The Panic Zone (26 page)

“S
ix miles south, you got the ruins of the old wooden fort where the Eighth U.S. Cavalry was posted for a time.” Ned Fuller nodded to the sweep of flat land that reached to the sky and mountains. “Big Cloud's just up ahead.”

Fuller had become Jack Gannon's tour guide after picking him up at the airport in Cheyenne where he'd held up a small sign bearing Gannon's name in block letters. He had a firm handshake and gunmetal eyes that drilled into Gannon's when they met.

“This had better be for real because my niece has been through hell.”

“It is, sir,” Gannon assured him before they left the terminal.

Now as they drove, he listened to Fuller point out landmarks. The mid-nineteenth-century storefronts and the municipal buildings evoked the frontier. As they cut through town, Gannon reminded himself of what he was pursuing, of what he'd endured and how far he'd traveled since Melody Lyon had first put him on this story.

Last night, after telling her that his call to Emma Lane was a strong lead, Lyon had urged him to fly to Wyoming and follow up. “We've just learned Reuters is sniffing around Adam Corley's murder in Morocco.”

The pressure for Gannon to break the full story was mounting.

“Want me to drop you at your hotel, or do you want to go straight to the house?”

“I'd like to get started,” Gannon said.

After they parked in the driveway of Emma's bungalow, Gannon grabbed his computer bag and approached the house with Fuller. Aunt Marsha met them at the door. Gannon smelled freshly brewed coffee and a faint hint of soap as he entered.

“Welcome, Mr. Gannon. I'm Marsha Fuller, Emma's aunt.” She shook his hand and gestured to the sofa. “We hope you had a good trip—all that way from New York, goodness! Would you like some coffee?”

“That would be fine.”

“How do you take it?”

“Milk and sugar, thanks.”

He set his bag near the sofa and before sitting, turned to a woman about his age who'd entered the room.

“I'm Emma Lane.” She held out her hand. “Thank you for coming.”

“Thanks for seeing me,” he said, “and please accept my belated condolences.”

Emma sat in the sofa chair opposite him. While she took stock of his face, the fading cuts, he noticed hers, how the anguish manifested by her stress lines and reddened eyes failed to disguise the fact she was pretty.

“After you called,” she said, “I'd thought of having my doctor and some of the local police join us. But for now, I think only my aunt and uncle need to be here.”

“I understand.”

“Tell me what you know.”

He began with the bombing in Brazil, his murdered colleagues, Maria Santo's discovery and the ex-CIA player's link to the law firm suspected of illegal adoptions. Then he went on to tell her about the link to the London human-rights group and human trafficking, and finished with Morocco and the murder of Adam Corley and Gannon's encounter with a U.S. agent.

Emma took it all in slowly, while every few minutes her aunt and uncle questioned how such things could happen.

“It's almost too fantastic to believe,” Uncle Ned said.

It was Emma's turn.

She allowed Gannon to set out a recorder and she started by recounting the details of the crash.

“I know Joe died out there, I felt it, but I swear other people were present—that they took Tyler. The investigators here told me Tyler was consumed by the intensity of the fire. All they found were his shoes. But during our drive, I had removed them and set them aside. In my heart, I know he is alive.”

Emma explained how she and Joe had gone to an L.A. fertility clinic, and she told Gannon about Polly Larenski's disturbing call, how everyone had dismissed it. How she felt compelled to go to California. How she'd learned Larenski was a lab manager at the clinic and was fired. How she'd tracked her down in Santa Ana, and how, before Larenski died in the fire, she'd admitted to selling Tyler's DNA to some shadowy corporation.

“What corporation?”

“I don't know, but Polly told me that the people she was dealing with had boasted to her after the crash that Tyler was alive, that Tyler was ‘chosen.'”

“Chosen for what?” Gannon asked.

“I don't know.”

“And you told police everything?”

“Yes. I went to the authorities in California, the FBI. I told police here. Nobody believes me. They think I've lost touch with reality. The doctors say I'm delusional, that I'm hallucinating as part of my grieving to help me cope with post-traumatic stress and survivor's guilt.”

Emma touched the corners of her eyes.

“Jack,” she said, “do you believe it's possible I'm not crazy? Do you believe Tyler may have been taken from the crash, that he may be alive?”

Looking into her eyes Gannon found pain, fear, helplessness and hope, and then he told her the truth.

“Yes, I believe he could still be alive.”

Emma's hands flew to her face. She gulped air and took a moment to maintain her composure.

“Then help me find my son. Oh, God, please, before it's too late!”

“Let's get started.”

Gannon set up his laptop and turned it on. Emma went to her bedroom and returned with a collection of file folders bound by a thick rubber band. Aunt Marsha made more coffee while Uncle Ned shook his head and quietly cursed to himself before turning to his niece.

“Honey,” he said softly. “I'm so damned sorry for not believing you. We couldn't have known. We just—”

Emma pressed her fingers to his mouth and hugged him.

“At times I didn't believe it myself,” she said.

Hours passed and Gannon and Emma examined file after file, page after page of the information they each had.

“Do you have any more details on who Polly Larenski was dealing with, or how she had contact with them?”

“No. She told me they called her at home, or at a pay phone. She said she had files she was going to give me, but they were lost in the fire.”

“Which is still under investigation by the Arson Unit.”

“Are you thinking someone killed her?”

“It's possible, since someone murdered ten people in Rio de Janeiro, and someone murdered Adam Corley in Morocco.” Gannon rubbed the back of his neck then shifted his thoughts. “When Polly Larenski called you the first time and said Tyler was alive, you said police here traced the number to a pay phone in Santa Ana?”

“Yes.” Emma flipped through her files for a document. “Here's the number and address.”

“And do you have Polly's home address and phone number?”

Emma passed him the information. As he jotted notes in his book, she pointed to one of Gannon's computer files labeled E.D.—Extremus Deus?

“What's that?”

“I'm not sure, some shadowy group. I need to follow up on that one,” he said while yawning and rubbing his eyes. There were so many files they had not yet reviewed. It was nearly 3:00 a.m., 5:00 a.m. New York time, and he was struggling to stay awake.

Uncle Ned drove Gannon to his motel, the Blue Sage Motor Court, dropping him off under the big wagon-wheel arch entrance.

“I'll pick you up around nine in the morning,” he said.

Emma planned to take Gannon to the crash site in the morning.

In his room Gannon took a hot shower to clear his mind. After he got into bed, he flipped through the notes he'd written in his notebook, reflecting on everything he'd learned.

Emma Lane's baby was “chosen.”

Was he plucked from a fiery crash?

Who stole him?

Polly Larenski was the key here, and now she was dead.

Who was she selling the DNA to?

Polly Larenski's phone numbers—her home number and the one for the pay phone near her house—they were the thread to the answer.

Gannon studied them.

He knew what to do.

He was closer now, closer than he'd ever been.

Deus Island, Exuma Sound

D
r. Sutsoff's island lay among a chain of uninhabited cays stretching for a few hundred miles southeast of Nassau.

It was a square quarter mile, ringed by white beachfront that slid into warm turquoise water and was lush with palm trees hissing in the breezes.

Aided by her investors, Sutsoff had purchased Deus Island from a Dutch drug dealer for eight million dollars in U.S. cash. Legend held that the island's name originated with Spanish pirates who, after a storm, thought they'd died and arrived at God's doorstep.

Geographically, it was within the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. But through forgotten treaties between Spain, France and Portugal, it had disappeared into a legal nether-world, giving the island's owner the unique ability to claim citizenship with the Bahamas and the other countries.

Sutsoff held a number of counterfeit passports under aliases.

Nearly two dozen people lived in the huddle of houses on the northern side. Sutsoff employed them to maintain her home and research facilities on the southern side, which included several dishes linked to advanced satellite systems, and a small biosafety containment lab.

Dr. Sutsoff had the lab constructed in an isolated area. Through her trusted intelligence connections, she'd bought
components from Malaysia, Indonesia and India, and hired experts to build it.

The structure was made with specialized ceilings, walls and floors that formed a sealed internal shell within the facility. It had airlocks and airtight double-door containment entrances, dunk tanks, showers and fumigation chambers. It also had sophisticated ventilation, exhaust and decontamination systems.

The lab had its own energy sources, powered by long-life batteries, in addition to wind, solar and diesel generators, whose mechanisms were reinforced to withstand hurricanes.

Sutsoff had trained her island staff on the safe handling, storage and testing of sample materials. Because they worked with agents for which there was no known cure, they had to be skilled at decontamination, containing spills, proper immunization and reducing the risk of infection.

Sutsoff reminded them that she'd lost a member of her African research team and that even the world's best micro-biologists had been infected during their experiments. A top Russian military scientist working with the Marburg virus had died hours after a lab accident.

Sutsoff's staff wore the newest positive pressure suits and had been well trained in decontamination showers and the removal and disposal of all clothing after working in the lab. They respected procedures for decontaminating materials such as tubes, scalpels, syringes and slides.

In the days since Sutsoff had returned from Africa with her samples, she and her staff had been working around the clock.

Now, hunched over her table where she was checking the results of refining her agent with the new material from the pariah bats Sutsoff knew success was within her grasp.

She had monitored news reports concerning cruise ship passenger Roger Tippert. Elena and Valmir, who had offended her with their mistakes and insolence, managed to
do their job. Investigators had failed to identify the mystery illness that had killed Tippert.

And they never will.

Looking through her microscope, Sutsoff imagined how the linear-thinking eggheads at the CDC and in the labs in Maryland must be crapping in their knickers wondering,
What the hell is this?

Just a teeny harbinger of the shape of things to come.

Sutsoff took pride in what she'd achieved. Her mind raced through the images from her years of struggle to accomplish the impossible.

She thought back to the crude work of Project Crucible.

The truth was, she had carried the other CIA scientists on that entire assignment. They'd gotten petty and had invoked Nuremberg when she told them what they all knew had to be done, but were too afraid to admit.

Those fools will be an asterisk in the history books.

Her work on Project Crucible was merely a first step. Sutsoff had corrected and advanced North Korea's misguided assumptions on File 91. Her cutting-edge research on molecular manipulation led to her discovery of a new pathway. Her work on remote-controlled nanotechnology was theoretically implausible, but if applied properly in the field, would work.

And it did work.

Very well.

Ask Roger Tippert's widow.

And Sutsoff's experiments on pathogens, which were aimed at developing the most effective lethal agent known, had progressed. She'd created a concoction using characteristics of Ebola and Marburg. Her study had shown a fatality rate in humans of 70 to 75 percent.

It worked beautifully in the Tippert trial.

But that rate soared after her team discovered Pariah Variant 1 in the African pariah bats of Cameroon. Sutsoff determined that the new lethal microbe must have arisen out
of the deadly carbon dioxide explosion at Lake Nyos. Her team had first observed that Pariah Variant 1 would have a fatality rate in humans of 95 to 97 percent. Now, after a little more work her in the lab, Sutsoff had pushed that rate to 100 percent.

One hundred.

Behold the most lethal agent the world will ever know: Extremus Deus Variant 1.

The perfect killer.

Unstoppable. And completely under her control.

The delivery mechanism had always been the tricky aspect. Sutsoff had grappled with it until she decided to refine nature's delivery system, human-to-human transmission.

But with a twist.

Subjects with certain DNA characteristics would be the perfect vessels for initial delivery—the younger the better. She'd worked out the calculations, factoring in failures and unforeseen challenges. A successful operation would require seventy subjects who met the criteria, a support system to nurture the operation and a security system to protect its covert development.

Sutsoff had known Drake Stinson through old agency connections and he'd shared her fears, her philosophy regarding Extremus Deus and her desire to see the operation to its successful conclusion.

Stinson had connections to human traffickers, illegal adoption rings, fertility clinics and various underworld networks around the globe. These resources would fulfill her requirement of finding seventy children with the DNA coding she'd required.

Money and methods were not a concern.

The only criteria were secrecy and invisibility.

The criminal networks used bribery, abductions and even murder to obtain the seventy children whose DNA was tested and retested. The children were held by others pos
ing as adoptive parents while they awaited Sutsoff's instructions.

When the time came, the new lethal agent would be introduced easily into the children's systems. The children would experience absolutely no symptoms ever and never be at risk. They were the mode of delivery. Their DNA coding made them ideal delivery vessels. If left inactivated, the agent would pass harmlessly through their systems. But once Sutsoff activated the agent, each person a child touched was at risk.

Using her advanced work on remote-controlled nanotechnology and low-frequency GPS technology, Sutsoff could use her computer and track and pinpoint the location of those who had been exposed. Then, by submitting the parameters for the targets, Sutsoff could determine who would succumb to the microbe.

If she chose to limit the parameter to certain DNA types with certain variables, then her target pool would be reduced. If she chose to broaden it, the number of victims would increase.

She could target it to all subjects with blue eyes, or only those with red hair, or people whose genetic codes were characteristic of males from the Mediterranean region, or females who possessed Asian DNA signatures.

By entering a few commands on her laptop, she could determine who lived and who died.

Extremus Deus.

A sudden pain jabbed her, her knees buckled and she had to steady herself at the lab table.

The onset of an attack.

“Doctor!” Her alarmed lab assistant approached her. “Do you require evacuation from the lab?”

“No. We're nearly finished.”

She wanted to scream.

Not now.
She couldn't battle this now.

Her pills were in the outer chamber. She couldn't leave now.

There was no time to lose. They were so close. She seated herself on her lab stool and took deep, measured breaths.

Slowly her agony subsided.

As she struggled to anchor herself, she focused on the reason she needed to complete her work.

It was her little brother, Will…reaching for her…pulling her back…

“Gretchen! Help me! Gretchen!”

The memory replayed in her mind, bleeding into the horror to come.

Her motivation for why she had to do this went beyond vengeance against a world that saw her brother, mother and father trampled to death before her eyes in Vridekistan—although it was the life-shattering event that had forged her destiny to change the course of civilization.

Like Oppenheimer, Sutsoff knew that in order to save something, you had to destroy something. It was the underlying philosophy of her inner circle, Extremus Deus.

Humanity was doomed unless corrective action was taken.

By her tragedy and through the power of her intellect and will, fate had equipped her to be the architect of that action.

That was what was at play here, she realized as she resumed her work, filling novelty float pens with the new lethal agent. It was like loading a plane with bombs. The pens themselves were not dangerous. A few more steps had to be followed: the introduction of the agent into the delivery vessel, then remote activation.

When their work was finished in the containment lab, Sutsoff's team followed the exit protocol, clean-up and decontamination procedures. Then they met on the lab's outdoor patio.

Sutsoff looked upon the novelty pens in the plastic tub. She played with one, watched the sailboat float from one end to the other as her staff awaited instructions.

She gazed out to the seaplane tethered to the dock at the island's leeward bay.

“Add the pens to the kits and alert the pilot that we have to get these to Nassau and expedited by courier to the seventy addresses.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“No mistakes can be made. We have no time left.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Once they've been delivered, we'll embark on the final stages.”