Final Winter

by Brendan DuBois

  So she did, right up to the very end. She stood still, her legs not quivering at all, a tiny victory but one she was pleased to have.

  The Director said, ‘Anybody have any questions?’

  Silence.

  ‘I have a couple, though,’ he said.

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  ‘General Bocks. Do you think you’ll have any problem bringing him on board?’

  ‘No, sir, I don’t,’ Adrianna said. ‘I know of his past participation in Agency missions. I’m sure he can be convinced to take part in this one.’

  ‘And you’re calling it Final Winter?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  A slight smile. ‘Seems fairly ominous.’

  ‘The whole matter is ominous, sir.’

  The Director scratched at his chin, looked up at the nearest plasma screen. ‘And you’ll be ready to deploy in just under a month?’

  ‘That’s correct, sir.’

  Another scratch of the chin. ‘And I want to be sure that this is understood, because if word gets out over what’s being attempted, there’ll be merry hell to pay...you understand that, right?’

  Adrianna nodded. ‘That was the focus of many, many hours of discussion, sir.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  She waited, the trembling still not there. Would it end now? Would it?

  ‘But there’s one more question I have, Adrianna, before you’ll get my approval.’

  She couldn’t speak. She just waited.

  ‘This...bacterial agent that you’re proposing to disperse from these aircraft: it’s completely safe, am I right?’

  Adrianna took a breath. ‘Absolutely, sir. It’s been field-tested in many other areas, over the years, by private medical personnel and biowarfare defense units of our military. As I mentioned in the briefing, it’s a variant of the b. sofia bacterium, completely benign to human ingestion. But it perfectly mimics the possible dispersion of an airborne anthrax attack. With the ground sensing stations that are already in place in these target cities, we can detect the bacterium once it’s been dispersed and be able to design computer models that will enable us to better prepare for when we’re attacked with real anthrax. It’s a large-scale research exercise, sir, one that has the potential to give us very valuable defense information in a short span of time.’

  The Director looked right at her, like he was trying to psych her out or something, and she stared right back at him. Bring it on, she thought, bring it on. I’ve got everything in place. Everything.

  He said, ‘When are you planning to see General Bocks?’

  ‘Two days, maybe three.’

  He said, ‘Good. You look tired. Take tomorrow off. And Final Winter...Adrianna, it’s approved.’

  She could barely speak. ‘Thank you, sir. Thank you.’

  Adrianna sat down, her legs quivering now like she had just run a marathon, and the screaming inside her mind started, victory, victory, holy victory. She was startled when a man at her right - Gideon, a Tiger Team leader stationed in Los Angeles - leaned over and said, ‘That was something funny you said just then, Adrianna.’

  ‘What was that?’ she replied, barely focusing on what he was saying.

  ‘The Director asked about an anthrax attack, and you said, “when we’re attacked”. You’re that certain - that it’s going to be when, not if?’

  Adrianna turned and gave Gideon her best smile. ‘Absolutely. It’s going to be when. Not if.’

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Several hours after the meeting of the Tiger Team leaders, the members of Tiger Team Seven followed their own leader’s instructions and took the day off. Each one of the members did something that day that partially revealed who they were and where they came from, though each would seriously challenge anyone who tried to analyze their activities. It was just a day off, a jewel to be cherished, that was all, and trying to read anything into it was so much bullshit.

  Which was true for all the Tiger Team members, save one.

  ~ * ~

  In the small garage in Monty Zane’s rental home outside Greenbelt - he had never owned property in his entire life, though that was going to change once he became a civilian -Monty lovingly polished the bright red gas tank of his Harley Davidson Road King motorcycle. Every piece of chrome and exposed metalwork was bright and reflective, and even the fat tires of his hog had been polished with Armor All. He wiped his fingers on the rag and stepped back, admiring the look of the beast, bad-ass and powerful, all that energy just tied up and bundled in that lovely Twin Cam 88 engine of pure Pennsylvania energy.

  The door of the house opened and Charlene stepped out, frowning, her blonde hair freshly washed, just barely touching her shoulders, a towel wrapped around her lovely midriff. ‘Are you going to ride that damn thing or just drool over it?’

  Monty laughed, wiped his hands again. ‘You know, babe, sometimes drooling comes from riding things ... as you know.’

  Charlene smiled and then stuck out her tongue at him. ‘You should be so lucky - which you will be, if you get your muscular ass back here before two o’clock, ‘fore the kids get home. Deal?’

  ‘Deal, love.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, walking back into the kitchen, flipping up the towel to show off her shapely butt. ‘Now have a good ride and don’t get killed.’

  Monty kept on smiling as he toggled the garage door opener. When the way was clear he straddled the bike and switched on the ignition, gave the start-up lever a good pop. The Harley roared into life with a satisfying thump-burble-burble and in a few seconds he was down the driveway and out on the road. He checked his Timex. A good four hours of quality driving time ahead of him, no highways, no urban centers, just get out into those blue country lanes that still crisscrossed this marvelous land of his, and he remembered those sweet last words of Charlene. Don’t get killed. Maybe a joke but there was a bit of seriousness back there, remembering what happened to him back on September 10th, that awful year. Monty liked keeping secrets from the civilians he worked for - made his image that much meaner and more mysterious - and he knew that everybody gossiped about the burn marks on his face. There were questions about where he had gotten burned - Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan -and everyone assumed that he had been torched in the line of duty, on some heroic mission, and they all assumed wrong. He had been burned on his day off, and in Mary-goddamn-land, when some kid with a week-old driver’s license had blown through a stop sign and punched through the side of another car in front of Monty. He had dumped the cycle, sliding into the car just as the gasoline cooked off and toasted part of his face. And the day and weeks after, when the hammer came down in Afghanistan, he had been stuck in a burn unit, cursing his luck, as his comrades went out and did a job that they had trained their entire lives for.

  Not a heroic story at all, damn it.

  The motorcycle now seemed like an extension of him as he drove east, not caring what particular road he took or where he was going. The trip was the destination, that was all, just the feeling of the wind in his face, the scent of things growing, the sights of the farmland out there, still being tilled, year after year.

  Monty grinned, thinking of what it must have been like out here a couple of centuries ago. Some of those farm buildings had been out there then, fresh new, home to farmers and grazers, and Monty had no doubt that some of his ancestors had been out there as well, working for the Man, dying and living and praying out there in bondage, and here he was, a descendant of theirs, not only prospering in this country but actually sworn to defend it, and man, that was a good feeling.

  He kept on riding.

  All right, there was another feeling, the one that gave him a quiet warm glow every time, especially when he was around Charlene, the former Miss Charlene Taylor, second runner-up five years ago in the Miss Virginia USA beauty pageant. For when Monty had started dating that fine specimen of Southern womanhood he had been curious about her past and had done a little checking.

  He lea
ned into a corner, felt the way the tires just gripped that pavement, like the firm touch of a masseuse, never letting go.

  Okay, a lot of checking. Monty had always been interested in genealogy and had done a lot of work here and there, trying to trace his family back, which was easy enough until you got into the latter part of the nineteenth century. Then the records became spotty at best - and for good reason, of course, because the black men and women of the South back then had been like survivors in some post-nuclear-war landscape, wandering around shellshocked, trying to scratch out an existence in what was left of the Southern economy, fighting off hunger and cold and the nightriders and the Klan. Keeping good records for a safe and prosperous future would sure as hell have been low on their ‘to do’ list.

  Leaned into another corner, really picking up speed, thinking for a moment what might happen if that damn vaccination program didn’t work. What kind of life would it be for his children? Growing up a dead country, scrambling around in the looted and empty cities, hearing tales of what it had been like to be the world’s only superpower, being here and now, starving, wondering what it must have been like to live when you didn’t go to bed hungry at night, every night. . .

  Well, fuck that shit. It wasn’t going to happen to his children.

  Then Monty laughed. He knew that he shouldn’t have. But his kids - Grace and Marilyn - wouldn’t Charlene’s ancestors have dropped dead from horror at the sight of those light-brown children? For during his genealogy work on his own side of the family, he had done some investigation into her side and had found out that one of her great-great-great-grandfathers had been a prominent slaveholder and a colonel in the Army of Northern Virginia. Monty had always gotten a big-ass kick out of how that proper Southern colonel would have probably shot himself in the head at the knowledge that one of his descendants would be marrying the descendant of a piece of his property.

  And as he rode, the laughter kept coming back, as it always did, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the Harley.

  ~ * ~

  Victor Palmer walked into the store, almost sighing with pleasure as the smell of old paper and ink came to him. The store was in an otherwise unimpressive strip mall outside Greenbelt, with a Pizza Hut franchise, a Jiffy Lube franchise, a bunch of other franchises and this little store, called Pulp Planet. Sometimes when Victor came here he thought the only thing Americans were good for were setting up franchises so that a strip mall in Maine looked exactly like one in California.

  He stood on the scuffed-up linoleum, looked around at the open bins set up against the walls. He walked slowly to the nearest bin, just savoring the anticipation of what lay before him. Rows and rows of old magazines in plastic sleeves were stacked in rows and he let his fingers brush over the plastic, looking at the brightly colored and lurid covers of the pulp magazines from the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. Ah, he thought, that had been the time, back fifty and sixty years ago, when there’d been dozens of pulp-fiction magazines published each month, from westerns to men’s adventure to mystery to science fiction and fantasy. The colors were garish, the stories were often poorly written and the advertisements for becoming a ‘he-man’ or getting rid of blackheads were always hilarious. But there was an energy and spirit to the pulps that had always appealed to him, especially during the grueling days of med school and residency. For he enjoyed losing himself in the spirit of the pulps, written during the Depression and the Second World War and the opening decades of the Cold War when the stories had suggested that, no matter how grim the news, anything was possible. Anything.

  Victor rummaged carefully through the magazines, look-ing for his particular favorite, Doc Savage, a pulp character that lived from 1933 to 1949. Doc was the subject of more than a hundred serialized novels, involving adventures all around the Earth, fighting crime, fighting evil, working to make the world a better place. A brilliant physician with the crime-fighting abilities of Sherlock Holmes, Doc kept his offices in the Empire State Building and had a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. Ridiculous stuff, Victor knew, but he loved these tales of black-and-white morality, about evil men with death rays and secret poison clouds, not with hijacked airliners and weaponized anthrax.

  Victor weaved a bit on his tired feet, looking through the Doc Savage magazines, and he remembered one particularly fantastic aspect of Doc’s world: the man believed in the ultimate goodness of humanity and thought that it was diseased minds that created criminals. Doc had a secret medical facility in upstate New York where criminals he had captured were operated upon, to correct the imbalance in their minds and thereby allow them to become useful, productive and law-abiding citizens.

  Poor Doc. Victor went to another bin of magazines. Doc never realized - as Victor had, during his first residency at an ER in an inner-city hospital in Atlanta - that some men (and a few women, to be honest) liked hurting people, liked killing people, liked being evil, and there was no miracle operation in existence that could change that. He remembered a bull session with Monty Zane late one night, when Monty had said, ‘You know, when it’s all said and done, the best way to protect this nation is to locate a certain number of men out there who hate us, and dispatch them with a nine-millimeter round to the forehead. Problem is, of course, knowing who they are and where they are.’

  How true. Victor rubbed his fingers across the clear plastic, remembered the joy in reading these pulps in those few hours available to him, early on in his medical career. He wished for the simplicity of that time, wished he had never heard of the CDC or weaponized anthrax or any other damnable thing. At the moment he thought it would have been a fine thing to enter the Public Health Service and end up as a small town MD in rural Arkansas or something, married to some local gal who’d worship him because of his education, and where he could haunt the used-magazine and book dealers on the Internet.

  What a life that would have been, instead of the nightmare he was in now. A nightmare that was going to get worse, for Victor had no doubt that details of the Final Winter immunization program would most certainly become public, if not this year then next.

  And he had already planned that as part of a plea agreement for quickly cooperating with the government, he’d be sent to a minimum-security facility, and be able to bring his collection of pulps with him.

  It would only be fair.

  ~ * ~

  Darren Coover sat in a comfortable easy chair in his apartment, the Bose Wave radio in the room set to a local classical station, as he worked on a New York Times crossword puzzle from 1950 while his laptop hummed away at his elbow on a portable desk. He looked over at the laptop, saw that the program he was running was doing its business, quietly surfing sex sites on the Internet - with an emphasis on busty women - and went back to his puzzle. He had long ago lost interest in doing contemporary crossword puzzles - he usually finished the Sunday New York Times one in under an hour -but he did love the challenge of solving posers and he found that doing old puzzles was a hell of a nice challenge.

  For one thing, there was a whole universe of cultural phrases and words that were a half-century old that one had to ruminate over before completing a fifty-year-old puzzle, which was a delight. Darren subscribed to a special service that recovered old puzzles from the New York Times microfilm records and mailed them out to subscribers around the world. It was one thing to solve a puzzle involving a play on words; it was something else when you had to remember the name of a Broadway star from the late 1940s.

  Remembering. Darren looked up at the laptop, merrily moving along the program that he had sent into its innards. The line from his Dell laptop was linked with a cable modem, and he spent a few moments just imagining the intricacy of sending those packets of information back and forth, back and forth, along the cable line. One cable here out to a utility pole to a switching station to… another memory, this time of a lecture being given back at the NSA campus - known as Crypto City - when a lecturer from MIT came in and stood in a secure conference room, yapping about somet
hing. Darren had sat at the rear, idly listening to the guy drone on, when the man had said something interesting. The lecturer asked, ‘How many computer networks are out there in the world today?’ There had been a low murmur and Darren knew it was a trick question, and he had kept his mouth shut until the lecturer had triumphantly said, ‘One. There is just one computer network in the world.’ Everything else was just a subset of this huge network. There had been a low titter of laughter, and the lecturer had just let it slide right over his pointy head.

  Because the right answer wasn’t one. Darren wasn’t sure what the right answer was, exactly, but he knew that the numeral one wasn’t it. For there was another network out there, one that belonged to the NSA. It was called HARDWIRE, and it was a network with a 526-bit encryption technology, based on a new quantum mechanics computing system that existed only in Crypto City. HARDWIRE allowed NSA operatives - like himself - to chat with one another.

  He looked down at the crossword puzzle, thinking yet again how the current puzzles were no longer much of a challenge. Ah, a challenge - now, getting a handle on Final Winter and what Adrianna had set in motion, that was one hell of a test, and he knew that he should have been satisfied with what was on his plate. But there was something there that he wanted to dig around, something that just didn’t quite make sense. If he dumped that porn program he was running and logged into HARDWIRE -which could take a while: the verification and password protection system made entering the White House look like buying a day pass at Disneyworld - he could chat with some of his co-workers and see what sniffings they had on Final Winter. Not that he didn’t trust what was going on with his Tiger Team. No, sir, not at all. It was just that -well, he liked things to work out right, to make sense. And right now something wasn’t quite making sense. He wasn’t sure what it was. There was just a tingling back there in his mind that bothered him.