No one said anything.
Terry thought of the Edgar Allan Poe story where a worm entered a man’s brain through his ear, then exited, after it had seeded the tissue with eggs. “Any recommendations?” he asked, hopeless reaching into his innards and giving them a stir.
“Actually, Terry, I do” the methodical speaker continued. “We use a ready made homing system to zero in on this unknown. The immune response--it’s given us an army of searchers.”
Terry immediately knew what he meant. No one else spoke. “Perhaps you better explain,” he said, wanting to be sure everybody was up to speed.
“Certainly. We ask hospitals to break these IgA and IgM antibodies into their component parts using standard electrophoresis.” In a few words he explained how immunoglobulins could be separated out from one another according to their molecular composition, thereby isolating the ones unique to people with SHAKES, and that these might carry antibodies designed to attack the mystery protein, or perhaps the mother organism itself. His every word conveyed the calm confidence of someone well practiced in thinking his way through terrain where no one else had traveled. “So why not harvest these antibodies, tag them with some recognizable marker, and use them as a wash on those bits of brain you’re sending to San Antonio. Like hound dogs given a specific scent, they should lock onto remnants of the protein we’re after, as well as the causative organism, if that’s still there. Either way, we bag the intruder.”
More silence, then someone gave a long, low whistle.
“Fucking brilliant!” peeled the crisp London accent.
“Simple, and elegant,” a new female voice said.
Terry recognized the Texas drawl, even though its usual harshness was softened by a musical lilt. Betty Houston had adopted her reassuring, all-is-under-control, public-media mode of speaking.
Other accolades poured out, all in a jumble.
The praise was rightly due, and Terry suddenly felt better--a lot better.
With a chance to track this thing down, forget hopeless!
He glanced a his watch. CDC and WHO were scheduled to give a joint press conference in two hours. Now there’d be something to report.
In the meantime he had another long shot to play. Though on the run, Anna Katasova might have access to a computer. He would e-mail her, offer to help her, perhaps get her charges dropped if she came clean about what she knew. Tell us everything--from Yuri’s part in this, to her own role, if any, and the big question that he’d allowed to lie dormant for six years--if her being set up by Wey Chen in 2002 had anything to do with three little blue pins in 2003?
Two hours later, Military Base 682, Research Division, Code name Dragon, North Guangdong Province
Wey Chen sat at her usual place in the viewing room, and her superior stood a few feet behind her.
She lowered the copies of intercepted e-mails between Terry Ryder and Anna Katasova.
On all the screens in front of her the combined CDC/WHO broadcast wound down.
She’d learned enough, and switched off the sound.
“Your former mentor has wasted no time in locking onto China’s connection with all this,” the man said as he paced in front of her, his face crimson with rage. “How could he have possibly unraveled so much so quickly, unless someone helped him?”
Wey Chen felt as if her windpipe had been cut. “Nonsense!” she replied with uncharacteristic forcefulness. “He knows nothing that he can prove.” She had to make this convincing.
“Look at his e-mails! He’s suspicious of you, of why we seized Anna Katasova in 2002--”
“Forget the e-mails! You heard what he said publicly--‘No evidence that this is an attack’--he repeated it a dozen times to those reporters. I know this man. If he thought he could make a credible case that someone had unleashed a bioweapon, he’d be screaming it far and wide--”
“How dare you minimize this matter? Just hours ago you warned that he would be our greatest threat--”
“He’ll pursue the organism, yes. Maybe even solve the pathogenesis of it all. But as long as he hasn’t any proof to the contrary, he’ll still be telling the entire world that they’re battling a naturally occurring enemy. In a way, we couldn’t have a better front.” Behind her bravado, she knew that her reassurances must sound pathetically naive, but her supervisor, frightened as he was, would want to believe them.
The rest of the room remained empty. His henchmen, having preferred not to draw attention to themselves by reassembling a second time in less than twenty-four hours, had chosen to watch the broadcast at their offices or in their homes. They would quickly contact each other now, and discuss what they’d seen, but in groups of twos and threes, at a gym, over drinks, or during a stroll, always careful not to stand out, in case there were watchers. One thing was certain. If they experienced the same incredulous panic that she felt, they would already be preparing scapegoats to take the blame, namely her, and the man at her back.
Which meant he’d also be open to desperate measures that might save his skin.
“Look,” she continued, still attempting to sound confident, “Katasova’s reply to Dr. Ryder insists that she knows nothing.”
Yet as Wey Chen spoke, her other plan stirred to life, the one she’d dared not acknowledge except in the privacy of her darkest nights. Just thinking about it evoked such fear that she was certain it would alert him and his henchmen to her treachery.
“Who can say how much Katasova’s figured out?” he said, growing more agitated as he paced. “Or how much Yuri Raskin has told her? Or that she won’t change her mind and take Dr. Ryder’s deal? And even if the woman is ignorant of what Raskin did, she and the daughter are walking around with China’s greatest secret. The fact that they don’t know it now doesn’t mean she or Ryder won’t eventually realize--”
“Until they do, we have time to fix this. The Americans won’t dare retaliate without solid proof, not since Iraq.” She’d summoned her most authoritative voice.
He stopped pacing.
“Fix it how?”
She took a breath, and carefully chose her words. “As I said, thanks to what Dr. Ryder reported today, scientists around the world will pursue the organism, not its creators. In the meantime, we take care of any threat that Raskin, Katasova, and Ryder may pose.”
“How?”
“It means a trip to America.”
“Go on.”
She told him what she had in mind.
The more he listened, the more he calmed down. “It might work,” he said when she finished. “You personally guarantee the disappearance of Anna Katasova and the daughter, after you use them to lure in Yuri.”
She nodded.
He slumped into the chair beside her and placed his finger tips together to form a pyramid. “What about Terry Ryder?”
“I can lure him in too. He’s already suspicious of me. He’ll come running if he thinks I’m ready to sell my secrets.”
He grew very still, splaying his fingers against one another until they looked like a spider doing pushups on a mirror. “Ryder’s death ought to look like an accident,” he said after having considered her proposition for a few minutes. “After all, the man must have shared his suspicions with someone, so we can’t have even a hint of wrongdoing to point a finger at us. As for Katasova, Raskin, and the girl, just make the bodies disappear. Two fugitives vanish without a trace while on the run from police, taking their daughter with them--there wouldn’t be cause to claim foul play, let alone connect it to us.” He got to his feet. “Make the arrangements. We’ll put you in contact with our teams that are already in the US.”
Fool! she thought, savoring a surge of triumph. Those in fear for their lives can grasp at straws went the Confucius saying. She hated those obviously trite clichés. These days they were marketed to the West as wisdom stuffed inside fortune cookies. No one in China paid them the slightest attention any more. Yet here was a grown man giving credibility to such treacle, judging by how easily she’d ma
nipulated him.
He gave her a slight bow of his head, and added, “Of course, you needn’t worry that we will care for Jade during your absence.”
Chapter 21
That afternoon, Friday, January 23, 2009, 2:01 P.M. EST
Wells Beach, Maine
Anna’s fingers flew across her keyboard.
Damn Ryder. She’d show him.
The fog outside her front window congealed to the lucency of cold grease, concealing the shoreline and smudging the rest of the world in grays. At the back door a storm surge had caused high tide to close in behind the spit of sand that locals called cottage row. The causeway leading to the mainland was already flooded, but the few residents who lived here year round took being stranded during a winter blizzard in stride. That the power stayed on, now that got them talking.
To Anna it meant the drawbridge was up and the FBI couldn’t raid her beach house for the next few hours unless they came by boat.
She’d need every minute of that time, and then some.
No evidence of a bioterror attack, he’d said on TV.
Her ticket out of this mess would be to find that proof and throw it in his and the general’s faces.
So far WHO had kept her password valid, and she could still access the most powerful search engines and greatest storage banks of medical data on the planet. But she worked at a frenzy, fearing that any second someone might cut her off without warning.
All morning she’d focused on data in the G-TOED system, particularly the uplink of presenting complaints from participating ERs. Symptoms were listed according to statistical prevalence, the most common traits on top. At first they’d appeared much the same as what she’d heard people say during newscast interviews. Trembling fingers; Can’t concentrate; Forgetful; Irritable; Stumble when I walk . . .
She studied the screen.
In the last half hour the count for reported cases world wide had jumped to fifty million. Worse, people had begun to list more serious disabilities as their presenting complaint. Fifty thousand signed themselves into ERs because they couldn’t walk without falling down. Five hundred thousand said that they couldn’t hold their hands steady enough to write. A million more couldn’t recall their ATM codes.
At the very bottom of the list appeared less frequent, more uniquely crafted descriptions that hinted at the individual anguish behind the numbers. The latest entry read, I hit my child . . .
Over the next fifteen minutes two further leaps brought the total close to a hundred million.
Not all of these would be SHAKES, she kept telling herself. The worried well would be pumping up the numbers with every imagined quiver or shiver. The real cases couldn’t be piling up that fast.
Oh yeah? the screen seemed to say, and added another five thousand to the Can’t walk roster.
She entered the updates into a diagnostic program for infectious diseases designed to analyze the presenting symptoms. Ideally it would spit out a list of known illnesses similar enough to SHAKES that one of them might share a common cause, and, if she caught a really big break, suggest a potential treatment.
No such luck.
Or rather too much luck.
All neurological syndromes known to man--neuropathies, encephalopathies, parathesias, pareses, dementias-- had at least some features of SHAKES. In short, nerves did not work right, with breakdowns located anywhere from light touch sensors at the tip of a toe to speech centers deep within the brain. Worse, without having the slightest idea of the underlying disease process, doctors would be reduced to shotgun therapy in their attempt to help victims, firing in combinations of medications to treat symptoms. Reasonable guesses would replace evidence-based medicine--antipsychotics and tranquilizers for violent behavior, antiparkinsonism agents for tremors, antidepressants for mood swings, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Flying blind like that, there’d be side effects, and the first principle of all physicians--Do no harm--would fall by the wayside.
She massaged her temples in frustration, then tapped back into G-TOED, watching the scarlet dots proliferate.
The size and spread of what she was seeing continued to numb her. She couldn’t get her mind around the enormity of so many victims or the increasing severity of their complaints. It was as if, out there, rendered invisible by the fog, a global war raged that she could neither see nor hear, but in which casualties fell by the millions, great chunks of their brains crippled beyond repair, the activities of daily living brought to an abrupt halt.
Nevertheless, Anna continued to work the data.
Out went the more esoteric complaints.
In went clusters of the most prevalent symptoms.
On went the program to scan for diagnostic possibilities.
A short list of diseases sharing at least some of the more common features would be a start.
This time, No Matches Found.
Yet something else turned up.
She’d expected to see clusters of the more advanced symptoms in the regions of the globe that had been struck first, and only minor, early symptoms in the surrounding environs. That pattern would reflect the usual way a communicable infection expands from one hot zone to create another. Instead, when she requested a geographic breakdown of the more serious complaints, out came a map showing that the people who couldn’t walk, now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, were equally distributed all over the globe. There were no definite hot zones. The most advanced, therefore earliest cases, had simply sprung up everywhere simultaneously, like something already in place.
But that couldn’t be right.
A least it better not be.
Despite all the miracles of twenty-first-century medicine, isolating the source of an infection had remained the mainstay of fighting epidemics since healers first battled plague during the middle ages. In this decade alone, the defeat of SARS and Bird Flu wouldn’t have happened without prompt identification of carriers and slapping mass quarantines on anybody who’d had contact with them. But how the hell could they quarantine something that had no center, no geographic source?
An icy chill did a slow creep up her spine.
She ran the numbers again, hoping to prove herself wrong, only to confirm that they checked out. No doubt about it--SHAKES simply popped up, operating outside the normal rules of contagion, and quarantines might not work against it.
How could an organism behave this way? She’d no idea.
And if there were no hot zones, how had the military come down with it first? Again, no answers.
She must get back in the loop. The best medical minds in the world would be brainstorming thousands of ideas as to the origin of SHAKES. That’s how scientists set off eureka moments. Everyone spurs everyone else to new thoughts, unlocking fresh concepts and arriving at bursts of insight they might never come up with on their own.
For starters, they must have all the known facts.
She clicked over to her e-mail.
Give this to your group, Ryder, she typed after submitting her map data, and wanted to add, Never accuse me of covering up for terrorists again.
Her hand hovered over SEND.
Tracking technology through the Internet had gotten to the stage where they could pinpoint a wireless laptop in seconds. With the WHO receiving hundreds of thousands of general hits per minute, she’d been willing to risk they couldn’t spot her among so much traffic. But e-mailing Ryder would be like waving a flag to say “Hi, here I am,” if he chose to set the FBI on her.
Yet she wanted to chance it. Alerting him to a troubling lack of hot zones would hardly undo his presumption of her guilt. But by obviously staking her freedom on his discretion, all in order to share that information, she might render him a little more likely to believe she acted in good faith. Might even lean him toward leaving her at large, in touch and cooperating, instead of throwing her into jail. That would be his logical strategy, especially if he wanted a conduit to Yuri, and Terry, even at his cocksure, manipulative best, was logical to a fault
. Besides, she’d be at risk of being traced no matter whom she contacted. Better a calculated gamble on the man who’d be twelve moves ahead of all the other players on the board. With a click of the mouse, she put the e-mail, and her fate, in his hands.
Military Base 682, Research Division, Code name Dragon, North Guangdong Province
Wey Chen stayed put in her seat long after her supervisor had left. The aroma of stale cigar smoke and rancid sweat wafted through her nostrils. She detested the omnipresent smell. It seeped into her clothing and flesh.
For little Jade’s sake, she promised, allowing the other plan, the one conceived in darkness, to once more uncoil itself inside her head. It would be, like so much else she’d done, to protect little Jade.
A metallic bitterness tingled her tongue, as if she’d regurgitated a cupful of blood, and an odor of rotted meat displaced the usual stink that permeated the room. The new scent worked its way down her throat, and she braced for what inevitably would follow.
The agony of seeing her own crimes no longer confined itself to dreams. Sometimes she experienced them in excruciating detail while awake, as if she were actually reliving them. Americans would label the affliction as a flashback, secondary to post traumatic stress.
Confucius called it conscience.
By either name, extreme emotion could trigger it. Unpleasant olfactory hallucinations preceded it.
She braced for its onset, her heart thudding far too fast, and watched the walls dissolve into nothing.
The change submerged her in a predawn mist.
She is standing in the courtyard, her body as rigid as the execution poles in front of her.
She hears the steel door swing open at her back, and the cries of the prisoners as they march out into the yard fill the air. The clink of their chains mingle with the shuffling of their feet.
The date is five years ago, February 19, 2004, the day she crossed the line. Unlike in the fluidity of a dream, events reoccur within real rules of time and space. Yet what she sees, touches, hears, tastes and smells has an overpowering immediacy, everything locked in the present more vividly than when she first experienced it. Because now, unlike then, she can’t shut out any of the sights and sounds. At the same instant she is oddly distant from it all, relegated to the status of a watcher, having no control over her body, mind, or senses. Sealed inside her own brain she observes as her thoughts, actions, and feelings unfold, all preprogrammed to a scenario that she is helpless to change.
The Darkness Drops Page 28
