Spiral

“One of the geeks at the NSA just hacked the site. The communication was paid for using a stolen credit card. The email was entered late last night. Couldn’t tell from where. No way to trace it. The account name was, get this, testicle.”

“Testicle?”

“She’s being cute. Orchid is from the Greek orchis. Which means testicle. Apparently the bulbs of the flower look like a hanging pair of balls.”

“Which she has us by.”

“That she does,” Carlisle said. “She wants three things. Number one: absolutely nothing in the press. Number two: money. Ten million dollars now, more later. And number three: she wants Hitoshi Kitano. She included an indictment of Kitano for war crimes against the people of Harbin, China. Murder, torture, biological experimentation, everything. She said nothing was negotiable. That if anything went wrong, that Crawler in Rochester loaded with the Uzumaki was only the beginning. She says she has an army at her command.”

“What army?”

“You’re not going to like it,” he said. He clicked on the video display, and an image appeared of an Asian woman dressed entirely in black. You could see her face clear as day-Orchid. Next was a close-up of her gloved hand, palm open. In the palm were two halves of a small brass cylinder.

“That’s likely the cylinder she took from the Connor kid,” Carlisle said. “The one Sterling told us about.” The camera shot lingered for a few seconds, then zoomed out. The wider view again showed Orchid. In her other hand, carefully balanced, was a large, almost perfectly transparent glass sphere about the size of a beach ball.

“What the hell is that?” Dunne asked.

“Hang on. You’ll see.”

Small black specks decorated the wall of the glass sphere. Dunne noticed that the dots were moving.

The camera zoomed in.

“Oh, Christ,” Dunne said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Inside the sphere, crawling all over one another like bees in a hive, were thousands of MicroCrawlers.

37

THE QUARANTINE WING AT DETRICK WAS CALLED “THE SLAMMER.”

There were seven rooms, each with a bed and a window that looked out on an observation room. A telephone allowed visitors in the observation room to talk to the quarantined person. From what Jake had been told, they sat empty almost all the time, reserved for the rare accident in the BSL-4 facility, where a cut on a glove or an improperly seated seal could expose an individual to a level-4 pathogen, such as Marburg or Ebola.

Jake was in one of the quarantine rooms, had been since four in the morning. Dylan was in the next one over. Where Maggie was, no one knew.

THE EXPLOSION AT SENECA ARMY DEPOT HAD BROUGHT everyone from the Geneva Fire Department to the CIA. Jake was half deaf as he tried to answer the questions yelled at him by authorities ranging from the local police to the FBI. He kept yelling back, demanding they put every man on the search for the FedEx van with Maggie tied up in the back. They assured him that roadblocks had been set up, helicopters were scouring the region. But the searchers found nothing.

By secure linkup, Jake had told Dunne and General Anthony Arvenick, the head of Detrick, everything he knew. Within an hour, Jake and Dylan had been placed in containment suits and airlifted out. As soon as they were airborne, a series of bombers swept in and dropped incinerating explosives on a mile-wide stretch of the depot. The sky was an orange hell. Jake saw the white deer running for their lives, trying to stay ahead of the flames.

They’d landed at Andrews Air Force Base in the middle of the night. From Andrews, it had been a ride in a convoy to Detrick, where they had been ushered into the slammer, Jake and Dylan in separate rooms. A steady stream of tests had followed: Jake was poked and prodded, and had a huge amount of blood drawn and saliva samples taken, along with a painful procedure during which they scraped tissue from his lung using a long arthroscopic device. They had also loaded him up with Amphotericin, an antifungal medicine.

After that came the debriefings. He told his story again and again, enduring question after question, his hands in bandages, his lungs still raw. He hadn’t had a moment to think until a half-hour ago. The DNA marker tests that they were running next door in the BSL-4 lab would be done by eleven a.m.

It was ten-fifty.

Jake paced the cage. His ears still hurt like hell, but his hearing was coming back in stages. According to Albert Roscoe, the head physician, a wiry, mid-fifties man with leathery skin and clear blue eyes, another day would be needed to see if the damage was permanent.

Jake didn’t care about his hearing or the burns on his hands. He fixed his thoughts on Dylan, thinking about how that brave little kid had tried to dump the Uzumaki. He had opened the cylinder, sucked out half of it, spit it on the floor of the bunker. But Orchid had gotten to him before he could do the same with the other half.