Final Epidemic

by Earl Merkel

  “Explain,” HHS ordered.

  “The first death involved a limousine driver,” Krewell said, “a profession that has extensive contact with people who travel. Who gave it to the driver? Okay, we have determined the girl recently returned from a trip to Japan; if she took a limo home, maybe we’ve identified our Patient Zero—the index case, or at least the first carrier we know about. Who else did she infect? Who did the driver give it to, and did any of them get on a plane and fly somewhere else? Nothing has shown up in the WHO Weekly Epidemiological Record, but, believe it—we have to assume that these are not isolated infections.”

  “My God.” The voice belonged to an Asian woman, the assistant director of the National Institutes of Health. “The airports. This could be spreading itself around the world already.” She spoke directly to HHS. “The first step is for the President to declare an emergency. We have to inform the public, let them know what they’re facing and what to look for.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” HHS said. “Of course, we would continue to explore all additional avenues. If the President declares a national health emergency, we can—”

  “Start a national panic,” said a man Beck did not recognize. “Two cases! That’s all we have confirmed. Let’s at least wait until we get the input from the CDC team in Florida. And before we start a worldwide panic, we better confer with WHO and the National Institute for Medical Research in England.”

  “At last, a reasonable suggestion,” the senator said. “We cannot react blindly, just because—”

  A shrill electronic chirp cut through the tense atmosphere and silenced the politician. The source came from next to Beck, and for an instant all eyes looked accusingly at him.

  Then Krewell fished the cell phone from his pocket and spoke into it. His face stiffened, and when he spoke again it was in low and urgent tones.

  Finally he finished and looked at Carson.

  “That was Dr. Porter,” Krewell said, and Beck could see the ashen cast that had spread on his features. “He was on his way to the airport when a call was transferred to him. CDC has just been formally contacted by its counterpart in the Russian Federation. They’ve had eighteen people die in the past two days, six in Moscow alone. Some kind of flu, they think.”

  Chapter 6

  28,000 Feet over Central Virginia

  July 21

  The matter of how Beck found himself aboard the plane that carried Carson back to Washington was not quite clear, least of all to Beck himself. “Ordered” was too strong a word, but “asked” was too cordial to cover it, either. However it happened, it had been some time since Beck had experienced the almost sybaritic pleasure of top-level government travel.

  Beck had not changed from the clothes he had worn to Atlanta. The Air Force sergeant who had escorted Beck to his seat had been unruffled, but Beck had caught her quick appraisal of his outfit.

  “You from Iowa, Sergeant?” he asked, settling against the pearl gray leather seat back.

  “No, sir. Alabama.”

  “Should have worn my ‘Roll, Tide’ shirt, then. I save it for formal occasions.”

  He was rewarded with a quick, surprised smile before the no-nonsense expression of the professional soldier won out again.

  “Yes, sir. I wear one under my Class A uniform, myself.”

  At that moment, Carson and Larry Krewell entered the cabin. As the sergeant retreated forward, they took seats flanking Beck. Both men snapped their seat belts tight before Carson spoke.

  “It’s been a while, Beck. Dr. Krewell says you have signed on with us again.”

  “It looks that way,” Beck said. “You’d think I’d know better by now, wouldn’t you?”

  “Actually, yes,” Carson said. “When you left government service, you didn’t have much good to say about us. Though perhaps I can’t blame you, given the condition you were in.” He examined his fellow traveler with a skeptical eye. “You certainlylook fit, Beck.”

  “Thank you. I eat a lot of roughage.”

  “You no longer see the Company’s psychiatrist, I mean.”

  “I’ve left the CIA behind me,” Beck said. “Along with everything associated with it.”

  “You haven’t missed it?” Carson made an impatient gesture at Beck’s expression. “I don’t mean the fieldwork, necessarily. It was foolish to play the cowboy so often; you had to know it was inevitable that the odds would catch up to you.”

  He leaned forward, ignoring how his companion pulled back at the movement. “But the analysis, Beck. The access to so much data, to the secrets that people kill for—diefor. Taking it, piecing it into a coherent picture. In that, you were quite good indeed. Surely you miss it?”

  “Not much. I miss believing that it was worth what was expected in return.”

  Carson again studied Beck wordlessly. Then he turned to Krewell. “We meet with the President immediately; there will be a helicopter waiting at Andrews when we land. Brief him, please.”

  The craft’s turbines spun up with a vibration that penetrated even the ultraefficient noise insulation of the fuselage. Outside, Beck saw a man in Air Force coveralls, the flashlights in his hands moving as if he were conducting an orchestra. There was only a small lurch when the plane began to roll. It was a tribute to the skill of the pilot and an acknowledgment of the status of his passengers.

  “Here’s the thing, Beck,” Krewell said. “There’s no doubt now, with the Russian outbreak and the new Florida cases, that the President will declare a health emergency. Health and Human Services will be in charge, nominally; I’ve been detached from CDC to serve as liaison, coordinator, whatever. By tomorrow afternoon, we’ll have involvement from every federal office with a doctor on staff, and that’s only the domestic stuff.”

  “I know the plan, Larry; I helped draft it. What I don’t know is what you want from me.”

  “You wrote the book on riots and disruptions, ol’ buddy,” Krewell said. “With this virus on the loose, there’s a potential for plenty of both. Officially, you’ll be advising the people involved with public safety and security.”

  Beck caught the emphasis, and immediately understood. When he spoke, his voice carried a trace of wariness that made Krewell’s lips twitch.

  “And what will I be doing,” Beck asked,“unofficially ?”

  “Oh, hell,” Krewell said. “You’ve been around the block a time or two, boy. I don’t guess it’s a surprise to hear things are worse than you know.”

  “The possibility of a killer-flu pandemic isn’t bad enough, Larry?”

  “We’ve known about the Russian outbreak for almost two days, Beck. That’s when your name first came up, ol’ buddy. That’s when we started the ball rolling to bring you back inside. Good thing, given the speed this thing’s spreading at.”

  Beck’s eyes flickered for an instant at Carson, who sat impassively. Then Beck turned back to Krewell; when he spoke, his voice had a new edge to it, cold and hard.

  “What the hell’s going on, Larry? What do you want from me?”

  Krewell looked at Carson.

  “I think the ball is in your court, Billy.”

  Carson had lit a cigarette as soon as the aircraft had rotated off the runway. He drew on it, then he carefully balanced it on the rim of the saucer he was using as an ashtray. To Beck, it seemed Carson was performing a ritual, steeling himself. But when Carson finally spoke, his voice betrayed no emotion at all.

  “You’ll be looking for the source of all this,” Carson said. “You will investigate and analyze any leads or information that will help us determine the origin of this virus. As a first step, you will be working on where the first cases appeared—the Russian outbreak.”

  Beck looked at the two men. His mouth was a hard, thin line, and his silence spoke volumes. When he finally spoke, his voice was firm and final.

  “I’m not going back into Russia. Not now. Not ever.”

  “The Russians guarantee your safety,” Carson said. “We’ve received assu
rances from the highest—”

  “That’s final. You’re wasting your time.”

  “We appreciate what happened to you over there, Beck,” Krewell said, careful to keep his voice neutral. “Six weeks is a helluva long time to hold out. I don’t know if I could have lastedhalf that long. But that was theMafiya, not the Russian government—”

  “Go ahead, Larry.” Beck said. “Educate me about the difference. I spent almost two months becoming an expert on the subject, remember? It was a very hands-on curriculum.”

  “And we got you out,” Carson interrupted. “As soon as we had the opportunity.”

  “Find somebody else.”

  “I wish we could,” Carson said. “But the Russians wantyou .”

  Krewell interrupted. “Putin made the request directly to the President, Beck.”

  “Putin doesn’t know me from Adam,” Beck retorted.

  “But Alexi Malenkov does,” Krewell said. “Okay, maybe you’ve been out of circulation, Beck. But you have to have heard how fast the power structure changes over there. Malenkov’s not a field operative anymore—hasn’t been for more than a year. He’s Putin’s director of state security now, and he is heading up the Russian efforts to deal with this virus.”

  “Then he knows I’m out of the business.”

  “He’s like every other Russian spook—he sees secret plots and conspiracies everywhere he looks. Malenkov says, first off, he doesn’t believe you are retired, and second, he doesn’t give a damn even if you are. He says you’re a wunderkind, Beck—a hotshot analyst who can see through brick walls and jump buildings in a single bound.”

  Krewell grinned at the face that Beck pulled.

  “Okay, but you must have pulled somethingserious on that ol’ boy back when you were playing spy versus spy. He has Putin believing you’re some kind of genius, and Putin has the President thinking the same way. They all want you working on this. Doesn’t give you a lot of wiggle room, ol’ buddy.”

  “Even if I agreed to go—and I’m not—you need a medical expert who can—”

  “You wrote the plague analysis,” Carson interrupted flatly. “You were one of the Company’s resident experts on biological warfare. In Russia, it’s a matter of trust: we’re dealing with your old contacts—you know them, they know you. This is a matter of national survival, Beck. There is no time to waste. If somebody drops the ball because they weren’t up to speed with the people and issues involved, millions will die.”

  The national security advisor looked Beck squarely in the eyes.

  “I will not try to minimize what you went through,” he said. “But hear us out. You owe us that, at least.”

  Carson drew a thick packet from the briefcase at his feet and tossed it on the table beside Beck. On the cover was the presidential seal, and stamped across the bottom were the wordsCOROMANT /US ARMY ULTRA.

  “You’ll find the historical background in there,” Carson said. “Essentially, what we are now calling H1N1-AK—the original Spanish flu of 1918—was recovered by an Army medical expedition in 1951. In Alaska, hence the suffix. The expedition mission was to obtain any samples of a particularly virulent influenza virus. The theory was that the virus might be recoverable from corpses preserved in the permafrost.”

  “Whatever my opinion of the Army,” Beck said, “it doesn’t dig up dead Eskimos just for exercise.”

  “There was a weapons-development component,” Carson admitted reluctantly. “But, in the event, that was deemed secondary to the potential for developing new vaccines.”

  “Because CIA had just stumbled onto Stalin’s germ-warfare project,” Krewell interjected. He did not waver under Carson’s hard stare. “Let’s not pretend humanitarian motives here, Billy. Nobody in the room is a virgin.”

  Carson took a final pull on his cigarette before mashing it in the makeshift ashtray.

  “I suppose not. By coincidence, a civilian research project along much the same lines was also undertaken that year,” he continued. “In that case, they found that the bodies had been buried too close to the surface. Over the decades, there had been enough thaw-and-freeze cycles to allow at least partial decomposition of the corpses. That was certainly enough to kill any viruses, and none were found.” Carson waved a hand dismissively. “Their project was severely underfunded, and—if I may say—rather amateurish in approach. They simply did not look in the right places, and finally ran out of time and money. The Army had no such problems. It also knew to look farther north. The expedition targeted villages that had been on Army survey maps in 1906. They just had to identify those that had completely disappeared on maps drawn in 1925.”

  “The official story is that the Army mission was a failure,” Krewell said. “The Army, of course, encouraged this point of view. But in point of fact, a live virus was captured by the expedition.”

  “Did we release this thing?” Beck demanded. “Was there some kind of accident, or—”

  “No,” Carson said. “Not by us. As Dr. Porter told the group, the samples from the most recent victims show some specific, unusual genetic markers. They do not match the viral coding of the Army’s virus. That’s a definite, Beck.”

  “But we have the genetic map, the genome sequences,” Beck pressed. “You can use it to develop a vaccine.”

  “H1N1-Florida, the new one, is a not a natural mutation of the base viral codes,” Krewell said to Beck. “It is not what we call a wild virus.”

  “Not wild?” Beck repeated, puzzled. “How does a virus like this incubate if it doesn’t—”

  “It is a chimera—a genetically engineered virus,” Carson said. “Is that simple enough? H1N1-Florida was created in a laboratory, intentionally. Whoever designed it grafted other genes onto the base influenza virus—genes that are specifically intended to increase the virulence factors.”

  Beck was stunned. “It’s a weapon.”

  “Legally, a weapon of mass destruction,” Carson said. “Release of which constitutes an act of war. Well, it’s been released, and it’s been aimed at us.”

  “A bioweapon, particularly one as contagious as this one, cannot be ‘aimed’ with any degree of precision,” Krewell corrected. “The number of people infected will grow exponentially, in an ever-widening circle. Even under the most draconian quarantine measures, it is a virtual certainty that the disease ultimately will spread to the aggressor’s population. Unless those who deployed it have already developed a vaccine, it is a suicide weapon.”

  “That would be insane,” Beck said.

  “No,” Krewell interjected. “Just incomprehensible. At least, tous . At Detrick, we were under a strict standing order. No chem or bioweapon could be developed unless there was a vaccine or antidote. But other folks didn’t play that way, ol’ buddy. For example, the old Soviet program took the position that the best bioweapons were those withno cure. Hell, by the late ’eighties, they were basing new biological weapons on multi-antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, just so existing treatments would be worthless.”

  “Which might explain why the Russians are asking for assistance,” Carson said. “The fact that they have an outbreak does not automatically clear them of responsibility or guilt.”

  “Are you saying the Russians started this plague? Without developing a cure for it?”

  “What the national security advisor is saying,” said Krewell, “is that at this moment we do not have a workable vaccine. Whether we can use what we know about the original H1N1 to come up with one—” He shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know.”

  “Why the act? Why pretend this is a natural outbreak?”

  “Because the President actuallyread your report—the whole thing, not just the executive summary,” Carson snapped. “He was particularly impressed by one of your conclusions. You cited evidence indicating the more violent upheavals in the social fabric—the rioting and vigilante activities, for instance—are less likely to occur immediately in so-called natural disasters than when the cause is a deliberate enemy
action.”

  “He’s trying to buy time, Beck,” Krewell said. “At minimum, the time it will take to get troops and medical support where they’ll be needed. And to come up with some kind of viable treatment.”

  Beck shook his head. “He’ll need days just to start mobilizing, let alone—”

  “The call-up began two days ago, when CDC finally got an ID on the Florida virus,” Krewell said. “By tomorrow—day after, at latest—we’ll have units in the major urban centers. With a little luck, by the end of the week the President can declare martial law and have it mean more than just national panic.”

  “Not enough time, Larry,” Beck said. “Not with a contagious, airborne agent.”

  “That’s why we must find who is behind this, and do it quickly,” Carson said. “The Russians have been aggressively investigating since their outbreak began. Go there and assist. Your job is to find out who has declared biological war on the rest of the world. Whoever is responsible may have a vaccine.”

  “What if they do not?” demanded Beck. “What if they are madmen?”

  “Then,” Krewell said calmly, “the computer projections tell us to expect millions of people to die. Very likely, hundreds of millions.”

  Chapter 7

  Chicago, via Fort Meade, Maryland

  July 21

  The telephone rang, and eight hundred miles away one of a row of computer screens in Fort Meade, Maryland, flashed an advisory to the technician on duty. He swiveled to the proper monitor and studied the lines that scrolled across the display. His fingers tapped on the keyboard; satisfied the call was being digitally recorded on the hard disk, the technician settled back to listen in real time.

  The answering machine had no recorded salutation, instead greeting callers with a loud beep after the requisite four rings.

  “Is she there?”

  The voice was unmistakably that of a woman, and was unequivocally furious. The tech grinned in sympathy; the computer had already identified the caller’s telephone number and location, cross-referencing that information against the known profile and calling pattern of the recipient.