Rattlesnake

by Andy Maslen

  MEMO

  To: Clark Orton

  From: Lina Forssum PhD

  Aerosolized malaria-derived pathogens

  Executive summary

  The normal vector for transmission of malaria is the female Anopheles mosquito. Through a bite, the plasmodium parasite is transferred to the victim’s bloodstream. Malaria is prevented by a variety of drugs including, but not limited to Mefloquine. We have successfully used gene editing to create a strain of malaria that is 157x more virulent than the natural strain. It is drug resistant and 97.5% fatal in rats. Untreated, malaria will debilitate an adult human within three or four days of transmission. In children and babies, it is normally fatal within the same timeframe. I would expect our new strain to produce the same results within one or two hours.

  As specified in your original research brief, the new strain, codenamed MalX121, can be manufactured as a suspension in water and aerosolized with commonly available propellant gases such as compressed air, CO2 or CFCs.

  On inhalation, the pathogen binds with T-cell receptors in the subject’s lungs, and crosses the mucus membranes of the alveoli into the bloodstream. From then on, it behaves exactly as natural malaria, except for the greatly increased rate of action as specified above.

  Our computer models predict a 94.65% success rate for inhalation from a 100m altitude airburst given certain parameters for concentration, overall payload, wind speed and direction, and population density. For subjects in the inhaled sub-population, the predicted fatality rate is 82%.

  Please note: these are computer-generated probabilities. Without field trials, I cannot guarantee the accuracy or otherwise of the numbers.

  Since Forssum had written her memo, a great deal of work had gone into the project. Like pathogens themselves, it had mutated and evolved in the face of new and different challenges. In its current incarnation, it had been gene-spliced with the Ebola virus to produce a biological agent of ferocious infectivity and deadliness. The latest variant had been codenamed EboMalX33. The 33 indicated the version number.

  He looked at Cruikshank. She was Cold Warrior 2.0. Implacable in her hatred for America’s enemies. Unfazed by the concept of collateral damage. And a woman of influence, resources and patience. From time to time he tried, without success, to create an erotic fantasy in which she starred. He’d eventually abandoned the efforts and simply asked his usual escort service to send a girl with a black wig cut in Martha’s trademark style. Much simpler. Much less frightening.

  “What’s up with you?” she asked, frowning. “Have I got something on me?” She looked down and flicked at the lapel of her black suit jacket.

  He shook his head.

  “Sorry, Martha. Miles away.”

  “Well, if you can bring yourself back to the here and now, you asked me here for a meeting. What’s up?”

  “What’s up is Project ROSS. EboMalX33 is ready. We need to move to animal trials. If that works, human.”

  She pursed her lips for a second and gazed upwards, before returning her eyes to Clark Orton’s expectant face.

  “Pigs OK?” she asked.

  “Fifty should do it; more would be better.”

  “I’ll have someone find a farm and let you know the location.”

  When a computer-modelled variant proved promising, the ROSS team had decided that for an effective test of its air-delivery system, animal tests needed to be conducted outdoors. And that to simulate its eventual deployment, the animals should be in a more-or-less natural environment. To that end, Cruikshank’s team had become adept at scouting out small to medium-sized pig farms in isolated rural locations, where a plane could overfly, deliver its payload and disappear.

  When the farmer discovered his or her mysteriously decimated herd and reported it to the local media and the Department of Agriculture, Cruikshank’s people would move in to silence the media and compensate the farmer.

  So, Test #34 was greenlighted. The results would prove nauseating and delightful in equal measure.

  25

  “They all just upped and died.”

  KANSAS is an almost perfectly rectangular state, apart from an eighty-five-mile stretch where the Missouri river takes over boundary duties between Kansas City and White Cloud. Right slap bang in the middle of this Great Plains state is a town called Lincoln, itself some twelve hundred and seventy-six miles due west of Langley, Virginia. Outside the town, on its northern side, sat a 330-acre piggery called Hollow’s Farm. A family concern, it had been in the Hollow family for six generations. “We’re pig people, and proud of it,” was the family’s unofficial motto.

  Meg Hollow, 65, broad in the beam, white of hair and with an outdoorswoman’s face the colour of teak, was eating lunch at noon, as was her routine. Her husband had gone out to check the pigs in Byatt’s Field, an expanse of well-churned earth scattered with pale spherical rutabagas. Corrugated iron sheds dotted the land, with bales of straw dumped outside for the pigs to dismantle and play around with.

  Something made her put her fork down on her half-finished plate of stew and look up, head tilted to one side. George was coming back to the farmhouse. Early. Years later, she would be unable to explain how she’d known. Call it a woman’s intuition.

  “Well, that man is certainly in a hurry,” she finally said to herself, frowning. Then she calmly finished her lunch, took the plate and cutlery to the sink and washed them up, set them to dry in the draining rack, dried her hands on her apron and, finally stepped out into the sun to shade her eyes and look for the pickup.

  Rain had been scarce in this part of the county, and the land was dry as bread flour. She saw the plume of pale brown dust drifting west well before she saw the old Chevy Silverado. But she could tell one thing. George was hammering it. The tiny rectangle of the front end resolved itself into distinguishable features – grille, windscreen, headlamps – as the truck rushed onwards, back towards the house.

  Meg knew something was up. She could feel it in her gut. That weird place in the pit of the stomach that tells you when one of the boys has had an accident with a tractor, or tangled with a sow made ornery by farrowing. But only George had gone out, and he was clearly driving fine, so he couldn’t have been injured. The roar of the engine reached her now.

  She didn’t have much longer to wait. Three minutes was all it took before George Hollow brought the truck to a sliding stop in front of the house and jumped down from the cab almost before the engine had completed its final revolution. His face told her something had happened. Something bad. Grey pallor beneath the tan, the skin around those piercing blue eyes that had first attracted her in high school now drawn and tight.

  She waited. Let him speak first. No, “What is it, George?” for her.

  “It’s the pigs, Meg. They all just upped and died.”

  Now she did speak.

  “What do you mean, ‘all’? There’s close to five hundred beasts up there. You mean the new mothers, the piglets, what?”

  George Hollow’s face contorted with a mixture of pain and anger.

  “Damn it woman, I mean every Goddamned last one of them. Looks like some kind of battlefield out there. Blood everywhere. I mean rivers of the stuff.”

  Shocked by her devoutly religious husband’s language as much as by his news she tried again.

  “Blood, how? Were they fighting, attacked, what?”

  “No, not fighting. I mean, there’re no wounds, or leastways none I could see. But, oh, Meg, every last one of ’em is just layin’ there in its own blood. All over their snouts, their eyes, the sows’ teats, their rears, some of ’em seem to have almost burst from blood.”

  And then he did something that frightened her more than his story.

  He began weeping. He just stood there, gnarled hands hanging at the sides of his denim coveralls and wept. She went to him, then, put her arms around him and held him until the sobbing subsided. Then she took him inside, made a pot of tea, and called the vet.

  Thirty minutes later, the vet
arrived. He was a thirty-something graduate of Kansas State University College of Agriculture called Nick Herzog. He drove a dusty white Ford Ranger pickup with ‘Great Bend Veterinarian Services’ applied to the doors in dark-green vinyl lettering. The Hollows climbed in and directed Nick to Byatt’s Field.

  Beyond the galvanised iron gate, the dead pigs lay in dark patches of glistening soil. The dry earth had drunk the blood hungrily, turning the field into a vast patch of brown and russet camouflage. Nick put his hands on his hips as he swung his gaze left and right. Then he rubbed the back of his neck.

  “My God,” he said, drawing disapproving stares from the Hollows. “Whatever did this, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  He walked over to the nearest pig, a vast sow, her double row of teats still leaking blood in bright-red rivulets that trickled over her belly and into the ground. Squatting, he prodded the swollen abdomen, then reared back and swore as the sagging, greenish skin split from throat to vagina, releasing a torrent of blood and liquefied viscera that splashed over his boots and soaked the cuffs of his trousers.

  He turned, white-faced, to the Hollows.

  “Call the Department of Agriculture.”

  While the vet and the Hollows were surveying the bloody and bloated remains of a five-hundred-strong herd of pigs, a secondhand but superbly maintained F-15 Strike Eagle was banking hard at thirty thousand feet and beginning its descent towards a private airfield in Texas.

  Two hours later, the pilot had changed into beige chinos and a blue, button-down Oxford shirt and was composing a brief, encrypted email.

  Animal trial underway. Initial impression positive. If all goes well, propose start work on human trial. Cambodia end online and ready to commence.

  The recipient of the email asked her communications specialist to monitor radio, cell phone, landline and internet traffic to and from Hollow’s Farm, State Road 96, Great Bend, KA 67530.

  26

  House Call

  THE doorbell rang. Terri-Ann put her mug of coffee down on the countertop and went to open the front door. Standing before her, holding a scuffed black-and-silver attaché case of a style that had gone out of fashion in the eighties, was a tall, solidly built man. Old-fashioned glasses, wire-framed below, tortoiseshell above, magnified piercing blue eyes. His cheeks were pink, and so smooth from shaving they glistened. He was stooping, as if embarrassed by his size in the presence of a normally constructed human being like Terri-Ann.

  Her first thought was that he was selling Bibles, such was the expression on his face, a mixture of hope and trepidation as if at any moment he might encounter a firebrand atheist who believed in guns and grit, but not God.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  The man pushed the glasses higher up the bridge of his nose. “Mrs Calder?” The voice produced from deep within his barrel chest was gravelly, but he was clearly making an attempt to lighten it.

  “Yes.”

  He spoke in measured tones as if reading from a script.

  “My name is Burton Cavanagh. I work at Orton Biotech. May I come in, please?”

  Terri-Ann frowned. But she stood aside and beckoned him in.

  Seated on the edge of an armchair in the living room, the man seemed too big for the furniture as if he had stumbled into a three-quarter scale model house.

  He plucked a business card from his briefcase, which he had opened fussily on his lap. He passed it to Terri-Ann. She read it carefully, turned it over, discovered no further text and placed it, face up, on the coffee table that stood between them.

  “What can I do for you, Mister Cavanagh?”

  “First of all, Mrs Calder, please know that I am genuinely sorry for your loss. The formula we are all taught has become threadbare from insincere use, but as a former soldier myself, let me assure you that your husband’s death is deeply felt by my office, my colleagues and by me, personally.”

  “That’s very kind of you to say so.” She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “And you’ve come to see me because …?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sorry.” He prodded the glasses up again. “I work in the Comp and Bens Department at Orton Biotech.” Then he blinked rapidly. “My apologies, Mrs Calder, the Compensation and Benefits Department. Internal jargon. Let me try again. A term in your husband’s contract of employment guaranteed certain rights, certain financial rights, should he, that is to say, were he to fall victim to a, ah—”

  “If he died in service, you mean?” Terri-Ann asked, feeling for the poor bureaucrat and wanting to spare him further embarrassment.

  He nodded.

  “That’s in a nutshell. Yes. The company maintains a very generous investment fund with the express purpose of compensating dependants of, of …” he trailed off again.

  “Dead employees,” Terri-Ann said.

  He smiled again, as if grateful for Terri-Ann’s obliging him with the plain words he seemed incapable of summoning for himself.

  “In your husband’s case, as a senior officer within the General Counsel’s Department, the sum in question is substantial. We are talking seven hundred and fifty-eight thousand, four hundred and twenty dollars.”

  Terri-Ann was startled by the figure. By its size and by its precision.

  “Vinnie never mentioned anything about this when he joined, Mister Cavanagh. And I’m sure we discussed his benefits at some length.”

  Cavanagh shrugged his beefy shoulders, their bulk at odds with the timidity of his manner. He was like an accountant trapped in a linebacker’s body.

  “Perhaps he preferred to focus on the less, ah, morbid aspects of his contract. Death is not a subject any of us likes to think about.”

  Terri-Ann felt the blood rising to her cheeks. Her heart had begun to thud in her chest. Something about Cavanagh’s attitude was making her uncomfortable.

  “My husband was a US Marine, and then a Delta operator. I can assure you he was in no way worried to think about death.”

  “Of course not. My apologies. Again. The purpose of my visit is simple. We need to clarify one or two administrative points before we can make the payment into any bank account you care to nominate.”

  “Administrative points,” Terri-Ann said flatly.

  “Administrative points,” Cavanagh agreed, nodding and blinking. “We need to know that there are no outstanding police or law enforcement investigations into the employee’s death. Are you able to confirm that?”

  “The SAPD have closed their investigation. They’re calling it suicide, which is ridiculous.”

  He nodded, eyes drooping like a sympathetic clergyman.

  “I understand. And if I may, are there any other investigations ongoing?”

  “Police, you mean?”

  “Police, whether city or state. Federal. Or,” he hesitated, “private?”

  She could have lied. It was none of the company’s business whether Gabriel and JJ were digging around. But her daddy had brought her up to tell the truth. Or most of it.

  “I haven’t hired a private investigator, if that’s what you mean. But one of my husband’s friends – an ex-soldier from England, actually – is helping me get some closure. Is that what you mean?”

  “If he doesn’t have an investigator’s licence, it’s outside the parameters of our policy. We should be able to close it out without any problems. So, your husband had a friend from Great Britain?”

  “Gabriel, yes. He and Vinnie worked together on a joint operation.”

  Cavanagh smiled at the name.

  “Gabriel. The Lord’s messenger. Is his surname similarly Biblical, I wonder?”

  “It’s Wolfe.”

  “‘Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.’ Matthew seven fifteen.”

  Terri-Ann caught a glint in the eyes behind Cavanagh’s FBI-style glasses. Was there something of the predator there, alongside the mild-mannered accountant?

  “Forgive me, Mister Cavanagh, I’m n
o Bible scholar. Gabriel’s just here to help me. Now, if there was nothing else?”

  Cavanagh stood, fumbling for the briefcase before it fell to the floor.

  “No, that’s everything. Thank you. We’ll be in touch about the money. Could I take a note of your phone number, please?”

  Christie hunched over the keyboard, his thick fingers smacking the keys so they clacked like an old-fashioned typewriter. Freed from the plain glass of his Ray-Ban Clubmasters, his eyes scrutinised the search result before him on the monitor.

  The database, one of many maintained by the Agency, was named JASPER. It stood for Joint Allied Service Personnel Employment Records. Someone, somewhere, was very pleased with themselves for that one, he’d thought the first time he logged in. Housed within its encrypted brain were the service records of the nearly three point five million serving NATO personnel, plus those of a further nineteen point nine million who had either been discharged, killed/missing in action or died post-discharge, of natural or unnatural causes.

  Christie typed:

  WOLFE + GABRIEL + BRITISH + SPECIAL FORCES

  The computers housed in super-cooled server rooms deep beneath the ground took seventeen point six seconds to retrieve the information Christie was looking for, displaying this little performance measure in the top left corner of the screen.

  Name: Wolfe, Gabriel

  Country: UK

  Unit: Special Air Service

  Active? N

  Decorations: Operational Service Medal for Afghanistan, Operational Service Medal for Sierra Leone, Operational Service Medal for Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq Medal with Clasp, Military Cross

  Date of discharge: 09-27-2012