The boat shifted and tilted, debris floating about. Seat cushions, life jackets, and a few empty water bottles bobbed up and down, but Hawker did not see the gunman.
As the boat began to roll, Hawker grabbed the injured man and pulled him into the water.
A moment later the speedboat flipped over. It remained floating, a few feet of the keel sticking out of the water.
Hawker held on to the unconscious man and kicked away from the boat, swimming backward toward the shore, his eyes still on the boat. No movement. He looked around in all directions, but the gunman had disappeared.
CHAPTER 11
Arnold Moore, director of operations at the National Research Institute, sat at a metallic desk with a glass top. Papers arranged in neat stacks lined both sides of a computer monitor that would fold flat into the desktop for more workspace if he needed it. To the left and right, printers and scanners and screens for satellite videoconferencing sat dormant, only their “standby” LEDs blinking softly in the semidarkness.
Across the desk from him stood one of the NRI’s best young minds, Walter Yang, a geneticist out of Stanford. If he wasn’t working in the lab, Walter was living online as a devotee of massive multiplayer computer gaming and anything that might lead to a hive mind. He seemed impressed with Arnold’s digs.
“This office rocks pretty hard, Mr. Moore.”
Rocks. Moore did not think it rocked, unless that meant it did not suit him.
Moore’s new suite at the Virginia Industrial Complex was a study in order and ultramodern design. It impressed others, especially its designers, and it bothered the hell out of Arnold Moore.
It was too sterile for him, too precise and lacking in individuality.
Even the walls bothered him. They were special Kevlar-coated glass, which could be turned instantly opaque at the press of a button. Someone’s idea of hip, high-tech décor, apparently designed to go with the NRI’s mission. When told about it, Moore had assumed someone was joking: the head of a secret agency working in a glass cube? He’d darkened the walls on day one and had yet to allow the light back in.
“Yes,” he said politely. “You would think that, Walter. Part of the joy of being young. Things can rock. Now talk to me about this UN virus.”
Walter cleared his throat and looked down at his notes. And Moore realized his own level of crankiness had reached an intraday high. The UN had been quarantined for three days and the natives were growing restless. The only saving grace was that Claudia Gonzales had arrived at work so early, she’d opened the offending letter before most of the staff had even arrived.
“Sorry,” Yang said.
“Don’t be,” Moore said. “Just tell me some good news.”
“We do have good news,” Yang insisted. “The CDC has exhausted its review of the sample and determined that it matches nothing in the database.”
“So we’re dealing with an entirely new virus?”
Yang nodded.
“How exactly is that good news?” Moore asked.
“It relates to the pathogen’s virulence,” Yang said.
Moore stared at him.
“We define virulence as the ability of a pathogen to cause disease,” Yang said. “It depends primarily on three things: the ability of the pathogen to infect cells; the ability of the pathogen to spread and what routes it takes to spread — what we call vectors; and finally, the damage it does to the infected cells.”
“Okay,” Moore said. “So tell me where we’re winning.”
“Well,” Yang said. “The epidemiology of this virus is quite impressive. It shows incredible speed and effectiveness at invading a host cell. It seems to attack all cells in the body. And so far our tests indicate it would spread through a large number of vectors.”
“In English, Walter,” Moore asked.
“Sorry, Mr. Moore,” he said. “I’ll try to be clear. In general, certain viruses attack only certain types of cells. Respiratory viruses attack cells in the lungs. Herpesvirus attacks skin cells. But this UN virus is highly and rapidly infectious across a wide range of, if not all, types of cells in the human body. That is extremely unusual.”
“We see this in Ms. Gonzales?” Moore asked.
Yang nodded. “A CDC check shows that she is dealing with the infection in many different areas. Bronchial cells, muscle cells, liver, kidney, and lymphatic cells. Basically every system in her body shows traces of the infection.”
Moore exhaled wearily. “Unless you’re the beneficiary of her insurance policy, this doesn’t qualify as good news, either.”
“No,” Yang said. “I mean, of course we’d prefer to see a smaller cellular range, and to be honest we’d certainly prefer a contagion that had fewer open vectors to be transmitted through, but—”
“How contagious?” Moore asked.
“Our tests confirm that it has the ability to spread in an aerosol, through sneezing and coughing like the common cold, through insect vectors like mosquitoes and ticks, etc. Just like malaria or West Nile virus, and through birds, like H1N1 or SARS.”
Neither did this news seem to qualify as positive, but Moore guessed Yang would get around to that. “How did it get into the ambassador’s system?”
“The envelope was lined with plastic,” Yang said. “In effect, it was hermetically sealed. The interior of the envelope was a vacuum until she tore it open. The note inside was written on special paper that reacted with oxygen and the heat of her fingertips. As it turned red it generated heat, which caused the virus and a thin layer of gel it had been deposited on to aerosolize. As she read the letter, the ambassador breathed it in.”
“And the red coloring?” Moore asked. “The blood on the letter?”
“A cheap parlor trick,” Yang said. “A side effect of the heat. Like invisible ink reappearing.”
“Someone has a flair for the dramatic,” Moore said. And yet, he reminded himself, no one had claimed responsibility. Something didn’t add up.
“Because of that and the other things it’s able to do, the CDC is calling it the Magician virus.”
“Great,” Moore said. “Now that we have it named, I’m ready for the good news.”
“Oh yeah,” Yang said. “Here’s the cool part, the really interesting part. So this virus is highly contagious outside the body and extremely infectious in the body. But aside from a fever and a monster headache, Ms. Gonzales is doing well. In fact this virus, which seems to be attacking every cell in her body, doesn’t seem to do much once it wins the high ground.”
Moore shifted in his seat. It seemed an odd bit of luck, too odd to actually be luck. “What are you telling me?”
“Most viruses take over a cell, inject their DNA, and force it to produce millions of copies of itself. Then they explode out of the cell, killing it or leaving it to die and moving on. The cell death all over the body causes the sickness. This UN virus enters a cell, forces the cell to reproduce its copies, and then — bizarrely — leaves the cell intact, with a small remnant of its DNA now encoded into the DNA of the affected cell.”
“Remnant?” Moore asked suspiciously. “What kind of remnant? Does it do anything?”
“We’re studying it now,” Yang said. “But it seems to be completely inert.”
Moore looked around his office, thinking and wondering. He considered the design of the room, how it seemed useless and excessive to him but had a purpose in the mind of the designers.
The Magician virus sounded like the brilliant creation of some disturbed mind. Most likely the mind of Ranga Milan. He guessed that this useless bit of DNA left behind had some purpose to its designer as well.