Spiral

“I’ll be in touch. Send a car out to Maggie’s.”

“What’s going-”

Jake hung up.

25

ORCHID CHECKED THE PHONE NUMBER WITH A FEW QUICK taps of her fingers. The heads-up screen in her glasses gave the response: LT. BECRAFT. CORNELL UNIVERSITY POLICE.

She listened to the conversation between Jake Sterling and Becraft. Orchid had taps on both Jake Sterling’s and Maggie Connor’s cells, allowing her to hear all conversations, control all functions. She’d installed the modified SIM cards in both phones weeks ago, long before she had taken Liam Connor hostage. She had wanted complete control of the communications environment. The taps had proven invaluable. Minutes before, Maggie had tried to call Toloff at Detrick. Orchid had shut her phone down.

Orchid checked the latest GPS location from Jake’s phone. He was moving, driving away from the address on Buffalo Road.

Toward Maggie, she was sure.

Good.

Orchid backed the FedEx van up to the front door of Rivendell, thinking it through. The police would likely be here in minutes, but she still had time. She went inside the house and dragged the dead woman, Cindy Sharp, through the front door. She threw Cindy’s body in the back of the FedEx van. Orchid had stolen the van a week before from a storage garage in Pennsylvania. She closed the door carefully, locked it, then walked around to the driver’s door.

She got in, started the engine, and checked Jake’s location again. He was retracing the path he’d taken, heading back to the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium. He was fifteen minutes away from his destination. Orchid was five.

She turned the FedEx van around, started down the gravel road. She heard a squeaking sound in the back of the van.

She glanced over her shoulder into the storage area. Dylan Connor was cuffed to the wall, tape on his mouth. He’d started to write HELP in the dust of the tinted back window with the tip of his shoe.

Clever boy. Just like his great-grandfather.

She pulled to a stop, then took a length of rope and secured his legs. “No more tricks,” she said. She wiped away the boy’s message with a brush of her fingers.

She turned onto the main road. Maggie’s call to Toloff still worried her. What if Maggie had used another phone? What if she had gotten through?

Orchid typed a series of commands on her leg.

Time to make sure everyone at Detrick was very, very busy.

26

XINTAO LU WAS EXHAUSTED. HE’D BEEN UP ALL NIGHT, working his way through the final part of the processing run. He was a graduate student in physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, but he was pretty sure he was going to switch to electrical engineering.

He dipped the wafer cartridge into the etching tank, letting the hydrofluoric acid perform the final step in the fabrication of his device. The little silicon chip he was etching had an array of microscopic holes, each barely larger than a virus. When superfluid helium passed through the holes, it would exhibit coherent oscillations that were sensitive to the absolute motion of the earth with respect to the stars. That’s what his thesis adviser said, anyway. But he was beginning to wonder about that. It all seemed too wild. Etch some holes in a piece of silicon, cool it to near absolute zero, and you would detect your rotation relative to the entire universe.

It made his head hurt to think about it, especially after twenty-four straight hours in his white bunny suit in the cleanroom. The dust-free environment was kept so by a ceiling full of HEPA filters constantly chugging away, creating a low roar that crept into your bones.

He scanned the rows of equipment, seeing only a couple of other users. A seminar was going on about a new kind of solar cell based on carbon nanotubes that had everyone jazzed. In a few more minutes, the seminar would end and the cleanroom would begin filling up again. The electron beam lithography machines were running-the demand on those was relentless. People were also camped out on the various other machines-the evaporators, ion millers, and etchers. They were all in their anti-dust bunny suits, conducting a defensive war against particles of dust and flecks of skin.

Xintao began to gather everything up. He was nearly done.

He heard a beep.

Strange. Near the RF plasma cleaning chamber. That was when he spied it. He’d sat before the machine time and time again, waiting for his sample to be finished. The wall behind the chamber was imprinted on his memory. Two brass pipes running vertically, delivering water to the cooling head.

Now there were three.

He approached the third pipe, touched his hand to it. The pipe was vibrating ever so slightly.

Xintao wasn’t sure why, but he immediately panicked. He stared at the pipe for a few seconds, then quickly glanced around, looking for one of the staff.

To his surprise, the pipe beeped again. Quietly, like an alarm clock sounding in another room. He pulled his hand back, walked away briskly, certain that he had to find someone from the staff.

He didn’t get far before the blast hit him.

LEON SOLOMON, THE FBI’S CHIEF COUNTERTERRORISM SPECIALIST, arrived in the back of an unmarked van after a short ride over from the J. Edgar Hoover Building. A barricade of cruisers, orange cones, and yellow police tape kept the crowd from getting too close to the wreckage. Twelve FBI men were already on-site in addition to hundreds of local firefighters and police. The crowd was big and growing, drawn by the irresistible lure of destruction. Some were slack-jawed, frozen in shock. Others had a strange kind of energy about them, an almost giddy excitement. Something had happened.

Solomon had a straight visual line to the carnage. The windows of the building were blown completely out, glass and concrete littering the street. A section of wall midway up the building was torn loose, tenuously hanging in space by a few strands of rebar. The TV vultures were everywhere, all three networks. Two helicopters circled overhead. The media were jumpy, hyped up, and ready to pounce. The press in New York were told that the shutdown of Bellevue was because of an outbreak of SARS. Total bullshit, and a few of the reporters were smelling it. You don’t send in the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force for SARS. And now, a day later, an explosion at the University of Maryland.

Solomon was anxious as hell. By design, a university campus was a hub of dissemination, full of people from around the world-people who would seek to return home in a time of crisis. Rescue workers, students, professors rush in, breathe the pathogen, and you’ve got an outbreak that sweeps across the campus, then the city, then the country, then around the world. If you wanted to spread a pathogen, this was a hell of a way to do it.

There had been a wild shouting match when the anonymous email had arrived in Sadie Toloff’s inbox, claiming credit for the explosion. The FBI director demanded they seal off the whole university, evacuate the entire College Park area. But they had dodged a bullet in Manhattan, and everyone was feeling lucky. The results had come in from Toloff’s lab at Detrick fifty minutes before. The kid in Times Square had been loaded with LSA-d-lysergic acid amide-one of the primary psychotropic alkaloid products produced by the Uzumaki. But the LSA was pharmaceutical-grade, likely administered by injection. All the genetic markers were negative for the actual fungus. The kid did not have an Uzumaki infection. He was going to make it. The Times Square incident was an elaborate ruse.

As for the mysterious Asian woman’s profile, the CIA thought she could be a member of one of the