“Swell.” Spigotta scowled. “Fuck. What a mess. Any brilliant suggestions?”
“Brilliant? No. Fresh out of brilliant. But I do have a few suggestions that I imagine you’ve already thought of.”
Spigotta’s gaze lingered on Derek. “Aren’t you the diplomat. Okay. Hit me with your less-than-brilliant ideas.”
“We need to notify the CDC and have them keep an eye out for anyone showing internal bleeding. USAMRIID can coordinate. Has the Bureau’s Hazardous Materials Response Unit gotten here yet?”
“On their way.”
“Good. They can work with Rid. We’ve got to figure out who knew about Chimera M13.” Derek turned to Liz. “Was it ever published?”
She shook her head. “No, but there are black patents on it.”
Black patents. Patents on top-secret government products. The paperwork existed somewhere in a government archive. Access was severely restricted.
“And,” she added, “we wrote a lengthy report on it. The Pentagon got it. Probably the National Security Council did, too.”
“Shit,” Spigotta said.
“We also need to figure out who had plans to this building,” Derek said. “These guys knew just where to go.”
Spigotta was already punching the buttons on his phone. “I’ll get somebody on it.”
Derek knew three of the USAMRIID people and all of the HMRU people. Liz had gotten the film out of the camera and was developing it. Derek told them what he’d seen and what he thought the problems were going to be. He asked if the facility had a portable embalming machine in the hot zone. Frank Halloran said no. They would have been able to embalm Michael Ballard right in HL4; the formaldehyde would kill the bugs and they would have been able to transfer his body out of the biocontainment area.
Dr. Sharon Jaxon, from USAMRIID, suggested they just incinerate the body and quit screwing around. No autopsy was necessary because they knew what killed him. “My vote,” she said, “is dump Ballard’s body, suit and all, in the incinerator. Goodbye safety issue.”
Derek grinned. Jaxon was a hard-edged blonde with broad shoulders, blunt fingers and a take-no-prisoners attitude. He personally knew her to like fast motorcycles, spicy Mexican and Thai food and that after making love she liked to sit up in bed with the sheets pooled around her waist and channel surf on the TV. He and Sharon had trained together at Fort Detrick. She had stayed in research. He had headed off to join UNSCOM to play hide-and-seek with Saddam Hussein. It had been a long time between meetings. He said, “Do you have a strong desire to spend the next decade in Congressional hearings or civil courts being sued by his family?”
“This is a national security issue,” she said. “Sometimes we have to put aside tact.”
“Let’s try not to put aside our humanity,” he said. Actually, he thought her suggestion was a good one, political repercussions be damned. It wasn’t his job to worry about public image. It was his job to make sure this manmade germ didn’t get loose. He glanced at his watch. “Sorry, but this really isn’t my problem. You guys figure it out.”
She looked like she was going to punch him, but Spigotta stomped into the room before she could.
“Stillwater!” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Out here. Now.”
Derek followed the FBI agent into the hallway. He thought Spigotta’s ruddy complexion had gone a little pale. Spigotta had stuck an unlit cigar in his mouth and was chewing on it, acting like he was going to break a no-smoking rule at any moment. Derek knew the feeling.
This stretch of corridor was body bag free, painted an industrial pale green and lit by harsh fluorescent lights. The tile floor was a dingy speckled white. Everything about the facility, especially security, seemed to have been done on the cheap.
Spigotta, voice hoarse, said, “I think you need to get over to Scully’s house. I can’t leave here, but I’m going to have my second-in-command, Aaron Pilcher, drive you there.”
Derek cocked his head. “What’s at Scully’s house?”
Spigotta swallowed. “The team I sent over there says it looks like a massacre.”
7
Aaron Pilcher was the blond suit who had originally delivered Derek to Spigotta. He shook hands with Derek and led him to a waiting Ford Taurus. Pilcher had pale blue eyes and boney cheeks. His teeth were small and even and reminded Derek of some small scavenger like a ferret or raccoon. Where Spigotta seemed like a G-Man, a leftover from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Pilcher was definitely one of the newer breed of agents — intelligent, articulate and curious. The man wanted information, a lot of it, good or bad, he would make the evaluation himself, thank you very much. Just answer the questions, do it now, give me your opinions, I’ll decide what they’re worth.
Derek tossed his GO Packs in the trunk of the Taurus and climbed into the passenger seat. Pilcher gunned the engine and headed for the front gate. “If you don’t want to end up on the evening news I suggest you slouch or something.”
Derek settled with resting an elbow on the window sill and seeming to prop his head with his hand, managing to cover part of his face.
“Any idea where to go with this?” Pilcher asked after the armed soldiers had cleared the press and gawkers out of the way. Within minutes they were speeding east on I-695.
“The Korean angle’s a possibility,” Derek said. “Get on your computers and see what comes up for Korean foreign nationals with experience in biology, especially high-end ID experience.”
“ID?”
“Infectious disease.”
“We can do that. See what immigration and the CIA have to say.”
“I’d run all your terrorism files, too.”
“Sure. Makes sense.”
Pilcher pulled off I-695 and headed north. Into wooded suburbs.
“What’s your take on this? This is your specialty, right?”
“Right.” Derek watched the urban landscape slide into semi-rural suburbia. Still plenty of strip malls, chain stores and fast food restaurants, but there were also more trees and farms and the size of the residential lots were larger. He was starting to feel impatient. Starting to feel that every second that went by was a step closer to disaster. The feeling was like having a rat gnawing at your stomach from the inside. It was a feeling he had often and he didn’t care for it. He could feel the rat, the panic rat, start to nibble. “My take?” he said, trying to concentrate on the agent’s questions.
“What’re they after?”
“Political blackmail is a possibility. If so, we’ll be hearing from them soon.”
“Like, U.S. out of South Korea or we let this bug loose at McDonald’s?”
“Right. Or release our prisoners out of wherever.”
“Camp X-Ray.” The al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“Sure. Or they want to develop it as their own strategic weapon system.”
“Strategic?” Pilcher said.
“Versus tactical.” Derek wasn’t sure Pilcher understood. He said, “Anthrax is a tactical weapon. You drop it on troops, it kills them in a finite way. Smallpox or Chimera, as weapons they’re not tactical. You can’t control them. They’re too infectious, they take off and kill everybody. If you have your own troops vaccinated against smallpox, or your own genetically enhanced version of smallpox, it’s still not really tactical. You use it as a threat. Like having 7500 nuclear warheads. Nobody needs that many. But it’s strategic. You bargain with it. We’ve got them so we’re tougher than you. It’s fucking stupid, but that’s how the world works. Smallpox or Chimera as strategic weapons — it’s suicidal.”