Virus: The Day of Resurrection (16 page)

The disease prevention teams were so busy fighting the battle before them that they did not yet realize the shadow sneaking up behind them. Then, as is often the case with major accidents and terrible tragedies, the danger lurking in the darkness leapt out, and it became too late to stop it in the blink of an eye.

The ferocity of the Tibetan flu raised its head gradually as the northern hemisphere advanced toward its most pleasant season. The days were bright and sunny, the winds were fresh and cold, and the green leaves shone brilliantly. Television transmissions cheerfully raced hither and yon across the globe, and tourists roamed all over the world, visiting Europe and Asia and America and Africa. The large-scale recession in the Western markets had begun to improve suddenly in expectation of expanding trade between the East and West, as the across-the-board arms reductions that were planned for that year at last began to be taken into account. The big news story in April was that the Soviet Union had successfully sent a manned spaceship into lunar orbit. Day after day, the newspapers kept going on and on about the “space heroes.” The president of a developing country in east Africa was assassinated, and the truce in Vietnam was on the verge of being upended by a right-wing coup d’état. May Rosalind, the television actress who starred in
The Biggest in the World
was going through a messy divorce, and in Japan, an article headlined
NEW CAPITAL CITY CORRUPTION
had just lit a fire under the tails of some cabinet members. At the top of the society pages were the usual articles about heinous crimes and traffic accidents, while articles such as “XX Dead of Tibetan Flu” and “Schools Temporarily Close Nationwide” were still only beginning to garner three to five paragraphs. In the family columns, the usual “How to Prevent Colds” articles appeared, and on the second page of the Society section there appeared a spectacularly useless request from the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Tibetan Flu Task Force, entitled “Avoid Crowds When Going Out During Golden Week.”

People still didn’t understand. Even the scientists didn’t realize what was happening.

EARLY SPRING

 1.
America
Fort Meade, Maryland

In an underground room within the towering white walls of the Pentagon, at the Department of Defense, Lieutenant Colonel F—one of the bigwigs from the Defense Information Agency—was listening as one of his subordinates gave a simple report, bringing him up-to-date on the situation during the month he had been away.

“And that’s all I have that relates to China and Asia,” the administrator said, gathering up his papers while speaking in Lieutenant Colonel F’s general direction. “If I may make a blanket statement, we are in a condition of stagnation. The Chinese nuclear weapon experiments show no sign of resumption. We still seem unable to grasp very well the performance factors of Chinese-made jet bombers. In Vietnam, the CIA failed again, and in Macau two CIA operatives have gone missing.”

“And our losses?” Lieutenant Colonel F asked.

“None.”

Lieutenant Colonel F nodded and signed the form in clear, fluorescent ink.

“Next is Europe,” the administrator went on. “Or shall we do Central and South America next?”

“The latter,” said Lieutenant Colonel F.

“The Cuban navy has three submarines, newly put into service. Two are used nuclear subs from the Soviet Union, and the other we’re not so sure about, but it’s new and seems to have been built somewhere in Eastern Europe, though there’s another theory that it might be British-made. We may find out more when the analyses of our high-altitude photographs come in.”

“Blasted limeys!” Lieutenant Colonel F grumbled. “Did you know they sent frogmen down at Portsmouth to check out our nuclear submarine?”

“Ancient history, sir,” the administrator said with a laugh. “In Brazil, we’ve discovered what appears to be the headquarters of a secret military organization made up of a gang of former Nazis. Doesn’t look like a very big deal, though.

Next was Europe. “We seem to have sniffed out a covert military operation of the EEC. The details will have to wait on some number-crunching; the fallout should come around next week’s secret departmental meeting. That assassination in Africa has triggered a string of riots that’s spreading across the eastern coast. Please see Document RU-3670-K for the particulars. In the Middle East, there isn’t anything of note going on aside from a general strike in Syria. According to reports from Ankara, Plan BV8 has been deemed a failure and called off—”

“BV8?” said Lieutenant Colonel F, eyebrows drawing together. Beneath his gray-flecked blond eyebrows, his eyes grew sharp. “The army one?”

“The deal appears to have failed,” said the administrator. “The go-between apparently never showed up.”

“Hold on a second.” Lieutenant Colonel F thought for a moment. “I’d like to hear a detailed account of what went wrong. Those spooks at the CIA couldn’t have made off with it?”

“Such a thing could not have—” the administrator started to say but then shrugged. “No, I don’t know.”

“BV8 …” Lieutenant Colonel F chewed on his mustache for a moment. “I have a bit of a connection to that one. Any other reports?”

“None, sir.”

“Very well.”

After the administrator had signed off on the report and left the room, Lieutenant Colonel F picked up the telephone receiver. “Get me Stanton,” he said.

Moments later, the man he wanted to talk to picked up.

“Stanton? It’s me. I just heard the report. You say BV8 failed? Can you tell me all about it? You probably know, but I was in the meeting back then too. I was the one who recommended Dr. Meyer from the army lab. We’re close, personally.”

Lieutenant Colonel F heard a violent fit of coughing erupt on the other end of the line.

“Stanton …” Lieutenant Colonel F said, frowning. “Have you caught that horrible flu too? Didn’t you get vacci—oh, you did, but it didn’t work? Well then, never mind. Don’t come in here to report. Don’t want you spreading germs all around. Send me a full report later—a
well
-sanitized report.”

There was a knock at the door, and a young clerk came in. She had just said, “Lieutenant Colonel, about the meeting this afternoon—” when she sneezed. Grabbing the edge of the table and staring down at it, F saw the white compress wrapped tightly around her neck, her watery eyes, and reddish blossoms of fever beginning to bloom in her cheeks.

“Hold it right there!” the lieutenant colonel shouted. “Turn your head away from me to speak, and don’t exhale into this room!”

“But, Lieutenant Colonel, the paperwork …” The clerk spoke in a hoarse voice and with a stuffy nose. When she coughed again, it sounded rather painful. She turned sideways and blew her runny nose into a pink handkerchief. When she finally turned to face him, her nose was shining a brighter red than her hair, and tears were welling up in her eyes.

“Just how high a fever are you running?” Lieutenant Colonel F asked with the expression of one who had just bitten down on something bitter. “How about going home, soaking your feet in hot water and mustard oil, and getting some sleep? That’ll do more for national defense than—”

“But, Lieutenant Colonel, everyone is sick and there are a lot of absences …” She gave a tearful sneeze. “Ah, I need to get out of here. This flu is really nasty and it lasts forever. I … this is hard … I want to take off work, but …”

“It’s all right, Ms. Connelly,” the lieutenant colonel said, at last softening his tone. “Leave the papers here and go. Honestly, with the flu going around like this, the Department of Defense and its duty to defend the country are being compromised.”

When the clerk shut the door, Lieutenant Colonel F’s right index finger suddenly shot to the bottom of his nose. For a long moment, he didn’t move a muscle, but when he finally, carefully pulled his finger away, a huge sneeze erupted as though it had been waiting for the chance.

Lieutenant Colonel F unconsciously crossed himself as he swore.

New York, East 55th Street, Saint Regis Hotel

There was a soft knock at the door of a quite luxurious two-room suite. A rather pear-shaped man opened the door, admitting an absurdly huge man whose long face somehow resembled that of a horse.

“How about our departure?” asked the horse-faced guest as he tossed aside his hat.

“Flying out of La Guardia at nine o’clock.”

“We’ve got three hours, then.”

“Take off your coat,” the fat man said, making for a bottle of wine on the table. “Have a drink. This room isn’t bugged.”

“Who can really guarantee that kind of thing? Almost every room in the Soviet embassy in Warsaw was bugged.”

The fat man smirked and handed his visitor a glass.

“Ciao!”

“Here’s mud in your eye!”

The two drank. The fat man sneezed, blowing out a little of his wine.

“You picked up a bug yourself in the Middle East, did you?” the visitor said with a laugh.

“In Armenia, actually,” said the fat man, covering his face a little with his hands. “How was Vietnam?”

“A lot worse than catching a cold,” said the horse-faced man, frowning. “Since at any rate, the coup d’état failed. The director was furious. The boss was replaced, and I’m headed to Africa come next month.”

The suite’s occupant shrugged his shoulders. “I missed out on getting my bonus too.”

“You said you were competing with some guy from the DoD in Turkey?”

“And he got ahead of me,” the fat man said, waving his cup around quickly as he grew red in the face. “There were a lot of things the CIA’s Middle Eastern arm wasn’t told. Over there, the course of political turmoil in the United Arab Republic comes before my deal …”

“Deal?”

“Yeah. The DIA was asked by some army brass to sound out that spy ring and see if it might be possible to get a certain item.”

“What kind of item?” asked the horse-faced man as he poured soda into his second drink. Seven tenths bourbon, with just a dash of soda. “Not intel on nuclear missiles, surely. Not at a time of across-the-board reduction and denuclearization.”

“’Across-the-board arms reduction?’ ” said the fat man, looking up at him with eyes that had been red even before he’d started drinking. “Bill … do you think such a thing is really possible?”

“The president is serious about it,” Bill said, shrugging. “Demilitarization, eh? Wonder what all the big companies and the soldiers who get laid off intend to do. Even we ought to think about it …”

“That
cannot be done
,” the man said, slapping his knee. “The president is a Red. He’s going along with the Soviets’ strategy.”

“Watch what you say now, Brett.”

“It can’t be done, I tell you. There have been presidents before him who said pie-in-the-sky kinds of things like that, but they couldn’t pull it off, now could they?”

“What’re you getting at?”

“The director’s against it too. As are a lot of the brass at the State Department and the Defense Department. The Senate’s the same. The Joint Chiefs are furious. It can’t be done, Bill.
We
absolutely cannot allow it. For example, Texa—”

“Brett,” Bill said with equestrian severity. “You’re being way too careless with your words!”

“Aw, who cares? Oh yeah, what were we just talking about?”

“What you were trying to get with your deal.”

“Oh yeah, that.” The fat man called Brett chuckled to himself. “But first, what country do you think the stolen intel came from?”

“Czechoslovakia?”

“No, Great Britain!” Brett said, chuckling some more. “I’ve got a lot of friends in MI6. We’ve even worked together on occasion. I’d love to have seen their faces.”

“What was the item?”

“Now, now, wait just a minute. We knew from the start that the DIA guys were on the move, but we didn’t know what it was they were after. But once a certain individual came over from the continental US and started working with them, we had a pretty good idea of what was going on.”

“Who was it?”

“Research doctor by the name of Meyer,” Brett said with a wink. “A scientist from Fort Detrick.”

Bill whistled at that. “Germs, then?”

“Oh yeah. The British army’s germ warfare lab in Porton Down. We’d gotten information ourselves—by way of the Soviets—that the Brits were apparently onto something huge. But from where the army stood, there was a bit of a reason for them to be so crazy to get it. You see, the original strain of the germ or virus or whatever it was was one that was stolen from our side at Fort Detrick.”

“Well, how about that.”

“I heard about it from a good friend at the FBI. Originally—get this—it came from Brooks Aerospace Medical Center, where they had some weird germs or something that had been collected in space.”

“Ah, the ones that grew like crazy? That they couldn’t figure out how to dispose of?”

“That’s right. Apparently, they had been studying those, those whatchamajiggers at Fort Detrick, but a little more than a year ago, they were stolen. They followed the buyers, and the trail led to Porton Down.”

Brett sneezed again.

“And then?” Bill asked, pouring himself a third drink.

“The bargaining stage seems to have been going well at first, but along the way, the other side raised its price. While the DIA was dithering, the seller approached us.”