by Tom Clancy
“How do we find out who did it?” This came from Arnie.
“We interview all the victims, find out where they’ve been, and try to narrow the focal centers down to one point if we can. That’s an investigative function. Epidemiologists are pretty good at that ... but this one’s a little big,” Alexandre added.
“Could the FBI help, Doctor?” van Damm asked.
“Can’t hurt.”
“I’ll get Murray over here,” the chief of staff told the President.
“You can’t treat it?” POTUS asked.
“No, what happens is the epidemic burns itself out over several generational cycles. What I mean by that—okay, one person gets it. The virus reproduces in them, and then they pass it on to somebody else. Every victim becomes an imperfect host. As the disease reproduces and kills the victim, the victim passes it on to the next one. But, and here’s the good news, Ebola doesn’t reproduce efficiently. As it goes through these generational cycles, it becomes less virulent. Most of the survivors in an outbreak happen toward the end, because the virus progressively mutates itself into a less dangerous form. The organism is so primitive that it doesn’t do everything well.”
“How many cycles before that happens, Alex?” Cathy asked.
He shrugged. “It’s empirical. We know the process, but we can’t quantify it.”
“Lots of unknowns.” She grimaced.
“Mr. President?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“The movie you saw?”
“What about it?”
“The budget for that movie is quite a bit more than all the funding for research in virology. Keep that in mind. I guess it isn’t sexy enough.” Arnie started to say something. Alex cut him off with a raised hand. “I’m not on the government payroll anymore, sir. I don’t have any empire to build. My research is privately funded. I’m just stating a fact. What the hell, I guess we can’t fund everything.”
“If we can’t treat it, how do we stop it?” Ryan asked, getting things back on track. His head turned. A shadow crossed the South Lawn, and the roar of a helicopter came through the bulletproof windows.
“AHII,” BADRAYN OBSERVED with a smile. The Internet was designed to give access to information, not to conceal it, and from a friend of a friend of a friend who was a medical student at Emory University in Atlanta, he had the password to crack into that medical center’s electronic mail. Another keyword eliminated all of the clutter, and there it was. It was 1400 hours on America’s east coast, and Emory reported to CDC that it now had six cases of suspected hemorrhagic fever. Better yet, CDC had already replied, and that told him a lot more. Badrayn printed up both letters, and made a telephone call. Now he really had good news to deliver.
RAMAN FELT THE DC-9 thump down in Pittsburgh after a brief flight that had allowed him to sit alone and think through several options. His colleague—brother—in Baghdad had been a little too sacrificial in his attitude, a little too dramatic, and the detail around the Iraqi leader had been pretty large, actually larger than the one on which he himself served. How to do it? The trick was to create as much confusion as possible. Perhaps when Ryan walked into the crowd to press the flesh. Take the shot, kill one or two of the other agents, then race into the crowd. If he could make it past the first line or two of spectators, all he had to do was hold up his Secret Service ID, better than a gun for getting through things—everyone would think that he was chasing the subject. The key to escaping from an assassination—the USSS had taught him this—was in the first thirty seconds. Survive that, and you have a better-than-even chance of surviving it all. And he would be the one setting all the security arrangements for the Friday trip. How, then, could he get the President to a spot in which he would have that option? Take POTUS. Take Price. Take one other. Then melt into the crowd. Probably better to fire from the hip. Best if the citizens didn’t see the gun in his hand until after the shots. Yes, that might work, he thought, taking off the lap belt and standing. There would be a local Treasury agent at the end of the jetway. They’d go right to the hotel whose large dining room would host President Ryan’s speech. Raman would have all day and part of tomorrow to think it through, under the very eyes of fellow agents. How challenging.
MAJOR GENERAL JOHN Pickett, it turned out, was a graduate of Yale Medical School, added to which were a pair of doctorates—molecular biology from Harvard, and public health from UCLA. He was a pale, spare man who looked small in his uniform—he hadn’t had time to change and was wearing camouflage BDUs—making his parachutist’s wings look very out of place. Two colonels came with him, followed by Director Murray of the FBI, who’d raced over from the Hoover Building. The three officers came to attention as they walked in, but now the Oval Office was too small, and the President led them across the hall into the Roosevelt Room. On the way a Secret Service agent handed the general a fax that was still warm from the machine in the secretaries’ room.
“Case count is now one hundred thirty-seven, according to Atlanta,” Pickett said. “Fifteen cities, fifteen states, coast-to-coast.”
“Hi, John,” Alexandre said, taking his hand. “I’ve seen three of them myself.”
“Alex, glad to see you, buddy.” He looked up. “I guess Alex has briefed everybody in on the baseline stuff?”
“Correct,” Ryan said.
“Do you have any immediate questions, Mr. President?”
“You’re certain that this is a deliberate act?”
“Bombs do not go off by accident.” Pickett unfolded a map. A number of cities were marked with red dots. One of his attending colonels placed three more down: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.
“Convention cities. Just how I would have done it,” Alexandre breathed. “Looks like Bio-War 95, John.”
“Close. That’s a wargame we played with the Defense Nuclear Agency. We used anthrax for that one. Alex here was one of our best for planning offensive bio,” Pickett told his audience. “He was Red Team commander for this.”
“Isn’t that against the law?” Cathy said, her face outraged at the revelation.
“Offense and defense are two sides of the same coin, Dr. Ryan,” Pickett replied, defending his former subordinate. “We have to think like the bad guys do if we’re going to stop them.”
“Operational concept?” the President asked. He understood that better than his wife did.
“Biological warfare at the strategic level means starting a chain reaction within your target population. You try to infect as many people as possible—and that’s not very many; we’re not talking nuclear weapons here. The idea is for the people, the victims, to spread it for you. That’s the elegance of bio-warfare. Your victims actually do most of the killing. Any epidemic starts low and ramps up, slowly at first, like a tangential curve, and then it rockets up geometrically. So, if you’re using bio in the offensive role, you try to jump-start it by infecting as large a number of people as you can, and you opt for people who travel. Las Vegas is the tip-off. It’s a convention city, and sure enough they just had a big one. The conventioneers get infected, get on the airplanes to fly home, and they spread it for you.”
“Any chance of discovering how they did it?” Murray asked. He showed his ID so that the general would know who he was.
“Probably a waste of time. The other nice thing about bio weapons is—well, in this case the incubation period is a minimum of three days. Whatever distribution system was used has been picked up, bagged, and trucked off to a landfill. No physical evidence, no proof of who did it to us.”
“Save that for later, General. What do we do? I see a lot of states with no infection—”
“That’s just for now, Mr. President. There’s a three- to ten-day lead time on Ebola. We don’t know how far it’s gotten already. The only way we can find out is by waiting.”
“But we have to initiate CURTAIN CALL, John,” Alexandre said. “And we have to do it fast.”
MAHMOUD HAJI WAS reading. He had an office adjoining
his bedroom, and actually preferred working here because of the familiar surroundings. He did not enjoy being disturbed here, however, and so his security people were surprised at his response to the telephone call. Twenty minutes later, they let the visitor in, without an escort.
“Has it begun?”
“It has begun.” Badrayn handed over the CDC printout. “We will know more tomorrow.”
“You have served well,” Daryaei told him, dismissing him. When the door was closed, he made a telephone call.
ALAHAD DIDN’T KNOW how circuitous the link to him was, merely that it was an overseas call. He suspected London, but he didn’t know and wouldn’t ask. The inquiry was entirely routine, except for the time of day—it was evening in England, after business hours. The variety of the rug and the price were the key parts, telling him what he needed to know, in a code long since memorized and never written down. In knowing little, he could reveal little. That part of the tradecraft he did fully understand. His own part came next. Placing the Back in a Few Minutes sign in his window, he walked out, locked the door, and went around the corner, proceeding two blocks to a pay phone. There he made a call to pass on his last order to Aref Raman.
THE MEETINGS HAD started in the Oval Office, were transferred to the Roosevelt Room, and were now all the way down the hall in the Cabinet Room, where more than one image of George Washington could watch the proceedings. The Cabinet secretaries arrived almost together, and their arrival couldn’t be a secret. Too many official cars, too many guards, too many faces known to the reporters.
Pat Martin came, representing Justice. Bretano was SecDef, with Admiral Jackson sitting on the wall behind him. (Everyone brought a deputy of some sort, mainly to take notes.) Winston was SecTreas, having walked from across the street. Commerce and Interior were survivors from the Durling presidency, actually having been appointed by Bob Fowler. Most of the rest were of undersecretary rank, holding on from presidential apathy in some cases, and in others because they appeared to know what they were doing. But none of them knew what he was doing now. Ed Foley arrived, summoned by the President despite CIA’s previous loss of Cabinet rank. Also present were Arnie van Damm, Ben Goodley, Director Murray, the First Lady, three Army officers, and Dr. Alexandre.
“We will be in order,” the President said. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. There’s no time for a preamble here. We face a national emergency. The decisions we make here today will have serious effects on our country. In the corner is Major General John Pickett. He’s a physician and scientist, and I will now turn the meeting over to him. General, do your brief.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. Ladies and gentlemen, I am commanding general at Fort Detrick. Earlier today, we started getting some very disturbing reports ...”
Ryan tuned the general out. He’d heard it all twice now. Instead he read over the file Pickett had handed him. The folder was bordered in the usual red-and-white-striped tape. The sticker in the center read TOP SECRET - AFFLICTION, rather an appropriate code name for the special-access compartment this one was in, SWORDSMAN thought. Then he opened the folder and started reading OPPLAN CURTAIN CALL. There were four variants of the plan, Jack saw. He turned to Option Four. That was called SOLITARY, and that name, too, was appropriate. Reading through the executive summary chilled him, and Jack found himself turning to look over at George, hanging there on the wall, and wanting to ask, Now what the hell do I do? But George wouldn’t have understood. He didn’t know from airliners and viruses and nuclear weapons, did he?
“How bad is it now?” HHS asked.
“Just over two hundred cases have been reported to CDC as of fifteen minutes ago. I emphasize that these have all appeared in less than twenty-four hours,” General Pickett told the Secretary.
“Who did it?” Agriculture asked.
“Set that aside,” the President said. “We will address that issue later. What we have to decide now is the best chance we have to contain the epidemic.”
“I just can’t believe that we can’t treat—”
“Believe it,” Cathy Ryan said. “You know how many viral diseases we know how to cure?”
“Well, no,” HUD admitted.
“None.” It constantly amazed her how ignorant some people could be on medical issues.
“Therefore containment is the only option,” General Pickett went on.
“How do you contain a whole country?” It was Cliff Rutledge, Assistant Secretary of State for Policy, sitting in for Scott Adler.
“That’s the problem we face,” President Ryan said. “Thank you, General. I’ll take it from here. The only way to contain the epidemic is to shut down all places of assembly—theaters, shopping malls, sports stadia, business offices, everything—and also to shut off all interstate travel. To the best of our information, at least thirty states are so far untouched by this disease. We would do well to keep it that way. We can accomplish that by preventing all interstate travel until such time as we have a handle on the severity of the disease organism we are facing, and then we can come up with less severe countermeasures.”
“Mr. President, that’s unconstitutional,” Pat Martin said at once.
“Explain,” Ryan ordered.
“Travel is a constitutionally protected right. Even inside states, any restriction of travel is a constitutional violation under the Lemuel Penn case—he was a black Army officer who was murdered by the Klan in the sixties. That’s a Supreme Court precedent,” the head of the Criminal Division reported.
“I understand that I—excuse me, just about everybody in the room—was sworn to uphold the Constitution. But if upholding it means killing off a few million citizens, what have we accomplished?” POTUS asked.
“We can’t do that!” HUD insisted.
“General, what happens if we don’t?” Martin asked, surprising Ryan.
“There is no precise answer. There cannot be, because we do not know the ease of transmission for this virus yet. If it is an aerosol, and there is reason to suspect that it is—well, we’ve got a hundred computer models we can use. Problem is deciding which one. Worst case? Twenty million deaths. At that point, what happens is that society breaks down. Doctors and nurses flee the hospitals, people lock themselves in their homes, and the epidemic burns out pretty much like the Black Death did in the fourteenth century. Human interactions cease, and because of that the disease stops spreading.”
“Twenty million? How bad was the Black Death?” Martin asked, his face somewhat ashen.
“Records are sketchy. There was no real census system back then. Best data is England,” Pickett replied. “It depopulated that country by half. The plague lasted about four years. Europe took about one hundred fifty years to return to the 1347 population level.”
“Shit,” breathed Interior.
“Is it really that dangerous, General?” Martin persisted.
“Potentially yes. The problem, sir, is that if you take no action at all, and then you find out that it is that virulent, then it’s just too late.”
“I see.” Martin turned. “Mr. President, I do not see that we have much of a choice here.”
“You just said it was against the law, damn it!” HUD shouted.
“Mr. Secretary, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and although I think I know how the Supreme Court would rule on this, there has never been a case in point, and it could be argued, and the process would have to deal with it.”
“What changed your mind, Pat?” Ryan asked.
“Twenty million reasons, Mr. President.”
“If we flout our own laws, then what are we?” Cliff Rutledge asked.
“Alive,” Martin answered quietly. “Maybe.”
“I am willing to listen to arguments for fifteen minutes,” Ryan said. “Then we have to come to a decision.”
It was lively.
“If we violate our own Constitution,” Rutledge said, “then nobody in the world can trust us!” HUD and HHS agreed.
“What ab
out the practical considerations?” Agriculture objected. “People have to eat.”
“What kind of country are we going to turn over to our children if we—”
“What do we turn over to them if they’re dead?” George Winston snapped back at HUD.
“Things like this don’t happen today!”
“Mr. Secretary, would you like to come up to my hospital and see, sir?” Alexandre asked from his seat in the corner.
“Thank you,” Ryan said, checking his watch. “I am calling the issue on the table.”
Defense, Treasury, Justice, and Commerce voted aye. All the rest voted no. Ryan looked at them for a long few seconds.
“The ayes have it,” the President said coldly. “Thank you for your support. Director Murray, the FBI will render all assistance required by CDC and USAMRIID to ascertain the focal centers of this epidemic. That has absolute and unconditional priority over any other matter.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Mr. Foley, every intelligence asset we have goes into this. You will also work in conjunction with the medical experts. This came from somewhere, and whoever did it has committed an act of war, using weapons of mass destruction against our country. We need to find out who that was, Ed. All the intelligence agencies will report directly to you. You have statutory authority to coordinate all intelligence activities. Tell the other agencies that you have my order to exercise it.”
“We’ll do our best, sir.”
“Secretary Bretano, I am declaring a state of national emergency. All Reserve and National Guard formations are to be activated immediately and placed under federal command. You have this contingency plan in the Pentagon.” Ryan held the CURTAIN CALL folder up. “You will execute Option Four, SOLITARY, at the earliest possible moment.”
“I will do that, sir.”
Ryan looked down the table at the Secretary of Transportation. “Mr. Secretary, the air-traffic-control system belongs to you. When you get back to your office, you will order all aircraft in flight to proceed to their destinations and stop there. All aircraft on the ground will remain there, commencing at six o’clock this evening.”