Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  Maggie felt the mysteries shrouding her grandfather dissolving away, the pieces of his life coming together. Her grandfather had gone to work at Detrick right after the war. Liam never talked about it, but she had gathered threads from what her grandmother Edith had told her. In the months before she died, Edith and Maggie spent a great deal of time together. Maggie loved to get her talking, to tell the stories of her life. It made Edith happy, distracting her when she was in great pain from the treatments. Edith said that Liam had insisted that they move to Maryland so he could continue his work at Camp Detrick. “He never was quite the same after the war,” she said. “He had nightmares. It must have been terrible. I can’t imagine.”

  Maggie was willing to bet that those nightmares were about Fusarium spirale.

  Bam! Bam! Maggie nearly jumped out of her skin at the thudding noise. Someone was banging on the front door.

  She started toward the reception area. Could it be Jake?

  Bam!

  But why wouldn’t he have called?

  She stopped, pulled out her phone, and flipped it open. The main display showed no messages. But she hit the key that took her to her voice mail. To her surprise, there were seven. All from Jake, all in the last half-hour. Why hadn’t her phone rang? Something was wrong with her phone.

  The banging grew louder, a steady thump, thump, thump. She retrieved the gun that Vlad had left her, suddenly thankful to have it.

  “Jake?” she asked, standing across the reception room from the front door, gun pointed toward it. Her hand was shaking. “Is that you?”

  The banging stopped.

  Complete silence. Her heart was pounding.

  She forced herself to check the window. The parking lot was empty.

  She leaned in close to the glass, trying to see the front door, but the angle was wrong. The window frame blocked her view.

  Then she heard a voice: “Mom?”

  “Dylan?”

  No answer.

  “Dylan?” She quickly flipped the deadbolt, turned the knob. He sounded scared. Really scared.

  The door exploded open, catching Maggie square in the chest. The next thing she knew, she was on her back, stunned, staring up at the ceiling. The back of her skull screamed in pain, her right arm bent behind her. She shook her head to clear her thoughts, pulled herself up.

  The gun barrel was less than six inches from her forehead.

  JAKE PULLED TO A STOP ON THE ROAD LEADING TO THE herbarium, a good two hundred yards away. He picked up the Beretta from the passenger seat, released the safety.

  He jogged to the building, staying out of sight of the front door. When he got close, he felt his heart jump into his throat. The front door was ajar.

  Maggie would not have left that door open.

  His pulse raced as he slid through the open door and into the waiting area, gun in the lead, ready to shoot. A weapon always upped the stakes. If you showed deadly force, you had to be willing to use it.

  The room was empty, the phone off the hook. Beyond it, through a windowless metal-reinforced door, was the herbarium proper, with its rows of storage cabinets. A tough space to enter unnoticed. He’d have a target painted on his chest.

  No choice. He had to go there.

  Jake opened the door slowly. The main lights were out, the only illumination coming from the back of the room. One brown cabinet after another, each maybe seven feet tall and four feet wide, arranged in four rows like giant dominoes. He listened closely for any sound, then stepped inside. He took up a position against the closest cabinet on the left, keeping his breathing even and slow. If someone was here, they would have heard him enter. Better to play dumb.

  “Maggie? You in here?”

  Nothing.

  “Maggie?”

  A rustling came from somewhere in the middle of the room. He peered around the cabinet, gun ready, his finger half-squeezing the trigger. He saw a human form standing in a shadowed space between the two rows of cabinets.

  Jesus. It was Maggie. Her mouth was taped closed, her hands behind her back. Bound and gagged.

  Jake kept the gun up, worked his way carefully along the left wall.

  Then Jake’s phone rang.

  Jake pulled it from his pocket and glanced down. The caller ID said ANS OR SHE DIES.

  Jake edged around until he could see Maggie again. He accepted the call.

  “You’re going to do something for me,” the woman said, her voice calm and low. She had an accent—Chinese, Jake was pretty sure. He picked up a slight echo, probably from her voice carrying across the warehouse-sized space. The acoustics of the room were complex, sounds ricocheting off the walls and cabinets. He couldn’t yet tell where she was, but he was sure she was inside. And therefore not more than a hundred feet away.

  Jake tried to think it through. She was most likely across the room, on the other side of Maggie. His best bet was to go left, circle around. Outflank her. “Who are you?” he said into the phone, listening for the echo.

  “You can call me Orchid.”

  “What do you want?”

  “In time. Now. Look at your phone.”

  Jake saw the numbers of his phone appear one by one, as if he was dialing. The dialing stopped on the second-to-last number. He recognized the number. It was Vlad’s cell.

  “Here’s what you will do. You’ll tell him everything is fine. Tell him that Ms. Connor’s cellphone batteries were dead. You understand? Then ask him how his search is going. He’ll tell you. You’ll respond appropriately. Then you’ll hang up. Do you understand?”

  “What do I get in return?”

  “Nothing. You fail, I kill her. I’ll be on the line. I’ll cut you off if you try and say anything wrong. You understand?”

  Jake kept moving, hoping the confusing acoustics would mask his forward progress. He swung around the next cabinet, gun in one hand and the phone in the other.

  Nothing.

  Jesus Christ, where was she?

  The last number appeared. Then the phone was ringing.

  Vlad picked up on the second ring. “Jake?”

  Jake approached the next cabinet, gun drawn.

  “Jake? Everything all right?”

  He whipped around, ready to fire. Nothing. “Everything is fine. Where are you with the sequencing?”

  “What was wrong with her phone?” Vlad asked.

  “The battery was dead.”

  Jake stepped around another cabinet, gun drawn. Nothing.

  “What about the landline?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t answer it.”

  “You didn’t ask her?”

  “No. Vlad. It’s fine. Tell me about the sequence.”

  Vlad didn’t respond. Then, “You sure you are fine?”

  “Vlad. Leave it. It’s been a tough couple of days.” Jake continued his progress along the left wall. Only three more cabinets to go.

  Jake was close. The next row was the one that was his best guess. “We’ve almost got it, Jake. Another half-hour.”

  He heard the slight squeak of rubber. A shoe. It came from the other side of the cabinet he was now facing. He looked to his right. He could still see Maggie. The shoe wasn’t Maggie’s.

  Moment of truth. He’d come around it quickly, firing.

  He took a breath, held it. He muted his phone, then tossed it across the room. The phone struck the far wall with a clang. Jake turned the corner, gun held in both hands, ready to blow Orchid’s head off.

  Standing there, staring right at him, was Dylan, eyes big as moons. Jake’s legs went rubbery, hands shaking at what he’d almost done. He’d come to within a fraction of a second of shooting.

  He eased the pressure on the trigger, his knees almost buckling.

  From behind him, a voice very close: “Put down the gun. Slowly.”

  28

  INSIDE OF AN HOUR, THEY HAD THE BRASS CYLINDER AT DETRICK.

  Dunne watched by video hookup from a nearby secure room as Toloff picked it up and turne
d it over in her gloved hands. She was inside the USDA class-4 Uzumaki facility, in a full pressure suit with external air. She looked like an astronaut on the moon. The facility had a bunch of cameras, always on, but they were typically used only for archiving. They’d been tapped into, were being broadcast live, with power players up and down the security food chain watching every move. The head of Detrick, a general named Arvenick, was certainly watching, as was the FBI director. Dunne assumed the President was linked in as well.

  A team of weapons experts and forensic materials scientists had already poked and prodded the cylinder every way they could. It had identical dimensions to the ones that had been recovered from the Japanese submarines. Something slid around inside when you tilted it, like a marble. They couldn’t do an MRI because the metal shielded out the radio waves. X rays didn’t show anything. A quick and ferocious debate followed about what to do, but in the end they’d simply decided to open the damn thing, and Toloff got the task. On the video, Dunne saw her hand shaking and the rivulets of sweat on her face as she twisted open the cylinder. The camera zoomed in on her gloved hands. “It’s resisting,” she said. Her hand jerked slightly. “All right,” she said. “The threads are sliding past one another. Here we go.”

  Dunne braced himself as if he were in the room with her. The cylinder might be booby-trapped. They’d checked the mass against the thickness of the walls, which they had evaluated with ultrasound. It could be an explosive.

  She unscrewed the cylinder, then carefully set the upper section on the table. She looked inside the other half.

  “Holy crap,” she said. She studied it for a few seconds, then looked up at the camera. “You’re not going to believe this.”

  She laid a Texwipe on the table, gently shook the cylinder over it to disgorge the contents.

  You’ve got to be kidding, Dunne said to himself.

  It was a bone. A human finger bone. The significance of the finger bone was not lost on Dunne. She had probably taken it from the finger she cut off of the man in Times Square.

  Toloff said, “There’s writing on it. Zoom in.”

  Etched in letters so small that they were barely readable was a message.

  KITANO MUST PAY

  Dunne recognized the Chinese characters at the end of the message. They were the characters for Orchid.

  29

  SHE DID EVERYTHING RIGHT. ORCHID MADE JAKE TAPE HIS own mouth closed, then put him in the lead, where he could see nothing but the way ahead. She directed him out the back door, a path that would take them nowhere near the gun he’d tossed aside. Her exit route was secure and hidden—through a stand of woods behind the herbarium. It was still light out, but the sun was low, the branches casting shadows that cut across the patches of snow like streaks of black paint.

  They were hundreds of yards away from the nearest road. If anyone caught a glance from afar, they’d look like a group of hikers.

  Maggie was behind him, holding Dylan close. Jake heard her crying. Orchid questioned her as they walked, asking where the Uzumaki was hidden. Maggie kept repeating, “I don’t know.”

  Jake’s nerves were on high alert. He was thinking it through, and he didn’t like where his thoughts were leading. If Orchid was after the Uzumaki, Jake had to end this. No matter the cost.

  Orchid spoke. “Up there,” she said. “To your left, twenty degrees.”

  A white FedEx van was parked on the side of the road.

  “The back door,” she said.

  The door screeched as Jake opened it.

  Maggie screamed, shielding Dylan from the grisly sight. A young woman was curled up on the floor of the van like a discarded doll. She’d been shot in the head. The bottom of the van was sticky red.

  “Inside,” Orchid said. Jake obeyed, the smell of iron thick in his nostrils. He recognized her from the red curly hair. Cindy. Maggie’s roommate from Rivendell.

  Orchid pointed toward the right wall. “Put that on.” A belt was hanging on the wall, thick and black with a plastic box on the back the size of a paperback book. Jake strapped it to his waist. He had a pretty good idea what it was for.

  She tapped a sequence on her leg.

  The belt on Jake’s waist hummed as fifty thousand volts shot up his spine. It knocked him to his knees, hands in fists, groaning. “That was a warning,” she said. “At full strength, it will kill you.” Orchid pointed to the woman on the floor. “Get her out. Put her in the woods. Make sure the body’s out of sight.”

  Jake did as he was told, carrying Cindy’s lifeless body. He tried to block out the cold, clammy feel of her skin, the terrible whiteness of her arm. A memory hit him from the bulldozer assault, the Iraqi soldiers buried in the sand, cat shit in a litterbox. Afterward he’d seen a sunburned arm sticking out of the sand, clutching a boot. The poor bastard must’ve been asleep, then took off running, grabbing what he could.

  Stop it. Jake focused on the situation, sorting it through, click, clack. Jake knew it, the soldier in him knew it. You do what you have to do. And what he had to do was stop this woman.

  He laid Cindy down among the leaves. He looked around. He was far enough away. He could make a run for it, might make it or at least get noticed. The other side of the woods led to a major road. He glanced back toward the van. Dylan was crying, Maggie trying to console him. Orchid stood, watching Jake. She had the gun pointed at Maggie’s head. She spoke, just loud enough to be heard: “Let’s go.”

  30

  “HE’S BEEN SITTING LIKE THAT FOR ALMOST TWO HOURS,” said Stan Robbins, the man in charge of Kitano’s surveillance. Robbins and Dunne were in a secure National Security Council conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the six-hundred-thousand-square-foot monstrosity across the street from the West Wing. On the screen before them was an overhead view of Hitoshi Kitano’s cell, a real-time feed from the surveillance cameras at the United States Penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia, a maximum-security facility.

  DUNNE HAD FIRST MET HITOSHI KITANO MORE THAN TWO decades ago, when Dunne was still a relatively unknown professor at Yale. Dunne’s Ph.D. treatise, then still speculation, on the downfall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rise of China had caught the old man’s attention. Kitano was by then one of the richest men in Japan. Their relationship had ended twenty-two months before, when, at eighty-three years old, Hitoshi Kitano had been imprisoned at Hazelton. The previous sixty years had been a circular journey for Kitano, starting and ending in an American jail. Dunne had insisted that the FBI closely monitor Kitano since his imprisonment. It had been a mess of paperwork, not to mention demanding the more or less full-time attention of Robbins. But the FBI had more than twelve thousand agents—they could spare one. Where Kitano and the Uzumaki were concerned, Dunne took no chances.

  The camera shot of Kitano’s cell was from a light fixture in the ceiling. Kitano sat stock-still, staring into space. The time stamp said four-forty-one p.m. What the hell was wrong with him? Dunne wanted to crack open his skull and peer inside.

  Dunne scanned the rest of the cell. On a small shelf on the wall were three books. “What’s he reading?”

  “One’s a book on pigeon racing.”

  “He’s a fanatic,” Dunne said. “Specializing in long-distance races. Two years ago, right before he was put in, one of his pigeons won the twelfth Sun City Million Dollar in South Africa, the most prestigious pigeon race in the world.”

  “Good for him. Book number two: Institutions, Industrial Upgrading, and Economic Performance in Japan: The ‘Flying Geese’ Paradigm of Catch-up Growth by Terutomo Ozawa. I read it: the author advocates something called gankou keitai.”

  “Kaname Akamatsu’s ‘flying geese’ model of Asian cooperation,” Dunne said. “The economies of Asia would develop in the mythical pattern of flying geese, with Japan at the lead and the other nations—China, Korea, Malaysia, and the like—following behind.”

  “And book number three?”

  “Yukio Mishima. Sun and Steel: a
rt, action, and ritual death.”

  Dunne nodded. “Kitano idolized Mishima.”

  “Why would he idolize a Japanese novelist?”

  “Because of how he died. Mishima killed himself in 1970. He was only forty-five and a huge cultural figure. He took the commandant of the Japan Self-Defense Forces hostage, then gave a speech from a balcony in Tokyo, demanding a return to rule by the emperor. He was trying to incite the Japanese military. Then he went inside and disemboweled himself.”

  “Why?”

  “He thought Japan had been emasculated at the end of the war. He was a fanatical believer in Bushido—the way of the warrior. Kitano bought the sword that was used by Mishima’s second to cut off his head. Kept it hung on his wall of his study.” Dunne watched the old man. Kitano had fought for a victorious Japan but over the years he had come to believe in wealth as much as in force. He helped rebuild the Japanese industrial base and pushed for an expanded role of the military in Japanese society. The way to a reemergent Japan was through both the yen and the sword. But Japan had slipped beneath the waves of history. China was the new dragon.

  Dunne knew Kitano’s history like he knew his own. Sixty-four years before, after the events on the Vanguard, Kitano had been held in a military brig in Honolulu. The Pacific Command had launched a furious search for the other submarines, each purported to have a brass cylinder containing the Uzumaki. Over the years they’d recovered five of those original seven cylinders, four right after the war, including the one found by the Vanguard, and a fifth in the 1970s in a wreck off the southern California coast. The final two, assuming they existed, were never found.

  Kitano had been held in a cell no larger than a closet for months on end, a beast in a cage, furious and raging. He had been questioned mercilessly, threatened repeatedly with trial and execution for war crimes. He claimed to have told them everything he knew—names of the Tokkō, information on their targets. They kept squeezing him until MacArthur cut a deal with Shiro Ishii. In May of 1947, Ishii turned over some ten thousand pages of records documenting the “research findings” obtained at Unit 731 about biological weapons, including the Uzumaki, in exchange for immunity. The prosecutions of all Unit 731 personnel were terminated, and Kitano was freed.