Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  “Make your point, Vlad.”

  “All I know is this. Not everyone liked our sweet old Irishman. I was told he sometimes played hardball. That a year or two back he had fight with head of Homeland Security. And deputy national security adviser. The delightful Mr. Dunne.”

  “About what?”

  “Don’t know. But my friend says Connor wasn’t happy. He said Connor was…” He struggled for the word. “Like liver. Livid.”

  “You really don’t know what it was about.”

  “Boy Scout honor.”

  “So? What happened?”

  Vlad considered his empty glass. “From what I hear, Dunne threw Connor out of his office. Told him to go to hell.”

  Vlad poured them both another shot of Gorilka. “Just be careful. My friend sounded nervous. And these people do not play games.”

  “Meaning?”

  Vlad looked thoughtful. “Meaning I feel more at home in your country all the time. Understand? Rules are different now. Times are—what did man with bad voice say? Times they are a-changing.”

  “Bob Dylan.”

  “That is him. Smart man. You should listen.”

  THE SECOND PIECE OF INFORMATION CAME AS A CALL TO Jake’s cellphone. It was after two a.m. and he was on his way home. He was on foot, walking the path through the old graveyard that separated Cornell from the neighborhoods below, weaving among the gravestones like a ghost.

  The caller ID said “Cornell PD.”

  “Professor Sterling? Sorry to call so late. It’s Lieutenant Ed Becraft, Cornell PD. We met earlier today.” Jake heard a tapping, like a pencil on a desk.

  “Is there something new on Connor?”

  The pencil taps kept up a steady rhythm. “Not exactly. My chief just got a call. From the office of a Major Elber at Fort Detrick, Maryland.”

  “Fort Detrick? What did they want?”

  “Between the two of us, Elber is the chief bioterrorism investigator at USAMRIID.” Becraft spoke the acronym like a word, you-sam-rid. It stood for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. “He wanted to know where we were on Liam Connor’s death. And if we’d learned anything about the missing Crawlers.”

  “Why?”

  “He said he couldn’t say. That it was classified.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That the investigation was ongoing. And the MicroCrawlers are still missing.” The pencil was tapping faster now. “Professor Sterling, I gave Connor’s grants a closer look. One jumps out at me. The principal investigator is listed as Vladimir Glazman. Connor is listed as co-PI. It’s got your name on it, too. DARPA project 54756/A00.”

  Jake recited the title from memory: “Crawlers in a Box: A Revolutionary Approach to Bioterrorism.”

  “Care to explain?”

  “That’s going to take some time.”

  “Well, let me ask you this: the fungi in Professor Connor’s lab? Could they be dangerous?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jake said. “His lab wasn’t rated for anything dangerous—it was BSL-1. Biosafety Level 1. It means that nothing in there was a significant health risk.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “Why?”

  No more pencil tapping. “Elber, this fellow from Detrick? He told me to seal off Connor’s lab. No one gets in or out. He said they would have a team here in the morning. Does that sound like BSL-1?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Jake said.

  “Well, then, we need to talk.”

  9

  ORCHID HELD THE STEERING WHEEL AT TEN O’CLOCK AND two o’clock, her hands wrapped in skintight black Forzieri gloves. She stared at her hands. The hands that had failed her. She still had a hard time accepting her failure. She’d known all his pressure points. She had researched his habits, his family, everything. But Liam Connor had tricked her.

  When he had finally confessed, he was barely alive. The Uzumaki, he’d said, was hidden in a stretch of forest at the edge of the Cornell campus. She had taken him there, followed him across the bridge.

  And then Liam Connor had jumped.

  She took a hand from the steering wheel, began to strum her fingers on her thigh. No nervous habit this; she was typing. Her gloves had a piezoelectric material woven inside that generated a tiny electrical signal with the movement of each finger. The words appeared as ghostly green letters along the top of her glasses: EN ROUTE TO MESSENGER.

  She needed time. The Messenger would give it to her.

  She touched index finger to thumb, and the tiny camera in her glasses took a picture of the road ahead. As stipulated, Orchid provided complete documentation: detailed notes combined with time-stamped photographs, from the beginning to the end. No detail escaped documentation. The client had demanded it.

  The old Camry plowed on. A few puddles of weak light thrown down by street lamps lining the road were all that interrupted the inky blackness. The I-Deal self-storage facility came into view. She turned off Route 79, the gravel crunching under her tires, and pulled the car to a stop two rows away from the unit she had rented two days previously and outfitted for her needs.

  She gave herself two minutes. She closed her eyes, folded her hands together, thumbs touching lips. She started the process, the calming, the stabilization that placed her where she needed to be.

  Two minutes later, she was ice. She reached over the seat and grabbed her backpack. She unzipped the top and checked the contents:

  1. D-321G infrared goggles.

  2. Pen-style X-Acto knife.

  3. A pair of eight-inch pruning shears.

  4. Blazer butane microtorch.

  5. 100cc syringe loaded with LSA-25.

  6. Johnson & Johnson rolled medical gauze, stored in a Ziploc sandwich bag.

  7. Ziploc freezer bag filled with ice.

  She stepped out of the car, smooth and calm, backpack draped over her shoulder. The night was cold, the asphalt mottled with patches of light snow. She walked through the silence, mind empty, letting doubt remain in the car, fingers typing on thigh: APPROACHING MESSENGER.

  She stopped before I-Deal unit #209. A few careful twists of the dial and the combination lock clicked open. She rolled the sliding door up two feet, bent down, and stepped under. She slid the door closed behind her, disappearing into the pitch-black darkness. Inside, she paused, taking in the smell. Wood and metal and a vague chemical odor. That would be the plastic. She had lined the walls, floor, and roof with plastic sheeting because of the inevitable spray.

  And another odor, stronger than the rest. A scent that was her stock in trade.

  Terror.

  Working by feel, she removed the Night Optics D-321G night-vision goggles from her pack and pulled them down over her eyes. The darkness was no longer darkness. The goggles were Gen 3, equipped with an infrared flashlight invisible to human eyes but not the gallium arsenide photocathode and microchannel plate detectors in the 321. The room was empty, save for a small satchel in the corner and a single nylon rope dangling from the ceiling, taut from the weight it held.

  At the end of the rope, hanging in a prone position in the center of the empty space, was the Messenger. He was a human cocoon, wrapped in cloth so only his face and chest were exposed, and supported knees to shoulder by nylon webbing. She had hunted him hours before, taking him in a stairwell in the Bronx. She used the Paxarms Mark 24B pistol projector with a dart equipped with fentanyl, to be followed by the M-5050 antidote. Fentanyl had the bonus that, should the target get away before the antidote was administered, the target would die.

  The Messenger twisted slowly in the darkness, fear in his eyes, mouth stuffed with cotton matte and taped shut, dramatically dulling his ability to make any kind of sound. It had been a simple hunt, too simple to be truly enjoyable, even if he was Japanese. He was completely unsuspecting. If asked, he would say he had done nothing to make one of the highest-paid killers in Asia hunt him. It was true. The Messenger’s only crime was his name.

  He couldn’t see
her but sensed her coming closer. She could tell by the heightened wriggling.

  She gave him the injection first, then went to work on his chest with the X-Acto knife, cutting the Chinese characters with quick, sharp strokes. He was Japanese, so there was little hair to contend with. And he was young and fit, so the skin was smooth and taut. Blood popped up like fallen raindrops.

  She finished the lettering, snapped a photo of her work, then mopped up the excess blood with a bit of gauze. She replaced the X-Acto knife and took out the clippers. When she had bound the Messenger, she had taped down all the fingers on his right hand save the middle one, as if he was giving her the finger. She placed the blades of the shears at the juncture of the knuckle.

  She squeezed hard.

  Snap!

  He fluttered, grunting and moaning, dangling at the end of his rope. The blood spurted down on the plastic sheet below, the flow making a central puddle surrounded by little circular swirls, the sound like rain.

  She took out the torch, fired up the flame, and cauterized the wound. The smell of burned blood and flesh was sharp in her nostrils.

  She picked up the severed finger and wrapped it in gauze, then put it in the Ziploc freezer bag filled with ice and stored it in her pack. She waited for three minutes, then checked again that the bleeding was stanched.

  She put away her tools, then typed on her leg: MESSENGER READY.

  He wriggled in his cocoon, rotating slowly. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, stopping his motion with a hand on the side of his head. “Tomorrow is your big day.”

  DAY 3

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27

  LETTERBOX

  10

  JAKE COULDN’T SLEEP. HE TOSSED AND TURNED, THEN FINALLY gave up. He rose and made a pot of coffee, then set to pacing his apartment, the windows outside black with night. A niggling memory kept at him, a certain conversation with Liam as they had walked among the abandoned concrete bunkers of Seneca. At the time, Jake had thought that it was just an old man unburdening himself.

  The two-lane road was empty as he drove through the predawn darkness, only the occasional farmer’s pickup passing in the opposite direction. Before the sun rose, he was thirty miles northwest of Ithaca on Route 96A, in the middle of a bucolic landscape of hills and farms. He topped a small rise and spotted his destination. It looked like an abandoned prison in his headlights; triple fencing, like layers of an onion, enclosed the ten-thousand-acre wasteland that was once the Seneca Army Depot.

  Liam had told Jake the history. The Seneca Army Depot had been built on Roosevelt’s orders in the run-up to World War II, when Liam was still a student in Ireland. By the time battleships were aflame at Pearl Harbor and Liam was queuing up to enlist in the British Army, the Seneca Depot had more than five hundred concrete bunkers storing armaments, helping to feed the war machine.

  After the war, new, larger bunkers were built to store nuclear weapons. Liam was in Ithaca by this time, starting the work that would make him famous. The depot acquired a fame of its own. At its peak, the depot was a small city employing more than ten thousand people, one of the largest facilities of its kind in the country. Jake remembered the newspaper photographs from later in the 1980s, when Dr. Spock, cheered on by thousands of anti-nuke demonstrators, climbed these fences to draw attention to the nuclear weapons inside.

  Now no one was watching. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the depot was shuttered, officially decommissioned in 2000. It had been left to the deer, the willows, and the geese. A few chunks of real estate had been bitten off: a prison along one edge, a youth center on another. But the core of the depot was a ghost town, a concrete mausoleum, eight miles long and four miles wide, nothing but neglected roads and bunkers. It was one of the most isolated, least-trafficked spots in the state.

  After parking outside the fence, he got out and sat on the hood of his Subaru. Half freezing, he watched the sun creep over the rows and rows of munitions bunkers. Every four hundred feet was another eerie concrete monolith, all long out of use. Beat-up roads cut between them, all slowly succumbing to weeds and grass. Jake had been inside one of the bunkers, a dank and musty place filled with mold and decaying leaves. They’d once stored nukes inside, Liam had said. The triggers to set them off were kept in a separate unit, hidden underneath a white building made to look like a guardhouse.

  Liam had connections with the current keepers of the depot, a consortium of businessmen planning to use the bunkers as ultra-secure housing for computer servers. He had finagled a key to one of the gates, even gotten permission to come anytime. He was running a biology experiment with the herd of rare white deer trapped inside the fences, a test of genetic variability in a confined population.

  Liam had told Jake he could think clearly here, sheltered from his schedule’s more immediate demands. Still, Jake thought the weight of the past was heavy in this place, banishing the trivial. At Liam’s urging, Jake had accompanied him here many times, the two men shooting the shit as they walked up and down the rows of concrete bunkers.

  Their talk often turned to war, what they’d experienced and what the future held. Neither liked what they saw when they peered into their crystal balls. They discussed the arc of technology, how the last fifty years had seen a revolution of the small. With new levels of information command and control, this revolution was changing warfare. It was also changing the tools of battle themselves. Small was the new big, and the generals were finally getting the message.

  The era of tanks and fighter jets battling on land and in the sky was drawing to a close. The wars of the future would be fought on small battlefields by tiny weapons striking from a thousand directions at once. The fight would take place inside computer networks, inside human bodies. Cyber-warfare. Swarms of semi-autonomous robots, such as the Crawlers. Biological weapons.

  It was on one of these trips that Liam told Jake about the Uzumaki.

  Jake had been stunned when Liam recounted the tale of the seven Tokkō with their deadly cylinders. About the Japanese submarine carrying one of the seven, its discovery by the USS Vanguard. Liam’s eyes had burned fiercely bright when describing the horrendous nuclear blast that had instantly destroyed the Uzumaki along with two hundred thirty-seven men.

  “Bastards,” Liam had said. “Willoughby. MacArthur. They wanted it, the Uzumaki. And they got it. Kept it secret all these years. Covered the whole thing up, right along with the atrocities at Unit 731. Now that pisspot at the NSA, Dunne, has Detrick working on it again.”

  Liam had given him an ironic smile. “Hell of a thing, isn’t it? A little fungus, more dangerous than all the weapons once stored here, a little bit of growth you could carry in a thimble.”

  Jake now stared out over the bunkers.

  11

  THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY RAN TO ALMOST A FULL PAGE.

  LIAM CONNOR, RENOWNED BIOLOGIST,

  ONE OF THE LAST LIVING FOUNDING FATHERS

  OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, DIES AT 86

  By Benjamin D. Ludgate

  Liam Connor, Nobel laureate who unlocked the secrets of selective adaptation, died Tuesday morning in Ithaca, New York. His death was announced at Cornell University, where he worked and taught for sixty years. His body was found at the bottom of a gorge on campus. The circumstances of his death are under investigation.

  A contemporary of James Watson and Francis Crick, the scientists who revealed the structure of DNA, Connor was best known for his work on mobile genetic elements, and for establishing that DNA resided not only in the nucleus but also in various other compartments in the cell. These ideas revolutionized cell and evolutionary biology.

  Liam Connor was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1924, the sixth child in a shopkeeper’s family. As a young boy, he was fascinated by plants and fungi, and he developed an encyclopedic library of these organisms based on his own classification system. When he was fourteen, his father took him to University College Cork (then Queen’s College), where he studied under the tutelage of Professor Seamus
Bailey. Within a few years, he was considered the most promising young biologist in the country. In 1943 he married Edith Somerville, a poet and essayist to whom he would remain married until her death in 2004.

  In 1942, Liam Connor enlisted in the British Army. For four years he served at Porton Down, the British chemical and biological weapons center, working on countermeasures to potential Axis weapons, including a brief period in Japan after the end of the war. In 1946, Connor emigrated to the U.S., spending three years doing classified work at Camp Detrick (later Fort Detrick) in Frederick, Maryland, on biological weapons countermeasures.

  He moved to Cornell University in 1950, taking a faculty position in the College of Agriculture. He first embarked on a fungal taxonomy project, creating what would become the 400,000-specimen Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, a collection now managed by his granddaughter, Margaret Connor. Throughout his life, he would continue to travel the globe, looking for specimens for the herbarium, especially those from northeastern China and South America.

  In the early fifties, he had his first major breakthrough. Building on the work of Barbara McClintock, he studied transposons, sections of the genetic code that could move around within the genome. Connor showed that these transposons could turn genes on and off, and correctly postulated that retroviruses were specialized forms of transposons. Even more revolutionary were his experiments on endosymbiosis, an idea first proposed by the Russian botanist Konstantin Merezhkovsky in 1909. Connor, together with biologist Lynn Margulis, showed that key cell components such as mitochondria were originally bacteria that were engulfed by the host cell. Controversial when it was proposed, endosymbiosis is now accepted as a major cornerstone in the evolution of complex organisms.

  Connor was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1960 and was awarded the Wolf Prize in 1972, the National Medal of Science in 1978, and (with Barbara McClintock) the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983. He received honorary doctoral degrees from seventeen institutions worldwide, including Queen’s College, Beijing University, and the University of Chicago. He was voted one of the ten most influential biologists of the twentieth century by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.