Hybrid, page 24
“Sorry sir, but we are being followed. Fairly sophisticated but not aggressive.” The sergeant answered without taking his eyes off of the road.
Martin wheeled around to look out the rear window but was blinded by the headlights of the trailing Suburban. “Who would be following us?”
“Any number of people, some good, some not so good. It will be handled.” McDaniels didn’t turn around. “So you are a believer in this pseudoscience as well?”
“I wouldn’t label it as a pseudoscience,” Martin said nervously as he slid back into his seat.
“It’s become one. When I hear the same facts quoted by radical environmentalists and gun-toting isolationists, I have a tendency to discount them.”
“Wow, with a philosophy like that, how did you ever get through your confirmation hearings?” Martin scoffed. “People basically suck, excuse my French. They will use any tool at their disposal to advance their own personal agenda. Facts don’t lie, people do, and when you pull all those facts together, the future becomes a very scary place. I’m not just talking about global warming; I’m talking about the loss of species diversity, deforestation, the depletion of natural resources—the list is as long as your arm, and each one of those inconvenient facts has an impact on human survival, whether we believe them or not.”
“I believe in our ability to survive; it is the thing that we do best,” McDaniels answered simply.
“Then you must stink at what you do, because your job is to make sure our enemies don’t survive.” Martin laughed again.
“My job is not to kill; my job is to protect the United States.”
“Then how are you going to protect it from the seven billion incubators that inhabit this planet, and the tendency of pathogens to mutate?”
“That’s your job.”
“Well, I’ll be the first to admit that I stink at my job. We have almost no natural defenses, and what little science can do will be too little too late. HIV, Bird-flu, SARS, NIM, and all the others that came before them matured within human tissue. The greater the mass of human tissue, the greater the probability that something really nasty will develop. There are some very serious-minded people who believe that we are on the verge of a massive natural pandemic, the results of which would be death tolls in the billions. And with the way societies and economies have become so interdependent, such a disruption would lead to famines and wars severe enough to finish the rest of us off.”
“Which brings us back to Avanti. He told you that he was working outside the wishes and desires of Jeser. Do you believe him?”
“I do. I doubt he’d lie to me—that’s not his style. In some ways, he’s a lot like he was twenty years ago. He wants me to know that he was the one who engineered this virus and is personally responsible for its dissemination. He wants to be remembered as someone who had the courage to do what others were afraid to do. It’s so insane,” Nathan said softly. “He twisted the knife by telling me that he used my computer models to convince Jeser that the outbreak could be controlled. He stole them, which means that someone in my department is working for him, or them.” Martin said sadly. “The outbreak in Colorado is supposed to get the world’s attention so everyone will close their borders to the United States. That’s supposed to limit the spread of the infection.” Martin shook his head. “They’re going to issue some demands so that they appear reasonable and then release the original virus no matter what we do.”
A moment of thoughtful silence followed. “Avanti wants you to reproduce that vaccine to slow or stop the outbreak”—McDaniels motioned towards the small vial in Martin’s hand—“to save just enough so that humanity survives, but society doesn’t.”
“One thousand doses, if he’s correct.” He gripped the bottle tighter. “I know what you’re wondering: is there time to mass-produce this? The answer is no. It would take several months to maybe a year before we could produce any reasonable quantity, and I’m guessing that if things go as Avanti thinks they will, we have two, maybe three months before worldwide dissemination. At that point, there’s no stopping it.”
Chapter 30
Reisch slept with the television on and a commercial full of screaming children awakened him. He suffered through thirty seconds of it before finally finding the remote control and turning the TV off. The sounds of the screaming and squealing children still rattled inside his painful head. American television was reason enough to condemn humanity.
The bedside clock said that it was exactly six o’clock, and to Klaus’s great relief, he found that his hand had recovered most of its function. His thinking was still a little thick, but it had improved enough that he could defend himself, at least against humans.
He began to stretch, but then stiffened. A hint of something foreign drifted across his mind. He tried to seize the trace of mental energy, but it was gone, or perhaps it had never been there at all. He was still on guard after his encounter with Amanda, and his control over his emotions was erratic. She had planted a seed of doubt in his mind, and for the first time in years he felt vulnerable. Suddenly, he took the remote control and threw it against the wall. It shattered into a hundred pieces, and after an instant of delight, he rebuked himself. He needed to stay in control; he couldn’t afford any more self-indulgent displays.
He swung his legs off the side of the bed, anxious to be up and moving, but as soon as his feet touched the floor, he knew something was wrong. There was activity all around him. Dozens and dozens of minds were awake and active.
“Military,” he said, with a raspy voice. They were setting up roadblocks on all of the main roads. His mind drifted through the throng of bored and cold soldiers, but none of them knew why they were here, or why they had been issued live ammunition. He would have to find an officer or someone else of importance to find out just how much danger they posed. The problem was that taking over a mind was like shooting off a flare for Amanda; in an instant, she would know exactly where to find him, and he wasn’t quite ready for their next meeting. He waited a moment, giving destiny the opportunity to provide him with the information that he needed, but after several minutes of silence, he decided to shower instead.
Fifteen minutes later, clean and refreshed, he dropped his key on the unmade bed and left for his car. He made it twenty feet before the night manager called to him. The man was wearing a parka that was open enough for Reisch to see the same torn and dirty T-shirt that had graced his portly form the night before. He slogged through the snow in unlaced army boots, and Reisch thought he should kill the man on general principle alone.
“Excuse me,” he called, and Reisch found his mind open enough to read. Quarantine? The word was unfamiliar, but the fat man provided enough of a definition to make the meaning clear. “The state police told me to tell all our guests that they were to stay put.” Apparently, he had been going from room to room telling everyone about the ban on travel.
“I’m just getting some supplies. I’m going to be right back.” Reisch smiled as he lied. The night manager said something else, but Reisch had already turned for the Mercedes. The small SUV sprung into life immediately despite the cold, and he let the engine warm. No one was watching or looking for him as far as his mind’s eye could see. This was all about the virus, not about him. The Americans were finally reacting to the outbreak. After seven long years, it was finally starting.
Reisch’s smile broadened. He knew that it was wrong to take credit for this, but he allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. All his actions had been scripted by a power far beyond even his understanding, but he had played his role faithfully. His reward for success would be survival; had he failed, he would rightly perish along with the rest of the unworthy.
Reisch turned on the radio and listened as the announcer read the manifesto of Jeser. It had been written by fools. He corrected his disparaging thought; he could afford to be magnanimous in victory. They weren’t fools, just irredeemably misguided, and their time was just about up. In due course, after they had their moment in the sun, he would bring about their destruction as dispassionately as he had brought about the Americans. In the end he doubted that he would celebrate or mourn their passing.
The radio reporter had been replaced by an epidemiology expert. His conclusions were a little more optimistic than the planners’, but that was understandable; it would take the Americans some time to come to terms with their imminent demise.
Within a month, American society would be in disarray. By six months, the great country would be little more than a graveyard, with a few thousand survivors wandering through the waste, struggling with their newfound abilities and searching for a purpose. Reisch would return to collect and direct them. He would help them discover the natural order of existence. It wouldn’t be difficult; most of them would have begun to sense it, and perhaps live by it. They would forge a new civilization, purged of corrupting concepts such as equality and democracy; the strong would thrive, and as time passed, the new species would become their own gods. Later, Reisch would repeat the process in Europe, then in Asia, and continue until humanity had been completely replaced by the Select. The key to success was to make the process gradual, with the first step being the trickiest. The United States had a lot of bombs and was the least predictable in its death-throes; it didn’t take much effort to push a button and ruin everything.
He dropped the car into gear and drove out of the snowy parking lot. The fat man was still waking people up and barely registered the Mercedes.
“Where are we going?” A tired-looking Pushkin asked from the backseat.
“I need to eat before we go,” Reisch said simply, basking in the glow of all the frenetic activity around him. He drove under an overpass and weaved his way through town, finally stopping at a McDonalds. He bought some scalding but weak coffee along with a Mc-something that passed for food. He slowly ate, thinking about the thousands of survivors. The number was only a guess; it might be just a few hundred, or perhaps as many as a million.
“So we are finally off to Costa Rica,” Pushkin said, drifting to the front seat. “Are you going to complete the mission now, or wait? There may not be a better opportunity.”
“You know that it is not due for another forty-four hours.”
“There are a lot of people out here, and some of them are bound to be looking for you. Anticipate complications, Klaus.”
Reisch paused at the mention of his given name. “Sending it now will effect containment.”
“In the end, your little bag here,” Pushkin playfully spun the black satchel, “makes containment rather moot.”
“We have to get to the end first, before we can talk about what is moot.” Reisch scored a rare debate point.
“You’re a little selective in your trust of Professor Avanti. You trust his estimates for spread of the first virus but not his estimates for containment of the second. You do remember that everything he told Jeser was a lie.”
Reisch still hadn’t made up his mind about Avanti. He first met the Ukrainian in Libya in the early nineties. Klaus had been without steady work since the collapse of the Soviets, and Pushkin arranged for the two to meet. At first they were rather leery of one another. Reisch was uncomfortable with the Ukrainian’s reputation for radical Islamic beliefs and, for his part, Avanti was unnerved by Reisch’s reputation of violent instability. To complicate matters, Avanti was part of a nascent organization that was forming around Osama bin Laden, the Saudi hero of the Afghan resistance.
“When you introduced us, did you know that Avanti worked with bin Laden?” Reisch asked his former boss, temporarily changing the subject.
“I knew that you had been assigned to kill bin Laden and failed.”
“The failure was not mine. Your glorious Red Army packed it in before I could even make it to Pakistan.”
Despite the irony, both Reisch and Avanti came to accept the fact that a former Soviet operative would provide security for a Jihadist camp that had ties with bin Laden. Years later, when Avanti split from Al-Qaeda, all conflicts of interest had been resolved, and the two men developed a mutual respect. With a free hand, and an endless stream of money supplied by the Saudis, Avanti expanded the hidden laboratory beneath the camp, assembled a world-class team of virologists and microbiologists, and Jeser was born. Much smaller, and more secretive than Al-Qaeda, they shared similar goals; at least that’s what their financiers believed. Reisch knew that Avanti was no more an Islamist than he was. The Ukrainian was hardly a Muslim at all; he drank daily and frequented brothels at every opportunity. He often joked with Reisch about how the good and pious Saudi money was paying for his life of decadence. His goal was not the dissemination of the Islamic faith or the global institution of Islamic law. His goal was not nearly so noble; he simply wanted to ensure the survival of humanity by destroying the majority of humans.
“I think Avanti is correct. I don’t see the Hybrid virus being contained.” It was a rare declarative statement from Pushkin.
“In many ways you two were very similar,” Reisch said, with a reminiscent undertone. “You both lived a life of excess, but never allowed it to interfere with your responsibilities. You both were well educated and at times quite profound, but chose to be profane as often as the situation allowed it. Both of you also managed to save my life.”
***
The Hybrid virus was born an accidental death. Even Avanti was never exactly certain how the disparate components combined to create the most lethal pathogen ever seen. It was a perfect weapon with only one flaw: it mutated as fast as any virus before it. To maintain full potency, the vials had to be kept in tissue cultures or freeze-dried, procedures that demanded expertise. Somehow, containment had been breached and within three days everyone in the remote camp was dead, except Reisch. Avanti had been in Rome debauching his way through Jeser’s funding when the sick and confused German managed to reach him by cell phone. Two days later, the German was in a Saudi isolation unit.
Months later, after Reisch had begun to Evolve, he learned from Avanti exactly how containment had been breached, and the depths of Jaime Avanti’s duplicity. For a time Reisch had planned to kill the Ukrainian in retaliation, but then reasoned that Avanti’s survival, like his own, served the natural order.
***
“Great minds—tragically, there are so few of us,” Pushkin said and then was gone again.
Klaus pulled onto the nearly deserted highway. The GPS told him that the only way to reach New Mexico without using the interstate or state highways was to turn back east towards Colorado Springs. He followed the circuitous route of farm roads for almost an hour before he came to the small town of Mescali. He drove past the obligatory Walmart and noted that there was not a single car in the large parking lot when one of Mescali’s four traffic lights changed in front of him. He stood on the brakes and the Mercedes skidded along the slick pavement, ending up only inches from a large military truck that had started to rumble through the intersection. His momentum lost, the driver glared at Reisch as he downshifted, rocking the squad of National Guardsmen in the back. In a cloud of black diesel smoke, they drove past him. After another moment, the light changed.
Reisch drove a little more slowly and carefully. The road twisted left, and he found a second group of National Guardsmen busy erecting concrete barricades directly in his path. Behind them were two armored personnel carriers, their cannons pointed directly at Reisch. He had only an instant to react, and he wasted it by staring into one of the barrels. Three armed men started waving their arms from behind the nearest barricade, signaling him to stop. It was cold, and they were wearing their winter gear, which disguised their insignias, but Reisch knew that the middle one was the man in charge. He was the youngest, most fit, and most dangerous. His mind darkened the instant he saw Reisch; it was nothing specific, more instinct. Reisch stopped twenty feet short of the barricade and glanced at his rearview mirror as the large green truck, with the sneering driver and twenty National Guardsmen, pulled up behind him.
Lieutenant John Fessner tapped on the driver’s side window as Reisch assessed the situation. His mind was uncharacteristically slow and ponderous, and with a burst of anger, he realized that he had Amanda to thank for that. He turned and found the soldier’s face just inches from him. Concentrate, he told himself. There were thirty-one minds focusing on him right now, and he was having trouble prioritizing them. Fessner tapped again, despite the fact that Reisch was staring at him in the eye.
Reisch realized that Fessner was not a man to be trifled with. A combat veteran with two tours in Iraq under his belt before the age of thirty, the lieutenant was capable of recognizing danger when he saw it. “Can you lower your window, sir?” he shouted, his breath fogging the window, with the last word added only out of habit.
Reisch searched for the switch, but it wasn’t where he thought it should be. The armrest on the door had two switches, and neither lowered the window. Instead, he accidentally hit the switch that locked the doors, and Fessner jumped back and half raised his weapon. The sudden movement of the lieutenant alerted the platoon sergeant, who eased himself and three other soldiers around the vehicle. The sergeant didn’t know what was happening, but he trusted Fessner.
Reisch found the window switches on the center console and finally lowered the window. “I’m sorry, officer, but you guys surprised me. I didn’t expect the army to be . . . Hey, what are you guys doing here, anyways?” Reisch spoke like a native Midwesterner; he feigned embarrassment, and then curiosity, to keep Fessner off balance.
“The road is closed, sir.” Fessner wasn’t off balance. “Can I see some ID?” He was polite, but his weapon was still poised.
