The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  She pulled into the fast lane and focused on the road, accelerating as she drove. She’d have answers soon enough.

  Normally the rush of night air exhilarated her. But the hint of smoke and fuel seemed stronger up here, and she found it unpleasant. There was something else she got a whiff of as well. Cloying and heavy, it collected at the back of her throat.

  The aroma of burnt flesh.

  She shuddered, swallowed, and braced herself for what the night in ER would hold. Whether from the fire on the boat or the explosions, there’d be burn victims, charred skin cracked open to the bone, seared muscle, and pain.

  She broke her own record for getting to Honolulu General.

  No ambulances, she noted, pulling into the hospital parking lot. That meant time enough to put up the top to her car. It hadn’t started raining yet, but the strange, incoming fog filled the air with humidity. Just the five-minute ride had left her skin slimy with it. She also caught a whiff of something else besides jet fuel and burnt skin. A bitter aroma--the way the air smelled after a lightning strike.

  She’d secured the leather roof and started to run across the front grounds when a low growl of yet another siren pierced the air. This one rose quickly in pitch, found its high note, and held steady. Left over from World War II, the air-raid warning system had just kicked in. Maintained through the nineteen-fifties for duck-and-cover drills, these days city officials put it to the more practical use of announcing incoming tsunamis.

  As if we didn’t have enough confusion, she thought, and rushed toward the ER entrance. Perhaps Ryder could tell her what the hell was happening.

  As she reached for the door, a spasm shot through her right hand, curling the fingers into a claw.

  “Shit!”

  She massaged them straight again, yet it took a full minute before her fist could open and close properly. Even then, her forearm continued to tremble. “Last thing I need,” she muttered, thinking of all the procedures that would require a steady hand tonight.

  3:22 A.M. IPT

  “FBI, NSA, EPA, CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, the Secretary of Defense, the President . . .”

  Robert Daikens was lining up what would be the conference call of his career.

  Terry tuned out the alphabet soup of agencies that ran America.

  He couldn’t stop staring at the receding aquamarine dot where over five thousand must be dead or dying. Even when he closed his eyes, the speck remained, as if it had burned a hole in his retina, the punctuation mark between life before tonight and all that would follow.

  Minutes later, as the helicopter gained altitude to head east, he could see where spectral fingers of steam laced with black smoke had reached into the city, carrying God knew what doses of radioactivity. They stretched out to obscure a million golden points of light, street lamp by street lamp, window by window, building by building, block by block, until the more isolated homes on higher ground were the last to wink from view.

  His brain, a trove of statistics for terror scenarios and ever at the ready to tell him the odds for survivors--always dismal--obligingly provided casualty estimates for this night. Here the fifty-fifty rule applied. Given the inclination of people to rush outside and see what had happened, half the population in the direct path of the mist would fall victim to radioactive poisoning, and half of those would die. Hundreds of thousands, he thought, his mouth too dry to speak. The totals numbed him. Counting the dead on such a gargantuan scale always did. You couldn’t wrap your senses around those kind of numbers. But the thought of Carla being among them hit home like a wrecking ball.

  A life in medicine teaches you to discipline your emotions. Drawing on every ounce of that skill, he turned to the pilot and got to work. “Link me through Pearl if you must, but get me the CDC hotline.” Seconds later he was delivering a barrage of on-the-fly orders to a very shaken Dr. Betty Houston, director of the Centers for Disease Control and czarina of all things infectious that dared infiltrate America.

  “Remobilize my original task force. And we’ll require people to help Honolulu doctors and officials take on the mystery disease there. Ditto for the backup of local hospital personnel dealing with victims of trauma, burns, and radiation exposure. In a matter of days, half the city’s health-care community could have radiation sickness themselves and be too ill to work. As for this SHAKES thing nationally, I advise you guys to set up a sentinel watch and see if it’s hit anywhere else . . .”

  She listened with minimal interruptions, quickly got up to speed, and wasted no time second-guessing him as he spoke.

  But while he scrambled to lay out a logical plan of action based on science, his eureka circuits railed at the inherent slowness of scientific method. The lumbering plod of clinical research had accelerated to light speed when it isolated the cause of SARS over a matter of months in 2003. Warp nine when it modified existing vaccines to combat bird flu in a period of six weeks during the pandemic of ’07. All ahead, full, Scotty. But to get ahead of this outbreak, if his eureka circuits were right and this was the attack he thought it was, they’d have to do better than warp nine. And as always in science, they’d require luck. Sometimes you had to go up a million blind alleys to make a find.

  “You ruined my morning, Ryder,” Betty said when he’d finished, her Texan drawl remaining coolly businesslike as it always did in a crisis. “But don’t worry. We’ll have everything up and running at our end by noon eastern.”

  Signing off, he switched back to the general’s frequency, only to hear him rattle off some familiar sounding numbers, and a nasal-voiced woman with a Brooklyn accent laboriously repeat them for verification. “Pull their files,” Robert Daikens continued. “Pick them up, on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a terrorist act.”

  Once more Terry witnessed the Robert Daikens he loathed--a man lost to the heat of his private obsession, putting the final spin on yet another attempt to snare the two Russians. But was it such a wild-goose chase this time?

  He looked back out the window into a darkness that went on forever.

  Each person implicated in today’s carnage--whether they be the usual suspects or complete unknowns--from the deceivers and perpetrators who’d brought it off, through the unwitting participants and accidental contributors who’d unintentionally played a part, to the unsuccessful preventers and would-be protectors who’d failed to stop it--they all would be thinking of the role they’d played. They would also be covering tracks, making sure that there were no loose ends pointing their way with the potential to incriminate them for what they’d done or omitted to do. Either way, these people could tell him what he needed to know a lot faster than science.

  To get it all, the FBI would have to round up many more suspects than Anna and Yuri, fingering most of them solely on the basis of hunches and suspicion. Terry’s mood spiraled downward. With investigators everywhere scrambling wildly off in all directions, their chances of a breakthrough through good detective work were also dismal.

  What if, he fantasized, so many multiple viewpoints and secreted details might simply be harvested from people’s heads, assembled in chronological order, then read like a lost scroll to uncover the truth about what had invaded the Reagan? Of course that was a pipe dream. Not even his eureka circuits could pull it off. “Profiling at a distance,” the CIA had once called such attempts at mind taps, having studied the technique in the late seventies. They later declared the whole business impractical and shut down the program.

  But that’s what he and legions of investigators would have to do through scut work--scour memories, dig out records, question everyone they could snare, all to turn up overlooked fragments of conversations, ideas, or incidents that might now seem germane, and rethink the past ten years.

  Sex In The Time Of Anthrax,

  Old Scars, Fresh Wounds:

  2001-2002

  Chimera

  From the Greek chimaira, she-goat.

  Myth, a fire-b
reathing monster with a lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail. Any similar unreal monster.

  An impossible foolish fancy.

  --Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language

  Know that from nothing else but the brain came joys, delights, laughter and jests, and sorrows, griefs, despondency and lamentations. And by this, in an especial manner, we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear and know what are foul, and what are fair, what sweet and what unsavory.

  --The Hippocratic Writings

  Chapter 6

  Eight years earlier

  Monday, October 1, 2001, 10:05 A.M. EST

  Boca Raton, Florida

  Bernie Smitts, Smitty to his friends, ignored the fine white powder when he opened the letter. Particles of it got on his hands, floated in the air, and dusted his shirt a little, but no harm done.

  He didn’t pay much heed to the message either. It read, YOU DIE NOW, and had been put together by large letters cut out of newsprint--from their own paper, The Whisperer, by the looks of it. He got a lot of those. After all, the point of the publication was to print dirt about the rich and famous, so why wouldn’t their targets throw a little back now and then? Retaliation like that he could take. Even lawsuits didn’t bother him anymore, as long as they caused sufficient publicity to increase circulation. He crumpled the note into a ball and launched it toward the miniature hoop and net mounted over his waste basket.

  Swish, and in went a perfect three pointer.

  He moved on to the next piece of correspondence, completely unaware that he would soon be the lead story of every major media outlet in America.

  Tiny spores of Bacillus anthracis, previously milled to the infinitesimal diameter that qualified them as weapons grade, were already hurtling along his respiratory tree, cascading through the lacy branches of the bronchioles. Some even made it to delicate clusters of alveoli, the tiny sacs at the end of the passageways where molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide slipped in and out of the bloodstream, allowed to pass through the diaphanous walls like VIPs at an exclusive club. But not the spores. They settled in the warm mucous lining, and incubated, like alien eggs. Three days later they germinated, becoming clusters of long wormlike bacteria with blunt ends. In another few days these produced and released more spores that grew into more bacteria.

  By now his immune system had sounded the alarm. White cells and antibodies summoned to destroy the invaders, accompanied by phagocytes, larger cells designed to gobble up the debris, swept into the lungs. But Bacillus anthracis has a capsule that armors it against such attacks, and it continued to flourish, all the while cooking up and releasing its most venomous feature of all--lethal toxins in concentrations strong enough to shred the surrounding lung tissues.

  On day four the structural damage allowed these bacterial hordes and swarms of spores to pour into his blood stream, disseminating themselves throughout the body. They had a particular predilection for occupying lymph nodes in the middle of the chest and penetrating the surface of the brain.

  But the toxins didn’t stop there. They ravaged vascular walls that then bled like open spigots. They invaded organs in their path until the cells burst from the swelling. They clogged the blood supply to tissue beds until one system after another went down like failing circuits on an overloaded power grid. Arterial and cardiac muscle fell useless; the chambers of his heart flailed with no more substance than a pulsing jellyfish; Smitty slid into shock.

  On day five he died, choking up bloody foam, drowning in his own fluids, and out of his mind with meningitis.

  Friday, October 12, 2001, 5:45 P.M. EST

  Wells Beach, Maine

  Dr. Anna Katasova sipped her wine and looked out over the dusky grasslands leading to the ocean. They had flared to a fiery gold in the last seconds of direct sunlight, but now looked as gray as wood smoke in the gathering darkness. Only little Kyra in her red coat provided a spot of color as she bobbed through the bristly growth, happily playing by herself.

  It had been right to bring her here.

  “Will the bad men with planes be back, Mommy?” she’d kept asking during the days after September eleventh.

  Comforting words hadn’t reassured her.

  But after a week in this spot where just over a gentle rise, rolling surf pounded the sand in a slow cadence that comforted like a heartbeat, the worry had disappeared from her innocent brown eyes and their sparkle returned.

  Half standing, half sitting, Anna leaned against the balcony railing of the cottage and pulled her jacket collar up, the evening air growing cooler by the second. Scattered around her feet were copies of The New York Times, their headlines fanned out like a deck of cards.

  October 8: Environmental Tests Detect Anthrax at the Florida offices of The National Secret.

  October 9: Swabs from the nose of another worker at The National Secret test positive as FBI agents wearing biohazard suits continue to swarm over the premises.

  October 10: Focus for Americans shifts from bombing campaign against Taliban positions in Afghanistan to bioterror threat at home.

  October 11: Third tabloid employee tests positive for Anthrax.

  October 12: NBC news employee in New York tests positive for anthrax after opening suspicious package.

  It made her flesh creep.

  Reflexively she glanced north toward Kennebunkport and the black finger of land upon which the homestead of its most famous family rested. The lights of the place twinkled as distant as stars, and just offshore, a bobbing triad of green, red, and white marked starboard, port, and stern of the gunboat that took up position whenever anyone of importance was in residence.

  She gathered up the papers, took them inside, and hid them in a cupboard, wanting them out of sight before Kyra came in for supper. Not that a five-year-old would read the articles or listen to Brokaw, but the sight of Mommy paying attention to it all served as a reminder that there was something to be scared of. In New York too many classmates in kindergarten had had no such protection, and they talked incessantly about how worried their mommies and daddies were, stoking Kyra’s own fears, until sometimes she returned from school in tears.

  At least Anna had been able to play a stay-at-home mom over the last month. Her work for WHO, the World Health Organization, had been suspended indefinitely, nobody wanting to fly anymore. A possibility of getting blown out of the skies frightened members of her team more than the prospect of lethal infections emerging undetected in South-East Asia.

  Keeping an eye on her daughter through the kitchen window, she started to prepare supper--Kyra’s favorite, macaroni and cheese, the ultimate US weapon in Americanizing any immigrant child’s palate. As the light outside faded, the coat still stood out, until it became a dancing little cranberry in a sea of shadows. The sight made Anna smile. For the moment she knew that Kyra felt safe.

  While their meal heated on the stove, she tried Yuri’s number again.

  Still no answer.

  Probably shacked up with his latest conquest.

  The old stab of jealousy tried to make yet another tiring appearance, more out of habit than passion. It had become a mere ache years ago, nothing compared to the gutting she took the first time he’d betrayed her. While still breast-feeding Kyra, she’d made a surprise visit to this very cottage and caught him in bed with his secretary. To survive, she decided, nothing short of her amputating him from her life would do, the way she would cut off a gangrenous limb before it destroyed her. Anna divorced him and kept the cottage.

  She gave the macaroni a stir and stared out over the water as it darkened to a midnight blue. On summer nights, before the painful times, she’d danced naked among those dunes, and they became the place where their newfound freedom sent her spirit soaring to the greatest heights. She wanted Kyra to have her start here, to feel that same wind under her wings.

  Yuri had bought it a few years after they’d both finished their retraining and qualified as licensed physicians in New York State
. He was already making triple her salary with his Park Avenue practice, catering to the new millionaires who’d emerged from the ruins of the old Soviet Union and immigrated to New York. “My White Russians” he used to call them.

  She’d seen that crowd for the gangsters they were, and wanted nothing to do with them. Bowing instead to the wishes of those who’d fast-tracked her and Yuri’s access to American citizenship and the city’s leading medical school, Anna specialized in infectious diseases, then offered her services to the World Health Organization. At the time, she had no idea what her so-called benefactors really had in mind.

  She angrily punched the number to Yuri’s apartment again.

  Still no answer.

  There’d been no answer for the last five days, ever since she and Kyra had left New York. Nor could she find him at work. Each morning when she called his office, the service said only that he’d signed his practice over to a colleague due to a personal emergency. They didn’t know if the situation would last another day or a week, couldn’t even say for certain he was still in town, but assured her that he contacted them regularly to collect his messages. The various operators were beginning to sound embarrassed as they took yet one more request that he phone her back.

  I’m not a jealous ex-wife, she’d wanted to yell at them. But as the days went on, she became an increasingly anxious one. Each time new anthrax stories had appeared, her innards knotted around a stomach already simmering itself in acid. And just as she’d feared, the more recent articles talked about tracing the strain back to its country of origin.

  She had to talk with him. If he was in trouble, the FBI would lump them together. She’d need details to protect herself.