by Carr, Jack
The wall parted and they walked into a world fewer than a hundred people in all of government knew existed, re-tethering to their life support system as the heavy steel doors shut behind them.
While level four bio-containment was filled with fancy electron microscopes and had ample space for multiple scientists, this room was surprisingly small. Colonel Garrett hadn’t met a doctor yet who didn’t feel claustrophobic during their first experience. It wasn’t necessarily the confined space or the oppressive feel of the rubber suit; rather, it was knowing what secrets the room concealed. Only two such facilities had been constructed, and the United States government disavowed any knowledge of their existence. President Nixon had signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972. It went into effect on March 26, 1975, and outlawed the development, stockpiling, retention, and production of biological agents and toxins for hostile purposes, making what took place in Maryland a violation of international law. Technically speaking the two doctors were about to commit a war crime.
Instead of stainless-steel tables and file cabinets, or expensive microscopes and computers, this room resembled a spacious closet. Unlike bio-containment level four, no video or audio recording devices documented the sensitive research and development that took place in this highly restricted section of the facility. The room was designed to withstand a magnitude nine earthquake and remain intact if hit with the equivalent of ten tons of TNT. It was equipped with a triple power backup system in case of a power outage, one of them coming from a separate section of the power grid built to withstand an electromagnetic pulse from the sun or a nuclear device. If all three failed, or if the six-foot-thick walls were breached from the outside, it was designed to self-incinerate, killing everyone and, more important, every thing inside. The cabinets and freezer were constructed of vinyl and plastic composites, which made them more conducive to burning and melting in the three-thousand degree heat if that emergency mechanism were triggered.
Its official designation, for those select few read into the program, was the Dark Room. Unofficially, by those who ventured inside, it was called the Bat Cave, not after the caped crusader of comic book lore, but for the caves of Zaire where the dreaded Ebola virus had spawned in the spoor of bat guano. Behind the doors of the Bat Cave were where the contagious diseases of bio-containment level four were weaponized for offensive warfare.
How could so much death fit inside such a small room?
Even with all the security protocols set up to restrict access and knowledge of its true purpose, there was another way inside.
The pedigreed baboon had started life at the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, Texas, before being transported to his current home in Maryland. More specifically a custom breed Papio anubis Papio hamadryas, he belonged to a colony established in 1972 for this precise purpose. The colony had been genetically bred for medical research and was ideally suited for bioweapon sensitivity testing. The center’s selective breeding and environmental manipulations resulted in the animals’ having a genetic structure similar to that of humans.
The baboon had been sedated in a separate, yet attached, animal research facility. It was now entombed behind a thick Plexiglas barrier. Using the robotic arm, Colonel Garrett opened the freezer and removed a small vial. With practiced efficiency he extracted a sample and injected it into the test subject while Major Burke took notes.
Their research involved infecting a series of animals with a new monoclonal cocktail as part of a dose exposure curve experiment. The biomedical researchers were in search of sublethal viral doses of a biological agent that put the United States government in violation of international law. Today’s experiment confirmed that the dose was lethal.
After it was done, an automated tray removed the primate from view and sealed him inside what was essentially a crematorium. When the doors eventually opened again, not even ashes would remain. The tray was then sprayed down with a solution of chemicals before being dried with a blower and exposed to fifteen minutes of intense UV light. It was as if the primate had never existed.
Their work complete, the two doctors then prepared to exit the classified structure. They would pass through the four air locks, remove their rubber bio-protective suits, incinerate their “bunny suits,” then receive the naked spray-down and UV light treatment before their lockers would be opened and they could put their clothes back on.
Once again under audio and video surveillance, they would reemerge to join the land of the living, both making it home in time for dinner with their families, leaving the secrets of the Bat Cave safely behind.
CHAPTER 4
The White House
Washington, D.C.
PRESIDENT ALEC CHRISTENSEN STOOD behind his desk in the Oval Office, looking down on the Rose Garden through windows of ballistic glass that framed one of the most recognizable rooms in the world. He was flanked by the national flag to his left and the flag of the president of the United States to his right. He ran his left thumb across a ring that hung on a chain hidden beneath his button-down Oxford dress shirt. It was the ring he had never been able to slide onto Jen’s finger. It reminded him of death and kept him focused on his mission.
It had been almost a year since his election night victory, when state after state came in for the popular war hero during a time of economic and racial tension that threated to rip the country apart. The talking heads and pollsters had been ecstatic as their projections came to fruition, especially after the brutal beating they had taken years earlier when they’d confidently projected at 100 percent the odds of victory for the Democratic ticket over someone they dismissed as a reality TV star with no chance of becoming president. They’d lost a substantial amount of credibility that night and were hoping to gain some of that trust back by making the right calls this time around.
By all indications, the new president had shown no overt interest in politics until he recovered from the wounds he sustained in Afghanistan. To the media establishment and a populace looking for a bright light on the political scene, he was a savior. He came from money, went to all the right schools, and had focused his efforts on a small Silicon Valley start-up a few years before 9/11. In campaign speeches, he didn’t lead with the story that had catapulted him into the public consciousness, as he didn’t want to be seen as taking advantage of Jen’s memory, but then, he didn’t need to. The media did that job for him: his fiancée killed on 9/11, the future president running into the burning building in an attempt to save her, the smoke inhalation, being carried out unconscious by a firefighter, a firefighter who then rushed back into the North Tower only to be buried in the rubble; the young entrepreneur working in the debris for days alongside firefighters, police officers, first responders, and citizen volunteers until collapsing from exhaustion. A journalist captured a photograph of him that would become emblematic of America’s response to the attacks: covered in the gray dust of the day, not wandering in a daze as were so many others, but sleeves rolled up, crowbar in hand, eyes fiercely set, prying a slab of concrete in the desperate search for survivors, in a desperate search for Jen.
When the New York Times identified him as the son of a prominent Manhattan financier and reported that his fiancée was missing in the rubble, they ran it with the headline “The Spirit of New York.” He applied to Army Officer Candidate School from his hospital bed a week later. What followed was basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, then Ranger School, and then his first assignment with the storied Tenth Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York, before deploying to Afghanistan. After thirteen months of sustained combat in a valley that would see some of the toughest battles of the War on Terror, he’d been wounded by an IED in an ambush while on a mounted patrol to a nearby village. He’d pulled himself from his burning HMMWV, the screams of his dying turret gunner muffled by a ringing in his ears, a ringing that remained an ever-present eulogy to those who never made it home. He was halfway to cover when he realized he was dragging the lifeless torso of
his driver, whose body from the waist down was still strapped in the vehicle. First Lieutenant Christensen had taken a 7.62x39mm round to his left hand as he made it to a rock by the side of what passed for a dirt road. Instead of rendering aid to his wounds, he called in artillery from their forward operating base and coordinated CASEVAC for the wounded. He ignored his own injuries and led a flanking element to counter the insurgents raining death down from elevated positions, the same positions he knew were probably used to attack and subsequently defeat the British and Soviets before him.
Alec had returned home and written a bestselling book. His narrative did not chronicle his experience in Afghanistan as would be expected. Instead he profiled six families, juxtaposing fathers and sons, the fathers having volunteered for Vietnam and the sons having volunteered after 9/11. The only mention of his own service came from the preface, where he framed the stories to come. Titled You’ll Be a Man, My Son, from the famous Kipling poem “If,” many hailed it as worthy of the Pulitzer Prize until he threw his hat in the political ring, at which point opponents then derided it as a well-thought-out publicity stunt to raise his public profile in a deliberate attempt to draw comparisons to John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.
When he decided to enter politics as a Democrat, the party elites were ecstatic to have a combat-tested veteran in their ranks at a time when they needed credibility on the foreign policy front. He became a darling of the liberal media, with answers that came across as compassionate, yet firm, even when his stance took a more libertarian position. Comparisons to JFK were in the talking points from a media establishment still enamored with the myth that was Camelot. That was all part of Alec’s plan.
Running for California’s 25th Congressional District, he won a narrow victory in a self-funded campaign. While his opponent said he was buying the election, Alec pointed to her ties to special interest groups, in particular her support of the pharmaceutical industry’s “pain clinics,” which were nothing more than opioid pill mills, ruining lives in a deliberate campaign to addict, decimating entire communities while enriching corporate leadership, lobbyists, and the politicians who made it all possible. As a primary reason for much-needed change, Alec’s campaign highlighted the amount of wealth the incumbent had accumulated over the course of her twenty-six years in Congress, much of it coming from the highly unpopular opioid industry. It didn’t hurt that he polled very well with females of both parties. In a district that was almost split down the middle politically, it was said that Republican housewives made the difference. It’s hard to compete with the story of running into a burning building after the woman you love, especially when it’s true.
Alec studied the life and political career of the legendary John Dingell of Michigan. As a liberal Democrat from the rust belt, Congressman Dingell would become the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives in congressional history, while holding strong to his steadfast belief in the individual, fundamental right to self-defense. He clearly articulated how the firearm transcended the changing political whims of his party. His sixty years of government service were proof to Alec that those positions were consistent with a progressive agenda and could still win elections in California. It didn’t hurt to have millions of new gun owners who had changed their positions on private gun ownership as they watched their cities descend into chaos the summer of the presidential election. They didn’t want to abandon their party, nor did they want to rally behind a movement with a rallying cry of defund the police. Alec offered a strong alternative.
He was an early adopter and one of the first to harness the power of social media. As with most technical innovations, the establishment was slow to adapt; Alec was not. His days in Silicon Valley, along with his time in combat, taught him that adapting faster than your enemy led to victory. He built his platforms using the best digital designers and tailored his message to a more libertarian-leaning youth segment of the voter bloc. Decriminalizing certain drugs on one side, staunchly supporting the Second Amendment on the other, while championing the environment and a sustainable heath care plan, all falling under the umbrella of freedom, resonated.
Later there would be those who would accuse his friends in that early tech start-up of manipulating social media algorithms to get one of their own into the White House. Was that true? Even Alec didn’t know for certain. What most people saw was a young, vibrant, wealthy, handsome candidate with a background tailor-made for politics. He fit the fairy tale.
Though many in his own party despised his success, the elites also saw him as a future presidential candidate. There was even talk of a presidential run early on, especially after he took the stage as a newly minted congressman at the 2008 Democratic convention in opposition to the war in Iraq. They had wanted to trot out a respected, young antiwar face of the party as a way to solidify the youth vote during a time when support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was at an all-time low. As always, Alec was thoughtful in his remarks, well informed on geopolitics, and most important, likable, causing many commentators to wonder aloud why the Democratic Party wasn’t running him, at least as a VP pick.
Alec was patient. He learned how Washington worked. He cultivated the relationships that would allow him to operate effectively in the swamp while remaining popular in California, a state he would have to win in a presidential bid. He laid the groundwork, continued to build his social platforms and harness their power. No longer was he dependent on the “kingmakers” of the legacy media establishment. Their power was waning, but they were too self-absorbed to notice. He built his own platforms in the new media and focused his messaging on those who digested their news via their smartphones and made their decisions largely based on influencers. He started a podcast before most people even knew what they were. Legacy print and cable media scoffed at him, but by the time he announced his campaign for the 2020 presidential election his podcast reach dwarfed the ratings of those in conventional media, the same media that continued to make cynical comments night after night from their soundstages in New York, D.C., and Atlanta. He could talk directly to the people and continue to build his base through engaging content and considerate conversations. He dominated the new media space in a way the rest of the Democratic field could only dream about. He studied the data, capitalized on relationships with influencers to co-opt segments of their audiences, and built a voting bloc powerful enough to sway an election.
That power made the party elite nervous. He was not under their control and therefore was unpredictable, but they also saw him as a way back into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Both Alec and the party leadership knew he would have to go farther left for his vice presidential pick to balance the ticket, a chance to keep power for a sixteen-year run. If they wanted to fundamentally transform the country, they were going to have to support the popular congressman. His vice presidential pick from Florida’s 9th District made him the first president in U.S. history to win with a female on the ticket. The fact that she was an Army JAG Corps veteran and of Cuban descent brought in the electoral votes from one of the more hotly contested battleground states in recent history. That she remained a major in the National Guard and “outranked” the new commander in chief, who had been medically retired as a first lieutenant due to his combat injuries, was a source of ample comedic material for the late-night talk shows. Even the women of The View could not stop themselves from fawning all over them both. It kept Alec center stage and made him relatable.
As the most eligible bachelor in D.C., he was a staple on the covers of magazines at supermarket checkout lines. In a world where a reality show about finding love trumped ratings across the board, he was a star. He enjoyed female company, but it always became clear after a few months that they would never be his top priority. Truth be told, his attention was on a ghost, one that was never far away.
Alec turned from the window and looked down at the Resolute Desk, which had been a part of the room since Queen Victoria had presented it to President Rutherford B. Hayes
in 1880. It was built from wood recovered from the HMS Resolute, a British ship that was abandoned after becoming trapped in the ice while on an arctic expedition in 1854. An American whaler recovered the ship two years later and returned it to the United Kingdom. President Christensen looked at it as a symbol of hope and resolve. Just shy of one hundred years after fighting the war for independence, the former colonial rulers gifted a desk made from one of their naval vessels to the leader of the country that defeated them. After contentious beginnings and the war that birthed a nation, the two countries had become the staunchest of allies.
He rarely walked into the Oval Office without thinking of the iconic photo of JFK working at that very desk with John Jr. peeking out through the kneehole panel at his feet, a photo that would not be published until after the assassination in Dallas.
President Christensen took a breath and looked at the four files on his desk. They had been delivered by his national security advisor that morning. Three of them were the reason for the journey he’d taken over the past twenty years.
The president is the only person in all of government who has unfettered access to the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. Everyone else is read into and out of special access programs based on “need to know.” Information is compartmentalized for reasons of national security. The real trick is knowing what to ask for and where to look. The young president was searching for something specific.