Pandemic (The Extinction Files Book 1)

by A. G. Riddle

“Stand by.” The agent in the van muted his headset, presumably to converse with his colleague.

  He unmuted the line and said, “Okay, we could review cam footage from our field units of the cafe off Reichsstraße and the teahouse, look for any individuals in disguise—”

  “Hughes would have thought of that. Remember, he’s smarter than you are. Think outside the box. What’s the one thing you have?”

  The team leader muted his mic again. A minute later, he reactivated it and said, “Sorry, we’ve got nothing here.”

  “You know the identity of someone meeting with Hughes as we speak.”

  “We use our contacts to trace Meyer’s mobile—”

  “Hughes would have thought of that too: Meyer won’t have his phone with him. Think about what you know.”

  “Uhmm…”

  “You know that Meyer is scared. He will have another phone, probably a disposable, and he will have given someone he loves and trusts the number—just in case. You find that person, you get to Garin Meyer. You get to him fast enough, you get Desmond Hughes—and we all live through this. I suggest you hurry, for all of our sakes.”

  In the teahouse bathroom, Garin Meyer had expected to see Desmond Hughes waiting in the stall, but it was empty.

  Garin entered, latched the door, and waited.

  Someone in the next stall slipped a package wrapped in brown paper under the divider. A note on top read:

  Put these on. Pass your clothes under. Wait twenty minutes. Then exit the teahouse and get in the taxi with license plate B FK 281.

  In the package, Garin found a change of clothes, including shoes. He changed quickly in the cramped stall and shoved his own clothes under the partition.

  A moment later, he heard the door to the next stall open. Voices whispered, though he couldn’t make out the words, and the door to the bathroom swung open.

  Twenty minutes later, he rose, exited the teahouse, and got in the taxi. The driver pulled away without asking for a destination.

  At Cafe Einstein in Unter Den Linden, a few blocks from Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, Desmond Hughes sat at an outside table, flipping through a print copy of Die Welt. He still wore the dark sunglasses and the ball cap pulled down to his eyebrows, blending in with the throngs of tourists bustling past. His calm demeanor hid the anticipation swelling inside him.

  As he flipped the pages, a picture caught his eye: a photo of sick Africans stretched out on mats in a large room. Personnel in Tyvek containment suits leaned over them. The headline read:

  Ebola Again?

  He scanned the article. It featured several quotes from a Jonas Becker, a German physician working for the World Health Organization, who had recently been dispatched to Kenya to respond to what looked like an Ebola outbreak. But the name that jumped out at Desmond wasn’t Becker’s—it was Dr. Peyton Shaw. Becker was joining forces with Shaw, whom he had worked with during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It quoted him as saying, “Peyton Shaw is the best disease detective in the world. I’m honored to be working with her and the Kenyan Ministry of Health to stop this outbreak. I’m confident we’ll be successful—just as we were in West Africa a few years ago.”

  Peyton Shaw—she’s the key to all of this, Desmond thought.

  But how? The message in his hotel room had said, Warn Her. Was the outbreak what he was supposed to warn her about? The memory he’d recalled yesterday morning replayed in his mind: the scene where he had walked through a warehouse filled with plastic-wrapped isolation rooms. It was all connected; he was sure of it. The pieces all fit together in some way.

  At that moment, a man wearing a knit cap and large sunglasses stopped before Desmond, towering over him.

  “That was very clever, Desmond.”

  Chapter 16

  Berlin’s Unter Den Linden boulevard was crammed with passersby. They weaved around the tables outside Cafe Einstein as they rushed to the Brandenburg Gate and the attractions in Pariser Platz, taking little note of Desmond and the man standing before him.

  The visitor sat, though he kept his hands out of sight, one under the table, the other in his jacket pocket.

  “Did you kill him?” he asked.

  Desmond slowly lowered the paper copy of Die Welt to the table and leaned back. “What did I tell you on the phone?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “I have a gun pointed at you under this table,” Desmond said. “If you’re not the man I spoke with on the phone, I will shoot you, then I will figure out who sent you, and I will find them and get my answers from them.”

  The man grew very still. “You said to wear a navy peacoat, jeans, sunglasses, and a hat. To hold up a sign that said ‘Looking Glass Tours’ in Pariser Platz.”

  “Where are the clothes?”

  The man swallowed, still visibly nervous. “I slipped them under a bathroom stall in the teahouse.”

  “What’s your name?”

  Confusion crossed the man’s face.

  “Humor me,” Desmond said.

  “Garin Meyer.”

  The night before, and all that morning, Desmond had considered very carefully what he would say to this man. And he had decided to lay it all on the line. He needed answers, and he sensed that time was running out.

  “Garin, yesterday morning, when I woke up in the Concord Hotel, that man was dead in my living room. I had a big bruise on my ribs and a knot on my head, and I don’t remember anything prior to that—who I am, what happened to me, or how he died.”

  Garin shook his head, clearly skeptical. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not. I found a note in my pocket. It led me to your phone number.”

  Garin squinted and glanced away from Desmond, as if contemplating whether he believed him.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Answers. I’m trying to figure out what happened to me.”

  Garin looked incredulous. “You want answers from me?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Because you owe me some answers.” Garin glanced around. “Forget it. I’m done.”

  He began to stand, but Desmond leaned forward and grabbed his forearm. “You said someone was following you. What if it’s the same person who killed Gunter Thorne?”

  That got Garin’s attention.

  “You really want to walk away without hearing what I have to say?”

  Garin exhaled and settled back into the chair.

  “Okay. Good. Let’s start over. How do we know each other? What do you do?”

  “I’m an investigative journalist writing for Der Spiegel. You contacted me a few weeks ago.”

  “Why?”

  “To discuss a story I’d written. It was about multi-national corporations that were possibly colluding with each other on everything from bid-fixing to currency manipulation and unauthorized clinical trials. You said I’d stumbled upon something much bigger, that I’d only seen the tip of the iceberg. You wanted to meet. You promised me the biggest story of my career, ‘possibly the biggest story of all time.’”

  “A story about what?”

  “The Looking Glass.”

  The three words struck fear into Desmond. But try as he might, he couldn’t remember why.

  “What is the Looking Glass?” he asked.

  “According to you, it’s a project that has been going on for over two thousand years. A scientific endeavor on a scale the world has never seen before. You said the greatest scientific minds in history, across generations, had been working on the Looking Glass, and that it was near completion. Your words to me were that it would make the Manhattan Project and the creation of the nuclear bomb look like a middle school science fair exhibit.”

  “The Looking Glass is a weapon?”

  “I don’t know; you never told me. We were supposed to meet four days ago. You were going to tell me everything then, and I was going to write up the story and publish it online. You said it was the only way to stop what was going to happen. Y
ou said they had penetrated all levels of governments around the world, and that exposing them was the only way to stop them.”

  “Stop whom?”

  “Again, I don’t know.”

  “And you have no idea what the Looking Glass is, or does?”

  “I wish I did. You wouldn’t tell me over the phone, only that very soon the scientists building it would use it to take control of the human race, and that it would permanently alter humanity’s future.”

  Desmond couldn’t hide his disappointment. He had woken up this morning expecting to get answers. And so, it seemed, had Garin Meyer. The man had as many questions as Desmond did.

  “Can you tell me anything else? Anything I said, even if you think it might be irrelevant.”

  “Just one other thing. You said there were three components of the Looking Glass: Rook, Rendition, and Rapture.”

  Rapture Therapeutics, Desmond thought. The dead man in his hotel room had been a security worker there. As for Rook and Rendition… he was sure he had seen those words somewhere too, but he couldn’t place them.

  Garin reached into his pocket and drew out a flip phone.

  “I said no phones.”

  “You’re also wanted for murder. This is a disposable I bought just in case there was trouble. Only my fiancée has the number.”

  Garin opened the phone, held it to his ear, and listened a moment, his body growing tense. He spoke in German, quickly, whispering, and Desmond had to focus in order to translate the words in his mind. “Don’t worry, it’s okay. Everything will be okay. I love you. I’ll see you soon.”

  Something was wrong. Desmond glanced around, taking in every face, every car, every motorcycle, his focus sharpened, like an animal on the open prairie that had sensed a predator entering its territory.

  Garin tapped a few keys on the phone.

  “Hand me the phone, Garin.”

  The German reporter swallowed but kept his head down, typing more quickly.

  Desmond reached across the table and grabbed the phone out of Garin’s hands, drawing the attention of several people at tables nearby. The screen was open to the text messages window, where Garin had written a single line:

  Cafe Einstein

  “I’m sorry,” Garin said. “They have my fiancée. They said they’d kill her if I didn’t tell them where we were and keep you here.”

  Over Garin’s shoulder, just down the street, Desmond saw a white cargo van pull away from the curb, its tires screeching, with two motorcycles close behind it. All three vehicles were barreling toward the cafe.

  “I’m sorry too, Garin.”

  Below the table, Desmond pulled the ring igniters on three tactical smoke grenades. Smoke billowed from under the table, pouring into the street. He took the remaining two canisters from his backpack, stood, pulled the ring igniters, and tossed them in opposite directions into the street. The smoke pulled a curtain across the thoroughfare. People shouted and shoved, scrambling to get off the street.

  Desmond tossed Garin’s phone onto the table and ran, covering his mouth with his arm, the handgun held straight down at his side in case they caught up to him. He moved quickly, turning off Unter Den Linden, putting distance between himself and the scene.

  Behind him, he heard tires lock and slide against pavement. Cars collided. The roar of the motorcycles ceased.

  A block over from Unter den Linden, on Mittelstraße, he slipped into the cab he had paid to wait for this very contingency. The Arabic man behind the wheel began driving, whisking him away to the destination Desmond had given him, glancing in the mirror suspiciously.

  Desmond knew he had to get off the streets. If he could make it to the Tränenpalast and onto the boat docked along the River Spree, he might have a chance.

  The taxi turned.

  Desmond never saw the black parcel van that crashed into the driver side, slamming his head into the window.

  His vision went black, and he fought to stay conscious. He pulled the handle on his door and stumbled out. His eyes wouldn’t focus. He reached in his pocket for the gun. He’d have to fight them.

  Boots pounded the pavement: three figures in black body armor, carrying assault rifles. They rushed toward him. He raised the gun, but a hand caught his arm. Another reached around him and covered his mouth with a cloth.

  Slowly, the blackness became complete.

  Chapter 17

  The World Health Organization and Health Canada operate an early warning system for pandemics. The system is called the Global Public Health Information Network, or GPHIN for short, and it has saved countless millions of lives.

  In 2003, GPHIN identified SARS in Hong Kong long before local health agencies knew what was going on. SARS remained a largely regional epidemic instead of a global pandemic thanks to GPHIN and the prescient actions of several health workers, including a doctor who ordered the slaughter of 1.5 million chickens and birds who were likely infected with the virus.

  In 2012, GPHIN again detected warning signs of an outbreak—this time of a respiratory illness in Jordan. The system was again correct, predicting the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus—MERS-CoV—before it went global.

  In a sense, GPHIN is to global pandemics what the seismometer and Richter scale are to earthquakes. Every day, GPHIN collects data from local, state, regional, and national health departments. It also crawls social media and blogs, looking for signs of a new outbreak.

  Hours after Peyton’s team arrived in Kenya, GPHIN identified what could be called a tremor. The data supporting the alert was broad-based, with signals from official and informal sources around the world. The pattern of symptoms was consistent. Around the world, people were getting sick with a mysterious respiratory illness.

  Within minutes, an analyst at Health Canada reviewed the alert and wrote the following memo:

  Respiratory alert Nov-22-A93 is a strong, broad-based signal consistent with an infectious disease being transmitted across continents in a short time span. Pathogen is unknown at this time but is most likely a flu strain, perhaps a new variant. Recommend further monitoring and investigation by local health departments.

  Staff at the WHO’s Global Outbreak and Alert Response Network (GOARN) filed the alert along with others they received from around the world that day.

  Chapter 18

  From his office, Elim watched the soldiers patrol the perimeter. Inside, figures dressed in protective suits roamed the halls. They had spent hours interrogating him, his staff, and his young American patient, Lucas Turner. They were relentless.

  The British patient had died four hours ago. His death was quite messy. The man had been barely conscious since arriving, his fever and fatigue rendering him listless. In his final hours, however, he’d tried to rise from the bed and escape his room, shouting, confused, inconsolable. Elim had begun to suit up to enter the room, but they had stopped him. Instead, the suited team entered the patient’s room. They placed a camcorder on a table in the corner and left without offering help, sealing the room again until the patient fell quiet. Then they marched to their trucks, returned with a body bag, and placed the man inside unceremoniously.

  When the group had first arrived, Elim had thought the hospital was saved. Now he suspected they were all prisoners here, and they would leave the same way the British patient had.

  Chapter 19

  When the Air Force transport plane was two hours away from landing in Nairobi, Peyton again walked to the whiteboard.

  “Listen up. We’ll be landing soon, so let’s go through a couple of procedural guidelines. We still don’t know what this pathogen is. We may not know for another five days, maybe more. We’re going to proceed as if we’re dealing with Ebola.

  “For those working in Nairobi, be in your hotel room at least one hour before sunset. I suggest you eat your meals together, do a head count, and retire to your rooms. Lock the door and wedge something under it. If somebody is missing or late getting back, call them immediately. If they don’t
answer, or if anything sounds amiss, call the US embassy and the EOC. Kidnapping and ransom is a possibility in Kenya.

  “The security situation in the field may be fluid; consult the deployment briefing handout for SOPs and observe any updates from me. A word on food for those in the field: only eat your MREs. The people you’ll encounter are often very hospitable and will likely be extremely grateful for our help. They may offer you food. It may be the only thing they have to offer. And it may well be safe to eat—but you are ordered to decline. Tell them that your supervisor requires you to eat only the government-issued food and that you’re sorry.

  “Any questions?”

  Silence fell over the group for a few seconds, then one woman asked, “Are we doing anything organized for Thanksgiving?”

  The question caught Peyton off guard. She had already forgotten about Thanksgiving.

  “Uh, yeah,” she said. “For those of you in Nairobi, there’s probably something at the US embassy and/or CDC Kenya. I’ll check into details and relay that to your team leaders. We’ll need to arrange security. For the teams in the field with me, we’ll figure something out. Other questions?”

  A Commissioned Corps officer and physician named Phil Stevens spoke up. “Does that mean we’re relaxing the bush meat policy to dine with the natives on Thursday?”

  “Yes, but only for you, Dr. Stevens. The featured dish will be Fruit Bat Meatloaf. I’ve heard it’s to die for.”

  When the laughs subsided, Peyton continued in a more serious tone. “Two pieces of personal advice. If this is one of your first deployments, I would strongly encourage you to call your loved ones when you land. Whoever that is—your spouse, mother, father, siblings—they will be worried about you, no matter what they tell you. Let them know you’re all right and that things aren’t as bad as the movies. Second, a note on entertainment.”

  This line always had the same effect: a majority of the men in the group perked up and began paying attention.

  “Find a good book to read.”