He'd think about it all the way across the Atlantic.
CHAPTER 27
"It really is a waste of time," Barbara Archer said at her seat in the conference room. "F4 is dead, just her heart's still beating. We've tried everything. Nothing stops Shiva. Not a damned thing."
"Except the -B vaccine antibodies," Killgore noted.
"Except them," Archer agreed. "But nothing else works, does it?"
There was agreement around the table. They had literally tried every treatment modality known to medicine, including things merely speculated upon at CDC, USAMRIID, and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. They'd even tried every antibiotic in the arsenal from penicillin to Keflex, and two new synthetics under experimentation by Merck and Horizon. The use of the antibiotics had merely been t-crossing and i-dotting, since not one of them helped viral infections, but in desperate times people tried desperate measures, and perhaps something new and unexpected might have happened-but not with Shiva. This new and improved version of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, genetically engineered to be hardier than the naturally produced version that still haunted the Congo River Valley, was as close to 100 percent fatal and 100 percent resistant to treatment as anything known to medical science, and absent a landmark breakthrough in infectious-disease treatment, nothing would help those exposed to it. Many would suffer exposure from the initial release, and the rest would get it from the -A vaccine Steve Berg had developed, and through both modalities, Shiva would sweep across the world like a slow-developing storm. Inside of six months, the people left alive would fall into three categories. First, those who hadn't been exposed in any way. There would be few of them, since every nation on earth would gobble up supplies of the -A vaccine and inject their citizens with it, because the first Shiva victims would horrify human with access to a television. The second group would be those rarest of people whose immune systems were sufficient to protect them from Shiva. The lab had yet to discover any such individuals, but some would inevitably be out there-happily, most of those would probably die from the collapse of social services in the cities and towns of the world, mainly from starvation or from the panicked lawlessness sure to accompany the plague or from the ordinary bacterial diseases that accompanied large numbers of unburied dead
The third group would be the few thousand people in Kansas. Project Lifeboat, as they thought of it. That group would be composed of active Project members just a few hundred of them-and their families, and other selected scientists protected by Berg's -B vaccine. The Kansas facility was large, isolated, and protected by large quantities of weapons, should any unwelcome visitors approach.
Six months, they thought. Twenty-seven weeks. That's what the computer projections told them. Some areas would go faster than others. The models suggested that Africa would go last of all, because they'd be the last to get the -A vaccine distributed, and because of the poor infrastructure for delivering vital services. Europe would go down first, with its socialized medical-care systems and pliant citizens sure to show up for their shots when summoned, then America, then, in due course, the rest of the world.
"The whole world, just like that," Killgore observed, looking out the windows at the New York/New Jersey border area, with its rolling hills and green deciduous trees. The great farms on the plains that ran from Canada to Texas would go fallow, though some would grow wild wheat for centuries to come. The bison would expand rapidly from their enclaves in Yellowstone and private game farms, and with them the wolves and barren-ground grizzly bear, and the birds, and the coyotes and the prairie dogs. Nature would restore Her balance very quickly, the computer models told them; in less than five years, the entire earth would be transformed.
"Yes. John," Barb Archer agreed. "But we're not there yet. What do we do with the test subjects?"
Killgore knew what she'd be suggesting. Archer hated clinical medicine. "F4 first?"
"It's a waste of air to keep her breathing, and we all know it. They're all in pain, and we're not learning anything except that Shiva is lethal-and we already knew that. Plus, we're going to be moving out west in a few weeks, and why keep them alive that long? We're not moving them out with us, are we?"
"Well, no," another physician admitted.
"Okay, I am tired of wasting my time as a clinician for dead people. I move that we do what we have to do, and be done with it."
"Second," agreed another scientist at the table.
"In favor?" Killgore asked, counting the hands. "Opposed." Only two of those. "The ayes have it. Okay. Barbara and I will take care of it-today, Barb?"
"Why wait, John?" Archer inquired tiredly.
"Kirk Maclean?" Agent Sullivan asked.
"That's right," the man said from behind the door.
"FBI." Sullivan held up his ID. "Can we talk to you?"
"About what?" The usual alarm, the agents saw.
"Do we have to stand in the hall to talk?" Sullivan asked reasonably.
"Oh, okay, sure, come in." Maclean stepped back and opened the door to let them in, then led them into his living room. The TV was on, some cable movie, the agents saw. Kung fu and guns mostly, it appeared.
"I'm Tom Sullivan, and this is Frank Chatham. We're looking into the disappearance of two women," the senior agent said, after sitting down. "We're hoping that you might be able to help us."
"Sure-you mean, like they were kidnapped or something?" the man asked.
"That is a possibility. Their names are Anne Pretloe and Mary Bannister. Some people have told us that you might have known one or both of them," Chatham said next.
They watched Maclean close his eves, then look off to the window for a few seconds. "From the Turtle Inn, maybe?"
"Is that where you met them?"
"Hey, guys, I meet a lot of girls, y'know? That's a good place for it, with the music and all. Got pictures?"
"Here." Chatham handed them across.
"Okay, yeah, I remember Annie-never learned her last name," he explained. "Legal secretary, isn't she?"
"That's correct," Sullivan confirmed. "How well did you know her?"
"We danced some, talked some, had a few drinks, but I never dated her."
"Ever leave the bar with her, take a walk, anything like that?"
"I think I walked her home once. Her apartment was just a few blocks away, right?… Yeah," he remembered after a few seconds. "Half a block off Columbus Avenue. I walked her home-but, hey, I didn't go inside-I mean we never-I mean, I didn't, well-you know, I never did have sex with her." He appeared embarrassed.
"Do you know if she had any other friends?" Chatham asked, taking interview notes.
"Yeah, there was a guy she was tight with, Jim something. Accountant, I think. I don't know how tight they were, but when the two of them were at the bar, they'd usually have drinks together. The other one, I remember the face, but not the name. Maybe we talked some, but I don't remember much. Hey, you know, it's a singles bar, and you meet lotsa people, and sometimes you connect, but mainly you don't."
"Phone numbers?"
"Not from these two. I have two from other gals I met there. Want 'em?" Maclean asked.
"Did they know Mary Bannister or Anne Pretloe?" Sullivan asked.
"Maybe. The women connect better than the men do, y'know, little cliques, like, checking us out-like the guys do, but they're better organized, like, y'know?"
There were more questions, about half an hour's worth, same repeated a few times, which Maclean didn't seem to mind, as some did. Finally they asked if they could look around the apartment. They had no legal right to do this, but oddly, even criminals often allowed it, and more than one of them had been caught because they'd had evidence out in plain view. In this case the agents would be looking for periodicals with photographs of deviant sex practices or even personal photographs of such behavior. But when Maclean led them about, the only photos they saw were of animals and periodicals about nature and conservation-some of them from groups the FBI deemed to be extremist-and all manner of outdoors gear.