Metzler casually picked up the sample bottle. “Like you say, I am a bright man. By the time old Ernst there pulled out his gun and shot me, I would have opened the valve and we’d all die.”
Speyer gave him an apparaising look. “I don’t think so.”
“Your choice, pal. But if I’m going to die anyway, I might as well take you nut cases with me.”
Baumann stopped in his tracks, uncertain what to do.
“Tell you what,” Metzler said. “We’re all going upstairs where you’re going to get my money. Then one of you is going to walk up to Columbus with me where I’ll catch a cab. Once I’m inside the cab I’ll exchange the sample bottle for the money. Everybody wins. And best of all I won’t have any reason to open my mouth because if I do I’ll lose the money. You get what you want and I’ll get what I want.”
Speyer was vexed but it was clear that he couldn’t see a way out of the impasse. He nodded. “Very well. But I will give you a warning after all. We have many friends. Open your mouth and you’re a dead man. Sooner or later someone will catch up with you.”
“I get the message,” Metzler said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I want to get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
Speyer got the leather money bag and walked up to Columbus Avenue with the biologist while Baumann wrapped the two cylinders in blankets and took them out to the trunk of the Mercedes.
Traffic was still fairly heavy, and it took only a couple of minutes for Metzler to hail a cab. When he got in, he exchanged the small cylinder for the money bag.
“Best you not forget what I told you,” Speyer said.
“Believe me, I won’t,” Metzler said.
Speyer pocketed the cylinder, turned and walked back to 86th, and for the first time since he’d seen the images on the computer screen he sighed in relief.
It was eleven by the time they stopped in front of the Hayden Planetarium. Speyer dropped the package containing a letter and the sample cylinder into a Federal Express collection box. It was free of fingerprints, the FedEx account number was untraceable to him, and it was addressed simply to: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., 20502.
“Do you think they’ll go for it?” Baumann asked.
“They’d be fools not to.” Speyer stared out the window as they headed north on the Henry Hudson Parkway to the George Washington Bridge and I—95. “Seventy-two hours,” he said. “If they don’t pay us by then we’ll spray one bottle over Washington and sell the other bottle to the highest bidder. And believe me, Ernst, there’ll be plenty of bidders.”
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The package, along with seventeen others, was delivered to the White House Mail Center in the Old Executive Office Building at one in the afternoon. Mary Wilcox, chief postal receptionist on duty, passed each package and letter through the Advanced Threat Evaluator, a complex piece of electronic hardware that checked for chemical, biological, or nuclear hazards.
The cylinder showed up on the X-ray and ultrasound scans, but the sensitive gamma ray and neutron detectors showed nothing. Nor did the chemical or biological sensors pick up a thing.
Nevertheless she stopped the conveyor and picked up the phone. “I might have something for you.”
A minute later, Tom Walton, the chief Secret Service agent on duty, came across the hall from his office and studied the image on the screen for a minute. “I don’t like the look of it,” he said.
“What do you think it is?” Mary Wilcox asked. She was thinking bomb.
“I don’t see any detonator circuits, but that might not mean a thing,” Walton said. “Get your people out of here for a few minutes.” He called his boss, Leonard Sills, who was chief of White House security, and then called the bomb squad from next door.
Both arrived at the same time, and Sills gave the okay to move the package and open it inside a blast box that was permanently set up in the hall. Everyone backed off to give the demolitions lead officer, dressed in a heavily padded and armored disposal suit, plenty of room to pick up the package carefully and walk with it out into the hall. When it was in the blast box they all breathed a sigh of relief.
Sills said something into his lapel mike, then nodded. “Give me five,” he said. He looked over at Walton. “POTUS is enroute by chopper. I asked them to hold him for five minutes.” POTUS was the Secret Service designator for the President Of The United States.
“Good idea.”
“I have the package open,” Martin LeRoche, the demolitions officer, radioed. “No wires, no circuitry, no external power source.”
“Any label on the bottle?” Walton asked.
“No, but there is a letter.”
“Leave the bottle, bring the letter,” Sills instructed. He took out a pair of surgical rubber gloves and put them on as LeRoche came back across the hall with the standard business-size envelope in his thickly gloved hand.
“It’s addressed to the president,” Sills said, carefully opening the envelope. It took him a minute to read the short note and for the words to register, but when he was finished his lips compressed and he looked up.
“What is it, Len?” Walton asked.
“Some nut case says he’s sent the president a sample bottle of bugs. Call Bethesda and get the CDC’s rapid response team over here on the double.” He turned to LeRoche. “I want this wing evacuated and sealed right now.” He got on his radio. “Thunder, this is Sills.”
“Copy.”
“We have a possible Mars One threat. Confidence is high. CDC is on its way.”
“Copy that. We’re diverting POTUS to the secondary.”
“We should be clear within the hour. But this one came with a note.”
“Fax it.”
“Will do,” Sills said, mindful of all the wheels that had been set into motion and hoping that this wasn’t the big one that they expected to happen someday.
DECATUR, GEORGIA
Dr. Theodore Osborne, director of the Centers for Disease Control laboratory division was about to sit down at the dinner table with his wife and teenage son when the phone call came for him. It was the lab where the cylinder had been brought.
“It’s not good news, I’m afraid,” Lieutenant Colonel Jan deHuis said. He was chief of the biological threat research section.
“Good God, don’t tell me that it’s legitimate?” Dr. Osborne said. He was a good Christian man who in his heart believed in the basic goodness of man.
“It’s an arbovirus. Like ebola and some of the other African hemorraghic strains.”
“Active?”
“Very,” deHuis said. “But this one’s in none of our databases. It’s brand new.”
“Did you find any biological tags?”
“None. But if I had to guess, I’d bet a year’s pay that this was cooked up in a military laboratory somewhere. Maybe Iraq. But I just can’t be sure. It’s not very sophisticated but I expect that after we run our live tests we’ll find that it’s deadly.”
“We’d better inform the president this evening,” Dr. Osborne said.
“It’s on your computer.”
“I’ll look it over and send it up. Thank you for the fast work, Jan.”
WASHINGTON, D.C.
President Reasoner’s National Security Council members got to their feet when he entered the situation room beneath the White House and took his seat at the center of the long table.
“I trust that everybody has read the letter that came with the cylinder, as well as the CDC’s report.”
“We have, Mr. President,” his national security adviser, Leslie Newby said.
“Very well, what do we do about it?” The president glanced at the wall clock. It was 8:30 P.M. “We have a half hour before the son of a bitch calls us, and I’m going to have to make some tough decisions.”
“We don’t know who they are, what they want or how long they’re going to give us,” FBI Director Dale McKeever said. “None of that was mentioned in the letter. So our fir
st job is to agree with everything they demand, but to stall for time.”
“Does the Bureau have any leads?”
“There were no fingerprints on the letter or the cylinder. The paper was standard twenty-pound copy paper that you can buy from any office supply house. We’ll have the brand later this evening, but I doubt that it’ll help much. The printer was an older Hewlett Packard DeskJet that you’ll find in about a quarter of all the households in this country. The cylinder is a laboratory item, manufactured two years ago by Western Laboratory Products in Waco, but distributed to nearly every lab supply company in the country. We’re checking, but if the bottle was purchased through an intermediary or through a blind, it’ll be a dead end.” McKeever checked his notes.
“The package was picked up at a FedEx drop box outside the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, but we can’t narrow the time it was placed in the box closer than six hours. We’re canvassing the neighborhoods immediately around the box for witnesses.” McKeever looked up. “There’s more of the same, but the fact of the matter is that we need time.”
The president turned to his CIA director, James Flynn. “Have your people turned up anything that might help?”
“If, as Dr. Osborne suggests, it’s a military virus from an Iraqi lab, we’re out of luck for the moment. Since the inspections were blocked again we’ve been unable to place an effective agent inside the country.” He spread his hands. “Given the time we might be able to find out something.”
President Reasoner’s eyes were hard. “How much time?”
“Months, Mr. President, certainly not days or hours.”
“They’ve covered their bases very well,” the president said. He looked at the note that had been sent with the cylinder. It was short and to the point. The virus was deadly, the terrorists had much more of it, and they would release it in a major U.S. city unless one very simple demand was met. A call would be made to the White House situation room at precisely 2100 hours EDT.
The sweep second hand of the wall clock came up to 9:00 P.M. and one of the incoming lines lit up. The Marine technician let it ring twice then made the circuit. They heard the warbling tone of a computer and the call was switched to the laptops in front of everyone at the table.
“Good evening, Mr. President and members of your security council.” The words appeared on the LCD screens.
The president hesitated a moment, and then typed his reply. “You have our attention. What do you want?”
“No later than seventy-two hours from now, your government will deposit $10 billion in U.S. funds into the following seventy-three off-shore bank accounts.”
A series of countries, banks, account numbers, and amounts, beginning with several deposits in the Grand Cayman islands totalling around $250 million, scrolled down the screen.
“Do we have a trace on him?” the president asked.
“No, sir,” the Marine said. “The call is coming from an anonymous remailer in Switzerland.”
“We can break that, but it’ll take us several days, up to a week if the remailer is good,” McKeever said.
“That means he could be anywhere?”
“Anywhere in the world.”
The president turned back to the laptop. “Who are you?” he typed.
“That is of no consequence. You will be trying to find us, of course, mobilizing all of your military and law enforcement agencies. Under the circumstances I cannot wish you luck, but your chances are not very good. What you must not do is go public. Besides causing a panic in every major U.S. city, we would be forced to demonstrate our resolve.”
“Son of a bitch, that’s his weakness,” McKeever said. He looked at the president. “Somebody knows these people. Neighbors, coworkers, somebody. That’s why they don’t want us to take our investigation to the public. He’s afraid that someone will come forward and identify him.”
“What do we do?” the president asked.
“Stall him.”
“We need more time,” the president typed. “One week.”
“Seventy-two hours.”
“Why are you doing this?” the president replied angrily.
“For the money, of course.”
“If you go through with this, we will hunt you down.”
“Surely you must have learned by now that any leader’s power—even a great leader—is limited. We will be quite safe. Seventy-two hours.”
“We will find you,” the president typed.
“The connection has been terminated, Mr. President,” the marine said.
11
WASHINGTON, D.C.
CDC Drs. Osborne and deHuis flew up to Washington to brief the president. They were seated across from him sipping coffee at 1:00 A.M.
“It’s a manufactured virus, Mr. President, there’s no doubt about it now,” Osborne said. “It’s equally obvious that it was designed to be a weapon, which in a perverse way works somewhat to our benefit. Once it hits the environment it has a life span of less than six hours. Quite ingenious, actually.”
The president exchanged a glance with his national security adviser. So far the CDC had not been made aware of the terrorists’ threat. “Would gas masks be effective? Or can the disease be spread by contact with other infected people?”
“The most effective way to deliver it would be by an airborne spray. Maybe out of an airplane. Or a canister with a timed release, say on top of the New York World Trade Center towers. Gas masks would not work.”
“But it could also be spread through a building’s or even a city’s water supply,” deHuis said. “In fact the virus might live a little longer in cold water than in the atmosphere.”
“In that case we’re only talking about a one-time limited effect, is that what you’re saying?” Newby asked.
“Yes, sir. That’s one of the reasons we believe the A virus was designed as a weapon. It could be used on a battlefield, but the soldiers could go in a few hours behind it to mop up the survivors.”
“The A virus?” the president asked.
“A for antique,” Osborne replied. “It’s an old strain, one that we couldn’t immediately find in our databases. It’s manufactured, we knew that for sure almost immediately; there are certain aspects of its makeup that are giveaways. The thickness of the cell walls for one, and its reaction to some of our antiviral bullets. Modern-day viruses have learned not to react.”
“I thought that this branch of biology was modern, since the seventies or eighties,” Newby said.
“Actually virology got its name and its real start in the thirties in Germany,” Dr. Osborne said.
It took a moment for what the doctor had said to sink in fully, and a look of surprise crossed the president’s face. “The Nazis?”
“It’s our best guess,” deHuis said. “My grandparents and my father were taken from Amsterdam and placed in a concentration camp. My dad was the only survivor. When I was little I would sneak downstairs at night to listen to the stories he told my mother about medical experiments. He actually knew Mengele.”
“I’m sorry …”
“I didn’t mean to ask for sympathy, Mr. President. I grew up with the stories so when I went into medicine I specialized in biological killers, which led me to the CDC. I did a college paper on the virology research of the era, and this strain has all the earmarks of the weapons the Nazis were working on.”
“How the hell did it get over here?” Newby asked, but the president cut him off.
“That’ll come later. What I want to know is what would happen if it were to be released, let’s say from the World Trade towers in New York, as you suggested.”
“It would depend on which way the wind was blowing. But assuming the worst case scenario and the virus was blown across Manhattan, a lot of people would die. The virus sample sent to us could conceivably kill a couple of thousand people. Three or four pounds of the stuff could kill hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.”
“Nor would their deaths be anything that you wou
ld want to witness,” Dr. Osborne said. “I worked on a couple of outbreaks in Zaire and the Congo, and I saw firsthand what hemorraghic fever does to the human body.” He averted his eyes. “Fever, sweating, palsy. Then nausea, weakness, diarrhea, vomiting. The patient bleeds internally. His organs, starting with the kidneys, fail. Excruciating pain. Bleeding inside the brain. Within twenty-four hours the patient is not only coughing up blood, he’s sweating blood. It oozes out of his pores.” Dr. Osborne looked up. “A half-million hemorraghic fever victims in Manhattan would be even worse than the Nazi death camps. It would be nothing less than a nightmare from hell.”
“No preventive measures?” the president asked. “No antidotes?”
“No, sir.”
The president nodded. “Thank you for the CDC’s fast action. I have to order you not to tell anybody about this. That includes families.”
“If there is an outbreak, we’ll have to be notified.”
“Of course.”
“May I ask a question, Mr. President?” Osborne said.
“Yes.”
“Is this an actual threat? Has someone threatened to release the virus in a big city?”
“I’m afraid so,” the president said. “But we don’t know which big city.”
Dr. Osborne thought about it for a moment. “Well, sir, we have to stop them.”
“We’re working on it, Doctor.”
Tom Hughes was awake when the call from the president came at 2:00 A.M. He’d not gotten much sleep since they’d lost track of Lane off the coast of Florida. Now that William was back safely from that operation and the one in Kalispell with Frances, he was still unable to get a full night’s sleep. Something was about to happen. He just knew it.
For the past three days Moira and the girls had all but tiptoed around the house when he was at home. Something was bothering him and they gave him all the peace and quiet they could. What the president was telling him confirmed his worst fears.
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