Final Epidemic

by Earl Merkel

  “I’m honored.”

  “You should feel so. Though, I admit, we did purchase several hours of audio recordings made during your . . . interviews. There was some official curiosity as to your presence in my country, you see. After all, my friend—a year earlier, you did arrange the defection of Comrade Alibelikov.”

  “He defected on his own, Alexi.”

  “If you say so. Still, it was quite embarrassing—having the head of our bioweapon program suddenly surface in Langley, telling your CIA all of our little secrets. Some of my people blamed you. Some continue to do so, I fear.”

  He lit another cigarette from the still-burning ember of his first.

  “Now, your family. Your daughter, how is she?—young Katherine. Little Katie—but no. She can be no longer little. She must be what now? Fourteen years?”

  “Fifteen,” Beck said. “She lives with her mother. In Virginia, across the river from D.C.”

  “Yes. Your divorce is known to us. So sad. I am divorced myself—two times, and I do not expect my current wife to be my last. It is the nature of our business, no?”

  “I don’t believe in divorce, Alexi.”

  “Nor did my first wife, my friend. But only one of the two parties is required to do so, yes?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Ah, I see.” Alexi nodded. “When I heard that you had left the employ of the CIA—well, had I believed it to be so, I would have been much saddened. Do not smile; in truth, our profession is populated with so many unimaginative brutes. On both sides, do you not agree? They see only what is on the surface; so superficial, so boring. You were so . . . sounpredictable, my friend!”

  He leaned forward confidentially. “You will enjoy this, Beck: I was once told, in all seriousness, that you were believed to be possessed ofpsychic abilities. This, in an official KGB assessment. Ah, you laugh. So did I. I told them, no—Beck Casey is no wizard. He is merely a genius, I said, adept in analyzing what to most would be meaningless trivia. And in jumping to the most startling conclusions—many of which happened to be frighteningly accurate. I told them that you were most likely an idiot savant—that it was doubtful you yourself understood the mechanics of what you did. Oh, yes. You were quite a puzzlement to us, Beck.”

  Alexi sat back, a doleful expression on his features.

  “And now you are—what, teaching history to children? A man with your gifts, a man with such value to his government. I am to seriously believe this?”

  “Please don’t tell me that you people stopped keeping files,” Beck said. “That would truly break my heart, Alexi, lying to me like that.”

  “Files,” Malenkov said, and waved his hand dismissively. “We need no files to tell our stories. We know each other too well. I still do not believe you are ‘retired,’ but it is a path you should consider with much seriousness. No, my friend, do not look at me like that. To play this game of ours, one must be ruthless and single-minded. This, you were never. Competent, yes. But not without scruples, and that is your failing.”

  Beck smiled. “After all we’ve been through. I’m hurt, Alexi, deeply wounded.”

  The Russian laughed. “I do not complain about this defect of yours, Beck. Had you been ruthless, you would have killed me. Remember? As you did poor stupid Borelovich, four years ago.”

  “Yes,” said Beck. “At the cemetery.”

  “Did you know that those cemeteries grew out of another plague?” Alexi Malenkov asked. “Yes. In 1771, almost sixty thousand Muscovites died of the Black Death. It was forbidden to bury the victims within the city limits, so the bodies were taken to fields forty kilometers from the Kremlin’s walls. Thus were established Danilovskoye, Kalitnikovskoye and Vagankovskoye. Our three great cities of the dead.”

  He drew again on the cigarette, and exhaled a prodigious amount of tobacco smoke.

  “Well. Now Moscow may surpass them all, if what I am told about this virus is accurate. Since last we spoke to your CDC, we have confirmed another thirty-six cases of this ‘flu.’ That makes seventy-seven cases in all, and the number of deaths is now up to twenty-two.”

  “We have two deaths, out of two confirmed cases.”

  “Pardon me, but it is now three deaths and six confirmations. So far. We received word while you were in the air.”

  “Bad time to be in Florida,” Beck said, and paused. “Or Moscow. Alexi, did this thing start here? Is this virus one of yours?”

  Malenkov shook his head.

  “Our virologists say no,” he said. “The genome sequencing is wrong. There, you see, I have no secrets from you. I have admitted that my country possesses such things. This is not a time for the usual games, you see.”

  Outside the window, the roadway was now lined with ugly apartment buildings that resembled badly molded children’s blocks. Beck could see that they were making good time. Moscow sits within five concentric rings of roadways, like a bull’s-eye with the Red Square at the center; this was the first ring, and very soon they would traverse to a four-lane they would follow to the Kremlin. As if reading his thoughts, the Zil turned right onto a ramp that curved to meet yet another roadway. At this rate, Beck knew they would be at their destination in less than fifteen minutes.

  Malenkov crushed out the cigarette, then leaned toward Beck and patted his knee.

  “It has been too long, my friend,” Alexi Malenkov said. “And what a hell of a way to renew our acquaintance, is it not?”

  “I am very happy that you are not hiding anything, Alexi. But I do have one concern.”

  Malenkov shook his head in mock disappointment. “And that is?”

  “You’ve assured me that this virus isn’t one of yours,” Beck said. “But why aren’t you asking me if it is one of ours?”

  Chapter 10

  Moscow

  July 22

  The Zil swept into the Kremlin, avoiding the main Trinity Gate used by most visitors in preference for a more discreet entrance closer to the Presidium, which houses the Russian governmental offices. Slowing only slightly, the vehicle turned right, past the great bell towers and cathedrals and armory.

  Immediately, Beck could sense the tension that gripped the vast fortress of the czars. Normally, on a fine summer’s day like this, throngs of tourists would be milling about the various courtyards and parade grounds in T-shirts and shorts, buying photo postcards or admiring in various languages the eighteen minarets that stood graceful sentinel around the triangular walls.

  Today, no tourists were to be seen.

  Instead, there were armed men everywhere—not the ceremonial guards dressed in Cossack costumes for the benefit of the foreign tourists, but soldiers in full battle dress whose posture and attitude displayed the casual toughness of the professional warrior. Nor were any pikes, ornate sabers or even fancifully engraved matchlock rifles in evidence; each of these troopers, Beck noted, carried the far less elegant but much faster firing AK-47. In addition, from each web harness hung a ceremonial knife, a stiletto with an ornate haft.

  And that spells elite unit,he thought,probably paratroop or even Spetznaz.

  Alexi Malenkov saw Beck’s eyes scan the courtyard and correctly guessed his thoughts.

  “Yes, there are more soldiers here than is usual,” Alexi said. “Officially, the large number of soldiers throughout the city has been attributed to ceremonial requirements. Today we have yet another anniversary of the Great Patriotic War; Putin even placed a wreath somewhere, I believe.”

  “You can’t believe you can keep this a secret, Alexi.”

  “There has as yet been no official announcement of the situation, and our media is being uncommonly cooperative in—how did I phrase the directive? Ah, yes—‘in not spreading rumors that might encourage civil disruption.’ All has been very orderly, so far. But even so—yes, there has been talk in the streets. The kettle is boiling, and it is always best to be prepared.”

  They turned a corner and the car skidded to a stop on the cobbled pavement. Opening his door, the Russian
motioned for Beck to follow.

  The location was correct for the presidential residence. But instead of the expanse of yellow-white marble and faux-Romanov architecture, a vast olive green canopy of rubberized fabric was tented over the entrance. To Beck, it looked not unlike the massive shrouds used in the States for building fumigation.

  Two no-nonsense guards, assault rifles at the ready, flanked a clear plastic flap that served as the only entry. If they noticed Alexi’s badge of rank, they gave no indication of deference. One of them carefully checked Malenkov’s ID against a computer-printed list, then keyed a radio handset.

  As they waited, Beck noticed the sign affixed to a stanchion.CONSTRUCTION —KEEP AWAY, it said in five languages, with the Russian added seemingly as an afterthought—it was, he thought, at best a transparent attempt to explain away the extraordinary activity.

  Finally, the radio crackled with words too low for Beck to hear, and the soldier gestured the two men inside. They ascended the stairs, walking against a slight draft that blew toward the outside.

  Upstairs, they passed through a foyer where throngs of Russian Army personnel were engaged in chaotic labor.

  “Consider yourself fortunate,” Alexi muttered to Beck. “Had we not come directly from the airport, neither of us would have been admitted. Perhaps not even with a good scrubbing down from these people.”

  He sidestepped two sweating soldiers who were unrolling heavy black plastic sheeting to cover the floor; others were draping the same material over the walls or affixing it to the ceiling. Electrical cables and rubber hoses twined with each other before branching off to conduits and brass manifolds around the large expanse.

  The devices and apparatus being wrestled into place looked vaguely familiar, though it took Beck a moment to recall where he had seen this before.

  Then he remembered: Israel, during the Gulf War.

  Here, in the middle of the Russian Kremlin, a mobile decontamination station was being erected.

  Beck had expected another meeting, perhaps even a mirror image of the bureaucratic free-for-all in Atlanta with which the day—no,he corrected himself mentally,that was already yesterday —had started. He had not taken into account the Russian disdain for group decisions, which roughly translated into an affinity for authoritarian rule.

  Only one man was in the ornate room.

  His back was to the door, away from the large television and VCR that stood between two low sofas. He was staring out a window that looked out over the Kremlin’s walls; in the summer sun, the cityscape of Moscow glittered like a jewel. The bright backlighting made him a silhouette, and to Beck he seemed to stand extraordinarily still.

  Then the figure turned, and Beck recognized the thin, almost skull-like face of Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.

  “I know you, Dr. Casey,” the Russian president said, as Beck’s mind automatically translated the Russian. “You have visited my country before.” Beck heard neither threat nor admonition in his tone, and wondered if it was intentional. Putin gestured at the sofas, and Beck and Alexi settled on either side of the video screen. The Russian president handed the latter a sheet of thick, crisp paper, which Alexi scanned quickly before folding it into a pocket of his uniform.

  “Vy gava’reet ye pa-Rooski,”Putin said, his inflection not as a question.

  “Not as well as you speak English,” Beck said.

  Putin nodded.

  “I have conferred with your president,” he said in the un-accented English his files said he learned in a KGB training academy. “We agree that our two countries are both in mortal peril; we have both pledged unconditional cooperation in this matter. Our medical authorities are exchanging what little information there is. At present, our official position is that this is a medical emergency, not an . . . attack. That may provide us time to determine who has done this. You wish to see the face of this atrocity?”

  Without waiting for a response, he moved to the videotape machine and pressed a button. The screen flickered to life. It showed a head-and-shoulders close-up of what could have been a fully spacesuited cosmonaut. Any facial features were obscured by the blue-white flare of overhead fluorescent tubes on the helmet’s plastic faceplate.

  As the camera pulled back slightly, Beck could see that the figure wore a gray coverall, shiny with its rubberized coating; black gloves covered his hands, and what looked like double wrappings of duct tape sealed the wrist against the protective suit. The corrugated hose of a self-contained breathing supply snaked over his shoulder.

  “This was recorded earlier today,” Putin said, his words curiously flat. “At our Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology. As you see, it is much like the most stringent containment facilities at your Fort Detrick or your CDC. I believe you call these ‘Level Four’ facilities, where the most hazardous organisms are contained.”

  On the videotape, the cosmonaut now was walking down a corridor toward a steel door that looked like the hatch of a submarine. The camera followed him through the second door of the airlock, the man momentarily passing out of the camera’s view. For an instant, the picture shimmied into a blur.

  When the focus again steadied, it was on a scene of sheer horror.

  Around the room, arranged like a dormitory from hell, were row upon row of hospital cots; at least two dozen, Beck estimated. Under sheets now stained and matted, human forms writhed and struggled—some frantically, fighting for breath with the panic of the drowning; others fitfully, feeble in their dying efforts to drag oxygen past bruise-blue lips. In several of the beds, the patients were in the midst of fevered seizures, mad convulsions that tore the intravenous tubes from their bodies and rocked the cots wildly. Everywhere, the floor was vile with puddled bodily fluids, skid-smeared where the spacesuited attendants had passed.

  Beck watched wordlessly as the camera walked down the line of cots, the picture jerking and unsteady with each step of the operator. Face after doomed face passed in close-up, features contorted with pain as uncontrollable coughing ripped the tissues of their lungs. A number of the victims dripped a thick, bloody phlegm from their noses and mouths. Too weak to even lift their hands, only their eyes still looked human in faces ravaged by the virus’s assault.

  “The first case was reported three days ago—in Tuvelov, a village just outside this city,” Putin said in the same curiously detached voice. “The first death came one day later, the same day we discovered it had spread to Arkadi, a neighboring village, and then to Moscow itself. Since then, our physicians have had no success in discovering a viable treatment. There are more than seventy identified cases, and our medical experts estimate that those already infected but still without symptoms number twenty to thirty times that figure. The contagion expands geometrically; within ten days, all of Russia could be infected. At present, our projections indicate the virus will be lethal in slightly fewer than eighty percent of all it infects.”

  The Russian president stopped, his eyes locked on the video screen. There, a young boy perhaps nine years old twisted in agony; frantically his hands clawed at his own throat, leaving red lines against the bluish, oxygen-deprived flesh.

  Mercifully, the camera moved on; and Putin shook himself, as if to force his words to continue.

  “Our attempts to contain this disease have fared little better,” Putin said. “Last night, I ordered troops to cordon off the western quadrant of the city, well outside the area where this influenza already is found. Because Tuvelov and Arkadi have reported cases of this disease, they also have been sealed. No one is being allowed out, or in. No one. The units were ordered to employ lethal force.”

  He turned to face Beck and Malenkov directly.

  “Already, this has been necessary,” he said. “Perhaps fifty have been shot, maybe more. I have ordered that the bodies remain where they fall, in full view of others who might attempt to cross these lines.”

  Beck looked at Putin, thinking of bullet-torn bodies lying in a Moscow street. Unbidden, his mi
nd’s eye superimposed another image, another place, over the carnage.

  “We too have considered containment,” Beck said. “In Florida.”

  “I have advised your President that containment is at best a temporary measure,” Putin said. “I am told, for instance, that parts of Moscow’s sewer system do not exist on our maps; these will serve as an avenue of escape for some. Others will finally fear the disease more than bullets; they will merely overwhelm the soldiers at a given place in the line—overrun them, as you say. Is this not true, Alexi Malenkov? Or does my senior security advisor now have new counsel for me?”

  Alexi stared back at him—without expression, but also without the pro forma respect that usually accompanied such an exchange. There was a hard tension between the two men that was obvious even to the American.

  Finally Putin shrugged—rather bloodlessly, Beck thought.

  “Inevitably, someone will elude our cordon,” Putin said. “If I allow that to happen, this death will spread beyond all hope of stopping. There is but one manner of perhaps preventing this, and it is at best a doubtful proposition.”

  He looked at his watch, and raised his eyes to focus on a far wall above Beck’s head.

  “I have ordered my military to sterilize the areas where this virus is known to exist,” Putin said.

  Beck felt the skin at the back of his skull tighten; beside him, Alexi sat in his own stunned silence.

  “In less than an hour, approximately one hundred helicopters will fly over western Moscow and the villages of Arkadi and Tuvelov. Each aircraft is equipped with aerial spraying devices, with which they will release chemical agents. This will be repeated as many times as is necessary. We are fortunate; the winds are favorable, and outside the sterilization zone deaths caused by our nerve gases will be minimized. I have been advised that by tonight at the latest, no one in the affected areas will remain alive.”

  “How many, sir?” Beck asked.

  “Perhaps two hundred thousand,” Putin said. “History may say it was a small enough sacrifice to save one hundred and fifty million other Russians. If this virus does not somehow outsmart us.”