Final Epidemic (8 page)

“What the hell’s going on, Larry? What do you want from me?”

Krewell looked at Carson.

“I think the ball is in your court, Billy.”

Carson had lit a cigarette as soon as the aircraft had rotated off the runway. He drew on it, then he carefully balanced it on the rim of the saucer he was using as an ashtray. To Beck, it seemed Carson was performing a ritual, steeling himself. But when Carson finally spoke, his voice betrayed no emotion at all.

“You’ll be looking for the source of all this,” Carson said. “You will investigate and analyze any leads or information that will help us determine the origin of this virus. As a first step, you will be working on where the first cases appeared—the Russian outbreak.”

Beck looked at the two men. His mouth was a hard, thin line, and his silence spoke volumes. When he finally spoke, his voice was firm and final.

“I’m not going back into Russia. Not now. Not ever.”

“The Russians guarantee your safety,” Carson said. “We’ve received assurances from the highest—”

“That’s final. You’re wasting your time.”

“We appreciate what happened to you over there, Beck,” Krewell said, careful to keep his voice neutral. “Six weeks is a helluva long time to hold out. I don’t know if I could have lasted
half
that long. But that was the
Mafiya,
not the Russian government—”

“Go ahead, Larry.” Beck said. “Educate me about the difference. I spent almost two months becoming an expert on the subject, remember? It was a very hands-on curriculum.”

“And we got you out,” Carson interrupted. “As soon as we had the opportunity.”

“Find somebody else.”

“I wish we could,” Carson said. “But the Russians want
you
.”

Krewell interrupted. “Putin made the request directly to the President, Beck.”

“Putin doesn’t know me from Adam,” Beck retorted.

“But Alexi Malenkov does,” Krewell said. “Okay, maybe you’ve been out of circulation, Beck. But you have to have
heard how fast the power structure changes over there. Malenkov’s not a field operative anymore—hasn’t been for more than a year. He’s Putin’s director of state security now, and he is heading up the Russian efforts to deal with this virus.”

“Then he knows I’m out of the business.”

“He’s like every other Russian spook—he sees secret plots and conspiracies everywhere he looks. Malenkov says, first off, he doesn’t believe you are retired, and second, he doesn’t give a damn even if you are. He says you’re a wunderkind, Beck—a hotshot analyst who can see through brick walls and jump buildings in a single bound.”

Krewell grinned at the face that Beck pulled.

“Okay, but you must have pulled something
serious
on that ol’ boy back when you were playing spy versus spy. He has Putin believing you’re some kind of genius, and Putin has the President thinking the same way. They all want you working on this. Doesn’t give you a lot of wiggle room, ol’ buddy.”

“Even if I agreed to go—and I’m not—you need a medical expert who can—”

“You wrote the plague analysis,” Carson interrupted flatly. “You were one of the Company’s resident experts on biological warfare. In Russia, it’s a matter of trust: we’re dealing with your old contacts—you know them, they know you. This is a matter of national survival, Beck. There is no time to waste. If somebody drops the ball because they weren’t up to speed with the people and issues involved, millions will die.”

The national security advisor looked Beck squarely in the eyes.

“I will not try to minimize what you went through,” he said. “But hear us out. You owe us that, at least.”

Carson drew a thick packet from the briefcase at his feet and tossed it on the table beside Beck. On the cover was the
presidential seal, and stamped across the bottom were the words
COROMANT
/
US ARMY ULTRA
.

“You’ll find the historical background in there,” Carson said. “Essentially, what we are now calling H1N1-AK—the original Spanish flu of 1918—was recovered by an Army medical expedition in 1951. In Alaska, hence the suffix. The expedition mission was to obtain any samples of a particularly virulent influenza virus. The theory was that the virus might be recoverable from corpses preserved in the permafrost.”

“Whatever my opinion of the Army,” Beck said, “it doesn’t dig up dead Eskimos just for exercise.”

“There was a weapons-development component,” Carson admitted reluctantly. “But, in the event, that was deemed secondary to the potential for developing new vaccines.”

“Because CIA had just stumbled onto Stalin’s germ-warfare project,” Krewell interjected. He did not waver under Carson’s hard stare. “Let’s not pretend humanitarian motives here, Billy. Nobody in the room is a virgin.”

Carson took a final pull on his cigarette before mashing it in the makeshift ashtray.

“I suppose not. By coincidence, a civilian research project along much the same lines was also undertaken that year,” he continued. “In that case, they found that the bodies had been buried too close to the surface. Over the decades, there had been enough thaw-and-freeze cycles to allow at least partial decomposition of the corpses. That was certainly enough to kill any viruses, and none were found.” Carson waved a hand dismissively. “Their project was severely underfunded, and—if I may say—rather amateurish in approach. They simply did not look in the right places, and finally ran out of time and money. The Army had no such problems. It also knew to look farther north. The expedition targeted villages that had been on Army survey maps in 1906. They just had to identify those that had completely disappeared on maps drawn in 1925.”

“The official story is that the Army mission was a failure,” Krewell said. “The Army, of course, encouraged this point of view. But in point of fact, a live virus was captured by the expedition.”

“Did we release this thing?” Beck demanded. “Was there some kind of accident, or—”

“No,” Carson said. “Not by us. As Dr. Porter told the group, the samples from the most recent victims show some specific, unusual genetic markers. They do not match the viral coding of the Army’s virus. That’s a definite, Beck.”

“But we have the genetic map, the genome sequences,” Beck pressed. “You can use it to develop a vaccine.”

“H1N1-Florida, the new one, is a not a natural mutation of the base viral codes,” Krewell said to Beck. “It is not what we call a wild virus.”

“Not wild?” Beck repeated, puzzled. “How does a virus like this incubate if it doesn’t—”

“It is a chimera—a genetically engineered virus,” Carson said. “Is that simple enough? H1N1-Florida was created in a laboratory, intentionally. Whoever designed it grafted other genes onto the base influenza virus—genes that are specifically intended to increase the virulence factors.”

Beck was stunned. “It’s a weapon.”

“Legally, a weapon of mass destruction,” Carson said. “Release of which constitutes an act of war. Well, it’s been released, and it’s been aimed at us.”

“A bioweapon, particularly one as contagious as this one, cannot be ‘aimed’ with any degree of precision,” Krewell corrected. “The number of people infected will grow exponentially, in an ever-widening circle. Even under the most draconian quarantine measures, it is a virtual certainty that the disease ultimately will spread to the aggressor’s population. Unless those who deployed it have already developed a vaccine, it is a suicide weapon.”

“That would be insane,” Beck said.

“No,” Krewell interjected. “Just incomprehensible. At
least, to
us
. At Detrick, we were under a strict standing order. No chem or bioweapon could be developed unless there was a vaccine or antidote. But other folks didn’t play that way, ol’ buddy. For example, the old Soviet program took the position that the best bioweapons were those with
no
cure. Hell, by the late ’eighties, they were basing new biological weapons on multi-antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, just so existing treatments would be worthless.”

“Which might explain why the Russians are asking for assistance,” Carson said. “The fact that they have an outbreak does not automatically clear them of responsibility or guilt.”

“Are you saying the Russians started this plague? Without developing a cure for it?”

“What the national security advisor is saying,” said Krewell, “is that at this moment we do not have a workable vaccine. Whether we can use what we know about the original H1N1 to come up with one—” He shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know.”

“Why the act? Why pretend this is a natural outbreak?”

“Because the President actually
read
your report—the whole thing, not just the executive summary,” Carson snapped. “He was particularly impressed by one of your conclusions. You cited evidence indicating the more violent upheavals in the social fabric—the rioting and vigilante activities, for instance—are less likely to occur immediately in so-called natural disasters than when the cause is a deliberate enemy action.”

“He’s trying to buy time, Beck,” Krewell said. “At minimum, the time it will take to get troops and medical support where they’ll be needed. And to come up with some kind of viable treatment.”

Beck shook his head. “He’ll need days just to start mobilizing, let alone—”

“The call-up began two days ago, when CDC finally got an ID on the Florida virus,” Krewell said. “By tomorrow—day after, at latest—we’ll have units in the major urban
centers. With a little luck, by the end of the week the President can declare martial law and have it mean more than just national panic.”

“Not enough time, Larry,” Beck said. “Not with a contagious, airborne agent.”

“That’s why we must find who is behind this, and do it quickly,” Carson said. “The Russians have been aggressively investigating since their outbreak began. Go there and assist. Your job is to find out who has declared biological war on the rest of the world. Whoever is responsible may have a vaccine.”

“What if they do not?” demanded Beck. “What if they are madmen?”

“Then,” Krewell said calmly, “the computer projections tell us to expect millions of people to die. Very likely, hundreds of millions.”

Chicago, via Fort Meade, Maryland
July 21

The telephone rang, and eight hundred miles away one of a row of computer screens in Fort Meade, Maryland, flashed an advisory to the technician on duty. He swiveled to the proper monitor and studied the lines that scrolled across the display. His fingers tapped on the keyboard; satisfied the call was being digitally recorded on the hard disk, the technician settled back to listen in real time.

The answering machine had no recorded salutation, instead greeting callers with a loud beep after the requisite four rings.

“Is she there?”

The voice was unmistakably that of a woman, and was unequivocally furious. The tech grinned in sympathy; the computer had already identified the caller’s telephone number and location, cross-referencing that information against the known profile and calling pattern of the recipient.

“Poor guy,” the tech muttered. “First he gets himself on a Priority Alpha watch status. Now he’s got his ex all over his case, too.”

He leaned back in his chair and popped a stick of gum in his mouth, idly wondering if this was a drug case or
something to do with the latest terrorist threat. No matter. Surveillance like this was child’s play, provided you had the right toys.

Here at the National Security Agency’s Maryland headquarters, they did, if most of them were kept in specially constructed rooms with electronically baffled walls.

A number of these super-secret systems exist, some known and some only rumored. One of the former—Echelon, a spy system of satellites and listening posts that can intercept millions of telephone, fax and e-mail messages—had long been a source of concern to European governments, who believed at least part of its electronic product was turned over to U.S. corporations for competitive advantage. Overall, Echelon and its lesser-known sister systems constituted a technology that allowed the NSA to pluck virtually every signal from every subdivision of the world’s communications spectrum.

It did not do this, of course; the staggering volume of signals traffic generated by today’s world would have made this an impossible task, even had the NSA wanted to do so. But if a NSA client—say, the FBI, the CIA, or even the President’s national security advisor—knew what to ask for, the NSA could quickly narrow its focus to envelop the target in an all-encompassing electronic bull’s-eye.

The system had proven adept in counterespionage and the incidental guns-for-cocaine operation, and in the current crisis was now proving its capabilities in domestic surveillance. It would have all been quite illegal, had it ever come to the attention of a federal judge.

The voice—now logged by the computer as that of Deborah Stepanovich, intercept number 351-29, cross-referenced to a dozen other strings of databank entries—had paused, presumably to see if anyone would pick up in the apartment. Now it resumed, with no loss of its initial heat.

“I am going to assume that this was not your idea, Beck—that you had nothing to do with this little deception. If the
three of them are in Chicago with you, please know they did not have permission to leave this state. Katherine
lied
to me, Beck, and I am very angry. I want her to call me immediately.”

The phone slammed down with a bang in Arlington, Virginia—ironically, only a few miles from the monitoring center where the technician cross-checked the standing orders for this particular “account.” He then punched in the number of Andi Wheelwright’s pager, followed by a series of letters and numbers that would be meaningless to anybody without the key.

Then, as he had done with the two previous calls that had gone to the apartment in Chicago, he tapped in the code that erased the message from Beck Casey’s answering machine.

“Sorry ’bout that,” he quietly apologized to the erstwhile recipient, “but orders is orders.”

In Arlington, Virginia, Deborah Stepanovich slammed down the receiver with enough force to rattle the tasteful side table on which it sat. Her hand trembled, she was so angry.