Fight the Future (7 page)

"Are you saying," Mulder said slowly, "that it wasn't a small outbreak?"

Kurtzweil's expression looked positively feverish. "I'm saying it wasn't the Hanta virus."

From the street came the sudden
yoof a siren. The two men started, then backed more tightly against the damp brick walls as a police car cruised slowly down the street. When it was gone, Mulder hissed, "What
was
it?"

Kurtzweil stared at his hands, finally said, "When we were young men in the military, your father and I were recruited for a project. They told us it was biological warfare. A virus. There were… rumors…

about its origins."

Mulder shook his head impatiently. "What killed those men?"

"What killed them I won't even write about," Kurtzweil exploded. "I tell you, they'd do more than just harass me. They have the future to protect."

Mulder regarded him coolly. "I'll know soon enough."

But Kurtzweil was too worked up to hear him. "What killed those men can't be identified in simple medical terms," he went on heatedly. "My god, we can't even wrap our minds around something as obvious as HIV! We have no
con-text
for what killed those men, or any apprecia-tion of the scale in which it will be unleashed in the future. Of how it will be transmitted, of the environmental factors involved…"

"A plague?"

"The plague to end all plagues, Agent Mulder," whispered Kurtzweil. "A silent weapon for a quiet war. The systematic release of an indiscriminate organism for which the men who bring it on still have no cure. They've been working on this
for fifty years
—" He punched the air for emphasis. "—while the rest of the world was fighting gooks and commies, these men have been secretly negotiating a planned Arma-geddon."

Mulder frowned. "Negotiating with
whom
?"

"I think you know." Kurtzweil's mouth grew tight. "The timetable has been set. It will hap-pen on a holiday, when people are away from their homes. When our elected officials are at their resorts or out of the country. The President will declare a state of emergency, at which time all federal agencies,
all
govern-ment, will come under the power of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"FEMA, Agent Mulder. The secret govern-ment."

Mulder whistled. "And they tell me
I'm
paranoid."

Kurtzweil shook his head fiercely. "Some-thing's gone wrong—something unanticipated. Go back to Dallas and dig, Agent Mulder. Or we're only going to find out like the rest of the country—when it's too late."

The older man shoved his hands into his pockets, turned, and walked quickly down the alley. Mulder stared after him, torn between annoyance, disbelief, and his own suspicions that Kurtzweil might well be on to something. Finally he called, "How can I reach you?"

"You can't," Kurtzweil replied without looking back. Mulder ran to catch up with him, pulling out his cell phone.

"Here—" he said breathlessly. Kurtzweil halted and stared at him. His eyes were wide, and for the first time Mulder recognized in the doctor's face that blend of fanaticism and fear that marked true and intense paranoia. He forced the cell phone into Kurtzweil's hand, then shook a finger at him.

"No calling Hawaii."

Mulder made his way in silence back to the leaden expanse of Connecticut Avenue.

BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL BETHESDA. MARYLAND

Dana Scully was so involved with her autopsy of the fireman that she almost didn't hear the brisk tread in the hallway and, moments later, the ominous click of a door opening. She whipped around, eyes wide above her surgical mask. Vague figures moved behind a frosted glass window: she recognized the young guard she and Mulder had scammed in the hallway, and two others wearing the uniform of military police. Without a sound she yanked the sheet back over the fireman's corpse, then darted across the laboratory to the freezer door.

She opened it as quickly and quietly as she could, slipped inside the frigid room, and shut the heavy metal door behind her. She winced as it clicked shut. Faint voices rose in the next room and she tensed, holding her breath as she tried to hear what they were saying.

"…
said they had clearance from General McAddie
…"

Abruptly the cloistered quiet of the freezer was broken by the chirping of her cell phone. Scully patted frantically at her coat, trying to silence it before it rang again. Before it could ring a second time she palmed the phone and hit the ON button.

"Scully… ?"

She crouched behind the door, her breath-ing quick and shallow, terrified that the guard was about to burst in. Mulder's voice came again from the phone. "Scully?"

She drew it slowly to her face. "Yeah," she said in a hoarse whisper.

"Why are you whispering?" Behind him she could hear the sounds of intermittent traffic, the bleat of a passing radio; he was at a pay phone.

"I can't really talk right now," she said, star-ing up at the door.

"What did you find?"

She took a breath. "Evidence of a massive infection."

"What kind of infection."

"I don't know."

Near silence in which she could hear static, the roar of a bus. Finally Mulder said, "Scully. Listen to me. I'm going home, then I'm booking a flight to Dallas. I'm getting you a ticket, top."

"
Mulder—
"

"I need you there with me," he went on quickly, not giving her the chance to argue. "I need your expertise on this. The bomb we found was meant to destroy those bodies and whatever they were infected by."

She shook her head. "I've got a hearing tomorrow—"

"I'll have you back for it, Scully, I promise. Maybe with evidence that could blow your hearing away."

"Mulder, I can't," Scully's voice rose. She bit her lip, angry and fearful of discovery. "I'm already
way
past the point of common sense here—"

Sudden voices sounded from the other side of the door. Without a "good-bye," Scully punched the phone off and shoved it into a pocket. Then she slid across the floor, ducking beneath one of the gurneys.

She pressed herself back as far as she could go and held her breath as the door to the freezer opened.

Footsteps. From where she was hidden Scully could see the guard's carefully buffed regulation-issue shoes pass within inches of her face. Two other pairs of feet followed, as the MPs crossed the freezer room, their steps echo-ing loudly on the linoleum floor. It was cold enough that Scully's entire body began to shake. She gritted her teeth, the gurney's metal shelf pressing against her back like a blade.

At the far wall the MPs hesitated. Scully watched as first one and then another stood on tiptoe. There was the bang of a steel cabinet being opened and closed; then the MPs turned and went back to the door, the naval guard behind them. He had just passed the gurney where she huddled when abruptly he stopped. Scully held her breath, heart pounding; she could have grabbed him by the ankle if she wanted to.

Go, she thought, and closed her eyes.
Go, leave, just go
…

They left. The freezer's heavy doors slammed shut. Scully sighed, and waited until it was safe to follow.

CHAPTER 7

FORENSICS LABORATORY FBI FIELD OFFICE DALLAS, TEXAS

tftf't/ou're looking for what amounts to a I needle in a haystack." The field agent waved his hand to indicate the room around them, an open space the size of a basketball court. "I'm afraid the explosion was so devas-tating there hasn't been whole lot we've been able to put together just yet."

Mulder had to agree. There were stacks of debris, twisted girders, roped-off areas where forensics experts sat and painstakingly tried to piece together what had been an office, or a kitchen, or a doorway.

It looked like the most tedious job in the world. Mulder stopped and stared at a table covered with what resembled a thousand scattered silvery blobs of solder. He raised an eyebrow, then turned back to the field agent.

"I'm looking for anything out of the ordi-nary. Maybe something from the FEMA offices where the bodies were found."

The field agent nodded, passing Mulder and pointing to another table. "We weren't expecting to find those remains, of course. They went right off to Washington."

Mulder looked away, hoping his frustration and disappointment wouldn't show. "Was there anything in those offices that didn't go to D.C.?"

The field agent gestured at the table. The jumbled contents looked as if they'd been there for months.

There were dusty glass bottles filled with what looked like metal screws and nails. Strewn across the table were a number of brushes of varying shapes and sizes, as well as tweezers, microscopes, and a very large magnifying glass.

"Some bone fragments came up in the sift this morning." The field agent picked up one of the bottles and gazed at its contents. "We thought there'd been another fatality, but then we found out that FEMA had recovered them from an archaeological site out of town."

"Have you examined them?"

"No." The field agent shrugged and replaced the bottle. "Just fossils, as far as we know."

Mulder nodded, when a figure standing in the doorway caught his eye. He lifted his chin very slightly and said, "I'd like this person to take a look, if you don't mind."

At the entrance to the workroom, Scully stood with arms crossed and stared at Mulder. Before he could call out to her, she walked across the room to join them. The field agent acknowledged her with a nod of greeting.

"Let me just see if I can lay my hands on what you're looking for," he said, and headed off into the maze of detritus behind them.

Mulder leaned against the table and gave Scully the once-over, twice. "You said you weren't coming."

"I wasn't planning on it," she said coolly. "Particularly after spending a half hour in cold storage this morning. But I got a better look at the blood and tissue samples I took from the fireman."

Mulder straightened. "What did you find?"

Scully lowered her voice. "Something I couldn't show to anyone else. Not without more information.

And not without causing the kind of attention I'd just as soon avoid right now."

She took a deep breath, and said, "The virus those men were infected with contains a protein code I've never seen before. What it did to them, it did extremely fast. And unlike the AIDS virus or any other aggressive strain, it survives very nicely
outside
the body."

Mulder's voice was a near whisper. "How was it contracted?"

"That I don't know. But if it's through sim-ple contact or blood to blood, and if it doesn't respond to conventional treatments, it could be a serious health threat."

Mulder started to reply excitedly, but at that moment the field agent reappeared. In his hands he carried a wooden tray holding several cork-topped glass vials. "Like I said, these are fossils," he announced, setting the tray down. "And they weren't near the blast center, so they aren't going to help you much."

"May If Scully waited for the field agent's nod, then picked up the tray. One by one she held the vials up to the light. They held bone frag-ments, the shattered remains of tibia and jaws and teeth. She selected one vial and stepped over to the chair beside a microscope, sat, and very care-fully tapped out a tiny fragment onto the viewing bed. She leaned forward, adjusting the focus until the fossilized sliver came into view.

Almost immediately she looked back up at Mulder. He took in her expression and quickly turned to the field agent. "You said you knew the location of the archaeological site where these were found?"

The agent nodded agreeably. "Show you right on a map," he drawled. "C'mon."

BLACKWOOD, TEXAS

The midday sun beat down upon raw red earth and dead grass, the domed white tents rising like huge, dust-stained eggs amid the unmanned trucks surrounding them. Several large generators gave forth a muted hum, but otherwise the scene was unutterably desolate. And strange.

Within the central tent, things were busier but no less strange. At the edge of an earthen hole, a small bulldozer wrestled with a large Lucite container set into its shovel, maneuver-ing it until it was a few yards from the opening. Monitors and gauges covered every inch of the container's surface, along with oxygen tanks and something resembling a circulating refrig-eration unit. It looked more like the sort of thing you'd find on a lunar landing module than in the Texas flatlands, and that's exactly what it was: a self-contained life-support sys-tem, its interior glazed with a thin, sugary layer of frost.

The bulldozer's engine cut off. Several technicians appeared. They lined up alongside the machine's shovel and lifted off the con-tainer, carrying it gingerly toward the hole. As they did so, a flap at the end of the room opened and Dr. Bronschweig appeared, clad in his Haz-Mat suit, hood unzipped so that it hung across his shoulders. He waved curtly at the technicians and started down the ladder leading into the hole. ,

"I need to have those settings checked and reset," he called, pointing at the gauge-ridden container. "1

need a
steady
minus two Celsius though the transfer of the body, after I adminis-ter the vaccine. Got that?
Minus two
."

The technicians nodded. They set the con-tainer down and began checking gauges. Bronschweig pulled his hood on and disap-peared down the hole, bumping against the clear hatch as he went.

Below, in the ice cave, it was dark save for the arctic blue glow coming from the plastic-draped area at one end of the chamber. Refrigeration vents continued to pump freezing air into the dim space. Dr.

Bronschweig moved stiffly across the cave, halting at the entrance to the eerily glowing alcove. With one gloved hand he moved aside the plastic drapery and entered.

Behind him plastic crinkled as the sheeting fell back into place. He stepped over to the gur-ney beneath its rack of monitors. A clear plas-tic bubble covered it, encasing the body of the fireman. Dr.

Bronschweig fished in his pocket and withdrew a syringe and ampule. He reached for a work light, moving it until its steady bright beam fell on the litter, and leaned closer to open the plastic casing. What he saw there made him gasp.