The Deep Zone: A Novel

by James M. Tabor

  “Hundreds of thousands of people die every year from bacterial infections we can no longer treat. In the U.S. alone. Other places, the numbers are … appalling.”

  “Hundreds of thousands of reported deaths. The true total is much higher, isn’t it?”

  “Of course. Did renal failure or hospital-acquired infection kill Mr. Jones? One checkmark in a different box on a report. An easy choice for dirty hospitals. Which most are.”

  “And your facility—BARDA—is trying to produce an entirely new family of antibiotics.”

  “Among other projects. But yes, that is one main thrust of the work.”

  Mr. Adelheid smoothed his ascot. How old was the man? The visitor could not say with any certainty. Forty or sixty. His skin was smooth, eyes bright, movements lithe. But there was something ancient about him, Sphinx-like, an inscrutable repose.

  “Consider this. The new currency of power is information,” Mr. Adelheid said.

  “Really?” The Laphroaig and the wine were making him bolder. “So given the choice between a ton of gold and a terabyte of information, you’d take the terabyte?”

  “On the surface, an easy choice. A ton of gold today is worth $45 million. No paltry sum. But: what if you have golden information? Do you have any idea how much money has been made from Dr. Waksman’s antibiotics?”

  “Billions, I would guess.”

  “Trillions.”

  “Don’t you have politicians who can help you?”

  “Of course we have politicians. And others. But no one like you.”

  “So what do you need, exactly?”

  “Exactly? At this very moment? Nothing. But there will come a time. Very soon, we think.”

  Keeping his eyes on the table, he said, “You want me to be a spy.”

  Mr. Adelheid made a sound as if clearing something unpleasant from his throat. “Spies make death. Our wish is not to take lives but to save them.”

  “For a profit.”

  “Of course for a profit.” His tone suggested that any alternative would be irrational, like living without breathing. “What are millions of human lives worth?”

  “Priceless.”

  Mr. Adelheid regarded him in silence for a moment. “You know of Reinhold Messner? The great mountaineer?”

  “I know he climbed Mount Everest solo.”

  “And without oxygen. In Europe, a god. Messner said, ‘From such places you do not return unchanged.’ ”

  “I don’t climb.”

  “Mountains are not the only realms from which we may not return unchanged.”

  Mr. Adelheid reached into his blazer, produced a slip of green paper the size of a playing card. He slid it to the middle of the table. A deposit ticket from Grand Cayman National Bank for Fifty thousand and 00/100 dollars, payable not to a name but to an eleven-digit alphanumeric sequence.

  “An appreciation for the pleasure of your company this evening. You need only the PIN. Which I will give you.”

  “For doing what?”

  “For joining me tonight.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars for a few hours?”

  “Of course.”

  It was dizzying, but another question had to be asked. “How much for doing the … observing you mentioned?”

  Mr. Adelheid named a figure that made his heart jump. For a moment the room blurred and sang like a plucked string. He put his hand on the table, a few inches away from the green slip. Thoughts skittered in his head.

  So this is how it feels. He watched as his hand, possessed, slid toward the green paper.

  “I urge you to think carefully.” Mr. Adelheid’s voice made a strange echo in the chamber. Or was it the whiskey and wine? “This threshold, like Messner’s realm, is one you cannot recross. Be certain.”

  It came out, quick and harsh, as though he had been waiting most of his life to tell someone. “I have a doctorate from a good university. Nineteen years of government service. I make eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and seventy-six dollars a year. I have been passed over for promotion three times. I do not want to die having had only this life.”

  Mr. Adelheid regarded him thoughtfully. “And there was that unfortunate business with your wife. Forgive me: former wife.”

  So he knows. Of course. He would know everything. He bit off each word: “Yes. The ‘unfortunate incident.’ ”

  It had been nine years, but like a gangrenous wound, this one would never heal; in fact, like such a wound, it seemed to grow deeper and more foul as time passed. Even Mr. Adelheid’s veiled reference made his rage flare. And not just rage. A hot and breathless shame for the losses—and for being one who’d lost the great things.

  Mr. Adelheid said, “It was unfortunate. She strayed. And yet—”

  “—and yet her lawyers took everything. The house, our savings, the antiques … our dogs.”

  “The Airedales, yes. And it goes on.”

  “Oh, yes. On and on. Do you know, after she left me, I had to move into a condominium”—he said the word as though it were an obscenity—“in one of those subdivisions with hundreds of them, all identical, lined up. It could be Bulgaria. Every morning I drive from there to BARDA, walk the same two hundred and nineteen steps to the laboratory, and at the end of each day I walk the other way. Week after month after year. That does something to a man.” He paused for breath, aware that he had not spoken to anyone like this for longer than he could remember.

  “I am so sorry.” There was something like sympathy in Mr. Adelheid’s voice.

  The guest’s fingertips lifted, extended, dropped down on the edge of the deposit slip. His chest felt like thin blown glass. A red spot, wine he had spilled, stained the linen beside his hand.

  He put the ticket into his shirt pocket.

  Mr. Adelheid lifted his wine glass for a toast. “Welcome.”

  “Thank you.” They drank.

  As his latest swallow surged through him, he felt empowered. “You know who I work for. Am I permitted to ask who you work for? My guess would be BioChem.” The largest pharmaceutical, headquartered in Zurich, operating in every developed country and many undeveloped ones.

  “No. Nor any other pharmaceutical concern. Are you familiar with the Dutch East India Company?”

  “I know that it raped Asian countries for centuries.”

  “No. It was the world’s first multinational corporation, and the first to issue stock. A government unto itself, with global reach.”

  “The Dutch East India Company became corrupt and collapsed.”

  “As do all empires.”

  “What I meant was, you can’t be working for the Dutch East India Company.”

  “A descendant.”

  The waiter brought balloon snifters of cognac. Mr. Adelheid sniffed, drank, smiled with closed eyes, a bliss like lovemaking.

  “I wasn’t aware it spawned any.”

  “A little knowledge can be dangerous. Too much can be fatal. I can tell you that the object of our present discussion has no headquarters, no corporate papers, no employees. Only members and friends.”

  “Are you talking about some kind of international cabal? Freemasons, Templars, that kind of thing?”

  A barked laugh. “God, no.” Mr. Adelheid paused, considered. “Think of an enormous, invisible web. If you touch it even lightly the whole web shivers.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “I could give you many. Cancer is to our era as infectious disease was to the last. One in three persons alive will contract cancer of some kind.”

  “Yes.”

  “There is a cancer vaccine, though.”

  “What?”

  “Oh yes. Almost nine years now.”

  “Can’t be. The government would not allow that.”

  Mr. Adelheid laughed and the candle flames shivered.

  “The government has nothing to do with it. The government houses the lowest common denominators of our species.”

  “Why?” He already knew the answer, but the
question asked itself. Mr. Adelheid frowned.

  “Healthy people do not buy pharmaceuticals.”

  A fellow worker, killed by brain cancer, had taken a medicine called Orbitrex. Thirteen hundred dollars for six small blue pills. Every week. For months.

  He knew that what his host was describing was wrong, but in this moment he could believe that it did not compare to the greater wrongs life had inflicted upon him. And there still existed in him a deep, silent place where all things rang one of two ways. Mr. Adelheid’s words rang true. Really, he had always known, or at least suspected. But how could you keep going and not bury that deeper still? There was no other way.

  “So we near the end of our evening together.” Mr. Adelheid stood and came to him and they clasped hands again. This time, Mr. Adelheid locked eyes and held his hand and forearm in an astonishing grip, like a tourniquet tightening.

  “So pleased. More than you can know. Before you depart, I would like to show you the house. A historic place, truly fascinating. More cognac?”

  “No. But thank you.”

  “Very well.” They walked into the hallway, as dimly lit as the huge room they had just left, and then toward the rear of the house. At the end of that hall they turned right, into another. The passages and chambers were draped in black crepe shadows. Mr. Adelheid held a cigar that trailed blue smoke. When did he light that? The visitor could not remember. Mr. Adelheid drew on the cigar and its tip flared red. They walked and walked, along halls and through rooms, passing many closed doors. At last through one whose hinges squealed and down a narrow, creaking stairway, poorly lit, into darkness from which rose odors of damp earth and stone and decay.

  He followed the red coal of Mr. Adelheid’s cigar as if it were a beacon, down one dirt-floored passageway after another, turning corner after corner, and for the first time began to feel afraid. The surface underfoot was rough, and he had to take care not to stumble. Every so often he stooped beneath massive beams.

  Mr. Adelheid stopped by a door five feet high, thick, rough-hewn. He could not stop thinking of spiders and snakes. Cellars always did that to him, and this cellar … Mr. Adelheid pushed the heavy door open and ducked into the room. He followed. There were no electric lights. Candles burned in rusting sconces. Massive iron rings, affixed to walls and ceiling, scabbed with brown rust. The smell in the room was stomach-turning, heavy with filth and mold.

  The stone floor sloped down toward a central drain. Mr. Adelheid walked to the drain, drew on his cigar. The tip flared red. There was the buzzing of the fly again, louder now, closer to him. For an instant he thought that he might have felt the brush of tiny wings on his lip, but he saw nothing in the gloom. He could not take his eyes off the drain.

  “In rooms like this, Captain Sadler took his pleasure. An underground passage led to the Potomac. Still does. Bodies were carted down and consigned to the river, which carried them to the sea.”

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “You know why. This is a very serious thing, this new realm you now inhabit. Caveat venditor.”

  Let the seller beware.

  Mr. Adelheid glanced around the chamber one last time. “Remarkable place, isn’t it? The kind from which you do not emerge unchanged. Nor ever forget.”

  Upstairs again, they walked to the front door, which began to open as they approached.

  “One more thing you should know.” Mr. Adelheid drew on his cigar, peered through blue smoke. “You will have company at BARDA.”

  “You mean other … observers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doing the same thing I am?”

  Mr. Adelheid tilted his head, exhaled smoke. “Enough to know that they are there.”

  Observing, he thought. Observing me. Is that what he means?

  He needed to know something. “How do you find … people like me?”

  Mr. Adelheid drew a red line in the air with his glowing cigar tip. “You find us.”

  “But I never did anything. You reached out to me first.”

  “We have done this for a very long time, and we are exceedingly patient,” Mr. Adelheid said. “Not unlike you scientists. A few unguarded words. An indiscreet letter. Financial transactions of a certain kind. These and other things.”

  The word came to him: “Signals.”

  “Indeed. And the strongest signals are those of distress.”

  Like a moth caught in a web, he thought.

  “Adou will drive you back. You will hear from me. For now, go and live the days of your life.” Mr. Adelheid disappeared into the mansion.

  The guest stepped out onto the porch and almost bumped into Adou. The place had been ablaze with light when he arrived, but now the porch was as dark as the deck of a slaver on a black Atlantic night.

  He could just discern Adou’s outline, shadow against dark. Then a lighter clicked and Adou touched fire to the tip of his cigarette. He had taken off the sunglasses. One empty, ragged eye socket flared red in the yellow flame.

  “Come.” It did not sound like a request this time. Adou moved off, as sure-footed as a midnight cat. He came behind, stumbling into the darkness.

  THE BULLET HIT FATHER WYMAN BEFORE HE HEARD THE AK-47 report. No surprise, that. Haji’s AK rounds traveled a mile in two seconds, way ahead of their sound. You never heard the one with your name on it. So to Father Wyman’s way of thinking, only fools and ground pounders ducked and flinched in firefights. When they were Oscar Mike, he stood tall in his up-armored Humvee turret, head on a swivel, hands on his fifty-cal’s oak, cigar-shaped grips, thumbs on the butterfly trigger.

  Father Wyman was not a priest. He was a heartland patriot less than three years out of high school, but he loved to read his Bible and to hold prayer meetings for the other troopers, so that was what the men in Viper Company at Combat Outpost (COP) Terok had taken to calling him. Wyman’s was not a foxhole conversion. He’d inherited from his father and mother an unshakable belief in the Book’s literal truth. It was not an ancient tome of mystic parable, but practical wisdom by which they lived their lives, day by day. They trusted it as farmers trusted their land and wealthy people their money. They read it more often than newspapers. They had no faith in soiled politicians and godless scientists. Anyone with eyes to see and a mortal soul knew that the Bible had survived centuries of sin and dark horror to bring them light. Why would God have saved it for them otherwise? When they touched their Bible, opened it, read from it, its power was as real as wind and fire.

  Wyman was as big as he was devout, six-three and 210 pounds. His machine gun was bolted to a wheeled carriage that rolled around the circular track of his Humvee mount, so he could easily man the gun one-handed. He had seen the muzzle flash two hundred meters out. The haji fired—a good shot, considering the AK-47’s notorious inaccuracy—and dropped down behind a washing machine–sized boulder, no doubt thinking himself safe.

  Too bad for you, Mr. Haji. Viper Company was equipped with “Badass”—that was what they called the new boomerang anti-sniper detection system (BADS), which used passive acoustic detection and computer-signal processing to locate a shooter with pinpoint accuracy. Badass’s developers, like those who created audible aircraft-crew cockpit warnings, knew that the male brain responded best to a female voice. So, while he was still running on adrenaline, in his earpiece Father Wyman heard a sultry young woman say, “Target bearing one-nine-one. Range two-zero-seven.”

  When he turned in that general direction, a bright red dot appeared on a particular boulder, two football fields distant, in the image in his monocular eyepiece. The red dot remained on that boulder no matter which way Father Wyman turned his head. A yellow dot representing his aim point, with computer-calculated elevation and windage adjustments, also appeared in the eyepiece. When the yellow dot merged with the red, a green dot appeared and the woman’s voice breathed, “Target acquired,” followed by a soft, continuous tone.

  Father Wyman loved the fifty-cal because it was more light cannon than machine gun
. It could reach out and touch at two hundred meters, no problem. Wyman depressed the trigger twice with his good thumb and the gun bucked. He felt the detonation of each round, the blasts milliseconds apart.

  BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM. That one blew apart the boulder.

  BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM. That one blew apart the sniper.

  “Scratch one haj …” Wyman said, but then the adrenaline ran out. White-faced, with his shoulder squirting blood, Wyman dropped out of the turret and collapsed on the Humvee’s floor.

  DeAengelo “Angel” Washington was a Crip from South-Central, but he had been born again, was just as Bible-struck as Wyman, and the two had grown as close as brothers. Angel had been riding shotgun with his SAW—squad automatic weapon—up front. He jumped back, pulled Wyman’s body armor off, stuck a tampon in the tubular wound, pushed three ampicillin caps into Wyman’s mouth, and gave him water.

  “That hurt, dog?” Angel was holding Wyman in his arms. Wyman was big, but Angel was built like Mike Tyson.

  “Not too much.” Smiling, voice soft, dreamy. “I get him?”

  “You got the mother. Dog meat now.”

  Angel turned and screamed “MEDEVAC!” at the Humvee driver, Corporal Dorr, a quiet young soldier from Arkansas, who was staring back at them, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. “CALL MEDEVAC, DOORKNOB, YOU DUMB CRACKER, ’FORE I SHOVE MY KA-BAR THROUGH YOUR EARHOLE!”

  Wyman and Washington were paratroopers of Viper Company, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment. COP Terok sat high on one side of a steep, twelve-hundred-meter mountain overlooking Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. The Korengal River flowed through the valley’s green floor, throwing silver loops around yellow fields of wheat, disappearing into the blue distance. Early in the mornings, white clouds curled around the black mountain’s flanks and hid the valley floor completely, and at such times Wyman and Washington agreed it was so lovely and peaceful that it could have been heaven. But this was perishable heaven, and by 0800 hours sun seared away those clouds, uncovering a valley of death laced with infiltration routes for veteran fighters from Pakistan.

  Just after noon, orderlies rolled Wyman on a gurney into Terok’s medical unit. He looked pale and spooky-eyed, but he was conscious and holding a black pocket Bible on his chest with his good hand.