“I know,” Bowman said. “But it doesn’t matter, really.”
That, she had to admit, was true. She held his hand tighter.
The cave made its low, unceasing moan, and from a great distance came the crash of vast rock breaking and smashing.
NATHAN RATHOR, A SMALL MAN WHO HAD NEVER BEEN physically strong and who had grown up in a family with servants, disliked doing things for himself. Some tasks, however, could not be delegated. Thus, after the last Sit Room teleconference with Donald Barnard, Rathor had sat in front of his restricted, eyes-only computer for the better part of an hour. Not much caught Nathan Rathor off guard, but Barnard’s comment that the team down in Mexico had a good chance of succeeding with its mission had. Knowing little about caves, and less about the team itself, Rathor had assumed it was the longest of long shots. But Barnard obviously knew something he did not—and that was unacceptable. The thing was, though, that Rathor could not delegate any of his sycophantic undersecretaries or special assistants to do this. Only he could tackle this job.
Rathor had told his staff to get dossiers on all the people on the team heading down into that cave. Thick files had come back quickly on every one of them except the security man—Bowman, if that was his real name—about whom not even Rathor’s best people had been able to find anything. Bowman aside, the more he learned about those people, the more concerned Rathor became. He was not stupid by any means, and he could see what this unique assemblage might be capable of.
If those people came back with some of that exotic extremophile, and if BARDA’s people really could fabricate new antibiotics, Barnard, not Rathor, would be the hero of the day. It would be insulting, but far from the worst possible thing that could come out of this, as Rathor well knew. The worst possible thing would be … well, better not to even think about it, given all the planning and money and painstaking preparation he and certain associates had put into this project. Not to mention the level of risk they were all tolerating. Plans, money, groundwork—all those were really only the body of the machine. Risk was the motor that made it run. When he was still quite young, Rathor had experienced the epiphany that avoiding risk meant consignment to the dustbin of life. As he grew older, he understood the epiphany’s corollary: that rules were for sporty games and fools. The competitions of life were deadly earnest, and in those, the greatest risk of all was losing.
As a cabinet-level official, Rathor had access to the government’s most sophisticated technology. Well, not its most sophisticated stuff—that was reserved for the secretaries of defense and state, and he knew it, and it infuriated him. But the things he did have access to still amazed him.
One of them that he had greatly enjoyed was the NSA’s version of Google Earth. Actually, Google had replicated the NSA program from cobbled-together bits and pieces of information. Google’s version never worried the spooks, whose software was about three generations ahead, and who had access to satellite data the lefty geeks at Google could only dream about. Even Rathor’s stepped-down version of the program could let him see, on a clear day, the license plate on a New York City yellow cab.
If people only knew.
Rathor often played with the observation tool. The NSA net collected images not only from orbiting satellites but from countless terrestrial cameras as well. Many were visible to the public—cameras that caught people running red lights and committing burglaries, cameras that monitored prisons and hospitals and government proceedings, on and on. Millions of cameras. People knew about all those and, as sheep always do, had accepted the change in their surroundings without a bleat of protest. Well, maybe a bleat here and there, but nothing the government couldn’t handle.
People did not know about countless other cameras, for two reasons. One was that their existence came from a top secret DARPA project called DarkEye. The secrecy would be breached eventually, of course—all such veils were, sooner or later—but by the time that happened, those who counted would have already moved on to the next generation. The other reason was that people could not see this network of cameras. They weren’t even really cameras. They were energy-transmitting nanobots that could be aggregated into microscopic, crystal-like clusters. These recorded—and transmitted—energy, which could be converted into viewable images. They were easy to place, self-powering, and virtually invulnerable.
Ground and low-elevation images from the nanocams were refreshed every three seconds. With a little canvassing, Rathor could, if he got lucky, look through windows at women in various stages of undress and, if he got even luckier, doing remarkable things to themselves with little machines or big men. In some cases he didn’t even have to look through windows. Pulling images from nanocams implanted in cellphones and ceilings put him right in the rooms with the women. Of course, he could—and did—afford beautiful women who performed unbelievable acts in the flesh. But there was something about penetrating the private space of others that excited him, and so he did it.
Given all this, it should have been easy to pull up images of this thing called Cueva de Luz, but he could not. He was able to isolate images of the surrounding region with enough resolution to show individual leaves on trees. But as soon as he moved to within a quarter mile of the cave entrance, the screen broke up into grainy distortion patterns, like gravel tossed onto ice. He tried every method he knew to get real-time images of this cave, with no success. Rathor’s temper was never far below the boiling point, and it was hard not to rip the keyboard loose from its cable and smash it against a wall.
He switched over to Google Images and found some stills of the entrance, distant but recognizable. It was immense. You could drive a train through that, he thought. Two trains. He zoomed in, hoping to get a look inside the cave, but he could get no farther. He saw the dim outlines of huge rocks and, in the center of the screen, blackness that must have been the passage leading down into the cave. It was only a picture, but something about it made him shiver.
You could not pay me enough to go in there.
Later that evening, instead of being taken straight to his mansion in Vienna, Virginia, Rathor dismissed his driver, telling the man he would be working late and would spend the night in his residential suite there at HHS. He did retire to his suite shortly after that, but rather than working, he spent a few hours drinking Beefeater martinis and enjoying YouPorn on a secure laptop computer. Shortly after one in the morning, Rathor changed into casual clothes: khakis, plaid shirt, golf jacket, walking shoes. He left his personal and government cellphones on the dresser in his suite’s bedroom, called for his own car, and drove to the Lincoln Memorial. At this hour, the entire mall area, including the Great Emancipator’s monument, was always deserted.
Rathor took his time, surveying the area for several minutes. Then he got out and walked toward the memorial, climbing the three sets of triple steps. Golden columns of light glowed between the memorial’s thirty-six graying marble Doric columns, one for every state in the Union when Lincoln died. Giant Lincoln, frozen in ice-white Georgia marble, contemplated eternity in the monument’s main chamber. Rathor came here not infrequently, sometimes during visiting hours, sometimes after. What could be more natural than a patriotic cabinet member looking to the Great Emancipator for inspiration and guidance?
He climbed the memorial’s fifty-eight steps—two for Lincoln’s presidential terms, fifty-six for his age when assassinated—and walked to the base of the statue. He moved casually around the memorial’s interior, assuring himself that it was empty. Then he went to the far end of the south chamber and stood a few feet in front and to the left of the towering Gettysburg Address carved into the chamber’s wall. Rathor reached into his right trouser pocket and thumbed the autodial button on his personal, encrypted sat phone. Buying it from the Israelis had cost what most people would consider a fortune, but the Israelis had also provided the locations of three natural “dead zones” secure from even the NSA’s eavesdroppers. It struck Rathor as a kind of ultimate irony that one such zone was ri
ght here on the mall, in this south corner of the Lincoln Memorial, surrounded as it was by granite and marble walls several feet thick and screened by the memorial’s massive bronze girders overhead.
In the phone’s almost invisible earbud transceiver, Rathor listened while the connection was made. Then, gazing at the Gettysburg Address, he murmured the long alphanumeric sequence he had memorized. Anyone watching would have assumed he was simply saying the words of the address to himself, as though repeating a prayer. In this particular spot, though, with his back to the surveillance cameras, he was beyond observation.
Several seconds of clicks and hums followed, the voice recognition software and code acquisition programs processing. Then the soft tone of a connection made.
“We have a need,” Rathor said.
“Indeed?” Bernard Adelheid’s voice always made Rathor think of an ice pick at work.
“Barnard told O’Neil the cave team might actually do something.”
“We have planned for that eventuality.”
“Yes, but they have a man named Bowman. Some kind of spook, maybe a former Delta, I don’t know. Very big and dangerous, I believe. Were you aware of that?”
“Of course.” Silence. Then: “I think you should have known that soldiers were using feminine products.”
Rathor’s jaw clenched. He would defend himself. “Who could have imagined that soldiers would be sticking tampons into bullet wounds?”
“You should have. That failure could be very costly. To the plan. And to you.”
The plan. Rathor knew Adelheid was right. The plan had been to get contaminated Chinese-made tampons into trailer-trash, welfare women. Tampons were the perfect vector. They were sold unsterilized. Knockoff brands were marketed by the big-box discounters millions of such women frequented. In China, they were ridiculously easy to contaminate. The women, well, they would be like lab rats who sickened and, in some cases, died for the cause, useful but without power to make waves. Spreading infection, they would create a voracious market for the ancient antibiotic colistin, stores of which BioChem had been secretly manufacturing and stockpiling for more than a year.
But then the law of unintended consequences intervened. Soldiers using the bacteria-infested tampons began getting sick and dying. That in itself would have been manageable, would in fact have been a good thing, generating even more sales of colistin. But the bacterium killing them was not the standard-issue Acinetobacter baumannii that had been introduced into the tampons. It was some mutated microbial monster that sneered at colistin and ate people alive from the inside out.
“The man Bowman is not the problem,” Adelheid said.
Rathor’s stomach did a little flip. “What else?”
“A man named Lathrop has discovered certain transmissions from BARDA.”
“What? How?”
Adelheid’s silence suggested his contempt for the stupidity of Rathor’s question. “How indeed. But how is irrelevant now. Something must be done.”
“About the transmissions, you mean.”
“No. Not about the transmissions. They are part of the irreparable past. That is not all.”
Oh, my God, Rathor thought. “What else?”
“One of the laboratories at BARDA has had an unexpected stroke of luck. At this point, full knowledge is restricted to only one individual, a scientist named Casey.”
Rathor’s mind raced and his legs felt weak. Adelheid said, “We will deal with the second issue ourselves. You will deal with Lathrop. We will take care of the unlucky Casey and his lucky discovery.”
“But—”
Adelheid said, “Gray,” and the line went dead. Rathor stood and stared, unseeing. Then he came back. It was always an immense relief to stop talking to Adelheid. And to turn off the sat phone, which, even with all its safeguards, was dangerous. Some risks felt better than others.
Mostly to maintain his ruse, Rathor continued to stand in front of the Gettysburg Address plaque, pretending to read the words of Lincoln’s greatest speech. He wasn’t actually reading, but then the word “government” caught his eye and his brain stuck on it. Nathan Rathor hated the government. Few things could make him feel violated and impotent, but the government was one. He would never forget the public humiliations he’d suffered while testifying as BioChem’s CEO, groveling at the feet—literally, raised as they were, like false little gods, on their dais—of senators whose performances for the news cameras made them, in his opinion anyway, lower than the women and men who opened themselves for the cameras of porn. One of those senators had been David O’Neil.
That was almost four years ago, of course, a century in Washington political time. He and O’Neil had “buried the hatchet” and “come to terms,” as the pandering hacks put it. O’Neil had “recruited him onto the presidential team,” and he had “left private enterprise for the greater good of public service.” Rathor knew full well that O’Neil had not asked him to serve on the cabinet out of any misguided olive-branch waving. He had asked him in observance of an old adage of war: “Friends close, enemies closer.” Rathor understood that there was nothing altruistic in the president’s tactic. And Rathor knew that O’Neil knew what Rathor himself knew. That was how the game was played in Washington, like a gladiator match in which both fighters were aware that success depended on seeing one move further through the whirlwind of blows and feints than their opponent. Or on using a poison-smeared spear point.
“Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Rathor hawked, spat. The people. What was it H. L. Mencken had said? “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” Truer words had never been spoken.
Rathor suddenly felt the need to piss. More than the need—an irresistible urgency, as though someone had inserted hot wire into his penis and stabbed his bladder.
Goddamn, he thought. The gin. He had an enlarged prostate and he was old. When he had to go, mild discomfort became searing pain very quickly. So he really needed to piss. But the bathrooms here were locked at this time of night. Going to a convenience store or gas station was unthinkable. He would not make it back to his office; that much, from long experience, he knew with certainty. There was only one thing to do. Take another risk.
He glanced over both shoulders. No one else was in the memorial. He was alone. There were security cameras, but they were aimed toward the great statue, not this remote, little-visited corner of the memorial. Casually, he took his right hand out of his pocket, rubbed his face as though brushing away tears, let it drop in front of him. He lowered his zipper, withdrew himself, relaxed, and sighed with relief. A weak stream of yellow urine spattered the marble wall beneath the Gettysburg Address and pooled on the memorial’s white floor.
AS A MAJOR AND TEROK’S SENIOR MEDICAL OFFICER, LENORA Stilwell had her own computer station, and one that was email-enabled, to boot. Command had finally lifted the ban on email, but any mention of ACE was a court-martial offense, with national security implications, et cetera, et cetera. On her desktop she set down the cup of coffee that was now as much a part of her walking-around attire as stethoscope and clinic coat. What time would it be in Tampa? She could send an email home at any time, of course, but there was a better chance of catching Doug and Danny during waking hours, which would allow her to have an actual exchange. She knew the time zone differentials, had done the calculus hundreds of times, so why was she having trouble now figuring out what time it was where Doug and Danny were?
It was Friday. Or was it? She checked the calendar function on her watch. It was Saturday, March 3. Now the time differential. Tampa was eight and a half hours behind the time in her location up in northeast Afghanistan. It was 12:13 A.M. at Terok, so it would be … it would be … damn. She frowned, closed her eyes, forced her brain to kick over. Okay: 3:43 P.M. in Tampa. Doug would be at work, Danny working after school. No way to catch either one of them for real-time commo.
She started to get up, then sat back down. Wait. Give it a tr
y. No telling when there’ll be a chance again. She flipped her laptop open, keyed in passwords, and opened her email program.
hey guys its me anybdy there? hw r u gys doing? Ther hs ben sum bad fitng & busy
Whoa. Can’t say that. It would suggest that there had been casualties, which could reveal some bit of intelligence with value to some unknown source somewhere. Or, at the very least, bad news for the home front. Start again.
hey honey its me anybody there? how r u guys doing? is cindy bck frm cmpus visits up north? r u guys gng fshng tmrrow on the boat? Dunno wht ur weather 4cast is. Ours samesame. I miss you both. I love you both.
She hit the Send button and sat back to wait. Doug had an iPhone, so even if he wasn’t at a computer, he might receive the email and reply. She watched the computer screen, listened for the little incoming-mail chime. A full minute passed, then two, and she reached to close the laptop, which was when it chimed and the email reply popped up. Doug still wrote like a civilian with all the time in the world, not like a time-poor Army doctor who calculated the half seconds she could save by leaving out punctuation, abbreviating where possible, and butchering normal grammar.
Lenny,
Wow. It had been a while. We were worrying. It is REALLY good to hear from you. I love you. Danny loves you. We miss you. I know you can’t say much about much, but from what we see on the news it looks like your area is heating up. Okay, your questions. Danny is nervous. Won’t admit it, but he is. Cindy got back yesterday. She visited Pitt, Penn State, Rutgers, and Amherst. She came over to see Danny this morning and said she liked Pitt most of all. We’re not going to go fishing tomorrow. And the weather? It’s Florida. You know how that is. We’re really low on groceries so I’m going to the commissary at MacDill this afternoon. I love you. Write me some more.
Cindy was Cynthia Merrit, Danny’s steady girlfriend, a beautiful, petite blonde whose voice always sounded to Stilwell like harp strings being softly plucked. She wanted to be a pediatrician and had been away for much of the previous week looking at colleges. Going fishing on the boat was taking their Scout 34 out for some tarpon fishing. MacDill was MacDill Air Force Base, just south of Tampa. National Guard members had access to all facilities of all service branches—commissaries, clinics, pools, everything.
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