Plague

by H W Buzz Bernard

  That concern aside, he’d rented a small unit at Castle Vault Public Storage near the airport and bribed the owner to allow him to wire for and hook up a small freezer within the unit. In addition to the bribe, which was substantial, he paid two years advance rent. The weaponized Ebola would be there waiting. For him, if needed. For someone else, if Allah so willed.

  The time had come to find out.

  Chapter Ten

  DRUID HILLS, ATLANTA

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21

  Two FBI Special Agents, Jeremy Babb and Al Merriwether, sat with Dwight and Zambit in the CDC team room. The door of the room was shut, dampening the chatter from the adjacent EOC. Dwight knew rumors were circulating among the employees manning the EOC workstations that something other than an exercise was afoot. He assumed it would be only a matter of time—hours? a day or two?—before the media caught wind of the possibility that Ebola might be involved. He and Zambit had already concocted a cover story. A lab monkey infected with a deadly virus had escaped from a secret research facility and found its way to Gullison’s golf course. The escapee was captured and destroyed. Too late, however, for the first two twosomes out last Thursday morning. But everything was under control now. If only.

  “So what should we be looking for?” agent Babb asked. Middle-aged and pudgy, a friar’s hairdo fringed his bald head. With his pen poised over a notepad, he looked more like an accountant than a federal law enforcement officer.

  Dwight shrugged. “Like we explained to you, we have only suspicions this might be a terrorist attack. As far as we know, there’s been no communication from any group or individual claiming responsibility for it.” He paused to see if this would elicit a response from the agents.

  Agent Merriwether shook his head. “Nothing on our end. Any chance this could be just some kind of accident or weird circumstance?” Merriwether, young and lanky, sported tiny, round eyeglasses and wore his dark hair close-cropped. Dwight guessed he couldn’t be more than a few years out of college.

  “Sure,” Zambit said, “but there’s just too much circumstantial evidence pointing the other direction. Something happened on that golf course. A deliberate release. Ebola, at least in America, doesn’t just pop up. It’s not endemic to this country. Especially a mutated or bioengineered version of it. In fact, there are only about a dozen Level-4 labs in the country that could even handle the virus. And there aren’t any terrorists working in them.”

  “So you think,” Babb said. “But back to my question.” He nodded at the notepad in front of him and tapped his pen on it impatiently.

  “Okay. ‘What should you be looking for?’” Dwight said. “I suppose any kind of unusual activity on the golf course that morning. Somebody who didn’t belong. Somebody acting strangely, suspiciously. Somebody spraying something. Maybe an aerosol bomb of some sort. I don’t know, you guys are the detectives.”

  “Yeah, like there aren’t dozens of people out walking and running on golf courses every morning before play starts. Like the front and back nines aren’t swarming with Hispanic workers by sunrise. But you’re right, we’re the gumshoes.” Babb, looking a bit exasperated and probably deciding he wasn’t going to get any useful input, put down his pen.

  “What would happen,” he said, after a short pause, “if some sort of full scale attack with this Ebola stuff really took place? Just assuming, that is.”

  Zambit looked away. Dwight fiddled with his earring and waited for Zambit to answer, but he didn’t. Finally, Dwight drew a deep breath and said, “Just assuming. Look what SARS, a severe form of pneumonia, did to Hong Kong for a few weeks in 2003. Virtually shut it down. And SARS had a mortality rate of just under 10 percent, mostly in the elderly and already-sick. Ebola? You could be looking at a death rate of up to 90 percent. No way to treat it. No way to prevent it. An overwhelmed health care system. An attack in Atlanta, like on MARTA or at a ball game...” He stopped talking, fearing his voice would betray him, give away the terror gnawing at his gut. His small audience waited in silence.

  He drew another deep breath, steadied himself and went on. “Hundreds of thousands,” he said, “hundreds of thousands of people would die. The populace would live in absolute fear, cowering in their homes. Barricaded. Or maybe just the opposite, maybe everyone would flee. Or try. A mass exodus. Anarchy. Who knows. Commerce would cease. Hartsfield-Jackson, the busiest airport in the world, would close its doors. Air traffic around the country would be paralyzed. Terror? We can’t image. Remember the kind of death we’re talking about here. Not a gentle passing in the night. A descent into the Ninth Circle of Hell. ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here.’”

  “Dante,” Merriwether said softly.

  Babb cleared his throat and spoke to the virologists. “You sound as if you believe, if this is bioengineered Ebola, that it was developed outside the U.S. and smuggled in.”

  Zambit nodded.

  “Then why would the terrorists wait to test it here, not where it was developed?”

  Zambit and Dwight stared at each other. Then Dwight said, “I think you’ve just suggested a totally new dimension for your investigation.”

  “Like a covert Level-4 lab, you mean? Here in the U.S.?”

  “Something like that,” Dwight said.

  Babb picked up his pen, examined it, clicked the retractable ball point in and out a couple of times. Then he looked at Dwight. “How in the hell would someone get Ebola into this country in the first place?” he asked, looking like a high school principal wondering how a kid got a gun into class. “I mean, if this is a weaponized virus, the terrorists had to start with something, right?”

  Dwight snorted derisively. “Smuggling Ebola in would be the easy part. We’ve had scientists stuff vials of plague bacteria into their suit jacket pockets and carry them back to research facilities in the U.S. from overseas. Another example: A number of years ago, a former director of South Africa’s biowarfare program, a guy by the name of Daan Goosen, freeze-dried some weaponized bacteria, crammed it into a toothpaste tube and slipped it to a retired CIA agent. The agent carried it back to the U.S. and dropped it into the laps of the FBI. Turned out it was something that carried the genes of a common intestinal bug fused with the DNA of a deadly pathogen that causes gas gangrene. In a toothpaste tube.”

  Dwight leaned toward the FBI agents as he continued to speak. “So getting Ebola into America would not be a challenge. During the height of the Cold War the Russians certainly were playing around with the stuff. And the security around their former biowarfare facilities is so shitty now it would make Disneyworld look like a maximum security prison. Someone could buy the virus on the black market—I’ll bet there’s a farmers’ market for virologists someplace—package it cleverly, poke it in a little jar, label it beluga caviar and fly it to America.”

  “And we’re worried about bombings and airline hijackings,” Babb said.

  “Yeah. Well, looks like that’s changed,” Dwight said.

  “And how much time, would you guess, do we have?”

  “A week maybe. Less. Hell, I don’t know. Assuming the worst, assuming our suspicions are founded, the bad guys know their stuff works; they know by now it’s probably been identified; and they know by now a red flag probably has been run up. Why would they wait before delivering their kill shot?”

  Babb stood, preparing to leave. “I don’t know,” he said, “but we’d damn well better hope they do.”

  NORTH METRO ATLANTA

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21

  Colonel Landry arrived at Richard’s office promptly at 1300 hours, military time. He appeared the archetype of a field grade officer: tall and lean with a hard, weather-beaten face and the searching eyes of a predator. His hair, brown flecked with gray, was sawed into a buzz cut. His uniform blouse bore five full rows of ribbons and devices in addition to a Master Parachutist Badge, a Combat Infantryman Bad
ge, a Combat Medical Badge and a Ranger Tab.

  “You’ve been around the block a few times I see,” Richard said, extending his hand to the colonel.

  Landry accepted the proffered greeting. “Too many blocks, too many times.”

  “It’s a bit unusual for an officer to have a Combat Medical Badge, isn’t it?”

  “I came up through the ranks. Earned the badge in Iraq in ’91 when I was just a Snuffy. OCS after that.”

  “So, you’re not a doctor?” Richard gestured at a chair. Landry sat.

  The colonel gave a halfhearted chuckle. “I learned how to patch up holes, jab guys in the butt with needles and set broken bones, but that was the extent of my medical training. I guess the Army figured that qualified me for project officer on the BioDawn effort.”

  Richard smiled and studied Landry more closely. He liked the man, yet there was something vaguely disconcerting about him. Like a plumb bob slightly off-center, but maybe not enough to worry about. “Well,” he said, “what can you tell me about that effort?”

  Landry sat back in his chair and stared out the window for a moment. “Probably not as much as you’d like,” he said, turning his gaze back to Richard. “It’s pretty damn sensitive stuff.”

  “Which, I gather, is why our money comes from a bank in the Cayman Islands.”

  Landry nodded. “Yeah. This project is so far off the books you won’t even find a torn page. There are some things you just don’t want civilians poking around in. Quite frankly, we’ve gone to great lengths to make absolutely certain there are no records, documents or orders that some eager-beaver senator or hot shot GAO investigator can glom on to. Even more to the point, the kind of ‘stuff’ we’re playing around with needs to stay well below the public’s radar horizon. There are watchdog organizations out there that would go into lunar orbit if they knew what was going on here.”

  “I’m not your enemy, Colonel. I’m just a guy who wants to know what’s happening in my house.”

  Landry squirmed in his chair, but stopped abruptly, apparently aware of what he was doing. Ever so briefly his eyes reflected something hard and remote, but just as quickly whatever it was disappeared, replaced by a practiced tractability.

  “I know,” he said. “My problem is your security clearance, or lack of it. Without it, I can’t go into the detail I was able to with your predecessors.”

  “Let’s try broad generalities then. Why BioDawn?” Richard began doodling on a sheet of paper. Badges, ribbons, insignia. Something continued to bother him about Landry, but he couldn’t get his arms around it.

  “That’s easy, Mr. Wainwright. BioDawn has been involved in several pioneering efforts. The company is recognized and well-respected for its accomplishments. It has precisely the kind of expertise and experience that lend themselves to the military applications the army is attempting to develop.”

  “The lead researcher, I gather, is Dr. Gonzales?”

  “Yes. He’s not BioDawn, though. He’s an army contractor. Brilliant, driven, reclusive. I’ll bet you haven’t met him yet.”

  “He’s about as approachable as Sasquatch.”

  Landry started to grin, but aborted it. “I don’t know too much about his background, but I do know he earned his Ph.D. at Emory. He excelled, I’m told, in DNA recombination, and transcription in bacteria and viruses.” He emphasized the words “recombination” and “transcription.”

  Richard nodded, realizing the colonel was talking around something, but he didn’t have the faintest idea what. DNA recombination? Transcription? What the hell is that all about? “How does that fit the army’s interests?” he asked, hoping the answer would put Landry’s words into some sort of usable context.

  Landry stood and walked to the window behind Richard’s desk and looked out. “I should turn my resume in here,” he said. “Half the buildings I’ve worked in the last 25 years date from World War II. Most of them were condemned, but the army didn’t have any place else to put us.” He turned and paced back to his chair but remained standing.

  “All of the stuff I’m about to tell you is unclassified. It’s public record, not that a lot of people worry about it or pay attention to it. But I suspect you’ll be able to cobble the information together and come up with a pretty good idea of what goes on behind closed doors.” He inclined his head in the direction of the windowless blockhouse. “And I hope what I say will allay any fears you might have; that you’ll realize the work going on here is vital to our national interests, to the defense of our country.”

  Richard looked down at his doodle pad, then back up at Landry. “Talk to me.”

  “Are you aware the Soviets once had a huge biowarfare program? Biopreparat. From the early 1970s to the early 1990s it cranked out thousands of tons of the most deadly germ agents in the world. Smallpox. Plague. Anthrax. And a lot of other lethal shit whose names I can’t even pronounce.” Landry paced back and forth in front of Richard’s desk.

  “At the peak of the Biopreparat program, the Russians had the capacity to produce 4500 metric tons of anthrax per year. 4500 tons. What on earth were the goddamn Russkies going to do with 4500 tons? Bubonic plague: 1500 tons. Smallpox: 100 tons. We hadn’t even weaponized the stuff, and they could spew out 100 tons a year if they wanted. During the 1970s they maintained a stockpile of 20 tons of smallpox at an army depot in a place called Zagorsk. ‘Didn’t want to be caught short,’ they said. Jesus.”

  Richard scribbled some figures on his pad. “Were the Russians the only ones who had the capacity to wage germ warfare?”

  “No. The South Africans, believe it or not, had a secret bioweapon program called Project Coast.”

  Richard’s eyebrows arched up.

  “Yes. They built quite an arsenal of anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola, Marburg and human immunodeficiency virus—HIV. Wonderful folks that they were they shared their treats with opponents of apartheid. Handed out chocolates laced with anthrax, beer mixed with botulinum, and sugar spiced with salmonella. They even considered going after Nelson Mandela when he was in jail.” Landry stopped pacing and shook his head in apparent disapproval.

  “And the U.S.?” Richard asked.

  “We’re never nasty enough, are we?” Landry sat. “Yeah. We had the capacity to manufacture small amounts of debilitating but not necessarily fatal bugs. Stuff called tularemia, Q-fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, staphylococcal enterotoxin B”—he stumbled over the pronunciation—“and of course anthrax. But not much. Less than 100 tons.”

  Richard drummed his pen on the desk. He was surprised by what Landry had told him, but didn’t see a connection to BioDawn.

  “So what am I missing here, Colonel? How does BioDawn fit into the germ warfare program?”

  Landry leaned forward, as if to share something conspiratorial with Richard. He lowered his voice to a gravely stage whisper.

  “The Russkies didn’t stop at just stockpiling this shit, they made it more deadly. They created antibiotic-resistant strains of it: anthrax, plague, tularemia. Scientists at a facility called Obolensk went even further. They took the gene that makes diphtheria toxin and spliced it into plague bacteria. Superplague with diphtheria. Nice, huh? Not only that, they were investigating the feasibility of introducing Ebola into smallpox. Who needs things that blow up, right? Old fashioned. Our enemies can come after us with crap we can’t even see now.”

  “But the Russian and South African programs are—”

  Landry held up his hand. “Dead, yes. But what happened to all those unemployed bioweapon scientists? You think they’re growing grain for vodka on the Russian steppe? Selling souvenir T-shirts in Moscow? Driving busloads of tourists through Kruger National Park? You think their knowledge isn’t for sale to the highest bidder? You think there aren’t enemies of America out there ready to turn a few of these guys into instant capitalists?” His voice got
louder with each interrogative.

  Richard waited for a direct answer to his question, but Landry hadn’t finished his mini-tirade.

  His face had turned the shade of a scarlet maple in October. “There’s a place called Koltsovo in Siberia. It was one of the Soviet’s largest and most sophisticated bioweapons facilities in the early ’90s. Top secret. Highly secure. The researchers there worked on really lethal stuff, smallpox and all kinds of hemorrhagic fever viruses: Ebola, Marburg, Machupo, Crimean-Congo. You name it, they were dicking around with it somewhere in a biosafety lab. After the Soviet Union collapsed, a group of western scientists visited Koltsovo in 1997. They found the facility half empty and protected, and I use the term loosely, by only a handful of guards; guards who hadn’t been paid in months. You think they gave a flying fuck if any of the smallpox or hemorrhagic fever viruses got legs?” Landry stopped and drew a deep breath. The intensity of the color in his face diminished.

  Richard decided to take a stab at BioDawn’s role. “So the U.S. Army thinks it’s time to bioengineer some weapons of its own?”

  “No, nothing offensive. No weapons. But we need to develop more effective defenses. There are currently no useful vaccines against many viral diseases, including the hemorrhagic fevers. Not that BioDawn has the facilities to deal with something like that. But there’re plenty of other areas that need research and development. Without getting specific, or classified, let me toss out a few things. In animal studies, the plague vaccine was found to be ineffective against airborne dissemination of the disease. And guess what? The Soviets were rumored to be working on airborne plague.”

  Landry took a handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped a sheen of perspiration off his forehead. Then he continued speaking. “So, there would appear to be ample opportunity to develop more effective vaccines against some pretty nasty bugs. But there are other routes that need exploration. We should be looking not just at vaccines, but antiviral drugs, too. Such as for smallpox, since right now we have only enough vaccine for lab workers and the military. So you see, we need help.” Landry sat back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his neck and waited for a response.