by Peter May
‘Steve?’ Dr. Ward walked briskly up to them. He looked grim. ‘They tell me the results have come through. We’d better go along and find out the worst.’ He cast a sideways glance at Margaret that made her feel like an intruder on someone else’s private grief.
Steve nodded, oblivious. ‘See you later,’ he told Margaret. And she watched him walk stiffly along the corridor with the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, and she could not imagine what kind of hell he must be going through right now. An arm slipped through hers and she found herself being steered toward the door. Professor Mendez smiled at her affectionately.
‘So much catching up to do, my dear, and so little time to do it,’ he said. And her heart sank, for the catching up could only mean a confrontation with a past she would rather forget.
Li watched from the door of the conference room as Margaret disappeared with Professor Mendez. His sense of loneliness and alienation was immense. Hrycyk pushed past him. ‘Where are you going?’ Li called after him, feeling that he knew what the answer would be.
Hrycyk turned his now familiar glare on Li. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘If you are going for a smoke, I will join you.’
Hrycyk frowned. ‘I thought you didn’t.’
Li confessed, ‘I have been trying to stop. But I could do with one right now.’
Hrycyk snorted his derision. ‘And I suppose you’ll be wanting to bum one of mine?’
‘Good of you to offer.’
Hrycyk glared again. ‘That’s the second time today you’ve got me with that,’ he growled. He paused, then, ‘I figure I can spare one,’ he said, ‘but we’ll have to go outside.’
The camaraderie of the smoker, even between two men who disliked each other so intensely, was irresistible — and increased by the sense of exclusion created by the need to stand out in the cold and wet to share their habit.
* * *
The break room was quiet. Margaret recognised a handful of faces from around the table in the conference room. There were one or two others, mostly women wearing camouflage fatigues, on a break from the night shift. She hit several buttons on the drinks dispenser and got her coffee black and sweet. ‘How do you take yours?’ she asked Mendez.
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘Never have. Got an allergy to the damn stuff. Plain water’ll do me.’
She got him a cup of cold water and they wandered over to a free table. There was a bleak desolation about the place. The smell of stale carry-out food hung in the air, the harsh glare of fluorescent light reflecting back off hard melamine surfaces.
‘This place has one of the few level four laboratories in the world,’ Mendez said. ‘They can deal with the most virulent and nasty bacteria and viruses known to man. In fact, they nurture and feed them in little glass petri dishes. Have you been here before?’ Margaret shook her head. ‘I have,’ he said. ‘Several times. And I always spend the next day and a half washing. Not that washing is going to stop the Ebola virus from turning my organs to mush, or anthrax from filling my lungs with fluid. But I always feel…’ he chose his word carefully, ‘…contaminated.’ He smiled. ‘The windows that look into the level four labs are very small, and the glass is several inches thick. They have a notice on the windows that says No Photographs. Not because you could photograph anything particularly secret or incriminating. They’re just scared the flash on your camera might startle the guy in the space suit working inside, and he might just drop one of those little glass dishes. Then the shit would really hit the fan.’
‘How in God’s name do they keep that stuff contained?’ Margaret asked.
Mendez shrugged. ‘You want to see the huge decontamination showers they have just for the monkey cages. Poor little things get pumped full of every disease they figure Bin Laden is preparing to use against us. And then all the water and waste from levels three and four go into a separate sewage outlet for decontamination before rejoining the main sewage supply. The air is taken in through a high-efficiency particulate air filter and passed out through another two. In fact, when you go out you’ll see a row of chimneys at the back. That’s effectively the exhaust system for the labs.’ He chuckled. ‘But you know, no matter what they say, I wouldn’t like to live in Frederick. If anything ever goes wrong here, that nice little German town with its antique shops and church spires is going to be the first to know about it.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘And, you know, they say this place is used for defence only. But the government lies to us about so much else…’ He sat back and let Margaret draw her own conclusions. He shrugged again. ‘Who really knows?’ he said, and sipped at his water. Then without warning he changed the subject. ‘I read about your appointment in the Houston papers. Kept meaning to look you up.’
Margaret said, ‘I had no idea you were at Baylor. Last time I heard you were still in Chicago.’
‘Oh, it’s quite a few years since I moved, my dear. But, then, you’d have known that if we’d kept in touch.’ There was the faintest hint of an accusation in this. ‘How is Michael?’
‘Dead.’ She hadn’t meant to be quite so brutal. But that faintest hint of an accusation had stung her. Mendez had been her late husband’s mentor at the University of Chicago before Michael had graduated and taken, against Mendez’s advice, an unfashionable post lecturing in genetics at the Roosevelt. Margaret never knew exactly what had happened between them — Michael had never confided — but there had been some kind of falling out.
The colour drained from Mendez’s face, and he appeared to be genuinely distressed. ‘Poor Michael,’ he said. ‘I had no idea. You hear nothing in Texas about what’s going on in the rest of the union. I have often thought they still believe themselves to be a separate country down there.’ He paused. ‘What happened?’
Margaret shook her head. ‘Honestly, Felipe, I’d rather not talk about it. At least, not now. Some other time, maybe.’
He put a hand over hers. It was warm and comforting. ‘I am sorry, my dear. I have no wish to resurrect painful memories. I am just so…shocked. Such a brilliant mind, such a bright future.’
Yes, Margaret thought bitterly, and a libido he could not control. She said, ‘You took early retirement?’
A little colour returned to his face, and an edge to his voice. ‘I’m afraid my retirement was forced rather than voluntary. I had a good few years left in me, I think.’
Margaret was taken aback. ‘What on earth happened?’
For a long time he seemed lost in his own thoughts, before becoming aware of her watching him. He must quickly have replayed her question, because a sad smile crept over his face. ‘I was based at the Michael E. DeBakey Center for Biomedical Education and Research at the Texas Medical Center. It was a wonderful position. We were working at the cutting edge of gene therapy, on the verge of some extraordinary breakthroughs.’ He paused to draw a deep breath and steady himself for his revelation. ‘And then a couple of my patients died during the course of clinical trials.’
Margaret put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered.
Resentment now crept into the voice of the old genetics professor. ‘I, or at least my department, had failed to obtain adequate informed consent. There was a major scandal. A lawsuit. It was suggested to me, as a remedy, that I take early retirement. The alternative was the humiliation of dismissal. Not being particularly drawn to the prospect of humiliation, I opted for the former.’ He sat back, forcing himself to smile. ‘A premature end to a promising career.’ Then he leaned forward again, in confidential mode. ‘Of course, the government conveniently chooses to forget all that every time it wants my help.’
Margaret knew how hard it must have been for a brilliant mind just to switch itself off, for a man like Mendez to find suddenly that his talents were no longer required. He had never been the easiest of men to like, but she felt genuinely sorry for him now. ‘That must have been a nightmare, Felipe,’ she said.
But he recognised the look in her eyes. ‘Good God, my dear, I do
n’t want your pity. I’d rather have your company. A little of that acerbic wordplay we used to indulge in when you so disapproved of Michael being a disciple.’
‘I didn’t disapprove of you,’ Margaret countered quickly. ‘I just thought Michael was too easily led. He needed to develop a mind of his own.’
‘Are you telling me it was his idea and not yours to go to the Roosevelt?’
‘It was a joint decision.’
‘Ah. And that was Michael developing a mind of his own, was it?’
Margaret took a deep breath. ‘I don’t want to fight with you, Felipe. That was all way in the past. And I’d rather it stayed there.’
Mendez appeared to relax, and his smile became beatific once again. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to drag up old, painful memories. Believe me, they are just as painful for me.’ He took both of her hands, now, in his. ‘But I would like to hear, someday, when you feel up to it, what happened to Michael. I understand you have a place up at Huntsville.’
She felt uncomfortable, her hands trapped in his. ‘That’s right,’ she said.
‘And I have a place just thirty miles down the road at Conroe. An old ranch house on the lake. I can get pretty lonely rattling about in that old place all on my own sometimes.’ He squeezed her hands. ‘I’d appreciate a visit. I really would.’
She said, ‘I’ll stop by sometime.’ But knew that she wouldn’t.
* * *
Li shivered in the cold wind that blew, almost uninterrupted, across the wide-open spaces of the two-hundred-acre Fort Detrick. In the moonlight, you could see the rows of new, young trees that lined the sprawling parking lots and hear the wind in their leaves. Lights still twinkled in low, huddled, buildings, and white water towers on stilts stalked the perimeter. The first cigarette had felt rough in his throat, and not as pleasurable as he had anticipated. The second, with which Hrycyk had parted very grudgingly, was altogether more satisfying.
The two men haunted the front of the building, walking in slow silence together along the tree-lined main drag of Porter Street and back again. They had decided on a second cigarette after there appeared to be no activity inside. Eventually Hrycyk said, ‘So you people still wear those blue Mao suit things over there?’
‘Not for a long time,’ Li said.
Hrycyk looked at him as if he suspected him of lying. ‘I’ve seen pictures on TV.’
‘Probably stock footage from the days of the Cultural Revolution. And some of the old folk still wear them. They were cheap and hard-wearing.’
‘But you still go around on bikes, right?’
‘Most people own a bicycle,’ Li conceded. ‘But a lot of people now own a car as well. In fact, there are so many cars in Beijing that the traffic just grinds to a halt at rush hour. It’s one of the most polluted cities in the world.’
‘No kidding!’ Apparently Hrycyk approved. As if pollution somehow meant civilisation.
Li said, ‘The average young Beijinger today works for a private company, might even be self-employed. He smokes the same brand of cigarettes as you, carries the same make of cellphone and drives the same kind of car.’
Hrycyk looked sceptical. ‘A Santana? Gimme a break.’
‘Actually, we build them in China,’ Li said. ‘Millions of them, in a factory near Shanghai.’ He smiled, ‘Who knows, Agent Hrycyk, you might even be driving a Chinese-built car, contributing in your own small way to the growth of the Chinese economy.’
‘My worst fucking nightmare,’ Hrycyk said, and flicked his cigarette butt into the night. ‘Next time I’ll make sure I buy something totally American, like…’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘Like a Chrysler Jeep.’
‘Oh, we build those in China, too,’ Li said. ‘In a factory on the outskirts of Beijing. We call them Beijing Jeeps.’
Hrycyk scowled at him, for once at a loss for words. He thrust his hands in his pockets, and they walked in silence back toward the main entrance. Finally he muttered, ‘Can’t believe we’re here in the middle of the night talking about a fucking flu epidemic. I mean, the flu! Jesus! It can’t be that serious, can it?’
The lights of a car raked the line of trees and swung past them on the road. It pulled up outside the USAMRIID building, and a small man hunched in a big coat hurried inside.
Li said, ‘Looks like the man who’s about to tell us just got here.’
Chapter Five
I
Anatoly Markin was a short man. No more than five-five. Margaret put him at about fifty. His skin was pasty white, flesh hanging loosely on a round face, dirty fair hair oiled and scraped back over a flaking scalp. Around his eyes and nose and mouth, his skin was crusting and red, and it had shed itself down the front of his crumpled suit. Margaret noticed, too, what looked like psoriasis around the knuckles on his fingers. His eyes, beneath strangely blond eyebrows, were an odd, pale blue and had a disconcerting quality when turned in your direction. He looked like a reptile that had been out of water for too long.
Markin sat at the head of the table and blinked at all the faces assembled around it. Dr. Ward was sitting further along from Margaret. But he had returned without Steve. She felt sick, fearing the worst, but had not had the chance to ask. Incongruously, Li and Hrycyk were sitting together near the far end.
Colonel Zeiss made the introductions and sat back, effectively handing the meeting over to Markin, who sat in silence for a long time, just looking at them, breathing in short, shallow bursts that crackled in his chest. At length, in a cartoon Russian accent, he said, ‘My hair, ladies and gentlemen, used to be jet black.’ He ran a scaly finger along one of his thick, blond eyebrows. ‘My eyebrows, too.’ He had their full attention now, and his breath wheezed and gurgled in the silence of the conference room. ‘I have not gone prematurely grey. My hair never regained its colour after it was bleached blond by the hydrogen peroxide disinfectant we sprayed into the air in zone one of Building 107 at Omutninsk. That is where we first developed tularemia for the purposes of biological warfare. We put it into little bomblets, and managed to kill a lot of monkeys with it on Rebirth Island. That was in the early eighties. Ten years after we signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.’ He smiled. ‘We lied a lot.’
He placed his hands on the table in front of him, as if to draw their attention to the dry, cracked skin and red, flaking knuckles. ‘Over the years,’ he said, ‘I have been vaccinated against almost everything you can imagine, from anthrax to plague. Many, many times over.’ He paused for effect. ‘You see the result before you. A man whose immune system has been shot to hell.’ A bitter laugh turned into a cough, and phlegm rattled in his throat. ‘I have more allergies than you people can count. I have lost my sense of smell, my sense of taste. My skin falls off me in drifts. If I did not spend an hour rubbing moisturisers and oils into my hands and face and scalp each morning, I would be red raw.’
His eyes grew suddenly very intense and he leaned forward on his elbows. ‘And you people thought that smallpox was dead! That there were only two remaining repositories in the world — one here in America, and the other at the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow.’ A momentary silence, then, ‘Hah!’ he shouted and slapped his palms on the table and sat back. ‘We developed a weapons-grade variety of it at a secret laboratory at Zagorsk and were producing a hundred tons a year of the stuff at Koltsovo.’ He shrugged, as if in apology. ‘Okay, so mortality rate is low — only 50 percent. But morbidity is excellent. Up to 90 percent of unvaccinated people exposed to the virus will contract it.’ He seemed to be enjoying himself now.
‘Then there is anthrax. Wonderful mortality rate. Up to 90 percent if untreated in the first two days. Horrible way to die. The bacteria takes over your lymphatic system before entering the blood and producing toxins that attack your organs. Your skin turns blue and your lungs fill with fluid and you drown. We knew just how effective it was when we had our own little biological Chernobyl at Sverdlosk. Spores were released accidentally from our
plant there and killed most of the night shift at a ceramics factory across the road. Given the right atmospheric conditions, the release of a hundred kilos of spores in any big US city would kill around three million people. We were developing a strain of anthrax that could be deployed in an SS-18 missile. A single one of which would have wiped out the population of New York City. At Stepnogorsk, we were producing two tons of anthrax a day.’
Some of those around the table had undoubtedly heard this before. But it was news to Margaret. She sat in stunned and horrified silence as Markin continued to catalogue the monstrous affront to civilised behaviour that had been perpetrated by the former Soviet Union with its hugely funded biowarfare programme. He appeared to draw succour from their disapproval.
‘Of course, smallpox and anthrax were not the only concoctions we were preparing for the arming of the SS-18s. There was plague, the bubonic variety of which killed a quarter of the population of Europe in the Middle Ages. And then there was Marburg, a rare filovirus that acts in much the same way as Ebola. And all that,’ he added, ‘when you Americans were hailing Mikhail Gorbachev as the great reformer, the man who would draw the world back from the brink of super-power confrontation. Well, I’ll let you into a little secret. In terms of biowarfare, there was only one super power. And that was the Soviet Union.’ He grinned, the whole superiority of his tone condensed in his next words. ‘And you know what? You people didn’t even know it.’
He stood up, as if his seat had suddenly become very hot. ‘I’m telling you this because you need to know that we knew what we were doing. We spent billions on research, built massive plants capable of bacterial and viral weapons production on the grand scale. We had thousands of scientists and researchers working full-time on ways to destroy the population of the West with infective agents.’ He took his time looking around the table, meeting the eyes that were all turned toward him. ‘And then suddenly it was over. The Soviet Union was no more. The money stopped, the programme was pulled, weapons stocks destroyed.’ He shrugged extravagantly. ‘They have a limited life anyway. A use-by date, just like you’d find in the supermarket.’ He drew a deep crackling breath. ‘But the know-how didn’t go away. What do you think happened to all these thousands of scientists when the government stopped paying them?’ He stabbed a finger into his own chest. ‘Like me, they went to work for the highest bidder.’ His eyes were alight now. ‘But unlike me, they didn’t all go to work for the good guys.’ And he sat down again just as suddenly.