hear helicopters overhead, and sirens started up. In less than thirty seconds Madison had been strapped to a stretcher and loaded into his own ambulance van. The other ambulance was already pulling out with the rest of his family. We all focused on helmet cam #13, whose owner was going along in the ambulance and, it seemed, was about to give us another rare view of Madison, but suddenly, his feed grayed out.