Germ Page 34

  Kendrick sighed. His eyes fluttered. He appeared ready to fall asleep. “Jack,” he said, “Karl Litt has created a programmable virus. A fatal virus. No one has to get near the target. The assassin is the virus: invisible, silent, unstoppable. If you breathe, it will find you.”

  The president picked up the decanter. His arms lowered to hang at his sides, empty glass in one hand, whiskey in the other. He made no move to unite the two. He walked around the coffee table and dropped onto the sofa, his features drawn tight.

  “Where’d the DNA come from?”

  “You name it. We leave our DNA everywhere. If hospitals aren’t drawing it out of our veins, we’re leaving it in the combs we use, the clothes we wear, the envelopes we lick … Doesn’t matter. Somehow, he got it. At least enough to slaughter ten thousand men, women, and children.”

  “Are these people he knows? Personally?”

  “Not likely.”

  “Then why? Why do such a thing?”

  “Because he can. Once the world believes he can select people at random to die so brutally, and that he’s willing to do so with impunity, don’t you think they will do anything to appease him? He can hold whole countries hostage. Demand anything: a hundred billion dollars, a million people for slave labor. Anything. Random, selective death. Anyone, anywhere. It’s the power of God.”

  The president shook his head dismally. “Ten thousand American citizens?”

  “For a start.”

  “God have mercy.”

  “Mmmm.” He pulled once on the pipe, then turned it around to study the meerschaum rendition of Michelangelo’s God, letting tendrils of smoke drift lazily out of his slightly parted lips. After a minute, he leaned over and carefully placed it on the table. “But we should not have such mercy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have one more thing to show you.” He moved his finger over the laptop’s track pad, grateful his hand had stopped shaking. The names scrolled.

  The president moved to the edge of the sofa, leaning to watch. Kendrick caused the names to slow, then stop, then reverse. Then stopped again.

  The president made a sharp noise, the way one would upon witnessing an accident. He grasped the laptop’s monitor. The plastic made a popping noise as his knuckles burned white from the force of his grip. Kendrick could almost feel the air around him heat up.

  Three names glowed on the screen, white letters on a black background. In format and content, they were similar to the other 9,997 names. But these and these alone would seal Litt’s fate.

  Kendrick suspected that the top one—John Thorogood Franklin of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC—by itself meant little to this man; he was strong enough to give his life if necessary. It was the next two that cinched it: the First Lady and their eleven-year-old son, a boy so loved and doted upon by his father that the media had— not so inaccurately—credited him with inspiring a familial inclination not seen in a chief executive for decades, and in so doing carrying the election for his dad.

  The president glared at the screen for a long time. Except for the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed heavily, he might have been made of stone—frozen by a sight as hideous as Medusa and her serpentine locks. When he finally turned, gone were the fear and disgust that had marked his countenance since the first video began. The emotions that replaced them were unmistakable: righteous indignation and fierce determination.

  Kendrick matched the expression with a scowl.

  “Tell me,” the president said in a voice of granite, “what do we do to stop this thing?”

  seventy-eight

  To distract her mind from the aches and stiffness of her body so sleep would come, Julia looked for familiar images in the intricate shadows on the ceiling. They were cast by the streetlamp shining through the lace curtains over their hotel room’s window. Slowly her imagination turned the dappled pattern into figures: a grinning devil’s face … a butcher’s knife … a fat snake, poised to strike … flames … A slight flutter of the gossamer curtains gave these last two images eerie movement. She closed her eyes.

  Their plane from Atlanta had landed at Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos Airport shortly before midnight. By half past, they had taken a cab to one of the glitzy hotels on Paulista Avenue, walked a dozen blocks into seedier streets, and found a small hotel more suitable for vagrants than vacationers. She liked that the cabbie couldn’t lead pursuers to them and that the hotel’s night clerk was more interested in the tattered girlie magazine on the counter than in who was checking in.

  She had calculated the odds of someone being able to track them down along their route to find Allen. It wouldn’t be difficult. She had to assume Karl Litt had discovered the tracking device, which meant his people would be laying an ambush for them somewhere between Atlanta and their destination. It made more sense to trap them closer to Litt’s headquarters, where his influence and familiarity presumably were greatest. Still, he might expect them to think that way and make his move farther from his home base, hoping to catch them off guard. She was determined not to let that happen. Even here, where it would be easy to let the sprawling Brazilian capital—with eleven hundred square miles and sixteen million inhabitants—lull her into a false sense of anonymity, she had to be on her toes.

  Then there was Kendrick. He knew precisely where she and Stephen were heading, and if his purpose for wanting Vero’s data was to conceal it instead of to find out what Litt was up to as he claimed, he would be after them as well. She’d risked everything to ask for his help. She didn’t want to admit it to Stephen, but she figured they had a slingshot’s chance in a gunfight of rescuing Allen without the firepower Kendrick could bring to the table. If he were one of the good guys, she wasn’t sure what to expect. Would he threaten Litt into releasing Allen and use diplomatic channels to defeat him?

  Litt wasn’t a country, though, so what kind of pressure could the United States apply to him and his organization? She recalled a seminar at which the lecturer had pushed the notion that major corporations were the “countries” of the future. As technology made geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries obsolete, the seat of global power would shift from governments to boards of directors. Withholding innovations or using them to gain leverage over others would be the new way of demonstrating might.

  By combining the nongeographical and apolitical aspects of a private organization and the militaristic might of a nation, Litt’s plans might prove to be a sort of evolutionary bridge to a civilization where the Microsofts and ExxonMobils of the world dictated social policy and law.

  She realized her mind had wandered and squeezed her eyelids tighter, until little plumes of red burst forth from the blackness. If beating the bush of hypothesis scared up anything, it was the fact that she knew almost nothing about Litt. Like a child making a monster out of a pile of laundry in the dark corner of her room, she had allowed the mystery of her enemy to grow into an omniscient, indestructible beast. Most likely he was some pathetic terrorist Kendrick Reynolds could squash with one strike from a team of commandos. It was this kind of action she had in mind when she sent Kendrick the chip data.

  In a perfect world, she and Stephen would arrive at Litt’s headquarters after Kendrick’s men had done their thing. She and Stephen would find Allen in a jury-rigged medical tent getting a cursory physical or in some mobile command center being debriefed. They’d be commended for alerting the U.S. government about the terrorist danger; told to forget everything they knew about Litt, Ebola, and rumors of invasion in the interest of national security; and sent home in the belly of a C-130 to get on with their lives.

  She opened her eyes, looking for the devil’s head in the shadows above. Optimism was the last thing she needed right now. It would turn to disappointment when Kendrick’s help turned out to be insufficient or nonexistent. The disappointment would turn to depression, which would make her indecisive and reactive. And that would get them all killed. Better to go into this on a foundation of rea
lity. Rescuing Allen was going to be the toughest thing she’d ever attempted, and success was far from assured.

  Determination surged into her chest at the challenge. In the dark, her lips formed a kind of steely smile.

  They had entered the room exhausted and had fallen into their separate beds without bothering to undress or even visit the communal bathroom down the hall. A window air conditioner had been on, filling the room with a horrendous combination of humming, ticking, and tepid wind. After a minute, Stephen had grunted out of bed and switched it off. After that, the curtain had settled and the shadows had congealed into the spiderweb pattern she now perused.

  Julia listened and heard Stephen’s slow, deep breaths. She was considering waking him to discuss Litt’s germ or their plan of attack or anything that might help her not feel so small and alone … when she fell asleep.

  seventy-nine

  Allen could not help himself. His mind kept returning to the video on Julia’s computer of the man succumbing to Ebola, or what they had assumed was Ebola. The pain, the bleeding out, the convulsions. He remembered the way he had described it to Julia: “Internal organs start to decay as though you’re already dead, but you’re not. Your blood loses its ability to clot, then your endothelial cells, which form the lining of the blood vessels, fail to function, so blood leaks through. Soon it oozes from every orifice—even from your eyes, pores, and under your fingernails. Then you die.”

  He felt it in him, dissolving his tissues like acid.

  He wished he were imagining it. Eighty percent of med school students experience some form of hypochondriasis—their detailed study of serious illnesses plants the seeds that blossom into psychosomatic symptoms. His roommate had suffered from it so badly, he’d dropped out. Allen wasn’t prone to that; even if he were, he thought he’d recognize the difference between made-up pain and real, my-guts-are-disintegrating pain. What he felt was the latter.

  The cot’s crossbar still pushed into his ribs, but now he imagined his ribs bending softly under the pressure, his liver and kidneys and lungs oozing around it, dripping to the floor.

  He opened his eyes. The bright fluorescents jabbed at them. The wall four inches from his nose was painted white. The roller had textured it with fine dimples. A faint brown smudge had remained after the last cleaning. He rolled over, folding the thin pillow to give his head more support.

  Someone was standing in his room, leaning into the corner opposite the cot. An angel, he thought. White skin against the white walls. A white tunic draped over the white skin. But no, wouldn’t an angel be beautiful? Perhaps not. This one was gaunt, skeletal, its head bald and bulbous. It wore sunglasses.

  Allen raised his head, squinted at the figure. It was a man. The tunic was a lab coat, but the distressing angularity of his face and the paleness of his skin were just as Allen had first perceived. He’d seen the face before. The video: he was the man who had approached the camera at the end of the second clip, when Vero was filming the air base and laboratories. Allen propped himself up on an elbow.

  The man smiled. “Good morning, Doctor,” he said.

  “What …” His throat was raw. He tasted blood. His voice was weak and gravelly. “What have you done to me?”

  “I believe you know.”

  “I know …” He swallowed dryly. “You’re Karl Litt.”

  The man pushed off the wall and stepped closer. His hands came together. With long fingernails he began scraping the back of one hand, then the other. “How do you recognize me?”

  Didn’t Litt know what was on Vero’s chip? If not, Allen wasn’t sure he wanted to tell him. He changed the subject.

  “Is this … Ebola?”

  “Did you determine that from your symptoms? I hope my specialty isn’t also getting around.”

  “How? How was I infected?” They may have injected him when he was unconscious, but he didn’t think so. If it was an airborne strain, then … “Why not you or the other guy … Gregor? Why not everyone here?”

  “So you don’t know it all.” He looked around the room, then sat on the edge of the cot. “How much do you know about DNA?”

  Allen raised his body into a sitting position. He felt his organs shifting and sloshing inside. He scooted back, slowly, painfully, until his shoulder blades were against the wall. “Not my field.”

  “As a physician, I’m sure you know more than an auto mechanic. But I’d hate for you to miss the punch line because the rudiments bogged you down. Oh …” He tugged a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and held it up to Allen.

  Allen looked down. Blood had drizzled down his chest. He touched his fingers to his face. Lots of blood. He felt his cheeks, hoping it wasn’t coming from his eyes.

  “You have a nosebleed,” Litt said. “It happens.”

  Allen took the handkerchief, wiped his hands and his face, and held it firmly to his nostrils.

  “DNA,” Litt said. “The complex molecule is a hereditary blueprint that defines a person’s skin pigment, eye color and shape, hair color and texture, height, bone structure—every physical trait, including genetic diseases. Each DNA strand is made up of six billion repeating chemical units called nucleotides, consisting of one of four different kinds of chemicals called bases—A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine, and T for thymine. So an individual’s genome could be expressed GTTCGTCAAATTG … and so on for six billion letters. No two people share the exact same sequence. Twins are close, but still unique. Interestingly, nature—” He held a up a conciliatory hand. “Or God. I understand your brother is a priest.”

  “A pastor,” Allen said flatly.

  “Well, then … God put markers in generally the same spots on our DNA strands. These markers are the same in everybody. They’re like road signs that tell us what the subsequent DNA codes are for— height, hair color, Huntington’s disease, obesity. These markers simplify the process of finding sequences unique to specific individuals.

  How many thugs are doing time because they left a bit of their DNA at a crime scene—blood, semen, skin, hair roots?”

  “All right,” Allen said. “DNA is unique and identifiable. That doesn’t explain—”

  “Now, now, Dr. Parker. This is fascinating stuff, if you hear me out.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sure you’re more versed in the ways of viruses. To refresh: A virus is designed to survive. Whatever it needs to replicate itself—to propagate the species, if you will—it will do. That may mean mutating to avoid a threat, such as an antibody, or to avoid competition from a stronger virus. That’s why we have so many different ones. Herpes viruses seek out the cells of nerve tissue, the avian flu virus goes right for the alveoli cells, deep in the lungs. A virus is like a key looking for the cell with a matching lock. When it finds the right cell, it unlocks it and strolls on in, a thief with a key to the jewelry store. The virus tells the cell’s DNA to stop what it’s doing and focus on replicating the virus. So now a cell is destroyed, and the virus multiplies. In Ebola’s case, the cells it commandeers happen to be the ones that hold together blood vessels and organs.

  “Since we know that a virus has the ability to find what it needs, why not tell it what it needs? Gene splicing is a fairly simple matter these days. The technology exists, for instance, to take out the gene that codes for brown eyes and literally stick in the gene that codes for blue eyes. However, I did not change what the Ebola virus looks for— the lock that fits it. I simply added another lock. When Ebola finds a tissue cell it would normally unlock, it encounters a second lock and can’t get in. That other lock is a specific individual’s DNA, just enough of a sequence to differentiate that person from all but a few other people in the world. I splice that sequence into the section of the Ebola DNA that tells it what to look for, part of its glycoprotein gene. Now, it looks for only the endothelial cells of the person I told it to find. When both keys match, it takes over the cells, replicates, and essentially becomes full-blown Ebola. Or, more precisely, Ebola Kugel. Kugel means “bullet”
in my native tongue. A bullet instead of a bomb.” His lipless mouth bent upward.

  Allen thought a moment. “You’ve got Ebola piggybacking on a common cold virus?”

  Litt nodded. “Rhinovirus. It can move across the country in twenty-four hours. But Ebola is not so much hitching a ride as it is spliced into it. That way it replicates with the cold virus. I’m making it all sound very easy,” he said with a wave of his hand, “but it’s infinitely complicated, I assure you. If it weren’t, someone else would have already done it.” He slapped Allen’s leg with his skeletal hand. “Now then. Why am I telling you all this?”

  When Allen said nothing, he continued. “To convince you I know what I’m doing. None of this is an accident. I am in complete control. So believe what I say now.” He bowed his head closer to Allen and whispered, “I have the cure.”

  Hope moved through Allen like adrenaline. He tried to suppress it, hold it down, but his heart thumped faster, his stomach tightened in anticipation.

  “There is no cure for Ebola,” he said.

  Litt rolled his head, exasperated. “Have you heard a word I’ve said? Ebola also doesn’t seek out specific individuals—but look at you. In fact, Ebola did not exist at all until I created it. Since I intend to use it against my enemies, would knowledge of a cure be something I shared?”

  “So why tell me?”

  “You have something I want. I’m negotiating.”

  “Vero’s memory chip.”

  “And information: who knows what.”

  “Julia and I, we looked at the chip data. That’s all.”

  “Your brother?”

  Allen rolled the back of his head against the wall: no.

  “See? You’re lying. How can I trust you now?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Kendrick Reynolds. You know him?”