Eden's Gate (26 page)

Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Eden's Gate

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“Jesus Christ,” Metzler said softly. He looked at the bottles in the glove box and then back at the computer screen.

“What is it?” Speyer asked.

“I don't know,” Metzler said, shaking his head. “I mean I don't know the strain; you need to have an infectious disease expert look at this. But it's an arbovirus, you know. It's got RNA and it's usually transmitted by a bug; mosquitoes or ticks. And it's damned active.”

“Deadly?”

“Give you hemorrhagic fever. All the capillaries in your body start blowing out and you bleed to death internally. Kidney failure. It's not pretty.”

“Do you have to get bitten by a bug to get it?”

“No,” Metzler said. “My guess is that this was engineered, like a vaccine. Infect a host, then reproduce the virus from their blood. In this form spraying it into the air would work.” He gave Speyer another hard look. “This came from a military lab somewhere. It's a goddamn weapon.”

“Do you have a problem with that?” Speyer asked.

Metzler shook his head. “No, but I think that two hundred fifty thou might be a little closer to the mark.”

“I can give you one hundred fifty; that's all we have here. But you may have this equipment.”

“Not a chance. I'll take the money and run, but I wouldn't touch this stuff with a ten foot pole.”

“How do we proceed?”

“I'll need a meter or so of high pressure hose and the valve caps that match the nitrogen tanks, the virus bottles, and the sample bottle.”

“I think we have everything that you'll need here.”

“I'll empty one of the nitrogen bottles, transfer all the virus material into it, then mix the gas from the second nitrogen bottle. When we're done both bottles will be charged with the virus and enough nitrogen to release it. I'll transfer some of that mix into your sample bottle.” He shook his head again and glanced at the computer screen. The virus was very active. “I hope that whoever you send that little bottle to knows what the hell they're doing. Because it'd probably be enough to wipe out a couple city blocks if it got loose and the wind was right.”

“Won't the outside of the bottles be contaminated?” Speyer asked.

“We'll wash everything down first,” Metzler said. “Don't worry, I know what I'm doing, and believe me, I
will
be careful.”

It was after ten by the time Metzler finished the job and the inside of the glove box was washed clean with an extremely powerful virus-killing antiseptic. He removed his hands from the gloves, took off the biohazard suit, then sat back and lit a cigarette as Speyer came to the doorway.

“Are you finished?”

“Finally,” Metzler said. “Two of the old valves were stuck and I nearly stripped them.”

“Is it safe to handle the bottles now, without having to wear a suit?”

“Completely.” Metzler stood up and got his jacket. “Now, if you don't mind, I'll take my money and I'll get out of your hair.”

“I want you to open the glove box first.”

Metzler chuckled. “I guess I can't blame you.” He stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, depressurized the cabinet, and opened the front cover. He took out the sample bottle, laid it on the table, and then took out the nitrogen bottles and set them on the floor. He dusted off his hands and held them out. “Germ free. But before you move this shit around I'd suggest you put some tape on the valves in case they get jostled.”

“You've done good work here,” Speyer said.

Metzler's eyes narrowed imperceptibly. “Aren't you going to give me the speech about forgetting that I ever met you or you're going to send big Ernst to break my legs or something?”

“You're a bright man. I don't think a warning is necessary.”

Baumann appeared in the corridor behind Speyer. He was not carrying the leather money bag.

Metzler casually picked up the sample bottle. “Like you say, I am a bright man. By the time old Ernst there pulled out his gun and shot me, I would have opened the valve and we'd all die.”

Speyer gave him an apparaising look. “I don't think so.”

“Your choice, pal. But if I'm going to die anyway, I might as well take you nut cases with me.”

Baumann stopped in his tracks, uncertain what to do.

“Tell you what,” Metzler said. “We're all going upstairs where you're going to get my money. Then one of you is going to walk up to Columbus with me where I'll catch a cab. Once I'm inside the cab I'll exchange the sample bottle for the money. Everybody wins. And best of all I won't have any reason to open my mouth because if I do I'll lose the money. You get what you want and I'll get what I want.”

Speyer was vexed but it was clear that he couldn't see a way out of the impasse. He nodded. “Very well. But I will give you a warning after all. We have many friends. Open your mouth and you're a dead man. Sooner or later someone will catch up with you.”

“I get the message,” Metzler said. “Now, if you don't mind, I want to get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

Speyer got the leather money bag and walked up to Columbus Avenue with the biologist while Baumann wrapped the two cylinders in blankets and took them out to the trunk of the Mercedes.

Traffic was still fairly heavy, and it took only a couple of minutes for Metzler to hail a cab. When he got in, he exchanged the small cylinder for the money bag.

“Best you not forget what I told you,” Speyer said.

“Believe me, I won't,” Metzler said.

Speyer pocketed the cylinder, turned and walked back to 86th, and for the first time since he'd seen the images on the computer screen he sighed in relief.

It was eleven by the time they stopped in front of the Hayden Planetarium. Speyer dropped the package containing a letter and the sample cylinder into a Federal Express collection box. It was free of fingerprints, the FedEx account number was untraceable to him, and it was addressed simply to: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., 20502.

“Do you think they'll go for it?” Baumann asked.

“They'd be fools not to.” Speyer stared out the window as they headed north on the Henry Hudson Parkway to the George Washington Bridge and Iâ95. “Seventy-two hours,” he said. “If they don't pay us by then we'll spray one bottle over Washington and sell the other bottle to the highest bidder. And believe me, Ernst, there'll be plenty of bidders.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.

The package, along with seventeen others, was delivered to the White House Mail Center in the Old Executive Office Building at one in the afternoon. Mary Wilcox, chief postal receptionist on duty, passed each package and letter through the Advanced Threat Evaluator, a complex piece of electronic hardware that checked for chemical, biological, or nuclear hazards.

The cylinder showed up on the X-ray and ultrasound scans, but the sensitive gamma ray and neutron detectors showed nothing. Nor did the chemical or biological sensors pick up a thing.

Nevertheless she stopped the conveyor and picked up the phone. “I might have something for you.”

A minute later, Tom Walton, the chief Secret Service agent on
duty, came across the hall from his office and studied the image on the screen for a minute. “I don't like the look of it,” he said.

“What do you think it is?” Mary Wilcox asked. She was thinking bomb.

“I don't see any detonator circuits, but that might not mean a thing,” Walton said. “Get your people out of here for a few minutes.” He called his boss, Leonard Sills, who was chief of White House security, and then called the bomb squad from next door.

Both arrived at the same time, and Sills gave the okay to move the package and open it inside a blast box that was permanently set up in the hall. Everyone backed off to give the demolitions lead officer, dressed in a heavily padded and armored disposal suit, plenty of room to pick up the package carefully and walk with it out into the hall. When it was in the blast box they all breathed a sigh of relief.

Sills said something into his lapel mike, then nodded. “Give me five,” he said. He looked over at Walton. “POTUS is enroute by chopper. I asked them to hold him for five minutes.” POTUS was the Secret Service designator for the President Of The United States.

“Good idea.”

“I have the package open,” Martin LeRoche, the demolitions officer, radioed. “No wires, no circuitry, no external power source.”

“Any label on the bottle?” Walton asked.

“No, but there is a letter.”

“Leave the bottle, bring the letter,” Sills instructed. He took out a pair of surgical rubber gloves and put them on as LeRoche came back across the hall with the standard business-size envelope in his thickly gloved hand.

“It's addressed to the president,” Sills said, carefully opening the envelope. It took him a minute to read the short note and for the words to register, but when he was finished his lips compressed and he looked up.

“What is it, Len?” Walton asked.

“Some nut case says he's sent the president a sample bottle of bugs. Call Bethesda and get the CDC's rapid response team over here on the double.” He turned to LeRoche. “I want this wing evacuated and sealed right now.” He got on his radio. “Thunder, this is Sills.”

“Copy.”

“We have a possible Mars One threat. Confidence is high. CDC is on its way.”

“Copy that. We're diverting POTUS to the secondary.”

“We should be clear within the hour. But this one came with a note.”

“Fax it.”

“Will do,” Sills said, mindful of all the wheels that had been set into motion and hoping that this wasn't the big one that they expected to happen someday.

DECATUR, GEORGIA

Dr. Theodore Osborne, director of the Centers for Disease Control laboratory division was about to sit down at the dinner table with his wife and teenage son when the phone call came for him. It was the lab where the cylinder had been brought.

“It's not good news, I'm afraid,” Lieutenant Colonel Jan deHuis said. He was chief of the biological threat research section.

“Good God, don't tell me that it's legitimate?” Dr. Osborne said. He was a good Christian man who in his heart believed in the basic goodness of man.

“It's an arbovirus. Like ebola and some of the other African hemorraghic strains.”

“Active?”

“Very,” deHuis said. “But this one's in none of our databases. It's brand new.”

“Did you find any biological tags?”

“None. But if I had to guess, I'd bet a year's pay that this was cooked up in a military laboratory somewhere. Maybe Iraq. But I just can't be sure. It's not very sophisticated but I expect that after we run our live tests we'll find that it's deadly.”

“We'd better inform the president this evening,” Dr. Osborne said.

“It's on your computer.”

“I'll look it over and send it up. Thank you for the fast work, Jan.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.

President Reasoner's National Security Council members got to their feet when he entered the situation room beneath the White House and took his seat at the center of the long table.

“I trust that everybody has read the letter that came with the cylinder, as well as the CDC's report.”

“We have, Mr. President,” his national security adviser, Leslie Newby said.

“Very well, what do we do about it?” The president glanced at the wall clock. It was 8:30 P.M. “We have a half hour before the son of a bitch calls us, and I'm going to have to make some tough decisions.”

“We don't know who they are, what they want or how long they're going to give us,” FBI Director Dale McKeever said. “None of that was mentioned in the letter. So our first job is to agree with everything they demand, but to stall for time.”

“Does the Bureau have any leads?”

“There were no fingerprints on the letter or the cylinder. The paper was standard twenty-pound copy paper that you can buy from any office supply house. We'll have the brand later this evening, but I doubt that it'll help much. The printer was an older Hewlett Packard DeskJet that you'll find in about a quarter of all the households in this country. The cylinder is a laboratory item, manufactured two years ago by Western Laboratory Products in Waco, but distributed to nearly every lab supply company in the country. We're checking, but if the bottle was purchased through an intermediary or through a blind, it'll be a dead end.” McKeever checked his notes.

“The package was picked up at a FedEx drop box outside the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, but we can't narrow the time it was placed in the box closer than six hours. We're canvassing the neighborhoods immediately around the box for witnesses.” McKeever looked up. “There's more of the same, but the fact of the matter is that we need time.”

The president turned to his CIA director, James Flynn. “Have your people turned up anything that might help?”

“If, as Dr. Osborne suggests, it's a military virus from an Iraqi lab, we're out of luck for the moment. Since the inspections were blocked again we've been unable to place an effective agent inside the country.” He spread his hands. “Given the time we might be able to find out something.”

President Reasoner's eyes were hard. “How much time?”

“Months, Mr. President, certainly not days or hours.”

“They've covered their bases very well,” the president said. He looked at the note that had been sent with the cylinder. It was short and to the point. The virus was deadly, the terrorists had much more of it, and they would release it in a major U.S. city unless one very
simple demand was met. A call would be made to the White House situation room at precisely 2100 hours EDT.

The sweep second hand of the wall clock came up to 9:00 P.M. and one of the incoming lines lit up. The Marine technician let it ring twice then made the circuit. They heard the warbling tone of a computer and the call was switched to the laptops in front of everyone at the table.

“Good evening, Mr. President and members of your security council.” The words appeared on the LCD screens.

The president hesitated a moment, and then typed his reply. “You have our attention. What do you want?”

“No later than seventy-two hours from now, your government will deposit $10 billion in U.S. funds into the following seventy-three off-shore bank accounts.”

A series of countries, banks, account numbers, and amounts, beginning with several deposits in the Grand Cayman islands totalling around $250 million, scrolled down the screen.

“Do we have a trace on him?” the president asked.

“No, sir,” the Marine said. “The call is coming from an anonymous remailer in Switzerland.”

“We can break that, but it'll take us several days, up to a week if the remailer is good,” McKeever said.

“That means he could be anywhere?”

“Anywhere in the world.”

The president turned back to the laptop. “Who are you?” he typed.

“That is of no consequence. You will be trying to find us, of course, mobilizing all of your military and law enforcement agencies. Under the circumstances I cannot wish you luck, but your chances are not very good. What you must not do is go public. Besides causing a panic in every major U.S. city, we would be forced to demonstrate our resolve.”

“Son of a bitch, that's his weakness,” McKeever said. He looked at the president. “Somebody knows these people. Neighbors, coworkers, somebody. That's why they don't want us to take our investigation to the public. He's afraid that someone will come forward and identify him.”

“What do we do?” the president asked.

“Stall him.”

“We need more time,” the president typed. “One week.”

“Seventy-two hours.”

“Why are you doing this?” the president replied angrily.

“For the money, of course.”

“If you go through with this, we will hunt you down.”

“Surely you must have learned by now that any leader's powerâeven a great leaderâis limited. We will be quite safe. Seventy-two hours.”

“We will find you,” the president typed.

“The connection has been terminated, Mr. President,” the marine said.