Final Epidemic (12 page)

Finally, the radio crackled with words too low for Beck to hear, and the soldier gestured the two men inside. They ascended the stairs, walking against a slight draft that blew toward the outside.

Upstairs, they passed through a foyer where throngs of Russian Army personnel were engaged in chaotic labor.

“Consider yourself fortunate,” Alexi muttered to Beck. “Had we not come directly from the airport, neither of us would have been admitted. Perhaps not even with a good scrubbing down from these people.”

He sidestepped two sweating soldiers who were unrolling heavy black plastic sheeting to cover the floor; others were draping the same material over the walls or affixing it to the ceiling. Electrical cables and rubber hoses twined with each other before branching off to conduits and brass manifolds around the large expanse.

The devices and apparatus being wrestled into place looked vaguely familiar, though it took Beck a moment to recall where he had seen this before.

Then he remembered: Israel, during the Gulf War.

Here, in the middle of the Russian Kremlin, a mobile decontamination station was being erected.

Beck had expected another meeting, perhaps even a mirror image of the bureaucratic free-for-all in Atlanta with which the day—
no,
he corrected himself mentally,
that was already yesterday
—had started. He had not taken into account the Russian disdain for group decisions, which roughly translated into an affinity for authoritarian rule.

Only one man was in the ornate room.

His back was to the door, away from the large television and VCR that stood between two low sofas. He was staring out a window that looked out over the Kremlin’s walls; in the summer sun, the cityscape of Moscow glittered like a jewel.
The bright backlighting made him a silhouette, and to Beck he seemed to stand extraordinarily still.

Then the figure turned, and Beck recognized the thin, almost skull-like face of Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.

“I know you, Dr. Casey,” the Russian president said, as Beck’s mind automatically translated the Russian. “You have visited my country before.” Beck heard neither threat nor admonition in his tone, and wondered if it was intentional. Putin gestured at the sofas, and Beck and Alexi settled on either side of the video screen. The Russian president handed the latter a sheet of thick, crisp paper, which Alexi scanned quickly before folding it into a pocket of his uniform.

“Vy gava’reet ye pa-Rooski,”
Putin said, his inflection not as a question.

“Not as well as you speak English,” Beck said.

Putin nodded.

“I have conferred with your president,” he said in the un-accented English his files said he learned in a KGB training academy. “We agree that our two countries are both in mortal peril; we have both pledged unconditional cooperation in this matter. Our medical authorities are exchanging what little information there is. At present, our official position is that this is a medical emergency, not an . . . attack. That may provide us time to determine who has done this. You wish to see the face of this atrocity?”

Without waiting for a response, he moved to the videotape machine and pressed a button. The screen flickered to life. It showed a head-and-shoulders close-up of what could have been a fully spacesuited cosmonaut. Any facial features were obscured by the blue-white flare of overhead fluorescent tubes on the helmet’s plastic faceplate.

As the camera pulled back slightly, Beck could see that the figure wore a gray coverall, shiny with its rubberized coating; black gloves covered his hands, and what looked like double wrappings of duct tape sealed the wrist against
the protective suit. The corrugated hose of a self-contained breathing supply snaked over his shoulder.

“This was recorded earlier today,” Putin said, his words curiously flat. “At our Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology. As you see, it is much like the most stringent containment facilities at your Fort Detrick or your CDC. I believe you call these ‘Level Four’ facilities, where the most hazardous organisms are contained.”

On the videotape, the cosmonaut now was walking down a corridor toward a steel door that looked like the hatch of a submarine. The camera followed him through the second door of the airlock, the man momentarily passing out of the camera’s view. For an instant, the picture shimmied into a blur.

When the focus again steadied, it was on a scene of sheer horror.

Around the room, arranged like a dormitory from hell, were row upon row of hospital cots; at least two dozen, Beck estimated. Under sheets now stained and matted, human forms writhed and struggled—some frantically, fighting for breath with the panic of the drowning; others fitfully, feeble in their dying efforts to drag oxygen past bruise-blue lips. In several of the beds, the patients were in the midst of fevered seizures, mad convulsions that tore the intravenous tubes from their bodies and rocked the cots wildly. Everywhere, the floor was vile with puddled bodily fluids, skid-smeared where the spacesuited attendants had passed.

Beck watched wordlessly as the camera walked down the line of cots, the picture jerking and unsteady with each step of the operator. Face after doomed face passed in close-up, features contorted with pain as uncontrollable coughing ripped the tissues of their lungs. A number of the victims dripped a thick, bloody phlegm from their noses and mouths. Too weak to even lift their hands, only their eyes still looked human in faces ravaged by the virus’s assault.

“The first case was reported three days ago—in Tuvelov, a village just outside this city,” Putin said in the same
curiously detached voice. “The first death came one day later, the same day we discovered it had spread to Arkadi, a neighboring village, and then to Moscow itself. Since then, our physicians have had no success in discovering a viable treatment. There are more than seventy identified cases, and our medical experts estimate that those already infected but still without symptoms number twenty to thirty times that figure. The contagion expands geometrically; within ten days, all of Russia could be infected. At present, our projections indicate the virus will be lethal in slightly fewer than eighty percent of all it infects.”

The Russian president stopped, his eyes locked on the video screen. There, a young boy perhaps nine years old twisted in agony; frantically his hands clawed at his own throat, leaving red lines against the bluish, oxygen-deprived flesh.

Mercifully, the camera moved on; and Putin shook himself, as if to force his words to continue.

“Our attempts to contain this disease have fared little better,” Putin said. “Last night, I ordered troops to cordon off the western quadrant of the city, well outside the area where this influenza already is found. Because Tuvelov and Arkadi have reported cases of this disease, they also have been sealed. No one is being allowed out, or in. No one. The units were ordered to employ lethal force.”

He turned to face Beck and Malenkov directly.

“Already, this has been necessary,” he said. “Perhaps fifty have been shot, maybe more. I have ordered that the bodies remain where they fall, in full view of others who might attempt to cross these lines.”

Beck looked at Putin, thinking of bullet-torn bodies lying in a Moscow street. Unbidden, his mind’s eye superimposed another image, another place, over the carnage.

“We too have considered containment,” Beck said. “In Florida.”

“I have advised your President that containment is at best a temporary measure,” Putin said. “I am told, for instance, that
parts of Moscow’s sewer system do not exist on our maps; these will serve as an avenue of escape for some. Others will finally fear the disease more than bullets; they will merely overwhelm the soldiers at a given place in the line—overrun them, as you say. Is this not true, Alexi Malenkov? Or does my senior security advisor now have new counsel for me?”

Alexi stared back at him—without expression, but also without the pro forma respect that usually accompanied such an exchange. There was a hard tension between the two men that was obvious even to the American.

Finally Putin shrugged—rather bloodlessly, Beck thought.

“Inevitably, someone will elude our cordon,” Putin said. “If I allow that to happen, this death will spread beyond all hope of stopping. There is but one manner of perhaps preventing this, and it is at best a doubtful proposition.”

He looked at his watch, and raised his eyes to focus on a far wall above Beck’s head.

“I have ordered my military to sterilize the areas where this virus is known to exist,” Putin said.

Beck felt the skin at the back of his skull tighten; beside him, Alexi sat in his own stunned silence.

“In less than an hour, approximately one hundred helicopters will fly over western Moscow and the villages of Arkadi and Tuvelov. Each aircraft is equipped with aerial spraying devices, with which they will release chemical agents. This will be repeated as many times as is necessary. We are fortunate; the winds are favorable, and outside the sterilization zone deaths caused by our nerve gases will be minimized. I have been advised that by tonight at the latest, no one in the affected areas will remain alive.”

“How many, sir?” Beck asked.

“Perhaps two hundred thousand,” Putin said. “History may say it was a small enough sacrifice to save one hundred and fifty million other Russians. If this virus does not somehow outsmart us.”

“Soo’kin sin,”
breathed Alexi.

For a moment, Putin seemed not to have noticed the vulgarity. “Do not pretend such surprise, General Malenkov. You pressed hard enough for—how did you put it?
‘Decisive
action,’ I believe you wanted.”

Alexi stared at his president wordlessly, but with eyes that spoke volumes. The two Russians’ stares dueled for a long moment, before Putin turned to Beck.

“I have been waiting to hear the sounds of the helicopters,” Putin said, and his voice was remote, distant. “There is a possibility, of course, that my order will not be obeyed.” He suddenly smiled, as if in comradeship with the American seated before him. “Or that they will decide to release their weapons here, over the Kremlin. I have been wondering which choice I would make, were I one of the pilots. In truth, I cannot make up my mind.”

The smile faded as quickly as it had appeared.

“I have given Alexi Malenkov my signed authorization to provide you with any information or assistance you need. He will accompany you to Lubyanka. There is an interrogation under way there—a cultist, one of the fanatics the FSB has had under surveillance for some weeks. Since before this virus appeared. I am told he may prove valuable to us.”

The three men stood. No one offered to shake hands.

Putin’s voice followed Beck to the door and stopped him there. When Beck turned, he saw that the Russian president was again at the window, looking out at the city.

“Four days ago, there was no sign of this virus in my country. Now I must sacrifice many lives, with no certainty it will prove successful.”

“Russians have died for Russia before,” Beck said, and Putin replied without turning.

“Americans may soon follow our example, Dr. Casey,” he said. “I spoke to your president, to make him aware of what I must do here, to Russians. He is weighing the advice of your own experts even as we speak. This very same option, I believe, had already been suggested to him.”

Moscow
July 22

The car carrying Beck entered Lubyanskaya Plaza, past the empty spot once occupied by a massive statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the man tasked by Lenin to create history’s most draconian secret police organization. Until August 22, 1991, Iron Felix had stood in stern bronze vigilance, overlooking the yellow-brick headquarters of the KGB.

Beck remembered the day. He had been in the midst of the crowd of Muscovites numbering in the thousands who surrounded the monument. They had cheered as cranes toppled both the statue and, they thought, the system of terror it had represented. Some of the crowd—as giddy with vodka as with the prospect of democratic rule—performed various indignities on the statue as it lay facedown on the ground.

Beck had looked up at the windows overlooking the scene, noting the senior KGB officers who had watched patiently from their office windows. Afterward, pragmatic in their understanding of Russian history, they had had the statue removed to a warehouse and cleaned.

Many believe it remains in storage, waiting. But Beck, like other professionals who had watched Russia’s subsequent mutation, knew better; like the institution founded by
Iron Felix—in its most recent incarnation, now known as the Federal Security Bureau—the statue had been quietly reerected. Lenin’s dark angel again stands proudly, now in a park far from the eyes of the Russian public. Similarly, his legacy to the Russian national character is once again busily engaged in its traditional pursuits.

It had been a short trip from the Kremlin. Alexi Malenkov had said nothing during the two-block drive; nor had Beck encouraged conversation. Instead, both men stared straight ahead, each pretending not to be listening for the sounds of helicopters in the distance. No one challenged Alexi as he led Beck past the guards and checkpoints inside.

Only in the small elevator that Alexi had activated with his own key did he begin to speak.

“Madness,” Alexi said, his voice barely under control. “We are attacked, and the only response our ‘leader’ can devise is to massacre our own people.”

“Putin has tough choices to make, Alexi. It’s what a leader does.”

“A leader,” Alexi repeated. “Is that what he is? Perhaps. In Russia, you see, we have created a new ruling class. It is made up of capitalists, our so-called oligarchs. Billionaires, all of them—and advised by your own very capable American public relations firms. These are the people who rule in Russia today, my friend.”

“Putin was elected, Alexi. As was Yeltsin before him.”

“Yes, please lecture me on the beauties of democratic government,” Alexi retorted, sarcasm dripping. “Yeltsin was unstable. Even in his occasional lucid moments, he scarcely had the wit to dress himself, let alone provide leadership. A faction of our billionaires’ club tired of his antics; they wanted more stability than could be provided under a manic-depressive alcoholic. So they found Putin.”