by Dean Koontz
"You mean they have a laboratory all their own?" Canning asked incredulously.
"That's correct."
"But the sophisticated machinery, the maintenance . . . It would cost millions!"
After he had taken time to relight his pipe, McAlister said, "Nearly all its life the agency has not been held accountable to anyone for how it spends its funds. Not to the Congress. Not to the President. No one. Furthermore, it receives considerably more money from the federal budget than is readily apparent. Attached to the largest appropriations bills like Defense and Government Operations, there are dozens of smaller appropriations—five million here, two million there—for programs which are seldom if ever scrutinized. Some of these programs don't even exist. Their appropriations are tunneled directly to the agency. Once the agency has the money, it disburses it to a couple of hundred companies all over the world, firms that are nothing more than CIA fronts. No one man within the agency ever knows where all the money goes. So . . . It would be quite simple for these Committeemen to siphon off a couple of million a year for their own, private purposes. I'm sure that's what they've done—and are still doing."
"But a laboratory devoted to chemical-biological warfare research is going to employ hundreds of people."
"As recently as a week ago," McAlister told him, "I'd have said the same thing. But since I learned about Dragonfly, I've been doing my homework. For Olin Wilson's purposes, a laboratory can be rather small. It can be staffed by as few as twelve specialists who are willing to be their own assistants. This kind of work is nowhere near as complicated as, say, searching for a cure for cancer. Any virus or bacterium can be cultured for pennies. For a few dollars you can grow enough plague virus to kill nine-tenths of the Russian population. Then you hit the remaining tenth with anthrax. Or worse. It's the delivery systems that pose the real problems, but even that kind of experimentation isn't prohibitively expensive. Biological warfare is cheap, David. That's why most all of the major world powers deal in it. It costs substantially less than the money needed to build more and more and more nuclear missiles."
In the courtyard below, a young couple, sheltering under a newspaper, ran for an apartment door. Their laughter drifted up through the rain.
Cherry-scented tobacco smoke hung in the humid air in Canning's kitchen.
"If the lab employs only a dozen men," Canning said, "there'd be no trouble keeping it a secret."
"And if one of the wealthy businessmen who sympathize with the Committeemen happens to be the owner, director, or president of a chemical company, he could help create a plausible front for Wilson's work."
"There ought to be records of some sort at this lab, something that would identify Dragonfly," Canning said. "They'll be in code, but codes are made to be broken."
"But we don't know where the lab is."
"Berlinson couldn't tell you?"
"He'd heard of it. He'd been associated with Wilson. But he had never been to the lab."
"And you haven't put a tail on Wilson?"
McAlister laid his pipe in the ashtray and smiled grimly. "Can't do that, I'm afraid. He's dead."
"I see."
"He was electrocuted while making his breakfast toast."
"Quaint."
"Seems there was a nasty short in the toaster's wiring. Brand-new toaster, too."
"The Underwriters' Laboratories would be surprised to hear about that," Canning said.
"I daresay."
"When did this happen?"
"The day after Roger Berlinson came to my home and offered to tell me what he knew about The Committee, exactly sixteen hours after I first heard Olin Wilson's name."
"How coincidental."
"It's for Ripley."
"And convenient."
"Of course, Berlinson couldn't give me the names of any of the other scientists who are working at this lab. But from that moment on, I never talked with him in my own home or in my car or anywhere else that might be electronically monitored."
"What more did Berlinson tell you?"
Early in 1971, while he was still employed by the Department of Defense, Dr. Wilson, with the aid of a hundred researchers, made several important breakthroughs in his work. He really did not strike out into any new territory, but he refined substances, pro-esses, and techniques that were already in use, refined them in the sense that an electric light bulb is merely a refinement of a wax candle, which, of course, it is, although it is much more than that. First of all he developed a petro-plastic spansule that was airtight, one hundred percent resistant to osmosis, neutral to body tissues, free of surface condensation, not even fractionally biodegradable—yet which was quite rubbery, unbreakable, and resilient. Second, he discovered a way to store deadly microorganisms within this spansule—a way to store them without the organisms losing more than five percent of their fertility, virility, and toxicity, no matter how long they were sealed up. Next, he worked out a procedure for implanting one of these spansules inside a human body in such a way that the carrier could not sense it, X-rays could not expose it, and only the most unlikely of accidents could open it before it was meant to be opened. Finally, he went outside of his specialty and applied other disciplines—surgery, psychology, pharmacology, espionage—to the problem until he perfected a way of turning any man into an unwitting, undetectable biological time bomb.
"Which is Dragonfly," McAlister said.
"And now you're going to tell me how it actually works."
"It's achingly simple."
"I believe it," Canning said. "Just from what you've told me so far, I think I can figure it out myself."
"So you tell me."
"First there's one thing I need to get straight."
McAlister waited.
"The Dragonfly project was never meant to decimate the Chinese population, was it?"
"No." McAlister picked up his pipe. "According to Berlinson, Dragonfly is carrying a severely mutated virus, something manufactured in the laboratory and essentially artificial in nature. It won't respond to any known drug; however, it was designed to have a poor rate of reproduction and a short life span. Seventy-two hours after the spansule is broken, the microorganisms in it and ninety percent of their progeny will be dead. In ninety-six hours, none of the microbes will exist. The threat is limited to four days. There isn't time for it to spread throughout China."
"Wilson never intended to kill tens of millions."
"Just tens of thousands. The stuffs apparently so toxic that a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand people will die in four days. But that will be the extent of it. Although I must say that this apparent concern for human life is not the product of any moral sensibility. It's a matter of logistics. If you kill millions of your enemy in a few days, you have an impossible logistics problem when you take over their country: how to get rid of the corpses."
McAlister's eyes suddenly seemed to have become a bit more gray than blue.
Shaking his head in disgust, Canning said, "If the kill target is so low, then the intent is to destroy the political and military elite—all of the highest officers of the Party, their possible successors, and their families. In the turmoil and confusion, a relative handful of men could take control of Peking, the strategic ports, and all of China's nuclear weapons."
"And it looks as if the Committeemen have more than a handful of men at their disposal," McAlister said. "We think they've made a deal with the Nationalist Chinese. For over a month there have been reports of frantic military preparations on Formosa. In the oh-so-glorious memory of Chiang Kai-shek, they evidently intend to reconquer the homeland."
"Jesus!" The implications became more staggering by the moment. In twenty years of day-to-day contact with the world of high-power espionage, Canning had never heard, had never conceived, of the agency's getting involved in an operation as crazy as this one. Blackmail of domestic and foreign politicians, yes. The overthrow of a small South American or African nation, yes. Political assassination at home and abroad, yes.
But he had never imagined that any element within the agency, no matter how fascistic and fanatical, would try to upset the delicate balance of world power all on its own hook. "But even if the operation were a success and the Nationalists reoccupied the mainland—"
"We'd be on the brink of World War Three," McAlister finished for him. "The Russians would figure that if we used that sort of weapon against China, we'd use it against them too. They'd be very tense. And rightfully so. The first time that Moscow suffered an epidemic of ordinary influenza, the first time a high Party official got a bad cold, they'd think they were under attack. They'd strike back at us with biological and nuclear weapons. No doubt about it." Beneath his Palm Beach tan, his pallor deepened. "We have to stop Dragonfly."
Canning went to the bar in the living room and came back with a bottle of Scotch and two glasses. He got four ice cubes from the refrigerator, popped them into the glasses, and poured two or three shots into each glass.
Picking up his Scotch, McAlister said, "I'm really not that much of a drinking man."
"Neither am I."
They both drank.
Canning sat down again.
The rain continued to snap against the windows. Lightning cracked across the black sky and threw flickering shadows onto the top of the kitchen table.
When he had nearly finished his Scotch, McAlister said, "You said you thought you knew how Dragonfly, the Chinese carrier, had been chosen and set up."
Clearing his throat on the first few words, Canning said, "If only the Party elite is to be killed, then Dragonfly has to be someone who has contact with a number of men at the top of the Chinese government. He has to be someone who would spread the plague in the right circles."
"That really doesn't narrow it down too much. Fully half the Chinese who visit the U.S. and Canada are high Party officials themselves."
Canning said, "I'm not trying to pinpoint a suspect. I'm just trying to see if I can reconstruct the way Wilson set it up." He folded his hands on the table in front of him. He never gestured when he talked. Outwardly, except for the cleaning and polishing and lint-picking, he was not a nervous man. "To start with, Wilson needed a carrier. For the purpose of this discussion, let's say he picked someone from that group of trade negotiators you mentioned a while ago."
"There were a couple of hundred more likely targets available," McAlister said. "It would have been easier to get to someone in the symphony orchestra, for example. At least ten of the musicians were from families that wield political power in Peking. But for the moment, let's say that it was someone from the trade negotiators."
"We ought to have a name for him," Canning said. "How about Charlie Chan?" He wasn't trying to be funny; it was the first name that came to mind.
"All right. How would Wilson get to Charlie Chan?"
Canning thought about it for a moment. Then: "These groups are always chaperoned by people from the State Department. Their itineraries are known. Most nights they eat dinner in a restaurant rather than at a catered banquet or in someone's private home. Since the itinerary would usually be made out days before the Chinese arrived, the agency could easily learn the names of the restaurants well ahead of time. Members of The Committee, with all the right credentials for agency men, would approach the owner of one of these restaurants, feed him some solemn bullshit about national security, and get his permission to put a couple of operatives in the kitchen. Better yet, a Committeeman would be the waiter who serves Charlie Chan."
McAlister didn't object to the scenario.
Staring at the rain that trickled down the window, Canning laid out Wilson's plan as quickly and neatly as he would have peeled and sectioned an orange. In a perverse way he was enjoying himself. This was what he had been born to do. After all those stifling years at the White House, he was back in action and glad of it "In his coffee or dessert Charlie Chan receives a fairly powerful but slow-acting sedative. Around nine-thirty, half an hour after he consumes it, Charlie pleads exhaustion and returns to his hotel room even if something else has been arranged for the rest of the night. By ten-thirty he's sleeping soundly. Three or four agents enter his room, pack him in a crate or shipping trunk, and take him out of the hotel. By midnight he's lying unconscious on an operating table in Wilson's lab."
Reaming out the bowl of his pipe with a small gold-plated blade, McAlister said, "So far I believe you've got it right. I can't be sure. Berlinson wasn't in the lab. He wasn't one of the agents who took Charlie out of the hotel in a shipping trunk. But he was a friend of Wilson's. He pieced together bits of information that he picked up from the good doctor. So far you sound like you're his echo. Go on."
Canning closed his eyes and could see the laboratory where it happened: cool fluorescent light that sharpened the edges of cabinets and cupboards, tables and machines; white tile walls and a tile floor; a yellow-skinned man lying nude on a cushioned operating table; half a dozen men dressed in hospital greens; murmured conversation rich with tension and excitemerit; the stench of antiseptic cleaning compounds and the sharp tang of alcohol like a knife slicing the air . . . "Wilson makes a half-inch incision in Charlie. Where it won't show. In an armpit. Or in the fold of the buttocks. Or maybe high on the inside of a thigh. Then he inserts the spansule."
"Only the spansule?"
Canning, his eyes still closed, could see it: a blue-white capsule no more than half an inch in length, a quarter of an inch in diameter. "Yes. Nothing else."
"Won't there be a mechanism to puncture the spansule and free the microorganisms when the time comes for that?"
"You said this entire thing was of a material that won't show up on an X-ray?"
"That's correct."
"Then there can't be any metal to it. And any mechanism that was meant to puncture the spansule on, say, the receival of a certain radio signal, would have metal in it. So there's just the spansule, the capsule, that little cylinder of plastic."
Finished with his pipe, McAlister put it in a jacket pocket and looked for something else to do with his hands. "Continue," he said.
"The spansule fits less than an inch below the skin. When it's in place, Wilson sews up the incision—using sutures that'll dissolve by the time the healing's complete, a week at most—and places an ordinary Band-Aid over it." He paused to think, and while he thought he used one finger to draw a Band-Aid in the finely beaded moisture that had filmed the inside of several kitchen windowpanes. "Then I suppose Charlie would be given a second drug to wake him up—but he'd be put into an hypnotic trance before he really knew where he was or what was happening to him. Wilson would have to spend the rest of the night clearing Charlie's memory and implanting a series of directives in his deep subconscious mind. Like . . . telling him that he will not see or feel the incision when he wakes up in the morning. And he'd have to be told when and how he's to break open the spansule."
"All this would be done just with hypnosis?"
"Since 1963 or thereabouts, we've had drugs that condition the mind for hypnotic suggestion," Canning said. "I used them when I was in Asia. The Committeemen would have used them on Charlie Chan. With the drugs it's not just hypnotic suggestion, it's sophisticated brainwashing."
"You're still echoing Berlinson. But how do you think they'd eventually trigger Charlie?"
"You sound as if you don't know."
"I don't. Berlinson made a good guess. I've talked with some of the experts in the field, and I have a fair idea. But I don't know."
"It would have to be a verbal trigger. A key phrase," Canning said. "When he hears it, Dragonfly will . . . detonate himself. Or maybe all he has to do is read the phrase in a letter."
"No good," McAlister said. "The letter, I mean. You forget that China is a totalitarian society. All mail going into China is opened and read. And most of it is destroyed no matter how harmless it might be."
"Then whoever triggers Dragonfly will be inside China already, and he'll do it either in person or on the telephone."
"We feel it'll be
in person."
"One of our agents," Canning said.
"Yes."
"How many do we have in China?"
"Three. Any one of them could be a Committeeman."
"Or all of them."
Reluctantly, McAlister agreed.
Increasingly excited about the assignment, Canning got up and began to pace. "Let's go back to the laboratory and pick up where we left off. Through a drug-induced hypnosis, Charlie has been programmed with all necessary directives. Next, he is told to fall asleep and not to wake up until his hotel-room telephone rings in the morning. Before dawn, he is returned to his room. He wakes up a few hours later, knowing nothing and feeling nothing about last night. Sooner or later he goes back to China. He lives precisely as he would have done had Wilson chosen someone else. Then one day a man walks up to him on the street, says the key phrase, and walks away. Per his program, Charlie goes home, where he has privacy of a sort. He breaks the capsule. Then he goes about his business as if it's just another day. He still remembers nothing —not the man on the street who triggered him, not Wilson, not the microorganisms that are breeding within him, nothing! In twenty-four hours he'll infect two or three hundred government people, who will pass the plague on to hundreds more, thousands more, before the virus dies out."
McAlister rose, picked up the ashtray and carried it to the wastecan, where he emptied it. "The spansule won't show up in an X-ray. The petro-plastic lets the rays pass through. There are no metal parts. We've been through this before. There are no inorganic materials other than the petro-plastic. There's nothing implanted with it to puncture it on a given signal. So how does Mr. Chan break it and infect himself once he's been triggered?"