Terry pulled on the outfit, zipped it up, yet stood back from the craft. “Why the hell should I believe anything you say?”
Yuri glanced down the road again. The white glow was definitely glowing brighter. “You’ll believe me when they kill you. Now stop acting like an idiot, and get on board.” He started the motor, but left the lights off.
“Not until you give me a reason, besides threats, why I should.”
Yuri attempted yet another smile, but didn’t quite pull it off. “In another few days, Ryder, I’ll have the key that all sides in this game will pay anything for. Then it’s Let’s Make a Deal for Anna and me. But I still need you to help me find her. So play along, and I’ll let America make the first bid on that package. With what’s in it, maybe you can even save your Carla--”
“Cut all the ‘key’ and ‘package’ spook-speak, Yuri. You tell me straight out what you have, or I don’t budge.”
Yuri cast a another glance down the road. He looked frightened. “Damn it, Ryder, there’s not enough of us to fight these guys--”
“Then I suggest you talk real fast and tell me something real short that makes sense. Sort of a show of good faith. Maybe start with why they want you dead? And how did they learn I’d come here? Come to think of it, you still haven’t explained how the hell you knew.”
“It’s like Mad Magazine. They got their spies, I got mine, you’ve got yours. Spy versus spy versus spy--”
Terry walked over, grabbed Yuri by the hair with one hand, and snapped the gun away from him with the other. A flick of the wrist, and he poked the muzzle up to Yuri’s right nostril, hole to hole. “I said, tell me something that makes sense!”
“Whoa, who made you the fucking tough guy!” Yuri said, still trying to grin, but sounding a little nasal.
One thing you could say about him, he didn’t flap.
The man with the scar in his forehead reached under his coat and pulled out another silver-plated pistol.
This gang must have bought them by the bunch. “Call off your boy, Yuri,” Terry said. “Remember, you can’t kill me.”
Yuri yelled something in Russian.
The driver lowered his gun.
Exhilaration rocked Terry. “Now I’m in charge! Answers, Yuri, truthful and accurate,” he demanded. At the same time, a tiny inner voice warned, You’re in a category five, friggin’ psycho flame-out, Doc.
But Terry didn’t care. He had the man who could tell him everything, and that might save Carla.
Yuri forced his grin a little wider. “They want me dead because of what I stole.”
“Which was?”
Yuri gulped a few breaths by mouth, his nostrils otherwise engaged. “Holograph technology.”
“What!” Terry flew into a rage. “You lying son of a bitch. Nobody can use that to make a bioweapon--”
“Figure the play, Ryder. I did. Not at the time, but now, after what’s happened, it’s a no-brainer.”
“I don’t see--”
“What does a country need if it’s going to launch a bioweapon, besides the organism itself?”
“You mean a delivery system--”
“No! I mean, besides that.” Yuri took another glance down the road, and his eyes bulged wide.
The white glow over the horizon became headlights. A whole string of them. There had to be at least a half dozen vehicles approaching.
“Vaccines, Ryder. They wanted the hologram program to help them make vaccines against SHAKES. But the quick way, synthetically, without telltale vats, or it’d be a dead giveaway that they’d launched a vaccination program over and above the one needed for bird flu. I swear, I didn’t know that’s what they were up to at the time. Just figured my getting the process for them was no more serious than their usual piracy. I saw myself as playing Robin Hood, stealing technology from the rich and helping to make cheap vaccines that the Chinese would market at a tenth the price. Hell, I even thought I was a hero when they used what I gave them to fast track their vaccine that stopped the bird flu pandemic . . .”
As Yuri babbled on, proclaiming his innocence, Terry had already shot his story full of holes. “It doesn’t fly, asshole!” he interrupted, jamming the gun muzzle farther up the man’s nasal passage. “Even if your friends got away with manufacturing a vaccine against SHAKES, how’d they immunize everyone with it and nobody noticed--” He stopped dead.
“You get it now?” Yuri said.
Oh my God, Terry thought as multiple pieces of the puzzle fell into place and his eureka circuits worked backward to three little blue pins. China’s good behavior, why it became a world leader in immunization research, had been a cover after all, so they could develop and distribute vaccines yet nothing appear out of the ordinary. But the real front had been the bird flu pandemic. It provided a legitimate excuse to immunize their whole nation on a scale no one had ever seen before. Otherwise China watchers in the US might have seen the sudden ramp up in vaccinations for what it was, a prelude to an attack. Instead, in the midst of a global immunization program against bird flu, the Chinese had administered a combined vaccine to their own population with nobody the wiser, stimulating antibodies against both bird flu and whatever would be released later to cause SHAKES. What’s more, for the bird flu pandemic to provide this necessary camouflage, its onset would have had to be perfectly timed. Yuri’s pals must have developed and released the H5N1 organism, engineering that outbreak as well.
All this Terry had understood in a rush of clarity, the logic of it sitting true with his intuitive powers that he’d learned to trust over the years. Most of all, three bird-flu cases during a SARS epidemic had finally been explained in the only way they could--part of an accidental release from a bioweapons program.
Perhaps his other suspicions were also true, that even SARS had been a weapon that got away from them.
As for the part that Yuri had claimed to play, it sounded too stupidly pathetic not to be true.
“Yeah, I get it,” Terry replied, his voice low with rage.
But none of it was what he needed to stop SHAKES. “What’s the organism they used now? How does it spread? Why’d our military get infected first?” He pressed harder with the gun, dilating Yuri’s nasal cartilage a little wider after each question.
“I swear, none of that had anything to do with me. I didn’t even know they had a bioweapons program--”
“How come only people who’ve had bird flu get it? What’s the relation?”
“Don’t know. Now let’s go!”
“How about why SHAKES doesn’t have a hot zone?”
“No idea.”
Terry reeled back from him, repulsed by his idiocy. “You useless, asshole, dumb fuck, loser--”
“You’re going to be the loser, big time, if we don’t get out of here,” Yuri said, massaging his rather red, freshly enlarged, right nostril.
Terry surveyed the string of of approaching lights. They were minutes away. “Right,” he said, slipping into his helmet. “But here’s the deal. You take me overland to Holomolecular Designs.”
“What! The only reason this bunch have left that place standing is to lure you in. They’ll set it alight for sure if we’re inside.”
“Can you sneak us through a back door?”
“Maybe, but--”
“Then consider it another show of good faith. If you also use your talents with holographs and get me my look at SHAKES that I came to see, I’ll not only find Anna. One phone call, and all those connections of mine can be put to work brokering the deal you want. So do we proceed? I figure it’s an offer you can’t refuse.”
Yuri glared at him. “You’re a fucking lunatic, Ryder.” He turned to his scar-faced chauffeur. “Okay. We’re going cross-country to the center, headlights off. You pull a U-turn with the van and lead those bastards north on a wild-goose chase.”
Terry figured the string of headlights was a mile out and coming fast. But unless the drivers actually stopped to search for skidoo tracks, they’d have no id
ea anyone had even been here. “Good play,” he said, and strode over to climb behind the driver on the other skidoo, grabbing him firmly by the waist. Even to keep from falling off in the middle of nowhere, he wasn’t quite ready to hug Yuri.
Forty minutes later, Thursday, January 29, 2009, 2:34 A.M. MST
One mile north of the Alberta-Montana border
The lights of the complex came into view, ten blazing spokes leading from a central hub, all of it nestled in the black recesses of a deep valley.
“Quite a sight, don’t you think?” Yuri said, pulling alongside and raising the faceplate of his helmet. “‘Ezekiel’s wheel of fire’ is what the locals call it.”
More like landing at a space station, Terry thought as they descended the gentle slope leading to the building. Motors shut down and gears shifted to neutral, they rode the machines silently, like bob sleds, through powdery snow.
Off in the distance he could see the glow of other facilities. Those would be the research centers for stem cell work. Along the southern horizon a solid line of fluorescent haze marked the US-Canada border, prime real estate where companies could ensconce their laboratories and clinical facilities on the Canadian side, land of scientific freedom, and their marketing offices on the American side, home of private enterprise. California might have its Silicon Valley, but here they could grow you a new liver. Cash on delivery, please.
Minutes later he was stamping fresh snow off his boots inside a rear entrance to the building and following Yuri through a maze of gleaming, yet deserted hallways. Yuri’s identity card opened every door they came to and kept all the automated security systems happy. Bold black letters under the photo of his very blond persona proclaimed him to be DR. RYAN SMITH.
“How’d you get that?” Terry asked.
“They reissued it to me a few days ago--welcomed me back with open arms. As Ryan Smith I spent a lot of time here in ’04 and ’05--supposedly renting their holograph projector as part of a top-secret project for the US Government. Bori provided the cash and phony credentials; I supplied the charm. Once I learned how to use the computers myself, I copied the programs. This time I’m purportedly working on SHAKES. Not entirely a lie, no? They pretty well give me the run of the place. There’s this one manager, Huguette, who’s particularly happy to see me again--”
“And what really brought you here now?”
“Back doors.”
“Back doors?”
“By 2005 I’d created a slew of hidden back doors in their computer systems so that the people we were dealing with in China could hack in and take what they needed electronically. A few days ago I used those same back doors as homing pigeons, to see if any of the old electronic addresses were still active. Most were closed down, but I got lucky with a few. I used those stations as my own door to the rest of their systems, all the way through to where they actually manufactured the vaccines--”
“And that’s what you think the US will give you a pardon for?”
Yuri grinned. “That’s just the teaser. There’s more to come.”
The Russian led him to what resembled a lobby for a movie theater, including waiting areas cordoned off with maroon velvet ropes. “Remember, be quick. When those guys on the road tire of chasing the van, they’re liable to come back here. If they get even an inkling we sneaked in, the whole bunch will blast their way through the security doors--”
“No guards, not even up front?”
“In this geekdom? No way. The little darlings who run the place make it a point of pride that electronics and the latest intelligence technology, not people, keep their programs safe. After all, they’re worried more about hackers than hit teams. I swear, the arrogance of computer geniuses never fails to dismay me--”
“Still, the building’s armed to the teeth with alarm systems, like a bank?”
“More bells and whistles than Fort Knox, but--”
“So we’ll have lots of warning if our friends break in.”
Yuri grinned again. “I like you, Ryder. You’ve the nerve of a bank robber. Jesse James, no?”
“No. He mainly robbed trains. You’re thinking of Clyde Darrow.”
“Ah, yes, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway--good flick.” The man pulled open a heavy, very high set of swinging doors and they entered a sleek steel-and-glass foyer. Stacks of cups and saucers, along with piles of napkins and trays of silverware had been laid out for what would have been a breakfast reception for Terry’s scheduled arrival later that morning.
Yuri crossed the floor and slid open a wide, even taller panel decorated in Inuit drawings--red and black winged creatures, part bird, part wolf. “It’s a warning and a blessing, I’m told,” he said. “An invocation to humankind that they use the secrets revealed here wisely. Too bad nobody listened.”
Including you, Terry thought.
They entered a massive, completely circular auditorium.
There were no seats, just a dark tiled floor covering an area as big as an airplane hanger, but with black walls and a domed ceiling that must have been at least a hundred feet high. Half way up the curved sides, a glass panel ran the room’s full circumference. Behind it were thousands upon thousands of tiny red, green, and amber lights on banks of control panels,
“You can run this show?” Terry asked.
“If they downloaded the electron micrographs from Honolulu, I can.” He walked over to to a console near the periphery of the room, inserted that magic identity card of his, and began to type on a keyboard. “Yep, it’s all ready to go. Here’s the lineup.” He handed Terry a palm pilot with an illuminated screen. “It’s a power point analog of everything the pathologists at your hospital sent them, including the patient histories in HTML format--”
“Shall we start?” Terry cut in, grabbing the instrument. Christ, he hated this techie shit.
“Rolling,” Yuri said, both hands gliding over the slide controls on the panel, his right one doing most of the work.
“What happened to your left arm?”
“Don’t ask.”
The room fell completely dark.
Shimmering out of the blackness, an image began to appear before them. Ghostly at first, it then took on such clarity and substance that Terry gasped. He was looking through a portal into a previously unseen universe.
For as far as he could see, a crisscross of beige-colored strands and swollen nodules intersected each other, creating a tightly woven maze stretching to infinity. He glanced at the text of his palm pilot.
It simply read, NORMAL MOTOR CORTEX.
“To give you an idea of perspective, an actual intact brain on this scale would be five times bigger than the sun,” Yuri said.
The structure shimmered, and a similar landscape appeared, except this one had been overrun with twisted white, amorphous shapes that reminded him of slugs attacking the roots of a plant. They’d wrapped themselves around the nerve cells, the now familiar looking appendages of long feelers, tentacles, and lava-lamp globs serving as claspers.
“If I’m going to be shot by assassins for doing this, I’d like to at least know what I’m looking at,” Yuri added. He actually sounded sincere, adopting the collegial tone that doctors use physician-to-physician when working a case.
“It’s brain tissue from those who initially survived the wreck of the Reagan,” Terry explained, “the ones who lived long enough to be rescued by shore patrols. Some were even able to speak before they died, which means they had reasonably intact central nervous systems. And if you’ll move on to another specimen . . .”
The glistening transition produced a yet more cluttered version of the same landscape. “Again, we see similar motor neurons and the same protein deposits.” Terry walked forward to get a closer look at some newcomers to the neighborhood--amorphous purple-colored structures that had attached themselves to the slugs. “What we’re looking at here would be the host’s own IgA and IgM antibodies attempting to latch onto the alien protein . . . .”
Another shimmering tr
ansition, and this time huge, gelatinous entities, translucent, yet pink-tinged, hovered over everything like a fleet of just-arrived starships. Within each, equally translucent jelly-bean shapes, these tinted pale-blue, orbited a single, purple sphere.
“Now we see the lymphocytes, part of a delayed immune response. Surrounding their single nuclei are the mitochondria. That’s where they manufactured the antibodies we just saw . . . .”
As he spoke, he marveled at the specificity of the images. They far outdid what his own imagination could provide. But he could still do something the holograms couldn’t--animate this microbe’s-eye view. The lymphocyte interiors became a bustle of activity. Small coils of messenger RNA rushed templates of instructions to the tiny, jelly-bean mitochondria. With the tenacity of tugboats working ocean liners, even smaller curls of transport RNA marshaled multicolored amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, into their proper places along the templates. Enzymes then dive-bombed the sites, facilitating a series of chemical reactions, until the entire system flashed with micro-fireworks forging new molecular bonds between the amino acids, the result being custom made IgA and IgM antibodies that floated off the production line as majestic as new battleships.
It all happened in a matter of milliseconds, yet as he stared at the process, he felt racked by frustration. Here he was witnessing a disease as no one ever had, but couldn’t see beyond the conventional understanding of an immune response to an invader. “Show me something that I don’t know,” he said to himself, hell bent on not squandering the ultimate insider’s point of view.
“What did you say?”
“Sorry, just thinking out loud. Next image, please.”
The landscape had deteriorated. It resembled a bombed-out city, the fine neuronal structures having been eroded and broken apart, bits of them hanging off one another, the way timbers swung free in the wreckage of demolished buildings.
Coventry laid to ruins.
There’s got to be a key here, he thought. Some elusive understanding evaded him. He’d the same inkling in ER when staring at an X-ray that refused to yield its secrets or struggling to make sense of a cluster of symptoms that stumped him. But what couldn’t he see now? “You’re sure your pals in China didn’t let something slip about the organism that did this?” he asked.
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