A much-younger-looking David Markis waved at her as he climbed down from the cockpit. My father-in-law. He looks so much like Daniel now that he’s rejuvenated, Elise thought. She could see his expression was anything but happy, however, as he reached back in to drag a struggling figure out of the second seat. It looked like a woman, her mouth, hands and feet taped and her eyes wild with fear and anger.
“Sorry, I had to take her with me. She was too suspicious about me wanting to rent the plane.”
“It’s all right, I’ll deal with her.” At the bound woman’s muffled shriek, Elise reassured her. “You won’t be harmed, miss. And neither will anyone else. You probably think we’re terrorists but this stuff won’t hurt anyone. And I’m sure you’d love to argue about it but I don’t want to hear it right now.” She dragged the prisoner over to the truck cab and boosted her gently into it. From there she started the pump.
The senior Markis hooked up the hose fitting and quickly transferred the full capacity of five hundred gallons to the plane. As soon as he had it in, he unhooked and leaped back into the aircraft, taking off into the puffy clouds of the burning Georgia summer sky.
Once she had parked back in the trees, Elise looked over at the bound woman. “Look, I know you’re scared, but really, there’s nothing to worry about. If I take that tape off your mouth will you behave?”
She nodded, wide-eyed.
Elise’s phone beeped at her. She looked at the incoming text, nodded in satisfaction. She worked the tape gently off of the younger woman’s face, revealing a strong chin and defiantly furrowed brow. They stared at each other for a long moment.
“What’s your name, hon?”
“Janet Bills. You don’t look like a terrorist.”
“What does a terrorist look like?”
She squirmed uncomfortably. “I don’t know. Crazy eyes? Crazy talk?”
“Well, you happen to be right. I’m not a terrorist, we’re just doing something illegal. But it won’t hurt anyone, so don’t worry about it. In a couple of hours I’ll let you go and everything will be fine.”
“Where’s he going? In the plane?”
Elise pondered this for a moment, then decided it didn’t matter if she told her. Besides, it was going to be a long vigil if they couldn’t talk about something. “Sanford Stadium. Athens. There’s a big Prosperity Gospel revival thing going on, all those suckers that think they can name it and claim it so God will give them a new Mercedes and a new bass boat. Lots of offering plates pouring money into the preachers’ coffers, just proving how much money God is giving the faithful. Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy – for the preachers. About seventy-five thousand people. And they paid ninety bucks a head for the ‘seminar,’ not counting the concessions. You do the math.”
“My father’s a pastor, and he said those people aren’t following God.”
Elise nodded. “I have to agree with you there, honey. Sounds like your father’s a good man.”
“So what is that guy going to do? What’s in the tanks?”
“What do you think it is?”
Janet thought for a moment. “I dunno…skunk stink? Some kind of dye? Like throwing blood on people that wear furs? I can’t think of anything else that wouldn’t hurt people.”
“Smart girl. Would you like a drink?” Elise hoped Janet wouldn’t notice she hadn’t actually confirmed her guess.
“Sure.”
Elise opened the juice bottle, and Janet drank with her taped-together hands.
“So how did you get into flying?”
“I just always wanted to fly, so in high school…”
Elise kept her talking until David came back. Then she cut the tape binding Janet’s hands and hopped out of the milk truck. When she had climbed into the second seat of the plane, she threw the truck keys down to the waiting young woman.
“There’s an envelope under the drivers’ seat with some money for the plane. You might not get it back. Have a nice drive, and sorry to inconvenience you. Oh, the truck kind of sticks in second.”
Janet nodded and waved, half a smile on her face.
They took off, winging their way northeastward. “I think you got a Stockholm buddy,” David said.
“What? Oh, you mean like Stockholm Syndrome? I held her hostage and now she likes me?”
“Yep.”
A pause. “So how did the spraying go?”
“Seventy-five thousand new converts. Just not quite the religion they expected,” laughed Markis.
“Yes, and tonight and tomorrow they’ll pass through the Atlanta airport and go back home to a thousand different places and then there’s no way they’ll be able to quarantine it.”
“Lord willing and the crick don’t rise. But they’ll try.”
Elise did not respond, lapsing into silence. She stared out the scratched and dirty cockpit as her thoughts closed in. Now that their task was over her husband was all she could think about. No matter how much he had protested and placated, she knew he did not expect to get away after his own piece of the plan in Los Angeles. If he did not show up at the rendezvous…well, she was no soldier, but the rest were. She told herself the men were frighteningly competent, and they would be able to rescue him.
If not now, then later. After the chaos. After tomorrow.
After Infection Day.
-25-
Daniel woke to the smell of disinfectant and lanolin. His cell was dim and clean, the narrow bed’s covers of ragged rough green wool with “US” printed here and there on them. He’d seen the same blankets in a few old barracks back when he’d been in the Army, though these days they had mostly migrated to the surplus stores. There was a naked steel toilet with no seat, and a sink with only one tap; no hot water. A roll of paper, in an incongruously cheerful green wrapper
He struggled to a sitting position, finding himself unable to straighten up. His right arm and shoulder were pain-free but twisted like a lightning-struck tree trunk. He stared at the strange crook in his forearm, shoving aside the surreal feeling. The limb was useless; the muscles were so misaligned he could barely close his hand. It reminded him of someone with cerebral palsy; he was half of Steven Hawking. He tried to remember if Hawking was still alive, and he said a little prayer that the Eden Plague would find him and free that amazing mind from the prison of his crippled body.
Daniel’s left side, hand, and arm were more or less useable, though his ribs were a bit compressed. His spine must have been broken as well, and healed in this hunched-over position. Fortunately his legs seemed to function reasonably well, so he struggled to move over onto the toilet. He was clothed in orange pajamas, with a convenient elastic waistband.
The necessaries finished, he drank from the faucet and lay back down on his bunk, on his side in a semi-fetal position, and tried to ignore the cat-claws in his gut. The Plague wanted to be fed.
Booted feet tramped outside his door. The little window opened, then shut, and the locking mechanism opened with a heavy clunking sound. The door slid back, then sideways on rails, and three men in blue hazardous material suits, filter masks and face shields came in.
Two of them had those huge-barreled revolver-blunderbuss things. The enormous tubes pointed his direction, naked threats. The other man carried a stainless steel chair.
The two guards took positions in the corners to the left and right of the door, and the man in charge sat down on the chair across from Daniel’s bunk, in front of the door.
“It’s not airborne, you know,” Daniel said without moving. “And I’m hardly in a position to jump you.” He held up a twisted arm.
“It’s just precautionary,” a familiar rich voice said, and his fears – his expectations rather – were fulfilled. It was Jenkins, the Third.
“I’ll say it again, Mister Jenkins. I am sorry about your son. I take full responsibility, and I’ll say so in front of any court or tribunal you care to convene.”
He laughed, a deep, cruel sound. “You’re never going to see t
he inside of a courtroom. You’ve just become a lab rat. A guinea pig. You’re going to bless the days when it’s just my scientists experimenting on you, because on the other days, I’m going to test the limits of your suffering.”
“It’s our suffering that defines us, Mr. Jenkins.”
“What?”
“C. S. Lewis. Loosely quoted.”
“Then you are about to be defined quite vigorously.” He laughed again, a naked, evil thing.
“It sounds to me like you’re afraid. What is it that scares you?” Daniel tried to hold the man’s eyes.
“If I fear anything, it’s the wanton disruption of the American way of life that you are trying to bring about. Have you thought about the chaos you might have caused had we not caught you in your little scheme?”
“What part of today’s ‘American way of life’ do you love so much? What part did the Founding Fathers sacrifice so much for? Is it our citizens dying of cancer? Heart disease? Or just traffic accidents? Is it the rampant violent crime, or drug use, or the PTSD of veterans like me? The drug use and mental illness that caused me to lose control and kill your son? We can get rid of all that if you just stop fighting it.”
He snorted. “Listen to yourself! You want to surrender the destiny of the human race to an untested virus that might mutate and wipe us all out. Or this thing could be a Trojan Horse designed by aliens or the godless communists to destroy the Free World. What if everyone welcomes it, and after a certain amount of time, or the deployment of some trigger mechanism, kablooie! Everyone infected with it dies or goes crazy, and the old Soviets win the Cold War from their graves while the Russians and Chinese and Al Qaeda laugh and cheer.”
“Plausible. Plausible, Mr. Jenkins, but I don’t think so. If you cared so much about your country you would have informed our elected leaders when you discovered it. There would be a multibillion-dollar program to deconstruct the virus already in place, to defend against misuse of it, and to genetically engineer it so it could be used for the good of everyone, under controlled circumstances, as a cure. Instead, you kept it hidden on an island, owned by a shell company, run by your own personal mad doctor and secured by amoral thugs who kept their own researchers prisoner. So even if I didn’t get half of Los Angeles infected, now it’s too big for just INS, Incorporated. You had to call in Homeland Security. People will talk. There’s nothing more of an oxymoron than a ‘government secret’ in the age of the internet.”
“You know Markis, I let you blather on because it amuses and gratifies me to see you lying there like a twisted freak.”
“So you must trust these men implicitly? You’re not afraid of them hearing anything you say?”
“They are utterly loyal to me.”
Daniel glanced at them, seeing nothing to contradict what Jenkins had to say. Still, the longer he kept Jenkins talking, the more time the other parts of the plan had to succeed. Maybe he might even get through to one of the minions.
“Did you tell them it will cure anything? And give them functional immortality? Live a thousand years like a man of twenty? Never have to watch what you eat, or worry about all the pains of growing old? Do they think a couple of grunts like them will get a piece of that? That it won’t be reserved exclusively for the rich and powerful?”
“They will get it, just as soon as I do. As soon as the bugs have been worked out. They don’t want to end up in a pathetic situation like you are now.”
Daniel chuckled. “Just a little longer, and everyone will have a better world, right? It’s always a just little bit longer, until they find a cure for cancer, or nuclear fusion gives everyone clean energy, or we balance the budget. But those things never come, Jenkins, because the rich and powerful don’t want them to come. If they did, the little people wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore, and people like you would have no leverage. Nothing to hold over their heads. But the Eden Plague can free them now, and we can still work on making the virus better as we go along.”
Daniel wasn’t sure how convincing he was, or how much of this he even believed his own self, but he had committed himself to the course and he wasn’t going to back out now. And maybe this was penance for his crime, even if it accomplished nothing else.
“You think I’m evil, Markis? You’re a pie-in-the-sky raving lunatic. You want to just roll the dice on a slice of Soviet-designed biological warfare and hope it all turns out all right.”
Daniel shrugged, as well as he could. “At least I put my money where my mouth is. What have you risked, Jenkins?”
“As little as possible. That’s how great things are achieved.”
“Really? I think truly great people would say just the opposite.”
Jenkins stood up. “We’ll just have to see who achieves greatness, then,” he sneered. “Good luck from that position.” He picked up the chair, backing out of the room. The other two followed.
“I could use some food, if you want more than a corpse to torture later.”
He laughed. “I think I’d rather see you suffer some more the way you are. Bon appétit.”
The door shut with a heavy slam. Bon appétit’s cat-claws ripped at his guts.
Eventually he slept.
-26-
Infection Day.
Jervis A. Jenkins III sat in the command vehicle half a mile from the terrorist’s underground lair. Outside, C Squadron, Special Forces Detachment – Delta, commonly known as Delta Force, deployed across the mountainsides. Measurement and signals intelligence, MASINT, had identified the hidden entrances using infrared and radar imagery comparisons, and each was being covered by a squad of elite special operators.
Jenkins looked down at the piece of paper in his hand, almost orgasmic every time he read it. The President’s signature at the bottom, handwritten, not autopenned, authorized him to take control of the counterterrorism operation under the “clear and present danger” clause of the Patriot Act. It was probably extralegal, perhaps illegal, as it severely bent if not broke the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibiting the use of Federal troops for law enforcement within the United States.
The power to break the law with impunity was intoxicating. Jenkins reveled in it.
Even now, select committees of the US Congress were being briefed and martial law would soon be declared, assuming they agreed. Even if they didn’t, that damn infected cruise ship was now under the guns of the Atlantic Fleet, and would stay quarantined offshore for as long as necessary. He wished he had been able to persuade the President to sink it, but like all politicians, the man had wanted to keep his options open, and a massacre was always bad for poll numbers.
It was a stroke of luck, the anonymous tip that turned the Markis group in, that pinpointed this bunker.
When he’d been briefed on the facility later, by an ancient civil engineer they had dug up – who had worked on it shortly before it was sealed up in the fifties – he’d been appalled at how the Pentagon had lost track of it. He wondered how many other installations like this were scattered around. It could have been a nightmare.
“I wish we’d been able to bring Markis to see us capture his people and their hidey-hole,” he mused as he pushed buttons, checking feeds from the various personal cams attached to the helmets of selected operators. “Better to have him locked in the secure facility, though.”
His driver and the communications techs, contractors rather than regular military, laughed at their boss’s comment. As well as they were being paid, they’d better laugh, he thought.
A buzz, then terse voices reported their positions and readiness. Most of the teams were just to cover the exits, to keep the rats from escaping. They had orders to shoot first, then capture wounded if it was absolutely safe.
These men were among the best elite hostage rescue and direct action specialists in the world. They had been briefed about the plot to spread a genetically engineered virus that would make Ebola look like the sniffles, and every one of them was cocked and locked, burning with eagerness to take down t
he enemies of their country, their families, and their way of life.
Jenkins loved this kind of control, and laughed inside. Fine upstanding stupid square-jawed suckers, so easily fooled by real leaders like me, using their own pure innocent patriotism against them. He looked at his watch, checked with his comm tech one more time, then said, “All right. Execute.”
In two different locations simultaneously, exactly-calculated shaped charges blew hatches open, leaving smoking holes but not collapsing the tunnels behind. Then tactical stacks of operators, heavily armored for this short-range op, piled into the tunnels in lockstep, rushing down the corridors toward their selected targets.
Alpha Team got to the big cavern first, and designated men spread out to find vehicles that could be started. Within fifteen seconds, six men roared out the vehicle tunnel toward the inside of the bunker’s main entrance, to open it to more forces outside.
The rest fanned out, quartering, searching and clearing each room, finding no one until they met Bravo team coming from the other direction, in what looked like a cafeteria. It was obvious the terrorists had prepared food here in the kitchen and eaten in the dining room. One of the soldiers reached down to pick up a crayon drawing of a truck in a tunnel under a mountain, a yellow sun shining incongruously above, its rays like petals of a flower.
“Patricks, if it ain’t intel, put it down. We got the whole place to clear.”
“But sir…” He held it up. “They didn’t say there were kids here.”
“Shit.” The lieutenant changed frequencies to the general net, and transmitted, “Common push, this is Delta Alpha One, we have evidence of children here, over.”
A series of double-clicks and pops came in acknowledgment, but nothing else. Chatter was discouraged, communications discipline was strict. Alpha Team spread out, with one more thing to think about. Nobody wanted to kill kids.
***
Daniel’s next awakening was brief. He heard the door open, saw the barrel of some kind of gun pointed his way, heard a hiss and felt the sting of a dart. It was a blessed relief from the twisting in his belly and the pain that ran through his starving, concentration-camp body.
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