No, no, no, no…
Maggie was shaking, her whole body quivering. “Oh, God, no. Please. Stop this. What do you want from me?”
“No. That’s not it at all. There’s nothing you can tell me.”
“Then why?”
“I want proof.”
Maggie was hyperventilating. “Proof of what?” She tugged as hard as she could at her restraints, unable to move. The Crawler loomed over her left eye. She tried to will it away.
Orchid twitched her hand. The Crawler skittered right a fraction of an inch, its legs catching the skin like barbs of a fishhook. Maggie squeezed her eyes shut, tried to brace herself for the pain she knew was coming. She had seen Crawlers tear through leather—her skin would be like paper.
“Ready?” Orchid asked.
Maggie forced herself to open her eyes. She said, “Screw you.”
Orchid smiled, then closed her hand into a fist twice in rapid succession.
Maggie winced, but there was no sharp bite of pain. Instead a slight sound, like a perfume mister. The air inside the mask was suddenly cloudy.
Maggie blinked, coughed inside the mask. The Crawler was motionless on her cheek, its legs holding on to her skin.
What just happened?
Maggie looked to Orchid. Their eyes met. Orchid smiled again.
The mask on her face. The filters were designed to catch particulates. Normally it was to keep dangerous agents out. But here it was meant to keep them in.
“Inhalation,” Orchid said.
The Uzumaki.
The mist was full of Uzumaki spores.
39
THE PRINCIPALS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL AS sembled in Camp David’s Laurel Lodge conference room. The mood was serious, no small talk, no joking and jostling. Lawrence Dunne took a chair along the back wall.
The room was long and narrow, with a sloped ceiling and wood paneling on all four walls. A thirty-foot-long wooden table ran down the center. The vice president, the President’s chief of staff, and the national security adviser were on one side, talking in quiet tones. The secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs sat directly across. Clustered at the far end were the directors of National Intelligence and Homeland Security, along with the FBI director, the head of the CDC, and the commander of Fort Detrick. Normally a ring of lesser functionaries would occupy the chairs against the walls, but not today. Today no one was let in the room who wasn’t absolutely essential. Dunne was the only deputy-level staff member present, in the room at the President’s behest.
The POTUS himself entered solo, exuding authority, making it clear to everyone who was in charge. With his Hollywood looks and background as self-made CEO of a billion-dollar Internet services empire, he had run as an agent of change, loyal to no one but the American people, promising to restore the nation to its former glory as the undisputed economic leader of the world. He was addicted to Butterfingers and was a serial sports fanatic, his current obsession being handball. He liked to project a calm, laid-back persona to the public, but he could stand up and dominate a room when he had to.
He worked his way around the table, calling for updates one by one. The Homeland Security chief, Mike Reardon, spoke first, a heavyset man with flat features and weathered skin, more truck driver than bureaucrat. “We’ve got the media under control for the moment. We’re leaking stories that the ATF found marijuana fields at Seneca Depot, and the bombing was a burn. All part of a major drug ring roundup. We told them to expect more arrests soon.”
“No one has connected this to Rochester?”
“We’re connecting the dots for them. The cover story is that the Rochester event was part of the roundup, stopping a shipment to Canada across Lake Ontario.”
Alex Grass, the head of the CDC, spoke next, a dapper man with sleepy eyes. “Dylan Connor is showing symptoms. His temperature dropped. He’s still alert, but he’s having auditory hallucinations.”
“What about the guy from Rochester?”
“Positive. Also, one of the soldiers from Drum that picked him up looks like he has it. The rest we don’t know.”
“We’re absolutely sure it’s the Uzumaki?”
“Three labs independently ran the samples, all with different protocols. I personally supervised the tests at CDC. Toloff at USDA. Arvenick’s people at USAMRIID. Every assay came back positive, three sigma. It’s the Uzumaki.”
The room was quiet except for the background clatter from the displays on the walls.
The President called upon the commander at Detrick, Anthony Arvenick. He was in charge of the operational response in case of a large-scale outbreak. “There’s no doubt, Mr. President,” the general said, his voice grave. “She’s got the Uzumaki. And thousands of those Crawlers. The scenarios range from bad to worse to nightmare.”
“Start with bad.”
“She’s already shown us bad. She leaves the Crawlers in a public place, they bite whoever happens by. But at least we know we’ve been hit. It’s bad, but in this scenario, at least we know. We can do our best to contain it, have a shot at limiting the damage to a small geographic area. The difference between a few deaths and a few thousand might boil down to the direction the wind is blowing.
“Worse, she releases it in a major population center but quietly. Say, sending in a Crawler to expel spores in the ventilation ducts of a building. The unsuspecting occupants come and go, and a whole city could be infected within days. If we picked it up in time, we might be able to shut it down. But to quarantine a city would be hell. It would start a panic like you can’t imagine.”
“Give me nightmare.”
“She hits us a thousand places simultaneously. She cultures enough Uzumaki to load up all those Crawlers, disperses them across the country any number of ways. Hell, she could mail them to every major city, have them pop out of ten thousand envelopes all at once. She does something like that, we don’t have a chance.”
The room was silent. “Lay out our options.”
“Other than giving her what she wants, not much. Our best chance is to stop her before she releases it.”
“And if we don’t catch it?”
Arvenick said, “Antifungals don’t seem to work. A private company, Genesys, has a prototype vaccine. It’s not ready, but we’re going to run human tests. It’s a vaccine, not a cure. It does no good if the fungus has already spread. Maybe we could prevent a second wave, but that’s it.”
The President nodded, his hands on the table before him. Dunne tried to read his face. “Mr. President,” Dunne said, standing.
“Lawrence.”
“The health consequences are only the start. However bad they are, they pale in comparison to the broader implications. The entire country would be cut off, isolated. No airline flights. No one would get in or out. The stock market would crash in a way that would make 1929 look like a walk in the park. Within days, we would have shortages of all kinds—food, medicine, water—as trade shut down. We would become a Third World nation. The financial center of the world would move to London, or more likely Hong Kong. The United Nations would—”
“I’m aware of what would happen,” the President snapped. Then to Arvenick, “We’ve got nothing else?”
Arvenick shook his head. “Nothing good. We know that antibiotics make you vulnerable. We could ban antibiotic use, but in doing so we’d be signing thousands of death sentences. Not to mention we’d have a whole series of bacteriological epidemics sweeping the country. And even after all that, it might not help.”