by Paul Mceuen
Dunne said, “Please, Professor. Save the talk for later, when we meet.”
The phone went dead.
Jake opened the door.
Maggie was there, the glowing fungus and the letterbox instructions in her hands. She looked exhausted, cold, and scared.
“I need your help,” she said.
DAY 4
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 28
KITANO
19
LAWRENCE DUNNE NODDED TO THE NYPD OFFICER ON THE line as he passed, flanked by his Secret Service detail and a small cluster of aides. The police had set up a multiblock perimeter around Bellevue Hospital, east to west from Second Avenue to the East River and north and south from Twenty-fifth to Thirtieth streets. He checked the time on his BlackBerry: six-forty-nine a.m. The first morning sunlight was just starting to hit the upper floors of the Midtown skyscrapers. Dunne had just arrived from City Hall. The mayor, his staff, and the Office of Emergency Management were doing their best to keep the panic under control and set contingency plans in the event of the worst. Dunne had gotten away as soon as he could.
He’d made the call to Sterling on the trip over. On Dunne’s recommendation, the FBI had kept tabs on Connor after their confrontation two years previously, checking to see if the old man was talking out of school about the Uzumaki. They found no evidence, but the profilers said one of the most likely conduits would be Jake Sterling. They’d get the truth later, he thought, once Sterling was at Detrick. Now if they could just find the other likely conduit, Maggie Connor.
A tighter, tougher cordon awaited him a block in, this one controlled by the Army. The spotlights had everything lit up like noon. The Chemical Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF) worked it by the book, sealed off the ward, made it airtight, and then placed the entire hospital under quarantine. Operational procedures were in place to handle an Uzumaki outbreak, thanks in large part to Dunne. Before he’d taken his position at the NSC six years before, the government had taken a hands-off approach to the Uzumaki. The fungus had been locked up, the spores sealed away in 1972 after Nixon renounced the offensive use of biological weapons. In 1979, Jimmy Carter put it further out of sight, in the hands of that woman Latterell, buried in the chain of command of the USDA, an agency with no military mission. The spores were kept in a sealed, cooled vault for the next twenty years.
After persistent lobbying by Dunne and a few key bioweapons experts and political heavyweights, the seals on the vault had been broken, the Uzumaki brought back to life. It was cultivated, its DNA sequenced, all in the first class-4 facility that the USDA weed people ever had. Upon hearing of this, Connor had been furious. He showed up in Dunne’s office, literally screamed at him, said that a countermeasures program was a Pandora’s box. If the Chinese caught wind, they would be furious beyond belief. The Uzumaki could, Connor said, set off a biological arms race between the two nations, potentially more paranoia-inducing, dangerous, and ultimately destructive than the nuclear arms race with the Soviets decades before.
But Connor was wrong. China could never be trusted; of this Dunne was sure. The case for a crash countermeasures program was a slam dunk. Two of the original seven Japanese subs carrying the Uzumaki cylinders were never found. One was believed to be sunk in deep water somewhere between Hawaii and California, unrecoverable, but the last one was a giant question mark. And who knew what the Chinese might have dug up at Unit 731? All it took was one hardy little spore. Growing a fungus wasn’t like enriching uranium: no high-tech centrifuges needed, no yellowcake imports, no production facilities to show up on satellite photos. The Chinese could have the Uzumaki, and the United States would never know. Not until it was used. Until the Chinese handed it to the North Koreans, the North Koreans sold it to al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda released it in a major U.S. city.
The most devastating terrorist attack in human history.
THE HUEY’S BLADES WHERE CHURNING TO LIFE AS DUNNE approached alone, ordering his retinue to stay behind. The makeshift helipad was set up in the middle of the FDR Drive, the chopper fueled and ready to take off for Fort Detrick. The airspace had been cleared within fifty miles of their flight path, and fighters scrambled to escort them.
Dunne spotted Sadie Toloff, the chief scientist of the USDA’s Foreign Disease–Weed Science Research Unit and the leader of Fort Detrick’s Uzumaki countermeasures program. Dunne knew Sadie very well. She was attractive, with short blond hair in a pageboy cut, though her features were a bit too quirky to be considered classically beautiful. She was wiry, almost nerdy, but very fit—she was a middle-distance runner in college. She completed her Ph.D. twenty years ago, on host-pathogen coevolution in cereal crops. He had known her for years, had personally approved her latest promotion, had even been her lover for a brief stretch four years ago. A mistake, they both agreed. Each was incapable of fealty to anything but the job. When a few spores from a citrus blight blew across the Atlantic on the African winds, Toloff and her team were the first responders. She was also known within a small, elite circle as Queen of the Uzumaki.
Yelling to be heard over the noise of the rotors, Toloff kept it all business. “That’s a triple-sealed Hazmat container with blood, saliva, and stool samples from the Times Square victim, along with breath samples for airborne spores. The individual containers are locked inside a steel-molybdenum vault that can withstand anything short of a nuclear blast. If the chopper goes down, that container will not, under any conceivable circumstances, breach.”
Toloff pointed to the team of four men handling the container. “Those two are from USAMRIID and the other two from my team at USDA.” She frowned. “They think us weed folks are pansies. Can’t stand that this is my show.”
Dunne nodded. USAMRIID dealt with the high-profile killers, human pathogens, such as smallpox and Ebola. The USDA team handled invasive pathogens. It wasn’t often the two organizations worked together closely, but the Uzumaki had something for everyone. “So far no fistfights?” Dunne asked.
“You wait,” she said. “Blood will flow.”
“You look beat,” Dunne said.
“I’m fine. But I’ll be better once we’re back at Detrick.” She rubbed her forehead with her palm. “What is happening, Lawrence? Some psycho woman kills Connor, then loads a Japanese kid up with what looks to hell like the Uzumaki and dumps him in Times Square? Where could she have gotten it?”
“No idea. We don’t know who she is yet. Could be the Chinese are backing her, or she could be an independent operator.”
“But why kill Connor?”
“Connor knew a lot about Uzumaki. Maybe she tortured him for information—how it could be used, what countermeasures we had.”
Toloff shook her head. “This is such a clusterfuck. Has anyone talked to Connor’s granddaughter?”
“You know her?”
“The fungus world is tiny, Lawrence. We all know each other.”
“Well, we haven’t located her yet. She left her house this morning, and no one has seen her since.”
The pilot came over. “Sirs? We leave in two.”
Dunne looked at the copter, the blades spinning up. He needed a chance to think. Away from the conference calls, the briefings. “How long’s the flight?”
“Maybe an hour and a half. You looking for a ride?”
20
JAKE DROVE FAST AS THEY SKIRTED THE MAIN CORNELL CAMPUS, the snow-laced streets and sidewalks eerily empty, the entrances blocked off by local police. It was eight-twelve a.m.—the first classes of the morning should be under way.
He continued on, going east on Route 366, past the Cornell orchards and their rows of apple trees. The fields were decorated in frost, the plants glistening white in the car’s headlights. It was arresting, the pastoral normalcy, as if this morning was like any other.
Maggie was in the seat beside him, the glowing fungus in her lap. She was all business, focused and determined, but also distant, as if a wall had gone up around her.
Vlad Glazman was in the back, the last bite of a je
lly doughnut forgotten in his right hand. He preferred to ride in the backseat, for reasons he couldn’t or wouldn’t say. Jake had practically dragged him from his bed ten minutes earlier, filled a Mason jar with the lukewarm coffee he found on the stove, and grabbed the jelly doughnut from the fridge. Vlad, to put it mildly, was not a morning person, unable to function without a massive dose of caffeine and sugar. He refused to teach any morning classes. He considered it a sin to be up before eleven.
Jake waited until Vlad was tanked up, his neurons firing. Then he told him everything.
Vlad didn’t respond for what seemed like forever. Finally he sucked down the last of the coffee and leaned forward from the backseat. “Let me get this correct. Connor told you about a Japanese superweapon called—”
“The Uzumaki.”
“Right. Carried by seven Japanese soldiers. In little brass cylinders. A fungus that could end the world.”
“You got it.”
“Then Dunne calls you personally—about the Uzumaki, you are certain. But you didn’t mention to him about other fungus, the glowing fungus. The one you found under a pile of rocks.”
“That’s right.”
“That fungus that might have a secret message in its genome.” Vlad licked the last of the jelly off his fingers. “This is crazy. Like the clocks with little birds.”
“Vlad, come on. This woman tortured Liam to find out what he knew—”
“I know, I know. But he jumped first.” Vlad rubbed his temples with his palms. “You believe this?” Vlad asked. “Really believe it?”
“Yes.”
He took a deep breath, nodded slowly. “Then I suppose I believe it, too.”
DECIDING TO PULL VLAD INTO THIS MESS WAS NO EASY choice, but Jake and Maggie needed someone with access to a genetics lab. With the campus closed, they couldn’t get to the Cornell BioResource Center, the genetic sequencing facility that Maggie normally used. But Jake remembered that Vlad had a friend that ran a backyard genetics lab.
From the backseat, Vlad said, “My friend at DTRA—who said Dunne and Connor fought? He heard rumors about secret bioweapons project run out of USAMRIID and the USDA. Very tightly held. Now it makes sense. Maybe this is what Connor was so angry about. Must be some sort of countermeasures program.”
“Why would Liam be so upset about that?” Maggie asked.
“That is obvious,” Vlad said. “The principle of defensive asymmetry. Connor’s law, as invented by your grandfather in the fifties: you create a cure, you create a weapon.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“During the Vietnam War, we—meaning, the U.S. military—considered the covert use of smallpox on the North Vietnamese in Laos. Why? The Americans were vaccinated, the North Vietnamese were not. Smallpox was a viable weapon because we had the cure and the Vietnamese did not.”
Jake said, “Same with the Uzumaki. When the Japanese had it, before there was penicillin in Japan, they were safe. The Americans were not. But later, when the entire world used penicillin, everyone was vulnerable and the Uzumaki was no longer a weapon.”
“Correct,” Vlad said. “But if our scientists come up with a cure at Detrick—”
“Connor’s law,” Jake said. “It’s a weapon again. But this time a weapon controlled by us. As long as we are the only country with the cure.”
“Correct. Locked and loaded.”
Maggie shook her head. “This is insane. You really think Liam was worried about the U.S. using a biological weapon?”
“Absolutely,” Vlad said. “Connor saw it all, from the fifties to now. Not just Vietnam. One of plans for the invasion of Cuba called for a botulinum biological attack. At the time, chairman of the Joint Chiefs—Lyman Lemnitzer—argued like a madman for it. There were plans to get Castro with toxic fungus in his wet suit. We had a hundred operational scenarios.”
“But that was decades ago,” Maggie said.
“The world repeats. Strong becomes weak. Weak becomes strong. When scared, you do what you have to.”
“But who is strong enough to scare us?”
“If you are Lawrence Dunne?” Jake said. “China. Dunne is a right-wing nut. His entire reputation is based on the Chinese threat. He’s convinced half the current administration that the Chinese will surpass us militarily by 2015.”
Maggie sat back, frowning. “But even if Liam knew all about the Uzumaki, he was opposed to Dunne’s scheme. It doesn’t tell us why that woman tortured him. What good would that knowledge do her?”
“Maybe she works for the Guoanbu—Chinese security,” Vlad said. “They’d have no trouble believing the U.S. is developing a biological first-strike capability.”
“But we’re the good guys,” Maggie said, “aren’t we?”
Vlad grimly smiled. “We are supposed to be. Not everyone is.”
Maggie took a right turn and pulled into the parking lot of the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium.
“My home away from home,” Maggie said. “We used to be on the main campus, in the Plant Science Building, but we got pushed out. Hardly anybody cares about physical specimens anymore. It’s all about genomics.”
Jake got out and scanned the area as Maggie unlocked the front door. The building was set along a gravel road, surrounded by fields on three sides and woods behind. The isolation made him nervous. The soldier in him said that this would be a hell of a place to launch an ambush.
Vlad rolled out of the backseat. He lifted the cuff of his left pants leg and pulled out a snub-nosed pistol. “I’ll wait out here,” he said. “Put an eye out.”
THE RECEPTION AREA WAS BRIGHT AND FRIENDLY, WITH chairs and couches for visitors.
“Through here,” Maggie said, leading Jake to a door at the back. It opened into a large space, maybe forty feet wide and a hundred deep, filled with rows of dull brown metal cabinets. The place had a cold, industrial feel, with concrete floors and an odd smell.
“Homey,” Jake said.
“It wasn’t designed for this,” Maggie said. “They used to raise raptors in here. Last year, workmen came in and cleared out the cages, sandblasted the floors, and moved us in.” She knocked her knuckles against one of the cabinets, the sound echoing in the large space. “Each one of these contains thousands of fungal specimens, categorized by type. We’ve got over four hundred thousand overall.”
“A fungal mausoleum,” Jake said.
“That’s one way to see it, I suppose.”
Maggie led the way to a small lab equipped with microscopes and equipment for sample preparation and inspection. On a piece of white filter paper, she scraped off a few flecks of the luminescent fungus.
“You know how this goes? Do any molecular biology yourself?”
“Not really. I’m a silicon man.”
“It’s pretty straightforward. This is a commercial kit for extracting DNA. First I grind the fungus up in some buffer,” she said, using a mortar and pestle, “to break down the cells. Then I treat it with a series of chemicals that will strip off the proteins and release the DNA.
“We’re going fishing for what we call the GOM, or genetic owner’s manual, of the fungus,” Maggie said. “It’s an artificial stretch of DNA inserted into the genome. Liam always used GOMs when he tinkered with an organism—to tell you what genetic modifications were made, what they might do, and who made them. If you are going to mess with the molecular programming of an organism—”
“—you better be willing to sign your work,” Jake finished.
“So he told you about GOMs.”
“Only the basics.”
“Well, here’s the advanced course. All you need to recover the information are the short genetic sequences at the beginning and the end of the GOM, called primers. Which Liam hid in the letterbox instructions, the first and last letters. Once you have those, it’s easy,” she said. “Even a physicist could do it.”
Jake watched as she worked her way steadily through the extraction process. Her movements were spare and precise, nothi
ng wasted. Jake got a strange feeling watching her, a kind of echo. Liam had worked exactly the same way.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “This Uzumaki fungus that the Japanese weaponized. It had to come from somewhere.”
“Meaning?”
“The Japanese didn’t just whip it up from scratch. They must’ve found it somewhere.”
“Maybe it was regional?” Jake said. “Endemic to Japan.”
“Not likely. Hosts and parasites evolve together. Liam said this was a corn fungus, correct? So if you want to find a corn fungus, you go to where corn came from—Mexico, South America. Now, here’s something interesting. My grandfather spent a lot of time in those areas. He was studying whether fungal spores could be spread by bird or butterfly migration—for example, monarchs fly thousands of miles from the U.S. to as far south as Mexico every year. But he never published anything on this. It always struck me as quixotic, all those trips. But maybe he was looking for something he wasn’t telling me about, something related to the Uzumaki.”
“So if he found something, you think he might have left the information about what it was encoded in the DNA here.”
“It’s possible.” Maggie held up a small microcentrifuge tube full of transparent liquid. “Done,” she said. “Ready for sequencing.”
MOMENTS LATER, THEY WERE BACK OUTSIDE. VLAD WAS WAITING by the car, gun in hand. “Anything?” Jake asked.
“A pheasant attacked, but I fought him off.”
Maggie handed Jake the tube with the DNA. “You two go. You don’t need me. I’m staying here.”
“What? Why?”
“I want to check the USDA APHIS alerts, to see if anything matches the description of the Uzumaki. If they’re worried about a pathogen, they’ll put out a notice. I also have all of Liam’s field notebooks in the back of the herbarium, the notes he took on his trips. I want to check the ones that cover his trips to South America. Especially Brazil.”