Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  “She wouldn’t have to. We had a kind of owner’s manual on a Wiki. Open access. My student made it. Joe Xu.”

  “Xinjian Xu?” Wheeler said. “The FBI has him in custody.”

  “Custody? Why?”

  He brushed off the question.

  Larkspur asked, “How sensitive are your Crawlers to electromagnetic pulses? Do you ever blow out the electronics?”

  “On occasion. Why?”

  “We’re trying to figure out if we can knock them out with an electromagnetic pulse.”

  “An EMP weapon? You’ve got to be kidding. You’re contemplating setting off a nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere? It would knock out a decent fraction of the nation’s communications infrastructure.”

  “We have smaller versions. Non-nuclear. Ones that can take out all the electronics in a fixed area. Anything from a single building to an entire city.”

  “You really think you can disable the Crawlers with an EMP?”

  “That’s what we hoped to find out from you.”

  “This Wiki,” Wheeler said. “It had the plans to build the Crawlers?”

  “Sure. It had everything. The CAD files for all the mask levels. Detailed procedures.”

  Larkspur looked pained. “That’s where she got them,” she said to Wheeler.

  “Got what? We’re a federally funded academic research lab. Everything is open access. There’s nothing illegal about that. Now. Why is Joe Xu in custody?”

  “He’s a Chinese national.”

  “So?”

  “He could have shared the designs with—”

  “I told you, it was all available. There’s nothing to…” Jake suddenly put the pieces together. “Why are you worried about the designs for the Crawlers?”

  Larkspur said, “Because two months ago a woman matching Orchid’s description placed an order with a Taiwanese silicon foundry called Unafab. It specializes in custom electronic and microelectromechanical systems. The CIA has had them under surveillance since 2007. They’re known to take any work they can get, including from military and even terror groups. Two weeks ago, that order was picked up, supposedly by a Chinese company called Star Technologies. We haven’t been able to find out anything on the company. But we do have a photo from the pickup.”

  She slid the photo across the table. The shot was from a distance, but Jake recognized her easily. “Orchid,” Jake said. “You think she ordered a manufacturing run of Crawlers.”

  “We know.”

  She showed Jake the video of Orchid and the glass sphere filled with Crawlers.

  AFTER AN HOUR OF QUESTIONS, JAKE WAS LEFT ALONE WITH his thoughts.

  They’d gone over it from every angle. The Crawlers used a standard silicon foundry chip set. They were not particularly vulnerable to EMPs because they had no external wires to act as antennas. The Army had, over the last decade, run an extremely thorough set of EMP tests on handheld devices and laptops. Now they were about to run a series using Crawlers from Jake’s lab at Cornell. If they were lucky, they would find a strong electromagnetic resonance, a frequency where the Crawler acted as a particularly good antenna. Then they could engineer the EMP bomb to hit it hardest at that frequency.

  They had their plans. But as Jake knew, sometimes things didn’t go as planned. And if they failed—if the Crawlers released the fungus, the results could be catastrophic.

  Jake remembered a quote by William Osler, one of the forefathers of modern medicine: “Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.”

  Osler had seen the ravages of a world war. Sixteen million people had died in World War I, including three hundred thousand at Verdun alone. Sixteen million in four years. But the influenza that followed in 1918 killed many times that number in a matter of months.

  And it wasn’t only the number of dead. A biological threat tore apart a society. War, for all its horror, galvanized a nation, pulled it together against a common opponent. But fever was a different kind of enemy. It struck from within, driving everyone into paranoid isolation, afraid of touching anyone around them. Jake had experienced it firsthand during the Gulf War. When the chem/bio weapons alarms went off and you put on your suit, you were alone and powerless inside that sweaty cocoon.

  No honor, only suffering. Courage was useless against a bacterium, a fungal spore, a virus that slipped into you by water, by touch, by breath. No way to be brave in the face of danger when the danger was beyond your ability to see. There were no war memorials to influenza victims in towns across America. Those people just suffered and died, and everyone tried their best to forget any of it had ever happened.

  An Uzumaki epidemic would be much worse than the 1918 flu pandemic, both in numbers and in the nature of the illness itself. The flu attacked only your body, but the Uzumaki turned you into a raving maniac, suicidal at best, homicidal at worst. An Uzumaki epidemic would be like hell on earth.

  Jake paced his cell, wanted to punch the Plexiglas window separating him from the outside. Thousands of Crawlers. She could release them in waves, at hundreds of locations simultaneously. If only a few succeeded, that would be enough. He had seen a map once, showing the travel patterns of people, tracked by their cellphones. Dense mats of lines connecting the major hubs of L.A., Chicago, New York, Boston, and Seattle. Smaller lines fanning out everywhere else. Infect just a few people, let them spread out, go to work, go to school, stop by the local Walmart, get on a plane for California to see a friend. In a matter of days the Uzumaki could be everywhere. At that point, there was no way to stop it.

  Game over.

  DOCTOR ROSCOE KNOCKED AT THE WINDOW. HE LOOKED beaten down.

  Jake picked up the phone, his heart racing. He thought of Maggie, wherever she was, so far away from her son. “Tell me,” he said.

  Roscoe took a deep breath, looked down at the floor, then back to Jake. He met him head-on, one man to another. “It’s Dylan’s tests. I’m sorry. The news is bad.”

  38

  MAGGIE FLOATED IN DARKNESS, COOL AND BLACK. SHE TRIED to will herself out of the darkness, into being. But she felt nothing, not even the movement of her arms.

  Dylan. Memories of Dylan. He was six years old, and they were looking for arrowheads at Taughannock Falls.

  Dylan had asked who Taughannock was, and she told him he’d been a Delaware Indian. The Iroquois had captured him and threw him over the falls.

  Dylan had stood at the waterfall’s bank for a long time, looking into the gorge, as if he saw the chief plummeting downward. “If I were falling, would you save me?”

  “You can count on that, buddy.”

  A SPARKLE, A SENSATION, LIKE A SILVERFISH IN MOONLIGHT.

  Pain.

  Her leg ached, the left one, for a reason she couldn’t remember. Her breathing was labored, her lungs constricted, unable to get enough air.

  Dylan. Where is Dylan?

  She jerked awake, eyes open, wincing at the onslaught of bright light. A wave of nausea hit her. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, breathing hard, fighting it off. The nausea crested, faded. She opened her eyes just a slit this time, let the light in slowly, titrating the light, until she could take its full force.

  She was strapped to a table tilted about thirty degrees from the horizontal. Above her was a high ceiling, round, a half-dome, I-beam struts holding up what looked to be sheets of painted white metal. She tried to sit up, but she was held by a gray elastic band tight across her chest. She was handcuffed at the wrists to the table on which she lay.

  Maggie looked around the room. In front of her were a pair of workbenches, one covered with electronic equipment: an oscilloscope, soldering irons, and spools of wire. The second was empty. Hanging above the workbench on a pair of hooks were two masks. Gas masks, she realized.

  Maggie strained at her bonds, looked as far to the left as she could manage. She saw a pistol on a cabinet ten feet away with an unusual, larger-than-normal barr
el. Next to it was a pair of cylinders the size of a roll of mints, each with a needle protruding from the end. A tranquilizer pistol. Beyond it she could see the top half of a large transparent sphere that looked to be made of glass, perhaps two feet in diameter.

  She turned to the right and immediately froze. She could just make them out from the corner of her eye. On a metal table not a foot from her head.

  She stared at them, fear like a hand slapping her. Five MicroCrawlers.

  Next to them was a pair of tweezers, the objects laid out on a square of white cloth like dentist’s tools.

  Maggie pulled at her bonds, fighting off panic.

  A door opened and closed, the sound coming from the direction of the stairs. Then footsteps.

  Maggie felt a chill run through her as Orchid came into view. “You’re awake,” Orchid said flatly. She wore a skintight black outfit, with black gloves. Her hair was cut short, like a man’s. She looked beaten up. The side of her face was black and blue. The fingers of her right hand were taped together.

  “Where’s Dylan?” The words came out like a croak, her throat parched.

  Orchid grabbed a water bottle. “Open,” she said. Orchid poured in half a mouthful.

  Maggie swallowed, coughing. But the water was soothing.

  “Where is my son?”

  Orchid didn’t respond. Instead she stood and went to a bench across the room. She returned with one of the gas masks Maggie had seen hanging on the wall. Orchid laid the mask on Maggie’s chest. It had a large, clear faceplate and dual particulate filters emerging from each side, like truncated tusks.

  She leaned over Maggie, looking directly into her eyes. “How much do you know about the Uzumaki?”

  “Screw you. Where is my son?”

  Maggie saw a flash of rage cross Orchid’s eyes. She raised her arm and struck Maggie brutally hard in the chest with the base of her open palm, driving it into her sternum. Maggie gasped, the pain radiating outward as though she’d been cracked open. She saw spots before her eyes and was afraid that she would vomit.

  Orchid said, “A word of advice. This is not going to be pleasant for you no matter how it goes. It’s your choice how bad it has to be. Now answer my question. How much do you know about the Uzumaki?”

  Maggie was still breathing hard, her breastbone throbbing. She couldn’t come up with a good reason not to answer. “Look, before yesterday, I’d never heard of it.”

  “Do you know the pathways of infection?”

  “Ingestion,” Maggie said. “From what I know, it’s by ingestion.”

  Orchid nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “Through the stomach. That is one possibility. But there is another one. Do you know what it is?”

  “Inhalation,” Maggie said. “Spores.”

  “Correct.”

  Orchid picked up the gas mask and placed it on Maggie’s face. She pulled the straps around the back of Maggie’s head, tightening them, making the fit snug. She was methodical, careful, checking the seals with her fingers.

  “Blow out,” she said. “It’s important that this fits properly. Exhale as hard as you can. Quickly.”

  Maggie quickly exhaled, sending a fresh wave of pain through her chest. The mask swelled slightly but held its seal.

  “Again. Harder. First breathe in.”

  Maggie slowly inhaled. She smelled the rubber and plastic, heard the underwater sound of the air hissing through the particulate filters.

  “Now. As hard as you can.”

  Maggie exhaled hard. Again the mask swelled, but the seals held.

  “Good.”

  Orchid grabbed the table with the Crawlers and pulled it close. She sat down on a stool next to Maggie. Orchid raised her damaged right hand, cupped her fingers, and moved them back and forth. One of the Crawlers, the farthest from the right, skittered forward, bumping into the tweezers laid out in front of them.

  Maggie watched, a cold, slack terror sweeping over her.

  Working carefully, deliberately, Orchid picked up the MicroCrawler with the tweezers. With her free hand she carefully lifted up the edge of Maggie’s gas mask. She slid the tweezers through the opening, placing the Crawler on Maggie’s cheek. Maggie tried to shake her head, to knock it loose, but she couldn’t. The Crawler’s legs hooked her skin.

  No, no, no, no…

  Maggie was shaking, her whole body quivering. “Oh, God, no. Please. Stop this. What do you want from me?”

  “No. That’s not it at all. There’s nothing you can tell me.”

  “Then why?”

  “I want proof.”

  Maggie was hyperventilating. “Proof of what?” She tugged as hard as she could at her restraints, unable to move. The Crawler loomed over her left eye. She tried to will it away.

  Orchid twitched her hand. The Crawler skittered right a fraction of an inch, its legs catching the skin like barbs of a fishhook. Maggie squeezed her eyes shut, tried to brace herself for the pain she knew was coming. She had seen Crawlers tear through leather—her skin would be like paper.

  “Ready?” Orchid asked.

  Maggie forced herself to open her eyes. She said, “Screw you.”

  Orchid smiled, then closed her hand into a fist twice in rapid succession.

  Maggie winced, but there was no sharp bite of pain. Instead a slight sound, like a perfume mister. The air inside the mask was suddenly cloudy.

  Maggie blinked, coughed inside the mask. The Crawler was motionless on her cheek, its legs holding on to her skin.

  What just happened?

  Maggie looked to Orchid. Their eyes met. Orchid smiled again.

  The mask on her face. The filters were designed to catch particulates. Normally it was to keep dangerous agents out. But here it was meant to keep them in.

  “Inhalation,” Orchid said.

  The Uzumaki.

  The mist was full of Uzumaki spores.

  39

  THE PRINCIPALS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL AS sembled in Camp David’s Laurel Lodge conference room. The mood was serious, no small talk, no joking and jostling. Lawrence Dunne took a chair along the back wall.

  The room was long and narrow, with a sloped ceiling and wood paneling on all four walls. A thirty-foot-long wooden table ran down the center. The vice president, the President’s chief of staff, and the national security adviser were on one side, talking in quiet tones. The secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs sat directly across. Clustered at the far end were the directors of National Intelligence and Homeland Security, along with the FBI director, the head of the CDC, and the commander of Fort Detrick. Normally a ring of lesser functionaries would occupy the chairs against the walls, but not today. Today no one was let in the room who wasn’t absolutely essential. Dunne was the only deputy-level staff member present, in the room at the President’s behest.

  The POTUS himself entered solo, exuding authority, making it clear to everyone who was in charge. With his Hollywood looks and background as self-made CEO of a billion-dollar Internet services empire, he had run as an agent of change, loyal to no one but the American people, promising to restore the nation to its former glory as the undisputed economic leader of the world. He was addicted to Butterfingers and was a serial sports fanatic, his current obsession being handball. He liked to project a calm, laid-back persona to the public, but he could stand up and dominate a room when he had to.

  He worked his way around the table, calling for updates one by one. The Homeland Security chief, Mike Reardon, spoke first, a heavyset man with flat features and weathered skin, more truck driver than bureaucrat. “We’ve got the media under control for the moment. We’re leaking stories that the ATF found marijuana fields at Seneca Depot, and the bombing was a burn. All part of a major drug ring roundup. We told them to expect more arrests soon.”

  “No one has connected this to Rochester?”

  “We’re connecting the dots for them. The cover story is that the Rochester event was part of the ro
undup, stopping a shipment to Canada across Lake Ontario.”

  Alex Grass, the head of the CDC, spoke next, a dapper man with sleepy eyes. “Dylan Connor is showing symptoms. His temperature dropped. He’s still alert, but he’s having auditory hallucinations.”

  “What about the guy from Rochester?”

  “Positive. Also, one of the soldiers from Drum that picked him up looks like he has it. The rest we don’t know.”

  “We’re absolutely sure it’s the Uzumaki?”

  “Three labs independently ran the samples, all with different protocols. I personally supervised the tests at CDC. Toloff at USDA. Arvenick’s people at USAMRIID. Every assay came back positive, three sigma. It’s the Uzumaki.”

  The room was quiet except for the background clatter from the displays on the walls.

  The President called upon the commander at Detrick, Anthony Arvenick. He was in charge of the operational response in case of a large-scale outbreak. “There’s no doubt, Mr. President,” the general said, his voice grave. “She’s got the Uzumaki. And thousands of those Crawlers. The scenarios range from bad to worse to nightmare.”

  “Start with bad.”

  “She’s already shown us bad. She leaves the Crawlers in a public place, they bite whoever happens by. But at least we know we’ve been hit. It’s bad, but in this scenario, at least we know. We can do our best to contain it, have a shot at limiting the damage to a small geographic area. The difference between a few deaths and a few thousand might boil down to the direction the wind is blowing.

  “Worse, she releases it in a major population center but quietly. Say, sending in a Crawler to expel spores in the ventilation ducts of a building. The unsuspecting occupants come and go, and a whole city could be infected within days. If we picked it up in time, we might be able to shut it down. But to quarantine a city would be hell. It would start a panic like you can’t imagine.”

  “Give me nightmare.”

  “She hits us a thousand places simultaneously. She cultures enough Uzumaki to load up all those Crawlers, disperses them across the country any number of ways. Hell, she could mail them to every major city, have them pop out of ten thousand envelopes all at once. She does something like that, we don’t have a chance.”