The Eden Prophecy (10 page)

The road bent sharply to the right; she tapped the brakes, squeezed the police car for space, forcing it to drop back, and then mashed on the accelerator once again. It was a bit late to start acting rational.

She made it half a mile farther before two more squad cars pulled onto the road in front of her.

She tried to shoot the gap between them but they closed it. She swerved to the left to cut around but one of them cut left as well, pinning her against the wall.
Another car blocked her way and slammed on its brakes. Danielle tried to stop, but too late.

She slammed into the rear of the police unit. The air-bag fired and the next thing she knew she was at a dead stop, dust and residue from the airbag’s explosive swirling around her.

Disoriented, she tried to get out. The door opened, then hands reached in and grabbed her, dragging her from the car and holding her to the ground.

Up ahead, Hawker continued racing down the road. Out in the river, the speedboat had slowed a bit, its driver apparently unaware that he was being followed. The boat was pulling closer to the left bank and Hawker knew this was his only chance.

Matching his speed with the boat’s, he watched for an opening. He spotted a gap in the stone rail that ran along the river’s edge, angled toward it, and accelerated. Cutting across the grass, he lined up with the opening and pinned the throttle open.

At fifty miles an hour, he hit the gap and the bike launched itself toward the speeding boat. The heavy Ducati began to fall away beneath him and Hawker pushed off it, throwing himself to the right.

He heard a tremendous crunch and then he hit the water behind the boat.

Breaking the surface a moment later, he saw the speedboat floundering, the fiberglass cracked and broken where the four-hundred-pound Ducati had slammed into it, like a stone hitting a paper cup.

Shedding his jacket, Hawker swam toward the boat as it began to go down. There were two men aboard. One appeared injured, maybe unconscious, but the other was getting back to his feet. He spotted Hawker, raised a pistol, and fired.

Hawker dove under the water. Bullets cut white lines through the murk here and there as he swam to a new position. He held his breath until the gunfire stopped and then he cautiously popped up.

The man with the pistol was gone, either hiding or gone overboard himself.

Hawker swam up to the swamped vessel. He slipped his own gun out of the holster, put a hand on what remained of the stern, and looked around.

The boat shifted and tilted, debris floating about. Seat cushions, life jackets, and a few empty water bottles bobbed up and down, but Hawker did not see the gunman.

As the boat began to roll, Hawker grabbed the injured man and pulled him into the water.

A moment later the speedboat flipped over. It remained floating, a few feet of the keel sticking out of the water.

Hawker held on to the unconscious man and kicked away from the boat, swimming backward toward the shore, his eyes still on the boat. No movement. He looked around in all directions, but the gunman had disappeared.

A
rnold Moore, director of operations at the National Research Institute, sat at a metallic desk with a glass top. Papers arranged in neat stacks lined both sides of a computer monitor that would fold flat into the desktop for more workspace if he needed it. To the left and right, printers and scanners and screens for satellite videoconferencing sat dormant, only their “standby” LEDs blinking softly in the semidarkness.

Across the desk from him stood one of the NRI’s best young minds, Walter Yang, a geneticist out of Stanford. If he wasn’t working in the lab, Walter was living online as a devotee of massive multiplayer computer gaming and anything that might lead to a hive mind. He seemed impressed with Arnold’s digs.

“This office rocks pretty hard, Mr. Moore.”

Rocks
. Moore did not think it
rocked
, unless that meant it did not suit him.

Moore’s new suite at the Virginia Industrial Complex was a study in order and ultramodern design. It impressed others, especially its designers, and it bothered the hell out of Arnold Moore.

It was too sterile for him, too precise and lacking in individuality.

Even the walls bothered him. They were special Kevlar-coated
glass, which could be turned instantly opaque at the press of a button. Someone’s idea of hip, high-tech décor, apparently designed to go with the NRI’s mission. When told about it, Moore had assumed someone was joking: the head of a secret agency working in a glass cube? He’d darkened the walls on day one and had yet to allow the light back in.

“Yes,” he said politely. “You would think that, Walter. Part of the joy of being young. Things can
rock
. Now talk to me about this UN virus.”

Walter cleared his throat and looked down at his notes. And Moore realized his own level of crankiness had reached an intraday high. The UN had been quarantined for three days and the natives were growing restless. The only saving grace was that Claudia Gonzales had arrived at work so early, she’d opened the offending letter before most of the staff had even arrived.

“Sorry,” Yang said.

“Don’t be,” Moore said. “Just tell me some good news.”

“We do have good news,” Yang insisted. “The CDC has exhausted its review of the sample and determined that it matches nothing in the database.”

“So we’re dealing with an entirely new virus?”

Yang nodded.

“How exactly is that good news?” Moore asked.

“It relates to the pathogen’s virulence,” Yang said.

Moore stared at him.

“We define virulence as the ability of a pathogen to cause disease,” Yang said. “It depends primarily on three things: the ability of the pathogen to infect cells; the ability of the pathogen to spread and what routes it takes to spread—what we call
vectors;
and finally, the damage it does to the infected cells.”

“Okay,” Moore said. “So tell me where we’re winning.”

“Well,” Yang said. “The epidemiology of this virus is
quite impressive. It shows incredible speed and effectiveness at invading a host cell. It seems to attack all cells in the body. And so far our tests indicate it would spread through a large number of vectors.”

“In English, Walter,” Moore asked.

“Sorry, Mr. Moore,” he said. “I’ll try to be clear. In general, certain viruses attack only certain types of cells. Respiratory viruses attack cells in the lungs. Herpesvirus attacks skin cells. But this UN virus is highly and rapidly infectious across a wide range of, if not all, types of cells in the human body. That is extremely unusual.”

“We see this in Ms. Gonzales?” Moore asked.

Yang nodded. “A CDC check shows that she is dealing with the infection in many different areas. Bronchial cells, muscle cells, liver, kidney, and lymphatic cells. Basically every system in her body shows traces of the infection.”

Moore exhaled wearily. “Unless you’re the beneficiary of her insurance policy, this doesn’t qualify as good news, either.”

“No,” Yang said. “I mean, of course we’d prefer to see a smaller cellular range, and to be honest we’d certainly prefer a contagion that had fewer open vectors to be transmitted through, but—”

“How contagious?” Moore asked.

“Our tests confirm that it has the ability to spread in an aerosol, through sneezing and coughing like the common cold, through insect vectors like mosquitoes and ticks, etc. Just like malaria or West Nile virus, and through birds, like H1N1 or SARS.”

Neither did this news seem to qualify as positive, but Moore guessed Yang would get around to that. “How did it get into the ambassador’s system?”

“The envelope was lined with plastic,” Yang said. “In effect, it was hermetically sealed. The interior of the envelope was a vacuum until she tore it open. The note inside was written on special paper that reacted with oxygen
and the heat of her fingertips. As it turned red it generated heat, which caused the virus and a thin layer of gel it had been deposited on to aerosolize. As she read the letter, the ambassador breathed it in.”

“And the red coloring?” Moore asked. “The blood on the letter?”

“A cheap parlor trick,” Yang said. “A side effect of the heat. Like invisible ink reappearing.”

“Someone has a flair for the dramatic,” Moore said. And yet, he reminded himself, no one had claimed responsibility. Something didn’t add up.

“Because of that and the other things it’s able to do, the CDC is calling it the Magician virus.”

“Great,” Moore said. “Now that we have it named, I’m ready for the good news.”

“Oh yeah,” Yang said. “Here’s the cool part, the really interesting part. So this virus is highly contagious outside the body and extremely infectious in the body. But aside from a fever and a monster headache, Ms. Gonzales is doing well. In fact this virus, which seems to be attacking every cell in her body, doesn’t seem to do much once it wins the high ground.”

Moore shifted in his seat. It seemed an odd bit of luck, too odd to actually be luck. “What are you telling me?”

“Most viruses take over a cell, inject their DNA, and force it to produce millions of copies of itself. Then they explode out of the cell, killing it or leaving it to die and moving on. The cell death all over the body causes the sickness. This UN virus enters a cell, forces the cell to reproduce its copies, and then—bizarrely—leaves the cell intact, with a small remnant of its DNA now encoded into the DNA of the affected cell.”

“Remnant?” Moore asked suspiciously. “What kind of remnant? Does it do anything?”

“We’re studying it now,” Yang said. “But it seems to be completely inert.”

Moore looked around his office, thinking and wondering. He considered the design of the room, how it seemed useless and excessive to him but had a purpose in the mind of the designers.

The Magician virus sounded like the brilliant creation of some disturbed mind. Most likely the mind of Ranga Milan. He guessed that this useless bit of DNA left behind had some purpose to its designer as well.

“I’ll take that as a stroke of good luck and something we shouldn’t count on continuing,” he said. “But I want you to study it. Let the CDC work on the main virus, and by all means keep up with them, but I want you to look at that inert DNA coding and figure out if it means anything, anything at all.”

Walter Yang stood. “What about the quarantine?”

Arnold was already reviewing his notes, head down.

“What do you mean?” he said without looking up.

“CDC wants to send the ambassador home.”

Moore stopped and looked up. “No,” he said. “Hell no. Anybody tries to bust that quarantine you stop them. Shoot them if you have to. Understand?”

“I’m not issued a weapon, Mr. Moore.”

“Then get one,” Moore said.

Yang seemed unsure, so Moore decided to be clear. “Listen to me,” he said. “We’re involved in this for a number of reasons, most of which I can’t explain to you or the CDC. But one thing that you should know is Claudia Gonzales once worked for the NRI. Ten years ago she was one of us. That may be an odd coincidence or it might mean something. The bottom line is, we’ve been put in charge through a presidential order and until I say so, until we know for sure that this bug isn’t a Greek bearing some mysterious gift, nobody leaves quarantine. Nobody. Got me?”

Yang nodded firmly, seeming far more subdued than
when he’d come in. Getting growled at by the boss when you figured you’d done well could do that to a person.

“Good work,” Moore said. “I’m sorry the crusty old bastard you work for didn’t say it earlier.”

Yang hesitated.

“Yeah,” Moore said. “I’m talking about me. Now get out there and dig. A lot may depend on what you find.”

Yang nodded, then left the office with some juice in his step. Moore’s intercom buzzed. The voice of Stephanie Williams, the NRI’s director of communications, came through loud and clear.

“Arnold, you got a second?”

“All yours,” he said. “What do you have for me?”

Because of Hawker’s unique cover, Williams had set up special channels of communication with Hawker that no one else in the organization aside from Danielle and Arnold Moore knew about.

She also kept track of the two agents when they were on assignment.

“I have information on Hawker and Danielle,” she said.

“What’s the word?” he asked.

“I’m afraid you’re going to be busy.”

That did not sound good. “I’m already busy, Ms. Williams.”

“We’re getting radio chatter from France on the police bands. Something about a house exploding, a shoot-out, and a high-speed chase in central Paris. Suspects are Americans. One male and one female.”

Moore cringed. “Good God,” he said. It never rained but it poured.

D
anielle sat in handcuffs, waiting in the private office of the commandant of the Police Nationale in central Paris. Hawker sat next to her, cuffed as she was, and seemed to be favoring his right shoulder.

For the moment they were alone.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Landed on my shoulder when the house blew up,” he said. “Hitting the water didn’t help it much.”

To be honest, she was surprised he’d even survived. “Why’d you go after them on that bike anyway?”

He looked at her. “Why did you run to the river?”

“I thought they were getting away.”

“There you go.”

She exhaled in exasperation. “Yes, but all I wanted to do was spot the boat and contact the police, not risk life and limb five times over on some insane stunt. That may have been the dumbest thing you’ve ever done.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he said. “There’s a lot of competition for that title.”

He made it a point to be funny, but the situation was not all that humorous. They’d been here for three hours, allowed no outside contact, not even with the embassy. Their papers had been confiscated and they hadn’t even been questioned yet. The situation could go either way:
They could be released, or if a pissing match developed, they might not see the outside world for months.