Littleberry said: 'I'm going in. I want to see his lab.' 'You're too senior for this kind of action,' Hopkins told him.
'You can't deny me.' Littleberry turned to Austen. 'You comin' too?'
'Sure am, Doctor,' she said to Littleberry. 'Hey - Hopkins said.
He gave orders for the doctors to stay behind him, but he thought he was fighting a losing battle to keep them out of it altogether. Everyone pulled on black Racal biohazard suits, and Wirtz made them wear body armor. They had lightweight radio headsets. Wirtz told Hopkins to stay well back. 'You and the doctors come in after we've secured the place.'
'I'll be climbing over your back, Oscar,' Hopkins said. He buckled a pouch to his waist, which he filled with certain essentials: swabs, his pocket protector full of pens and other junk, his Mini Maglite flashlight, and a Boink biosensor. He strapped on his SIG-Sauer nine-millimeter semiautomatic. He ran his radio headset wire down to a transceiver at his waist, which operated over a wide
variety of channels. This piece of equipment made it possible for members of the team to talk with each other and with the Command Center. Finally he put a Racal hood over his head, running his radio wire under the hood's shoulder shroud. He switched on the batterypowered blower for the Racal filters, and the hood pressurized. The blowers made a low hum. The battery would keep the hood pressurized for up to eight hours. He jumped up and down lightly on the balls of his feet, feeling keyed up and wanting to move.
'Take it down, Will!' Oscar Wirtz said. 'You're shaking the floor, man.' Wirtz thought: He would not do well in a shooter. But I don't have the heart to tell him.
Hopkins turned off his blowers and removed his Racal hood. There was no sense in wearing it while they were waiting for Tom Cope to make a move.
On the rooftops nearby, the snipers kept the windows of Cope's apartment under surveillance with infrared zoom scopes. They could see Cope occasionally, when he moved close to the metal curtain. They put the crosshairs on his eyes when he peered out, but they couldn't shoot. He always seemed to be carrying the bomb. He moved often and seemed fearful of going near the windows.
A little over a mile away, Frank Masaccio sat in the Federal Building wondering what to do. He had the Sioc in Washington watching his every move, secondguessing him, and the White House seemed ready to have some kind of heart attack. The President had not given the news conference; it had been put on hold while the situation in New York unfolded. Frank Masaccio was pondering his options.
Steven Wyzinski's voice came to him: 'Frank? Frank? Do you hear me? The attorney general is here at Sioc.' 'Mr Masaccio.' It was the voice of Frank Masaccio's ultimate boss, second only to the President in the chain
of authority. 'Any decisions you make will be reviewed and cleared by me.'
Masaccio continued to recommend that no sudden moves be made. He didn't want to commit his forces to an action or to reveal their presence to Cope. Certainly trying to open negotiations with Cope would be a ri
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thing to try - it might set him off. It wasn't clear what Cope suspected, but Masaccio planned to wait for him to leave the building, then to take him. Trying to take people inside apartments was a recipe for a shooter gone bad, and if the guy had a weapon of mass destruction in his apartment, you had to suck the egg through a pinhole - so ran Masaccio's thinking.
In the apartment, Cope went into the bathroom again, carrying the mother bomb. He placed it on the floor. Then he unraveled a long piece of toilet paper and blew his nose. He wiped his face with more toilet paper. He went over to the sink and rinsed his face with cold water.
The surveillance team knew it was cold water, because they could see the color of the water in the thermal imagers.
He was so nervous that he was trembling. Why am I so afraid? He looked into the mirror. His eyes had a strange color. Was that a golden ring around the pupils? He looked into his pupils reflected in the mirror. His nose was running. His upper lip was glistening wet.
No. It could not be. He knew that brainpox was selective in its infectivity. He knew that it infected only about half of the people exposed to it in low doses. It was like so many virus weapons. He had been around the virus for months and he had not become infected. This was impossible. He wondered if he had made a mistake. Maybe when I did the release in Washington I didn't hold my breath in that subway car for long enough.
Maybe some of it stuck to my clothes or my hair. No, that's impossible, I'm immune. I'm imagining things. There is nothing wrong with my mind, nothing. I don't feel anything. If I was infected with brainpox, my mind would feel different. I am a normal paranoid schizophrenic, he said to himself, and he almost smiled, but he wondered again if he had made a big mistake when he had done the Phase II trial in Washington. Cope had a bioreactor full of liquid Cobra virus. Littleberry believed that the reactor was very hot, and that led to a discussion of what to do if some kind of biological meltdown occurred in the apartment during an action. People from the mayor's Emergency Management Office were in the Command Center with Masaccio, and they had an idea that sounded as if it might just work. It was to fill some Fire Department pumper trucks with disinfectant and spray the entire building if Cope's bioreactor dumped its contents. The Fire Department found a chemical shipper in Brooklyn who had a lot of sodium hypochlorite on hand - that's common laundry bleach. Several pumper trucks went over to Brooklyn and were filled with bleach and water. They then fined up, as discreetly as possible (which wasn't very discreetly) on a street around the corner from Cope. The Fire Department also had decontamination trucks, which are used to decontaminate firemen or citizens who have been exposed to chemicals or asbestos, and those trucks were stationed nearby.
It was now one o'clock in the morning. Cope had not been able to fall asleep. He was still indecisive. Part of the reason for that was that he was no longer completely him. The transformation was occurring rapidly now. Crystals were forming in his brain stem.
'Move the fire trucks in as close as possible without making them visible in any of Cope's windows,' Hopkins
said, speaking to Masaccio. 'Get them ready to start spraying bleach into the building if we call for it. Wirtzy is dying to move. If we go through the wall, start the spray. If the bomb goes off, let's hope the spray will decontaminate the building.'
'That's a big hope, Hopkins,' Masaccio said.
Down
It was now three o'clock in the morning. Alice Austen had been watching Cope on the screens of the thermalimaging cameras. He had not gone to sleep. When he stood up from the couch and began to move across the room, she made a tentative diagnosis. Cope seemed to be making some involuntary gestures. Jerky movements. He was talking to himself. And moaning. 'I'm not sick. Not sick.'
'Listen, Will. I think he's infected,' Austen said. They studied his body movements, but Austen couldn't be sure.
Then Cope seemed to make up his mind. 'Option two,' he said.
'What was that?' Hopkins said. 'He's losing it,' Littleberry said.
The blurry thermal image showed Cope bent over the object in his hands. They heard a sound. It was the sound of the metal end piece being unscrewed from the glass bomb tube. He fiddled with something. They heard a dry, rustling, cracking sound. It was the sound of wires being pulled through a packed mass of viral hexagons in the tube. He was re-arming the bomb.
Hopkins stood and put his hand up. 'Wirtzy! He may blow something! Get ready!'
Everyone put on Racal hoods, which took a few
seconds. They zipped up their suits and started their air filters running. If the building goes hot with that bomb, Hopkins thought, it could kill all of us, space suits or not. The air near bioground zero would be so thick with virus, it might overwhelm the suit's protection. Quick as cats, Oscar Wirtz and five Reachdeep operational ninjas positioned themselves against the thinned wall, on either side of the charges. The master breacher, Wilmot Hughes, readied his controls. Everyone was wearing full space-suit battle dress with body armor
. The ninjas were carrying flash grenades and Heckler & Koch assault weapons.
In Washington, as it dawned on the Sioc group that Reachdeep was getting itself poised to move, a number of people began shouting contradictory things at the same time.
'What the hell's Hopkins doing?' 'Masaccio! Answer us!'
Cope replaced the cap on the cylinder. The bomb was now armed. He slid it inside the carry-bag.
Hopkins stared at the thermal image, trying to read Cope's body language. Was this a man who was getting ready to blow himself up? Hopkins didn't think so. But what was he doing?
Carrying the bag, Cope walked into the corridor that led to the laboratory. He did not put on a protective suit. He opened the door of the lab. Now, in the fish-eye lens, they saw him clearly for the first time. He stood by the door, looking across the room toward the bioreactor, and suddenly he picked up a heavy glass beaker and hurled it.
The bioreactor, which was itself made largely of glass, exploded, its blood-warm contents splashing through the air in a spray of droplets. The pink contents poured out and flooded across the floor in a warm running meltdown of amplified liquid Cobra virus.
'It's gone hot!' Hopkins yelled. 'Go!' Masaccio responded.
Everyone pressed flat against the wall, and the master breacher detonated the charges.
The wall went down as if it were made of gravel, and an oval hole opened up. Wirtz and the ninjas poured through.
Austen, who was lying on the floor, couldn't look. She tucked her head down under her arm, and her stomach lurched. There were brilliant flashes at her back, from the flash grenades. The flash grenades blinded the thermal cameras.
Wirtz had led his team through the hole. They kept their guns ready but held their fire. Hopkins saw the screens go white when the flash grenades went off. Then the screens came back to normal. He saw Cope's thermal image, running across the field of view.
'Oscar, he's moving to your left!' he shouted over the radio link.
He saw Wirtz and his people moving through the apartment. Two of them detached leftward.
'Wirtzy, he's in the kitchen!' Hopkins shouted. Suddenly he saw the form of Tom Cope curl up in a ball - and, unbelievably, Cope dropped straight down through the floor and out of sight. 'He's going down!' Hopkins yelled. They pointed the imagers down through the floor. They saw Cope's form descending straight down through the building, until his image faded away.
Tom Cope had smashed the bioreactor, and he had backed out of the room and shut the door. An instant later, the apartment had filled with shocking explosions and flashes of light. He raced into the kitchen. Figures in black space suits were tumbling into his living room.
Many old buildings in New York City have dumbwaiter shafts that are no longer used or are used for
trash disposal. The dumbwaiter was Cope's planned escape route. He had not dared to try it because he was afraid they would be in the basement waiting for him. Now he had no choice.
Carrying his doctor's bag, Cope had climbed through an opening in the wall of the kitchen and curled up on the dumbwaiter platform. He let the ropes go and the platform went down fast, the ropes singing in the pulley. He came to a halt with a bang in the basement, inside a closet. He flung himself out the door. No one around. He raced through a heating tunnel and came to a small opening in the brickwork covered with a sheet of plywood. He tore the plywood off. There was his crawl space, his escapeway. He went through it, scraping his knees on broken concrete. He cut his knee, ripping his pants. The crawl space was black with dust. Ahead, he heard the rumble of a subway train.
The F.B.I. Hostage Rescue Team coming in through the front door of the building was in a rush to get to the third floor, and they formed a strung-out deployment, team members stopping on every floor to cover the next wave. They had reached the third floor when they heard on their radio headsets that the suspect had gone down through the building, and was presumed to be hiding in the basement.
In the apartment, Oscar Wirtz and some of his team headed for the kitchen, where Hopkins was telling them that Cope had disappeared. In the kitchen they found the dumbwaiter shaft.
Seconds later, Hopkins entered. He was carrying a spray tank full of Envirochem, a powerful antibiological liquid. Austen followed behind him, and Littleberry after that. They headed for the bioreactor room, where Hopkins did his best to spray Envirochem all over the floor and walls, making a mist inside the room. Soon
bleach would be pouring into the building from the fire trucks.
On his radio, Hopkins heard Wirtz calling to him. He headed for the kitchen, Austen and Littleberry behind him.
'He's gone down a shaft,' Wirtz was saying. 'We're heading after him.'
They followed Wirtz down the stairs, through tremendous confusion. The other H.R.T. teams in the building were wearing respirators but not space suits, and they were evacuating the building's residents. The elderly woman who lived below Cope had to be gotten out fast now, since the reactor was in a room above her.
Leaving these problems to the other teams, the Reachdeep group focused on getting Cope. Wirtz and his ninjas spearheaded a sweep of the basement, with the scientists hanging back but unable to stay out of the operation. Wirtz was swearing to himself about this, vowing that next time he would make sure the scientists were put in a box. For the moment, he could do nothing about it.
It didn't take him long to find the crawl space and the sheet of plywood lying on the floor. 'Cope! Are you in there?' he shouted.
No answer.
Wirtz noticed a spot of blood on the concrete floor of the crawl space, and near it were drops of some kind of moisture that was not blood. Hopkins swabbed the blood and jammed the swab into his Boink. The biosensor beeped. 'Cobra,' he said.
What now?
They shouted again into the crawl space. Silence. 'Scientists back off,' Wirtz said. 'Operations people in first.' He vaulted up into the crawl space. One by one his people followed him, squirming on their hands and knees, pushing their weapons ahead of them. They
barely fit. They did not have flashlights; this was an unforeseen development.
Wirtz, the first in line, came to the end of the crawl space. It opened out into darkness and dropped down into a low, narrow passage running at right angles. He could still see a little.
'What's happening down there?' Frank Masaccio asked. He was sitting at his command post, listening to the audio feed, and he was quietly losing his mind. He did not feel as if he was in control of the team.
'What's happening in New York?' These words were spoken by Steven Wyzinski at Sioc in Washington. There was a rumbling sound, a roaring, and it grew louder. It was being picked up by Wirtz's mike.
They heard Wirtz's voice over the sound, saying, 'That's a subway train you're hearing. We're near the subway. I'm behind some kind of wall here.'
Cope had gone into the subway. He had slipped through the grasp of a huge F.B.I. operation, and he was carrying a biological bomb or bombs.
'This is fucking terrible!' Masaccio yelled.
'Maybe we can biocontain him,' Hopkins said into his headset.
'What do you mean?' Masaccio asked.
'The subway tunnels are a natural biocontainment area. If he blows a bomb in there, maybe we can seal the tunnels off and stop the trains. Maybe we'd rather have him down there than up in the open air. Let's try to trap him in the tunnels. Frank, you need to shut doyen the air-circulation fans in the subway. You don't want tunnel air being vented outdoors, and you don't want air being drawn in, either.'
Masaccio put through an emergency call to the Transit Authority Operations Control Center on West Fourteenth Street. This is a large control room, manned by dozens of subway system operators. He got a system
supervisor on the line. They began stopping the trains. They turned off all the air blowers and fans. Masaccio went into a flurry of shouting and orders. The bottom line was that F.B.I. agents and New York City police officers were to seal off all the subway entrances
in the neighborhood of East Houston Street, and then go down into the subway and sweep the tracks, to find Tom Cope. Almost none of these forces were equipped with any kind of biohazard masks or protection. If Cope's bomb went off, many of them would die. Masaccio was throwing in his reserves, but they were not prepared. He had no choice.
Reachdeep team members followed the crawl space that Cope had entered underneath his building. It led to the door at the far end of the Houston Street subway stub tunnel. The door was supposed to be locked, but what appeared to be a secure catch was in fact a mechanism that snapped open if you knew how to operate it. This was Cope's route of escape. The route went directly past the places where Harmonica Man and Lem had lived. They had died because they had seen Cope using the door.
Oscar Wirtz led the way, then five ninjas, and then, bringing up the rear, came Hopkins, Austen, and Littleberry. It is true that Mark Littleberry, or any man his age, did not belong in an operation of this kind, but no one could control Mark Littleberry; the man was fundamentally uncontrollable.
The tunnel was silent. The subway trains had stopped running.
Faintly, they heard Masaccio's voice on their headsets: 'What are you doing? Report?'
'I can't hear you, Frank. You're breaking up,' Hopkins said. 'We're coming into the Second Avenue station. You've got to seal it off.'
'We're doing it now, we're sending police into all the stations,' Masaccio replied.
They moved forward, running at a jog trot.
F.B.I. communications specialists told the Reachdeep group to switch their radios over to a frequency used by the Transit Authority. This improved the reception, which depended on wires strung inside the subway tunnels. When the Reachdeep people came up onto the Second Avenue platform they found it deserted.
Cutoff
He had come out onto the Second Avenue platform a few minutes ahead of his pursuers. Should he wait for a train? At three in the morning, he might have to wait a long time.
Don't wait for a train, that would be stupid. And the street up there will be crawling with agents. Don't go up to the street here.
Cobra Event Page 32
