The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  As Yuri explained his idea, Terry readied to scoff in his face, until a deeper, truer instinct leapfrogged scorn and caused him to think, This made sense!

  No, wait a minute, it couldn’t be right. Yuri was a cunning, womanizing, rarely-to-be-trusted hustler in a white coat, certainly not a physician who could deliver a credible theory to explain SHAKES. And it’s inspired by a movie, for Christ’s sake.

  But another part of Terry’s mind ran with the idea. In science, a theory is only as good as its capacity to explain unknowns. Point by point, he worked through each enigma that had stumped him until now, and was speaking aloud, pouring out thoughts in a torrent for fear the revelations would disappear if he didn’t articulate them fast enough.

  And Yuri joined him, until they tumbled over one another coming to the same conclusions.

  “If bird flu, H5N1, is the causative organism, it delivered a one-two punch--”

  “Right! First the influenza, against which the Chinese could play the hero. But it also seeded its victim’s DNA with the message to produce the rogue proteins, and the altered DNA has been doing just that ever since--”

  “Except it took two years for the amounts of protein to become clinically significant--”

  “And these proteins, unlike the ones in 1918, don’t just take out the sites that produce dopamine. They invade every part of the brain--”

  “Maybe that’s because the Chinese tinkered with the influenza strain in another way. They made its proteins much more invasive...”

  What’s more, Terry thought there’d already been a proven precedent where viruses seeded brain cells with genetic material, and the makeover led to a slow production of abnormal proteins. Just last year scientists in Britain traced the origins of Mad Cow Disease and its deadly prions to a previously unsuspected microbe found in livestock. He lost his breath, electrified by how every piece fit.

  “Not bad for a Ural cowboy, eh Ryder?” Yuri said, pouring the tea.

  Terry raised his own cup in salute. “No doubt about it.” But even if the theory continued to hold up, they were still a long way from a definitive treatment, and while immunosuppressant techniques could buy time, there wouldn’t be enough doses for everyone. He’d done the math. Were all the people who’d survived bird flu to come down with SHAKES, add another billion to the current sick count. As for the “lucky” ones who’d get to dampen their antibody response, how many, their immunity compromised, would die from infections that had nothing to do with SHAKES? Bottom line, understanding this beast was not enough. They needed a cure, now. “Take me with you.” he said.

  Yuri looked up from adding more leaves to the already strong brew. He regarded Terry warily, the way any doctor would regard any patient who’d just gone off his rocker. “Pardon?”

  “What did Wey Chen promise you?”

  “Everything I need to make a deal with Uncle Sam.”

  “The vaccine?”

  Yuri grinned at him. “Smart boy.”

  “How are you planning to get it?”

  The grin widened.

  “Let me guess. You’re going into those laboratories you located.”

  Yuri started to laugh. “Just one, with Wey Chen’s help.”

  “But how do you intend to get into China undetected, let alone access one of their bioweapons labs?”

  “The Siberian express. It’s part of poor Bori’s former network. Think of it as a deluxe, multinational version of your old underground railway, but for entrepreneurs. It lets me travel to any country in the world and never show my passport. I become a ghost.”

  “And Wey Chen will be waiting there to hand you the vaccine?”

  “Not exactly. But with her help, I’ll know where to find it, along with records of their bioweapons program, plus anything else that’ll sweeten the pot for my deal with Uncle Sam and blackmail Beijing into calling off their hit teams.”

  “How do you know it’s not a trap?

  “As I tried to tell you earlier, I have something she needs. Any attempt to double cross me, she hurts herself. It’s a perfect plan.”

  Terry had ten-year-old socks with fewer holes in them, but didn’t care. “Then take me with you. This is too damn important for you to do alone.”

  Yuri refilled their plastic cups with equal portions of the black steaming liquid. “No dice. Anything I bring back is my ace in the hole. I’ll be using it to negotiate. Don’t take offense, but while the great Terry Ryder may have connections enough to deliver the offer, you just aren’t a big enough fish to swing the bargain I’m after. Anna needs more than immunity. She needs to work, and that requires someone in Washington with not only the clout to clear her name, but the power to restore her security clearance. That way she’ll be able to do the job she loves and raise Kyra. So you just get me news of Anna from your best source possible, and, when the time comes to deal, set me up with your highest contact. From there, I work my own way up the power chain.”

  “You want my best source? My highest contact?” He downed the tea in a single gulp and fished out his newly acquired satellite phone. “I’ll give you my best source.”

  As Terry punched in the code numbers, Yuri’s glittering black eyes lost their playfulness. “Who are you calling now, Ryder?”

  “My very best source, to find out about Anna.”

  Yuri sprang to his feet and was at Terry’s side in an instant. “Wait a minute. I want to verify who you’re talking to--”

  “Not until I say ‘hello’ first. There’s voice recognition involved.”

  “But--”

  “Morning. This is Dr. Terry Ryder,” he said, allowing the automated security system to verify his identity, then connect him with her personal phone in the Oval Office.

  After a few clicks, he was through.

  “Dr. Ryder, I hope you have good news for me,” she said.

  “I know a lot more than when we talked yesterday, Madame President--”

  Yuri snatched the phone from his hand. “Who is this?” he demanded into the mouthpiece, scowling fiercely.

  Even in the dim light, Terry saw the man’s face go slack with amazement and his shoulders snap back as he almost stood at attention. “Yes, Ma’am, I’ll put him right on,” he said, and sheepishly handed over the phone.

  “I’m, sorry for the interruption, Madame President,” Terry said.

  “Who the hell was that?”

  “Yes, he is a very rude and unpleasant fellow,” Terry said, glaring at Yuri, who winced. “Believe it or not, that’s the Dr. Yuri Raskin we’ve all been looking for.”

  Yuri’s expression snapped back into a scowl.

  “He’s involved, but not in the way we thought,” Terry continued. “In fact, I think he wants to be quite useful.”

  Terry quickly explained Yuri’s complicity in supplying the Chinese with the holograph technology, its role in producing vaccines against SHAKES, and the mechanisms of the disease that he’d seen in the holograms. “Yuri hasn’t told me the specifics of his plan, but I think he’s arranged to get his hands on samples of that vaccine through one of his old contacts. He’s also pinpointed which labs in China were involved in its production. If we can prove the Chinese made it and that it was specifically designed against SHAKES, would that be enough of a smoking gun for you?”

  He heard her draw in a breath. “It’d be the miracle I’ve been praying for. But your proof would have to be iron clad.”

  “It will be. That vaccine has to contain bits of the rogue proteins in order to stimulate an antibody response against them. Those bits are as unique as fingerprints and we can prove a match. Not only that, if most of China’s good citizens have those same antibodies in their bloodstream, I’d say you have their leadership over a barrel.”

  “What about the vaccine itself? Will it help people who are already sick?” She didn’t betray so much as a hint of her personal stake in the question. That didn’t make answering her any easier.

  “I’m afraid not, Madame President. Since the
damage from SHAKES is a result of our own immune response to those same rogue proteins once they’re embedded in brain tissue, the vaccine’s boost to that immunity would make us all worse. But it might protect people who are still only in the first incubative stages of the disease, if it’s administered before significant amounts of the proteins implant themselves--” He stopped himself, realizing he’d gotten too technical. “Sorry--”

  “You said us,’” she interrupted.

  “Pardon?”

  “You said ‘us’--‘make us all worse.’”

  Shit! It had been a slip. Should he lie? Put the misuse of “us” down to fatigue? Then again, the president had a right to know that her appointee to lead the charge against SHAKES might lapse into homicidal meltdowns. “I’m afraid it’s been a night of many revelations,” he said, speaking very hesitatingly. “I’m now part of the walking wounded.”

  She fell absolutely silent. He couldn’t even hear her breathing. “I’m sorry, Dr. Ryder,” she replied after a few seconds. “You obviously know I understand how devastated you must feel, but can you carry on? I’m not requesting anything I haven’t demanded of myself.”

  “You don’t even have to ask, Madame President. Physically, I’ve no problem, at least none to bother about. Mentally, I seem prone to strangling people who piss me off.”

  She let out a chuckle. “You can start with half my cabinet.” The silence returned. It seemed to say, So there’s no hope for us?

  Unprompted, he briefed her about immunosuppression, the results out of Honolulu, and the possibility of developing drugs to shut down the DNA that produced the rogue proteins, but it all sounded pretty thin. He hesitated, not saying the next logical step, in case she’d rather he just get on with it and not tell her.

  “Out with it, Ryder,” she said, intuiting that he was holding back.

  “Our best bet, Madame President, may lie in going after treatments that the Chinese might already have.”

  “You mean through Raskin. How can you be sure that he’ll cooperate?”

  “We have the power to grant him what he wants more than anything in the world--his wife’s name cleared, her reputation restored, and the safekeeping of his daughter.”

  Yuri had been leaning his head as close to Terry’s ear as possible, attempting to hear her end of the conversation, and bristled whenever the talk turned to him or Anna. Terry ignored him.

  “He also wants something for himself, but figures on making a deal with the Department of Justice for that one. Between you and me, I think he’s only a thief, albeit a very stupid one, with no inkling that they’d use what he gave them for anything but the making of commercial vaccines. You know, run-of-the-mill industrial espionage--

  “I’m afraid we have a problem,” she interrupted.

  “Why? Those guys have made deals with far worse types, and he could be a bonanza of information--”

  “It’s not that. Can he hear me?”

  Terry pressed the phone tightly against his ear, sealing off any leaks of her voice. “No.”

  She exhaled long and hard, then added, “Anna Katasova is dead.”

  * * * *

  Terry struggled to remain stone-faced as she summarized the FBI reports out of Wells Beach. Yuri, no longer able to eavesdrop on the other side of the conversation, scrutinized his every expression and word.

  “It happened yesterday. The Chinese came for her, probably the same ones who killed Boris Yurskovitch.”

  The facts as he heard them inflicted the mental equivalent of whiplash. Anna shoot eight trained assassins dead? Incredible. Defending Kyra to the death--that he believed. He also experienced an appalling emptiness, an echo of grief for a time from long ago. Yet his sorrow steeped itself in a sense of waste, not longing. It was the sad lament he’d accord to anyone who had come so far with so much promise and yet met so bleak an end. Her death also stripped him of an illusion--the possibility that a nostalgic reconciliation might someday occur, one in which friendship would rise from a long dead passion and forgive old betrayals. Instead, his failure with her had been rendered final, leaving him with a surprisingly powerful feeling of loss. And guilt paid him a visit. If he hadn’t been such a hard-ass when she’d e-mailed him last week, perhaps coaxed her to surrender, not demanded it, maybe she’d still be alive. He started to pace in the snow, too rocked by the back and forth of his emotions to remain still under Yuri’s watchful stare. The rest, the evidence on the scene that the FBI pieced together, he’d have to analyze later. All he could think of now was that Yuri must not find out. He’d go berserk. Lash out at whomever and whatever he could blame. The country that had driven Anna into hiding, Kyra in toe, putting them at the mercy of assassins, might be first on his list. He now had no more reason to make a deal with the US government and deliver up the serum than shake hands with her killers. If anything, he’d let SHAKES wreak his revenge. “How is the story being spun?” Terry asked, choosing his words carefully.

  “As a triad drug deal gone bad. Strictly life-goes-on, back-page stuff.”

  “Keep it that way.”

  It was only after hanging up that he realized how bossy he’d been.

  “So any word of Anna?” Yuri asked, his eyes darkening to a glittering mix of hope and suspicion.

  “They still haven’t found her.”

  “But the deal’s set? Complete immunity for us both, and they clear her name.”

  “Absolutely, on one condition.”

  Yuri scowled. “What condition.”

  “I go with you into China.”

  Chapter 29

  That same morning the world started to run out of mannitol. Doctors everywhere anguished over dark choices. Whether in emergency rooms, tents, stadiums, make-shift clinics or mud-floored huts, relief versus agony came to depend on rotating schedules of mannitol, analgesics, and anesthetics, the intervals between decreased doses growing longer as supplies dwindled. Where no drugs remained, the pressure from expanding claspers, tentacles, and globules increased. The living felt as if their skulls were being pried open from within, the way ice can split rock, but as parietal, frontal, and occipital bones strained to rip apart along their suture lines, the joins held, perpetuating their agony.

  Care givers applied the term “fortunate” to those who died. Of course, the “how” mattered. If clumps of brain stem herniated through the large aperture at the base of the skull--the foramen magnum--and burst into the spine--a process known as “coning”--the respiratory centers were destroyed, causing instant death. However, if the visual cortex located at the back of the cerebral lobes yielded to the crush, people were cast into blindness yet remained alive, screaming with pain and holding their heads for hours before they slipped into a coma. It was even worse when the tracts of nerves that normally carry sensations of pain and temperature took the brunt of the squeeze. This set off phantom signals and simulated the agony of searing burns all over the body, an ordeal no less real to the victims than if their flesh were actually in flames. In every case, those who remained conscious sobbed for death.

  “It happened so suddenly, Terry,” Shelly said, her anguish audible even over his satellite phone. “She seemed to be doing so much better. Thursday evening the white count had stabilized, even recovered a bit. But overnight she began to complain of headaches, and in a matter of hours the pain became unbearable. The neurologists began administering boluses of mannitol and put her out with sedation, so it’s a waiting game.”

  Carla’s radiation sickness had abated, the immune response rebounded, and the swelling surged--he’d been dreading the possibility. But even he, despite his unique ability to anticipate all that could go wrong, had let himself hope that she’d get a break.

  From throat to crotch, his insides wrenched into a knot and wrung him out like a rag. The brutal reality of what awaited her now--pain, coma, and death--brought him to his knees.

  “They’ve also immunosuppressed her with prednisone. If you want, I can get one of her doctors to talk with y
ou, in case you have any other ideas.”

  “No, there’s nothing more to do,” Terry said, fighting to control his breathing and keep a steady voice. “I appreciate you telling me.” He hung up abruptly, unable to even ask Shelly how she or the rest of the staff were doing. There’d be others in similar difficulty, but he could only bear to think of Carla, having no more room for anyone else’s pain.

  A day later, Saturday, January 31, 2009, near midnight

  Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean

  They flew in an endless night, crossing the dateline and jumping ahead a day, yet remained in the earth’s shadow between the previous sunset and a slowly approaching dawn.

  But their first leg on the Siberian Express wasn’t quite the relay of clandestine airstrips, island hopping through the Aleutians, stealth boats, hideouts, and transport in the back of a turnip truck that Terry had expected.

  “More champagne, Ryan?”

  A young woman wearing an Aeroflot co-pilot’s uniform, cargo division, leaned over to refill Yuri’s glass. Her blouse hung revealingly open, its previously buttoned front having somehow come undone since her initial visit to the V.I.P. container. She spoke English, for Terry’s benefit.

  “Thank-you, Katya,” Yuri said.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. “It’s years since I saw you on this flight.”

  “Working too hard in the lab, my dear.”

  “I’ll bet.” Smiling mischievously, she walked over to the tiny kitchenette that was part of the unit, pulled some pre-prepared meals out of a GE mini-fridge, and popped them into a Panasonic microwave.

  He, and Yuri, aka Dr. Ryan Smith, were sitting in comfortable lounge chairs that made up into beds. A flat-screen Sony theater system with DVD player and digital sound occupied one wall. “Top-of-the-line stuff,” Yuri had boasted. “Nothing Russian.”

  Against another wall stood a work desk with Internet connections. Beside it was a cubical bathroom with shower. The place might have been a double stateroom on a luxury liner, but for the fact that there were no portholes or windows and it had been custom made to fit inside a standard Aerflot super-container, the kind used to ship horses by the dozen. Nevertheless, the compartment had its own climate control, could be off-loaded onto a truck, and ran on its battery system for twenty-four hours. During long range flights, the end wall folded down, allowing access to the rest of the plane, and a thick curtain could be pulled across the opening to provide privacy. He and Yuri had been sealed inside it near Vancouver airport, transported on a flat bed to the cargo terminal, then loaded into the hold by forklift, all with nary a challenge from any security guards.