The Devil's Game (The Game Trilogy Book 2)

by Sean Chercover

  Others simply packed up their cars and left town.

  They were turned back by National Guard troops in biohazard gear.

  The Guard had set up roadblocks with astounding speed on all highways and major roads, effectively sealing most people inside a radius of about ten miles from the edges of Columbia. No way to block all the small roads, but with the major arteries sealed, gridlock took care of the rest. Upon seeing the gridlock, most aspiring evacuees realized getting indoors was their best bet after all, and turned back.

  Evan Sage’s phone vibrated with the text he’d been waiting for.

  But not the result he’d been hoping for:

  Confirmed.

  He turned to the doctor standing to his left and started to speak. His tongue resisted the command, as if saying the words would somehow make it real.

  But it was real, and there was not a goddamn thing Evan could do about that. He removed his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair and rolled up his sleeve. “It’s confirmed.”

  The doctor administered the antibiotic shot, taped a small cotton ball over the injection site. Evan buttoned his cuff and nodded thanks to the doctor. He slipped back into his jacket.

  Evan opened the door and stepped into the cacophony of the bullpen. He clapped his hands together. “Ladies and gentlemen, please, your attention for a minute.”

  Every voice fell quiet, every face turned toward him, every phone call put on hold as they awaited the verdict.

  Evan cleared his throat. “Our intel has just been confirmed by the BioWatch system. The detectors show positive for pneumonic plague.”

  A woman in the back of the room let out a low moan, and a large man near the front started weeping. Another man’s voice said, “God help us.”

  “Be assured, no one in this room is going to get sick.” Evan looked at the doctor, now standing at his side. He drew a blank. He was usually good with names but today was far from usual.

  Rock Around the Clock . . .

  Bill Haley and the Comets . . .

  No, not Bill Hailey . . . Phil Hawley.

  Evan said, “Dr. Hawley will take it from here,” gesturing for the doctor to take the floor.

  Hawley stepped forward and addressed the room. “Each of you will receive an injection of either doxycycline, tetracycline, or ciprofloxacin, depending on your allergies and medical history. They’re all effective prophylactically against pneumonic plague, but you’ll need an additional shot every twenty-four hours for the next seven days—do not miss a shot.”

  “What about our families?”

  “All essential emergency personnel will be treated prophylactically, and the CDC teams will be arriving shortly, but we simply don’t have the supply to treat the entire civilian population just in case they catch it. Those who become symptomatic will of course be treated. Best thing you can do for your families is convince them to stay indoors and away from other people.”

  “For how long?”

  “The good news is, the Y. pestis bacterium is sensitive to sunlight, so it dies pretty fast in the open air. Aerosolized, it’s viable for one to two hours without a host. But until right now, we didn’t have a live culture of this particular strain to study. It’s possible this one has been bioengineered to last longer, perhaps as long as six hours. With about six hundred thousand people in the affected area, we may see as many as a hundred thousand become symptomatic in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Our biggest challenge is to keep those initial carriers from spreading it to the greater population, so we must keep the area sealed off and enforce the governor’s curfew to keep the local population from mingling with each other as much as possible. This plague is pneumonic; it is essential that emergency personnel wear surgical masks, gloves, eye protection, and gowns if possible when dealing with the public after the initial infection period from the cropdusting has passed. Pneumonic plague presents similarly to inhalational anthrax, so your teams should be on the lookout for symptoms such as fever, persistent coughing, labored breathing or shortness of breath, chest pain, and of course hemoptysis as the condition worsens—”

  “In English please,” said a voice from the back.

  “Yes, sorry. Coughing up blood. We’ll begin to see that in about forty-eight hours, or as soon as twenty-four in people with compromised immune systems. Some patients will also present with nausea and vomiting and/or diarrhea . . .”

  Evan’s cell phone vibrated. He glanced at the screen—Greg Rundle calling from headquarters in DC.

  Evan left Dr. Hawley to finish the briefing and stepped back into the office, closing the door behind.

  Greg Rundle said, “Jesus Christ, Evan. You’re supposed to be at Langley. If the attack hadn’t happened, you’d be facing a disciplinary hearing for gross insubordination right now.”

  “Lucky me,” said Evan.

  “Watch it, you might still face sanctions before this is over. Just had my ear chewed off by a four-star general. Colonel Michael Dillman has been leading a black ops team to try and stop the terrorists, and he may have died in that effort today. Shelly Henniger was right—you’ve climbed up your own ass on this thing. Soon as you’re medically cleared to leave Columbia, get your ass back to Langley. Turns out she was right about the Yemeni al-Qaida cell.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Start believing it. Analysis of the chatter out of Yemen matched keywords picked up by our cousins at GCHQ from a small Islamic center in the East End of London. CIA and MI5 staged a joint raid early this morning. They found aerial maps of South Carolina, contact information for the private airfield in Chester, and traces of the weaponized bacteria. Also a supply of antibiotics. Henniger was right.”

  “Bullshit,” said Evan. “This smells like a cover-up. I’m telling you Dillman was behind this.” He started to mention Daniel Byrne’s frantic call and text messages, but stopped as a new thought made his blood run cold. He took a breath. “Sir, when I called the local airport and train station to shut them down, they told me they’d already been shut down. They’d both received bomb threats followed by power outages, fifteen minutes before the planes flew over the city.”

  “So the terrorists are well organized. We already know that.”

  “But why go to all the trouble to mount an operation like this and then shut down transportation? Whoever did this took steps to keep the outbreak contained.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Simply that al-Qaida wouldn’t do that—they’d want the outbreak to spread and cripple the whole country.” Evan knew he was heading into dangerous territory. “And I’ve run through my list of contacts—no one has even heard of this group, the Brightest Dawn. Frankly, I don’t think it exists.” What the hell—in for a penny, in for a pound. “Sir, I hate to even consider this possibility, but are we sure this isn’t us? Some kind of false flag operation?”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “I’m just saying, if you look at the facts that my investigation has—”

  “Your investigation is dead. This attack was the work of Yemeni Islamists connected to al-Qaida, and your job is to help CIA uncover the evidence that will enable us to bring the perpetrators to justice. Period. If you value your career and your country, you will leave that paranoid conspiracy shit alone. Are we clear?”

  Evan Sage swallowed his first response.

  “Yes, sir. We’re clear.”

  47: SILENCE

  “It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth—in other words, to silence.”

  —Albert Camus, The Plague

  48: TEARDROP

  Columbia, South Carolina

  12:13 p.m.—Twenty-four hours after contamination . . .

  Kara, please.”

  “No. Daniel, this is bullshit.”

  “I promise you, we’re working on it.�
��

  “Working on it? We’re watching TV and ordering room service and swimming in the hotel pool. What we are not doing is working on it.”

  “Gerald’s team is scanning the city electronically, every CCTV camera, every ATM camera, Internet traffic, e-mail traffic, cell phones—the works. And we’ve got National Guard and state police allies keeping an eye out. Columbia’s still under curfew. What would you have us do? Wander the streets calling, ‘Yoo-hoo! Conrad, where are you?’”

  Pat hurled the book he was reading hard against the wall and stood up. “That’s it, I’m out.” He strode toward the door. “I’m gonna go smoke a joint up on the roof-deck. Kara: Fight fair. Daniel: Stop being a dick. It’s a lovers’ quarrel, not nuclear frickin’ war.”

  Pat jerked the door open and marched out of the suite.

  Daniel said, “He’s right. I’m sorry for the sarcasm. There was no call for that. Not me at my best.”

  Kara nodded acceptance of the apology. “So this is our first lovers’ quarrel,” she said.

  “I guess it is.”

  “And that would make us . . . lovers.”

  “Of course we are—c’mere.” Daniel opened his arms, Kara stepped close, and they held each other for a minute without speaking.

  Kara said, “I stopped drinking enough to keep the voices away back in Norway. Didn’t get drunk in Liberia and haven’t had a drop since we landed. It’s like I’ve laid out a bloody welcome banner for the voices. So where the hell are they?”

  Daniel kissed the top of her head and thought about what to say. The voices had abandoned Tim Trinity, too, a few days before his death. But that was not helpful information.

  He said, “You had the dream on the plane. That was something.”

  “But what’s the point? I get tortured by voices for six years, I lose my daughter, my marriage. Career, friends . . . everything, my whole life. Then you come along, and suddenly this AIT kicks into high gear, adding dreams and fainting spells and—goddamnit what for? So we can be just a little bit too late to stop an atrocity? What’s the point of it? Because it’s starting to feel like a lesson in random cruelty. What could the universe possibly be trying to tell us in this ridiculous manner?”

  Kara looked up at him as a teardrop slid down her face.

  Daniel wiped it away with his thumb and said, “Now who’s looking for God?” She took it as intended and smiled back at him. He didn’t know what to say next, except the obvious. “I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to be in your shoes, so I know this is a case of easy-for-me-to-say, but—”

  She stopped him with a finger to his lips, then turned and walked to the window and looked out at the sun-drenched city.

  He followed and stood beside her, and she took his hand in hers.

  The streets below were completely empty. It brought to mind an old horror movie, Charlton Heston tearing through the deserted streets of dead Los Angeles in a convertible, machine gun by his side, ready to blast away at anything that moved.

  But this horror was real.

  Kara said, “It’s so quiet out there.”

  Daniel said, “My monkey brain wants to endlessly re-examine the last week looking for everything I might’ve done differently to get us here just a little sooner. But I didn’t know then what I know now. Even if I could reverse time, I’d just do the same things all over again. So I tell my monkey brain he’s a narcissist, and he goes away for a while. Then he comes back and tries again.”

  Daniel looked down and across the block to the Columbia Museum of Art’s courtyard, all red bricks and young trees and a gleaming steel sculpture rising above a blue fountain. The kind of fountain kids studying fine art at USC would sit around to eat their lunch on any other day.

  Today there was just one man. A white-haired old man in an old black suit, shuffling through the courtyard with his dog and then stopping to sit on the edge of the fountain.

  Kara said, “You see him?”

  “Yeah. I see him.”

  At first glance, Daniel had thought the man homeless, but now he looked closer. The suit was at least thirty years old and shiny from too many pressings, but it was spotless and the cuffs were not frayed. The white mane was a little wild, but clean.

  And the dog looked healthy and well fed.

  The old man glanced up and down Main Street, then patted the edge of the fountain. The dog jumped up and in, splashing around for a minute, then back out again, where he shook water all over his master’s pant legs before turning in a circle and lying down in a small patch of shade.

  The old man’s shoulders shook as he was seized by a coughing fit that lasted so long the dog eventually got up and came over to check on him. He patted the dog and continued coughing for another minute, then reached into his breast pocket and produced a silver flask and drank deeply from it. He put the flask away, and the coughing started again, even more violently this time. The coughing stopped and the man worked to catch his breath. Then he wiped his hand on the side of the fountain.

  There was blood on his hand.

  The man now lay on his back along the fountain’s edge and stared at the blue sky above, his chest rising and falling very slowly.

  The final lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” came to Daniel’s mind unbidden:

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  Kara said, “There’s already fifty thousand at the stadium—this thing is stronger than anyone anticipated and they just put another call out for all available doctors. This is what I do, Daniel. I have to go. I can help. I need to help.”

  Daniel said, “I know you do.” He squeezed her hand. “Just be careful.”

  “I will. And I’ll have my cell. If anything happens—voices, visions, any kind of episode at all—I’ll stop what I’m doing and call you immediately.”

  “I know you will.”

  49: LIAR’S CLUB

  12:13 p.m.—Forty-eight hours after contamination . . .

  My fellow Americans: Two days ago, our homeland was savagely attacked by terrorists using weapons of mass destruction banned by every civilized nation on the planet. These bioweapons were smuggled into this country and used to unleash an aerosolized plague bacteria on the great state of South Carolina—on civilians going about their daily lives—mothers and fathers, children, grandparents, police officers, teachers, young men and women striving to earn a university education.

  “Since I spoke to you last evening, we have learned a great deal more about the barbaric group of cowards behind this attack on our citizens. I want to acknowledge the courage and dedication of the men and women of our intelligence services who have worked and continue to work around the clock to bring those responsible for this atrocity to justice.

  “And make no mistake: We will see justice done. To those who committed this unpardonable sin and those who supported them financially, I make this promise: Your days are numbered. America will not rest until you are made to answer for your crimes. We know who you are, we are coming for you, and there is nowhere you can hide. We will hunt you to the ends of the earth. And you will burn in hell. For there is no God of any religion who would condone or forgive the evil you have committed against humanity.

  “Let me be clear: America will stand strong through this terrible ordeal, and we will emerge even stronger. We will never allow cowards and extremists to change our way of life nor turn us away from prosecuting the war on terror. We are, and will remain, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

  The president turned from the podium and walked back into the White House.

  Pat said, “At least he didn’t tell us to go shopping.”

  An animated graphic swept across the television screen to
the sound of a military snare drum with a lot of reverb added. The graphic read: Bioterror America and featured the map of South Carolina under neon-red crosshairs.

  There followed a video package including cell phone video of the planes flying over Columbia trailing dark mist behind their wings, fighter jets streaking across the sky, shots of smashed windows and looted stores, army Humvees driving through downtown streets, soldiers ordering civilians off the streets at gunpoint, and finally an aerial shot of five Cessnas left on a stretch of two-lane blacktop, surrounded by military vehicles.

  The newsreader said, “The terrorists abandoned the single-engine planes used in this horrific bioterror attack on a stretch of highway just outside of the city limits, and those planes are now being examined for forensic evidence. The city of Columbia remains under quarantine, although the CDC insists that the air is safe to breathe and says the quarantine is to prevent the spread of disease from those already infected.”

  A shot of the football stadium came up on the screen, with a large CDC mobile command center parked in front. “Williams-Brice Stadium, home of the Carolina Gamecocks, has been set up as a central intake facility, and the governor has issued the following statement: ‘If you or a loved one is showing signs of infection that include fever, go directly to the central intake facility where all arrivals are screened. Anyone with plague symptoms will be turned away by area hospitals and redirected to the stadium. If you are in the quarantine zone but are not sick, you should stay home until the curfew is lifted. National Guard and FEMA personnel will be patrolling the streets to assist people back home and prevent looting.’”

  The newsreader introduced a retired general and a former CIA Middle East analyst on split-screen, and asked them to shed some light on the situation.

  The former CIA analyst said, “Out of necessity, the government is keeping most of the intelligence data back—we can’t tip our hand to the terrorists—but our sources have confirmed that the group behind this vicious attack is a little-known but well-funded al-Qaida affiliate based out of Yemen that calls itself the Brightest Dawn, and they staged the attack out of an Islamic cultural center in London with the help of British jihadists.”