The Cobra Event

  “What about the patients, Dr. Heyert, the kids with Lesch-Nyhan?”

  “I am a doctor. I do want to help them. It’s just that there’s no money; it’s a rare disease.”

  “Cope—did he develop the virus?”

  “No. Others at BioArk had mostly developed it already. But there were some problems, and it was felt that the Americans could solve them. Tom merely sharpened the edge of the weapon. I fired him because he was unreliable and seemed—really odd, kind of scary.”

  “How much virus did he steal?” Hopkins asked.

  “I don’t know…. He stole a Biozan.”

  “A bioreactor?” Littleberry said.

  “The number-four Biozan, yes.” Heyert was trembling.

  “We need to see your records on Cope,” Hopkins said.

  The employee records of Bio-Vek were kept in a locked filing cabinet in Heyert’s secretary’s office. Heyert gave agents the key, and they soon pulled Cope’s employment file and his résumé. If his résumé was accurate (a big assumption to make), he had a Ph.D. in molecular biology from San Francisco State University, and he had a troubled employment history. For a while he had worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He had never married.

  Thomas Cope was the Unsub no longer. The file contained his Bio-Vek company photo ID. In his physical features he was what might be described as a gray man. He had no strong or defining characteristics—he was of medium height with rather pallid skin, hair thinning on top but not completely gone. He was thirty-eight years old, and he wore metal-framed eyeglasses.

  A team of investigators continued to question Heyert, but soon after having given them Cope’s name, he stopped talking and demanded to have access to his lawyer.

  Hopkins telephoned the information on Cope to Frank Masaccio, who put his task force to work on it. The first thing they did was to run a credit check on Cope. This is one of the easiest and best ways to find someone. You can learn if they are using a credit card, and if so, you can find out which businesses they are shopping at and what they have been buying lately. The pattern of activity on a credit card can quickly pinpoint a subject’s location.

  They found out that Cope had been using a Visa card under his own name to order laboratory equipment from a variety of suppliers across the United States. The things were being shipped to a mail drop that Cope maintained at a private mail service in a strip shopping center known as the Apple Tree Center in East Brunswick, New Jersey. There was no other activity on the credit card except for these orders. Cope was evidently picking up his equipment in a car or truck and driving it somewhere else.

  Hopkins was now standing in the parking lot at Bio-Vek, talking on his cell phone to Frank Masaccio. Masaccio said to him, “We’re going to have Cope in a day or two, maybe in hours. You Reachdeep folks have done great work.”

  “Don’t count on anything,” Hopkins said.

  “Yeah, I know. Any operation can fall apart. But we’re going to bust him. I can feel it. We’re throwing up a massive surveillance operation around the Apple Tree Center. I’ve got half the agents from the Newark office on the case. Cope is going to be history. Hold on a minute, Will, there’s a call I have to take.”

  Hopkins waited. Just then, Hopkins’s beeper went off. He checked it. It was the contact number for SIOC in Washington.

  When Masaccio came back on the line, he sounded like a different man. “We’ve got a problem in Washington,” he said.

  Washington

  SATURDAY, MAY 2

  THE SECOND Cobra Event SIOC meeting began thirty minutes later. It was ten o’clock in the morning when Hopkins and Littleberry landed on Governors Island. They went straight to the meeting room in the Reachdeep unit, where Austen was already in a videoconference with Washington. Frank Masaccio was sitting beside her.

  From his office at the F.B.I.’s National Security Division, Steven Wyzinski had given the order—with White House approval—to deploy disaster medical groups in Washington. There had been eleven deaths from what looked like Cobra in Washington overnight. Victims had been showing up in emergency rooms all over the metropolitan area. The C.D.C. task force on Cobra was working the epidemiology.

  “The news media is starting to go berserk,” Jack Hertog said. He had just come from the White House, and he seemed extremely angry. The video screen made his polo shirt look chartreuse. “They’re saying it may be food poisoning. They’re also saying it may be deliberate. What if we’ve just been bombed with a chemical weapon?”

  Walter Mellis was in the SIOC room with him. “We’ve got a team in place, and we’re looking at the epidemiology now, I have a preliminary result,” he said.

  “What is it?” Hertog asked brusquely, turning to Mellis.

  “All the cases seem to have been commuters on the Washington Metro. There was a release of hot agent somewhere in the subway.”

  “Goddamnit!” Hertog cried. “What’s the casualty projection?”

  “We’ve seen only eleven cases, so far, which is telling us that this was a small release, not a large one,” Mellis replied.

  “A warning,” Hopkins said.

  “He must have popped a few grams of agent into the air,” Littleberry said. “If it was a big release, you’d know it. You’d have thousands of cases.”

  Mellis turned aside and listened. Someone was speaking to him. Then he said: “We’ve been working on samples in Atlanta. We have preliminary confirmation that the agent in Washington is in fact Cobra virus.”

  All the cases of Cobra were being moved by Navy and Army medevac helicopters into Bethesda Naval Hospital. That is, the survivors were being moved. The dead were being stored in a refrigerated biohazard truck that was making the rounds.

  Jack Hertog laid down the White House line. He said, “I am here to tell you that the President of the United States will hold a news conference later today. The President is going to explain to the American people what is happening. It seems that the Reachdeep operation has been a failure. It has failed totally, disastrously.”

  “We have the Unsub’s name,” Hopkins said.

  Silence fell over the SIOC.

  “His name, we believe, is Thomas Cope. He is a molecular biologist, a former employee of Bio-Vek, Inc., a biotech company headquartered in Greenfield, New Jersey,” Hopkins said. “We’re getting background on him now.”

  “Is he under arrest?” Hertog asked.

  “Not yet,” Frank Masaccio said.

  “That’s not good enough,” Hertog said. “Where is he?”

  “Can we put Cope’s image on the screen?” Hopkins asked. Cope’s face appeared on screens in Washington. “We just obtained this photograph during the seizure of Bio-Vek.”

  Frank Masaccio said that Dr. Thomas Cope’s name appeared on the F.B.I. profile list of Americans who had visited Kenya around the time the cobra boxes were bought in Nairobi. Bio-Vek records indicated that Cope had never married and had no children, but he had relatives. The F.B.I. was trying to locate them. Then Masaccio explained about Cope’s mail drop in New Jersey. “When we checked the doctor’s credit records,” he said, “we found out that he recently placed an order for safety suits and breathing filters from a company in California. The shipment went by Federal Express, marked for Saturday delivery. It’s due in today. They’re telling us at the mail service that Cope usually picks his stuff up on the day it arrives. We’ve checked all the phone numbers he left on various forms, and none of them check out, so we can’t trace him through phone calls. But he’s coming to get that package. He’s got a key that lets him in anytime, and we’ve already got nearly a hundred agents waiting to nail him.”

  “Yes, but how soon?” Hertog demanded.

  “Hours if we’re lucky,” Masaccio said. “The Reachdeep people will be suited up, just in case of trouble at the shopping center, if the guy’s got a biological with him.”

  “The director of the F.B.I. has authorized me to say that all, repeat, all of the Bureau’s resources will be dedicated to th
is case,” Steven Wyzinski said.

  “After the horse left the barn!” Hertog said, his voice rising. “How do you know he’s going to pick up his mail? How do you know it isn’t a group?”

  “I can’t guarantee anything until he’s in custody, but I’m confident we’ll have him soon,” Masaccio said.

  “Cut the bullshit!” Hertog shouted. “People are dying in Washington, for chrissake. This is not Lubbock! This is Washington. This is the goddamned fucking capital of the country! The people who run the fucking world live here! You marshmallows dicking around with your test tubes have left us open to a real mess. I want some straight F.B.I. work here, coordinated with anybody else in the goddamned government who knows how to get some results in this situation. I want the Reachdeep dick-heads on that island off this case, and I want your top guys, Frank, your pros, taking this one down fast.”

  Littleberry suddenly broke in, shouting, “The terrorist is going to cook New York while you are shifting gears and the President tries to save his own ass.”

  “You’re fired,” Hertog snapped.

  “You can’t fire me, I’m retired.”

  “Then I’m going to take away your goddamned pension.”

  Break

  AUSTEN AND HOPKINS sat facing each other in the meeting room outside the Reachdeep Core. They had had nothing to do for hours except talk about the case. Mark Littleberry was out on the deck, staring across the water at the city. He’d been there for a long time.

  “I’m worried that Frank’s going down a blind alley,” Hopkins said. “What if Cope doesn’t pick up his mail? He could be anywhere.”

  Austen doodled with a pencil on her map of the city. “You know, I’ve been thinking…there’s such a tight cluster of cases here. Here, in this part of the city. It’s weird. We’ve got cases in Washington, but all the other primary cases fall in one part of the city. Look.” She showed him on the map. Her finger moved over a part of Manhattan. It was lower Manhattan, and toward the eastern side. Her finger moved over Union Square, where Kate Moran had lived, and over East Houston Street, where Harmonica Man and Lem had lived, then over the Lower East Side, where Hector Ramirez and his family lived—and to the Sixth Avenue flea market on Twenty-sixth Street, where Penny Zecker and Kate Moran had met. “There’s a pattern here.”

  “Sure, but what?”

  “Cope is like a thread crisscrossing the area,” she said. “You can see it in the cases. When you have a cluster of illnesses, you go out and find the threads that link them. Cope is the thread.”

  “You can’t go and check that out. We’re grounded.” Hertog had made it very clear that Reachdeep was restricted to Governors Island and to doing lab work only.

  NAGGED BY THE POSSIBILITIES, Austen went to the hospital wing, where the Army Medical Management Unit was situated, and she put on a protective suit and went in. She was headed for the rooms where the family of Hector Ramirez was quarantined. Hector’s young mother, Ana, was now in critical condition and was not expected to live. High doses of Dilantin seemed to be preventing her seizures, but not the self-cannibalism, and she was under heavy restraint in the intensive-care unit.

  In a room that overlooked an avenue of plane trees, Austen visited Carla Salazar, Ana’s older sister. Carla had been tested and had shown no sign of Cobra infection, but she had been kept in quarantine. She was frightened, and distraught over the condition of her sister and the death of her sister’s little boy.

  Austen sat down with her and asked her how she was doing.

  In a very small voice she said, “Not good. Not good.”

  “Do you feel okay?”

  “I am okay now. But what about later? I could be like my sister. I can’t look at her.” She began to cry.

  “I want to show you a picture, Mrs. Salazar. Can you look at a picture?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Austen handed her the color photocopy of Cope’s face, taken from the company card. F.B.I. investigators had earlier showed Carla Salazar the composite image from Nairobi.

  She studied the color image for a moment. “Maybe I have seen this man,” she said. “Maybe.”

  Austen’s heart turned over. I wish Hopkins was here, he’d know the right questions to ask.

  “Is this who murdered my sister’s son?” Mrs. Salazar asked.

  “It is possible. Who is he?”

  “I’m trying to think. I seen him a couple times, I think. I’m not sure. I think he’s the guy that yelled at some of the kids. He yelled at some of the boys one time. I don’t know. I don’t know. No, it’s not the same guy…. You think it’s the guy that poisoned Hector? He was real mad at the boys. It was something about a cat.”

  HOPKINS GOT on the telephone to Masaccio. “Frank—listen. We have a possible identification. There’s a lady here, one of the Ramirez boy’s relatives, who thinks she remembers Cope in the neighborhood.”

  “How strong is she about it?”

  “Weak. But this could be real.”

  “Will, look. I know it’s tough being shut out of the investigation like this. But there’s nothing I can do about the White House. You’re not a street agent, you’re a scientist. We’re set up and going to take Cope. My guess is it’s going to happen any minute now.”

  “He could do a lot while you’re waiting around there.”

  “The guy’s modus has not been to try to destroy a city. He had his chance, and he didn’t take out Washington.”

  “Cope has been in the testing phase,” Hopkins said. “What if he’s finished with his tests?”

  “All right! I’ll send someone to run your lead for you. When I get someone available. Calm down, Will.”

  “LET’S DO THE IMPORTANT elements again,” Hopkins said to Austen. “Just tell me the details you think are important.”

  They had been trying to find a pattern, but nothing was coming. She listed the pieces that she thought had meaning. She said: “We have Hector’s aunt, who thinks she saw him. That would be around Avenue B. We have Harmonica Man living nearby on Houston Street. We have the black dust in the glue—it’s subway dust.”

  “And there was a pollen grain in the dust, remember? Forsythia.”

  “We need to go to that part of the city and look in the subway tunnels again,” she said.

  He stood up and paced, then slammed his hand on the wall. They couldn’t go off the island.

  Austen turned and headed out of the meeting room. “See you later, Hopkins.”

  He looked around. Wirtz was off with the communications equipment. Littleberry was still standing out on the deck. Hopkins picked up his gun and holster, which had been sitting next to a Felix. He took a Saber radio—his last voice contact with the federal government. He picked up a hand-held biosensor, programmed to detect Cobra. He took one of the color Xeroxes of Tom Cope’s photograph. The mild bespectacled face stared at nothing. Hopkins folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

  Mark Littleberry saw what they were doing. “Where are you guys going?” He said he would come, too.

  “For once you’re not going to go AWOL, Mark. Can you stay here and do the explaining if anyone asks where we’ve gone?”

  Austen and Hopkins walked out of the front door of the hospital and down the long steps. The hospital was quiet now, the Army doctors gathered in the biocontainment suite. They passed down an avenue of plane trees, past abandoned buildings, and they arrived at a pier that stretched into Buttermilk Channel in the direction of Brooklyn. A police launch was tied up, manned by two cops. They were listening to a news-radio station that was carrying sketchy reports of some kind of outbreak of disease in Washington.

  “Can you guys give us a lift over to the Battery?” Hopkins asked.

  As far as the cops knew, Reachdeep team members still had a priority for anything they wanted, and the two policemen were happy to oblige.

  The police launch swung out into Buttermilk Channel, moving fast. The tide was running out to sea, and the boat bucked slightly against the t
hrust of the East River. Austen and Hopkins looked around: the sun was going down.

  On the terrace of the Coast Guard hospital, Mark Littleberry continued his thoughtful vigil. He saw the launch crossing the river. He looked up at the sky and saw mare’s tails fingering in from the south. The west winds of the past few days had shifted and then almost died, and the air had gone soft and mild. He saw from the structure of the sky that an inversion of the air had occurred over the city, trapping dust and particles, holding them suspended. The moon was rising in the late day, and it reminded him of something he’d seen almost thirty years earlier. He had not heard the television and radio broadcasts, but he knew that news of the attack on Washington was beginning to fill the airwaves. The breaking news and the structure of the sky would force Thomas Cope to act. “He’ll do it tonight,” Littleberry whispered.

  Bioprep

  THE EARLY HUMAN TRIALS were finished. A large glass tube with metal ends sat on the lab bench in his Level 3 containment zone. He had filled the tube with hexagons of viral glass. The glass pieces were thin and clear, about the size of quarters. He was wearing a white Tyvek suit with double gloves and a full-face respirator, and he was just filling the tube with the last of the little windowpanes, holding them with tweezers, lifting them out of the drying tray.

  He held a piece of viral glass in the last of the day’s light, which was shining through a crack in the curtain. The glass refracted all the colors of the rainbow. It reminded him of an opal.