“Don’t do it,” Marty snapped. She faced him through the open passenger-side door, hand extended, gun pointed at his head.
He looked up, attempting to focus on his tormentor—a child who refused to accept the truth, the hard lesson—but her image swam and danced in the fading light of his brain. “You won’t pull the trigger,” he said. As he spoke, he sprayed the truck’s seat with his own blood.
“You’re right,” she answered, her voice harsh and filled with resolve. In a sudden, violent motion she smashed the barrel of the gun onto his hand. Once, twice, three times until his arm sagged limply, dangling toward the floorboard.
Barashi didn’t embrace martyrdom as an Islamic tenet or believe in the foolishness of beckoning virgins in Paradise. But he did believe fervently in his cause: to rid the world of the scourge of Arab humiliation and degradation. For that, he could become a martyr.
He wriggled his right hand into the duffel bag, feeling for the hard, cold metal of a grenade. The church lady seemed oblivious to his effort, staring only at his shattered and bloodied left hand, the one that dangled uselessly over the edge of the seat.
His right hand, hidden from the woman’s view by the folds of the bag, finally touched steel, though the tactility seemed distant and disconnected from his being. A violent spasm of blood-choked coughing seized him, and he lost his grip on the grenade, feared he was going to pass out. A few seconds, Allah, a few more seconds.
He found the grenade again, worked his fingers around it, felt the ring holding the safety pin. Using his forefinger, he struggled to pry the ring from the pin, but was too weak to budge it. Yet he knew he must, knew he could. The explosion would shatter the truck and with it the Ebola-filled tank, spraying the lethal virus over a broad radius; an eruption of aerosol death let loose to catch whatever wind currents it could. Let loose on an apocalyptic journey through an unsuspecting American suburb.
The sound of sirens, many of them now, filled his ears, competing with the screams of terrified neighborhood residents, the yowls of hyper-excited dogs and the desperate commands of Richard Wainwright to shoot him.
“Kill him, for God’s sake, Marty,” Richard bellowed, “he’s got grenades in there.”
She won’t, Wainwright. She can’t. He made a final appeal to Allah, looked up at the church lady—suddenly in focus—and felt the ring on the pin begin to give. The woman mouthed something to him, perhaps “I’m sorry” or “help me.” Puzzling. Why would she say that? To whom? Then he glimpsed something in her eyes, something that hadn’t been there before. And he knew. “I see into your soul,” he croaked. “Allah will not forgive.”
“The one I know will,” she said.
A brilliant flash erupted from the muzzle of her gun.
Epilogue
SUNRIVER, OREGON
FIVE MONTHS LATER
The last of the day’s light drained from the western sky, swirling down a distant, ethereal drain beyond the snow-draped Cascade Mountains. Stars annealed on the brilliant blackness of central Oregon’s high-desert sky provided the only light for Richard and Marty as they strolled along a footpath through a sparse stand of ponderosa. Moisture from their exhalations formed tiny puffs of condensation fog that quickly dissipated in the brittle December cold. In the middle distance, a coyote yipped, welcoming the night.
“You’re getting better with that cane,” Marty said. She steadied Richard as they transited a patch of ice.
“It’s a walking stick,” Richard said, attempting to feign irritability. “The doctor says I’ll be able to trade it for a five-iron by spring.”
“I didn’t know you were that serious about golf.”
He thought about the last time he’d played, the last time he was home. “There’s a beaver out there that misses me,” he said.
“I suppose you’ll explain that to me someday.”
“It’s nothing licentious.”
“Well, I’ve been around you long enough to know that.” She paused. “But a lady can always hope.” She giggled.
“All talk, as usual.”
“I’m good at that.”
“So when can I look forward to a sermon at Tommy’s church?”
She squeezed his hand. “I’m better off helping Tommy behind the scenes. If I were to preach, you know good and well the focus would be on my media persona—‘The Nine-millimeter-Methodist’ or the ‘Pistol Packing Pastor’—not on my message. Besides—”
Something scurried across the path in front of them, a fox on the hunt, perhaps.
“Besides what?”
“The lease on my apartment in Bend is up in February. I don’t know if I’ll stay beyond then. I still need to get away... I don’t know, enter a convent or something, get my head straight.”
“A convent?” Richard could feel his metaphorical chain being jerked again.
“Or go to work in a strip joint.”
“You’re incorrigible. Maybe I should take Hadassah up on her offer.”
“Hadassah Seligmann? What offer?”
“I got an email from her the other day. She said if things didn’t work out between me and you, she’d find a nice Jewish girl for me.”
“Meddling in your life again.”
“Somebody has to, I guess.”
“I suppose I could... if I weren’t, as you say, incorrigible. And I’m not.”
“Not what?”
“Incorrigible. I’m just confused.” She spun him around, made him look closely at her. In the darkness, her eyes reflected only starlight, pinpoints of brightness from somewhere near the outer edges of the universe. “I don’t understand,” she said. “We ask God for the strength to do something, then ask His forgiveness for doing it. Even with God, nothing is black and white.”
He wrapped his arms around her, a gesture that seemed oddly devoid of intimacy, swaddled as they were in heavy sheepskin jackets, and brought his mouth close to her ear. “Let me resolve at least part of your ambivalence then. Don’t go. Stay here.”
“You’re offering to make an honest woman out of me?” she whispered.
“I haven’t made a dishonest one out of you yet.”
She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him, her hair filled with the aroma of wood smoke. She pulled back and through a small stratus of steam said, “You know, that’s the one thing I really don’t like about being a minister.”
“There’s always your fantasy life.”
“I gave up on that, remember?”
He took her hand. “Stay,” he said. They walked on without speaking, accompanied only by the crunch of their boots on cornflake snow. Despite the penetrating cold, Richard’s thoughts drifted back to a sizzling afternoon in Georgia, a day with towers of white cumulus stacked over Atlanta.
He, Marty and a badly wounded but recovering Hadassah—sans earrings and safety pins, her hair brown and straight, not blond and spiky—had watched for the better part of two hours as a procession of law enforcement and federal officials from across North America snaked through the city en route to a memorial service for Lieutenant Jackson and Dr. Butler. Later, they’d watched in tear-distorted silence as Jackson’s wife, then Dwight’s aged grandmother, accepted American flags from the governor and posthumous Presidential Awards for Heroism from the Secretary of Homeland Security. Small solace.
“I never told you,” Richard said, “I prayed for Dwight’s grandmother and Jackson’s wife at the memorial service.”
Marty moved closer to him so that they were shoulder to shoulder. “Was it hard? I mean, did it seem strange after so long?”
“Awkward.”
“You need more practice then.”
An owl hooted in the darkness.
“Any suggestions?” Richard asked.
“For me. Try some prayers for me. I keep playing that morni
ng back through my mind. Keep seeing Barashi’s gaze locked on me, keep seeing his sudden realization of what I was going to do.” She turned toward Richard and spoke in a voice husky with emotion. “I know I saved lives, but in the long run, did my shooting him make any difference? Make us any safer? Make any inroads at all against, as the Bible says, ‘the principalities of darkness?’”
Richard looked up as a shooting star traced a bright, white trail across the sky. The brilliance was fleeting, quickly devoured by the surrounding blackness. He didn’t answer.
“I thought not,” Marty said.
Richard stopped, turned, placed his hand under Marty’s chin and tilted her face upward toward his. “Don’t jump to conclusions,” he said. “Sometimes we get overwhelmed by the darkness. But as long as we can muster just a pinprick of light, yes, we can make a difference.”
“Even if the light comes from the barrel of a handgun?”
“Even if.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“As I recall, there was a lot of blood shed in the Old Testament. That’s how a nation was built and preserved. That’s how God worked among men.”
Marty leaned against Richard and buried her face in the folds of his sheepskin. He encircled her with his arms, pulling her into him firmly, as though retrieving something he’d lost.
The owl hooted again, this time drawing a response from another.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
SAME NIGHT
An empty fast food container, spurred on by frost-tinged gusts of wind, tumbled along a passageway between rows of corrugated steel units at Castle Vault Public Storage near Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. A small figure, collar on his light jacket upturned, hands jammed into his pockets, searched for unit 317 along a dimly-lit passage.
Shivering in the pre-Christmas cold, he found the unit and pulled a piece of paper from his wallet. Clenching a penlight in his teeth, he aimed it alternately at the paper, on which was written a sequence of numbers, and a combination lock on the door. In less than a minute, an almost inaudible click announced he’d succeeded in releasing the lock.
He pulled open the door of the unit and stepped inside. The hum of a freezer, just as the late Sami Alnour Barashi’s letter had promised, filled the tiny cubicle. He found a light switch and flipped it on. He walked quickly to the freezer, lifted its door and peered inside.
He was at once both relieved and terrified. Relieved he’d found the stored hope for victory, terrified the legacy of Alnour Barashi and Russia’s Koltsovo Institute lived on.
(Continue reading for more information)
Author’s Note
Several years before deciding to try my hand at becoming a novelist, I read Richard Preston’s gripping nonfiction page-turner The Hot Zone, a book about the deadly Ebola virus.
While most species of Ebola are not transmittable through the air—lucky for us humans—the variant featured in The Hot Zone may be. Fortunately, that variant, while fatal to monkeys, is not fatal to humans. Again, lucky for us.
But it got me thinking, What if? What if a brilliant (and psychopathic) microbiologist were able to marry the variant of Ebola not fatal to humans but perhaps transmittable through the air to the form most deadly to humans? That is, what if someone were able to weaponize Ebola? It would be a nightmare aborning. Perfect for a novel.
But breathing life into the story was slow. I’m not a microbiologist. To inject authenticity into the tale required a lot of research. Like most novelists, however, I’d rather write than relive my college days cramming for finals. Still, it had to be done, so for several years I “burned the midnight oil”—not literally—while simultaneously pecking out early drafts of Plague (whose working title at the time was The Koltsovo Legacy). I also took a two-year sabbatical to complete Eyewall, my debut novel.
The research on Ebola and microbiology turned out to be a labor of love since I was truly fascinated (frightened?) by the subject. The Websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more commonly called the CDC, and the World Health Organization provided reams of invaluable information and data.
Besides the Hot Zone, there were a number of other books that helped me develop insights into microbiology, viruses and the Russian and American biowarfare programs:
Biohazard—The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World by Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman
The Dead Hand—The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (a Pulitzer Prize winner) by David E. Hoffman
Germs—Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad
Level 4—Virus Hunters of the CDC by Joseph B. McCormick and Susan Fisher-Hoch with Leslie Alan Horvitz
Virus Hunter—Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the World by C. J. Peters and Mark Olshaker
The emergency room scenes in the novel were vetted by my cousin, Dr. John A. McDonald, a veteran emergency room physician. Any errors in the procedures described are mine and not his.
A number of people read and critiqued all or part of the book, and thus guided me through at least five revisions. In the end, it was my editors at Bell Bridge Books, Pat Van Wie and Deb Smith, whose eagle eyes and keen insights got me to the goal line.
But there were others who did some downfield blocking. Novelist Steve Berry, back when he was able to do that sort of thing, reviewed and critiqued—in well-deserved less-than-glowing terms—an early version of the first chapter. Bill Robinson, Sid Moore and Gary Schwartz read ragged early drafts of the novel and gave me both attaboys and figurative slaps upside the head.
My Peerless Book Store writers critique group was invaluable in making Plague better. Several members, past and present, read all or much of the initial draft of the book: Mark All, Paul Brussard, Rob Elliott, George Weinstein and John Witkowski. I am deeply indebted to people who volunteer to spend their time that way.
Thanks also to my literary agent, Jeanie Pantelakis of Sullivan Maxx, for believing in me and my work and hooking me up with Bell Bridge Books.
While the characters in the novel are all products of my imagination, there is one, Richard Wainwright, for whom I borrowed the professional DNA of an old friend. I loved the idea of having my hero be a high-integrity CEO who goes around fixing companies(all fictitious ones in the novel) and who could take over and run almost any kind of operation for a short period.
There was such a person in real life, an old high school friend, Steve Miller. Steve, early in his career, was CFO of Chrysler. From there he went on to spend the next twenty years salvaging a variety of foundering corporations. He met with enough success that he was labeled by the Wall Street Journal as “U.S. Industry’s Mr. Fix It.”
I lost track of Steve over the years, but I followed his professional accomplishments via newspaper and magazine articles. In the meantime, I completed Plague, modeling Richard Wainwright’s professional life after Steve’s, except for the fact that Steve was never in the Marines.
In early 2009, I found out Steve had written an autobiography, The Turnaround Kid—What I Learned Rescuing America’s Most Troubled Companies. I got in touch with Steve and he sent me an autographed copy. It was a fascinating read. But I was stunned and saddened to learn that Steve’s wife, Maggie, had died of cancer in 2006. I’ll freely admit that tears flowed as I read of Maggie’s death in the book.
The bizarre thing was I had written the death of Richard Wainwright’s wife into the novel long before I was aware of Maggie’s passing. I explained this to Steve, and trust he doesn’t hold it against me.
Here’s the good part: The stories for both Steve and my fictional Richard had happy endings. Steve remarried and Richard fell in love.
Art accidentally imitating life.
About the Author
H. W. “Buzz” Bernard is the author of EYEWALL and PLAGUE.
EYEWALL, his debut novel, became a number-one best seller on Amazon’s Kindle. Buzz is a native Oregonian and attended the University of Washington in Seattle where he earned a degree in atmospheric science and studied creative writing. He’s currently vice president of the Southeastern Writers Association.
He lives in Roswell, Georgia, near Atlanta, with his wife, Christina, and over-active Shih-Tzu, Stormy. If you’d like to learn more about Buzz you can go to his Website: buzzbernard.com; or his author page on Facebook: H. W. “Buzz” Bernard.
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