Virus: The Day of Resurrection

by Sakyo Komatsu

  “The deal appears to have failed,” said the administrator. “The go-between apparently never showed up.”

  “Hold on a second.” Lieutenant Colonel F thought for a moment. “I’d like to hear a detailed account of what went wrong. Those spooks at the CIA couldn’t have made off with it?”

  “Such a thing could not have—” the administrator started to say but then shrugged. “No, I don’t know.”

  “BV8 …” Lieutenant Colonel F chewed on his mustache for a moment. “I have a bit of a connection to that one. Any other reports?”

  “None, sir.”

  “Very well.”

  After the administrator had signed off on the report and left the room, Lieutenant Colonel F picked up the telephone receiver. “Get me Stanton,” he said.

  Moments later, the man he wanted to talk to picked up.

  “Stanton? It’s me. I just heard the report. You say BV8 failed? Can you tell me all about it? You probably know, but I was in the meeting back then too. I was the one who recommended Dr. Meyer from the army lab. We’re close, personally.”

  Lieutenant Colonel F heard a violent fit of coughing erupt on the other end of the line.

  “Stanton …” Lieutenant Colonel F said, frowning. “Have you caught that horrible flu too? Didn’t you get vacci—oh, you did, but it didn’t work? Well then, never mind. Don’t come in here to report. Don’t want you spreading germs all around. Send me a full report later—a well-sanitized report.”

  There was a knock at the door, and a young clerk came in. She had just said, “Lieutenant Colonel, about the meeting this afternoon—” when she sneezed. Grabbing the edge of the table and staring down at it, F saw the white compress wrapped tightly around her neck, her watery eyes, and reddish blossoms of fever beginning to bloom in her cheeks.

  “Hold it right there!” the lieutenant colonel shouted. “Turn your head away from me to speak, and don’t exhale into this room!”

  “But, Lieutenant Colonel, the paperwork …” The clerk spoke in a hoarse voice and with a stuffy nose. When she coughed again, it sounded rather painful. She turned sideways and blew her runny nose into a pink handkerchief. When she finally turned to face him, her nose was shining a brighter red than her hair, and tears were welling up in her eyes.

  “Just how high a fever are you running?” Lieutenant Colonel F asked with the expression of one who had just bitten down on something bitter. “How about going home, soaking your feet in hot water and mustard oil, and getting some sleep? That’ll do more for national defense than—”

  “But, Lieutenant Colonel, everyone is sick and there are a lot of absences …” She gave a tearful sneeze. “Ah, I need to get out of here. This flu is really nasty and it lasts forever. I … this is hard … I want to take off work, but …”

  “It’s all right, Ms. Connelly,” the lieutenant colonel said, at last softening his tone. “Leave the papers here and go. Honestly, with the flu going around like this, the Department of Defense and its duty to defend the country are being compromised.”

  When the clerk shut the door, Lieutenant Colonel F’s right index finger suddenly shot to the bottom of his nose. For a long moment, he didn’t move a muscle, but when he finally, carefully pulled his finger away, a huge sneeze erupted as though it had been waiting for the chance.

  Lieutenant Colonel F unconsciously crossed himself as he swore.

  New York, East 55th Street, Saint Regis Hotel

  There was a soft knock at the door of a quite luxurious two-room suite. A rather pear-shaped man opened the door, admitting an absurdly huge man whose long face somehow resembled that of a horse.

  “How about our departure?” asked the horse-faced guest as he tossed aside his hat.

  “Flying out of La Guardia at nine o’clock.”

  “We’ve got three hours, then.”

  “Take off your coat,” the fat man said, making for a bottle of wine on the table. “Have a drink. This room isn’t bugged.”

  “Who can really guarantee that kind of thing? Almost every room in the Soviet embassy in Warsaw was bugged.”

  The fat man smirked and handed his visitor a glass.

  “Ciao!”

  “Here’s mud in your eye!”

  The two drank. The fat man sneezed, blowing out a little of his wine.

  “You picked up a bug yourself in the Middle East, did you?” the visitor said with a laugh.

  “In Armenia, actually,” said the fat man, covering his face a little with his hands. “How was Vietnam?”

  “A lot worse than catching a cold,” said the horse-faced man, frowning. “Since at any rate, the coup d’état failed. The director was furious. The boss was replaced, and I’m headed to Africa come next month.”

  The suite’s occupant shrugged his shoulders. “I missed out on getting my bonus too.”

  “You said you were competing with some guy from the DoD in Turkey?”

  “And he got ahead of me,” the fat man said, waving his cup around quickly as he grew red in the face. “There were a lot of things the CIA’s Middle Eastern arm wasn’t told. Over there, the course of political turmoil in the United Arab Republic comes before my deal …”

  “Deal?”

  “Yeah. The DIA was asked by some army brass to sound out that spy ring and see if it might be possible to get a certain item.”

  “What kind of item?” asked the horse-faced man as he poured soda into his second drink. Seven tenths bourbon, with just a dash of soda. “Not intel on nuclear missiles, surely. Not at a time of across-the-board reduction and denuclearization.”

  “’Across-the-board arms reduction?’ ” said the fat man, looking up at him with eyes that had been red even before he’d started drinking. “Bill … do you think such a thing is really possible?”

  “The president is serious about it,” Bill said, shrugging. “Demilitarization, eh? Wonder what all the big companies and the soldiers who get laid off intend to do. Even we ought to think about it …”

  “That cannot be done,” the man said, slapping his knee. “The president is a Red. He’s going along with the Soviets’ strategy.”

  “Watch what you say now, Brett.”

  “It can’t be done, I tell you. There have been presidents before him who said pie-in-the-sky kinds of things like that, but they couldn’t pull it off, now could they?”

  “What’re you getting at?”

  “The director’s against it too. As are a lot of the brass at the State Department and the Defense Department. The Senate’s the same. The Joint Chiefs are furious. It can’t be done, Bill. We absolutely cannot allow it. For example, Texa—”

  “Brett,” Bill said with equestrian severity. “You’re being way too careless with your words!”

  “Aw, who cares? Oh yeah, what were we just talking about?”

  “What you were trying to get with your deal.”

  “Oh yeah, that.” The fat man called Brett chuckled to himself. “But first, what country do you think the stolen intel came from?”

  “Czechoslovakia?”

  “No, Great Britain!” Brett said, chuckling some more. “I’ve got a lot of friends in MI6. We’ve even worked together on occasion. I’d love to have seen their faces.”

  “What was the item?”

  “Now, now, wait just a minute. We knew from the start that the DIA guys were on the move, but we didn’t know what it was they were after. But once a certain individual came over from the continental US and started working with them, we had a pretty good idea of what was going on.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Research doctor by the name of Meyer,” Brett said with a wink. “A scientist from Fort Detrick.”

  Bill whistled at that. “Germs, then?”

  “Oh yeah. The British army’s germ warfare lab in Porton Down. We’d gotten information ourselves—by way of the Soviets—that the Brits were apparently onto something huge. But from where the army stood, there was a bit of a reason for them to be so crazy to get
it. You see, the original strain of the germ or virus or whatever it was was one that was stolen from our side at Fort Detrick.”

  “Well, how about that.”

  “I heard about it from a good friend at the FBI. Originally—get this—it came from Brooks Aerospace Medical Center, where they had some weird germs or something that had been collected in space.”

  “Ah, the ones that grew like crazy? That they couldn’t figure out how to dispose of?”

  “That’s right. Apparently, they had been studying those, those whatchamajiggers at Fort Detrick, but a little more than a year ago, they were stolen. They followed the buyers, and the trail led to Porton Down.”

  Brett sneezed again.

  “And then?” Bill asked, pouring himself a third drink.

  “The bargaining stage seems to have been going well at first, but along the way, the other side raised its price. While the DIA was dithering, the seller approached us.”

  “How much did they want?”

  “Thirteen thousand pounds.”

  “Highway robbery,” Bill said, making a sour face. “That won’t do. They realized you were competing with the DoD guys and jacked up the price.”

  “Well, naturally, I asked my boss. And then he said, ‘I don’t mind. It’ll be payback for when they got ahead of us in Berlin. Get it.’ ”

  “And did you ready the cash?” Bill asked with sleepy eyes. He licked his lips at the thought. “Thirteen thousand … in real bills?”

  “Of course. Unlike ‘Cicero,’ that spy who infiltrated the British embassy in Ankara during World War II, nothing got past these guys.”

  “Cicero?” laughed Bill. “That’s an old story.”

  “At any rate, the DoD people were supposed to make the deal in Istanbul. We were waiting in Ankara. The seller talked as if he already had the merchandise in hand. England hadn’t started raising any Cain yet, so it looked like everything was going perfectly. Just in case, we were on the lookout for any DIA types too, and were all ready to give them a bloody nose. However …”

  “Didn’t work out that way?”

  “The seller suddenly announced they were pulling out of the arrangement. We thought it had been smuggled to the DIA, but that wasn’t it either. Haven’t heard a thing since then.”

  “You think they sold it to a communist country for more?”

  Brett shook his head. “They weren’t the type. First of all, doing that would harm the trust their customers place in their business. And besides …”

  “What?”

  “After they were stood up, they might have attracted the attention of more mercenary types. I think they were desperate. If they’d been able to sell it to Russia, they wouldn’t have done something like that.”

  “That’s true as well.”

  “Two or three days after that, a man named Karlsky who had been working at the germ warfare lab committed suicide in Brighton. Wonder if something had gone wrong … if maybe his pals had screwed up trying to get it out.”

  This time it was Bill the Horse-Faced who sneezed.

  “Brett! You’ve given it to me!” he said, laughing loudly. “Hey! Maybe this Tibetan flu that’s going around is really that bug you almost stole!”

  “Aw, no way!” Brett started laughing too. “No way a simple flu virus is nasty enough to be used in germ warfare. Though if it was, you’d just have to make all the soldiers carry chicken soup!”

  The two of them laughed together.

  “So poof went your bonus. And instead of vacation, you’ve got to work on measures for dealing with Cuba.” Bill slapped the back of his neck a couple of times and rubbed at his red face.

  “I get to go to Miami, though. That’s not so bad.”

  “It’s gonna be hot every day from here on out, though.” Bill frowned and loosened his collar. “Where are you headed?”

  “Canada. Pugwash …”

  “Odd place to go.”

  “Left-leaning scientists from all over the world are gathering there for a big meeting. You know the drill: ‘No more war.’ ‘Reveal your secrets about weapons of mass destruction to the public.’ That kind of thing. You’ve never heard of the Pugwash Conference? It’s something Bertrand Russell and Einstein dreamed up and organized. This’ll be the twenty-somethingth meeting of it.”

  “Bertrand Russell … he’s that old coot from the Aldermaston Marches, right?”

  Brett nodded.

  “So you’re keeping an eye on the Pugwash Pinks, eh?”

  “Busting them up a little, actually. There may be some fallings-out among them this year. Thanks to you-know-what.”

  “Revelation of important national defense secrets?” Brett closed his eyes and leaned his head back with a pained expression. “Scientists engaged in spying. But do you think that’s gonna work this time?”

  “It’ll tear ’em apart,” Bill said. “What’s the matter? You running a fever?”

  “I think I had too much to drink.” Brett stood up, wobbling just a bit. “I’m gonna go cool my head.”

  Well then, shall I pour myself one more or not? Bill thought after Brett went off toward the bathroom across from the bedroom. The sound of the shower running came from the direction of the bathroom. His nose began to feel ticklish again. You’ve gotta be kidding! Have I really caught it from him?

  Suddenly, a loud noise came from the shower.

  “Brett? You okay in there … ?” Bill’s voice was slightly slurred from the alcohol. “You fall down?”

  There was no answer, only the sound of the shower running. Bill unconsciously raised his head. He had the feeling he had heard Brett moaning.

  Bill jumped up and ran to the bathroom. “Brett!” he shouted, banging on the door. It was locked from inside. “Are you okay? Brett?”

  The sound of water running. He suddenly strained his ears. Aside from the sound of the shower, he could hear the sound of water going down the drain in the floor. Bill took a step back from the door and then slammed his body against it. It didn’t budge. An instant later, he reached into his wallet, pulled out a credit card, and slid it into the crack between the door and the doorframe. The Yale lock opened, the door swung wide, and Bill saw a fat man’s back, still wearing an undershirt, collapsed face-forward in the bathtub.

  “Brett!”

  Not bothering to turn off the shower, Bill put a hand on Brett’s shoulder. As soon as he did so, Brett fell back onto the floor. His face was drawn up taut and his teeth were bared and clenched. His whole body was frozen up, and Bill couldn’t feel a pulse. Brett had gone pale as a sheet. Bill, having stood up from the floor, realized that his pistol had somehow found its way into his hand. He called an ambulance and made it look like Brett was still alive to the other people in the hotel as he had the body carried away to the police. The cause of death was a sudden myocardial infarction.

  “You say he had a cold?” the pathologist asked Bill. “I don’t know—the influenza going around this year is a mean one. Even affects the heart. If you catch it, drink alcohol, and then douse yourself with cold water …” The doctor sneezed. “I don’t know. If you think you’re catching cold, be absolutely sure to take it easy. All right?”

  This time it was Bill’s turn to sneeze loudly. Ultimately, he didn’t go to Pugwash. This was not because of a cold, but because Brett’s death, and its cause, had raised a few questions among the upper echelons.

  Maryland, Fort Detrick

  A black Chrysler glided alongside the tall, imposing concrete wall and pulled up to the gate where a burly MP stood watch like a silent sphinx. The MP did a hasty photo check, confirming the identity of the high-ranking officer riding within. He asked the officer to wait a moment while he called inside.

  “What’s all this?” Lieutenant Colonel F asked the driver—a man who worked directly for the DIA. Before the front gate there were seven or eight average-looking, casually dressed people on either side of the road. They were staring intently at the front gate. Most of them were middle-aged or el
derly, though there were young people and women in tennis shoes among them as well.

  “They’re holding a vigil, sir.”

  “A vigil?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lieutenant Colonel F threw a hard, sharp, soldierly glance across the rabble. Three standing, two leaning against the fence, two talking, one pacing back and forth—all of them looking in his direction, at the gate of the US Army’s germ warfare research center.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Nothing, sir. They’re just standing around like that, observing.”

  “Observing? Observing what?”

  “This building.”

  A faint line of irritation rose on the lieutenant colonel’s forehead.

  “It’s already been more than seven, eight years,” continued the driver, “but they’re still keeping watch like that, sir. Just like that.”

  “In other words, they have some kind of axe to grind with the military?”

  “It doesn’t appear to be so. They aren’t holding up placards or anything. It’s just …”

  “Just what?”

  “Maybe they’re just worried.”

  Lieutenant Colonel F took another look back at the civilians. The two chatting had stopped, and now they all silently stared at the gate. A heavyset old lady wearing a hat with a silly decoration came up and joined them. Caught in the line of their silent gaze, the lieutenant colonel was growing somehow more fidgety with each passing moment.

  “Why doesn’t somebody run them off?”

  “They keep coming back even if they do. Also, since all they do is stand around and stare, we can’t really stop them.”

  “Have there been background checks on them?”

  “I’d be surprised if there hadn’t been. I’ve heard they’re just average civilians. They don’t really have any kind of leader.”

  “They’re Reds then,” the lieutenant colonel said conclusively. “Pinkos at the very least.” He was becoming more and more annoyed. Wasn’t there some law he could use to crack down on this rabble? If this defiant mood of theirs were to infect the people here … The lieutenant colonel closed his eyes and tried to think of some way to get rid of them. What was being done here was necessary for national defense. Nearly every country in the world is doing the same, and if America alone should fall behind in this research, we soldiers wouldn’t be able to carry out our responsibilities. How can we make these sentimental, peacenik buffoons see that?