by Alex Kava
Platt pulled on a double pair of rubber gloves and Herandez taped them to the sleeves of the suit while Landis taped Platt’s boots to the legs, creating an airtight seal. The helmet, a clear, soft plastic bubble, was the final step and usually the telling one. Platt had watched men and women, brave soldiers, dedicated scientists, freak out in a space suit from claustrophobia, clawing their way out. Platt had spent thirty-six hours behind enemy lines in Afghanistan trapped inside a tank disabled by an IED (improvised explosive device), hoping someone other than the Taliban would find him while he treated his fellow soldiers, one with a gaping head wound, the other with half his arm blown off. There wasn’t much that could compare to that. Entering hot zones in a co-coonlike space suit seemed like a cakewalk.
He waited while Hernandez and Landis double-checked his suit. Even before they switched on the electric blower Platt was sweating, trickles sliding down his back. The motor whirled and he heard the air sucking into the suit while it puffed out around him.
Herandez gave him a thumbs-up. It was difficult to talk over the sound of the electric blower. Platt waved a gloved hand at the tape and made a tearing motion. She nodded, understanding immediately, and started ripping off three-to-five-inch pieces then attached them one on top of the other to Platt’s sleeve where he could easily reach. If there was a break in his suit he’d use the pieces to patch the hole before the suit lost pressure. Any kind of break or tear could render the suit useless in a hot zone.
It had been a while since Platt had done this in the field. The last time had been at the Miami Herald in 2001 when a letter addressed to JLo found its way to a photographer. The letter was filled with anthrax spores. The photographer died weeks later. Platt still had hopes that this wasn’t anything close to anthrax. In fact, he’d be pleased with a hoax.
Finally he returned Herandez’s thumbs-up. Waddling like a toddler learning to walk, he let the pair of sergeants help him out the back of the truck. He waited to get his balance. In three steps he was at the back door of the house and ready.
CHAPTER
15
Elk Grove, Virginia
When Maggie was a little girl she loved to watch old black-and-white horror movies. The Creature from the Black Lagoon was her favorite but she also loved Alfred Hitchcock and episodes of The Twilight Zone. As soon as she saw the man in the orange space suit walk through the kitchen door she almost expected to hear Rod Serling’s voice narrating the bizarre scene.
Earlier, Cunningham had reluctantly made the call to the Army Research facility. It was either USAMRIID or the CDC, and USAMRIID was only about an hour away. Cunningham had given Director Frank of the FBI and Commander Janklow the basics, along with a layout of the residential area. All three men agreed extraordinary measures would be taken, including whatever it took to prevent a panic. Then Cunningham asked Maggie to unlock the back door to the kitchen and they waited.
They had been expecting a group from USAMRIID. Maggie had even watched the white panel truck back onto the lawn. She saw the construction crew block off the street. And yet, she wasn’t sure what she had truly expected—men and women in gas masks, perhaps. Maybe surgical scrubs and gowns. But certainly not space suits.
It was just a precaution, she told herself. Of course, they had to take every precaution. But at the same time she told herself this, she also felt a bit sick to her stomach.
The man in the orange space suit didn’t see her at first. It took full body movement to turn and look around. And he couldn’t possibly hear her. His suit hissed and whirled to keep the pressurized air circulating. Maggie imagined it was even noisier inside the plastic bubble.
He moved slowly, deliberately, a moonwalk into the living room. The boots looked heavy. His arms stuck out, not able to rest against the puffed suit. He stood less than six feet away when he turned. She couldn’t see his face through a fog of mist built up on the plastic helmet. With a gloved hand he pushed the plastic against his face and was able to smear the inside moisture away.
His eyes met hers. They were intense, dark brown and his brow was furrowed. He looked as if he was trying to decide what to say to her. The plastic started to fog up again and this time he slapped it against his face, causing a hiccup in his electric motor. The air pressure gasped, hesitated then started sucking air again. When he looked at Maggie a second time he attempted a shrug, as if to say he had no idea what had just happened. And then he did something Maggie never expected. He grinned at her. It was enough to break the tension and she actually laughed.
That’s when Cunningham came into the room with Mary Louise close behind, close at his side. The little girl took one look at the spaceman and started to scream.
CHAPTER
16
Elk Grove, Virginia
Tully punched the number into his cell phone again. For security purposes he never saved numbers in his phone’s memory. Or at least he wouldn’t even if he knew how.
Still no answer.
After two rings it went to voice message again. He flipped the phone shut. Both Cunningham and Maggie had their phones turned off. He’d rather believe that than the alternative—the U.S. Army wasn’t allowing them to answer.
It wasn’t that Tully didn’t respect the United States military…okay, that wasn’t true. He didn’t respect military officers, especially like the guy he had seen earlier, the one directing traffic, able to order and command with only a wave of a hand and a nod of the head. How many soldiers had that same officer sent to their deaths with as little as a wave of a hand or a nod of his head? Anytime Tully had worked with the military on previous operations the officers in charge took over and did so without apology or even much notice. They didn’t play nice and usually they preferred to do so in secrecy. And as far as Tully could tell, they were doing the exact thing right here, right now.
Tully had moved his car to the other side of the street, still along the curb, but at an angle, so he could see between the panel truck and the back of the house. It was just a slice but enough to make out an orange field suit moving from the truck to the back door several minutes ago. And now he could see a second orange suit just blurred across the same path.
He glanced away to watch Ganza loping across the street from the construction crew, making his way back to Tully’s car. Ganza wasn’t much taller than Tully—maybe an inch or two—but he seemed to carry his height like it was a burden on his skeletal frame. His long, thin legs with knobby knees poking at sagging, brown trousers, skinny neck and sloped shoulders reminded Tully of a giraffe. Even his white lab coat—he hadn’t bothered to leave it behind during their rush to the scene—looked like the spotted hide of a giraffe with gray-and-brown splotches where Ganza had attempted, unsuccessfully, to get out stains. When Tully first got divorced it had been a game for him to guess which men he met were married and which ones were single. Caroline would have never let him leave the house with a stain on his tie. Now stains would be a permanent part of his wardrobe if he didn’t have women in his life—Maggie, Gwen, Emma—constantly wiping at his shirt cuffs, his tie, his jacket lapels. Tully guessed early on that Ganza had never been married. Not only that, he evidently didn’t spend much time around women who even wiped at his stains.
Ganza opened the passenger door and slid in, slamming the door shut with more force than necessary. It was the most emotion Tully could remember the man ever displaying.
“Sons of bitches won’t let us collect evidence,” Ganza said in his trademark monotone, despite the slammed door. “They have to isolate and contain.”
Tully could have told him that before Ganza bothered to show his ID and badge to the soldiers masquerading in construction-crew clothing.
“They’re right, you know.” He didn’t glance over to see Ganza scowl at him. He didn’t need to. He could feel it. “They can’t risk more people getting exposed, if there is something in that house.”
“I know that. But they’ll destroy whatever evidence there is. They don’t know what to look fo
r.” Ganza grabbed the half-eaten tuna sandwich from the dashboard. It had been sitting there since he left it, in the sun. He took a bite and another then said with his mouth still full, “I offered to gear up and collect it.”
“You mean in one of their space suits?”
“Sure, why not?”
“You ever been in one before?” Tully asked.
“Can’t be much different than a gas mask.” But Ganza sat back and gave Tully a long sideways look. “What? You’ve been in one?”
“Once. A long time ago,” Tully said and left it at that.
He and Ganza weren’t friends and Tully wasn’t the type to share more than what was necessary, a trait Gwen Patterson constantly reminded him was—what were her words?—“rather annoying.” Of course, she didn’t like it. She was a psychologist by trade. She could get people to share their deep dark secrets. And if Tully wanted her to be a part of his personal life he would need to learn to share those deep dark secrets with her.
But Ganza…he didn’t owe Ganza anything. Besides, Tully didn’t like to be reminded of the four-hour episode that had been early on in his FBI training. It had been part of basic training back then—after all, 1982 was still the Cold War—that they should all spend several hours in a space suit, although the activity was more about breaking agents down than about biocontainment.
Tully saw something. He could see motion through the slice between the truck and the back of the house. He jerked forward, practically diving around the steering wheel to get a better look. He hoped he was mistaken. But if he wasn’t, it looked as if they were taking someone out of the house and into the rear of the truck in a clear plastic body bag.
CHAPTER
17
USAMRIID
Fort Detrick, Maryland
They called it “the Slammer,” and Maggie knew about it only from rumor. She would have preferred to leave it that way.
The Slammer was actually a Biosafety Level 4 containment hospital, an isolation ward within USAMRIID at Fort Detrick. The Army used it for patients suspected of having an infectious disease or of being exposed to a biological agent. Those patients, until proven otherwise, were also suspected of being highly contagious.
For the most part, Maggie understood that the Slammer was used, or ready, primarily in case any one of USAMRIID’s scientists was accidentally exposed in one of the research labs. USAMRIID housed frozen specimens of all kinds of nasty organisms, viruses and diseases. At one time during the Cold War USAMRIID’s chief assignment was to collect and design biological warfare. These days, as far as Maggie knew, it was solely dedicated to developing vaccines and controlling, or rather containing, any exposures or outbreaks. And after 9/11 and the anthrax scare that followed, it was also USAMRIID’s job to come up with remedies for any terrorist threats that might include contaminations or deadly pathogens.
If one of their own pathologists or veterinarians or microbiologists got pricked with a contaminated needle or cut by a broken test tube or bitten by a lab monkey they had to be able to treat them. They wouldn’t be able to transport them to an area hospital and risk further exposure or media. So they’d take them here, to their own hospital that they, themselves, had nicknamed the Slammer, because it was exactly that, a biological solitary confinement. Maggie realized that Assistant Director Cunningham probably had no idea that when he agreed to the Army taking control of the situation it meant committing himself and Maggie to the Slammer.
At first glance the rooms appeared to be ordinary hospital suites, if you didn’t mind one of the walls being a full-glass viewing window and having double steel doors locked from the outside. Maggie suspected that she and Cunningham would each get their own room, their own solitary confinement. Mary Louise and her mother were also here somewhere. Maggie hoped they were together.
A woman in a blue space suit escorted Maggie to her room through a series of staging areas. Each had thick heavy doors. Each slammed shut behind them, but it wasn’t until the last door, when the air locks sucked in, sealing the door shut, that Maggie felt a panic begin. It started slowly, quietly, ticking in the back of her mind like a heartbeat, only a heartbeat that didn’t seem to belong to her. The air was different inside this room. Different from the hallway. Different from the inner staging areas they had just passed through.
Maggie told herself it was just a slight bit of claustrophobia. She’d be fine. Maybe if she told them she had been stuffed into a freezer last year by a madman, they would sympathize and let her go?
Probably not.
To be fair, the panic had actually begun earlier back at Mary Louise’s house. It started when Maggie watched the two orange spacemen take Mary Louise’s mother out the back door of her suburban house sealed inside a sort of bubble stretcher, what almost looked to Maggie like a plastic body bag. That’s when Maggie felt her skin go clammy and sweat trickle down her back. She worried they intended to take all of them out in plastic body bags and she knew she wouldn’t last a minute inside. It didn’t matter that the contraption had its own oxygen supply. She would panic. She would want to claw her way out. And she had already started to feel her heart racing and her breathing start to become labored. Yes, that was when the panic started.
The spaceman, who she later learned was Colonel Platt, must have seen the terror in Maggie’s eyes. He had already had to settle a screaming child and load up a sick and bleeding woman. Had he been worried that he might have another person in hysterics, clawing her way out of his expensive contraption?
Later Maggie would learn they simply didn’t have enough bubble stretchers for all of them, so Cunningham and Maggie ended up getting a decon shower in the kitchen. The spray misted their clothes, their skin, their hair but didn’t soak through their clothes. Her plastic bag tucked up under the back of her shirt and coat remained safely in place and out of sight, damp and sticking to the sweat of her skin. She could still smell the bleach. It seemed to stay inside her lungs, stinging if she dared to take a deep breath.
“OVERNIGHT,” the woman in the space suit yelled at Maggie over the hissing of her air blower. She handed Maggie a hospital gown that had been folded on the chair. “WE’LL NEED TO KEEP YOU OVERNIGHT.”
Then she motioned for Maggie to sit up on the bed while she unwrapped a plastic tongue depressor and cotton swab. She set aside a sealed syringe. “I NEED TO TAKE A THROAT CULTURE AND THEN DRAW SOME BLOOD,” she shouted, mouthing and exaggerating the words slowly in case Maggie still couldn’t hear her. Then showing her a specimen cup she said, “AND I’LL NEED YOU TO FILL THIS.”
Beyond the glass wall Maggie could see others watching. But the woman in the space suit must have misunderstood Maggie’s misgivings and pointed to the corner where Maggie could see she, at least, had her own bathroom.
Still, she wondered if it was normal that she could hear her heart beat so loudly. How long had it been pounding this hard against her chest? There was no doubt now. This one, this heartbeat, did belong to her. She tried not to listen. She tilted her head back when the woman was ready, and opened her mouth, trying not to concentrate on not being able to swallow, to breathe, even if it was for a few seconds. The woman was good, experienced, fast. Thank God.
She bagged the swab then picked up the syringe. Maggie looked away while the needle pricked and sunk into her skin. She could see tubes and equipment along the other walls, a camera in the corner of the ceiling, monitors blinking and beeping even though they weren’t attached to her yet.
The last time she was in a hospital room, shortly after the freezer incident, she remembered waking up, startled to find tubes and wires connected to her body, bags of fluids hanging above her, monitors bleeping out the rhythm of her heartbeat. She was told that another minute or two of hypothermia and the freezer would have been her ice coffin.
They had drained all the blood out of her to warm up and then put back in. She wasn’t sure how that was possible. She didn’t like to think about it even with her medical background. For weeks afterward s
he had nightmares about the procedure. Otherwise she remembered little about the entire ordeal, except for the cold, the panic, the claustrophobia, all of which culminated in an overwhelming exhaustion.
The woman in the space suit capped one tube of blood and began to fill yet another, Maggie focused on the window. At least it wasn’t a one-way view. She could see the faces on the other side. There were four, maybe five people, punching keyboards, watching monitors, computer screens. All were occupied except for one. One who must have just joined them because she hadn’t noticed him until now.
He stood close to the window, watching her. Having someone she recognized calmed her even if he did have a furrowed brow and worried eyes. She released a sigh and realized it was almost as if she had been holding her breath.
She smiled at R. J. Tully and he gave her a stiff wave, his face lined with concern. She remembered the envelope, double-bagged and swaddled, carefully hidden within her neatly folded jacket. She’d have to find a way to get it to him. But for now she mouthed to him, because she knew he’d never be able to hear her through the thick wall of glass, “Harvey. Please check on Harvey.”
He simply nodded.
CHAPTER
18
Reston, Virginia
Emma Tully pulled out the letter from the yellowed envelope. At first, the stack of envelopes that were gathered together with an orange rubber band had grabbed her attention because the top one, this one, had a twenty-cent stamp with a woman’s picture: Ethel Barrymore. She’d never heard of Ethel Barrymore before. Perhaps she was Drew’s grandmother? It didn’t matter. What caught Emma’s attention was that she couldn’t believe stamps had ever been twenty cents.
