The Panic Zone

by Rick Mofina

  It was them.

  He lifted his radio to his mouth.

  Gannon and Emma were not far from the Delacorte Theater when Gannon’s cell phone rang.

  “Jack, it’s Mike. We just heard on the scanner that they spotted them near West Drive not far from Seventy-ninth.”

  “We’ll head there now. Alert the photographers.”

  Gannon and Emma started running.

  Lancer and several NYPD officers bolted from the police command point on West Drive, at the Eighty-third Street level. They navigated their way through the park toward Central Park West, while above them a police helicopter rolled into position to offer support. Radios crackled with updates from the breathless detective who was now running.

  “She’s on foot on Central Park West, north of the museum. She’s moving fast, I could lose her if she gets in a cab. Goddammit, am I the only one watching her? Wake up, you guys!”

  Gannon and Emma worked their way from the park. Mike Kemp called as a chopper thudded above them.

  “Give me your location,” Kemp said.

  “Uh—” Gannon looked around quickly “—Central Park West, around Eighty-first.”

  “Okay, go south, Jack. You’re close! Keep the line open.”

  Gannon could hear Kemp crank up the scanner volume.

  At that moment, he and Emma saw a CBS news crew running to a parked news van, a reporter with a phone pressed to his ear, just ahead of a camera operator.

  Kemp was shouting in Gannon’s phone.

  “She’s crossing from the east to the west side of Central Park West!”

  As Gannon and Emma crossed to the west side and ran south, they saw flashing emergency lights several blocks away. Two parked NYPD patrol cars had swung into the street, their tires squealing as they headed north toward them.

  Closer to them but a few blocks away, Emma glimpsed a woman pushing a stroller across the traffic lanes of Central Park West.

  “I see her! I see Tyler!” Emma screamed.

  Two blocks ahead, Sutsoff, pushing the stroller, heard the sirens and saw the chopper. Her ears were ringing from the blood rush of her racing heart.

  Her medication was wearing off.

  All she needed was five minutes.

  “NYPD, freeze!”

  A man behind her was running, gaining on her. She saw the badge on a chain around his neck. Police cars were roaring toward her. She glimpsed a hotel entrance a block ahead. If she could make it, then get up the elevator in time to hide for five minutes.

  She just needed five minutes.

  “NYPD. Freeze or I’ll shoot!”

  Gannon and Emma, racing south, were a block away when they saw Sutsoff, who was approaching them, throw a look over her shoulder at the man chasing her.

  From her position, Emma saw the stroller, saw the little face of the baby strapped in it and saw the shouting cop behind Sutsoff draw his gun.

  “No! Don’t shoot!” Emma screamed.

  Emma thrust her palms out just as Sutsoff pushed the stroller into the street against the red light and the chrome grill of a ten-ton Brooklyn Gravel Service dump truck catapulted Sutsoff thirty feet, onto the windshield of a Mercedes, before she bounced into the middle of Central Park West.

  Her bag with her laptop tumbled down the street.

  The impact had clipped the stroller, sending it toddling into Central Park West traffic and into the path of the two pursuing NYPD patrol cars, their sirens wailing and lights flashing.

  Jack moved toward the stroller, but Emma, her arms, hands, reaching, was quicker, seeing the fear in the baby’s eyes as wig-wag lights and bumpers roared toward him.

  “Noooo!”

  Emma’s fingers clamped the stroller handle and pulled it to her just as the officers braked, skidding to within inches of the baby’s foot.

  The child was unharmed.

  “Tyler!”

  Emma thrust her face to his, gasping as his eyes brightened with recognition. She lifted him from the stroller, sat on the street and sobbed.

  “Mommy’s got you! I’ll never let you go, never!”

  Adhering to training and using their doors as shields, the officers put their hands on their weapons.

  “Don’t move, lady! Don’t harm the baby. My partner’s going to approach you slowly. You give her the baby.”

  “No!”

  “Lady, you have to give us the baby!”

  Gannon tried to help. “She’s the mother.”

  “Back off, sir!” one cop said, taking in the gathering crowd. “Back off, everybody!”

  Other officers took charge of the scene and one shouted into his shoulder microphone for an ambulance as the smell of burning rubber, the wail of more sirens and the hovering helicopter filled the air.

  When Lancer and the other NYPD officers arrived, Gannon pleaded to him.

  “Lancer, tell them it’s her baby!”

  Lancer held up his ID and slowly defused the situation.

  Police gathered around Sutsoff, while others rerouted traffic and sealed the scene, clearing the way for the ambulance as spectators and other reporters arrived.

  Lancer picked up Sutsoff’s bag, pulled out her laptop and took it to a patrol car. Gannon nodded to a WPA photographer to get pictures.

  “I didn’t see them,” the truck driver said. “I swear. I had the green!”

  His rig was deep into the intersection. Sutsoff was a few feet away.

  Her neck was broken, rib shards had speared her heart and she didn’t hear the paramedics working to save her. They slid an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. Her head lolled and she met the eyes of Emma Lane, rocking her baby.

  Emma stared at her.

  As Gretchen Rosamunde Sutsoff lay in a growing pool of blood staring at the sky, a warm wave rolled over her.

  Project Crucible no longer mattered to her.

  Extremus Deus no longer mattered to her.

  Gretchen was a happy little girl again flying above old London at night.

  Flying like Peter Pan and Wendy and dreaming of living in London forever with her mother, her father and little brother, Will.

  Epilogue

  Gretchen Sutsoff died before her ambulance reached the hospital.

  The first news reports indicated that there had been an attempted abduction of a baby boy at the Human World gathering when the fleeing suspect was killed in a traffic accident.

  The unharmed child had been reunited with his mother.

  What was not reported at the outset was how Dr. Foster Winfield and the experts from Project Crucible, Fort Detrick and the CDC had examined the files found in Sutsoff’s laptop and confirmed that she never activated her lethal agent. The microbe remained harmless and would pass safely through anyone’s system within twenty-four hours.

  That analysis was supported by the fact that medical staff at the event in Central Park had no reports of any serious or unusual illnesses arising from the gathering.

  In the days and weeks that followed, the Royal Bahamas Police, aided by U.S. authorities, began dismantling Sutsoff’s lab on Deus Island and the Blue Tortoise Kids’ Hideaway on Paradise Island.

  Investigations at the Golden Dawn Fertility clinic, and clinics at other locations around the world, helped police uncover the networks used by Sutsoff and her inner circle.

  All of the major players—Drake Stinson; General Dimitri, the intelligence chief; Goran, the human trafficker; Reich, the global banker and Downey, the arms dealer—had been found dead, victims of the weapon they’d helped develop.

  An autopsy performed on Sutsoff resulted in the discovery of a malignant tumor that was removed from her brain. It exhibited widespread necrosis that could have contributed to her actions.

  For all investigators, the priority remained the stolen children. They were all recovered with help from Sutsoff’s files. Medical experts examined them closely and monitored their health. Detectives around the world conducted exhaustive interviews and examinations of records, counterfeit and
forged passports and illegal adoption files, and they determined that most of the adoptions were processed by Stinson’s firm in Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian detectives, including Roberto Estralla, provided information enabling the stolen children to be reunited with their families.

  One of those reunions happened in Kunming, China.

  Late one night, local police knocked on the door of Sha Shang and Li Chen’s home. Sha was fearful of a police action but Li screamed when the officers smiled and little Pan Qin emerged.

  Li thought she was dreaming and told her husband to pinch her as she checked her boy for the birthmark on his left ankle shaped like two hearts touching, symbolizing her eternal love for her son.

  It was there.

  Li fell to her knees and crushed her son in her arms.

  Similar scenes were replayed in countries around the world where children were returned safely to their families.

  For weeks, the plot to unleash Extremus Deus Variant 1 in Central Park remained the top news story around the world. Any doubt about Jack Gannon’s skills vanished as he led the WPA’s coverage with exclusive reports that made use of Marcelo Verde’s dramatic photos of the explosion at the Café Amaldo.

  “I was dead wrong about you, Gannon.” George Wilson removed his glasses and winked. “But you know, you’re only as good as your last story.”

  Gannon wrote about Gretchen Sutsoff’s life, her genius and her descent into madness. It was the tale of a brilliant scientist who came within a heartbeat of committing one of the most devastating acts in history.

  Sutsoff was buried next to her mother, father and little brother in a small cemetery in the Virginia countryside not far from where she was born. The ceremony was arranged by a distant relative. Gannon was among the few people present. Lancer, Winfield and Kenyon were there. None of Sutsoff’s relatives were present when her coffin was lowered into the ground. The woman who wanted to erase the world was not mourned.

  Gannon never forgot the people who’d helped him. He thanked Oliver Pritchett and Sarah Kirby and everyone along the way. And in a feature about Gabriela Rosa, Marcelo Verde, Adam Corley and Maria Santo, he honored the dead.

  Gannon arranged through Roberto Estralla to send bonus money he’d received to Pedro and Fatima Santo in the Rio favela of Céu sobre Rio to set up a scholarship in the name of their murdered daughter, Maria.

  About a month after Emma and Tyler were reunited, Gannon accepted Emma’s invitation to visit them in Big Cloud.

  The three of them got into Emma’s car and headed across Wyoming’s high, rolling plains. They went to one of Emma’s favorite spots, twenty miles north of town alongside the Grizzly Tooth River. Emma had packed a lunch, and while Tyler threw pebbles into the river, she turned to Gannon.

  “The other day I was given a gift, Jack.”

  Gannon could not begin to guess what it was.

  “After we found Tyler, he was examined thoroughly by so many doctors, goodness. He’s perfectly fine, but when they double-checked his DNA they found that he’s Joe’s biological son.”

  “Really?” Gannon grinned.

  “Yes. Somehow, in all of this, a miracle happened.” Emma looked at the sky. “It means Joe is still with us, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “What about you, Jack?”

  “What about me?”

  “Ever think of settling down?”

  Gannon shrugged. “I almost got married once, to a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.”

  “What happened?”

  “Didn’t work out. I guess I’ve always been a loner.”

  “Well, you’d better watch yourself.” She smiled. “You never know what’s coming for you.”

  “You never know.”

  He smiled back, watched Tyler toddling after a butterfly, then reflected on Sutsoff and her lonely funeral. That got him thinking about how he really had no one in his life except his sister, Cora.

  But he’d lost her long ago.

  He looked toward the mountains.

  If she wasn’t dead, she was out there.

  Somewhere.

  As he considered the snow-crowned peaks he thought that maybe it was time to find her.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In crafting The Panic Zone, I was inspired in part by the public record and accounts of people subjected to experimentation without their consent. A little online research or, better yet, a pleasant visit to your local public library will yield information on chilling projects conducted, or secretly planned, throughout history. I make no claim to being a scientist or possessing any knowledge in the field and apologize to the experts among you for any technical errors or implausibility in my made-up tale. I ask you to bear in mind that The Panic Zone is not a textbook but rather a work of fiction drawn in my imagination after reaching into the darkest corners of historical fact.

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