The Cobra Event (18 page)

On board were two F.B.I. pilots and a tech agent, a woman.

“Frank’s really upset about something,” the woman remarked.

“I’ve never heard him that bad,” one of the pilots said. The woman shook Austen’s hand. “Special Agent Caroline Landau.”

Austen observed that the helicopter was full of racks of electronic equipment. Caroline Landau fiddled with some wires, crimping a cable harness. “This damned equipment is going to lose our case for us,” she remarked to the pilot.

The helicopter flew straight across Manhattan and up the Hudson River. It turned west across New Jersey and landed at Teterboro Airport, beside a twin-engine turboprop passenger plane. “Good luck with whatever,” Special Agent Landau said to Austen. Then the helicopter lifted away, to return to its duty over the city.

The turboprop plane was a Dash 8 owned by the F.B.I. A pilot and copilot were on board, checking their instruments. Austen went up the steps, and the props sputtered and started. The Dash 8 cut into the queue of taxiing planes and was prioritized for immediate takeoff. It climbed to altitude and left New York behind. She looked out the window to try to see the sick organism, but the city was lost in predawn clouds.

She was the only passenger. The other twenty-nine seats were empty.

“If there’s anything you need, Dr. Austen, please ask us,” the pilot said to her over the loudspeaker.

“I’d like a telephone,” she said.

The copilot walked back and showed her a communications console facing a seat. There was a lot of gear, including several telephones. He picked up a headset and handed it to her. “It’s secure. You can dial anywhere in the world.”

She put on the headset, adjusted the microphone, and called her father in New Hampshire. She woke him up. “Aw—God. It’s five o’clock, Allie,” he said. “Where’ve you been? I was calling all over Atlanta. Nobody knew where you were.”

“Sorry, Dad. I’m on a field investigation.”

“I thought so. Where are you?”

“I can’t say. It’s kind of an emergency.”

“What’s that noise I hear?”

“It’s nothing important.”

“Aw!” He still sounded groggy. He coughed, and she heard him drinking water. “Where are you, in a factory or something?”

Her father was living in a small house in the woods near Ashland, New Hampshire. Her mother had died three years earlier. She thought about how excited her father would be if he knew she was calling him from an F.B.I. aircraft headed for Washington. “Dad, I just wanted to say how much I admire you,” she said.

“You wake me up at the crack of dawn for this?” He chuckled. “I can take it.”

“I may not have a chance to call you for a while.”

“Hey—I’m going out to do some fishing. As long as you got me up.”

“What are you going for, Dad?”

“Landlocked salmon. They’re still hitting.”

“Yeah. Get some.”

“Keep in touch, sweetie.”

“Good-bye, Dad. I love you.” She sat back in the seat and closed her eyes. That wasn’t a perfect good-bye. If I end up like Kate Moran. She got up and went into the plane’s washroom and looked at her eyes in the mirror, for the second time that day. She saw no sign of a color change. I hope I’m right about this. I know I’m right. But if I’m wrong, I’ve just pulled the biggest fire alarm handle in the world, and I didn’t even know it existed.

Andrews

WASHINGTON, D.C
.

WILL HOPKINS, JR
., and Mark Littleberry had had a few hours’ layover at the airport in Bahrain, on the Persian Gulf, and they finally had a chance to shave. But they didn’t have any clean clothes, and when they hooked onto some spare seats on board a U.S. military airlift command transport 707 bound for Andrews Air Force Base, they looked a little worse for wear.

The flight landed at Andrews at dawn on Sunday morning. Littleberry was due to go out to Bethesda, Maryland, to the National Naval Medical Research Institute, where he would be debriefed about the attempt to obtain a sample of an Iraqi biological weapon. Hopkins had to go to the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico. They had both been fired by the United Nations, they had caused a diplomatic incident, and there was going to be a lot of explaining to do. Still, it was a fine Sunday morning in Washington, and Hopkins was feeling lucky to be alive. “Let’s go over to Georgetown and find a café and just sit there,” he said. “Get some coffee, some breakfast, enjoy the sun. You and I need to decompress a little.”

“I can get on this program,” Littleberry said.

He called his wife, Annie, to let her know he was safe. He told her he expected to be back in Boston within a few days, as soon as the briefings were finished. “Get your bathing suit out, honey, because we’re heading for Florida.”

They went in search of a shuttle bus into Washington. They were just arriving at the curb when Will Hopkins’s Skypager beeped. It was inside his bag. He unzipped the bag and looked at the number on the beeper. It was not familiar. But he plucked a cell phone from his pocket and dialed the number back. He identified himself and listened for a minute. “S
IOC
? What? Oh, man. When is she coming in? I’m supposed to wait for her?” Suddenly, Littleberry looked down and frowned. The beeper in his bag had gone off.

“It’s a calldown,” Hopkins said to him.

Littleberry pulled his cellular telephone out and turned it on. It was a secure cell phone on a government band. He walked off to one side. A minute later, he returned. He said, “Can you give me a lift to the meeting? After you pick up the doctor?”

HOPKINS AND LITTLEBERRY
were waiting on the tarmac at Andrews when Alice Austen stepped off the Dash 8.

Hopkins said, “Hi. Supervisory Special Agent William Hopkins, Jr.” He shook Austen’s hand. “This is Dr. Mark Littleberry. He is a consultant to the F.B.I. on matters involving biological terrorism. We will accompany you to the meeting.”

Austen thought that Supervisory Special Agent Hopkins was a little underdressed. She noticed the plastic pocket protector. The word
geek
entered her mind.

An F.B.I. car appeared, and they headed for downtown Washington, traveling very fast. The car threaded sparse traffic on the Beltway, then turned west onto Pennsylvania Avenue.

Hopkins cleared his throat. “I’m the guy in the bureau who is supposed to handle a bioterror event. Can you tell us what’s going on, Doctor?”

She told them briefly. “There have been several deaths. It looks like serial murder using a virus, but we don’t have any idea what the virus is.”

“Terror singlets, huh?”

“If that’s what you call it,” she said.

“We were sort of figuring on a bomb,” he said.

“These are bombs.”

“It’s a onesies and twosies kind of thing.”

“It’s murder using a contagious disease,” she said.

“We can handle this,” he said.

Austen looked at him skeptically. “Do you think so?”

The car circled around the Capitol and got back on Pennsylvania Avenue. The cherry trees were past their peak, but the city still glowed with lingering blossoms. A homeless man poked around in a pile of garbage near a restaurant. Their car skirted the north side of the Mall and headed for Ninth Street.

“My turn to say something,” Mark Littleberry remarked.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“We are about to go on air, live, with the whole federal government. You guys ever done that before?”

“Nope,” Hopkins said.

“If you two are jabbing for turf, it’s going to look awkward,” Littleberry said.

Austen and Hopkins were silent.

A phenomenally ugly building of monstrous proportions loomed over Pennsylvania Avenue. It was made of raw yellow-gray concrete, with deep-set, bulletproof, smoked windows. It was the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the national headquarters of the F.B.I. The fortress was wider at the top than at the bottom, an upside-down iceberg. The Bureau car turned up Ninth Street and went into the Hoover building through a security point, around an explosion-barrier, down a ramp, and into a basement garage. They took an elevator to the fifth floor, and came to a door. It was a steel vault door with a combination lock. There was a combination pad on it and a red sign that said, “Restricted Access—
IN USE
.”

“Looks like they’ve already begun,” Will Hopkins said. He punched in an authorization code. A lock clicked, and he pulled open the door. It was the entry foyer of the Strategic Information Operations Center.

S
IOC

THE SIOC ROOM
at F.B.I. headquarters was a windowless, radio-secure chamber. It was lined with copper and steel, so that no stray signals could get out and be caught by an eavesdropper. The interior space of the S
IOC
chamber was divided into sections that were visible to one another through glass panels. A number of people were sitting around a meeting table in one of the smaller sections.

A tall, silver-haired man in a suit came out to meet them. He was Steven Wyzinski, the head of the F.B.I.’s National Security Division. “You’re William Hopkins? Everyone cleared?”

“These people are basically, sort of, my group,” Hopkins said.

Austen was introduced to a number of F.B.I. officials, but she had trouble remembering their names.

“We’ll be going up on the bird in twenty-five minutes,” Wyzinski said, glancing at a clock on the wall. “We don’t have much time. We have to move fast and hard. Please give us all the information you have, Dr. Austen.”

Austen opened her laptop computer, showed them the images, and described the situation. They asked her many questions, firing them at her left and right. They wanted to make absolutely sure the event was real before they called in the rest of the government.

“Satellite transmission initiates in four minutes,” someone announced.

“We’re going live,” Steven Wyzinski said, rising to his feet. “Thank you, Dr. Austen.”

They filed into the videoconference situation room and sat down at a table, where a sound technician wired them with clip-on microphones. There were a number of large video screens positioned on the walls. The screens were glowing but blank. There were several speakerphones on the table.

Steven Wyzinski adjusted his necktie. He cleared his throat nervously.

One by one, the video screens filled with faces. Voices came on the speakerphones. The room filled with power, real power; you could feel it in the air.

“I’m bringing the meeting to order,” Wyzinski said. “Welcome to S
IOC
. This is a threat-assessment meeting for the Cobra Event. The Federal Bureau of Investigation customarily gives a name to major crime investigations and this one will be designated Cobra. You will understand the meaning of the term shortly. This meeting has been called by the Bureau under the mandate of Presidential Decision Directive 39 and National Security Directive 7…”

Austen felt herself trembling, ever so slightly, and she hoped it didn’t show. She hadn’t slept well in days. Hopkins was sitting next to her.

On two video screens, side by side, were the faces of Walter Mellis and the director of the C.D.C., Helen Lane. Mellis was wearing the full-dress white uniform of the United States Public Health Service, including action ribbons across the chest.

“Congratulations, Dr. Austen,” Mellis said.

“Walt? Where are you?” she said.

“Dr. Lane and I are at headquarters in Atlanta.”

Frank Masaccio’s face appeared on another screen. He was with Ellen Latkins, chief of the Emergency Management Office for the City of New York. She was representing the mayor.

Steven Wyzinski introduced Austen, and the calldown people identified themselves. Many of them were high-level military officers. There was also a man from the Office of the Attorney General, at the Justice Department.

“Is the White House coming online?” Wyzinski asked.

“White House on now!” said a technician in the background.

A large viewing screen set in a commanding position glowed and went live. It showed a rumpled middle-aged man in a pink polo shirt. He had the air of someone who was used to attending meetings that were choreographed to the minute. “Yeah. Jack Hertog here. I’m with the National Security Council of the White House. I’m not sure this incident needs a response from us at this point.”

Wyzinski turned the floor over to Austen.

She stood up and took a breath. Her photographs flashed on the viewing screens. She read the words that were printed on the dispersion devices, the cobra boxes. She said, “It’s a very frightening situation. Six disease-related deaths have occurred in a short time.”

“Are we sure that we’re dealing with a biological agent?” an Army colonel from U
SAMRIID
, at Fort Detrick, asked.

“I am fairly sure,” Austen said. She explained that there had been infective transmission of the unknown disease-causing agent in at least two cases. She told them that she suspected that it was a virus.

“If so,” the Army colonel said, “then it’s a Level 4 hot agent. But there’s been no identification, right?”

“Correct,” Austen said.

“So how can you assess a threat if you don’t know what the agent is?”

“Good point,” Wyzinski said.

“Will, tell us—how bad
is
this threat?” Frank Masaccio said, addressing Will Hopkins.

“Dr. Littleberry should answer that.”

Littleberry leaned forward over the table. The cameras followed him. “There are a lot of unknowns here,” he said. “Certainly the identity of the agent, but also the identity of whoever is dispersing it. It’s hard to assess the threat, but what we do know is that the lethal-dose response in a population under biological attack can be enormous. A couple of pounds of dry hot agent, released in the air in New York City—you might get ten thousand deaths. The top range would be two million deaths, maybe three million.”

“Your top range seems exaggerated,” said Jack Hertog, the White House man. “I’ve seen different estimates in different policy reviews.”

“I sure hope it’s exaggerated, son,” Littleberry said.

Hertog looked annoyed; people didn’t call members of the White House inner staff “son.”