by Tom Clancy
“Not much, I’m afraid. If there are cenote-like caves in the area, they are not listed, and they don’t show up on satellite. Sorry, Sam.”
“If there’s something there, I’ll find it,” Fisher said.
* * *
The path led him away from the WHCP Headquarters building and deeper into the forest, winding northwest toward Lake Victoria. The terrain steadily lost elevation, and the forest slowly turned more junglelike. On either side of the trail, the ground appeared spongy, and soon Fisher heard the croaking of frogs.
After an hour’s walk, he stopped and studied the GPS’s screen. This was the area. He was a quarter mile from the lakeshore. He turned his body, checking each of the cardinal directions, until he was oriented, then pulled Jimiyu’s machete from his belt, stepped off the trail, and started hacking.
Twenty minutes later, he emerged from the trees and found himself facing a craggy rock wall entwined with vines and dotted with pockets of bright red flowers. He craned his neck upward. The wall, only ten feet high, was topped by a berm of shrubs. He climbed to the top, then boosted himself over the lip, wriggled through the foliage, and found himself lying on a narrow stone shelf. Across from him, six feet away, was a matching shelf, and between the two, a ten-foot-wide crevice. Fisher peered over the edge. The crevice dropped away into darkness. He picked up a stone and dropped it in. A second later he heard a faint splash.
* * *
Ten minutes later, with a few essential items transferred from his Granite Gear to his waist pack, he secured the rope to a nearby tree, rigged his rappelling harness, and started down the crevice. After twenty feet the light dimmed enough that he flipped on his headlamp. The walls were comprised of jagged, volcanic rock mottled gray brown by lichen and molds. Above, the mouth of the crevice was a sun-filled slash through which Fisher could see overhanging branches. As his hand bumped over the thirty-foot knot in the rope, he stopped and sniffed the air. Water. Stagnant water. Somewhere below he heard dripping, echoing through a larger space. His heart rate increased. Then at fifty feet, with only ten feet of rope remaining, his groping foot plunged into water. Carefully, a few inches at a time, he lowered himself until his feet touched solid stone. The water, surprisingly cold, came up to his knees.
He unraveled the rope from the descender ring, then shined his headlamp left, down the length of the crevice, then right. He saw nothing but darkness. Which way? He thought.
He tossed a mental coin: heads for right; tails, left. Right.
He set out.
* * *
After fifty feet he bumped into a solid wall. The water here was hip-deep. He felt a slight current swirling around his thighs, so he scooted down until he was kneeling, then probed the wall with his right hand. At the bottom of the crevice where it met the wall, he found a jagged plate-size hole through which cold water was gushing.
He reversed course. Ten feet past his dangling rope the crevice walls began narrowing, and soon he was pressed flat against the rock, his face turned to the side as he shuffled along.
He stopped. Ahead, he could hear the distant splattering of water on rock. He pressed on, stepping and sliding, stepping and sliding.
His left foot plunged into open space.
He jerked back and went still, his heart pounding.
He stepped left again, foot probing, until he found the opening again. He probed with the toe of his boot until he’d circumscribed the opening. It was a fissure, two feet wide, beginning just below the surface of the water and dropping vertically through the rock floor. He stepped left until he was straddling the slash and pressed his back against the wall. He had a decision to make. He had no idea how far this main crevice extended or what might lie ahead. He pulled the GPS unit off his belt and checked the screen: According to the extrapolation buffer, he was precisely on top of the coordinates, but with a margin of error of six to eight feet horizontally and who knew how much vertically, this fissure could be what he was looking for, or it could be nothing at all.
Then he saw it. Jutting from a quarter-inch crack in the wall before his eyes was a rock screw — a rock screw identical to the ones he’d seen aboard the Sunstar.
* * *
He pulled the twenty-foot coil of emergency 7mm climbing line from his waist pack, looped it through the rock screw’s eyelet, tied it off with a modified clove hitch, then grabbed the rope with both hands and lifted his feet off the ground. The screw held.
Fisher didn’t give himself time to think, didn’t give himself time to fully acknowledge that tingle of fear in his belly, but rather stuck both feet through the fissure and began lowering himself. When the water reached his chin, he took a deep breath, ducked under the surface, and began forcing his way through the opening, wriggling his legs, then his torso, and finally his shoulders until at last he slid through and suddenly found himself hanging in the open air.
He looked up. From this angle the fissure was shaped like a jagged, narrow triangle and through the opening he could see diffused sunlight. Water poured through, crashing over his head and shoulders before plunging into the darkness and spattering against unseen rocks below.
Fisher extended his legs and felt his boots touch rock. He kicked off, swung out from under the waterfall, then glanced down. Ten feet down, his headlamp illuminated a flat shelf of rock off which the water was splashing. He lowered himself to it, then sidestepped left, out from under the waterfall, and looked around. Off the side of the shelf was a natural switchback stone staircase, worn smooth by millennia of water. At the bottom was a pool, roughly oval, and measuring twenty feet by twenty feet, and across from this a gravel beach that backed up to a sheer rock wall.
There was something different about the wall, Fisher realized. Unlike the rest of the cave and the crevice above, this wall was not mottled with brownish gray lichen but covered from top to bottom in a scabrous red growth.
Fisher felt the skin on his arms and on the back of his neck tingle with goose bumps. And then, for reasons he’d never quite be able to explain, four words from Peter’s mystery note popped into his head: “Red… tri… my… cota.”
34
CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Fisher sat sipping coffee in one of the leather club chairs beneath the windows and watched as the attendees, looking frustrated and haggard, wandered back into the room one by one and retook their seats at the conference table. The first hour of the meeting had been little more than a circuitous debate, going nowhere and revealing nothing, so the DCI (Director, Central Intelligence) had called for a break.
The others present were Lambert, three biologists from the CMLS (Chemicals, Materials, and Life Sciences) Directorate of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Department of Energy’s undersecretary for science and two of her deputies, one from the office of Biological and Environmental Research, the other from High Energy Physics.
“Okay, let’s get back to it,” the DCI called, and everyone took their seats.
Round two, Fisher thought, his mind drifting back to that cold, dark cave…
* * *
Against his every instinct, after staring at the red growth for five solid minutes, he’d waded across the pool, which he found was only knee-deep, and walked up the beach to the wall. He wasn’t sure what he expected to happen, but of course the growth hadn’t leapt off the wall at him, nor did it explode into a lethal powder when he’d taken the tip of his Applegate and gently pried loose a quarter-size chunk of it from the wall and deposited it in an empty trail mix baggie he’d found in the bottom of his waist pack.
He’d then reversed his course, climbing back through the fissure and then up the crevice and hiked back to the Highlander, where he’d called Grimsdottir and had her conference in Lambert.
“Remember Peter’s words, ‘Red… tri… my… cota’?” Fisher asked.
“I remember,” Lambert said.
“It’s just a gut feeling on my part, but I think it’s a biological reference. A fungus of som
e kind, I’m guessing.” He explained what he’d found in the cave. “And I’m willing to bet this stuff — whatever it is — is what’s inside the canister I found aboard Wondrash’s plane.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Grimsdottir said. Fisher could hear her tapping her keyboard. “We’ve got a compiled biological database here somewhere…” she muttered. “Yeah, here it is… Okay, I’m doing a fuzzy search using those key words. Hang on…” Thirty seconds later she was back. “Whoa, give that man a gold star.”
“What?” Lambert asked.
“It’s called Chytridiomycota—tri… my… cota. Peter was close; he had most of it, right down to the color, with just a few letters transposed. Chytridiomycota is a kind of fungus. Comes from the Greek chytridion, which means ‘little pot’—or a structure that contains dormant spores. Approximately a thousand species in a hundred twenty or so genera, distributed among—”
“Bottom line it, Grim,” Lambert said. “What is it?”
“A fungus. A motile, spore-producing fungus.”
“And it does what?”
“Specifically? I don’t know. That’s over my head,” Grimsdottir replied. “According to what’s in front of me, there are about seventy thousand known species of fungi in the world, but that’s estimated to be only about five percent of what’s likely out there. So, we’re talking about maybe two million species of fungi — most of which we haven’t even found.”
“Give me a comparison,” Fisher said.
“Birds: five thousand species in the world. Insects: There are about nine hundred thousand different types. Compared to those, they know nothing — absolutely nothing—about fungi or what they can do. In fact, I just read a CDC report last month: Fungal-based diseases are on the rise, and a lot of the medical community think it’s the next big, bad epidemiological nightmare.”
“Christ,” said Lambert.
The scourge of Manas, Fisher thought.
* * *
The second half of the meeting picked up where it had left off: an argument between the biologists over what exactly Chytridiomycota was, its classification, its cellular makeup, and so on. Fisher noticed one of the biologists, a woman named Shirley Russo from the CMLS, wasn’t partaking in the debate but rather jotting notes, grimacing, and shaking her head.
As had most of Washington’s elite, Fisher had heard of Russo. The sole heiress to an old-money Connecticut family fortune, Russo had broken the mold and instead of letting herself ease into the role of überrich benefactor-socialite, had at the age of fifty gotten her Ph.D. in biology. Rumor had it she donated every penny of her salary to the International Dragon Boat League, which sponsored fund-raising dragon boat races for breast cancer survivors. Looking at her slim frame, Fisher guessed Russo had spent a fair amount of time at the oars herself.
He caught Lambert’s gaze and gestured with his eyes toward Russo.
Lambert broke in. “Dr. Russo, you look like you have something to say.”
Russo looked up from her pad and cleared her throat. “I have a theory,” she said.
“A fringe theory,” one of her fellow biologists said.
The DCI gave him a hard stare. “Why don’t you let us worry about that. Dr. Russo.”
She hesitated, then said, “One of the areas I study is called petro-parasitology. I think this fungus you — or whoever — found is a petro-parasitic organism. I agree with the others: I think it belongs to Chytridiomycota, but that’s like saying birds and bees are alike because they both have wings.”
“Petro-parasitic,” Lambert said. “I assume that means what I think it means?”
Russo nodded. “That it eats petroleum-based substances? Yes, that’s exactly what it does.”
Fisher and Lambert exchanged worried looks.
The other biologists began talking, arguing back and forth across the table. Russo simply folded her hands on her legal pad and waited. The DCI brought the meeting back under control and then said to Russo, “Go on, Doctor.”
“The problem is,” she said, “that we’ve never seen a fungi that does this. Technically, there’s no reason why it couldn’t exist. There are enzymes we use to clean up oil spills all the time. They feed on the oil, neutralize it, then die and degrade and become part of the food chain.”
“But you’re not talking about that, are you?” said Lambert.
“No. I’m talking about a self-sustaining organism that feeds on petroleum-based substances — from crude oil, to kerosene, to the gas we put in our cars — then replicates and spreads, just like a fungal colony would. See, the thing about fungus is that it’s hearty, tenacious stuff. It’s hard to kill and harder still to make sure you’ve killed it all. It can lie dormant for years — for millennia—then just flip itself back on and pick up where it left off.”
“Okay,” the DCI said, “clearly the rest of you have concerns about Dr. Russo’s theory. Am I correct?” There were emphatic nods around the table. “But let me ask you this — and I want to hear it straight — is her theory plausible? Could there be something to it?”
No one responded.
“Goddamn it,” the DCI barked. “I don’t care about your egos, or your funding woes, or whether a theory is mainstream or fringe. If anyone at this table either doesn’t believe Dr. Russo’s theory is plausible or has a better theory, speak up right now, or I’ll make sure you spend the rest of your careers counting fly turds.”
Again, none of the scientists responded. Some looked at their hands; others shifted nervously in their seats. The DCI looked at each one in turn. “No? No one?” He turned to Russo again. “Doctor, I assume you have some ideas how we can confirm or refute whether this stuff is… What did you call it?”
“Petro-parasitic.”
“Right.”
Russo thought for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll have an answer for you in the morning.”
* * *
The DCI thanked and excused the group, save Fisher, Lambert, the DOE undersecretary, and the scientist from the High Energy Physics division, a tall, balding man with thick, wiry eyebrows named Weldon Shoals.
“There’s another component to this issue we need to discuss,” the DCI said. “I know everyone here has top secret and above clearance, but I’ll remind you that whatever we discuss stays here.”
The undersecretary and Shoals nodded.
The DCI turned to Lambert. “Irv, if you would.”
Lambert spent the next ten minutes outlining what they knew and what they suspected about PuH-19. He left out any mention of Peter, Calvin Stewart, Bolot Omurbai, or the North Koreans. Top secret clearances or not, these men didn’t have the need to know.
“The question we have,” the DCI said, “is what could someone with technical know-how do with this fungus, some PuH-19, and a linear particle accelerator?”
“You mean, could they create a giant fungus monster, or some kind of cancer supercure?” Shoals said, straight-faced.
Fisher chuckled. The DCI, hiding his own smile, replied, “No, what I’m asking is could the fungus’s characteristics be enhanced — altered.”
“In other words, mutated?” Shoals asked.
“Yes.”
“Absolutely. Mutation has gotten a bad rap. Hollywood horror directors have made it a boogie word, but mutation is just another way of saying ‘change.’
“But if I understand you correctly, what you want to know is, could someone, using PuH-19, a linear accelerator, and some high-energy physics principles, turn Dr. Russo’s strain of Chytridiomycota — a theory I believe has real credibility, by the way — into something worse than it might otherwise be? Something that not only eats oil but uses it for fuel, then replicates and spreads like a plague?”
The DCI nodded.
“The answer is yes. Without a doubt. See, the trick is, you don’t shoot radioactive junk at something and it suddenly mutates into whatever you want it to be. It’s not alchemy. It would take years of trial and error to find the right balance — the right recipe
that gives you what you want.
“Most man-made mutations — both bad and good — are discovered by accident. So, back to the essence of your question: Could these notional someones you’re talking about have come up with the right combination of ingredients to create a weaponized, petro-parasitic fungus? Again, I’m sorry to say, the answer is yes.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Lambert said.
“And it gets worse,” Shoals said. “If in fact something like this überfungus existed, the only sure way to kill it or stop it would be to have access to the process that created it. Without that, you’re just stumbling around in the dark, hoping you find the right recipe to shut the thing off. And, if by some miracle, you found it, would it be too late?”
35
THIRD ECHELON SITUATION ROOM
“And I tell you, as surely as Allah’s will binds us all, the modern world and the disease of technology cleaves us from all that is holy. It is a pervasive evil, one that infects every person and every culture it touches. Above all others, this is the greatest danger to Islam—”
Fisher pressed the remote’s REWIND button and watched for the third time Bolot Omurbai’s latest speech. He paused it, Omurbai’s face filling the screen.
“That’s what you’ve got in mind, don’t you?” Fisher murmured.
Unable to sleep, he’d driven to Fort Meade at three a.m., signed in with the duty officer, and then gone to the situation room and made coffee. Two hours and four cups later, he’d reviewed all the speeches Omurbai had given since beginning his second reign as Kyrgyzstan’s president.
“Technology cleaves us from all that is holy…”
“A pervasive evil…”
“Infects every person and every culture…”
Omurbai was insane, that much seemed clear, but however irrational his thoughts, his reasoning was well-ordered: The modern world is evil; technology is an infectious agent — it is the greatest enemy of Islam.