by Hank Parker
“Entirely predictable,” said Curt.
“Agreed,” said Cothran. “I’m just not sure what else could have been done to contain this earlier. Especially since it took so long to learn about the second outbreak in Lancaster County.”
“There’ll be plenty of lessons learned from this,” said Curt. “Beginning with prepositioned emergency supplies in every metropolitan-area county in the country. A better communications plan from the outset. And a crash program for developing and stockpiling vaccines for every disease that’s a significant risk.”
“In fairness, we had no reason to anticipate a Kandahar outbreak in the States,” said Cothran. “It wasn’t common even in Afghanistan.”
“But it’s an internationally reportable disease requiring BSL-4 handling, a designated select agent, and a potential terrorism threat. Plus, our soldiers were exposed to it in Afghanistan. For me, that’s enough to justify an aggressive U.S. prevention and response effort.”
“I can’t argue with that,” said Cothran.
“You said they’re making progress on a Kandahar vaccine,” said Curt. “Are the virus stocks well secured?”
“Fort Detrick and CDC are doing most of the work,” said Cothran. “DHS has arranged for twenty-four/seven security at all the locations where the virus is stored—CDC, Fort Detrick, and the Barn. They need to do a thorough inventory at the Barn. The records were pretty sloppy, so no way to know for sure if any had been taken before. And of course someone could have grown more to replace what they removed.”
“But we’ve got to assume that the guy we saw took some,” said Mariah.
“Afraid so,” said Cothran. “In fact, we’re worried that some of it might have been brought into the Philippines.” He filled Mariah in on the video images at the Philadelphia airport, Taipei, and Manila. “And there’s no record of this guy in any of our databases,” he said.
“Why would he bring the virus to the Philippines?” asked Mariah.
“Maybe he’s planning to sell it to one of the rebel groups down in Sulu or Mindanao,” said Cothran. “Like Abu Sayyaf. They have connections to al-Qaeda and, we think, even ISIS. Bottom line is we need to find this guy. We’re doing our best to track him down. And if he’s got the virus with him, that’s where you guys come in. You’ll know how to handle it. By the way, you’ll have a cover—I think you’ll like it, Mariah. You’re a scuba diver, right?”
Had Curt told him that? “Not yet. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”
“Well, you should know how to play the role. Your flight leaves tomorrow morning. Direct from Honolulu. Someone will meet you in Manila.” Cothran reached behind him, pulled an envelope off his desk, and handed it to Mariah. “Your tickets. And new passports. No visa needed. Your stay shouldn’t exceed thirty days.”
“I thought your work was in security,” she said with a wink. “It seems like a bit more than that.”
“Oh, no, not at all,” Cothran said, leaning back and waving her off in a way that seemed forced. “I make a half-decent bureaucrat, that’s all. However,” he said, sliding a thin sheaf of papers across the desk toward her, “I’m authorized to inform you that you’ve been granted an upgraded clearance. Read through this, ask any questions you’d like, and sign in the designated place.”
Mariah hid her surprise and skimmed several paragraphs that were mostly focused on the dire consequences of revealing classified information. She wondered again what she was getting into. She had so many questions to ask Curt—but she suspected he probably wouldn’t answer them. Well, what the hell, she thought. She scrawled her signature, handed the papers back to Cothran, and opened the envelope he’d given her a minute before. Two plane tickets and passports, both in the name of Anderson. She looked up at Cothran, questioning.
Cothran smiled. “You’re newlyweds.”
* * *
Doctor Vector drew a cup of water from a lab sink and swallowed two Tylenol. He’d come down with a bad cough and a headache, was feeling unaccountably tired, and he had this persistent itching, especially under his armpit. He’d been putting in long hours for months now and it was beginning to wear on him. Worse, he’d somehow allowed ticks to escape from the garage lab, despite all of his painstaking precautions. What had he done wrong?
He forced the second-guessing out of his mind. The past could not be undone. He had to focus on the future. His work would soon be finished and then there would be plenty of time for rest. It was coming down to the wire. Now it was time for another feeding, to fatten up his charges, to prepare them to go into battle as healthy and well fed as possible. A wry, apt expression popped into his head: An army marches on its stomach.
And it was a war, he reminded himself.
He looked around his new lab, deep inside an abandoned warehouse in South Philly. Roomy enough, but kind of cobbled together compared with his old lab by the farmhouse. Still, he couldn’t complain. With the help of those idiot goons, he’d quickly cleared out the old lab and resurrected a new one here. Too quickly, in his opinion. But he’d had to move fast or see the destruction of his research.
He placed the empty water glass in the sink, but as soon as the glass thunked against the sink’s steel basin, Doctor Vector felt the itch under his arm yet again and froze. His heart began bucking wildly in his chest. A thin film of sweat broke across his brow. The lab around him dropped away as his mind connected the dots of the past few days. Headache. Coughing. And this itch—this infernal itch. He tore off his lab coat, pulled his T-shirt over his head, and twisted the skin of his armpit closer to his face.
Idiot! he screamed silently at himself. Another mistake, made in haste. In his rush to clear out the garage lab, he’d let down his guard, had failed to rigorously follow the careful protocols he swore by. And now here was a tiny tick, embedded in his skin, swollen with his blood.
How had it happened? he asked himself, knowing already that it didn’t really matter. Had he neglected to count every tick during the transfer, including those that were in the process of feeding? Had he failed to securely cap a container? Had he somehow missed a newly hatched larva or just-molted nymph? But he knew it made no difference how old the tick was. At any age it would be a teeming reservoir of Kandahar virus, which was now undoubtedly in his system, coursing through his bloodstream, making its way into his liver, his kidneys, his heart, his brain. The worst symptoms would show up soon. The cough and headache he had now were nothing compared to losing his mind and bleeding out. Did this also mean sure failure of the mission? How much more time did he have? At least a couple of days, he was sure of that. Enough time to finish the job?
He forced himself to concentrate. He willed the cold, rational, calculating scientist’s part of his brain to take over. One thing at a time, he told himself. First he’d do what he could to treat himself: medication, then tick removal and disposal, antiseptic, full body check. After that, back to work. He opened a medicine cabinet and took out a bottle of ribavirin.
* * *
Tony Parnell leaned back from his computer and sighed. The best story of his career and he wished it wasn’t happening. A disease that killed most of its victims was now threatening the city of Philadelphia, his home turf, a place that already seemed half-dead with dusk-to-dawn curfews and National Guard troops roaming the streets. But he had a deadline and a word-count limit and he’d already compiled so much information that he didn’t know how he could meet either. And now there was the latest shocking news. With the assistance of the Inquirer’s managing editor, who had close ties to the FBI, Parnell had been carefully cultivating high-level sources in law enforcement, all “anonymous” of course. Yesterday one of these sources had told him about another apparent Kandahar outbreak, in Omaha, Nebraska.
Parnell opened the bottom drawer of his file cabinet, fished out a road atlas, and did some rough calculations. Omaha was more than a thousand miles from Philadelphia. So
a viral disease that supposedly wasn’t airborne had suddenly jumped halfway across the continent? Had someone from the Philadelphia area flown out there, unknowingly infected? Was this thing airborne after all and had it somehow been transported across half the continent by the winds? Or had it been deliberately introduced?
A deliberate release into the Midwest would be bad enough. But whoever did it probably wouldn’t stop there. And if Kandahar was airborne the consequences could be much worse, especially if it got into the wrong hands. His source had revealed that the intel types were now suspecting that the viral strain had been bioengineered for greater lethality. That suggested a terrorist connection.
And what might terrorists do with an airborne disease? Parnell envisioned scenarios where they’d use a crop-duster airplane or modified car exhaust system to distribute the hot agent, or get it into the air-handling systems of public buildings or mass transit facilities. They could even incorporate it into a small bomb and detonate it in a crowded area. And because the virus was so infectious, a modification that would allow it to be transmitted through the air from the sneezes or coughs of infected persons would mean that the disease would be passed along as rapidly as a flu virus. But this bug was much deadlier than even the most lethal strains of flu.
There was no way he could work all of this into the article, and most of it was purely speculative. But he owed it to the public to at least inform them about this apparent second outbreak in Omaha. He pulled a business card from his wallet and reached for his phone.
* * *
Doctor Vector knew that everything he’d done to deal with the tick bite, even administering ribavirin, would ultimately do no good. Advanced symptoms of Kandahar virus were already apparent. He’d effectively been dealt a death sentence. It was just a matter of time.
But time was what he desperately needed. Ten days to be exact. He hoped the ribavirin would delay the advance of the disease long enough to buy him the time. He told himself to be positive, to focus. He mentally reviewed a list of tasks and checked them off in his mind. The first job was to thoroughly clean out the lab, leaving no sign of the work that had taken place there. He’d start with the animals.
He unlocked a door on the far side of the lab and entered the animal room. He wheeled a large cart over to the cages of mice, loaded the cages onto the cart, and pushed the cart out the door, through the main lab, and into the hallway. He entered another room three doors down. An incinerator stood in the far corner.
He walked over, ignited the fire, pulled on a pair of thick gloves, and pulled the first mouse out of a cage, taking care to close the cage door afterward. Holding the mouse in one hand, he opened a small access door on the incinerator door with the other.
There was no time to first euthanize the mice. Not that it mattered to Vector. He held no particular affection for these animals. The ticks, of course, were a different story, even though one had been responsible for his impending death. But that was not the tick’s fault. He had only himself to blame. He proceeded to dispose of the remaining rodents with his characteristic attention to detail.
Vector then returned to the main lab and approached the insect growth chamber. He’d need about a thousand gravid ticks for the mission. The ticks would fit into a special small container, one that he’d already designed and fabricated. It looked like a large pillbox and was sitting on a nearby lab table. He scrutinized the labels on the racks inside the growth chamber, removed a few vials, and secured them inside the special box. There were still thousands of ticks left over. He’d have to dispose of them. His pets. He pushed the emotion out of his mind. This was no time for sentimentality. Then he had a thought. A backup plan. A Plan B.
He retrieved a portable cooler from a storage closet. This was the container that he’d used to transport the ticks from his original lab at the farmhouse. It took him only a few minutes to transfer the ticks from the growth chamber into the cooler and securely seal the cooler lid with duct tape. They should be comfortable enough in their new, temporary home. There was some air inside the cooler, but even so ticks could go a long time without air. He’d fed them earlier in the day. That meal should hold them for a while. They’d live at least as long as he would without another feeding. And by the time he was dead, his Plan B soldiers—he thought of them as his special ops forces—would be deployed to feed to their hearts’ content.
Between fits of coughing, Vector carried the cooler to the warehouse exit and wrestled it into the back of a nondescript, windowless cargo van that was parked in the lot of the warehouse laboratory. After locking the van and placing the key under the right front bumper, he paused for breath, pulled out his cell phone, and sent an encrypted message to the leader of the local sleeper cell that Omar had set up.
He slowly made his way back to the lab. Once he was inside, the coughing began again, at first as a kind of wheeze, then erupting into uncontrollable hacking that left him gasping for breath. He spat blood into a handful of Kleenex, staggered to the bathroom, and flushed the tissues down the toilet. He took a few seconds to catch his breath and then returned to the lab.
He poured some Clorox onto a cleaning cloth and began to wipe down surfaces. He wasn’t concerned with preventing the spread of disease. Rather he was trying to do everything possible to disguise the purpose of the laboratory. At this stage there was nothing he could do about the equipment, but if he was thorough about the cleanup, no one would be able to link the lab to the Kandahar virus. At least not at first. He knew the authorities would eventually figure out the purpose of this lab. But by that time it would be too late.
Several hours later, his work was done. Vector wearily straightened his shoulders and looked around. He’d miss this place but it was time to leave. He turned off the lights and left the room. He’d do all he could to get a good night’s sleep. He had a long flight in the morning.
* * *
Very early the next morning, a three-car passenger train passed under a bridge, approached a sharp curve just south of Elkton, Maryland, and began to slow down. The train held several dozen residents of southeastern Pennsylvania who lived in the mandatory ten-mile-radius evacuation area outside the virus quarantine zone. At 2:00 a.m., less than thirty minutes away, the train would pull into Aberdeen, Maryland. There the passengers would be discreetly transferred to a U.S. Army train that would transport them to their final destination: Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
The engineer rubbed his eyes and stared at the tracks ahead. This was his first run to Aberdeen since he’d gotten the call from TSA the day before. If it went well, there would be many more runs in the days ahead, most carrying a lot more passengers. This was supposed to be a trial run. They’d told him that there could be protests and that the passengers might even resist, but the boarding had been completed without incident. Probably because of the heavy presence of National Guard troops at the Wilmington station, he thought. But he knew that the residents of the evacuation zone were furious about their forced deportation and they had many sympathizers in the surrounding region, people who feared that the depopulated area might soon include them.
The engineer was startled from his thoughts when his eyes caught on something ahead, beside the tracks: several dark figures barely illuminated by a half-moon periodically hidden by scudding clouds. Probably homeless people, he thought. Maybe living under that bridge he’d just passed. Vagrants seemed to have made the tracks their home along the northeast corridor. It was well known throughout his industry that there just weren’t the resources to guard the train lines, or even to keep the fences intact.
The engineer kept his eyes closely on the figures. There had been several recent incidents of rocks being thrown at trains in this area. The engine’s windows were reinforced and a projectile, even a bullet, probably wouldn’t penetrate them. But a large rock could do real damage and would be a major distraction. He slowed the train further, down to thirty miles per hour, and blew a sho
rt high-pitched blast on the train whistle. He saw one of the figures, a hefty-looking man, separate himself from the rest of the group, stand right by the tracks, and begin waving his arms.
With a flash of realization, the engineer understood that these people were not vagrants, or a pack of kids up to no good. These people intended to stop the train. They’d probably try to disembark the passengers. Well, good luck with that, he thought. No way was he stopping. He accelerated slightly and blew past the waving man by the tracks.
But then, several hundred yards ahead, where the track started to curve, he saw a large, motionless dark shape on a crossroad, pointed toward the track, well back from the rails. A truck. As the engineer watched, it began to move, slowly, toward the rails. Were they planning to park the truck on the track, assuming he’d stop the train? Were they idiots? Did they know nothing about momentum, mass times velocity? Even at thirty miles per hour, there was no way he could avoid plowing into the vehicle at this distance. He had only one chance. Speed up and hope to get by it before it reached the tracks. The advantage lay in his favor. He was already moving and the truck had been idling and would take several seconds to get up to speed. He pushed the throttle forward and leaned on the whistle lever. The train accelerated quickly and began hurtling down the tracks. It soon reached a velocity approaching eighty miles per hour.
He made it, clearing the truck by scant feet, moving past it into the darkness, the train’s wheels screeching on the steel tracks, the whistle blasting shrilly into the night.
Too late he remembered the curve.
The engineer quickly hit the air brakes, then immediately engaged the emergency brake. The deceleration was almost immediate, and drastic, the train slowing to half its speed in a matter of seconds. But with the sudden slowing and the sharp leftward curve came instability. The train lurched and began to tilt to the right as another law of physics, inertia, kicked in, naturally trying to move the train straight ahead despite the curvature of the track.
