Bio-Strike

You’ve done bigger favors before. Without blinking.”

“That’s right. Before. But right now I’m at my desk looking over my shoulder. I swear to God, Alex. If you were a fly on the wall you’d see that I’m serious. Over my shoulder. Somebody overhears me talking to you on the phone, I’m in the shit. At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue your name is an unwelcome utterance. And will be until the current administration leaves office.”

“Because I opted to attend a press conference that the president felt might have stolen some of his bill- signing thunder,” Nordstrum said. “Are you listening to yourself? I was a journalist. And I’m still a free citizen. Ballard’s executive powers do not extend to canceling my First Amendment rights. I’m surprised he hasn’t just ordered me thrown into a dungeon somewhere.”

“Let’s not get hyperbolic—”

“I don’t have to. Or I shouldn’t. We’re potentially talking about Roger Gordian’s life.”

Blake sighed. “Nobody holds him in higher regard than I do,” he said, easing into a semiofficial tone of voice. “And you know he’s got a legion of supporters here in the capital. Give me a day or two. I’ll figure out how to handle your request, work it through the appropriate channels.”

“What kind of ridiculous phrase is that? It can’t wait. Not an hour or two. I need what I need. Right away.”

“Alex, please, I’m trying to explain—”

“Never mind,” Nordstrum kept his voice level. “How’s the new bride, Neil?”

There was an instant’s silence.

“Cynthia’s fine,” Blake said, thrown off stride.

“What is it now, a year that you’ve been married?”

“Yeah. Well, close. We celebrate our first anniversary the day after Christmas—”

“You plan on taking her to that cozy little apartment on Euclid Street for the romantic occasion?” Nordstrum asked. “Or is it still set apart for your independent use?”

This time the silence was much longer.

“How come you ask, Alex?”

“No reason in particular. I just remembered that you never let go of the place. Must have a sentimental attachment after all those good times you had there in the heyday of your bachelorhood.” It was Nordstrum’s turn to pause. “But listen, you can forget about my request. I know you’re under constraints. I’ll try some of my old pressroom cronies at the Washington Post instead. You never know, they might have something for me. With them, it’s always give and take.”

“Alex—”

“I need to hang up—”

“Alex, wait, damn it.”

He waited.

“Give me that fax number at UpLink,” Blake said.

* * *

In his Sacramento office, Eric Oh listened intently as Todd Felson, his colleague at Stanford, offered him the details of the initial tests he’d performed on the food samples taken from Roger Gordian’s office.

“You know those wafers we found on his desk? Three of them are impregnated with polymer coacervates in the fifteen to twenty-micron range,” he said. “There’s a tremendous amount of the stuff.”

For the third time in a seventy-two-hour period during which he’d been swept along like a man on a whitewater run, Eric was caught breathless.

“Microencapsulation,” he said. “Todd, I think we’ve found our activator.”

“Looks like it,” Felson said. “The particle walls are an ethyl cellulose/cyclohexane gelatin. Highly soluble in liquids at body temperature. And very susceptible to breakdown under the high pH levels in a person’s digestive system. Or mucous membranes, for that matter.”

“Have you gotten to examine the core material at all?”

“Coming up next.”

* * *

It was ten o’clock in the morning, just two hours after the closed conference room meeting adjourned, when Megan answered her office phone to hear Alex Nordstrum’s excited voice on the line.

“Meg, I’ve got news,” he said.

She sat up straight behind her desk

“I’m waiting,” she said.

“I can lay out the paper trail for you later, but the main thing now is that there’s a private outfit in Ontario, west of the Hudson Bay, that fits the bill for our germ factory in every way. Uniquely. The flow of bioprocessing equipment to it is incredible. I’ve got listed purchases of regulated biological cultures and growth media, freeze drying and containment equipment, recombinant gene tech… it goes on and on. This is a soup-to-nuts bioprocessing facility, and one that was built at great expense. I’d guess the initial cost would total a hundred million dollars. You won’t find any other operation like it in Canada, and only a few comparable facilities exist here at home.”

Megan took a breath.

“You mean to tell me that nobody in Washington has deemed it in our national interest to investigate what’s being developed at this place?”

“I’ll share a bit of irony, Meg. We do business with these folks. Loads of it. They own agricultural patents that have scored them numerous federal contracts. And they recently won the bidding competition for a huge deal to develop genetically modified strains of Fusarium oxysporum—a fungus that’s proven to be wholesale murder on coca plants.” He paused. “The State Department’s been trying to persuade the Columbians and Peruvians to use it against their narco farmers, and it looks like it’s going to happen. Chew on that one for a second. Given this company’s presumed ties to the Quiros family, which derives its income primarily from the cocaine trade, it’s conceivable they’re creating a fungus that’s specially adapted to wipe out the crops of competing growers. And all on our government’s tab.”

Megan was silent a moment, thinking, the receiver held tightly in her hand.

“Tell me the name of the firm, Al,” she said at last.

“Earthglow,” he said. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

TWENTY-FOUR

NORTHERN ONTARIO, CANADA NOVEMBER 17, 2001

Remote was a relative term nowadays, paul “Pokey” Oskaboose was saying as he dipped his single-prop Cessna 172 from the cloud rack. “I read some magazine article by somebody a while back, and I think it said there are something like six, maybe eight places left on the planet where you can spend an hour — or maybe it’s a night, I forget — without hearing an engine noise of some kind or other.” He banked sharply toward the bunched, snow-draped hills to port.

Seated on his right, Ricci watched the world slant down and away. “How long till we’re over the plant?” he asked, his stomach lurching.

“Should be any minute.” Oskaboose pointed out his window. A Cree-Ojibway Indian with a wide, bony face and dark hair worn in a buzz cut, he was on loan to Ricci from the Sword watch quartered amid the radomes and communications dishes of an UpLink satellite ground station to the southwest, located midway between the Big Nickel Mine in Sudbury and Lake Superior. “You see the twin rises over there, sort of rounded, got all those wrinkles in them?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The local tribes call them Niish Obekwun. Means Two Shoulders. Past them’s a gap where a stream slices down to the White River. And then that third taller slope. Goes up pretty steep.”

Ricci nodded.