Dunne couldn’t help smiling. His superior, National Security Adviser Marvin Alex, was an old Washington hand who’d done stints at State and Defense for both Republican and Democratic administrations. His salty language was SOP.
“Should I send a response, sir?”
“Tell him I’ll be there to help him hold hands inside of two hours.”
Dunne had already triggered the U protocol, a series of escalating steps to be followed in case of a potential Uzumaki outbreak. They were at level 2 until the Uzumaki infection in the Japanese kid could be verified. At level 2, the CDC, USAMRIID, and all the various alphabet soup of federal agencies quietly started procedures to ready themselves for full-blown response, like a giant beast awakening for the final battle at Armageddon.
Dunne pulled out his laptop and brought up the two photos of the young Chinese woman: one taken by the security camera on the bridge at Cornell, the other by a passerby in Times Square.
Two years ago, Dunne had led a small team of bioweapons experts and epidemiologists through a series of worst-case scenarios for the Uzumaki: a terrorist group gets ahold of one of the missing cylinders, or the Chinese dig it up at Harbin and decide to use it in a preemptive attack. Without an effective treatment or a vaccine-both of which were months, if not years, away-the number of dead from even a single-point-of-dispersal event could be in the millions. A lone actor could single-handedly trigger a disaster of cataclysmic proportions.
DUNNE WAS OUT OF HIS SEAT THE MOMENT THE HELICOPTER sat down on the helipad next to the main USAMRIID building. Toloff was already on the tarmac, barking orders at the ground crew. Dunne watched as the Hazmat container was wheeled away, then followed Toloff as they jogged along Ditto Avenue through the heart of Detrick.
Toloff pointed to the red-brick building up ahead. “In under an hour we’ll know exactly how much shit we’re in. We’ll crack open the vault in a class-3 area, move the sealed biosafety containers into class-4. I’ll run everything from there.”
Dunne grabbed her arm. “I’m going to be talking to the President in a few minutes. He’s going to want an answer, good or bad.”
She didn’t have to reply. Her anguished face said it all.
22
JAKE AND VLAD DROVE PAST ONE DILAPIDATED HOUSE AFTER another, their yards filled with cast-off farm equipment, auto parts, and washer-dryers. Buffalo Road was only ten miles from downtown Ithaca but a world away. Central New York was mostly rural poor, dotted by old industrial towns. Ithaca was an anomaly, an educational mecca with twenty thousand or so overeducated academics and artists plunked down at the northern edge of Appalachia.
Vlad leaned forward. “Slow down,” he said. “I want to live to be an old man.”
“We’re fine,” Jake said. He glanced at the speedometer-seventy-five. Fine, unless they crested a hill and found a tractor coming the other way.
“Please,” Vlad said. “I am convinced I will make a very good old man.”
Jake kept the gas on as they passed an abandoned farmhouse, the roof swaybacked and peppered with holes, the windows covered in rotting particleboard. A stack of rusted wheel rims in the yard had fallen over, spreading across the yard like poker chips on a blackjack table. An old grain silo stood in the field behind it, the front gone, save the metal staves like the rib cage of a long-dead animal.
“Why would anyone live out here when they don’t have to?” Jake asked.
“He likes a place to shoot his guns.” Vlad also had a thing for guns. The Cornell police arrested him once after they’d received calls of a strange man firing a pistol into Cascadilla Gorge. “What the hell are you doing?” the arresting officer had asked.
“Shooting at rocks.”
“Why?”
“Rocks don’t shoot back.”
Vlad tapped Jake on the shoulder. “Okay, slow down. There.”
JAKE PARKED BEHIND A BRAND-NEW JET-BLACK CADILLAC Escalade, and they started up the walk. Uncut weeds poked up between the stepping stones. At first glance, Harpo’s place blended in with the rest. The yard was full of junk like all the others, but this junkyard was more of a high-tech graveyard. Computer servers. Broken monitors. Various things Jake couldn’t identify for sure, but they looked like burned-out versions of what he saw in bio labs: centrifuges, hot plates, PCR cyclers. There was even a DNA synthesizer.
“We don’t tell him anything about why we want this,” Jake said. “We agree?”
“Don’t worry. He will not ask.”
The door to the house was new, with the flat brown paneling that Jake recognized as the vinyl covering of a reinforced steel door. There were two dead bolts in addition to the knob, and a small security camera above the door encased in a little black cage.
The front door opened before they could knock. A big man stood there, maybe six-three, two-fifty. Thick through the waist and even thicker through the chest. He wore sweatpants, orange Crocs on his feet, and a T-shirt advertising a Cambridge bar called the Plough & Stars. He had a Snickers bar in his hand.
It wasn’t hard to see where he got the name Harpo. On his head was a shock of curly white hair, almost like a fright wig. “This Jake?” he said to Vlad. “The Crawler guy?”
“He is the one.”
He welcomed them in, gregarious and open, a contrast to all the security measures. He threw an arm around Jake. “I love your little robots, would kill to get my hands on a few. You might sell me some? Been trying to pry some loose from Boris Badenov here,” he said with a glance at Vlad, “but he ain’t biting.” He let go of Jake, turned serious. “Think about it. I could make you good money-two hundred bucks apiece, easy. Conversation pieces for technophiles. You teach it to dance the Macarena to an MP3, I bet we could get five times that. What do you say? You interested?”
Jake passed, a bit too gruffly. He was already antsy. He just wanted to get the DNA sequenced and get back to Maggie.
Harpo took it gracefully. “Come on.”
The interior of Harpo’s house was a total contrast to the outside. The living room was well lit and relatively clean but completely devoid of furniture. Instead it was full of computer servers, most of them dark. “You want an HP BladeSystem c7000?” Harpo said, patting one of the silent server stacks. “I’ll sell it to you cheap. Got no use for them now. I ran a data-mining service for a while. We generated customer profiles based on Web surfing patterns, but now everyone’s gotten into that game. You want easy pickings, you gotta be in at the beginning. Selling something no one else does.” He smiled. “Like I’m doing now.”
“What do you sell?”
“You ever heard of vanity publishers? You write a book and the big houses won’t buy? For a fee, a vanity publisher will print your book for you, churn out a hundred copies, a thousand, whatever you pay for. Enough copies to give to your friends and pretend you’re a big-time author. Well, I’m a vanity publisher, too. But I publish in DNA.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning DNA publishing is your chance to expand your print run to astronomical scales. Any message you want, I’ll encode it in DNA, run PCR on it, and send you a
“You’re kidding. Who buys this stuff?”
“You name it. Frustrated poets. Novelists. One woman had me make six billion copies of her poem, one for every human on the planet. It stank, by the way. All about calla lilies. Another guy, some religious nut, wanted the Sermon on the Mount. He carries a little mister with him, like for perfumes? Everywhere he goes, he gives a little squirt. Says he’s spreading peace and joy. But it pays the bills.”
He led them down the hall, past a door that opened to the bathroom, then on to another room, what Jake
