I got some flex-cuffs out of my car and bound both men and then leaned like a sloppy drunk against the door and called the police and the Pier.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The EMTs took the surfer boys away and I wasted time filling out police reports. By the time I got back to the Pier I could feel each separate place where I’d been hit, and I hurt. A lot.
I went over it with Church, with the duty officer, with Lydia-Rose, with the DMS attorneys. The story did not vary and it did not make sense. Was this a mugging? Was it some kind of drug-induced road rage? Neither of the surfers had a record more serious than parking tickets. Neither had any political ties of any significant kind.
So… what was this?
I thought of Rudy and Glory Price and wondered it if was possible for there to be such a thing as a plague of random violence. Normally that would be the kind of question I’d ask Rudy.
Damn it.
I went into my office bathroom and splashed some cold water on my face and wondered who the hell the old guy was who looked back at me from the mirror. Thin, sallow, with bags under his eyes and a shifty expression. I wouldn’t trust that face if I was seated next to him on the bus.
“Well,” I told him, “are you a lot of fun to be around.”
He told me to go fuck myself.
My phone rang and I hurried back to take the call. It was Church and I could hear the whine of a helicopter behind him. An echo of that reached me through my window and it was clear he was on the roof helipad.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Airport,” he said. “I’m going to Madison.”
He told me about the incident at Bristol-Hermann Laboratories, and the subsequent murder-suicide at the police station. Captain Allison Craft and her partner were dead. So was the only suspect who could explain what happened.
“What did they get away with?” I asked.
He said, “That lab processes rare strains, mutated strains, and weaponized strains of highly infectious diseases. The perpetrator stole samples of several of the most virulent diseases currently in existence. And, Captain… one of them is SX-56.”
I nearly slid out of my chair. The room was suddenly too bright, the edges of everything too sharply defined. It felt like I was surrounded by things that could cut me.
SX-56.
“Jesus Christ…,” I breathed. I’ve faced all kinds of monsters, but it’s not the ones with fangs and claws that scare me. Not really. It’s the ones too small to hit, too small to shoot. Viruses.
SX-56 was a hypervirulent strain of smallpox. The disease has been killing people since at least 10,000 BC. They found traces of it on the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses V. At the end of the eighteenth century it was killing four hundred thousand people each year in Europe alone. It ravaged the skin, caused blindness in many of its victims, and even though it was lethal to everyone, it was particularly aggressive in kids, killing 80 percent of those infected. Conservative global estimates of people killed by smallpox in the early to mid-twentieth century? Maybe five hundred million.
Be with that number for a moment. Let it bite you deep enough to bleed.
Even during the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union worked together to produce vaccines that stopped the disease in its tracks. The global eradication of smallpox was declared December 9, 1979. The monster was dead. We’d won.
Except that we didn’t.
Samples of the smallpox virus existed in labs, in viral storage facilities, and in government bioweapons research centers. Yeah… the kinds of labs that are illegal according to all international treaties. But Russia has them, so does China, and every other major power.
So do we.
A few years ago new cases of smallpox began cropping up. Mutant strains that were resistant to the vaccines. They struck and they went away. Over and over again. The press lauded the World Health Organization doctors who descended on the outbreak sites and prevented the spread, and yes, those guys are actual superheroes. But here’s the thing… those outbreaks were deliberate and careful experiments conducted by terrorist groups. It was a pattern I’ve seen too often. I shut down a few of these labs, and in such cases I tended to be moderately harsh. Scorched earth harsh.
The latest and deadliest strain of smallpox was SX-56, developed in Russia by a team officially labeled as “rogues.” I knew better. Everyone in my line of work knew better. They were no more rogue than the Ghost Net hackers who were officially disavowed by the Chinese government.
SX-56 is a monster. There’s nothing scarier. It’s on a par with seif al din and Lucifer 113. Yeah, that kind of scary. It is an ultra-quick-onset weaponized pathogen. Because the virus has a simple gene structure it doesn’t need much incubation time. Unlike anthrax, there’s no specific drug, antibiotic, or antiviral medicine that can treat people who have it. You get it and you die. If you’re an adult you might live long enough to see your children die first. It is an immensely cruel weapon. I knew that research samples of it existed at the CDC, the National Institutes for Health, the FDA, and even in labs affiliated with Homeland Security. The lack of tighter regulations is one of the reasons I never get a good night’s sleep.
And Nathan Cross stole it and sent it off strapped to a fucking drone.
Holy God. Is the entire world insane? I mean, really… tell me that we’re not all out of our son of a bitching minds.
“What the hell is happening?” I demanded. “Why are people going crazy?”
“I don’t know,” said Church. “I’m afraid many of the answers are buried down at Gateway.”
He hadn’t meant it to hurt, but it hurt.
It really killed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Here’s another fine example of the world kicking me when I’m down.
The smallpox case was taken away from us before Church had even made it to the airport. Gone. Bam. Done. Handed over to the CIA. Brick called to tell me. He didn’t say so, but I had the feeling that Church was not in any mood to tell me himself. Church has iron control but no one can take that many punches in a row. They were on their way back to the Pier.
You can sit there and gape in shock or you can do something. I yelled at Bug and at Dr. Hu to get me some actionable information. Bug already had his whole team on it, and he didn’t seem to care any more than I did that this wasn’t our case. Hu, who usually entertains himself by insulting me, had a different take today.
He said, “Believe me, Ledger, I am going to make sense of this. I am not going to be ass-raped by the fucking CIA.”
Then he hung up. I wanted to pat him on the back.
After that, I began tearing through the reports of the DMS failures, looking for patterns and trying to build a case out of scant information. No, let me correct that. It wasn’t that we had insufficient information, we actually had a lot of it, but so far it didn’t make much sense. The Cop part of my brain was offended by that. I needed answers and I needed logic. I’m occasionally an idiot, I’ll accept that, but at the end of the day I am a trained investigator who needs things to make sense. You see, people don’t understand the cop mind. They think we like puzzles. We absolutely do not. We like order. We attack mysteries in order to put disparate pieces back into their proper place. We don’t enjoy the process. It’s the end result that matters. Order out of chaos. It’s not entertainment, it’s who we are.