Spiral (19 page)

21

THE HELICOPTER CARRYING THE POTENTIALLY CATASTROPHIC
payload flew at three thousand feet over the outskirts of Frederick, Maryland. Through the Huey’s window, Dunne watched the rows of houses and crisscrossing streets jammed with morning traffic pass underneath them. He checked his watch: eight a.m.—rush hour. Dunne couldn’t help think about the madness of Fort Detrick’s location. Ground zero for biowarfare—the place that kept the most dangerous agents ever devised by man or nature—should be off the map, housed somewhere in the desert or the badlands of South Dakota. Instead it was in the middle of the second-largest city in Maryland, a mere fifty miles from Washington, D.C. If the Uzumaki got out, Detrick would be the command center for the fight to stop it.

The Huey banked as they crossed the north entrance guard shack. Dunne watched the Eight Ball, the four-story steel globe used during the fifties and sixties to test the efficacy of bioweapon dispersion and aerosolization, pass beneath them. Since the forties, Detrick had been the focal point for U.S. chemical and biological weapons efforts, but had fallen on hard times after biological weapons were banned in 1972. Now she was in the middle of a new growth spurt, due in no small part to his efforts. The one-two punch of September 11 and the anthrax attacks had put bioterrorism back at the center of the national security agenda. Buildings were going up as fast as they could be slapped together on the twelve-hundred-acre site, creating the largest concentration of class-3 and class-4 biohazard facilities in the United States. This included Toloff’s dedicated and highly secret facility for Uzumaki research and countermeasure development.

Toloff was up front, making arrangements with the ground crews for their arrival. The copilot unstrapped himself and came back to Dunne’s seat. He knelt next to Dunne, yelling to be heard over the noise of the rotors. “Sir, I’ve been told to deliver you a message from the national security adviser’s office. I quote: ‘Get your ass to the White House.’ ”

Dunne couldn’t help smiling. His superior, National Security Adviser Marvin Alex, was an old Washington hand who’d done stints at State and Defense for both Republican and Democratic administrations. His salty language was SOP.

“Should I send a response, sir?”

“Tell him I’ll be there to help him hold hands inside of two hours.”

Dunne had already triggered the U protocol, a series of escalating steps to be followed in case of a potential Uzumaki outbreak. They were at level 2 until the Uzumaki infection in the Japanese kid could be verified. At level 2, the CDC, USAMRIID, and all the various alphabet soup of federal agencies quietly started procedures to ready themselves for full-blown response, like a giant beast awakening for the final battle at Armageddon.

Dunne pulled out his laptop and brought up the two photos of the young Chinese woman: one taken by the security camera on the bridge at Cornell, the other by a passerby in Times Square.

Who the hell are you?

Two years ago, Dunne had led a small team of bioweapons experts and epidemiologists through a series of worst-case scenarios for the Uzumaki: a terrorist group gets ahold of one of the missing cylinders, or the Chinese dig it up at Harbin and decide to use it in a preemptive attack. Without an effective treatment or a vaccine—both of which were months, if not years, away—the number of dead from even a single-point-of-dispersal event could be in the millions. A lone actor could single-handedly trigger a disaster of cataclysmic proportions.

DUNNE WAS OUT OF HIS SEAT THE MOMENT THE HELICOPTER
sat down on the helipad next to the main USAMRIID building. Toloff was already on the tarmac, barking orders at the ground crew. Dunne watched as the Hazmat container was wheeled away, then followed Toloff as they jogged along Ditto Avenue through the heart of Detrick.

Toloff pointed to the red-brick building up ahead. “In under an hour we’ll know exactly how much shit we’re in. We’ll crack open the vault in a class-3 area, move the sealed biosafety containers into class-4. I’ll run everything from there.”

Dunne grabbed her arm. “I’m going to be talking to the President in a few minutes. He’s going to want an answer, good or bad.”

She didn’t have to reply. Her anguished face said it all.

22

JAKE AND VLAD DROVE PAST ONE DILAPIDATED HOUSE AFTER
another, their yards filled with cast-off farm equipment, auto parts, and washer-dryers. Buffalo Road was only ten miles from downtown Ithaca but a world away. Central New York was mostly rural poor, dotted by old industrial towns. Ithaca was an anomaly, an educational mecca with twenty thousand or so overeducated academics and artists plunked down at the northern edge of Appalachia.

Vlad leaned forward. “Slow down,” he said. “I want to live to be an old man.”

“We’re fine,” Jake said. He glanced at the speedometer—seventy-five. Fine, unless they crested a hill and found a tractor coming the other way.

“Please,” Vlad said. “I am convinced I will make a very good old man.”

Jake kept the gas on as they passed an abandoned farmhouse, the roof swaybacked and peppered with holes, the windows covered in rotting particleboard. A stack of rusted wheel rims in the yard had fallen over, spreading across the yard like poker chips on a blackjack table. An old grain silo stood in the field behind it, the front gone, save the metal staves like the rib cage of a long-dead animal.

“Why would anyone live out here when they don’t have to?” Jake asked.

“He likes a place to shoot his guns.” Vlad also had a thing for guns. The Cornell police arrested him once after they’d received calls of a strange man firing a pistol into Cascadilla Gorge. “What the hell are you doing?” the arresting officer had asked.

“Shooting at rocks.”

“Why?”

“Rocks don’t shoot back.”

Vlad tapped Jake on the shoulder. “Okay, slow down. There.”

JAKE PARKED BEHIND A BRAND-NEW JET-BLACK CADILLAC
Escalade, and they started up the walk. Uncut weeds poked up between the stepping stones. At first glance, Harpo’s place blended in with the rest. The yard was full of junk like all the others, but this junkyard was more of a high-tech graveyard. Computer servers. Broken monitors. Various things Jake couldn’t identify for sure, but they looked like burned-out versions of what he saw in bio labs: centrifuges, hot plates, PCR cyclers. There was even a DNA synthesizer.

“We don’t tell him anything about why we want this,” Jake said. “We agree?”

“Don’t worry. He will not ask.”

The door to the house was new, with the flat brown paneling that Jake recognized as the vinyl covering of a reinforced steel door. There were two dead bolts in addition to the knob, and a small security camera above the door encased in a little black cage.

The front door opened before they could knock. A big man stood there, maybe six-three, two-fifty. Thick through the waist and even thicker through the chest. He wore sweatpants, orange Crocs on his feet, and a T-shirt advertising a Cambridge bar called the Plough & Stars. He had a Snickers bar in his hand.

It wasn’t hard to see where he got the name Harpo. On his head was a shock of curly white hair, almost like a fright wig. “This Jake?” he said to Vlad. “The Crawler guy?”

“He is the one.”

He welcomed them in, gregarious and open, a contrast to all the security measures. He threw an arm around Jake. “I love your little robots, would kill to get my hands on a few. You might sell me some? Been trying to pry some loose from Boris Badenov here,” he said with a glance at Vlad, “but he ain’t biting.” He let go of Jake, turned serious. “Think about it. I could make you good money—two hundred bucks apiece, easy. Conversation pieces for technophiles. You teach it to dance the Macarena to an MP3, I bet we could get five times that. What do you say? You interested?”

Jake passed, a bit too gruffly. He was already antsy. He just wanted to get the DNA sequenced and get back to Maggie.

Harpo took it gracefully. “Come on.”

The interior of Harpo’s house was a total contrast to the outside. The living room was well lit and relatively clean but completely devoid of furniture. Instead it was full of computer servers, most of them dark. “You want an HP BladeSystem c7000?” Harpo said, patting one of the silent server stacks. “I’ll sell it to you cheap. Got no use for them now. I ran a data-mining service for a while. We generated customer profiles based on Web surfing patterns, but now everyone’s gotten into that game. You want easy pickings, you gotta be in at the beginning. Selling something no one else does.” He smiled. “Like I’m doing now.”

“What do you sell?”

“You ever heard of vanity publishers? You write a book and the big houses won’t buy? For a fee, a vanity publisher will print your book for you, churn out a hundred copies, a thousand, whatever you pay for. Enough copies to give to your friends and pretend you’re a big-time author. Well, I’m a vanity publisher, too. But I publish in DNA.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning DNA publishing is your chance to expand your print run to astronomical scales. Any message you want, I’ll encode it in DNA, run PCR on it, and send you a
billion
copies.” He held up a small vial of clear liquid. “This one’s shipping today.”

“You’re kidding. Who buys this stuff?”

“You name it. Frustrated poets. Novelists. One woman had me make six billion copies of her poem, one for every human on the planet. It stank, by the way. All about calla lilies. Another guy, some religious nut, wanted the Sermon on the Mount. He carries a little mister with him, like for perfumes? Everywhere he goes, he gives a little squirt. Says he’s spreading peace and joy. But it pays the bills.”

He led them down the hall, past a door that opened to the bathroom, then on to another room, what Jake surmised had once been the master bedroom. The door had been taken off the hinges. In its place was a series of plastic transparent curtains. “Keeps the dust down,” he said as he pulled them back. “Here it is. My manufacturing facility.”

Jake was taken aback. He had expected a few beakers and gels, but nothing like this. The onetime master bedroom was a full-fledged biotech lab. Along the wall were black-topped lab benches with overhead cabinets, all of it new and shiny. On the countertops were the standard fare of a modern biology lab: centrifuges, pipettes, shakers, and row upon row of reagents. Except for a few odd-looking pieces that were clearly homemade, Jake could have been in any of a hundred research labs at Cornell. It was as if a crane had plucked a room from the Life Science Technology Building and plopped it down on Buffalo Road.

“How much did all this cost you?”

“Not more than forty K. I got most of it on DoveBid—it’s an industrial equipment online auctioneer. Wait for a biotech firm to go belly-up, you can get deals. Not like the deals I did a few years back during the telecom bust, but not bad. The rest I made myself. This stuff ain’t rocket science. What’s a PCR cycler but a fancy Crock Pot?” He turned to face Vlad. “Okay, you Russian piece of shit, I’m assuming you didn’t bring Captain Robot Bug here so I could bring his prose to life.”

“You ready for challenge?” Vlad held up the tiny vial with the DNA from Liam’s glowing fungus inside. “We need sequence.”

“Concentration?”

“Unknown.”

“How homogeneous?”

“Don’t know.”

“How long is the strand?”

“Don’t know.”

“But you have the primer sequence?”

Vlad nodded.

“And when do you want it?”

“Now.”

Harpo took the vial. He turned to Jake. “Here’s the deal, sport. Two hundred bucks an hour, plus supplies. And I keep the time sheet in my head. Cash only. No checks. No Visa, no MasterCard. And no American Express.”