by Earl Merkel
Fort Detrick is forty-eight miles away from the White House, as the crow flies. There was a time when any crow unwise enough to fly over the base ran a substantial chance of falling from the sky, the victim of birdshot from guns wielded by PFCs charged with keeping the skies clear of avian intruders.
This was not because of any particular malice toward crows, or birds in general. Rather, it was the fear that some random feathered interloper might become an inadvertent vector for one or another of the agents undergoing testing at the site.
The Crow Patrol is a legend of the distant past at Detrick now, ever since chemical and biological weapon development was officially ended by Richard Nixon in the late sixties. Today it is the home of USAMRIID, the Army’s infectious disease research branch. As such, Fort Detrick has been officially rehabilitated. The research there now focuses on studying antidotes, vaccines and other treatments or preventatives involving CBW. Officially, its former black arts are no longer practiced there.
Officially, they are practiced nowhere in the U.S. military.
It was late, even for a military operation, but few at Detrick had left their research stations since word of the first case in Florida.
It was almost midnight when a figure in a Class IV exposure system—the staff called them “Mr. Bubble” suits, for the obvious reason—had torn her eyes from the blue glow of a computer screen at which she had been staring intently. She clicked the mouse with an awkwardly gloved hand, toggling between two not dissimilar displays that she studied with equal intensity.
“I’ll be damned,” breathed Barbara Jones, who in addition to carrying a Ph.D. in biogenetics from Johns Hopkins was a major in the United States Army. She was “Dr. Jones” to the rare outside visitor, “Major Jones” to the enlisted personnel, and “B. J.” to her close colleagues. But never, never was she “Major Barbara.”
She reached around the controls of the electron microscope and pressed an oversized switch. Immediately, a voice rasped from the intercom speaker.
“What’s up, B. J.?”
It was the voice of the man who had, almost single-handedly, overseen the biowarfare research at Fort Detrick, Maryland, for the past three decades. For the past two and a half of them, the program’s very existence had been classified “Ultra D”—an infinity above the merely “top” secret.
“I’ve been playing around with a sample of Agent VIX,” Barbara answered.
For a moment, her supervisor was dumbstruck.
“Good God. Why are you even handling that stuff?”
B. J. screwed her face into an expression that would have been better suited to a much younger female; she did not like her work questioned, even by someone she respected as much as she did this man.
“The genome is pretty close to the killer flu. So I kind of played a hunch.”
B. J. was famous for her hunches, and wore the idiosyncrasy as a badge.
“And?”
“I think I found something,” she said, and this time her mentor heard the edge in her voice. “I think maybe I found something important.”
Chapter 24
Arlington, Virginia
July 22
Deborah Stepanovich stared at the television screen, appalled by the events of the past twenty-four hours, by the sequence of shocks that threatened now to spin completely out of control.
When she had left her law offices in the District yesterday evening, all had been well—at least, as well as they could be when one’s teenage daughter had taken French leave to a still-indeterminate location.
But Deborah had awakened today to find the capital in complete chaos. Things were still reasonably quiet here, across the river; but Deborah had decided that she wanted Katie home, immediately.
Not for the first time this morning, she wondered why Beck had not returned any of her calls from the previous afternoon. Whatever his faults or failings, Deborah did not doubt Beck’s love for his daughter. For a long moment, she eyed the telephone, debating whether to try him in Chicago one more time.
Instead, she reached for her bag and removed the Palm Pilot in which she kept her records, notes and the telephone numbers she seldom felt inclined to call.
Deborah Stepanovich squeezed the telephone handset hard enough to feel the plastic flex beneath her fingers. Had the other woman been present in the room, instead of at the other end of a long-distance connection, Deborah was sure that by now she would have throttled Carly Holmes’s mother.
“Joyce,” she said, careful to keep her voice level. “Just tell me.”
She could hear Joyce Holmes’s sigh of exasperation, and seethed silently while she waited for a response.
“Mah Gawd. Theah’ just out havin’ some fun, Debbie. Ah’m sure theah’ just fine.”
Joyce Holmes’s Southern accent was a relatively recent acquisition, Deborah realized; not too many years ago, when Katie and Carly had played on the same soccer team, Joyce’s pronunciation had been the more clipped tones that reflected her upbringing in a Cleveland suburb.
Around the time that Carly’s father had moved in with a real estate agent from Silver Springs, Joyce’s almost-severe suburban-mom persona had begun a marked evolution to that of flirtatious Southern belle. Now she sounded as if she had never ventured north of the Mason-Dixon line and that her worst fear was the dreaded return of Sherman’s raiders.
There was more rustling, as if quantities of paper were being riffled near the distant mouthpiece.
“Heah it is. Carly’s using mah American Express—they send the bill right to her father, thank Gawd. Still and all, Ah just don’t know about givin’ out the numbers to justanybody, Debbie.”
Joyce paused, and in the loaded silence Deborah envisioned a cat lazily toying with a fieldmouse. This time, Deborah could hear the handset creak with the intensity of her own grip. She forced herself not to speak.
“Oh, well—seein’ it’syou, darlin’.” Joyce Holmes read off the credit card numbers, and added, “Now, don’t you go shoppin’ with mah card numbers, heah?” The giggle made Deborah’s skin crawl. “Course, I’m jokin’ with you, Debbie. Say hi to the girls for me, ’kay?”
Deborah was still livid by the time she got through to American Express, negotiating through the electronic menu until she reached a live operator. She bullied her way to a supervisor, then another; over the next quarter hour, she had been bumped in slow sequence again and again to whoever was next highest in the Amex pecking order.
She had lost track of names and titles by the time she reached what she sensed was her last hope. The voice was female and sounded both competent and unbending.
“Ms. Stepanovich, surely you understand that we cannot—”
“Look,” Deborah said, and was surprised to hear her own voice sound reasonable. “I don’t want you to violate any laws. I don’t want any personal or confidential information on this account. All I want to know is where the card was last used, and how long ago.”
She took a deep breath and played her last card.
“You know about this flu out there: I am just trying to find my daughter. She’s fifteen. Please help me.”
There was a momentary hesitation, and with a sudden sinking in her stomach, Deborah knew her appeal had failed.
Then the voice spoke, in a tone crisp and professional. “Hold, please.” A pause. “That card was last used—Island Resort Properties, apparently a motel . . . yes. Two days ago. In”—there was a sudden hesitation, as if the speaker had been taken aback—“in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.”
“Florida,” Deborah repeated, her throat suddenly tight and dry.
For a moment, the fear rose within her and she could not speak.
“Hello? Are you still on the line?”
Deborah shook herself. “Yes. Thank you very much.”
“Please don’t mention it,” the voice said, then dropped to a conspiratorial level. “Toanybody, if you catch my drift. My prayers are with you; I’ve got a teenager too.”
Chapter
25
Washington, D.C.
July 22
In retrospect, Larry Krewell realized, it had been foolish to expect that New York City would be any better prepared to deal with a biological attack than anywhere else in the country—indeed, in the rest of the world.
It was not, despite the millions that had been spent on training and drills and equipment. Not even the imposition of martial law made a difference. A trooper could shoot a rioter, perhaps; but no number of soldiers could impose its will on a lethal, untreatable microbe driven by an almost supernatural impulse to spread.
Less than an hour before, a Coast Guard helicopter had swept down upon a boat that had ignored repeated hailing calls to heave to for boarding. It had sped on heedlessly, until a Coast Guard marksman had fired a single three-round burst from his M-14 into the bridge, then stitched a longer burst along the deck that silenced the boat’s engines. The helicopter circled overhead until the Zodiac arrived with a boarding party, each member of which wore the full exposure suit that had been, only that morning, ordered mandatory in such circumstances. Three hooded and goggled Coast Guardsmen clambered aboard, one tripping awkwardly against the first of two bodies they would find in the cruiser’s cockpit.
AsCorazón wallowed in the waves, a red-and-white can skittered back and forth across the blood-slick decking. It was ignored initially by the Coast Guardsmen, until one picked it up in his gloved hand, half intending to pitch it overboard. Inside his mask, he did a double take. Then he dropped the canister as if it were white-hot, and he pawed at the microphone clipped against his rubberized tunic.
The cargo found on boardCorazón was ominous in its implications. Neither Krewell nor General S. V. “Swede” Brandt, the Army brigadier who had set up command headquarters at One Police Plaza, held any doubt as to what the opened canister had contained; few soup cans come from the factory complete with a pressurized atomizing apparatus inside.
Though New York City was already under martial law, civilian government remained in charge, albeit unofficially, of everything not directly related to administering troops on the city’s streets. That included public health, and it took Krewell less than two minutes to get his counterpart in the New York City Department of Health patched into the emergency conference call. In turn, that municipal official had insisted on adding one more participant to the discussion.
Now there was a momentary burst of crackling static, followed by a voice Krewell recognized from newscasts. Almost immediately, Krewell found himself metaphorically nose-to-nose with the city’s mayor, an intense and demanding personage who was obviously unaccustomed to the desperation he now found his city facing.
The news Krewell delivered left the mayor at first stunned, then infuriated.
“So what thehell is supposed to happen now?” demanded the mayor, an angry and disembodied voice that crackled from Krewell’s speaker phone. “You expect me to seal off the southern tip of Manhattan? It’s too late. How many of those people do you think are still there? They went back to work, or took a cab to some other part of the city.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Mayor.” Swede Brandt’s tones were firm, measured. “It is no longer your decision to make.”
The speaker box went silent for a moment.
“Jesus, this is a nightmare.”
Krewell forced himself to stay calm. No drills, no academic course of study could have prepared a normal human being for the situation they all faced. Larry felt sympathy for the New York mayor: the man was a former prosecutor, and a tough-minded one at that. He had used the same approach as mayor, and was credited with spurring a renaissance in the city’s quality of life.
But nothing in his experience could have been adequate preparation for the single harsh reality of biological terrorism. The concept was, under most circumstances, unthinkable: triage, on a massive scale. Those who could be saved had to be identified and selected; the others written off, coldly and deliberately. After a bioweapon had been deployed at a target like New York City, the question was no longer how toprevent deaths—widespread mortality had already become inevitable. Instead, the question became who must be left to die, so that others may live.
In Russia, Krewell knew, Putin had understood that truth instinctively; he had acted ruthlessly, but with a cold-blooded pragmatism. Not so in New York; its officials were still thinking of how to save everybody, and that was impossible.
Krewell understood.
Most people don’t think that way,he told himself.Firemen run into buildings because they need to believe they can save everybody. Well, this time they can’t. The fire is about to burn very brightly in New York City.
“We will proceed on the assumption that the virus has now contaminated an initial core group in New York City.” In contrast to the mayor’s, Brandt’s tone was unemotional. He could have been reading from a printed card. “Pending orders from the Joint Chiefs, I will—”
“Damnit, General. Dr. Krewell, you don’t even know what was in those cans.”
Krewell hardened his voice. “You’re right, Mr. Mayor,” he said. “We won’t have confirmation from the lab for another five hours, at best. By that time, the majority of the people who were standing downwind on that shoreline will have infected whoever they’ve been in contact with. And those people will be incubating their own virus load, passing it to others.”
“So what the hell do I do?”
“Mr. Mayor, we are still developing a. . .proactive course of action,” Krewell said, wondering how much of his implied optimism either Brandt or the city official actually believed. “But the immediate response has to be containment. Slow down any spread of contagion for as long as possible.”
“The city is already quarantined,” the mayor said. “Your people havetanks blocking the bridges and tunnels, for God’s sake.”
“I’d suggest you clear the streets,” Krewell said. “The less contact people have with others, the less their chance for immediate infection with the virus.”
The mayor’s voice was harsh and scornful. “A curfew,” he said. “We have rioting in all five boroughs, and you think you can impose a curfew. What—you expect that I can just get on a bullhorn and convince people to go home?”
“We can order the streets cleared, Dr. Krewell,” Swede Brandt said, ignoring the mayor. “Get everybody inside. Make certain nothing moves on the streets—no cars, buses, trains. I have sufficient assets in troops and helicopter gunships to enforce this order—at least, throughout most of the area of operation. But I must be authorized to employ lethal force.” Both men knew that was a presidential decision, but one that had already been tacitly made, if not yet officially communicated.
“I concur, General,” Krewell said.
“You’re threatening to gun people down?” The mayor’s voice was accusatory. “On the streets of New York?”
Krewell bit off the obvious rejoinder. “Mr. Mayor, all I can do is give you my advice as an epidemiologist,” Krewell said. “My belief is that your city now has been exposed to this virus. Until a treatment strategy has been developed, the only option is to slow the spread of the contagion. By whatever means necessary.”
“Like the Russians did?” The mayor’s voice was furious. “Is that what’s next? This is still the United States of America. This isNew York City, man!”
“Yes, Mr. Mayor,” Krewell heard himself saying. “But right now, it’s also under attack. You’re standing on a battlefield, at ground zero.”
“God help you if you’re wrong.”
“No, sir,” Brandt’s voice corrected the mayor. “God help us if he’s right.”
Day Three:
July 23
Chapter 26
Columbia Falls, Montana
July 23
They had streaked west for another two hours, passing high above the Continental Divide; had it been daylight, Beck knew, the awesome brown and white spine of the Rockies would have stretched past the horizon on either side. Instead, only the occasi
onal twinkling of mountain hamlets marked where the ground began.
Beck forced himself to read the thick sheaf of briefing documents Andi had provided, burying himself in the details of the American fringe groups who had been tracked and monitored as potential domestic security threats. The specifics of the various Montana militia organizations alone comprised almost sixty single-spaced sheets.
For almost a decade, the trend line of violence had been rising on an ever-steeper slope, though much of it had occurred below the radar scope of the general public. Many Americans believed that the tragic events of September 11, 2001, had constituted the climax of terrorism on U.S. soil. It had not, as the litany of antigovernment conspiracies through which Beck was plowing showed vividly; it had been only the most dramatic, at least thus far. Since then, several hundred major bombing or other terror plots—generally unknown to the public at large—had been shortstopped by the intensive efforts of the FBI and other police agencies throughout the United States.
It had become a savage game of odds and numbers, Beck realized. Even in the most draconian police state, no government could stymie every terror plot; the difficulty was a magnitude harder in a democracy that protected the constitutional rights of even the most cold-blooded criminal.
Inevitably, the statistics dictated, terrorists would slip past the cordon of American law enforcement and win another one.
As they had now,Beck thought—and was surprised at the warning light that flashed deep inside his mind.
Almost against his will, he felt his mind shift into a pattern that had once been familiar—one segment of his intellect logically analyzing, calculating, assessing the matter at hand; in the background, another simultaneously churned like a computer multitasking, more ethereal and far more subject to flashes of deductive insight that always seemed outside his command.
After his own experiences as a prisoner, Beck had learned firsthand not to trust the fruit of any interrogation based on torture. But as a paranoid sometimes has real enemies, sometimes a torture victim tells the real truth in lieu of merely what he thinks the torturer wants to hear. The Aum had tried both chemical and biological terrorism in the past; they had joined in a ritual suicide, among cults typically an act of final defiance, contempt and oblivion.