Crime Zero (43 page)

The male reporter was saying: "With concern growing that the so-called Peace Plague has spread beyond Iraq, some factions in the U.S. actually welcome the disease, hoping it spreads to our shores. So far all documented deaths have been male, and some women's groups now see this as a final reckoning for all the centuries of what they term 'male tyranny.' "

Naylor shook her head. "Oh, Alice, why did you have to go do it?" she said. A wave of sadness flowed through her.

As she thought of her friend, she watched the women begin to chant on-screen. When they put aside their petty allegiances to a particular lover or family member, every woman secretly agreed that men were expendable. Deep down they all knew that everything evil in the world came from men; they just didn't want to admit it. "Ali, everyone would have understood. You would have been a heroine."

Naylor's eyelids were heavy, but she was at least resolved on a course of action. When she had rested and made the necessary preparations, she would destroy the only remaining threats to Crime Zero. Then the world could start using its energies to build a new future rather than fight to preserve its diseased past.

Chapter 41.

ViroVector Solutions, Palo Alto. Thursday, November 13, 2:06 P.M.

Kathy Kerr stared at the blank screen, unable to believe her eyes. "What do you mean it's been deleted?"

Louis Stransky, the tech agent working on TITANIA, gave a pained shrug. "Like I said, Kathy. We've got Gold clearance. TITANIA's ours now. But the file's gone. There was one there, though, because Alice Prince made a directory. Still, it's not there now."

Kathy's shoulders slumped as she sat in front of the screen in the Level 1 conference room. She'd hardly slept for days, using the bunk provided in the dome upstairs to snatch only an hour or two. Since Monday she, Harte, and Patterson had been trying to sequence and understand the instructions carried by Crime Zero. Only once this was done could they define and build a safe vaccine. But the more they ran the complex iterations on the Genescope, the more Kathy realized that they would need more time, a lot more time.

Secretly she had been banking on Alice Prince's vaccine. Knowing her methods, Kathy had thought it would only be a question of finding it. When Stransky had called her in the Womb to tell her he'd gained control of TITANIA's Gold clearance, she had been convinced the search was over. But it wasn't. The file had been deleted, and Kathy didn't know where else to look for a shortcut. The only approach left was to continue the painstaking processes required to build a safe antisense construct from scratch, all the time knowing that tens of millions of men would be dying as the time passed.

"Do we know who deleted it? Or when?"

Stransky shook his head. "Nope. It was a complete delete, no trace. But it had to have been recent, or the empty directory would have been automatically deleted too. If you're thinking about Madeline Naylor, I've canceled her Gold clearance, so she shouldn't be able to get in now."

An urgent beeping suddenly sounded, but Kathy was so lost in her thoughts that she barely noticed it.

Stransky said, "Aren't you going to check that?"

"What?"

"It's your pager."

Blankly she reached down to her waistband and the pager attached there. She peered at the liquid crystal display and read the words typed there. For a moment her mood lifted.

Decker was finally awake.

Biosafety Level 4 Hospital, ViroVector Solutions.

2:21 P.M.

He had been buried alive. He was about to be reborn.

In the gloom, through the translucent nightmarish walls, he could see white ghosts staring in at him. The rushing in his ears sounded like his own blood flowing in his veins. The smell of chemicals and disinfectant hung in the air.

He was one of his father's embalmed victims, imprisoned in some transparent underground prison. That was why he felt so much pain, why his whole body ached.

He turned to his left but found it difficult to move. He was wired up to a series of beeping chrome instruments and monitors. The rushing sound came from an air pipe to the right of his head. He rolled over and was rewarded with excruciating shooting pains down his left side, which rose above the general ache enveloping his whole body. The pain in his chest took his breath away, leaving him gasping as if he'd been rescued from drowning.

The pain helped clear his head, helped him focus. He was in a bed enclosed in a plastic bubble. To his left inserted in the plastic wall was a pair of reversible gloves, his sole contact with the outside world.

The bed was the only one in a small, featureless room. The white ghost floated to his left, just out of his peripheral vision. Then it stepped closer to him and smiled through a glass faceplate. It told him in a strange distant voice that he was OK and that he should rest.

But it wasn't a ghost at all. It was a woman in a white space suit. Why was she in a suit? Why was he in here?

With a groan he compared this dark, surreal waking with all the times he used to wake in Matty's home. No bright sunlight crept in here. He wondered for a moment if he'd ever see the sun rise again. However hard he listened, he couldn't conjure up the sound of his grandfather's violin; he heard only the rasping rhythm of the bed's air pump and the dull beep of instruments.

Despite this, he felt a strange sense of well-being. Like water settling in a pond, his disturbed mind became clearer. He slowly remembered fragments of what had happened: the airport, Alice Prince, the amulet around her neck, and the fall. But there was something else, something more important, that his fractured memory was edging toward.

Chapter 42.

White Heat Science Park, Palo Alto. Thursday, November 13, 2:30 P.M.

The emerald green rental Jeep Cherokee pulled up at the top of the rise overlooking the Science Park and the adjoining ViroVector campus.

Through the binoculars Madeline Naylor could see that there were no media vans camped outside; that was good. Most of the TV stations had assumed that USAMRIID in Maryland and the CDC in Atlanta were the focal points for combating the Peace Plague, and the authorities hadn't disabused them of that. It annoyed Naylor that Pamela Weiss still hadn't announced Crime Zero's release, to start preparing people for the inevitable.

The Science Park next to ViroVector had been cordoned off. Police sat by the main gates, and no one was allowed in or out. So she couldn't go in via the inspection tunnels on the perimeter fences, as she'd originally planned. But that didn't bother her. After much preparation she knew what she was going to do.

On the backseat of the Jeep two bags contained all she would need. And on the passenger seat next to her was a pile of four printouts. A woman's face smiled out from a block of text on the top one. Across the head were the words "FBI Personnel Database. Highly Confidential."

Just then a black van drove down the main road. The windows were tinted, and there was a strange air filter device on the roof. She recognized it as one of the specially equipped biohazard vans used by the FBI to transport agents through contaminated areas. She watched as it turned into the main gate of the ViroVector campus. It stopped by the main dome, and she saw three figures in black Racal biosuits get out. All were female. According to TITANIA's lists of on-site personnel, every FBI ninja on duty around the campus was a female agent. No risks were being taken, and they wore full Racal space suits all the time, not to protect them from contamination but to stop them from contaminating any of the male project team inside. This way the female agents didn't have to be confined to campus. They could work in shifts and go back out into the contaminated world.

The arrangement suited Madeline Naylor perfectly.

Biosafety Level 4 Hospital, ViroVector Solutions, Palo Alto.

2:35 P.M.

Looking at Luke Decker, Kathy Kerr bit back her disappointment and frustration at Alice's deleted file. She was relieved Decker had surfaced from his coma and could only guess how bad he felt.

She wanted to reassure him that it wasn't Alice's amulet that had released the virus. In fact Kathy wasn't even sure how really contagious was the version of Crime Zero with which Alice had infected Decker. He had been put in the slammer only as a precaution, so he could be nursed through his coma and the broken arm and fractured ribs from his fall could be treated.

Entering the isolation room, she saw him lying in the plastic-enclosed bed, his head swathed in bandages. He looked so alone, lying in the bubble, cut off from human touch. She wished she could reach in and save him from his disease as immediately as he had rescued her at the Sanctuary. In that moment seeing him completely vulnerable made her realize that she didn't want to lose him again.

"Hello, Luke," she said. "How are you feeling?"

His smile took her by surprise. She wondered what painkillers he had been given.

"Oh, I've been better," he said. His voice sounded weak. She had to strain past the ear mufflers protecting her from the airflow in her suit to hear him. Suddenly he frowned as if trying to remember something. "Come closer, Kathy. I'm sure there's something I should tell you."

"Don't worry about it," she said. "It'll come to you." She sat down on a chair beside the bed, placed her right glove through one of the reversible gloves in the side of the bubble, and held his hand. She felt him grip her tightly through the layers of latex. "Before you try to tell me anything, there are a few things you should know."

Slowly she explained how Alice Prince and a stack of luggage had broken his fall. Alice Prince was dead, but he had escaped with a fractured arm, a row of cracked ribs, concussion, and some spectacular bruises. Then she told him about Crime Zero. That it was now spreading uncontrollably around the world. That it was just a question of time before the body count started.

As he lay there, she told him Prince had infected him with an earlier version of Crime Zero. And that he had been isolated in case he was contagious and would infect the core team at ViroVector working on a vaccine. She reassured him that at his age the lethal stage shouldn't kick in for a year. By then they might have something.

"What about Madeline Naylor?" he whispered.

She shook her head. "We don't know where she is, but McCloud's convinced she'll be caught."

As she spoke, Decker frowned and then let out a sigh of revelation, as if finally understanding or remembering something important.

"I think you do have the vaccine," he whispered.

"No, Luke, I don't," she said. Perhaps she shouldn't have tried to tell him so much. Decker had only just come out of his coma. "We will get the vaccine, but I haven't got it yet. There was an antidote on TITANIA, but it was deleted."

"No, no, it's not on the computer."

Kathy frowned, not understanding. "Well, where is it then?"

Decker gave her a puzzled smile, disentangled his good hand from hers, and pointed to himself. "I think it's in here," he said.

It was so clear to Decker now as he looked at the shock on Kathy's face. Before she could even ask him to explain, and despite his stricken breathing, he told her about his meeting with Alice Prince at the airport.

"She gave me the vaccine, Kathy. She told me so. It was in the amulet. Somehow she realized who she was hurting. She wanted me to say sorry to Weiss and ensure her godson was OK."

Kathy looked stunned when Decker finished his halting story. He could tell she didn't want to let herself believe it in case it wasn't true. "But how do you know she wasn't lying?"

"I just know, Kathy. Why would she? She was about to die."

"But it looks remarkably like a version of Crime Zero. And your genes have already begun changing; your serotonin levels are up, and your testosterone and catecholamine levels are being modified." Then Kathy seemed to think of something. "But if it was an antidote construct, it could act in an opposite way to Crime Zero. And perhaps your early symptoms are--"

"Kathy," interrupted Decker, "I don't know what the hell you're talking about. You're the expert. Why don't you just infect me with Crime Zero Phase Three and see what happens? If I've already got the virus, who cares, and if I've got the antidote, we might learn something."

Kathy didn't respond at first.

"C'mon, Kathy, I feel useless in here, and this is something I can do to help. So just do me a favor. Give me the goddamn bug, and let me make a contribution to the war effort."

Calcutta, India.The Same Day, 3:11 P.M.

The two Indian boys swimming at the Tollygunge Club were separated by two years. The elder brother, Babu Anand, was fourteen. He had been the youngest male over puberty on the BA186 flight from Heathrow. He coughed frequently as he swam.