Fires of Midnight

by Jon Land

  The most blatant example of this so far was also the most recent: an invisible, undetectable gas or liquid called GL-12 that, once released into the air or water, put anyone exposed to it asleep. Imagine the possibilities, Haslanger had boasted proudly. Imagine the ease with which a stubborn enemy could be defeated, casualties to U.S. troops reduced to zero. With the help of the army, Group Six arranged to test GL-12 in Bosnia, specifically the Muslim village of Reyvastat, which had come under brutal shelling by a Serb armed column entrenched in the surrounding hillsides.

  According to plan, the GL-12 had been released in a secret airdrop directly over those hillsides. The problem was that Haslanger had failed to properly estimate the potential effects of the wind, which blew his sleeping gas instead over the besieged village. As a result, the residents were sent into an unplanned slumber from which hundreds never awoke when the Serb column attacked and massacred them as they slept.

  Group Six, Erich Haslanger and Colonel Lester Fuchs, had become accessories to a mass murder. Although the nature of the mission kept the incident from ever reaching the attention of Washington circles, the very promising GL-12 was shelved altogether. Haslanger blamed GL-12 and the other failures on Colonel Fuchs’s insistence that he follow through on any number of wide-ranging and mutually exclusive projects instead of patiently developing a select few. Fuchs blamed Haslanger for failing to live up to the expectations that had accompanied him to Group Six.

  But Haslanger remained the best chance Fuchs had to earn his general’s stripes and he knew it. All his hopes had fallen on the old man’s well-documented, though controversial, genius. Haslanger had been achieving dramatic results for half a century, but his tenure at Group Six has thus far failed to produce the one superweapon that would affirm its efficacy and preserve its very existence. Today’s test was another in a long chain of attempts and the first since the devastating failure in Reyvastat.

  Haslanger longed for the simpler times following World War II after the Americans had sought him out. No one asked him any questions. He was given a job to do and no one cared how he did it. Failure was accepted as a natural precursor to ultimate success. Accountings were never required.

  He was paying for that now, every time his eyes slipped closed and the shapes came to visit in the instant before he managed to shove sleep aside. Occasionally the products of his past almost reached him, just as they had two years before when he realized sleep and death were one and the same.

  Haslanger held himself blameless for all he’d done prior to joining Group Six. He was ahead of his time, he told himself. In the early years, the proper technology simply hadn’t existed to allow for the complete realization of his visions. That technology did exist today, but Haslanger could never have gone back even if the Pentagon wanted him to. Too many shadows and shapes had been left behind, horrifying night things that had doomed him to a life of wakefulness.

  Sometimes Haslanger wondered what had become of his creations. Since he’d given up sleep and denied them their visits, however, he’d been getting better at forgetting them.

  This afternoon’s test site was a large open area between Group Six’s headquarters and the Brookhaven perimeter fence line, layered with man-made hills and valleys to simulate battlefield conditions. A dozen soldiers and three jeeps were nestled comfortably between a pair of these hills. They were volunteers drawn from a nearby army base who liked the idea of participating in a top-secret government research project.

  A quarter-mile away from the soldiers, five men in summer-weight uniforms stood near an M1A2 battle tank listening to the last of Fuchs’s remarks as Haslanger cringed.

  “Looks ordinary, doesn’t it, gentlemen?” Fuchs said, turning his attention to the tank after completing his usual introductory ramblings.

  The five men from the Pentagon followed the colonel’s gaze to the M1A2.

  “But a laser developed by Group Six personnel has been mounted on the underside of that M1A2,” Fuchs continued. “It fires a series of bursts over either a narrow or wide area, depending on conditions. The desired effect, as you know, is temporary blindness of the enemy. This is in keeping with our desire to redefine the way war is fought today. Our goal is nothing less than one-hundred-percent survivability for American troops.”

  On cue a technician wearing a white lab coat who’d emerged from the tank’s innards distributed a set of dark-lensed goggles to each man.

  “If you’ll join me over here now and don your protective goggles, please.”

  The Pentagon men slid away from the M1A2 and placed the goggles over their eyes. Haslanger eased past them and approached the tank, nodding at the two technicians perched outside its cab. They ducked back down and closed the hatch behind them. Haslanger heard a scratchy, whirring sound, indicating the laser’s generator had been activated. He turned toward Fuchs.

  “Fire when ready,” the colonel said into a walkie-talkie connecting him to the men inside the tank.

  Fuchs raised the binoculars to his goggles and watched the soldiers a quarter-mile away take their prearranged positions, the leader returning a walkie-talkie to his belt. Using live, unprotected volunteers for such an experiment would have been unheard of at Los Alamos or Lawrence Livermore, but not here at Group Six, especially not with what they were charged with creating.

  Fuchs steadied his binoculars.

  The laser’s bursts of blinding light exploded in rapid succession as if from a massive strobe that fired lightning. For an instant everything seemed perfect and Fuchs felt almost celebratory. Then the sight through his binoculars made him gasp.

  The clothes of the soldiers burst into flames. Even from this distance he could hear their screams as they crumpled and rolled in agony across the ground. It was Reyvastat all over again, sure to draw even more negative attention since it had happened here where containment and damage control would prove difficult indeed. He felt his own frustration boiling over, imagining what Congress might do with this. His gaze turned on Haslanger, who seemed almost to be smiling.

  “What have you done?” Fuchs screamed, grasping the old man’s arm.

  Haslanger stood wide-eyed and awestruck, not able to take his eyes from the flames as he responded.

  “Not exactly the way we planned it, but equally effective, I should think. With some slight refinements—”

  “Damn you!” Fuchs rasped.

  “Wonderful,” Haslanger mouthed, scarcely believing the accidental and wondrous discovery of this combustion ray. “Positively wonderful.”

  SEVEN

  “You’re from the government, I assume,” the Harvard University registrar, Robert Mulgrew, greeted Susan Lyle when she entered his office on the second floor of University Hall.

  Susan showed him her identification. “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

  “Terrible what happened at the Galleria. We lost some students who were attending our summer session, I’m told. No confirmation. Still being sorted out. You’d be the person doing the sorting, I assume.”

  “One of them.”

  Mulgrew nodded as if he understood. “You’ll want some addresses and backgrounds to go with names, then.”

  “Just one.”

  “Did you say ‘one’?”

  Susan nodded. “And I don’t have a name,” she said as she produced the list of books contained in the blue backpack. “These were found in the area of the mall.”

  Mulgrew took the list and raised his glasses. “I understand,” he told her, fully believing he did.

  “I want to know what courses call for these books and who might have been taking all of them.”

  Mulgrew glanced at it again. “That won’t be a very long list.” He reached for some folders lying on his desk and looked back at Susan before he opened them. “Do you know what it was yet, what killed them, I mean?”

  “We’re still investigating.”

  “I’ve heard the rumors, you see. Some kind of disease, people say, an epidemic. Victims in isolatio
n wards. Victims who haven’t been allowed to see their families.”

  “I can’t respond to that.”

  “But, you see, people are scared. People are wondering if they’re safe. We’ve already lost two-thirds of our summer session enrollment to panic. It’s difficult to reassure them.”

  “There is no epidemic. That much I can tell you.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Mulgrew said, sounding as though he meant it.

  He located the course catalogue for the summer session and made a list of the most advanced science offerings, then cross-matched them with the book titles Susan had supplied. The course list compiled, he switched on his computer and ordered the machine to perform a search for all students enrolled in each of the courses.

  “Here we are,” Mulgrew said, with no trace of accomplishment in his voice.

  A single name was centered on the screen: JOSHUA WOLFE.

  “It’s all so awful,” Mulgrew said very softly.

  “Can you print out his complete file, everything you have?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The file took several minutes to print. Mulgrew read it off the screen as it slid by.

  “Isn’t this terrible,” he muttered barely above the printer’s whir. “He’s one of our regular-term students, as well, enrolled in the doctoral sciences program after completing his masters in a mere—”

  Mulgrew stopped suddenly, got up and went to the printer. He lifted the stack up off the tray and inspected the top page.

  “I thought I saw it wrong on the screen. I thought, I was hoping …”

  “What is it?” Susan asked him.

  Mulgrew’s eyes had glazed over with shock. “Joshua Wolfe is only fifteen years old.”

  “I’ll need to see his room,” Susan said.

  “Of course. I understand. I’ll have security let you in.”

  Minutes later Mulgrew accompanied Susan and a uniformed security guard the brief distance across Harvard Yard to Weld 21, a room in a freshman dormitory used for summer-session students.

  “If there’s anything else I can do,” Mulgrew offered, “I’ll be in my office.”

  “Thank you,” said Susan, and she closed the door behind her.

  Weld 21 was actually a pair of rooms and would probably have been occupied by two or three students during the school year. But for the summer, clearly, only one had resided within it. The bedroom section contained a bed, a chair, a television and nothing else. There were no posters on the walls, no stereo with monster speakers, nothing that indicated occupancy by a teenager. The only things even remotely suggesting the presence of a youth were half-open dresser drawers and a collection of clothes that lay strewn about over the floor and bed, as if Joshua Wolfe had packed and left in a hurry. A glance into the closet revealed no suitcase. A number of wire hangers had dropped to the dull tile floor.

  The second room was something else entirely.

  It was dominated by computers. One of them she recognized as the Power Macintosh Series II 8100/80, the fastest, most powerful computer of its kind available. Two smaller computers were set against another wall, each boasting external hard-drive boosters. Bookshelves rested against every available wall, all of them packed solid.

  Susan moved about the room slowly, taking it all in. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, and she picked up and discarded several items from desk or shelf until she spotted a thick, neatly bound report. She opened it and studied the title page:

  IRREVERSIBLE EFFECTS OF POLLUTANTS ON

  THE ENVIRONMENT AND POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

  A Doctoral Thesis By

  Joshua Wolfe

  First Draft

  The same shelf was stacked with notebooks. She lifted one up and skimmed its contents. Then another. And another.

  All this boy’s research notes and theoretical ponderings were centered around air pollution. One whole notebook was dedicated to global warming, another to the greenhouse effect.

  The next three off the shelves had Susan retreating to a stiff-backed desk chair. They concerned the need for drastic and dramatic solutions to the pollution problem and detailed the devastating effects to mankind if that problem was not addressed in full very soon. Geniuses, she knew, were prone to be obsessive, and Joshua Wolfe’s personal obsession was laid out in notebook after notebook.

  Susan moved to the desk holding the Power Macintosh, dragging the single chair with her. She switched it on and accessed its menu list. Not surprisingly, all the hard drive’s files had been erased. Disappointed, Susan started working her way through the desk’s drawers in the hope of finding at least some semblance of a clue.

  The second drawer down yielded much more than that in the form of a plastic storage case containing unlabeled floppy backup disks. Excited now, Susan popped the first one in and opened the single file it contained. A poem appeared on the screen, the first in a long collection that made up the file. The poems were laid out in the chronological order in which they had been written. Susan hit HOME, returning to the first poem in the sequence. It read “Josh, Age 3” above the title:

  “The Fires of Midnight.” Eleven stanzas followed.

  We all know how it feels to cry

  We’ve all sometimes had to lie

  But it’s those of us whose spirits died

  Who life seems to have defied

  But here is a door

  And I will deny it no more

  The one thing the world couldn’t ignore

  Soon I will be the one they all adore

  And with the midnight hour about to begin

  And the fires ready to burn within

  What you have but cannot see

  Is all I wish I could be

  If you’ve ever felt this way

  You know it’s no good to live for another day

  So now you see you’re not great

  And the future holds a much worse fate

  So walk a mile in these shoes

  And my fires will teach you to lose

  You can’t escape

  There’s no one the fires don’t rape

  I cry for you

  And I cry for the world

  ’Cause we all live together

  And one day we’ll be equal forever

  Susan read the lines over, chilled by them, having to remind herself that a three-year-old had written “The Fires of Midnight.” But hardly an ordinary three-year-old. A three-year-old already aware and frustrated by the fact that he was different. A three-year-old who must have been an outcast, who desperately wanted to fit in and knew he never could.

  Heart hammering against her rib cage, Susan ejected the disk and slid a second into the slot. This one had a file menu and she began scanning through the contents. Joshua Wolfe’s obsession with air pollution stretched far beyond its potentially catastrophic long-term effects and encompassed the development of drastic solutions. File after file was devoted to his experiments on various agents meant to attack it at the molecular level. Several of the technological references clearly indicated that the boy was playing around with some form of genetically engineered organism designed to suck pollutants right out of the—

  Susan froze the screen, eyes fixed upon it. She had almost passed over this file, would have if a spark of recognition hadn’t flickered in her mind.

  Plans, blueprints …

  She had seen them before, just hours earlier. Seen them in Firewatch’s mobile command site.

  They were the original plans for the Cambridgeside Galleria.

  Susan tried to steady herself but her mind was racing too fast. She recalled the air-quality registers the sweep team had found in the mall, the connection to Joshua Wolfe’s work unavoidable.

  What do I know? What can I prove?

  Start with a hypothesis. Assume Joshua Wolfe’s presence in the boiler room, and the presence of those air-quality registers inside the mall, indicated he was conducting an experiment. Assume he had released an organism or enzyme of his own creation
designed to destroy air pollution. Only it hadn’t worked as planned and the result, the result had been …

  And with the midnight hour about to begin,

  And the fires ready to burn within.

  The fires of midnight, Susan thought. Was that what Joshua Wolfe had inadvertently unleashed in the Cambridgeside Galleria two days before?

  She found a semblance of the answer in the next file she accessed. Mathematical formulas and equations she could make little sense of dominated screen after screen until she locked on to a file devoted to what the boy apparently intended to release in the Galleria as part of his test: CLean AIR.

  It was printed that way only as a title, replaced in later usages with the contraction “CLAIR.” She scanned back a few files and realized Joshua Wolfe had named all of his experimental formulas after women. He was apparently as adept at turning a phrase as he was at turning a test tube, a poet indeed.

  But it was his expertise with a test tube that interested Susan now. According to what she could decipher from Joshua Wolfe’s equations, two vials of CLAIR would be required to cover the area of the Galleria. This was later amended to a single vial, at the last minute, actually, perhaps as late as Sunday morning.

  That fact moved Susan’s focus in another direction. What if, what if …

  She reached for the phone, closed her eyes to remember the number Mulgrew had given her.

  “I need something else,” Susan told him. “The science labs that Joshua Wolfe would routinely have access to—would he be required to check out materials? Would there be a record?”