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“OKAY, WE KNOW YOU’RE not the guy we’re looking for,” Glenn said, sitting down. “Thanks for your patience. I know how upsetting it is for them to tear your life apart. They did it to me too.”
“You’re one of them. You don’t get to say ‘they.’”
“Not really. Or yes, I am one of them, but only for a few months while we try to stop this horrible situation from getting any worse.”
“You thought I’m going to make it worse?”
“Someone is. Maybe someone here. Maybe someone who lives ten miles from here. Maybe the target is the flu vaccine here, maybe not. We honestly don’t know for sure.”
“But your guess that it may be—that’s important enough to invade a man’s privacy?”
“A hundred million Americans will be dead before this is all over. If the vaccine from here doesn’t go out, maybe it’ll be a hundred ten million or more. Yeah, it’s important enough. You love your wife. I love my mother and sister and her kids. Times ten million people just like them. That’s worth ruffling some feathers.”
“I know. It’s just so—” He puffed out a breath. “I hate people getting in my business.”
“Me too. Be grateful you’re not into internet porn.”
“Nor will I ever be, now that you’ve said that.”
“Tell me about the vaccine. I need to know how it’s stored once it’s done.”
“We have a bank of refrigerated cabinets.”
Glenn remembered them from the quick tour he’d taken. “At two to eight degrees?”
Polk nodded. “Five exactly.”
“I assume there are back-up systems to keep it cold. Generators?”
“Of course. Though without opening the door, they’d probably not be in danger for a full hour of electrical outage. The seals on those refrigeration units are pretty damned good.”
“What about freezing them? What’s the lowest they can survive?”
“You don’t want them under zero. The cells before processing, they’re at minus seventy.”
“So if I switched the vaccines to that freezer, I’d kill them.”
“Fifteen thousand ampoules? Haul them across the facility? That’d take you a while.”
“Yeah, you’re right of course. I’m just trying to figure out how a person could destroy the vaccines without destroying the whole facility.”
“Like with bombs.”
“Or a fire.”
“Hard to burn this place down.” Polk glanced up. “There are sprinklers even in here, and the building has a lot of concrete and tile.”
“What temperature renders the vaccine ineffective?”
“I’d have to look it up. Twelve, maybe? No, it’d depend on time. Probably there’s a chart around here somewhere, time versus temperature. A hundred for a second or two would definitely do it. But twelve degrees for a few hours should do it too. There are warning labels on each bottle that tell pharmacists to return it immediately to refrigeration.”
“Thanks. Can you be thinking of any other way to destroy the vaccine that we might not be thinking of? Once it’s done, I mean.”
“It’s almost done.”
“It is?”
“Couple of days more. Some quality control work after that, and it’ll be out the door the beginning of next week.”
That could be why Monday was the date. His certainty that this was the target shot up another notch. “When do you get your dose?”
“The day before we ship, is my understanding. And here, under the watchful eye of management. I’m not the only one who’d think about taking the dose home to a wife or kid rather than taking it myself.”
“I imagine you’re right about that. I appreciate your time, and I’m sorry your privacy was invaded.”
“Not your fault, I guess. So I can go?”
“Yeah, you can go. Don’t chat about any of this to coworkers, please.”
Nydia came back in a minute later. “Learn anything while I was gone?”
“What if it’s as simple as screwing up the refrigeration system for the vaccines?”
“There are controls and redundant checks, right?”
“Maybe someone smart could get past that. Someone with electronics knowledge? It’d be one thing just to kill the generators, and another to shut off the electricity up the line somewhere. But what if it was more subtle, and it was possible to fool the thermostats into thinking everything was fine, but it wasn’t?”
“We’ll have to ask Rogers if that’s possible. First we need to get this next interview done.” She used the office phone to call for the next guy to come in.
Glenn said, “Get anything from the airport yet?”
“No. But Dodd’s still here. He isn’t going to be running. Anyone trying to leave before this shift is over will be stopped. And then we’ll question whoever that is—and probably not here, but at FBI headquarters.”
“The dogs are here now too?”
“Here and working. No alerts.”
“Alerts being...?”
“When a dog gets his scent. He gives the handler a signal, the alert that he smelled something.”
“So there’s no dynamite here.”
“Or C4 or nitroglycerine or whatever other wonders of destruction are on the list of—” She cut herself off as the door opened.
Griffin Miller’s head popped in. He was dark-haired but pale-skinned, the hair making the skin look even paler. “You ready for me?”
“Yes,” Nydia said. She began by asking him about international travel.
Glenn figured there was a reason she did so, but she hadn’t mentioned to him what that reason was.
“I did a summer in hostels in Europe after my sophomore year. And a professional conference some years back. Six or seven, maybe? And the last time was four or five years ago, when I spent a working vacation with a group of doctors. Volunteer work, I mean.”
“And where was that?”
“Armenia.”
“What were you doing there? Something to do with vaccine development?”
“Helping doctors give birth control injections. Like Russia and a lot of its former republics, Armenia has low access to birth control and a high abortion rate. In effect, abortion is the primary means of birth control. So this group was offering patches, shots, and IUDs for free.”
“And the Armenian women wanted that?”
“Lines were blocks long. To put it in context for Americans, it was like the line-up for the hottest Disneyland ride.” One side of his mouth smiled. “I suppose it was that—if you consider sex free of worry about pregnancy as an entertaining diversion, it was a far better attraction than Thunder Mountain.”
Nydia glanced at her tablet, and then she gave Glenn the signal to take over.
He did, but he wasn’t sure where to go with it. She hadn’t quizzed the guy about his donations yet, so he stuck with the Armenia thing. “Sounds like interesting work. Who did you work with?”
He named an organization Glenn had heard of. “They do a lot of AIDS work too, right?”
“They do. Different program though than the one I worked with.”
“Who did you work with? The medical staff, I mean.”
“Oh, gosh, I can’t remember all the names. No one I kept in touch with. And half of them didn’t speak English, especially the nurses, so we communicated through smiling and pointing.”
“How long were you there?”
“Only two weeks doing that. And then I did a bit of tourism, visiting the sights.”
“What are the sights in Armenia?”
“Old churches, art museums, and a surprising number of monasteries. Or surprising to me, at least, until I learned a bit about the place and its history. There was a pretty lake that had several around it. Nnnn—no, sorry, not remembering the name of the lake, but I think it started with an ‘n.’”
“Meet anyone interesting there?” Glenn thought it was a ham-handed question. Meet any terrorists there you’re willing to tell us about? Right, like he’d answer that in the affirmative.
“I don’t talk to strangers much. Also, remember, I don’t speak Armenian. Or, rather, by the end I could count to twenty and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘how much’ and ask for a dozen different dishes at restaurants. And say ‘this is to prevent pregnancy,’ but that doesn’t come up much as a tourist.”
“Especially in monasteries.”
“No indeed.”
“How long have you been working here, again?”
“Three years.”
Glenn struggled to come up with more friendly but useful questions, and managed only a few before Nydia took over again.
“I want to talk about your interest in population control,” she said.
“Sure.”
“Tell me about it.”
He gave another of those half-smiles. “I’m interested in the issue of population control. Not sure what else there is to it.”
“Interested enough to donate a lot of money to the cause.”
“Don’t forget time. I used that one vacation to volunteer, after all.”
“I hadn’t forgotten,” she said.
Glenn wondered if Miller heard the same steel in her voice he heard. If so, he didn’t react to it. He remained relaxed.
Nydia said, “Why do you care about the issue?”
“Simple. It’s really the only real issue there is. Wars over resources? That’s caused by overpopulation. Radical religions? Exacerbated by overpopulation. Urban crime? A problem of overpopulation. Mexicans sneaking into the U.S. and people fighting over the issue? Wouldn’t happen without overpopulation there. And look at a map for deforestation between Mexico—where the church has successfully banned birth control—and neighboring countries where the country has wisely overturned that religious ban, and you’ll see a sharp line. Lots of trees versus no trees in Mexico. Global warming? Overpopulation. Species extinction? Overpopulation. Emerging diseases? Ask Dr. Stevens there. They come from overpopulation, too—either the encroaching of humans onto lands that rightly belong to the animals carrying the disease, or the eating of strange animals—particularly primates—because the population has overwhelmed the carrying capacity of the land, or people being crowded together making diseases pass with shocking ease. Overpopulation means sewage running in the streets in some places, so more diseases still.” The whole time he was talking, he was leaning forward just a little with every sentence. He was obviously passionate about the topic.
“And so you must think of what’s happening now as a great thing.”
“I’m sorry?” He sat back.
“The flu. It’s decreasing the population, is it not?”
“Well, yes, it is, but....” He looked to Glenn. “I care about the issue, but I hate to see people dying of the flu. The solution to overpopulation is getting every woman on the planet to commit to having just one child. In a hundred years, human population will be at a much healthier level. That simple.”
“What about men? They get a break?”
“The women are the ones who matter. Their fecundity is the limiter to population growth. One man impregnating each woman once, one man impregnating twenty women once, doesn’t matter. If she says no after the first birth—or if the state says no for her and sterilizes her—then by 2120, we’d be living in a much nicer world. Not you and I of course, but whoever is alive then. Fewer wars, less disparity of income, extinctions would have leveled off.”
“Sounds pretty radical, that forced sterilization thing.”
“Radical—” He stopped.
“Yes?” she said.
“Radical, yes, and therefore I know it’s not ever going to happen.”
“So did you decide to take matters into your own hands?”
“What matters?” he said.
“It’s your hot-button issue. You can see there’s no practical way to get to the place you want the world to be at. Women won’t voluntarily limit their births. Men won’t use condoms every time. Governments don’t have the will to sterilize—not even China did, did they, with their one-child rule? So if there’s not enough political will out there, not enough courage, then one courageous man should take it on himself.”
“I’m surprised you’d think that’s courageous.”
“In a sense.”
“If someone did that, I don’t believe I’d see it that way. But did someone? Or is this natural, or an accidental release of an experimental virus?” He looked at Glenn, who looked at Nydia.
“I think you know the answer to that,” she said to Miller.
His face conveyed the equivalent of a shrug. “That you’re here suggests it’s an act of terrorism, so I suppose I should rule out accidental release. But it seems illogical to look here for that. If it was released purposefully, that wasn’t a vaccine issue. There’s no hint that there was live virus of this type inside last year’s vaccines, was there?” Again he looked at Glenn.
“No,” said Nydia. “It was released into the wild. Out east. You haven’t been out east in the past year or two, have you?”
“No,” said Miller, settling back again. “I haven’t.”
“Driven there maybe?”
“I don’t like driving very far. I keep thinking about getting rid of my car, in fact. The Bay Area is one of those places you could function without a car. Only problem is groceries. I prefer to only shop every ten days, get a lot of stuff at once, and it’d be awkward doing that on BART.” He seemed much more relaxed now than he had been two minutes ago.
The question was, was that prior tension because they were getting close to revealing the identity of a terrorist, or just because he was passionate about population control? Glenn didn’t know, and his gut wasn’t telling him anything useful. He hoped Nydia’s was.
“Have you heard where the flu came from?” Glenn asked, knowing he was speaking out of turn.
Miller hesitated. “New Jersey, you mean?”
“No, the vector. Or the host.”
“A bird, I believe. Chickens?”
“Crows.”
“Huh. Maybe I did hear that. I don’t watch the news a lot.”
Glenn stared at Miller, but he still couldn’t tell if the man was lying or not. He glanced at Nydia.
She took over again. “How did you get interested in the issue of overpopulation?”
“Initially? In a college course. I wrote my final research paper on it for that course, and I learned a lot then.”
“And it stayed with you?”
“It did. I knew then I’d never be a father, and I’ve never thought differently.”
“Not once since then?”
“No. I mean, I can’t change what other people do, but I can change myself, right? If every person who educated themselves about the issue committed to not becoming a parent, that’d be the start of a solution.”
“But not enough, I’d think.”
“That answer depends largely on how educated a populace is. There’s some data that suggests education is inversely correlated with family size. The correlation is particularly strong in minorities in any culture. IQ is inversely correlated too.”
“Is that so?” Nydia said. “I imagine you’re a smart guy.”
“That’s not unique here. Or in this field. Those aren’t easy courses we take on the way to our master’s degree or Ph.D. or MDs.”
“Is that what you have?”
“I’m ABD.”
She clearly knew what it meant. “Why no dissertation?”
“Got tired of grad school, the politics, the rules that were in place just to be there, rather than for some rational reason. It was like high school had never ended. By then I was tired of high school, having been in it or a facsimile of it for twelve years at that point. I passed my orals and left.”
“And did what?”
“I can email you my CV, if you like. It’s all there.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Miller sighed and began to recite his professional experience, which had begun in Kansas.
Nydia interrupted. “Why did you leave that job?”
“I was tired of it.”
“Go on.”
He gave another company and position.
“Why did you leave that job?”
“To come here.”
“What salary were you making there?”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
Nydia stared at him.
“Fine. About the same as I do here.” He named the number.
“A lateral move. Why come here then?”
“I guess I get bored. Same people, same work, same place. Time for a change.”
“So you didn’t have any relationships keeping you there?”
“Not particularly, no, not at that point.”
“Why here?”
“I’d always heard a lot about San Francisco, how great it is. So I wanted to give it a try. Life is short, right? Why not have different experiences? Another benefit to staying child-free. You can move, change your career, travel, whatever.”
“Wouldn’t you be making more money had you stuck it out at your first job?”
“Maybe, maybe not. My needs are few. Probably eating out is my biggest expense beyond rent.”
“Who do you eat out with?” Nydia asked.
“Whoever. Sometimes alone.”
“How often alone?”
“I don’t know, a third of the time?” He made a face. “What’s that got to do with your hunt for your imaginary terrorist? Or with anything, for that matter?”
“Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I’m being friendly.”
“And yet these don’t feel like friendly questions,” he said.
The interview dragged on, but instead of becoming more nervous, Miller seemed to grow bored and distracted. Finally, Nydia dismissed him. “Don’t go out of town. And email me your CV right away.”
“I need to work until we’re finished with the vaccine. Of course I’m not going out of town,” Miller said, and then he left.
Nydia frowned at the desk. Glenn didn’t interrupt her. After two or three minutes, she looked up. “I don’t like him.”
“I wouldn’t cross him off the list, but I wouldn’t put him at the top.”
“He’s first or second for me,” she said.
“So the sexual harasser, this guy, and then Slug Boy?”
She gave him a look.
“Sorry, but you shouldn’t have told me. Now I’m stuck with the image.”
“For heaven’s sake, Glenn, just don’t call him that to his face.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen his face yet. Not for more than a second, anyway.”
“Hmm. You have a point.” She stood. “I need to talk to Rogers, and then I want to make some calls.”
“Back to DC?”
She shook her head. “His former employers. Miller’s, I mean. And graduate advisor if I can track him down.”
“Why?”
“I get the feeling he might not have left for such innocuous reasons. Maybe there was trouble at work. Also, he sounds like a loner.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“He took vacation alone with a bunch of strangers. Going out to eat—I bet he’s not alone a third of the time but most of the time. Most people tend to lie about things like that to appear more normal.”
“So, he’s a strange duck. Bad at connecting with people. Maybe he lectures too much, like when he got going on overpopulation here, and he drives people off.”
“Loners are never good.”
“That’s always what they say on TV. ‘He kept to himself, but he seemed nice enough.’”
“Some things become truisms because they’re true.” She checked her phone. “No CV yet from him.”
“Maybe he had to take a leak first.”
She stood. “Maybe. I’m going to go get it from personnel. In fact, I’ll get all three of them for the three remaining suspects and do some calling of former employers next, see if anyone will talk with me without a court order.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Look around again? Think. Let it all seep into your brain and see if something new pops for you.”
“Okay, what else?”
“Maybe we should close this place.” She moved for the door. “At least we can save these lives.”
