The Omega Covenant

by Richard Holcroft

  “We hugged the first time, though she didn’t want to get too close to me, in case she was coming down with something.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  Dorothy again pulled the top of her robe tight around her neck. “Achy... and cold.”

  “May I check your face and throat?’

  Dorothy nodded.

  Maggie pulled a penlight and tongue depressor from her bag and asked her to open her mouth. After probing Dorothy’s throat for a few moments, she checked both of her eyes, then rolled a thermometer across her forehead. “I don’t have a full medical kit with me, but you do have a fever; your pupils are dilated and your throat a bit raw. I’d like to get you to an emergency room where they can give you a complete exam.”

  “But I–”

  “Sorry, Ms. Seitz, but we need to have you checked out immediately. It’s very important we rule out any infection.”

  Once Maggie Winthrop assured her they’d get her back to her home if they were certain she had no serious signs of infection, she agreed to go. Dorothy shuffled to the bedroom to change into a proper dress and grab her purse.

  After speaking with Ms. Seitz, Maggie called and arranged a meeting with John Scheppers for later that afternoon. Scheppers lived nearby and didn’t mind hanging around the office after work to help solve the mystery of Helen’s smallpox exposure.

  She exited the elevator on the twenty-third floor of the Hanscombe Building and walked through the glass door entrance for Heritage Investments. She introduced herself to the receptionist who dialed Scheppers’ extension to tell him the CDC representative had arrived.

  Scheppers, a slim, prematurely gray, six-footer, appeared a few minutes later and led Maggie to a nearby conference room with a panoramic view of Uptown and Central Park.

  After commenting on the view, she began, “I’m with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta working with the city medical examiner’s office. I understand you knew Helen Seitz fairly well.”

  “Yes, of course. We’d worked together for two years.”

  “And dated also?

  “Yes.”

  “When had you last seen her?

  “Right before she left for Hawaii, June ninth. We had dinner together.”

  “Where was that?”

  “A small place near her apartment called La Colombe.”

  “Just the two of you?”

  “Right.”

  She paused to enter the restaurant name in her tablet and continued. “Pardon me, but I have to ask: Was Helen seeing anyone else that you know of?”

  “No. Frankly, we were both so busy we didn’t have time for anyone else. We were pretty steady, you might say. I’m just devastated by this.”

  “Were the two of you intimate?”

  “Yes,” he said without a pause.

  “When was the last time?”

  “The night before she left for Hawaii.”

  “And you’ve experienced none of the symptoms she had–fever, sweats, headaches, rash, nothing like that?”

  “No, none at all.”

  “Did she call you at any time during the trip?”

  “Three times. Once the day she arrived on Oahu; a second time before boarding the cruise ship in Honolulu; a third before they left Honolulu for home.”

  “Did she complain in any of those conversations about being ill–any indication she wasn’t feeling well?”

  He shook his head. “Each time she said things were going great. The last night, the nineteenth, she still sounded upbeat but added she was looking forward to getting home.”

  Checking her notes again and allowing twelve to fourteen days for the smallpox symptoms to appear, Maggie felt comfortable concluding Helen had to have contracted the virus on the inter-island cruise, but she didn’t yet know when.

  “You happen to know what cruise line they were on?” she asked.

  He looked off into space for a minute in deep thought and then looked back at the doctor. “Tropic something–Tropic Star, maybe.”

  She nodded. “I’ll check it out.” She didn’t know precisely what other victims had done the past two weeks, but she’d heard the teenager in New Orleans and the man in Atlanta had also been to Hawaii the past two weeks. “How about the woman who went to Hawaii with Helen, Corrine Alberts? Did you know her?”

  “Met her two or three times. Is she... ?”

  “Yes–passed away two days after Helen.” He said nothing but simply shook his head. She continued, “There’s almost certainly a connection between the two, most likely related to their trip. That’s why it’s critical we find everyone who may have been exposed to the virus while Corrine and Helen were infectious.”

  “Of course.”

  Maggie realized the timing for Helen’s acquaintances would’ve been bad if they had been exposed. The vaccine would prevent smallpox only if given within four days of contact with the contagious carrier. John seemed unaffected so far, but others close to Helen may not have been so lucky.

  “And you didn’t see her after they returned from Hawaii?”

  “No, I was away on business,” he said. “Next time I heard anything about her at all was when I got a call from her sister. She called to tell me Helen was in the hospital. I caught the first flight out the next morning, but by the time I got back, she was gone.”

  Maggie made a few more notes and rose to leave. “I’ll give you my card, Mr. Scheppers,” she said and placed it on the table. “If you or someone else at your firm start to experience any of the symptoms I’ve mentioned, or think of anything relevant, please contact my office immediately.”

  Scheppers nodded and escorted her back to the reception desk.

  As Maggie rode the elevator back down to the ground floor, she reminded herself to call Dr. Silverthorn at CDC to discuss her meetings with Dorothy Seitz and Scheppers. She hadn’t heard back from Manhattan Metro, so she assumed Dorothy has checked out negative. But it appeared Hawaii health officials and federal agents should be notified immediately that the initial smallpox exposure had almost certainly occurred at one of the Hawaiian Islands.

  19

  The White House, July 7th

  President Charles McHugh strode into the Oval Office where several members of his administration had been waiting: his vice president, James Decker; Director of National Intelligence Walt Giraud; National Security Advisor Karen Hall; Assistant CIA director Vince McDonald; and the president’s chief of staff, Donald Wright.

  “Let’s sit at the smaller table,” the president said. He preferred the round, wooden table in the corner of the Oval Office or the upholstered sofas in the center for working sessions. He used the iconic presidential desk primarily for photo ops and important state occasions. The White House steward arranged for beverages and snacks to be brought in, since they expected the hastily-called meeting to be long and contentious.

  Once they were seated, the president began, “It seems things related to the smallpox outbreak have escalated. The public radio station in New York received a letter this morning we need to discuss.” He nodded toward NSA chief Hall.

  Hall said, “We’re still trying to determine its origin and authenticity. We haven’t heard anything yet from Al Jazeera or the Middle Eastern press, but it looks genuine.”

  Director Giraud donned his glasses and picked up a copy of the letter he’d obtained to show the president. “It’s handwritten on Parsian Azadi Hotel stationery and reads: Amali yat e talafi juyaneh. Basically an in-your-face phrase in Farsi meaning tit-for-tat.”

  The president stared off into space. “Damn the bastards. If our friends in Tehran are so willing to take credit for the smallpox attack, I’d like to at least know the reason.”

  “The nuclear reactor deal, perhaps?” Decker asked.

  “I doubt it,” the president said. “They bragged for weeks about how they got the better of us. So why would they be pissed off about it now?”

  “To remind us they’re still the big kahuna in the Middle E
ast, most likely.”

  Giraud snorted. “Hell, we should’ve learned by now that what these fanatics do or don’t do needs no justification, and doesn’t have to make sense. They keep making threats–that they’re ready to attack us anytime, anyplace. We can’t take every threat seriously; they like to bluster.”

  McHugh nodded and rose from his chair. “The free world knows we’re a peaceful nation but have our limits. Whoever spread this virus knew how deadly the attack would be and went for maximum impact.”

  “Why they did it is of little consequence anyway,” Decker said. “How they did it is the major question right now.”

  Giraud glanced at Karen Hall for a few seconds before he looked back at the president. “We all know one of our problems the past twenty years is that our Middle East intelligence is sparse and unreliable at best, flat-out wrong at worst. Iran, Syria, Yemen, you name it–we don’t have a clue about what’s going on in those countries. “

  McHugh balled his right hand into a tight fist and glared at Giraud. “And why is that?” he asked. “You’re the expert.”

  Assistant CIA Director McDonald came to Giraud’s partial defense. “Mr. President, it’s no secret very few of the agents we have on the ground in those countries are natives or fluent in Farsi, able to move about freely and make valuable contacts. They stand out like the Westerners they are. The few Farsi-speaking agents we’ve had in the past ended up jailed, deported, or executed faster than we could get them out of the country to debrief them.”

  McHugh then turned to Giraud. “You’re our imaging and mapping specialist. Can’t we decipher more of this by satellite so we don’t have to worry about things like language problems?”

  He shrugged. “Satellites can’t see inside buildings so they’re pretty useless for detecting bioweapons research. We need agents on the ground–preferably those with science backgrounds–able to get into their labs. We can’t do it all with satellites.”

  “Iran’s interest in biowarfare is nothing new anyway,” McDonald said. Being a thirty-year veteran of the CIA, he often differed greatly with the agency’s upper-level directors, generally political appointees who knew next-to-nothing about running a spy agency. “Iran’s biological and chemical programs go back at least as far as the mid-eighties and their war with Iraq. That’s when they set up the Special Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Industries organization within their Ministry of Defense. Right from the beginning it was dedicated to arming the regime with microbial and chemical weapons. And one of its first moves was to begin using medical research centers as fronts for biowarfare laboratories.”

  “You bet,” Giraud added. “And what biological agents they couldn’t develop in their own labs–with the generous aid of Russian, North Korean, and Chinese scientists, of course–they liberally stole from other countries.”

  McHugh’s anger hadn’t cooled much. “Okay, so assuming Iran is responsible for this attack,” he said, “I’ll go back to the vice president’s question: Smallpox is different; how in hell could they get hold of the virus in the first place–a disease the whole world considered eradicated more than thirty years ago? I thought CDC and Russia were the only two places on earth that held these specimens.”

  Hall measured her words. “In theory that’s true, Mr. President. But according to our own agents and certain biological weapons experts we’ve talked to in Mossad, Iran has been recruiting scientists from Russia for years–experts who’d worked with biological weaponry in the past. It is likely Syria has a well-developed bioweapons program, and you can bet your last dollar that if Syria has it, Israel does, too. That’s just a start.”

  McDonald added, “Mossad claims Iran has a whole bunch of nasty shit in its biowarfare program–anthrax, SARS, Ebola, cholera–which could be used, not only against our citizens, but against our domesticated animals, food, and water supplies, as well. There’s no limit to their destructive potential.”

  Hall nodded. “And totally contaminate our environment if they wanted.”

  “Right. Plus, we’re basing our response primarily on mass immunization, when most of the intelligence folks tell us Iran may have genetically altered the virus and made it resistant to current drugs.”

  “So what do we do in that case?”

  When no answer was forthcoming, the president slumped back in his seat. “It’d be a disaster.”

  No one said a word for several moments, until Giraud spoke up. He suggested that experts start working immediately on a doomsday scenario for a hypothetical immune-resistant virus. The bulk of public health resources would continue to be used to make plans for a virus more easily controlled with traditional immunization.

  “A miracle would help too,” the president said.

  “Where were these victims when they became infected?” Wright asked. Again, no one spoke. “Answering that question is a priority.”

  “We can eliminate the missile delivery option,” Giraud said. “Iran’s Shahab-5 and -6 have the range to reach all of Africa and most of Europe, but there’s no way for them to get anywhere close to US territory without the whole world knowing about it.”

  “Right, just like you’d think we would have intercepted four off-course airliners headed for New York City,” Karen Wall said, sarcastically.

  “Well, let’s just say that if Iran chooses to send warships to either ocean, they’d have lots of company.”

  “What about ship-launched missiles?”

  Wright thought for a moment “A possibility. They’ve got destroyers with that kind of capability in the Atlantic and nothing to stop them from venturing into the Pacific from around India. But our navy watches them closely and would reduce their ships to rubble before they’d finished loading coordinates in the guidance systems if we thought they represented a serious threat to our cities.”

  “Agreed. Right now, everything points to an atomizer of some type, activated by a suicidal terrorist or timer,” McDonald said.

  Wright spoke up. “I talked with Dr. Silverthorn at CDC less than an hour ago. She’s in New York interviewing patients and family members of the deceased. We know at least three of the smallpox patients in the New York City area had recently vacationed in Hawaii.”

  “Where specifically?” Giraud asked.

  “All we know for sure is that two of the stricken girls knew each other in Manhattan, left for Hawaii on the same flight, roomed together in Honolulu and then again on a seven-day, inter-island cruise out of Honolulu.”

  “Which other islands?”

  “It was with Tropic Star Lines–stops in Kauai, Maui, and the Big Island, ending back in Honolulu.”

  The president looked each of them square in the eyes. “Okay, that’s a start. But while the FBI and local police are gathering information about the other known patients, I want daily briefings about how both the immunization process is going and our hunt to find the perpetrators. I also want somebody from the State Department to meet with Iran’s UN delegate in New York, to express, in the strongest words possible, that we plan an appropriate response to their unprovoked action. Third, I want the bureau and our intelligence agencies to use every resource at their disposal to find out who’s responsible for this attack, and why.”

  They all nodded.

  Once the others had left, the president turned back to his chief of staff, Donald Wright. “Cancel my afternoon meeting with CIA Director Venable. He and the other eggheads at Langley haven’t gotten anything right since I’ve been president… and probably two or three decades before that. They’ve screwed this one up, too. Once again, we learn about an attack by the biggest bully in the Middle East after it’s infected US citizens with one of the deadliest viruses known to man.” He paused for a moment, then said, “There will be changes... and Venable’s head is going to be the first to roll.”

  Wright nodded and made a note to himself. “One additional matter, Mr. President. About the upcoming trip to Hawaii, considering the current circumstances and the fact that two of our smallpox
victims spent time there, do you still think it is wise to go?”

  McHugh didn’t have to think about it. “Absolutely. Unless this smallpox thing gets completely out of hand, I’m committed to it. We’ve got to show the American people the White House is functioning normally, and there’s no reason to panic.”

  “In light of your past heart attack, I worry about these occasional chest pains you’ve mentioned to Dr. Braden. There’s no question this trip is terribly important, but Dr. Braden didn’t immunize you for smallpox because of your compromised immune system, and I have a bad feeling about the trip in general. It won’t be easy for you, physically.”

  The president thought his chief of staff was being overly concerned about his health but tried to remain patient. “This trip has been planned for months, Don. We’ve got the Pan-Asian Trade Council meetings the better part of the week. I’m scheduled to meet with the Japanese and Chinese foreign ministers regarding the disputed islands issue. The fundraisers on Oahu and Kauai are important for the governor, and we need his support.”

  “Yes, sir, but–”

  “Plus, Israeli Defense Minister Drechsler will be joining us for the missile launch. Most important, we need to either demonstrate a successful intercept for Sokolov’s and Kim Jong un’s benefit, or scratch the program altogether.”

  Wright nodded.

  “And I had a physical four months ago. Everything looked fine.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “I’d also like to get in a few days of vacation, if possible–you know, golf, mai tais. You do remember those things, don’t you?”

  Wright couldn’t hide his annoyance. “With all due respect, sir, I’d also advise against that if things worsen here. It wouldn’t look good if you’re golfing in Hawaii while people back home are dying.”

  “I understand. But a couple of hours at the missile range with Defense Minister Drechsler for what we hope is a successful launch, scheduled meetings with state officials in Honolulu, an afternoon fundraiser and quick speech in Lihue–perhaps a round or two of golf near the house on Oahu–and we head home. I don’t see a problem.”