Arisen : Genesis (7 page)

The two of them had been childhood friends, years and lifetimes ago in Kenya. Or, the closest thing Zack had to a childhood friend. Abo was one of the token Kikuyu who got shipped in to Zack’s posh English school in the Highlands. Zack befriended him because, foreign and powerless as the new boy was, he was just about the only one who didn’t make Zack feel like an impostor. And even he did, just less so. To say they ultimately went in different directions would be to massively understate the case.

Many years later, when Abo’s photo turned up in a classified portfolio of low-level runners for al-Shabaab, Zack saw a chance. It had been hell arranging a safe meeting. But they did it, and Zack offered Abo a one-way ticket out – all the way to those United States of America. This would be in return for one full year’s service, working as the CIA’s informant in the Islamist terror organization.

Abo went for it.

Zack figured he would. He was basically a good kid. He just never had the chances Zack did. Now he’d been given one. And he seemed grateful. He said he wanted to live in LA.

Oh well
, Zack figured.
Everyone’s stupid about something.

He dropped the phone beside him and stretched out, fingers knitted behind his head. A nap would be nice. But there were still sirens going by outside every few minutes. And he was too wound up to sleep, which was his usual state lately.

In the last few minutes, Baxter had identified (
maybe
) a connection between the outbreak and the ambush on their Special Forces – or, rather, the herd of randoms that had wandered into the middle of it. And Zack had mentally connected it (also a big maybe) to the ruckus at the clinic. Now he was feeling super-interested in the nature of this new virus.
Excuse me
, he mentally amended,
“illness.
” As far as he knew, nobody yet knew if it was a viral infection. It could as easily be bacterial, fungal, parasitic… or prions, maybe.

Hell, who am I kidding? It’s going to be a virus
.

He could feel it.

* * *

Baxter knocked once and opened the door. Zack was still lying there, hands behind neck, staring at the mold-stained ceiling. Baxter paused in the doorway, backlit from the hall.

“So, myelin toxin,” Zack said, simply picking up where he left off. He did this for no good reason. Other than maybe because it was his job to train up the new guy.

“Myelin toxin,” Baxter echoed.

Zack paused. “How much do you know about Biopreparat?”

Baxter nodded. “The Soviet biowarfare program. Ran for decades before the dissolution of the USSR. Big on genetically engineered bioweapons.”

“Correct. But you need to understand this was bioweapons development on an
industrial scale.
The program stretched across 40 facilities in 15 cities, in all seven of Russia’s time zones. It also had tens of billions of rubles in funding, as well as
tens of thousands
of scientists, microbiologists, bioweaponeers, industrial designers, support personnel…”

Zack paused to scratch his stubble, which was coming in itchy as always. He’d have to work in a shave somewhere along the way. “They did variations on all kinds of horrific shit, engineered to be even more virulent and contagious than nature made them. New versions of typhus, smallpox, yellow fever, and encephalitis that
cannot be vaccinated against
. Special strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, designed to be resistant to
all known antibiotics
.”

“Jesus,” Baxter said. “Imagine the social impact of an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant plague…”

“Yeah, do. No, don’t.”

“And one of their guys hooked up with al-Shabaab?”

“Yes,” Zack said. “And Biopreparat, or as they called it internally, ‘the System,’ also had a project called Bonfire. They’d been studying regulatory peptides – chains of amino acids that regulate the central nervous system. They’re activated at times of high stress, or emotion: fear… hate… anger… love. Too much of it in the system can cause heart attacks, stroke, paralysis.”

Baxter still stood in the doorway. He leaned against the door jamb and crossed his arms, his lanky frame still backlit. Zack went on.

“So they isolated this one peptide in particular, one which damaged myelin sheaths – these are what protect the nerve fibers that transmit signals from the brain and spinal cord to the body. Up until the fall of the Soviet Union, and the defection of some of their top scientists, this peptide was
totally unknown in the west
.”

“And so that’s myelin toxin?”

“Yes. Well, it is if you give somebody too much of it. The Kremlin was keen on it for two reasons. One, since it’s a substance that naturally occurs in the body, it actually
wasn’t covered
by the international Biological Weapons Convention. Second, and for the same reason, you can whack somebody with it – and it will look like death by natural causes. The coroner will find this stuff in his bloodstream. But this stuff is always in the bloodstream.”

“Nice.”

“If you want to put it that way. I mean, here was a bioweapon that was not only naturally occurring, but which they could use to damage victims’ nervous systems… alter their moods… trigger massive psychological changes. Or just kill, as the mood took them.”

Baxter squinted down at the older man lying in the dark. “I thought you had a masters degree in public policy?”

“I do. But my undergrad work was in cellular biology. Lingering influence of my plantation-owner parents.”

“Your parents were plantation owners? Did they have slaves?”

“Yes. Mainly me.”

“So did the Soviets succeed in weaponizing this stuff?”

“In the end. It only exists in traces in mammals, so they had to synthesize it if they wanted it in any quantity. This meant duplicating the genes for it, which they managed to do. And after that it was just a matter of splicing the DNA into whatever random cells they had in the lab. Then reproducing those. And then the real fun began.”

“A chimera virus?”

“Exactly. First they tried to create a hybrid myelin toxin/plague weapon, by splicing the virulent sections of DNA from myelin toxin into a bad-ass strain of plague they had.”

“Did it work?”

“Nobody knows for sure. We don’t think so.” Zack paused, and his lids lowered fractionally. It had been a long day. “However, we do know that they, or one of their heirs or successors, did manage to create a myelin toxin/smallpox weapon.”

“How do we know?”

“It’s what we call an existence proof. Because that’s what made it into the hands of Sheikh Atom and his a-S ass-buddies. That’s what we found and destroyed – within like minutes of when they planned on using it on the demining teams at Lemonnier. And it all went down a handful of miles from where we sit. In the bush of Somalia.”

Baxter looked impressed. “Okay. Now I see why you’re fixated on this stuff. You already dodged one enormous bioweapons bullet.”

“Exactly. And, by the way, with the relatively long incubation period, this one would have gone from the deminers to the garrison at camp. And then, via the global military transport network, it could have ended up anywhere. I don’t think these assholes thought about that, but then bioterrorists aren’t known for their long-range planning skills.”

“So this new outbreak,” Baxter said. “Do you think it could actually be a bio-terror attack?”

Zack blinked slowly. “That’s exactly it. There’s not necessarily any way to tell the difference. Particularly at first.”

“So that’s why you worry every time.”

“Pretty much.”

“The chance that it might be bio-terror.”

“Or bio-error. Like I said, these guys aren’t rocket surgeons. They’re not the kind of guys you’d trust to work with Group-4 infectious agents and not, you know, make some terrible containment error.”

“I think I’m gonna have nightmares about that now.” Baxter cocked his head, as if trying to see something in memory. “What are the symptoms of smallpox, by the way?”

“Incubation period five to ten days. Onset of symptoms includes high fever, vomiting, headache, and a strange stiffness. Within a week, small spots start to appear, a rash on the face, which develops into painful blisters, then scabs, which fall off, leaving scars. Serious strains have a mortality rate up to 35 percent. Blindness, from ulcers on the cornea, is an occasional after-effect.”

“Jesus.”

“Smallpox has arguably changed the course of history more than Jesus. It devastated eighteenth-century Europe, and blew away most of the indigenous population in North America. Just in time for the white man to move in.” Zack paused to consider whether that was fair. The hell with it, he was nearly as white as Baxter.

“And the symptoms of myelin toxin?”

“In humans? Never tried, as far as we know, thank God. But animal tests indicated it would be nervous system stuff – tremors, paralysis, radical mood changes. Heart palpitations and heart failure at the high end.”

Baxter nodded, then pointed to his footlocker. “I really only came in to get my shaving kit.” He grabbed it and made his exit.

Zack sighed and thought about getting up.

But it was late now. And he was very tired.

Instead, he lay where he was – and allowed himself to start getting worked up again.

I mean, excuse me
, he thought, as he had many times before,
but what the fuck?
Aside from the fact that the bioengineering of super-viruses was about the most evil and backward use of human effort and ingenuity imaginable… and since there was still every chance, in the view of this senior analyst, that it would be a virus that ended the story of humanity… it just struck him as particularly fucking stupid, even in a particularly stupid fucking species, to risk immanentizing the eschaton by
intentionally
creating something more virulent and hardy, something
even worse
, than the nightmare fuel already designed by natural selection – the most remorseless and efficient designer of biological predators ever known.

Or call her Mother Nature, if you like…

Zack’s light flickered out on that.

11/11

Morning of the next day found Zack stirring on his rack.

He’d had no night duty, so had just slept through. But he felt strangely unrefreshed. He’d had frantic, desperate dreams, though he couldn’t remember them. He felt like he had been running all night.

He got himself settled back in the TOC, an enormous mug of steaming coffee by his mouse hand. He had a fair bit of routine crap to deal with first thing. When you were a far outpost of the Empire, you had to send regular reports. Whether they’re hilltop signal fires, or 256-bit AES encryption over a private satnet, the Senate must have news from the provinces.

Though, of course, sometimes the outpost gets overrun
.

He thought of Benghazi back in 2012. Not surprisingly, the two Agency shooters who had died there – who went down rescuing over thirty consular staff, and helping fight off a 400-strong militia all night – had been ex-SEALs. Zack knew they had also been buddies of Dugan and Maximum Bob, who knew them casually from back in the teams, and more intimately in later security work for the Agency.

Were lessons learned there? Zack knew SOF guys are learning creatures above all else. Even if government isn’t.

But we can’t stop trying.
That’s when he figured he may as well try to do something productive – something that might get more attention on the implications of this outbreak, before those implications started kicking in their doors. It was pretty stupid worrying about the future, when it was his job to impact it.

He had already filed the spot report about the quarantine tent. But this was the bit where he really earned his paycheck – and maybe also put his ass on the line.
Here’s where I put the anal in analyst
, he thought with a mirthless laugh. Here’s where he’d actually analyze, connect dots, and put together his theories about the ongoing threat of bioweapons, alongside the threat of killer mutated viruses out of the African bush.

It was all speculative. But it wasn’t total bullshit.

For some reason, Africa was always the epicenter. And, as usual, the shit had to be coming down around their ears before anyone in the west noticed, never mind took action. CDC and WHO would be looking into it, and addressing containment. But no one infected with this new bug had yet hopped off a triple-seven at Heathrow or LAX. And no one would take it seriously until someone did.

At which point it might be too late.

Zack was alone in the TOC in the early morning, puffy headphones on, deep into his analysis document. He was writing it locally, and not uploading a draft until it was watertight – and minimally likely to turn into a CLM (career-limiting maneuver). This was when Maximum Bob stuck his head into the room. He rumbled a single syllable, which caused Zack to startle, then spin.

“ZACK.”

He pulled his head out of the headphones. “What’s up?”

Bob paused, and seemed to consider before speaking. Then he entered, pulled a rolling ergonomic chair across the plastic mat on the floor, and sat on it backwards. His tattooed, thigh-sized forearms lay crossed on the seatback.

“I just talked to an SF buddy of mine, an Eighteen-Bravo at Lemonnier. And he tells me Triple-Nickel went out with SNA yesterday
not
as a mentoring patrol. The were looking for another SNA unit. A platoon-sized element that went missing yesterday.” Zack arched his eyebrows at this. “
Just disappeared
, dropped right off the map.”

“No shit?”

“None.”

“That is a little spooky.”

“Yeah. Like I said.” Bob smoothly levered his big bulk up. “I’m gonna go check the perimeter. Dugan’s on the horn to our oppos around the region, trying to get the scoop.”

“Knuckleheads outside,” Zack said, “cold shooting some hoop.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Carry on.”

As Bob left, Zack paused to notice how weirdly quiet it had gotten. Normally at this time of the morning there was a lot of street noise – somewhat muted, but regular, like an insect hive hum. Shops opening, stalls setting up, people getting their day going. Zack only noticed it now by its absence. And the shadows seemed to fall a little strangely in there. He guessed the days were starting to shorten. The safehouse seemed to press in on him.