The Devil's Pitchfork (30 page)

They called Hingemann from Zataki’s small spartan office. They had a high-speed Internet hookup and the university professor looked tired on the screen of the computer.

“How is Liz doing?” Hingemann asked.

“She’s hanging in there, but her condition is deteriorating rapidly. Do you have any ideas, Doctor?”

Hingemann hesitated. “I don’t know if it will work.”

Jaxon said, “We’re grasping at straws here, Doctor. Nothing we’ve tried has worked. What’s your idea?”

“Well,” Hingemann said, frowning. He scratched at his beard. “I understand we were pressed for time, so I couldn’t read as carefully as I had hoped to...”

“None of us have,” Zataki said.

“Yes, of course. This is a very interesting organism, Chimera. You understand that they grafted a number of odd things into its genome, taking sections of various viral and bacterial genomes and merging them into a viral genome. It’s the possible antigens that caught my attention.”

All living cells had molecules on their surfaces called antigens. Antigens did a number of things, but what their primary purpose seemed to be was to act as keys. Those keys were designed to fit in locks in other cells—a way for cells to interact. The human immune system responded to antigens by producing antibodies specific to the antigen’s key. Those antibodies were designed to kill the cells with the specific keys that fit their lock. It was how vaccines worked. The immune system was alerted to the specific key, then churned out more antibodies to kill those specific cells if they should show up again. It was like a flu shot. The flu vaccine had specific antigens. If those cells appeared, the body’s immune system recognized the bug and mounted an immune attack.

“Are they in the files?” Zataki asked.

“Well ... some of them. But, as you may know, your own institution has done work on
Yersinia pestis
and vaccines using recombinant V antigen. I don’t know for a fact that the V antigen is present on Chimera M13, but they used quite a large section of the
Yersinia
genome in piecing together their virus. I think it’s possible.”

Yersinia pestis
was the bacterium that caused Bubonic plague. Slowly Zataki said, “You think we should inject Liz with the plague vaccine?”

“No,” Hingemann said, leaning earnestly toward the camera. “I think you should inject her with
Yersinia
. With the plague itself.”

46

Walter Reed Army Medical Center

A
ARON
P
ILCHER PARKED HIS
car and raced into the Walter Reed Emergency Room, chastising himself for not having ridden in the ambulance. They were just wheeling the pilot out of the ambulance when he approached.

“Has she said anything?” he asked, flashing his badge.

The paramedic, a woman with thick black hair she wore tied back in a bun, looked up from where she was double-checking an IV line. “No. She’s been out the whole ride.”

“Will she make it?”

The paramedic shrugged. “Pretty messed up.”

“I need her awake.”

As they rolled the gurney in, they were met by a pair of doctors in green scrubs, who took one look and began to roll Cynthia Black deeper into the bowels of the E.R. One of the doctors, a woman with red hair and purple-framed glasses, said, “Prep the O.R., call Jamieson.” The other doctor nodded and scribbled notes.

Pilcher said, “I need to talk to her.”

“She’s not talking to anybody,” the female doctor said, not paying him much attention.

“I’m with the FBI and she’s a witness in this terrorist event—”

The doctor glanced up. “You’ll have to wait. She’s not talking. She’s unconscious.”

“Can you wake her?”

“No, and if I could I wouldn’t. You’ll have to wait.”

“She may have information about this attack on the White House.”

The doctor steeled herself. She pointed to a waiting area. “The answer is still no. You can wait. I’ll talk to you when I can.”

“But—”

She turned and walked away, leaving Pilcher to stew in his own juices. Staring at a sign that warned not to use cellular phones inside the hospital, he scowled and walked outside, pulled out his phone and punched in the number for Spigotta. Nobody answered and he was shunted to voicemail. Damn it! What was going on? He left a message saying where he was and what he was doing and that he would check in every fifteen minutes or so.

Feeling helpless, he clicked off his cell phone and went back inside to wait on news about the Coast Guard pilot.

47

Washington, D.C.

S
ECRETARY
J
AMES
J
JOHNSTON—CORRECTION
, he thought wryly, ex-Secretary—hailed a cab outside Walter Reed only minutes before Aaron Pilcher entered the E.R. The cab driver was, to his surprise, a young white guy who spoke English. He looked like a college student with shaggy brown hair and an equally shaggy beard, but he couldn’t have been any older than twenty-five.

“Where to?”

Johnston was about to give the driver his address in Fall’s Church and have him take him home to his wife. He was now a disgraced bureaucrat during one of the worst days in American history, if not
the
worst day. What was there to do now? Go home, lick his wounds and contact a literary agent to see if some publisher would be interested in his memoir?

Did I spent a career in the Army learning to throw in the towel in the face of defeat? Is that what all those years were about? Including his tours in Panama, Iraq, Haiti and Serbia? Is that what he had learned as a Ranger, in the Army’s Special Forces?

He thought of Derek Stillwater, still out there somewhere.

“Hey, pal, you awake?”

“Leave nobody behind,” Johnston said.

The cab driver turned to look at him. “Maybe you’d better get out.”

Johnston shook his head. “Sorry. Just thinking.” It was the code of the Army Rangers—leave nobody behind. Derek was still out there, fighting the battle, even the war.
I won’t leave him behind.

He supplied an address in Georgetown. As they drove, he noted that the state of emergency hadn’t shut down the city. On the contrary, even though there was an unusually high level of police and military activity on the roads, it looked like Washington was waking up and getting ready to go to work. He wondered, now that somebody else was in charge, if they would lock down the city—close the trains, subways, airports. What would the FBI and Secret Service do? Maybe the people with that authority were dead.

It didn’t look like they were putting a ring around the city, trying to hold their enemies inside. Maybe because it was too late. Maybe The Fallen Angels—and Sam Dalton—were already out of the city, maybe even out of the country.

The cab pulled up in front of a redbrick townhouse and Johnston noted with satisfaction that lights were burning. He paid the driver and gave him a generous tip. He buzzed the front door.

After a moment the door opened and an elderly man who looked almost eighty years old stood in the threshold. In a heavily accented voice he said, “So, James ... I wondered if I would hear from you.”

“I need your help.”

“Ah,” he said. “Come in, come in.”

Johnston followed him into the main floor, an elegantly decorated living room done in Early American.

“So, James ... “

Johnston faced Ernst Vogel. “You’re up, so you know.”

“
Ja
. I know. Hell in a handbasket. Are you still working?”

“The President asked for my resignation.”

“Foolish. A political decision, I would think?”

“Yes.”

“A massive terrorist crisis and he thinks like a politician,” Vogel said with a sad shake of his head. “Not a man for a crisis, I don’t think.”

“Just the ways of Washington. But ... I think I can still do something...” Johnston looked in the old man’s faded blue eyes. “I think
we
can still do something.”

“
Ja
,” Vogel said. “Perhaps. Perhaps. Come upstairs, then. Tell me what you are thinking.”

Vogel’s office was upstairs. It was crammed with computers, large-screen monitors and cable lines. Vogel sat down in front of one of the keyboards and turned his chair to face another, which he gestured for Johnston to sit in. Vogel, in the 1960s and ‘70s, had been at the leading edge of East Germany’s cryptography efforts. In 1976 he defected, slipping out of East Berlin in a secret container built into the gas tank of a delivery truck. By 1979 he was consulting to the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. Johnston had gotten to know the old man in the ‘80s during a lengthy tour of duty in the Pentagon. An odd friendship had grown out of their working together on computerized simulations of military and terrorist attacks.

Johnston said, “You’ve been following the day’s news? The terrorist attack on U.S. Immuno and the attack on the White House?”

“
Ja. Natürlich
. Are they related, these two?”

That question gave Johnston pause.
Were
they related? He hesitated. “What is the media saying?”

“Well, at the press conference, the new FBI director, let us see, Director McIvoy, said they had not found any proof that they were connected.”

Johnston frowned, wondering if that was how the FBI was proceeding. Perhaps it was true. Maybe Dalton had been uninvolved with The Fallen Angels, but had merely taken advantage of the chaos of the attack and the nine o’clock staff meeting to make his own mark on history.

But he didn’t believe it. He thought they were related.

Thinking aloud, Johnston said, “The Bureau will be taking Dalton’s background apart. That’s old ground. Nothing for us there, I don’t think. Stillwater—”

”Who is Stillwater?”

“My agent, a specialist in biological and chemical warfare. He was tracking the U.S. Immuno attack and went off chasing a theory of this that someone from his past, a Richard Coffee, was the head of the group. I’ve lost touch with him, but he may have been on to something.”

“Let us assume for a moment,” Vogel said softly, “that they are two prongs of a lengthy attack,
nicht wahr
? What would that mean?”

“Mean?”

“This biological agent they stole ... the media is not saying what it is, exactly. Only that it is very dangerous, an experimental biological warfare agent.”

“It is a virus that is highly infectious and completely fatal.”

“So ... they steal this virus. To do what with it?”

“Use it? Sell it? Bargain with it?”

Vogel peered at Johnston with his clear blue eyes and shook his head. “If these incidents are separate—this germ and this attack on the President—then perhaps they will sell it or blackmail someone with it. But if the incidents are connected...” He shook his head even more vigorously. “My friend, if the incidents are
connected
, killing the President and throwing the government into turmoil, then they will plan to
use
this ... germ. How will they do that? How much did they steal?”

“About a dozen test tubes of the stuff ... not even that much. They were cryovials, about the size of your little finger. Jammed full of viruses, but nonetheless...”

“So they must grow more.”

“Well... “ Johnston wished Derek was here to answer these questions; or anyone who was a microbiologist. “I think so,” he said. “I mean, they could do a lot of damage with twelve little vials, but yes, I would think if they wanted to do something big and ... world-stopping, they would need more of it than a dozen small vials. Ultimately, anyway.”

“So,” Vogel smiled. “They would need a laboratory. A high-level laboratory, perhaps?”

“Yes,” Johnston said. “If they had any sense ... not a given ... they would need something approximating a Level IV containment facility.”

Vogel turned to his computer and ran a computer search. Most of the listings he found were published by the CDC and provided definitions of the differences between the four biological containment levels. Each level, I, II, III and IV, built on the previous level. Vogel read while Johnston looked over his shoulder. “What are we looking for?” Johnston said.

“Something unique to Level IV,” Vogel said. “Of course, my question would be, if The Fallen Angels were kind of sloppy or suicidal, would they stop short at Level III?”

Johnston thought of the deft attack on U.S. Immuno, on the biosafety suits the terrorists had worn, of the speculative Korean exchange that Derek Stillwater had offered: “
Hurry up.”
“
You can’t hurry this kind of thing
.” The Fallen Angels were many things, but sloppy was not one of them. “No,” Johnston said. “They wouldn’t stop short at Level III.”

“Well, then, the things that stand out for me are the biological level safety suits. Are there many manufacturers?”

“No, I don’t think so. In the United States it’s Chemturion. I actually know something about them. They’re manufactured exclusively by ILC Dover, Inc in Delaware. Same company that makes spacesuits for NASA. I’m pretty sure there are others in other parts of the world, though.”

“Yes,” Vogel said. “Yes, I think so. I’ll find them.”

“What else comes to mind?” Johnston said, leaning forward to peer at the screen.

Vogel tapped the computer screen showing an article about a Level IV facility in San Antonio, Texas, the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, that used them for SARS research. “The type of safety hoods they use. They recirculate the air from inside the facility. Unusual, apparently.”

“Okay. Can you—”

Vogel held up a finger. “I will need time, but I can track these down, see who has ordered these in the last, hmmm ...”

“Eighteen months,” he said.

“You’re assuming they’re here? Local?”

“If they’re out of the country there’s no hope for us.”

Vogel nodded. “Give me time ... and privacy, please.”

“Can I use your telephone?”

“Certainly. Who are you going to call?”

General Johnston got to his feet and adjusted his suit. “An old friend of mine. General Stuart English.”