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THE NEXT MORNING HE woke and remembered Ellis. He was rejecting good women left and right during this crisis. A smarter man might grab at the chances of intimacy while he could. When he was a kid in college, he’d always said in conversations about the end of the world that the last thing he’d do is have sex with any willing woman. Either he’d not known himself very well back then, or he’d grown up.
He sent a text to Ellis and hoped he’d get a reply. Statistics told him he had a one in four chance of hearing back from her. Same chance of survival Harper had. Far too small.
Next he tried Emile but couldn’t get him, so he called Chanchal instead. She told him, excited, about their progress in the lab. They were figuring out the New Flu, down to the molecular level, though they still weren’t entirely sure what made it more lethal than the natural Asian forms.
When he had heard her news, he said, “Is Emile okay? I’m worried that I couldn’t get in touch.”
“Emile is at his brother’s house.”
“Oh God. He didn’t make it?”
“No, and his sister-in-law is in the ICU and isn’t expected to live either, so Emile felt he had to go and collect their teenage daughter.”
“Is that their only child?”
“No, there’s an older boy, at university in Paris. Stuck there, of course.”
International travel was impossible now, so the kid wouldn’t be able to attend his parents’ funerals. And domestic flights were grounded too. “How’d Emile get there? Drive?”
“Called in some favors to get a ride on a military flight, is my understanding. He’ll be back soon.”
“He’s lucky to have the connections to get a ride up there. A lot of people are missing funerals. I hope he can make it back.”
“Did you see the news this morning?”
“No, I was busy. What’s up?”
“Images of mass graves in New York. They’re huge, bigger than a football field. Powerful images.”
“I see we have high infection numbers now in Denver, Phoenix, and L.A.”
“Yeah, the new models predicted that well,” she said.
“I wonder what it’s like to live somewhere like, I don’t know—Bend, Oregon. The flu isn’t there yet in force, the airport is small and easily shut down, but you know it’s coming. Imagine trying to prevent it from getting a good hold there. Being a civic leader and trying to keep it out.”
“We’ll likely see roadblocks, something of that nature.”
“Might not be a bad idea. If I ran a town, or a county, I’d station police on every road in. I’d allow truckloads of fuel and food in and nothing more. And I’d demand the truck driver not leave his truck while locals unloaded, in case he was infected.”
“Some other people would probably still sneak in anyway. And there are always the crows, and they can take it anywhere on the continent. Are you okay, Glenn?”
“I’m fine.”
“You sound tired. We miss having you here.”
“I miss being there.” But he wanted to help Nydia find the man who had done this. He needed to find him.
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HE WAS WOKEN IN THE middle of the following night by a pounding at the door. It was Nydia, again staring at her tablet.
“Hang on. I’m still fuzzy with sleep. Need coffee.” The room had a four-cup coffeemaker, and he set it to going, then spent five minutes in the bathroom, including washing his face with cold water. Only then did he feel capable of thought.
“I’m sorry I woke you. It’s important.”
“What time is it?”
“Four-thirty.”
“Have you been up all night?”
“I got a few hours of sleep before I got the call.”
“What call? No, you probably need the coffee more than I do. Take the first cup.”
“I had some already. And I’m wired with excitement anyway. We almost have him.”
“Who? Jarri?”
“No. The guy here in the States. He used burner phones whenever he opened emails from Jarri. What we’ll be able to get is the cities where he did that—maybe even the city where he lives.”
“But will he have answered them from home?” Glenn certainly wouldn’t have. “Might he not have driven a couple hundred miles to do that?”
“It’s unlikely he’ll have driven that far. We know from experience that we’ll get 97% of perpetrators if we look within a hundred road miles of the site where they opened the email or made a phone call. Also, the more different places he went to open them, the better for us. Most people who try this sort of thing do, ranging out in various directions. It’s almost an instinct, it’s done so often. But it’s the wrong thing to do because he’ll have drawn us a map.”
“When will you know where he is?”
“This morning.”
“Can you trace him through the phones themselves?”
“Probably not. If it were you, how would you do it?”
Glenn rubbed his face, trying to make his brain get fully up to speed. “Buy a phone with cash, someplace like a dollar store. Wear sunglasses and a hat in case of security cameras.”
“And if you can figure that out—no offense—professional criminals can too.”
The coffee was dripping now, and he poured what there was of it into a cup for himself.
“We also have a new email from this guy. The first one going back to Jarri.”
“Can you show it to me?”
“That’s why I’m here.” She handed over the tablet.
The email read:
Ready to initiate Phase II ten days from today, 0700 local time.
“When was it sent?”
“Twenty-eight hours ago.”
“So you have nine days to figure out what this is and to stop it?”
“We have nine days, Glenn. I need your help. Now more than ever.”
“You have it, you know that, but I’m not sure how I can help.”
“Tell me what Phase II is going to be.”
That surprised him. “Hell, I don’t know.”
“Guess. I need educated guesses, with your education behind them.”
“But it could be anything. Maybe they’ll bomb the White House. Or attack Israel so that the U.S. military has to make a tough choice about where its priorities are. Or anything at all.”
“Assume they’re scientists. Assume at least that the attack is related to your area of expertise. If you’re the terrorist, and you’ve released flu into the American crow population, probably captured several, shot the virus into them or whatever, maybe even did that in a few places around the country, what do you do next? You see the first part of your plan worked. What’s your next move?” She stared at him, her expression intense.
Glenn turned to refill his coffee, getting another half-cup out of the slow machine, trying to buy himself a moment to think. When he turned back to her, the look on her face made him sorry he had to say it. He’d rather be able to give her what she wanted. “I don’t know. Release yet another virus somehow so that medical resources are strained more? Attack Fort Detrick or Atlanta, where ongoing research might lead to a treatment? Blow up a bunch of big hospitals?”
“What about shutting down production of one of those labs—the ones who make drugs?”
“Medicines are made—the antivirals—at dozens of locations. That’d be a trick to hit them all. Did dozens of people in various locations get the emails from Jarri?”
“No. If there are more conspirators, there’s no sign of it. If there are more, we may need to find this guy to find them. He’s the only one opening mail from Jarri.”
One man doing all this damage. It was a staggering thought. “It’s certainly possible one man was responsible for the flu taking hold. Maybe this Jarri has more people with him who helped develop the virus, or maybe he’s acting alone. But if he’s in Europe....” Glenn downed the coffee and kept thinking it through, working through his thinking aloud. “One man acting here in the U.S. would be easier to defend against. He can only be in one place at a time. If the location he plans to do something is Atlanta or Fort Detrick, then you have a place to protect. In the case of Detrick, an Army base, it’s already pretty well protected.”
“Unless he’s already inside it. What about the new vaccines? Where are they making those?”
“They’re also made at many plants, but not as many as antivirals. A dozen, I believe, but one was in Canada, and Canada might have kept them from fulfilling their contract to the U.S.” Were he the Prime Minister of Canada, he certainly would have, keeping the vaccines for his own population, nationalizing the plant if that’s what it took, and he’d have dealt with the political repercussions later.
“How long until the whole country is vaccinated?”
“I have a projection that takes into account the total deaths I’ll show you that explains it.” He drew in the air two intersecting sloped lines. “Here’s the number of vaccines versus national population. As people die, these lines intersect at some point, probably eighteen months from now. At that point, crisis over. So harm could be done for eighteen more months by impeding the flow of vaccines, but I don’t see how that’s possible to stop them all.”
She paced in the small space she had for it. “For now, let’s stay with figuring out the terrorist plot. Where might they attack that would matter? And that there was a limited number of. One of, two or three at most.”
“Maybe the largest vaccine manufacturing facility? I’d have to look up which one that is. Maybe the SNS warehouses.”
“What’s that?”
“Strategic National Supply of antivirals and other supplies.”
“Right, the truck that was attacked in New Jersey. I saw that memo.”
“Yeah. The locations are a closely guarded secret, but it’s not impossible someone could have found them. I think maybe four of them haven’t been touched yet. The ones west of the Rockies are waiting for the flu to arrive there in force before trucks go out with supplies.”
“Okay, but that’s four locations, not one. I assume spread out geographically?”
“I assume so, yeah.”
“You don’t know where they are?”
“No. It’s need-to-know. I don’t. It really is a secret, one of CDC’s biggest.”
“If they don’t tell someone as high up as you, that does suggest decent security. I’ll ask for one of our better hacker guys to try and find out the information, to test how easily it can be done. If it’s impossible for him, we can move that down the list. Okay. What else might be a target? Not just a single place, but anything at all you can think of for a second way to attack. A system. Information. Anything.”
“I’m thinking.” Glenn sat in a chair and closed his eyes. What’s the worst possible thing that could happen? He was drawing a blank. Was there anything that could make it that much worse?
“Glenn?” she said.
He answered without opening his eyes. “Problem is, most of the worst things have happened already. Riots at stores. Sick people refusing to go into isolation. Various nuts blathering nonsense on television.”
“People attacking commercial poultry farms.”
His eyes popped open. “What?”
“Some citizens in a southern state—Alabama, maybe? Arkansas?—attacked a chicken farm, burning down buildings, shooting workers. It was on the news last night, but I didn’t pay much attention.”
“I didn’t watch any news at all. Haven’t in a week.” He shook his head. “If the chickens are kept entirely indoors, their worst chance of catching it is from a poultry worker, from a human, not vice-versa. And I read a report about how those workers have all been tested and have to have their temperature taken daily before being allowed in the barns. So destroying all chickens makes no sense at all. The USDA will take care of the ones that are infected. They know how to do it right. Vigilantes don’t.”
The stupidity of people was overwhelming sometimes. They could fight bacteria. Viruses were harder, but they could be fought too. But stupidity? It seemed endless, wave after wave of it, made worse by panic. “Wait,” he said, as a thought stirred in the back of his mind. But it was gone, just like that. He frowned.
Nydia gave him a full minute, but then prompted him again. “Back to the terrorist. What might he be planning?”
Glenn tried to relax and let his mind wander. He closed his eyes. “Okay, I’m a terrorist. I’ve released a killer flu into a population. I’ve always had a second step to my plan. And that’s....”
His mind sent him the image of burning poultry barns. Boy, I bet that stank. No, not chickens. Something else. Something in a single location, probably not too far from where the guy lived. At this point, a stranger showing up somewhere like a vaccine facility would be bizarre enough, so he thought that might not happen. Were the facilities guarded? He’d toured one, and it had chain link fence all around it, as he recalled. Forget the vaccines for a moment. What else might terrorist X do? Think outside the box. He could poison a reservoir—no. Too limited an effect, no matter what you poisoned, even LA. This guy wasn’t going to do something minor and local. Not after the success of getting the flu going worldwide. He could hear Nydia stirring. He ignored her and tried to let his mind drift freely, hoping it would drift over the answer.
“Second release of flu?” he said.
“What good would that do? You’ve told me how it’s going to spread all around the globe on its own.”
“I mean, a second flu. If you can engineer this type, why not engineer another type, another new subclade, close, but not too close? Still H5N1. Or why not use another type? H3N2, maybe. At first, those new infections get lost in the noise of the infections of the first type. Testing still happens, but I’m sure by now it’s haphazard. If someone comes into the ER, coughing, short of breath, they’ll assume it’s the New Flu. Eventually, some lab sees it has something else in a few patients. Vaccines for the first type won’t work on the second type. Medical resources are already strained. Vaccine facilities are all committed to manufacturing the New Flu vaccine. Either one would have to switch to the second flu, or some other adjustment would have to be made. You might extend the crisis by a year by doing that.”
“What about population numbers? If a hundred million Americans will be dead within a year of the first sort, a second flu would increase it to what?”
“I’ll ask one of our statisticians to run those numbers.” He felt another stab of worry about Harper and had to push it aside. “But if you want my guess? H3N2 isn’t any good. Not lethal enough. If it’s similarly lethal, similarly pathogenic, another three hundred thousand in a year might die. And it doesn’t have to be the flu, even, though that’d be the best way to hide what he was doing. It’d confuse the diagnosis for longer. If you could get maybe MERS going in the population at the same time, the extra strain on the healthcare system would be devastating. Healthcare workers might be cutting corners by now, getting sloppy with protocols. They’re assuming everyone in a room or on a ward has this flu. In a hospital, with a new disease moving through the population, everyone there and not in proper isolation could catch two deadly viruses. The survival rate of that would be very low. Let’s say MERS, as is, fatality rate about thirty percent for people who were healthy when they contracted it. But if they’d already had the New Flu, fewer than one in a hundred would survive having both.”
“Okay. We’ll put a check mark next to that one. Keep thinking of more. Now, why would the date be important? July 15.”
“I don’t know. Is it some anniversary of something? Don’t people commit acts of terrorism on Hitler’s birthday? Maybe Mohammed’s?”
“April and December, respectively,” she said without needing to look it up, impressing him yet again. “And Bastille Day is July 14, so that’s close but not close enough. We have people looking at the date, but so far we’ve found nothing special about it. I thought you might know of something. Is it an important day in disease history?”
“I can’t think of any date that is. Is there anything else your experts have figured out from the email? Hints of foreign language? Psychological state? Or what about your take on all that?”
“You saw the same email we did. The bit that’s there is in idiomatic American English. It’s likely either the person is a native speaker or studied or lived here for a long time. If he had written a two-page manifesto, we’d have been able to pull out much more information and make many more educated guesses about his background and mental state. But this thing is too short. All I can tell from it is that they’re working from an agenda they devised some time ago. It doesn’t seem to be in reference to another recent email. So at some point, I’m guessing, a year or two or maybe even five years ago, they made a plan. Probably they met face to face. Now, they’re half a world apart and executing the plan.” She twisted her mouth in frustration. “I wish I knew when they’d infected the birds.”
“Is there anything else about these emails that makes you able to hunt down other messages by the guy? I mean, not to whoever he’s working with here. To anyone. Family, coworkers, whoever, using the same phones.”
“It’s doubtful he’ll have done that with the same phone. He seems to know what he’s doing, both in the sense of his plot, and in being careful about executing his plan. We’ll find him eventually. I always believed we would, even if it took ten years. But now we can’t wait for that to happen. We don’t have ten years. We have ten days.”
“Let me pull up all the emails from Jarri. Look at them again. What do these tell you?”
He read through them quickly. There were still code words they weren’t certain about that might hold clues to his identity. “Nothing more. As you say, they’re all too short. Jarri could be writing a plumber, for all this tells me. Or anyone,” he said, before she started grilling him about what plumbers had to do with anything.
“Why a plumber?”
“Damn.” He laughed. “It was just a word.”
“You’re sure? It wasn’t your unconscious mind sending up a hint?”
“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I can’t think of a thing a plumber could do that would affect more than a few hundred people at a time.”
“Well you know what Freud said.”
“That sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? I’ve always thought that was the defensive talk of a man for whom a cigar was very much more than a cigar. He wanted to chew on his phallic symbol, but he didn’t want to think too deeply about the fact he was doing that.”
“Plumbers,” she said, forcing him back on topic. “You’re sure you didn’t have a germ of a thought about that?”
“No. Or yeah, okay, I did for a half-second. But even infecting a water supply of a big city with some toxin, that’d only be one city. And I’m sure it’s something a non-plumber could do. And I suspect big cities have pretty good security about that post-9/11, don’t they?”
“They should. But I’ll pass the concept along. I know we already have anticipated that as a terrorist act, so we have a long list of substances that could be added to municipal water supplies that would harm people. I’ll get that for you if you want, and you can see if anything jumps out at you.” She waved her hand, waving the topic aside. “So what else do you have for me?”
“Secondary pathogen release is my best guess. Or possibly delaying vaccine distribution somehow, coordinated across all facilities?”
“Is there something that can be done to the—I don’t know, whatever. Like poison the growing medium? I don’t know how that works. Something so that all the vaccines at all the facilities end up bad? Maybe the vaccines still go out, but they don’t work.”
“Impossible. Too many people are in on that. Too many redundant checks in the system. The growing medium is the inside of chicken eggs. The eggs come from many farms in different states, and if those farms didn’t have eggs, other farms would. And I was thinking, I don’t believe it would be some stranger showing up there. Now, with everyone at those facilities aware of how important their work was, they’d notice someone strange hanging around or walking through the front door.”
“I’ll make sure they all have increased security. Unless you come up with another idea of what Phase II is, I think that should be our next job. Or rather, you have a job to do first. Get information out to hospitals—protocols or whatever you call them—to make sure they test the flu and don’t make an assumption that’s what it is. No exceptions.”
Glenn knew there’d be exceptions. There were only so many tests that could be done with the limited staff they had. He could tell people to test thoroughly, but he couldn’t force compliance. “I can do that in an email to Lorraine. What about you and me? What should we do?”
“We—the FBI, I mean—should run background checks, tear into every employee’s background in those places. Get the NSA to work on tracking them more closely. I mean, last time—anthrax—it was a professional. Why not this time?” She was talking to herself more than to him.
Glenn wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of all that spying. It wasn’t just the interference in important work that such an investigation might cause. It was the whole idea of the security state, looking into innocent people’s web searches and emails. What if they were into something innocuous but embarrassing, like guys into cross-dressing or something along those lines? Or maybe cross-dressing no longer embarrassed people? The culture was changing so fast around him, he didn’t have time to keep up.
“What are you thinking now?” she said.
He knew that the wrong answer to that question would be “cross-dressing.” He chose a more general interpretation. “The guys in the lab—or gals—who have some innocent sexual kink that you’ll uncover.”
“Some aren’t so innocent. Some can be indicative of serious psychological problems.”
“I’m afraid to ask which ones.”
“None you need to worry about.”
“None I—?” He realized what she was saying. “Wait, did you go through my web searches and emails?”
“Of course we did. Weeks ago.”
“Gahh!” he said.
“I don’t see why you’re upset. We cleared you. You don’t even look at porn.”
“I don’t have time to look at porn. If I had more time, I might. And then you might think I was a perv.”
“The oddest thing about you was that you went through a spiralizer phase. Recipes.”
He had, after his sister had bought him one as a Christmas gift. “I’m really bothered by that. That you know something like that about me.”
“I don’t think less of you for the spiralizer thing. It’s odd, but not that odd. I guess some people would see it as a little girly, but I’m not sexist in that way. I have no problem with it.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You’re working on special assignment with the FBI. You didn’t think we’d do a background check?”
“I’ve been checked. Repeatedly. Fingerprinted, my mother and sister interviewed, neighbors, all of that.”
“Not like we do it.”
“You could have asked my permission. I’d have said yes.”
“We did ask. You signed forms.”
“Nobody reads all those pages!”
“You should.”
He shook his head. “This doesn’t bother you at all? Digging into everything about these lab workers? About me? As a citizen of a putative democracy, it doesn’t trouble you?”
“No. Not when I’m trying to catch a terrorist who has already consigned millions to death. This hunt is an endeavor you’re involved in too, Glenn. Are you saying you don’t care about catching him?”
“Of course I care!” His frustration with not being able to give her any good ideas, his frustration about the uselessness of all the interviews, his weeks-old frustration at not being able to halt the spread of the disease—it all came to a boiling point. “I could be out doing something useful with the CDC instead. I could be talking to panicked hospital administrators about procedures, or answering questions for tribal health directors, or in the lab, or helping in the ICC, or doing any number of things. But I’m here, helping you, pissing off colleagues and living out of a suitcase.”
“And you chose to be here. So get used to the idea that we—meaning you too—have the authority and the right to look into the backgrounds of people who we deem to be potential suspects. And speaking of being in the military, in a sense you’re here under the command of the President, your ultimate boss. You wear a uniform of the United States. Not every soldier wants to shoot people or believes what he is doing is the best solution to international problems. But they have orders, so they do it. You agreed to do this, so you need to see it through.”
“Why are we fighting, Nydia?” Glenn said. “I hate fighting.”
“I—” She stopped, and took obvious deep breaths to calm herself. “I’m not sure. I don’t want you distracted by this theory stuff about democracy and privacy. I need you to keep thinking about Jarri and this local guy and what he’s up to. I need you to help me figure out who he is, where he is, and what he is planning. I’ll meet you in an hour for breakfast and see what you’ve come up with. Okay?”
“Okay, yeah, sure.”
She left without another word.
