Breathless

Forty-four



Lamar Woolsey took an early-bird flight out of Las Vegas and landed in Denver in time for a late breakfast, which he did not get to order, let alone eat, because two men were waiting for him when he came off the enclosed jet bridge into the terminal. They were in the area from which, since September 2001, everyone except airport personnel and ticketed passengers was excluded.
The moment that he spotted them, Lamar knew they were waiting for him. They had a look with which he was familiar: fully ready but pretending weariness, vigilant but feigning indifference. One of them had a hands-off cell phone, shaped like an ocarina but hardly bigger than a peach pit, hooked over his right ear.
Out of courtesy, so they would feel that their plainclothes disguise was effective, Lamar looked away from them and continued walking until the one without the cell phone called his name. Then he halted, turned to them as they approached, and said, “Ah, you must be with the conference.”
The one with the cell phone said, “No, sir,” and with a gesture encouraged Lamar to step out of the flow of disembarking passengers.
Neither of them spoke the name of his agency, but when they flopped open their ID wallets, Lamar wasn’t surprised to see that they were with the Department of Homeland Security: Derek Booker, Vincent Palumbo.
“I assume I won’t be able to keep my commitment to speak at the conference.”
Encouraging Lamar to walk with them, Palumbo said, “No, sir, you won’t. The organizers have already been told you’ve got to withdraw from the program due to a sudden illness.”
“What illness might that be?” Lamar asked.
“It’s not been specified, sir. That’s up to you.”
“I’ll use my imagination. I’m quite imaginative. Maybe it’ll be a tropical parasite with outrageous symptoms.” Lamar carried only his laptop. “I’ve got a suitcase coming through on the luggage carousel.”
Booker said, “We don’t have time for that now, sir. Feldstein will bring it to the site no more than an hour after we’ve gotten you there.”
Lamar didn’t bother to ask them the location of the site. They wouldn’t tell him in public, lest they be overheard.
They escorted him to a locked service door where someone waiting on the farther side opened it in answer to Palumbo’s brisk knock.
Corridor, stairs down, corridor, corridor, exit door: On the concrete apron, a sedan waited for them. As Booker got in the front passenger seat, Lamar settled in back beside Palumbo. The waiting driver glanced back at Lamar and said, “Feldstein, sir.”
“I’ve got a terrible tropical parasite, Mr. Feldstein, but not to worry. You can’t be infected just by riding in a car with me.”
“That’s good to know, sir,” Feldstein said as he popped the hand brake and tramped the accelerator.
“Is the site in the city?” Lamar asked Palumbo.
“No, sir. We’re flying out from here.”
“To where?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
Palumbo’s apparent discretion must mean that the agent hadn’t been told the location. In Lamar’s experience, that was unusual.
“What’re we dealing with this time? Explosives, chemical, biological, nuclear …?
“Sorry, sir,” Palumbo replied, “but I’m really not at liberty to disclose anything.”
Extraordinary. The escorting agents always knew the nature of the threat. Usually they presented a briefing en route.
Two airliners waited on a taxiway to use the runway that was being held clear for Feldstein.
Following the centerline stripe, the young agent drove at such high speed, he seemed to think he was expected to achieve flight velocity.
The executive helicopter was parked at the extreme end of the runway, on the chevrons marking the overrun area. As Lamar Woolsey, Palumbo, and Booker got out of the sedan, the chopper’s rotors began to slice the air, casting scimitar shadows on the concrete.
The three men ducked under the blades, and the agents followed Lamar into the craft as Feldstein drove away.
Palumbo and Booker took the seats nearest the door, and Lamar made his way farther into the eight-passenger craft.
Another man was aboard, ensconced in one of the last two seats.
Lamar sat across the narrow aisle from Dr. Simon Northcott. “I’ve got a terribly vicious tropical parasite. What’s your excuse, Northcott?”
“Food poisoning.”
Belting in, Lamar said, “You lack imagination, my friend. As I’ve noted regarding other issues. Where are you coming from?”
“We took off from my hotel parking lot just minutes ago. I was looking forward to this conference.”
“Well, you never know,” said Lamar. “Maybe this time it’s not just a plot to poison millions. Maybe this time it’s the end of the world, and you wouldn’t want to miss that, would you?”
Northcott’s smile was indistinguishable from any other man’s grimace. He was a good enough fellow and incredibly intelligent, but his sense of humor had atrophied in the Paleozoic Era.
The whine of the engine escalated, and Lamar looked out the window as the pavement fell away.
“How does a bankrupt government,” Northcott said, “pay to have all these cars and helicopters and jets and field labs and swarms of mortician-faced agents standing by 24/7, coast to coast?”
“I’ve heard the secretary of the treasury has worked out a deal to sell the Chinese five Midwestern states, where the people are just too uncool, anyway.”
Northcott didn’t wince a smile, but stared at Lamar as if he might be serious. Crane-tall, hawk-faced, as lean as an anorexic stork, he hunched forward like a vulture on a tree limb. He really wasn’t an actively bad guy, and he truly was incredibly intelligent, but Lamar found him about as likeable as an attack of gout.
“What do they want with you this time?” Northcott asked. “Is it physics or maths?”
“You’re a geneticist and physiologist, so you probably wouldn’t be here if this had anything to do with explosives or chemicals. If they want me on a biological threat, my guess is it’s not physics or maths so much as it is chaos theory.”
If Northcott’s smile looked like a grimace, then his grimace was more like the expression of a man who found a live cockroach swimming in his soup at the very moment he broke a tooth on a ball bearing spooned from the same bowl.
“The butterfly effect, fractals, strange attractors, nonlinear equations—it has a voodoo feel to me.”
“Well,” said Lamar, “the field hasn’t been around half a century yet. When we’ve got a century and a half behind us, if we haven’t piled up multiple irrefutable proofs of basic contentions, I’d agree with you that we should stop calling it science and start calling it religion. And of course we already have quite a lot of proofs we’ve built upon.”
Northcott knew to what the century and a half referred, and he was about to skewer Lamar with pointed words when Agent Palumbo came along the aisle, holding on to the seats on both sides, and went down on one knee in front of them.
“ETA is fifty minutes. The pilot had a sealed directive for me. The site is in an unincorporated rural area in the higher foothills, a private residence belonging to someone named Grady Adams, and with him will be a veterinarian, Dr. Camillia Rivers. Both are witnesses, not suspects at this time. It’s a biological issue, but the decision has been made that decontamination and isolation protocols will not be necessary. The field lab needs only to approximate the sterility of a hospital operating room. Neither airtight nor positive-pressure antimicrobial suits will be required.”
“Then what the hell kind of biological threat would it be?” asked Simon Northcott.
Palumbo corrected him: “Sir, the directive calls it a biological issue.”
Northcott’s face clenched, the high points of his cheekbones and his nose as white as tensed knuckles, the rest of it red. “I’ve been yanked from the conference to be flown off at high speed to consider an issue?”
“Sir,” Palumbo said, “all I can say is, based on my experience, this might not be either a ticking-clock or a doomsday case, but it’s big somehow. Something different and way big. It came up quick, and D.C. calls it a Priority One Incident, which until now has meant only one thing—nuclear detonation imminent. Paul Jardine is on his way to the site now.”
Lamar had met Jardine a few times in the past six years. After the recent reorganization, he had been appointed deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security for the western half of the country, from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
Northcott said nothing more, but he looked neither mollified nor impressed.
Lamar said, “Agent Palumbo, I’m sorry. The engine noise, the rotors … I didn’t get the owner of the residence, the site. What did you say his name was?”
“Adams, sir. Grady Adams. The veterinarian is Dr. Camillia Rivers.”
“Within every chaos,” Lamar said, “is an eerie order waiting to be revealed.”
“Sir?”
Lamar said, “Just talking to myself, son.”
“Sir, we’re now in a communications blackout until the end of this. I have to impound your cell phone and laptop.”
The laptop was at Lamar’s feet, and he presented his cell phone to the agent.
“Sir, I also need any text-messaging devices you’re carrying.”
“Oh, son, I have too few years of life remaining to spend one minute text-messaging.”
Northcott, on the other hand, proved to be a walking telecom store. Grumping, he shed two cell phones and an array of devices that filled Vincent Palumbo’s available sport-coat pockets.
As the agent went forward again, carrying their laptops, Simon Northcott said, “They’re all idiots at Homeland Security. This does it. I’m going to take my name off the volunteer specialists roster.”
The more enlightened officials in the federal government were aware that the scientists directly in their employ were not generally speaking the most brilliant in their fields—with the exception of some people at NASA and a number in institutes completely funded by the Department of Defense. Consequently, specialists in numerous sciences were solicited to volunteer to be available to Homeland Security in crises, if called.
As one of many on the roster who had his skills, Lamar had been tapped only six times in seven years, and he imagined there had been as many as a hundred crisis responses during that period. He doubted that Simon Northcott was drafted as often, because only a fraction of terrorist plots involved biological weapons, whereas a specialist in probability analysis and chaos would be a valuable team member regardless of the threat scenario.
“Priority One Incident,” Northcott said with a sarcastic note, “yet it’s not a threat, it’s an issue. A Priority One Issue—now there’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one.”
Lamar put his forehead against his window, looking down at the shadow of the helicopter racing over the landscape below them.
Grady Adams of Colorado. Marcus had no closer friend than Grady Adams, who had been with him when he died.
Carl Jung, the psychologist and philosopher, had believed that coincidence—most of all that most extreme kind of coincidence called a synchronism—was an organizing principle of the universe as real as any of the laws of thermodynamics and of gravity. On issues such as culture and human exceptionalism, Lamar Woolsey had little in common with Jung, but there was certainly a place for the man in chaos theory, where hidden order could be found in even the most seemingly disordered and formless systems like the actions of wildly tossing storm waves and the furies of tornado winds.
Grady Adams. Lamar figured, drawing this card at this time was like being dealt the most meaningful card from a thousand-deck shoe.