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Authors: Jon Land

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Thank-yous on this one have to begin with the wonderful family at Tor/Forge, starting of course with Tom Doherty but continuing right down the line. Linda Quinton, Yolanda Rodriguez, John Del Gaizo, Bob Gleason, and everyone else believe in people as well as books, and it is a pleasure working with them all. Natalia Aponte is a terrific editor who spares readers the pain of my mistakes and misjudgements.
But it was my miraculous agent, Toni Mendez, who found Tor/Forge in the first place, just another day in her devoted commitment to my work and my career. Ann Maurer, a creative genius in her own right, is prominently responsible for making sure that work continues to improve by refusing to accept anything even remotely approaching mediocrity.
I am also blessed with numerous people who keep my technology on the straight and narrow. Emery Pineo, still the smartest man I know, recently learned he was a finalist for the Presidential Award for Science Teacher of the Year award. He’s the winner hands down in my mind. And I thank Walt Mattison for not only his expertise in weaponry and armaments, but also for introducing me to the world of the Special Forces, the true American heroes. Thanks also to the now retired Dr. Mort Korn for his typically insightful input.
Along the way I was also helped enthusiastically by John Signore, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Illinois Department of Corrections, the Daughters of
the Republic of Texas, Mike Gonzales of the San Antonio River Authority, Jim Schmidt of John Deere. Thanks to Tom Walser for showing me Atlanta, Eric Darrow for introducing me to the Texas Panhandle, Matt Lerish, and Steve Frantz. And to Dr. Richard Greenfield for La Jolla and his beautiful new home.
A very special acknowledgement to Dr. Alvan Fisher for steering me through the medical aspects of this book. Advising me was no simpler a task than serving his station on the front line in the war against a deadly, insidious disease.
I finish with a sad note. My Brown University advisor and mentor, Professor Elmer Blistein, passed away last fall. Professor Blistein, who referred to himself as Dr. Frankenstein since I was the monster he created, made it a tradition to take me to lunch after each book was published. Sadly there will be no more lunches but, thanks in large part to this great man, there will be lots more books. I’ll miss you, Professor.
The Alpha Deception
The Council of Ten
Day of the Delphi
The Doomsday Spiral
The Eighth Trumpet
The Gamma Option
Labyrinth
The Legacy of the Tau
The Lucifer Directive
The Ninth Dominion
The Omega Command
The Omicron Legion
The Valhalla Testament
Vortex
The front of the building was lined with cars labeled with the familiar logo of the security company. Several of the unmarked variety were double-parked next to them. Security guards holding shotguns stiffly across their chests flanked the floodlit entrance on either side.
“FBI,” Alex told her, taking her arm. “They’ve assumed jurisdiction in this.”
“In what?” she returned.
Karen’s thoughts stopped abruptly when they approached the entrance to the lab where the research on Lot 35 had been confined, located in a separate section of the building to avoid intrusions by the curious. Another suited man stood guard at the door. Karen approached the threshold and felt her feet grow heavy. Her stomach churned. The floor wavered.
The Lot 35 laboratory was a shambles.
Tables had been turned over atop shattered glass. Filing cabinets had been spilled and robbed of their drawers. Computers lay in smashed heaps.
Strange, Karen would reflect later, on how those were the images she would always recall coming first. Not the blood. Not the bodies of her eight-person Lot 35 team who, as always, were working late.
She should have been here! On any other night she would have been.
Coming soon from Tor Books …
A Blaine McCracken Novel
 
by Jon Land
 
 
 
 
 
Enjoy the following preview!
 
Susan Lyle gazed out the window of the helicopter as it hovered over Commercial Avenue. The rotor wash kicked up dirt and debris on a normally bustling Cambridge thoroughfare that sat deserted save for the Massachusetts State Policemen making a concerted effort to keep the milling crowds back.
“Setting down now, Doctor,” the pilot called to her from the cockpit.
Susan felt the chopper begin its straight drop and checked her watch: barely three hours had past since the alert had come in and she’d issued the appropriate orders. How well they’d been followed she would know soon enough, though initial view gave her reason for high expectations.
The entire block, from the Sonesta Hotel across the length of the Cambridgeside Galleria mall and Monsignor O’Brien Highway, had been blocked off by sawhorses and yellow strip barriers. A ring of officers in riot gear fronted
the primary mall entrance on the chance that the efforts of their fellows holding the lines went for naught.
The suspended traffic lights bounced as the chopper settled down in the center of Commercial Avenue in front of the Royal Sonesta Hotel. Susan saw a man in a police uniform approach with one hand raised to shield his eyes, while the other kept his hat pinned to his head. She climbed out of the chopper and started forward, watching the officer lower the hand from his eyes, clearly surprised by her appearance. She wore brown slacks and a cream-colored blouse beneath a slight summer-weight jacket. Her blond hair bounced as she approached the state policeman, flung randomly by the rotor’s slowing spin. Her skin was fair and firm, her eyes a shade hovering between blue and green. She looked to be of average height, until she straightened her knees once confidently free of the blade’s reach and looked the officer almost straight in the eye.
“Doctor Susan Lyle,” she greeted, right hand extended and voice raised to carry it over the chopper’s whirring engine. “Firewatch Command.”
“Captain Frank Sculley, Massachusetts State Police,” he returned, lowering the hand that had been shielding his eyes to take it. “Got a command post set up just over here.”
“Have my instructions been followed, Captain?”
“
Your
instructions?”
“The quarantine.”
“Best as we could manage.”
“And the witnesses?”
“They’re still together.”
“On scene?”
Sculley gestured toward a trio of coach buses parked down the block and enclosed by cruisers. Beyond them the steadily increasing crowd continued to look on. “I commandeered those from a tour group. Figured that was as good a place to hold them as any.”
Some of the tension eased from Susan Lyle’s face. “What about the hotel guests?”
“Trouble there. We lost some of them.”
“Some …”
“Dozens. Lots actually. Sorry, Doctor. By the time I got here—”
“They’ve got to be tracked down and isolated, do you hear me? There’s another chopper en route with men inside who can handle the details. I’ll want you to coordinate things with the hotel personnel.”
Captain Sculley shrugged, not looking very happy.
Dr. Susan Lyle’s eyes fell on a Mexican restaurant located on the Galleria’s ground floor, but accessible via its own off-street entrance. “I assume that was open.”
“Until the local police closed it.”
“And the patrons?”
Captain Sculley said nothing.
“My instructions were to secure the perimeter, Captain,” Dr. Lyle snapped. “No one allowed out.”
“Too late by the time your instructions all came through. In case you haven’t noticed, things have been pretty crazy around here the last few hours.”
Susan Lyle let it go. She had been expecting too much of the local Cambridge and Massachusetts authorities who knew nothing of Firewatch Command’s existence, or of the helicopter on constant prep outside the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Whoever was standing watch could be anywhere in the country within six hours of an alarm being sounded, whisked there in a jet that was fueled and ready twenty-four hours a day at Hartsfield International. In the fifteen years since Firewatch’s formation, there had been only two such alarms before today: one false and the other easily passed off to a leak in a chemical storage tank a few miles from the afflicted area. If the initial reports were borne out, the Cambridgeside Galleria would mark the first incident of high confidence potentially warranting full-scale alert status. That decision would be Susan’s to make.
“How many people have actually entered the mall?” she asked Sculley.
“I haven’t counted. The Cambridge patrolman first on the scene, the sixty or so witnesses we’ve got in those buses.”
“Have any of them displayed any effects or symptoms?”
“Whatever happened in that mall, the symptoms are pretty—”
“Just answer my question, Captain.”
Sculley’s neck turned slightly red. “Not that we’ve been able to detect, no.”
“And the equipment that was supposed to arrive from Mass General?”
Sculley gestured toward the command post. “In that rescue wagon.” Susan Lyle wasn’t looking at him as he continued. “I’m going to assume, Doc, that whatever’s in that truck is something the hospital keeps just in case somebody like you from out of town needs it.”
“That’s correct, Captain,” she said and started across the street.
“Probably means lots of other hospitals are similarly supplied.”
Halfway across the street, Susan turned back his way. “In every major city.”
“Like you were expecting this.”
“Prepared for it, more accurately.”
“You got your problems, I got mine,” Sculley said and planted himself in front of her, stopping. “For instance, you haven’t asked me about the next of kin of the people who were inside that mall. We got damn near a full-scale panic on our hands. I haven’t got enough men on detail to hold all these people back from the perimeter. Plenty have pushed their way through. A few got close to the mall.”
That got her attention. “But not inside.”
“No,” Sculley said, “not inside.”
“What about the National Guard?”
“Governor’s calling them up. It takes time.”
“And the media?”
“News blackout, as per your orders. There’ve been
some leaks, rumors. You can’t keep word of something like this quiet. If you ask me—”
“I didn’t,” Susan said. “We do nothing and say nothing until we determine the level of contamination.”
Sculley’s eyes gestured toward the nervous throngs gathered at the heads of both Commercial Avenue and Monsignor O’Brien Highway. “You wanna tell
them
that, Doc? That’s where the next of kin of plenty of those inside are gathered. Parents mostly. Sunday at the mall, loaded with kids, you get my drift.”
“Why don’t we wait until we have something intelligent to tell them? Why don’t we wait until I’ve had a chance to inspect the inside?”
 
The isolation suit was a poor fit, a generic medium when Susan could better have used a small. She pulled it up over her pants and blouse, and checked the miniature camera built into the helmet just over the faceplate. The camera’s controls were built into the right wrist area of the suit, deceptively simple with a continuous run switch that would insure continued recording even if the wearer was incapacitated. Sculley helped Susan pull the double-tank backpack over her shoulders and then escorted her wordlessly to the security line set up before the Cambridgeside Galleria’s main entrance.
“I’ll be waiting for you when you come out.”
Susan’s response was a noncommittal smile. She snapped her faceplate into place. Then she squeezed between a pair of sawhorses and approached the vacuum seal portal that had been installed in front of the glass doors. The primary goal was to maximize containment, both by quarantining those exposed and by isolating the supposed point of origin.
The thick airtight plastic of the prefab unit wavered a bit in the wind. The “door” to the vacuum seal was actually a zipper running up the plastic. Susan stepped inside and then resealed it before proceeding through the closed
double glass doors onto the first floor of the Cambridgeside Galleria.
She was aware of each breath echoing in her helmet as she advanced. The rhythm of her heart came as deeper, quicker riffs in her head, seeming to expand the confines of her helmet with each throb. She activated the camera’s wrist control and made sure to rotate her helmet sideways as well as up so the tape would capture the entire scope of the mall. Later computer enhancement and magnification would be able to lock onto and enlarge any specific point or area her visual inspection might miss. The microphone built into her helmet sent a delayed, scrambled transmission to Firewatch Command which would evaluate her analysis and pick up with the decision-making should transmission break off suddenly. Initially she was silent, letting the pictures of a similarly scrambled video speak for her. Those pictures along with her words reached Atlanta via a digital translink.
Outside Susan had managed to remain detached when Sculley broached the issue of the victims and their next of kin. At that point they were nothing more than theoretical concepts. But now the victims, or what was left of them, became reality. She felt her throat clog up. Drawing breath became a struggle, and she sought to calm herself by focusing on the task before her.
Susan waited until she reached the second floor before beginning to transmit her report. Her initial estimates based on what she had seen so far put the count of victims in the 1,500 range conservatively. The condition of the bodies seemed to be identical. There was no reason to describe that condition in detail, since the video transmission would more than suffice.
“Condition of remains confirmed,” she started, speaking into the microphone located just below her misting faceplate. “Confinement of exposure confirmed. Fatality rate from exposure … one hundred percent.”
Susan moved on across the floor, stepping over what
had been a hand and turning away from what had been a face.
“Confidence of hostile action very high,” she continued. “Fire danger is clearly Level One. Full alert status recommended. All—” Susan cut herself off suddenly. A sound had caught her ear, something moving, rustling.
Something alive.
“Wait a minute,” she continued. “I think I heard …” She aimed herself in the direction the sound had come from. When she heard it again, louder, she turned toward a store on the right, miniature camera turning with her. “I think the sound came from inside that—”
A shape hurled itself toward her, rising for her faceplate. Susan threw a gloved hand up instinctively. The broadcast picture scrambled, then died. A crack sounded just ahead of her garbled screaming that faded into oblivion as the transmission ceased abruptly.
 
If you would like a longer, personalized preview of THE FIRES AT MIDNIGHT, send your name and address to:
Jon Land
c/o Tor Books
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

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