The Messenger (24 page)

“Right,” Watterman says. “So, do we have a line on any of Khan’s people?”

“Oh, yeah. Names and photographs. It went out last night. Should be on CNN in minutes.”

“Okay. I told them already, but do they know all about the precautions?”

“What precautions are you talking about, sir?” one of the agents asks him. She looks like a fourteen-year-old, with long eyelashes. The logo on her T-shirt marks her as FEMA.

“We have to round up those people and take them alive if possible. Okay? Everybody knows that, right?” he asks, but even before he does, the young agents are all shifting uncomfortably.

“These are suicide terrorists, Doc. They’re not—”

“They’re not going to go easy,” a second agent interrupts. He has red hair and a frown. Freckles strewn across his cheeks. “Everybody’s in on this—Delta Force, the Navy SEALs, every SWAT team in the country, every member of the National Guard. You don’t pull that shit and get away with it.” He stares at Watterman the way a bouncer at a nightclub informs you that it’s time to go home.

Watterman, to his great credit, keeps his voice even. “We need them alive to interrogate them, right? But infinitely more important than that, we need to examine their blood. There’s a high probability they have been immunized. If so, we want them alive, before they’re dead and their cells start to break down—”

“Nobody does what these assholes did and gets away with it—”

“You need to think,” Watterman cuts in. “You’re not thinking. You’re reacting.” He stands back from them, looks over at Chamai to see if at least he gets it. “Right now it’s about us finding a therapy. A cure. A remedy, an antidote to the poison, a course of treatment, a drug or a cocktail of drugs, maybe a patch …”

“Right, instead of growing it in eggs,” Chamai says.

“That’s right. Antisense—it’s a technique of genetic modifications that we build antivirals out of. That’s the current state of the art and how we will eventually do it, but in the interim, while we build whatever it takes, this pox could rip around the world several times. It might mutate. There’s a good chance that it has been genetically tweaked. As patients enter the system, the CDC may get lucky and quickly find a cohort that has natural immunity, okay? Great, then we can build something out of their blood. But all that takes time,” he says, looking around at the young people grown suddenly serious. “And more time means very many more deaths, so … We need to take them
alive
. Healthy. Cooperative. The deader they are, the less valuable they are. And when they are found they get isolated at Level 4, right?”

“Hot zone,” provides Chamai.

“Learn to think like a virus. Revenge can come later,” Sam tells the redheaded agent, and walks away.

Across the building is what everyone calls the situation room, but in reality it’s a central communications center and case offices for the task force.

Roycroft is on the monitor reporting from Homeland Security, and it is here that Watterman first hears the names of the two persons
linked to Khan in Berlin—a man and a woman, still at large.
Yaghobi
and
Vermiglio;
both names are presumed false.

Yaghobi traveled from Berlin to Toronto, and then changed flights and continued on to LAX. Both of those aircraft have been quarantined and are being tested. The Vermiglio woman flew Lufthansa to JFK. That plane has also been quarantined and is undergoing tests in Frankfurt. Both terrorists are presumed fleeing in the wake of the Sawalha arrest. Vermiglio may have escaped across the Canadian border, and the RCMP and CSIS are on that. Yaghobi is being traced on the Pacific coast.

The number of cases has grown to an estimated total of between fifty and seventy-five thousand.

Norment’s face hangs above them on the monitors as he describes the herculean efforts of the CDC’s continent-wide inoculation program. Much is made of international cooperation. Abroad, the WHO has revved up their immunization machinery, and it appears as if all the highly funded preparedness rehearsals and simulations are paying off.

While Norment waxes enthusiastic over the mass inoculations, General Walthaer sits and stares. He must be locked down at Fort Detrick, Watterman thinks. Walthaer could use an acting coach; staring down at the floor like that only makes him look depressed; he needs to keep his chin up. Of course, like everyone at the top, he’s not getting enough sleep.

Yes, everybody looks like hell, so that’s not it. Watterman studies the general all through Norment’s report. His spider sense for official BS is tingling. Maybe there’s something Walthaer knows but hasn’t reported.

Roycroft is winding things up. Flawless in a perfectly tailored suit, great hair. That’s what has got him this far. Good looks and no sense of humor.

“Mr. Secretary?” Watterman half stands, but Roycroft is already doing the same. “There are potential benefits that can be derived from the plasma of any of the terrorists linked to Dr. Khan, and perhaps others who …” Others are stirring in their chairs. “We
have to emphasize that it is crucial to apprehend the suspects alive, if only as a matter of public health.…”

He glances over toward Walthaer’s monitor. The general is looking up now. Yes. He knows something.

“General, you know as well as I do that Khan is not the kind of guy who would do anything without a back door …”

Walthaer almost winces, looks away, stands, and steps offcamera. Norment’s is the only face left, still looming down on him from the monitor. There is a camera up there somewhere and Watterman turns and scans the ceiling for it.

“Relax. We’re on it already, Sam,” Joe Norment says, and then he too stands up out of frame. A moment later the image on his monitor blinks out. It is replaced with a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shield.

Watterman stands there. The room is emptying out. “It’s not a goddamn chess match!” he shouts to the vacant screens. “It’s not a fucking round of golf, or betting on the goddamn game,” he spits. They’re all gone. He’s shouting to a bunch of logos.

Grimaldi is there with one rock climber’s hand grasping his elbow. “They don’t get it,” Watterman says to her. “They think it’s something they can
win
 …” For a moment he falls silent and looks at her. Beautiful, clean skin. Dark eyes, like Amy if she had lived.

“Viruses don’t behave like we do. They don’t
care
about us or our war games. The predictability of a hazardous biological event has fluid parameters, and to make the hubristic decision that it’s adaptable for use as a weapon, that you can just hire the so-called experts—”

“Doctor. Sam …”

“—that’s the real terror.”

“Fine. But it’s gone beyond that now.”

“No, no, darling. No, it hasn’t. No, no. That’s what they always say, but no! It’s never
beyond that
.”

“Look, come on. Let’s go get something to eat. We’re either going to catch them or we’re not.”

“No, I already had my pill for breakfast. First, we’ve got to pull Barrigar off of the Yaghobi chase for a few minutes—”

“Ha-ha. Fat chance—”

“Look, if we can find Khan, find him alive, maybe find his hard drive, we can save a week, a month. Maybe only a day. But that’s a lot of lives.”

She looks at him for a long moment. Nods. “I’ll get Barrigar right away, Sam,” she says quietly, and goes.

When Daria wakes, it is almost sunset and they have slowed. The bus rocks forward. The fields are behind them now and they are poised at an intersection. There is no traffic, but they must stop completely. After a moment the bus leans around a corner and they continue on down a wide suburban highway. On either side are the light industrial zones that keep the American economy running.

“We are coming into Indianapolis,” Nadja tells her. “We have to transfer here …”

Minutes later they stop at the station and the passengers get out to stretch their legs.

Daria moves like a ninety-year-old granny, leaning on the seat backs, groaning in spite of her attempts to pretend that everything is normal. Any quick movement causes dizziness. Nadja walks in front of her. Impatient, reaching back to help her get down the steps when they get to the front.

She goes into the station and paces its length and then out into the parking lot. She could just keep going. Just run away from Nadja. Just keep moving, find a friendly cornfield and die, but when she looks back Nadja is there, smoking in short jerky puffs, while she finishes her invalid’s walk back along the sidewalk, triggering the automatic doors. Nadja tags along beside her. She has bought a few things—candy bars and chips in a plastic bag, a bottle of water—and carries it all, kicking their luggage along to the next bus, leaving Daria free to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other.

They hand over their tickets and climb back onto the bus. It is cool, mostly empty, and quiet, and they make their way to the next pair of seats that will become home. There is music playing from a
sound system that the driver must have activated, something about a desperado coming to his senses.

She achingly slips into her seat by the window. Nadja bites on the ends of the candy bar wrappers to open them, breaks them in half and hands Daria a hunk.

“You’re bleeding,” Nadja says. “You say there’s nothing wrong, but you’re bleeding.”

Waiting for Barrigar, Sam sits at one of tables at the glorietta, doodling in his legal pad and, when that doesn’t work, picking up the latest
New Yorker
. Each day newspapers arrive, doused in ultraviolet light and passed through an ozone atmosphere, then doled out along the coffee tables, but he doesn’t want any more news. The
New Yorker
issue must have gone to press in the week before the anthrax attacks were revealed, and it projects a kind of cheerful grouchiness, a mix of complaint and whimsy, revelations of venality, and acerbic criticisms spread through its articles and cartoons that bring unexpected tears to his eyes.

When he looks away from the magazine, his eyes fasten on Reilly walking through the situation room. Reilly. For him to be at the chicken factories means the presence of the National Clandestine Service, the blackest operational side of the NSA. It is a shock to see him, and Watterman stops actually reading, and begins faking a simulacrum of a man relaxing on a park bench while he peeks over the top of the magazine at Reilly moving through the ART offices.

A pair of physical-plant techs walk up. They are both young, enthusiastic, and going about their hands-on labor in a relaxed and confident way. They are carrying what he estimates to be a sixteen-foot ladder, which they set up right beside him.

“Am I going to have to move?” he says.

“We’re putting up some sound equipment. Speakers. You might want to slip around to that side, then you can come back. Take about a half hour, I guess.”

“We won’t drop anything on you, sir,” says her coworker.

Don’t
sir
me, he thinks. He gets up and moves around the other side of the glorietta, angles his chair so he can keep spying on Reilly, who goes into one of the conference rooms with Barrigar and a quartet of backup agents. They close the door and pull the blinds.

Reilly has spent his entire working life off the books; the kind of Washington animal that only emerges when everybody else is shit-scared or when the best option is rendition or death. Laws? To Reilly and his species, these are not even speed bumps; since the Patriot Act, almost anything can be covered with false paper. You could hide a million Level 4 labs around the United States; all of them could be engaged full-time researching, devising, and engineering offensive toxins, ringed with outsourced security. No one would ever know. “Oversight” isn’t in the dictionary for those guys. In the years that Sam has been out in the wilderness, Reilly and his gang could have come up with anything imaginable.

He’d only met Reilly when it was much too late, when Amerithrax had snapped on the bright light of media scrutiny and threatened to reveal what had really been going on in the closed world of the biowarriors. In a way he actually
owes
Reilly, since it was Reilly’s claim that evidence that might have further implicated Sam back in ’82 be inadmissible for reasons of national security that got him off the hook. So … the most evil man in the world had been his protector. Suddenly Sam desperately wants to be back in Decatur and curled up beside his warm Maggie. It’s that sinking feeling of having made another big mistake in life. Home—yes, that’s where he should be right now. Another tear stings his eye.

“… sorry, sir, we have to come around this side now …”

He gets up, moves back across the glorietta, and sits down just in time to see the conference room blinds snap open. Reilly is done with them now and will probably be heading back to Washington, Watterman guesses. Barrigar escorts him out of the situation room en route to the air locks. As Reilly comes out onto the strada, he glances over, sees Sam sitting there, changes course and comes over to his table. Reilly doesn’t raise his hand to shake.

“You know your Khan fellow?”

“Yep.”

“The Germans say they have eight more who traveled from Berlin. Yaghobi and Vermiglio are our two. That’s from the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the BND—that’s the German CIA. In addition Khan had at least one assistant resident in each city.”

Barrigar opens a folder and displays a pair of photographs. The Adlon hadn’t stinted on their security cameras, and the image is crisp: a thin-faced boy, his shirt too large for his bony frame. Doing up his necktie as he rides alone in the elevator. All bushy hair and a nose that would take him a long time to grow into.

“He’s the one who actually booked the suite they used, ostensibly for job interviews,” Barrigar says.

“Well, great. Okay. Then you realize how critical it is to put the same protocols out on
all
these people. Tell Interpol, tell Scotland Yard, the Germans, whoever, to take them
alive
because we need their blood,” Sam chants for the millionth time. “It could be the difference between a cure in six weeks or six months. It might save a life, or it might save a couple of hundred thousand lives, or millions, or even hundreds of millions.”