Legends

The muffled voices talking to each other in an unintelligible language had worked their way into the texture of Martin’s dream; he decided he was Lincoln Dittmann at Triple Border, listening to the Saudi he’d later identified as Osama bin Laden conferring with the Egyptian Daoud. When he finally realized that the men weren’t speaking in Arabic, he forced himself through the membrane that separated sleep from wakefulness and sat up. It took a moment for his eyes to become accustomed to the dim light cast by feeble bulbs burning in sockets on the stone walls of the vaulted basement. He reached out and touched the cold bars and remembered that the guards had forced him into a low cage, the kind used to house monkeys in laboratories. He could make out Almagul curled up on a pile of rags in the cage next to his. Beyond her cage were other cages—more than he could count. Eight of them contained prisoners sleeping on the floor or sitting with their backs to the bars, dozing with their bearded chins on their chests.

Near the stone staircase, three men in white lab coats stood around a high stainless-steel table talking among themselves. Martin could hear their voices. Gradually a migraine mushroomed behind his eyes and he felt himself being sucked into another identity—one in which the language the men were speaking seemed vaguely familiar; to his astonishment he discovered that he understood fragments.

… very stable, even in sunlight.

… the advantage of anthrax over plague. Sunlight renders plague stock harmless.

… should concentrate on anthrax.

… I agree … especially pulmonary anthrax, which is extremely lethal.

… Q fever persists for months in sand.

… What are you suggesting? … bombard New York with sand and then attack America with Q fever?

… still think we are making a mistake focusing on bacterial agents, which are, in general, difficult to stabilize, difficult to weaponize.

Of course! The men were speaking Russian, a language Martin had studied in college in what seemed like a previous incarnation. He remembered the shrink at the Company clinic telling him of a case where one alter personality was able to speak a language that the other personalities didn’t understand. It was a perfect example, she’d said, of how compartmented legends can be in the brain.

… not going to make the case for nerve agents over bacterial agents again, are you? Samat himself decided the question months ago.

… Samat said we could revisit the issue at any point in our program. Nerve agents—VX in particular, but Soman and Sarin also—can be deadly.

… they have serious manufacturing problems.

… I want to remind you that tabun is relatively easy to manufacture.

… Tabun is only moderately stable.

… we are turning in circles … try one of the hemorrhagic fevers—the Ebola, for instance—on one of our clients.

… Ebola is taking us down a dead-end street. I grant you it is lethal but it is also relatively unstable, which makes an ebola program problematic.

… still, we have the spores Konstantin developed in his laboratory, so we might as well test them on one of the guinea pigs.

… only eight guinea pigs left.

… not to worry … two new ones.