The White Plague (45 page)

“They… they call me DA, sir.” He sat facing Velcourt.

“DA, is it?” Velcourt looked up at Turkwood. “You can leave us alone, Charlie. DA looks harmless to me.”

Turkwood left, but there was reluctance in every movement. He spoke from the doorway before closing the door. “You have that nine-fifteen appointment, sir. The phone conference.”

“I’ll be right here, Charlie.”

He waited for the door to close, then: “They’ve been pretty rough on you this morning, eh, DA?”

“Well… it was a stupid thing for me to do, sir.” David Archer sounded brighter once Turkwood was gone.

“Do you want to tell me how you got access to the satellite code, DA?”

Archer looked at the floor and remained silent.

“Before you tell me, DA,” Velcourt said, “I want you to know that you’re back on my staff and I have a promotion in mind for you.”

Archer lifted his chin and looked at Velcourt with an expression of incredulous hope.

His voice warm, Velcourt asked: “How’d you do it?”

“It was fairly simple, sir.” Archer took on an eager expression as he warmed to his explanation. “I could see by the transmittals that it was ninety numbers and a random scrambler. I just programmed a random hunt with a confirming feedback. At off-hours I had the random hunt poking at the satellite channels. It only took about a month.”

Velcourt stared back at the younger man. “You cracked it in a month?”

“My program was self-correcting, sir.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It seeks out its own internal channels to make the job easier. I made a ripple response confirming each correct bit in the code series and the program just made notes, ninety numbers at a time. Our system’s fast, sir. I checked about a million different series every minute.”

Velcourt felt that he had just heard something profoundly important but he couldn’t put his finger on it. “They told me that code was unbreakable, DA.”

“No code’s unbreakable, sir.” He gulped. “And you know there are other people sending private messages. I thought it would be all right. I wasn’t using the channels when there was official traffic.”

“What other people?”

“Well, Doctor Ruckerman, for one. He talks to somebody named Beckett at Huddersfield.”

“Oh, that’s official. Ruckerman’s on Saddler’s staff – science advisors.”

“But he doesn’t log them, sir.”

“Probably too busy. Who else uses the system for personal communications?”

“I don’t want to rat on people, sir.”

“I sympathize. But you don’t think you just ratted on Ruckerman, do you?”

“Well, he is calling Huddersfield.”

“Right! The rest of the calls are probably just as innocuous. I’d like to know who they are, though.”

“Mister Turkwood, sir. And Ruckerman calls his family out in the Sonoma Reserve. It’s always things like that, sir – people calling family or friends.”

“I’m sure you’re right. I’d like you to make me a list of the names, though, and leave it with my secretary. Sign it with your new title: director of White House communications.”

Archer had the good sense to know when he had been dismissed. There was a wide grin on his face as he stood. “Director of White House communications, sir?”

“That’s right. And your job’s a tough one. You are to make sure that when I send out a field order, it goes to the proper person, that it’s confirmed, and that action is taken according to my order.”

Velcourt recalled that conversation with pleasure as he looked out at the gathering dusk. It was one of the few pleasures in an otherwise unpleasant day. Even as he sat here staring with bloodshot eyes out the window, he knew Soviet bombers were diving once more across Istanbul. Satellite observation had detected a vehicle moving near the Stamboul end of the shattered Galata Bridge – whether shifted by some natural cause or driven by human hands the satellite could not determine. So the rubble would be stirred once more, the Golden Horn rocked by tactical nukes, with Beyoglu and Oskudar getting an additional burning to make sure.

How long has it been since I slept, really slept?
Velcourt wondered. He could understand how this office had killed Prescott so quickly.

After Archer, there had been the phone conference with the Russians, the French and the Chinese, then the briefing by Ruckerman and Saddler. Ruckerman had passed off the unlogged calls with a wave of the hand. Too damned much red tape! Velcourt had liked this response, but his mind still whirled with the briefing.

What the hell did Ruckerman mean when he said O’Neill must have found a way to produce Poly G in quantity? What the hell was Poly G? Their explanations had only clouded his mind.

And Saddler sitting there, shaking his head and saying that, given other circumstances, O’Neill surely would have qualified for a Nobel!

Sweet Jesus! A molecular biologist goes mad and sets the world on its ear.

Saddler and Ruckerman had sat right here in this office arguing, Saddler demanding: “And where would he get the natural DNA to induce polymerization?”

“Obviously, he found a way!”

What the hell had that meant?

“Then how did he make his DNA biologically active?” Saddler had asked.

Velcourt had a memory that could replay such conversations word for word, but replay did not clarify what he had heard.

“Remember he was a pharmacist also,” Ruckerman had said.

Pharmacist. Velcourt knew what that was. He cursed the fact that he had not seen fit to take more science courses in the university. Gobbledygook!

“It’s fantastic!” Saddler had said. “This man was capable of dealing with polymers at the most delicate level.”

“And don’t forget,” Ruckerman had admonished, “he found the placement sites, controlling the precise order in which the monomers were arranged. And we’re talking about giant molecules.”

“Listen,” Saddler had said, “we have to find that man and keep him alive. God! The information in his head!”

Considering the provocation, Velcourt thought his interruption mild. “Would you two gentlemen mind including me in your discussion? You’re supposed to be briefing the President.”

“Sorry, sir,” Saddler said. “But both of us are more than a little awed by how O’Neill obviously handled the peptide-bond formations in –”

“What in the hell is a peptide bond?”

Saddler looked at Ruckerman, who said: “It’s a basic linkage in the DNA helix, Mister President. It proceeds much like a zipper, starting with amino acid valine at one end of the chain, closing bond after bond until the protein molecule is completed.”

“I understand about one fourth of what you just said,” Velcourt said. “Which means I don’t understand a damn thing!” They heard the frustration and anger in his voice.

Ruckerman frowned. “Sir, O’Neill tailored a special virus, perhaps more than one.”

“Certainly more than one!” Saddler said.

“Most likely,” Ruckerman agreed. “He created it to infect certain bacteria. When a bacterial virus infects bacteria, an RNA is formed that resembles the virus DNA and not that of the host. The sequence of the nucleotides in the new DNA molecule is complementary to that of the DNA in the virus.”

Saddler, seeing the angry glint in Velcourt’s eyes, held up a hand. “Sir, O’Neill identified the genetic message in humans that directs that the fetus will become a female. He formed a disease that bonds itself to that message.”

That, Velcourt understood. He nodded.

“Huddersfield confirms that there are no asymptomatic carriers of this plague,” Ruckerman added.

“It infects men and doesn’t kill them, is that what you mean?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then why the hell didn’t you say so?” Velcourt drew in a deep breath to calm himself. Damn these bastards with their gobbledygook! “What’re the symptoms in men?” he asked.

“We’re not sure yet, sir,” Saddler said. “Perhaps no worse than a bad cold.” He emitted a nervous laugh.

“I don’t think this is a subject for humor,” Velcourt said.

“No, sir! No, sir, it isn’t.”

Ruckerman said: “The disease either masks or changes that sex-differentiation pattern in a lethal manner.”

“How could he know it’d do that?” Velcourt asked.

“We don’t know how he tested it. We don’t know a great many things about it, but we’re beginning to define a pattern,” Ruckerman said.

“What pattern and how does it work?”

“I’m talking about the pattern of O’Neill’s research, sir,” Ruckerman said. “We know something about his original laboratory… before he went to Seattle. There were friends who visited him there. We know he had a computer.”

“His chemical techniques must’ve been virtually flawless,” Saddler said. “For example, he would’ve had to use bacterial enzymes derived we know not how, but we are forced to keep reminding ourselves that he had been at his DNA researches for about five years preceding the tragedy in Ireland.”

Velcourt looked from one man to the other. “What kind of rotten fate would put such a unique man in the path of that kind of motivation?”

“The Bechtel people have run an analysis,” Saddler said. “They say it was bound to happen sometime – sooner or later. O’Neill wasn’t all that unique.”

Velcourt was aghast. “You mean anyone could have done this terrible thing?”

“Not just anyone,” Ruckerman said. “But a growing number of people. The increasing spread of knowledge about how it was done, that and the simplification of techniques plus the availability of sophisticated equipment to anyone with the money…” He shrugged. “Inevitable, given the kind of world we live in.”

“Inevitable?”

Ruckerman said: “Consider his original laboratory, especially that computer. He must’ve stored chemical fractions for later use. Any good lab would. And he’d use his computer for cataloguing and analysis. No doubt of it.”

“He had no difficulty getting antibiotics, of course,” Saddler said. “He took them off his own shelves when he sold the pharmacy.”

“The antibiotics to which his plague is immune,” Velcourt said. That part he remembered from earlier briefings when Prescott was still alive.

“Analysis of the equipment he is known to have used,” Ruckerman said, “tells us he employed a delicate play of chemical kinetics to achieve his results.”

“There you go again!” Velcourt snapped.

“Sir,” Ruckerman said, “he used temperature control and enzyme cutting techniques at various stages, heat as a driving energy or lack of it as a brake.”

“He used X-ray, temperature and chemical processes,” Saddler said.

“We have a list of the publications to which he subscribed,” Ruckerman said. “It’s clear he was very familiar with the work of Kendrew and Perutz. He wrote notes in the margin of one publication on the enzymic dissecting techniques of Bergman and Fruton.”

Velcourt recognized none of these names, but he heard the awe in Ruckerman’s voice. There was also something on which a politician could focus.

“You have a publication that he used?”

“Just one. He had loaned it to a student and the student forgot to return it.”

“This O’Neill sounds like a complete laboratory team all in one man,” Velcourt said.

“He was multi-talented, no doubt of that,” Saddler agreed. “Had to be to crack that code all by himself.”

Ruckerman said: “The psychological profile suggests that some of his talents may have lain dormant until released by the driving passion ignited when his family was killed.”

Saddler said: “Milton Dressier is now insisting that O’Neill was at least a latent schizoid and was driven into this genius mode by access to a different personality that lay dormant until that bombing in Ireland.”

Velcourt had heard of Dressier – the psychoanalyst in charge of the Profile Team. The President said: “He went nuts, and the nut was the one who was capable of doing this.”

“In a nutshell,” Saddler said.

All three of them joined in a nervous laugh. Saddler and the President stared at each other afterward, abashed.

Velcourt had little time to review the briefing after the men left. Something they said, though, nagged at him. Something about breaking a code.

As the day’s fatigue threatened to overwhelm him, he tried to recapture that elusive something. It was full dark outside by now and the lights of the Capitol bright against a cloudy sky.

I’ll think about it tomorrow
, he thought.

Do not cry that I have been unfair, you Irish and English and Libyans. You chose your leaders or tolerated them. The consequences were predictable. You pay now for the failure of reason. You Irish, at least, should have known better. Like a one-crop society, you staked your survival on violence. Is the lesson of the potato blight grown so dim? As you sow, so shall you reap.

– John Roe O’Neill, Letter Three

I
T NO
longer bothered John that he was forced to leave the vicinity of McCrae’s château without spreading the plague there. He knew now that he was being saved for more important things at the Killaloe Lab. Nemesis remained true. Jock had saved him from a terrible error. Herity was confused. Had John merely been stumbling about blindly in the dark outside the telephone hut?

By his intervention, Jock had also revealed Herity’s purpose. Herity was looking for O’Neill.

This amused John. With Herity nearby, O’Neill-Within would never reveal himself. John Roe O’Neill lay subdued, blocked by a fear-anesthesia. The nightmare screams were temporarily walled off. John O’Donnell could stride along with his three companions, swinging his arms freely. He felt liberated.

Jock Cullen and four armed soldiers escorted them two miles down the hill away from the château before returning their weapons. Herity checked his machine gun carefully, then looped its supporting strap around his neck. John merely slipped the pistol and ammunition into a hip pocket and pulled the yellow sweater over it.

They parted at a crossroads where a signpost still pointed the way to Dublin. Jock gestured to the sign with the rifle: “You know the way. Don’t come back.”

The consequences of disobedience did not have to be spoken. The escort turned and marched back up the hill, leaving John and his companions in the stone-bordered roadway. There were tall pines all around, but meadows could be glimpsed ahead where the road led down off the ridges.