Cobra Event

by Preston, Richard

  They will be back. They will jump on the merry-go­round, and they will yell and throw rocks at the cats, and meanwhile, their feet will be pounding the crystal to dust. Shake the dust from your feet, children. You are a burden to the earth.

  Hector Ramirez, five years of age, was just about to climb up the slide when he changed his mind and went over to the merry-go-round. His mama sat on a bench talking with another lady. He climbed up on the merry-go-round and stood there for a moment. You needed to have more kids to get it moving, but he thought he could get it moving anyway. He climbed down and pushed it, and it began to turn with a squeaky sound, but not much. 'Mama! Mama! Spin me.'

  His mama didn't want to spin him. He was about to run off to the Slide when he Saw the little nice thing. He thought it might be candy. It looked like ... Sugar? He picked it up. It had colors in it, like a rainbow. He Sniffed it, but there waS no smell. He put it in his mouth. It seemed to turn rubbery and melt in his mouth real fast, but it didn't taste like candy. 'Ew!' he Said. He Spat out Some rubbery bits.

  It had tasted like ... nothing.

  He bent over and spat again, and again, and looked over at his mother.

  'Hector! What are you doing?' 'Nothing, Mama.'

  She waS young and pretty. She wore a short Skirt and a denim jacket and black boots. 'What are you doing?' He couldn't give her any kind of answer, so she gave up and went back to talk with the other lady. Oh, well. He went off to slide down the Slide.

  The cold symptoms come on in a matter of hours. The eclipse phase - where no obvious symptoms appear in the central nervous System - lasts from one to three days. Meanwhile Cobra is rocketing along the wires. The infected brain cells switch into crystal-phase production, and the cells plump up with cryStalS. The transformation of the personality is abrupt and devastating. The Shift to autocannibalism happens explosively. It often occurs when the infected host is momentarily Startled or confused, or is experiencing strong emotions.

  Briefing

  The forensic operation had been going flat out on Governors Island for nearly eighteen hours. The Reach­deep team had generated a lot of information, but the information was leading nowhere fast.

  An epidemic task force from the C.D.C. had arrived and set up Shop in an empty Coast Guard building, and they had been making telephone calls and going around the city, looking for any new cases of Cobra and locating people who had been in close contact with those who had died. Walter Mellis had flown down to Atlanta with samples from the autopsies for the C.D.C.'s molecular biology labs, and USAMRIID waS also starting an analysis.

  Reachdeep worked in isolation. Frank Masaccio believed that the team needed to focus on the criminal evidence. No one was allowed to telephone Reachdeep without placing the call through Masaccio's office, but Reachdeep could phone out anywhere. No one was allowed to land on the island and enter the Reachdeep unit unless it was okayed by Masaccio or Hopkins, but Reachdeep team members were given Standby helicop­ters ready to fly them anywhere they wanted, or ready to fly in experts. 'I've put you guys in an ivory tower,' Masaccio had told them. 'An ivory tower with a helicopter landing zone.'

  Seagulls perched on the railings of the observation

  deck outside the Reachdeep conference room. The gulls looked in the windows at the racks of communications gear, at the people in black biohazard suits.

  Two helicopters lifted off from the heliport in lower Manhattan and crossed the East River. They passed over the Coast Guard hospital and touched down in the middle of the island. Five minutes later, Frank Masaccio appeared with a group of men and women, F.B.I. agents and New York Police Department investigators. They were the managers of his Cobra task force. They had arrived for the daily briefing. They were carrying boxes of take-out Chinese food. Lunch.

  The New York F.B.I. is experienced in the matter of catering food. The Bureau supplies take-out food to safe houses and stakeouts, since the agents don't have time to prepare their own food or to go out to a restaurant (eating in a restaurant also might draw attention to them). The food must be delivered by other F.B.I. agents, since food-delivery people would be a danger to the security of an operation. Not surprisingly, the New York F.B.I. has the best take-out food capability of any field office in the United States.

  The food was excellent. It included Peking duck. There weren't enough chairs to go around. People sat on the floor. For a. time there was no conversation in the room, only eating. Eventually Masaccio brought the meeting to order.

  'You start, Hopkins,' he said.

  Austen had been sitting curled up against the wall, feeling comfortably alone with herself for the first time in days. Masaccio's voice woke her from her reverie.

  Hopkins stood up in front of the Felix devices and summarized the state of the Reachdeep investigation. He said that Reachdeep had made a tentative identification of the Cobra agent. It was a chimera, a recombinant

  virus engineered in a laboratory. He said it was a mixture of an insect virus and the common cold. Mixing the two viruses had produced a monster. 'But that's not all that's going on in this virus,' Hopkins said. 'We're going to find more engineered DNA wetware in this virus. I'm sure of it.'

  Alice Austen gave her autopsy findings. Suzanne Tanaka showed photographs of the virus particles and the crystals in which the particles were embedded. James Lesdiu reported the results of his analysis of the materials in the boxes.

  'My number one question is this,' Frank Masaccio said to the Reachdeep team. 'Are you any closer to the perpetrator?'

  'It's hard to say,' Hopkins answered.

  'That answer sucks, Hopkins. I want the Archimedes perp. I want him yesterday.' Masaccio summarized what had been happening outside Reachdeep. State health officials and the city health commissioner had been brought in and quietly informed of the situation. 'The mayor's Emergency Management Office has been geared up,' Masaccio said. 'We have fire department chemical­hazard and decon teams standing by on Roosevelt Island. We've got New York City Police Department SWAT teams on standby. We are doing our best to keep the news media out of this. ... One other thing: the mayor is unhappy.'

  'With whom?' Hopkins asked.

  'With me. He's bouncing off the walls in City Hall. He's yelling on the telephone. Most of the Cobra task force is idle, and it's driving the mayor nuts. You guys aren't giving us enough leads to push. I've got agents running around the city looking for more of those little wooden boxes, but nothing's turned up.' He mentioned that his office had done 'a tiny little news release' to the media. 'What?' Hopkins blurted.

  'We had to warn people about the boxes, Will. We're saying it's a poison. We're not giving out that it's a germ weapon. But we can't keep a lid on this thing forever. The minute you guys find something real, you get in touch with me.'

  'I need an art historian,' Hopkins said. 'What?'

  'An art historian, Frank. Someone who can look at the boxes and tell us where they came from.'

  A Brief History of Art

  Frank Masaccio flew back to Manhattan, where he stationed himself in the Federal Building. Within the hour a helicopter landed on Governors Island carrying a professor of folk art from New York University. His name was Herschel Alquivir.

  The New York office of the F.B.I. had called Professor Alquivir on the telephone and reached him at his apartment on the Upper West Side. They wanted to know if he could help them identify a work of carved wooden folk art. Could he do it right now? Would that be too much trouble?

  He agreed to help. He was stunned when, less than sixty seconds after he hung up the telephone, a team of federal agents knocked on the door of his apartment. They had been waiting in cars on the street. He was rushed in a Bureau car with police escort - three police cars moving ahead, breaking up traffic with their sirens and lights - to the West Side heliport. Professor Alquivir was flown to Governors Island, in a state of increasing alarm at what he had gotten himself into.

  They brought him into the meeting room and showed him the door that led into the
decon room and the Core. The door was plastered with biohazard signs. Hopkins showed Professor Alquivir how to put on an F.B.I. biohazard suit, and then the professor examined the

  boxes. He was a slender man, middle-aged, with a passion for carved wooden objects. He maintained a calm demeanor. Finally he said, 'These boxes are children's toys. I think they were made in East Africa. I'm quite sure of it. Cobras don't live in East Africa, they live in Egypt, India, and other parts of southern Asia. But the king cobra is known, of course, to many people around the world. And there is a large Indian population in East Africa. I see Indian influences in this box, but the type of object is fundamentally African. This is a type of toy that's not uncommon, I believe, in East Africa. Because of the Indian influence - the cobra - I should say the place of manufacture might be near the coast of the Indian Ocean, where Indian influence is strongest.'

  At 9:30 that night, two agents from the New York office of the F.B.I. departed on a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, with a connection to Nairobi.

  Washington TUESDAY, APRIL 28

  Archimedes had completed the first phase of his human trials. The boxes were Phase I trials. During a course of medical experimentation upon humans in a Phase I trial, you test small amounts of a new experimental drug on subjects. Phase I trials are safety trials. Having seen the announcement of the boxes on the television news, Archimedes understood that the Phase I safety trials of brainpox showed it was unsafe for humans. Given this success, he would move into Phase II. During Phase II, you increase the dosage and the numbers of people tested. He felt reasonably confident that the results would be satisfactory, but he wanted to have more assurance. After that would come the Phase III trial, when he would give a huge loading dose of brainpox to the human species.

  He was uncertain about whether they were looking for him by now, uncertain as to what they might have conjectured about him, if anything.

  He was walking through the concourse of Penn Station with a flask containing one hexagon of viral glass tucked in his pocket. He stood looking at the Amtrak departures on the big display board. A Metroliner train was due to be leaving in ten minutes for Washington, D.C. He paid cash for a round-trip ticket to Washington. I

  have not seen Washington in weeks, he thought. Human trials can occur anywhere humans live.

  He had a pleasant lunch of a vegetable pocket pita sandwich on the train, and he enjoyed the green countryside. He delighted in the bridge over the Susque­hanna River where it drained into Chesapeake Bay, and he drank a glass of white wine to help himself relax and to steady his resolve. Bridges are beautiful. They are constructive and mathematical. They are one of the good things that humans make.

  In the Metro Center Station of the Washington Metro, at midday, a man was sitting on one of the concrete benches along the wall of the station platform. He was breathing rather heavily, as if he was short of breath. A train came along. The man took a deep breath and stood up. As he was walking toward the train, he threw something along the platform, casually, as if he was discarding a bit of trash, and he stepped onto the train. The trash was a shiny bit of plastic, perhaps. It broke into pieces and was quickly trodden underfoot by passing crowds. No one noticed that the man was wearing a flesh-colored latex rubber glove on his right hand or that he was holding his breath when he got on the train. He continued to hold his breath for almost a minute afterward. 'Ah,' he said, letting out his breath as the train proceeded along the tunnel, heading in the direc­tion of Union Station, where Amtrak trains will take you anywhere. He dropped his rubber glove in a trash can somewhere in Union Station.

  Dust GOVERNORS ISLAND, TUESDAY

  The face of an F.B.I. metallurgist appeared on a screen in Reachdeep. 'This Q dust you sent us is a type of medium­carbon steel. The annealed structure of the particles would indicate they formed through a pressure process such as the hot rolling process.'

  'Railroad track,' Austen said to Hopkins.

  'There's more,' the metallurgist said. 'We found a grain of something that looks like pollen.'

  'Pollen? What kind?'

  'We're trying to find out right now.'

  The F.B.I. consulted Dr Edgar Adlington, a palynologist (pollen expert) at the Smithsonian Institution in Wash­ington. A special agent named Chuck Klurt walked across the Mall from F.B.I. headquarters to the brown towers of the Smithsonian. Klurt took an elevator to the basement.

  Dr Adlington was hunched over his desk in a windowless room that smelled of old books and dried leaves. He was examining a flower under a magnifying lamp.

  Special Agent Klurt placed some microscope photo­graphs of a single grain of pollen in front of Dr Adlington. 'We have a little problem. Can you tell me what this is?' 'Well, it is a pollen grain.'

  'Any idea what it came from, Dr Adlington?'

  'Why do you people have to give me just one grain? Do you take me for a psychic? This is not the kind of thing I can just look up in a book.'

  'But could you help?' Special Agent Klurt asked. 'Yes, indeed,' he answered. 'The problem, while challenging, is not insurmountable. What did you say your name is?'

  'Klurt.'

  'Now, Mr Klurt.' Adlington flipped through the photo­graphs, studying them. The pollen grain looked like a wrinkled football that had grooves running down the seams of the ball. He took a ruler and laid it on the photograph, while his finger traced features on the pollen grain and he glanced at Klurt every now and then to make sure that Klurt understood. 'See, here - what we have here is a colporoidate sporomorph, actually three­colpate, about thirty microns long on the polar axis, in a prolate spheroid with a polar-to-equatorial axis ratio of approximately 1.5, 1 would say, while the sexine - do you see the sexine, Klurt? - you have to bear in mind that the sexine, here, is thicker but not terribly much thicker than the nexine, and it is densely reticulate with heterobrochate form, viz., muri simplibaculate - do you follow me?'

  'Yeah.'

  'This pollen grain may come from one of several families of the Caprifoliaecae or certain of the Celastrac­cae, but if I had to say, I would place it in the family Oleaceae.'

  'Mmmm -'

  'Yes. And I would venture to say we are looking at intermedia or japonica. Perhaps I am going too far out on a limb, here, Mr Klurt, but I would hazard a guess - just a guess! - that this pollen grain comes from none other

  than Forsythia intermedia "Spectabilis." ' He handed the photographs back to Special Agent Klurt.

  'So what is it?' the agent asked.

  'I told you, it's forsythia! A flowering shrub. "Spectabi­lis" is the most beautiful type of forsythia, with large vivid yellow flowers that bloom in April. It is the most popular forsythia in America.'

  Forsythia blooms in many places around New York City in the spring. Knowing that the pollen came from forsythia could not help pin down the location of the Unsub. The grain of pollen seemed untraceable.

  The cobra boxes themselves came under the scrutiny of a consultant in tropical wood, a middle-aged professor of plant cellular biology from American University in Washington named Lorraine Schild. She arrived at Governors Island in a state of terror.

  Professor Schild stood in the decon room before the door that led into the Evidence Core. She was dressed in surgical scrubs. Austen and Tanaka were helping her step into a black F.B.I. biohazard space suit.

  'I don't think I can do it,' she said. Her voice quavered. They pleaded with her. They shooed Hopkins and Littleberry away while they tried to reassure her.

  'It's my worst fear,' she said. 'There's a horrible virus in there, isn't there?'

  'We've been all right, so far,' Tanaka said. 'We really need your help,' Austen said.

  Finally they prevailed on Dr Schild, and she suited up and went into the Core. She sat down at a microscope and looked at the wood in the boxes. Austen sat next to her. Dr Schild's voice came out of her Racal hood, muffled and weak. When she had signed a consulting contract with the F.B.I. two years earlier, she had had no idea it could lead to this. She kept t
urning her faceplate this way and that, trying to see into the microscope. 'The

  wood cellular structure is extremely fine-grained,' she said. 'This is a very hard wood. The darker streaks are heartwood. The curvature of the rings indicates that it's the center of a small trunk. I believe this is a flowering legume. A wood this hard would suggest it is a type of acacia tree. I can't tell you exactly the species of acacia. There are so many acacias.'

  'Where does it grow?' Hopkins asked.

  'In habitats all over eastern Africa. Can I leave now?' They took her out and deconned her in the decon room, spraying her with bleach. Dr Schild refused to get back on the Black Hawk helicopter. She asked to be put on a civilian flight back to Washington.

  Nairobi WEDNESDAY

  Frank Masaccio had taken to sleeping in the Federal Building, where he had a bed in a room the size of a closet. At one o'clock in the morning, he put in a telephone call to Nairobi, to the Old Norfolk Hotel, where two agents from his office, Almon Johnston and Link Peters, had checked in some hours earlier. It was now Wednesday morning in Kenya. Masaccio told them about the wood. He suggested they look for shopkeepers selling cobra boxes made of acacia wood.

  Special Agent Johnston was a tall African-American who had lived in Kenya for a year when he'd been posted there as a sales manager for an American company that did business in Africa, before he'd joined the F.B.I., so he knew his way around. Peters worked in the foreign counterintelligence division of the Bureau. He had never been to Africa in his life.

  They were joined by an officer from the Kenya National Police, Inspector Joshua Kipkel, who provided them with a car and a driver. Neither agent knew where to begin looking, but Inspector Kipkel suggested they try some of the better shops - they are called houses - on Tom Mboya Street and Standard Street in downtown Nairobi. So they drove down the streets, stopping at the shops. They looked at the goods for sale. Occasionally the F.B.I. agents purchased something in order to sweeten