Spiral

“I told you, it was all available. There’s nothing to…” Jake suddenly put the pieces together. “Why are you worried about the designs for the Crawlers?”

Larkspur said, “Because two months ago a woman matching Orchid’s description placed an order with a Taiwanese silicon foundry called Unafab. It specializes in custom electronic and microelectromechanical systems. The CIA has had them under surveillance since 2007. They’re known to take any work they can get, including from military and even terror groups. Two weeks ago, that order was picked up, supposedly by a Chinese company called Star Technologies. We haven’t been able to find out anything on the company. But we do have a photo from the pickup.”

She slid the photo across the table. The shot was from a distance, but Jake recognized her easily. “Orchid,” Jake said. “You think she ordered a manufacturing run of Crawlers.”

“We know.”

She showed Jake the video of Orchid and the glass sphere filled with Crawlers.

AFTER AN HOUR OF QUESTIONS, JAKE WAS LEFT ALONE WITH his thoughts.

They’d gone over it from every angle. The Crawlers used a standard silicon foundry chip set. They were not particularly vulnerable to EMPs because they had no external wires to act as antennas. The Army had, over the last decade, run an extremely thorough set of EMP tests on handheld devices and laptops. Now they were about to run a series using Crawlers from Jake’s lab at Cornell. If they were lucky, they would find a strong electromagnetic resonance, a frequency where the Crawler acted as a particularly good antenna. Then they could engineer the EMP bomb to hit it hardest at that frequency.

They had their plans. But as Jake knew, sometimes things didn’t go as planned. And if they failed-if the Crawlers released the fungus, the results could be catastrophic.

Jake remembered a quote by William Osler, one of the forefathers of modern medicine: “Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.”

Osler had seen the ravages of a world war. Sixteen million people had died in World War I, including three hundred thousand at Verdun alone. Sixteen million in four years. But the influenza that followed in 1918 killed many times that number in a matter of months.

And it wasn’t only the number of dead. A biological threat tore apart a society. War, for all its horror, galvanized a nation, pulled it together against a common opponent. But fever was a different kind of enemy. It struck from within, driving everyone into paranoid isolation, afraid of touching anyone around them. Jake had experienced it firsthand during the Gulf War. When the chem/bio weapons alarms went off and you put on your suit, you were alone and powerless inside that sweaty cocoon.

No honor, only suffering. Courage was useless against a bacterium, a fungal spore, a virus that slipped into you by water, by touch, by breath. No way to be brave in the face of danger when the danger was beyond your ability to see. There were no war memorials to influenza victims in towns across America. Those people just suffered and died, and everyone tried their best to forget any of it had ever happened.

An Uzumaki epidemic would be much worse than the 1918 flu pandemic, both in numbers and in the nature of the illness itself. The flu attacked only your body, but the Uzumaki turned you into a raving maniac, suicidal at best, homicidal at worst. An Uzumaki epidemic would be like hell on earth.

Jake paced his cell, wanted to punch the Plexiglas window separating him from the outside. Thousands of Crawlers. She could release them in waves, at hundreds of locations simultaneously. If only a few succeeded, that would be enough. He had seen a map once, showing the travel patterns of people, tracked by their cellphones. Dense mats of lines connecting the major hubs of L.A., Chicago, New York, Boston, and Seattle. Smaller lines fanning out everywhere else. Infect just a few people, let them spread out, go to work, go to school, stop by the local Walmart, get on a plane for California to see a friend. In a matter of days the Uzumaki could be everywhere. At that point, there was no way to stop it.

Game over.

DOCTOR ROSCOE KNOCKED AT THE WINDOW. HE LOOKED beaten down.

Jake picked up the phone, his heart racing. He thought of Maggie, wherever she was, so far away from her son. “Tell me,” he said.

Roscoe took a deep breath, looked down at the floor, then back to Jake. He met him head-on, one man to another. “It’s Dylan’s tests. I’m sorry. The news is bad.”

38

MAGGIE FLOATED IN DARKNESS, COOL AND BLACK. SHE TRIED to will herself out of the darkness, into being. But she felt nothing, not even the movement of her arms.

Dylan. Memories of Dylan. He was six years old, and they were looking for arrowheads at Taughannock Falls.

Dylan had asked who Taughannock was, and she told him he’d been a Delaware Indian. The Iroquois had captured him and threw him over the falls.