68
SIMON BLAINE FOLLOWED Captain Gurulé into the Level 4 facility. He felt curiously calm, almost serene. It was a pure delight how beautifully everything had worked, how all the pieces fell into place, how everyone had played to perfection their assigned roles in the drama—the politicians, the press, even the public. It seemed effortless, but of course it was the result of years of meticulous planning, finding the right people and carefully enlisting them, running scenario after scenario, formulating backup plans and secondary backup plans, and playing out every possible move to the endgame and then selecting the best line of attack. All that hard work, all that time and money, was now paying off.
The only wild card had been that fellow Gideon—damn him—who not only had shocked Blaine deeply by coming around asking questions so early in the investigation, but had then seduced his impressionable daughter and dragged her into the situation in a most unfortunate way. Still, Alida, like Blaine himself, was resourceful and would survive. And once he had his hands on the smallpox and had carried out the plan, she would understand everything. She would of course see his point of view—she already did in general terms—and would be at his side as she had always been before. Always. They had an unbreakable father-daughter bond, something rare in this world.
“Sir?” The captain held out an air hose dangling from the ceiling for Blaine to attach to his suit. “It locks in with a clockwise twist.” He demonstrated the movement on his own suit.
“Thank you, Captain.”
As he snapped the hose in place, Blaine heard the faint hiss of air, which brought with it a scent of freshness mingled with the smell of plastic and latex.
“Who was that man back there?” he asked the captain, his voice muffled by the plastic hood.
“I didn’t get a good look at him. Don’t worry, he’s not one of the scientists with security access to the vault.”
Blaine nodded. He had put an enormous amount of trust in the captain, and it was not misplaced. Captain Gurulé was USAMRIID’s most outstanding young microbiologist, vaccinologist, and biodefense researcher, one of the very few people with the clearance to access the smallpox virus. A dazzling man holding both an MD and a PhD from Penn, with uncompromising political views, competent, highly effective—the perfect ally. Courting him had been a very slow and painstaking process, but it had been absolutely critical to the plan.
The lab was virtually empty, as they knew it would be. It was true their every move was being recorded on video, but by the time anyone looked at those videos the whole world would already be aware of what they had done. The terrorist nuclear threat had done its job to perfection.
In a few minutes, they had reached the back of the facility where the Variola was stored in cryogenic suspension, locked in a biosafe inside a walk-in vault. The door to the vault was of stainless steel and identical to a bank safe-depository, modified by USAMRIID for its current, deep-freeze purpose. It was, Captain Gurulé had explained, used for storing the most dangerous, exotic, classified, or genetically engineered microbes.
At the vault door, Captain Gurulé pressed in another code, swiped his card, and turned a tumbler. The door swung open on electronically powered hinges, and they entered. A sudden burst of condensation from the vault’s forty-below temperature clouded their visors. Blaine could start to feel the cold already creeping in. Heavy coats stood on a rack by the door, but the captain waved him past them. “We’ll be out of here quickly,” he said.
The door automatically shut behind them with a deep boom and the click of tumblers. Blaine stood still a moment, waiting for his visor to clear. Then he glanced around.
The vault was surprisingly spacious, with a large central area of stainless-steel tables. They walked past a number of biosafes and cabinets, then passed through a locked door into the inner cage of the vault. Against the far wall, bolted into a framework of angle iron, stood a small biosafe set apart from the others, painted bright yellow and covered with biohazard symbols.
“Please remain standing back, sir,” said the captain.
Blaine held back, waiting.
The captain approached the biosafe, yet again entered a code, and then inserted a special key into a slot on the front. When he turned it, a yellow light began to blink in the ceiling of the vault and a low alert sounded, not loud but insistent.
“What is that?” Blaine asked, alarmed.
“Normal,” said the captain. “It lasts as long as the biosafe is open. There’s no one on the other end checking up on it.”
Inside the safe, on racks, Blaine had a glimpse of the so-called pucks—the white, cryogenically sealed cylinders—that contained the deep frozen, crystallized Variola. He shuddered a moment, thinking of the lethal cocktail each puck contained: the immense amount of pain, suffering, and death enclosed in every one of those little cylinders.
The captain carefully removed one puck from its rack and examined the numbers etched into its side. Nodding to himself, he then took another, identical puck out of his biosuit pouch and placed it in the empty slot in the rack.
One puck was all that was needed. They were designed to keep the virus sealed, in a deep freeze, for at least seventy-two hours—which allowed more than enough time to accomplish their goal.
The captain shut the safe, locked it, and the beeping stopped. He brought the puck over to one of the stainless-steel tables. Blaine knew what he had to do next, and he held his breath in anticipation. It would be a delicate operation.
Laying the puck on the stage of a stereozoom microscope, the captain examined its surface for at least five minutes before making a small mark on it. Then he took a scalpel from the pouch of his biosuit and, with surgical care, cut a small tile of white plastic from the puck. Contained within that tiny piece of plastic, Blaine knew, was a tracking microchip.
The captain flicked the plastic piece to the floor and kicked it under the yellow biosafe with the side of his shoe.
Blaine shivered again. His fingers were already growing numb from the cold. The captain seemed immune.
“I’ll take that, if you don’t mind,” Blaine said, pointing at the puck.
The captain handed it to him. “Be very, very careful, sir. If you drop it, the world as we know it ends.”
A moment later they emerged from the vault, and were forced to wait once again for their visors to unfog. It took longer this time. Even so, everything was ticking along like clockwork.
They made their way back through the lab until they had reached the decontamination showers and air lock. The shower accommodated only one person at a time, and the captain entered first. The automatic door rumbled shut; Blaine could hear the hissing sound of the chemical decontaminants spraying down the captain. The sounds stopped; the outer door opened with a whoosh of the air lock. A moment later the inner door opened to admit him to the shower. He stepped inside and was momentarily engulfed in a blast of chemicals, while a metallic voice instructed him to raise his arms and turn around. Then the door opened and he stepped into the ready room—to find the barrel of a gun pressed immediately against his visor.
“Give me the smallpox,” said a voice Blaine recognized as that of Gideon Crew.