No one responded.
“Goddamn it,” the DCI barked. “I don’t care about your egos, or your funding woes, or whether a theory is mainstream or fringe. If anyone at this table either doesn’t believe Dr. Russo’s theory is plausible or has a better theory, speak up right now, or I’ll make sure you spend the rest of your careers counting fly turds.”
Again, none of the scientists responded. Some looked at their hands; others shifted nervously in their seats. The DCI looked at each one in turn. “No? No one?” He turned to Russo again. “Doctor, I assume you have some ideas how we can confirm or refute whether this stuff is… What did you call it?”
“Petro-parasitic.”
“Right.”
Russo thought for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll have an answer for you in the morning.”
The DCI thanked and excused the group, save Fisher, Lambert, the DOE undersecretary, and the scientist from the High Energy Physics division, a tall, balding man with thick, wiry eyebrows named Weldon Shoals.
“There’s another component to this issue we need to discuss,” the DCI said. “I know everyone here has top secret and above clearance, but I’ll remind you that whatever we discuss stays here.”
The undersecretary and Shoals nodded.
The DCI turned to Lambert. “Irv, if you would.”
Lambert spent the next ten minutes outlining what they knew and what they suspected about PuH-19. He left out any mention of Peter, Calvin Stewart, Bolot Omurbai, or the North Koreans. Top secret clearances or not, these men didn’t have the need to know.
“The question we have,” the DCI said, “is what could someone with technical know-how do with this fungus, some PuH-19, and a linear particle accelerator?”
“You mean, could they create a giant fungus monster, or some kind of cancer supercure?” Shoals said, straight-faced.
Fisher chuckled. The DCI, hiding his own smile, replied, “No, what I’m asking is could the fungus’s characteristics be enhanced — altered.”
“In other words, mutated?” Shoals asked.
“Yes.”
“Absolutely. Mutation has gotten a bad rap. Hollywood horror directors have made it a boogie word, but mutation is just another way of saying ‘change.’
“But if I understand you correctly, what you want to know is, could someone, using PuH-19, a linear accelerator, and some high-energy physics principles, turn Dr. Russo’s strain of Chytridiomycota — a theory I believe has real credibility, by the way — into something worse than it might otherwise be? Something that not only eats oil but uses it for fuel, then replicates and spreads like a plague?”
The DCI nodded.
“The answer is yes. Without a doubt. See, the trick is, you don’t shoot radioactive junk at something and it suddenly mutates into whatever you want it to be. It’s not alchemy. It would take years of trial and error to find the right balance — the right recipe that gives you what you want.
“Most man-made mutations — both bad and good — are discovered by accident. So, back to the essence of your question: Could these notional someones you’re talking about have come up with the right combination of ingredients to create a weaponized, petro-parasitic fungus? Again, I’m sorry to say, the answer is yes.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Lambert said.
“And it gets worse,” Shoals said. “If in fact something like this überfungus existed, the only sure way to kill it or stop it would be to have access to the process that created it. Without that, you’re just stumbling around in the dark, hoping you find the right recipe to shut the thing off. And, if by some miracle, you found it, would it be too late?”
35
“And I tell you, as surely as Allah’s will binds us all, the modern world and the disease of technology cleaves us from all that is holy. It is a pervasive evil, one that infects every person and every culture it touches. Above all others, this is the greatest danger to Islam—”
Fisher pressed the remote’s REWIND button and watched for the third time Bolot Omurbai’s latest speech. He paused it, Omurbai’s face filling the screen.
“That’s what you’ve got in mind, don’t you?” Fisher murmured.
Unable to sleep, he’d driven to Fort Meade at three a.m., signed in with the duty officer, and then gone to the situation room and made coffee. Two hours and four cups later, he’d reviewed all the speeches Omurbai had given since beginning his second reign as Kyrgyzstan’s president.
“Technology cleaves us from all that is holy…”
“A pervasive evil…”
“Infects every person and every culture…”
Omurbai was insane, that much seemed clear, but however irrational his thoughts, his reasoning was well-ordered: The modern world is evil; technology is an infectious agent — it is the greatest enemy of Islam.
And what, Fisher thought, is the essence of the modern world? Of technology? What is the engine behind it all? Answer: oil, and everything that flows from it. A plus B equals C. Oil is the enemy of Islam; oil itself must be destroyed.
The scourge of Manas.
And where better to launch the opening salvo in his war but beneath his own country, which shares one of the world’s greatest untapped reservoirs of oil? Conservatively, the fields beneath Central Asia were estimated to contain 300 billion barrels — a third of a trillion — of recoverable oil.
It was a mind-boggling number, Fisher admitted, and without the Chytridiomycota (or, as Fisher and Lambert had started calling it, Manas), Omurbai would have as much luck destroying the fields as he would trying to knock the air from the sky. But now…
He laid the remote aside, sat back, and rubbed his temples. How had all this started? With one man, his brother, dead. It seemed surreal, the twisting course he’d followed to this point, and somewhere along the way Peter’s death had been pushed into the background. Despite what his instincts had told him, Fisher had hoped, in some small part of his mind, that Peter’s death would turn out to be a simple — if that word could be used — murder. Faced with that, Fisher would have simply tracked down those responsible and seen them either dead or locked up. Done. But it had turned out to be anything but a simple, thoughtless murder, hadn’t it?
Instead, here he was, sitting alone in the dark and staring at the face of a madman who planned to let loose a plague that could in one fell swoop turn the planet back to the Stone Age.
Fisher awoke to a hand shaking his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw Lambert standing beside his chair. “Morning,” Lambert said. “How long have you been here?”
“What time is it?”
“Six.”
“A few hours. Couldn’t sleep.”
“Join the club.” Lambert nodded at Omurbai’s frozen face on the screen. “Not a good image to have in your head when trying to nod off.”
Fisher took a sip from his coffee cup; it was cold. “You know what he’s got planned, don’t you, Lamb?”
Lambert nodded and sat down in the next chair. “There are still a lot of ifs. We don’t even know if that stuff is what we think it is. Or if they’ve managed to enhance it. That’s what they needed Stewart for. Something wasn’t working, something they couldn’t get right. The question is, did they fix it?”
“Good question. I’ve also been thinking about Carmen Hayes,” Fisher said. “She’s gotten lost in all this.”
“And Peter.”
“Him, too. But at least now we know why they grabbed her in the first place.”
The biggest hurdle Omurbai and the North Koreans would have with Manas was deployment: how to introduce it where it would have the biggest impact and spread the quickest. Fisher assumed they’d long ago broken Carmen down and that she’d been cooperating. She’d been gone four months — plenty of time to study the subterranean rivers and streams beneath Kyrgyzstan and its neighboring countries, then map the points where they intersected the oil fields and tell Omurbai exactly where to drop Manas.