Kill Switch (9780062135285) (35 page)

42

March 26, 7:57
A.M.

Frederick, Maryland

With a puff of pressurized air, Tucker crossed out of an airlock into the BSL-­3 laboratory. He wore a containment suit and mask, much like the men and women bustling within the long, narrow space. He imagined there were more Ph.D.s in this lab than there were test tubes—­of which there were a
lot
. Across the vaulted space, tables were crowded with bubbling vessels, spiral tubing, glowing Bunsen burners, and slowly filling beakers. Elsewhere, stacks of equipment monitored and churned out data, scrolling across computer screens.

Orchestrating this chaos like a mad conductor was Abram Bukolov. The Russian doctor moved from workstation to workstation like a nervous bird, gesticulating here, touching a shoulder there, whispering in an ear, or loudly berating.

These poor souls are going to need a vacation after this.

The biolab lay in the basement of a research building on the grounds of Fort Detrick, a twelve-­hundred-­acre campus that once was home to the U.S. biological weapons program before it was halted in 1969. But that legacy lived on, as Fort Detrick continued to be the military's biodefense headquarters, home to multiple interdisciplinary agencies, including USAMRIID, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. They were currently in the building that housed the Foreign Disease Weed Science Unit, part of the Department of Agriculture.

It seemed the U.S. military was already well aware of the national security threat posed by invasive species. Today that caution paid off, as they mobilized scientists from across the entire campus of Fort Detrick to tackle the threat posed by a weaponized form of LUCA.

Bukolov finally noted Tucker's arrival and lifted an arm, waving him to his side, which proved a difficult task as the doctor headed away from him, deeper into the lab. Tucker excused his way through the chaotic landscape, finally reaching Bukolov beside a table holding a five-­liter glass beaker with a distillate slowly dripping into it from some condensation array. The liquid looked like burned coffee.

“This is it!” Bukolov expounded, his voice slightly muffled by his mask.

“Which is what?”

Tucker had been summoned here this morning by an urgent call from the good doctor, pulled from his temporary accommodations on base. He had been kept in the dark about what was going on at the labs here since they landed three days go in D.C. He and Bukolov had been whisked straight here under military escort.

“I was able to crack the lichen's code.” He waved a half-­dismissive hand toward the team around him, giving them minimal credit. “It was just a matter of determining what it was in
living
lichen that became inert or dissipated after it died. I won't bore you with the technical details, but we were able to finally distill the chemicals that created that burn, that killed LUCA cells on contact. In the end, it wasn't just
one
chemical but a mix. A precise solution of sulfuric, perchloric, and nitric—­all
acids
.”

Bukolov's eyes danced, as if this last part was significant. When Tucker didn't question him, the doctor gave him an exasperated look and continued. “Not only is this the kill switch, but it explains
why
the genetically superior LUCA did not survive the Archean eon, but cyanobacteria did.”

“What's the answer?”

“One of the turning points of that primordial era to the next was a shifting of atmospheric conditions, an acidifying of the environment. Remember, back then, oxygen-­producing plants did not exist. It was a toxic hothouse. Acid rain swept in great swaths over the earth, tides and storms burned with it.”

“And that's important why?”

“Cyanobacteria were perfectly equipped to deal with this acidification of the environment. They were already masters of organic chemistry, as evidenced by their control of photosynthesis, a process of turning sunlight into chemical energy. They rode that acid tide and adapted. Unfortunately, LUCA's mastery was in the field of
genetics
. It placed all its evolutionary eggs in that one basket—­and chose wrong. It could not withstand that tidal change and stumbled from its high perch in the food chain. And like sharks sensing blood in the water, cyanobacteria took advantage, incorporating that acid into their makeup and burning LUCA out of the last of its environmental niches, driving it into evolutionary history.”

Bukolov pointed to the steaming dark ­brown mire in the beaker. “That's the acid.” A single drop splashed from the distillation pipe into the soup. “That's what passed for rain long before we were even single-­celled organisms floating around in mud. What we're brewing here is a form of precipitation that hasn't been seen for 3.5 billion years.”

“And that will kill LUCA.”

“Most definitely.” Bukolov stared at him. “But even still, we must catch any such environmental fires started by LUCA
early,
preferably as soon as they're set. Once it establishes a foothold and reaches critical mass, it will explode across an environment, a raging firestorm that even this ancient rain might not put out.”

“So if we're too late stopping Kharzin, even this might not be enough.”

Bukolov slowly nodded, watching the slow drip of acid. “The only good news is that we ran some preliminary estimates of the threat posed by the single bulb Kharzin possesses. In the long term, he could, of course, try to grow more bulbs, but that would take much patience.”

“A virtue Kharzin is sorely lacking.”

“In the short term, we estimate he could macerate and extract at best a liter or two of weaponized LUCA. But it's still enough to light a fire somewhere, a fire that would quickly become a storm.”

So the only question remains: Where does he strike that match
?

To answer that, Tucker had only one hope.

In the shape of a deadly assassin.

And so far, she was not being cooperative.

9:12
A.M.

“Felice Nilsson could have scrubbed her credit cards,” Harper told him over the phone.

Tucker spoke to her as he crossed in long strides from Bukolov's lab and headed across Fort Detrick's campus for his dormitory. “Like I said from the start, Harper. It was a long shot.”

Three days ago, he had informed Sigma about his radioed conversation with Kharzin and the conspicuous absence of a certain someone to that deadly party in the mountains of Africa. Kharzin had claimed Felice was on
another
assignment, which even back then struck him as odd. She had been Kharzin's point man in the field from the start, hounding Tucker since he'd first set foot aboard the Trans-­Siberian Railway. Then as Kharzin's team closed in for the kill, she was suddenly pulled off and reassigned.

Why? And to where?

Tucker had proposed that perhaps Kharzin had pointed that particular blond spear in a new direction, sending her in advance to prepare for the next stage of his plan—­and likely to execute it, too.

“It was a good idea,” Harper said. “To search for her whereabouts by placing a financial tracer on her. But so far we've failed to get any hits from the documents you photographed aboard the train. Not the four passports, not the five credit cards, not even the bank routing numbers you managed to find. She likely received a new set of papers.”

Sighing, Tucker ran through his steps that day as he broke into her berth. He had carefully sifted through her belongings, photographed what he found, and returned everything to where he'd found them.

“Maybe I wasn't careful enough,” he said. “She must have gotten wise to my trespass.”

“Or she could have just gone to ground and is keeping her head low. We'll keep monitoring.”

1:22
P.M.

Tucker briefly visited Bukolov after lunch and discovered the doctor was working with an engineer, devising an aerosol dispersal system for his acid solution, which to him looked like a backpack garden sprayer. But he heard phrases like
flow rate composition
and
contaminant filter thresholds,
so what did he know?

Bukolov had little time to chat, so Tucker left and decided to do something more important.

Standing on a windswept wide lawn, he hauled back his arm and whipped the red Kong ball across the field. Kane took off like a furry arrow, juking and twisting as the ball bounced. He caught up to it, snatched it in his jaws, and did a little victory prance back to Tucker's side, dropping the ball at his toes. Kane backed up, crouching his front down, his hind end high, tail wagging, ready for more.

It was good to see such simple joy—­though
obsession
might be the better word, considering Kane's current deep and abiding love for that rubber Kong ball. Still, the play helped temper the black cloud stirring inside Tucker.

If only I'd been more careful . . .

Tucker exercised Kane for another few minutes, then headed back to their dorm. As he crossed the lawn, his phone rang. It was Harper again.

“Looks like you have a future career as a cat burglar after all, Captain Wayne. We got a hit on Ms. Nilsson.”

“Where?”

“Montreal, Canada. Hopefully you and Kane are up for a little more cold weather.”

He pictured Felice's face, remembering Utkin in the sand, bloody and crawling.

“I'll grab our long johns.”

43

March 28, 10:23
A.M.

St. Ignace, Michigan

Right back where I started . . .

Tucker stood on the hotel balcony, staring out at the frozen edges of Lake Huron. Snow sifted from a low morning sky. The rest of the view could best be described as
brittle
. It was below freezing with the forecasted promise of the day climbing a whole two degrees.

He'd started this adventure in Vladivostok, a frozen city by the sea.

And here he was again: cold and facing another assassin.

Bukolov called from inside the room. “Some of us don't have the hardy constitution of a young man. Perhaps if you close the balcony door, I won't catch pneumonia before your tardy guest arrives in the area.”

He stepped back inside and pulled the slider and latched it. Kane lifted his head from where he curled on the bed.

“But for the hundredth time, Doc: you didn't have to come.”

“And for the hundredth time: you may need my expertise. We have no idea how Kharzin plans to utilize his weaponized LUCA. And my solution has had no real-­world field test. We may have to improvise on the fly. Now is not the time for inexperienced guesswork.”

It had been two days since Sigma's cyber net had detected the credit card hit in Montreal. Unfortunately, Felice still remained a ghost, leaving only the occasional financial bread crumb behind: at a gas station outside of Ottawa, at a diner in the small town of Bracebridge. Her movements seemed headed straight for the U.S. border. Immigrations and Customs were alerted, but the northern border of the United States was an open sieve, especially in the dense woods nestled among the Great Lakes. She could easily cross undetected.

This was confirmed yesterday when they got a hit here in St. Ignace, the northernmost city in Michigan. Ominously, she had made a single purchase from the local Ace Hardware & Sporting Goods.

A plastic backpack sprayer.

Tucker stared toward their hotel room's closet. Inside rested the battery-­powered chemical dispersant rig engineered by Bukolov and filled with his acid slurry.

Since then they had had no further hits indicating her whereabouts.

Was she still in town? Had she moved on?

Waiting in the wings, ready to mobilize in an instant, were
fourteen
two-­person helicopter teams, each armed with their own canisters of the kill-­switch solution. Six of these teams were located in Michigan; the other eight in the surrounding states.

Whether this was enough manpower or resources for the situation, Tucker didn't know, but he left it to Harper's best judgment. Harper feared that alerting the authorities at large would invariably turn into a brute-­force manhunt that Felice would easily spot. If that happened, she would bolt, scrubbing those cards. They would never get a second chance at her. They had to do this right the first time and as surgically as possible.

So for now, the job of stopping Felice and her team—­
of stopping LUCA
—­fell to Tucker and the other quick-­alert teams.

He hoped Harper's caution was not their downfall.

7:02
P.M.

As the sun sank toward the horizon, Tucker's phone finally trilled.

“We've got something,” Harper said as soon as Tucker answered. “Picked up a report on a Harbor Springs police scanner. Fifteen minutes ago, a woman matching Felice's description, accompanied by three other men, were spotted stealing a speedboat from the marina. It was heading into Lake Michigan.”

Tucker leaned over a map spread out on the coffee table. “Harbor Springs . . . that's thirty miles south of us.”

“You're the closest team. Get to your extraction point. A helicopter is en route to pick you up.”

Tucker disconnected. “Doc, we're moving!”

Bukolov was already heading for the closet. He grabbed the backpack holding their gear, including the dispersant rig. Tucker unzipped his duffel. He slid out a noise-­suppressed Heckler & Koch MP-­5 SD submachine gun, donned the gun's concealed chest rig, and harnessed the weapon in place. He then pulled his jacket on over it and shoved a Browning Hi-­Power 9 mm into a paddle holster in the waistband at the back of his pants.

But his real firepower leaped off the bed and followed him to the door.

With Kane at their heels, Tucker and the doctor left the room and jogged across the icy parking lot. Off in the distance, helicopter rotors chopped the sky, coming in fast. The white-­and-­blue Bell 429 swooped over their heads, slowed to a hover, and then touched down.

As soon as the three of them had boots and paws inside, the Bell roared and sped upward. They banked hard over Lake Huron, passing above the Mackinaw City Bridge, and headed out across Lake Michigan.

Tucker tugged on a radio headset, and the pilot's voice came over it. “Fifteen minutes to Harbor Springs, gentlemen. I have incoming for you on channel five.”

Tucker punched the proper frequency. “Up on channel five,” he called over the rush of the engine.

Harper came on the line. “We have the make, model, and registration number of the boat. I gave it to the pilot. The last sighting put her on a heading of two-­three-­nine degrees. They should be passing the city of Charlevoix right about now. It's a fast boat, Tucker. Running at about forty knots.”

“What's in front of it?”

“Mostly cargo traffic from the St. Lawrence seaway. The bulk of the ships are heading for either Milwaukee or Chicago.”

“Carrying what?”

“I'm working on it.”

Bukolov had his headset on. “I have an idea of what's happening here, Ms. Harper. I think Felice is targeting one of those cargo ships, one that's likely carrying something organic—­fertilizer, seeds, even herbicide.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because it's what I would do if I were in Kharzin's shoes. He could not have produced more than a ­couple of liters of weaponized agent by now. Far too little to disperse via air. Such small amounts require him to
directly
contaminate a primary source in order to ensure suitable germination and propagation—­but how do you get the most bang for your buck in such a scenario? Let's say Ms. Nilsson can contaminate a cargo of agricultural products and that ship docks in Chicago or Milwaukee or another major distribution hub—­”

Tucker understood. “Planting season is starting throughout the Midwest. That infected cargo could incubate in the hold and then be spread throughout the nation's heartland.” He imagined the havoc that would be wreaked. “Harper, what about the Coast Guard? Can we get them mobilized, to set up some sort of blockade? We can't let that ship reach shore.”

“I'll sound the alarm, but I doubt we have enough time. Doctor Bukolov, answer me this. What happens if the LUCA is introduced into a body of water?”

Tucker stared at the snow-­swept lake racing under the helicopter, appreciating her concern.

“Simply speculating, much of the organism would survive. Lakes have plenty of vegetative matter to host or feed LUCA. This organism survived and thrived for millions of years during this planet's most inhospitable period. It's aggressive and highly adaptable. Nature always finds a way to go on, and LUCA is
Nature
at its most resilient.”

“I was afraid you'd say that.”

“What's got you worried, Harper?” Tucker asked.

“If Felice boards one of those ships and contaminates the cargo, we've got more ways to lose than win. If the ship is sunk or destroyed, LUCA still escapes.”

Bukolov nodded. “Additionally, if the contamination does reach open water, it would be much harder to clean up with the kill switch.”

“Then we need to stop Felice before she reaches one of those ships,” Tucker said.

After signing off, he switched channels to the pilot, a young National Guard aviator named Nick Pasternak. “Give me all the speed you can, Nick.”

“You got it. Hold tight.”

The timbre of the engines climbed, and the Bell accelerated to its maximum speed. At 150 knots, the ice-­crusted coastline rushed beneath them.

“Coming to Harbor Springs now,” Nick called five minutes later. “The marina where your boat was stolen is on our nose, thirty seconds out.”

“Once there, head out on the same bearing the boat took. Two-­three-­nine degrees. Then keep your eyes peeled. If they're still on this bearing, they've got a twenty-­five-­mile head start on us.”

“I can close that in six minutes.”

The helicopter passed over the frozen docks of the marina, turned its nose southwest, and headed out over the lake. As it raced away from the coast, Tucker watched the waters slowly change from green to blue. He strained for any sign of the stolen boat through the thickening snowfall.

Nick had better eyes. “Speedboat dead ahead! Make and model seem to be a match.”

Tucker had to be certain. “Give us a close flyby.”

“Will do.”

The Bell swept down until it was a hundred feet off the water, speeding low over the water.

“Boat coming up in five seconds,” Nick reported. “Four . . . three . . .”

Tucker pressed his face against the window. The speedboat appeared out of the storm mist. As the helicopter buzzed over it, he saw the deck was empty, no one behind the wheel.

What the hell . . .

7:33
P.M.

Bukolov stared out his window. “Nobody's aboard.”

Ignoring him, Tucker radioed the pilot. “Keep on this bearing!”

The doctor turned to him. “Does that mean they already boarded one of the cargo ships?”

“Most likely.”

Nick called out, “Cargo ship dead ahead!”

“I need her name,” Tucker replied. “Can you get us close to—­?”

“Yep, hold on. Descending.”

“But don't crowd her!” Tucker warned.

If Felice was aboard that ship, he didn't want her spooked—­at least not yet.

“I understand. I'll keep us a half mile out.”

Tucker picked up a set of binoculars and focused on the boat.

Off in the distance, the gray bulk cut slowly through the storm, led by a tall well-­lit wheelhouse, flanked by flying bridges. He imagined the pilot and crew inside there navigating the ship through the growing weather. At the stern rose a three-­level superstructure, less bright. Between the two castles spread a flat deck interrupted by cranes and a line of five giant square cargo hatches. He adjusted his view down and read the name painted on the cargo ship's hull.

He radioed it to Harper. “I think we've got her.
Motor Vessel Macoma
. I need whatever you can get on her. Especially her cargo.”

“Stand by.” She was back in two minutes: “
Motor Vessel Macoma
. Capacity is 420 deadweight tons. It's bound for Chicago carrying fertilizer-­enhanced topsoil and compost for agricultural use.”

Tucker turned. “Doctor, would that fit the bill?”

“Yes . . .” Bukolov confirmed. “Such material would make the perfect incubation bed for LUCA.”

Harper remained more cautious. “Tucker, are you sure this is the ship?”

“We spotted an abandoned speedboat, adrift a few miles astern of the
Macoma
. Listen, Harper, we're not going to find a neon sign guiding us. We have to roll the dice.”

“I hear you. You're on scene. It's your call.”

“How soon can we expect any help?” Tucker asked.

“The closest team to you is still forty minutes out. I'm working on the Coast Guard.”

“Then I guess we're going in. If Felice is smart, and I know she is, she'll be rigging that ship with explosives. So the sooner we can intercede, the better.”

“Then good luck to the both of you.”

Tucker switched channels. “Nick, we need to get aboard that ship. Can you do it?”

“Watch me,” he said, with the confidence of the very young and very foolish.

Nick descended again, a stomach-­lurching drop to thirty feet. He banked until the chopper was dead astern to the
Macoma
. The dark ship filled the world ahead of them. He moved slower, closing the gap, buffeted by the storm's crosswind. The Bell's nose now lingered mere feet from the ship's rear railing.

Nick radioed his plan from here. “I'm gonna pop us higher, bring us to hover over the roof of that aft superstructure. You'll have to jump from there.”

Tucker studied the towering castle rising from the ship's stern. The superstructure climbed three levels, its lights glowing through the snow.

“Go for it,” he said.

“Hang on.”

Nick worked the cyclic and throttle, and the Bell shot straight up. Fighting the winds, the helicopter glided forward, bobbling, struggling.

Oh, God . . .

Bukolov agreed. “Oh, God . . .”

The landing skids bumped over a top railing—­then came the sound of steel grinding on steel as the skids scraped across the roof. Crosswinds skittered the craft.

Crack . . . crack . . .

From the shattering blasts, Tucker thought something had broken on the helicopter.

Nick corrected him. “Pulling out! Somebody out there with a gun, taking potshots at us.”

The helicopter lifted, rising fast.

Tucker unbuckled and leaned forward, searching through the cockpit's Plexiglas bubble. A man, cloaked in storm gear, stood on the roof deck below. He slung his rifle, picked up another weapon, and rested it atop his shoulder, something larger and longer.

A grenade launcher.

Tucker yelled, “Hard left, nose down!”

Nick worked the controls, pitching the nose and leaning into a bank.

Too late.

Below, a flash of fire, a trailing blast of smoke—­

—­and the rocket-­propelled grenade slammed into the Bell's tail rotor, sending the bird into a hellish spin.