Текст книги "The Eden Plague"

Автор книги: David VanDyke

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

“Coming right up, punkin.” Ever since her mother died, he couldn’t refuse her anything, not that he wanted to. The chemo had been hard on her, and getting her to eat so well was a minor miracle. The cruise seemed to be good for her, to lift her spirits, and the oncologists all said that kids made good cancer patients, because they had the best attitudes. Attitude was everything, as his football coaches had all drummed into him so long ago.

He put a tray full of food down in front of his daughter and joyfully watched her eat. It was going to be a good day.

***

“Time to get off the boat,” Larry said to Spooky as they heard the disembarkation announcement for Cancun over the public address system. “Between this guy,” he hooked a thumb at the closet where the taped and frightened staffer had spent an uncomfortable night, “and the commander you knocked out, they’ll be onto us soon.”

“I’ll use his badge one more time to get off the ship,” Spooky said as he packed a shoulder bag. “We meet at El Gringo Loco.”

Larry raised his eyebrows at Spooky. Actually they weren’t going anywhere near that bar, but the man in the closet would certainly pass this tidbit on to the authorities. He raised his own bag to his shoulder and the two men made their escape from the ship, Spooky from the staff and crew exit, Nightingale with the usual crowd of tourists heading in to the bars in Cancun.

-23-

Infection Day Minus Two.

Binoculars brought the water treatment plant at Van Norman Lakes Reservoir into sharp focus. Daniel could see the enormous tubes of the termination of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Beyond it were hundreds of miles of pipes that gathered and funneled waters from the Sierras down to the Los Angeles Basin. It was a marvel of engineering, completely gravity operated, even generating hydroelectric power on the way. The devastation that the diversion of water caused Mono Lake and Owens Valley and many other, smaller natural Edens of California was deemed a cheap price to pay for keeping the economic powerhouse of the West Coast going.

Daniel shifted his view to the trees planted between the Granada Hills Youth Recreation Center and the enormous structures that prepared millions of gallons of water a day for Los Angeles thirsty residents to use. The stiff breeze’s direction was important; he had to choose a place upwind to maximize his chance of success.

Not that he actually expected to succeed.

Daniel had spotted the car tailing him ten minutes ago; figured he had another ten minutes before Homeland Security pulled him over and checked him out. He opened and drank as many canned protein shakes as he could, choking down about seven.

Homeland Security. Such a wonderfully loaded phrase. Nobody could possibly object to some nice security for the homeland, right? But it gave birth to dysfunctional abominations like the Transportation Security Administration, stealing iPads, patting down toddlers and detaining old people with colostomy bags for fear of being politically incorrect while angry young underwear bombers were let through. It led to trading away constitutional rights and responsibilities to those in power, in return for the comforting illusion of protection that no amount of armed security forces or foreign interventions could provide.

He cut short his musings as he noted the wind direction was blowing just right for his ploy. Dialing a number on the disposable phone, he put in a code, and then tossed it out the window into a drainage ditch.

Shoving the surplus agricultural spray truck in gear, he drove down the slope of the hill and along Balboa Boulevard. It was the last mile of his journey across seven states, trusting to anonymity and the millions of vehicles on the road to get him to his goal. But it didn’t really matter where or if he was intercepted; the design had been put in motion the moment he left the Sosthenes Bunker. It would be great if he could deploy the Plague into the water; but with or without him, the plan was going forward.

The tail car started accelerating behind him, and he knew he was blown. They’d probably gotten a look at his face, despite his best efforts at concealment, and matched it against a biometric database. Daniel sped up, taking the turn into the recreational complex in a skidding screech. He was just five hundred yards from his target section of the fence.

Daniel floored it, then reached over and threw a large lever under the dashboard. The mechanism in back of the truck, normally used for spraying a fine mist of agricultural chemicals in orchards or fields, coughed to life. In a moment a pale white fog trailed behind him, the stiff Santa Anna wind carrying it almost due west.

Four hundred yards, he thought.

The heavy government sedan behind him gained on his anemic truck despite the best he could do; it wasn’t long before he heard the impact of bullets. But five thousand gallons of Eden-Plague-infused solution protected his person from harm.

Three hundred yards to go.

Unfortunately the wheels were not so well covered. He felt one of the dual tires in the right rear go flat, and he steered gently, carefully, to avoid getting the liquid sloshing and so overturn the truck.

Only two hundred yards now.

The car roared up, trying to get alongside on the right, upwind of the mist. Daniel kept the speeding truck close to obstacles on that side – parked cars, fenceposts, curbs – preventing them from passing. One hundred yards.

The truck shuddered and he felt the other right rear tire go. The vehicle settled on its suspension and he could barely control it, so he just kept his foot on the floor and aimed for the piece of fence that separated the sports complex from the water treatment plant’s eastern perimeter road. Strips of shredded rubber banged into the fender well, louder than the gunshots, and he prayed for speed as the barrier came up.

He crashed through.

Still at thirty miles per hour, Daniel roared along next to the enormous rectangular pools that held and distributed the water for treatment. He blessed the designers of the Eden Plague, as Elise had told him that the processing would not kill the virus. Even now the mist was settling into the pools, contaminating Los Angeles’ main tap supply with the life-giving microbe.

He’d almost made it to the end of the complex when he felt the tearing of a bullet in his shoulder and his right arm went numb. His vision blurred and the unstable truck yawed to the left, then rolled once and ground to a halt, breaking open the tough plastic solution tank. He felt the liquid slosh onto him.

Moments later the legs of his pursuers walked into his line of vision. His head was stuck at an awkward angle, pressed against the ground and the remnants of the broken driver’s window of the truck. Dust and grit swirled over him, getting in his eyes, and he was sure his body was broken in several important places. He wondered whether the virus would knit his bones in this awkward position.

Daniel could hear the buzz of a helicopter getting closer. It didn’t matter. He’d done the job.

“Should we get him out?” asked a voice attached to the legs.

“They said not to touch him. He’s contaminated.”

“This whole thing’s probably contaminated. Stay upwind. Besides, he can lie there and bleed for all I care. Scumbag terrorist. ”

“Did they say what the stuff is?”

“No, just some kind of chemical. Nothing too bad. I already called it in. They’re shutting down the plant until they can make sure the water is safe.”

“High five, partner.”

“Yep. Might get a commendation out of this one.”

“We should.”

The sound of the helicopter drowned out their conversation, though it barely added to the gritty wind. The legs walked out of his line of sight. Daniel waited. It seemed like forever, but was probably just a few minutes. He drifted off in a fog of pain. This was good, because the gnawing hunger of the Eden Plague was coming back. He let himself slide into unconsciousness.

Daniel awoke to the smell of plastic and his own bodily fluids. The world looked blue, but that was just the colored sheet covering his face. It was loose enough for him to breathe, but he couldn’t move. He was wrapped and taped. He could hear sounds of activity nearby, snippets of conversation and orders. It sounded like they were cleaning up the crashed truck. He felt himself being lifted. The motion told him that unfortunately he was right; pieces of him had healed into an unnatural configuration. His mind drifted to wondering if someday Elise and the rest would be able to adjust the virus to straighten out bones too.

Daniel heard a resonant, commanding voice rise from the babble. “Put him in the chopper.” He laughed to himself, his mind seizing on irrelevancies. Nobody who actually lived and worked around helicopters called them “choppers.” Aircrew called them “airplanes” or “birds” or sometimes “helos,” or by their military designation – “Black Hawks” or “Sixties” or “Hueys.” Never “choppers.”

Amateurs.

They put him inside the running bird, which sounded to him like some kind of Sikorsky, probably a UH-60 Black Hawk. He was in the hands of the enemy, now, and in God’s, Cassie would say. He sure hoped she was right. He could use some God right now. Closing his eyes, he said a prayer, and let the pounding of the rotors lull him to sleep.

***

It had taken five days for Nightingale and Nguyen to work their way back up through Mexico, eventually crossing using false documents at San Ysidro, the busiest border station in the US. Checked into a nondescript motel in Mission Hills, California, they ate free continental breakfast and watched the headline news.

“Search and rescue forces of three nations were mobilized today as the cruise ship Royal Neptune was reported overdue to arrive at Port Canaveral, Florida from Bermuda. While the US Coast Guard cautions against speculation, the internet is already buzzing with talk of the latest victim of the Bermuda Triangle.”

The two men turned to each other with ill-concealed horror.

Larry downed his coffee. “Damn. DJ was right. They hijacked it, quarantined it,” he whispered.

“Or sunk it to the bottom. The war, it is starting.”

“I guess it is. So let’s go fight it.”

They drove their rental car the mile or two to the north edge of the fence line surrounding the Van Norman water treatment plant. There was a communications conduit thirty yards inside the fence, where it ran from the main structure to a point where it dove into the ground. Beneath the earth, it would join and run alongside the enormous pipes of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, providing a secure fiber-optic link all the way up the pipeline. The line connected the whole system together, computers at each critical node – control valves, hydroelectric generators, pressure sensors – and the water treatment plant in front of them. But right here, it was exposed.

Larry checked his watch. “Some time in the next hour, I’d say. You still think you can do it fast enough?”

“As long as nobody shooting at me, I do it in under one minute. If they are, I do it even faster.”

Larry shrugged, resigned. “Sure hope you’re right. This is gonna take some nice timing.” He stared at his phone.

Seventeen minutes later the phone beeped and the go-code displayed.

They immediately exited the car, walking up to the barrier. Larry worked heavy-duty wire shears along the cyclone fencing, making a hole within seconds big enough for Spooky.

The small man slipped through with a tool bag in his hand, his eyes roaming over the concrete and steel facility. They were far away from any of the plant workers’ usual locations, and the fence line only got checked twice a day. Dropping to his knees next to the conduit, he took a battery-powered saw and sliced carefully through the thin conduit pipe. Peeling it away with pliers, he exposed the fiber-optic lines within.

With a few deft movements of his fingers he attached a clip-on shunt, which interposed itself into the line. Now, unknown to the plant managers, Spooky had access to the computer that ran the whole system. He pressed a button and the LED on the shunt started flashing. Slipping back across the hot dry dirt, he ducked through the fence and into the car.

The tiny flash drive in the device dumped the cyber-worm Vinny had prepared into the line, where it burrowed its way in and immediately started taking over the system. Within two minutes the control computer, though otherwise unaffected, would ignore all commands to shut down water distribution. It would take tens of minutes or even hours to manually close valves and stop the contaminated liquid from flowing out into greater Los Angeles. By that time it would be too late.

Larry put the sedan into reverse, backing into a position away from the fence but facing down the long perimeter road. “I know he said to leave right away, but I ain’t gonna miss this.”

“It will not make us happy. We cannot interfere.”

“I know.”

So they had a front-row seat for the Daniel Markis road rally. They cheered as he started the sprayer and crashed through the fence; they pounded the dashboard as he cut off the pursuit and kept the mist going; they groaned when the truck rolled, and the helicopter landed. And they sweated as they watched the blue-wrapped bundle carried on a stretcher into the helicopter, both men wondering to themselves whether Markis was alive or dead.

-24-

Infection Day Minus One.

Elise Markis steered the bulk milk truck down the gravel track under the trees that line the little landing field outside of Athens, Georgia. She checked her watch. Ten minutes to go. She didn’t want to be too early; the less time sitting around, the less time for people to question her presence.

She pulled the truck over before the rough road broke out of the tree line, at the downwind end of the runway. Hopping out of the cab, she made a final check of the hose, the pump, and the fittings.

Elise looked up from her check as a single-engine, low-winged airplane roared overhead and landed lightly on balloon tires. It turned around and taxied toward her. She jumped back in the truck and drove out to the end of the runway, meeting the aircraft as it turned around and lined up for takeoff. As she pulled up, she looked over the plastic tanks, tubing and brass nozzles of the crop duster.

A much-younger-looking David Markis waved at her as he climbed down from the cockpit. My father-in-law. He looks so much like Daniel now he’s rejuvenated, Elise thought. She could see his expression was anything but happy, however, as he reached back in to drag a struggling figure out of the second seat. It looked like a woman, her mouth, hands and feet taped and her eyes wild with fear and anger.

“Sorry, I had to take her with me. She was too suspicious about me wanting to rent the plane.”

“It’s all right. I’ll deal with her.” At the bound woman’s muffled shriek, Elise reassured her. “You won’t be harmed, miss. And neither will anyone else. You probably think we’re terrorists but this stuff won’t hurt anyone. And I’m sure you’d love to argue about it but I don’t want to hear it right now.” She dragged the prisoner over to the truck cab and boosted her gently into it. From there she started the pump.

The senior Markis hooked up the hose fitting and quickly transferred the full capacity of five hundred gallons to the plane. As soon as he had it in, he unhooked and leaped back into the aircraft, taking off into the puffy clouds of the burning Georgia summer sky.

Once she had parked back in the trees, Elise looked over at the bound woman. “Look, I know you’re scared, but really, there’s nothing to worry about. If I take that tape off your mouth will you behave?”

The young woman nodded, wide-eyed.

Elise’s phone beeped at her. She looked at the incoming text, nodded in satisfaction, and then worked the tape gently off of the younger woman’s face, revealing a strong chin and defiantly furrowed brow. They stared at each other for a long moment.

“What’s your name, hon?”

“Janet Bills. You don’t look like a terrorist.”

“What does a terrorist look like?”

She squirmed uncomfortably. “I don’t know. Crazy eyes? Crazy talk?”

“Well, you happen to be right. I’m not a terrorist, we’re just doing something illegal. But it won’t hurt anyone, so don’t worry about it. In a couple of hours I’ll let you go and everything will be fine.”

“Where’s he going? In the plane?”

Elise pondered this for a moment, then decided it didn’t matter if she told her. Besides, it was going to be a long vigil if they couldn’t talk about something. “Sanford Stadium. Athens. There’s a big Prosperity Gospel revival thing going on, all those suckers that think they can name it and claim it so God will give them a new Mercedes and a new bass boat. Lots of offering plates pouring money into the preachers’ coffers, just proving how much money God is giving the faithful. Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy – for the preachers. About seventy-five thousand people. And they paid ninety bucks a head for the ‘seminar,’ not counting the concessions. You do the math.”

“My father’s a pastor, and he said those people aren’t following God.”

Elise nodded. “I have to agree with you there, honey. Sounds like your father’s a good man.”

“So what is that guy going to do? What’s in the tanks?”

“What do you think it is?”

Janet thought for a moment. “I dunno…skunk stink? Some kind of dye? Like throwing blood on people that wear furs? I can’t think of anything else that wouldn’t hurt people.”

“Smart girl. Would you like a drink?” Elise hoped Janet wouldn’t notice she hadn’t actually confirmed her guess.

“Sure.”

Elise opened the juice bottle, and Janet drank with her taped-together hands.

“So how did you get into flying?”

“I just always wanted to fly, so in high school…”

Elise kept her talking until David came back. Then she cut the tape binding Janet’s hands and hopped out of the milk truck. When she had climbed into the second seat of the plane, she threw the truck keys down to the waiting young woman.

“There’s an envelope under the drivers’ seat with some money for the plane. You might not get it back. Have a nice drive, and sorry to inconvenience you. Oh, the truck kind of sticks in second.”

Janet nodded and waved, half a smile on her face.

They took off, winging their way northeastward. “I think you got a Stockholm buddy,” David said.

“What? Oh, you mean like Stockholm Syndrome? I held her hostage and now she likes me?”

“Yep.”

A pause. “So how did the spraying go?”

“Seventy-five thousand new converts. Just not quite the religion they expected,” laughed Markis.

“Yes, and tonight and tomorrow they’ll pass through the Atlanta airport and go back home to a thousand different places and then there’s no way they’ll be able to quarantine it.”

“Lord willing and the crick don’t rise. But they’ll try.”

Elise did not respond, lapsing into silence. She stared out the scratched and dirty cockpit as her thoughts closed in. Now that their task was over her husband was all she could think about. No matter how much he had protested and placated, she knew he did not expect to get away after his own piece of the plan in Los Angeles. If he did not show up at the rendezvous…well, she was no soldier, but the rest were. She told herself the men were frighteningly competent, and they would be able to rescue him.

If not now, then later. After the chaos. After tomorrow.

After Infection Day.

-25-

Daniel woke to the smell of disinfectant and lanolin. His cell was dim and clean, the narrow bed’s covers of ragged rough green wool with “US” printed here and there on them. He’d seen the same blankets in a few old barracks back when he’d been in the Army, though these days they had mostly migrated to the surplus stores. A naked steel toilet with no seat beckoned, and a sink with only one tap: no hot water. A roll of paper, in an incongruously cheerful green wrapper

Daniel struggled to a sitting position, finding himself unable to straighten. His right arm and shoulder were pain-free but twisted like a lightning-struck tree trunk. He stared at the strange crook in his forearm, shoving aside the surreal feeling. The limb was useless; the muscles were so misaligned he could barely close his hand. It reminded him of someone with cerebral palsy; he was half of Steven Hawking. He tried to remember if Hawking was still alive, and he said a little prayer that the Eden Plague would find him and free that amazing mind from the prison of his crippled body.

Daniel’s left side, hand, and arm were more or less useable, though his ribs were a bit compressed. His spine must have been broken as well, and healed in this hunched-over position. Fortunately his legs seemed to function reasonably well, so he struggled to move over onto the toilet. He was clothed in orange pajamas, with a convenient elastic waistband.

The necessaries finished, he drank from the faucet and lay back down on his bunk, on his side in a semi-fetal position, and tried to ignore the cat-claws in his gut. The Plague wanted to be fed.

Booted feet tramped outside his door. The little window opened, then shut, and the locking mechanism opened with a heavy clunking sound. The door slid back, then sideways on rails, and three men in blue hazardous material suits, filter masks and face shields came in.

Two of them had those huge-barreled revolver-blunderbuss things. The enormous tubes pointed his direction, naked threats. The other man carried a stainless steel chair.

The two guards took positions in the corners to the left and right of the door, and the man in charge sat down on the chair across from Daniel’s bunk, in front of the door.

“It’s not airborne, you know,” Daniel said without moving. “And I’m hardly in a position to jump you.” He held up a twisted arm.

“It’s just precautionary,” a familiar rich voice said, and his fears – his expectations rather – were fulfilled. It was Jenkins, the Third.

“I’ll say it again, Mister Jenkins. I am sorry about your son. I take full responsibility, and I’ll say so in front of any court or tribunal you care to convene.”

Jenkins chuckled, a deep, cruel sound. “You’re never going to see the inside of a courtroom. You’ve just become a lab rat. A guinea pig. You’re going to bless the days when it’s just my scientists experimenting on you, because on the other days, I’m going to test the limits of your suffering.”

“It’s our suffering that defines us, Mr. Jenkins.”

“What?”

“C. S. Lewis. Loosely quoted.”

“Then you are about to be defined quite vigorously.” He laughed again, a naked, evil thing.

“It sounds to me like you’re afraid. What is it that scares you?” Daniel tried to hold the man’s eyes.

“If I fear anything, it’s the wanton disruption of the American way of life that you are trying to bring about. Have you thought about the chaos you might have caused had we not caught you in your little scheme?”

“What part of today’s ‘American way of life’ do you love so much? What part did the Founding Fathers sacrifice so much for? Is it our citizens dying of cancer? Heart disease? Or just traffic accidents? Is it the rampant violent crime, or alcoholism, or the PTSD of veterans like me? The drug use and mental illness that caused me to lose control and kill your son? We can get rid of all that if you just stop fighting it.”

Jenkins snorted. “Listen to yourself! You want to surrender the destiny of the human race to an untested virus that might mutate and wipe us all out. Or this thing could be a Trojan Horse designed by aliens or the godless communists to destroy the Free World. What if everyone welcomes it, and after a certain amount of time, or the deployment of some trigger mechanism, kablooie! Everyone infected with it dies or goes crazy, and the old Soviets win the Cold War from their graves while the Russians and Chinese and Al Qaeda laugh and cheer.”

“Plausible. Plausible, Mr. Jenkins, but I don’t think so. If you cared so much about your country you would have informed our elected leaders when you discovered it. There would be a multibillion-dollar program to deconstruct the virus already in place, to defend against misuse of it, and to genetically engineer it so it could be used for the good of everyone, under controlled circumstances, as a cure. Instead, you kept it hidden on an island, owned by a shell company, run by your own personal mad doctor and secured by amoral thugs who kept their own researchers prisoner. So even if I didn’t get half of Los Angeles infected, now it’s too big for just INS, Incorporated. You had to call in Homeland Security. People will talk. There’s nothing more of an oxymoron than a ‘government secret’ in the age of the internet.”

“You know Markis, I let you blather on because it amuses and gratifies me to see you lying there like a twisted freak.”

“So you must trust these men implicitly? You’re not afraid of them hearing anything you say?”

“They are utterly loyal to me.”

Daniel glanced at them, seeing nothing to contradict what Jenkins had to say. Still, the longer he kept Jenkins talking, the more time the other parts of the plan had to succeed. Maybe he might even get through to one of the minions.

“Did you tell them it will cure anything? And give them functional immortality? Live a thousand years like a man of twenty? Never have to watch what you eat, or worry about all the pains of growing old? Do they think a couple of grunts like them will get a piece of that? That it won’t be reserved exclusively for the rich and powerful?”

“They will get it, just as soon as I do. As soon as the bugs have been worked out. They don’t want to end up in a pathetic situation like you are now.”

Daniel chuckled. “Just a little longer, and everyone will have a better world, right? It’s always just a little bit longer, until they find a cure for cancer, or nuclear fusion gives everyone clean energy, or we balance the budget. But those things never come, Jenkins, because the rich and powerful don’t want them to come. If they did, the little people wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore, and people like you would have no leverage. Nothing to hold over their heads. But the Eden Plague can free them now, and we can still work on making the virus better as we go along.”

Daniel wasn’t sure how convincing he was, or how much of this he even believed himself, but he had committed himself to the course and he wasn’t going to back out now. And maybe this was penance for his crime, even if it accomplished nothing else.

“You think I’m evil, Markis? You’re a pie-in-the-sky raving lunatic. You want to just roll the dice on a slice of Soviet-designed biological warfare and hope it all turns out all right.”

Daniel shrugged, as well as he could. “At least I put my money where my mouth is. What have you risked, Jenkins?”

“As little as possible. That’s how great things are achieved.”

“Really? I think truly great people would say just the opposite.”

Jenkins stood up. “We’ll just have to see who achieves greatness, then,” he sneered. “Good luck from that position.” He picked up the chair, backing out of the room. The other two followed.

“I could use some food, if you want more than a corpse to torture later.”

He laughed. “I think I’d rather see you suffer some more the way you are. Bon appétit.”

The door shut with a heavy slam. Bon appétit’s cat-claws ripped at his guts.

Eventually he slept.