A War of Shadows, page 6
She was silent. Finally she asked, “Mark? Is it within our current technology to build something like this?”
He shrugged. “I guess so. The bacteriophage would be the toughest. Give me Fort Dietrick, about twenty or thirty million dollars, and a staff of a dozen really good medical technicians, and I think I could do it in half a year or so.”
Sandra shivered slightly, even in the controlled atmosphere of the labs. “Now I see why they had all those conventions against this sort of thing. Edelman—that funny little ugly FBI man—said upstairs that it was an erector set for scientists.”
“At least that,” Mark said grimly. “And somebody’s really made a nasty toy here. Or toys. There’s one other thing.”
She looked up at him. “What?”
“The empty cylinders contained, of course, some of the Boland strain. Apparently it’s kept in a nice mixture of freon and other gases which make it totally dormant until exposed to air. Some of the stuff would be left, naturally.”
“Naturally,” she agreed. “So?”
“It’s different, Sandy. It had the same ancestors, but that’s all. It’s not the same bug at all.”
She stared at him. “So much for the universal vaccine, then,” she said flatly.
He smiled. “What can be engineered can be destroyed,” he assured her. “At least we got the start. Now, as for me, I think a good eight hours and I’ll lick it. You get some sleep, too. You’re as dead as I am.”
She smiled weakly. “Okay, we’ll both go. You going home?”
“No, I’ll go beddy-bye upstairs in the clinic. You?”
She sighed. “I’m going to try and make it. I need clothes, a shower, and sleep. They know where to find me if they need me. I’m only the paper-pusher here.”
“No you’re not,” he said kindly. “You’re the glue.”
Her sleep was deep and dreamless, the best sleep, the kind her body and mind craved. In her own apartment, in her own bed, a comforting sleep that, deep down, she knew might be her only chance for many days.
As it always did, the telephone’s constant ringing brought her out of it. She sought to ignore it, even as it drew her consciousness to the surface.
She awoke as if drugged, and reached for the phone. As she did her eyes fell on the little electric clock next to it.
It said 4:12 P.M.
My god! she thought. I’ve slept almost thirteen hours!
She picked up the insistent phone. “O’Connell,” she managed, her mouth full of mush.
“Sandy? This is Mark,” came a familiar voice. “I figured you’d still be out. Good girl. Now get over to the labs here as soon as you can.”
She tried to shake the sleep from her. “What’s happening?”
“I—I can’t tell you right now,” he said hesitantly. “Something nasty. Something I stumbled on by accident. Just—well, get over here quick as you can, okay? I’ll be in my cubbyhole.”
She was puzzled, but said, “All right, Mark,” and hung up.
* * *
It’s funny how when you oversleep you feel like you’ve never slept at all, she thought for the tenth time since starting out. The trip was a quick one, under an hour if you had the traffic with you, and she pulled into a space assigned to NIH bigwigs and hurried inside. Mark’s tone on the phone worried her.. Something nasty, he’d said. Something I stumbled on by accident.
Of course most business couldn’t be done by phone anyway—security and all that. But his tone—he’d been upset, terribly upset, and fear tinged in his voice.
What would cause fear in the medical Rock of Gibraltar?
There were the usual procedures to go through. Nine guards, twenty-six TV cameras—maybe more, they never told you everything—four airlocks and the whole sterilization mess.
Finally in her medical whites she walked again down that familiar yellow-painted corridor to those double doors and pushed them open.
Nobody was there. The computer was on, the whole lab was activated, there was even a sample on the electron microscope. A pad lay on the floor as if hastily dropped, and she picked it up. It held a lengthy serological series in Mark’s handwriting. He had been trying to find the key, the organisms from which the two Wilderness Organisms had been bred.
She was curious, but not concerned. He went out for more coffee, probably, she told herself. She settled down to wait for him, passing the time until his return by going over his notes. They were in a typical doctor’s scrawl, and highly disorganized, and outside her specialty at that, but she roughly followed what he was doing.
Having isolated from the protein “punctuation mark” the first signal in the DNA message of the Wilderness Organism, he and the computer were trying to duplicate it using computer models.
Dr. Denise Ferman, a petite little black woman who was a crack expert at toxicology, stuck her head in the door.
“Oh, hi, Sandy!” she said. “Where’s Mark?” “In the canteen, most likely,” Sandra replied. Ferman shook her head. “No, I just came from there. He must be up top—I’m pretty sure he’s not in A-complex.”
That worried Sandra. She reached over, pressed an intercom stud and three numbers on its face. “Security,” said a voice in her ear.
“This is Dr. O’Connell,” she said. “Is Dr. Mark Spiegelman in A-complex or did he come out?”
“Let me check,” said the voice. There were a few seconds of dead air, then the voice returned. “Dr. Spiegelman logged into A-complex at 12:15, cleared security and decontam at 12:45, and has not yet emerged.”
“All right, thank you,” she said, hanging up. “He’s got to be here someplace,” she said to Denise Ferman. “Security says he is.”
The toxicologist looked puzzled. “Let’s go see,” she suggested.
There were eight one-person control centers in A-complex, four multi-person labs, and a small automated canteen. They checked them all.
Nobody had seen or heard Spiegelman in hours. “This is impossible,” Ferman insisted. “You can’t disappear out of a place like this. He has to have gone up, no matter what security says.”
She didn’t know why, but she was suddenly feeling nervous and a little scared. “I’m going back up,” she told the scientist. “You let me know if he somehow turns up here.”
Ferman nodded, and Sandra O’Connell began the long procedure back out. Something smelled—and smelled bad. First that strange phone call, then this. At each step in the chain she questioned the human attendants. None had seen Dr. Spiegelman leave, and his initial passes were still there. Once out, she called down to Denise Ferman once more.
“Still nothing,” the toxicologist told her. “He isn’t here.”
She went to security and made a scene. They, too, assured her that it was impossible for him not to be down there, but when they checked with the others they agreed to go down and take a look. A huge black sergeant and four very efficient-looking squad members went down, through the same procedure, checks, and watches that made it impossible for anyone to just vanish.
The security team was very efficient without being intrusive. They searched the obvious places, then the less than obvious, then the impossible places as well.
Over an hour after they went in, the intercom at the security central desk crackled. “We found him,” came the sergeant’s voice.
She could hardly restrain herself. “Oh, thank god! Where was he?”
The sergeant hesitated. “Inside a vacuum chamber in Con 3. Somebody knocked him out, dragged him in there, and pumped all the air out.”
SEVEN
The great airliner rose slowly and majestically like a giant silver bird, looking too impossibly huge and bulky ever to become airborne. But its nose went up, and suddenly, painfully, it started to climb.
Suzy laughed and rubbed her hands. It would pass almost directly over their position in the woods just beyond the end of the runway. With George and Alicia holding the mortar steady, Suzy held the shell just over the mouth of the round, squat mortar until the plane was almost on top of them, then dropped it in the hole and fell back.
There was a whump, a swirl of smoke, and some-thing shot upward, catching the great plane amidships. There was a tremendous explosion, and the huge silver bird started to collapse, almost to fall apart in a ball of flame.
He swore he could hear the screams of the dying passengers, 386 ordinary men, women, and children burning, falling to their deaths. He was only superficially aware of Suzy and the others dancing and cheering as the plane came down. He was up there, screaming with the dying innocents, no longer sure as to why they were dying.
Someone was grabbing him, poking him. “Come on, Joe! Wake up!” a deep, throaty voice urged.
He awoke with a cry stifled in mid-utterance as he realized where he was and that it had been a dream once again.
Doug Courtland looked at him in concern. “You oughta see a shrink or somethin’ about this, man,” he told the other. “My lord! This is the third time this month!”
He sighed and wiped the perspiration from his face. “I’ll be okay, Doug, thanks,” he assured the other. “Just a nightmare. Nothing more.”
Courtland looked uncertain, but finally nodded, shrugged, and walked back to his own bed.
He sat up, holding his head in his hands, trying to stop the shaking, to get a grip on himself.
A nightmare, yes. Just a dream. A bad dream. Only once, almost ten years ago, it’d been real.
There was a Hell, he told himself, and he was in it. He got up, went into the bathroom, closed the door and switched on the light. He steadied himself on the sink and looked into the mirror.
It was a strong face on a strong body; a Caucasian complexion but strong Negroid features and a bush of thick, wiry hair now tinged prematurely with gray. The face was lined, etched in with experiences he could not forget; his brown eyes looked old, empty, hollow.
When would it let him alone, this past that haunted him? What did it want? What sort of penance would sponge away the guilt?
Look what’s happened to you, Sam Cornish, he thought bitterly. Ten years older than your age of thirty-four and growing older at twice the clip every night. A hundred years in Hell already served—how many more to go?
How young and bright and starry-eyed Sam Cornish was when he was alive, he thought. Black power and the Revolution and all that. Black power! He snorted in derision. Too white for the Blacks, too black for the whites, but just right for the Revolution. Read Marx and Mao and protest march and all that shit.
But to most of his contemporaries that was passe, lip service. Hedonism replaced the Revolution before he’d gotten there. Blow pot, disco dance, go all night in bed with Suzy, blue jeans and bennies…
Suzy. There she was again. The Revolution would sweep away decadence. Come the Revolution and all would be perfect. Society was rotten, capitalism was poison, they’d drugged the world into submission. They had to be awakened.
He’d believed it, all of it. He’d drunk it in like an alcoholic in a liquor store.
Seven or eight committed “patriots,” a tight little cell. Hit a bank here, a bank there for money. It was easy. Just pass a note. Pick small banks, never be ambitious. George with his chemicals. Steal some weapons here, some explosives there. Even that damned mortar from a National Guard unit in summer camp. Easy. Fun.
Some notes to the papers, a fancy name, the Synergistic Commune Action Brigade, some bombs in harmless places. Everybody so sure of the Revolution nobody even stopped for a moment to ask what the Revolution was, who would run it, and other things like that. It was “us” against “them,” kiddies playing revolutionaries against the fascists.
Until that plane. Three hundred eighty-six dead innocent people, and the SCAB celebrated a great victory.
Somehow, deep down, he’d kidded himself.
Somehow he’d rationalized, told himself that the Revolution was real, the Revolution would come, that what he was doing was building a better world.
Three hundred eighty-six dead people. And they danced and laughed in their joy.
Three hundred eighty-six dead people.
Building a better world for who? And what sort of world?
There’d been 387 casualties in that plane crash, the extra one being Sam Cornish.
He’d run and run and still it pursued him. Here, at Sky Forest, he’d stopped physically, and in the strong-man work of the commune and its unquestioning ways he’d worked it off, put it away from him, become Joe Conway, tapped maple trees in these beautiful Vermont mountains, cut cordwood, built buildings and dug post holes for fences, and he’d dropped out.
Except now, except in the night, when the ghost of Sam Cornish still haunted him. Dope didn’t work, pills didn’t work, nothing worked.
He was checking out the site they’d picked for a new stable for the horses, farther away from the main buildings, deciding how much wood would be needed, how construction would have to proceed, when the man came out of the trees toward him. He turned and looked at the stranger curiously; unknowns were rare up here, and this fellow seemed particularly out of place in suit and tie and tailored overcoat.
He waited, wondering, for the newcomer to reach him.
The man stopped a little away from where he stood and looked him over. “Hello, Mr. Cornish,” he said in a soft southern accent that was as out of place here as the man himself.
Sam Cornish froze, ice shooting through him. He’d been here so many years that he no longer feared capture or exposure, never even thought of it any more—and here it was.
“Joe Conway’s the name,” he responded nervously.
The man smiled. “Don’t worry, Mr. Cornish. I’m not here to arrest you. We could have done that years ago.”
Something twisted within him; he wasn’t certain whether to attack or run, so he stood where he was. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.
“Mr. Cornish, we deal in the public safety. We try and remove threats to it. If they cease to be threats, well, there’s a lot of other folks still menacing the public who need attention. Some of your old buddies, for example, got to Cuba. They sat there on their fannies in shacks cutting sugar cane and singing revolutionary songs in Spanish. Well and good. Let them stay in their own self-imposed prison. It’s cheaper. You came here. We traced you here inside of a few months, and let you be first because we hoped that some of your lovable friends would join you. After a while it was pretty clear that you had had second thoughts about the revolution, and were in your own version of a Cuban sugar cane field. We picked up Granger, as you probably know. He told us you tried to stop the plane attack, and left when they carried it out. So we left you here. Cheaper and convenient. Of course, we keep an eye on you and hundreds of others like you just in case, or in case some of your more dangerous friends decide to renew old friendships, but that’s all.”
His emotions were in turmoil, jumbled and confused. Somehow what the man said made sense, but it was, in its own way, more depressing than being a hounded fugitive.
“So why tell me this now?” he asked. “Or are you finally getting around to the leftovers?”
The other man shrugged. “I told you I wasn’t here to arrest you. I want to make a proposition to you. If you say no, well, then, that’s that. Business as usual. Stick to this commune and this lifestyle and you’ll never see us again.”
This was more confusing than before. “What sort of a proposition?” he asked suspiciously, not trusting anything the man was saying.
“You’re pretty cut off here,” the man noted. “Do you know about the Wilderness Organism?”
He nodded slowly. “We get the papers. Lots of talk about it, naturally. There are a lot of small towns in Vermont.”
“And you’ve heard that the thing is a laboratory-created disease? That someone is planting it?”
“I heard,” he said, not sure where this was leading.
“Suppose I said that we just shot Jim Foley trying to plant the disease?” the man continued.
Cornish’s mouth dropped. “Foley!” Suddenly his mind raced. “Any other—”
“No, no Suzanne Martine yet,” the man replied, guessing his question. “Wouldn’t be surprised, though.”
He relaxed a bit, strangely relieved but unable to figure out why.
“Mr. Cornish, I’d like you to come down to the village with me,” the man told him. “I want to show you a couple of movies, that’s all. At the end I’ll explain all this, and you can say no, no thanks, and walk out of there and back here. No hassles, no conditions, no blackmail. Will you do it for me? Just to humor me?”
The old suspicions were back. “You’re not just looking for an easy arrest, are you?”
The man sighed. “Mr. Cornish, I wouldn’t have to trick you and you know it. Come on. I promise nothing else will happen.”
He gave in, his curiosity overcoming his massive doubts. “Why not?” he said, resigned.
They used the back of the sheriffs office, which was cleared. An FBI badge and a call from the governor did wonders.
The films were a horror story. Hundreds and hundreds of ordinary people, men, women, children, all in some way horribly stricken. The blind, the feeble-minded, the palsied and the paralyzed, and those haunted faces of those who’d lost their pasts.
And then the big show, a tape of Operation Wilderness itself.
“It was dumb luck we caught them,” the agent, who never had given his name, told him. “Sheriff of a ski town not far from the cabin was an ex-Bureau man who’d been on your case. Foley came into town for supplies, and he made him, even after all these years, even with the beard and dyed hair. He’d worked sixteen solid weeks on the plane sabotage case, and our artists had portrayed you all in every way we could think of to disguise you. The pictures were just burned into his brain. So he followed Foley back to the cabin, got a make on two others through the Bureau telex, caught sight of a sub-machine gun, and we set it up.”
