Pandora's Clock

by Nance, John J. ;

  Holland resisted the impulse to go look for the pilot. No one could have lived through that. It would be a gory scene at best. Whoever he was, he’d paid for the assault with his life.

  Several people had been injured coming down the slides in the evacuation. Three of them were being carried away from the right side of the 747 to the edge of the runway. There was a man in a torn and bloody suit who seemed to have been badly banged up, and two people with leg injuries lay nearby.

  Holland knelt down and examined the passenger in the business suit. He was unconscious, but breathing normally. He had lacerations on his forehead and chest, but none looked life-threatening. Nothing about the man looked familiar, and that startled him, though it was stupid to think he could memorize all two hundred fifty faces. He’d undoubtedly been one of the sea of faces in the coach cabin.

  A familiar figure passed to his left, and he turned and yelled at his lead flight attendant.

  “Barb!”

  “James!”

  He held open his arms and she came to him with a bear hug.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She looked up and smiled and nodded.

  “Those people in the back, Barb. You told me someone was in the upper loft …” His voice trailed off as Barb Rollins pointed to the edge of the crowd of milling passengers where a young woman was sitting with someone else on the ground.

  “They’re okay! They came tumbling out of that loft just in time when the explosion hit!”

  “Thank goodness!” Holland muttered, catching sight of Rachael several yards in the distance.

  Dick Robb found the captain. The airport fire chief was right behind him. Holland stood and faced the man, wondering why he would approach the group at all. Hadn’t he heard who they were?

  “That was one helluva show, Captain!” the chief said.

  Holland shrugged. “We … did what we had to. Whoever that bastard was, he attacked us on the descent.” Holland turned to look at the wreckage of the Gulfstream again, remembering the range of such an airplane. It hadn’t been a fighter chasing them. It had been an armed business jet all along.

  He turned back to the fire chief and wiped his forehead. “And, I guess, this is the same one who attacked us last night near the Canary Islands.”

  Was it the Canaries? Or was it Africa? It was all beginning to blend together.

  “Captain?” the fire chief said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m told these are probably the worst injuries.” He gestured to the three laid out before him on the ramp. “Of course, whoever was in that other machine”—he gestured to the Gulfstream—“is undoubtedly dead.”

  Holland nodded.

  “We’ve got an ambulance on the way,” the fire chief continued. “This isn’t much more than an outpost, but we’ll make do. The British commander is on his way to talk to you about—”

  “Look”—Holland had raised his hand, palm out, to stop the chief, then looked down and took a deep breath before meeting the man’s gaze again—“You’re a brave fellow to come out here and help us like this, but perhaps we should keep everyone else away for at least the next twelve hours.”

  The chief smiled and shook his head in puzzlement. “Whatever for, Captain?”

  “Do you know who we are? Have you been following the news?”

  “Certainly!” the man replied. “The whole planet has been pulling for you.”

  “Well, until sometime later today we’re still a potential threat to anyone. We could still be carrying the virus they uncorked in Germany.”

  The fire chief was shaking his head. “Captain, during the night the news broke that whatever you’ve been exposed to can’t be transferred by air. You hadn’t heard, then?”

  Holland shook his head. “We couldn’t risk using the radios, and we were too far out for the commercial broadcasts.”

  “I see. Well, except for those who actually had physical contact with the infected passenger, the way I understand it is, no one on board your aircraft really has much of a chance of infection. By the way, your Air Force is already on the way with medical help and supplies. We just got the word,” he added.

  James Holland looked around at the mauled remains of the almost new 747-400, and at the smoking wreckage of the Gulfstream—the comparatively tiny machine that had tried so hard to kill them through the night. None of it seemed real.

  “Captain?”

  A passenger with a blanket around her shoulders had moved away from the main group and found him. Holland looked around and recognized her instantly. Her words and her disapproving glare had echoed in his head more than once during the past thirty hours.

  “Hello, ma’am. You okay?” he asked.

  She stood her ground for a few seconds as if studying him, then smiled slightly and nodded.

  “Well, we made it,” he added, feeling awkward.

  In a sudden gesture, she extended her right hand, and he took it, feeling a firm grip despite her years.

  “Captain, you remember what I told you so many hours ago?”

  He nodded and smiled as he covered her right hand with his left one as well.

  “You didn’t trust me because I wasn’t thinking for myself.”

  She nodded. “I was wrong.”

  Holland looked down at the runway surface for a few seconds and took a deep breath, then met her eyes once more.

  “No ma’am. You were right. At that moment in time, you were all too right.”

  EPILOGUE

  REHOBOTH BEACH, DELAWARE—SUNDAY, DECEMBER 31

  Rusty Sanders handed the small stack of newspaper articles back to Sherry Ellis, shaking his head in amazement. The same photograph of the crippled 747 on the runway at Ascension Island stared out at them from a half-dozen clippings.

  “If Roth wasn’t responsible, Sherry, maybe he should have been. Every civilized nation on the planet has declared war on Aqbah. Even Iran is promising to help. However this happened, Aqbah’s finished, and the Saudis have been leading the charge. That sheik who lost his jet was ready to start a holy war!”

  Sherry had been staring out the window, her mind elsewhere.

  “So what’s your vote?” he prompted. “Guilty or not guilty?”

  She turned slightly, looking at him over her shoulder. “Us, or Roth?”

  “Roth, of course. What do you mean, ‘Us’?”

  She smiled and turned back to the window.

  “I honestly don’t know, Rusty. Could be innocent. Could be guilty. Jon moves in mysterious ways.”

  “I thought that was God. God moves in mysterious ways.”

  She nodded. “Given our delicate position, I’d say they were effectively one and the same.” She turned and looked at him. “After Jon’s amazing performance in Senator Moon’s office, I was so confused I almost decided we’d been hallucinating.”

  “I know. Me too. He never seemed ruffled, all the evidence had disappeared without a trace, and he had an explanation for everything we saw. But if he wasn’t the renegade, who was? Somebody helped Aqbah commit suicide. Somebody was trying to kill us!”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Maybe? They were shooting at us at National Airport! They destroyed a jet chasing us!”

  Sherry raised an index finger toward the ceiling and shifted to an artificially low voice. “‘But, Dr. Sanders,’ said Jon Roth, ‘they were only trying to hit the tires of the baggage tug you stole. If they’d wanted to kill you, they would have done so. They were trying to bring you in. That’s all!’”

  Rusty shook his head, then said quietly, “I know what I saw.”

  Sherry looked at him for several moments before replying.

  “Do you? I’ve got to admit, Rusty, I can’t absolutely say he’s lying, and the intelligence fraternity will forever be convinced that spymaster Jonathan Roth pulled it off, whether he did or not.”

  Rusty shook his head. “I wonder if we did the right thing?”

  “We had a choice?” Sherry asked, ju
st as quickly.

  “Well …”

  She turned and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “It was a Hobson’s choice, remember? Just like the old English stable-keeper in, what, the sixteen hundreds? You can have any horse you want, Hobson used to tell his customers, as long as it’s the one closest to the door!”

  He nodded.

  She moved her hand to his chin and brought his face around until their eyes were locked.

  “You remember Jon’s deal, Rusty? ‘Shut up, forget your delusional accusations, and you two can keep your positions. Or, you can take your wild, unsupported story on the road and face the consequences.’ In forty-eight hours we would have been branded insane and dangerous, we would have been unemployed, and Jon would have let the aggrieved parties at National Airport know where to send the subpoenas for all the damage we caused. The horse closest to the door was the only choice, bubba!”

  “I know, I know.”

  She removed her hand. “Okay. Just remember what we promised each other. We can watch him better from the inside. What’s done is done.”

  “I suppose. At least everyone on the jumbo got home, with three days of quarantine, no illnesses, apologies from everywhere, and first class passage. Only the insurers of the wrecked Boeing and the squashed Arab in the business jet were casualities—unless you count Aqbah, of course.”

  “You’re forgetting Professor Helms and that young mother in Iceland,” she said.

  He grimaced and nodded. “You’re right. I’m sorry. But the point is, Sherry, by sheer happenstance Roth looks like the sage advisor whose steady hand carried the President through a difficult crisis, rather than the Machiavellian liar who almost triggered a holocaust. He tried to play God and almost slaughtered more than two hundred and fifty lives by helping Aqbah, and we don’t even know how. He’s broken more laws than I can count by launching a major covert operation without a presidential finding, probably lied to the President a dozen times, lied to a senator, manipulated everyone, tried to kill us, wrecked my apartment, shattered my nerves, and … and …”

  “And currently enjoys the full confidence of the executive branch and the Senate, which will rubber-stamp his confirmation as CIA Director, because not even we are sure those accusations are true,” Sherry added.

  He nodded. “And the only two people who really suspect he’s a snake remain under his direct control!” Rusty thumped his chest with his hand. “Us.”

  Sherry smiled at him and cocked her head. “If you’re gonna live in a jungle, you gotta expect snakes. We do work for the CIA. We still work for the CIA. There are worse fates.”

  Rusty nodded and stood.

  “Someday, though,” he began, “some horrible virus like that one will hitch a ride on a commercial jet, and we’ll lose control in a matter of hours.”

  The sliding glass door was unlatched and Rusty opened it slightly, letting the thundering roar of the waves fill the plushly decorated beachfront room. The moon had risen over the Atlantic ocean, full and huge, on an unusually balmy winter’s evening. Below them, on the boardwalk, a couple strolled past, obviously enjoying each other’s company as others celebrated New Year’s Eve in the distance. Even with the parties and the fireworks, the resort community had an off-season, deserted feeling.

  And Washington, D.C., lay safely in the distance, a hundred miles to the west.

  “Rusty, I’m glad you called me. I was hoping you’d call.”

  Rusty turned to find her standing beside him, her hair almost iridescent in the moonlight. He felt a bit off-balance.

  “I … wasn’t sure, you know …”

  “Yes, you were,” she said with a smile and a toss of her head.

  “Well, how I felt, yes, but I mean whether you …”

  “You knew that too!” She put a finger to his lips to block his response, then gently put her hand on his arm and turned him to face her.

  “How long do we have here?” she asked.

  “I … made reservations for three days.”

  “For only this room?” Sherry glanced over her shoulder, affecting a puzzled expression. “But … there’s just one bed. Where are you going to sleep?”

  There was momentary confusion on Rusty’s face as he stammered a reply.

  “Well, I thought … I thought …”

  “You did, huh?” Sherry asked, a grin spreading across her face as her hands began unbuttoning his shirt. Rusty smiled back at her.

  “You thought right,” she said. “The lady is willing. So! Come take me to bed, double-oh-nothing.”

  OVAL OFFICE, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.—TUESDAY MORNING, JANUARY 16

  Jonathan Roth had forced the meeting, and the presidential chief of staff had made room on the calendar with undisguised reluctance. The President’s schedule was impossibly hectic, but Roth had insisted he would want to hear the final report immediately.

  Roth entered the room precisely on schedule at 10 A.M. with an Army brigadier general, the commander of the Army infectious disease unit at Fort Detrick. The President, noting the grim expressions, motioned the two men to the couches opposite his desk.

  Roth was holding a thick folder, but he did not hand it over. Instead, he cleared his throat and gestured to the general sitting nervously next to him.

  “As you know, while our medical response teams were holding the crew and passengers at Ascension, we … I … recommended a longer quarantine.”

  “I remember clearly, Jon,” the President said. “I took the responsibility for letting them come back home in three days. No one was sick. What’s your point?”

  “But they were, Mr. President, and we didn’t know it.”

  “Explain that, please.”

  Roth already had his hand up.

  “Sir, as you know, it takes exhaustive electron microscope examination of blood samples or tissue samples, done by researchers in bioisolation suits in a Level Four environment, to try to determine what a dangerous virus looks like. By the time the 747 arrived at Ascension, we had the initial pictures of the virus that killed the two researchers in Bavaria. They’re calling it the Hauptmann Strain for obvious reasons. Almost at the same time, we received pictures of the virus infecting Professor Helms’s blood.”

  Roth turned to the general, who picked up the narrative.

  “Helms was definitely infected, sir, but the infection had nothing to do with his heart attack. There was a significant viral presence in his blood, and it seemed to match the Hauptmann Strain almost exactly. It even fluoresced, which is a process that helps us verify if a virus is the same as one we’re comparing it to. We then drew blood from each of the passengers and crew on Flight Sixty-six while in quarantine, and it’s taken us this long to confirm the results.”

  “You’re drawing out the suspense, gentlemen. Get to the point,” the President said as he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

  “The point, sir,” Roth said, “is that despite our conclusion that the virus could only infect through a fluid medium, we were wrong. Eighty-two percent of the humans aboard that flight were infected.”

  The President straightened up with a startled expression.

  “Wait a minute! No one was sick! No one has become sick, and we’re weeks down the road!”

  “Actually, they were, Mr. President,” the Army general said. “The virus mutated. The deadly Level Four pathogen that killed those two men in Bavaria mutated in Professor Helms as it infected him. Something, perhaps only one protein, changed. We have no idea what, but the viral program that began running riot in Helms’s bloodstream suddenly lost the ability to sicken and kill humans, and its incubation period changed. Helms infected almost everyone aboard that 747, but not with the Hauptmann Strain—it was a mutated version, which takes several days longer to fully incubate. We’re calling it the Helms Bavaria virus. Most of the passengers reached full infection status at home here in the U.S., but because there were no overt symptoms, we didn’t know it, and neither did they.”


  “This … this virus … this Helms Bavaria is not dangerous?”

  The general shook his head. “We can’t assume that. It could mutate again and return to a lethal status, but now, you see, we’ve utterly lost control. It’s out there in the population, quietly infecting without causing illness. But if it mutates again …”

  “It could show up anywhere, at any time, as a Level Four epidemic,” Roth added.

  The President sat back hard on the couch, his mind racing.

  “My God! That aircraft really could have been a vessel of doom. You remember we went back and forth on that.” The President sat in thought for a few seconds before addressing Roth again. “Okay. How long does it take for the virus to disappear? Do you build an immunity?”

  Roth looked the President in the eye as he answered.

  “If we had kept them quarantined at Ascension for a month, the virus would have been totally gone. As it was, this symptomless infection was raging as they came back to their families on the twenty-seventh, and probably peaked several days after that. Each person probably infected a dozen others, and so on. The general here tells me there may be an immunity to the Helms Bavaria built up eventually in our population, but not necessarily an immunity to any future mutated version.”

  The general nodded. “It’s like dealing with some clever alien in a science fiction story. We don’t know what it’s capable of, but we do know it’s out there now, and beyond our control.”

  “In a nutshell, sir,” Roth continued, “we screwed this up. We got the diagnosis wrong about airborne transfer and the incubation period, and we released those people far too soon.”

  “What’s … the bottom line on this, Jon?” the President asked.

  Roth looked down and studied his shoes for a few seconds before looking back up at the chief executive and replying.