The White Plague (12 page)

“But is he really indifferent?” Beckett asked.

“I think he is,” Hupp said. “Otherwise, he could not do this thing. You see the pattern? Real outrage, which comes from an agonized sensitivity and then, on the other hand, the indifference.”

“But he calls himself Madman,” Godelinsky murmured.

Hupp said: “Ah, Dorena, you have it precisely. This is his defense. ‘I am mad,’ he says. This is in the dual sense of anger and of insanity. Justification and explanation.”

“Bill,” Godelinsky said, “what other agencies pursue this O’Neill?”

Beckett shook his head. The question bothered him. There was no room for mistakes. Godelinsky’s question went directly to that concern. “I don’t know what other agencies.”

“But you know others seek him?” she insisted.

“Oh, yes. Depend on it.”

“I hope it is being done with the utmost delicacy,” she said.

“You begin to see him as I see him,” Hupp said.

“How do you see him?” Foss asked.

Hupp leaned back and closed his eyes. This gave him a curiously childlike appearance marred only by the thick glasses. “O’Neill, I am certain. Irish ancestry. Very well educated here in the States. Perhaps I should say
superbly
educated. Intimate knowledge of Irish history. Probably acquired young from his family. Think on it. He carried through a difficult project in molecular biology under what were undoubtedly adverse circumstances. A minimal laboratory, we can be sure.”

“Why can we be sure of that?” Foss asked.

“If it’s O’Neill,” Beckett said, “the FBI estimates he went into hiding with about a half million dollars.”

Lepikov sat up straight. “So much? How could an ordinary citizen acquire so much wealth?”

“Not an ordinary citizen,” Beckett said.

“That is it precisely,” Danzas said, his tone remote and clipped. “Doctor Hupp and I are agreed upon the extraordinary situation of this Madman.”

Hupp opened his eyes at mention of his name but appeared unconcerned by Danzas’s formality. He said: “Francois has it in a nutshell. Our Madman is an extraordinary human being who has suffered great spiritual anguish, a wrenching of the soul. From this, he achieves a fanatic’s motivation to make others share his anguish. Would we not agree that he has been successful in this regard? Not one human female alive on Achill Island and… you’ve all seen the reports from Ireland and Great Britain. The latest reports from North Africa…” Hupp let his voice trail off.

Beckett summed up: “With some reservation, we agree that O’Neill is our Madman. He is schizoid in a particular way…”

“Not fragmented in the conventional sense,” Hupp said. “Split, but aware of the split. Aware, yes. That is it.”

“No one answers my question about this man,” Lepikov said. “He is extraordinary? How does this acquire for him the five hundred thousand dollars?”

“He inherited part of it with a family business,” Beckett said. “And he had a good job and he made good investments.”

“Not to mention what he inherited from his wife,” Foss said.

Lepikov grunted, then: “He was a capitalist, yes; now, I see. And look what it has brought us. One wrong move on our part and he gives us new diseases, perhaps even worse ones.”

“Sergei is right,” Hupp said. “Given the ability that O’Neill has demonstrated, he could have a disease that would, say, kill only people with Oriental ancestry.” Hupp stared at the slight epicanthic fold in Lepikov’s eyes.

“He must be stopped!” Lepikov said.

“And now we understand why the number-one priority is to understand him,” Foss said. “We cannot make even one mistake. He is too dangerous an opponent.”

“Dear lady,” Lepikov said, looking at Foss, “the mind of this Madman may be too subtle for us to understand.”

“We have to do it anyway,” Beckett said, barely concealing his anger at such defeatist talk.

“This could not have happened in the Soviet Union,” Lepikov said.

A short, harsh laugh escaped Godelinsky. “Of course not, Sergei. There is no injustice in the Soviet Union.”

Lepikov shook a finger at her. “That is dangerous talk, Dorena.” In Russian, he added: “You know well that we do not allow uncontrolled experiments.”

“He says they don’t allow uncontrolled experiments in Russia,” Foss translated.

Godelinsky shook her head. “Sergei is right that there is much internal spying in our homeland, but he is wrong all the same. He is forgetting that one man alone did this thing in the privacy of his own home. Even in the Soviet Union we do not know everything done by one man alone in such privacy.”

Beckett ate dinner with Foss and Hupp that first night. The others begged off, saying they preferred dining in their own quarters. Danzas had shuddered at the menu.

“Cauliflower with cheddar cheese? What is this, a new American poison? There is not even wine.”

Foss was gloomy all through the meal, staring around the small antiseptic dining room, a white-walled space off the larger DIG kitchen facility where the technical staff, mostly female, ate. Beckett had introduced his party to the staff as they passed through to the smaller room. The technical people had returned looks that mixed awe and a kind of cynical fear.

Perhaps that’s what made her gloomy
, Beckett thought.
That and that damned Lepikov!

Once she was seated at the table, Foss confirmed this: “Sergei’s right. We have to understand this man perfectly. How can we do that?”

“I do not understand the electron,” Hupp said. “But I can use electricity safely.”

“Ain’t science wonderful!” Foss said.

After dinner, Beckett returned alone to his private quarters, a sterile little room with adjoining bath. The cot was cantilevered from the concrete wall. There was a single straight chair and a desk but the wall beside the desk carried a document safe whose combination was known only to Security and Beckett. His first task each night was to examine the safe and check whatever new material had been left for him.

Beckett sighed as he saw the thick package of papers sitting neatly in the opened safe. He sat down at the desk and began leafing through them, wondering as he did so what system of selection Security was using. Were the priorities determined at a higher level? He thought that probable. The top document carried the presidential seal. The covering page had two red-bordered “overnight transmittal” stamps, one marked “Pentagon Liaison” and unsigned. The other carried the NSC stamp of the National Security Council and was signed with a scrawl that was almost undecipherable, but that Beckett thought might be
something
like Turkwood.

He read the enclosures carefully, more and more puzzled as he went. First was a verbatim transcript of a radio broadcast received at a military listening post, purportedly from someone in Ireland identifying himself as “Brann McCrae.” It struck Beckett as the worst kind of religious nonsense, obviously the work of a crank. McCrae asked the world to return to tree worship, naming the rowan as “the most sacred witness of holiness.” His broadcast contained an appeal to a nephew, Cranmore McCrae, in the United States, to “take your airplane and fly to me. I shall make you high priest of the rowan.”

McCrae’s broadcast claimed “the rowan guards my women.”

At the bottom of the transcript’s last page was an unsigned scribble that Beckett thought might be the writing of the President himself. It read:

“Locate this Cranmore McCrae. Has Brann McCrae isolated a female population in Ireland?”

Next in the package was another transcript, this an official communication to the White House from “The Killaloe Facility” in Ireland. The sender was identified as “Doctor Adrian Peard.” The transcript carried a list of “equipment requested for immediate shipment with highest priority.”

Beckett scanned the list carefully. It was what would be expected at a good DNA research center. At the bottom of the list, in that same unsigned scribble, was the terse comment: “Ship it.” then: “Beckett – anything else they might need?”

Beckett wrote directly below the question: “A reliable source of stereoisomers.”

The message from Doctor Peard concluded with the information that a Doctor Fintan Craig Doheny had been appointed chief of the “Plague Research Section.”

The scribbler asked, “Who’s this Doheny?”

Beckett wrote beneath the scribble: “Unknown to me.” He signed it with his full name and title.

Beneath this page was another page bearing the presidential seal. It was addressed to Beckett and bore only an NSC stamp at the bottom, no name. It read:

“Try to find out from Godelinsky or Lepikov why the Soviet Union has sealed off certain areas beyond the Urals. Satellite confirmation of this but no response from Moscow to our questions.”

Beneath this was another similar page with the terse question:

“Where will O’Neill most likely hide?”

So they’re convinced it’s O’Neill,
Beckett thought.

The final page, also stamped with the unsigned NSC cartouche frame, asked merely:

“How on artificial insemination?”

Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?
he wondered.

There was no doubt in Beckett’s mind that the authorities had hidden away other female populations. He knew of at least one at Carlsbad. Was the government considering repopulation schemes? How many women were really dying out there in the United States?

The more he thought about it, the angrier Beckett became. He scrawled across the final page: “What does this question mean? What’s going on out there?”

Only then could he attempt to sleep, knowing it would be short and that he would be up within the hour.

Actually, he slept only twenty-five minutes, bouncing off his cot to write a series of memos to the mysterious NSC questioners. The first memo suggested they ask this Peard to hunt down the religious nut, McCrae, reminding the Irish that they would need women to test whatever their laboratories produced.

On the Doheny question, he said: “Ask the Irish, for God’s sake.” This was the closest he came to revealing his anger.

On the Soviet question, he said merely: “Will do.”

On the question of where O’Neill might hide, Beckett said: “Try Ireland or England. He’ll want to watch the effects of his revenge. Doubtful he speaks Arabic. Libya unlikely. Otherwise, he may merge into some city population here, possibly as a bereaved derelict. Will raise this question with full Team.”

On the artificial insemination question, he asked: “What is meant by this question? What do you want us to consider?”

Finally, Beckett wrote: “Anything new on how O’Neill spread his disease? If not, intend to raise this question soonest with full Team.”

Having finished, Beckett reread his memos, reflecting on the questions that had prompted them. There was a sense of disorganized panic in the questions, a random groping for leads.

We need organization
, he thought.
And we need it damn fast
.

In the way his mind often did, as Beckett’s thought focused on this urgent need, he had a sudden flash of insight about Danzas,
the organized man.

Danzas was a man born, not out of his time, but out of place. By rights he should have been born in northern New Hampshire or in Maine. He was a Down Easter in French disguise – cantankerous, suspicious, close-mouthed, using his accent as a shield more than as a help in communication. Or it could be argued that Danzas had been born in exactly the right place, and similarities to a Down Easter were the product of a social coincidence. Brittany, Beckett had heard, was noted for these selfsame characteristics – an insular place keeping itself to itself, trusting only its own ways, quick to identify and make common cause with its own people – accent, manners, attitudes revealed in regional quips, jokes that often revolved around the confounding of tourists and other strangers.

The insight told Beckett how best to work with Danzas, where the man’s strengths would be found and how to employ them.

No small talk. Share his prejudices. Put him in charge of organizing key elements of our project.

I’ll have to find out what his food preferences are,
Beckett thought.

Without consciously focusing on it, Beckett had begun marshaling his forces, assembling The Team into a working pattern to get the best out of all its members – the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Glory O! Glory O! to the bold Fenian Men.

– Ballad by Peadar Kearney

T
WO WEEKS
before the Achill demonstration, John was ready to leave his Ballard hideaway. He knew he would have to cover his tracks carefully. The search would be massive and international. The very size of the search meant they probably would find his place quickly. The pressures on anyone who had any contact with him, even his instructor in forgery in St. Louis, I guaranteed that no secrets would be kept for long. There were no illusions in his mind about governments obeying his orders not to seek him out.

The new passport was made with extreme care. He made it from Mary’s passport, taking the document from her passport case, which contained John O’Neill’s passport and the separate ones for the twins. Why he chose Mary’s passport he could not say, but he carefully hid the unused passports in the lining of his suitcase.

As he worked on the forgery, he remembered Mary saying that it would make the twins feel important to have their own passports.

The memories were oddly displaced. He felt like an eavesdropper, someone peering into the secret joys of a fellow human, prying without permission into private matters. But he could remember the twins’ delight, comparing their pictures, showing off their ability to read and write, signing their own names importantly on the proper lines.

When he had completed the chemical erasure of Mary’s passport, he felt that he had removed her even more from the world of the living. He went to the secret compartment in the suitcase and looked at the three blue-bound booklets with their golden embossing. The passports were real. But how much of the real person was contained in them? If he erased all of them, did that actually make the people unreal? He peered closely at the coded perforations on Mary’s passport. The laughter and happiness at the arrival of the passports were part of that movie playing in his skull. He could see Mary handing a passport to each of the children, Kevin first and then Mairead.