Red (18 page)

He shook his head and started for the door. “With any luck you'll have something more sensible to tell the president when you meet with him tomorrow.”

THEY'D MOVED her again. Where, she had no clue.

Monique de Raison stared at the monitor, mind taxed, eyes burning.

It had been less than twenty-four hours since they'd put a sack over her head for the second time in as many days and led her into a car, then onto an airplane. The flight had lasted several hours—she could be anywhere. Hawaii, China, Argentina, Germany. She might have been able to figure out the region by any stray conversation she overheard, but they'd stuffed wax in her ears and taped them. She couldn't even determine the temperature or humidity, because they'd landed during a rainstorm that had wet her hood before she'd been shoved into another car and brought here.

A man of German or Swiss descent whom she'd never met before had pulled the bag off her head and unplugged her ears. He'd left her in this room without speaking.

Another laboratory. Blinding white. A small lab, maybe twenty by twenty, but crammed with the latest equipment. A Field Emission Electron Microscope, a Siemens, stood along one wall. The microscope could effectively examine wet samples as well as specimens treated with liquid nitrogen. State of the art. Next to it, a long table arrayed with test tubes and a Beckman Coulter Counter.

In the corner, a mattress, and in an adjoining room without a door, a toilet and a sink.

The room was constructed of cinder blocks, like the others. On second look, she was sure that whoever had built the other two labs she'd been in had also built this one. How many did they have? And each had been carefully supplied with everything a geneticist or a virologist would need.

She'd curled up on the mattress, dressed in the pale blue slacks and matching blouse they'd given her before the trip, and cried. She knew that she should be strong. That Svensson surely wouldn't actually release the virus as he'd threatened to. That if he did, she might be the only one who could stop it. But the chance of the back door she'd engineered surviving the mutation was terribly small. They had to be bluffing.

Still, she'd cried.

A man in a white smock with red hair and bifocals had entered the room twenty minutes later carrying a brown snakeskin briefcase. “Are you okay?” He actually looked surprised at her condition. “Goodness, what have they done to you? You're Monique de Raison, right?
The
Monique de Raison.”

She stood and pushed her bangs from her eyes. A scientist. Her hope surged. Was he a friend?

“Yes,” she said.

Only a few days earlier she might have slapped this man for his gawking. Now she felt small. Too small.

A glint sparkled in the man's eyes. “We have a wager. We have a wager.” He motioned to the door. “Who will find it first, you or us.” He leaned forward as if what he was about to say was to be kept secret. “I am the only one betting on you.”

He was slightly mad, she thought.

“None of us will find it,” she said. “Do you realize what's happening?”

“Of course I do. The first to isolate the antivirus will be paid fifty
million
dollars, and the whole team will be paid ten million each. But there are eleven teams, so Petrov—”

She slapped him then. His glasses spun across the room. “He's going to release the virus, you idiot!”

He stared at her. “He already has.”

Then he set the case on the floor, walked to his glasses, returned them to his face. “Everything you need is in the case,” he said. “You will see all of our work in real-time calculations, and we will see yours.”

He headed for the door.

“Please, I'm sorry!” She hurried after him. “You have to help me!”

But he closed the door and was gone.

That was over an hour ago. Now Monique stared at a dizzying string of numbers and tried desperately to focus.

He hasn't released the virus, Monique. The chances of finding an antivirus
in time are too low. It would be suicide!

But he'd kidnapped her, hadn't he? He knew he would eventually be caught and would spend the balance of his life in prison. What did he have to lose?

And Thomas . . .

Her mind was swallowed by her two encounters with the American. His harebrained kidnapping of her. He had tied her to the air conditioner in the Paradise Hotel while he slept, while he took his dream-trip to retrieve information that he could not possibly know. The attack by Carlos. She'd seen Thomas shot, and yet he'd survived and come for her again. She'd kissed him. She'd done it to distract whoever was watching, but she'd also done it because he had risked his life for her, and she felt desperate for him to save her. He was her savior.

She didn't know if her irresponsible feelings for him were motivated by his character or by her own despair. Her emotions were hardly trustworthy in a time like this.

Was he still alive?

You have to focus, Monique. They will come for you again. Father will
have the whole world looking for you.

She took a deep breath and reapplied her concentration. A model of her own Raison Vaccine filled one corner of the screen. Below it, a model of the Raison Strain, a mutation that had survived after the vaccine had been subjected to intense heat for two hours, exactly as Thomas had predicted. She'd analyzed a simulation of the actual mutation a hundred times over the past hour and saw how it had worked. This was a freak of nature far more complex than anything a geneticist could have come up with on his own.

Ironically, her own genetic engineering, designed to keep the vaccine viable for long periods without contacting any host or moisture, had allowed the inert vaccine to mutate in such adverse conditions.

As far as she could see, there were only two ways in which an antivirus could be developed with any kind of speed—meaning weeks instead of months or years.

The first would be for her to identify the signature she had engineered into her vaccine to turn it off, as it were. She'd developed a simple way to introduce an airborne agent into the vicinity of the vaccine—a virus that would essentially neutralize the vaccine by inserting its own DNA into the mix and rendering the vaccine impotent. It was her personal signature as much as a deterrent to foul play or theft.

If
she could find the specific gene she'd engineered, and
if
it had survived the mutation, then introducing the virus she'd already developed to neutralize the vaccine
might
also render the Raison Strain impotent.
If, if,
and
might
being the key words.

She knew the signature like she knew her best friend. The problem now was how to find it in this mangled mess called the Raison Strain.

The only other way to unravel an antivirus in such short order was to chance upon the right gene manipulations. But ten thousand lab technicians could coordinate their efforts for sixty days and not strike the right combination.

Svensson knew something, or he wouldn't risk so much on a long shot. Surely he understood that her signature might not have survived, or that it might not work on the mutated vaccine.

Monique moved the cursor over the key below the diagram of the Strain and brought up a window of its DNA. She would search for her key first.

She slammed her fist on the black Formica desktop. Glass tubes rattled in a tray. She swore through gritted teeth. “This can't be happening!”

“I'm afraid it is.”

Svensson! She spun in her chair. The old goat stood in the doorway, smiling patiently, leaning on a white cane.

He moved into the room, dragging his leg, eyes glimmering with self-satisfaction.

“Sorry to leave you alone so long, but I've been a bit preoccupied. The last couple days have been quite eventful.”

Monique stood and held the desk to hide a tremble in her hand. The man wore a black jacket, white shirt, no tie. His dark hair was parted in the middle and slicked back with cream. Blue veins stood out on his knuckles.

“What's going on?” she asked, as evenly as possible.

“What isn't?” He closed the door. “But that's unfair. You have no idea how exciting the world has become in the last forty-eight hours, because you've been hard at work trying to save it.”

“How can I work if you move me every twelve hours?”

“We're on an Indonesian island, in a mountain called Cyclops. Quite safe here. Don't worry, it will be home for at least three days. Have you made any progress?”

“With what? You've given us an impossible task.”

The old man's smile didn't soften, but his eyes glazed. He studied her for an inordinate amount of time.

“You're not as motivated as I'd hoped.” He walked toward her. “Please insert this disk,” he said, withdrawing a CD-ROM from his breast pocket. “And please don't think of assaulting me. If you think I can't slit your belly open with the flip of my wrist, you're a fool.”

She took the disk and slid it into the computer's DVD tray. It retracted.

“The rest of the world has had the benefit of what you're going to see for three days now. I want to make sure you understand everything.”

A single virus shell popped onto the screen and she recognized it immediately. The Raison Strain. A clock showed real time at the bottom of the picture.

“Yes, a most efficient mercenary. But you haven't seen what it can actually do.”

“This is a simulation,” she said. “Anyone can create a cartoon.”

“I assure you, not a single piece of hypothetical data has been used for this ‘cartoon,' as you call it. I'll leave it for you to analyze later.”

She watched as the virus entered a human lung and immediately went to work on the cells of the alveoli. She knew how it would work, penetrating the cells with its own DNA and ultimately rupturing the cells. Soon thousands of virus-infected cells were streaming through the body's network of veins and arteries, searching out new organs. Even so, with this microscopic damage, no symptoms would be evident.

The clock at the bottom sped up and began ticking off hours, then days. It slowed at sixteen. The infected cells had reached a critical mass and were producing symptoms. Their assault on the body's organs resulted in massive internal hemorrhaging and quick failure within two more days.

Like an acid, the virus had eaten the host from the inside out.

“Nasty little beast,” Svensson said. “There's more.”

Monique had seen a thousand superbug simulations. She'd participated in autopsies of Ebola victims. She had seen and studied as many viruses as any other living person. But she'd never seen such a ravaging animal, not one that was so contagious, so systemic, and so innocuous before reaching maturity and consuming its host like so many piranha.

Monique cleared her throat.

The next frame showed a map of the world. Twelve red dots lit up. New York, Washington, Bangkok, and on, tiny fires popping to life.

“Forgive the melodrama, but there really is no other way to show what the naked eye cannot see.”

By the end of day one, the number of cities had reached twenty-four.

“Our initial deposit. Everything else is the virus's own doing.”

Lines spread over the map, showing air-traffic routes. The lights spread. By the beginning of day three, half the map was solid red.

Now the simulation changed to show the spread of the virus from one host to another. Monique knew the facts well enough: One sneeze contained as many as ten million germs traveling at up to one hundred miles per hour. With this virus, the time between a person acquiring the germ and becoming contagious was a mere four hours. Even assuming each contagious agent infected only a hundred per day, the numbers grew exponentially. By day nine the number had reached six billion.

Svensson reached forward and pressed the space bar. The simulation froze.

“That brings us up to date.”

At first she didn't understand. Up to date, meaning what?

“Give or take a few hours,” he said.

“You're saying you've actually done it?”

“As promised. And I will admit that not all of the infected cities represent saturation. The red light means the virus is currently airborne, sweeping through that city. We calculate that it will take two weeks for global saturation.”

He pulled out a small vial of amber liquid. Uncorked the lid. Sniffed the opening. “Odorless.”

She knew the whole truth then. It was hard to grasp, even with his simulations. Computer models and theories and pictures were one thing, but to imagine that what she was seeing had actually happened . . .

He could be lying about all of it, forcing her to slave on an antivirus so that with it he could blackmail the world.

“You need more convincing, I can see.” He pressed the intercom button on the phone. “Bring him down.” He picked up a clean slide.

Maybe he really had done it.