Red Tide

by G. M. Ford

  A squeaky floorboard chirped under his feet as he crossed the living room and made his way to the kitchen. He could hear the girls chattering on the phones as he poured himself a glass of milk. He considered and then rejected the idea of poking his head in to say goodnight. In his mind’s eye he could see the anguished looks they threw at the door these days, aghast that their privacy had been compromised by anything so trivial as a heartfelt greeting. Pleeeeeeease.

  Jim turned out the kitchen light on his way to bed.

  18

  A hundred feet up, the maze of skeletal oak branches churned in the wind like ghostly dancers. Now and again their undulations were accompanied by a mournful creak from somewhere deep in the trunk, where its centuries-old essence stood rooted in a narrow strip of grass that separated the sidewalk from the street.

  The clouds had blown north, leaving a desultory moon to compete for the sky. A fierce rush of wind stirred the highest branches, sending tiny bits of tree debris ticking and pinging down onto the cars parked below. Then, just as quickly, the wind stilled, leaving her alone on the street, listening to nothing more than the soft pad of her feet on the sidewalk as she moved along.

  Meg Dougherty pulled open her front gate, stepped inside and then used the all-too-familiar loop of wire to hold it closed. As she had done every day for the past several weeks, she reminded herself to buy a new latch and then inwardly smiled as she remembered how long she’d been reminding herself. She was working on exactly whom she was going to rope into helping her put it on when the welcome sight of her own front door separated her from the thought, leaving her with nothing more than a sense of relief and an intense desire to crawl into bed and pull the covers over her head. She heaved a sigh of relief and let herself into the small foyer separating the house from the street.

  She stopped in the foyer, sat down on the little antique bench and brushed off the soles of her bare feet. Then she stood and hiked her dress up over her hips, peeled the shredded pantyhose down and threw them onto the floor in a heap. She went inside, dropped her purse on the coffee table and was headed for the stairs when she noticed the strip of light coming from beneath the kitchen door. She shook her head disgustedly and chided herself again for being such a space case. She straight-armed the swinging kitchen door, sending it inward, bouncing it gently off the wall and then back onto her shoulder as she reached into the kitchen and flipped off the forgotten light.

  She turned away and took two steps toward the stairs, when the taste in her mouth told her she wanted a drink before going to bed. Something cold and wet. She crossed the darkened kitchen, trying to recall what she had in the fridge. Last week’s orange juice or maybe some more recent iced tea. She couldn’t remember.

  As she reached for the handle, her right foot slipped on the floor. She steadied herself, lifted her foot slightly and realized she was standing in a pool of something…something cold and sticky that clung to the bottoms of her feet like syrup. She stood on one foot and opened the refrigerator, sending a weak shaft of light cascading across the checkerboard floor, illuminating the room just enough to make out the dark oblong pool spread out across the floor…not coming from the refrigerator as she had feared. Her eyes followed the pool…coming from over by the back door. Over by the…was it…was that…that thing laughing?

  Her legs turned to jelly. A hoarse cry escaped her throat. She tried to run from the room, only to slip and fall heavily on her side, rolling now in the sticky pool of liquid as she struggled to regain her feet. A high keening sound escaped from her chest as she crabbed across the linoleum on her hands and knees. “Oh God. Oh God,” she chanted as she burst from the room and staggered back out the front door, out onto the walk, back through the gate into the street, where she turned toward the house, her face a mask of terror, her hands balled into fists, ready to fight for her life.

  Nothing moved. Only the sound of the wind in the trees and her own lungs gasping the night air. She stood for a long moment. Waiting. For what she didn’t know. Until she recovered some part of her senses and began to pat herself down, looking for her cell phone and then realizing it was in her purse. On the coffee table. In the house. She shuddered.

  She looked around; the street was empty and, after another moment, when nothing moved and no sound reached her ears, she began to wonder about herself. Had she made it up? At the end of a long and difficult day, had she taken some odd configuration of light and shadow and mentally turned it into something hideous…some bloodless husk staring, mouth agape, at her kitchen ceiling?

  Tears filled her eyes. She began to snuffle as she considered the possibility that her senses might have betrayed her. That she was sufficiently overwrought to have freaked herself out over nothing more than…nothing more than…what?

  She approached the house again. Mounted the single stair and went directly to her purse where she grabbed the cell phone and quickly flipped it on. She started to dial…got as far as nine-one…and stopped. What if she was wrong? What if she called the cops and it turned out to be nothing more than her imagination?

  Slowly, she walked to the kitchen door, pushed it open far enough to admit her arm and snapped on the overhead light. She pulled her arm back and stood and watched as the door wiggled to a stop, then took a deep breath and pushed it open again.

  Her eyes were first drawn to the light switch and the smear of red she’d left on the wall. Then to the floor in front of the refrigerator where a pool of thick, nearly black liquid lay painted in places where she’d fallen in it. And finally her eyes moved to the far side of the room, to the kneeling figure.

  She didn’t recognize him at first. Couldn’t pull her eyes from the wet collection of severed cords and tubes and muscle tissue that she’d mistaken for his gaping mouth. Wasn’t until she came to grips with the fact that his nearly decapitated head, held in place by a single strand of tissue, was resting upside down on his back that her eyes traced the profile and her brain was able to process the data. Brian Bohannon.

  19

  “It’s inert,” the man said.

  His name was Preston Novac, and, although his deep tan and rugged good looks spoke of a vigorous outdoor life, truth was he spent nearly all of his time in laboratories squinting into microscopes. The good looks were the product of three generations of Ivy League genes. The tan was accomplished during lunch hours, under the same lights they employed to grow viruses. Preston Novak was chief epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. His area of expertise was what they called “special pathogens.” New germs. Invented germs.

  “How can that be?” Hans Belder wanted to know. “It has been…not even twenty-four hours since…”

  “Its timing sequence has been altered,” Preston Novac said. His words hung in the air.

  “Systemically?”

  “On the protein level.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Somebody with a great deal of expertise went to a great deal of trouble.”

  Novac reached into his pants pocket and came out with half a dozen photographs, which he dropped onto the table in front of the TV monitor. The prospect of something new to look at roused the room. They’d been up most of the night. Run the tape from the tunnel at least a dozen times. Only Belder and Harlan Sykes had availed themselves of the couches in the room next door and taken naps. With the exception of Mike Morningway, who was up at Harborview looking after the real Colin Taylor, everybody else was still up, wrinkled and baggy-eyed, living on Starbucks and waiting for the CDC to pronounce judgment on whether life, as they knew it, had come to an end.

  Belder used his spatulate thumbs to separate the photos. Everyone in the room shuffled forward for a look. Taken through a microscope, the photos showed what appeared to be a haphazard collection of threads; many were separate and distinct, others interwoven with one another…nearly all were curved at the extremities like a shepherd’s crook.

  “Magnified seventeen thousand times,” Novac said. “There’s n
o question about it. It’s either Ebola Zaire or Ebola Reston.” He made a face. “In the best of times, it’s hard to tell them apart. With all the genetic manipulation we’ve got going on here, we’ll probably never know for sure.”

  Belder pointed at a spiny-looking aberration in the top picture. “And this?”

  “An airborne pollen spore of some sort. Something in the immediate vicinity of ragweed, we think.” Novac used a finger to point. “Looks as if someone used the spore as both a host and a delivery system. Something to keep the virus alive but dormant. They freeze-dried the spore so it would be even lighter and more aerodynamic and then piggybacked the virus onto the spore so that the virus could be assimilated through the nose and lungs.”

  “So that something like hemorrhagic fever would no longer require direct human fluid contact in order to be spread,” the mayor threw in.

  “Exactly,” Novac said. “Once the virus discovers lungs, you can get it out of the air. All it would take is someone to cough or sneeze in your face.”

  Belder shook his shaggy head. “Which…for all intents and purposes, is the equivalent of being able to contract AIDS over the telephone.”

  The analogy brought the buzz of conversation to a sudden halt.

  “You realize what you’re implying here,” Colonel Hines said.

  “Of course,” Novac said. “This wasn’t accomplished in anybody’s garage. There aren’t more than a dozen scientists in the world who could pull off something like this.” He made a backhand gesture at the photographs. “This wasn’t guesswork. These people had the genome for this virus.” He looked around the room. “This isn’t the work of some backwater terrorist. This is the work of nations.”

  “But why?” Belder asked incredulously. “Why would anyone go to such expense to create a virus whose effects last only a matter of moments. If one were trying to create a weapon…something that could be used…”

  “I think what you see here is an experiment gone wrong,” Novac interrupted. He looked around the room. “And quite possibly the first piece of clinical evidence that the Walsdorf Conjecture may actually be true.”

  Helen Stafford read the dazed facial expressions and jumped in. “The Walsdorf Conjecture is an idea that’s been bouncing around the genetic engineering community for the past ten years or so,” she said. When no one else picked up the thread, she went on. “One of the difficulties in altering genes has always been that one invariably produces a series of effects in addition to the effects one is seeking.”

  “It suggests that genes are linked laterally in addition to sequentially,” Hines said. “That there’s an underlying connection we don’t yet understand.”

  Belder got to his feet. “Johan Walsdorf suggested that certain aspects of a gene are tied together at the protein level and that to alter any one of these aspects is to unwittingly alter all other similar aspects.”

  “For instance,” Novac said, “if one were to alter the genes of a tomato plant…trying to…say…increase the plant’s tolerance to cold…”

  “Which has already been done,” Stafford said.

  Novac nodded his agreement and said, “What they found was that when they altered the lower end of the plant’s temperature sensitivity they also unwittingly altered the upper end of the scale. That to make the plant more resistant to cold was to make it less resistant to heat.”

  Belder ran a liver-spotted hand through his hair. “What Mr. Novac is suggesting is that whoever altered this virus was probably attempting to substantially reduce the incubation period…which is usually from seven to twenty days…”—he waved a hand—“to a matter of seconds…and what they unwittingly got in return was a drastic reduction in the life cycle as well.”

  “A virus that attacks immediately and then dies immediately,” Colonel Himes added. “A tactical germ, as it were. Something that kills who you want, when you want, without rendering the terrain uninhabitable.”

  “Which means…” Ben Gardener began, “all the people we’ve got up at Harborview are going to be okay.”

  Belder smiled and bobbed his shaggy head. “Assuming both Mr. Novac and Mr. Walsdorf are correct, it most certainly does.”

  “And we can get started removing the remains from the tunnel,” Sykes ventured.

  “Absolutely.”

  A congratulatory sigh of relief was still being passed around when the door opened and Harry Dobson stepped back into the room. His face and his uniform were both a little the worse for wear, but the smile was brand-new.

  “Homeland Security will have a team here this afternoon,” Dobson said. “They’re treating this as an act of international terrorism.”

  “Why international?” Ben Gardener wanted to know.

  “Because we made the guy in the elevator,” Dobson said.

  “Already?” the mayor sounded surprised.

  “From the coat we found in the mobile squad room. A fifty-six long. Custom-made by a company in New Jersey. Nine hundred bucks’ worth of jacket. Sold in only one local outlet. A place down in the City Centre Building called Europa. We rousted the owner. Guy name of Boris Castellanos. Didn’t even have to look at his records. Only jacket of that style and size he had custom-made was for a guy named Frank Corso.”

  “The writer?”

  Dobson pulled a memo-sized piece of paper from his coat pocket and held it at arm’s length. “This is the guy who got fired by The New York Times for fabricating a story. Cost the paper a nine-million-dollar libel suit. Went to work for Natalie Van de Hoven over at the Seattle Sun…”

  “The guy from the Himes case,” Sykes said.

  “Same guy,” Dobson said. “Guy’s got a jacket as thick as your wrist. A pair of felony convictions for assault and a misdemeanor interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duties. A very shadowy figure. Supposed to be some sort of recluse. Doesn’t appear in public. Doesn’t even sign the books he writes these days. Lives on a boat somewhere in Portage Bay.”

  “And they think this Corso guy could be the perp?” the mayor asked. “The one who set things off in the tunnel.”

  Dobson shrugged. “I mentioned his name to the feds, and all of a sudden they get real sticky on me. Said they’ve got a jacket on him too. Said he’s got a connection to a terrorist organization. Said they’d bring it along and we could discuss the matter. Suggested it might be best if we told the press as little as possible.”

  “At least he’s not a carrier,” Dr. Stafford said.

  “How do we know?”

  Stafford laid it out for him.

  “Then my officers…”

  “Are gonna be just fine,” she finished.

  Dobson’s joy was short-lived. His face clouded over again. “Except for the officer they found in the alley,” he said quickly.

  “What?”

  Dobson’s face darkened. “We had a sergeant posted in the alley right next to the bus tunnel. We thought he might have had a heart attack, but the docs on the hill say they found a puncture wound on the back of his neck, like somebody stuck him with a needle or something.” He took a moment to let his words sink in. “They’re not having a lot of luck bringing him around.”

  “And you think this Corso fellow…” the mayor let it hang.

  “Certainly explains how he got inside our cordon, now doesn’t it?”

  Nobody was prepared to argue the point.

  “Speaking of the press…” Chief Dobson said.

  “Harlan and his staff will give you everything you need,” the mayor piped in. He looked at his watch. “By when do you think?” he asked Harlan Sykes, whose expression said this was all news to him.

  “Say eleven,” he answered uncertainly.

  The mayor put on his handshaking face. “So…we keep a lid on this thing till eleven in the morning, then come out as a group.” He drew quotation marks in the air with his fingers. “Terrorist act in the bus tunnel. So and so many dead.”

  “Let’s try to get the number right the first time,�
� Sykes added solemnly.

  “Anyway,” the mayor went on, “initial fears of possible contamination led authorities to seal the area…”—he waved a hand—“yadda, yadda.”

  Sykes squared his shoulders. “We’ll get you a packet.”

  The phone rang. Ben Gardener picked it up, put the receiver to his ear and listened. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, his body began to stiffen. The fatigue-induced slump in his shoulders began to disappear, as he rose to his full height.

  “I understand.” He flicked his eyes over at Harry Dobson and then pulled them back onto the desk in front of him, as he continued to listen. “Those were the exact words?” he asked. “Thank you,” and hung up.

  When he lifted his eyes, the room was looking his way. “We’ve got a threat.”

  “Who’s we?” Dobson demanded.

  “All three newspapers. All three TV stations.”

  “When?”

  “Ten minutes ago.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Yesterday was the beginning. Sunday is the end.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Fear is the first motivation. Fear if you do. Fear if you don’t. Fear if you can’t make up your mind. Fear that somewhere out there in the great beyond your golden moment has already happened and you never even heard the whisper of its passing.

  Jim Sexton’s greatest fear was that one of these days he was going to lose it. Going to let some silly slight or ignorant injustice push him over the edge, where he was going to come unglued on some pissant Johnny-come-lately like Robert Tilden and let loose with an invective-filled monologue…a tirade of such power…a rant whose particulars were so pointed, whose obscenities so obnoxious that rumors of the moment would linger near the water cooler for years, preventing the sorry soul who had invoked his rage from ever showing his face on the premises again. At least, that’s how the scene played out in his head, when he wasn’t under pressure.