Spiral

Ricks tapped his headset and spoke to the brigade commander back at Drum. He watched his language. Higher-ups were also on the line. “We’ve got a civilian, fleeing. On foot.”

“Jesus Christ” came the response, a voice Ricks didn’t recognize. “Get him. Now.”

LEVI WAS RUNNING NOW. HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT WAS happening. Something big was happening, something bad. That’s when he heard it. A low swish, swish, swish, barely audible over the sirens in the distance, but then louder.

He looked up. A helicopter popped into view over the trees, hovered directly overhead, huge and violent, the wind tearing at them, stirring up huge swirls of leaves.

He froze, tossed the money on the ground. The helicopter wash tossed the bills to and fro.

A voice boomed from above. “Do not move!”

36

THE NEWS OF THE SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPTION REACHED Lawrence Dunne as his Town Car pulled into the gates of Camp David. Forty minutes before, they’d received an untraceable satellite phone call from Orchid, with GPS coordinates for a park in Rochester, New York. She claimed a Crawler infected with the Uzumaki was there. A Black Hawk out of Fort Drum had taken the man who found it into custody. Local law enforcement was cordoning off the surrounding neighborhood, and a CBIRF squad was on its way.

The officers at the guardhouse did a complete car search before waving Dunne’s car through. On the insistence of the head of the Secret Service, the President and his crisis team had relocated to Naval Support Facility Thurmont, as Camp David was officially known. The reason was simple: thousands of people passed within a few hundred feet of the White House every day, any of whom could release a burst of spores that might find their way into the building’s ventilation ducts. Camp David, on the other hand, was an isolated one-hundred-eighty-acre site in the Catoctin Mountains, sixty miles north of Washington, D.C., one of the most thoroughly guarded sites on earth. All of the staff were the Navy’s finest, trained at the highest level and specially selected, all with Yankee White clearances, the most rigorous possible. There was no way anyone could get close to Camp David.

The deputy director of the FBI, a cocky little bastard named William Carlisle, was waiting for Dunne as the car door opened at the main compound. He had a sealed 9×12 envelope in one hand and a handheld video display in the other.

He handed Dunne the envelope. “We know who Orchid is,” he said. “Her name’s Lanfen Wong.”

Dunne took the file, opened it, pulled out the photo. The woman was young, pretty, dressed in a military outfit Dunne recognized as Chinese, People’s Army.

“There’s a file on her at FBI,” Carlisle said. “We’re working it hard. I’ve got maybe fifty agents on this full-time, pulling records, looking for credit cards, phones, anything. So far it’s mostly history. Foreign national, came from Shanghai, spent time in the Chinese army. She came to the U.S. in 2000, went to college at Wayne State, in engineering. She was off-scale bright, made straight A’s in her freshman year. But she had a habit of hurting people. Sophomore year she broke the arm of one of her instructors in a dispute over getting a B.

“After that, she signed on with Blackwater.”

“Blackwater? They hire foreign nationals?”

He nodded. “For their non-U.S. operations. But they couldn’t handle her. Lasted a year there, ended really ugly. Apparently a few of her fellow employees tried to rape her in 2003 while on assignment in Africa. She killed one, broke the spine of the other. She returned to China before she could be arrested. After that, the trail goes cold.”

“When did you get this?” Dunne asked Carlisle.

“Twenty minutes ago.”

“Why didn’t anyone spot her on U.S. soil sooner?”

“Facial recognition didn’t pick her up. That’s what the scars are about. She changed her face. She’s unrecognizable to the computers. An entirely different eigenface, as the NSA boys call it.”

“And you’ve got nothing since 2003?”

“Four years ago, she canceled her credit card with Bank of America.”

“Then nothing?”

“Nothing. We’re hitting everyone who ever knew her. Focusing on her entire life here. We might get lucky. Maybe someone’s seen her. Or she’s using an old haunt.”

“Anything about her being political? Anti-Japanese?”

“Here’s the thing. She’s actually not entirely Chinese. She’s one-quarter Japanese.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Yup. She is from Nanking. Her grandmother was raped by a Japanese soldier before the war. So her mother was half-and-half. Apparently that was a no-no after the war. Her mother was treated like a third-class citizen. The granddaughters, too. They had the stigma of Japanese blood in them. That was why she came to the United States.

“There’s something else. Even bigger. An email with a video attached came in a little over a half-hour ago, delivered to an FBI office in Kalispell, Montana. We traced the email to an Internet site called Time Cave. You compose an email, they send it at a later time.”

“And?”