General Robbins had checked in, as had Burt Ehlers of DHS. Both tried to impress upon her the importance of her work to the overall effort. She was willing to stipulate to that. The big problem was that she wasn’t entirely certain what her work would comprise. Somehow, she was supposed to determine what—if anything—in the psychopathic brain structure would render psychopaths immune to the Crazy 8s virus. That part of the theory was sound—recent research had determined that the central nervous system was directly linked to the peripheral immune system through the action of meningeal lymphatic vessels, so it was possible that brain structure or chemistry could confer immunity, under certain conditions. The geniuses on tap would try to come up with a way to use that knowledge to effect a treatment or a preventive vaccine, or both. But how did you turn brain structure into a pill, or an aerosol mist that could be sprayed on the city from helicopters? And if you could alter brain structure that way, how could you do it without turning the recipients into psychopaths?
She was still puzzling over that when Jack Thurman showed up. “Everything to your satisfaction?” he asked.
“It’s great, Jack.” She swiveled her chair to face him and waved a hand as if to indicate what she was enthused over, but there was too much—it was all around her, and so she let her hand float down to her lap. “It’s a fantastic setup, but I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with it all.” As she explained her concerns, he sat wearily in a chair still enveloped in plastic shrink-wrap.
“You just worry about your end of it, Fallon,” he said when she was finished. “We’re all specialists here. Except me and Carter, and maybe Book. You have your niche, and the folks who need to figure out a way to pharmaceuticalize—is that a word?—your research will do that.”
“We’re not going to be able to go in there and give every victim an injection of something.”
“No, of course not. But we have people working on delivery, too. And we’re not even sure about the psychopath angle yet, so we’re working other, different angles at the same time. When I say we’re got some of the nation’s best minds on this, I’m not exaggerating. And you’re included in that company.”
Fallon felt her face flushing and hoped it wasn’t visible. Jack had a long career in law enforcement behind him, though. He noticed things. No way he couldn’t see her cheeks turning red, even if he was too much of a gentleman to mention it.
Well, let him notice. So she blushed when she was complimented, at least to some degree. So what? She hadn’t had much experience with it at home lately, or with being noticed at all, for that matter.
“I . . . appreciate that, Jack. I just want to be sure I can hold up my end.”
“I have no doubts. Neither do Carter and the others. I advocated bringing you in, Fallon. I know it’s a pain in the ass. I’m sorry about the way it happened and about taking you away from your family and your regular work. But it really couldn’t be more important. And there’s nobody in the field who’s better qualified than you. I assure you, your qualifications were thoroughly vetted before the decision was made. You’re here because we all think you can contribute to the success of the mission. It we didn’t, you’d be back in your lab, oblivious. Probably happier, too.”
Fallon considered. Happier? If ignorance was truly bliss, maybe. She had been brought here clumsily, abruptly, without being consulted. The thought of it still made her angry. But the stakes were such that she had to set aside selfish considerations. She was an American. She was a human being. She was a mother. Those facts required her to take action, if she could, against a scourge that could threaten both Americans and all humanity. Including her own son.
“No, I’m—and if you tell Robbins this, I’ll deny it to my dying day—I’m glad you brought me in, Jack. Sure, it’s inconvenient. And I might not feel this way if it lasts very long. But I don’t do what I do just because I’m fascinated by dark and twisty minds. I do it because I think understanding these things is good for society. If I really want to help people, I can’t just hide in the lab for the rest of my life. I have to be where I can do something concrete.”
“I’m glad you feel that way.” Thurman bit back a yawn. “Hope sleep isn’t important to you.”
“Not as long as there’s plenty of coffee.”
“Coffee we have although I won’t vouch for its quality.”
Fallon smiled. “Do you have any guess as to how long we’ll be here?”
“Not long, really. Carter’s concerned about the virus escaping the quarantine zone. We’ve got about”—he glanced at his watch—“eighty-two more hours before the bombers come in. Ninety-six-hour countdown started at six this morning.”
That rocked Fallon. Less than four days until Phoenix was obliterated by nuclear weapons. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were primitive by comparison, but they were still horrible enough to convince the world to do everything possible to avoid ever using them again. Now the United States would not only be the first country to have used atomic bombs, but also the second—and on its own citizens. The world seemed to darken around the edges, and for a moment, she was afraid she was about to faint.
“How can anything be done that fast?” she asked, her voice tight. “Much less finding a cure, manufacturing a vaccine, delivering it . . . ?”
“We don’t have to do it all. If we’re on track for a cure, Robbins will hold off. But we have to have made good progress. As for doing things fast?” He indicated their surroundings with a nod. “Did this lab exist earlier today?”
“Touché.”
“Carter Robbins is not an evil man, Fallon.” Thurman rose from his chair and paced while he talked. Fallon could see how tired he was, but also how agitated. She wondered how long it would be until she felt the same way. “He’s a worried one, and I don’t blame him. For the first few days, the city wasn’t sealed off. Once we realized the magnitude of the problem, we tracked down people who had flown out of Sky Harbor and tested them. Couldn’t find anyone who had been infected. You might have heard about the private plane that crashed in Colorado, after flying out of Phoenix. We tested those folks, the survivors and the deceased. Trace amounts of the virus’s biomarkers, but nothing dangerous. We’ve tried to trace people who left the area by bus or train, too. But that still leaves everybody who drove out, or through, who we don’t know about. We have to assume it’s already out there in the world.”
“Then what’s the point of the quarantine? Isn’t the horse already out of the barn?”
He stopped pacing and squeezed his lips together until they went white and nearly disappeared, then answered. “It’s still concentrated in the Valley. We don’t know yet if an incidental contact with an infected person will spread it the same way it has in Phoenix, but we know what it’s doing here. Containment is never a permanent solution to something like this. The longer we try to keep them in, the harder some folks will try to get out. The clock’s ticking. Getting Carter to wait another eighty-one hours and change was a struggle, and it’s hard to argue with his reasoning.”
“I hope we can come up with a better plan, then. I hate the idea of nuking the Valley, especially if it might already be too late.”
“So do we all, Fallon,” Thurman said. “So do we all.” He started for the door, then stopped and looked at his watch again. “All hands meeting in twenty, in the usual conference room. Have Specialist Briggs drive you over in about fifteen minutes.”
Then he was gone, leaving her alone with her instrumentation and her racing mind. She would have to wait awhile before firing up all her equipment. She couldn’t risk using it until she had tested it, ensuring its functionality and noting baseline measurements. This attitude—it’s a crisis, time is of the essence, so let’s have another meeting—was more what she expected from a bunch of government bureaucrats.
She wondered how long it would be until she was part o
f the problem.
CHAPTER 11
81 hours
Book stood at the end of the room, using a laptop to project a PowerPoint presentation onto a blank wall. He was wearing faded jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his wiry forearms. He knew the underarms were dark with sweat, and his mop of curly hair was all over the place, but he didn’t care. He’d been working hard, and if these people had wanted a fashion model, they’d have picked another analyst. He’d at least sworn off pocket protectors back in grad school, so they should count themselves lucky for that.
The first slide was a map of the Valley of the Sun, with rough, semiconcentric circles in different colors emanating from an area toward the right side. “I’ve been trying to map the spread of the contagion,” he said. “It’s difficult, because until people realized there was a problem, nobody was monitoring it. But I built some algorithms to backtrack from what we do know, and I think this is pretty close.”
He stood beside the projection and tapped the spot in the middle of the rings, but he caught himself before he spoke, and turned to the room.
“Dr. Johnstone,” he said, addressing the representative from the Centers for Disease Control. “You’ve said that the virus doesn’t resemble anything known to modern medical science, correct?”
“That’s right,” she said. She steepled her fingers together, her elbows on the table. “It’s not just a new strain of something we’ve already encountered. It is, as far as we can tell, an entirely new beast. That’s very unusual, as you might expect.”
“I might have an explanation for that,” Book said, turning back to the map. He put his finger on the same spot at the center of the colored circles, and held it there. “According to my calculations, the virus started right here. It’s a spot in the city of Mesa.”
“Why there? What’s significant about that spot?” General Robbins demanded.
“You remember the meteor that broke apart over Phoenix a few days ago?” Book asked.
“Of course.”
“This,” Book said, torn between an impulse toward theatrical suspense and his own pragmatic nature, “is where the biggest fragment landed. Same spot. Now, maybe that’s a coincidence, but I don’t think so.”
One of the assistant SecDefs rose halfway from his chair, his palms flat against the table. Rosy blotches marked his face. “You’re talking about pan . . . something,” he said. “That’s just a theory!”
“Panspermia,” Book agreed. “The interplanetary or interstellar transfer of organic matter. And as of now, it’s far more than a theory. I believe it’s the only explanation for what we’re up against.”
Before him, he saw several unbelieving faces. “Some people think that life on Earth came about through the mechanism of panspermia,” he said. “Traces of organic matter, caught in comets, meteors, in space dust and debris, could survive almost indefinitely in some cases, making the long trip from star to star in a state of suspended animation. Upon finally landing somewhere, though, if that somewhere is conducive to that matter, it essentially wakes up. Comes to life. There could be pockets of life throughout the universe, all spread the same way.”
“That’s a little far-fetched,” the SecDef said. The red spots on his cheeks were beginning to fade.
“More than a disease that turns people into zombies?” Fallon muttered. Book kept his smile to himself before countering the SecDef in his own way.
“No more so than any other theory,” Book said. “Including the one that says God rolled some clay between his hands to make a ball, then used a pinch more to create Adam and Eve. Regardless, the fact is we have a pandemic of unknown origin, and it emanates from the exact same spot where the biggest piece of material from outer space landed right before the virus began to spread. Sometimes two and two doesn’t make four, but there had better be a pretty compelling explanation for why it doesn’t. I can’t quite conceive of any other explanation for this.”
“Wouldn’t the virus have come from different spots around the area?” the woman from FEMA asked. “That meteor broke apart, and fragments landed all over the place.”
“Maybe it was concentrated at the meteor’s core,” Book said. “And the landing shattered the core enough to let it out. I’m not saying my theory is necessarily a hundred percent solid. There are still a lot of unknowns. I’m just saying that at this moment, it’s the best I’ve got.”
“If it’s true,” Johnstone said, “then we have to get our hands on that meteor fragment. We’ve been trying to study the virus from the sample population we’ve picked up, but in those cases, it’s already been genetically corrupted by its victims. It’s proving incredibly hard to isolate. If we can get some pure, undiluted samples, we can make a lot more progress.”
“That’s going to be tough to do,” Soledad Ramirez observed. “That big chunk landed in the City of Mesa Basin. Law enforcement got out there as fast as they could, but by the time they reached the site of impact, it was gone. We don’t know who took it, or how, or why. There were smaller bits all over the county, some of which were grabbed by souvenir seekers. Arizona State asked for samples for it to study, and got some. But those were collected by private individuals, most of whom don’t have sterile collecting equipment or experience with such things, so we’d have to consider them potentially contaminated. Anyway, ASU is inside the quarantine zone, so those samples are effectively as out of reach as the missing core.”
“If someone took it from the basin,” Ehlers asked, “wouldn’t that also be contaminated?”
“We think that piece was almost three feet in diameter,” Book replied. “If that’s the case, then the surface might be, but there could be enough material beneath the surface that hasn’t been exposed. I agree with Dr. Johnstone; getting our hands on the core is our best bet.”
“If that is the origin of the virus,” Fallon asked, “that means we’d have to confiscate every bit of the meteor, no matter how small, right? If there’s no way to know for sure how much of it contained traces of whatever bacteria caused the outbreak, we can’t leave any of it out there. Dust from the meteor breaking apart might have fallen someplace, with trace organic matter inside.”
“If we can come up with a treatment,” Dr. Johnstone said, “then such extreme measures might not be necessary.”
Thurman cleared his throat, and the others quieted down to listen. “Here’s the problem, as I see it. We don’t know where that big fragment went. We could find it, with a little time. Except that we can’t go into the zone without risking infection. We’ve never seen anything so virulent. So how can we get in to look for it?”
“Exactly,” Book agreed. “The spread of violence matches the spread of the virus, almost to a T. And it’s getting worse every minute. Even if we could get a team in there, the chance of them getting out again is pretty slim.”
“You’re right, Book,” Ramirez said. “Law enforcement inside the zone is already overwhelmed. Where they’re still alive, they’re sheltering in place, trying to defend themselves. There’s no such thing as control anymore; there’s only survival—if you’re lucky enough.”
“You have helicopters,” Fallon pointed out.
“Sure, we could send choppers in,” one of the other service secretaries said. “But they can’t land. We can’t let anybody drop down into the city. They’d be infected, or torn apart. Even with hazmat gear, until we really know what we’re dealing with and how it’s transmitted, we can’t guarantee anyone’s safety. And hazmat gear doesn’t keep an Infected from bashing in your skull. We need boots on the ground in there, but the situation doesn’t allow it.”
“I might have a way,” General Robbins put in.
Book waited, expecting him to recommend immediate bombing runs. Instead, Robbins surprised him. “I’ve got some Stryker NBCRVs on hand. For you civilians, that’s a Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Reconnaissance V
ehicle. It can go into an area where there are potential radiation or biological or chemical hazards. It’s got every kind of sensor and scrubber you can think of. It’ll carry a four-man crew—all with personal protective gear on, as well—and they’ll be able to collect samples from the inside, without ever opening the hatches. The samples are stored in secure vials, and they can be brought back here to study.”
“It’s not ideal,” Dr. Johnstone said. “But it could work.”
The assistant SecDef turned to him. “Use volunteers, Carter,” he said. “Real ones. And be sure they know what they’re getting into.”
“To the extent that I do, anyway,” Robbins said. “Yes, sir.”
Driving Fallon back to the lab, Specialist Briggs hemmed and hawed until Fallon insisted that he come out with it. “I, uhh . . . I’m gonna have to turn you over to someone else for a while,” he said.
“You mean some other soldier will be watching my every move in case I turn out to be a terrorist or something?”
“That’s not exactly the task I’ve been assigned, ma’am.”
“I’m just giving you a hard time, Specialist. Why are you dumping me?”
“I’m trained as an assistant surveyor, ma’am. That’s one of the MOSs aboard a Stryker NBCRV.”
“MOS?” she repeated.
“Military occupational specialty.”
“So you’re going to go in the quarantine zone and survey, or whatever?”
“That’s right, ma’am.”
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