"What the hell are you talking about?" Gena yelled.
Bartholomew lifted her jaw, glancing over at Drake, taking in their guns, their blood-spattered clothes and faces. Folding her arms across her chest, she moved over to stand protectively in front of her granddaughter, worried, maybe, that they were going to eat the little brat. She didn't seem to notice the President standing behind Drake in the shadows.
"You were in Roseville," she said. "The Homeland circus. Where would we be without NORTHCOM and Homeland Security."
"Go screw yourself, lady." Gena chambered a round in Chertok's forty-five and pointed it at her face. "The doc said you had tons of the stuff down here, so where is it?" She cocked the gun. "Where is it?"
"Stop this." MacMillan moved in front of her, blocking her line of fire. "Please...Miss Hahn...you're not thinking clearly...none of us are."
"Get out of the way!" Gena blinked at him, confused.
"Stupid fool," Bartholomew spat. "Keep your voice down."
"What's the matter with you?" Gena was starting to crack, the muscles twitching in her cheeks, her eyes bloodshot and crazy. "We've got to get out of here before they get their act together and bomb the place or whatever they're going to do." She hesitated, then lowered the gun, looking over at Buzard. "We've got to dump this son of a bitch before they catch us with him. Jesus Christ. We've got to get out of here!"
"We can't go anywhere yet." MacMillan's voice was cautious, soothing. "You can hear them out there...it's too dangerous to move around right now. We've got to—"
"Catch us with who?" Bartholomew was staring at Gena. "What are you—" She looked over at Drake, scanned the office, then caught her breath when she finally noticed the President talking to himself by the door. "What's he doing here?" she demanded, backing away, glancing at the window as if she expected to see a pack of Secret Service agents lurking outside. "Why's he here, Louis? What's going on?"
"We brought him along..." MacMillan hesitated. "It couldn't be helped."
"What do you mean you brought him along?"
"We didn't have any choice, Christine. We needed his access."
"Are you insane?" She stared at Buzard with horror. "They can track his wristband."
"I don't think so." MacMillan flinched, looking up at the ducts running along the ceiling. The mob was getting closer—hundreds of people loose in the tunnels around them, trashing offices, smashing their way through the labs—a mindless uproar echoing through the pipework. "We just came up from Central and no one tried to stop us. The system's down. It must be." He looked over at the monitors. "What do you mean it's useless?"
Bartholomew was still focused on Buzard.
"He's been beaten," she said. "Badly."
"Too much whiskey." Drake grinned at her, wondering what the fuss was all about. He was feeling better now—a lot better—a warm, deep-tissue glow spreading through his muscles like a rush of morphine. "He fell down the stairs or something."
"Shut the hell up," Gena said vaguely, staring at Bartholomew.
The lab director's eyes flickered across their faces, reading their condition at a glance, then she looked away again, subdued. Wondering how to get rid of them. Drake could tell. Bartholomew's arrogance had taken a beating over the last few days, but they still couldn't trust the old bat.
"He's delirious," she said, frowning at Buzard. "Do you know what they'll do if they find him like this? With us? We've got to get him out of here—"
"No one's looking for him, Christine," MacMillan said. "If anyone's still lucid out there, they're trying to reach the surface." He placed a hand on her shoulder. "Christine. Look at me. What do you mean it's useless? What's happened?"
Bartholomew suddenly looked very old and tired.
"The plasmid mutated," she said. "The analysis confirmed it."
The blood drained from MacMillan's face.
He stared at Bartholomew for a minute, then dropped her hand and limped over to the monitors, leaning closer to scan the rows of nucleotide symbols flowing down the screens. Fumbling with a keyboard, punching at the keys, he looked like he was having trouble breathing.
"That's impossible," he managed. "It was just a theory."
"Check the base pairs," Bartholomew said.
"What's just a theory?" Gena asked, her voice breaking.
The old lady frowned, then dug her hands into her pockets and looked uneasily at the window. They could hear the mob spreading through the tunnel outside the lab, shrieking and fighting, tripping alarms, tearing apart an office somewhere down the hall...
"Did you lock the outer door?" she asked calmly.
"We closed it," MacMillan said. "The locks don't work any more."
"They could get in...we can't let that—"
"They're beyond trying doors, Christine."
"What's just a theory?" Gena shouted.
Bartholomew stared at her for a moment, then she seemed to come back to the present again, glancing at MacMillan as he moved from one monitor to the next, squinting at the readouts, opening new windows, zooming in on blocks of data.
"BLOWTORCH is evolving," she said quietly, listening to the screams and panicked shouting. "Very rapidly. We haven't identified the specific mutagens involved, but it looks like a series of transitional point mutations have radically altered its genetic expression."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"This can't be right." MacMillan was muttering to himself, still crouched over the displays, the green columns of DNA sequences marching across his glasses like troop formations. "I've never seen these sequences before...it couldn't have changed that fast."
"It's swarming," Bartholomew said. "Replicating exponentially."
"So? So what?" Gena looked at MacMillan, then turned back to Bartholomew, her face glistening in the reflected light from the screens. "So it changed or something. What the hell does that mean?"
"What do you think it means?" Bartholomew asked.
"Stop it, Christine." MacMillan punched a key with an air of finality, then turned away from the monitors, his face clouded, staring listlessly into space. The old man looked like a terminal case who'd just lost his medical insurance.
"It means the vaccine is obsolete, Miss Hahn." He let out his breath, avoiding Gena's panicked eyes. "From what I've seen, it looks like the plasmid mutated in response to the vaccine itself. Adapted in the wild. It happens all the time with conventional vaccines and antibiotics, but we thought it couldn't happen with BLOWTORCH." He shrugged, a hopeless twitch of the shoulders. "It was supposed to be impossible."
"Something went wrong with the primers," Bartholomew said.
"We'd have to check everything." MacMillan leaned back and closed his eyes. "We could start with the cDNA fragments if we had the time."
"So it's weak." Gena was getting frantic. "So what? We can still use it, right? Take more like you said. We're still OK, so it's got to be working."
Bartholomew folded her arms, staring at MacMillan like a sphinx. The President was wandering around behind her, mumbling and giggling, bumping into furniture like a windup doll with a broken spring. Wherever he was, he seemed to be enjoying himself.
"I'm sorry," MacMillan said finally. "The mutation's been spreading through the population for days: taking over, building to a critical mass. That's why the effects have been scattered until now. The vaccine isn't getting weaker; it just doesn't work on this new variation. We're still functioning because it takes time for the mutation to accumulate in the thalamus."
"But you can do something," Gena said. "There's got to be something."
MacMillan shook his head, staring at his shoes.
"It's a matter of time, Miss Hahn." He looked over at Drake, then dropped his eyes again. "If we had the time and resources, we might be able to develop a new counter-agent, but we'd have to start all over again. The new strain has to be analyzed. Antigens have to be cultured, isolated, purified. It could take months. Years."
"Too late for us," Bartholomew added, watching the President now, her eyes glistening with hatred. "We created a monster, Louis. A self-organizing, self-directed swarm of predatory replicons that absorbs its hosts like a jellyfish. A massive, psychotropic jelly." She smiled a little, looking up at the vents. "It's amazing, really, even for the Federal government. A biological weapon evolves into a new life form that feeds on human perception..." Her smile died away, falling apart muscle by muscle. "Your tax dollars at work."
"No way." Gena had turned very pale. "Not after all this. No way."
MacMillan said something, but Drake had stopped listening.
They were in danger. Immediate danger. His muscles were squirming, his scalp tingling as if someone had just turned on a powerful magnetic field. The lights flickered and a mottled patchwork of shadows began to drift across the floor like a snake. He was wide awake—every nerve on red alert.
"Something's here," he heard himself say. "Can't you feel it?"