The White Plague (60 page)

“There’re some restrictions on his movements during the day,” Doheny said. “He goes nowhere near the safe-tank down there with Kate and Stephen. Somebody has to be with him at all times. Close watch and alert and keep him on the grounds. Unsafe beyond our perimeters. He’ll understand that.”

“What about the priest and the boy?”

“No restrictions there. I want him to run into them frequently. Is old Moone around?”

Peard glanced at his wristwatch. “He’s in quarters right now.”

“Have him bug O’Neill’s room during the day tomorrow.”

“You’re sure he’s O’Neill?”

“Sure as gold in the bank.”

“If he discovers he’s being bugged, won’t that make him suspicious?”

“Moone knows how to do it. Tell Moone to put a recorder on the bug and let me have the tapes daily.”

“You’re staying?”

“I’m staying. You couldn’t get me away from here.”

Peard’s mouth drew into a tight line. He did not like this development. Peard liked his own little empire, his own powers. Doheny’s presence diluted those powers.

“I want no slip-ups,” Doheny said. “No repetition of Kevin O’Donnell’s stupidities. If this fails, it’s on my shoulders. That being the case, my orders will be followed to the letter and I’m staying to see to that.”

Peard nodded, finding this to be expected. If it failed, Doheny could only blame himself.

“Am I billeted in the same room?” Doheny asked.

“Yes.”

“Come along now,” Doheny said. “Let’s get our rest. Tomorrow’s a busy day.”

“I still have the supply lists to go over,” Peard said.

Doheny smiled, but Peard noticed that the smile went no farther than his mouth.

“Very well, then,” Doheny said. He left the room.

Peard waited for several minutes before picking up the telephone and placing a call to Dublin. When it was answered, he identified himself and said: “I think we have Doheny’s ass.”

Until this plague, it was little appreciated how technology, scientific research and development included, speeds up both success and disaster.

– Samuel B. Velcourt

H
ULS
A
NDERS
B
ERGEN
, not feeling at all like the influential secretary-general of the United Nations, slammed the door of his office and strode across to stop, then leaned with both fists on his desk.

This can’t go on
, he thought.

It was almost dark outside, the end of a foggy spring day in a New York City oddly similar to what it had been for more than fifty years – people hurrying to get off the streets before nightfall. Busy streets at this hour had been a mark of the city for as long as Bergen could recall. He could hear the traffic sounds even at this height.
New York had always been a noisy city at nightfall
, he thought.

Activity still buzzed, too, in the halls and offices outside Bergen’s doors. The UN was a ferment of reports and rumors. The Chinese at Kangsha were not denying that they stood on the edge of an important medical announcement. A brilliant new research team in Brazilian Israel had just that morning made cautious revelation of a cryogenic suspension technique that preserved the life of an infected female indefinitely. The Swiss were reporting “mixed success” with a dangerous chemo-therapeutic approach to the plague.

Trust the Israelis and the Swiss to produce brilliantly unorthodox techniques to meet this problem, Bergen thought. They were alike in this, closing ranks and turning inward for their superb strength.

And what was happening at Huddersfield?

Bergen straightened and flexed the sore muscles of his hands. Bad habit, that, making fists when he was upset.

On top of what had happened this morning in Philadelphia, the British action shutting down all but the most essential communications with the Outside filled Bergen with disquiet. He moved around his desk and seated himself in his fine Danish chair. The traffic sounds were particularly clear in this position.

The differences from BP New York had been mostly accepted, he was told – checkpoints every few blocks, identification scanners, apartment wardens who were supposed to know every occupant by sight. How quickly the outrageous became routine!

Very little partying these days, Bergen knew. More’s the pity. A good relaxing, old-fashioned party was exactly what he needed right now. Take his mind off the problems before him, especially this new one demanding that he make a decision.

Too many unknowns lurked just at the edges of awareness, Bergen thought. Why had Ruckerman been sent to England? Bergen did not buy for a moment the story that an advisor to the President of the United States had been accidentally contaminated. Velcourt was up to something. A canny fellow, Velcourt. Look how quickly he had appeared to jump on the pope’s bandwagon, speaking out against “unbridled science.” Of course, that stand would be reassessed in view of what had just happened in Philadelphia.

Explosion of a gas main followed by an uncontrolled fire – and the pope and nine cardinals were dead. Accident? Bergen thought not. It had the smell of a contrived incident. Too many people were on the streetside rumor mill saying it was God’s judgment for the pope’s attack on scientists. This had been planned and executed by a master assassin with almost unlimited resources. Velcourt’s doing?

Well, the streets were a dangerous place to play that game, as the Soviets had learned to their dismay. Get people used to mobbing up and the many-footed animal could turn against you. Get people accustomed to spreading rumors and the rumor system took on a life of its own. False reports and quack cures were rampant in the streets all over the world, Bergen knew. It required special teams to chase them down and quiet them or… God help them! find that one had been confirmed.

Vinegar baths, for the love of heaven!

There was no doubt at all that the plague was mutating and spreading into animal populations, both feral and tame. Velcourt had said privately that he already was taking actions to preserve certain key species – cattle, pigs, dogs, house cats. Other nations surely were taking similar steps or would be soon. The UN’s “Private Alert” system had spread the word quietly, but it surely would be public knowledge within hours.

What can we do? Will we have to write off all wild species?

Africa was a lost cause. No hope there at all. Some Indian elephants might survive, especially in places like the Berlin Zoological Gardens, which remained intact thanks to the Soviet Union’s Iron Ring buffer zone. The Iron Ring was being hailed as a superb, self-sacrificing Soviet intervention. Bergen shook his head. Only a few years back the Iron Curtain had been generally cursed. Now, the Iron Ring was a boon to mankind.

Bergen leaned his head into his open palms. How scattered his thoughts were! Any diversion at all was welcomed to put off the moment when he had to make his decision. The question was not: Should they try to save the world’s feral populations? It was:
How do we break the news that such an effort is impossible?
The animals of the sea would not survive. Finis the whale. Finis the gentle porpoise. Finis the amusing sea lion. Finis the happy sea otter. Finis, finis, finis!

Wolf, coyote, badger, prairie dog, kulon, panda, civet cat, hedgehog, antelope, deer…

Good God!
he thought.
The deer
.

Bergen had visions of hunters, already bridling at confinement away from their annual forest orgy, reacting to announcement that the deer was finis. And the elk… the bison.

No more Groundhog Day!

The concept “Endangered Species” had become ridiculous. How could he concern himself with tigers, jaguars, leopards and sea cows when man was now among the world’s most endangered species?

If only people could be united to…

Bergen straightened, holding to this thought, sensing something valuable in it. A volunteer project? Contributions? People would laugh at a financial effort to save wild animals. Collecting for such creatures while humans remained in peril! There would be outcry against bleeding hearts. But the wild animals were valuable – to science, to genetics especially, to research. Scientists might be reduced to using only humans as guinea pigs. That carried very nasty overtones in its effects on morality.

Morality, yes.

Bergen thought about the report he had been handed only a half hour ago, the thing that had angered him so deeply. He had known for some weeks that elements close to the centers of power in the U.S. Capitol were fomenting unrest among American Muslims. Rumors of a secret base in the Sudan were rampant. There were stories that Muslims from the Sudan were prepared to launch an infective jihad, breaking out of their confinement to kill infidels with sword and knife… and to kill the women merely by breathing upon them.

What had happened to the old human values?

Bergen felt that he fought a lonely battle to preserve something of the old human values – concern for your neighbor, the Golden Rule.

The report he had been handed before storming into his office had identified the source of the local Muslim unrest. Shiloh Broderick! Bergen had come to look upon Broderick as a satanic figure, the essence of all that must be suppressed that the world might be restored to some semblance of its former order. Broderick’s agents were at work in New York City and in five other key centers, including Philadelphia. The report made this undeniable. Had it been Broderick behind the death of the pope? Bergen was prepared to believe it.

How to save the best of human morality in the face of such men?

Bergen could feel the new surge in plague research. They were on the verge of momentous things. Announcement could come momentarily. The good things from the past had to be preserved!

Save the animals.

He began to see the shape of it then: a rallying cry, a diversion to occupy embattled people and get them past this last bad time until the researchers provided a plague cure. The idea gave Bergen something restorative and opened up an answer to his other problem.

Should the report on Broderick be shared with Velcourt? Bergen was not free of the suspicion that the President might somehow be involved with Shiloh Broderick. They said the two hated each other, but that was an old ploy. Broderick might be a very handy tool to people such as Velcourt. No matter. Knowledge that the secretary-general of the United Nations knew about Broderick’s latest incursion might put a damper on further violence from that source. And Bergen knew he had an upbeat note on which to end the exchange.

Save the animals.

Bergen reached for the red telephone in his desk drawer and had actually touched the phone when a change in the noises outside his office caused him to hesitate. Something crashed out there. He could hear a difference in the human sounds – shouts, distressed cries… some of them cut off abruptly. He removed his hand from the red telephone and stood up, was standing there undecided when his door burst open.

A man in a dark ski mask and carrying a silenced machine gun stood there. The burst of bullets that cut across Bergen’s chest stitched a pattern of holes in the window behind him.

The gunman uttered a wild cry, the last human sound that Bergen’s ears reported: “Imsh Allah!”

O King that was born
To set bondsmen free,
In the coming battle
Help the Gael.

– old Irish prayer

I
T WAS
three horsemen racing along the lough from the south – black movement in the fading light. John saw them at a distance, hearing at the same time the movement of many heavy vehicles on the hills above the Facility. The horses were lathered, he saw, but still responding to the crop. John watched them from a position on the lawn fronting the lough where he had gone to be alone after a harried day. He knew he was not really alone; there were men watching from a doorway behind him. He did not have enough emotion left even to resent this. He felt drained, incapable of any strong movement.

Questions… questions… questions…

There had been hardly a moment this day when someone was not picking at him. And the answers poured from his mouth without conscious volition – another voice, another personality, which acted from within, rising out of an alarming source of independence.

Was it O’Neill-Within?

He could not even be sure of that.

The horsemen were still at some distance but not slackening their pace. John noted that the riders did not look back, which he interpreted as meaning they were not someone’s quarry. The urgency of their movement struck him then. Something about them… He felt the coldness of impending disaster.

The sound of approaching vehicles had grown louder but he could hear the beat of the horses’ hooves now. His chest felt tight. Then he recognized two of the riders –  Oh, God! It was Kevin O’Donnell and Joseph Herity beside him, a stranger close behind. The horses plunged onward against a backdrop of stone-pocked hills, a landscape that darkened by the second as the sun dipped toward the western hills.

Why were Kevin O’Donnell and Joseph Herity coming here… and on horseback? He watched the men gallop past him up the lawn. Herity gave John a devil’s grin as he passed but the others did not even turn. They drew up at the courtyard formed by the two lakeside wings of the building, dropped their reins and strode inside past John’s watchers without a word.

Arrival on horseback: Why should that be threatening?
John wondered. As the sun dropped behind the hills, leaving his world in the long twilight, it grew colder. John shivered. He had been nine weeks here, seeing the slow shift from senseless industry to a new vitality. They had the best equipment in the world, all of it sent in on the free boats via the Finn Sadal, and it was beginning to focus correctly at last. John had felt the excitement all day, another reason he was drained.