Red Tide

by G. M. Ford

  Corso groped in his pocket and found Slobodan Nisovic’s key. Satisfied, he ducked under the barrier and veered left, heading for the door to the Underground.

  The second he stepped out from behind the SUV, a shout stopped him in his tracks.

  “You there,” the voice boomed.

  He didn’t stick around to check out the source. Instead, he turned on his heel and retreated down the narrow alley between the vehicles. When he looked uphill again, the woman had risen to one knee and was looking directly at him as he lifted his foot and stepped up into the huge van.

  Bigger than the biggest motor home, the Critical Incident Mobile Squad Room was a cornucopia of cop equipment. On the left, a compact communications center ran a third of the way along the wall. Lots of colored lights. Every kind of radio and telephone known to man. Across the aisle, half a dozen orange haz-mat suits hung on a steel bar, black breathing devices on a narrow shelf above. On the left, a series of shelves and bins bursting with god knows what. On the right, four closets about the size of airplane bathrooms. The rear of the coach consisted of four individual holding cells, each with its own little seat allowing the occupant to rest in relative comfort.

  The sound of scuffing feet sent Corso across the aisle to the closet doors. He went down the line, trying the doors. Locked. Locked. “Shit.” Here they come. Locked. “Fuck.” The fourth door wasn’t quite latched. It swung open at a touch. The walls were covered with tools. Picks, shovels, axes…a winch hung from the back panel. In the center of the floor sat a wicked-looking device Corso thought he recognized as the Jaws of Life. He fit his legs around the mechanical pincers, wiggled his shoulders inside and closed the door.

  Five seconds and the van rocked hard. Heavy breathing. Corso listened as an arm rifled through the orange coveralls, sending the suits swinging and squeaking on their metal hangers. Then the rattle of the first closet door and then the next and the next and then, finally, the one he was in. The door had locked itself. Corso held his breath.

  The van rocked again. “What the hell are you doing in here?” came a voice.

  Corso heard somebody swallow hard. “Thought I saw one of them duck in here, Captain. I was…”

  “Everything locked?” the captain asked.

  “Yessir.”

  A short silence ensued. “They need you up the street,” was all he said, but the sense of disapproval was palpable.

  “Yessir.”

  Footsteps and the clank of boots on the metal stairs. The squeak of a chair and the flat click of a button. “Patch me through to the chief,” the captain said.

  Didn’t take but half a minute. “Harry…it’s George. Yeah…but listen…we’re stretched way too thin. I need another…” Corso could hear the scratch of conversation coming through the line, but could not make out the words. “I’m not kidding, Harry…I’ve got a serious problem down here. I don’t get some help…” The scratching interrupted him again. This time for good. “Yes. Yes sir. Yes I do.”

  Ten seconds passed. Long enough to be sure the circuit was broken.

  “Goddammit,” the captain bellowed.

  10

  It was with great trepidation that SPD Chief Harry Dobson put down the telephone receiver and crossed the room to the mayor’s side. Gary Dean wasn’t the kind of man who took bad news well. It was almost as if he was unable to attack a problem until he had first expended his anger and frustration on some underling and thus, in his own mind at least, deflected a major portion of the attendant guilt.

  “We’ve got serious crowd control problems in the square,” he whispered.

  The mayor folded his arms across his chest, pursed his lips and blew out a long breath. He kept his lips puckered as he looked around the room.

  Dobson went on. “What with maintaining control at the Weston and this new incident downtown, we’re stretched too thin.”

  “So…you’re saying what?” Harlan Sykes asked.

  “I’m saying we need to examine our priorities.”

  The mayor began shaking his head before the words were out of Dobson’s mouth. “You need more people down there, pull them off the Weston and send them downtown until we get things back under control.”

  “I’ve got no personnel to spare. We’re completely maxed out.”

  Sykes opened his mouth to speak, but Dobson cut him off. “Besides which”—he waved a hand—“I’m not putting any more of my people at that kind of risk until I know exactly what’s going on down there.”

  “You heard what the doctor said,” the mayor said.

  “I heard,” he scoffed. “She was every bit as confused as we were.”

  “How goddamn hard can it be to get fifty civilians packed up to Harborview for observation?” Harlan Sykes whispered accusingly.

  Dobson met his gaze. “Pretty damn hard,” he said. “You don’t think so…maybe we ought to get you a helmet, and a baton and send you…”

  The mayor waved him off. “What’s the holdup?” he demanded.

  “Harborview isn’t quite ready for them yet. They’re clearing two whole floors, so they can keep them in strict barrier isolation. They’re saying it’s going to be another hour…at least.”

  The mayor shot a glance at his watch. “It’s been over two hours since this thing started.” He looked around the room and lowered his voice. “I thought we were prepared for this type of situation. I thought—”

  Dobson cut him off. “This is the big time, your honor.” His face had taken on that ashen hue his subordinates often saw in times of crisis. “We’ve got something here that kills people in their tracks, then bleeds them out on the way down. Our local epidemiologist thinks it’s a hemorrhagic fever. Some relative of Ebola…” He waited a second for the word to sink in. “Just about the deadliest disease ever discovered on the planet.”

  “She wasn’t sure,” the mayor said. “She said—”

  “She said she wanted some backup on this thing.” He looked from Dean to Sykes and back. “And, unless I’m mistaken, the good Dr. Stafford looked pretty much scared shitless when she wheeled out of here.”

  Dean and Sykes were momentarily taken aback. Neither could remember Harry Dobson ever having used profanity before, just as neither had ever heard the undercurrent of bitterness which had worked its way into his tone. Now Dobson lowered his voice. “Harborview’s doing the right thing,” he said. “This stuff is worse than the plague. It’s killed health care workers all over the world. They’re breaking out the space suits, which is just exactly what I’d be doing if I was in their place.”

  Sykes was shaking his head. “What a mess.”

  “Which rhymes with press,” Dobson snapped. “I’ve got seventy press queries sitting in my mailbox. I’m getting heat from the nationals. CNN’s starting to nose around. Our detainees are using cell phones. We’re getting flooded by calls from families.” He rolled his eyes. “Some of whom are also calling the press. I think it’s time we threw everybody a bone.”

  Again, the mayor disagreed. “We’re keeping a lid on this thing,” he insisted.

  “It’s bad policy,” Dobson said.

  “We’re not keeping a damn thing from them,” Sykes threw in.

  “With all due respect—”

  “We don’t know squat,” the mayor hissed. “Anything we released at this point would be pure speculation.”

  Dobson shrugged. “You know how they are.”

  The mayor waved an impatient hand. “There’s nothing we can do about that. If the press wants to fabricate facts, that’s their business. What we need to be absolutely certain about is that we don’t appear to have been even remotely guilty of misinformation.”

  Sykes did what he did best. He agreed wholeheartedly. “We need better medical data. Until then…” He began to ramble on about the need for accurate information.

  Harry felt his pager buzzing on his hip. He pulled it from his belt and brought it close enough to read the number without his glasses. Eastern Washington area code. His
wife Kathleen. With all that had been going on, he’d forgotten to call her this morning. Ever since she’d left for Pullman, ten days ago, they’d spoken on the phone every day. Gave her an outlet for the frustrations of nursing her ninety-six-year-old father through the final stages of Alzheimer’s. Gave Harry a connection to the day-to-day universe that cops often lost somewhere in the shuffle of the job.

  Harry sidled over toward the corner of the room, where he pulled out his cell phone and dialed. She answered on the third ring. “Is everything okay?” she wanted to know.

  “Real busy,” he answered. “How’s by you?”

  “Same here.”

  “How’s Tom?”

  She sighed. Same old. Some days he’s clear as a bell. Some days he has no idea who I am. Thinks I’m some state worker going to take him to a nursing home.”

  “What about Nancy?” he asked, bringing up the sore subject of Kathleen’s older sister, who while living in nearby Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, had thus far provided little or no support for their dying father, insisting instead that he’d be better off in a nursing home, a notion which Kathleen vehemently opposed.

  He heard his wife heave another sigh. “Nancy’s out for Nancy,” his wife said. She caught the bitterness in her own voice. “Sometimes I think that maybe she’s right. Maybe…” Her voice trailed off.

  Harry knew better than to get involved in the family tug of war. Wasn’t his business anyway. Wasn’t like he and Tom Green were close or anything. Truth was they’d pretty much detested one another for the past thirty years or so. Harry clamped his jaw closed and looked around the room.

  As if on cue, the conference room door opened and Dr. Helen Stafford pushed her way back into the room.

  “I’ve got a situation here,” Harry said. “I’ve gotta go.”

  He could sense her anxiety. “Maybe you ought to…” he began.

  “I’m gonna stick it out,” she said.

  “Gotta go,” he said again.

  “Bye,” she said and broke the connection.

  Harry turned his attention back to the room just in time to check out the dozen or so people who trailed Stafford into the room. The body language said the three guys in front were the heavies. One was an elderly gentleman in gray slacks and a black cashmere blazer. He’d reached that stage in life where he was no longer required to keep his long white hair properly combed, and his leonine mane was beginning to take on the disheveled look of Albert Einstein during his later years at Princeton.

  The second man wore a black yarmulke and a full set of side whiskers. He had that vaguely unkempt look of lifetime academics, as if the niceties of careful grooming were, to some extent at least, either beneath his dignity or so far down his list of priorities he never quite got that far.

  The third guy was just the opposite. An army officer. A bird colonel. Hat tucked under his arm, chin tucked to his chest, he entered the room with an erectness of bearing and a seriousness of purpose that seemed to bring the very air to attention.

  Without so much as a word, the trio made a beeline for Ben Gardener and the TV monitor. As the entourage spread out along the back wall, Harry Dobson checked them out. Six men and a woman. Harry made the two on the near end to be low-key security types. There seemed to be a general understanding that they would occupy the positions closest to the luminaries. They showed a lot of teeth, but their quick little eyes rolled relentlessly over the room like searchlights.

  The rest of the men were surely functionaries. Secretaries, drivers. People accustomed to standing around waiting.

  From where he stood, Harry’s view of the woman was obstructed by the tallest of the toadies. Short blonde hair and a good-looking pair of legs were as far as he’d gotten when Dr. Stafford appeared at his shoulder.

  “I take it we’re about to get a second opinion,” Dobson whispered.

  “And a third and a fourth,” she said.

  “Who we got here?”

  “The old guy with the hair’s Dr. Hans Belder, president and founder of the Nehring Works, a German firm specializing in vaccines for exotic viral infections. Probably knows more about viral infection than anybody else on the planet. He’s delivering the keynote speech at the convention.”

  “The rabbi?”

  “Isaac Klugeman,” she said. “He’s the Israeli version of Belder.”

  “What about GI Joe?”

  She sighed. “Colonel David Hines, used to be assistant director of”—Stafford spelled it out—“U-S-A-M-R-I-I-D…U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Maryland.”

  “Used to be?”

  She turned her back on the others and lowered her voice. “Got to be such a pain in the butt, the army removed him from his post.”

  “Pain in the butt how?”

  “Strident,” she said. “All gloom and doom. We’re all gonna die.” She shot Harry a quick look. “You know the type.”

  “So how come he’s here?”

  “He invited himself along.”

  “No…I mean how come he’s still a part of the scene if he’s been removed from his position.”

  “He’s on the UN inspection team. The people who travel around the world making sure nobody is playing with biological matches.” She rolled her eyes and then put her lips close to Harry’s ear. “I hear the army would love to get rid of him but he’s got a friend somewhere inside the Joint Chiefs who won’t let it happen. I was told he’s under direct orders not to speak with the press.”

  From the corner of his eye Harry caught sight of Ben Gardener, who, not coincidentally, was also looking his way. He read the glance and had to turn away so Ben wouldn’t see the smile. Gardener had watched Harry getting into it with the mayor and his monkey and desperately wanted to know what was going on. Except, these days Ben Gardener was a careful man…the kind who wanted to play it safe…to keep out of it…to let Dobson handle the dirty work.

  “Could you run the tape for us?” Dr. Klugeman asked. When Ben Gardener moved to comply, the crowd along the wall shuffled forward for a look. A single image shuddered on the screen for a moment and then they were inside the bus tunnel again, rolling toward the victim on the escalator, looking at the world from an eerie close-to-the-ground vantage that warped things out of perspective. And then they moved around to the far side of the cadaver, and three quick zooms into the side of the victim’s face, where the magnification made the stubble of his beard appear the size of wires. Where the redness of the face could now be seen as an interconnected series of bone-shaped blotches rather than as a uniform field of color, and the yellow discharge which had leaked from many of the lesions suddenly became visible.

  Belder shot his colleagues a glance. “Hemorrhagic fever to be sure,” he whispered. Looking now from one to the other as if inviting argument. “Can there be any doubt?” he asked. If there was, nobody said it out loud.

  “Doesn’t look like this one bled out,” Colonel Hines said pointing at the screen.

  “The escalator was moving when the officers found him,” said Dobson.

  “Ah,” Belder said, nodding.

  Colonel Hines stood stiff-legged and ashen-faced. “You’ve called Atlanta?” Discretion phrased it as a question. Fear made it sound like an order.

  “They’re on the way,” Stafford assured him. She checked her watch. “They should be here in a little over four hours.” She anticipated Belder’s next question. “Level Four containment lab and all,” she said.

  Again Belder nodded his shaggy head. He tapped the screen with a well-manicured fingernail and, as if scripted, the picture moved to the bodies at the bottom of the stairs. Hans Belder put his nose nearly on the screen. He blinked several times as the camera zoomed in closer and closer.

  “We have a police officer’s report that says the tunnel’s full of bodies,” Stafford narrated. “Perhaps as many as a hundred.”

  Belder furrowed his brow. “I don’t understand,” he said, pulling his face back and looking around the
room. “Were all of these people traveling together?”

  “No,” Dr. Stafford said. “Not as far as we know.”

  The old man made a dismissive noise with his lips. “Not possible,” he said.

  “That time of the afternoon, most of them are going to be commuters trying to get back home after a long day,” Dobson said. “They’re almost certainly strangers to each other. Maybe a few of them…” he began and then waved the notion off.

  The old man shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said throwing a hand at the screen. “Hemorrhagic fever does not work this way. In order for this many people to have contracted hemorrhagic fever at the same time, they must either have contracted it from the same source…”—he tapped the screen with the backs of his fingers—“most certainly somewhere in Central Africa…or they must have spent sufficient time in one another’s company to have infected one another.” He blew out a thick breath. “And even that doesn’t begin to explain the complete lack of variance in incubation period and the absolute mortality rate.”

  The mayor lost patience. “I don’t understand,” he sputtered. “What is it…how do we…”

  “Hemorrhagic fever doesn’t sneak up on a person,” the colonel offered with a scowl. “It comes on with a very definite and very unpleasant set of symptoms.”

  “In seven to twenty-two days,” Belder threw in.

  Hines went on. “You come down with a terrible headache. Your eyes feel like they’re going to burst from your head. You get a fever. You begin to bleed from the nose and mouth. You become delusional.” He moved his shoulders slightly. “Not the sort of symptoms one can ignore, or put off treating,” he said finally.

  Klugeman straightened up and looked around. “Hemorrhagic fever liquefies the body. Your capillaries and mucous membranes dissolve. The chest cavity fills with blood. And then your intestines.” He paused for effect. “Then you either bleed out through your nose and mouth or through your anus.” He pointed at the screen. At the halo of blood fanning out from the women’s heads. “In all probability…that single pool of blood contains sufficient virus to kill off most of the world’s population.”