by John Case
‘Is this going to be a regular thing – because if it is, maybe you could have dinner waiting,’ she said.
‘I wanted to show you something,’ Frank said, tapping the tube of satellite photos.
‘Okaaay,’ Annie said.
The other woman stood at the door, indulging her curiosity. Finally, Annie introduced them. ‘Frank – Indu. Indu’s my roommate.’
‘And Frank?’ Indu asked coyly.
‘Frank’s a journalist,’ Annie replied.
Indu gave Frank a crinkled smile and, with an amused glance at Annie, went inside.
Annie turned to Frank. ‘What did you want to show me?’
‘Satellite pix.’
‘What?’
‘Satellite pictures. A bird’s-eye view . . .’
‘Of what?’
‘Kopervik. March twenty-sixth, about 1300 hours. You look like a dot.’
‘You’re serious?’
Frank nodded. ‘I know what you found.’
Annie regarded him coolly, wondering if this was a trick, and if it was, wondering how he could underestimate her so completely. ‘Really!?’ she said, her voice thick with sarcasm.
‘Yeah.’
‘And what did we find?’
‘Bupkis.’
‘What?’
‘The bodies were gone. Someone got there ahead of you.’
She looked at him for a long moment, and then she invited him inside. ‘I don’t think we should talk about this on the street.’
And even inside, with the photographs spread out on the kitchen table, their corners weighted with books, she was still hesitant to talk about it.
‘I’m sure Gleason made you sign something,’ Frank said. ‘But that’s gotta be irrelevant now – unless you’re holding something back.’ He tapped the satellite photo. ‘Or is this pretty much it?’
She inclined her head. ‘Pretty much,’ she said. ‘I was in shock. I guess I still am.’
He tapped out the second photo from the tube and put it on top of the first, re-anchoring the corners with the books.
‘This is four or five months earlier,’ Frank said. ‘September seventh.’ The snow was pristine and undisturbed. ‘And this,’ he went on, unrolling a third photograph, ‘this is September ninth.’ He put the third picture on top of the other two and weighted them down. ‘That’s when it happened,’ he said.
They stared at the photograph for a long while. The ground was torn up, the coffins in a pile. A helicopter sat on the snow, not far from the church. Finally, Annie said, ‘So they’d been gone for months by the time we got there.’
He nodded.
‘Who was it?’ she asked.
Frank looked at her as if to say, If I knew the answer to that one . . .
The telephone chirped, and chirped again. Neither of them moved until Indu shouted down to Annie that her mother was on the line. Annie grimaced and rolled her eyes, but once she picked up the phone, it was clear that her mother was also her best friend. The talk between them was conspiratorial and animated, girlish and sweet.
‘Oh noooooo,’ Annie was saying. ‘You’re kidding.’
As they talked, Frank was thinking, Maybe I should do the story now, just write it – instead of trying to solve it. Even if he didn’t have all the answers, it was still a front-page story. A big story. And if he published it, the spooks would have to respond. Gleason & Company might be able to dodge him, but they couldn’t dodge the whole press corps.
On the other hand, once he wrote the story, it wouldn’t be his anymore. Better, then, to wait until he was certain he’d gone as far as he could go. And he wasn’t certain of that – not at all. There were still things he could do, questions he could imagine answering. Like: what kind of weapon could you make with the Spanish flu? There were people who could tell him the answer to that – in fact, he knew a guy who could tell him that. He’d met him at a conference on terrorism. Two years ago, in Baltimore. He could still see his face. Broad face, high cheekbones, black hair. Funny name. Some kind of funny name. Who was that guy?
Annie wandered out of the room, then came back, carrying her contact lens container. Still talking to her mother, she removed a lens from each of her eyes. When she looked up at Frank, he saw that she had the mad, unfocused gaze of the very nearsighted.
He gave her a little wave, as if to say, I’m over here – and saw her smile.
‘I have to go,’ she said at the phone. Then, ‘Love you! Love you, too.’ She actually kissed the telephone before she replaced it in its cradle. Returning to the table, she rubbed her eye with a knuckle and stood staring myopically at the satellite photo.
‘I better go,’ Frank said. ‘There’s a lot to do.’ He began to remove the books from the corners of the pictures when Annie put a hand on his sleeve.
‘Wait wait wait,’ she said. ‘Wait.’
Frank looked at her, then at the photo. Finally, he said, ‘What?’
She pointed at the helicopter. Shot from above, its fuselage showed as a kind of elongated teardrop, its dark rotor blades delineated against the snow. ‘Look at that,’ she said.
Frank cocked his head and squinted. ‘What? You mean the helicopter?’
‘The stripes,’ she said.
Frank stared harder at the photo. ‘What stripes?’
‘On the fuselage.’
He looked and shook his head. ‘I don’t see any stripes.’
‘There.’ She pointed at a slurry of dots near the rear of the fuselage.
He looked hard. ‘I still don’t see it,’ he said.
‘It’s an American flag.’
‘Get out!’
‘You have to squint!’
He squinted. Tilted back on his heels.
‘I spend half my life like this, sitting in the dark, looking through an electron microscope, trying to pick out images from pictures that are a lot blurrier than this one. It’s a flag,’ she repeated ‘An American flag.’ She took his hand in hers and, with his forefinger, traced a tiny rectangle in the air above the photograph. ‘The stripes run like this,’ she said, sketching parallel lines over the fuselage. ‘See?’
She was right. It was the ‘grid’ he’d seen, or imagined he’d seen, at Panoptikon. The parallel lines were stripes and, once you looked for them, they were hard to miss – but impossible to see through a magnifying loupe.
‘Now I’m really confused,’ Frank said. ‘It doesn’t compute. I mean, not at all.’
‘Do you think it’s a military helicopter?’
He shook his head. ‘Could be. Or maybe not. It might just be from a ship that’s flying an American flag.’
Annie perched on a stool. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said, stifling a yawn.
‘Tell me something,’ he asked, nodding toward the picture. ‘If Kopervik was over here, where was your ship – the Rex Mundi?’
She thought about it for a moment, then pointed to a spot on the counter, a couple of feet to the left of the photo. ‘Way over here somewhere. We had to get there on snowmobiles. It took a long time.’
He squinted at the dots for a while longer, satisfying himself that they did indeed coalesce into stripes. Then he pushed the books from the edges of the pictures and let them curl up. Finally, he tapped them back into the tube. He was thinking that he might go back to Panoptikon, and see if he could find some coverage of the ship’s anchorage. ‘Was there a name for the harbor?’ he asked.
Annie shook her head. ‘It wasn’t a harbor, really. And I’m sure it didn’t have a name. We just anchored – offshore.’
So much for that idea, he thought, secretly relieved. His Visa card was on fire, and he had serious doubts that the foundation would approve the money he’d already spent – much less finance a second go-round.
Annie walked him to the door, still yawning, and apologizing. ‘I got up at six.’
‘There’s a cure for that, you know.’ Suddenly, he wanted to kiss her. But just as he leaned toward her, she jumped back, talking fast an
d telling him she was glad he knew everything she did – at least now there wasn’t this wall of secrecy between them, so please call her and tell her anything he found out. Then she yanked him toward the door and more or less shoved him outside. It reminded him of junior high.
The guy with the funny name was Thomas R. Deer, and what was funny about it was that the middle initial stood for ‘Running.’ He was a broad-shouldered Sioux from eastern Montana, and an expert on chemical and biological weapons. His office was on the seventh floor of the National Security Studies Institute, across the street from the Bethesda Metro stop.
Frank gave his name to the receptionist and sat down in the elegantly appointed anteroom to wait, leafing through a copy of the Economist.
He’d met Deer at a conference sponsored by the Army War College. The topic was something like ‘Urban Protection Against Bioterrorism: Crisis Management and Consequences.’ Most of the time was taken up with speeches by muscular nerds from the Pentagon and earnest scientists from private consultancies. There were suits from the White House, Agriculture, Justice, and Defense, and others from Lockheed, Cal Tech, and Brookings. There was a woman from the FBI Laboratory, and someone else from the Academy of Emergency Physicians. But the ones who’d interested Frank the most were a lot less smooth, and a lot more endangered. They were the ‘first-responders’ – the fire chief from Arlington, the nurse from Fairfax, the worried-looking man from New York’s Office of Emergency Services.
They were the ones who’d be mise-en-scène, and they were not optimistic. The first-responders to a chemical attack would probably fall victim to it themselves. And what could they do, in any case? There were only so many ambulances, so many hospital rooms, so much space in the morgue. Once an ambulance had been used, it would have to be decontaminated – which meant it would be taken out of commission. So, too, with the emergency rooms themselves, and with the people who staffed them: how efficient could they be, wearing biohazard suits? The truth was: a gas attack on a single high-rise would paralyze the New York health-care system within an hour.
And a biological attack would be even worse, because the holocaust would not become apparent for days. It would appear, gradually and then as a flood, in one emergency room after another – until it was too late to do anything but bury the dead. Or burn them. And by then, depending on the pathogen that was used, the hospital workers themselves would be dying.
It was the kind of conference that stuck in your mind.
‘Frank?’ Deer leaned through the doorway, resplendent in what looked like an Armani. ‘I thought that’s who you were! Come on back.’
They padded down a carpeted hallway, exchanging small talk about the Washington Post and a funky little restaurant in the Eastern Market, where the city’s best crab cakes could be found. When they reached his office, Deer gestured to a leather wing chair and settled himself behind a broad, mahogany desk. At his back, a windowed wall looked out upon the capital.
The small talk continued for another minute or two as they caught up with each other’s careers, talking about the places their jobs had taken them during the last two years. Deer was first to come to the point. ‘What’s up?’ he asked.
Frank shrugged. ‘I’m working on a story that’s kind of unusual,’ he said. ‘I thought you could help.’ The tale took about ten minutes to tell, and Frank told it in a way that was almost amusing, beginning with the flight to Murmansk and his stay at the Chernomorskaya. Deer laughed at Frank’s description of the hotel, but as the story continued, his brow began to furrow.
‘You’re sure the FBI knows about this?’ Deer asked.
Frank nodded. ‘Yeah, they know. So does the Pentagon.’
The consultant grunted. ‘Okay, so who took the bodies?’
‘I don’t know,’ Frank said. ‘For a while I was thinking –’
‘The Iraqis.’
Frank look surprised. ‘How’d you know?’
‘Because that’s what everybody thinks. They always think the Iraqis did it, no matter what it is.’
‘But you don’t.’
‘No. Why would they want something like this?’
Frank shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Because it’s so lethal . . .’
Deer didn’t look convinced. ‘“Lethal” is relative,’ he said. ‘And with a pathogen like influenza, you’d be looking at a lot of preliminary work, just weaponizing the stuff. You’d be going to a lot of trouble –’
‘What do you mean, ‘weaponizing’ it?’
‘Different bugs have different characteristics. Some are virtually indestructible, others die out right away. If you want to turn a pathogen into a weapon, you’ll probably want to cultivate a particularly virulent strain. Punch up what we call the “mortality-enhancing factors.” Figure out the optimal dispersal method. That’s what we mean by “weaponizing” it. And there are a dozen bugs and toxins that have been researched from here to Sunday – and they aren’t hard to get. You wouldn’t have to go the Arctic.’
‘What kind of bugs and toxins?’
‘Anthrax. Botulin.’
Frank made a note. ‘You can buy them?’
It was Deer’s turn to shrug. ‘If you work in a university lab, or a commercial one, or even if you’ve got some phony letterhead that says you’re a scientist – yeah, you can get what you want through the mail. Q-fever, tularemia, plague – they’ll send it to you, FedEx. But the point I’m making is: if you’re looking for a biological weapon, why reinvent the wheel? The open literature is full of stuff – including stuff about delivery systems.’
‘Such as what?’ Frank was writing rapidly in his notebook.
‘Aerosols. Ticks. Bats. Bombs –’
‘Bats?’
‘Absolutely, bats! Pigeons, too. And dolphins!’
‘How do you –’
‘Strap ’em up.’
‘With what?’
‘Little porcelain bombs.’
‘You’re kidding.’
Deer held his eyes with a level gaze. ‘Do I look like I’m kidding?’
Frank shifted in his seat. ‘But what were you saying? About influenza . . .?’
‘It wouldn’t make much of a weapon. No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well,’ Deer said, ‘for one reason: if you’re fighting a war, you’re facing military units in the field. So you’d want something that has an immediate effect – something that’ll knock people down. Like gas.’
‘And if you wanted to attack a civilian population?’
‘You mean, like Saddam and the Kurds?’
‘Yeah,’ Frank said. ‘Like that. Or a terrorist scenario.’
Deer swiveled around in his chair and looked out at Washington. ‘You’d still want something you could control – something you could demonstrate without taking out the planet.’
‘Like what?’
‘Pulmonary anthrax. With pulmonary anthrax, you could make some pretty strong demands.’
‘Why? What’s so special about it?’
‘Well, it’s a terrific germ – I mean, literally. It scares the wits out of people. And it’s a pathogen you could work with. You could show people what you could do, and what you could stop doing, which is just as important.’
‘So you’d stage a demonstration by taking out a city –’
‘Or a town. Or even a building. You wouldn’t have to do a lot to get people’s attention. With pulmonary anthrax, you can’t even bury the dead. You have to burn them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the infective agent is about as fragile as a boulder. It’s a spore. You could boil it and it wouldn’t make any difference.’
Frank nodded. ‘All right. And with influenza . . .?’
‘You couldn’t threaten anyone with it. All you could do is use it. And then the birds would take it. You get a herald wave going in a place like Peking, and bam! – the next thing you know, it’s all over the map. It’s a pandemic. And that’s where we get into what I said about ‘relative lethal
ity.’ Something like Ebola’s got a lot higher mortality rate than the Spanish flu. In fact, it pretty much kills almost everyone who gets it. But getting it is kinda hard to do – so it really doesn’t kill that many people. On the other hand, with influenza you have a fairly low mortality rate, but it’s supercontagious. Of course, if you played with it . . .’
‘What do you mean “played with it”?’
‘Well, with gene-splicing. Theoretically, you could combine it with something else, another pathogen that was a lot more lethal.’
‘Like what?’ Frank asked.
The scientist rocked from side to side in his chair, considering the possibilities. ‘Cobra venom.’
‘What?!’
‘Sure. That way, you wouldn’t just catch the flu, you’d catch a snakebite to the lungs.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Frank exclaimed.
Deer nodded. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s a scary business. But I don’t think that’s what your people are doing – I mean, the people who took the bodies up north.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, because if they wanted to do something like that, splicing one pathogen to another, they wouldn’t need a particularly dangerous strain of the flu – or one that was so hard to get. They could use whatever was going around. They could use the common cold. But that’s not the point,’ Deer went on. ‘The point is: everyone gets the flu. That’s the thing about it. And you can’t control it. So if you used it as a weapon, you might wind up killing millions of people – tens of millions.’
‘That’s what I’m saying,’ Frank said. ‘That’s what I’m worried about.’
‘But why would anyone want to do that?’ Deer asked.
Frank thought about it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
Deer clasped his hands to the nape of his neck and leaned back in his chair. ‘My guess is, whoever took the bodies, wanted them for research. It was probably a pharmaceutical company – one of the smaller ones. A start-up with more balls than brains.’