Final Epidemic (18 page)

There’s no shortage of bad news,
Krewell thought, though to his mind it still failed to encompass the full scope of the developing catastrophe.

The good news was that, as yet, no cases of the killer influenza had been reported elsewhere in the country.

As yet,
Krewell repeated silently. It was inevitable, only a matter of time. Flu respected no boundaries, natural or man-made.
But if we can slow it down, even for a few days—well, who the hell knows?

With the singular exception of the Russian Federation, the situation was the same elsewhere in the world. Thus far, no flu cases had been found.

Uniformly, the governments involved were determined to keep it that way, by any means necessary.

Virtually all international travel had come to a halt that was as sudden as it was complete. Taking their cue from the American action, foreign governments severely restricted civilian travel inside their borders at the same time they slammed shut all the doors into their countries. As an island, England drew into itself and halted all incoming travelers, including their own citizens returning from abroad. Stung, the Irish quickly followed suit.

In most countries, police preemptively scoured their databases to identify any persons whose travels had taken them to Russia or the U.S. within the past two weeks. These persons were visited by medical personnel, usually accompanied by armed escorts. Entire families were quarantined or, in some instances, removed to isolation facilities.

In some cases, enforcement was even more draconian: in one of the Balkan states, Krewell read, unconfirmed reports
said that guards had opened fire on a caravan of Roma that had attempted, as was their routine, to slip across the border. According to rumors that had reached the embassy, there had been no survivors among the gypsy band.

Russia was, officially and ominously, silent. Since NBC had aired the videotape of the massacre, virtually every news organ in the world had broadcast pirated copies; newspapers printed stop-action frames, blurry in a way that did nothing to mask the horror. The Russian response, both to the world and to its own population, had been—nothing.

Krewell knew that Putin had been in contact with the President before the massacre. Presumably, he was still—but Krewell had as yet heard nothing about whether the mass killing had accomplished its mission, even as a stopgap measure. Had Putin burned out the contagion, or were new cases even now spreading elsewhere in Moscow and the rest of the country? There was simply no information.

And that may well mean the Russians don’t even know themselves.

Krewell shook his head.

The most surprising aspect of the entire situation was the fact that this virus was mimicking a natural outbreak. The flu had appeared in only two locations: Florida and Moscow. In a biological attack, which this surely was, one would expect outbreaks of the disease to occur almost simultaneously in multiple, probably widespread locations.

That was indeed puzzling, and Krewell frowned as he contemplated.

What are we missing?
he wondered, not for the first time.

Word of the Aum mass suicide had been bitter news to all of them, but it had hit Larry Krewell particularly hard. Krewell had not realized how much he had counted on their ultimate rationality, on the hope that nobody would unleash a certain death without first securing a way to save themselves.

The realization there would be no answers from the Aum
had shaken him profoundly. He had been unable to keep it from his voice when Beck Casey, seeking instructions, had called from Moscow on the satellite phone.

“Come home,” Krewell had told him. “Billy Carson wants you back here. You’ll probably end up advising on the riots. They want to develop a strategy they can use while the cities burn. Right now, the only idea anybody has is to hand out matches while we wait for the epidemic to spread.”

“What do you mean?”

The realization that he had said too much came to Krewell at the same time he realized he did not care that he had.

“The Russian solution, Beck. The President is being told that he has to sacrifice Florida—that it’s the only way to buy time, to come up with a viable plan to save the rest of the country. With every new case that gets reported down there, more people in D.C. agree. And we’re getting a
lot
of new cases now.”

Krewell laughed bitterly. “Hell of a note, ol’ buddy. All that’s left is for you to come home and help us play Nero. Say, you know how to play the fiddle?”

There was a silence on the line for a long moment.

“Good luck, Larry.”

“You too, Beck. You too.”

The line went silent, dead.

Larry Krewell was not a religious man. But at that moment, he felt an urge to pray.

And did.

Jersey City, New Jersey
July 22

The way Dickie Trippett saw it, back when he first considered biowar against the United States, the most difficult part of the mission was going to be purely technical—that is, an overly complicated task that involved calculating wind direction and velocity, the optimal height of the release, even the relative humidity of the air itself. And these were only a few of the factors that, his helpful Japanese teacher had cautioned, would influence the dispersion of the biological agent. Learn, Anji had counseled the American; only then would the bioweapon be delivered to him.

The condition for delivery had been an unhappy surprise for Dickie. His original plan had been to select a suitable place and time—say, upwind of Rockefeller Center a few minutes past noon—open the sealed containers and shake them empty. To discover that considerably more preparation was required for effective dispersal of this particular weapon . . . To Dickie, it was very disheartening.

It’s like getting a damn electric guitar for Christmas,
he thought, finding a simile in his own soured experience.
Yeah—that’s when they tell you that you gotta take lessons.
In his own case, the unforeseen prerequisite had sharply
curtailed his musical career: he had attended the guitar class two or three times, learning a few basic chords before boredom drove him away.

The pattern was not much different with the bioweapon, though Anji’s dogged persistence made it seem longer. Dickie was not a details sort of guy.

In the eyes of the man from Japan, the American failed to appreciate the sheer elegance of the weapon itself—a form of anthrax, he had told Dickie, deadly to those who breathe the spores but incapable of human-to-human transmission. The perfect weapon for the oppressed, the Japanese had termed it—but only if it is used wisely. Patiently, he explained to Dickie that one does not merely scatter such a material artlessly. That might kill only thousands, whereas a more scientific approach could take a toll tenfold higher.

The more Anji pressed, the more Dickie resisted. Mathematics had never been his strong suit, and even with the aid of the calculator his visitor had thoughtfully provided, Dickie found it a tedious process indeed. But Anji had persevered. Only when he was satisfied that Dickie had mastered at least the rudiments of basic biowarfare had he relented, assuring his student that it was all child’s play from there.

Child’s play. Uh-huh.
—Dickie threw up his hands in frustration.

Ever since that asshole in Washington had gone on TV, the hardest aspect of the mission suddenly had become simply
getting
to the target area. The executive order had literally closed down the majority of transportation options. For the Empire State Legionnaires, most of whom were located far enough upstate to place Canada closer to them than Manhattan, it posed a sudden, critical logistical problem.

Dickie felt the urge to hit someone, anyone.

He looked at the three metal containers in the nylon athletic bag on the seat beside him. The Japs were damn clever, Dickie had to admit it. The canisters even looked like soup cans, he thought, even to the red-and-gold label with “
Campbell’s” in ornate letters and the pull-tab, peel-back tops. Easy to carry, easy to use, in a handy soup-for-one size that belied their lethal potential.

Three fuckin’ cans,
he raged internally.
More than enough to fuckin’ annihilate every kike, nigger, spic, rag-head—
Mentally, he sputtered to a halt, frustration blocking his otherwise impressive capacity for racial and religious invective.
And take down every faggot New York yuppie asshole along with ’em, too.

Except the trains were stopped and the airports shut down, almost completely. The restriction on gasoline purchases—a deviously clever ploy, Dickie had to admit—created more than the obvious problem, too. You could always steal gas from somewhere, and usually a vehicle to go with it. But for Dickie’s plan, the worst practical impact of the fuel restrictions was to grossly reduce traffic volume on the highways leading to and from the Big Apple.

The law was taking advantage of the situation in a big way: on the radio, Dickie had already heard that roadblocks were being manned by police, sometimes backed by troops. Ostensibly, it was to screen for potential flu carriers.

Dickie snorted out loud.
Flu,
Dickie told himself bitterly,
as if that wasn’t some kind of damn government ploy, too.
He was not surprised; the government couldn’t afford to let people know that the revolution had finally begun.

He had expected some kind of government disinformation when the attacks began. His Japanese mentor had warned him that, when the patriots struck, the federals would devise some lie as an excuse for despotic oppression against them. The militia leader had no doubt the government was using the opportunity to detain or search cars and occupants and confiscate whatever it might find.

So far, Dickie had been lucky, motoring along in his Ford pickup at just under the legal limit. Figuring the majority of the attention would be on interstate routes, he had stuck as much as possible to the secondary roads that wound
southward toward New York City. At first, in the rural upstate region, that had not been difficult. He had a good set of USGS charts and a hand-held global positioning system receiver that gave him a constant update on his location. His progress was slow, but relatively steady.

Dickie skirted population centers like Syracuse, where he expected the authorities to give a high level of scrutiny to anything moving on the road. It was a good strategy. Dickie had been stopped only once, by a county deputy who had been manning a crossroads blockade west of Middletown. With a suitably abashed smile, Dickie had shown the policeman his license and insurance cards; his other hand—the one holding the nine-millimeter Taurus automatic—was out of sight low against the door. It helped that the deputy stood at arm’s length, and declined to touch Dickie’s ID. Without comment, the deputy had accepted Dickie’s cover story of working an upstate construction job and rushing home to a wife worried about the flu scare.

Dickie found himself enjoying the trip: the rolling countryside, dotted with farmhouses that looked abandoned, and sometimes should have been; the almost-empty two-lane highways that curved and climbed over the wooded Alleghenies; even the increasingly industrialized landscape that began immediately after the foothills flattened. It had given him a good feeling to see what he considered the “real” America, and he found himself humming along to the tunes on his radio.

That is, until he had neared the Jersey shore. Here, even the sparse traffic had gradually slowed and thickened; before Dickie fully realized it, he found himself inching along in an improbable gridlock.

He flipped through the dial until he found an all-news radio station. It was as bad as he feared: the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, the bridges and even the ferries—all were closed. Decisively so, according to the newscast: at each, the imposing bulk of a buttoned-up Abrams tank straddled the
traffic lanes. One particularly breathless reporter noted the sandbagged automatic weapons positioned to support the flanks; she waxed poetic about the insectlike visages of exposure-suited troopers and the perverse grace of the helicopter gunships that flitted like lethal dragonflies overhead.

New York was under martial law and effectively quarantined.

It could have been music to Dickie’s ears—Babylon was crippled, bleeding—had it not underscored one unimpeachable truth: the doors had all been slammed closed and nailed shut, with Dickie and his anthrax on the outside.

He worked his way farther south, through Hoboken. On the other side of an expanse of cocoa-colored water, the New York skyline was a gray range of craggy man-made peaks. It would have been a spectacular vista, for one more appreciative.

Briefly, Dickie considered the feasibility of attacking New York City from his location across the bay. No. Even if the wind direction was right, he could never find a place high enough. Without a lofty starting point, particularly at this kind of distance, the majority of the spores—conceivably, Anji had warned,
all
of them—would merely settle onto the intervening water.

It would be, Dickie decided, a criminal waste of the weapon’s potential.

He could, of course, find an acceptable place and pop the top right here in New Jersey. Anthrax was decidedly democratic and cared not a bit whether the lungs where it would spawn inhaled the aromatic Jersey air or the sour tang of a Big Apple alley.

But the more Dickie pondered it, the more the idea seemed to him unworthy—even shameful. Normally, he would have had no qualms about inflicting a plague on the Garden State, starting with the grittier industrial sections. It was a job somebody would have to get to anyway, sooner or later. Another idea was that he could keep driving south;
Philadelphia, or perhaps even Washington, might prove a more accessible target.

But now, with the New York skyline seemingly close enough to touch, anything less felt like a cop-out, the worst kind of compromise.

He stared at the wall of towering structures for several moments, a modern-day Moses barred from his promised land.