The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  “You idiot!” Terry continued. “They ramped up their own bioweapons program after she reported to the home team that we'd tried to recruit her for ours. It was you who set off the whole chain of events.”

  Robert Daikens went white. He stopped trying to tongue the blood off his lips and allowed it to flow freely down his chin. “You can’t prove that.”

  Terry looked toward Phillippa Holt. “Madame President, have your experts briefed you on the gist of Wey Chen’s computer discs yet, especially the one containing a history of China’s bioweapons program?”

  She nodded.

  “Did the timeline of major events pretty well correspond to my version?”

  She shifted her gaze down to Daikens, eyes narrowed. “Yes. The report didn’t identify the general by name, but up until 2001, their bioweapons program had been a limited affair, mainly targeting livestock on Taiwan to destabilize the island’s economy, wiping out their pork industry with hoof and mouth disease, that kind of thing. It’s why they initially wanted the holograph technology--to surreptitiously make vaccines that would protect their own livestock against the strains they were releasing to the south. According to Wey Chen’s records, up until 2002, only a few zealots were working to weaponize SARS and bird flu. But once she reported what had been offered her, and the military came to believe that we were weaponizing chimeric organisms, the zealots gained a lot of converts, not to mention financial support. They expanded their own program full tilt, intending not just to match us, but get a step ahead. The result was SHAKES.”

  Daikens stiffened. “Now wait a goddamn minute, Ryder. Nobody’s going to pin all that on me.”

  Terry tightened his grip on Daikens’ collar. “We all just heard you admit to leaking the contents of classified discussions to a known agent of a foreign power. That, dear Robert, is against the law. A good prosecutor at your court-marshal will argue that your leak, in giving rise to their bioweapons race, a race that culminated in the attack by SHAKES, is the crime of the millennium. You’ll go down as the man who placed this nation, not to mention the rest of the globe, at its greatest peril in history. How’s that for a legacy, ’eh, Robert?”

  By now Daikens had the color of a corpse. “You wouldn’t dare go public, asshole.” His voice had risen another half octave, but his tone remained combative. “Just try and make me a scapegoat. If I’m forced to defend myself, I’d have to tell all, under oath in court. My testimony will leak and ruin what little credibility this country has left.”

  Terry smiled. “He’s right, Madame President. If it all got out, we’d definitely be on the receiving end of a butt kick from the rest of the planet. But China would be on the receiving end of World War Three, which their leaders will take all precautions necessary to avoid.”

  “What are you getting at?” the general asked, pupils flaring as his expression flicked from fight-mode to fright.

  Ryder grinned down him, showing one tooth at a time. “If their spies so much as sniff a whiff of your stinking threat to spill the beans, pal, it’s not American justice that you’ll have to worry about.”

  “Now just a goddamn minute--”

  “What say we just let the Chinese have him, Madame President? Throw him on their helicopter out there, a parting show of good faith against loose lips.”

  “Jesus Christ, Ryder, I’m an American. You can’t--”

  “Then tell me where Anna is!”

  Chapter 36

  Two days later, Saturday, February 7, 2009, 6:20 A.M.

  Frank Rajensky had just endured his eighty-seventh hour as a grounded cabby when he heard a shot come from the apartment upstairs.

  That would make it the fourth in his building.

  Minutes later a blood stain began to appear on the ceiling of his den. It spread to a diameter of several feet, then started to drip onto his rug. “Don’t go in there,” he told his wife, closing the door behind him and locking it. Ignoring the dull throb behind his eyes, he pushed his IV pole to their front entrance, closed the flow lock on his last bag of mannitol, and detached it from the intravenous line that the hospital had inserted in his forearm so he could treat himself at home.

  “Make each liter last twenty-four hours,” they’d told him, but the pain had been too excruciating without double that dose.

  He stepped out in the hallway, and stumbled up the stairs. A cluster of the immediate neighbors had gathered around the open door, a few of them having already forced their way inside. Frank pushed through, only to see a man come out of the room that would be directly over his den, his shoes tracking red as if he’d walked across a freshly painted floor. “It’s a forty-four. I only got thirty-eights. Can any of you people use it?” He brandished a black hand gun with a silver handle.

  “I’ll take it,” Frank said.

  “Not so fast, buster. The price is a dozen bags.”

  “What?”

  “I got here first. The gun’s mine. You want it, you buy it.”

  “If I had a dozen bags, I wouldn’t need the gun.”

  “That’s your problem. Any other takers?”

  No one said anything.

  The man with the gun turned back to Frank. “Well, since you’re the only buyer, I’ll cut you a better deal. Four bags.”

  Frank swallowed. “I’ve only half a bag left. How about you just loan it to me for that. Take the gun back after...”

  The others had begun to drift away.

  The man considered the offer. “How many bullets you got?”

  “Two.”

  “Do the job with one. That way I get a loaded piece that’s of use to somebody, and the half bag.”

  Frank broke into a sweat. He wanted the gun for when he chose the moment. This was too rushed. And if he were still alive after the first shot...

  “I’ll think about it,” he said, and made his way back down to his wife, holding onto the banister so as not to fall. She’d be ready to make love before they said goodbye. That had been their plan, for when the time came.

  But she met him in the landing, her eyes a radiant blue again, the lifeless stare that had haunted them these past few days vanished. “Frank, there’s news...”

  Ramsey Lewis had waited until his wife Mildred went into St. Paul to do the weekly shopping, then phoned the neighbor’s boy, asking him if he could come over and do a few chores for ten bucks an hour.

  One of those jobs involved climbing to the top shelf where Mildred had stored the shotgun high enough that Ramsey couldn’t get to it.

  “Sucker needs a cleaning,” he told the kid.

  In the seventeen days since his visit to the hospital in St. Paul, he’d collapsed in the barn a week ago Friday, had been unable to walk at all since last Monday, and his arms shook so hard whenever he tried to do the simplest of tasks, they’d became totally useless. He’d inquired about mannitol, but neither their local doctor nor that poor excuse of a hospital could promise him a supply anytime soon. When the headaches started, he knew what he faced.

  Once the boy left, Ramsey manage to load both barrels, cock them, and bring the muzzles up into his mouth. But at that point his tremors got so bad, the double cylinders kept pressing on the base of his tongue, making him gag. “Fuck this,” he said, not wanting anyone to think he’d been such a wimp as to throw up on himself. Besides, he had a better idea, something he could leave as a legacy. He grabbed a pencil from his bedside, and scribbled Mildred a note, steadying his writing hand by holding it at the wrist.

  Kneeling, he wedged the gunstock against the head board of his bed, leaned against the business end of the barrels with his left chest, just over the heart, and reached toward the triggers.

  But his arms not only trembled uncontrollably, they were too short.

  He ripped the bed sheet into strips, tied two of them together, fed the single long strand through the finger guard, looped the two trailing ends back around the bedposts, and brought them forward again, holding one in each hand like a set of reins. A few seconds more, and he�
��d repositioned the gun against the head board, himself against the barrels, and was ready to discharge his weapon with a single tug.

  That’s when Mildred walked in on him.

  She reached him in a single leap, ripped the gun from his hands, and grabbed the note. “Study my brain?” she read, shaking with fury. Crumpling up the paper, she beaned him with it. “Pull a stunt like this again, asshole, and I’ll shoot you myself, except it’ll be between the legs, where you’ll hurt, not die. Now I suggest you turn on the goddamn radio and listen to what’s happened...”

  At Memorial General in San Diego, Lorraina Cortez hovered over Allehandro as he shrieked in agony. For the twentieth time in the last few hours she held a pillow in her hands and leaned over him, thinking the unthinkable. It took her a few minutes to realize that the TV at her back, always tuned to the cartoon station in a futile hope that it would anesthetize his mind and dull the pain, had stopped broadcasting The Simpsons. Instead, a newscaster, reporting live from Kennebunkport, Maine, announced that the president of the United States would be making a major announcement.

  “My fellow Americans...” Phillippa Holt began a few seconds later, and an euphoric world learned that Chinese scientists had made a miracle breakthrough in the battle against SHAKES.

  * * * *

  Help On The Way! Relief! They save the day again! screamed news headlines, special editions hitting the streets a few hours later. Officials from around the globe fell over each other lauding China’s marvelous expertise in vaccine and pharmaceutical technology. Both CDC and WHO scrambled to explain what the vaccines would offer and how the oral medication would work. Some experts cautioned that ramping up production for such new products would take time. Others suggested that these drugs should be tested first. Still more pointed out that those already suffering from symptoms would still require their immune response to be turned off before they could experience a complete halt in the progression of the disease, and all warned that existing brain damage would remain permanent to some degree. But killjoys were not welcome on this day of celebration, and no one paid them the slightest heed. Instead, people stampeded by the hundreds of thousands to their nearest medical facilities, demanding to be guinea-pigs. When laboratories in China followed up the initial announcements with the equally stunning claim that they could be ready to start shipping the products in bulk by midweek, their Web pages crashed under the onslaught of all the orders that flooded in from around the globe. At a dollar a shot, they would make out like bandits. But the media only commented that if these were Western companies, they’d be charging ten times the price. In all the exuberance, no one questioned how drug manufacturers in China could be so ready so fast.

  At CENCOM, those who manned the US nuclear arsenal wondered why they were quietly being ordered to punch in coordinates that re-aimed the bulk of their missiles at preselected targets in China.

  “Did someone declare war?” the duty officer asked, verifying the latest numbers to be entered.

  “Must be an exercise,” one of his juniors suggested.

  “Right,” another added. “Why would we bomb the guys who saved the world?”

  In Kennebunkport, Terry Ryder turned up the hot water in his shower. We’re back to MAD, he thought. Mutually Assured Destruction, like during the cold war with Russia. Except now the standoff would be with China. Nukes versus bugs, he’d called it.

  The premier had left Kennebunkport having been forcefully reminded that the United States possessed a lot more of the former, and would be watching for any suspicious activity regarding the latter.

  The jets of steaming water revived Terry, loosening the stiffness in his shoulders. Providing back-up to the president during her twenty-four-hour confrontation with the premier had taken more out of him than his swim in the Bone Crusher. But those negotiations, and the threat of disclosing all evidence in Wey Chen’s documents, led to a mutual acceptance of the smoke screen now playing itself out around the globe, both sides hoping to prevent World War III.

  Kennebunkport

  Anna lay motionless on the bed, her skin a translucent white. Only the dark glitter of her eyes told Terry that she was alive.

  A breathing tube protruded from the front of her trachea, and a steady whisper of oxygen hushed the occasional beep from monitors that measured life in digital readouts and fluorescent squiggles. The room had the antiseptic aroma and of an ICU, but not enough to hide the hint of flesh gone bad. He eyed the stained dressings over her long dancer’s neck and winced.

  Reaching through the portable IV poles and webs of tubing suspended from bags of intravenous solutions, he took her hand. “Hello, Anna.”

  She gave him a wan smile and weakly squeezed his fingers.

  The physician who’d been caring for her, a tall blond man whose well-tanned face suggested a lot of time spent in tropical climes, discretely withdrew to a corner of the room. No sooner had Terry come through the door, they recognized each other from missions of long ago, but, exchanging a glance as secretive as a Mason’s handshake, neither man acknowledged their mutual affiliation with a network that, officially, didn’t exist.

  “How is she doing?” Terry had asked.

  “As well as can be expected. She has a fever, the wound’s infected, and her neck needs reconstructive surgery. I’ll feel a lot better once we can transfer her to the Mass General.”

  Terry knew that the Chinese would never rest easy as long as she were alive. Assuring her and Kyra’s safety had been one of the sticking points in brokering the deal. But the sooner she got to a proper intensive care unit, the better. She’d already been moved twice by van, once by the general, from the boat barn to a closed military base north of town where he’d stashed her for a week, and yesterday night, when the President had her brought here to the house after the premier had left. A trip via air ambulance ought to be a piece of cake.

  His gaze returned to Anna’s. The urgency in her eyes compelled him to ask the doctor, “May I be alone with her?”

  “Of course.” The man left, pulling the door shut behind him.

  Terry braced himself. Hours earlier, he’d insisted to Phillippa Holt that he be the one to break the news about Yuri. “I saw him killed. He lost his life saving me and Jade. Whatever else he was, the guy had guts, and might not even have been in China if Daikens hadn’t sicced the feds on his wife. So I tell her, now, before she hears it from some stranger. I owe them both that.” Yet, face to face with Anna, he paused.

  His former lover stared up at him, her face gaunt compared to how he remembered it. Fear, pain, the ravages of shock--it had pulled the cheek and jaw muscles taut, stretching her skin over her skull like it was a size too small. But the flash in her pupils shone as defiantly as ever.

  She gestured to the morning paper with the blazing headlines on her nightstand, retrieved a pad of paper from the folds of her covers, and wrote, How’d you get the Chinese to back down?

  “Actually, part of it was you and Kyra.”

  Her look of amazement made it clear, even in her weakened state, that she thought he was crazy.

  “I showed the premier this.” He pulled from his pocket a folded printout of a photo. Smiling at them, their sleeves rolled up, were Anna, Kyra, and Wang Jiawei himself. Healthy Ties To A New Year, read the caption. The three of them had just received their anti-bird-flu injection. The article was dated two years ago, January 1, 2007. “I clicked that up from the computerized archives of the New York Times, and placed it on the table between us. He went pale.”

  Her puzzled look remained.

  “Think, Anna. I call it my Coventry theory. Most of the citizens in Beijing, and other major cities vulnerable to Western scrutiny, would have received the same vaccine as the rest of the world during that big immunization program. But the rest of China, the one and a half billion of them who live away from big urban centers where westerners weren’t likely to go, especially during a time of enforced quarantines, would be given a bivalent vaccine, against both the b
ird flu, and the subsequent rogue proteins. But for such an occasion as that photo-op, those in on the conspiracy would have made sure the premier got the good stuff.” He tapped the photo. “Not to make the substitution too conspicuous, I assumed the whole batch used at that occasion would have been good stuff.”

  The frown vanished. Her face lit up.

  “Now you’re catching on, no? Anyone who received that particular vaccine would have high levels of antibodies to the rogue proteins, mirror images to those telltale claspers, tentacles, and globs. These would be pretty big fingerprints, if they turned up in the premier, plus one and a half billion citizens of China, yet no one else on the rest of the planet had them, except you and Kyra.” Pointing to the photo, he added, “That’s why they were so gung ho to have both of you killed. In your blood there was a smoking gun, and it could be traced to Beijing.”

  Anna nodded, indicating she’d understood. And what did the good premier say to your pointing all that out? she wrote, wearing a grin of pure Schadenfreude.

  “Back-pedaled. Insisted that if there was anything to Wey Chen’s story, then it must involve only a rogue faction of the military, and he knew nothing about it. Swore up and down to investigate the whole situation as soon as he got home, and dropped his demands that the president hand me and Jade over to him. Who knows. Maybe the guy’s partially telling the truth, that the attack was initially developed and launched by a rogue group without the top brass having a clue what was going on. Wey Chen’s records indicate that her group was acting under Beijing’s radar. But he sure as hell knows about it now. The important thing is...” Terry held up the front page headlines. “...we got his cooperation.”

  She scribbled another note.

  Yuri? Her expression was so hopeful, it broke his heart.

  Grimacing, he shook his head. “I'm sorry, Anna. He didn’t make it.”

  She looked at him, her features frozen, uncomprehending, the way people always react when they initially hear those terrible words. It almost seemed a type of self-protection, a refusal to understand that let her have a few last seconds in a universe where Yuri still lived, until the meaning punched through, and an emptier world where he no longer existed crashed down on her.