Mappa Mundi (46 page)

“Theories,” Kropotkin said. “Nothing more. There was never a way that was delicate or discreet enough to put them into practice. And governments, especially this one, had a long history of attempted uses of all kinds of mind control and propaganda devices.”

“Far seers.” Natalie nodded. “The MK-Ultra project.” She'd studied what she knew of the projects that the USA had run during the Cold War but all of her material had been anecdotal. She'd seen no proofs in which she couldn't poke a hole some way, just as with all the other paranormal claims she'd investigated. “They may have been able to do something. It's hard to say definitely either way.”

“It's impossible,” her father snorted. “Easy to claim, never proven in a controlled test.”

Guskov turned to Natalie. “But you're in a different position now, Doctor Armstrong. You can read minds, isn't that right?”

Natalie hesitated, aware of all the attention in the room fixed on her and an undercurrent of wary and instinctive dislike, exactly the same reaction as Jude had first shown.

“It seems to be so,” she said carefully. “But it's a result of the Selfware process, the altered program. I don't know what it is.” Their faces were wide-eyed. They wanted to believe her. They were frightened, too. “Why don't we put it to the test?”

Her challenge surprised them.

“Wait, I thought there was another test subject, I mean, a person—before you,” Lucy said. “What was the outcome of that?”

Natalie looked at Guskov and her father, one at a time. “You know. Why haven't you told them?”

Kropotkin answered for them. “Because we would not believe it.”

“I don't believe it, either,” she said. “But now we can find out beyond a shadow of doubt. Your patient, Bobby X, as he was known on the list, is still alive. Unless he's reached a critical point, he may still be able to come here. He's volunteered to be our subject.”

“Excuse me, but what are we talking about here?” Khan shook her head in confusion, both hands open to the air. “May be able to? We're a hundred and fifty feet underground in a sealed container. How is he going to get in?”

Natalie met her incredulous gaze calmly and smiled, “That's the
most interesting question of all. Shall we go into the Test Centre and find out?”

As they got up, Isidore spoke for the first time. “This changes everything,” he said, looking straight at Guskov. “You didn't foresee this. Whatever it is, it's obviously extremely powerful and dangerous. It doesn't fit the plan.”

“We'll see.” Guskov smiled and waved them out of the door ahead of him.

Natalie caught up with her father in the corridor. He glanced down at her and whispered, “Bobby X is still
alive?”

“I think so.” She felt his hand reach for hers and hold it, tenderly.

“Good,” he said, squeezing her fingers.

She had to fight to breathe against the tough pain in her throat all the way to the control centre. Calum hadn't thought Bobby would survive. He didn't think she would.

Utah from the plane's window was orange, broad, and arid beneath the cloudless sky of the day. They flew in low to Dugway's tough little strip and Jude watched their shadow racing, getting larger and larger. Two jackrabbits broke cover and went dodging and leaping away as they touched down. Their frantic paws left fan-trails of dust that spread on the wind and then quickly settled. In the distance, mirage lakes shivered. The plane turned and taxied towards the huts at the edge of the airfield.

Jude turned away from the view unwillingly and looked at Mary as she put her jacket on in the seat across from his, smiling unconsciously as he did. She'd been such a good friend for so long, he couldn't think of her as a devious barefaced liar. The ghost wings in his back fluttered. His smile faded.

“Penny for them?” she asked.

“If it turned out that we'd already run into this project, in Florida, say. The procedure would be to hand over our materials to the project team leader and bury any subsidiary investigations, right?”

Mary's coral mouth, glossed and perfect, smiled as she tipped her forehead down, confirming that.

“But if this looks like an international—”

“Then we have the option to hand it over to the International Committee,” she said. “You're not really thinking of doing that?”

“I'm sure it's in violation of a number of nonproliferation agreements and conventions, without even looking.” He undid his seat belt and stretched his legs. His body felt old.

“We need a reliable deterrent.”

“We need to keep everyone behind the line if any treaty is going to work,” he said. “That's going to last about two seconds when they find out about this.”

“You don't honestly believe that other nations haven't pursued this?”

He yawned. “I don't know what to believe.”

She nudged his shin with her foot and uncrossed her legs. “Wait and see.”

Outside, the sun had turned the morning into a baking oven. Heat radiated from every surface and the dryness of the air made Jude cough. He and Mary walked between their military escorts and took two cars to the Proving Grounds, the shift from hot blast to cold air-conditioning a shock plunge that Jude resented like a hole in the head. He was shivering when he got out and then within seconds they were through another wall of red heat and into a cold room that felt like an icebox.

“Who needs Swedish saunas?” he muttered to Mary and she grinned.

Despite his initiation into the marines Jude had never entirely liked army ways. Now the formalities irritated him. His head felt scratchy on the inside, but that was most likely his imagination rather than the actual NervePath spreading. Knowing that didn't help.

The Proving Grounds were an enormous lot of sixty-four square miles. Uninhabited except by lizards, rodents, rabbits, and the occasional deer they had been the test area for the USA's biological and chemical programmes for over sixty years. Out here there were animals that had
become resistant to diseases that had been used in tests, including Q-Fever and equine encephalitis. The fact that, even under this torment, life could scratch out an existence and had adapted gave Jude hope in the face of what Natalie had told him of Guskov's plans. Things were never as hopeless as they looked. Then again, it was the animal migration here that worried him the most intensely, too. Local domestic animals and humans had been infected with germs from bomb tests on this land before.

Their contact here, Lieutenant Colonel Sharrock of the army's Medical Research, Development, Acquisition, and Logistics Command, met them in the bunker confines of the viewing station they had been ushered into. He shook hands with them and showed them to seats. In front of them screens were blank, except for the names and locations of their camera feeds set out in plain type. Sharrock, a heavyset man with greying hair and a face that was lean even down to the almost lipless economy of his mouth, had a cultured, authoritative voice that had long since lost specifics of local accent—although, as they went through introductions, he admitted to being a Texan.

Jude's first question was, “How does this fit in with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Colonel?”

The colonel blinked. He wasn't used to answering to civilians but he said, “As stated in our documentation, Agent Westhorpe, the Deliverance system is a defensive technology, designed to counteract the effects of terrorist attacks using biological and chemical weapons. Although we signed up not to test offensive weapons of this nature or with nuclear capacity there is no law that says we can't test countermeasures.”

“Your countermeasures read to me like they have one hell of an offensive capability,” Jude said, conversationally. He didn't have any quarrel with the man and didn't want to anger him, but the anger in himself wasn't going to let this situation slip past without extracting every chance to square off. As he sat back in the comfortable leather of the chair the grazes on his back fired into life. He twitched his lip in a suppressed curse and hoped he hadn't started to leak blood on his shirt.

Mary smiled, flirting by flashing a glance of mutual Jude-tolerance in Sharrock's direction. “What my very direct partner means is that we're very anxious to understand the full implications of your technology.”

“I'm glad to be able to answer,” the colonel said, his eyes showing no signs of annoyance. He must have been well used to being worked over by all kinds of interrogation strategies, including the nice-and-nasty technique, and if he thought they were doing it deliberately he didn't seem to care. “But first, let's look at this.” He used a remote to cue one of the cameras.

“What are we looking at?” Mary asked.

The picture that appeared showed a strip of unremarkable desert. From the camera's high angle they could see the fence line of a small paddock. As the picture zoomed closer a selection of sick-looking animals came into sharper focus.

“This is a range of species.” Sharrock pointed out the individuals with a laser pointer. “They're in a pen about ten miles north of this spot. They've been infected with anthrax. These steers and the sheep are just about on their last day. These others—caged off in the shade there—monkeys and coyotes, are rabid with the racing variant of that disease and hydrophobia has taken hold.”

Jude's stomach clenched as the shots became close studies of suffering. A marmoset, flecks of foam around its mouth, was leaping and shrieking around its bars, tiny fingers bloody, eyes mad. Beneath it a coyote panted frantically and at its side another lay inert, flanks heaving. The larger animals stood or lay in laboured positions, struggling to breathe, shifting with their constant but futile efforts to obtain relief from ceaseless pain.

“They're beyond ordinary help now,” Sharrock said and sent the picture up to the top left of the projection area. The main view now showed a microscope slide, dyed and highlighted in glorious colours.

“This is a sample of the anthrax-infected sheep's blood. These here are the disease marked out in red.” His pointer skated over a set of
bacilli that were rod-shaped and loosely linked together several at a time like chains of sausages, “And this is our product, Deliverance.”

Jude looked at the green spheres suspiciously. “They're huge.”

“About as big as you can get in the microscopic world, uh-huh,” Sharrock confirmed. “Still just able to cross the tissue barriers into the bloodstream and that's the main point. Now watch. This sample is set to show you what happens when the release of the payload is triggered.”

“How does that work?” Mary had her Pad out and was comparing what he said with her information.

“We set the shell to open when the immune response in the body has peaked in reaction to the initial infection.”

“So, after you've sneezed and coughed all over?” Jude said.

“Exactly. Ensuring maximum spread.” Sharrock darted his pointer at a green planet circling idly. They could see a shady coloration inside it, purplish. The histamine inrush was signalled by a surge of pink and, amid the flood, the cell wall of the planet suddenly thinned and separated, snapping back on itself like a broken elastic band. The purple and indigo colour of its payload spread out, revealing itself to be a pair of cells.

“That's the antigen—engineered T-cells that destroy the anthrax.”

The purple cell's long tendrils caught and wrapped around the red invader. Within a minute they had infiltrated and destroyed it. As its wrecked parts joined those of the ruined Deliverance spore the indigo shapes, like jellyfish, floated off, tasting their way towards another red bar.

“Is this time-lapse?”

“No, real-time,” Sharrock said and turned to grin at Jude.

Jude had to admit he was impressed.

“Now, let's see what that looks like in real life.” Sharrock switched back to the pitiful animals.

“But isn't this shock against Deliverance going to combine with their original symptoms and, you know, kill them before the cure can take any effect?” Mary peered at the cattle now on screen with her nose
part-wrinkled in disgust. Like Jude, she was semisquinting in an effort not to really see what she had to see.

“These animals went through their histamine shock about thirty minutes ago.” Sharrock pointed to one steer that was coughing, a runny discharge splaying from its nostrils and mouth. Its eyes were watery and surrounded by clouds of flies. “The Deliverance should kick in any time now, as the levels start to decline.”

“This won't be so much use against chemical warfare unless it's a slow-acting attack,” Jude said. “But against biologicals it might do some good. Do you think the infection rate and transmission vectors would be strong enough?”

“We've predicted by modelling at the CDC that we could cover an area like downtown Washington within twenty-four hours, pretty much at saturation, working from just a few fixed-point releases.”

“And if you're not infected with the disease or toxin?” Mary asked.

“Then it won't do you any harm, except for the sneezing and coughing,” Sharrock said. “Although those can be pretty strenuous.” He flicked a switch and the picture changed cameras. They found themselves looking at a test room full of soldiers in fatigues, sitting around. All of them had streaming eyes, running noses, and a miserable look. Those who weren't involved in a fit of explosive sneezing were very still. They looked exhausted and pissed-off.

“Volunteers,” Sharrock said, grinning. “Testing an empty version. Only one man went in there with it two hours before this was shot. The rest were uninfected then. And we've done the same tests using water dispersal, food, and air contamination …”

“Prevailing wind tests?”

“Downwind testing, yeah. Right out here in front of this building.”

“And where were the furthest cases found?” Jude asked, trying to gauge how far it would carry before settling into the ground.