Spiral (27 page)

37

THE QUARANTINE WING AT DETRICK WAS CALLED “THE SLAMMER.”

There were seven rooms, each with a bed and a window that looked out on an observation room. A telephone allowed visitors in the observation room to talk to the quarantined person. From what Jake had been told, they sat empty almost all the time, reserved for the rare accident in the BSL-4 facility, where a cut on a glove or an improperly seated seal could expose an individual to a level-4 pathogen, such as Marburg or Ebola.

Jake was in one of the quarantine rooms, had been since four in the morning. Dylan was in the next one over. Where Maggie was, no one knew.

THE EXPLOSION AT SENECA ARMY DEPOT HAD BROUGHT
everyone from the Geneva Fire Department to the CIA. Jake was half deaf as he tried to answer the questions yelled at him by authorities ranging from the local police to the FBI. He kept yelling back, demanding they put every man on the search for the FedEx van with Maggie tied up in the back. They assured him that roadblocks had been set up, helicopters were scouring the region. But the searchers found nothing.

By secure linkup, Jake had told Dunne and General Anthony Arvenick, the head of Detrick, everything he knew. Within an hour, Jake and Dylan had been placed in containment suits and airlifted out. As soon as they were airborne, a series of bombers swept in and dropped incinerating explosives on a mile-wide stretch of the depot. The sky was an orange hell. Jake saw the white deer running for their lives, trying to stay ahead of the flames.

They’d landed at Andrews Air Force Base in the middle of the night. From Andrews, it had been a ride in a convoy to Detrick, where they had been ushered into the slammer, Jake and Dylan in separate rooms. A steady stream of tests had followed: Jake was poked and prodded, and had a huge amount of blood drawn and saliva samples taken, along with a painful procedure during which they scraped tissue from his lung using a long arthroscopic device. They had also loaded him up with Amphotericin, an antifungal medicine.

After that came the debriefings. He told his story again and again, enduring question after question, his hands in bandages, his lungs still raw. He hadn’t had a moment to think until a half-hour ago. The DNA marker tests that they were running next door in the BSL-4 lab would be done by eleven a.m.

It was ten-fifty.

Jake paced the cage. His ears still hurt like hell, but his hearing was coming back in stages. According to Albert Roscoe, the head physician, a wiry, mid-fifties man with leathery skin and clear blue eyes, another day would be needed to see if the damage was permanent.

Jake didn’t care about his hearing or the burns on his hands. He fixed his thoughts on Dylan, thinking about how that brave little kid had tried to dump the Uzumaki. He had opened the cylinder, sucked out half of it, spit it on the floor of the bunker. But Orchid had gotten to him before he could do the same with the other half.

Dylan was asleep now, finally. They let Jake talk to him by telephone about two hours ago. They were only a few feet apart, but they might as well have been across the country.

Dylan and he had talked quite a while, mostly about Maggie. Dylan was so worried about her. Jake tried to keep some distance from that. He was already thinking too much about her, more than was good for him. There was nothing he could do about Maggie right now but try to help her son.

Dr. Roscoe told Jake what symptoms to watch for, what the Uzumaki would do to a human being. They had the records from what had happened on the USS
Vanguard
, as well as from the files recovered from Unit 731. Apparently there had also been some tests run on American prisoners in the late fifties, lifers willing to trade risk for a shot at a bigger cell and better food. The symptoms would show up inside of a day, the low temperatures, the sweats, the nervous energy, the itchy skin. From there, the visual hallucinations would start, the general deconstruction of the personality, leaving a raving, dangerous maniac.

Jake felt fine. No hint of a symptom. But Jake had a terrible feeling in his chest. Dr. Roscoe had Dylan’s medical records retrieved from his GP in Ithaca. Dylan had been on penicillin antibiotics twice in the last six months, most recently five weeks before. Just before Dylan went to sleep, he had said that he was feeling light-headed. And that he was sweating.

A RUCKUS IN THE HALL. JAKE WAS ON HIS FEET, WATCHING
the action in the main hallway through two sets of windows. They ushered in a man in an isolation suit identical to the ones Jake and Dylan had worn. Jake caught a glimpse of his face: good-looking, middle-American boy, scared half to death, looked like he couldn’t be more than thirty.

Roscoe showed up in the observation room soon after. He picked up the phone, motioning for Jake to do the same.

“What happened?” Jake asked.

“He found one of your Crawlers in a children’s park in Rochester. It bit him. They think it had the Uzumaki inside it.”

“She’s using them as vectors.”

Roscoe nodded. “We’re proceeding worst-case, even though we got to the guy within ten minutes of contact with the vector. We’ve also quarantined the team that picked him up.”

“Wait. Ten minutes? How did you get there so fast?”

“I don’t know. Look. Let us worry about him. I have news. Your tests are back. The DNA arrays and the cultures are negative. No signs of the Uzumaki in your lungs, in your stomach. You’re completely clean so far. We’ll keep you in quarantine the next few days, just to be sure. But the odds are you’re clean.”

“What about Dylan?”

Roscoe hesitated. “We’re not finished with his.”

“Why? Why are mine finished and not his?”

“There was an issue with contamination with Dylan’s lung sample. We have to run it again.”

“Contamination? In a BSL-4 lab?” Roscoe was hiding the truth. “You know something, tell me.”

“There are people here to see you.”

“Goddamn it. Tell me.”

“Let us finish the tests, Jake. We’ll know for sure soon. There are people here to see you.”

JAKE’S VISITORS WERE IN UNIFORM, A MAN AND A WOMAN
.

“I’m Colonel Daniel Wheeler, USAMRIID. This is Major Melissa Larkspur.”

“I’m an electronics expert out of Wright-Patterson in Dayton. I’ve been studying your Crawlers, exploring ways to stop them. Orchid,” Larkspur said, “programmed the Crawler at Rochester to respond to a thermal signal and strike. We checked the registers on the flash drive. The last program she entered was there.”

“Orchid appears to know a great deal about your Crawlers,” Wheeler said. “We’re looking to see if she hacked into your computer system.”

“She wouldn’t have to. We had a kind of owner’s manual on a Wiki. Open access. My student made it. Joe Xu.”

“Xinjian Xu?” Wheeler said. “The FBI has him in custody.”

“Custody?
Why?
”

He brushed off the question.

Larkspur asked, “How sensitive are your Crawlers to electromagnetic pulses? Do you ever blow out the electronics?”

“On occasion. Why?”

“We’re trying to figure out if we can knock them out with an electromagnetic pulse.”

“An EMP weapon? You’ve got to be kidding. You’re contemplating setting off a nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere? It would knock out a decent fraction of the nation’s communications infrastructure.”

“We have smaller versions. Non-nuclear. Ones that can take out all the electronics in a fixed area. Anything from a single building to an entire city.”

“You really think you can disable the Crawlers with an EMP?”

“That’s what we hoped to find out from you.”

“This Wiki,” Wheeler said. “It had the plans to build the Crawlers?”

“Sure. It had everything. The CAD files for all the mask levels. Detailed procedures.”

Larkspur looked pained. “That’s where she got them,” she said to Wheeler.

“Got what? We’re a federally funded academic research lab. Everything is open access. There’s nothing illegal about that. Now. Why is Joe Xu in custody?”

“He’s a Chinese national.”

“So?”

“He could have shared the designs with—”

“I told you, it was all available. There’s nothing to …” Jake suddenly put the pieces together. “Why are you worried about the designs for the Crawlers?”

Larkspur said, “Because two months ago a woman matching Orchid’s description placed an order with a Taiwanese silicon foundry called Unafab. It specializes in custom electronic and microelectromechanical systems. The CIA has had them under surveillance since 2007. They’re known to take any work they can get, including from military and even terror groups. Two weeks ago, that order was picked up, supposedly by a Chinese company called Star Technologies. We haven’t been able to find out anything on the company. But we do have a photo from the pickup.”

She slid the photo across the table. The shot was from a distance, but Jake recognized her easily. “Orchid,” Jake said. “You think she ordered a manufacturing run of Crawlers.”

“We know.”

She showed Jake the video of Orchid and the glass sphere filled with Crawlers.

AFTER AN HOUR OF QUESTIONS, JAKE WAS LEFT ALONE WITH
his thoughts.

They’d gone over it from every angle. The Crawlers used a standard silicon foundry chip set. They were not particularly vulnerable to EMPs because they had no external wires to act as antennas. The Army had, over the last decade, run an extremely thorough set of EMP tests on handheld devices and laptops. Now they were about to run a series using Crawlers from Jake’s lab at Cornell. If they were lucky, they would find a strong electromagnetic resonance, a frequency where the Crawler acted as a particularly good antenna. Then they could engineer the EMP bomb to hit it hardest at that frequency.

They had their plans. But as Jake knew, sometimes things didn’t go as planned. And if they failed—if the Crawlers released the fungus, the results could be catastrophic.

Jake remembered a quote by William Osler, one of the forefathers of modern medicine: “Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.”

Osler had seen the ravages of a world war. Sixteen million people had died in World War I, including three hundred thousand at Verdun alone. Sixteen million in four years. But the influenza that followed in 1918 killed many times that number in a matter of months.

And it wasn’t only the number of dead. A biological threat tore apart a society. War, for all its horror, galvanized a nation, pulled it together against a common opponent. But fever was a different kind of enemy. It struck from within, driving everyone into paranoid isolation, afraid of touching anyone around them. Jake had experienced it firsthand during the Gulf War. When the chem/bio weapons alarms went off and you put on your suit, you were alone and powerless inside that sweaty cocoon.

No honor, only suffering. Courage was useless against a bacterium, a fungal spore, a virus that slipped into you by water, by touch, by breath. No way to be brave in the face of danger when the danger was beyond your ability to see. There were no war memorials to influenza victims in towns across America. Those people just suffered and died, and everyone tried their best to forget any of it had ever happened.

An Uzumaki epidemic would be much worse than the 1918 flu pandemic, both in numbers and in the nature of the illness itself. The flu attacked only your body, but the Uzumaki turned you into a raving maniac, suicidal at best, homicidal at worst. An Uzumaki epidemic would be like hell on earth.

Jake paced his cell, wanted to punch the Plexiglas window separating him from the outside. Thousands of Crawlers. She could release them in waves, at hundreds of locations simultaneously. If only a few succeeded, that would be enough. He had seen a map once, showing the travel patterns of people, tracked by their cellphones. Dense mats of lines connecting the major hubs of L.A., Chicago, New York, Boston, and Seattle. Smaller lines fanning out everywhere else. Infect just a few people, let them spread out, go to work, go to school, stop by the local Walmart, get on a plane for California to see a friend. In a matter of days the Uzumaki could be everywhere. At that point, there was no way to stop it.