Virus: The Day of Resurrection (7 page)

An investigation was made after the winds had died down the following day. The crash site was on an Alpine slope about thirty kilometers west of Torino. It was surmised that the airplane had been flying blind in the middle of the snowstorm, and because the wind had suddenly begun to blow from the southwest during the night, its pilot had misjudged his course and been blown northward, to finally crash in a difficult Alpine crossing. The blackened bodies of the passengers—three in number—were discovered in the wreckage of the cockpit. Two engines and various fragments were scattered across a kilometer of snowy slope, but the airframe itself had cleanly burned. From the few fragments of its body that remained, investigators learned that it had had a fully wooden airframe, and this caught the attention of one assistant inspector who had in the past had dealings with Interpol.

A request went out to all the nations of Europe for information regarding the downed airplane, but when no plane was found that matched its description and its nationality remained unknown, the incident began to draw suspicion. An information officer attached to NATO arrived, and it became apparent that the black paint on the fragments was made for confusing radar waves, which generated a buzz of interest among the spy and intelligence agencies of all the European nations.

Was this a spy surveillance craft, like the infamous U2? they wondered.

In the end, however, it became clear that they would not be finding any clues.

Right around that time, Professor Gregor Karlsky, who had been working for the military in secret, was discovered at the Brighton home of his sister-in-law, where he had committed suicide by cutting the artery in his left wrist. MI6 came out to investigate. Nobody, however, thought to connect an airplane crash in the Alps to the suicide of a professor five hundred kilometers away. However, MI6—which was in terms of implacability on par with the Israeli Mossad—slowly, steadily began to reel in the threads it was eyeing so suspiciously.

Beside the wreckage of the crashed airplane, smashed against exposed boulders, its lid blown off, its body torn apart and twisted, there lay the scattered remains of a duralumin trunk. Though it appeared as though all of its contents had burned up in the explosion, a dozen or so meters away, a thin metal plate lay in the snow. Its blue plastic coating was mostly destroyed, and it retained only a faint hint of its former cylindrical shape. In the snow nearby was a boulder on which broken shards of silver-plated glass lay scattered about, sparkling in the sunshine. The tiny glass shards occasionally crunched under the shoes of the investigators and bystanders who had gathered. Under their weight, the sparkling bits of glass were ground into a fine powder. What bits remained stuck were mostly tracked around among the snow and the rocks when the investigators and onlookers went back down the mountain.

In almost no time afterward, the final cold wave of that year hit. The wreckage of that strange wooden airplane had been carried away for the investigation, but the bits of powdered glass remained where they were, under a layer of snow that just barely covered them.

Then …

When Old Man Winter’s onslaught had finally subsided, the number of sunny days over the Alps began to increase. The snow dividing Italy and France, which lay between the two high peaks of Mont Blanc and Mont Viso, began to melt slightly, and that water was gathered into the Fiume Po which runs west to east across the fertile Lombardia Plain and empties into the Adriatic Sea to the south of Venice.

The railway that passes by Italy’s northern entry point of Torino ran west by way of Milan, passing through Venice, Trieste, Beograd, and Sofia on the way to Istanbul, gateway to Asia, then turning southwest, past Genoa and the eastern coast of Italy on the way to Rome and Napoli. To the east, it ran through Lyon and Dijon to Paris, heading into the very heart of Europe. From Milan, there was also a line that ran through the famous Simplon Tunnel to arrive at Lausanne and Geneva in Switzerland. All of middle and eastern Europe was bound together in a net of railways. In the great cities of Europe—Rome, Paris, Geneva—there were international airports where streams of people flew down from the sky and back up into it, flowing like great rivers …

It was yet a little early for the snow to thaw. This aged planet spun round and round through the blackness of space, its axis tilted to about twenty-three point five degrees as it continued on the recursive journey it had made billions of times already, its axis of rotation gradually nearing the point of the spring equinox.

SPRING

 1.
March

Around two o’clock in the afternoon on March 13, on the road leading from Civitavecchia to Rome, a fancy sports car was involved in an accident.

The car was an Alfa Romeo gas turbine “Barca Volante.” A tractor trailer hit the edge of its bumper, barely avoiding a head-on collision, and pushed it into a guard rail. According to the testimony of the truck driver, the sports car had been doing about ninety kilometers per hour on a straight road when it had suddenly started weaving as though the driver were drunk. It had run right over the centerline, and panicking, the truck driver had swerved to avoid a collision and then slammed on the brakes. Thanks to the fact that the bumpers had caught on one another, the sports car had managed to avoid going over the guard rail. Two or three eyewitnesses corroborated the trucker’s testimony.

This was an unusual accident because there were as yet very few turbo cars on the road. The scene was quite terrible. The rear part of the Fiat engine had been ripped open by the shock of plowing into the guard rail. The turbine blades that had flown out of it were stuck in the back of the trailer and in the asphalt like silver needles. However, the two passengers had been separated from the engine by a protective steel plate set behind it, and had thus managed to avoid being skewered. By the time the driver of the truck had run to the other car, its driver was already dead. To lower the likelihood of dying in an accident, flexible steering columns were installed in almost any high-performance automobile and were assisted by numerous driver-protection and shock-absorption features that activated at the slightest bending of the wheel. At first glance, the driver of the sports car had appeared to be uninjured, aside from his right ankle, which was stuck in the bent body of the car.

Even so, the man was unmistakably dead. His leaden face hung low, and there was no longer any pulse in his forward-thrust arms. The glamorous platinum blonde in the side seat appeared to have sustained far worse injuries. She had not been wearing her seatbelt, and her face was covered in blood from where her forehead had struck the windshield. Her clothing was torn here and there, exposing a terrible laceration, and her chest was visibly collapsed from where it had struck the guardrail. A ruptured lung was blowing out bubbles of blood.

Even so, the woman was alive. An ambulance raced to the scene, and when the emergency crew rescued the woman from the twisted, warped body of the car, she was dripping blood from her mouth, continuing to mutter all the while:

“Tonio … Tonio … oh, stop it … what’s wrong with you … ?”

There were two reasons why this accident drew so much attention and left such an unusually detailed record. The first reason was the identity of the man who died. A film and television heartthrob, Antonio Sevellini had been a world-class actor, known for his cosmopolitan, playboy lifestyle and taste for luxury. As if that weren’t enough, the woman in the car with him was a call girl who had once achieved international notoriety due to her role in a NATO spying incident. Because she had been in the midst of a passionate love affair with Tonio—and because Tonio was the lover of a Middle Eastern princess whom it was rumored he would soon marry—the scandal-loving public went into overdrive at the news of his death. A call girl implicated in a spy case, a Middle Eastern princess, an international movie star—theories of conspiracy and assassination involving these three abounded, although the police authorities investigating the accident apparently viewed it as nothing more than a bad turn of luck that had nothing to do with scenarios suggested by juicy gossip.

The second reason for all the attention was Alfa Romeo, the automaker that had built the car. Their Barca Volante was the world’s first practical two-hundred-kilo-class gas turbine sports car, and questions still lingered regarding its safety and handling. The automakers of Europe and America had all been developing concept cars for a new class of vehicles that could maintain a steady two hundred kilometers per hour. This was because they were looking ahead to the “Eurasian Highway”—a giant, two-hundred-meter-wide roadway begun on nearly a billion dollars’ credit and investments from almost every nation, to start in Paris and continue in a nearly straight line through Luxembourg, Berlin, Warsaw, and Minsk before finally terminating in Moscow. The trouble with building cars in that class had involved the endurance of the tire and axle areas and the output of the engine. In the case of the engine, a rotary design made in West Germany had been considered the favorite to develop the industry standard; as for cracking the wheel problems, the likely contenders had been the Rolls Royce hovercraft and the Curtiss-Wright aircar from America, which had brought about fundamental change in the way that cars ran.

In the midst of all this, however, Italy’s Alfa Romeo, an automaker famous for its sports cars and racecars, had unexpectedly unveiled its Barca Volante—a gas-turbine car with a maximum speed of two hundred forty kilometers per hour. The world had caught its collective breath at the sight of its myriad new features. The first thing that caught the eye of the press was its incredibly lightweight Fiat Virgo gas turbine. In city traffic, the stream of hot, rapidly moving exhaust from the turbine blew mostly downward against the ground thanks to a turbulence plate, but out on the highway, where speeds exceeded two hundred kilometers per hour, it blew directly from the rear, giving a boost to the car’s speed, just like a turbo prop. Because the blades of the low-pressure turbine were fitted with the epoch-making changeable pitch device, the shift in output from zero to full power was truly smooth. Equipped with Goodyear’s heat and abrasion resistant, elastic fluororesin tires, internal anti-slip plates, an optional autodriver that could be used both in city traffic and during high speed travel, automatic switchover to power steering, numerous new features for protecting the driver, plus a radar alarm and night vision for foggy nights, this high-performance automobile was touted as having stability of speed and drivability equal to a motorboat at two hundred twenty kilometers per hour.

Beaten to the punch, the other automakers were naturally on the lookout for opportunities to nitpick and criticize the new vehicle.

Barca Volante’s fully loaded deluxe model had just been announced in early March, and only three had as yet been sold to private citizens in Europe, among whom was Tonio, who—in recognition of his international fame and the skill he had displayed in the former Le Mans auto race—had been enjoying a test drive, as it were, at half the regular price.

PLAYBOY DRIVER IN FIRST TURBINE AUTO CRASH
was the headline splashed over front pages all across Europe. The R&D and sales departments at Alfa Romeo went white in their collective face, and an investigation was launched into the cause of the accident. Had it been some flaw or defect in the automobile? Or had it all been the driver’s fault?

Witnesses all claimed that in spite of the straight road, Tonio hadn’t been going
all that
fast. Ninety kilometers per hour, maybe less. The traffic accident experts who investigated the case said the same thing. The most eloquent testimony of this came from the car’s speedometer, whose needle had remained stuck at eighty-five.

The odometer showed that the car had not yet gone fifteen hundred kilometers. Taking that into account, what could the cause have been? For it to have crashed so soon and at such a low speed—was there some fatal flaw in the steering system? And what had happened to the driver protection system they were so proud of, said to be on par with that of a Mach 3-capable jet?

Each and every bit of information that came in seemed to be nothing but bad news for Alfa Romeo. On top of that, hearsay began to surface that sounded at first blush spectacularly bad for the company. The eyewitnesses were in agreement with one another, saying things like, “It looked like Tonio had lost control of the steering wheel.” Also, people who had seen Tonio driving from various spots along the sidewalk averred that, “Tonio had this incredibly glamorous woman sitting right beside him, but it was like he was taking the test for his driver’s license—he was clinging to the wheel without batting an eye at her.” Even the guy who had topped off his kerosene at a petrol stand in Civitavecchia said he was “driving extremely carefully.”

From this, it did not appear that he had lost control of the vehicle due to any passion between him and “Ms. M.”

A story underscoring that point emerged by way of Tonio’s family doctor in Milano. Some years ago, Tonio had narrowly escaped death in an accident at the Le Mans race, and he had afterward developed (and striven earnestly to conceal) a mild phobia of high speeds. “Ever since that day, he was always a careful driver,” the doctor said.

However, when he had been approached with the offer of a half-price Barca Volante, Tonio, being possessed of quick-draw linga such as had not been seen since the days of Errol Flynn, had found himself unable to turn down this phallic totem worshipped by women the world over and had thus made a show of accepting the offer gladly, though internally he had been conflicted.

Taking these factors into account, the only way left to learn about the circumstances of this bizarre accident was to hear them directly from the mouth of Ms. M, who was hospitalized in Rome. Doctors made a preliminary announcement that Tonio’s cause of death was cardiac arrest caused by instantaneous neural paralysis resulting from the impact of the crash—in other words, a heart attack brought on by shock—but this was a little baffling, because it was known that Tonio had been in extremely good physical and mental condition up until that point, and that his heart in particular had been in fine shape. “It was probably because of the blow he took to the solar plexus from the steering wheel,” appended the already doddering and senile forensic specialist. Yet it seemed odd that Tonio, who had never thought twice about getting into brawls even while groggy and plastered, would be done in by a single blow to the body. Besides, this was Alfa Romeo’s vaunted bendable steering wheel. And so it was that the efficacy of the safety wheel—which should retreat softly like a feather futon if the driver’s body strikes it—became a target of heavy criticism.

Because of one thing after another, Alfa Romeo was stuck grinding its teeth for a week. On the eighth day, Ms. M had finally recovered to a point at which visits could be permitted. For all their spectacle, Ms. M’s injuries were less serious than they appeared. Even her head injuries had not damaged her brain or skull, and the sunken place in her chest was not—from the standpoint of modern medical technology—life-threatening. On the eighth day, an investigator from Alfa Romeo, having kept the hospital under siege all week, leapt up when word was given that a visit would be allowed.

“Wait just a moment, please,” the attending physician said. “She’s still suffering from a strong psychological shock, you know. Please limit this visit to one person, for no more than fifteen minutes.”