The president had declared martial law, and military forces were even now converging on Albuquerque. General Craig Barron—an Army four-star whom Melody knew personally, and disliked immensely—had been named commander of US forces on the home front. He had been granted huge latitude to defeat the Ligados no matter what the cost. Which made him, for all practical purposes, as powerful as the president, if not more so. The war was coming into our own borders, and no infringement on the liberties of civilians was more important than keeping those nukes out of Ligados control.
Melody drove a white Impala with a faded “Proud Navy Mom” bumper sticker on the back. I climbed into the passenger seat, and Melody dropped the accelerator to the floor, leaping out of the parking space as if driving a Ferrari. She took the turns fast enough that I gripped the door handle for balance, and in moments we were heading west on Route 32.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” I asked.
“Fort Detrick, Maryland,” she said. “Specifically, USAMRIID.”
“Biomedical research?” I asked.
She nodded. “Infectious disease research, psychological research, neuroscience research. Anything that keeps our soldiers alive, improves their ability to fight, or does the opposite to our enemies, they study it there. It’s the national center of our biological weapons program.”
“I thought Nixon shut down our bioweapons program fifty years ago.”
Melody shrugged. “Potato, potato. Yes, it’s all called biodefense now. But how can you defend against what the enemy might do without figuring out what weapons they might throw at you? It’s two sides of the same coin. And you can bet they’ve been all over this fungal organism with everything they’ve got.”
“I’m guessing, since we’re driving there, that they’ve had some success.”
“That’s what we’re going there to find out.”
It took us an hour to get there, but we finally turned off the highway and made our way onto the Fort Detrick complex, where we followed signs to Building 1625, a six-story new construction with an imposing brick-and-glass facade. Inside, an army lieutenant led us down winding corridors and through doorways marked with biohazard warning signs. I glimpsed a sign on a lab door that read “Warning: Trespassers Will Be Used as Science Experiments.”
Finally, he brought us to a room that resembled a cross between a medical lab and box seats at a basketball game. One whole wall looked out through plate glass onto a gymnasium-sized room where perhaps two hundred people of different ages, genders, and modes of dress milled with no obvious purpose. Some sat at tables, some walked around the room, some picked at the remains of a breakfast spread. Many talked together in groups of two or three. Most looked bored.
Melody and I chose seats from several rows of folding chairs that had been set in front of the glass, looking out at the people like visitors at the zoo.
“Don’t worry; it’s one-way,” said a tall man in a long lab coat with thinning red hair. “They can’t see you. Make yourself comfortable. The others will be here shortly.”
“Tyler, I’d like you to meet Neil Johns,” Melody said. “Neil, this is Dr. Tyler McCarrick, chief of neuroscience research here.”
“You must be the Major’s newest protégé, then,” McCarrick said. “I sat in your shoes once, not so long ago.”
“Don’t flatter us,” Melody said. “It was a very long time ago.”
“You worked for Melody?” I said.
McCarrick nodded. “I was assigned to the agency for a little over a year, before I went back for my doctorate. Best education of my life.”
I wanted to ask him if he’d known my father, but it didn’t seem the time. Other people, mostly in military uniforms, filtered into the room, and Dr. McCarrick was forced to play host.
I shifted in my seat. “Who are all these people?” I whispered to Melody.
“Mostly staff members of different agency directors or high-ranking military types,” she said. “Sent by their bosses to make sure nobody else benefits from Dr. McCarrick’s research before they do.”
“I meant, who are all those people.” I pointed to the crowd of people in the room beyond the glass.
Melody shrugged. “I have no idea.”
A tall, broad-chested man in a well-decorated Army uniform entered at the front of a small entourage. The small conversations going on throughout the room stopped.
“And everyone here has just been outranked,” Melody said, her voice pitched so only I could hear her.
“Who is that?”
“General Craig Barron,” she said. “Our new commander. The fact that he’s here himself instead of sending a subordinate means he knows something we don’t know.” She nodded at Barron, who nodded back at her.
“I should have known I’d find the Major at an event like this,” Barron said.
“I can’t say the same for you, General,” she said. “Why are you here?”
“To see the show, of course.” He and his entourage took a block of folding chairs on the other side of the group.
“How come you always know the highest-ranking person in any room?” I asked Melody.
She grinned. “It’s probably from a career spent going over other people’s heads to get the job done.”
Dr. McCarrick cleared his throat. “I think we can get started,” he said. He positioned himself on one side of the window wall, in our line of sight, but not blocking our view of the people on the other side. “Aspergillus ligados is an amazing creature. Unique among invasive pathogens, it compromises its host by imitating the appearance and function of the host cells and presenting the same interface to surrounding cells. This includes showing a ‘self’ marker to immune cells, which can’t tell the difference between the fungus and the host’s body. It hacks the body so effectively that the body doesn’t even know it’s there. Makes it very difficult to design a treatment that will kill the fungus without also killing the host.
“What we’ve managed to do here is hack the fungus right back. Instead of trying to defeat it, we’ve redesigned our own version of it, one that will interface with the original version already in situ.”
“No surprises yet,” Melody said, keeping her voice low. “That’s what they do here.”
“What is?” I asked.
“Genetic tweaking. Take a deadly sheep disease and modify it to affect humans, for instance. Or shorten its incubation period. Or aerosolize it. Anything to make it more deadly on a battlefield or in the hands of a terrorist.”
“Doctor?” a woman in a Navy uniform asked. “Does this mean you’re planning to infect people with a second version of the fungus?”
“Exactly right, Captain. The first one we can’t do very much about. With our modifications, however, the second one we can very much control.” He beckoned to the glass. “Let me draw your attention to the patients in the far room. Each of them presented with an established infection of Aspergillus ligados. They were captured by military or law enforcement and brought here for study and treatment.
“Earlier this morning, they were further infected with our new strain of the fungus. Before and after treatment, each patient was lucid, able to give his or her name, remember salient indicators of time and place, and answer questions involving simple mathematics or memory. Before treatment, however, most patients were surly, largely uncooperative, and on several occasions attempted to harm or kill research staff. Now, as you will see, they are significantly more accommodating.”