“No time to stand and chat,” he said. “We’ll talk on the way.” He charged down the hall at a fast walk. My legs were longer than his, but I had to trot to keep up. “Brazil is a mess. American soldiers have been defecting left and right, and no one can trust the chain of command. All communication is compromised, and no one knows if their buddy might just decide to shoot them in the back of the head.”
He passed the elevators, turning instead through a narrow door that led to a concrete stairway. He barreled down the stairs at breakneck speed with me close behind. “One of our aircraft carriers went off the grid,” he shouted over the noise of our echoing footfalls. “Just disappeared, with no response. Thousands of people, and then nothing. We can see it from the satellites, so we know where it is, but we don’t know who’s in charge or what’s happening on board. We recalled the other ships in the battle group, and now the president has to decide whether we try to board the thing or just stay away until we know their intentions.”
We reached the bottom of the stairs, and Andrew used a numeric keypad to gain entry through a thick metal door. “Shortcut,” he said. He opened the door, and I found myself in the cavernous server room, the rows of hardware stretching off into the distance. We descended another short staircase to reach the floor. Andrew set off again, cutting a zigzag pattern through the racks and leaving me to keep up as best I could.
“What about Melody and Shaunessy?” I asked.
“I talked to them just before the briefing,” he said. “They seemed uncompromised, as far as it’s possible to tell such a thing. I told them to get out of there as soon as they possibly could.”
I gave my head an angry shake. “I shouldn’t have left,” I said. “I should be down there with them.”
Andrew spared me a quick, skeptical glance. “Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “You couldn’t do them any good there, and you just might be able to do them some good from here.”
We reached the entrance to our own basement room. I wasn’t sure I would have been able to distinguish it from a dozen other doors out of the server room, but Andrew seemed to know where he was going. I followed him inside.
The room looked like no one had left it in days. Tables were strewn with empty Chinese cartons and disposable soda cups. In one corner, jackets and a few chair cushions had been thrown on the floor to create a makeshift bed. Everyone looked haggard, with unkempt hair and bloodshot eyes. But despite their obvious exhaustion, there was an intensity to the conversations and the sense of a fiercely shared mission.
I logged in and found more than five hundred emails waiting for me. “Don’t worry about those,” Andrew said. “I need you to concentrate on the infection vectors into the United States. Forget about containment; we’ve got the CDC engaged and we’re mobilizing quarantine zones. I recommended that the president ground all flights into the country, but a few whistle language message intercepts isn’t enough to convince him. What I need to know is the source, and I haven’t had the time to study the data from that angle. There’s a pattern to how it’s spreading. I can feel it, but I just can’t put my finger on it.”
“What sort of pattern?” I asked.
Andrew sank into his chair and rubbed at his forehead. “If these were tourists coming home from Brazil, or immigrants from Venezuela, you’d expect to see vectors in any city with an international airport. But we don’t see that at all. LA and Denver and Houston are all affected, but not New York, not Chicago. Little towns in Arizona and New Mexico show traffic, and in general, with the exception of Denver, the intercepts are concentrated in the South.”
“Isn’t Denver one of the largest cocaine gateways?” I asked. I had learned a few things studying the drug trade with Andrew earlier in the year.
“Sure. But what’s the connection?”
“Neuritol.”
Andrew looked baffled. “What’s that? A prescription drug?”
“Didn’t she tell you?” I could have screamed. I understood why massive organizations like the NSA and the CIA didn’t end up sharing information very well, but within our own small team? Of course, Andrew hadn’t been around for those conversations, so he didn’t know about Neuritol, and he didn’t make the connection to the drug trade.
“Melody’s granddaughter, Emily, went to the hospital a few weeks ago with symptoms similar to those my brother experienced with the mycosis he brought back from the Amazon. Turns out it was a side effect of the new smart drug she was taking to improve her performance in school. The drug was called Neuritol, and it was distributed in used albuterol inhalers. I suspect it’s primarily a mechanism to deliver fungal spores to hosts in the US.”
Andrew stood again and paced as much as the cubicle walls allowed. “I remember something about her granddaughter being pretty seriously ill but nothing relevant to all this.”
I cursed myself for a fool. Why hadn’t we told the whole team? Why hadn’t we called reporters and drug experts and made a scene? It seemed like an unforgivable failure now, but I realized it wouldn’t have seemed nearly as critical at the time. The similarity with my brother’s symptoms had been a curiosity, something to investigate, perhaps, but I would never have guessed it was an attack vector for a foreign power. It wasn’t my first priority, and Melody probably didn’t want to tell the whole team about her personal family issues.
“How quickly can it spread from person to person?” Andrew asked.
“That’s just it. It doesn’t,” I said. “It’s not a virus. The spores have to be breathed directly into the lungs. People don’t produce new spores; they come from the original fungus, somewhere in the Amazon. This isn’t like a pandemic, which is why its rapid growth is so surprising. It has to be purposely spread.”
“The crop dusters in Brazil,” he said.
“Right. And if Neuritol is the means, it looks like the spread into the United States has been in progress for weeks, if not months. Paul was a chance infection. Their real strategy is to quietly infect through the illegal drug trade, probably through the same routes that cocaine takes from Colombia. In fact, it’s a good bet that the cocaine itself has been laced with fungal spores as well, unless there’s some chemical incompatibility there.”
Andrew pulled up a map on his screen that showed the various routes by which cocaine was smuggled from Colombia up through Mexico to different towns and cities along the US border and compared it to his list of cities and towns from which Johurá messages had been intercepted. “It fits,” he said. “That’s how they’re doing it.”
“What can we do to stop it?”
Andrew barked a short laugh. “That’s a question every administration since Nixon’s has asked, for all the good it’s done them.”
“But we have to do something.”
“We’ll warn the DEA, for sure,” he said. “Their usual investigative cycle won’t be enough, though. The advantage we have is that Neuritol is part of a category of drugs that’s already illegal. We just have to get it prioritized, and I’m pretty sure I can make that happen.”
“We can’t just work this one through channels,” I said. “It’s not just about the DEA or the FBI or the Department of Justice. Everyone in the country should know. We need people looking out for their loved ones, paying attention to what drugs they’re taking and how they’re behaving. We need city cops to be on the lookout, and social workers and school teachers. There are a lot of people out there who aren’t in intelligence services who could help.”
“What are you suggesting?” Andrew asked.
“We need to hold a press conference,” I said.
Andrew laughed. “Good luck with that.”