Red Tide

by G. M. Ford

  “I suggest you take whatever precautions are available to you at this time.”

  The guy started to ask another question, but Harry cut him off. “I’ll let you know if there’s any change in status,” he said in a tone designed to stifle further query.

  Harry walked back to the collection of cops. “Get a perimeter on any and all exits from the ship,” he said. “Nobody goes on. Nobody gets off.” He cut the air with the side of his hand. “Nobody,” he said again. “Go.”

  Everyone moved at once. The sounds of barked orders and scuffed shoes were muffled by the thick night air as Harry pulled his cell phone from his pocket.

  “Emergency Services,” he said.

  Soon as he got somebody on the line, he told them what he needed.

  Before he could pocket the phone, another police cruiser came sliding into the lot. He was about to go ballistic on the officer for driving so recklessly when the door bounced open and out stepped Corso.

  “It appears you may have been right,” Harry said.

  46

  Charly Hart pushed the walkie-talkie button. “Chief?” he said.

  The response was sharp and immediate. “I thought I told you to go home.”

  Charly ignored him. “I’ve got two of our suspects here, Chief. One dead. One wounded. A patrol officer named—”

  “Mr. Corso has apprised me of the situation,” the chief said. Charly Hart could be heard to swallow. “These are the guys we’ve been looking for, sir,” he said after a pause.

  “Are you certain?”

  “ID says Paul Rishi and Samuel Singleton. Same names we got from Canadian Immigration.”

  “Seal off the area. Nobody in. Nobody—”

  “Don’t think we need to, sir.”

  When the chief failed to respond, Charly Hart went on. “Don’t think these two ever got their virus canisters on board.” Charly told him the story. “So we went through the bin the guy says he set their equipment in and lo and behold, down at the bottom are a pair of backpacks. Full. Seals still intact. Right where the guy says he put ’em. Everything else in the bin is empty.”

  “I’m going to send a CDC team your way,” the chief said. “In the meantime, nobody goes aboard the ship and nobody gets off.”

  “Yessir.”

  “How’s the officer?”

  “Pretty broke up about it, sir. Never had his piece out before.”

  “Get him some help.”

  “Already did, sir. Except this time of night the only thing I could come up with was a grief counselor.”

  “Keep me posted,” the chief said.

  “Yessir.”

  Harry pocketed his phone just as the elevator door slid open. He stepped to the side, allowing Hans Belder and Isaac Klugeman to precede him from the elevator car.

  “CDC team came up negative,” Harry said. “No trace of the virus.”

  “Sounds like you may have gotten lucky,” Belder said as he passed.

  “I pray to God,” Harry said.

  “Sometimes luck is better,” Klugeman added with a grim smile. A muted ding announced the arrival of the second elevator, crammed with people from the FBI, the CIA, the Centers for Disease Control, Homeland Security and every other agency that could be squeezed into an elevator. Corso and the guy from Scandinavian Cruise Lines stayed in between the two groups as they walked all the way to the stern of the ship, where a knot of police officers milled about the rails, engaged in low-key conversation. The sight of the chief coming their way brought about an instant improvement in posture.

  The dozen or so cops backed away, making room for the official delegation to enter the metal corridor marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. At the far end of the space, a huge stainless steel food locker covered nearly the entire width of the area. Fifteen by fifteen with a four-foot-square window to the right of the door. Somebody had slipped a thick, greasy bolt through the eye beneath the handle. Put the nut on too. Nobody inside was going anywhere.

  The chief and the scientists bellied up to the window. The feds hung back at the end of the hall. Corso straightened up and looked over the top of the trio. Two guys in blue coveralls walking back and forth inside, trying to keep warm. A pair of black breathing devices lay on the floor. Nearest guy had an unruly mop of black hair and a wicked-looking scar zigzagging down his face like a slalom course.

  The other guy looked fairly normal until he reached the far side of the space and turned back the other way, revealing a withered ear, shriveled and brown as a dried apricot. He was pleading his case, whatever it was, to the guy with the scar, who, quite obviously, wasn’t buying it. From their positions outside, Corso and the others were unable to hear so much as a whisper.

  Harry looked over at Corso. “One of these the guy you and Gutierrez saw?”

  “Nope. One we saw was older than these two.”

  “You get a look at the guys we got up the street?”

  “Neither of them either.”

  “So where’s the guy you’re describing? There were six of them in addition to this Holmes guy. I got Bohannon in the morgue, got two here and two up the street. Where’s this Holmes character?”

  Corso shrugged. Harry turned to the guy from the cruise line. “How long before they run out of air?”

  “Two days,” the guy said. “Give or take.”

  “How cold is it in there now?”

  He stepped around the corner and consulted a gauge. “Thirty-four.”

  “How cold can you make it?”

  “Forty below.”

  Belder let go a low whistle. “Forty below is the end of the virus.”

  “Minus twenty-five would be sufficient,” Klugeman added.

  “It would kill it?”

  “Absolutely,” Klugeman said.

  “Unless, of course, it had been engineered to withstand that kind of cold,” Belder cautioned.

  “What would be the point?” Klugeman snapped. “That sort of engineering is far too costly and time-consuming to be used frivolously.” His scowl did not encourage disagreement. “I mean…what would be gained? There is no strategic value to a cold-tolerant virus.”

  At that point, the one with the scar noticed he had an audience. His thick lips folded back into a sneer. He crossed the room in three quick steps and slashed at the window with his knife, causing Harry and the doctors to flinch a step backward.

  He began to shout but could not be heard by those outside. Scattered bits of spittle appeared on the inside of the window as he yelled himself red in the face. The second man crossed to his side, spoke to him and then took him by the shoulder. Scar shrugged off the hand and took another swipe at the window with his knife. The violence of the movement sent the other guy skittering back against the rear wall, where he watched in horror as Scar separated a brass spraying rod from his backpack, aimed it at the window and let loose a thick stream of what could have been a thin broth. He kept at it until the window was completely covered and he was no more than a shadow behind the glass.

  Klugeman stepped forward; he put his finger on one of the many brown specks at large within the solution. He beckoned Belder to his side. “See,” he said, “some kind of airborne pollen.” He tapped the glass with his fingernail. “The virus is inside the little pod. Exposure to air opens the pod. The pollen containing the virus becomes airborne.”

  Belder slipped his glasses over his nose and peered intently at the area. After a moment, he looked back at the chief. His face was the color of oatmeal. “The doctor is correct. And once Marburg is airborne…once it discovers lungs…” He waved an uncomprehending hand. The words congealed in his throat.

  “You have no choice,” said Klugeman. “You must kill the virus.”

  Belder nodded gravely. “Freeze it,” he said. “By the grace of God, you have the opportunity. You must seize it.”

  A buzz of conversation ran through the crowd in the passageway. Harry turned to face them. “Any of you gentlemen care to do the honors?” he asked.

  The c
rowd went suddenly silent. Which made the voice from Harry’s pocket all the more audible. “Hey,” it said, “Chief Dobson.”

  Harry turned his back on the feds, pulled out his phone. “You listen to me, whoever you are,” he whispered.

  “You gotta get down to Pier Eighteen while everybody’s still on board.”

  Harry appeared dumbfounded. “Eighteen?”

  “Caravelle,” said the guy from Scandinavian Cruise Lines.

  “What about Caravelle?”

  “Dey got a ship down at Eighteen.”

  “What ship?”

  “Anodder cruise ship.”

  “There’s only two,” Harry insisted. “I watch them come and go every weekend. In Saturday morning. Back out on Sunday.”

  “Dey do it every October. Last cruise of da year,” the guy said. “Dey got a lot of comps from when they had the sickness, so they put on anoder ship. Keep da refunds down.”

  “Something’s not right here,” came the electronic voice. “I don’t know what these guys are doing, but—”

  Harry held the phone to his mouth. “You listen to me, whoever you are. We’re on the way, and when we get there you damn well better be there waiting for us. Do you hear me?” No answer. “I will find you,” Harry said. “Know that. I will find you.” Silence. Harry pointed to the jittery crowd. “Everything we have to Pier Eighteen.”

  They didn’t have to be told twice. Harry then pointed to his own men. “Seal off this entire deck. I don’t want anybody up here at all.” When they were slow to disperse, he hollered, “Go,” and things got moving. He beckoned for a sergeant. Sent Belder and Klugeman with him. A minute later, only Harry Dobson and Frank Corso remained. They passed a long look.

  “You better go,” Harry said.

  “Might be best if we were both here.”

  “It’s not your job.”

  “It’s all of our job.”

  Jim Sexton stood with his elbows resting on the round metal rail, the chief’s voice still ringing in his ears. Hard as he’d tried, he’d been unable to convince himself to wipe the phone clean of prints and throw it into the Sound. He’d have preferred to think that this inability to take definitive action was a matter of good character. A sense of the heroic which allowed himself to put the good of others before his own well-being. He’d massaged that notion for a full fifteen minutes before reluctantly rejecting it.

  Who was he kidding anyway? The reason was baser and far more pragmatic than that. Problem was that plan wasn’t going to work. Sooner or later, when all the excitement died down, somebody was going to notice that the timing of today’s piece showed that he seemed to be getting to the story before the cops, and sooner or later they were going to demand an explanation, which sooner rather than later would lead to Pete, and, quite simply, no sane plan could hinge on Pete. Simple as that. So much for rising above self-interest. He closed his eyes and hoped for an inner voice to lead him from the darkness.

  47

  “Eight hundred fifty-seven feet at the waterline,” the captain said. “A little over seventy-seven thousand tons.” He looked around, making sure everyone was duly impressed. “We cruise at twenty-five knots with a range of nearly four thousand miles.” Sitting there, partially obscured by the fog, the ship looked more like an office building tipped over onto its side. Black down below, all white and shiny up top, it seemed unreasonably large and most certainly incapable of sustained movement.

  “Accommodations for just over two thousand guests and eight hundred crew members,” he was saying. “Two pools, five separate dining rooms, a casino, six hot tubs. It’s got a running track all the way around.”

  The sight of five space suits stepping out of the elevator brought his spiel to an abrupt halt. Corso stood among the assembled multitude of government functionaries, seventy yards upwind from where the CDC crew members made their appearance.

  They watched in silence as the space suits waddled over and handed their test kits to a similarly clad figure who disappeared inside a mobile laboratory, while they lined up at the rear of a small tanker truck, where they took turns rinsing one another off with a pressure washer. Ten minutes later, when the last man was presumably decontaminated, they shed their biohazard suits and disappeared behind a cordoned-off area at the extreme edge of the pier. By that time, the air was permeated with the smell of chlorine bleach.

  “How many crew members are on board this time of night?” one of the FBI agents asked the captain.

  “About two hundred,” he answered.

  “Passengers?”

  The captain shook his white mane. “No passengers till six A.M.”

  “What about the cleanup crew?”

  A bald-headed guy in a pair of forest green overalls stepped forward. “I got a hundred forty-one people on board. Fifteen women, a hundred and twenty-five men.” He checked his watch. “They’re due to get off for lunch in eleven minutes.”

  Corso watched as the CDC lead pressed his earpiece deep into his ear and stepped away from the rest of the group. If his facial expression was any indication, the news wasn’t good. He watched as the guy took a deep breath before opening his mouth. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. All eyes were on him. “Preliminary tests on the wipe kits show the presence of the virus.” A buzz ran through the crowd. “In some cases trace amounts, in others truly alarming levels of toxicity.” He waved off the barrage of questions. “They’re working on more specific test protocols as we speak. Sometime in the next hour or so, we should have a much better idea of what we’re dealing with here.” The buzz started again, “But,” he began again. Silence. “It doesn’t look good. Anyone who’s been on board is going to have to be isolated indefinitely. Anyone who’s on board now, which is somewhere in the vicinity of three hundred fifty people, well, I would say their chances of having been exposed to the virus to one degree or another are quite high.”

  This time the buzz broke out in earnest, as groups broke off from the main body and huddled on their own. Corso watched as the mayor used his index finger to pound in a point with the governor. Watched as the FBI and CIA broke into separate knots of whispered conversation that seemed to repel one another like the opposing poles of a magnet.

  “This is insane,” Harry Dobson muttered.

  “Actually, in its own little way, it was a hell of a plan,” Corso said. “While everybody’s looking the other way, you hop on three cruise ships and contaminate six thousand people from something like twenty-three countries. You stretch out the incubation period of the virus a little bit and everybody gets all the way back home before they start feeling sick. And even when they do, first thing they assume is that they got the standard ship sickness. They go to their doctors.” Corso twirled a hand in the air. “Worldwide epidemic, doomsday, god only knows how many dead before it’s over.”

  “Damn near everybody,” Harry Dobson said. “That’s what’s so crazy about it. Whoever these people are, they have no regard whatsoever for human life. It’s like they’re willing to kill everybody, willing to unmake the entire planet, just to prove some point they want to make.”

  “Ever been to India?” Corso asked.

  Harry shook his head.

  “Falling through the cracks in India isn’t like it is here,” Corso said. “You fall through the cracks in India, you end up all the way on the bottom, ’cause there ain’t no other place to fall.” He snapped his fingers. “You wake up one morning and you’re a garbage eater. Living on the streets of some city with all the others just like you. In the blink of an eye, you go from your mama’s knee to living with people who purposely maim themselves in colorful ways…who gouge out an eye or cut off their fingers to make begging easier. People who’ll cut your throat with a piece of glass over something you found in the trash.”

  The chief was paying rapt attention now, but Corso was just about through.

  “There’s no message here, Chief,” Corso said. “If they wanted to send a message they’d have gone after the germ docto
rs. This isn’t about politics. This is about suffering and the human need for revenge.”

  They milled around in silence for a moment. Up close to the overhead lights, the fog moved inland as a translucent sheet of white, folding itself around the Arctic Flower like tissue paper and then rising off the water in stages, to envelop the Alaskan Way Viaduct and then move upward toward the stadiums beyond.

  Corso watched as Harry Dobson looked his way and scowled. Wasn’t until Harry took a step to the left that Corso thought to look behind himself, where a pair of cops approached warily, as if they weren’t at all certain they wanted to be this close to whatever in hell was going on. Between the officers, propelled along by the elbows, a hooded apparition in a burgundy ski jacket stiff-legged it their way.

  “Guy says you want to see him, Chief,” said the shorter of the two officers.

  “Wouldn’t take no for an answer,” added his partner.

  Before the chief could speak, the hood pulled a hand out of his pocket and thrust it forward. A black cell phone rested in the palm. Harry stared at it for a minute and then left it there; instead, he took a step forward and pulled the hood from the man’s head. Jim Sexton came into view.

  “I should have known,” the chief said, snatching the phone and putting his nose right up on Sexton’s. His hands were twisted into knots. “You make me sick, you know that? You put people’s lives at risk over some stupid story, you—” He unknotted one hand and grabbed hold of Sexton’s jacket, jerking him even closer.

  Corso put a restraining hand on the chief’s shoulder. “We’ve got company,” Corso said. The ship’s captain, Belder, Klugeman, Mayor Dean, the governor, the guy from the sanitation company, and a pair of FBI field agents all walked a respectful half step behind the guy in the brown cashmere topcoat as they made their way across the tarmac toward Corso and the chief. As they approached, the chief let go of Jim’s jacket and smoothed his own clothes with his hands.

  The mayor took the lead with the introductions. “I don’t know whether you two have met,” he began. He indicated the guy in the topcoat. “Harry, this is Bernard Pauls, chief of Homeland Security.” Pauls nodded but failed to offer a hand. “Mr. Pauls, this is Harry Dobson, chief of police for the city of Seattle.” Harry returned the nod.