They'd been able to keep a lid on the nature of the disaster, at least for now. It was only a matter of time before they needed to make a statement, however. Accidental exposure to noxious gasses was undoubtedly the story they would tell. In this case, a lie was more believable than the truth.
She walked through the main room to one of the isolation chambers designed to contain patients with the most heinous of communicable diseases like ebola or smallpox. She slid back the glass door and entered the hermetically-sealed room. Two gurneys were positioned side-by-side in the center. On top of each was a corpse. The one on the left belonged to a circus clown they had determined had no surviving relatives. On the right was Special Agent Cranston, whose SAC had volunteered him posthumously for this final assignment.
"Are you guys ready?" she asked, glancing up at the camera to her right. One had been placed in each corner of the room above massive amplifiers that stood nearly five feet tall.
"Whenever you are," her assistant's voice crackled through the intercom.
Lauren just wanted to get this over with. They all knew how this was going to end. Sure, she could have been sitting safely in the observation room with the others, but there was one key behavioral component they still needed to evaluate under controlled conditions, one which required someone to physically remain in the room. They needed to witness the spontaneous aggression. The cameras would digitally capture the swarming attack and plot the individual wasps to determine any sort of group patterns or individual dominance. Considering the fabric didn't feel thick enough to protect her from a stiff breeze, she wasn't surprised in the slightest that there had been no volunteers for the experiment, which commenced when she nodded her readiness.
"Starting at eight hertz."
Lauren watched both bodies, which had been stripped from the waist up. She focused on their abdomens, waiting for the first indication of movement beneath the skin. The sound was so low that she felt it as a vibration deep in her chest without hearing it.
All of the remains from the circus had been identified and cross-referenced against every federal database in hopes if discovering a motive for the attack. Other than a few outstanding warrants, some unpaid traffic tickets, and a surprising number of deadbeat fathers, there were no criminals of note. Several had served time for petty offenses from possession to larceny, but there were no connections to organized crime, foreign governments, or groups on any of Homeland Security's watch lists.
"Moving on to sixty-five hertz."
It produced a low, solid tone that reminded her of a stomach growling. She watched and waited, knowing full well that any second now she was going to come under siege by a swarm of killer wasps.
None of the victims had been related to prominent elected officials or celebrities in even the most peripheral way. None of them had been wealthy by anyone's definition, nor had any of them been party to any litigations or class action lawsuits. The demographic profile fit the standard rural American model. The ratio of Caucasians to minorities couldn't have been less remarkable. To all involved, the attack at the circus seemed to be the definition of random.
"Nine hundred thirteen hertz."
The sound reminded her of her childhood, of her mother humming while she fixed dinner.
The precision of the randomness suggested that someone had invested a great deal of thought into choosing the exact location for a controlled experiment, not unlike the one they were conducting at this very moment.
So far, they had yet to locate the man they had seen on the video recordings. His body wasn't among the remains in the room next door, nor were his face or fingerprints in any law enforcement databases. The circus' employment records listed the man as Dipak Patel, an animal handler of some renown, whose resume included stints at the San Diego Zoo and as an animal wrangler for several Hollywood films. They obviously hadn't followed up on his references, for none of them had heard of the enigmatic Mr. Patel. In fact, prior to his arrival at the circus, they could find no evidence that Dipak Patel even existed.
"Four-point-one kilohertz. How are you holding up in there, Dr. Allen?"
Lauren gave a thumbs-up. The sound became so shrill that it raised the hackles on the backs of her arms.
The timing of Patel's appearance and now disappearance was the most troubling part of the equation. Cranston had been right in his initial assessment. This was all too coincidental. The Super Bowl was set to kick off with a bang on Sunday night, in what was slated to be the last game ever to be played in the Georgia Dome before it was razed in favor of a more modern stadium. With over seventy-two thousand people in attendance and nearly twice that many pouring into the Atlanta area, among them foreign dignitaries from around the world, a well-coordinated strike could make the mass-casualty event at the circus pale by comparison. Add in the more than one hundred million viewers across the globe and it was an opportunity to make a statement the likes of which had never been made before. Even the President of the United States---a lifelong Detroit Lions fan---was scheduled to be a guest in the owner's box when his team took the field for its first appearance in the big game against the heavily favored Jacksonville Jaguars.
"Twelve kilohertz."
The high-pitched sound pierced her. She imagined it shattering wine glasses.
There was no way in the world that the game would be postponed or moved to a different venue, despite the insistent and repeated urgings of the FBI. The economic impact on the region was estimated to be as much as four hundred million dollars and there wasn't enough time to satisfactorily prepare another city to host such a grand event. Besides, there was the issue of saving face. Moving the game would be a tacit admission of fear by a country that could ill afford to expose a chink in its venerable armor. The Super Bowl was the ultimate expression of American ideals; an unparalleled spectacle of excess on an almost hedonistic scale. To allow the possibility of a strike to alter it in any way would be a betrayal of the American way and a demonstration of weakness that would open the door to the kind of terrorists who were waiting for just such an opportunity. Like every Super Bowl following 9-11, this year's game had been declared a National Special Security Event by the Department of Homeland Security and would be policed like a sovereign military state unto itself.
"Sixteen kilohertz. Anything at all yet?"
Lauren shook her head. The sound was so shrill it felt as though it originated from the center of her brain.
Regardless of the DHS's assurances and the countermeasures already in place, she had a bad feeling about this. Preventing someone from crashing a plane into the dome or sneaking explosives or weapons into the stadium was one thing, but how could they possibly detect wasp larvae that could easily be smuggled inside anyone in attendance? Hell, all someone would need to do is park within range and trigger the sound frequency to awaken the insects inside a dog in the back seat of a car or a mounted policeman's horse. There were too many variables outside of their control, and it didn't help that their mandate was to keep a lid on the slaughter at the circus until after the event. They were playing with fire and it seemed as though she was the only one willing to admit it. Theirs may have been the most powerful empire the planet had ever known, but its aura of invincibility was illusory.
"Twenty-two kilohertz. Here's where things get interesting."
The high-pitched sound was replaced by...nothing. They had passed into the supersonic range.
She heard a faint crinkling sound, like someone crumpling paper. She looked from one man's belly to the next. There was no sign of movement. Just pale skin mottled by flaccid blue veins and---
Wait.
There.
"Are you guys seeing this back there?"
"Nothing yet. What do you---?"
The man on the left erupted first. There was the merest ripple of skin, and then a tattered hole appeared and the air filled with wasps. The speed with which it transpired was staggering. She had seen it happen to the cocker spaniel with her own eyes, and yet she was sti
ll caught off-guard. She never even saw Cranston's abdomen tear open. God. She could hardly see anything through the sheer number of wasps swarming around her. They were all over her, crawling on her mesh mask, thrusting their stingers at her face, trying to sting her through the fabric. They were still juveniles, perhaps a third of the size of adult wasps and not yet fully developed, but no less terrifying. She stumbled forward, madly brushing them off. All she could see was the mass of seething bodies mere inches from her face that could kill her in a matter of seconds. The fabric felt too thin; their combined weight pressed it to her skin. A scream rose in her chest and burst past her lips, but the buzzing was so loud that she hardly heard it. She fell to her knees and swatted at the wasps on her veil. Carcasses crunched underneath her and she was certain that stingers prodded through the suit and into her knees. An all-consuming, blind panic took root. Screaming and thrashing, she tried to scurry away from them, but they were everywhere. All over her. Crawling under her hood, beneath her clothes, in her hair. She was certain of it.
She was going to die.
Lauren screamed and screamed until her throat was raw and she started to cough.
She opened her eyes and fought back the terror. The wasps were still everywhere, but they hadn't penetrated her defenses. There were no stingers in her skin. She was going to be all right. Slowly, she rose to her feet and brushed the wasps away from her eyes so she could see. Both of the corpses were crawling with them. Over and over, they stung the lifeless bodies and returned to the air, only to be replaced by a seemingly inexhaustible supply.
"Go ahead," she said.
"Are you okay in there for sure, Dr. Allen?"
She nodded and manipulated the chemical respirator under her face shield over her mouth. A fog descended from the ceiling and settled toward the floor. The shadowed forms of the insects were nearly invisible through the toxic cloud as they succumbed to the poison and dropped to the ground.
Their carcasses crackled underfoot like she was walking on bubble wrap as she studied the aftermath. There were so many of them that any effort to count them would be a waste of time they didn't have.
The buzzing sound diminished, and then ultimately ceased altogether.
The corpses were black with stingers. It was impossible to tell what they might have once looked like, or even what color their skin had been.
This was their worst fear realized.
How could they prevent an attack that could kill countless thousands when they couldn't see where the wasps were hiding or hear the sound that initiated their assault?
CHAPTER THREE
I
Atlanta, Georgia
The spectacle was like nothing she'd ever seen before. The tailgating had begun in earnest the day before, and by the time she arrived not long after sunrise, the parking lot was shoulder-to-shoulder with people as far as she could see. There were news crews from around the world, speaking in languages ranging from every possible dialect of English to some she had never heard in her life. The NFL Experience---a fantastic exhibit where everyone, from kids through adults, could learn what it was like to play in the pros through the use of pseudo-virtual reality technology---had drawn nearly as many patrons as the game itself. There were people drinking, grilling, fighting, playing, swearing, and cavorting everywhere she looked. They wore jerseys and face and body paint and reminded her of infantries preparing to go into battle. And all of them were blissfully unaware of the threat that could at any moment kill every single one of them.
The police and military presence was relatively unobtrusive, at least more so than she had hoped. While every access point was strictly controlled and every vehicle subjected to search, there was still too much foot traffic for her liking. The Georgia Dome had become a city unto itself, a teeming metropolis of nearly a hundred and fifty thousand crammed into a space of no more than five square miles. Even with the more than three thousand army, national guard, FBI, and police personnel, working the crowds was a task so daunting that Lauren feared they had lost the race before it even started.
Drab olive helicopters thundered overhead and a squadron of F-22 Raptors at Dobbins Air Reserve Base, twenty miles away in Marietta, was ready to scramble at a moment's notice. The airspace was being carefully monitored and any aircraft that deviated as much as an inch from its flight plan was to be unceremoniously grounded. The president's own secret service contingent numbered more than a hundred. Their instructions were to form an eight-man cordon around him at all times. The windows of his luxury box had been replaced with bulletproof glass and all ventilation ducts had been sealed. The door had been reinforced with several inches of solid steel and more than thirty monitors showing live footage of every emergency exit route from the suite had been installed. It was a panic room that could theoretically withstand anything shy of a nuclear detonation.
Still, Lauren had a bad feeling that disaster loomed on the horizon. Whoever created the wasps hadn't done so overnight. It had surely taken years of trial and error, multiple previous incarnations, and unerring foresight to produce this particular species. Was it so difficult to think that these people could have been preparing for this very event since the moment the Georgia Dome was announced as the host of the game more than two years ago? Was it impossible to believe that a single faceless man could walk right through every single one of their checkpoints and martyr himself on national television?
Everyone on security detail had memorized the pictures of the man taken at the circus prior to the catastrophe. Even the employees manning the concession stands had a picture of him taped behind their counters. Every section had a dozen agents assigned to watch it, and there would be more than a hundred on the field itself, many of them posing as cameramen who would film the crowds and relay the feeds to computers that had been specifically programmed to analyze and detect erratic or inconsistent behavior. The fire suppression system had been modified to divert from the dry chemical tanks to ancillary drums containing more than five thousand gallons of insecticides at the flip of a switch. Even the PA announcer had been thoroughly vetted and his equipment had been modified so that it was incapable of producing any sound with a frequency higher than fourteen kilohertz, a full eight thousand hertz lower than the established sound trigger.
If there was anything they had missed, Lauren couldn't think of it, and yet, at the same time, she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something obvious they had overlooked.
She passed through security for the fourth different time that afternoon on her way into the stadium once again. The agent studied her face and her body before letting her pass into a gated section where she was patted down and her ID carefully scrutinized by two men in army fatigues before being allowed to pass. She worked her way through the mad throngs toward the command center, which had been set up behind the visiting team's goalposts, directly under the lower tier of stands and between the tunnels from which the players would emerge onto the field through smoke and fireworks. Popcorn crunched underfoot and she nearly slipped in a puddle of beer. The entire place reeked of body odor, barley and hops, and processed meat products. The plainclothes forces blended into the woodwork all around her, betrayed only by the ceaseless motion of their eyes across the masses. And by the bulges of their shoulder holsters beneath their civilian attire.
After once again producing her credentials, she was admitted to the command center. There were people in motion everywhere she looked. Every console was manned by a red-eyed, harried agent swilling coffee and fearing to so much as blink. There had to be two hundred monitors, each divided into four different live-action quadrants. Facial recognition programs zeroed in on one individual after another, searching for Patel or any known person of interest. Every man or woman wore either a headset or an earpiece, depending upon their designated mobility. The tension had ratcheted up several notches since she was last here. She feared that if the man wasn't apprehended before kickoff, the whole scene might boil over into aggression and mistakes would b
e made.
Special Agent Antonio Bellis, FBI liaison between the command center and the military, police, and secret service teams, broke away from a gathering and hustled to her side.
"Are all of your preparations in place?"
"The four containment vehicles are ready and waiting for transport. Each has been checked and double-checked to confirm the patency of the air-tight seals. Not even a single oxygen molecule could get out of their cabs. And all of the EpiPens have been distributed to their pre-arranged locations. They're well within range if we factor in a full minute for the manifestation of symptomatology, but I still worry that mass panic will prevent their timely administration."
"That can't be helped. Besides, it won't come to that. If this guy's anywhere near here, my men will find him."
"You're assuming he's working alone."
"We've been over this and I'm tired of repeating my position, Dr. Allen. Your sole responsibility now is to maintain your level of preparedness and stand silent vigil. If things get out of hand---which they won't---your people are to minimize casualties. That's all. Leave the rest of this to the professionals. We have this under control."
He turned his back on her and waded into the frenzy of activity again.
The Calm Before The Swarm Page 4