“Why? It is good a vaccine exists—
if
the pig Malenkov did not again lie, and if this vaccine has, in truth, been manufactured. But your VIX will stop this killer virus, will it not?”
“Yes,” Beck said. “But VIX will also kill millions itself. Look—Alexi said there were three hundred million doses of vaccine stockpiled somewhere. We can use it to selectively vaccinate around any contagion zones. At the very least, we can set up a herd immunity that will contain the outbreak, while more vaccine is manufactured. We can stop this thing, without killing people with VIX.”
Ilya frowned at the American in genuine puzzlement.
“And why should I assist you? Release your VIX; we understand ‘acceptable losses.’ Russia will be safe, whether this vaccine exists or not.”
“But will Putin?” Beck pressed. “You heard Alexi. The game is stacked against your man, by people who have billions to spend. As it stands now, Putin cannot escape being labeled a mass murderer; do you imagine he can survive this conspiracy?”
“I see the point you make,” Ilya said. “But he can become a hero, untouchable—
if
he makes available a vaccine that can save the world.”
“We have to move quickly,” Beck said. “Once the VIX is released, it’s too late. And if we find that the vaccine doesn’t exist, releasing VIX is our only hope.”
Ilya looked at Beck thoughtfully for a moment. Then he reached into his pocket and withdrew the stiletto Alexi Malenkov had brought.
Beck stiffened, his eyes on the scalloped blade. It was only with difficulty that he looked back at the Russian’s face.
Ilya smiled, and tossed the knife onto the table. It clattered loudly in the tense silence.
“When we last met, I had placed a blade very much like that one into your flesh. You are aware of what would have happened next, had we not been interrupted?”
Beck nodded, aware that his throat was suddenly too parched to speak.
“You will forgive me this question, please: Why should I believe you hold no . . . ill will toward me?”
“You’re a killer, and probably a psychopath,” Beck said, and was surprised to hear that his voice sounded almost normal. “Worry about that later, because I
will
come after you. But right now, there are millions of people who will die unless we work together. One of them may be my daughter. I want to save her, and the rest who will otherwise die from this madness.”
“So. And what can you give me? What do
I
want?”
“You want to save Putin. And yourself.”
“Indeed,” Ilya said, and smiled thinly. “It would seem that, for now, we are on the same side.”
Fort Walton Beach, Florida
July 23
The stench of the unburied dead was now almost unbearable, its assault on the senses magnified by the mingled tang of diesel fuel and burning meat. Carol Mayer had organized the detail, finding recruits among the relative handful of persons still strong enough to drag corpses to the far end zone. There, a makeshift pyre vomited an evil black cloud into the Florida sky.
But there was no way to keep up with the mortality. By her own rough estimate, Carol had calculated that more than two thousand souls had been brought to the football stadium. Of these, no more than three hundred now remained alive—if one could define as “life” the state in which these existed.
Sometime overnight while Carol slept, the CDC field team had left, slipping away without notice or fanfare. Carol had been infuriated, though a pragmatic part of her realized that anything else would have been a futile gesture. There was nothing anybody could do for the dead, and the same was true for the camp’s other inhabitants.
Carol had dozed for less than two hours, poorly. She was too much the physician not to recognize the symptoms that she too was finally displaying.
Every joint in her body ached, a dull throbbing pain that was mirrored in the excruciating headache with which she had awakened. Without checking, she knew she had a raging fever. Her head also had filled, a thick red-tinged mucus that stained the tissues she now used almost constantly. Breathing was starting to become painful, punctuated by coughs that ripped things deep in her chest.
Two or three others in the work crew she had gathered still appeared without obvious symptoms, as had Carol only the evening before. By the expressions on their faces as they looked at her now, Carol knew that any hope they might have held was now gone.
She pulled hard at the blanket-wrapped form she was dragging, and tiny white-hot pinpoints of light arched and wheeled across her vision. She straightened, feeling for an instant the caress of a cool breeze against her cheek. But when she touched her fingers to her face, the skin felt hot and brittle.
From deep inside, she tried to conjure up a serene image, the way Choctawatchee Bay appeared from her balcony: an expanse of blues and slate gray, punctuated by the foamy comma of wavelets that textured the surface of the ancient waters. But though she tried hard, she could not hold the image for more than a few seconds before it paled and faded from her imagination.
Briefly, she thought about the two teenage girls who had fled this place of death. In her mind’s eye, she saw them speeding along in her pickup truck. Their two faces looked fresh and impossibly happy, and whipping with wild abandon in the slipstream of the wind was the long dark hair of . . .
. . .
of
. . .
of the younger one.
Damnedest thing,
she told herself,
I can’t seem to remember her name.
She swayed on her feet, then toppled to the dusty ground.
Tallahassee, Florida
July 23
From somewhere close, much too close, the flat, jackhammer-like bark of what Katie now recognized as an automatic weapon punctuated the bedlam of lesser noise outside. She could hear faint screaming, drowned by a second long burst; when those faded, the screams had ended too.
She peered upward though the casement window that looked out at ground level. Now and then she caught a glimpse of running feet, some of them in heavy boots and others bare or wearing light beach sandals. Once, the owner of a pair of feet in white-and-red Air Jordans tripped right outside, sliding and bouncing headlong past her vantage in a manner almost comical. Before Katie could even smile, another pair of feet—these, in spit-shined Oxfords below gray uniform pants—skidded to a stop. There had been shouting, unintelligible to her but unmistakably filled with both fear and rage. Two shots, carefully spaced, echoed around the basement where Katie had taken refuge. Then the Oxfords wheeled and sprinted back in the direction from which they had come.
“Katie.” It was said softly, though more from lack of strength than any awareness of the need for caution.
J. L. lay on a worn afghan Katie had found discarded in a corner, musty with mildew and dust. The younger girl knelt beside her friend.
“I’m sorry, Katie. Oh, God. I feel so—” J. L. vomited explosively. As the spasm racked her friend, Katie Casey held her as gently as possible, one hand stroking J. L.’s blunt-cut hair in a soft rhythm. When her hand touched J. L.’s forehead, the heat of the fever was like touching a kettle.
“It’s okay, J. L. We’ll be okay in here.” Her voice was reassuring and calm, and unaffected by the tears that were once more tracking through the grime on her face.
Katie fought down the raw tickle that again rose in her throat, telling herself to ignore it, just as she was trying to ignore the headache that was no longer merely a nagging shadow inside her temples.
“It’s going to be okay,” she repeated. Not for the first time today, she wondered what it would be like to die.
Montgomery, Alabama
July 24
“You can’t be serious. The President has already authorized the mission.”
The voice belonged to Billy Carson, and it was starkly disbelieving.
“Listen to me.” Beck gripped the sat phone so tightly his fingers ached. “There is a vaccine. You don’t need to release the VIX, Carson.”
“You think we want to? Beck, listen—the first confirmed flu cases were reported in New York just over an hour ago. And now we’re getting reports that a mob of several thousand people tried to overrun the military cordon at the Lincoln Tunnel. They almost made it. Next time they probably will.”
“Oh, God.”
“ ‘Oh, God’ is right. If the virus spreads into New Jersey or Connecticut, we simply don’t have the troops to establish a perimeter. We don’t have time to wait for the Russians to search for any vaccine. Not one that may exist only in a murderer’s lie.”
“Alexi wasn’t lying, Carson. He was ready to expose
himself to a canister of virus. Doesn’t that prove the vaccine exists?”
“It may only prove that Malenkov was a madman,” Carson retorted. “And we already know that, don’t we?”
The transmission erupted in a brief flurry of clicks and crackles, and a new voice came on the line.
“Dr. Casey, I am talking with Mr. Putin,” the President said. “He wishes to speak to the man who shot General Malenkov.”
Ilya took the phone from Beck’s hand, and spoke into it in a clipped, precise volley of Russian so low that Beck was only barely able to follow. He heard his own name once, and recognized those of several Russian industrialists in what appeared to be a much longer list.
Finally, Ilya extended the sat phone to Beck, a grim expression on his face.
“You are a historian. You are given the opportunity to listen as history is made—or, perhaps, ended for all time.”
As he held the receiver to his ear, Beck could hear the conversation already in progress between the presidents of Russia and America.
“There is but one way to get this information quickly enough,” Putin was saying. “Could you use such methods on your country’s richest men?”
“They threaten you directly,” the President said. “Those who are involved in this plot threaten billions more.”
Putin laughed, a single harsh bark. “You do not answer my question, Mr. President. No matter. I will do what I can do. If this vaccine of Malenkov’s does in fact exist, I will . . . persuade one of these men to give it to me.”
“Will you provide us with the supply we require? My advisors inform me that we can still initiate what they call herd immunity, and that will—”
“I too have experts,” Putin interrupted, “and they too speak of this immunity. Yes. If vaccine exists, we will share. If it does not—”
“I will have no choice but to release Agent VIX,” the President said.
There was a hesitation on the line.
“I do not wish to influence your decision,” Putin said. “But were this my decision to make, I do not think I could choose to wait. As I could not, when I was forced to use chemical weapons here.” His voice again became brusque. “I will leave you to your advisors. As for the vaccine and this conspiracy Malenkov revealed—we will talk when I . . . know more.”
There was again the sound of encryption software reprogramming itself, and when it ended Beck heard only the end of the President’s dialogue with his national security advisor.
“Mr. President, it’s your responsibility,” Carson said, his voice both urgent and intense. “The planes are probably already in the air. I can only advise you—and my advice is to release the VIX. Only you can decide. But you must decide now.”
Eglin Air Force Base, Florida
July 24
The last shipment of VIX had arrived just after dawn, in the cavernous belly of a C-5 Galaxy with British markings, joining dozens of other blue-gray canisters that had already arrived from Maryland. All of the VIX containers came off the aircraft shrink-wrapped and stacked on plastic pallets that were attended to by forklifts, quickly but with care. Each canister was ridiculously undersized for the havoc its contents were designed to wreak: their dimensions were those of the propane tanks usually mounted on a recreational vehicle or outside a fishing cabin.
Freed from their polyethylene cocoons, the pressurized units themselves were surprisingly light. Installing them into the flight line of assorted sprayer-equipped fighters and transport aircraft scraped together for the mission, a single airman could easily carry a canister in either hand—even in the cumbersome protective suit that regulations required for the exercise.
Good thing, too,
thought Colonel Peter Sivigny, watching exactly that exercise through the polycarbonate windows of his own protective mask.
Since nobody is going to take ’em off. Nobody sane, anyway.
Sivigny was sweating profusely under the impermeable membrane of his coveralls, and grateful for the opportunity to do so. Many of those infected in the first day of the outbreak no longer perspired; the dead seldom do.
Despite the heat and inconvenience the antiexposure suits caused, for the past thirty-six hours the rubberized outfits had served as the mandatory uniform of the day for all personnel—as a safety measure for the uninfected, even those air-men who had already been displaying symptoms when the order was posted. In theory, any viruses being shed were sealed inside with their hosts. Thus far, the theory appeared sound. Several men had already died inside their rubberized minienvironment, but all of them had been diagnosed before the alarm klaxons had sounded.
Due to its proximity to ground zero for the outbreak, it was inevitable that Eglin had been hit hard by the virus. Casualties had been particularly high in the heavily populated central administration and headquarters sections of the main base. There, the virus had rippled outward from the base hospital; within a day, it had infected much of Eglin’s brass and the upper-echelon support staff that thought it actually ran the rest of the huge installation. Some of the infected had died within hours, others within the day. A few still staggered on—literally, dead on their feet—inside the ring of armed and gas-masked Air Police that they, or their late predecessors, had ordered posted around the contagion zones. The action had been too late, of course; the virus had continued to spread itself relentlessly.