“Professor Sterling?”
“I’m here.”
“Lawrence Dunne. I’ve a lot on my plate right now, so I’m going to get right to it. You worked closely with Liam Connor, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Did he ever mention a man named Hitoshi Kitano?”
“The billionaire? No. Why?”
Silence. “We need you to come in. To Fort Detrick. Right away.”
“Why?”
“I’ve no time for explanations right now. One of our staff will call and arrange transport.”
“All right. But what is this—”
“Professor Sterling. I must go, but I personally wanted to stress something to you. At this point, any conversation you may have had with Liam Connor is classified information and should only be discussed with someone in an official capacity. Do you understand?”
Jake heard a knocking at his door.
He started toward it, phone still to his ear.
“No, I’m not entirely sure that I do. Why do you—”
Dunne said, “Please, Professor. Save the talk for later, when we meet.”
The phone went dead.
Jake opened the door.
Maggie was there, the glowing fungus and the letterbox instructions in her hands. She looked exhausted, cold, and scared.
“I need your help,” she said.
DAY 4
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 28
KITANO
19
LAWRENCE DUNNE NODDED TO THE NYPD OFFICER ON THE line as he passed, flanked by his Secret Service detail and a small cluster of aides. The police had set up a multiblock perimeter around Bellevue Hospital, east to west from Second Avenue to the East River and north and south from Twenty-fifth to Thirtieth streets. He checked the time on his BlackBerry: six-forty-nine a.m. The first morning sunlight was just starting to hit the upper floors of the Midtown skyscrapers. Dunne had just arrived from City Hall. The mayor, his staff, and the Office of Emergency Management were doing their best to keep the panic under control and set contingency plans in the event of the worst. Dunne had gotten away as soon as he could.
He’d made the call to Sterling on the trip over. On Dunne’s recommendation, the FBI had kept tabs on Connor after their confrontation two years previously, checking to see if the old man was talking out of school about the Uzumaki. They found no evidence, but the profilers said one of the most likely conduits would be Jake Sterling. They’d get the truth later, he thought, once Sterling was at Detrick. Now if they could just find the other likely conduit, Maggie Connor.
A tighter, tougher cordon awaited him a block in, this one controlled by the Army. The spotlights had everything lit up like noon. The Chemical Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF) worked it by the book, sealed off the ward, made it airtight, and then placed the entire hospital under quarantine. Operational procedures were in place to handle an Uzumaki outbreak, thanks in large part to Dunne. Before he’d taken his position at the NSC six years before, the government had taken a hands-off approach to the Uzumaki. The fungus had been locked up, the spores sealed away in 1972 after Nixon renounced the offensive use of biological weapons. In 1979, Jimmy Carter put it further out of sight, in the hands of that woman Latterell, buried in the chain of command of the USDA, an agency with no military mission. The spores were kept in a sealed, cooled vault for the next twenty years.
After persistent lobbying by Dunne and a few key bioweapons experts and political heavyweights, the seals on the vault had been broken, the Uzumaki brought back to life. It was cultivated, its DNA sequenced, all in the first class-4 facility that the USDA weed people ever had. Upon hearing of this, Connor had been furious. He showed up in Dunne’s office, literally screamed at him, said that a countermeasures program was a Pandora’s box. If the Chinese caught wind, they would be furious beyond belief. The Uzumaki could, Connor said, set off a biological arms race between the two nations, potentially more paranoia-inducing, dangerous, and ultimately destructive than the nuclear arms race with the Soviets decades before.
But Connor was wrong. China could never be trusted; of this Dunne was sure. The case for a crash countermeasures program was a slam dunk. Two of the original seven Japanese subs carrying the Uzumaki cylinders were never found. One was believed to be sunk in deep water somewhere between Hawaii and California, unrecoverable, but the last one was a giant question mark. And who knew what the Chinese might have dug up at Unit 731? All it took was one hardy little spore. Growing a fungus wasn’t like enriching uranium: no high-tech centrifuges needed, no yellowcake imports, no production facilities to show up on satellite photos. The Chinese could have the Uzumaki, and the United States would never know. Not until it was used. Until the Chinese handed it to the North Koreans, the North Koreans sold it to al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda released it in a major U.S. city.
The most devastating terrorist attack in human history.
THE HUEY’S BLADES WHERE CHURNING TO LIFE AS DUNNE approached alone, ordering his retinue to stay behind. The makeshift helipad was set up in the middle of the FDR Drive, the chopper fueled and ready to take off for Fort Detrick. The airspace had been cleared within fifty miles of their flight path, and fighters scrambled to escort them.
Dunne spotted Sadie Toloff, the chief scientist of the USDA’s Foreign Disease–Weed Science Research Unit and the leader of Fort Detrick’s Uzumaki countermeasures program. Dunne knew Sadie very well. She was attractive, with short blond hair in a pageboy cut, though her features were a bit too quirky to be considered classically beautiful. She was wiry, almost nerdy, but very fit—she was a middle-distance runner in college. She completed her Ph.D. twenty years ago, on host-pathogen coevolution in cereal crops. He had known her for years, had personally approved her latest promotion, had even been her lover for a brief stretch four years ago. A mistake, they both agreed. Each was incapable of fealty to anything but the job. When a few spores from a citrus blight blew across the Atlantic on the African winds, Toloff and her team were the first responders. She was also known within a small, elite circle as Queen of the Uzumaki.
Yelling to be heard over the noise of the rotors, Toloff kept it all business. “That’s a triple-sealed Hazmat container with blood, saliva, and stool samples from the Times Square victim, along with breath samples for airborne spores. The individual containers are locked inside a steel-molybdenum vault that can withstand anything short of a nuclear blast. If the chopper goes down, that container will not, under any conceivable circumstances, breach.”
Toloff pointed to the team of four men handling the container. “Those two are from USAMRIID and the other two from my team at USDA.” She frowned. “They think us weed folks are pansies. Can’t stand that this is my show.”
Dunne nodded. USAMRIID dealt with the high-profile killers, human pathogens, such as smallpox and Ebola. The USDA team handled invasive pathogens. It wasn’t often the two organizations worked together closely, but the Uzumaki had something for everyone. “So far no fistfights?” Dunne asked.
“You wait,” she said. “Blood will flow.”
“You look beat,” Dunne said.
“I’m fine. But I’ll be better once we’re back at Detrick.” She rubbed her forehead with her palm. “What is happening, Lawrence? Some psycho woman kills Connor, then loads a Japanese kid up with what looks to hell like the Uzumaki and dumps him in Times Square? Where could she have gotten it?”