Near Death (31 page)

The head of President Redland’s secret service detail, Andy Bostick, was only a few feet from the teahouse door when he heard the first shout. When he and a bevy of officers rushed in he saw that the Japanese and French head of states had pitched forward unconscious. The German chancellor looked woozy, like he was about to pass out. Bostick drew his machine pistol and scanned the room for assailants but there were none. He holstered his weapon and he and another agent grabbed Redland and rushed him toward the door, screaming into his cuff microphone, “This is a Code Nine! We’ve got Rushmore on route to the Stagecoach. Let Pivot know we’ll be at Nighthawk in two minutes. I want wheels up to Kansai the second we roll up. Tell Angel we’ll
be heading back to the Ranch as soon as the chopper touches down!”

As the president was being thrown into his limo in a daze, ambulances started screaming onto the palace grounds. Each head of state was being handled and evacuated by his or her own people. The limo sped off toward the Kenshun-mon Gate at one corner of the palace grounds and by the time it screeched to a stop at the side of Marine One, Redland was unconscious. Agents carried him up the stairs where a naval surgeon, a nurse, and his personal physician, Martin Meriwether, grabbed him and laid him out in the aisle. They quickly checked his vitals and hooked up a cardiac monitor. “What happened?” the surgeon shouted.

“All of them,” Bostick answered, “they’re all dropping like flies.”

“Poison,” the surgeon grunted, pulling a blood sample from an arm vein. “We may have to intubate him.”

“Not so fast,” Meriwether said, as the chopper lifted off. “His vitals are okay, his color’s good. He’s got tachycardia but his EKG looks fine. Let’s hang on. How long till we get to Air Force One?”

“Seven minutes,” Bostick said.

“I say let’s watch him. There’s nothing we can’t handle once we get there. This isn’t cyanide or something
immediately lethal. Let’s stay cool.”

Air Force One was fully fueled and waiting on the taxiway at Kansai International Airport. Redland was stretchered onto the big plane and they were airborne in two minutes flat.

In the medical bay, the doctors nervously stood over him, ready to intervene in any way necessary; but thirty minutes into the flight, he was waking up spontaneously, pulling at his chest leads, his eyelids fluttering in confusion.

“Are you okay, Mister President?” Meriwether asked.

“Jesus Christ, Martin!” Redland said, trying to sit up. “I don’t know what to say! I just saw my father. He was waiting for me in the most amazing place.” Redland’s eyes were wild and searching. “I don’t know how to tell you this so I’ll just say it. God was waiting for me too. I don’t know what the hell’s going on but it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

Meriwether looked at the doctors and agents crowded around the president’s bed. He said only one word. “Bliss.”

Forty-three

15 DAYS

“Are you all right?” she asked. He could hear her kettle whistling in the background.

Emily had been calling Cyrus at the end of every night and the beginning of every morning.

“Still nothing,” he said. “No leads.”

“I’m sorry. Any more photos?”

“Just the one. As of two days ago she was okay.”

“I’m sure she’s still okay. Did you get any sleep?”

“A couple of hours.”

“Can you rest today?”

“I’m in my car on the way to the airport,” he said. “There’s an emergency meeting of the task force.”

“About the G Eight?”

“How’d you guess?”

“Not much of a guess,” she admitted. “Will you call me later?”

“You know I will.”

The fallout from the G8 was seismic. The Bliss
epidemic and the Inner Peace Crusade’s countdown clock were already big news. Now there was nothing else, as if every other molecule had been sucked out of the news cycle and all that remained was Bliss—and every news channel had the Inner Peace Crusade countdown clock on a screen crawl.

When Cyrus arrived at the Roosevelt Room at the White House the other task force members shook his hand and whispered private words of concern for his daughter but he was determined to keep his travails private and said as little as possible.

Bob Cuccio delivered the briefing on the G8 fiasco. A member of the Imperial household, a senior butler named Shunji Murakami, had spiked the water kettle with Bliss and then committed suicide. According to his wife, he’d been using Bliss since it first appeared in Japan and had become obsessed with it. A search of his computer found he’d been sending messages to the Inner Peace Crusade website and had offered his services for a “great deed.”

Despite what the public had been told President Redland was not back to his normal self. After leaving the Bethesda Naval Hospital, he was taken to Camp David where he remained in relative seclusion, functional, but in a state of agitated anxiety. The attorney general and the chief justice of the Supreme Court had been in
consultations with the vice president and the cabinet but no one was inclined at the moment to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Redland was still compos mentis, at least legally, and the prevailing sentiment was that a transition of power would be seen as too disruptive in the midst of a crisis.

The same couldn’t be said for two other G8 attendees. The Canadian prime minister resigned from office citing psychological stress, and the French prime minister had attempted suicide when he returned to Paris, though news on that had been suppressed. The other world leaders seemed less affected, which, according to the government’s mental health experts, pretty well reflected the diversity of the Bliss experience among the general population.

The task force reiterated the urgency of tracking down Alex Weller and the group formally expressed their outrage at the kidnapping of Cyrus’s daughter. Cyrus bowed his head during the brief pronouncement then stood to give his report: The Inner Peace Crusade’s website was shuttling so fast from one proxy server to another that tracking down a physical location of Weller’s computer was impossible; the FBI’s hotline was inundated with purported Weller sightings but none had panned out. He concluded by saying, “It’s hard to imagine that anyone in the country hasn’t seen pictures
of Alex Weller or Joseph Weller.” He lowered his voice, “Or my daughter.”

The group went on to discuss contingency plans to protect against the poisoning of other government officials and the need for the urgent development of a Bliss rapid-detection assay to efficiently screen water and food channels. The CDC and FDA were investigating an outbreak of putative nonintentional Bliss intoxications in New England, and the breaking news as of that morning was that beer from Meecham’s brewery well may be involved. A team of inspectors was en route to the brewery in Merrimack, New Hampshire, with the intention of a precautionary shutdown and emergency recall. The DEA was devoting its full resources to identifying the major suppliers of Bliss and decapitating the epidemic. At the end of the meeting, an assistant secretary of the Treasury made a brief presentation on a new ominous issue: the growing economic impact of Bliss usage. Some leading indicators of industrial productivity and consumer confidence were showing slippage and the markets were reacting badly. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve were following the situation closely and the assistant secretary promised to provide the task force with more data when available. On that note, the meeting was over.

Alex poked his head into Tara’s bedroom.

“How’s my girl?” he asked.

She was clutching Freddy the Teddy, watching a video on a portable DVD player. The room was littered with new toys that Erica and Jessie had bought her on their shopping trips to Ellsworth. Erica was sitting on an armchair, reading a book.

“Fine,” Tara said listlessly.

“That’s good; let me have a closer look.” He felt her pulse, checked her pupils and eye movements.

“When can I go home?” she asked.

“Soon,” Alex said. “Very soon.”

“Can I talk to Mommy?”

Erica’s lower lip trembled. “Not today, maybe tomorrow,” Alex said.

“Daddy?”

“Doctor Alex has to go now. You give our patient anything she wants, okay, Erica?”

Erica swallowed and nodded.

It was a long drive to New Haven, but Alex was happy to leave the house again. The brewery raid had been exciting and he’d been looking forward to more “direct
action.” He assembled the same travel team as before: Sam and Steve up front, he and Jessie in the backseat. They arrived after dark at the warehouse of the Beaver Brook Water Company, a company that provided coolers and five-gallon bottles of spring water to homes and businesses in Connecticut and New York.

The parking lot was nearly empty. Steve got out of the van, stretched and slowly started walking toward a single car. A man got out of the sedan. “You Jason?” Steve called out.

“Yeah,” the man said nervously. “You with them?”

Steve nodded. “Everything cool?”

“Yeah. Pull into the garage behind me. I’ve got my truck in there. Will I meet him? Alex?”

“Definitely. He wants to shake your hand, man.”

Jason Harris, the Beaver Brook driver, closed the garage door after Sam pulled in. Steve got out first and checked the place out, his hand on the gun in his jacket. When he was satisfied they were alone he signaled it was okay for the rest of them to get out. When Alex emerged, Jason was rock star dumbstruck until Alex warmly greeted him and gave him a strong hug.

“Thank you,” Alex said. “This is going to help us a lot.”

“Whatever you need to do,” Jason said to them, “let’s get going with it—I’ve got to roll out of here at five A.M.”

“We’re ready to work.”

“I gave my crew the day off. You’ll be able to help me with the deliveries?”

“I’m a little recognizable,” Alex said, “so I’ll stay in the van with Jessie, but Sam and Steve are your guys. They’re trainable.”

Jason smiled. “They only need to push a dolly.”

They got down to the task. There were pallets of several hundred five-gallon water bottles laid out before them. They used syringes to draw up a concentrated solution of Bliss from a plastic canteen then injected a precise volume through the top of each plastic water bottle with large-bore needles. A spot of superglue was applied to seal the holes and each bottle was given a good shake.

They finished loading the delivery truck after midnight and crawled back into the van for a sleep. Jason napped in the cab of his truck. A little before 5 A.M., Jason woke them with a large sack of fast-food breakfast and a tray of coffees, and in the thin light of dawn he drove out of the garage with Sam following closely behind.

Beaver Brook serviced a number of New York investment
banks and hedge funds. Jason made his first stop at 6:30 in midtown at the service entrance to Sproutt and Company, a large bond-trading operation. While Alex and Jessie waited in the van, Steve and Sam donned Beaver Brook baseball caps and helped Jason unload and stack the rectangular bottles on dollies.

On each floor of Sproutt they sought out the Beaver Brook watercoolers in the break rooms and kitchens, and systematically replaced the bottles in use with new ones. By the time they’d finished, the offices and trading floors were packed. At their last stop, a break room on the thirty-eighth floor, Sam nudged Steve to make sure he noticed a young man filling a jug with new water and pouring it into a coffeemaker.

Outside, they gave each other fist bumps and drove away to their next stop, a hedge fund on Sixth Avenue.

The management of Sproutt knew they had a problem on their hands by midmorning. Throughout the building, dozens of people who used water for coffee and cold drinks dozed unresponsively at their desks and computer terminals then awoke in varied states of agitation, confusion, and reverie.

A flood of 911 calls hit the system, ambulances started to arrive and by lunchtime all trading operations
shut down. Emergency personnel on the scene and doctors in the crowded emergency rooms quickly made the diagnosis of mass Bliss intoxication. An army of police and public health officials descended on the quarantined building but by the time the bottled water was identified as the likely source, over 200 employees had been affected, many of them never to return to work.

Just when the authorities thought the situation was under control, the next wave hit at Paddington Ventures on Sixth Ave.; then another at Briggs Asset Management downtown on Broad Street; and a last at the Cantwell Bank on Wall Street.

Alex gleefully listened to news radio stations on their way back to New Haven. Mass warnings were broadcast cautioning against drinking from commercial watercoolers. At least a thousand people had been hospitalized and panic was sweeping the city.

With every breathless report Alex excitedly tousled the hair of Sam and Steve in the front seat and squeezed Jessie’s thigh. He couldn’t wait for the moment Sam could pull out his laptop and post an announcement on their website.

“This is a great day!” Alex exclaimed. “And it’s just the beginning.”

Earlier that morning, Jim Bailey drove his oil truck up the long driveway and brought the heavy vehicle to a stop at High Cliffs. The old man eased himself down from the cab and ambled over to the front door. The ocean breeze carried a sweet hint of spring but Bailey, a lifelong native of Bar Harbor, hardly noticed. It was just the beginning of another long workday. He pushed the buzzer with a thick finger.

When he heard the doorbell Joe Weller wondered if Davis Fox had locked himself out after his morning jog. He put his coffee cup down. He was alone on the ground floor. Everyone else was still in bed. He opened the door, expecting to see Davis, but there was the oil man instead.

“Oh yeah, hi there,” the old man said. “Bailey’s Oil. You part of the Parris family?”

“No,” Joe said, hesitating. “I’m a friend.”

“Any family about?”

“Erica’s upstairs, I think.”

“We got an automatic low oil alert back at the office. You weren’t due for a refill till later in the month. Thermostat must’ve been set higher than usual for the off season. I expect you want a delivery today, right?”