The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (36 page)

Eph turned. Setrakian was gone.

The agent sent two cops out to get him.

Eph looked back toward Barnes. “Everett. You know me. You know who I am. Listen to what I am about to tell you. There is a plague spreading throughout this city—a scourge unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

The FBI agent said, “Dr. Goodweather, we want to know what you injected into Jim Kent.”

“What I …
what
?”

Barnes said, “Ephraim, I have made a deal with them. They will spare Nora if you agree to cooperate. Spare her the scandal of arrest and preserve her professional reputation. I know that you two … are close.”

“And how exactly do you know that?” Eph looked around at his persecutors, moving past bewilderment and into anger. “This is bullshit, Everett.”

“You are on video attacking and murdering a patient, Ephraim. You have been reporting fantastic test results, unexplained by any rational measurement, unsubstantiated and most likely doctor-manipulated. Would I be here if I had a choice? If you had a choice?”

Eph turned to Nora. She would be spared. She could perhaps fight on.

Barnes was right. For the moment at least, in a room full of lawmen, he had no choice.

“Don’t let this slow you down,” Eph told Nora. “You may be the only one left who knows what’s really happening.”

Nora shook her head. She turned to Barnes. “Sir, there is a conspiracy here, whether you are willingly a part of it or not—”

“Please, Dr. Martinez,” said Barnes. “Don’t embarrass yourself any further.”

The other agent packed up Eph’s and Nora’s laptops. They started walking Eph down the stairs.

At the second-floor hallway, they met the two cops who had gone after Setrakian. They were standing side by side, almost back to back. Handcuffed together.

Setrakian appeared behind the group with his sword drawn. He
held its point at the lead FBI agent’s neck. There was a smaller dagger in his other hand, also fashioned of silver. He held that one near Director Barnes’s throat.

The old professor said, “You gentlemen are pawns in a scheme well beyond your comprehension. Doctor, take this dagger.”

Eph took the weapon’s handle, holding the point at his boss’s throat.

Barnes said, breathlessly, “Good
Christ
, Ephraim. Have you lost your
mind
?”

“Everett, this is bigger than you can know. This goes beyond the CDC—beyond regular law enforcement even. There is a catastrophic disease outbreak in this city, the likes of which we have never seen. And that’s just the half of it.”

Nora came up beside him, reclaiming hers and Ephraim’s laptops from the other FBI agent. She said, “I got everything else we need from the office. Looks like we won’t be coming back.”

Barnes said, “For God’s sake, Ephraim, come to your senses.”

“This is the job you hired me to do, Everett. To sound the alarm when a public health crisis warrants. We are on the verge of a worldwide pandemic. An extinction event. And somebody somewhere is pulling out all the stops to make damn sure it succeeds.”

Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

E
LDRITCH
P
ALMER
switched on a bank of monitors, showing six television news channels. The one in the lower-left-hand box interested him most. He angled his chair up a few degrees and isolated the channel, raising its volume.

The reporter was posted outside the 17th Precinct headquarters on East Fifty-first Street, getting a “No comment” from a police official concerning a rash of missing persons reports being filed throughout the New York area in the past few days. They showed the line of people waiting outside the precinct house, too many to be allowed inside, filling out forms on the sidewalk. The reporter noted that other seemingly unexplained incidents, such as house break-ins in which nothing appeared to have been stolen and no one appeared to be home, were being reported also. Strangest of all was the fact of the failure
of modern technology to assist in the search for the missing persons: mobile phones, almost all of which contain traceable GPS technology, had apparently gone missing with their owners. This led some to speculate that people were perhaps willfully abandoning families and jobs, and noted that the spike in disappearances seemed to have coincided with the recent lunar occultation, suggesting a link between the two occurrences. A psychologist then commented on the potential for low-grade mass hysteria in the wake of certain startling celestial events. The story ended with the reporter giving airtime to a teary woman holding up a JCPenney portrait of a missing mother of two.

The program then went to a commercial for an “age-defying” cream designed to “help you live longer and better.”

The congenitally ill tycoon then switched off the audio, so that the only sound, other than the dialysis machine, was the humming behind his avaricious smile.

On another screen was a graphic showing the financial markets declining while the dollar continued its fall. Palmer himself was moving the markets, steadily divesting himself of equities and buying into metals: gold, silver, palladium, and platinum bullion.

The commentator went on to suggest that the recent recession represented opportunities in futures trading. Palmer strongly disagreed. He was shorting futures. Everybody’s except his own.

A telephone call was forwarded to his chair through Mr. Fitzwilliam. A sympathetic member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, calling to inform him that the epidemiologist with the Canary project, Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, had escaped.

“Escaped?” said Palmer. “How is that possible?”

“He had an elderly man with him who apparently was more wily than he’d seemed. He carried a long silver sword.”

Palmer was silent for one full respiration. Then, slowly, he smiled.

Forces were aligning against him. All well and good. Let them come together. It would be easier to clear them all away.

“Sir?” said the caller.

“Oh—nothing,” said Palmer. “I was just thinking of an old friend.”

Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem

E
PH AND
N
ORA
stood with Setrakian behind the locked doors of his pawnshop, the two epidemiologists still shaken up.

“I gave them your name,” said Eph, looking outside the window.

“The building is in my late wife’s name. We should be safe here for the moment.”

Setrakian was anxious to get downstairs to his basement armory, but the two doctors were still rattled. “They are coming after us,” said Eph.

“Clearing the way for infection,” said Setrakian. “The strain will move faster through an orderly society than one on high alert.”

“
They
who?” said Nora.

“Whoever had the influence to get that coffin loaded onto a transatlantic flight in this age of terrorism,” said Setrakian.

Eph said, pacing, “They’re framing us. Sending someone in there to steal Redfern’s remains … who
looked
like us?”

“As you said, you are the lead authority to sound the general alarm for disease control. Be thankful they only tried to discredit you.”

Nora said, “Without the CDC behind us, we have no authority.”

Setrakian said, “We must continue on our own now. This is disease control at its most elemental.”

Nora looked over at him. “You mean—murder.”

“What would you want? To become like that … or to have someone release you?”

Eph said, “It’s still a polite euphemism for murder. And easier said than done. How many heads do we have to cut off? There are three of us here.”

Setrakian said, “There are ways other than severing the spinal column. Sunlight, for example. Our most powerful ally.”

Eph’s phone trembled inside his pocket. He pulled it out, wary, checking the display.

An Atlanta exchange. CDC headquarters. “Pete O’Connell,” he said to Nora, and took the call.

Nora turned to Setrakian. “So where are they all right now, during the day?”

“Underground. Cellars and sewers. The dark bowels of buildings, such as maintenance rooms, in the heating and cooling systems. In the walls sometimes. But usually in dirt. That is where they prefer to make their nests.”

“So—they sleep during the day, right?”

“That would be most convenient, wouldn’t it? A handful of coffins in a basement, full of dozing vampires. But no, they don’t sleep at all. Not as we understand it. They will shut down for a while if they are sated. Too much blood digestion fatigues them. But never for long. They go underground during daylight hours solely to escape the killing rays of the sun.”

Nora appeared quite pale and overwhelmed, like a little girl who’d been told that dead people do not in fact grow wings and fly straight up to heaven to be angels, but instead stay on earth and grow stingers under their tongues and turn into vampires.

“That thing you said,” she said. “Before you cut them down. Something in another language. Like a pronouncement, or a kind of curse.”

The old man winced. “Something I say only to calm myself. To steady my hand for the final blow.”

Nora waited to hear what it was. Setrakian saw that, for whatever reason, she needed to know.

“I say, ‘
Strigoi,
my sword sings of silver.’” Setrakian winced again, uncomfortable saying this now. “Sounds better in the old language.”

Nora saw that this old vampire killer was essentially a modest man. “Silver,” she said.

“Only silver,” he said. “Renowned throughout the ages for its antiseptic and germicidal properties. You can cut them with steel or shoot them with lead, but only silver really
hurts
them.”

Eph had his free hand over his other ear, trying to hear Pete, who was driving in a car just outside Atlanta. Pete said, “What’s going on up there?”

“Well … what have you heard?”

“That I’m not supposed to be talking to you. That you’re in trouble. That you’ve gone off the reservation or some such.”

“It’s a mess here, Pete. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Well, I had to call anyway. I’ve been putting in time on the samples you sent me.”

Eph felt another stone fall into his gut. Dr. Peter O’Connell was one of the heads of the Unexplained Deaths Project at the CDC’s National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne, and Enteric Diseases. UNEX was an interdisciplinary group made up of virologists, bacteriologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, and clinicians from inside and outside the CDC. A great many naturally occurring deaths go unexplained in the United States each year, and a fraction of these—about seven hundred per annum—are referred to UNEX for further investigation. Of those seven hundred, merely 15 percent are satisfactorily resolved, with samples from the rest being banked for possible future reexamination.

Every UNEX researcher holds another position within the CDC, and Pete was the chief of Infectious Disease Pathology, an expert on how and why a virus affects its host. Eph had forgotten sending him early biopsies and blood samples from Captain Redfern’s preliminary examination.

“It’s a viral strain, Eph. No doubt about that. A remarkable bit of genetic acid.”

“Pete, wait, listen to me—”

“The glycoprotein has amazing binding characteristics. I’m talking skeleton key. Astonishing. This little bugger doesn’t merely hijack the host cell, tricking it into reproducing more copies of itself. No—it fuses to the RNA.
Melds
with it. Consumes it … yet somehow doesn’t use it up. What it’s doing is, it’s making a copy of itself
mated with
the host cell. And taking only the parts it needs. I don’t know what you’re seeing with your patient, but theoretically, this thing could replicate and replicate and replicate, and many millions of generations later—and this thing is
fast
—it could reproduce its own organ structure. Systemically. It could change its host. Into what, I don’t know—but I sure would like to find out.”

“Pete.” Eph’s head was swimming. It made too much sense. The virus overwhelmed and transformed the cell—just as the vampire overwhelmed and transformed the victim.

These vampires were viruses incarnate.

Pete said, “I’d like to do the genetics on this one myself, really see what makes it tick—”

“Pete, listen to me. I want you to destroy it.”

Eph heard Pete’s windshield wipers working in the silence. “What?”

“Save your findings, hang on to those, but destroy that sample right away.”

More windshield wipers, metronomes of Pete’s uncertainty. “Destroy the one I was working on, you mean? Because you know that we always bank some, just in case—”

“Pete, I need you to drive straight to the lab and destroy that sample.”

“Eph.” Eph heard Pete’s blinker, Pete pulling off the road to finish the conversation. “You know how careful we are with any potential pathogens. We’re clean and we’re safe. And we have a very strict laboratory protocol that I can’t just break for your—”

“I made a terrible mistake letting it out of New York City. I didn’t know then what I know now.”

“Exactly what kind of trouble are you in, Eph?”

“Bleach it. If that doesn’t work, use acid. Set it on fire if you have to, I don’t care. I’ll take full responsibility—”

“It’s not about responsibility, Eph. It’s about good science. You need to be straight with me now. Someone said they saw something about you on the news.”

Eph had to end this. “Pete, do as I ask—and I promise I will explain everything to you when I can.”

He hung up. Setrakian and Nora had listened to the end of his conversation.

Setrakian said, “You sent the virus somewhere else?”

“He’s going to destroy it. Pete will err on the side of caution—I know him too well.” Eph looked at the televisions for sale along the wall.
Something about you on the news …
“Any of these work?”

They found one that did. It wasn’t long before the story rolled around.

They showed Eph’s photograph from his CDC identification card. Then a blurry snippet of his encounter with Redfern, and one of the two look-alikes carrying a body bag from the hospital room. It said that Dr. Ephraim Goodweather was being sought as “a person of interest” in the disappearance of the corpses of the Flight 753 airline passengers.