Chimera Read online

  McCabe knew that physically, Jordan Spinner had made a complete recovery. Psychologically, well, qualifications notwithstanding, he'd objected to her coming on board. She was an emotional liability they could ill afford; he himself was enough to contend with. But Reynold had insisted, so he'd let it slide. He'd work around Spinner, or walk over her, whatever was necessary.

  "Doctor Spinner," Brant nodded politely when they reached her. "This is Special Agent Joshua McCabe. I'll introduce everyone else once we're inside." He gestured for her to precede them into the theatre.

  She offered them a tight smile. Minimal makeup, and her only perfume was a lingering trace of chlorine. A swimmer. A habit from growing up on an Australian beach? Or did she need the amniotic comfort?

  The seats in the tiered lecture theatre were almost full. On the podium, Susan Broadwater was deep in conversation with an African American man in his fifties, David Wilson. Supposedly Wilson was from the Defence Intelligence Agency, but McCabe knew his paycheque came from the CIA.

  Susan looked up, and, flashing him a brief smile, said politely, "Josh. How've you been?"

  "Peachy." He accepted her outstretched hand. Something must have triggered his social skills, because he surprised himself by adding, "Glad you're here."

  She stared at him a moment, looking for the truth. "Me too. You, I mean." Her face twisted. "That didn't come out right. I know you'd prefer not to be here, but-"

  "All right," Assistant Director Reynold said, mercifully interrupting yet another uncomfortable reunion. "Let's get started."

  There was seating for four people on the podium out front: Reynold, Wilson, Susan Broadwater and McCabe. Brant sat with Spinner in the audience. Beside them, US Navy Commander Charles 'Chuck' Long was talking to Julia Giovanni, a CIA library researcher. Like Spinner, both Long and Giovanni had lost family members in Oklahoma. That didn't place them above suspicion, but McCabe knew them, and he was glad to have them here.

  When everyone was seated and the doors closed, Reynold pulled the microphone close. He nodded to a handful of familiar faces, peered over his bifocals, and said, "Thank you all for coming. Many of you who were already here at Quantico came with the intention of either running or undertaking training courses that deal with WMDs. The reason courses were suspended and you were asked here early this morning is that we have reason to believe that such an attack is about to be implemented. Indeed, it may already have occurred."

  The background sounds of shuffling papers, cleared throats, and scribbling pens abruptly stopped. The silence was deafening.

  "Following this briefing you will be assigned to task forces to assess the risk possibilities, investigate leads, and devise management strategies for potential domestic and international responses. Team leaders will meet each morning and evening to collate data." Reynold paused and looked around. "This is not a war-game scenario like Global '95. This is not a test or a joke. We believe this threat to be real. It will not be discussed with anyone outside this room except with the express permission of myself or the people on this panel." He gestured to McCabe, Broadwater, and Wilson. "An open dialogue will set the agenda for this briefing. Feel free to question any speaker at any time to clarify points. First up is Major Susan Broadwater, a molecular biologist with USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases."

  Scanning the faces in the audience, Susan said, "I know some of you are familiar with the current status of bioweapons. I'd ask you to be patient while we recap for the benefit of those who are not.

  "Make no mistake." She linked her hands together on the table and leaned forward, closer the microphone. "Bioweapons-BWs-represent a significantly greater threat to our society than any other form of weapon, including nuclear. BWs are relatively easy to make, transport and distribute, and in the worst scenarios they cannot be treated or vaccinated against. They have been called weapons of mass destruction. However, as the man who developed such weapons for the Russians, Ken Alibek, correctly pointed out, they should more appropriately be called weapons of mass casualty.

  "Several months ago, the Aum sect caused havoc using a chemical weapon in a Tokyo subway. BWs are a different ball game. And, contrary to popular opinion, they're not new; they've been used since biblical times. When you leave here, you might like to check the history of Lord Jeffery Amherst, who instigated the deliberate infection of Native American Nations with smallpox. The results were catastrophic.

  "A human specific bioweapon can kill most of the population of a city before it even knows it's under attack, leaving the physical infrastructure virtually intact. In rural areas it can destroy human life while leaving crops and livestock untouched, uninfectious. Thrown into chaos, the remaining population can easily be overtaken by a small, lightly equipped military force. Relatively unskilled labour will take an additional few weeks to decontaminate an infected area of human casualties, leaving it ready for immediate habitation by an enemy's population."

  The expression on some of the faces in the audience was frankly disbelieving. Acknowledging their doubts, Broadwater added, "In recent years, the public have been outraged to learn that in the 1950s the United States Government ran nuclear tests on unsuspecting civilian populations." She cast a knowing eye at Wilson. "What is also public but not common knowledge is that biological tests were undertaken as well."

  Mutters of surprise travelled around the theatre. "In 1950," Susan continued, "the United Stated Navy ran six mock attacks on San Francisco. They sprayed what they believed to be harmless Serratia marcescens towards the coastline. Three days later eleven patients with Serratia infections appeared in local hospitals. One man died. Army scientists concluded that all 800 000 residents of San Francisco, in a three hundred square kilometre area, had been exposed.

  "By 1957, in 'Operation Large Area Coverage', the US Army was raining supposedly benign but easily detectable BW simulants over vast tracts of the continental US. Fluorescent particles of inorganic zinc cadmium sulphide over Winnipeg, Manitoba, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, rural Maryland and Leesburg, Virginia; I could go on all morning. As to the effectiveness of BW agents, from 1963 to 1969, tests were conducted on animals at Johnson Atoll. The details are still classified, however, I can tell you that BW agents were released on animals from a spray tank mounted on an F-105 Navy jet travelling at 600km/h. The acceptable kill rate was fifty percent."

  Like Broadwater, McCabe knew some of those seated in the audience, if not personally then through association. Susan's history lesson was nothing new to them. Others, particularly the younger agents and technicians, were visibly shocked. He glanced at Spinner; her face was drawn and unreadable.

  While Susan continued to rattle off detailed statistics, McCabe's thoughts turned elsewhere, to Williams' victim, Agent Adams.

  The handling procedures and compilation of physical evidence from the Federal Murrah Building, the manner it was dealt with in the forensics labs, and its proper storage under Adams' watchful eye would provide the legal foundation of the prosecution's case against McVeigh. The evidence room had been Adams' personal domain for months. McCabe needed to be in that room, now, to slip into the dead agent's skin, smell what Adams' had smelled, touch what he had touched, look with Adams' eyes-instead of sitting here listening to a short history in BW. Problem was, if McVeigh's lawyers got the merest whiff of something amiss, the case against him would evaporate-which screwed McCabe's chances of gaining access to the evidence room anytime soon. Indeed, the Attorney General had ordered the room sealed.

  "The new FBI mandates are designed to arm you with the tools to investigate and pre-empt attacks," Reynold was saying. "Not just respond to them. Simply put, some organisms offer a threat so great that a successful attack will leave no one alive to run an investigation. Our concern is that such an attack has occurred, using a biological compound and delivery method considerably more sophisticated than those of the Aum Sect or our home-grown Rajneeshees Cults. The sooner we know the details, the great
er our chances of taking control and managing the situation."

  Managing the situation . McCabe almost laughed aloud. The phrase ranked up there with being better prepared .

  As if reading his mind, Reynold shot him a look. "Special Agent Joshua McCabe is known to most of you either personally or by reputation as an FBI profiler with the Behavioural Science Unit here at Quantico. He transferred to the Domestic Terrorism Unit following the Oklahoma City bombing. Agent McCabe also brings a unique perspective to the current situation."

  Not unique, just uncommon. "Don't be fooled into thinking the United States abandoned BW for ethical reasons," McCabe began bluntly. "We didn't. In 1969, President Nixon announced their abolition because the CIA told him the Russians were decades from developing anything viable. Nixon figured on dissuading not only the Russians but also several poorer nations from developing a cheap alternative to nuclear weapons. Scrapping BW research also shaved millions of dollars off the defence budget, assuaged domestic antipathy to the Vietnam War and nuclear power, and set the table for nuclear arms controls. Perversely, the eradication of BW research programmes in this country has now made us highly vulnerable to attack." Which was exactly what the Consortium believed. Damn you, Williams . Damn every one of you for your bitterness and you hubris.

  "These were halcyon years," he continued. He didn't need notes to recite it, chapter and verse. He'd been weaned on it. Literally. "If we could put a man on the moon we could do anything. We'd brought microbe-carrying insects under control with DDT. Yellow fever and malaria had disappeared in all but a few impoverished third world countries. Antibiotics slaughtered age-old nemeses like tuberculosis, and we were vaccinating against viruses like polio, diphtheria and whooping cough. And, after a ten-year battle, we were on the verge of defeating the single greatest killer in human history, smallpox. Humanity was celebrating its perceived triumph over microorganisms. Health professionals went so far as to declare infectious diseases all but dead.

  'But just as smallpox was eradicated, something ugly, something even more nightmarish than smallpox or the plague crept out of the jungles of Africa: Ebola."

  A low mumble rolled across the audience. The very name inspired terror. Blood and flies, the smell of burning flesh. Burning her .

  He picked up a glass of water, sipped-and almost spat it out. Perrier. Since when had Perrier replaced tap water in the water jugs? Someone in the room knew. Hell, a lot of people knew. Except that one of them was trying to mess with his head.

  Defiantly swallowing half the glass, he continued, "Haemorrhagic viruses are common. We have our own, home grown Hanta Fever. And there are other African ones like Marburg and Lassa. But Ebola Zaire had a unique feel to it, as if something tangibly evil had evolved from our worst nightmares to replace smallpox. AIDS had already jumped species and turned pandemic, but we wouldn't recognize that for another five years. And AIDS, for all its unique horror, is a slow virus, and it's not airborne."

  "Excuse me," said Spinner. "Ebola is not airborne. It's spread by body fluids."

  Susan sent McCabe a look indicating that she would answer. "If it's not airborne, ask yourself why the CDC keep it locked up in a Level 4 bio-containment facility, when AIDS is only in Level 2."

  "Joe McCormick from the CDC spent days surrounded by crashing Ebola Zaire victims in 1976, and he never caught it." Spinner countered. "He does not believe it's airborne."

  Ah, the comfort of denial so eagerly embraced by academics. "Despite McCormick's experience," McCabe said, "there were multiple cases in Zaire where the epidemiology clearly pointed to airborne contagion."

  "There was no record of-"

  "I was in Zaire," he finished. "I witnessed first-hand what Ebola can do. In most of these places there were no records because there was no one left alive to make records, Dr Spinner."

  Spinner stared it him. He finished the glass of Perrier.

  "I have personally seen it happen in the USAMRIID lab at Fort Detrick." Susan's voice cut through the mumbles of surprise. "And outside the lab, in Virginia, at the Reston outbreak."

  "I understood the Reston outbreak was a different pathogen," said Spinner, less certain now.

  This time, Susan spoke to her directly. "I was part of the Reston team. The genetic differences are minute; it's the same clade of viruses. The final clincher came with the Kikwit outbreak earlier this year. Post-mortems found loads of viruses both inside and outside the alveolar cells in victims' lungs. There's no longer any doubt. Ebola can infect through inhalation."

  Eyes flickering uncertainly, Spinner scribbled something on her notepad. As a virologist she should have known about the Kikwit findings, but at the time she'd been in a hospital bed, likely isolated from the world by her loss. Was she now capable of climbing out of that personal nightmare and into a larger one?

  McCabe could feel Reynold's eyes on him, asking him to play the game as directed. He shrugged. "For the sake of discussion, let's agree that Ebola-Zaire is not readily caught through airborne particles. We're not talking about Ebola au naturel . We're talking about a weaponised version; one designed to be absorbed through the lungs."

  The noises from the audience were now frankly disbelieving-until Wilson said, "Agent McCabe is correct. The moment the Soviet Union signed the Biowarfare Convention treaty in 1972, BW labs disguised as pharmaceutical plants began sprouting all over the USSR. They were run on a scale equalling, if not surpassing, their nuclear technology. It was also a hell of a lot easier to hide from satellite and spy plane surveillance. By the late 1980s more than sixty thousand people were engaged in research, testing, production and equipment design of BWs in the USSR. They could mass-produce anthrax at a rate of two tons per day with the same production efficiency and reliability-and similar manufacturing techniques-we use to bottle Coca-Cola."

  Once again, their audience fell silent, even apprehensive.

  "This information comes to us courtesy of a couple of highly placed defectors," Wilson added. "Despite some fancy footwork and bumbling attempts to hide the evidence, in 1990 an international BW inspection team learned that the Soviets could manufacture, amongst other things, between eighty and one hundred tons of weaponised smallpox per annum."

  Reynold leaned forward and, glancing at Wilson, said, "Agent Wilson was one of the inspectors on that team. Which is why he is here today."

  "What the West saw as a medical triumph," Wilson continued, "the Soviets, who supported the smallpox eradication programme, viewed as a biowarfare opportunity. When the USSR disintegrated, they began selling off their BW manufacturing equipment and stockpile to anyone who had the money. In April last year, Iraq purchased five tons of VX nerve. Worse, in the cash strapped Soviet economy, most of the BW staff hadn't been paid in years. The resultant brain drain to other countries, including Iraq, was-still is-more like a haemorrhage. And they're not leaving empty handed."

  Five knew who . A dying man leaving a cryptic clue-except Adams was the antithesis of crypticism. His meaning was literal. Five victims of the Oklahoma bombing knew members of the Consortium, a group of bitter old men who couldn't stomach Nixon's order to cease and desist. McCabe scanned the theatre. Not just old men, but idealists who had, for one reason or another, slipped across the murky no man's land of morality. The physical evidence might be out of his reach, but not the files on the Oklahoma victims.

  "You're saying the USSR sold weaponised Ebola and smallpox to Iraq?" Spinner blurted.

  "No, something worse," McCabe replied, not entirely certain if her reaction was disbelief or alarm. "A chimera : a combination of the two."

  "What's a chimera?" someone called from the audience.

  "Genetically altered viruses, tailor made BWs," Susan explained. "It's no surprise the Soviets tinkered with them because you can pick and choose desirable traits; increased lethality, greater tolerance to UV light and so on, while discarding excess DNA baggage. Defectors had already warned us that they'd working on a chimera since 1989. Specifically, an Ebola-smallpox hybr
id more virulent than the original organisms."

  The room erupted in exclamations. Spinner's expression shifted. No question this time, she was frankly appalled. "Why in hell would someone make a virus more deadly than it already is?" she demanded.

  "Why did we make a hydrogen bomb when we had an A bomb?" Susan pushed her notes aside. "Like any weapon, you want more bang for you buck."

  "But who'd be insane enough to want to prove it?" Spinner added.

  "That," Reynold said, "is what we're here to find out."

  -Chapter 6-

  Mathew Island

  Dispersal: Plus 16 hours

  The visibility during the dive that morning had been a remarkable fifty metres. Not uncommon in open ocean or at depth, but unusual on the windward side of an island, especially one now pounded by a storm. The underwater landscape had been surreal, alien. Stubby corals and sea pens grew in isolated oases across a lifeless desert of ebony sand. There were few fish around, except for pair of angelfish patrolling their barren kingdom, regally unaware of anything amiss.

  Nate had expected to see the ubiquitous grey sharks. Small, no more than two metres long, the territorial animals commonly patrolled the deeper waters off coral walls. Warner had brought a sharpened aluminium rod along, not to inflict damage on the bad-tempered animals but to keep them at bay. But even at a depth of sixty metres inside the vent, the only sign of life were strangely isolated soft corals and sponges growing on the walls. Maybe the sharks didn't like the intense heat.

  Neither Nate nor Warner had been inclined to go deeper; they'd already passed what was considered the safe limit for sport divers, and the temperature had been downright uncomfortable. During the ascent, they'd repeatedly had to wash the perspiration from inside their facemasks. Few air bubbles had erupted from the vent, but the thermal-springs had created temperature gradients, giving the water an oily look.