Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  Come on, girl. You’ve got work to do.

  Maggie read the descriptor for Fusarium spirale. It was native to northern Brazil and infected corn and cereal substrates. It produced a pair of nasty mycotoxins, a common fumonisin called B1, a nephrotoxin that affected kidneys, and another one similar to the LSA compound found in Claviceps, aka ergot. If ingested, these mycotoxins caused symptoms ranging from mania and hallucinations to constricted blood flow in exterior appendages that led to gangrene. From what she read, all the local farmers had a mantra: stay away from the spiral.

  It was a nasty fungus but no worse than dozens of other mycotoxin-producing species. What was special about this one? According to what Jake had told her a few hours before, Liam maintained that the Uzumaki was the most dangerous biological pathogen he’d ever seen. So how did it get that way? How had the Japanese changed it when they knew next to nothing about genetics at that time?

  A few more clicks gave her the first clue. Fusarium spirale was an unusual bugger: it was dimorphic. Dimorphic fungi could exist in two completely different morphological states, with utterly different phenotypes—like a caterpillar and a butterfly. You’d never know by looking at them that they were the same species.

  Depending on its environment, Fusarium spirale could be the spiral that attacked and devoured corn in the fields. This form produced toxins discouraging predators and reproduced sexually, sending billions of spores skyward to be spread by the wind and rain.

  The second form was much simpler, a single-celled yeastlike organism. It grew in hot, moist conditions, such as inside the bodies of warm-blooded mammals. It would take up residence in the digestive tract of either humans or birds, reproducing asexually, by simple division. It would grow quickly but was relatively harmless, producing none of the poisonous toxins that were present in the spiral form. Its goal was simple—to ride along with the mammal, not causing it too much discomfort, until it dropped out in the fecal matter of the host and would begin life again in its spiral form.

  Maggie struggled to piece it all together. She stared down at the pictures of the little spiral growths. So how had the Japanese turned fungus into a weapon?

  Dimorph. Two forms. One kills you, the other doesn’t. She was beginning to get an inkling about how it would go. How you could turn this fungus into a killing machine.

  Maggie decided to take a risk and call Sadie Toloff. She looked up the number in the old, beaten address book she still kept. She hadn’t talked to Sadie in a couple of years, since a conference in Toronto. But she thought she could trust her.

  Maggie opened her cellphone and dialed the number. It rang once, then went dead.

  She hung up, tried again. The result was the same. What was wrong with the damn lines? Maybe the circuits were overloaded because of the events at Bellevue.

  She decided to try the landline in the reception area. She dialed Toloff’s cell. This time it rang four times, then clicked to voice mail.

  Maggie kept it short. “It’s Maggie Connor. I’m okay. In shock about Liam. I need to talk to you about Fusarium spirale. Give a call and I’ll explain everything.”

  She hung up the phone.

  The heater chugged, turned itself off. The room was deathly quiet.

  All of a sudden, she felt very alone. She wished to hell Jake would get back.

  24

  HARPO’S NEAT AND ORDERLY LAB WAS A WRECK. USED PIPETTE tips littered the countertops, and gels were everywhere. Vlad and Harpo had finished the PCR, and now they were running a Sanger gel, counting off bands. They were doing it retro, using two-decade-old technology. Jake knew the basics of what they were doing, but it was another thing to watch them going at it. Like sitting in the corner of an old-time editing room in Hollywood, bits of film taped to the walls, the director and his assistant trying to piece together the story hidden in the images.

  Vlad dropped a cuvette, cursed in Russian.

  Jake watched them, outwardly calm but inside twisted up with worry. “What’s the problem?”

  “Something went wrong,” Harpo said. “All we got was a fragment. But I think I know what the problem is. We just have to lower the cycling temperature.”

  “How long?”

  “Another hour. At least.”

  FRUSTRATED, JAKE PACED THE HOUSE. HE STOPPED AT THE back window, looking out at the forest that picked up right behind Harpo’s yard. A dog loitered, a handsome old hound with huge ears and black eyes. He stood in front of a fancy doghouse with the name DUKE over the door, his tail raised and watching Jake. He started barking, then thought better of it, sat down, and scratched his ear.

  Jake wondered whether the NSA people were looking for him. They had made reservations for him on a flight out of Ithaca that had left hours ago. Jake guessed that if he called his voice mail at home, there would be messages asking what the hell had happened. He decided to leave those messages unchecked. At least a little while longer.

  To his right, behind a glass case, was Harpo’s collection of guns. Mostly hunting rifles but with a few military pieces thrown in. Jake recognized the sleek lines of the M16 and, below it, an M9 pistol in a black holster. It was the civilian version of the sidearm Jake had carried when he was in the service. He still had it, tucked away on a high shelf in the closet of his apartment. He took it down, cleaned and oiled it, every few months, not because he thought he’d ever use it but out of a sense of respect. The special burdens of soldiers.

  Three days.

  Three days ago, life had been normal. Three days ago, he would’ve been grading papers, looking for an hour to sneak away to the gym. He might’ve gone over to Liam’s lab. Maybe Dylan would have been there, and Jake and the boy would have tried to teach the Crawlers some new trick. Now Liam was dead, tortured by those very same Crawlers. Jake was in a backyard bio lab, waiting for a guy named Harpo with fright-wig hair to decipher Liam’s final message. A message Liam had left hidden inside the genome of a fungus under a pile of rocks in a forest.

  He pulled out his phone and called Maggie. Six rings, then voicemail. He left a message and tried again. Same result. What the hell? He’d talked to her a half-hour before—she said she was making progress, had found an entry in Liam’s field notebooks that was almost certainly about the Uzumaki. So where was she now?

  He called information, got the number for her work. It rang four times, then clicked to voice mail: a woman’s voice, not Maggie’s, saying he’d reached the Cornell University herbarium, offering a phone tree of options. Jake chose “0” and left another message, telling Maggie to call him right away.

  Damn it. Where was she? And if she had left the herbarium, why didn’t she call? The only thing he could think of was that something had happened, maybe something back at home.

  He called Rivendell.

  The phone rang and rang and rang. No answering machine. No voice mail.

  What the hell was going on? Maggie’s roommate Cindy was supposed to be there, watching Dylan.

  He thought about calling the police, then glanced again at Harpo’s gun collection, to the Beretta M9. Jake could be at the herbarium in fifteen minutes. He took down the M9 and unholstered it. Range of maybe fifty meters. History of slide problems but a good weapon. Checked the magazine. Full. Fifteen rounds.

  He sought out Vlad and Harpo, the M9 in hand. “Harpo, I need to borrow this.”

  “You plan on committing a felony?”

  “No jokes. I can’t get Maggie on the phone.”

  “Did something happen?” Vlad asked.

  “I don’t know. Call my cell the minute you have the rest of the sequence. And if you don’t hear from me in the next half-hour, call the cops.”

  ONCE OUTSIDE, JAKE CALLED LIEUTENANT BECRAFT AT THE Cornell police department. Becraft sounded surprised to hear from him. “Professor Sterling? Where are you? The Detrick people—”

  “Can you do something for me? Can you send someone out to Maggie Connor’s place? No one’s answering the phone. A woman named Cindy Sharp is supp
osed to be there. Watching over Dylan. Maggie’s son.”

  “Jake. Where are you? Is there some kind of problem?”

  “I’ll be in touch. Send a car out to Maggie’s.”

  “What’s going—”

  Jake hung up.

  25

  ORCHID CHECKED THE PHONE NUMBER WITH A FEW QUICK taps of her fingers. The heads-up screen in her glasses gave the response: LT. BECRAFT. CORNELL UNIVERSITY POLICE.

  She listened to the conversation between Jake Sterling and Becraft. Orchid had taps on both Jake Sterling’s and Maggie Connor’s cells, allowing her to hear all conversations, control all functions. She’d installed the modified SIM cards in both phones weeks ago, long before she had taken Liam Connor hostage. She had wanted complete control of the communications environment. The taps had proven invaluable. Minutes before, Maggie had tried to call Toloff at Detrick. Orchid had shut her phone down.

  Orchid checked the latest GPS location from Jake’s phone. He was moving, driving away from the address on Buffalo Road.

  Toward Maggie, she was sure.

  Good.

  Orchid backed the FedEx van up to the front door of Rivendell, thinking it through. The police would likely be here in minutes, but she still had time. She went inside the house and dragged the dead woman, Cindy Sharp, through the front door. She threw Cindy’s body in the back of the FedEx van. Orchid had stolen the van a week before from a storage garage in Pennsylvania. She closed the door carefully, locked it, then walked around to the driver’s door.

  She got in, started the engine, and checked Jake’s location again. He was retracing the path he’d taken, heading back to the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium. He was fifteen minutes away from his destination. Orchid was five.

  She turned the FedEx van around, started down the gravel road. She heard a squeaking sound in the back of the van.

  She glanced over her shoulder into the storage area. Dylan Connor was cuffed to the wall, tape on his mouth. He’d started to write HELP in the dust of the tinted back window with the tip of his shoe.

  Clever boy. Just like his great-grandfather.

  She pulled to a stop, then took a length of rope and secured his legs. “No more tricks,” she said. She wiped away the boy’s message with a brush of her fingers.

  She turned onto the main road. Maggie’s call to Toloff still worried her. What if Maggie had used another phone? What if she had gotten through?

  Orchid typed a series of commands on her leg.

  Time to make sure everyone at Detrick was very, very busy.

  26

  XINTAO LU WAS EXHAUSTED. HE’D BEEN UP ALL NIGHT, working his way through the final part of the processing run. He was a graduate student in physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, but he was pretty sure he was going to switch to electrical engineering.

  He dipped the wafer cartridge into the etching tank, letting the hydrofluoric acid perform the final step in the fabrication of his device. The little silicon chip he was etching had an array of microscopic holes, each barely larger than a virus. When superfluid helium passed through the holes, it would exhibit coherent oscillations that were sensitive to the absolute motion of the earth with respect to the stars. That’s what his thesis adviser said, anyway. But he was beginning to wonder about that. It all seemed too wild. Etch some holes in a piece of silicon, cool it to near absolute zero, and you would detect your rotation relative to the entire universe.

  It made his head hurt to think about it, especially after twenty-four straight hours in his white bunny suit in the cleanroom. The dust-free environment was kept so by a ceiling full of HEPA filters constantly chugging away, creating a low roar that crept into your bones.

  He scanned the rows of equipment, seeing only a couple of other users. A seminar was going on about a new kind of solar cell based on carbon nanotubes that had everyone jazzed. In a few more minutes, the seminar would end and the cleanroom would begin filling up again. The electron beam lithography machines were running—the demand on those was relentless. People were also camped out on the various other machines—the evaporators, ion millers, and etchers. They were all in their anti–dust bunny suits, conducting a defensive war against particles of dust and flecks of skin.

  Xintao began to gather everything up. He was nearly done.

  He heard a beep.

  Strange. Near the RF plasma cleaning chamber. That was when he spied it. He’d sat before the machine time and time again, waiting for his sample to be finished. The wall behind the chamber was imprinted on his memory. Two brass pipes running vertically, delivering water to the cooling head.

  Now there were three.

  He approached the third pipe, touched his hand to it. The pipe was vibrating ever so slightly.

  Xintao wasn’t sure why, but he immediately panicked. He stared at the pipe for a few seconds, then quickly glanced around, looking for one of the staff.

  To his surprise, the pipe beeped again. Quietly, like an alarm clock sounding in another room. He pulled his hand back, walked away briskly, certain that he had to find someone from the staff.

  He didn’t get far before the blast hit him.

  LEON SOLOMON, THE FBI’S CHIEF COUNTERTERRORISM SPECIALIST, arrived in the back of an unmarked van after a short ride over from the J. Edgar Hoover Building. A barricade of cruisers, orange cones, and yellow police tape kept the crowd from getting too close to the wreckage. Twelve FBI men were already on-site in addition to hundreds of local firefighters and police. The crowd was big and growing, drawn by the irresistible lure of destruction. Some were slack-jawed, frozen in shock. Others had a strange kind of energy about them, an almost giddy excitement. Something had happened.

  Solomon had a straight visual line to the carnage. The windows of the building were blown completely out, glass and concrete littering the street. A section of wall midway up the building was torn loose, tenuously hanging in space by a few strands of rebar. The TV vultures were everywhere, all three networks. Two helicopters circled overhead. The media were jumpy, hyped up, and ready to pounce. The press in New York were told that the shutdown of Bellevue was because of an outbreak of SARS. Total bullshit, and a few of the reporters were smelling it. You don’t send in the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force for SARS. And now, a day later, an explosion at the University of Maryland.

  Solomon was anxious as hell. By design, a university campus was a hub of dissemination, full of people from around the world—people who would seek to return home in a time of crisis. Rescue workers, students, professors rush in, breathe the pathogen, and you’ve got an outbreak that sweeps across the campus, then the city, then the country, then around the world. If you wanted to spread a pathogen, this was a hell of a way to do it.

  There had been a wild shouting match when the anonymous email had arrived in Sadie Toloff’s inbox, claiming credit for the explosion. The FBI director demanded they seal off the whole university, evacuate the entire College Park area. But they had dodged a bullet in Manhattan, and everyone was feeling lucky. The results had come in from Toloff’s lab at Detrick fifty minutes before. The kid in Times Square had been loaded with LSA—d-lysergic acid amide—one of the primary psychotropic alkaloid products produced by the Uzumaki. But the LSA was pharmaceutical-grade, likely administered by injection. All the genetic markers were negative for the actual fungus. The kid did not have an Uzumaki infection. He was going to make it. The Times Square incident was an elaborate ruse.

  As for the mysterious Asian woman’s profile, the CIA thought she could be a member of one of the ultranationalist, anti-Japanese groups, such as Sunshine 731 or Black Sword. These radical groups were furious that the United States would not turn over Hitoshi Kitano for prosecution as a war criminal. She was playing games, seeking publicity, that’s what the profilers said.

  Solomon wasn’t so sure.

  Inside, he met up with the local fire chief and the shell-shocked director of the facility. The main atrium was utter chaos. Debris—wood, gla
ss, chairs, railings, piping—was strewn about the floor. One of the skylights overhead was shattered. The fire chief pointed inside. “It’s in there. That’s where the bomb was.”

  Solomon went in, going straight to the epicenter of the explosion, scanning the wreckage for the item mentioned in the email. The fire chief filled in the details. As best they could tell, the explosive was fitted inside a fake section of piping. Thankfully, the student who saw it had survived, though he’d lose an arm and sight in both eyes. He’d told them that it had started to make a noise. It had likely been set off remotely.

  But it wasn’t the details of the bomb that interested Solomon. It was another item, one that no one else had yet noticed, partially obscured by a piece of plaster. Just like the anonymous email had said, right there on the floor, glinting in the rescue spotlights.

  A goddamn brass cylinder.

  27

  MAGGIE WAS BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND HOW FUSARIUM spirale could be turned into a devastating biological weapon.

  During World War II, genetics was still a new science. No one was even sure that DNA was the basis for genetic information until the Hershey-Chase experiments on T2 viruses in 1952. Even with today’s techniques for splicing and dicing genomes, creating a successful genetically modified organism was a huge undertaking.

  But the scientists at Unit 731 had chosen well.

  Fusarium spirale was relatively harmless when it lived in your gut, viciously dangerous when it infected a corn plant. If you want to make a monster out of it, all you had to do was scramble its genetic programming. Turn off a few genes, turn on a few others, get its signals mixed. Make it pump out toxins when it was living inside you. Maggie shuddered at the thought. You’d have a chemical weapons factory killing you from the inside out.

  Maggie could guess how they’d done it. They could have used chemicals or radiation to induce mutations, then test them on human subjects. Cultivate the ones that killed the quickest. If you were a sadistic monster willing to use live human subjects, you didn’t need biotechnology.