The Devil's Pitchfork (5 page)

He snapped a couple pictures. “Okay,” he said. “Onward.”

She turned and saw that his own composure seemed to be slipping. The skin on his face seemed stretched over his cheekbones and his forehead was damp with sweat. She pointed to his neck. “No jewelry.”

Derek pulled back his shirt so she could see. Around his neck were two necklaces. One was a string of dark-colored beads; the other was a heavy chain from which dangled a gold four-leaf clover and a St. Sebastian’s medallion.

“It’s not jewelry,” he said. “And I’m not taking them off.”

She stared at him. His color seemed to be getting worse, taking on a grayish-green tinge. “What are the beads? Is that a St. Christopher’s medallion?” she said.

“Ju-ju beads. Got them from a friend who spent some time in Somalia. It’s a St. Sebastian’s medallion. He was believed to fend off plague.”

“You’re superstitious!”

“I believe in luck, good and bad. Now, you got a john in here? I’ve got to go throw up.” His tone was flat, matter-of-fact.

Liz’s eyes widened. “I don’t think you’re up to this!”

“I’m up to it,” he said in a strangled voice. Without pausing, he rushed past her. “This is just stage fright.” He found the sink and vomited into it.

A moment later, clear-eyed, he splashed water on his face, closed his eyes and tried to center and calm himself. He could feel his pulse slow, his respiration even out. Just stage fright, he thought.

Liz said, “Aren’t we a pair. Neither of us should go in.”

“Yeah,” Derek said. “We should both be on a beach somewhere drinking rum drinks and thinking about our sex lives. Unfortunately, I’ve never been that lucky. Let’s go.”

They donned their spacesuits and progressed through Styx and into Hades.

Inside HL4, spacesuits filled with pressurized air, Derek paused to take it all in. Using the underwater camera, he snapped pictures from several angles, including a careful shot of the empty shell casings on the floor. It seemed to him that the physical evidence supported Liz Vargas’s version of events. That was good, because he had been suspicious of how she had survived the encounter. The bruises were even more convincing.

Careful where he put his feet, Derek moved through the facility, peering in each door. Autopsy tables, laboratories, cages occupied by monkeys, rats, mice and guinea pigs. All appeared unchanged. Moving from room to room, switching air hoses as he went, he snapped pictures. Finally he stood at the entrance to the storage room. More photographs. Liz stood silently next to him.

“I assume you’ve got all the usual suspects in here. Ebola, Marburg, Hanta...”

“Plus anthrax, Tularemia, cholera...”

“Great.” He didn’t proceed into the room. His breathing sounded loud in the suit, despite the roar of air from the hose. A room full of demons, he thought.

What Derek had not shared with Spigotta, Halloran and Vargas, was that he had attempted to retire after being booted from Iraq. He had spent several months under the care of a psychiatrist who had finally told him, “You’ve spent most of your professional life peering through the gates of hell. You’re handling the stress better than most. Go take a vacation somewhere warm. Drink some margaritas, get laid, have some fun. Remind yourself why you do this kind of work. Then make the decision whether or not to quit.”

Remind yourself why you do this kind of work.

Because I can.

The vacation had lasted until September 11, 2001. When President Bush later created the Department of Homeland Security, one of the first people called had been Colonel Derek Stillwater, PhD. (Retired).

The Secretary of Homeland Security wanted people skilled in various aspects of terrorism—organization, nuclear, financial, biological, logistical, chemical—who could be dropped into any situation and provide advice, investigative and pre-emptive skills, and be able and willing to work within and without the established law enforcement channels.

Derek shook his head to clear his thoughts and took a deep breath of air that smelled suspiciously of the previous occupant’s body odor. Jim Scully must have had a serious case of nervous perspiration when working HL4. Derek stepped into the storage room and took a picture of the liquid nitrogen tank, which, except for the punch-button code lock and the biohazard warnings, resembled a beer keg.

Leaning over the black binder, Derek took a series of photographs, then called for Liz to open the tank and display box 6, the now-empty container of Chimera M13. With nitrogen fog curling from the mouth of the container, Derek snapped more pictures. Finally he had Liz put it away.

He wasn’t sure what to look for. It would make sense to do a thorough inventory of all the freezers, but that would take hours and he didn’t have hours.

Everything was just as Liz had described it. He turned slowly, scanning the room, shifting the air hose as he went, his peripheral vision severely impaired by the plastic faceplate.

He tried to think it through. A highly trained, coordinated assault. Twelve men. He assumed men, though it wasn’t a given. The drivers and a guard stayed with the vans. Two men from each vehicle entered the building. Four of the men set up perimeter posts to guard the intersecting hallways and the elevator doors. Two men entered HL4. They knew exactly where to go, had an ID badge and knew the entrance security codes to Styx and to the freezer containing the bug.

Inside, they had wasted no time. Lucky for Liz Vargas they hadn’t checked on her. “Hurry,” one of them had said in Korean. “You can’t hurry this sort of thing,” the other had probably said, the one opening the freezer and stealing the bugs. That implied that the guy doing the hands-on work had experience with high-level infectious agents. Even Korean, that put him in a very small group worldwide.

Then they left. They didn’t put the binder away or check on Liz or go to any other part of HL4. They did close the nitrogen container, thank God for small favors. That didn’t require more than dropping the top in the hole so it clicked shut, but they could have kicked the damn thing over which would have made the room damned near impossible to clean up. Perhaps they hadn’t wanted to risk infecting the outside of their own suits, which would be a problem back in the vans or wherever their headquarters or staging area was. It wouldn’t do to wipe out your own guys.

With clumsy gloved fingers Derek flipped pages in the binder. Probably fifty pages of acetate-covered paper.

He picked up the binder.

He stared. Liz said, “What the hell?”

Beneath the binder was a playing card. On the back of the card was a leering devil with cloven hooves, spiked tail and jutting horns. In one long-fingered hand the devil held a pitchfork.

6

W
HEN
D
EREK AND
L
IZ
got out of HL4, the spacesuits hanging bathed in purple UV light and the underwater camera soaking in a bucket of Lysol, Spigotta was swearing into a cellular phone and Frank Halloran was gone.

“Tell the fucking press it was some sort of crazed employee or something!”

Spigotta listened, the cellular mashed up against his ear. “Hey,
you
do the media,
I
handle the investigation. But you can’t tell the fucking press that some Army assholes let some man-made super germ loose on the world. So use your goddamned imagination.” He clicked off and glared at Derek.

“Well?” He spat out the word like a bullet.

“Camera’s soaking, but there is a...”

Liz broke in and described the playing card. Spigotta stared at her, then shifted his gaze to Derek. “What the fuck?”

“Under the binder,” Derek said. “I shot it. There’ll be pictures.”

“The devil and his goddamned pitchfork? That’s what you said before! You!” Spigotta jabbed Derek in the chest with a thick finger. “You got an explanation, Stillwater?”

“No.” Derek shook his head.

Spigotta squinted suspiciously. “What card is it? Please tell me it’s not a Tarot.”

“No, regular deck. It’s a joker.”

“So? C’mon. Feed me up some bullshit explanation of the devil card and your statement about the devil’s pitchfork. Nice coincidence. Or would you like to try at Bureau headquarters?”

Derek rolled his eyes. “I’ve been calling super bugs the devil’s pitchfork since before the Gulf War. I’ve written position papers analyzing the U.S. and military and worldwide risk from biological warfare and bioterrorism. The President, the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary General of the U.N., they’ve all read my reports.”

“Swell.” Spigotta scowled. “Fuck. What a mess. Any brilliant suggestions?”

“Brilliant? No. Fresh out of brilliant. But I do have a few suggestions that I imagine you’ve already thought of.”

Spigotta’s gaze lingered on Derek. “Aren’t you the diplomat. Okay. Hit me with your less-than-brilliant ideas.”

“We need to notify the CDC and have them keep an eye out for anyone showing internal bleeding. USAMRIID can coordinate. Has the Bureau’s Hazardous Materials Response Unit gotten here yet?”

“On their way.”

“Good. They can work with Rid. We’ve got to figure out who knew about Chimera M13.” Derek turned to Liz. “Was it ever published?”

She shook her head. “No, but there are black patents on it.”

Black patents. Patents on top-secret government products. The paperwork existed somewhere in a government archive. Access was severely restricted.

“And,” she added, “we wrote a lengthy report on it. The Pentagon got it. Probably the National Security Council did, too.”

“Shit,” Spigotta said.

“We also need to figure out who had plans to this building,” Derek said. “These guys knew just where to go.”

Spigotta was already punching the buttons on his phone. “I’ll get somebody on it.”

Derek knew three of the USAMRIID people and all of the HMRU people. Liz had gotten the film out of the camera and was developing it. Derek told them what he’d seen and what he thought the problems were going to be. He asked if the facility had a portable embalming machine in the hot zone. Frank Halloran said no. They would have been able to embalm Michael Ballard right in HL4; the formaldehyde would kill the bugs and they would have been able to transfer his body out of the biocontainment area.

Dr. Sharon Jaxon, from USAMRIID, suggested they just incinerate the body and quit screwing around. No autopsy was necessary because they knew what killed him. “My vote,” she said, “is dump Ballard’s body, suit and all, in the incinerator. Goodbye safety issue.”

Derek grinned. Jaxon was a hard-edged blonde with broad shoulders, blunt fingers and a take-no-prisoners attitude. He personally knew her to like fast motorcycles, spicy Mexican and Thai food and that after making love she liked to sit up in bed with the sheets pooled around her waist and channel surf on the TV. He and Sharon had trained together at Fort Detrick. She had stayed in research. He had headed off to join UNSCOM to play hide-and-seek with Saddam Hussein. It had been a long time between meetings. He said, “Do you have a strong desire to spend the next decade in Congressional hearings or civil courts being sued by his family?”

“This is a national security issue,” she said. “Sometimes we have to put aside tact.”

“Let’s try not to put aside our humanity,” he said. Actually, he thought her suggestion was a good one, political repercussions be damned. It wasn’t his job to worry about public image. It was his job to make sure this manmade germ didn’t get loose. He glanced at his watch. “Sorry, but this really isn’t my problem. You guys figure it out.”

She looked like she was going to punch him, but Spigotta stomped into the room before she could.

“Stillwater!” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Out here. Now.”

Derek followed the FBI agent into the hallway. He thought Spigotta’s ruddy complexion had gone a little pale. Spigotta had stuck an unlit cigar in his mouth and was chewing on it, acting like he was going to break a no-smoking rule at any moment. Derek knew the feeling.

This stretch of corridor was body bag free, painted an industrial pale green and lit by harsh fluorescent lights. The tile floor was a dingy speckled white. Everything about the facility, especially security, seemed to have been done on the cheap.

Spigotta, voice hoarse, said, “I think you need to get over to Scully’s house. I can’t leave here, but I’m going to have my second-in-command, Aaron Pilcher, drive you there.”

Derek cocked his head. “What’s at Scully’s house?”

Spigotta swallowed. “The team I sent over there says it looks like a massacre.”

7

A
ARON
P
ILCHER WAS THE
blond suit who had originally delivered Derek to Spigotta. He shook hands with Derek and led him to a waiting Ford Taurus. Pilcher had pale blue eyes and boney cheeks. His teeth were small and even and reminded Derek of some small scavenger like a ferret or raccoon. Where Spigotta seemed like a G-Man, a leftover from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Pilcher was definitely one of the newer breed of agents—intelligent, articulate and curious. The man wanted information, a lot of it, good or bad, he would make the evaluation himself, thank you very much. Just answer the questions, do it now, give me your opinions, I’ll decide what they’re worth.

Derek tossed his GO Packs in the trunk of the Taurus and climbed into the passenger seat. Pilcher gunned the engine and headed for the front gate. “If you don’t want to end up on the evening news I suggest you slouch or something.”

Derek settled with resting an elbow on the window sill and seeming to prop his head with his hand, managing to cover part of his face.

“Any idea where to go with this?” Pilcher asked after the armed soldiers had cleared the press and gawkers out of the way. Within minutes they were speeding east on I-695.

“The Korean angle’s a possibility,” Derek said. “Get on your computers and see what comes up for Korean foreign nationals with experience in biology, especially high-end ID experience.”

“ID?”

“Infectious disease.”

“We can do that. See what immigration and the CIA have to say.”

“I’d run all your terrorism files, too.”