Red Tide (8 page)

13

D
r. Hans Belder buried his nose in the TV monitor again. At his request, Ben Gardener had rewound the tape to the first victim’s cheek. Highest level of magnification. Belder used his fingernail to trace the outline of the lesion…first one and then another and another, as if by repetition alone he could convince himself that what he was seeing was real. He sat back in the chair and surveyed the room.

“I’m sure…” he began. “I’m sure you all remember the simulation your government ran with the pox virus.”

He looked up at Colonel Hines, who anticipated the question. “Operation Dark Winter,” Hines said. “Back in two thousand and one.”

“Some sort of doomsday game,” the mayor said.

“Doomsday indeed,” Belder said, taking in the room with a bemused smirk on his face. “Game? I’m not so sure.” He cast another glance at the colonel. “I seem to recall that your organization took part in the project, Colonel.”

Hines nodded gravely. “Yes…we did.”

“Perhaps it would be instructive for these ladies and gentlemen if you would help them recall the results of this…”—he searched for a word—“of this game, as you people like to call it.”

Hines took a deep breath and then began to speak. “The idea was to simulate a terrorist attack using smallpox spores as the agent. The exercise was conducted by the CDC, the CSIS, the MIPT, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies…” He noticed he was losing his audience and waved an impatient hand. “The best people we had at the time.”

“Still the best you have,” Belder added.

“Anyway…” Hines continued, “as I recall…the scenario went like this. They picked three cities. I think they were Atlanta, Philadelphia and Oklahoma City.” His eyes made a quick sweep of the room. “This takes place in the weeks immediately preceding Christmas, so everybody’s out and about. Anyway…they picked three shopping malls in the holiday season. Had three teams of terrorists posing as maintenance men go into the malls and spray smallpox onto the potted plants.”

“You must understand…” Belder interrupted, “technically speaking, smallpox no longer exists on the planet. It has been eradicated in its natural state. The only known sources for the virus are the CDC in Atlanta and the Vector laboratory outside Novosibirsk, in Russia.”

“So what we did…” the colonel said, “was to program everything we knew about smallpox, everything we were prepared to bring to bear on an epidemic…”—he used his fingers to count—“our vaccine supplies, our health care system, our emergency response agencies—all of it was programmed into a supercomputer, which was then asked to give us the most likely scenario of what would happen under those circumstances.”

“The results were…” Again Belder searched for a word.

“Ignored,” Hines said quickly. “The results were ignored.”

Belder nodded. “For the most part…yes.”

Hines reddened slightly. “All they did was to start vaccinating health care workers.” He cut the air with the side of his hand. “Which lasted until one of their unions decided they didn’t like the risk and then they stopped that too.” He looked over at Belder. “God forbid we inconvenience anyone…embarrass anyone…” He shook his head in disgust. Closed his mouth hard.

“Tell them the results,” Belder prompted.

“It went something like this,” Hines said. “Two days into the game, the CDC had one confirmed case of smallpox in Oklahoma City and suspected about twenty more. Eight hours later, they’d confirmed the twenty cases and had fourteen more under the microscope. Similar results started coming in from Atlanta and Philadelphia.”

Across the room, the phone buzzed. Gardener walked over, picked it up and began to whisper into the receiver.

Hines kept talking. “By the time a week had gone by, tens of thousands were showing symptoms. Hospital emergency rooms were overwhelmed by the volume.”

Belder held up a finger. “Interestingly enough, in the early stages of an epidemic such as this, it does not much matter whether the symptoms are real or imagined. Both strain the system in precisely the same manner.”

“Ten days in, we’ve got two thousand cases in fifteen states with more showing up in Canada, Mexico and Britain. Two weeks in, it’s sixteen thousand cases in half the states in the country. A thousand people have died and we’re completely out of vaccine. The health care system is a shambles. Violence is rampant in the streets.”

He paused, as if inviting someone to contradict. “By February one…the computer estimates we’ve got three million cases of smallpox. A million Americans are dead and there’s no end in sight.”

“And this…” Belder said, “is with a disease for which there is a vaccine. An easily produced vaccine at that. Something where we can put a ring around outbreaks. Something where some of the population at least is immune.” He reached over and tapped the TV screen with his fingers. “This,” he said, tapping the screen harder now, “this has no cure. No treatment whatsoever. You cannot vaccinate against this. The virus keeps spreading until it runs out of hosts.” He folded his arms. “Game over.”

Gardener hung up the phone. He looked out over the room and caught Mike Morningway’s eye. “Mike,” he said, “it seems your man has turned up indisposed.” He worked to keep his voice neutral. “We’re sending in a four-man team.”

Morningway waved a confirming finger but was unable to hide the disappointment in his eyes. This was the kind of failure the budget committee didn’t forget. His expression said that some serious fence-mending was going to be required. As a preliminary step, he quickly changed the subject. “About the press…” he began, “my office is being flooded with—”

“We’re not telling the press a thing until we have something accurate to tell them,” the mayor insisted. “It’s bad enough they’ll make up news. I’ll be damned if we’re going to assist them in the process.”

The proclamation fanned a crackle of conversation within the room. Sykes whispered frantically into the mayor’s ear as pronouncements of disagreement came from several quarters at once. As he so often did when faced with opposition, Gary Dean began to waffle, nodding almost imperceptibly at whatever pearls of wisdom Sykes was pouring into his ear and holding up a hand in the “yeah yeah…give me a minute” position.

That’s when the colonel broke in. “He’s right,” Hines announced. “This has to be strictly ‘need to know.’ ” The undertone of disagreement disappeared. The room was suddenly silent. “Keep it vague. Terrorist act in the bus tunnel. Unspecified number of victims. Ongoing investigation.”

14

F
ingers pulled the strings around Corso’s face tight, leaving only a small oval with Corso’s features bunched in the center of the opening.

“They told us you weren’t gonna make it.”

“Just a misunderstanding,” Corso assured him.

The cop’s orange haz-mat suit was now topped off by a red plastic miner’s hat with a tiny TV camera mounted above the light. While his hands were busy checking Corso’s protective suit, his eyes moved over Corso’s face like searchlights.

“You got any experience at this sort of thing?”

“Coupla chemical spills,” Corso said.

The policeman nodded knowingly. “Well then…you just stay close and do as you’re told and everything will be all right.” He took the breathing apparatus from Corso’s hand and went over it carefully before handing it back. “We’re going down on opposite sides of the station,” he said. “These suits have built-in radios, but we don’t run on the same frequency as the SFD, so you’re coming down onto the south concourse with us. That way you can hear what’s going on, and we can keep track of you. Okay?”

Corso said it was. “You don’t rip the suit and you don’t take off the mask for any reason.” He waited for Corso to agree before going on. “We’re gonna have you do the wall wipes. We’re gonna want four from each end of the station.” He drew in the air with his finger. “There’s a central hall that bisects the station. It’s where the elevators are located.” He pointed at his imaginary drawing. “We’re coming in here…down at the south end of the station. One set of stairs, two escalators to and from the mezzanine.”

“I know what it looks like inside,” Corso said.

The cop’s expression said he was surprised. “So…you divide the space between the central corridor and the end walls into fours. Get a sample from each area. Put it in a tube and seal it. Write on the label where it came from. South concourse. East wall. Sample number one, number two…” He rolled his wrist to indicate “and so forth.” “The samples closest to the elevators will both be number four.”

“Got it,” Corso assured him.

“Write it all out. Don’t make up a secret code for yourself. Write it so some guy in the lab will know exactly where it came from without you having to translate.”

Corso assured him he would and then followed him across the street to the mouth of the tunnel, where the rest of the team were making their final preparations.

They’d pulled everybody back. The street was nearly empty. The last three aid cars were rolling over the top of the hill, shuttling the civilians up to Harborview. Whatever was down in the tunnel had everybody spooked. He looked up. The moon had ducked under the clouds and now rode low in the sky like a tarnished nickel.

“He ready?” the cop called Bobby asked.

“Ready as he’s gonna be,” was the answer.

Corso watched as, one by one, they adjusted their breathing devices. He followed suit, pulling the straps until they felt tight on his face and then using his hands to wiggle the apparatus into place. Bobby came by for a final check, flipped a switch on the side of Corso’s mask.

“You hear me?” came crackling from a tiny speaker somewhere near Corso’s right ear. Corso nodded. Bobby pointed to a small black button beneath his filter canister. “You wanna talk…push this.”

Corso pushed the button. “Okay.”

Bobby nodded and handed Corso a clear plastic box, divided into a dozen small round compartments, one of which held a felt-tipped pen, the rest of which contained folded squares of gauze. “You make the wipe and then put your samples in here,” crackled in Corso’s ear. Bobby brandished a gloved finger. “Remember…good labels.”

Corso pushed the button. “Got it.”

“Let’s roll.”

The other cop pulled the plastic back and, one by one, everyone stepped inside. Without further conversation, the firemen headed directly over to the nearest victim, whose body lay half on, half off the escalator. Corso followed Bobby and his partner around the mezzanine, toward the wide set of stone stairs on the far side of the station. By the time they reached the top of the stairs, Ensley had rolled the victim over onto his back and was using swabs to take samples from the guy’s blood-encrusted mouth and nose, while the other fireman took wipe samples from the walls.

They went down the stairs in single file, with Corso bringing up the rear. Halfway down, the first bodies came into view; collapsed and colorful, they were strewn about the floor like carelessly discarded toys.

The team stopped for a moment and stood three abreast on the central landing, taking in the carnage that appeared before them. “Jesus,” somebody whispered.

Another dozen stairs and they could begin to see the bus…and the driver, rigid in the seat, his head thrown back, mouth, filled with dark blood, shouting its silent outrage at the ceiling. As one, they turned their faces away and kept moving down until they could see the entire length of the station. Again, they stopped.

Fifty or sixty on this side alone, Corso figured. Something inside of him would not permit him to count, as if to reduce the situation to mere numbers would somehow constitute an act of desecration. Bobby stepped up into the bus and pulled out his test kit. The other cop walked to the nearest body and knelt by its side.

“Let’s get this done and get the hell out of here,” Bobby’s voice said.

Corso began to pick his way among the corpses. Careful to keep his feet away from the thick pools of blood surrounding each and every body, pools which in places had run together, connecting these people more intimately in death than they would have allowed in life. Here, with the promise of the escalator so near, the concourse was full. Bodies collapsed upon bodies. He shuffled sideways, stepping over limbs and torsos, skirting the smears of black fluid where desperate people had tried to crawl forward through their own effluent, leaving wavy salutations of finger-painted horror on the smooth stone floor.

As he cleared the back of the bus, Corso could make out the northbound concourse for the first time. He winced. Just as bad over there…maybe worse. The firemen came into view on the stairway landing. Corso ran his eyes the length of the floor. Over there, across the silent bus lanes, the victims were bunched up at the north end, as if they’d had an extra half a minute of terror and had made a collective run for the escalator.

He turned away and concentrated on the job at hand, eyeballing the long white tile wall. Using the artwork as a guide, he figured he was about a quarter of the way to the central exit sign when, moving with great deliberation, he stopped and took his first sample…wiping…folding…block-printing the label. One south. Southbound.

The air inside the suit was hot and dank; he moved along, treating the dead bodies like downed power lines as he sampled his way up to the elevators, wiping and sealing and printing his way along, accompanied only by the sound of his own measured breathing.

He managed to block it out. Keeping a loud, ongoing dialogue running in his head at all times. Doing everything by the numbers until he reached the elevators. Four South. Southbound. And the old folks in their bold black and yellow ski parkas, so bright and gay you wanted to tell them the game was over…that they could get up now and have a laugh with the rest of us…and…right there…her little hand reaching out…just a fingertip away from the old man’s hand…a little Japanese girl in a red plaid skirt and a blue sweater…“Hello Kitty” proclaimed the front of her sweater.

Corso knelt by her side. Took him two tries to grasp the hem of her skirt with his gloved fingers and pull it down over her legs. He was about to rise when a gray stain on the floor caught his eye. Just outside the elevator door, a sunburst of gunpowder adorned the stone. Bits of brown paper bag had been blown about and here and there on the floor small pieces of glass glinted green and purple in the overhead lights.

Moving more carefully now, avoiding the shards of glass, Corso retraced his steps until he could see Bobby and his partner taking samples from a woman who’d fallen dead near the edge of the platform. Corso pushed the button on the front of his mask.

“Hey,” he said.

Both of them looked his way.

“Whatever it was killed these folks was set off right here,” Corso said.

“You sure?” Bobby’s partner wanted to know.

“Yeah.”

He touched his chest and the red light on his TV camera came on as he walked slowly in Corso’s direction, swinging his head from side to side for the benefit of the video recorder. Corso pointed to the gray stain. Then at the bits of paper and finally at the small shards of glass. “Something like a glass vial…inside a paper bag…set it off with something like a cherry bomb,” he said.

The cop agreed. “I’ll get us a wipe on the explosion point and see if I can’t come up with some of the paper and glass. You finish your wipes on the tunnel.”

Corso did as he was told. Moving toward the north end of the tunnel where the bodies were fewer and farther between, he had, for the first time, a chance to wonder what he was going to do when they got topside again and discovered he wasn’t Colin Taylor from Emergency Management Services.

He worked quickly as a sense of urgency began to fill his veins. Four, three, two, one South and he was at the far end, staring into the gaping gullet of the deserted tunnel. He pushed the final piece of gauze into place, snapped the lid closed and turned back. That’s when he saw her again.

Two floors up on the mezzanine. No mask. No hazmat suit. Just standing there taking it all in. Same “all there and in charge” look she had when she’d come out of the alley and disappeared into the tunnel. The look of a woman who knew something they didn’t. She sensed his eyes and stepped back out of view.

Corso reached for the talk button. Stopped himself. He stepped out onto the platform and looked up. She was gone. He could feel it.

“Let’s go,” crackled in his ear. He nodded and started back toward the cops, who, by this time, were halfway to the far end of the station.

Corso stopped at the elevator, watching Bobby and his partner pick their way through a thicket of corpses. He pushed the up button. Waited. Bobby turned his way.

“Come on, man. Let’s go!”

The elevator car arrived. The door slid open. Corso pulled the wipe kit from his pocket and held it up in front of his masked face, before ceremoniously bending over and setting it on the floor. The elevator door started to close. Corso used his arm as a lever to hold it open. Bobby and his partner were loping his way. “Hey…hey…what the hell are you doing?” He stepped into the car, pushed the up button with one hand and pulled his mask off with the other, just as the door slid shut.