Spiral (28 page)

Game over.

DOCTOR ROSCOE KNOCKED AT THE WINDOW. HE LOOKED
beaten down.

Jake picked up the phone, his heart racing. He thought of Maggie, wherever she was, so far away from her son. “Tell me,” he said.

Roscoe took a deep breath, looked down at the floor, then back to Jake. He met him head-on, one man to another. “It’s Dylan’s tests. I’m sorry. The news is bad.”

38

MAGGIE FLOATED IN DARKNESS, COOL AND BLACK. SHE TRIED
to will herself out of the darkness, into being. But she felt nothing, not even the movement of her arms.

Dylan. Memories of Dylan. He was six years old, and they were looking for arrowheads at Taughannock Falls.

Dylan had asked who Taughannock was, and she told him he’d been a Delaware Indian. The Iroquois had captured him and threw him over the falls.

Dylan had stood at the waterfall’s bank for a long time, looking into the gorge, as if he saw the chief plummeting downward. “If I were falling, would you save me?”

“You can count on that, buddy.”

A SPARKLE, A SENSATION, LIKE A SILVERFISH IN MOONLIGHT
.

Pain.

Her leg ached, the left one, for a reason she couldn’t remember. Her breathing was labored, her lungs constricted, unable to get enough air.

Dylan. Where is Dylan?

She jerked awake, eyes open, wincing at the onslaught of bright light. A wave of nausea hit her. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, breathing hard, fighting it off. The nausea crested, faded. She opened her eyes just a slit this time, let the light in slowly, titrating the light, until she could take its full force.

She was strapped to a table tilted about thirty degrees from the horizontal. Above her was a high ceiling, round, a half-dome, I-beam struts holding up what looked to be sheets of painted white metal. She tried to sit up, but she was held by a gray elastic band tight across her chest. She was handcuffed at the wrists to the table on which she lay.

Maggie looked around the room. In front of her were a pair of workbenches, one covered with electronic equipment: an oscilloscope, soldering irons, and spools of wire. The second was empty. Hanging above the workbench on a pair of hooks were two masks. Gas masks, she realized.

Maggie strained at her bonds, looked as far to the left as she could manage. She saw a pistol on a cabinet ten feet away with an unusual, larger-than-normal barrel. Next to it was a pair of cylinders the size of a roll of mints, each with a needle protruding from the end. A tranquilizer pistol. Beyond it she could see the top half of a large transparent sphere that looked to be made of glass, perhaps two feet in diameter.

She turned to the right and immediately froze. She could just make them out from the corner of her eye. On a metal table not a foot from her head.

She stared at them, fear like a hand slapping her. Five MicroCrawlers.

Next to them was a pair of tweezers, the objects laid out on a square of white cloth like dentist’s tools.

Maggie pulled at her bonds, fighting off panic.

A door opened and closed, the sound coming from the direction of the stairs. Then footsteps.

Maggie felt a chill run through her as Orchid came into view. “You’re awake,” Orchid said flatly. She wore a skintight black outfit, with black gloves. Her hair was cut short, like a man’s. She looked beaten up. The side of her face was black and blue. The fingers of her right hand were taped together.

“Where’s Dylan?” The words came out like a croak, her throat parched.

Orchid grabbed a water bottle. “Open,” she said. Orchid poured in half a mouthful.

Maggie swallowed, coughing. But the water was soothing.

“Where is my son?”

Orchid didn’t respond. Instead she stood and went to a bench across the room. She returned with one of the gas masks Maggie had seen hanging on the wall. Orchid laid the mask on Maggie’s chest. It had a large, clear faceplate and dual particulate filters emerging from each side, like truncated tusks.

She leaned over Maggie, looking directly into her eyes. “How much do you know about the Uzumaki?”

“Screw you. Where is my son?”

Maggie saw a flash of rage cross Orchid’s eyes. She raised her arm and struck Maggie brutally hard in the chest with the base of her open palm, driving it into her sternum. Maggie gasped, the pain radiating outward as though she’d been cracked open. She saw spots before her eyes and was afraid that she would vomit.

Orchid said, “A word of advice. This is not going to be pleasant for you no matter how it goes. It’s your choice how bad it has to be. Now answer my question. How much do you know about the Uzumaki?”

Maggie was still breathing hard, her breastbone throbbing. She couldn’t come up with a good reason not to answer. “Look, before yesterday, I’d never heard of it.”

“Do you know the pathways of infection?”

“Ingestion,” Maggie said. “From what I know, it’s by ingestion.”

Orchid nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “Through the stomach. That is one possibility. But there is another one. Do you know what it is?”

“Inhalation,” Maggie said. “Spores.”

“Correct.”

Orchid picked up the gas mask and placed it on Maggie’s face. She pulled the straps around the back of Maggie’s head, tightening them, making the fit snug. She was methodical, careful, checking the seals with her fingers.

“Blow out,” she said. “It’s important that this fits properly. Exhale as hard as you can. Quickly.”

Maggie quickly exhaled, sending a fresh wave of pain through her chest. The mask swelled slightly but held its seal.

“Again. Harder. First breathe in.”

Maggie slowly inhaled. She smelled the rubber and plastic, heard the underwater sound of the air hissing through the particulate filters.

“Now. As hard as you can.”

Maggie exhaled hard. Again the mask swelled, but the seals held.

“Good.”

Orchid grabbed the table with the Crawlers and pulled it close. She sat down on a stool next to Maggie. Orchid raised her damaged right hand, cupped her fingers, and moved them back and forth. One of the Crawlers, the farthest from the right, skittered forward, bumping into the tweezers laid out in front of them.

Maggie watched, a cold, slack terror sweeping over her.

Working carefully, deliberately, Orchid picked up the MicroCrawler with the tweezers. With her free hand she carefully lifted up the edge of Maggie’s gas mask. She slid the tweezers through the opening, placing the Crawler on Maggie’s cheek. Maggie tried to shake her head, to knock it loose, but she couldn’t. The Crawler’s legs hooked her skin.

No, no, no, no …

Maggie was shaking, her whole body quivering. “Oh, God, no. Please. Stop this. What do you want from me?”

“No. That’s not it at all. There’s nothing you can tell me.”

“Then why?”

“I want proof.”

Maggie was hyperventilating. “Proof of what?” She tugged as hard as she could at her restraints, unable to move. The Crawler loomed over her left eye. She tried to will it away.

Orchid twitched her hand. The Crawler skittered right a fraction of an inch, its legs catching the skin like barbs of a fishhook. Maggie squeezed her eyes shut, tried to brace herself for the pain she knew was coming. She had seen Crawlers tear through leather—her skin would be like paper.

“Ready?” Orchid asked.

Maggie forced herself to open her eyes. She said, “Screw you.”

Orchid smiled, then closed her hand into a fist twice in rapid succession.

Maggie winced, but there was no sharp bite of pain. Instead a slight sound, like a perfume mister. The air inside the mask was suddenly cloudy.

Maggie blinked, coughed inside the mask. The Crawler was motionless on her cheek, its legs holding on to her skin.

What just happened?

Maggie looked to Orchid. Their eyes met. Orchid smiled again.

The mask on her face. The filters were designed to catch particulates. Normally it was to keep dangerous agents out. But here it was meant to keep them in.

“Inhalation,” Orchid said.

The Uzumaki.

The mist was full of Uzumaki spores.

39

THE PRINCIPALS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL AS
sembled in Camp David’s Laurel Lodge conference room. The mood was serious, no small talk, no joking and jostling. Lawrence Dunne took a chair along the back wall.

The room was long and narrow, with a sloped ceiling and wood paneling on all four walls. A thirty-foot-long wooden table ran down the center. The vice president, the President’s chief of staff, and the national security adviser were on one side, talking in quiet tones. The secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs sat directly across. Clustered at the far end were the directors of National Intelligence and Homeland Security, along with the FBI director, the head of the CDC, and the commander of Fort Detrick. Normally a ring of lesser functionaries would occupy the chairs against the walls, but not today. Today no one was let in the room who wasn’t absolutely essential. Dunne was the only deputy-level staff member present, in the room at the President’s behest.

The POTUS himself entered solo, exuding authority, making it clear to everyone who was in charge. With his Hollywood looks and background as self-made CEO of a billion-dollar Internet services empire, he had run as an agent of change, loyal to no one but the American people, promising to restore the nation to its former glory as the undisputed economic leader of the world. He was addicted to Butterfingers and was a serial sports fanatic, his current obsession being handball. He liked to project a calm, laid-back persona to the public, but he could stand up and dominate a room when he had to.

He worked his way around the table, calling for updates one by one. The Homeland Security chief, Mike Reardon, spoke first, a heavyset man with flat features and weathered skin, more truck driver than bureaucrat. “We’ve got the media under control for the moment. We’re leaking stories that the ATF found marijuana fields at Seneca Depot, and the bombing was a burn. All part of a major drug ring roundup. We told them to expect more arrests soon.”

“No one has connected this to Rochester?”

“We’re connecting the dots for them. The cover story is that the Rochester event was part of the roundup, stopping a shipment to Canada across Lake Ontario.”

Alex Grass, the head of the CDC, spoke next, a dapper man with sleepy eyes. “Dylan Connor is showing symptoms. His temperature dropped. He’s still alert, but he’s having auditory hallucinations.”

“What about the guy from Rochester?”

“Positive. Also, one of the soldiers from Drum that picked him up looks like he has it. The rest we don’t know.”

“We’re absolutely sure it’s the Uzumaki?”

“Three labs independently ran the samples, all with different protocols. I personally supervised the tests at CDC. Toloff at USDA. Arvenick’s people at USAMRIID. Every assay came back positive, three sigma. It’s the Uzumaki.”

The room was quiet except for the background clatter from the displays on the walls.

The President called upon the commander at Detrick, Anthony Arvenick. He was in charge of the operational response in case of a large-scale outbreak. “There’s no doubt, Mr. President,” the general said, his voice grave. “She’s got the Uzumaki. And thousands of those Crawlers. The scenarios range from bad to worse to nightmare.”

“Start with bad.”

“She’s already shown us
bad
. She leaves the Crawlers in a public place, they bite whoever happens by. But at least we know we’ve been hit. It’s bad, but in this scenario, at least we know. We can do our best to contain it, have a shot at limiting the damage to a small geographic area. The difference between a few deaths and a few thousand might boil down to the direction the wind is blowing.

“
Worse
, she releases it in a major population center but
quietly
. Say, sending in a Crawler to expel spores in the ventilation ducts of a building. The unsuspecting occupants come and go, and a whole city could be infected within days. If we picked it up in time, we might be able to shut it down. But to quarantine a city would be hell. It would start a panic like you can’t imagine.”

“Give me
nightmare.
”

“She hits us a thousand places simultaneously. She cultures enough Uzumaki to load up all those Crawlers, disperses them across the country any number of ways. Hell, she could mail them to every major city, have them pop out of ten thousand envelopes all at once. She does something like that, we don’t have a chance.”

The room was silent. “Lay out our options.”

“Other than giving her what she wants, not much. Our best chance is to stop her before she releases it.”

“And if we don’t catch it?”

Arvenick said, “Antifungals don’t seem to work. A private company, Genesys, has a prototype vaccine. It’s not ready, but we’re going to run human tests. It’s a vaccine, not a cure. It does no good if the fungus has already spread. Maybe we could prevent a second wave, but that’s it.”

The President nodded, his hands on the table before him. Dunne tried to read his face. “Mr. President,” Dunne said, standing.

“Lawrence.”

“The health consequences are only the start. However bad they are, they pale in comparison to the broader implications. The entire country would be cut off, isolated. No airline flights. No one would get in or out. The stock market would crash in a way that would make 1929 look like a walk in the park. Within days, we would have shortages of all kinds—food, medicine, water—as trade shut down. We would become a Third World nation. The financial center of the world would move to London, or more likely Hong Kong. The United Nations would—”

“I’m aware of what would happen,” the President snapped. Then to Arvenick, “We’ve got nothing else?”

Arvenick shook his head. “Nothing good. We know that antibiotics make you vulnerable. We could ban antibiotic use, but in doing so we’d be signing thousands of death sentences. Not to mention we’d have a whole series of bacteriological epidemics sweeping the country. And even after all that, it might not help.”

“Why not?”

“We’ve assumed that those people who’d taken broad-spectrum antibiotics within the last few weeks would be at risk. That gives a maximum number of dead in the hundreds of thousands. But it might be much, much worse. If you believe Sadie Toloff at the USDA.”

Dunne jumped to attention at this. He’d heard nothing about revised estimates.

“Toloff’s piecing together what Liam Connor knew. She’s got a team of over forty scientists—fungal biologists, epidemiologists, gastrointestinal specialists—going through his notebooks. His published papers. It’s clear he was looking to find a cure for the Uzumaki.”

Dunne lost his patience. “Get to it.”

“Mr. President,” Arvenick said, pointedly ignoring Dunne. “We’ve known a long time that the Uzumaki infects humans after an antibiotic regimen. After the bacterial populations in the digestive tract are knocked down. But—and this is what Sadie Toloff is piecing together from Connor’s notebooks—he maintained we have in our appendix a specific bacterium that feeds on the Uzumaki. Like a parasite, the bacterium knocks the Uzumaki out, almost like a natural bacterial immune system.”

“And most people have this bacterium?” asked the President.

“Not quite, sir. Most people
had
it. But we’ve been using antibiotics for decades now. The bacterium might well be nearly wiped out in the human population. Once it gets killed by a course of antibiotics, it looks like it’s slow to come back.”

No one spoke. No one moved.

“General Arvenick, give me your best guess on casualties. How high?”

“Say on day one we have one person infected. And every day each infected person infects one more. At the end of one month, that adds up to over five hundred million.”

It was as if the air had been sucked out of the room.