Crime Zero (aka the Crime Code) (1999)

by Cordy, Michael

  Turning, she saw Decker sitting against a pillar next to the Calvin Klein billboard just as Jackson had promised. Dressed in a black suit, he was gagged, and his hands were tied behind his back. When she looked into his green eyes, he seemed surprised more than scared. He kept glancing beyond her as if expecting there to be someone else.

  She bent down to his level and reached forward to pull off the tape that covered his mouth. It wasn't strong tape and came away easily. His lips were dry beneath it.

  "Where's Naylor?" Decker asked. There was no time for subtlety. The whole plan was to have her here too. If they took Prince, but Naylor was free and she had Phase 3...

  Alice smiled. "She's not important. She's safe."

  Decker tried to remain calm. After forcing Jackson to call Naylor, Decker had left him to McCloud's men and rushed here. McCloud had already sealed the airport, and although Decker couldn't see any of the ninjas, he knew they were close, waiting to pounce.

  "What have you done with Phase Three?" he asked.

  When Alice told him, his heart sank.

  Then she put her face close to his and explained everything else. As he listened, he leaned forward, unsure he was hearing correctly. Then Alice reached for the teardrop amulet around her neck and made as if to bite it.

  At that moment Decker saw two of McCloud's ninjas appear over Alice's shoulder, their guns trained on her, antivirus bleach sprays at the ready.

  Suddenly everything slowed down.

  Alice followed his eye. Snapped a look over her shoulder. Stood up, pulled the amulet from its chain, and broke it into two parts with her teeth. One part bore a tiny needle.

  The ninjas ran at her.

  "No," he screamed at them. Could see panic in Alice's eyes.

  She moved back, against the waist-high parapet. She slipped backward. Made no attempt to steady herself. Kept both hands locked on the amulet. Suddenly she was falling backward over the parapet.

  Decker reached for her, clutching at the ruptured amulet, its contents dripping onto the crowd below.

  Senses heightened, he imagined seeing fine droplets float through the air. Beautiful in the refracted light, falling toward people oblivious of them on the concourse below.

  "No," he shouted again, throwing himself at Alice Prince. She spread her arms wide. Received him in her embrace as she fell backward over the mezzanine.

  "Spook," McCloud shouted behind him. But he too was falling now. Alice beneath him, jabbing the ampule needle into his arm. Below him everyone was screaming.

  Alice smiled, clasping his face to hers, wrapping her body around his. "For Libby," she whispered.

  Then there was nothing.

  Alice Prince's body had jumped with shock when she saw the men in biosuits and guns. But as soon as she realized it was a trap and there was no way out, her terror left her.

  She felt no fear of death. She would soon be reunited with Libby. And she had done all she could. It only seemed right that Decker, the son of her daughter's killer, should be the one.

  Even as she positioned herself beneath Decker's body and crashed into the cart of luggage beneath her, snapping her neck, dying instantly, Alice was smiling.

  Madeline Naylor was too late. She couldn't believe it. She stood stunned in the teeming crowd, watching the two bodies fall through the air toward her. The sound of impact was that of two heavy mattresses falling on dry kindling wood, a sickening cracking thud.

  After breaking her way through the flimsy bathroom door, she had rushed here, trying to stop Alice and save her from herself. But she had failed. Her friend was dead. Alice was gone.

  Dazed, she pushed through the babbling crowd to see the two bodies lying on a pile of broken luggage. Decker was sprawled over Alice in a parody of two spent lovers. Squinting, she stared at Alice's neck. She turned away.

  On autopilot she registered the ninjas in Racal suits swarming around the bodies with bleach sprays and covering the main exits. Their unworldly appearance added to her sense of unreality. But even now she still sensed the danger. Her disguise wasn't foolproof, and they would be looking for her. She had to get out fast. Her mind automatically clicked through all the processes required to close down an airport. She remembered the exercise she'd run at JFK.

  She pulled the green tote bag over her shoulder, pushed her hand inside, and reached for the Glock. Then, keeping her hand on its grip, she walked slowly through the large milling crowds on the main concourse, heading for the service door by the Barnes & Noble bookstore. Most of the ninjas were preoccupied with keeping the crowds from leaving the main exits. No one seemed to be watching as she stole away down into the labyrinth of service tunnels below.

  Alice had mentioned once how the AirShield maintenance men who serviced the bacteriophage air purifier cartridges had a locker and shower room down below the concourse. At the bottom of the stairs Naylor found herself in a large corridor with pipes running along the walls and strip lights on the ceiling. Just as she was about to turn right, she saw a sign pointing left toward service lockers. Six company logos were on the sign; the top one was AirShield's.

  The door was locked, but it was so flimsy she easily kicked her way in. In the small dark room she put on an Air-Shield overall and baseball cap and consulted an airport plan stuck on the wall behind a grimy plastic shield. Bending back the shield, she pulled the map out. There was one passageway that would take her past the baggage handling area and out under the runways toward the perimeter fence at maintenance exit 3C. From there she stood the best chance of escape.

  Striding down long corridors beneath flickering spines of fluorescent strip lights, she ignored the few people she passed, and calculated how much time she had before the FBI managed to seal the whole airport. From Jackson's phone call, probably part of a trap, McCloud had had ample time to cover most of the main points of entrance and exit. Exercises she had run in the past had always taken no more than fifteen minutes to close down a large airport. Containing suspected airborne pathogens was more difficult, though. Every man in the front line of containment had to wear full biohazard protection. And men had to be concentrated where the biggest population of passengers was. The outer perimeters were left thin, at least for the first hour or so.

  Following the map, she saw a large junction ahead, from which all the main passageways under the runway branched out. If she were organizing the containment, she would have placed a man there to cut off those routes. Knowing Mc-Cloud and the standard procedures, she knew that was precisely what he and his agents had done. Naylor could try to go around, or she could use the junction to her advantage.

  Slowing to a walk, she wiped the sweat from her brow. The large exposed pipes that ran down the right of the corridor were hot. And McCloud would have closed down the air-conditioning to prevent the distribution of contaminated air. Naylor stopped ten yards from the underground junction and rested her green tote bag on the floor. She stood listening for a moment before she heard the two voices: a man and woman. She listened for another minute to make sure they were alone. Then she began to walk toward the junction. She made no attempt to be particularly quiet. She just walked slowly and calmly, a maintenance employee in overalls going about her daily work.

  She saw the eerie figure in the black space suit before he saw her, but she made no attempt to avoid him.

  "Halt, FBI," said the man when he spotted her. His voice sounded strange through the suit's speaker as if he were on a long-distance phone line. "Sorry, ma'am, but you can't come this way. You've got to go back to the main building."

  "What's going on?" she asked, roughening her voice, hoping the man wouldn't recognize her. "I got to go check a thousand things." She reached into her tote. "Look, I got a pass and everything."

  The man leveled his gun at her, and the woman agent came and stood beside him. "This isn't about passes," she said. "You can't go any farther. Just go back now. We don't want any trouble."

  "What's wrong?" Naylor asked, feigning fear. "Why you dressed like
that?"

  The man lowered his gun and smiled at her through his glass visor. It was a kind, reassuring smile. "Don't worry. Go back to the main building, and everything will be explained to you."

  She shrugged then. "OK."

  "Take care, now," said the man, already turning away with his partner.

  Naylor's gun was out of her tote in less than a second, and both FBI agents--her agents--were dead in under four.

  Within two minutes she was wearing the female agent's black biological space suit and using her headset to track the other agents' movements. In just over sixteen minutes she was outside the cordon sanitaire and in a stolen car making her way to the city.

  Crime Zero Phase 3 was out. But she had heard something on the headset. Something about Alice Prince and Decker that meant she couldn't rest yet. As she drove, she tried not to think about Alice. There would be time enough to mourn her. But first she had to protect her legacy.

  *

  PART 3

  Crime Zero

  Chapter 39.

  Flight BA186, Calcutta, India. Monday, November 10, 8:00 A.M.

  Flight BA186 from London to Calcutta was the first flight carrying passengers infected by a bacteriophage air purifier tunnel contaminated with Crime Zero Phase 3. For everyone on board the infection would begin unobtrusively enough, a slight cold and a cough.

  Every virus has a chosen host cell, whether it is the leaf of a tobacco plant in mosaic disease or the CD4 subset of T lymphocytes in a human sufferer of AIDS. The genetically engineered Crime Zero Phase 3 virus was no different. It was an airborne virus transmitted by respiratory infection, and the first cells it targeted were the lungs. Once it had been ingested there, it sought out the relevant target cells in the brain's hypothalamus, the respiratory tracts, and, in the case of males, the testes. It then began to subvert those cells' DNA with its own. Using the genetic clues it found there, the virus then unbundled its own genetic contents for replication within the human host in three different ways.

  In the 118 female passengers on board BA186 the virus would generate no symptoms, except the mild cough that would last for a few days and help transmit the infection.

  In the thirty-six prepubescent boy passengers the cough would be the only uncomfortable symptom. Within days the viral vector would unload a battery of control sequences into target cells in the brain's hypothalamus. These control sequences would fine-tune the seventeen interdependent genes mainly responsible for aggression and inhibition within the boys. Their genomes would alter, levels of the inhibiting neurotransmitter serotonin increasing, if deficient, or maintaining, if naturally adequate, the level of the more stimulating transmitters, such as dopamine and noradrenaline modifying, if too high. Potential testosterone levels would also be managed to within predetermined tolerances. Unknowingly the boys would be subtly changed. The default of violent aggression shifted to pacific cooperation. Each would find it easier to "behave well." They would exhibit no other symptoms.

  In the 210 males over puberty the cough would mutate into other symptoms, the onset of which would depend upon age. The initial genetic programming would be the same as the boys.' And each male would stabilize in this less aggressive state, in the similar way a person with HIV might stabilize before contracting full-blown AIDS.

  Meltdown would be determined by the age-indicative telomeres on the tips of their chromosomes. The youngest would enter meltdown and die within seven or eight days, the oldest in three years.

  In the onset of meltdown the virus's dominant genetic code would boost the inhibiting levels of serotonin still higher while instructing full expression of the fuel neurotransmitters and stimulating androgens to kick in, flooding the men's systems.

  Immediate physical symptoms of meltdown would include those associated with extreme clinical anxiety, hair loss, acne, and shrinking of the testes. Psychological symptoms would include chronic anxiety, hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and obsessive ruminations. Death by brain hemorrhage would arrive mercifully within a matter of days. A proportion would take their own lives.

  All the men on Flight BA186 would die in the next three years, but not before each husband, father, brother, son, lover, and grandfather had passed Crime Zero to whoever came within breathing distance of them.

  Within a matter of days the single flight from London to Calcutta would carry Crime Zero to every continent in the world. The number of humans infected would already be in the hundreds of millions. Within a week only the most remote areas of the globe would be uninfected. Then the youngest of the men on the flight would start to die.

  ViroVector Solutions, Palo Alto. The Same Day, 3:00 A.M.

  The other scientists were already calling it a loop virus. But to Kathy Kerr it looked more like a hangman's noose, an indiscriminate viral executioner that would lynch all men unless it was stopped. The blowup photograph from an electron microscope was pinned to the door of the Level 1 laboratory conference room in the outer ring of ViroVector's biolab complex. It featured Luke Decker's blood at a magnification of one hundred thousand. The picture was dominated by what looked like a loop with a curled devil's tail. It was the Crime Zero virus, and Luke Decker's blood was teeming with it.

  Kathy was still troubled by the clear genetic differences between the virus Alice had infected Luke with and Crime Zero Phase 3. But when she'd suggested studying them more closely, Bibb and the others had argued that although Luke remained in a coma, there were more pressing matters to contend with. Prince had probably developed various versions of Crime Zero, and the one she carried in her pendant was simply an earlier version, sharing greater similarities to the Phase 1 vector than Phase 3. Despite her nagging doubts, Kathy knew she needed to focus on Phase 3.

  "A week's impossible. No way!" said Jim Balke, Vi-roVector's short and scruffy operations director, who ran the large-scale production plant on-site. He nervously rubbed his already red eyes and took another shot of coffee. "We're going to have to aim at a more realistic target. We have to accept that people are going to die. Lots of them. We can't do anything about that."

  "But that's the whole point of why we're here." Sharon Bibb groaned. "To see how we can limit the numbers." Her dark hair was pulled off her narrow face, and the stress showed in her eyes. In front of her an open laptop and piles of paper were evidence of the last few hours of work. On her left the brilliant Schlossberg twins, Mel and Al, brought in from her team at the CDC in Atlanta, scribbled away on charts, showing each other what they were working on but saying nothing as they communicated. It was past three in the morning, and all around the room the walls were plastered with sheets of flip-chart paper. Every sheet was covered with brainstormed ideas scrawled by the team.

  "But a week's just not going to happen," Balke said again. "You'd be lucky to do it in a year. Even if we had the vaccine now, it would take the whole pharmaceutical industry six months just to produce and distribute enough to treat the

  U.S. We're not going to have time to test it."

  "For God's sake, Jim," growled Major General Tom Allardyce, squaring his jaw and rising from his seat to pace around the room. Two other USAMRIID scientists sat at the far end of the table, peering over a laptop, frantically checking antisense oligonucleotide sequences against Crime Zero's genome, searching for clues that would lead to a vaccine. "Of course a week's too damn short. But we've got no choice! If you want to start accepting deaths now, fine. But quit moaning. When we come up with a cure, other countries will help produce it. Ever since Crime Zero's gone live, the President's informed all heads of state. Each has agreed with the U.S. not to say anything to their people yet but to start making contingency plans. The Russians have already offered their production facilities and weaponization expertise. Jim, your role is crucial in determining how we can scale up production from shake flasks."

  Kathy Kerr rubbed her temples and looked at the flip chart by the door. Two axes were scribbled on it in blue marker pen. A steep exponential curve in red ink ran from the origin
of the graph. The horizontal axis represented time--yesterday's date, November 9, was written in as time zero--and the vertical axis represented the population of men banded by age. Three black lines connected the red line with the horizontal time line; the first at seven days, the second at one year, and the third at three years. By the first line was the scribbled legend "Men start dying--30 million per week"; by the second, "1.2 billion plus men dead." There were only three words by the third line: "All men gone."

  She took a deep breath and tried to take some comfort from the caliber of the team assembled around her. As well as Sharon Bibb and Allardyce, each had two of his or her brightest and best there. The last person in the room was the pessimistic Jim Balke. In a perverse way Kathy was glad he was being so downbeat; it seemed to fire up the others.

  All the team were dressed in surgical greens, and not one of them had slept since McCloud's agents had confirmed that an air purifier tunnel at Los Angeles's airport had been contaminated with Crime Zero and that at least two planeloads of infected passengers had spread the virus. Other major international airports were being checked, and Crime Zero had been detected at London's Heathrow, but that was academic. One contamination was enough. Crime Zero was out. The world was hot.