The Devil's Hand

by Carr, Jack

  “Please elaborate,” Vic said.

  “Okay, let me break it down for those of you with Y chromosomes. It’s possible for something to be ‘airborne’ but not necessarily spread via respiratory pathways. Think of it in terms of getting sprayed with perfume by one of those annoying salespeople at a mall. We are all old enough to remember malls, right? Well, you smelled the perfume, sometimes even tasted it, but you didn’t cough the perfume onto someone else an hour or even days later.”

  “Are you saying someone wants us to think this virus is spread naturally from human to human, but it was really intentionally released to infect people?” Katie asked.

  “A bioweapon,” Reece stated.

  Haley looked at Reece.

  “That is my theory. It’s only ‘airborne’ in that it is spread by contact with direct aerosol droplets released by a controlled pressure device, through a mist or a cloud of droplets. After that, it can only be spread as any standard hemorrhagic virus, with direct blood-to-mucus-membrane contact. It’s actually difficult to spread with limited precautions.”

  “That’s what makes it an effective bioweapon,” Reece offered. “If you release a virus with that kind of death rate it does you no good if it then spreads back and infects the country that released it.”

  “That’s right. Most importantly, it is incapable of human aerosolization like COVID-19. It’s the perfect bioweapon. It strikes with incredible efficiency but its genius is that it doesn’t continue to spread past those initially infected.”

  “That would defeat its purpose,” Reece said, thinking aloud. “So, how do we kill it?”

  “You don’t kill it. It has infected everyone it’s going to infect.”

  “Unless someone is still out there releasing it manually.”

  “Correct.”

  “So, to stop it, we find whoever is releasing it and we stop them,” Reece stated. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” Haley said slowly. She had never heard the word stop used in a way that so naturally implied “kill.”

  “Can you prove it?” Vic asked.

  “No. It’s just a theory. To prove it we would need to first know what type of virus we are dealing with, and by that I mean what specific virus we are looking at. Right now, we are working off data that suggests it is a new strain of Ebola because that is what it most closely resembles under electron magnification and because it matches a sample from a recent outbreak in Angola. If it is in fact an engineered bioweapon that is not in our system, we would have nothing with which compare it. Some of these viruses were weaponized going back to World War Two. Bioweapon research from Germany and Japan was absorbed by the Soviet Union and the United States, who then built on that research to develop their own programs; all highly classified. After we knew the type of virus, we’d then need a sample of the original bioweapon to compare to a sample from Colorado or Texas.”

  “And what does the CDC think of this hypothesis?” Vic asked.

  “So far it has fallen on deaf ears. We started with the premise that this outbreak originated in Angola because the mutated strain from samples in Richardson and Aurora match the sample taken from Angola to a T. After it was identified, we, the scientific community as a whole, set out to develop an inoculation the way we did with COVID-19.”

  “You mean making a vaccine from one of the infected patients?” Reece asked.

  “That is by and large a Hollywood myth. You just can’t pull antibodies off the shelf and inoculate three hundred million people. It doesn’t work that way. The point is, all our efforts went into developing a vaccine. No one stopped to ask why the spread rate is deviating from every other contagious disease ever documented.”

  Sensing that those around the table were not grasping the concept, she continued, “Usually the spread rate is inverse to the mortality rate.”

  “That does not sound good. What exactly does it mean?” Reece asked.

  “The faster pathogens spread, the slower they kill. That preserves the host and gives the virus a chance to spread, to survive. By contrast, this virus may have adapted to spread via respiratory droplets. Someone can pass it through a cough, rather than direct blood-to-blood contact as with your garden-variety hemorrhagic virus. It’s hard to infect another human when a disease is transmitted through blood. But, if this virus maintains its mortality rate of 85 percent to 90 percent in its current mutation, then it is no longer a flu or H1N1 outbreak with a 0.01 percent mortality rate or even COVID with a 0.1 percent or 0.2 percent mortality rate. If this outbreak continues on its current path and escapes the isolation measures in Richardson and Aurora, we are talking 280 million people dead, and that does not take into account international ramifications.”

  “The sixth wave,” Katie whispered.

  “The sixth wave?” Reece asked.

  “Holocene extinction,” Haley explained. “Planetary extinction of the human race. Earth has witnessed five previous mass extinctions. The last one was approximately sixty-six million years ago. Many scientists believe we are due for another.”

  “Dr. Garrett, you do not seem as distressed about this possibility as one would expect,” Vic noted.

  “That’s because this is not that event, but we are being manipulated to believe it is for a reason that I don’t yet understand.”

  “Explain,” Vic pressed.

  “Are any of you familiar with mathematically modeling R0?”

  “The what?” Reece asked.

  “R0, reproduction number, you may have heard it called ‘r-naught.’ It’s a mathematical term used to describe the intensity of an infectious disease and therefore indicate its rate of transmission. Think of it as a spread rate. One-to-one transmission is a one. If it rises higher than one-to-one, the result is what we call logarithmic growth at uncontrolled speed. Below one-to-one, it burns itself out.”

  To the blank stares of her audience, Haley continued: “A situation where, on average, each infected person spread the illness to one other single person would establish an R0 of one.”

  “You lost me,” Reece admitted.

  “Simply put,” Haley said. “If the R0 is over one, it’s on a logarithmic escalation. That number does not change by the day; rather it takes weeks for curves to be established.”

  “You are saying that Texas and Colorado deviate from the established model,” Reece said, processing the data and wrapping his head around the implications.

  “That’s right. The rate of spread in Richardson, thousands of patients all at once, would put the rate off the map. The r-naught would be twenty, thirty, or possibly higher, but then it jumped to another location with a smaller subset. That is too high a variance within the virus. They do not mutate or adapt that quickly.”

  “Meaning?” Reece asked.

  “Meaning that the logarithmic growth rate would indicate the entire country should be infected by now, but we are not. Somebody, possibly a group of people, is releasing it in aerosolized doses trying to mimic a respiratory-spread contagion.”

  The repercussions of Haley’s theory settled over the table.

  Vic broke the silence first. “To be clear, you are saying this could be a coordinated release, mirroring a respiratory-spreading virus with a ninety percent mortality rate. A bio-terrorism attack.”

  “Yes, but it’s not really all that well done, to be honest.”

  “How so?” Vic asked, leaning forward.

  “As I said, think of me as an infectious disease forensic investigator. I tried to find the index case in Angola. That’s harder than one would think. All the bodies were incinerated to prevent the spread of the virus. However, in this country we keep detailed medical records and in the case of a new strain of airborne Ebola, some of the HIPAA restrictions are lifted by executive order. The CDC tracked down flight manifests from Angola and cross-referenced those with patients here in the United States. Up until this point we’ve only looked at this though the public health lens because of the CDC’s initial reporting from Angola. As fa
r as I know, the CIA and the FBI have not convened a task force because as of yet no one has explored it from a national security angle. And, based on what we have seen thus far, it seems cut-and-dried at face value; the virus index case is one of 457 people incinerated in Angola but at least one carrier boards a plane and from Africa travels to the United States.”

  “What we’ve been concerned with up to now is tracking down and testing passengers for the disease to contain the spread, not scrutinizing their backgrounds,” Katie said, thinking aloud.

  “That’s right,” Haley confirmed.

  “I’ll get detailed backgrounds on the passengers,” Vic said.

  “From your connections at the State Department?” Haley asked.

  “Yes,” Vic confirmed.

  “Whoever did this made a mistake. I should have found a name on the manifests that matched a name in hospital records.”

  “Unless the U.S. carrier is dead in their house and has not yet been identified,” Reece observed.

  “True, but if you are a terrorist, you’d want us to tie a name on a flight to a name in a hospital and wrap it all up nicely to hand to the American public.”

  “Why wouldn’t they do that?” Katie asked.

  “OPSEC,” Reece said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “OPSEC. Operational security. If we found them before they died, there is the possibility we could turn them and trace the attack back to its origin.”

  “There is no getting around the fact that a carrier might be deceased in his or her bed and as of yet undiscovered. But it’s also possible that person doesn’t exist, that it was not brought in from Angola,” Haley said.

  “There are still a lot of missing pieces here,” Vic said.

  “Also true, but I found something else of interest, and it only came to me after Katie told me about what happened tonight and that her attackers were speaking Farsi.”

  “Which is?” Katie asked.

  “The first person admitted to Richardson Methodist Medical Center was Mahan Faramand. I did some digging. He’s a second-generation Iranian American.”

  “Interesting,” Katie conceded. “Is he still alive?”

  “No, unfortunately he was one of the first to succumb to the virus. Do you know what’s even more interesting? The first group of patients in Aurora had two names that stood out, Izad Turan and Sebastian Phillips. Turan has been in the country for twenty-five years. Guess where he’s from?”

  “Iran,” Vic stated.

  “What about Sebastian Phillips?” Katie asked. “He doesn’t sound Iranian.”

  “His given name is Shahram Pahlavi. Where do you think his parents are from?”

  “Iran,” Katie said, remembering the gunshots and the screaming in Farsi reverberating through the dark warehouse, now echoing through her mind.

  “Do we know if Izad Turan and Sebastian Phillips are still alive?” Reece asked.

  “They are,” Haley confirmed. “At least as of two hours ago.”

  “Did you check all the names from Richardson?”

  “I did, of all patients thus far, anyway.”

  “And?”

  “And there were three patients with Iranian surnames: Mahan Faramand, Reza Abed, and Hashem Shirazi.”

  Reece swallowed as the blood drained from his face.

  “Reece,” Vic said, “are you okay?”

  Reece stood and walked to the windows overlooking the Severn River. He felt the pull of the ocean.

  Take Katie and get out! Get on that boat and sail away!

  To where? Anywhere but here…

  Vic stood and moved next to Reece at the window.

  “Reece?”

  “Vic,” Reece said, the tone of his voice matching the darkness beyond the shutters. “The names.”

  “What names?”

  “Faramand, Turan, and Pahlavi.”

  “What about them?”

  “Those are all last names on the 9/11 target list the president gave me.”

  “Dear God.”

  “Vic, get me a list of names from Angola. Highlight anyone with Iranian ties. Tell the president what’s going on.”

  “I’m going to wake up the director. We will brief the president at the PDB. I’ll get a team of Agency doctors on this immediately.”

  “Vic, if Dr. Garrett is right and there is an Iranian connection to the hit tonight that is also linked to this outbreak or bio-attack, they are not going to stop. Can you get Katie somewhere safe?”

  “Of course. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do what I do best. First, I need someone with an infectious disease background.”

  Reece turned back from the window.

  “Haley, are you up for a trip into the hot zone?”

  “James,” Katie said, a tinge of nervousness in her voice. “Where are you going?”

  “I want to talk to Izad Turan and Sebastian Phillips. And, Vic?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll need to borrow an Agency jet.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Denver, Colorado

  THE AGENCY GULFSTREAM 550 landed at Denver International Airport and taxied to a private terminal set up by the Department of Justice after 9/11 to receive government aircraft and officials needing to avoid public air travel. The fleet of taxpayer-funded private aircraft had received scrutiny in recent years after the high-visibility firing of FBI Director James Comey, who was photographed boarding an FBI G550 in Los Angeles for a flight to D.C. As with most outrages, it was short-lived as another hot topic distracted the media the following day.

  Reece and Haley were met by a young CIA analyst, who was the Agency liaison to the FBI Denver Field Office.

  “Mr. Ree… I mean, Mr. Donovan, Dr. Garrett, I’m Ken Daniel. I have your credentials and hazmat suits in the Suburban. The subjects have been moved from the hospital to two separate Chem-Bio Protective Shelters outside the main field hospital. As requested, they are under guard, though I have been told that was an unnecessary precaution.”

  “Why is that?” Reece asked.

  “They were some of the first patients, sir. They don’t have much time left. They’d already been triaged to the expectant area.”

  Reece nodded.

  “Expectant” meant there was no hope. Usually annotated with a black badge, those in the expectant category of military triage were given pain medications and left to die while resources were allocated to those patients who had a chance.

  “Thanks, Ken. The guards are there to keep anyone from killing them before we can question them,” Reece said.

  “Oh, I see.”

  Ken wiped sweat from a brow that carried a look of perpetual nervousness. He was young, thin, with a mop of blond hair that Reece suspected drove the FBI agents in the field office nuts.

  “What do you do for the Agency, Ken?” Reece asked as they made their way to the black Suburban parked on the edge of the tarmac.

  “Analyst, sir. Collections.”

  “Do you have time overseas?”

  “Not yet, sir. I’ve been in Denver for the past year, mostly answering emails and trail running.”

  “How far is the hospital?”

  “About ten minutes. Everything south of the 70 is shut down from the Denver Zoo to Buckley Air Force Base. I’m sure you’ve seen the rioting. It’s getting bad. I’m worried the military is going to kill more people just keeping containment than this virus would.”

  Reece and Haley shared a look.

  “That’s why we’re here, Ken,” Haley said.

  “Do the two people under guard have something to do with this?”

  “We are going to find out.”

  Reece’s phone buzzed.

  “Excuse me,” he said, hitting “accept.” He put the phone to his ear and stepped away from his colleagues.

  “What do you have for me, Vic?”

  “Confirmation that Sebastian Phillips is Shahram Pahlavi. His parents emigrated from Europe in the mid-nineties. Both docto
rs. Settled in California and then Arizona, where Shahram was born. Prior to medical school at University of Leuven, Belgium, they were citizens of Iran. I just put them under surveillance in Phoenix.”

  “The father was on my list. Shahram would have been just a kid on 9/11. Anything else?”

  “Shahram rents an apartment near the university, but he owns a home in Denver. Tax records do not indicate any rental income from either property. I’ll text you the addresses. I’m working to get local LE and FBI on those locations, but they are overtaxed right now with containment, protests, and rioting.”

  “Understood. How about Izad Turan?”

  “NSA went through his email and browsing history. It’s clean. They went deep and found an old Hotmail account set up in 1999. It never sent an email. Its draft folder was accessed but the contents deleted, and it hasn’t been touched since 2001. It was so long ago that the NSA has not been able to recover or restore the deleted files.”

  “Back when using the draft folder with two or more people having the log-in information was the preferred method of communication for terrorists. What about cell phone tracking data?”

  “Turan does not appear to own a cell phone. Not that we could find anyway. Shahram’s locational data was turned off for the most part, but as you know we can still track. That data indicates a pattern of life that centers around his apartment and campus, with occasional trips to the Rocky Mountains.”

  “What does that tell us?”

  “The report indicates that on multiple occasions he left his phone at the apartment when we have him active on university computers.”

  “So, he’s leaving his cell phone in his apartment?”

  “Yes, it’s possible he’s just forgetful,” Vic conceded.

  “It’s also possible he doesn’t want his phone carrier capturing locational data on the days he leaves it at home,” Reece said, remembering the phone he left on his dresser in Coronado, California, as he started crossing names off his terminal list.

  “It’s feasible.”

  “Those are the days he’s going to the house in Denver,” Reece said.

  “I concur. That is a valid assumption.”

  “What else do you have for us?”