Spiral

He scanned the rows of equipment, seeing only a couple of other users. A seminar was going on about a new kind of solar cell based on carbon nanotubes that had everyone jazzed. In a few more minutes, the seminar would end and the cleanroom would begin filling up again. The electron beam lithography machines were running-the demand on those was relentless. People were also camped out on the various other machines-the evaporators, ion millers, and etchers. They were all in their anti-dust bunny suits, conducting a defensive war against particles of dust and flecks of skin.

Xintao began to gather everything up. He was nearly done.

He heard a beep.

Strange. Near the RF plasma cleaning chamber. That was when he spied it. He’d sat before the machine time and time again, waiting for his sample to be finished. The wall behind the chamber was imprinted on his memory. Two brass pipes running vertically, delivering water to the cooling head.

Now there were three.

He approached the third pipe, touched his hand to it. The pipe was vibrating ever so slightly.

Xintao wasn’t sure why, but he immediately panicked. He stared at the pipe for a few seconds, then quickly glanced around, looking for one of the staff.

To his surprise, the pipe beeped again. Quietly, like an alarm clock sounding in another room. He pulled his hand back, walked away briskly, certain that he had to find someone from the staff.

He didn’t get far before the blast hit him.

LEON SOLOMON, THE FBI’S CHIEF COUNTERTERRORISM SPECIALIST, arrived in the back of an unmarked van after a short ride over from the J. Edgar Hoover Building. A barricade of cruisers, orange cones, and yellow police tape kept the crowd from getting too close to the wreckage. Twelve FBI men were already on-site in addition to hundreds of local firefighters and police. The crowd was big and growing, drawn by the irresistible lure of destruction. Some were slack-jawed, frozen in shock. Others had a strange kind of energy about them, an almost giddy excitement. Something had happened.

Solomon had a straight visual line to the carnage. The windows of the building were blown completely out, glass and concrete littering the street. A section of wall midway up the building was torn loose, tenuously hanging in space by a few strands of rebar. The TV vultures were everywhere, all three networks. Two helicopters circled overhead. The media were jumpy, hyped up, and ready to pounce. The press in New York were told that the shutdown of Bellevue was because of an outbreak of SARS. Total bullshit, and a few of the reporters were smelling it. You don’t send in the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force for SARS. And now, a day later, an explosion at the University of Maryland.

Solomon was anxious as hell. By design, a university campus was a hub of dissemination, full of people from around the world-people who would seek to return home in a time of crisis. Rescue workers, students, professors rush in, breathe the pathogen, and you’ve got an outbreak that sweeps across the campus, then the city, then the country, then around the world. If you wanted to spread a pathogen, this was a hell of a way to do it.

There had been a wild shouting match when the anonymous email had arrived in Sadie Toloff’s inbox, claiming credit for the explosion. The FBI director demanded they seal off the whole university, evacuate the entire College Park area. But they had dodged a bullet in Manhattan, and everyone was feeling lucky. The results had come in from Toloff’s lab at Detrick fifty minutes before. The kid in Times Square had been loaded with LSA-d-lysergic acid amide-one of the primary psychotropic alkaloid products produced by the Uzumaki. But the LSA was pharmaceutical-grade, likely administered by injection. All the genetic markers were negative for the actual fungus. The kid did not have an Uzumaki infection. He was going to make it. The Times Square incident was an elaborate ruse.

As for the mysterious Asian woman’s profile, the CIA thought she could be a member of one of the ultranationalist, anti-Japanese groups, such as Sunshine 731 or Black Sword. These radical groups were furious that the United States would not turn over Hitoshi Kitano for prosecution as a war criminal. She was playing games, seeking publicity, that’s what the profilers said.

Solomon wasn’t so sure.

Inside, he met up with the local fire chief and the shell-shocked director of the facility. The main atrium was utter chaos. Debris-wood, glass, chairs, railings, piping-was strewn about the floor. One of the skylights overhead was shattered. The fire chief pointed inside. “It’s in there. That’s where the bomb was.”