The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  The man who had Yuri by the collar hauled him the rest of the way into the street.

  Three more men in black coats directed traffic around the wreck, waving wallets with ID photos, this time FBI written in red on a yellow background. Another pair of the dark-coated agents worked the street, ordering curious pedestrians to move on. When a blue-and-white NYPD car pulled up and the officers offered assistance, they were graciously allowed to take over crowd and traffic control.

  A black SUV, the armored Lincoln model still preferred by most embassies in Iraq, arrived on the scene. Yuri’s new handlers pushed him toward it. The driver got out, and opened the back door. He wore the same style of black coat as the others. Also cashmere, Yuri thought.

  “What’s with you plainclothes guys all in identical outfits?” Yuri asked this latest arrival, hoping to lighten the mood. Get a cop relaxed enough, and it might be possible to slip away from him. “Was there a sale at the bulk barn?”

  “First of all, we are not plainclothes guys,” the man said to him in a thick Russian accent. “And we dress the way we do for three reasons, same as them.” He jerked his thumb toward the line-up of Asians in the tan coats. “To keep warm, to blend in when we’re alone, and so we know who not to shoot in a fire fight.”

  Yuri took a closer look at the man’s beefy face to see if he was joking, and noticed a scar that curled through his right eyebrow into his forehead.

  “Wait a minute. I know you--”

  Before Yuri could say anything more, the man forced him down by the back of his neck and shoved him inside the waiting vehicle. Unlike with the Asians, he landed in a seat, not on the floor.

  The door slammed shut behind him.

  There were certain days connected to perilous moments that he’d never forgotten. The one and only time time he’d seen the crypt-keeper since leaving Sverdlovsk was the day he learned that the man had been a KGB agent all during those years at the hospital, and now worked as one of Boris Yurskovitch’s siloviki. That day was also the first time Yuri sneaked into China.

  The crypt-keeper jumped back into the driver’s seat, and they sped away, skidding and sliding in the slush.

  At least Yuri had thought it was the crypt-keeper.

  But the shoulders and head seemed much too large.

  He looked in the rear-view mirror, and saw Boris Yurskovitch himself grinning at him.

  “Greetings, Yuri,” the big man said in Russian. “Did I mention I would be saving your ass today?”

  “What the fuck just happened?” Yuri asked in pure New Yorkese, confusion and anger overriding mother tongue.

  “The Asians were sent to kill you, but worse, they would first, with not so friendly persuasion, make you lead them to me.” Boris had switched to his mangled version of their adopted city’s language.

  “Kill me?”

  “Did I mention the Chinese are sweeping up our network? My people, they drop like flies last week. First the ones in Hong Kong--supposed traffic accident, all five incinerated in the one van; then our connection in Vancouver--apparent robbery victim; a few days ago everybody in Montreal office--vaporized when building blew up from gas leak. So I figured we were next. Obviously I was right--”

  “Hey! Not our network, pal. Yours. I haven’t had anything to do with those creeps for over three years.”

  “Our network, Yuri. I get nervous when I hear a former confidant try to distance himself from me.”

  “Damn it, Boris, why the fuck would the Chinese come after us about that business now?”

  The car did a shimmy as they turned into the 65th Street transfer and entered Central Park. Boris revved out of the skid. “Ah, I asked myself exactly that question for the last week, and have no clue until this morning when news headlines gave me a few ideas.”

  “The Reagan?”

  “More the rumors about a bioweapon having been used against the crew that drove them all--how do the Americans say--bonkers? And now talk that civilians on Oahu island show same tremor symptoms--”

  “That couldn’t have anything to do with us--”

  “Oh, Yuri, the lies you tell self. That’s why you never be free as me. In our trade, who knows what clients do with secrets we sell them. At least FBI sees it that way. My sources at the bureau warned me they prepare warrant for your arrest as we speak. The outbreak on the Reagan and in Honolulu is what they want to discuss with you. I figure our Chinese friends have own FBI sources. That’s probably why they moved on you today, to make sure you don’t tell the feds damaging things about our past dealings. Did I mention the FBI also intend to pick up Anna?”

  “Anna!”

  “Yes. Anna! They want to turn you two into modern-day Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.”

  Yuri’s anger drained into fear. “But she never had anything to do with it--”

  “You are going underground, my friend,” Boris continued. “We both are. I cannot afford to let you get caught by either side. It is only because you have been such a good friend and doctor that I don’t just kill you. I tell you this so you understand you have a lot to show gratitude to me for. And as way to repay me, you will find out what is behind this sudden interest in us on behalf of the Chinese. That means travel, and payola, so empty your bank account while you still can. My people will handle false papers. Your first job, for starters, is verify if bioweapons really the cause for what goes on in Honolulu.” The casual cheeriness in his voice belied the menace of his words.

  Yuri swallowed. He’d seen firsthand how Boris disposed of anyone he considered a threat, and all illusions about who could outmaneuver whom in going up against this killer had long ago shattered. “How do you propose I find that out?” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm.

  “Yuri, Yuri, Yuri. Use that wise-guy brain of yours. We call an expert with the best sentinel-alert system in the world.” He flipped a cell phone into the back seat. “Ask your wife.”

  * * * *

  Anna’s grip on the receiver tightened. “We don’t know any more than what’s on CNN, Yuri,” she lied. An encrypted briefing from Geneva with both PACOM’s and the CDC’s stark, yet top-secret appraisals of the outbreak had arrived on her computer hours ago. They echoed the growing alarm at WHO that this thing was rapidly spinning out of control.

  “But, Anechka, what’s your take on it? You’ve got all the nifty gizmos and equipment. If we’re under some kind of biological attack, tell me. Do I drop everything? Pick Kyra up at school? Get her someplace where she won’t be exposed? I gotta’ find out!”

  The pleading tone set her teeth on edge. And his voice sounded an octave higher than usual. Way up there in his panic zone, she thought. Pretty extreme reaction to rumors that, as far as he would know, were about something still six thousand miles away. “What are you playing at, Yuri?” she said, sensing a con. And a clumsy one at that. Given his usual golden tongue when trying to pry something out of her, he must be really rattled and in a lot more trouble than usual.

  “I told you, I’m just worried about Kyra--”

  “Don’t lie to me!” She spoke barely above a whisper, not wanting to be overheard by a huddle of nearby scientists who were frantically arguing with one another. The object of their disagreement and dismay was on the wall in front of them, a computer screen the size of a garage door that showed the Americas as seen from space.

  This was no ordinary map. A rash of red dots blinked all over the Hawaiian Islands, along the west coast from Mexico to Alaska, and inland across the Rocky Mountains. They petered out through the central plains, but were popping up in isolated clusters down the length of the east coast as she watched.

  G-TOED they called the system.

  Global Tracking Of Emergent Diseases.

  A brain child of two Canadian physicians, the program monitored Web sites all over the planet for individual stories of odd syndromes as they were reported to chat rooms. In ’07 it had rung the alarm bells when human cases of bird flu began to spread quicker than usual, giving the world sufficien
t early warning to get a jump on the pandemic. Before that, in ’03, a more primitive version picked up on SARS. Today, with electronic charting becoming the norm, wherever doctors worked with computers, when a triage nurse asked, “What’s the problem?” the patient’s reply would be logged into G-TOED’s data base.

  The last seven days it had picked up on the low level of scattered reports involving mild tremors and fleeting episodes of numbness. Because of their apparently benign nature, neither G-TOED nor Anna’s staff had made much of them.

  It was after the wreck of the Reagan that the map had lit up like a pinball machine. Most clusters of symptoms still had to do with mild tremors and numbness, but people complaining of memory problems, bizarre personality changes, and outbursts of violent behavior were beginning to appear in force.

  As Yuri continued to wheedle for information, snippets of her colleagues’ attempts to explain what was happening grew louder.

  “After the news reports, everyone with a twitch has panicked.”

  “I know, fish! Toxins in imported canned fish cause neuropathies.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “Seriously, a bad batch might have hit stores.”

  “Simultaneously? All across the country? No way.”

  She quickly retreated to a corner where Yuri wouldn’t overhear the other conversations. If anyone outside this room got even a hint of what they were seeing, and the story leaked to CNN, there’d be mass panic. Nothing frightened people more than an invisible unknown that could invade their bodies. She cupped her hand around the mouthpiece. “You’re lying to me, Yuri. Now what’s got you so scared? And I want the truth.”

  Silence.

  It went on and on, terrifying in its eloquence.

  “Oh, God, no,” she murmured, succumbing to a terrible premonition. It was born out of a possibility that had plagued her for years. She’d never been able to entirely shake her fears that he was into something dirty--something with those Russian gangsters whom he called businessmen that required the skills of a doctor.

  “Hey, everyone knows they trade in the three Gs--girls, guns, and gems. I only provide discrete medical treatment for the girls,” he’d say whenever she had confronted him, his tone oozing the false bravado that told her he was lying. Yet she had no proof of it, and never pressed hard enough to get any, preferring to keep her suspicions vaguely improbable so she could live with them.

  Yuri’s silence at the other end of the line continued, each passing second more telling than the previous.

  Her own people’s excited chatter rang hollow in her ears.

  “. . . if toxins had been deliberately added at source . . .”

  “. . . no way . . .”

  “. . . why not? Terrorists have coordinated attacks before . . .”

  The imperative of the day’s events and all those years of lies about his doings with Boris made it impossible not to ask. “Yuri, don’t tell me . . .” Her throat tightened around the words, and they faded to a dry croak. She grabbed the back of a nearby table to keep her balance, the inside of her chest congealing to ice. “Please say you haven’t been fool enough to get in deeper with that pig, Boris Yurskovitch,” she managed to whisper. But even then she hadn’t made the full extent of her intuitive doubts explicit.

  “I swear, Anechka, it’s nothing like that.” But his voice broke apart, splintering on a lie that not even he, the master deceiver, could utter.

  Panic sliced through her. “You got involved in his arms trade, didn’t you?” She sank into a chair, incredulous, still trying to keep her next thought at bay, telling herself that it must not be, yet her gaze inexorably turned toward the giant map that pulsed with ever greater numbers of red dots.

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  But his denials were useless now.

  The artifice of vagary by which she’d kept those worst fears at a safe distance all these years shattered, and a separation as vast, black, and cold as the universe opened between them. She shut out his protests, reducing them to a voice coming from far off, and heard herself utter the truth that she couldn’t bear to admit. “What’s begun today is the result of something that monster made you do?”

  Yuri’s breath stuttered as he stifled a sob. “No! No! Not at all, I swear--” He broke down, emitting a series of bumpy minisobs that disgusted her. “But until I can clear myself,” he added in a sudden rush, “I have to hide, and so do you. Grab Kyra and run!”

  “What?”

  “Hey!” a man shouted in the background at his end.

  “The FBI’s sworn out warrants,” Yuri said, speaking even faster, “for your arrest as well as mine--”

  The connection went dead.

  In that same hour, 200 nautical miles SE of Oahu

  USS Clinton, Nimitz Class Carrier CVN 77

  Terry Ryder slammed down the receiver.

  A boy-faced ensign who’d been unable to arrange his outgoing calls cast him an earnest look. “Still can’t get through, Sir?”

  Medical residents served up that same youthful, altruistic gaze whenever the job at hand got the better of them, as if heaping doses of sincerity would cut it when their ability couldn’t. “Don’t worry, I’m not blaming you,” Terry said. “The combined forces of Graham Bell, Marconi, and God probably couldn’t find an open connection to Honolulu today.”

  The kid beamed a grin at him. “E-mail’s working, Sir.”

  Terry slumped against a steel bulkhead, one of the few surfaces not honeycombed with tiny red and green lights, floor-to-ceiling control panels, or wall-to-wall computer screens. The hardness of it felt good against his back, the muscles having grown so tense they felt bulked up to the consistency of lead. The added weight of wearing a HAZMAT suit for fear of contaminating the rest of the ship only added to his fatigue.

  Prior e-mails to Honolulu General and the nursing station in emergency had brought no replies. Probably because no one had time to check them today. But ER physicians were pessimists by nature. Every day at work offered up reminders of how you could lose in a heartbeat what was most precious. He couldn’t help but fear that Carla had been injured, or worse, and no one wanted to tell him. “I better resend the message in case the first twenty got lost,” he said.

  The ensign set him up at a work station.

  Ryder here. Are you guys okay? Just wanted to let you know I’m still alive. Pass the word. Especially to Carla.

  Almost instantly, unlike the previous attempts, he received a response.

  Hey, Dr. Ryder, it’s Shelly. I just left her at Waikiki doing rescue and recovery. She’s mad as hell at you in case you were dead and didn’t tell her. Better watch it.

  Terry laughed out loud, feeling as if a band around his chest had been let out a notch. So much for caught-in-a-missile-blast scenarios. No aftereffects? he asked, hoping against hope that Carla might also have escaped the reach of radioactive mists.

  This time he had to wait for the reply to come. A usual delay? Or did shoot-from-the-hip Shelly suddenly find herself at a loss for words to deliver bad news?

  His chest tightened up a notch.

  Carla’s fine, Dr. Ryder. We all are, given the circumstances. Gotta go.

  He’d spared people the truth enough times to recognize Shelly doing the same to him. His fingers flew over the keyboard. What are you not telling me?

  It had to be about the mists.

  An even longer delay ensued.

  Finally, she wrote, Carla will kill me for making you worry, but this is what we’ve all been told so far.

  She talked of curies and estimated levels of exposure for the sixty percent of hospital staff who’d rushed to Honolulu General last night. Then she laid out the statistical chances of survival as they applied to different amounts of contamination.

  Again he recognized the technique--keep the data impersonal, imply that this is how such grave situations worked out when strangers were involved. You never assigned odds to the loved one directly. Supposedly that defanged the fa
cts and rendered them less frightening.

  Not for him.

  Uninvited images of how bad it could get flooded through his head with merciless clarity. Crimson matrices where red and white cells normally grew to maturity withered before his eyes. Saucer-shaped platelets that usually circulated by the millions of millions, ever ready to form clots in case of a hemorrhage, shriveled into crumpled wreckage. No longer able to coagulate, her blood would seep from the raw surface of radiation burns along her intestinal walls, spilling through the undulating mucosa in scarlet rivulets. Once tiny arterioles in the vascular tissue sprang leaks and added to the cascade, she’d be well on her way to exsanguination, shock, and death.

  Dr. Ryder? Shelly typed.

  Terry couldn’t say how long he sat there, staring at her words, attempting to stop the onslaught of his imagination.

  A few consoles over, the general slammed his palm onto the counter top. “Ryder, you better see this,” he said, his voice sounding uncharacteristically squeezed off at the neck.

  Terry forced the last of his marauding visions back into the darkness from where they’d come. The next few days would tell what Carla had in store for her. He’d damn well face it with her rationally and clinically, not at the mercy of worst case scenarios storming through his head. Experimental treatments existed. Stem cells for one. They’d been used to permanently replace ravaged bone marrows in animal studies. Even regular transplants could restore white cells, provided there were no rejection problems--

  “Now, Ryder!”

  Terry ignored him. I appreciate you letting me know, Shelly. Please tell Carla I’ll phone her as soon as I can get a line, and give her my love. Also, you take care of yourself, he typed, wondering if she’d been exposed as well, yet respecting her privacy enough not to ask. At least radiation poisoning is a known entity. We can treat it.

  You take care too, she replied.

  He approached the general at his console. “This better be good, old man.” He was not at all in the mood for an update on the hunt for Anna and Yuri.