Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  A shadow in the weeds on the road to his right. A shape emerged, started running toward him.

  Dylan!

  He ran toward the boy, scooped him up in his arms. Dylan was crying.

  “Are you all right?”

  Dylan answered, but Jake couldn’t hear him through the buzz in his skull.

  “Are you all right?” Dylan nodded yes. “Where is she?”

  He spoke, but again Jake couldn’t understand.

  “Where? Point!”

  Dylan kept speaking, but he also pointed. Back toward the edge of the depot, where they had parked the FedEx van.

  “Stay here!” Jake yelled.

  DYLAN WATCHED JAKE RUN AWAY.

  He was again alone in the darkness.

  He was suddenly very cold, shivering, his teeth chattering. He could still taste the salty liquid on his tongue.

  DAY 5

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29

  VECTORS

  35

  LEVI BROWN LOVED THE QUIET. IT WAS BEFORE SIX A.M., the sky deep blue-black and empty, save for the scatter of stars. The lights from a lone street lamp stippled the old playground near the Genesee River, just outside the Rochester city center. Levi had a good half-hour before the early-morning mothers arrived, kids in tow. The neighborhood wasn’t the best, but there was little reason to fear a mugging this time of day. No gang-banger was crazy enough to be out at this time. Not in this cold. No one would interfere with the coming transaction.

  Levi spotted his customer approaching from the north. The customer was well dressed, about forty, probably upper management at Kodak, an overachiever looking for something to fill the void.

  No words were spoken. Levi handed over the two vials of small multicolored pills and took the cash in exchange. He quickly counted it, eight hundred dollars.

  Transaction done.

  Levi waited until the customer was out of sight, enjoying the feel of the money.

  A siren started up in the distance.

  He had turned to leave when he spied it, sitting on a bench, plain as you please. A woman’s purse.

  The purse was red leather, small, with a thin shoulder strap. The kind the young girls carried.

  He picked it up. The zipper was open. He looked inside, saw a fold of money. A lot of money.

  He reached in to get it and was rewarded with a sharp sting.

  “OUCH!”

  He jumped, dropped the purse on the ground.

  He looked at his finger. Two pools of blood were rising on the side of his finger. He wiped it off and saw two thin cuts before the blood rose to hide them again.

  What the hell?

  Levi knelt before the purse, carefully picked it up. He shook out the contents.

  The sirens were getting closer.

  The money was there, along with a few pens, a tube of lip balm, and a condom in its wrapper. He picked up the money.

  Something slipped from between the bills and lay on the concrete, sparkling in the first rays of the morning sun. At first he thought it was some kind of crystal, or a piece of glass, but it had metal strips on it. More like a little computer chip.

  “Are those legs?” Levi said aloud.

  He prodded it with the end of a pen. It skittered backward, then raised up on its hind legs as if to put up a fight.

  The sirens were getting louder. He saw the spinning lights playing across the buildings.

  One thought took over: Get the hell out of here.

  THE UH-60 BLACK HAWK CAME IN LOW. ARMY CAPTAIN JAMES McNair, 10th Mountain Division, was at the stick. Major Arthur Ricks, 2nd Battalion, 10th Combat Aviation Brigade, was at the open door. This was his baby. They had scrambled out of Fort Drum, a straight shot over Lake Ontario, running full out, covering the distance in less than twenty minutes. The orders had been clear but undeniably odd. They were after a robotic spider. And if they found it, or if the locals found it, Ricks and his men were to seal it in a biohazard box and get that little robot spider out of there as soon as goddamn possible.

  Ricks spotted the park. It was tree-lined, square. It was also empty. The local police had established a perimeter. Ricks counted eight squad cars.

  “Major. Over there.”

  Ricks saw it in infrared. A man running along the river, away from the park.

  Ricks tapped his headset and spoke to the brigade commander back at Drum. He watched his language. Higher-ups were also on the line. “We’ve got a civilian, fleeing. On foot.”

  “Jesus Christ” came the response, a voice Ricks didn’t recognize. “Get him. Now.”

  LEVI WAS RUNNING NOW. HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT WAS happening. Something big was happening, something bad. That’s when he heard it. A low swish, swish, swish, barely audible over the sirens in the distance, but then louder.

  He looked up. A helicopter popped into view over the trees, hovered directly overhead, huge and violent, the wind tearing at them, stirring up huge swirls of leaves.

  He froze, tossed the money on the ground. The helicopter wash tossed the bills to and fro.

  A voice boomed from above. “Do not move!”

  36

  THE NEWS OF THE SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPTION REACHED Lawrence Dunne as his Town Car pulled into the gates of Camp David. Forty minutes before, they’d received an untraceable satellite phone call from Orchid, with GPS coordinates for a park in Rochester, New York. She claimed a Crawler infected with the Uzumaki was there. A Black Hawk out of Fort Drum had taken the man who found it into custody. Local law enforcement was cordoning off the surrounding neighborhood, and a CBIRF squad was on its way.

  The officers at the guardhouse did a complete car search before waving Dunne’s car through. On the insistence of the head of the Secret Service, the President and his crisis team had relocated to Naval Support Facility Thurmont, as Camp David was officially known. The reason was simple: thousands of people passed within a few hundred feet of the White House every day, any of whom could release a burst of spores that might find their way into the building’s ventilation ducts. Camp David, on the other hand, was an isolated one-hundred-eighty-acre site in the Catoctin Mountains, sixty miles north of Washington, D.C., one of the most thoroughly guarded sites on earth. All of the staff were the Navy’s finest, trained at the highest level and specially selected, all with Yankee White clearances, the most rigorous possible. There was no way anyone could get close to Camp David.

  The deputy director of the FBI, a cocky little bastard named William Carlisle, was waiting for Dunne as the car door opened at the main compound. He had a sealed 9×12 envelope in one hand and a handheld video display in the other.

  He handed Dunne the envelope. “We know who Orchid is,” he said. “Her name’s Lanfen Wong.”

  Dunne took the file, opened it, pulled out the photo. The woman was young, pretty, dressed in a military outfit Dunne recognized as Chinese, People’s Army.

  “There’s a file on her at FBI,” Carlisle said. “We’re working it hard. I’ve got maybe fifty agents on this full-time, pulling records, looking for credit cards, phones, anything. So far it’s mostly history. Foreign national, came from Shanghai, spent time in the Chinese army. She came to the U.S. in 2000, went to college at Wayne State, in engineering. She was off-scale bright, made straight A’s in her freshman year. But she had a habit of hurting people. Sophomore year she broke the arm of one of her instructors in a dispute over getting a B.

  “After that, she signed on with Blackwater.”

  “Blackwater? They hire foreign nationals?”

  He nodded. “For their non-U.S. operations. But they couldn’t handle her. Lasted a year there, ended really ugly. Apparently a few of her fellow employees tried to rape her in 2003 while on assignment in Africa. She killed one, broke the spine of the other. She returned to China before she could be arrested. After that, the trail goes cold.”

  “When did you get this?” Dunne asked Carlisle.

  “Twenty minutes ago.”

  “Why didn’t anyone spot her on U.S.
soil sooner?”

  “Facial recognition didn’t pick her up. That’s what the scars are about. She changed her face. She’s unrecognizable to the computers. An entirely different eigenface, as the NSA boys call it.”

  “And you’ve got nothing since 2003?”

  “Four years ago, she canceled her credit card with Bank of America.”

  “Then nothing?”

  “Nothing. We’re hitting everyone who ever knew her. Focusing on her entire life here. We might get lucky. Maybe someone’s seen her. Or she’s using an old haunt.”

  “Anything about her being political? Anti-Japanese?”

  “Here’s the thing. She’s actually not entirely Chinese. She’s one-quarter Japanese.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Yup. She is from Nanking. Her grandmother was raped by a Japanese soldier before the war. So her mother was half-and-half. Apparently that was a no-no after the war. Her mother was treated like a third-class citizen. The granddaughters, too. They had the stigma of Japanese blood in them. That was why she came to the United States.

  “There’s something else. Even bigger. An email with a video attached came in a little over a half-hour ago, delivered to an FBI office in Kalispell, Montana. We traced the email to an Internet site called Time Cave. You compose an email, they send it at a later time.”

  “And?”

  “One of the geeks at the NSA just hacked the site. The communication was paid for using a stolen credit card. The email was entered late last night. Couldn’t tell from where. No way to trace it. The account name was, get this, testicle.”

  “Testicle?”

  “She’s being cute. Orchid is from the Greek orchis. Which means testicle. Apparently the bulbs of the flower look like a hanging pair of balls.”

  “Which she has us by.”

  “That she does,” Carlisle said. “She wants three things. Number one: absolutely nothing in the press. Number two: money. Ten million dollars now, more later. And number three: she wants Hitoshi Kitano. She included an indictment of Kitano for war crimes against the people of Harbin, China. Murder, torture, biological experimentation, everything. She said nothing was negotiable. That if anything went wrong, that Crawler in Rochester loaded with the Uzumaki was only the beginning. She says she has an army at her command.”

  “What army?”

  “You’re not going to like it,” he said. He clicked on the video display, and an image appeared of an Asian woman dressed entirely in black. You could see her face clear as day—Orchid. Next was a close-up of her gloved hand, palm open. In the palm were two halves of a small brass cylinder.

  “That’s likely the cylinder she took from the Connor kid,” Carlisle said. “The one Sterling told us about.” The camera shot lingered for a few seconds, then zoomed out. The wider view again showed Orchid. In her other hand, carefully balanced, was a large, almost perfectly transparent glass sphere about the size of a beach ball.

  “What the hell is that?” Dunne asked.

  “Hang on. You’ll see.”

  Small black specks decorated the wall of the glass sphere. Dunne noticed that the dots were moving.

  The camera zoomed in.

  “Oh, Christ,” Dunne said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Inside the sphere, crawling all over one another like bees in a hive, were thousands of MicroCrawlers.

  37

  THE QUARANTINE WING AT DETRICK WAS CALLED “THE SLAMMER.”

  There were seven rooms, each with a bed and a window that looked out on an observation room. A telephone allowed visitors in the observation room to talk to the quarantined person. From what Jake had been told, they sat empty almost all the time, reserved for the rare accident in the BSL-4 facility, where a cut on a glove or an improperly seated seal could expose an individual to a level-4 pathogen, such as Marburg or Ebola.

  Jake was in one of the quarantine rooms, had been since four in the morning. Dylan was in the next one over. Where Maggie was, no one knew.

  THE EXPLOSION AT SENECA ARMY DEPOT HAD BROUGHT everyone from the Geneva Fire Department to the CIA. Jake was half deaf as he tried to answer the questions yelled at him by authorities ranging from the local police to the FBI. He kept yelling back, demanding they put every man on the search for the FedEx van with Maggie tied up in the back. They assured him that roadblocks had been set up, helicopters were scouring the region. But the searchers found nothing.

  By secure linkup, Jake had told Dunne and General Anthony Arvenick, the head of Detrick, everything he knew. Within an hour, Jake and Dylan had been placed in containment suits and airlifted out. As soon as they were airborne, a series of bombers swept in and dropped incinerating explosives on a mile-wide stretch of the depot. The sky was an orange hell. Jake saw the white deer running for their lives, trying to stay ahead of the flames.

  They’d landed at Andrews Air Force Base in the middle of the night. From Andrews, it had been a ride in a convoy to Detrick, where they had been ushered into the slammer, Jake and Dylan in separate rooms. A steady stream of tests had followed: Jake was poked and prodded, and had a huge amount of blood drawn and saliva samples taken, along with a painful procedure during which they scraped tissue from his lung using a long arthroscopic device. They had also loaded him up with Amphotericin, an antifungal medicine.

  After that came the debriefings. He told his story again and again, enduring question after question, his hands in bandages, his lungs still raw. He hadn’t had a moment to think until a half-hour ago. The DNA marker tests that they were running next door in the BSL-4 lab would be done by eleven a.m.

  It was ten-fifty.

  Jake paced the cage. His ears still hurt like hell, but his hearing was coming back in stages. According to Albert Roscoe, the head physician, a wiry, mid-fifties man with leathery skin and clear blue eyes, another day would be needed to see if the damage was permanent.

  Jake didn’t care about his hearing or the burns on his hands. He fixed his thoughts on Dylan, thinking about how that brave little kid had tried to dump the Uzumaki. He had opened the cylinder, sucked out half of it, spit it on the floor of the bunker. But Orchid had gotten to him before he could do the same with the other half.

  Dylan was asleep now, finally. They let Jake talk to him by telephone about two hours ago. They were only a few feet apart, but they might as well have been across the country.

  Dylan and he had talked quite a while, mostly about Maggie. Dylan was so worried about her. Jake tried to keep some distance from that. He was already thinking too much about her, more than was good for him. There was nothing he could do about Maggie right now but try to help her son.

  Dr. Roscoe told Jake what symptoms to watch for, what the Uzumaki would do to a human being. They had the records from what had happened on the USS Vanguard, as well as from the files recovered from Unit 731. Apparently there had also been some tests run on American prisoners in the late fifties, lifers willing to trade risk for a shot at a bigger cell and better food. The symptoms would show up inside of a day, the low temperatures, the sweats, the nervous energy, the itchy skin. From there, the visual hallucinations would start, the general deconstruction of the personality, leaving a raving, dangerous maniac.

  Jake felt fine. No hint of a symptom. But Jake had a terrible feeling in his chest. Dr. Roscoe had Dylan’s medical records retrieved from his GP in Ithaca. Dylan had been on penicillin antibiotics twice in the last six months, most recently five weeks before. Just before Dylan went to sleep, he had said that he was feeling light-headed. And that he was sweating.

  A RUCKUS IN THE HALL. JAKE WAS ON HIS FEET, WATCHING the action in the main hallway through two sets of windows. They ushered in a man in an isolation suit identical to the ones Jake and Dylan had worn. Jake caught a glimpse of his face: good-looking, middle-American boy, scared half to death, looked like he couldn’t be more than thirty.

  Roscoe showed up in the observation room soon after. He picked up the phone, motioning for Jake to do the same.r />
  “What happened?” Jake asked.

  “He found one of your Crawlers in a children’s park in Rochester. It bit him. They think it had the Uzumaki inside it.”

  “She’s using them as vectors.”

  Roscoe nodded. “We’re proceeding worst-case, even though we got to the guy within ten minutes of contact with the vector. We’ve also quarantined the team that picked him up.”

  “Wait. Ten minutes? How did you get there so fast?”

  “I don’t know. Look. Let us worry about him. I have news. Your tests are back. The DNA arrays and the cultures are negative. No signs of the Uzumaki in your lungs, in your stomach. You’re completely clean so far. We’ll keep you in quarantine the next few days, just to be sure. But the odds are you’re clean.”

  “What about Dylan?”

  Roscoe hesitated. “We’re not finished with his.”

  “Why? Why are mine finished and not his?”

  “There was an issue with contamination with Dylan’s lung sample. We have to run it again.”

  “Contamination? In a BSL-4 lab?” Roscoe was hiding the truth. “You know something, tell me.”

  “There are people here to see you.”

  “Goddamn it. Tell me.”

  “Let us finish the tests, Jake. We’ll know for sure soon. There are people here to see you.”

  JAKE’S VISITORS WERE IN UNIFORM, A MAN AND A WOMAN.

  “I’m Colonel Daniel Wheeler, USAMRIID. This is Major Melissa Larkspur.”

  “I’m an electronics expert out of Wright-Patterson in Dayton. I’ve been studying your Crawlers, exploring ways to stop them. Orchid,” Larkspur said, “programmed the Crawler at Rochester to respond to a thermal signal and strike. We checked the registers on the flash drive. The last program she entered was there.”

  “Orchid appears to know a great deal about your Crawlers,” Wheeler said. “We’re looking to see if she hacked into your computer system.”