Mutant (30 page)

They waited.

“Maybe we can still jump them,” Richard whispered.

They began to hear voices transmitted from the outer chamber through the speaker system.

“Any sign of them?” said a man.

“Not that I can see,” said another.

“Then where the hell are they?” cried a young woman.

“What the hell?” said Kathleen, standing bolt upright.

Richard joined her, and saw the astonished faces of Azrhan, Lisa, and Detective Roosevelt McKnight looking in the window.

9:28 P.M. East River Heliport

Thirteen minutes behind schedule, silver sprays of molten flowers burst across the night sky in the opening volley, all to the accompaniment of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“Be kind to your web-footed friends,” Butkis sang along, following the tune of the famous march as it blared from the PA system lining the FDR. “For a duck may be somebody’s mooother—”

“Can it, for Christ’s sake,” said Morgan. “It’s fucking time to go. They started thirteen minutes late.” He gripped the side of his seat to stop his hands from shaking.

The manager of the heliport lay in the trailer office, his head oozing blood and what looked like gray toothpaste. Though seeming to have bought Butkis’s story of mechanical failure, he’d insisted that the other pilots take off and vacate the no-fly zone before the deadline. When they refused, he went inside, threatening to call the police. “Leave this to me,” said Morgan, following him in with a wrench. “I’ll simply knock him out and tie him up.” The first blow interrupted the man’s dialing 911, but only dropped him to his knees, leaving him still clutching the receiver. To Morgan’s horror, the man moved his thumb to press the final 1. The next blow made a wet cracking sound.

The pilot looked at him sideways and said, “Hey, man, chill out. Your face is the color of chalk.” Still humming, he snapped on the microphone in his headset. “Let’s go, gentlemen,” he said, accelerating the rotor until the craft lifted slowly off the tarmac. Rising past the blaring speakers, he took his position a hundred feet above the FDR, his companions flanking him over the quay to his left and the rooftops on his right.

Directly below, Morgan saw a tapestry of faces looking upward, some right at him, their expressions a mélange of puzzled frowns and friendly smiles. Children were everywhere, their grins flashing in the glow of the sodium lamps spaced along the freeway. A few of the older ones waved. He broke into a cold sweat, unable to bear their gazes.

Butkis leaned forward, his hand hovering over the switch that activated the nozzle.

Morgan felt his mouth go dry, and for a giddy instant he thought of reaching out and snatching the pilot’s hand away, as if in this last second he could not only recall what they were about to release, but the fate that awaited him.

Outside the cockpit, shimmering spheres of blue puffed into blazing streaks of red, each with the speed of an exploding star.

He shut his eyes against the flash of light, only to see the faces from below emerge in his mind like a mob of dark apparitions. “Christ,” he muttered, and ended up staring into the distance to banish the phantom gallery, finding it as unendurable to look upon as the real one. A canopy of golden showers seemed to cover all of New York.

His impulse vanished, carrying with it any illusion that by stopping Butkis he could somehow save himself. He’d already crossed too many other lines of no return, beginning on a moonlit night in Oklahoma, and just now, a hundred feet below in a stifling little room.

The pilot flicked the toggle up and crept ahead, trailing a white mist behind his machine that floated down toward the crowd as delicately as lace.

Morgan’s gaze followed its descent. The frowns below were replaced by expressions of surprise, anger, and shock as the mist settled onto people’s faces and arms. Some wiped their foreheads with their palms and rubbed the greasy substance between their hands while examining it. A few went as far as taking a whiff of it off their fingertips. Others tried to wipe it out of their eyes and off their lips.

He could spot the ones who had heard the ruse about it being a skin care product. One young man dressed in only a bathing suit beckoned them toward him, then held up his arms making as if to shower in it, rubbing it over his shoulders, under his arms, and into his scalp. Others around him followed suit, many signaling thumbs-up, presumably because they found the sensation pleasant on such a hot night. Those who objected responded with angry gestures, waving them to get out of there and giving them the finger.

“Remember, gentlemen,” said Butkis into the microphone, “keep our forward speed at fifteen knots, and we spend no more than four minutes, tops, over the target.”

Glancing to either side, Morgan saw that the other two helicopters had begun their runs as well.

The seconds crawled by, the slow speed giving him the impression they were standing still. The straps holding him to his seat seemed to impede his breathing, making him feel even more trapped.

And beneath him, like an endless human carpet, his victims continued to roll by, every one of them, it seemed, staring at him.

“Wow!”

“Beautiful, Steve!”

“Look at that!”

Geysers of pink and violet spiraled up from a collection of barges on the Hudson River, mesmerizing those gathered in his office. But Patton himself kept stealing glances in the direction of the East River where his own show was under way. Not that he could see any of it, yet the fireworks under which it would be unfolding were visible across the horizon, and he couldn’t take his eyes off them.

“Yes, it’s wonderful, isn’t it?” he said, trying not to sound impolite. Half the people he’d invited hadn’t showed up, and most of them had added insult to his injury by sending replacements who were clearly from their B list. A deputy assistant to the assistant director of state parks, a low-level Democrat from Albany, even a public works manager from the mayor’s office, for Christ’s sake—any low-rung freeloader who could be barely considered “green” they’d fobbed off on him.

He grabbed another glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter and downed half of it in a gulp. Within twenty-four hours, he thought, the symptoms will start to hit, and the first diagnoses of bird flu will be made. In forty-eight hours I’ll insist the police declare Sullivan and Steele as officially missing, then suggest they search Agrenomics, it being a matter of record that she suspected someone there had set up two previous attempts on her life. Once the cops discover the lab, I’ll step to the fore, offer to interpret what’s happened, and be the most sought-after man in New York. And all these little pikers can suck my ass.

More eruptions of golden fire spewed into the night, their reflections playing along the full height of the World Trade towers located a few blocks to the east.

“Great!”

“What a way to party, Steve.”

“Any more of those little quiche tarts?”

Yeah, right!

The faces of new victims kept scrolling into view.

“God, can’t you go faster?” said Morgan, fidgeting noticeably in his straps. “I can’t stand this.”

“Hey, Bob,” said Butkis, “this is the speed you told me to keep.”

Morgan started to pluck at the release on his safety belt. “I’ve got to loosen this. It’s so tight I can’t breathe!”

“Relax and enjoy the show. The cops will take at least five minutes to realize something’s happening and get their own copters over here. By then we’ll have scooted back to Queens.” Plumes of purple and white sparks arched overhead. “I mean, it’s like doing an air gig on Broadway!”

Morgan tried to slow his respirations.

Butkis broke into song again. “There’s no business like show business . . .”

The helicopter on their right was approaching the hospital, and Morgan glanced ahead to the roof, expecting to see it crammed with people.

It looked empty, except for three figures standing on the corner nearest him, two of them, it seemed, dressed entirely in red.

Surprised, he stared through the intervening darkness, trying to make out the threesome in better detail, until he suddenly realized they were all in moon suits, the two red ones exactly like the self-powered units they kept on hand at Agrenomics.

A freezing sensation crept along the inside of his skull, and he thought the unthinkable. Could Sullivan and Steele have escaped? Had they warned everyone at the hospital off the roof?

“Shit!” shrieked Butkis.

Morgan snapped his eyes straight ahead and saw a wall of lights approaching fast.

“Scatter! It’s the cops,” Butkis screeched into the microphone, revving the motor and slinging the craft upward. Except they’d blanketed him from above and behind as well. “Through the fireworks,” he yelled, and rolled out over the water, streaking straight toward the barges, climbing as he went.

Balls big as planets exploded red, white, and blue in front of them.

“Yahoo!” whooped the pilot as he tore through the barrage. He got halfway to the other side when the craft on his left exploded in flames.

Morgan started to scream.

Butkis looked down and saw a sparkling cluster of rockets streaming right at them. “Oh, fuck—!”

A direct hit to the fuel tanks blasted them both into oblivion.

From his vantage point on the roof, Richard watched the debris fall into the water and the crowd in front of the hospital react in horror. Farther along the freeway people didn’t respond at all, the flame and noise probably seeming part of the show. Less easy to miss were all the police helicopters overhead hugging the shore as they stayed well away from the line of fire.

Stanton leaned over the wall and pointed out to Kathleen the uniformed patrolmen starting to cordon off the half-mile stretch where the attackers had managed to spray before being routed. “Right after you called me from Agrenomics,” he said, “I contacted 911 and the director of the emergency response team. They’re going to handle this the same way they would a mass exposure to radioactivity—everyone stripped and decontaminated, their clothing bagged for disposal, even the water used to hose them down contained. Then we basically Lysol the FDR . . .”

Most of the spectators continued to watch the ongoing fireworks, unaware that they were about to be quarantined, though a few at the periphery of the crowd began to point and take notice of the massive police presence and the arrival of school buses by the hundreds behind them.

“. . . Of course it’s going to be on a massive scale. We’re looking at wherever we can house huge numbers— Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, Shea—and it’ll be a civil liberties nightmare in a few minutes trying to keep a hundred and fifty thousand people—”

“Offer them hope,” Richard said.

“Hope? There is no hope for the ones who get sick. That’s what’s going to be so damn tough. Everybody’s going to try and run—”

“Tamiflu,” Richard said, cutting him off.

Kathleen made a face. “Tami-what?”

Stanton looked thunderstruck. “My God!”

“The idea came to me on the ride back here.”

“Richard, you may be right. That’s ingenious. Why didn’t I think of it?”

Richard grinned. “Because you’re stuck up in that ivory tower of yours.”

“What the hell is Tamiflu?” Kathleen asked.

“We can start by raiding every pharmacy in the city,” Richard continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “Timing’s critical of course. I doubt we have the usual thirty-six-hour window, what with the vectors directly invading the cells, and we’ll need to find practically every dose in America plus ship it here by tomorrow to have enough—”

“I’ll get on it right away,” said Greg. “And the drug company itself is sure to have supplies—”

“Will one of you answer me?” interrupted Kathleen. “I said, ‘What the hell is Tamiflu?’ It sounds like a Debbie-Reynolds-gets-a-cold flick.”

Both men stared at her.

Richard then chuckled, and said, “No, but it might give us a happy ending, just like her movies.”

“So what is it?”

“A neuraminidase inhibitor.”

“Called oseltamivir phosphate,” added Greg.

Richard raised his eyebrows at him. “Hey, I’m impressed, buddy.”

“Hey, yourself. I still read and keep up, you know, so no more ivory-tower cracks—”

“If you two don’t start speakin’ to me, and in English, I’ll be throwin’ the two of you off this buildin’—”

“Okay, okay,” said Richard, with a laugh. “Remember Julie Carr showed us those electron micrographs of influenza and all its bristles? She told us then that those structures contain neuraminidase, a molecule able to cleave the bond between the virus and a cell, setting the organism free to go off and find other cells in the body to infect. Tamiflu, given early enough, blocks that setting-free action. The flu bug can’t replicate and spread beyond the first cells infected as it usually does, so its damage is limited.”

“But will it work on the hybrid? Especially a hybrid delivered within a genetic vector.”

“That’s the million-dollar question,” said Stanton. “It won’t stop the vectors from entering cells and the initial replication of the virus. But it may block the spread of these organisms to other cells. The trouble is, even in ordinary flu, some strains have a slight variation in their neuraminidase, making it less susceptible to the drug’s blocking action. Whether this hybrid is one of those, we’ll only know when we try.” He slipped his arm around her shoulders and gave her a hug. “But it at least gives everyone, you two included, a fighting chance.” He looked over at Richard. “And now that it seems I’ve got my best friend back insulting me the way he always used to, I sure don’t intend to lose him to some damned bug.”

One of the police helicopters overhead broke out of the pack and moved to hover above the hospital helipad where the air ambulances usually landed. Within seconds of touching down, the door slid open and McKnight appeared. “Can I invite Drs. Sullivan and Steele to join me?” he called out. “You two won’t want to miss what happens next.”

The display was building to its climax when the head waiter took Patton by the elbow and said, “There appear to be some more guests at the door, sir.”

The environmentalist brightened, thinking that they might be some of the people he actually had wanted to come. “Oh, well invite them in. Better late than never, I always say.” He stood in the middle of the room, where he would be best framed by the view, his preferred spot for greeting people who visited his domain. He began to feel better. The mission must be complete by now, he thought. He’d had a few uneasy seconds a few minutes ago when he saw a dirty orange smudge in the direction of the East River impose itself on all the glitter. But no one else around him seemed to have even noticed, and he attributed it to one of the rockets misfiring.