Hybrid, page 33
“What kind of damage can four of these bastards do?”
The secretary of Health and Human Services was better prepared than he had been that morning. “We’ve made a number of assumptions, but worst-case scenario is 128 million dead. Best case scenario is seventy-seven million.”
“That doesn’t make sense. You told me we could treat this thing!” The president was shocked and angry. “You told me two hours ago that one man has already survived with standard medical treatment.”
“We have medical resources for only about two million people. They will survive, but once the supplies are gone, people are going to die.”
“Stop saying that. I’ve heard it for the last two days,” the president snapped. “What about this paper thing? Have we looked at it from that angle?” They had recovered six of the vials, all in various stages of reformulation, along with some unusual parchment.
Stanley said, “It’s not really paper. We think that after it has been complexed with the virus, it becomes stable. Light and heat then release the virus.”
All of them had visions of an army of sanitation workers dressed in isolation suits picking up every tiny piece of paper from coast to coast. “Anything else?” the president asked.
“The survivor, the one the secretary talked about earlier, is being sent to Los Angeles to try and do the same thing that Father Oliver did in New York,” said Stanley.
“Good, maybe we’ll get lucky a second time. What about the bastard who started all of this—Klaus Reisch?”
“He seems to have disappeared. We believe that he has a vial of virus, and a vial of vaccine. He stole them from Jaime Avanti,” Stanley answered.
“So, even if by some miracle, we manage to find these other four, we’re still not out of this?”
Chapter 50
Oliver heard someone say he was dying. Through the mass of tubes and bodies Oliver had found Greg, and the look on his face confirmed the dire prognosis. Except Oliver didn’t feel like he was dying, although, as he had never been dying before, he wasn’t sure what to expect. It hurt—it hurt like hell—but he could breathe. He could feel his heart beating. It was a little fast, but it was strong and regular. He moved his feet and hands, which seemed to work just fine. So, how was he dying? He was strapped to a board, and his head was taped to something, so all he could see was the bright light shining down on him. He tried to reach up with his hand and move it out of the way, but his arms were tied as well.
Okay, he thought, just a little nudge. He extended his mind towards the theatre light, and it swung on its rotating arm so violently that it snapped off at the joint. The aluminum and glass dome sailed across the room and exploded against the back wall. Everyone in the ER jumped, except Oliver. He was laughing through the oxygen mask. “Boy, I stink at this,” he said to himself.
Faces appeared over him. “Let me up. I’m fine.” Hands began to restrain him, and somehow his arm restraints were off him. He pushed people away and then brushed off the mask covering his face.
“I need to speak to Greg Flynn,” he repeated enough times until someone listened. Greg’s face appeared. “Please tell them to let me up. I really don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Greg began to undo the remaining restraints. “You should be dead,” he whispered.
“I should be, but I’m not. Listen carefully. Mohammed met with two other terrorists a year ago. One of them is here in New York and the other is in Boston. The local one is Michael Moore.”
“The movie guy?” Greg had his pen and pad out and began scribbling down the name.
Oliver didn’t make the connection. “No, he’s a clerk in the county welfare office. I know where he lives; it’s about ten miles from here.”
“Give me an address.”
“No, get me closer and I can take care of him. I should have been smarter with Mohammed.” Oliver sat up, and for a moment his head swam. “Get the FBI guys to help. We don’t have much time.” He dropped to the floor and after an unsteady moment rose to his full five-foot-four inches. “That’s better,” he said, and with Greg’s help began to dress. “Frick and Frack are here,” he said as the agents pulled back the curtain. “Load up the wagons, boys; we’re going for a ride. We gotta line on terrorists number two and number three.”
Frick looked at Frack, and then at one of the flustered ER nurses. “What did you give him?”
“Never mind that,” Greg said, annoyed and relieved at the same time. “We’ve got to go, now.”
Thirty minutes later, the four of them were stuck in midtown traffic. Oliver had told the agents everything he knew about terrorist number three, and he hoped that the Boston bureau was having better luck than the one in New York.
“It’s the middle of the night and every Tom, Dick and Harry is out driving their car. Let’s go; we can walk from here,” Oliver said. He opened the car door and slowly climbed out. He was bleeding again, but he still felt okay. “He’s leaving his apartment,” he shouted to Greg. “He knows what happened to Mohammed, and he has the virus!” Oliver tried to run down the sidewalk. Greg and the two agents abandoned the car and followed the wounded priest for two blocks.
“Oliver, you’re bleeding everywhere. Just tell us what he looks like, and we’ll take him.” Greg had taken his arm and tried to guide him into a storefront. For a second, Oliver resisted, and then he stopped.
“Thank God,” he said in a breathless voice. “He’s coming this way, about a block down that way.” He motioned with his head, but all Greg could see was a sea of faces.
“Did you both hear that?” Greg asked Frick and Frack. They nodded as one, just as they had been doing all day. “He’s got the virus with him, so be careful what you shoot.”
Oliver sat down on a step, his face pure white. Okay, so I don’t feel so good, he thought. Terrorist number two was less than a hundred feet away, and Oliver grabbed his mind.
***
Greg heard the scream and saw the telltale disruption in the flow of human traffic. He pulled out his now-defunct police badge and forced his way through the crowd to the stricken man. He didn’t find what he had expected. Number two was clean-shaven, mid-fifties, and obviously a woman. Oliver had missed.
A gunshot drowned out the woman’s screaming, and people began running in all directions. Greg looked up to see Frack sink to his knees, blood beginning to stain the lower portion of his nicely tailored black FBI suit. Frick returned fire, and a man dressed in a North Face ski parka dropped to the concrete, a shower of blood spraying the overcoat of the man behind him. Greg watched as the whole scene developed before him. Frack was down and bleeding, the North Face man was down and bleeding, and then the man with the stained overcoat looked up at Frick and shot him in the head. Frick had missed as well.
The overcoat man began to turn toward Greg, but then suddenly dropped to his knees, his hands clawing at his head and face. He tried to scream, but fell over backward instead. Greg watched the man go down and waited an eternity until he became still. He waited a second longer and then moved carefully toward the fallen terrorist. He reached down and scooped up the fallen weapon, all the while keeping his eyes trained on the man’s oddly shaped head. He moved closer and rifled through the stained overcoat. His fingers found a set of keys and a wad of paper in his chest pocket, but no other weapon. Frack had tossed him a pair of plastic wrist cuffs, but they weren’t necessary. The man was already very dead. His eyes had ruptured, his face was swollen, the skin was stretched tight and covered in small petechial hemorrhages, and what looked like bloody brain oozed from both of his ears. In his left hand was a small blue vial.
Greg stood and walked back over to Oliver. The priest was praying, and Greg sat next to him waiting for him to finish.
“I don’t know how well it will be received, but I just gave myself Last Rites.” The priest’s voice was barely a whisper. “Sorry, Greg. I screwed up.” He looked over at the still body of Frick. “It happened so fast. I think I passed out a little and then got so scared that he was going to get away that I grabbed the first mind I could.” Oliver was crying. “He shot them, and I couldn’t stop him. I tried.”
“You did stop him. He’s dead. We have the vial.” The ubiquitous New York City sirens were getting louder.
Chapter 51
The vial was getting warm. No, it’s getting hot, Issam Rahim corrected himself. He knew that if the vial was warmed too quickly the yield would be low, so he turned the lamp down. He picked up the instructions for the twentieth time in an hour, but they still didn’t tell him anything new. His Arabic was only passable, so his particular set of instructions had been written in English, but something had been lost in the translation.
It started raining again, and the drops drummed on the slate roof and Issam’s nerves. It was always raining in Seattle, and he didn’t have a clue what the rain would do to the processed paper. Part of the reconstitution process involved immersing the paper in a tub of water for five minutes, but then—and the instructions were very clear on this point—the sheets were to be dried and kept dry. He looked out the window as spring rain turned his steep driveway into a small river. Like Izhan Ahmed in Los Angeles, and the other fourteen fighters, Issam had been chosen for his ability to think independently and adapt to changing circumstances. The special paper would never work here, and with each passing moment, Issam knew that his opportunity for shahada was slipping away. For more than three years, he had dreamed of his glorious martyrdom. With one act, all his offenses would be wiped away, and he would find himself sitting close to the throne of the Almighty, living in the most beautiful house in all of paradise, the dar al-shuhada, the house of martyrs. Now, the rain threatened all of that.
He stroked the blue vial and found that it had cooled. The quarantine was scheduled to begin in less than six hours, and the streets were filled with Americans hurrying to buy enough beer, potato chips, and DVDs to last a week. His heart told him that the time to act was now, but his mind hesitated. The vial had not had the requisite thirty hours to reach maximum potency.
It will have to do, he thought, and resolutely opened the vial of the Hybrid virus.
***
The death of Oliver had slowed everyone and everything, except for Phil’s mind. He kept running scenarios in his head, calculating how many more people would die with each second, minute, and hour delay. It had taken more than a day for the government bureaucracy to decide how to get him safely to Los Angeles, and then another four hours to arrange for secure transport. Phil had become a national risk and a national treasure, both of which required a twenty-car entourage.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said to Rodney Patton through his face shield as they cruised down the 405 with a police escort. Phil was wearing a level-four contamination suit, complete with his own purified air source and a team of technicians to ensure that it worked. “There’s too much going on around me to get a clear picture of what’s going on out there.”
“What do you need?” Patton screamed back.
“To be by myself,” Phil screamed. The cacophony of voices, opinions, and worry flooded every space in his head.
“There’s no way anyone is going to let you go out solo. That suit alone requires two people to make it work right.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Phil came very close to swearing from pure frustration.
Patton just shook his large head.
“We don’t have the time for this,” Phil said, and then there was a series of muted explosions. Cars ahead of them and behind them began to careen in every direction. Hoods, hubcaps, and engine parts flew all around them. “Keep driving,” Phil yelled to their driver as their black Suburban accelerated through the growing pile-up. “Just another day in L.A. traffic,” Phil said to Patton.
“Bullshit!” the big black man said, but his face had broken out into a grin from ear to ear. Ron Benedict looked back at them with a scowl on his face.
“You really shouldn’t have done that, Doctor,” he scolded Phil. “These bastards have infiltrated every level of our government; and after what happened in New York, you can bet your ass that they know that you’re here and what you can do.”
“Then let me do it,” Phil yelled back at Benedict, who glanced over at Patton and then finally turned back to face forward.
“Keep going,” he said to the driver.
It took them forty-five minutes to complete the first of twenty-four grids, and Phil had reached his limit. “This is taking too much time. We need to use a helicopter.”
No one had wanted to accept the responsibility of putting Phil in a helicopter that was making slow circuits over America’s second largest city. Benedict had pushed for one, but had been overruled at almost every level. “You have to convince them that this is going to take too much time.” Phil had to yell to be heard.
“Tell them he forced you,” Patton added.
Benedict hesitated for a moment and then reached for his cell phone. After ten minutes of arguing, punctuated by long periods of silence, the assistant director of the FBI closed his phone and took a deep breath. “It’s going to take at least an hour for the attorney general to sign off on the presidential order. So while they worry about the niceties, we are going to misappropriate a helicopter.” Benedict turned and faced Phil. “This better be worth my pension.”
Thirty minutes later, the three men were skimming across the rooftops of East L.A. in a police helicopter.
“He wants you to slow down,” Patton said as Phil started to motion with his arms. They couldn’t get him a headset without breaking the suit’s air seals, so he and Patton had worked out some signals. “Hover, right here.”
Phil scribbled a note and passed it to Patton. “Can you drop us any lower?” Rodney asked the pilot. The LAPD pilot nodded and dropped down low enough that grass and dust began to fly through the open window.
Phil listened with his mind—there had been something here, but it seemed remote. He was here—gone now, Phil quickly wrote and showed it to Patton.
The big man frowned and the search went on. Seven more times, Phil had them pause and nearly land, but each time the spore had grown cold.
“We’re going to need to refuel,” the pilot told Benedict after nearly two hours of the yo-yo flying. Patton twirled his finger in the air for Phil, who nodded that he understood.
Phil couldn’t shut out his companions’ growing frustration and panic. He reached for the pad of paper, which had slipped between his seat and Patton’s. He was just straightening up when he felt it again, only stronger. He grabbed Patton’s arm so hard and suddenly that the big man yelped.
“Son of a bitch!” Rodney screamed, trying to pry Phil’s gloved hand from his forearm. Benedict looked back at the sudden commotion, and it took him a moment before he understood.
“Stop!” he yelled to the pilot. “Hold this position.”
Phil was writing again, and Rodney was rubbing his injured arm.
“That’s some grip he’s got,” Patton said to Benedict as Phil finished his note. “He wants to land there.” Phil was pointing at the tallest building in a cluster of tall buildings. A circled H marked a helipad.
“That can’t be right. That’s the Federal Building,” the pilot said.
“Shit,” said Benedict.
“Son of a bitch,” replied Patton. “This should have been the first place we looked.”
The pilot flared the helicopter and bumped to a soft landing. Phil was out a moment after the skids touched down. “He’s here,” he yelled to Benedict through the roar of the blades.
“Say again?”
“He’s here.” Phil’s voice was still muffled, even though the pair had moved away from the helicopter. Patton trailed behind, blocking out some of the rotor noise. “He works in this building,” he said, pulling open a door. A powerful stream of mental energy compelled him down a flight of stairs.
“Dr. Rucker, it’s safer to take the elevator,” Benedict called after him, but all he got in return was a series of unintelligible noises that under the right circumstances could have been words.
“Yeah, he’s always this way,” Patton said in answer to Benedict’s questioning look. “After you,” he said, and Patton followed the assistant director of the FBI down the stairs.
Phil went down seven flights before he started checking the floors individually. At first, he would just open the fire door and stand there for a moment. By the twenty-fifth floor, he was walking the circuit of the floor. When he opened the door to the twenty-third floor, he stopped and turned to his two escorts. “In here,” he said, and they followed him into the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management with their weapons drawn. A number of people began to stand and challenge them, but they were immediately silenced when Benedict introduced himself. Phil just kept walking until he came to a small corner office. Phil read the nameplate: Joseph Rider.
“Is this the guy?” Patton poked his head into the empty office.
Phil didn’t hear him. He had wheeled around and was striding towards a young black woman. He almost made it, but the isolation suit wasn’t designed for running. Phil fell face first into a file cabinet and cracked his faceplate. The young woman screamed and dropped the phone. “She’s warning him!” Phil yelled, struggling to his feet.
Benedict saw the crack and lifted his weapon. “No one move! Everybody down on the floor, now!” Patton had also raised his weapon, and the two panned across the room. “Dr. Rucker, are you still secure?” asked Benedict.
“No leaks; I’m fine. Lower your weapons. They’re not involved.” Phil was back on his feet and had picked up the phone. Joseph Rider, aka Izhan Ahmed, had already hung up. “Where is he?” Phil addressed the cowering woman.
