Kay picked it up, turned it. “Is this a cell phone?”
“Nope.” Nick grinned. “Its only function is to summon your humble servant. And now, I’ll leave you to your work.” His grin disappeared. “I don’t know how long you’ll need to go through those files, but I expect a long time. It’s a hell of a lot of data. But you’re not going to kill yourself doing it. You need to eat and rest. I’ll make sure you do that. You’re no good to anyone dead on your feet, Kay.”
It was her weak point—working until she dropped. And no, it wouldn’t help anyone.
“Okay, Nick. I’ll try to be smart about it.”
He stood and stared into her eyes, all playfulness gone. “Yeah. You will. I’ll leave you to it. I’ll check in with you from time to time. In the meantime, I’m going to monitor our perimeter and contact ASI. Find out if there’s any more intel.”
“Find out about Felicity, if you can.”
“Will do.” He leveled his index finger at her as if pointing a gun. “I’ll be checking in on you.” And he walked quietly out the door.
He did check in on her from time to time. She’d sit up to stretch her aching back muscles to find that the water pitcher had been refilled, fresh fruit on the plate, new sandwiches. Kay barely noticed. She sank into the job like you sink into quicksand, pulled ever deeper.
It was impossible to tell whether it was day or night. Didn’t matter, she was digging deep into the files and trying to figure out what was going on that had cost Priyanka and Mike Hammer and Bill their lives—and figure out who was behind it.
She dove into Bill’s work files, opening each and reading enough to discard it. There were thousands of files, each one interesting. She had to tug herself away from most of them because however fascinating they were, they didn’t pertain to the issue at hand.
It was an overwhelming job. Not all the files were his—some were research papers from around the world. The Infectious Diseases Data Observatory and the Epidemic Diseases Research Group in Oxford. The French Institute of Health and the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Nagasaki School of Global Health, various agencies within the World Health Organization…the list was endless.
His root directory wasn’t organized according to author or source, but according to material. He was a well-known expert on influenza, which was one of the most-studied viruses on earth. The printed information on the influenza virus could fill an entire university library—and in some universities, did.
She sighed and resigned herself to manually examining all the files. It was intense, eye-straining labor, and after a while, the words began to blur on the screen.
She stopped, rubbed her eyes.
She’d scrolled though about a thousand files and had barely scratched the surface. She couldn’t even outsource it because you needed to be an expert to understand what to look for. Mere keywords wouldn’t do it. All the files were about the influenza virus and would contain those hundred or so keywords pertaining to it. It would take her days to train someone even as bright as Felicity to search the files, and even then she could easily miss something significant.
It was as if someone had opened up a firehose of knowledge of the influenza virus and was flooding her with it.
In fact, it was almost as if…as if Bill was blinding her with science. From beyond the grave.
Damn! She straightened, widened her eyes to knock the sleep out of them. So far she hadn’t found out anything, not after hours and hours of work.
Were all these files essentially smoke?
Because…because he had been working on something illegal, something that transgressed the Biological Weapons Convention, the convention that prohibited research into bio-weaponry. So he’d have done it in secret, wouldn’t he?
Could there be a hidden section with the information she was seeking?
Kay went right back to the root directory and searched harder for something that would indicate secret files within secret files behind firewalls and fire-breathing dragons. She went over the lists carefully but as much as she tried to find a secret or separate section of files, she couldn’t.
And yet, he’d encrypted his entire computer with another layer of encryption. No one did that if there wasn’t something to hide. CDC encryption was very good. But you weren’t supposed to be working on non-CDC research.
Maybe…maybe that was it. Maybe he carried out his secret research after hours, when the day staff left and a skeleton staff remained for the evening and overnight.
She’d done that sometimes, with a time-sensitive research project. Her office had an armchair that became a very uncomfortable cot. More nights than she cared to think about, she’d worked until morning, stretching out on the cot for short breaks.
The building grew quiet after six p.m. and there were no interruptions. Just silence and almost unfettered access to the computing power of the institution and all its high-tech equipment.
If Bill had been working on something illegal, surely he’d have done it after hours? And maybe—maybe he’d finessed access to the BSL-4 lab? Mostly only governments ran bio-safety level 4 labs and there were only 9 government labs in the country, including the CDC. And a few private ones.
Though obtaining unauthorized after-hours access to the BSL-4 labs would be incredibly difficult, it was feasible that Bill had done the basic research at work and then tested the virus in one of the handful of privately owned BSL-4 labs with no cumbersome reporting protocols.
Or he could have done the theoretical work and then handed off the testing to a private lab. This kind of project, in the wrong hands, would have almost unlimited funding, unlike the CDC’s funding, which was squeezed harder and harder each year.
But then, Kay and her colleagues were trying to save lives, not a top priority these days. If you were trying to take as many lives as possible, create the most suffering possible, well then…money would flow to you. A weaponized Spanish flu virus would, really, be worth billions. Using bio-weapons was crazy reckless, but if you knew what you were doing, and if you could design a flu that degraded quickly and you were far from the borders of the country being attacked, you could depopulate a country in a few weeks and take over the infrastructure.
You’d have to be as mad as Hitler, but theoretically, it could be done.
No!
Her entire body rebelled at the thought.
Kay went back to the root directory and selected files from no more than a year ago and files time-stamped past 1800 hours.
Priyanka said she’d started observing odd behavior eight months ago. A year would probably cover it all.
The files appeared on her screen, but there were 20 files per screen and—she peered at the numbers at the bottom of the screen—50 pages each. A thousand files. Doable, certainly. And better than the hundreds of thousands of files that had at first appeared.
By the fourth file, Kay knew she had hit gold.
Bill had put together all the latest research on the Spanish flu, including Russian research on a patient buried in the Russian permafrost for a hundred years. It took her several hours, but she read it all and saw that he was interested in a fast-acting, fast-degrading flu.
Made sense. The virus was like tossing nuclear bombs around. No one wanted a worldwide pandemic, not in these days of mass air travel, of mass movements of people. At any given moment, there were 40 million refugees awash in the system, more than at any other time in the history of the world. A locus of infection in a group of refugees who were not monitored and the spark could turn into a conflagration that would burn the world down.
This original weaponized influenza virus had been genetically engineered to kill select individuals or groups with shared DNA.
Kay stopped for a moment, rubbing her eyes.
All of this was so freaking hard. It felt like she was twisting her brain so much it hurt. This was the opposite way of thinking of a medical researcher, who was trained—and trained intensely—to look for ways to mute the effects of disea
se. If possible, to eradicate it. The brass ring for every researcher was to do to all infectious diseases what had been done to smallpox—eliminate it from the earth.
Humankind’s most ancient and relentless enemy made powerless.
And now she had to follow the thought processes of someone who wanted to make our mortal enemy stronger. More virulent, more dangerous, more lethal.
It went against absolutely everything she believed in. It went against everything she’d ever done with her life. It went against everything science stood for.
Kay had grown up with an FBI Special Agent and she knew the men of ASI. They trained hard to serve and protect. It was their instinct. Her grandfather, as a young special agent, had run into a burning building to save two children who had been held hostage. The hostage taker had set fire to the building, preferring death to capture. The two children survived, thanks to her grandfather.
She’d asked him how he’d had the courage to run into a fire and he’d looked at her blankly.
Because that was what he did.
What Nick did. What Metal and Joe and Jacko and the other men at ASI did.
What she was doing was the equivalent of asking them to cower and hide if terrorists attacked. They couldn’t do it. She couldn’t do this.
But she had to.
She leaned forward again, holding another sandwich that had magically appeared at her elbow.
Hour after hour went by as she began to pick up on what Bill had been doing.
The first thing he’d done was increase the morbidity of the virus. She deleted out for the moment everything but the effect of the virus. In one file, she found a 3-D rendering of the virus, the elements in yellow where the virus attacked the human system. That was on one half of the screen. On the other half was the original virus, the yellow smaller, more scattered.
The new gene had been designed to attack the immune system immediately, like an RPG. The effect was immediate and devastating. The incubation period was reduced to almost zero.
He—and whoever was working with him—had created a virus that blew the immune system up and flooded the lungs with fluid.
God, the image flashed in her mind of Mike Hammer clutching his throat, drowning before her very eyes in a back alley. How he’d clutched his throat, chest heaving to bring in air that couldn’t fill the lungs, which were already filling with fluid. His face going from shock to fear to death in a minute and a half.
Someone had created that. Someone had wanted that.
She rested her forehead on her palm, exhausted and demoralized. Such horrors, things she and her colleagues had fought against all their adult life, being planned. The thought of the virus rotating in front of her on the screen being let loose to choke hundreds of thousands—millions!—of men, women and children…it hurt her to even think of it.
This virus for the moment was being used selectively, but it was there, engine idling, waiting to escape and become a worldwide pandemic, threatening humanity itself.
How could people do this?
Heavy hands on her shoulders. “Okay, princess. Time for a rest.”
Nick turned her office chair around until she sat facing him, inside the vee of his legs. Nick frowned, framed her face with his hands. “What’s wrong, honey?”
She must look as stricken as she felt.
Kay curled her hands around his wrists, trying to anchor herself. Tears were welling in her eyes, but it was mostly rage that she felt.
“Let me tell you what we’re up against, Nick. Like I said, in 1918, the Spanish flu killed more people than World War I. The most deadly war in history couldn’t compete with the Spanish flu. This particular flu attacked the immune system, making it go haywire. So, the stronger the immune system, the higher the death rate. Most flus kill children and the elderly, but this one affected strong young adults most of all. People couldn’t shop or meet up or even attend funerals. For a while, there was speculation that it would kill most of humanity. Even now, we don’t fully understand it. And someone, someone in the institution where I work, has taken that and made it worse. Made it faster-acting, even more deadly. I’ve studied these files and I keep backing away from that, because it’s too insane for words, but I can’t. Someone has taken this knowledge—which is the upshot of the work of thousands and thousands of the best minds humanity has—and turned it against us. I…I can’t wrap my head around it.”
There was still rage, but a tear fell down her cheek.
Nick wiped it away with his thumb, and sighed. “I know, honey.”
“I am just so…so angry.”
He nodded. “I know exactly how you feel, believe me.”
Kay blinked. “You do?”
“Oh yeah.” He hooked another rolling chair with a foot, pulled it toward him, sat down. He took her hands in his. The warm fleece sweater and socks had helped in the chilly room, but her hands had been cold. She’d been so focused on the files she’d barely noticed. But his big, calloused hands chased the chill away, filled her with heat. Those hands infused her with warmth and strength.
She cocked her head. “There’s a story there.”
“Damn straight. A terrible one, too.” He leaned forward, kissed her cheek. “So. You and I are alone here, but in a week, we wouldn’t have been. A new ASI recruit will be starting work soon. Matt Walker. Former Lieutenant Matt Walker. A very good man whose path crossed a very bad man’s.”
Kay was listening with every sense she had, not just her ears. Nick’s expression was serious, almost grim, his voice flat, as if intent on not betraying emotion. He didn’t realize it, but he was holding on to her hands so tightly it almost hurt. He’d gone continuously out of his way not to hurt her. If he was holding her hands too tightly, it was because of the emotions he was trying so hard to repress.
This was important to him, and therefore to her, too.
Discovering what Bill had been trying to do had been like an abyss opening up at her feet, the earth breaking itself apart. What had before been solid terrain was now dangerously cracked. But this was the world Nick operated in, where bad people did bad things.
She needed some insight into this world to remain sane, this new insane world of black hearts and sick minds, where bastards work really hard to kill as many people as possible.
It made no sense to her, but it made sense to Nick.
“A SEAL like you?”
“Yeah.” His jaw flexed, and his hands tightened even more. “Lieutenant Matt Walker was a legend. Three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Spoke decent Arabic and Pashto. He led from the front, always, the bravest of the brave.”
The way he was speaking… “Is he—is he dead?”
“No. No thanks to the US Navy, though.”
“What happened?”
“He and his men were stationed at an FOB in Helmand. An FOB is a—”
“Forward operating base,” she said. At his look, she shrugged. “I listen when people talk. You’d be surprised what I’ve picked up from the guys.”
“I hope just military slang.”
“Mm. And some other stuff. Jacko’s very inventive. I’ve got a PhD and I’ve never heard that stuff before.” Jacko, who was a very gifted mechanic, had once had a piece of engine bite him and she’d learned a lot of interesting expressions before he discovered she was there, listening to him with a grin. He’d shut up immediately.
Nick winced.
“Never mind that.” Kay leaned forward. “What happened at the FOB?”
It was as if she’d waved a wand. It wiped the slightly amused wince from his face and replaced it with an expression she couldn’t quite pin down.
“Matt and his team were on endless patrols. We’re not even at war anymore in Afghanistan but goddamn if fine men aren’t still being killed. So anyway, in prances this CIA prick. Not gonna say his name because it’s still classified, but his middle name was mother—” His eyes glanced to the side, then back. His jaw clenched as he bit back the word motherfucker. “He briefed Ma
tt on the new mission. Turns out the new mission was sort of the old one, except for one thing. They were supposed to keep the local warlord happy at all costs. Give him the total white-glove treatment.”
Now it was her turn to wince. “I’ve heard that some warlords were—are—nasty people.”
“Scumbags, most of them,” Nick nodded. “This particular scumbag was the worst of the lot. Ignorant and brutal. Matt said he took an extra-long shower whenever he had to visit the warlord, keep him pacified. Then one day he arrived unexpectedly, had some patrol schedules to share with the fuckhead.” Another sideways glance away. “Sorry.”
Kay nodded. “I’m a scientist. I know how to recognize correct technical terminology. Fuckhead sounds about right. So, your friend Matt arrives unexpectedly…”
“Yeah.” Nick drew in a deep breath. “He entered the compound, went to what passed for the warlord’s office, which was crumbling stucco walls and a beaten earth floor with some flea-laden rugs over it. Matt heard screaming and broke into the warlord’s room. The warlord, he had,” Nick swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up then down, “he had a little boy bent over a table and was raping him brutally. The boy was screaming and crying. Warlord looks up, frowning, says the Pashto equivalent of ‘the fuck you want?’ Totally ignoring the little kid who’s screaming under him. There’s a charming practice in that part of the world called ‘Bacha Bazi’—boy toys. They use underage boys for sex. It was supposed to have been wiped out, but that’s wishful thinking.”
“What did Matt do?” Kay could almost see the scene, feel a good man’s pain at watching a little boy being brutalized.
“Broke the sick fuck’s jaw is what he did. He freed the little boy, helped him clean up, then the little boy led him to a basement where,” Nick swallowed heavily again, “there were twenty-two little boys, ages six to ten, more or less, chained. They were too cowed even to cry. Some had scars from being beaten with sticks. Matt freed them, loaded them onto the Humvees, then went back into the warlord’s office and kicked him in the balls.”
Kay was theoretically against violence, had heard the slogan violence is never the answer a thousand times, but she was fast coming to understand that sometimes violence was indeed the answer.