Alice Austen did not go on the raid. She was not trained in operations. She stayed with Suzanne Tanaka, sitting by Tanaka's bedside, wearing a protective suit. Tanaka was connected to monitoring machines and lifesupport machines, but they made no real difference, nor did any of the supportive therapy seem to make any difference. The virus had invaded Tanaka's midbrain, had nested itself at the top of the brain stem, where it could not be reached. Tanaka had bitten her lips, but what seemed to bother her the most were the poxlike blood blisters that formed and began to burst inside her mouth. She asked for water but could not coordinate her swallowing, and she spilled water mixed with blood from her mouth over the arms of Austen's biohazard suit.
Tanaka remained conscious until nearly the end. The virus had left the conscious part of her mind clear even while it destroyed her unconscious mind.
'Do you believe in God, Alice?' Tanaka said. Her voice was thick, difficult to understand. Her face twitched, covered with sweat.
'Yes, but I don't understand God,' Austen answered. A helicopter landed, carrying Suzanne Tanaka's mother, who had been flown up from North Carolina. Tanaka had finally asked for her mother to come see her. But by the time they got her mother dressed in a protective suit, it was too late. Suzanne Tanaka had died. The first unit of F.B.I. agents to move on Bio-Vek was a group wearing operational clothing but not space suits. They tried the door. It was locked, so they broke it with impact rams, and rushed in. They were followed instantly by Wirtz and the Reachdeep operations group, who were wearing space suits. They had suited up at the airfield. They peeled off down a corridor. Littleberry and Hopkins, both wearing protective suits, went with Wirtz to show him the way to the bioreactor room. Agents poured into the building, heading in all directions.
They found Heyert and one Bio-Vek manager. There was no one else on the premises. Heyert was in his office talking on the telephone when they entered. The team served him with a search warrant and informed him that all of Bio-Vek, Inc., was being confiscated as federal evidence, including all computer data. They did not place Dr Heyert under arrest. They asked him if he would mind waiting voluntarily in his office for a short while, because Hopkins wanted to speak with him. Even though he was not under arrest, they read him his constitutional rights and reminded him of his right to say nothing, and his right to have an attorney.
Heyert agreed to wait. He did not want to seem to be fleeing.
Littleberry led Hopkins and Wirtz straight to the bioreactor room. They entered it thirty seconds after they'd gone through the front door of the building. The bioreactors were shut down and the room stank of bleach. They could smell the bleach coming through their respirators.
They took out swabs and collected samples from a variety of spots in the bioreactor room. They filled two dozen small plastic tubes with swab tips. Hopkins swabbed the bioreactor and the equipment, while Littleberry swabbed the walls, corners of the room, and a light switch. Hopkins stood on a table and pulled down the HEPA filter units in the ceiling. There was fresh, new fiber material in them.
'Look in the trash,' Littleberry said.
They found a trash can stuffed with used HEPA filters and used bioprotective suits. Everything was drenched with bleach. It was a small room, and it was obvious that one or two people, working for an hour or two, could clean it up.
Hopkins ran samples through the hand-held Boink. It chimed and chimed, telling them that it saw Cobra everywhere in the room. The effort to clean the room had failed completely. The bleach had killed the virus but could not destroy all the DNA of the dead virus particles.
They went back to the office, where agents waited with Dr Heyert.
Hopkins sat down facing Heyert, with Littleberry next to him. They removed their face masks. Hopkins thought it might make medical sense to leave his mask on, but on the other hand, Heyert was not wearing a mask, and neither were most of the F.B.I. agents. It was one of those situations where you take your chances.
Hopkins said, 'I want to offer you an opportunity to
make the right decision. It will be the most important decision you make in your life, Dr Heyert. We have found an overwhelming amount of evidence that you are making biological weapons here. You cannot justify this as legitimate medical research. Your company has been seized and you are under investigation. I believe you will be arrested. The charge will be violation of Section 175 of Title 18 of the United States Criminal Code. That's the biological weapons section. Conviction can result in life imprisonment. If the crime is connected to a terrorist act, then it is a capital crime, and the death penalty can be imposed. I want to repeat: the death penalty can be imposed.'
Heyert stared at him.
'We can't do a plea bargain with you,' Hopkins continued. 'But if you cooperate with us right now, we can recommend leniency to the sentencing judge. Otherwise I believe you are likely to spend most of the rest of your life in prison.'
'I haven't committed any crime. If there was anything wrong ... it was an accident.'
'We took samples from your bioreactor yesterday when you were running hot, Dr Heyert. We found a virus. We have sequenced most of the genes in the virus and it is clearly a weapon. It is a weaponized chimera. It's a mixture of-an insect virus, smallpox, and the common cold. It's very nasty. It seems to alter a gene in the human body, creating Lesch-Nyhan disease in normal people. It is a lethal weapon.' ,
'This is a lie.'
'The evidence will be introduced at your trial.' 'I have not committed any crime!'
'You could be charged as an accessory to terrorism,' Hopkins said.
Heyert was deeply frightened now. 'There have been deaths?'
'You tell me,' Hopkins said.
Something began to fracture inside Heyert. It happened delicately at first, like an egg developing a crack. The egg did not exactly break, it only leaked. 'It isn't my fault,' he said.
Littleberry, who had been staring at Heyert with a fierce expression, yelled, 'Then whose fault is it?'
'We don't control things,' Heyert said. 'We are controlled by BioArk, the Concern. BioArk is our silent general partner. I'm an employee. I am only a middle manager.'
'How do we find BioArk?' Hopkins asked. 'Geneva.'
'It's a Swiss company?'
'It's a multinational. I don't know where the Concern comes from originally. It is headquartered in Switzerland.'
'There's n terrorist making threats in New York City. Who is he?'
Heyert almost shuddered. 'I don't know what you are talking about,' he said.
'Yes, you do. Please do the right thing, Dr Heyert. For your sake and that of your family.'
Heyert drew a long breath. 'His name is Tom Cope - Thomas Cope. He's a strange man. A good scientist. He helped develop ... our ... some of our ... uh ... strains.' 'What do you mean?' Hopkins asked.
'We hired him to do research on a - a particular aspect of the virus. It wasn't able to replicate in human tissue very well. He ... fixed it.'
'Why? Why did you want the virus to do that? Replicate in human tissue?'
There followed a long pause, and Hopkins saw fit to let it drag on. Finally Hopkins repeated, 'Why?'
Heyert seemed on the edge of tears. 'I have a family,' he said. 'I am afraid for them.'
,Why?,
'BioArk. I am afraid. Can you - I - I can help you. I can tell you about BioArk. But can you protect my family? And me? These BioArk people are ... without pity.,
'We can't make any promises,' Hopkins said. 'If you can help us in the investigation and agree to testify, there is a witness protection program.'
'I'm more afraid of BioArk than I am of you.' The words tumbled out. Heyert couldn't stop now. 'BioArk is a biotechnology company. A multinational. Part of the BioArk business - only part of it - is black research into weapons. They also make medicines. They do both. They work both sides of the street. They were paying me and my staff well, but if we talked we would be killed. They located a subsidiary here because this is - well, this is
America, where the most talented people in biotechnology are. They set up this company, Bio-Vek, to do contract weapons-research into focused areas. One of them was the development of N.P.V. as a weapon. I - I hired Tom Cope to figure out how to get N.P.V. to infect humans. There is very big money in this, Mr Hopkins.'
'What about the patients, Dr Heyert, the kids with Lesch-Nyhan?'
'I am a doctor. I do want to help them. It's just that there's no money; it's a rare disease.'
'Cope - did he develop the virus?'
'No. Others at BioArk had mostly developed it already. But there were some problems, and it was felt that the Americans could solve them. Tom merely sharpened the edge of the weapon. I fired him because he was unreliable and seemed - really odd, kind of scary.'
'How much virus did he steal?' Hopkins asked. 'I don't know. ... He stole a Biozan.'
'A bioreactor?' Littleberry said.
'The number-four Biozan, yes.' Heyert was trembling.
'We need to see your records on Cope,' Hopkins said. The employee records of Bio-Vek were kept in a locked filing cabinet in Heyert's secretary's office. Heyert gave agents the key, and they soon pulled Cope's employment file and his resume. If his resume was accurate (a big assumption to make), he had a Ph.D. in molecular biology from San Francisco State University, and he had a troubled employment history. For a while he had worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He had never married.
Thomas Cope was the Unsub no longer. The file contained his Bio-Vek company photo ID. In his physical features he was what might be described as a gray man. He had no strong or defining characteristics - he was of medium height with rather pallid skin, hair thinning on top but not completely gone. He was thirty-eight years old, and he wore metal-framed eyeglasses.
A team of investigators continued to question Heyert, but soon after having given them Cope's name, he stopped talking and demanded to have access to his lawyer.
Hopkins telephoned the information on Cope to Frank Masaccio, who put his task force to work on it. The first thing they did was to run a credit check on Cope. This is one of the easiest and best ways to find someone. You can learn if they are using a credit card, and if so, you can find out which businesses they are shopping at and what they have been buying lately. The pattern of activity on a credit card can quickly pinpoint a subject's location.
They found out that Cope had been using a Visa card under his own name to order laboratory equipment from a variety of suppliers across the United States. The things were being shipped to a mail drop that Cope maintained at a private mail service in a strip shopping center known as the Apple Tree Center in East Brunswick, New
Jersey. There was no other activity on the credit card except for these orders. Cope was evidently picking up his equipment in a car or truck and driving it somewhere else.
Hopkins was now standing in the parking lot at BioVek, talking on his cell phone to Frank Masaccio. Masaccio said to him, 'We're going to have Cope in a day or two, maybe in hours. You Reachdeep folks have done great work.'
'Don't count on anything,' Hopkins said.
'Yeah, I know. Any operation can fall apart. But we're going to bust him. I can feel it. We're throwing up a massive surveillance operation around the Apple Tree Center. I've got half the agents from the Newark office on the case. Cope is going to be history. Hold on a minute, Will, there's a call I have to take.'
Hopkins waited. Just then, Hopkins's beeper went off. He checked it. It was the contact number for Sioc in Washington.
When Masaccio came back on the line, he sounded like a different man. 'We've got a problem in Washington,' he said.
Washington SATURDAY, MAY 2
The second Cobra Event Sioc meeting began thirty minutes later. It was ten o'clock in the morning when Hopkins and Littleberry landed on Governors Island. They went straight to the meeting room in the Reachdeep unit, where Austen was already in a videoconference with Washington. Frank Masaccio was sitting beside her.
From his office at the F.B.I.'s National Security Division, Steven Wyzinski had given the order - with White House approval - to deploy disaster medical groups in Washington. There had been eleven deaths from what looked like Cobra in Washington overnight. Victims had been showing up in emergency rooms all over the metropolitan area. The C.D.C. task force on Cobra was working on the epidemiology.
'The news media is starting to go berserk,' Jack Hertog said. He had just come from the White House, and he seemed extremely angry. The video screen made his polo shirt look chartreuse. 'They're saying it may be food poisoning. They're also saying it may be deliberate. What if we've just been bombed with a chemical weapon?'
Walter Mellis was in the Sioc room with him. 'We've got a team in place, and we're looking at the epidemiology now. I have a preliminary result,' he said.
'What is it?' Hertog asked brusquely, turning to Mellis.
'All the cases seem to have been commuters on the Washington Metro. There was a release of hot agent somewhere in the subway.'
'Goddamnit!' Hertog cried. 'What's the casualty projection?'
'We've seen only eleven cases, so far, which is telling us that this was a small release, not a large one,' Mellis replied.
'A warning,' Hopkins said.
'He must have popped a few grams of agent into the air,' Littleberry said. 'If it was a big release, you'd know it. You'd have thousands of cases.'
Mellis turned aside and listened. Someone was speaking to him. Then he said: 'We've been working on samples in Atlanta. We have preliminary confirmation that the agent in Washington is in fact Cobra virus.'
All the cases of Cobra were being moved by Navy and Army medevac helicopters into Bethesda Naval Hospital. That is, the survivors were being moved. The dead were being stored in a refrigerated biohazard truck that was making the rounds.
Jack Hertog laid down the White House line. He said, 'I am here to tell you that the President of the United States will hold a news conference later today. The President is going to explain to the American people what is happening. It seems that the Reachdeep operation has been a failure. It has failed totally, disastrously.'
'We have the Unsub's name,' Hopkins said. Silence fell over the Sioc.
'His name, we believe, is Thomas Cope. He is a molecular biologist, a former employee of Bio-Vek, Inc., a biotech company headquartered in Greenfield, New Jersey,' Hopkins said. 'We're getting background on him now.'
'Is he under arrest?' Hertog asked. 'Not yet,' Frank Masaccio said.
'That's not good enough,' Hertog said. 'Where is he?' 'Can we put Cope's image on the screen?' Hopkins asked. Cope's face appeared on screens in Washington. 'We just obtained this photograph during the seizure of Bio-Vek.'
Frank Masaccio said that Dr Thomas Cope's name appeared on the F.B.I. profile list of Americans who had visited Kenya around the time the cobra boxes were bought in Nairobi. Bio-Vek records indicated that Cope had never married and had no children, but he had relatives. The F.B.I. was trying to locate them. Then Masaccio explained about Cope's mail drop in New Jersey. 'When we checked the doctor's credit records,' he said, 'we found out that he recently placed an order for safety suits and breathing filters from a company in California. The shipment went by Federal Express, marked for Saturday delivery. It's due in today. They're telling us at the mail service that Cope usually picks his stuff up on the day it arrives. We've checked all the phone numbers he left on various forms, and none of them check out, so we can't trace him through phone calls. But he's coming to get that package. He's got a key that lets him in anytime, and we've already got nearly a hundred agents waiting to nail him.'
'Yes, but how soon?' Hertog demanded.
'Hours if we're lucky,' Masaccio said. 'The Reachdeep people will be suited up, just in case of trouble at the shopping center, if the guy's got a biological with him.'
'The director of the F.B.I. has authorized me to say that all, repeat, all of the Bureau's resources will be dedicated to this case,' Steven W
yzinski said.
'After the horse left the barn!' Hertog said, his voice rising. 'How do you know he's going to pick up his mail? How do you know it isn't a group?'
'I can't guarantee anything until he's in custody, but I'm confident we'll have him soon,' Masaccio said.
'Cut the bullshit!' Hertog shouted. 'People are dying in Washington, for chrissake. This is not Lubbock! This is Washington. This is the goddamned fucking capital of the country! The people who run the fucking world live here! You marshmallows dicking around with your test tubes have left us open to a real mess. I want some straight F.B.I. work here, coordinated with anybody else in the goddamned government who knows how to get some results in this situation. I want the Reachdeep dickheads on that island off this case, and I want your top guys, Frank, your pros, taking this one down fast.'
Littleberry suddenly broke in, shouting, 'The terrorist is going to cook New York while you are shifting gears and the President tries to save his own ass.'
'You're fired,' Hertog snapped. 'You can't fire me, I'm retired.'
'Then I'm going to take away your goddamned pension.'
Break
Austen and Hopkins sat facing each other in the meeting room outside the Reachdeep Core. They had had nothing to do for hours except talk about the case. Mark Littleberry was out on the deck, staring across the water at the city. He'd been there for a long time.
'I'm worried that Frank's going down a blind alley,' Hopkins said. 'What if Cope doesn't pick up his mail? He could be anywhere.'
Austen doodled with a pencil on her map of the city. 'You know, I've been thinking ... there's such a tight cluster of cases here. Here, in this part of the city. It's weird. We've got cases in Washington, but all the other primary cases fall in one part of the city. Look.' She showed him on the map. Her finger moved over a part of Manhattan. It was lower Manhattan, and toward the eastern side. Her finger moved over Union Square, where Kate Moran had lived, and over East Houston Street, where Harmonica Man and Lem had lived, then over the Lower East Side, where Hector Ramirez and his family lived - and to the Sixth Avenue flea market on Twentysixth Street, where Penny Zecker and Kate Moran had met. 'There's a pattern here.'
Cobra Event Page 29
