“I heard on the news this morning they’re going to spend $900 million to buy 60 million doses of something called MVA . . .”
“Modified Vaccinia Ankarta,” Kaplan said. “But it takes ten to fifteen years to bring a drug to market. Buy stock in Acambic Corporation, or Bavarian Nordic, out of Denmark. I’d bet you Cheney did.”
“So we have ineffective vaccines?” Scott asked.
“Let’s even suppose stocks are effective,” Kaplan said. “During the last known smallpox outbreak, in Yugoslavia, each of the first generation of victims infected about thirteen other people before they themselves were diagnosed. It took twelve to fourteen days before they became febrile. So, suppose an ordinary smallpox virus was released in the U.S. by terrorists, say in a large hotel with a thousand guests. They aerosol it into the ventilation system somehow. Now thirteen thousand second-generation carriers are created over an incubation period of the next twelve days. Though in some cases, the disease takes a form they call black pox, which kills in three to five days. So for twelve days, suppose a quarter to a third of those one thousand first-generation carriers drives or flies to other cities. The first infected person walks into a hospital or health clinic within three or four days, say, the rest straggling in later. Nobody expects smallpox anymore, so the first diagnosis might be chicken pox. Blood tests on the first patient are ordered, though until pustules form, there’s little cause for alarm. Once the pustules form, infectious disease specialists are called in. Smallpox is diagnosed. The hospital immediately quarantines the patient in a negative-pressure room with HEPA air filters and vaccinates the patient and anyone on the staff who might have been exposed. City and state health commissioners are contacted, the state medical examiner, the police, the FBI, who then try to discover and track down anybody the patient might have come in contact with. There’s an attempt to suppress news coverage of the outbreak, but then another case turns up, and another, and another. Perhaps they’re all taken to the same hospital, which would then have to be quarantined and cordoned off by police to make sure nobody tries to leave. The whole hospital. But the odds are, all the patients aren’t going to go to the same hospital. Multiple hospitals would eventually have to be quarantined.
“Okay? So now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gets involved, along with Health and Human Services and the National Security Council. The news media have to be informed. They’re asked not to sensationalize the story, but Fox News runs one of their ‘fair and balanced’ stories about how the end of the world is approaching, and the New York Post headline says, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE in hundred-point type. The president gives a news conference, saying all that could be done is being done. It’s not enough. Supplies of vaccine in the infected city would be used up within the week. And remember, it’s in more than one city. Health workers take care of themselves and their families first. Cops enforcing the law raid clinics and put doses in their pockets because nobody wants their kids to die this way. The CDC arranges for shipments from emergency reserves. Other cities refuse to give up their supplies as the federal system begins to crumble. Health-care responders, police, firefighters, and hospital staffers are vaccinated, but that just angers the ordinary citizens unable to acquire the vaccine. Within ten days, all quarantine facilities in the contamination zone are full to capacity as the number of victims exceeds isolation capabilities. Maybe healthcare workers improvise by converting armories or convention centers into quarantine facilities. Somebody’s got to stand watch, to make sure the quarantines aren’t violated. That means troops.
“The news starts reporting on plague riots in other cities where uninfected people clamor in protest, pleading to be vaccinated. Ambulance drivers, police, and health-care workers refuse to respond to reported cases. All transportation stops to prevent the spread. Airports shut down. Roadblocks go up. Chaos ensues. There’s looting, and there’s widespread panic as infected people who don’t know yet that they’re infected get in their cars, hoping to escape the contagion. Schools are quarantined and parents are told to stay away, but parents aren’t going to stay away—they’re going to go get their kids. The disease spreads. Entire cities have to be cordoned off, with soldiers shooting any citizens who refuse to obey orders or try to escape. Assuming the rate of infection remains constant, with each original victim passing the disease along to another thirteen people, after two or three generations, there will simply not be enough vaccine left, even if it could be distributed and administered, and no way to contain the epidemic, other than to isolate the city, using military power if necessary, and nothing else to do but to allow the disease to run its course through the remaining population.”
“Jesus,” Scott said.
“Wait till I get to the scary part. That’s with plain old variola major,” Kaplan said. “In best case, you get a million dead and the plague is contained within six to eight weeks. In a worst case, you get a couple hundred million dead and you never really get containment. It just kills everybody it can kill and runs out of fresh meat. And then it spreads globally. Okay? But suppose we’re talking about a new virus, a ‘DB’ or ‘Doomsday Bug.’ Weaponized smallpox. With variola major, you can actually save somebody’s life if you vaccinate them in three to five days. You can take the same virus and bioengineer it to be 100 percent fatal, 100 percent contagious, and resistant to any known vaccines—in other words, a virus that would, if released into the general public, effectively kill 100 percent of the population. I’ve also heard the term ‘EWA’ for ‘End of the World Agent.’ In DOD circles, the Doomsday Bug is considered a weapon that hasn’t been worth developing because it’s just too horrible to ever actually use. Who’d use a weapon that would destroy the user as well as the intended victim? You’d have to be crazy or suicidal. Gee—know anybody in this part of the world fitting that description?”
“And this kind of bioengineering—this is something you think the Iraqis were capable of? Gene splicing and all that?”
“Gene splicing’s not that hard. All you need’s the raw materials, the Wiley book, and a few quiet moments.”
“So how would you create a Doomsday Bug?” Scott asked.
“Interleukin-4 is a good start,” Kaplan said. “That makes it resistant to vaccines. You can speed it up, so that it’s all black pox, and make it all kill in two or three days, which lowers the amount of time between generations, so there’s less time for a carrier to pass the disease along, but that’s easy to counter if you make it even more contagious, which you might be able to do by making it smaller. Every strand of DNA has hundreds of thousands of genes they call G-DNA or Garbage DNA. Trim away the garbage and you get a lean, mean killing machine. Variola major is transmitted fomitically—fomites are substances that absorb and transport germ particles. In this case, body fluids. The virus lives in the back of the patient’s throat and is transferred every time the person exhales or coughs or sneezes. But if you want to make it truly airborne, just make it smaller, and it starts to live on the wind. It rises from the dead bodies as they bleed out and lose fluids. As a bomb, you could mix weaponized smallpox with some sort of evaporant, maybe a light oil, and fill up a water balloon and throw it into a crowd. So do I think the Iraqis could have this? They certainly could, no question.”
“UNSCOM never found anything?” Scott wanted to know.
“I think we were getting close when we got kicked out,” Kaplan said. “Saddam couldn’t develop his nukes because the Israelis and the United States kept blowing up his reactors and missile factories. Some of us figured he probably said the hell with it, I’ll build something they can’t find or blow up. We were bombing Iraq on a weekly basis throughout most of the nineties, but he wasn’t just fighting us—he had seventy-five million people next door in Iran who hated his guts and wanted to come rescue their oppressed Shiite brethren. And Iran had Scuds, and a nuclear program that nobody was bombing—yet—so he needed something to threaten them with, to keep them on their side of the mountains. Plus, I don’t think
he even really knew exactly what his own people were doing. He was so paranoid, moving from palace to palace, that he kept himself isolated from what was going on inside his own research programs. His own sons had militias and weapon stockpiles that Daddy didn’t know about.”
“And Mohammed Al-Tariq?”
“Top of the list,” Kaplan said. “I warned you about getting me started, didn’t I?”
“You warned me,” DeLuca said. Kaplan took off his glasses and cleaned them on his coat sleeve, examining them for spots in the fluorescent lights overhead. “Have you heard the story of the Alf Wajeh? I only have it secondhand, but as I understand it, it’s more or less the Muslim version of the story of the plague in the Bible. The plague comes and only the faithful, the one thousand, survive. There’s some evidence that that story might be back in play.”
“Meaning?”
“We’re anticipating multiple attacks. Possibly in the hundreds.”
“My God,” Kaplan said.
The three men were silent. Between the three of them, there was little else that could be said.
“Have a nice day,” the doctor said at last, smiling a bitter, angry smile. He took a card from his pocket and gave it to DeLuca, adding, “Keep me posted. I’ll e-mail you if I think of anything else.”
He left DeLuca alone with his son.
“I was scared when we couldn’t get a read from your transponder at Sinjar Jebel,” Scott said. “When you went into the tunnel. But I’m more scared now.”
“Where is it, by the way? My transponder?”
“It’s on your bedstand,” Scott said. “That’s how I found your room. This place is like a maze.”
“Then lock onto my signal, Scottie,” DeLuca said. “Because as long as I’m alive, this isn’t going to happen.”
“You still think you’re Superman?” Scottie asked.
“And Batman, too,” DeLuca said.
“Whatever happens, we go down swinging, right, Pops?”
“Right,” DeLuca said.
“Will you call Mom?”
“I’ll call her. I don’t know what I’ll say, but I’ll call her.”
“Why do you always think you have to know what you’re going to say before you call?” Scott said. “Just call.”
The phone rang back in Massachusetts six times before Bonnie answered. He realized his biggest fear was that she wouldn’t answer, which would mean she was out, which could mean she was sleeping with somebody else . . . It was a crazy insane jealous idea, but it was also the number-one reason why soldiers were hesitant to call home. Bonnie sounded groggy when she answered.
“Hello?” she said.
“It’s me,” he said. “I’m sorry to wake you up.”
“It’s five in the morning.”
“I know. That’s why I said I’m sorry to wake you up.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Everything’s fine. I got a mild case of whiplash when my Hummer hit a . . . goat. How about you?”
“I’m tired. I had a hard time getting to sleep. I have been for a while.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
“Bonnie, I’m sorry about everything.”
“I know you are.”
“I can’t really explain.”
“I know you can’t. Gillian dropped by and tried to tell me how important the work you’re doing is.”
“It is.”
“I’m not arguing with you. I’m sure it is. I just don’t really care anymore.”
He didn’t know what to say.
“Bonnie . . .”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s just not what I want. This is not what I want. Lying in bed talking to you at five in the morning from five thousand miles away is not what I want. And this isn’t going to change.”
“It’s going to change. As soon as . . .”
“As soon as what? As soon as the world is a safe place to live again? When is that going to be, David? Tell me so I can mark that on my calendar.”
He endured another long silence.
“I tried to call you the other night,” his wife said.
“That wasn’t a good time.”
“Well it’s never a good time, is it?”
“No, but that was really not a good time. I should have shut my phone off . . .”
“Shut it off,” she said. “I’m not calling again. I’m through. I quit. I can’t do it anymore. I just don’t have anything left for you. And don’t say you’re sorry again.”
“This Flight 1230 stuff,” he told her. “It’s nothing to worry about. It’s not an attack. It’s just the Asian flu.”
“I know. It was on the news before I went to bed.”
“I thought maybe you’d be worried.”
“I wasn’t. By the way, your young friend Kamel took six steps today. It’s going to be a long road, but they think he’s going to regain full use.”
“That’s good news. I’ll tell his uncle. But Bonnie?”
“What?”
“Just don’t have him over to the house. Okay? I’m probably just being paranoid, but it would be better if the people he’s related to didn’t know my last name or where I live.”
“Well, you’re too late. I had him over last night, for dinner. In his wheelchair. With Caroline and her daughter. I thought it would be good for him to meet somebody close to his own age.”
“Okay then,” DeLuca said. “I just didn’t want to have to worry about your safety.”
“Oh didn’t you?” she said, laughing. “You didn’t want to worry about my safety? Gee, I wonder what that might feel like . . .”
“Bonnie,” he began. He wanted to tell her to get a smallpox vaccination, but he knew he couldn’t say even that much.
“Look—do you have any better idea of when you’ll be coming home? I found an apartment but I don’t want to move in and then have to carry both the rent and the mortgage.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t tell you when I might be home. I saw Scott tonight, by the way.”
“How is he?”
“He’s great. You’d be proud of the work he’s doing.”
“Look, David, the paperwork will be waiting for you, okay? I’m assuming you’ll want to use your friend Don as your lawyer. Is that right? Because if it is, I could get things started from here.”
“Bonnie, we said we weren’t going to talk about this until I get back . . .”
“Yeah, but when will that be, David? Enough, okay? Enough. Enough. All right? Enough.”
The phone went dead.
He decided now would be a good time to up the dosage of his painkillers. He tapped the red button four times. The pain in his neck went away. The pain in his heart did not.
When he woke up again, he felt a warm hand on top of his own. He opened his eyes and saw a welcome face.
“Hello, Evelyn,” he said. He was still feeling the effects of the drugs, feeling slightly woozy and carefree, the ache in his neck a dull throb now. “How are you?”
“I’m well,” she said. “The issue is, how are you? I was talking to your friend Preacher Johnson. He gave me quite a scare. He said they didn’t know if you’d be . . .”
“Paralyzed?” DeLuca said. “If you see him again, tell him I’m going to do the cha cha on his grave. It’s just a couple of swollen disks. They say.”
“I’m so glad,” she said. “I never quite knew what it was like to share a foxhole with somebody, but it’s true what they say, isn’t it?”
“About what?”
“About sharing a foxhole.”
“What do they say?”
“Well, I don’t know, but they must say something. At any rate, I’m delighted to see you. You’re not an easy person to track down, even when you’re unconscious. I had to call old Denby and ask him a favor, and he called your friend General LeDoux, who told me to talk to your Colonel Reicken. He’s quite an idiot, isn’t he?”
“Lieutenant colonel,” DeL
uca corrected her.
“Not anymore,” Warner told him. “He was just promoted to full bird.”
“What?” DeLuca said. “Why?”
“Oh, God knows why,” she said. “I think much of the credit goes to you—you chaps have been doing so well that the man in charge gets the bump for a job well done. Isn’t that how it goes?”
“That’s how it goes,” DeLuca said. He made a decision. It was his job with CI to investigate malfeasance or corruption within the ranks, internal crimes ranging from theft to treason, and things like troops opening fire on men who were waving white flags.
“Evelyn,” he said, “you can protect your sources, right? If I were to tell you something in confidence—give you information—can you promise me it won’t get back to me?”
“For you, darling, I’d go straight to prison,” she said. “Particularly if I knew you’d come visit me there. Though that might look a bit suspicious. What is it?”
He handed her the photographs Scott had given him and explained what they were and how they’d been taken.
“You can’t print those or they’re going to know what office they came out of,” he said, “but here’s what you can do. Find a prisoner named Richard Yaakub, an Arab-American, probably still here on the base, unless he’s been transferred, and ask him if he has anything on tape regarding the raid, because he bugged Reicken’s office with a baby monitor hooked up to a voice-activated tape deck, so it’s possible. The odds are, you’re not going to get the tapes, so when you don’t, go to the JAG office and tell them about the tapes, because I’ll bet you they don’t know about them, and then leak them the photographs somehow, without them knowing it’s you? Can you do that?”
“Oh love, this is exactly what I can do,” she said. “You don’t like this fellow very much, do you?”
“I’m not doing it because I don’t like him,” DeLuca said. “I’m doing it because he’s killing people unnecessarily, and making it harder for the rest of us to do our jobs. I just don’t want to be connected because I don’t want whoever they send in to replace him to think he has to kick my ass for taking Reicken down. I have enough people who want to kick my ass as it is.”
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