The agent straightened the bills and counted out the amount of the ticket, handing Fitzhugh his change and ticket folder. She brushed her hands against her dress to dry them from the dampness of the money.
“You’ll have to hurry, señor, your plane leaves from Gate Five in ten minutes.”
Fitzhugh swept up the ticket and bills in his hand and walked rapidly through the terminal thanking his lucky stars he was in Mexico City, where the security wasn’t nearly as tight as it was in the United States. On the way to Gate 5, he ducked into a restroom, fearing he was about to throw up.
He leaned on a sink, looking into a mirror at his reflection. His face was flushed, almost scarlet in color, and perspiration beaded his forehead. He sleeved the sweat off with a forearm. He was burning up. Every muscle in his body ached and he felt as if he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. He knew from previous malarial attacks his fever had to be a hundred and two.
“Jesus, I haven’t had an attack this bad since Costa Rica three years ago,” he mumbled to himself. He bent to splash his face with water, not noticing its pink tint as it dripped into the sink.
He blew his nose in a wad of toilet tissue and dropped the bloodstained paper onto the floor as he hurried to catch his plane, dry swallowing a handful of aspirin to bring his fever down.
Twenty minutes later, he was airborne. He leaned his seat back and wrapped his arms around his duffle bag and tried to sleep, hoping he would feel better when he awoke in Houston.
Inside his body, the plague organisms multiplied by the millions, growing exponentially. With every breath, Fitzhugh exhaled the deadly bacteria, which were sucked up by the plane’s air recycling system, passed through the ancient and inadequate air-filters, and blown out through the air returns to eventually infect every passenger on the airplane.
When the 230 passengers arrived at Houston International Airport and made their connecting flights, the plague would be on its way throughout the United States and into fifteen foreign countries less than two days after a lone man had breached the Mexican Army’s quarantine perimeter in the jungles south of Mexico City.
Colonel Woodrow Blackman was awakened by his telephone at four a.m. He swung his feet off the bed and took the call while trying to clear his head of sleep fog.
“Hello?”
“A coded message just came through from Janus, Colonel. It is marked ‘Eyes Only.’”
“How the hell did you know Janus’s code, Lieutenant?”
“You gave it to me, sir, and told me to call you if anything from Janus came through.”
“I suppose I did,” he muttered, glancing over his shoulder to see if the call had disturbed his wife’s slumber. “I’ll get dressed and drive down in a minute. Make damn sure nobody else knows about this.”
“Yes sir. I mean, no sir. No one else will know.”
“Keep the fuckin’ control room locked. Even if the president shows up, don’t let him in. Nobody goes in there.”
“I understand, sir.”
He hung up and padded into the bathroom, deciding against a shower and shave… for now. If something had come through from Tlateloco at this hour it had to be important, damned important to USAMRIID.
He dressed as quietly as he could after brushing his teeth and slipped out of the house, climbing into his Buick Skylark for the short drive to Fort Detrick Headquarters Building.
Although a practical man, he refused to buy a Japanese or other foreign-made car even if they did get twice the gas mileage as American automobiles. While he was often the butt of jokes among his superiors at Fort Detrick for driving “gas guzzlers,” his reply was always the same— he’d be damned and French-fried before he’d support the industry of slant-eyed gooks who should have been bombed off the face of the earth during World War II.
He stubbornly held to the belief that America’s economy was going to ruin because we let Japs and Chinks and commie Russkie bastards send television sets and stereos and cars to our shores while they refused to be pressured into allowing a single American-made item into their countries without exorbitant tariffs and taxes.
Blackie would only buy American-made TVs and electrical appliances. If a lone part was manufactured elsewhere, he refused to purchase it on patriotic grounds, nor would he allow his wife to buy imported wines or perfumes.
“Fuck ’em,” he would say, his final word on any potentially foreign-made acquisition to the Blackman household. “Let the little yellow bastards starve.”
He passed through two electronically operated security doors requiring his palm print before he reached the control room door, finding Lieutenant Jeremy Collins standing there with a deep flush in his cheeks.
“Why aren’t you in there?” Blackie snapped.
“The security device won’t let me back in, sir. It does not recognize my palm print now.”
Blackie slapped his hand atop the metal plate and the door slid open. “Oh, yeah, I forgot. I changed the code last night ’cause I’m workin’ on something supersensitive right now, Collins,” he said. “As soon as I get what I need from one of our moles I’ll put your prints back in the system. Now, stay in front of this door an’ don’t let anybody in.”
“Not even General Cushing, sir?”
“Especially not the general. We don’t need him mucking about in our business right now. Hell, he’s home in bed now anyway. He told me his wife wakes him up every morning an’ makes him ‘cuddle’ with her before he can come to work.”
Blackie made a face and shivered elaborately. “God, but she’s an ugly woman. I hate to think I’d have to cuddle the bitch.”
He waited for Collins to chuckle at his joke, which the soldier did with a strained look on his face, and then he repeated, “You stand in front of the door, Lieutenant, until I get this coded message run off an’ the chip’s memory wiped clean.”
“Yes sir, Colonel.”
Blackie shut the door and pushed a button to secure the control room and went to his panel. A flashing light told him a message was stored in his “Top Secret” electronic mailbox. He sat down and punched in his access code, PATTON, watching the screen until the descrambler did its work.
A small LCD began passing a message in front of him.
Janus: This is it. Hot-bug is a bacteria, not a virus as we suspected… repeat, hot-bug is of bacterial origin. It is believed to be previously unknown form of airborne anthrax. Not recognizable under scope. Gram-positive and rod-shaped, but with anomalies. Human-to-human transmission confirmed. Send “Paco” to Mexican Army quarantine command post fifteen hundred hours for handoff. Sample is containerized, but must use all BL Four precautions. This baby is hotter than hot. Janus out.
“Anthrax,” Blackie whispered. “It can’t be. It shouldn’t be human-to-human transmission if it’s anthrax. Something’s gotta be wrong.”
They’d tested every known form of anthrax for years and not one variety of rod-shaped bacilli showed any promise. In cattle the transmission of anthrax among others in the same species was rampant, as well as in horses.
Humans only contracted respiratory anthrax from one type of anthrax bacillus, called woolsorter’s disease because it was only found in sheep and in the early days of woolen manufacture the women who sorted the skins for manufacture were the only ones who’d ever caught the respiratory form of the disease. But the idea that a deadly respiratory anthrax affecting humans might exist, clearly in some mutant form found only in Mexico, was exciting, a revelation.
The offensive weapon they’d been looking for since biological warfare became a science might be respiratory anthrax, if this mutation could indeed be transmitted from human to human and if they could formulate an effective vaccine to protect our troops.