Spiral (21 page)

25

ORCHID CHECKED THE PHONE NUMBER WITH A FEW QUICK
taps of her fingers. The heads-up screen in her glasses gave the response:
LT. BECRAFT. CORNELL UNIVERSITY POLICE
.

She listened to the conversation between Jake Sterling and Becraft. Orchid had taps on both Jake Sterling’s and Maggie Connor’s cells, allowing her to hear all conversations, control all functions. She’d installed the modified SIM cards in both phones weeks ago, long before she had taken Liam Connor hostage. She had wanted complete control of the communications environment. The taps had proven invaluable. Minutes before, Maggie had tried to call Toloff at Detrick. Orchid had shut her phone down.

Orchid checked the latest GPS location from Jake’s phone. He was moving, driving away from the address on Buffalo Road.

Toward Maggie, she was sure.

Good
.

Orchid backed the FedEx van up to the front door of Rivendell, thinking it through. The police would likely be here in minutes, but she still had time. She went inside the house and dragged the dead woman, Cindy Sharp, through the front door. She threw Cindy’s body in the back of the FedEx van. Orchid had stolen the van a week before from a storage garage in Pennsylvania. She closed the door carefully, locked it, then walked around to the driver’s door.

She got in, started the engine, and checked Jake’s location again. He was retracing the path he’d taken, heading back to the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium. He was fifteen minutes away from his destination. Orchid was five.

She turned the FedEx van around, started down the gravel road. She heard a squeaking sound in the back of the van.

She glanced over her shoulder into the storage area. Dylan Connor was cuffed to the wall, tape on his mouth. He’d started to write
HELP
in the dust of the tinted back window with the tip of his shoe.

Clever boy. Just like his great-grandfather
.

She pulled to a stop, then took a length of rope and secured his legs. “No more tricks,” she said. She wiped away the boy’s message with a brush of her fingers.

She turned onto the main road. Maggie’s call to Toloff still worried her. What if Maggie had used another phone? What if she had gotten through?

Orchid typed a series of commands on her leg.

Time to make sure everyone at Detrick was very, very busy.

26

XINTAO LU WAS EXHAUSTED. HE’D BEEN UP ALL NIGHT
, working his way through the final part of the processing run. He was a graduate student in physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, but he was pretty sure he was going to switch to electrical engineering.

He dipped the wafer cartridge into the etching tank, letting the hydrofluoric acid perform the final step in the fabrication of his device. The little silicon chip he was etching had an array of microscopic holes, each barely larger than a virus. When superfluid helium passed through the holes, it would exhibit coherent oscillations that were sensitive to the absolute motion of the earth with respect to the stars. That’s what his thesis adviser said, anyway. But he was beginning to wonder about that. It all seemed too wild. Etch some holes in a piece of silicon, cool it to near absolute zero, and you would detect your rotation relative to the entire universe.

It made his head hurt to think about it, especially after twenty-four straight hours in his white bunny suit in the cleanroom. The dust-free environment was kept so by a ceiling full of HEPA filters constantly chugging away, creating a low roar that crept into your bones.

He scanned the rows of equipment, seeing only a couple of other users. A seminar was going on about a new kind of solar cell based on carbon nanotubes that had everyone jazzed. In a few more minutes, the seminar would end and the cleanroom would begin filling up again. The electron beam lithography machines were running—the demand on those was relentless. People were also camped out on the various other machines—the evaporators, ion millers, and etchers. They were all in their anti–dust bunny suits, conducting a defensive war against particles of dust and flecks of skin.

Xintao began to gather everything up. He was nearly done.

He heard a beep.

Strange
. Near the RF plasma cleaning chamber. That was when he spied it. He’d sat before the machine time and time again, waiting for his sample to be finished. The wall behind the chamber was imprinted on his memory. Two brass pipes running vertically, delivering water to the cooling head.

Now there were three.

He approached the third pipe, touched his hand to it. The pipe was vibrating ever so slightly.

Xintao wasn’t sure why, but he immediately panicked. He stared at the pipe for a few seconds, then quickly glanced around, looking for one of the staff.

To his surprise, the pipe beeped again. Quietly, like an alarm clock sounding in another room. He pulled his hand back, walked away briskly, certain that he had to find someone from the staff.

He didn’t get far before the blast hit him.

LEON SOLOMON, THE FBI’S CHIEF COUNTERTERRORISM SPECIALIST
, arrived in the back of an unmarked van after a short ride over from the J. Edgar Hoover Building. A barricade of cruisers, orange cones, and yellow police tape kept the crowd from getting too close to the wreckage. Twelve FBI men were already on-site in addition to hundreds of local firefighters and police. The crowd was big and growing, drawn by the irresistible lure of destruction. Some were slack-jawed, frozen in shock. Others had a strange kind of energy about them, an almost giddy excitement. Something had
happened
.

Solomon had a straight visual line to the carnage. The windows of the building were blown completely out, glass and concrete littering the street. A section of wall midway up the building was torn loose, tenuously hanging in space by a few strands of rebar. The TV vultures were everywhere, all three networks. Two helicopters circled overhead. The media were jumpy, hyped up, and ready to pounce. The press in New York were told that the shutdown of Bellevue was because of an outbreak of SARS. Total bullshit, and a few of the reporters were smelling it. You don’t send in the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force for SARS. And now, a day later, an explosion at the University of Maryland.

Solomon was anxious as hell. By design, a university campus was a hub of dissemination, full of people from around the world—people who would seek to return home in a time of crisis. Rescue workers, students, professors rush in, breathe the pathogen, and you’ve got an outbreak that sweeps across the campus, then the city, then the country, then around the world. If you wanted to spread a pathogen, this was a hell of a way to do it.

There had been a wild shouting match when the anonymous email had arrived in Sadie Toloff’s inbox, claiming credit for the explosion. The FBI director demanded they seal off the whole university, evacuate the entire College Park area. But they had dodged a bullet in Manhattan, and everyone was feeling lucky. The results had come in from Toloff’s lab at Detrick fifty minutes before. The kid in Times Square had been loaded with LSA—d-lysergic acid amide—one of the primary psychotropic alkaloid products produced by the Uzumaki. But the LSA was pharmaceutical-grade, likely administered by injection. All the genetic markers were negative for the actual fungus. The kid did not have an Uzumaki infection. He was going to make it. The Times Square incident was an elaborate ruse.

As for the mysterious Asian woman’s profile, the CIA thought she could be a member of one of the ultranationalist, anti-Japanese groups, such as Sunshine 731 or Black Sword. These radical groups were furious that the United States would not turn over Hitoshi Kitano for prosecution as a war criminal. She was playing games, seeking publicity, that’s what the profilers said.

Solomon wasn’t so sure.

Inside, he met up with the local fire chief and the shell-shocked director of the facility. The main atrium was utter chaos. Debris—wood, glass, chairs, railings, piping—was strewn about the floor. One of the skylights overhead was shattered. The fire chief pointed inside. “It’s in there. That’s where the bomb was.”

Solomon went in, going straight to the epicenter of the explosion, scanning the wreckage for the item mentioned in the email. The fire chief filled in the details. As best they could tell, the explosive was fitted inside a fake section of piping. Thankfully, the student who saw it had survived, though he’d lose an arm and sight in both eyes. He’d told them that it had started to make a noise. It had likely been set off remotely.

But it wasn’t the details of the bomb that interested Solomon. It was another item, one that no one else had yet noticed, partially obscured by a piece of plaster. Just like the anonymous email had said, right there on the floor, glinting in the rescue spotlights.

A goddamn brass cylinder.

27

MAGGIE WAS BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND HOW
FUSARIUM
spirale
could be turned into a devastating biological weapon.

During World War II, genetics was still a new science. No one was even sure that DNA was the basis for genetic information until the Hershey-Chase experiments on T2 viruses in 1952. Even with today’s techniques for splicing and dicing genomes, creating a successful genetically modified organism was a huge undertaking.

But the scientists at Unit 731 had chosen well.

Fusarium spirale
was relatively harmless when it lived in your gut, viciously dangerous when it infected a corn plant. If you want to make a monster out of it, all you had to do was scramble its genetic programming. Turn off a few genes, turn on a few others, get its signals mixed. Make it pump out toxins when it was living inside you. Maggie shuddered at the thought. You’d have a chemical weapons factory killing you from the inside out.

Maggie could guess how they’d done it. They could have used chemicals or radiation to induce mutations, then test them on human subjects. Cultivate the ones that killed the quickest. If you were a sadistic monster willing to use live human subjects, you didn’t need biotechnology.

Maggie felt the mysteries shrouding her grandfather dissolving away, the pieces of his life coming together. Her grandfather had gone to work at Detrick right after the war. Liam never talked about it, but she had gathered threads from what her grandmother Edith had told her. In the months before she died, Edith and Maggie spent a great deal of time together. Maggie loved to get her talking, to tell the stories of her life. It made Edith happy, distracting her when she was in great pain from the treatments. Edith said that Liam had insisted that they move to Maryland so he could continue his work at Camp Detrick. “He never was quite the same after the war,” she said. “He had nightmares. It must have been terrible. I can’t imagine.”

Maggie was willing to bet that those nightmares were about
Fusarium spirale
.

Bam! Bam!
Maggie nearly jumped out of her skin at the thudding noise. Someone was banging on the front door.

She started toward the reception area. Could it be Jake?

Bam!

But why wouldn’t he have called?

She stopped, pulled out her phone, and flipped it open. The main display showed no messages. But she hit the key that took her to her voice mail. To her surprise, there were seven. All from Jake, all in the last half-hour. Why hadn’t her phone rang? Something was wrong with her phone.

The banging grew louder, a steady
thump, thump, thump
. She retrieved the gun that Vlad had left her, suddenly thankful to have it.

“Jake?” she asked, standing across the reception room from the front door, gun pointed toward it. Her hand was shaking. “Is that you?”

The banging stopped.

Complete silence. Her heart was pounding.

She forced herself to check the window. The parking lot was empty.

She leaned in close to the glass, trying to see the front door, but the angle was wrong. The window frame blocked her view.

Then she heard a voice: “Mom?”

“Dylan?”

No answer.

“Dylan?”
She quickly flipped the deadbolt, turned the knob. He sounded scared. Really scared.

The door exploded open, catching Maggie square in the chest. The next thing she knew, she was on her back, stunned, staring up at the ceiling. The back of her skull screamed in pain, her right arm bent behind her. She shook her head to clear her thoughts, pulled herself up.

The gun barrel was less than six inches from her forehead.

JAKE PULLED TO A STOP ON THE ROAD LEADING TO THE
herbarium, a good two hundred yards away. He picked up the Beretta from the passenger seat, released the safety.

He jogged to the building, staying out of sight of the front door. When he got close, he felt his heart jump into his throat. The front door was ajar.

Maggie would not have left that door open.

His pulse raced as he slid through the open door and into the waiting area, gun in the lead, ready to shoot. A weapon always upped the stakes. If you showed deadly force, you had to be willing to use it.

The room was empty, the phone off the hook. Beyond it, through a windowless metal-reinforced door, was the herbarium proper, with its rows of storage cabinets. A tough space to enter unnoticed. He’d have a target painted on his chest.

No choice. He had to go there.

Jake opened the door slowly. The main lights were out, the only illumination coming from the back of the room. One brown cabinet after another, each maybe seven feet tall and four feet wide, arranged in four rows like giant dominoes. He listened closely for any sound, then stepped inside. He took up a position against the closest cabinet on the left, keeping his breathing even and slow. If someone was here, they would have heard him enter. Better to play dumb.

“Maggie? You in here?”

Nothing.

“Maggie?”

A rustling came from somewhere in the middle of the room. He peered around the cabinet, gun ready, his finger half-squeezing the trigger. He saw a human form standing in a shadowed space between the two rows of cabinets.

Jesus
. It was Maggie. Her mouth was taped closed, her hands behind her back. Bound and gagged.

Jake kept the gun up, worked his way carefully along the left wall.

Then Jake’s phone rang.

Jake pulled it from his pocket and glanced down. The caller ID said
ANS OR SHE DIES
.

Jake edged around until he could see Maggie again. He accepted the call.

“You’re going to do something for me,” the woman said, her voice calm and low. She had an accent—Chinese, Jake was pretty sure. He picked up a slight echo, probably from her voice carrying across the warehouse-sized space. The acoustics of the room were complex, sounds ricocheting off the walls and cabinets. He couldn’t yet tell where she was, but he was sure she was inside. And therefore not more than a hundred feet away.

Jake tried to think it through. She was most likely across the room, on the other side of Maggie. His best bet was to go left, circle around. Outflank her. “Who are you?” he said into the phone, listening for the echo.

“You can call me Orchid.”

“What do you want?”

“In time. Now. Look at your phone.”

Jake saw the numbers of his phone appear one by one, as if he was dialing. The dialing stopped on the second-to-last number. He recognized the number. It was Vlad’s cell.

“Here’s what you will do. You’ll tell him everything is fine. Tell him that Ms. Connor’s cellphone batteries were dead. You understand? Then ask him how his search is going. He’ll tell you. You’ll respond appropriately. Then you’ll hang up. Do you understand?”

“What do I get in return?”

“Nothing. You fail, I kill her. I’ll be on the line. I’ll cut you off if you try and say anything wrong. You understand?”

Jake kept moving, hoping the confusing acoustics would mask his forward progress. He swung around the next cabinet, gun in one hand and the phone in the other.

Nothing.

Jesus Christ, where was she?

The last number appeared. Then the phone was ringing.

Vlad picked up on the second ring. “Jake?”

Jake approached the next cabinet, gun drawn.

“Jake? Everything all right?”

He whipped around, ready to fire. Nothing. “Everything is fine. Where are you with the sequencing?”

“What was wrong with her phone?” Vlad asked.

“The battery was dead.”

Jake stepped around another cabinet, gun drawn. Nothing.

“What about the landline?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t answer it.”

“You didn’t ask her?”

“No. Vlad. It’s fine. Tell me about the sequence.”

Vlad didn’t respond. Then, “You sure you are fine?”

“Vlad. Leave it. It’s been a tough couple of days.” Jake continued his progress along the left wall. Only three more cabinets to go.

Jake was close. The next row was the one that was his best guess. “We’ve almost got it, Jake. Another half-hour.”

He heard the slight squeak of rubber. A shoe. It came from the other side of the cabinet he was now facing. He looked to his right. He could still see Maggie. The shoe wasn’t Maggie’s.

Moment of truth. He’d come around it quickly, firing.

He took a breath, held it. He muted his phone, then tossed it across the room. The phone struck the far wall with a clang. Jake turned the corner, gun held in both hands, ready to blow Orchid’s head off.

Standing there, staring right at him, was Dylan, eyes big as moons. Jake’s legs went rubbery, hands shaking at what he’d almost done. He’d come to within a fraction of a second of shooting.

He eased the pressure on the trigger, his knees almost buckling.

From behind him, a voice very close: “Put down the gun. Slowly.”