The Messenger (13 page)

“Do these have oil? Maybe I should take some of the others—” she says to the man, who efficiently grabs back the chips and waits for her to make up her mind. She opts for a nuked slice of pizza and a Coke and, by the time she has done so, has spread everything she can to his hands: carefully counted out her change, looked away and politely blocked a cough with her palm, and actually touched his finger when he reached forward with her coins. Smiling the whole time. “You’re so kind,” she says to him.

She is not really hungry, and when the pizza is ready, she finds a seat in the corner of the car and picks at it while paging through a not-too-badly crumpled
USA Today
. The newspaper is mostly concerned with sports and scandals, but her eye is attracted by a report on the arrest in Israel of a man distributing letters laced with a white powder. Analysis is being done, but it is feared the man was acting as part of a terrorist organization.

She carefully reads the article again. It has the dry feel of something taken off a wire service and actually says very little. Because its subject is foreign it occupies a bare two inches in the overall universe of
USA Today
.

The hour has passed too quickly. The sordid little snack bar is closed in advance of their arrival in Philadelphia. She goes back to her seat and, when they coast into the station, takes her bag and the laptop and climbs down from the train. Inside, she watches while the Acela heads away without her, and then lines up to buy a ticket on the next train that will take her to D.C.

She has fifteen minutes, and she does her regular routine there in the station, going to the bathrooms, paging through the magazines in the little bookstore. Buying some gum, holding up a sweatshirt to see if it will fit. In the process she learns that Philadelphia occupies a place of mythical importance to the United States of America; this is obvious from the posters and souvenirs on sale, which prominently feature the damaged Liberty Bell. The motif is everywhere, ultimately reduced to a silk-screened graphic that adorns T-shirts
and snowglobes. If it’s not the Liberty Bell that’s being hawked, it’s the paraphernalia of one of the several sports teams who are resident in the city.

The train glides in and she rushes along the platform to the cars. This is a much simpler, tawdrier train than the Acela. Just ahead of her, an elderly woman is helping her forty-something child up the stairs onto the train. At the top they turn together and, with the aid of a porter, begin to navigate to a seat. She sees the daughter’s face—the features appear squeezed, and the expression is flat, but the close-set eyes are restless, roaming across everything in their path. They settle on Daria and she looks away, embarrassed to be caught staring.

“You can sit anywhere, ma’am,” the porter says once he has got the mother and daughter into their seats. The mother looks up as Daria passes by. A beautiful woman once, Daria realizes. Lovely bones, and a fine spray of gray hair that frames her face. Good eyes and a lot of tiredness.

She walks past them, holding her breath and being careful not to touch their seats, and moves all the way through and behind into another car, hoping that somehow her deadly aura won’t carry to the two women. She aims for a seat in the back of the car, but just before she gets there, an elderly couple comes through and takes it, and she has to go one more car to find some space.

It is a warm day in September and the light streams in the window. She stares out across the narrow station yard. There is a fringe of rough grass beside the tracks, and bees are combing the blossoms, their darting movements faster than a human can see, picking, choosing, gathering.

She’d helped her uncle and brothers tend hives one summer. As long as Amir or Ra’id was with her, it was permitted. She was the youngest and a girl, and after she’d helped her mother, nothing more was expected of her, so she got to watch the fantastic creatures come and go while her brothers stripped the hives of honey.

In those short days she had fallen in love with the honeybees, with their intricacy and their obsessive will to survive. The sweetness of their product was truly a gift from God. Seemingly out of
nothingness they built their waxen labyrinths. They created a special jelly that they used to transform an egg from a common worker into a queen. If you ate it, it could cure wounds.

Once, Amir had come to her, a swarm of bees draped across his shoulder and neck. He walked stiff legged and was trying not to laugh and startle them. So many stings would be fatal. She put her hand out and in a moment one of the insects landed on her finger and began crawling along, then another and another until a little bridge had been formed between her and her brother.

He just stood there and smiled at her. She let her hand move an inch or two away, and slowly they all returned to Amir’s shoulder.

“Magic …” her brother said to her.

At night her mother told stories and they sat with the cousins and sang. But mostly she was outside from dawn until darkness. Sleeping under the trees, fig trees and a lonely pear that were protected with nets. At the end of the summer, all the children helped her uncle put out sticks with glue to trap the birds. They had food then and her father was near enough to visit. It was the last good summer. With her brothers and the hives. Everything got worse after that.

She watches a lonely bee foraging on the vegetation that grows beside the tracks. Is her future written? Will she just finally run out of flowers, be forced to travel so far from home that she loses her way?

An announcement is made that she dimly hears above the Nano; a shiver creaks through the car. They slip forward; the bee, the grass, the flickering ties of the tracks, the trees, the streets, blur into nothingness.

Now everything has been zapped up into emergency mode.

Suicidally, and in disregard of his warnings that Washington was poisoned and therefore they should be holing up in the nearest bunker as per the most recent Continuity of Government plan, the FBI decided that Dr. Samuel Watterman’s presence was required at the White House. There was a flight in a very fast, very maneuverable
FBI business jet to Andrews AFB, where he was bundled into an SUV with blacked-out windows and sped across town. The whole process made him aware of how out-of-date and ineffectual he was, and left him paralyzed and pissed off.

Once they got to the West Wing, of course, there was a wait, and the FBI contingent had to mill around, shuffling back and forth in the breezeway before being ushered down the hall to the Roosevelt Room.

“You okay, Doc?” Lansing whispered to him.

“I could use a bathroom.”

“Better just suck it up for now.”

The Roosevelt Room was decorated differently than when he had first been there, long ago and far away in the Reagan administration.

Back then it was a great cast of characters in an administration riding high. Ed Meese. What’s his face, Stockman … the monetary wunderkind who was going to save the world. Oliver North, who was always up for a good time; the kind of guy who liked to pull frat house pranks and painful practical jokes. His big thing was Rex 84, an emergency management plan the government could use to legally incarcerate dissenters. There was a certain kind of terrible logic about it, Sam had to admit. The details all came out later. At the time he’d known nothing about it.

Yes, those were the top-secret days. Back when the designation meant something. Fun times with the monsters. Lots of compartments. Lots of high-octane secrets. Reagan was a movie star and was enjoying life that summer of ’81; it had been only a couple of months since the shooting, and they dressed him up like a cowboy and got Nancy out with him, smiling, and shaking hands so that people would forget all about Hinckley.

Sam had been thirty-three at the time, working at keeping his Democrat’s head down and burnishing his reputation as a biowarrior with one foot in public health. They sat him in the back row of chairs that had been set up around the rim of the Roosevelt Room. Since it was a Republican administration, the equestrian portrait of
Teddy Roosevelt was over the mantelpiece. All the biggies spoke in turn. Havercamp droned on and on. The Secretary of Health and Human Services laughed and nodded. Reagan’s people, despite their commitment to trim the fat from the budget, were committed to the best biowarfare defense systems money could buy. So was Caspar Weinberger.

There were plenty of obstacles, not the least of which were nonproliferation treaties that had been signed. Regarding the whole field of biowarfare, there were two types of reactions, Sam thought. The Denial crowd, who were ignorant of basic epidemiology, and the Avengers. Both sides needed the Poisoners, and he was eager to make a career at the interface. In any government, in any epoch, there had always been scientists ready to work on the most secret of arts, and, yes, back in the day he’d been one of the best.

The Denial crowd really didn’t want to parse it too finely, but what they truly longed for was the perfect defense, a biologically impenetrable membrane. Making the germs was comparatively easy; it was much harder to come up with a defense against them over, say, the next century. Weinberger and his friends were more than ready to throw money at the problem. Little wars were breaking out everywhere, and they wanted it confirmed that bioweapons were too sophisticated and expensive to be developed by terrorists.

But Watterman refused to give them that.

BACCHUS
had been one of the experiments he had designed to demonstrate the case. As far as the treaties went, the program was right on the edge, and therefore a carefully guarded secret. Watterman, the good administrator, knew all their funds were drawn from the blackest of the black budgets, and since he was a rising star, and biowarfare was a “sexy threat,” he was confident when he predicted that
BACCHUS
would be funded within a month. He hadn’t even been thinking about it very much;
BACCHUS
was only one of the programs he had administered.

The point of Bacchus was to see how cheap it would be to produce a credible biological weapon. It was his baby from the beginning and he brought it in ahead of time and way under budget. He’d
been very proud of it: a lab the size of a mobile home or shipping container, equipment bought off the shelf. Germs? You could get botulinum out of your garden. The weaponizing was the greater engineering challenge, and let’s say you wanted to do some tweaking; that took time, money, and big brains, but he demonstrated that even an inefficient bioweapon was disproportionately dangerous, and cheap.

Yes, those were the days. Ed Meese loved him. They talked about scotch. When the meeting broke up, he met James Baker, who said he was “interested and concerned.”

But that was three decades ago. The cocaine years. Big hair,
Raging Bull
, Kenny Loggins, and Pat Benatar.

The Democrats were in the White House now. FDR’s portrait hung over the mantelpiece and Teddy was on the west wall. The décor had changed, but everything else was the same. He made for a seat at the back, but Barrigar took him by the elbow and led him to the long table. “Right here next to me, Sam …” he said. In seconds the room had filled up.

“I’m Tom Roycroft, I’m the Secretary of Homeland Security, and I hereby direct that recordings and minutes taken from this meeting are restricted. This is no media, secure and secret …”

Roycroft. Watterman recognized the face of the Secretary of Homeland Security, but had forgotten his name. It was obvious that he was in charge, because of the body language of everyone around him. It might have been respect or loathing, but a bubble surrounded Roycroft that kept human contact to a minimum.

“… purpose of this meeting is to assess the nature and dimensions of the threat, to ensure our coordination is at optimum efficiency, and to ascertain the identity of the perpetrators and their sponsors, and to apprehend and bring them to justice. We have a huge public health emergency and we will be covering that as well.…”

They dimmed the lights and Major General Gordon “Gordo” Walthaer, the commanding officer in charge of USAMRIID, began his report. Beside him, a colonel operated the laptop for Walthaer’s
point-by-point, displayed on a screen that emerged from a sideboard at the end of the room.

Maps with yellow flags showed where anthrax samples had been found—seven locations in Atlanta and twenty-four in Washington, D.C. Samples had been taken, sealed in crash-tested, fireproof boxes, and were being delivered to USAMRIID labs by helicopter.

Sitting beside Roycroft was J. Benton Davies, the Director of the FBI. When the lights faded back up, he began the FBI report.

Davies said the FBI had learned that there were at least two anthrax attackers. The first had entered the United States on a flight originating in Vienna five days earlier. He was Tariq Sawalha, and his target had been Washington, D.C. Sawalha was twenty-one and held Italian citizenship but had been born in Dubai. He had offered no resistance when he was captured. He was suffering from inhalation anthrax, but was medically stable and talking freely. Helpful and cooperative. The Atlanta terrorist who had targeted the CDC headquarters was unknown and still at large.

While it was clear from Sawalha’s interrogations that he believed he was alone, and that he had no knowledge of the CDC attacker, nevertheless the FBI was assuming the strains of anthrax used in both cities were identical, and that the terrorists had been trained, supplied, and financed by a common source. As Davies spoke, he couldn’t help but glance down toward Evan Kubica, Director of the CIA.

The Secretary of State weighed in.

“… do any of us have anything like a signature that would indicate a national program in Iran, or any other client state …”

General Walthaer shook his head and said the anthrax was still being analyzed in his labs.

“… what would be a best estimate of the probability of additional attacks?”

All eyes turned to Kubica, who could only try to restrain himself from shrugging. “There’s a significant probability, but no certainty,” he finally said.