The Cobra Event (27 page)

“What?”

“An art historian, Frank. Someone who can look at the boxes and tell us where they came from.”

A Brief History of Art

FRANK MASACCIO
flew back to Manhattan, where he stationed himself in the Federal Building. Within the hour a helicopter landed on Governors Island carrying a professor of folk art from New York University. His name was Herschel Alquivir.

The New York office of the F.B.I. had called Professor Alquivir on the telephone and reached him at his apartment on the Upper West Side. They wanted to know if he could help them identify a work of carved wooden folk art. Could he do it right now? Would that be too much trouble?

He agreed to help. He was stunned when, less than sixty seconds after he hung up the telephone, a team of federal agents knocked on the door of his apartment. They had been waiting in cars on the street. He was rushed in a Bureau car with police escort—three police cars moving ahead, breaking up traffic with their sirens and lights—to the West Side heliport. Professor Alquivir was flown to Governors Island, in a state of increasing alarm at what he had gotten himself into.

They brought him into the meeting room and showed him the door that led into the decon room and the Core. The door was plastered with biohazard signs. Hopkins showed Professor Alquivir how to put on an F.B.I. biohazard suit, and then the professor examined the boxes. He was a slender man, middle-aged, with a passion for carved wooden objects. He maintained a calm demeanor. Finally he said, “These boxes are children’s toys. I think they were made in East Africa. I’m quite sure of it. Cobras don’t live in East Africa, they live in Egypt, India, and other parts of southern Asia. But the king cobra is known, of course, to many people around the world. And there is a large Indian population in East Africa. I see Indian influences in this box, but the type of object is fundamentally African. This is a type of toy that’s not uncommon, I believe, in East Africa. Because of the Indian influence—the cobra—I should say the place of manufacture might be near the coast of the Indian Ocean, where Indian influence is strongest.”

At 9:30 that night, two agents from the New York office of the F.B.I. departed on a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, with a connection to Nairobi.

Washington

TUESDAY, APRIL
28

ARCHIMEDES HAD COMPLETED
the first phase of his human trials. The boxes were Phase I trials. During a course of medical experimentation upon humans in a Phase I trial, you test small amounts of a new experimental drug on subjects. Phase I trials are safety trials. Having seen the announcement of the boxes on the television news, Archimedes understood that the Phase I safety trials of brainpox showed it was unsafe for humans. Given this success, he would move into Phase II. During Phase II, you increase the dosage and the numbers of people tested. He felt reasonably confident that the results would be satisfactory, but he wanted to have more assurance. After that would come the Phase III trial, when he would give a huge loading dose of brainpox to the human species.

He was uncertain about whether they were looking for him by now, uncertain as to what they might have conjectured about him, if anything.

He was walking through the concourse of Penn Station with a flask containing one hexagon of viral glass tucked in his pocket. He stood looking at the Amtrak departures on the big display board. A Metroliner train was due to be leaving in ten minutes for Washington, D.C. He paid cash for a round-trip ticket to Washington. I have not seen Washington in weeks, he thought. Human trials can occur anywhere humans live.

He had a pleasant lunch of a vegetable pocket pita sandwich on the train, and he enjoyed the green countryside. He delighted in the bridge over the Susquehanna River where it drained into Chesapeake Bay, and he drank a glass of white wine to help himself relax and to steady his resolve. Bridges are beautiful. They are constructive and mathematical. They are one of the good things that humans make.

IN THE METRO CENTER STATION
of the Washington Metro, at midday, a man was sitting on one of the concrete benches along the wall of the station platform. He was breathing rather heavily, as if he was short of breath. A train came along. The man took a deep breath and stood up. As he was walking toward the train, he threw something along the platform, casually, as if he was discarding a bit of trash, and he stepped onto the train. The trash was a shiny bit of plastic, perhaps. It broke into pieces and was quickly trodden underfoot by passing crowds. No one noticed that the man was wearing a flesh-colored latex rubber glove on his right hand or that he was holding his breath when he got on the train. He continued to hold his breath for almost a minute afterward. “Ah,” he said, letting out his breath as the train proceeded along the tunnel, heading in the direction of Union Station, where Amtrak trains will take you anywhere. He dropped his rubber glove in a trash can somewhere in Union Station.

Dust

GOVERNORS ISLAND, TUESDAY

THE FACE
of an F.B.I. metallurgist appeared on a screen in Reachdeep. “This Q dust you sent us is a type of medium-carbon steel. The annealed structure of the particles would indicate they formed through a pressure process such as the hot rolling process.”

“Railroad track,” Austen said to Hopkins.

“There’s more,” the metallurgist said. “We found a grain of something that looks like pollen.”

“Pollen? What kind?”

“We’re trying to find out right now.”

THE F.B.I
. consulted Dr. Edgar Adlington, a palynologist (pollen expert) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. A special agent named Chuck Klurt walked across the Mall from F.B.I. headquarters to the brown towers of the Smithsonian. Klurt took an elevator to the basement.

Dr. Adlington was hunched over his desk in a windowless room that smelled of old books and dried leaves. He was examining a flower under a magnifying lamp.

Special Agent Klurt placed some microscope photographs of a single grain of pollen in front of Dr. Adlington. “We have a little problem. Can you tell me what this is?”

“Well, it is a pollen grain.”

“Any idea what it came from, Dr. Adlington?”

“Why do you people have to give me just one grain? Do you take me for a psychic? This is not the kind of thing I can just look up in a book.”

“But could you help?” Special Agent Klurt asked.

“Yes, indeed,” he answered. “The problem, while challenging, is not insurmountable. What did you say your name is?”

“Klurt.”

“Now, Mr. Klurt.” Adlington flipped through the photographs, studying them. The pollen grain looked like a wrinkled football that had grooves running down the seams of the ball. He took a ruler and laid it on the photograph, while his finger traced features on the pollen grain and he glanced at Klurt every now and then to make sure that Klurt understood. “See, here—what we have here is a colporoidate sporomorph, actually three-colpate, about thirty microns long on the polar axis, in a prolate spheroid with a polar-to-equatorial axis ratio of approximately 1.5, I would
say
, while the sexine—do you see the sexine, Klurt?—you have to bear in mind that the sexine, here, is thicker but not
terribly
much thicker than the nexine, and it is densely reticulate with heterobrochate form,
viz
, muri simplibaculate—do you follow me?”

“Yeah.”

“This pollen grain may come from one of several families of the Caprifoliaecae or certain of the Celastraccae, but if I
had
to say, I would place it in the family Oleaceae.”

“Mmmm—”

“Yes. And I would venture to say we are looking at
intermedia or japonica
. Perhaps I am going too far out on a limb, here, Mr. Klurt, but I would hazard a guess—just a guess!—that this pollen grain comes from none other than
Forsythia intermedia
‘Spectabilis.’ ” He handed the photographs back to Special Agent Klurt.

“So what is it?” the agent asked.

“I told you, it’s forsythia! A flowering shrub. ‘Spectabilis’ is the most beautiful type of forsythia, with large vivid yellow flowers that bloom in April. It is the most popular forsythia in America.”

Forsythia blooms in many places around New York City in the spring. Knowing that the pollen came from forsythia could not help pin down the location of the Unsub. The grain of pollen seemed untraceable.

THE COBRA
boxes themselves came under the scrutiny of a consultant in tropical wood, a middle-aged professor of plant cellular biology from American University in Washington named Lorraine Schild. She arrived at Governors Island in a state of terror.

Professor Schild stood in the decon room before the door that led into the Evidence Core. She was dressed in surgical scrubs. Austen and Tanaka were helping her step into a black F.B.I. biohazard space suit.

“I don’t think I can do it,” she said. Her voice quavered.

They pleaded with her. They shooed Hopkins and Littleberry away while they tried to reassure her.

“It’s my worst fear,” she said. “There’s a horrible virus in there, isn’t there?”

“We’ve been all right, so far,” Tanaka said.

“We really need your help,” Austen said.

Finally they prevailed on Dr. Schild, and she suited up and went into the Core. She sat down at a microscope and looked at the wood in the boxes. Austen sat next to her. Dr. Schild’s voice came out of her Racal hood, muffled and weak. When she had signed a consulting contract with the F.B.I. two years earlier, she had had no idea it could lead to this. She kept turning her faceplate this way and that, trying to see into the microscope. “The wood cellular structure is extremely fine-grained,” she said “This is a very hard wood. The darker streaks are heartwood. The curvature of the rings indicates that it’s the center of a small trunk. I believe this is a flowering legume. A wood this hard would suggest it is a type of acacia tree. I can’t tell you exactly the species of acacia. There are so many acacias.”

“Where does it grow?” Hopkins asked.

“In habitats all over eastern Africa. Can I leave now?”

They took her out and deconned her in the decon room, spraying her with bleach. Dr. Schild refused to get back on the Black Hawk helicopter. She asked to be put on a civilian flight back to Washington.

Nairobi

WEDNESDAY

FRANK MASACCIO
had taken to sleeping in the Federal Building, where he had a bed in a room the size of a closet. At one o’clock in the morning, he put in a telephone call to Nairobi, to the Old Norfolk Hotel, where two agents from his office, Almon Johnston and Link Peters, had checked in some hours earlier. It was now Wednesday morning in Kenya. Masaccio told them about the wood. He suggested they look for shopkeepers selling cobra boxes made of acacia wood.

Special Agent Johnston was a tall African-American who had lived in Kenya for a year when he’d been posted there as a sales manager for an American company that did business in Africa, before he’d joined the F.B.I., so he knew his way around. Peters worked in the foreign counterintelligence division of the Bureau. He had never been to Africa in his life.

They were joined by an officer from the Kenya National Police, Inspector Joshua Kipkel, who provided them with a car and a driver. Neither agent knew where to begin looking, but Inspector Kipkel suggested they try some of the better shops—they are called houses—on Tom Mboya Street and Standard Street in downtown Nairobi. So they drove down the streets, stopping at the shops. They looked at the goods for sale. Occasionally the F.B.I. agents purchased something in order to sweeten relations with the shopkeepers. The agents showed them photographs of the cobra boxes. All of them said they had seen such boxes, but they said that they were out of stock at the present time. One shopkeeper offered to ship a cargo container full of cobra boxes to New York but he said he would need a large cash deposit up front. “I shall have this container shipped to you at a special price.” Inspector Kipkel spoke to the man sharply in Kiswahili.

“
M’zuri sana
,” Johnston said to the shopkeepers. To Peters and Kipkel, he said, “This isn’t panning out.”

Next, Inspector Kipkel suggested they try the Kenya National Museum. He said, “It has a good tourist shop, and it has collections you may find interesting.”

They explored the National Museum and its gift shop, but they found nothing like the cobra boxes on display or for sale. Inspector Kipkel said, “We will go to the City Market.”

“Sounds okay to me,” Link Peters said.

“It will be difficult for you there. You will see,” Inspector Kipkel said to them.

Their driver took them to a rotting concrete structure in downtown Nairobi, on a dusty street across from a supermarket. The Nairobi City Market had been built many years earlier by the British, when they had been the colonial rulers of Kenya. It resembled an aircraft hangar. They entered through the front entrance, and immediately they were surrounded by a knot of shopkeepers waving leather goods and carved chess pieces and jewelry. When Johnston showed the shopkeepers photographs of the cobra boxes, the shopkeepers were certain they had seen such boxes. They were certain they could get more boxes for the Americans. In the meanwhile, would Johnston and Peters like to buy anything else? A beaded belt, perhaps, or a set of napkin rings? Silver jewelry? A carved mask?

“Some of this stuff is really beautiful,” Link Peters said to Almon Johnston. Peters stopped to buy some wooden carvings of lions and hippos for his kids. It took the agents two hours to explore the City Market. They circled around the building, stopping at each shop in turn, showing the photographs. It created an unbelievable sensation, a churning knot of commercial hysteria that followed them everywhere they went. Yet no one could show the agents a box of the right type.

It was getting near five
P.M
., closing time for the Nairobi City Market. Almon Johnston turned to Peters and said, “I’m beginning to think we should try Tanzania.”