Eden's Gate

by David Hagberg

  “We’ll help you, but you’ll have to help us, too,” Frances said. “We want to know everything that happened.”

  “I’ve already told them—”

  “I meant everything, Dr. Metzler, no matter how seemingly insignificant it might seem to you.” She gave him a warm smile.

  His lips compressed, and then he nodded his head. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week; his eyes were red and his hands shook as he lit a cigarette. “It started about three months ago with Rudi Steiner, who owns a place on the upper west side called the Bund.”

  They were recording Metzler’s story but one of the special agents was also taking notes. For the most part they let him tell his story, but a couple of times Lane interrupted him to clear up a point.

  “Why did you come to the FBI?” Lane asked when he was finished.

  “I wanted to get out of New York as soon as possible, before they did their thing.”

  “Yeah, but why did you blow the whistle?”

  He glanced at Frances, and then shook his head. “I can be an asshole sometimes, I know it. But I’m no Tim McVeigh.”

  Frances smiled. “Just maybe you have saved the lives of a great many people, Dr. Metzler. I’d say that makes you one of the good guys.”

  They got a street map of midtown Manhattan north, and Metzler pinpointed the locations of the brownstone where the lab was set up in the basement, and the German-American club on Columbus. When he was done they took him back to his room.

  “It would be a lot easier if we could use Washington on this,” Hood said. “But if you’re right, and there is an informant inside the Bureau, we’d be wasting our time. Which we might be doing in any event, because there’s probably nothing left at the brownstone and this Rudi Steiner is probably long gone by now.”

  “We don’t have any other choice,” Lane said. “Who do you know in New York who’s not busy right now, and who’ll keep their mouths shut?”

  “That depends on what you want to do. If we go in there guns blazing, there’s no telling what we might run into. Booby traps, maybe. And considering the stuff Metzler says he loaded into those tanks, I for one wouldn’t want to be anywhere near when they went off. Hell, maybe they’re leaking.”

  “The lab will be our first stop,” Lane said. “I’ll have a CDC team meet us, but in the meantime we have to stake out both places. Very quietly. If the media gets wind that something’s up, it might end up on television, and it’s a safe bet that Speyer is watching.”

  “Do you think that he’d actually pull the plug?” Hood asked.

  Lane nodded. “Yes, I do. And completely without remorse.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  NEW YORK

  Speyer’s brownstone on West 86th looked empty, and no one answered the door when Lane walked up and rang the bell. Hood and the two New York FBI agents stood to one side with Frances, while the pair from the CDC waited in a van across the street. Columbus was busy, but only the occasional pedestrian or cab went by here. It was 7:00 P.M., only forty-eight hours to go.

  “No one’s home,” Lane told the others. He took out a lock pick and had the door cracked in under forty-five seconds.

  “Easy, William,” Frances cautioned.

  He extended an eighteen-inch pointer and ran it slowly around the edge of the slightly ajar door feeling for trip wires, switches, or fail-safes. So far as he could determine, the doorway was clear.

  “So far, so good,” he said. “Stand by.” He eased the door the rest of the way open, stepped inside the stairhall, and cocked an ear to listen. The house was quiet. There was a musty smell in the air, as if no one had lived here for a long time.

  He took out his pistol, went to the end of the short corridor, eased open the basement door, and turned on the lights. “Anyone home?”

  There was no noise. Not even the sounds of the air conditioner, or a clock chiming; the house was dead.

  Frannie and the others came to the front door. “William?” she called.

  “Check upstairs and in back,” Lane ordered. “But it looks as if they’re gone.”

  “Watch yourself,” Hood cautioned.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Lane flipped on the corridor light. A steel door at the end of the corridor was open, and he approached it cautiously. The layout was exactly as Metzler had described it. He found the lab’s light switch and flipped it on. His eyes were immediately drawn to the glove box and the open steel container inside with the skull and crossbones symbol and the single word: VORSICHT!

  CDC field agents David Holt and Deena Goldman wore biohazard suits and every move they made was methodical and very careful. One slip-up could mean death. Metzler told them that he’d washed everything down, but they were not going to bet their lives that he hadn’t made a mistake.

  Hood and the others were upstairs, leaving Lane and Frances alone for a couple of minutes in the corridor outside the lab.

  “Is that the box you brought up from the bunker?” she asked.

  “One and the same,” Lane said. “It’s a good thing that I didn’t do what I wanted to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Open it to see what was inside.”

  Frances shivered. “It’s good for you that I taught you how to listen to your instincts, love.”

  Lane had to laugh despite himself, and despite the gravity of the situation. Frannie was dead serious. Like every woman Lane had ever known, she felt that it was her God-given duty to change the man in her life. And she had, of course, but he wasn’t about to give in so easily just yet.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Later,” he said.

  Holt took several samples inside the glove box and mounted them on the microscope’s stage while Deena Goldman powered up the computer. The images that appeared were all hook-shaped stick figures. None of them were moving.

  “This is the same as the sample,” Holt confirmed.

  “Are they dead?” Lane asked.

  “Yeah. The inside of the box is loaded with disinfectant. Nothing could possibly live in there.”

  “Is there any way of telling how much of the virus there was?”

  “Not really. It depends on the concentration inside the four bottles. But even at low pressures there could be a lot of it. Plenty to wipe out a good-size city.” Holt looked over at Lane and Frannie. “That’s just a wild-ass guess, but I think that if I’m mistaken it’s on the low side.”

  Hood came to the head of the stairs. “It’s all clear up here,” he informed them. “Anything down there?”

  “Nothing we can use,” Lane said. “We’ll be right up.” He turned to the CDC agents. “Take whatever you need and then get out of here.”

  “We’ll be here another twenty hours at least,” Holt said. “We need to call for a backup—”

  “We’re walking away from this house in the next ten minutes. That’s how long you have,” Lane said. “If the news that we’ve been here leaks, the game is up.”

  Holt wanted to argue, but he looked around the lab and nodded. “I understand.” He said. “We’ll be out of here in ten.”

  The German-American club was obviously closed. A metal accordion gate was drawn across the door, and a couple of old men stood out front talking, while another rattled the lock. Lane, Frannie, and Michael Hood were in the back of the plain gray New York FBI van parked across the street. Special Agents John Tremain and Floyd Rudy had come down at Hood’s request to help out. It was about the way Lane figured it would be. But he wanted to see for himself.

  “There’s probably a back way, if you want to get in there,” Tremain suggested.

  New York was a dead end after all. “There’ll be nothing inside that’ll help out,” Lane said.

  “We can keep someone here around the clock.”

  “Don’t bother. I don’t think anybody’s coming back here. Ever.”

  The two New York FBI agents exchanged a look. “Can you tell us what we’ve been doing here tonight, with the
CDC and all?”

  “We were following up a lead we had in Philly,” Hood said. “But it looks like we’re too late. If you can run us back out to LaGuardia we’ll get out of your hair.”

  “How do we log this, Mike?” Tremain asked.

  “You don’t.”

  WEST FRIENDSHIP, MARYLAND

  The ADM Agribusiness truck finally arrived a few minutes after ten. The pilot Sergeant Heide was driving, and Sergeant Rudolph rode shotgun. They had taken their time coming east, avoiding most of the state truck weigh stations, and sticking strictly to the speed limits, despite that they had been stopped three times for log book checks.

  The guards on the long driveway radioed to the house, and Speyer and Baumann drove down to meet the truck at the big barn. “Gentlemen, it’s good to see you,” Speyer told them. “Did you have any trouble?”

  “Nothing more than we expected,” Sergeant Heide said.

  The barn doors were opened and Heide backed the truck inside almost all the way to the rear. He shut off the engine and he and Rudolph climbed down from the cab and stretched.

  “It’s good to finally be here,” Heide said. The center of the barn was set up as a workshop with all the tools and equipment needed to put the ag plane back together and to carry out the final modification.

  “There’s dinner waiting for you up at the house,” Speyer said.

  Heide eyed the long bench and the toolboxes. “Thank you, sir, but we had dinner on the road and I’d like to get the aircraft put back together first.”

  “There’ll be a modification, as I told you in Montana, but it shouldn’t be terribly difficult.”

  “That won’t be a problem, Herr Kapitän. How about the men?”

  “They’re ready, Carl,” Baumann assured him. “We did a weapons check at twenty hundred hours, and they’ll have their travel documents in order no later than oh eight hundred.”

  “There was no news on any of the radio stations we picked up on the way east. Are we on schedule, sir?”

  Speyer gave him a vicious smile. “Forty-five hours and counting.” Sergeant Heide was the only one who knew the whole story now other than Baumann.

  “The aircraft will be ready to roll before dawn,” Heide promised. “Are the plans and the parts for the modification here as well?”

  “Yes, but there is one problem that must be rectified.”

  “What is it, sir?”

  “I need a pilot.”

  A grin spread across Heide’s face. He looked like a kid on Christmas morning. “I think that we can take care of that small problem, Herr Kapitän.”

  “Good man,” Speyer said, clapping Heide on the arm. “I’ll have Mrs. Speyer bring down your dinners.”

  Heide’s smile died. “That won’t be necessary, sir,” he said carefully. “As I said, we had our dinner on the road just a couple of hours ago.”

  Speyer suppressed a momentary flash of anger, then nodded. “Very well. If you need anything, Sergeant Baumann will be at your disposal.” He turned and walked off.

  Baumann helped open the truck’s door and lower the big steel ramp. “If I were you I’d watch myself when he talks about his wife.”

  Heide and Rudolph looked at him. “Are they having it out again?” Rudolph asked.

  “Worse than ever.” Baumann looked over his shoulder to make sure that Speyer hadn’t returned. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he kills her before this mission is completed.”

  Heide laughed. “It might be for the best all around, if you know what I mean.”

  The three of them removed the tie-downs holding the airplane in position. On the count of three they lifted the tail. The Bull Thrush was not a small aircraft. Even without its propeller, wings, and tail feathers, and empty of fuel, oil, and payload, it weighed nearly four thousand pounds. But it was well balanced on the main landing gear, and came out of the truck and down the ramp without too much effort.

  When they got the plane to the middle of the barn, Heide chocked the wheels and got out the tools he would need. Baumann and Rudolph brought out the rudder and vertical stabilizer, and the elevators and horizontal stabilizer. They brought out the two wings with great care not to cause any damage and laid them out on either side of the fuselage. Last, they muscled the heavy three-bladed stainless steel prop out. They slid it onto the hub once Heide packed it with grease and placed the splice keys in their slots.

  “This is a beautiful machine,” Heide said earnestly as he worked.

  “It’s ugly, it looks like a big bug.” Baumann laughed. “Now the Gulfstream, that is a pretty machine.”

  “It’s a matter of function, Ernst. The Gulfstream could not carry out the mission this one is designed for.”

  Baumann stopped what he was doing and stared at the back of Heide’s head. He wondered if Carl truly understood what he had just said. If the White House decided not to pay the ransom, then this machine that Heide thought was so beautiful would be used to kill a great many people.

  Heide turned and caught Baumann’s expression. “What is it, Ernst?”

  “You understand the full consequences if the mission develops?”

  Heide shrugged. “I don’t worry about things like that. I have a job to do and orders to follow. That’s enough for me.” He chuckled. “The rest of it gives me a headache.”

  Rudolph was checking one of the landing gear struts. He looked up. “You should take the advice, Ernst, and stop worrying like an old woman. The captain has not let us down yet. In a couple of days we’ll be out of here and safe.”

  “And warm,” Heide said. He made the shape of a woman’s curves with his hands. “Very warm.”

  Speyer came down to the barn with the Mercedes. The ag plane’s tailfeathers were on, and Heide, Rudolph, and Baumann were working on the starboard wing, getting ready to lift it into place. “How much longer?”

  “A couple of hours, Herr Kapitän,” Heide said, wiping off a wrench. He was in his element.

  “Have you started the modification yet?”

  “It’s almost finished. The plumbing’s already installed along with the controls inside the cockpit. I mounted the delivery lever on the opposite side from the throttle so there can be no error. Once the wings are in place and secured, the wiring harnesses connected and the rest of the plumbing led out, we’ll install the wing rack to hold the bottle, the control servo to open the valve and the spray nozzles. When I’m finished here, I’ll start a weather track. This operation won’t maximize if the winds aloft are wrong.”

  “The weather is supposed to hold for the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours.”

  “Good. Then all that’s left to do is set the mission parameters. I’ll need a flight path and alternatives, along with two landing zones.”

  “We’ll work that out tomorrow after you’ve finished here and gotten some sleep,” Speyer said.

  “What about the weapon? When will I be allowed to inspect it?”

  “Right now,” Speyer said. He motioned to Baumann, who popped the Mercedes’ trunk, brought out one of the bundles, and laid it on the workbench.

  Rudolph stepped back a pace, but Heide gingerly approached the table, and carefully unwrapped the bundle. He had a great deal of respect for what he was handling; they all did. The cylinder’s valve was sealed with duct tape, but that precaution was not very reassuring.

  “It’s okay to handle this without special protective equipment?” Heide asked.

  “Yes. But be careful of the valve,” Speyer warned. “It’s very deadly stuff.”

  “I will be careful, Herr Kapitän, believe me.” He shook his head. “To think that they developed this sixty years ago. If it had gone operational we might have won the war.”

  “Well, we’re going to win a war of a different kind this time.”

  Heide grinned. “Yes, sir. We will even the score. Just a little.”

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  A few minutes after midnight Tom Hughes walked across the hall into the operations center where
Lane and Frannie were poring over satellite images of the greater Washington-Baltimore area. They were looking for private grass strips that would not show up on any FAA list of small airports.

  “Any luck?” he asked.

  They looked up. Frannie’s hair was a little disheveled, but Lane still looked crisp in his light madras sweater and hand-tailored natural linen trousers. “Nothing yet, how about you, Tommy?” he asked.

  “We might have caught our first break. Frank Lee finally got back to me. Thomas Mann has three phone lines and a pair of cell phone accounts. All of them are encrypted, but we have taps on them now. When someone calls we might not know what they’re saying to each other, but we’ll be able to tell where they’re calling from.”

  Lane sat back and stretched his back, the only sign that he was as tired as the rest of them. “If I were Speyer I wouldn’t allow any outside calls. It would be too dangerous.” He frowned, and then a sudden grin spread across his face. “I just had another thought. You’d have to think that Mann knows where Speyer is holed up. They’re pals, after all. We just have to force him into making a call.”

  “He’d have to know that making that call would be risky,” Frannie pointed out.

  “That’s right, but there are risks, and then there are calculated risks. And he believes that his phone lines are secure.”

  “Well, arresting him and questioning him wouldn’t do any good,” Hughes said. “As soon as Speyer found out he would pull the pin. It would take something important to happen to force Mann to call.”

  “Give the man a cigar,” Lane said. He snatched the phone and dialed the home number of the FBI’s Helena SAC Linda Boulton. He held his hand over the mouthpiece. “If Chief Mattoon was arrested by the FBI tonight and held incommunicado, the word would get back to Washington. If there is an informer inside the Bureau, he would call Mann.”

  “That might work, William,” Hughes agreed. “They might see Mattoon as a weak link. That’s information Speyer would have to have. But it could cause him to make his strike early—that is, assuming the president decides not to pay the ransom.”