Darkness at Dawn (4 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn
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Well yes, Mr. Snake Eater, yes I am out of place
. She couldn’t wait for the dog and pony show to be over and to finally get back to her peaceful, perfumed apartment.
She suddenly tuned back in to Connelly’s droning voice, the pitch having changed: “. . . and so now for a better explanation of the threat to our country, I’ll give the floor to Deputy Director of Operations Montgomery.”
Lucy focused on Uncle Edwin. Whatever his faults, he was a serious and intelligent man, and whatever he had to say, she was obviously here to listen to it.
As he rose, the lights dimmed, making the laptop and netbook monitors glow in the dark.
A disembodied voice came over the loudspeaker system. “Ladies and gentlemen, please turn off your computers and cell phones and pagers. It goes without saying that the report you are about to hear is SCI—Sensitive Compartmented Information. Clearance level Majestic.”
The entire room took in a shocked breath. Not even the President of the United States was always cleared for Majestic-level intel. It was the level of clearance needed to know that aliens had landed. Certainly she shouldn’t be privy to Majestic-level intelligence.
The room was too dark to see individual features, but she could hear a low buzz.
“Quiet please.” Uncle Edwin bent down to press a button, and the enormous monitor behind him lit up. At first Lucy thought the projection system was broken, because the screen was blank, white. Then the image came into focus, and she could see granite outcroppings and snow-covered peaks against a blindingly bright turquoise sky.
Something small was moving across the white landscape. The image zoomed, so fast it nearly gave her nausea, and focused on a man, trudging across a snowy valley floor.
Uncle Edwin’s voice was clear, calm and emotionless. “This image was taken two days ago at 0600 Zulu time by a Keyhole satellite that was instructed to change the direction of its lens. The man you are watching is one of my operatives, following up SIGINT and HUMINT that a biowarfare laboratory had been set up by Al Qaeda in . . . mountain terrain.”
Lucy could hear between the lines. Someone at NSA had picked up a cell-phone conversation or an email—SIGINT—and an operative or operatives had been sent in to wherever to get human intelligence, HUMINT.
Figures were superimposed on the screen, probably geotagging coordinates, and probably encrypted. She couldn’t understand them anyway. But on the bottom of the screen in a chyron, the white numbers were easy to understand.
 
Biodata: temp: 99.7°, BPM: 120, BP: 110/70
 
The satellite was able to read body temperature, the beats per minute of the heart and blood pressure. The man was running a slight temperature.
He trudged forward, head down, moving as if in slow motion.
Then the man swayed, fell to his knees and, shockingly, vomited. She heard breaths catch around her in the dark as a deep red projectile stream, horrifically bright against the white snow, came spewing out of him. He rose, shaking, to his feet, took a few steps and was wracked by another vicious bout of retching that went on and on, so long Lucy wondered how he was breathing. Bright streaks of red marred the snow.
The man took another few steps, fell to his knees again.
Data was streaming at the sides and across the top, but the most important statistics were along the bottom of the monitor.
 
Biodata: temp: 103°, BPM: 160, BP: 110/60
 
The man wasn’t getting up. He vomited again, an astonishing amount of material. Surely he hadn’t gone trekking in the mountains after a heavy meal? Though most of what he was vomiting seemed to be blood.
There was heavy silence in the room as they watched the man try to get up and fail, and vomit again where he lay, collapsed, on the ground. His limbs were still, the only movements those necessary to retch. Everything that came out of his mouth now was bright red.
It occurred to Lucy, with a hard squeeze to the heart, that she was watching a man die, alone in some frozen desert.
No one spoke; they just watched the monitor as the file speeded up.
Biodata: temp: 104°, BPM: 180, BP: 100/50
 
Biodata: temp: 104.5°, BPM: 100, BP: 90/50
 
Biodata: temp: 104.5°, BPM: 80, BP: 80/40
 
Biodata: temp: 104.5°, BPM: 50, BP: 70/30
 
Until finally:
Biodata: temp: 104°, BPM: 0, BP: 0
 
Lucy wanted to look away, but Uncle Edwin said quietly, with that vast authority he had that no one, including her, could possibly resist, “Wait. There’s more.”
What else could there be?
She thought.
The man’s dead.
But, horribly, there
was
more.
Uncle Edwin clicked ahead, the white digits of the chronometer rolling forward faster and faster. What was it he wanted them to see beyond white fields of snow and a dead man, lying in a lake of his own blood, which expanded with each passing minute, deep red close to the body, lightening to a faint pink a couple of feet out?
The minutes ticked by—an hour of film for each minute of real time—and Lucy blinked. The body was . . . she leaned forward, wondering if this was an optical illusion, but it wasn’t. The body was shrinking, minute by minute. It was like the death scene of the Wicked Witch of the West in
The Wizard of Oz
.
The man had on thick mountain gear, so it was hard to tell at first, but the clothes flattened out, the head retracted like a turtle’s until it was no longer visible. Horribly, a boot fell off and rolled away from the leg, as if the foot had been chopped off.
The film fast-forwarded through sunset, the shadows lengthening visibly in the speeded-up monitor, until the image turned black. But not before an evening wind gusted lightly, blowing gray powder away from the still form. Lucy suspected that gray powder was the remains of the body, like incinerated ash.
“Your eyes aren’t deceiving you,” Uncle Edwin’s deep calm voice said. “Postmortem, there was a process of early liquefaction, then ultra-fast dessication. The powder you saw at the end was my operative.”
A few lights came on, and Lucy could see grim faces around the room. It was a lot to take in.
“We suspect a viral hemorrhagic fever disease. Detailed intel is in a flash drive that was on the person of my operative. We have a senior officer of the CDC here. Dr. Samuels, can you report your impressions on the basis of what we’ve just seen?”
A disheveled-looking man rose, passing a hand over his overlong flyaway hair and straightening a crumpled jacket. He looked like a caricature of an academic, but the instant his strong voice spoke into the microphone, he held everyone in the palm of his hand. His voice was deep and he spoke with utter authority.
“There are numerous strains of hemorrhagic fever viruses, the most famous of which—but not the most frequent—is Ebola. HFVs are not, strictly speaking, human diseases. HFVs are transmitted to humans by means of contact with infected animals. The virus attaches to host receptors through the surface peplomer and into vesicles in the host cell. The main targets of infection are endothelial cells, mononuclear phagocytes and hepatocytes. Usually, the virus leads to hemorrhagic diathesis through direct damage of cells involved in hemostasis. In other words, vessels can no longer contain blood and the patient bleeds out, dying of hypovolemic shock. Mr. Deputy Director, how long beforehand had your agent been inserted?”
“Two days,” Uncle Edwin answered. “But we don’t know when he was exposed.”
“Well, it must have been an unusually virulent strain. Incubation can typically run up to twenty-one days, after which symptoms develop, including high fever, nausea, abdominal pain.” Dr. Samuels pointed a finger at the screen, frozen at the last moment of light—empty clothes in a vast white desert. “No known original cases have been reported outside sub-Saharan Africa, most have occurred in clusters around the equator. HFVs thrive in heat and moisture. Wherever that place is, it is in a mountain range full of snow and the temperature is below freezing. Furthermore, the man in the image seemed normal until affected by violent symptoms. Sometimes humans infected with HFVs have been known to take a week to die. On the basis of what was shown us, I think we could rule out hemorrhagic fever.”
Uncle Edwin’s voice was clear and cold. “And what about a weaponized HFV, Dr. Samuels?”
Dr. Samuels’s bushy gray eyebrows rose. “Weaponized? Hmm. Well, I know the Russians tried it and gave up. There’s a working group on civilian biodefense, which includes thirty representatives from academia, public health services and military services, chaired by the CDC. HFVs are twenty-eighth down on the list of possible dangers. It’s been said that North Korea might have weaponized yellow fever but doesn’t have a delivery system. As I said before, the disease thrives in heat and moisture, which rules out much of the earth north and south of the 30th parallels. Even when someone is infected, during the incubation period transmission of the virus isn’t common. These are not highly contagious viruses, and most cases of infection are by direct contact with the mucous membrane of an infected patient.”
“Nonetheless,” Uncle Edwin said calmly. “I would ask you to posit a mutated form of a hemorrhagic fever virus, airborne, highly contagious, fast-acting also in cold or temperate climates. What would be our position then?”
Dr. Samuels was silent for a long moment. There was no noise in the room at all. Everyone leaned forward a little to hear what he had to say, even Lucy.
“There is, as of today, no known cure for any of the hemorrhagic fever viral diseases. The mortality rate is 89 percent. Treatment is supportive and basically palliative. USAM-RIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, has developed a vaccine that is 100 percent effective in monkeys but not in humans. Large-scale contagion of a weaponized, airborne cold-climate virus would require barrier nursing in every single hospital and medical center, all of which would become overwhelmed in less than forty-eight hours. Every infected person would have to be put in immediate quarantine for at least twenty-one days, something clearly impossible if there is large-scale contagion. Every single human being would have to walk around wearing double gloves, an impermeable Tyvek gown, an N-95 mask or at least an air-purifying respirator—which, by the way, cost almost one thousand dollars each—leg and shoe coverings, a face shield and goggles. International, interstate and city-to-city transport would have to be banned, so good-bye food supplies. All planes would be grounded. What would be our position then? I think, Deputy Director, that the technical term for that would be fucked.”
T
WO
 
MIKE was beginning to grasp what this was about. A mission, an overwhelmingly important one, at high altitudes. Well shit, he could do that. He’d trained his entire life to do exactly that.
Mike was strictly a boots-on-the-ground kind of guy. And he knew exactly whose boots he wanted on the ground. His men, the men he’d been training at ten thousand feet and who were still there, already acclimatized. So—cut the training mission short and go out in the field.
Fine by him.
Frankly, what he’d heard and seen scared the shit out of him. If someone was about to loose a highly contagious form of Ebola on the world, that someone needed to be stopped, right now.
Montgomery leaned forward slightly into the microphone. “All right, the people in this room below director level now constitute the Committee on Weaponized Hemorrhagic Fever Viruses, code named Stop Cold. Stop Cold will meet on a daily basis until we get the information contained in my operative’s flash drive and will report to the directors, who are now the Stop Cold Oversight Committee.” He looked slowly around the conference table, eyeing each person coldly. “And remember, you are all under Majestic confidentiality rules, and any breach of secrecy will be treated as high treason.”
Jesus. Mike had been on a lot of top secret missions, but never one this secret. Well, he knew how to keep his mouth shut. And he knew how to give his men need-to-know intel. Just enough to do their jobs.
“The Stop Cold Committee will meet in Room 346 right now and start drawing up contingency plans. The efforts will be coordinated by Homeland Security. Everyone in the room is dismissed except for Dr. Samuels, Captain Shafer and Dr. Lucy Merritt.”
Mike wondered which of the pen-pusher types was Dr. Merritt when Hot Babe right across from him drew in a shocked breath, opened wide those beautiful blue eyes and turned them on the Deputy Director.
“Oh no,” she hissed. “No way!”
Mike was staggered, which was a big sign of how exhausted he was, because he wasn’t the easily surprised type. So . . . Hot Babe’s name was Lucy Merritt and she was an . . .
operative
? Like Evelyn Salt?
What floored him even more was her saying no to Edwin Montgomery, fucking Deputy Director of Operations of the fucking CIA. No one said no to Montgomery, no one. Mike doubted whether the Defense Secretary or even the Director of Homeland Security would have the nerve to say no to him. Let alone Hot Babe.

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