"The city lights make them harder to see. But they're there, and there's an invisible radiant connecting them right over our heads."
She raised an eyebrow. "Stars I can't see? Connected by an invisible radiant? Does this work on other women?"
She was joking, but he could hear the tension in her voice. For all her spirituality, Serena Serghetti was the most practical, down-to-earth woman he had ever known. She was scared for him, and all his mumbo-jumbo wasn't going to change that.
"All I'm saying is that Pennsylvania Avenue by design extends to the center of the U.S. Capitol, somewhere under the basement crypt, which is directly below the rotunda, which is directly below the Capitol dome, which itself is a representation of the celestial dome."
Serena looked frustrated and upset. "I told you, Conrad, the shape of the hill beneath the Capitol has been altered over the centuries with all the terracing, let alone the structure above."
"But the stars haven't, Serena. Which is why you and the feds can't find the cornerstone. You're looking at blueprints. I'm looking for the intended center of the dome. And my cosmic radiant in the sky, with the assistance of the Pentagon's Global Positioning System, is going to lead me to the cornerstone and the celestial globe."
Serena took a deep breath and looked him in the eye. "Now how can I argue with a man who has the logic of Don Quixote. Or is it Don Juan? It's so hard to tell with you."
She wiped an eye, and Conrad couldn't tell if it was a tear or the wind.
"Maybe a nightcap would clear things up for you," he said. "After all, this could be my last night alive."
"I hate you," she said and punched him hard in the chest.
Laughing, he rubbed an aching rib. "So why save America?"
She looked conflicted. "Because the cliché is true: America is the world's last best hope."
"I thought you believed Jesus was."
"I meant right now, politically, America is the best we've got for the unencumbered work of the Church and freedom of religion, which isn't going over too well in other parts of the world like the Middle East and China."
"Is that you or Rome talking?" he asked, hoping to raise her ire and get her worries off him. "Because there are some people, mostly in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, who feel that the Church is the problem and that the world would be better off without it."
His ploy seemed to be working.
"The Church, however corrupt an institution, is a symbol of the kingdom of heaven in a world that is passing away," she said. "As such it stewards the eternal, life-changing message of redemption."
"Oh, so the Church is the last best hope?"
She looked him in the eye, lost in some dark thought, and then glanced away.
"No, Conrad. Unfortunately, as things now stand, you are."
Scary thing was, Conrad felt she really believed it, because she started to cry softly. He held her tight in the dark and looked out at the dome of the Capitol glowing in the night, wondering if she was in his arms for the last time.
PART TWO
14
INSIDE A SECRET ROOM in the Capitol, Max Seavers sat before congressional leaders with officials from the intelligence community and Health and Human Services. Three years ago, as the Chairman and CEO of SeaGen Labs, he had told this same group that a bird flu pandemic could one day kill millions of Americans. This morning, as the head of DARPA, he was there to announce that that day had come.
"This was taken yesterday from a village in the northeastern province of Liaoning in China," he said, wrapping up his confidential briefing with a slide stamped "top secret" across the bottom.
The slide showed Chinese health officials in protective gear burning the bodies of men, women, and children outside a poultry farm.
"As you can see, our intel raises serious questions about Chinese disclosure of the spread of bird flu among their population. They want nothing to cloud the upcoming Olympic Games next month. And they have already warned us that any attempt to publicize our concerns will be taken as a political act to undermine the Games and international relations. Unfortunately, by then it will be too late. Worse, the Games themselves, with people attending from all over the world, may prove to be the ultimate launching platform for a global pandemic when they go back home."
Seavers moved on to his next slide. It was a grainy black and white.
"The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which was a form of bird flu, killed fifty million people. The new H5N1 mutation is far more dangerous today, targeting adults in the prime of life, and killing more than half of those it infects. No one in the world is immune, putting all six billion of the planet's human population at risk."
Senator Joseph Scarborough, the chairman of the committee, turned red with anger. He peered down his glasses at the man seated next to Seavers, an official from the Centers for Disease Control and demanded, "And what the hell is the CDC going to do about this?"
"The messy medical reality is that people can spread flu a full day before they show symptoms," the official said, meekly tap-dancing around the fact that "nothing" was his real answer. "So even shutting U.S. borders against an outbreak at the Beijing Games offers no reassurance that a super-strain isn't already incubating here. Should an outbreak hit American shores, the best we can do is limit international flights, quarantine exposed travelers, and restrict movement around the country. That could slow the virus' spread and give us time to dispense our stockpiles of the SeaGen super-vaccine to limit the inevitable economic and social chaos."
The senator now fixed his gaze on Seavers. "I thought the SeaGen vaccine wasn't designed to fight this new strain."
"On the contrary, we've always known that human-to-human contact of the virus would one day be widespread. But advance preparation is always iffy because a vaccine developed to combat today's bird flu may be ineffective against tomorrow's mutation. SeaGen's smart vaccine solves that problem with its ability to 'dial up' or 'dial down' certain genes, modulating the immune system to combat whatever mutation the virus assumes."
"And how exactly does your vaccine 'dial down' a person's immune system?"
"Through a microbiobot inside the vaccine that can receive instructions via wi-fi signals."
"You mean from outside the body?"
"Yes, sir."
"What if somebody doesn't have the flu, Dr. Seavers? Could signals from the outside instruct this 'biobot' to dial down targeted genes?"
"Theoretically, I suppose, yes, but the chance-"
"Goddamn it, Seavers. You people did it again. You took federal dollars to develop a vaccine to save lives and instead you weaponized it. Now you want to give it to every American."
"Not yet," Seavers said. "The first step is to inoculate first responders. To keep a country's basic infrastructure working in the event of a pandemic, an estimated 10 percent of the population must be inoculated-including all doctors, nurses, police, and other emergency personnel-as soon as the virus strain is identified and the first batch of vaccine becomes available."
"Is that all?"
"And I'd want mandatory vaccinations of armed personnel and elected officials as well, since a pandemic could disrupt government and render the Twenty-sixth Amendment useless. If need be, we can scale up to the general population once the bird flu lands in the U.S."
Max Seavers and Joseph Scarborough stared at each other, the silence in the chamber thick. Behind the tension was the complexity of a symbiotic relationship in which Scarborough held the purse strings for the Pentagon while the Pentagon's contractors underwrote Scarborough's reelection campaign and lifestyle. Seavers often found it hard to tell when Scarborough was posturing for effect or genuinely incensed.