The Panic Zone

by Rick Mofina

  “And the weapon? I understand Sutsoff’s stolen something from Project Crucible and will turn it on us, is that correct?”

  “Yes.” Winfield cleared his throat. “Foster Winfield here. I was the chief scientist on Crucible.”

  “I’ve been briefed,” Hunter said, “but need you to tell me in simple terms, Dr. Winfield, what we’ve got, so I can brief the director. I understand Sutsoff’s unleashed a new virus?”

  “No, not exactly. It’s complicated.”

  “Simplify it, please, Doctor.”

  “She’s created a new super-lethal agent to attack DNA. She can manipulate it to work at a hyper rate to target any specific group, or combination of groups.”

  “How?”

  “We’ve just completed deeper analysis that shows evidence of molecular electronics and manipulation on a supramolecular nanoscale.”

  “Which means?”

  “She can control her new lethal agent using radio-frequency command via wireless technology, from a cell phone or computer.”

  “But to do what, exactly? I still don’t understand. If I were carrying this super Pariah V1 agent, infected as it were, wouldn’t I be dead?”

  “No, that’s part of the sophisticated, unbelievable aspect of her engineering. The agent acts less like a virus and more like a dormant remote-controlled bomb.”

  “How?”

  “I could carry it and remain in perfect health, then transmit it to you or a thousand people through contact. Those people could continue transmitting it to others and so on, that’s the virus-like aspect she’s developed. But the agent would remain dormant as it were. Nothing would happen to anyone until Sutsoff activates the agent using remote manipulation. And she could target people with specific DNA characteristics. It would be like creating armies of microscopic lethal time bombs, transmitting them to a large group and then commanding them to detonate in everyone in that group according to the targeted DNA characteristic. Or put another way, targeting everyone in the group who has a 212 area code, or everyone who has a 212 area code with a 555 prefix and so forth.”

  “Or anyone at all?”

  “Yes, she can establish whatever range she likes.”

  “I’ve seen the photos from the cruise-ship victim and the two victims in Nassau. They’re gruesome. The potential here is apocalyptic.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Hunter,” Lancer said. “While we do not have irrefutable evidence of a planned attack in New York, we strongly urge cancellation of the Human World event.”

  “Agent Lancer, this administration does not govern by fear. You know as well as I that it will never allow potential threats to dictate its agenda. As you say, you do not yet have irrefutable evidence of a planned attack. You have not yet confirmed your suspect is in the country, or the city. There are many complications, many considerations,” Hunter said. “I need to know, what if Sutsoff succeeds in passing along this lethal agent but never activates it?”

  “Nothing happens. The agent passes harmlessly through your system, like a placebo, in about twenty-four hours.”

  “So how do we stop it?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “We better find a way and fast. We expect over one million people to gather in less than twenty-four hours for the main event of the conference in Central Park. This morning, the Oval Office said the president and first lady will attend and greet as many people as possible.”

  66

  New York City

  It was down to hours.

  Robert Lancer checked his watch against the wall clocks.

  Long before the sun rose over Manhattan, law enforcement for New York City notched up security for one of the largest peace-time gatherings in the city’s history.

  No word on the possibility of pulling the plug on the event.

  Not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza, Lancer had taken his place at Operational Command. The NYPD was the lead agency for the conference.

  Now, it was coordinating with the FBI’s Command Center at Federal Plaza and the city’s Office of Emergency Management, which was on full alert for a biological attack. Other local, state and federal agencies were also bracing for a possible strike, and the U.S. Secret Service big-footed its role to protect the president. Security had been heightened over concerns arising from Gretchen Sutsoff’s emerging threat.

  It was 3:50 a.m.

  The next security status meeting would start in ten minutes. Lancer was checking e-mails when his cell phone rang.

  “Bob, it’s Norris at Federal Plaza Command.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Our embassy in Kuwait City says Drake Stinson’s just been detained for questioning by Kuwaiti security.”

  “Did he give them anything on Sutsoff?”

  “No, they’ve had him for twenty minutes and will transmit the interview live. We’re setting up to share it with Operational Command.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Yesterday Dutch police arrested a couple at Schipol in Amsterdam bound for New York, traveling with a two-year-old with a forged German passport. Under questioning they said they knew a Dr. Auden.”

  “One of Sutsoff’s aliases. They get anything more from them?”

  “They’re still in questioning. In France last night, police intercepted a couple with a toddler at de Gaulle. They were bound for New York. Their passports were suspect and the pair admitted knowledge of Auden in the Bahamas. Bob, there’s talk she made a video.”

  “A suicide video?”

  “We don’t know. But add the most recent couples detained to the others yesterday from Madrid, Hong Kong and Argentina, and we now have twelve couples linked to the doctor.”

  “That’s twelve out of the seventy we found in her computer files. Keep me posted, Norris. I have to go.”

  The meeting commenced with updates and arguments over the best course of action.

  “We have to pull the plug on the Central Park event,” a state official said. “If this is a significant threat, we have to shut it down.”

  “Organizers are dead set against it,” said a woman from city hall.

  “What about the president?” an NYPD official asked.

  “The White House hasn’t indicated yet if the president and first lady are pulling out,” the Secret Service official said. “We’re flowing all updates to the Oval Office. However, it’s still a go. To answer the question that was raised at the last meeting, when the Pope celebrated Mass here, we had twenty-three real threats. Four were deemed significant and involved evidence of weapons and explosives. We thwarted all of them and the event went ahead without incident. Nothing made it into the press.”

  “This is Johnson with Tactical. At our last briefing we were advised that this weapon could be remotely activated by wireless. Do we know what frequency range? Can’t we jam it, or shut down towers, block satellites?”

  “Captain Tillser, NYPD Comms. We’re exploring that option with the NSA and wireless providers. Bottom line, if we go that route, we risk disrupting or disabling all emergency communications for police, fire, ambulance. It would render us useless.”

  “Where are we on Sutsoff, Lancer?” The NYPD captain shot him a sour look. Lancer was checking the new message he’d received.

  “We got her alert out to Customs and Border Protection and Interpol. The public alert goes to media this morning. Ahead of all that, we gave Interpol our intelligence for some seventy suspects we think are linked to Sutsoff and the Human World Conference. Several people around the world have been detained for questioning, including Drake Stinson, who at this moment is being questioned by police in Kuwait. Stinson is known to be a member of Sutsoff’s secretive inner circle, a doomsday group known as Extremus Deus. He is a person of interest.” Lancer nodded to the large screen at the far end of the room. “I’ve just been alerted we’re receiving video of his questioning in Kuwait, which we’ll share with the task force now. Okay, Norris, send it through.”
<
br />   Three seconds passed before Drake Stinson appeared on the screen.

  “Is this live, real-time?” someone asked.

  “Aside from a five-second delay, it’s live,” Lancer said.

  Stinson was seated at a table in a stark room across from the two men questioning him.

  “Mr. Stinson, what can you tell us about Dr. Sutsoff’s operation?”

  “It’s too late. She’s crazy, you can’t stop—”

  Stinson grimaced.

  “Mr. Stinson?”

  Stinson’s chair scraped and his body spasmed.

  “Are you all right?”

  Stinson wrapped his arms around his stomach and groaned. Agony spread over his face and his skin began to bubble as if corn were popping under the surface. Bloodstains blossomed on his shirt as his abdomen expanded.

  “Oh, God!”

  Stinson’s eyes liquefied and he slid to the floor, bones and spine cracking as his body contorted into a hunched position before he died.

  The two Kuwaiti agents stood over him, their mouths agape, before the video signal was switched off.

  “What the Christ was that?” an NYPD official asked as others around the room muttered in disbelief.

  “This is what we’re facing,” Lancer said.

  “How the hell do we stop that?”

  67

  New York City

  Gretchen Sutsoff rose before the sun.

  She was rested and ready.

  Little Will was sleeping soundly.

  Still in her nightdress, Sutsoff went to her laptop computer.

  Drake Stinson had betrayed her. She knew that he was now somewhere in the Middle East trying to broker a deal with what he thought was an antidote to Pariah Variant 1.

  As she started entering the activation codes for him, she did the same for the other members of her inner circle—General Dimitri, Downey, Goran, Reich and especially Ibrahim Jehaimi for violating her trust.

  Before they’d joined her in the toast in Benghazi, she’d worked a veterinarian’s hypodermic needle through the wine cork and injected enough lethal agent—a special prolonged-acting version—for all of them.

  She took care of Jehaimi with a little gift of sweets later.

  Now it was time to tidy things up.

  It took five full minutes to complete the activation process, which ended when she tapped the enter key. Wherever they were in the world, they’d just taken their final breaths.

  Goodbye.

  She’d erased them.

  Done.

  Sutsoff was hungry.

  She showered, then ordered a breakfast of poached eggs and English tea to her room. While the baby slept, she ate quietly and watched the new day break over Manhattan.

  When she finished, she switched on the TV to watch the morning news programs. The weather called for a clear day in the low seventies.

  Pictures of herself appeared on the TV screen.

  A news crawler under the images said the FBI was searching for a former CIA scientist wanted in connection with murder, a conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism and theft of government property. No mention of a target or method of operation. Do they know? The news report showed footage of CIA headquarters, Fort Detrick, the resort on Paradise Island, a cruise ship and the face of the passenger from Indiana.

  Sutsoff was calm.

  She no longer looked like the wanted fugitive—Botox, body padding and a wig had taken care of that. She was Mary Anne Conrad, traveling with her grandson Will.

  Her work would continue. She was only a few hours away from full activation. This just makes things interesting, she thought, as the baby woke and started to fuss.

  Sutsoff changed him.

  Then she unscrewed her float pen and mixed the clear liquid from the barrel into his breakfast: fruit, toast and juice from room service.

  There we go.

  As the baby ate, she checked on progress through her various e-mail accounts. She was disappointed to learn that only a handful of families were now in place in New York hotels.

  She returned to the TV news, which was now showing preparations for the gathering in Central Park. The event would start later that morning. Over one million participants were expected for the full slate of music and addresses from global celebrities, including the president.

  “Over a million people—my, isn’t that perfect?” She smiled at the baby. “It’s more than perfect. It’s beautiful.”

  Sutsoff noticed a new e-mail.

  One of the couples was having trouble. They’d lost their floater pen. They were at the Tellwood, only four blocks away. Sutsoff had prepared extra pens.

  She typed an e-mail to them.

  “All finished eating, Will? Let’s take a little walk before we head to the park.”

  She got him dressed, collected her laptop and some other things in a bag and loaded her stroller. Before she left, she took some more medication.

  Nothing would stop her now.

  68

  Nassau, Bahamas

  In the predawn darkness, a police car crept through Nassau’s Over-the-Hill district.

  The faint yelp of a distant dog sounded a warning as a flashlight beam shot from the car’s passenger door. Light raked across the dilapidated shops with barred windows, the boarded-up canteens, eviscerated cars and tumbledown houses.

  Royal Bahamas Police Detective Colchester Young and his partner Angelo Morgan had worked their street sources. An angry ex-girlfriend had tipped them to their subject, hiding at his aunt’s place in Over-the-Hill.

  “He said he had to lay low,” she’d told them, then added, “he carries a gun all the time.”

  The car rolled up to a neat home with pretty flower boxes.

  In a heartbeat, Young and Morgan, armed with a crow-bar, semiautomatic pistols and a warrant, entered the house and found Whitney Wymm struggling to get up from the couch.

  Wymm reached for the gun he’d stashed under the couch, but his wrist was crushed under Morgan’s boot. Young slammed Wymm to the floor, rolled him on his stomach, put his knee in his back and cuffed him.

  Wymm was one of the top document counterfeiters in the West Indies.

  Young and Morgan had effective methods of extracting information and within an hour of his arrest, Wymm admitted that he’d created new passports for the woman in the photograph the detectives had shown him.

  Gretchen Sutsoff.

  Wymm gave them all the photos he’d used to create new passports for her in the name of Mary Anne Conrad and for the baby she had with her, William John Conrad.

  By the time the sun rose, the detectives had alerted their supervisor to the vital new information. The supervisor alerted his bosses, who saw that the update was immediately rushed through official channels to the FBI in Washington.

  The FBI passed it to the FBI Field Office in Manhattan and the New York Police Department, and it was circulated to every law enforcement officer tasked to find Gretchen Sutsoff.

  Early that morning in Manhattan, Art Wolowicz and Clive Hatcher were among the teams of NYPD detectives assigned to that aspect of the case. They were canvassing hotels when the new alert beeped on the mobile computer in their unmarked Chevy Impala.

  “A new picture and alias—this one’s a freakin’ chameleon. Where we goin’ next?” Wolowicz asked.

  Hatcher pried the lid off his takeout cup, blew on his coffee and said, “LaQuinta, then Comfort Inn, then let’s go back to the Tellwood.”

  69

  New York City

  “We’re close to Tyler, I can feel it, Jack.” Emma Lane’s concentration never strayed from Gannon’s computer monitor.

  The memory card she’d obtained from the Blue Tortoise Kids’ Hideaway held hundreds of files. Gannon and Emma continued studying them now at Gannon’s desk in the World Press Alliance headquarters.

  They’d first read the files yesterday, during their flight from Nassau.

  Tears had rolled down Emma’s face when she’d found Tyler’s case
among them. It contained his health records from his doctor and the clinic in California, Emma and Joe’s personal information, their photos, articles on their crash from the Big Cloud Gazette, even Joe’s obituary. Then separate information about “adoptive parents” Valmir and Elena Leeka, and something about Tyler’s birth parents having died in a car accident.

  “Why are they doing this?” Emma had asked over and over.

  Gannon didn’t have the answer

  Today, he zeroed in on the data related to seventy couples or families located around the world.

  “There seems to be a pattern.”

  Earlier that morning, after Gannon had brought Melody Lyon up to speed, she’d assigned other reporters to help. They’d taken the names Gannon had mined from the files and started calling New York hotels to see if any people named in the files were registered.

  In studying the files, Gannon had discovered that each case involved a small child, usually under three years old. Each case also seemed to involve an adoption through law firms or agencies in Brazil, South Africa, Eastern Europe, Malaysia, China or India. And each case involved name changes and exhaustive health records.

  In the more recent files, Gannon found that names of the “families” or “couples” had been removed or changed. But a few files contained notes about traveling to New York for the Human World Conference. Gannon had managed to pull some of those names from those files. He was reviewing them when he got a call from a WPA reporter who was helping them.

  “Jack, it’s Linwood.”

  “You get anything with those names I gave you to check?”

  “Zip.”

  “Keep checking.”

  Gannon kept poring over the files. His focus sharpened when he found one he’d overlooked. It contained two names: Joy Lee Chenoweth and Wex Taggart out of Vancouver, Canada.

  There were photos of the couple with a boy about three years old and recent notes suggesting that they would be going to the Human World Conference and staying at the Tellwood Regency Inn.

  Gannon picked up his phone and called the hotel.

  “Tellwood Regency, how may I help you?”