The Ares Decision (30 page)

T
HEY WERE NEARLY ON
top of it, but the village was still virtually invisible. Cone-shaped rock formations jutted a hundred feet in the air, many with windows and doors built into them. The more modern buildings looked a thousand years old—crooked one-room dwellings constructed of stone blocks and surrounded by ancient fences designed to corral livestock.

They skied in from the east, Smith taking a route too steep for the Iranians, most of whom had given up all pretense of guarding him. His momentum took him to the base of a packed-down track that acted as Main Street, and he skated along it. Faces appeared in icy windows and then just as quickly disappeared at the realization that he was a stranger.

He felt a poke in the small of his back and turned to see that it had come from the man who’d led their seemingly endless expedition through the mountains. They stopped near a set of rough-hewn steps and removed their skis before climbing up to a door that led directly into the cliff. The man went through a complex series of knocks, and a moment later he was being embraced by a bear of a man carrying an AK-47.

The sensation of heat against his skin was incredibly seductive, and Smith stepped inside, crossing a mishmash of traditional rugs to the fireplace.

“Is Farrokh here?” he said, pulling off his gloves and holding his hands to the flames. The journey had taken three days—far longer than he’d anticipated—and there was no telling what progress Omidi was making with weaponizing the parasite. Or if he was even bothering. By now, it was possible that he’d smuggled a victim over the U.S. border and the infection had wiped out half the population.

“Have something to eat.”

A beautiful young woman in a head scarf appeared a moment later with a plate of Middle Eastern meze and two steaming cups of tea.

“Look, I don’t have any more time to screw around. I want to see Farrokh. Now.”

The Iranian took off his outer clothing and flopped onto a pile of colorful pillows by the fire. “Farrokh is a busy man.”

Without his hat and sunglasses, he looked quite a bit younger than Smith had originally estimated. His eyes reflected not only unusual intelligence, but also a calm sense of power and confidence. Not a man you’d waste on an errand like the one he’d just performed.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” Smith said, silently cursing his own stupidity. “You’re Farrokh.”

His only reaction was to point to the pillows next to him. “Please, Dr. Smith. It’s been a long journey. Rest.”

He did as he was told, pulling off his ski clothes and trying to keep his impatience in check. The pace in this part of the world was different, and trying to fight millennia of cultural norms was going to get him nowhere.

“Our organization must be diffuse so that it will live on if any individual dies. But, to answer your question, yes. I am the one they call Farrokh.”

Despite his best effort to play the diplomat, Smith couldn’t hide his anger. “Then what the hell have we been doing? I was told you’d been briefed on what’s happening.”

“Rash action is never advisable,” Farrokh said. “And taking the measure of a man who wants to be my ally is never a waste of time. In fact, it’s why I’m still alive.”

When Smith spoke again, he’d managed to calm down a bit. “What’s the verdict?”

“You appear to be a man who should be taken seriously.”

“So you trust me now?”

Farrokh laughed and reached for one of the cups of tea, offering it to Smith. “I can count the number of people I trust on one hand, and I don’t anticipate needing an additional finger because of our acquaintanceship.”

“But you believe that the parasite exists and that your government has it.”

“Yes, though I fail to see why this is my problem.”

Despite his attempt at nonchalance, it was clear that he knew exactly why it was his problem.

“I understand that you don’t much like the U.S., but you have to admit that we’ve been leaving you and your country alone. Do you think that’ll continue if Omidi succeeds in releasing a biological weapon inside our borders?”

Farrokh shrugged. “America is directly or indirectly responsible for millions of Iranians dead, the reign of a brutal dictator, and frankly the repressive and backward Islamic system we live under now. Perhaps this is simply a balancing of the scales.”

“No,” Smith said. “You’re smarter than that. It doesn’t matter how many Americans you kill; there will still be one of us left to push a button. And then there won’t be an Iran for you to liberalize.”

Farrokh nodded thoughtfully. “The ayatollah has become senile and Omidi is insane. They believe that God has delivered this weapon to them and that he will guide their hand as they use it to destroy the enemies of Islam.”

“I’m not sure it’s going to work out that way.”

“No. I have come to understand that God rarely takes sides in such matters. The righteous and innocent are as likely—perhaps more likely—to suffer as the wicked. To rely on his intervention is the height of arrogance and stupidity. America has both the power and the will to butcher anyone who shows even mild defiance.”

Smith tried to shut out the quiet tick of the ancient clock on the wall. It seemed to get louder and louder as their pointless geopolitical debate dragged on.

“America is a massive stabilizing force in the world, and you know it as well as I do. How many countries with our military and economic power would have shown the same restraint? What would
your
country do with our arsenal? Hell, what would the Germans do with it?”

Farrokh sipped his tea for a few moments before taking a step away from philosophy and toward something more concrete. “Do you know where Dr. van Keuren has been taken?”

“No. Our intelligence-gathering capabilities inside Iran are pretty much a joke.”

“Ah, so this is to be left up to me too?”

“It’s your country, and I’m guessing you keep up with these kinds of things.”

Another shrug. “I hear whispers.”

The words were enigmatic, but the tone wasn’t. Farrokh’s network had undoubtedly been digging into this from the moment Klein’s people first contacted him.

“Where? Where is she?”

Farrokh browsed the food on the tray between them, crinkling his nose and finally smearing something unidentifiable on a piece of flatbread. “There has been recent activity at an abandoned research facility in the central part of the country. Also, a number of academics have been called away on government business and have been out of touch with their families ever since. The timing seems more than coincidental.”

“How heavily protected is it?”

“It’s underground and the entrance is well guarded.”

“I don’t know if I can get us air support, but I can sure as hell try.”

Farrokh frowned and lay back in the pillows. “Do you really think I would coordinate a foreign attack on my own country? I am a reformer, not a traitor.”

“But—”

The Iranian held up a hand, and a moment later the man who had let them in appeared in the doorway. This time he looked less cheerful and his weapon was no longer safely shouldered.

“Teymore here will take you to your quarters. I hope we have an opportunity to speak again soon.”

S
ARIE VAN KEUREN GUIDED
the scalpel carefully as she cut a cross section from the brain on the table in front of her. Its small size made it more difficult to work with, but she was grateful she’d been able to convince Omidi that working with animals would be more productive. The glassed-in room bordering her lab was now full of a bizarre variety of caged monkeys—some lab animals but others appearing to have been snatched from zoos and private owners.

Each individual cage was covered with cloth draping, something she’d accurately said was necessary to prevent them from dying of injuries sustained trying to get to the people on the other side of the glass. The real reason, though, wasn’t to keep them from seeing her new colleagues, but to keep them from seeing each other—a subtle distinction easily missed by Omidi and his scientific lapdogs.

Sarie glanced up and noticed that the canvas covering a number of the cages in the middle section of animals had blood on it. She jotted down the time on a pad next to her and went back to working on the brain.

There were a number of potential strategies for making the parasite less dangerous, but almost all fell apart under the weight of any serious thought. The most obvious was to nurture the mutation that attacked the victim’s corneas in order to cause blindness. Biologically straightforward, but it was a bit far-fetched to believe that a bunch of infected animals wandering around bumping into things would escape notice. Omidi’s toadies weren’t world-class, but they weren’t
complete
idiots.

Improving attention span had been her second plan. At first it had seemed perfect in a somewhat horrifying way. If she could reduce the infected’s ability to be distracted during an attack, she would increase the probability that they would kill their victims and stop the chain of infection. Unfortunately, though, the areas of the brain responsible for that type of focus were too diffuse to target. The parasite had been working on the problem for millions of years. Her time was somewhat shorter.

The answer, surprisingly, had been lurking in the mirror neurons. The pattern of damage was easy to change, and she’d already managed to affect the way that parasite victims identified with each other—creating the first seeds of reciprocal animosity. While the plan had many obvious weaknesses, if she could get them interested in attacking each other, she estimated that she could reduce the rate of spread by as much as forty percent.

Even more important, she’d discovered that the parasite had a significant exposure-response relationship—the higher the initial parasitic load, the faster the onset of symptoms. She’d used that to convince Omidi that she was actually making progress in reducing the time to full symptoms when, in actuality, she was just giving progressively larger doses of infected blood to the test animals.

What he wasn’t happy about, though, was that this was creating a corresponding effect on the time to death. The fact that the believers were starting to slowly disappear seemed to indicate that Omidi was setting up an alternate group somewhere else in the facility to review her research and work on the time-to-death problem. She also had to assume that they would be testing her “modifications” on humans and that it wouldn’t be long before they figured out that they didn’t actually work.

That’s why it was so important that phase two of her plan be enacted quickly and decisively. Unfortunately, she hadn’t yet been able to come up with a phase two.

Sarie finished with the brain and went through the primitive decontamination procedures before entering the large room next to the lab. Five softies manning somewhat-dated computers watched her as she took a seat in front of the only terminal with an English operating system.

She was just starting to enter her notes when Yousef Zarin slid his chair up next to her.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said, leaning close and keeping his voice barely above a whisper.

“Excuse me?” she responded, continuing to enter numbers into a matrix of bogus mortality rates.

“I’ve been looking at your data and examined some of your samples myself.”

She smiled weakly through clenched teeth, refusing to let her growing fear affect her ability to think.

“Mirror neuron damage is evolving very quickly.”

“I have to apologize for my ignorance of neurology, Dr. Zarin. What are mirror neurons again?”

It was his turn to smile. “You might be surprised to know that I actually read your paper on the effects of toxoplasmosis on human behavior. Your intellectual gifts and grasp of brain function were very much on display.”

“I appreciate the compliment,” she said, sounding a little too cheerful for a woman in her position but finding it impossible to get the right balance. “It’s just that I’m not sure what—”

His voice lowered even more. “I believe that if these changes continue, victims of the parasite will no longer be able to differentiate between infected and healthy people.”

She stopped typing, but her fingers seemed frozen to the keyboard.

“It’s very clever,” Zarin continued. “I would have thought you’d simply try to reduce aggressive impulses, but of course that would have been too obvious, wouldn’t it? How do you say…I take my hat off to you.”

“I think you’re misinterpreting—”

“I don’t pretend to be your equal, Doctor, but I am not an uneducated man.”

“You…,” she stammered, trying to come up with something credible to say. “Maybe it’s a side effect of decreasing onset times that I missed. We could—”

He shook his head and she fell silent.

“No, the more I think about it, the more I see the brilliance of it. Given time, it could have a significant effect on the spread of the infection. Unfortunately, time is something we don’t have.”

“What?”

“We are not all fundamentalists and fanatics, Sarie. The time for more and more horrifying weapons is done. It must be. Technology has put too much power into men’s hands—the power to destroy everything that God has created.”

Was it a trick? Was he just trying to find out the details of what she had done in order to reverse the damage? How the hell was she supposed to know? The bottom line was, she’d been caught. There was no point to further scheming or protests. If Yousef Zarin was truly with her, he could potentially help her save millions of lives. If he was against her, she was already dead.

“You’re not going to tell Omidi?” she said, mindful of the ever-present cameras bolted to the ceiling above them.

“Omidi is a pig. This is an act of desperation—an evil perpetrated by politicians trying to cling to power and disguising it as piety. I will help you. But I’m afraid the path you’ve taken is of no use.”

He was right, of course. It had been her own act of desperation. In the unlikely event that she was given the time necessary to perfect the genetic modifications, they wouldn’t last. The parasite was too adaptable—if it were released in a place that didn’t have Africa’s geographic isolation, it would evolve with devastating speed, hiding its symptoms, modifying the way it spread, extending the contagion period in the people it infected.

In the back of her mind, she knew she should be cautious, but she so desperately needed someone to stand with her. To not be alone anymore.

“Is there a way out, Yousef ? Or a way to communicate with the outside world? I have friends who might be able to help.”

The Iranian shook his head. “We are a hundred meters underground and all messages leaving the facility have to be approved by Omidi personally.”

“Then we have to think of something else.”

He nodded. “And quickly. I suspect that the scientists who are no longer with us—the ones loyal to Omidi—are working on a way to transport the parasite outside the human body.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“He came to me and asked if I agreed that work on transportation should wait until the final genetic sequence was done and I supported you, but he asked questions that were too technical for him to have devised on his own. It was clear that his people were advising him that the modifications wouldn’t affect transportation modalities.”

“Then we have to get out of here, Yousef. We have to get help.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible. However, we are not powerless.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was brought here years ago when this was a secret bioweapons lab and asked to write a report on safety issues. There were many problems—systems that are archaic or nonfunctional, poorly thought-out procedures, unrepaired cracks in the walls and ceiling. The government counted on the facility’s isolation. The closest population center is a village two hours’ drive from here.”

“As near as I can tell, they didn’t listen to you. This place is a disaster waiting to happen.”

He nodded. “Shortly after my inspection, America attacked Iraq because of the WMD program they believed was going on there. My government feared the same fate could befall Iran and shut the facility down.”

“So you still understand the weaknesses in the systems here?”

“Better than anyone, I imagine.”

She leaned back in her chair and stared past him, watching the other people in the room doing their best not to call attention to themselves. She wondered what they’d say if they knew what she and Yousef were about to doom them to.