Red Snow (6 page)

Beyond the glass of DeClercq’s seaside home, silver moonlight sparkled on the ripples of Burrard Inlet. Topping a knoll on the beach was a driftwood chair and an antique sundial. Each sweep of the beacon from nearby Lighthouse Park caught the words etched around the metal face: “The Time Is Later Than You Think.”

Though it was cold and stark out there, inside the blazing fireplace cast warmth and cheer. The hearth was flanked by two overstuffed chairs, the Holmes and the Watson. The Katt of old had always claimed the Holmes chair—“I’m more flamboyant”—thereby relegating the chief superintendent—“You’re staid and dependable”—to the role of sidekick. Tonight, however, the teenager was curled up in the doctor’s seat, having said to DeClercq, “You’re the great detective. How arrogant I was to usurp your sleuthful throne.”

Would wonders never cease?

After cleaning up, grooming, and tending to Waif, they’d spent the night making pizza and gingerbread men. Now they sat in the armchairs by the fire, watching a
Monty Python
skit on TV and killing themselves with laughter. So there’d be no jealousy, Katt had Catnip, the resident cat, snuggled in her lap and Napoleon, the German shepherd, at her feet. DeClercq cradled the blind stray in the crook of his arm.

There was a knock at the door.

“I’ll get it,” he said.

On the threshold stood Joseph Avacomovitch. He was about to embrace the Mountie in the bear hug that Gill had turned down when he saw the scruffy cat. Instead of crushing it, the long-parted friends opted to shake hands. With a flick of his eyes, Joe glanced over Robert’s shoulder at the greenhouse door through which he had crashed all those years ago.

“Long time, no see,” the cop said.

“Too long,” said the Russian.

Closing the door on winter, Joe and Gill hung up their coats and trailed the Mountie along the hall to the living room that overlooked the ocean.

Just half an hour later, Katt went to bed. She had sleep to catch up on before the morning’s early start. They’d stop by the vet’s to board both cats, then follow the Sea to Sky Highway up Howe Sound to Squamish and into the mountains to Whistler. The drive would normally take an hour and a half, but snow was in the forecast.

A heavy snowfall.

With whiteout conditions.

The kind of weather known to cut Whistler off from the rest of the world.

“So,” said Robert, “let’s see the DVD.”

Joseph opened his briefcase and fished out the disk. As Robert fed it into the player, the forensic scientist cautioned, “A stiff drink will help us watch it.”

“Name your poison.”

“Vodka.”

“Gill?”

“Are you having one?”

“Sure.”

“Then make it three.”

The Mountie went to the fridge for a chilled bottle and poured three shots.

“Za vashe zdorov’ye!”
said Joe, raising his glass.

“To your health!” echoed Robert.

“Cheers!” said Gill.

As they watched, a black man with ruby red eyes shambled, shambled, lurched, and shambled toward the camera. Blood trickled from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and bubbled through his pores from hemorrhages under his skin. Dissolving flesh hung from his bones, while his sagging face detached from his skull.

It could have been a schlocky Hollywood zombie movie.

But it wasn’t.

“September 1976,” said Joe. “The first recorded outbreak of Ebola Zaire, along the Congo River in the rainforest of Central Africa.”

The oozing man shuffled up an aisle squeezed by hospital beds filled with thrashing wretches in the grip of seizures. Gore pooled underneath them and inched across the floor. The lurching zombie slopped through the slime and stalked the camera out the door.

The living dead terrorized the street beyond, crawling among the corpses and clutching at those not yet infected. Women wailed in anguish and yanked out their hair. Babies cried for mothers who lay dying in the blood-soaked dirt. If they ever offered an Oscar for hell on earth, this place would win it hands down.

“Ebola Zaire is a perfect parasite,” said Joe. “It assaults every part of the body, except skeletal muscle and bone. The virus lives to replicate itself, and it turns each victim into a seething bio-bomb. Spread around the globe, it would kill off 90 percent of the world’s population in six weeks.”

All of a sudden, the horror movie morphed into a science fiction film. Astronauts in biohazard suits, their heads sheathed in breathing equipment, filled the screen. They roamed the village collecting samples from the dead while their flesh liquefied into red gumbo.

A tiny Soviet emblem adorned each man’s shoulder.

“The Vektor compound in Siberia,” said Joe as the DVD switched scenes again, this time to a labyrinth of tunnels sealed by airlocks. “In the 1980s, forty thousand scientists worked for Biopreparat, the Soviet Union’s biological weaponry agency. They had access to ten thousand viruses, including 140 strains of smallpox and three kinds of Ebola. The Ebola Zaire strain came from the village we just saw.”

“Black biology,” commented Gill.

The Russian nodded.

“Ebola’s weakness is twofold. First, it kills too quickly, eating up bodies from brain to skin before victims can infect enough new hosts to sustain an epidemic. Second, like the AIDS virus, it spreads solely by direct contact with infected body fluids. To address this, the virologist you see here—Vladimir Grof—created an
airborne
strain.”

“How?” asked Gill, about to drain her glass.

“He began by thinking about the worst scourge in history: smallpox. That disease has a longer incubation period and a much lower kill rate than Ebola, but it spreads more easily. Grof realized that if he could combine the virulence of Ebola with the infectiousness of smallpox, he would have a supervirus without compare. He found a way to insert Ebola genes into a smallpox shell to create a hybrid that could be spread by air.”

“Phew!” said Gill. “What happened to Grof?”

The previous scenes had shown him going about his work in a secret lab at the Vektor compound, weaponizing viral agents for the Soviet military. In the scenes they were watching now, he’d become a living skeleton, his Slavic face merely angles of skin and skull.

“A Vektor virus wormed into his heart,” said Joe. “This footage was taken shortly before he died. During the Soviet era, Grof had had it all. A dacha on the Black Sea and a hunting lodge in the Urals. But with the fall of Communism, he lost everything. Suddenly, he was working in a crumbling lab and went months without getting paid. He blamed American capitalists for his decline. For revenge, he sold his supervirus—in the form of three aerosol bombs—to a bioterrorist.”

“Who?” asked the Mountie.

“We don’t know.”

“Where?”

“Seattle,” answered Joe.

“How did he smuggle it in?”

“By diplomatic pouch. You see, the fall of the Soviet Union had created a new threat from broke, disgruntled Biopreparat scientists looking to sell their toxic wares to hostile states. To stop that, Washington funded several make-work projects through Russia’s Academy of Sciences. Ironically, Grof was sent to America as an example of the program’s success. He used the opportunity to transact his revenge.”

“So you know what he sold and where he sold it, but not who the buyer was. How did you find out as much as you did?” asked Robert.

“He boasted about it before he died. We know the transaction took place, but we don’t know why the bombs were never used.”

Joe paused to let Gill and Robert take in all he’d just told them.

“Now here’s the nightmare scenario,” he continued. “Nowhere on earth is more than twenty-some hours away by plane. Nothing gathers an international crowd like the Olympics. If a bioterrorist were to release Grof’s supervirus at Whistler in February—or at Sochi in 2014—he’d essentially create thousands of human time bombs, people carrying a potential airborne pandemic to all four corners of the globe.”

Nightmare indeed, thought Robert.

He made a mental note to discuss Grof’s Frankenvirus with Zinc and Nick at the next day’s security powwow.

In a post-9/11 world, Robert knew, it was madness to hold the Winter Olympics at a site where the venues stretched over a hundred miles. It was going to cost a fortune in taxpayer money to police the games, what with skating down near the American border, curling and hockey in Vancouver, snowboarding up on the North Shore mountains, and the alpine events off hell and gone along one of the world’s most precarious roads. To make the games palatable to the Canadian public, security had originally been budgeted at a laughable $175 million. But those costs had soon skyrocketed to around a billion dollars. And then the bottom had crumbled away from the national treasury, which left taxpayers barely able to afford to protect the
actual
games. There was simply no money in the kitty for
preliminary
tryouts like those being held at Whistler over the next few days.

As fate would have it, this was also the week that VISU, the RCMP-led Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit, was fine-tuning its multi-threat detection system in downtown Vancouver. Called Safesite, this system boasts an array of sensors that can monitor entire city blocks and sniff out forty chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats. If a terrorist organization like al-Qaeda wanted to attack the Olympics with sarin, mustard gas, anthrax, or ricin, or with a “dirty bomb” of radioactive waste, the target would be Vancouver, not Whistler. That’s why all but a few of the Olympic defenders were now on a test run in Lotusland.

In tough economic times, hard choices had to be made. Until security ramped up for the
actual
games, still two months away, Whistler had let down its guard.

Whistler

Mephisto’s inspiration had come from
Dactylella
, a carnivorous fungus. The fungus looped its many threads into nooses. If a roundworm stuck its head into one of the holes, the ring tightened, strangling it like a hangman’s rope. Then a penetration tube emerged from the thread to pierce the body of the worm and suck out nutriments. Sated, the fungus released its prey.

Good idea, Mephisto had thought.

And
voilà
.

The metal strangling device he’d created resembled a dog collar attached to a four-foot chain ending with a hook. The inside of the collar was ringed with a circular razor blade.

“How does it work?” Scarlett asked.

They had just returned to the mountainside chalet overlooking the El Dorado Resort, where they’d baited the trap designed to hook DeClercq.

The psycho demonstrated. The loop constricted when he yanked the leash.

“Wicked!” she replied.

“And
this
,” her boss added, “I created for you. I got the idea from Jivaro headhunters.” Mephisto handed her the weapon.

The Ice Pick Killer’s eyes widened with admiration as she grasped how it worked.

“Wicked!” she repeated.

Her new favorite word, it seemed.

The most diabolic weapon, however, had come not from his brain but from Vladimir Grof. The two had linked up on the Internet, that godsend of sexual perverts and worldwide terrorists. What began with a discussion of biological plagues—with the Russian in Siberia and Mephisto in the United States—had eventually culminated in a face-to-face meeting. That meeting took place in a Seattle hotel room, on a sunny autumn morning when Scotch mist swirled over streets bustling with weekenders going about their chores.

“Bring out your dead,” Mephisto had said then, gazing down at them as the bitter, dying virologist puffed on a Lucky Strike and blew out smoke rings.

“Bring out your dead!”
The cry had echoed through the burghs of fourteenth-century Europe as street carts gathered up the twenty-five million victims of the Black Death.

Mephisto envisioned streets of panic.

Streets red with blood.

“What you have here,” Grof said, tapping the box on the table, “is a plague of biblical proportions. The 1918 flu wiped out one percent of the human population. This will annihilate
ninety
times that, or nine of every ten people.”

Mephisto did the math.

It took a million years to populate the earth with a billion people:

1 billion around 1800;

2 billion around 1930;

3 billion around 1960;

4 billion around 1975;

5 billion around 1987;

6 billion around 1999.

Seven billion were projected for 2011, the year following the Whistler Olympics.

A 90 percent cull rate would cut that to seven hundred million, or a global population about double that of the United States. Instead of a planet in peril from melting polar ice caps, receding glaciers, rising sea levels, freak weather patterns, vanishing species, food shortages, and mobs of climate refugees, we’d be left with the fallout of a biological killer unlike anything the world had ever seen, a weapon conceived to eliminate urban populations but save infrastructures. Gone would be the overwhelming pressures on the environment, energy sources, natural resources, food, water, and housing. Every survivor would have his choice of home from those already built, meaning slums could be demolished to recover green space. The last time the earth had had a population of seven hundred million was 1700.

Wouldn’t that be El Dorado?

The elusive City of Gold.

Especially for the Gilded Man, who was immune to this plague, and thereby free to speculate for his self-interest.

Me, thought Mephisto.

The savior of humankind.

The only man with the balls to do what had to be done, while lesser men talked and talked at useless gabfests that accomplished nothing, staging silly Earth Hours and self-aggrandizing rock concerts, obviously afraid to deal with the real threat: too many people pumping too many people out of their loins.

“Bring out your dead!”

“Pandora’s box,” said Grof, caressing the lid of the oblong case in front of him. “The hard work is done. All you do now is release the monster in here—” he raised the lid to expose three cans of freeze-dried horror and a vaccination kit—“at a meeting of people about to fan out around the globe, and they will carry the incubating plague home with them. Six to seven days later, the world will be bleeding, and the blood won’t clot. By day nine, most of the population will be dead. Fate will determine who lives and dies.”

Grof tapped the vials and syringes.

“The Ebola genes are
inside
the smallpox shell, so all you need to protect yourself are smallpox antibodies. Smallpox vaccinations stopped in 1971, and the world was declared smallpox free in 1979. Because a smallpox vaccination lasts for ten years, no one alive today—with the exception of those who inoculate themselves with what is in this kit—is immune to this virus.”

Mephisto’s original plan had called for the simultaneous release of the supervirus in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Had DeClercq not found his hideout on Ebbtide Island and cleaved the boat on which he tried to flee, sinking Pandora’s box to the bottom of the strait, he’d have succeeded. It had taken precious years for Mephisto’s secret salvage operation to recover the box. And in those years, the U.S. military had launched a smallpox vaccination campaign among its forces, so the world was not quite as unprepared as it had once been. Still, the supervirus would wipe out most of the human population, in a world ill-equipped for the double whammy of the smallpox-Ebola time bomb.

“Time for bed,” Mephisto said. “A big day tomorrow.”

“When do I get to see what’s in the box?” asked Scarlett.

“Curiosity killed the cat.”

“Meow,”
she purred.

“I guess it won’t hurt to give you a peek, since you’ll be the one to let loose the monster.”

With Scarlett watching, Mephisto eased Pandora’s box out of its watertight case.

Pausing for suspense, he raised the lid.

“Do you grasp the irony?”

“No,” she replied.

“What’s the second most recognizable logo in the world?”

“McDonald’s Golden Arches?”

He shook his head. “The scarlet uniform of the RCMP. Canada’s the only country with a cop as its national symbol. The image is trademarked.”

“So?”

“What’s the
most
recognizable logo in the world?”

Scarlett clapped her hands.

“Wicked!”
she said.

Mephisto smirked.

“Wicked indeed,” he concurred.