The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  “It’s a virus,” she said. “It spreads like the common cold: by contact with tiny droplets of mucus floating in the air or touching the eyelids, or by contact with infective blood. It can be dried into a powder and it can get into the air, so it may also be infective through the lungs. It’s neuroinvasive—that means it travels along the nerve fibers and invades the central nervous system. It replicates in the brain. It amplifies explosively in the brain. It kills in about two days, so it has a very fast replication phase, as fast as anything I’ve ever seen. The virus makes crystals in brain cells. The crystals form in the center of the cell, in the cell’s nucleus. It damages the brain stem, the areas that control emotion and violence and feeding. The virus causes people to attack themselves and to eat their own flesh. It is not…natural.”

  “This is wild speculation,” Mellis said.

  “Come on, Walt, you started it when you talked to me about stealth viruses,” Austen said.

  “I’m thinking about the Unsub,” Masaccio said. Unsub is Bureau jargon for “Unknown Subject”—the unknown perpetrator of the crime. “Is this a group or a loner?” Nobody could answer his questions.

  “Dr. Austen, one thing I have to ask: are you personally contagious?”

  “Please don’t take me off this case.”

  Masaccio grunted. “Hm…so we could go postal if we’ve been chatting with you? What a thought.” He rolled a large gold class ring on his finger and made a sucking sound with his teeth. He stood up and crossed to the window, which looked north, toward midtown and the Empire State Building. He put his hands in his pockets. “Self-cannibalism, spreading through New York like the common cold.” He turned around and faced them. “I don’t have a single goddamned space suit in this office!”

  “The fire department has protective suits,” Lex Nathanson said.

  “So what can the New York City Fire Department do with a brain virus, Lex? Pour some water on it?”

  “I have to inform the director of C.D.C.,” Mellis said.

  Frank Masaccio hung up, then turned toward Nathanson and Austen. “I’m taking this to our National Security Division. The head of the N.S.D. is a guy named Steven Wyzinski.” He punched up another string of numbers. Wyzinski returned the call immediately, and they spoke quietly for a minute or two.

  “Steve wants to do a SIOC calldown,” Masaccio said. “Can anyone tell me why bad things always happen on Saturday night? You can’t find anybody in Washington on a Saturday night.”

  “What is a—calldown?” Austen asked.

  “A SIOC calldown.” He pronouced it Sy-ock. “That’s a meeting of experts and federal people at F.B.I. headquarters. SIOC means Strategic—ah—Strategic—huh. Jesus, I can’t remember. Alzheimer’s must be setting in. It’s the F.B.I.’s command center in Washington. You’ll go. Lex and I are going to stay here in New York and get the ball rolling locally. The mayor’s office has to be brought into this. I’m going to start lining up a joint task force with the police department—that’s an asset. The fire department could be an asset—I’m trying to see the end of this…”

  Austen watched him. What she saw was a very bright man working out the opening moves of a chess defense. The problem was that the unknown opponent was in control of the game.

  Archimedes

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 25

  ARCHIMEDES OF SYRACUSE, the great mathematician and weaponeer who died in 212 B.C., designed glass lenses or mirrors that focused sunlight on enemy ships and set them on fire. He understood the principle of the lever and the fulcrum, the idea that one can place a long lever on a fulcrum and use it to move a giant mass. “Give me only a place to stand, and I can move the world,” Archimedes said.

  Archimedes liked to ride the subway. He could ride for hours, thinking about things, planning. He sat in the cars looking at people from behind his metal-framed eyeglasses, a faint smile playing across his face now and again. He was a prematurely balding man of medium height. Usually he wore a tan cotton shirt and loose, natural-fiber trousers, and sneakers made of canvas and rubber. The clothes were simple but actually quite expensive. He had reasonably friendly feelings toward most people, and it made him feel bad that some of them would have to go.

  The subway was the bloodstream of the city, with connections that ran everywhere. Archimedes liked to study connections. He stood on a platform in Times Square, watching the trains go by. Then he took the shuttle across midtown Manhattan to Grand Central Terminal. He walked briskly through the station, moving among the crowds, listening to their footsteps, looking at the golden constellations overhead in the vaulted space, beautiful Orion the Hunter. He thought of the tracks that go out of Grand Central into the world. People were always talking about viruses from the rain forest that would find their way to modern cities and infect the inhabitants. But it works the other way around, too, he thought. Diseases that emerge from New York City can spread out and reach the humans who live in the rain forest. There are more connections from New York City to the rest of the world than from any other city on earth. Something can explode from here to go everywhere on the planet.

  He walked west a few blocks to the New York Public Library, and he circled around it and sat down on a bench in Bryant Park, among lawns and London plane trees and, of course, people. Too many of them. He sat on a bench and watched them pass before his eyes, the temporary biological creatures whose lives would not be remembered and who would vanish in the reach of deep time. He looked up at the library, the repository of human knowledge. They are not going to understand my optimism and my hope, he thought. But I think we can be saved. I hold the lever in my hands.

  Dash

  SUNDAY, APRIL 26

  BEFORE DAWN, a New York City police car took Alice Austen from Kips Bay to the East Side Heliport at Thirty-fourth Street. It parked near the landing platform as a Bell turbo helicopter operated by the F.B.I. came down the East River at full power. The helicopter drew up sharply and landed on the platform. Austen ran for it.

  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 a
re 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. “SIOC? 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.

  SIOC

  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 SIOC 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 SIOC. 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.