The Cobra Event (19 page)

Ellen Latkins, from the mayor’s office, broke in. She had been getting increasingly angry. “Look, if you people really think that this could escalate to anything even close to the scenario you’ve described, then I would like to know how you plan on handling this.”

“I share your concern,” Jack Hertog said. “However, you must understand that we have no reason to think that what we have here is a major act of terrorism.” He was thinking to himself: Why did I agree to have my name on the list?

“Wait,” Austen said. “The deaths have happened very quickly. The disease is unknown. It is explosive in its effects on people. I think we have a problem in New York. There’s some kind of murderer out there.”

Hertog smiled. “There
are
murderers out there, Doctor.”

“You haven’t seen this disease!” she said.

Steven Wyzinski decided to neutralize things. “We need to work up an assessment of the threat,” he said. “The threat is not just the disease but the person or group behind it. The person or group who is called…what is it?”

“Archimedes,” Austen said. “The words ‘
Archimedes fecit
’ are Latin. They mean ‘Made by Archimedes.’ They refer to the cobra box. The date on the box could be the date that Archimedes prepared the box. The expression ‘human trial’ probably refers to human medical experimentation.”

There followed a great deal of discussion about the motives of Archimedes. The Cobra Event did not seem like classic terrorism, in which a group acts with an agenda. Or if there were an agenda it didn’t seem obvious at this point.

Jack Hertog had been getting annoyed with the meeting. The White House had bigger problems to deal with than a killer loose in New York. “There’s been no explicit threat to commit a wide-scale terrorist act,” he said, “So Dr.—ah—Littleberry’s projections sound kind of academic.”

Littleberry stood up. “Hey! One of those photographs that Dr. Austen took of the cobra dispersion boxes shows an engineering drawing,” he said to Hertog in a harsh, angry voice. “It’s a bioreactor of some kind. A bioreactor can make a shitload of virus in a real hurry—”

“
Thank you
, Dr. Littleberry,” Hertog said.

Hopkins had been sitting there, wondering when to speak. He was still wearing clothes that needed laundering in the worst way. “It looks like we could have a very serious situation,” he finally said. “I think—”

“Who are you, again?” Hertog asked.

“Supervisory Special Agent William Hopkins, Jr. I’m a forensic molecular biologist. I’m head of scientific operations for the biology group at the Hazardous Materials Response Unit in Quantico.”

“Oh, yeah. You’re that biological SWAT unit that’s not ready,” Hertog said.

“We’re ready, sir. And we’re not a SWAT group. We are scientists.”

“It’s my understanding that you’re not ready for anything.”

Hopkins sensed that Hertog was losing interest. He said, “I think we are seeing a pattern. We are seeing a biological terrorist going through a testing phase. That’s the meaning of the expression ‘human trial.’ For some reason, bioterrorists like to test their stuff. It happened with the Aum Shinrikyo sect in Japan, before they let off nerve gas in the Tokyo subway. They tested anthrax two or three times, and they couldn’t get it to work, so they switched to nerve gas. The same thing happened in 1984 in The Dalles, a town in Oregon. The Rajneeshee sect put salmonella in salad bars in restaurants around town, and seven hundred and fifty people got sick. It was a test. They were planning a wide-scale biological attack on the town that was to happen later. What’s happening in New York could be the testing phase for a huge release of a biological weapon.”

“This is just speculation,” Hertog said.

“But we can use forensics to stop it,” Hopkins went on. “Normal forensic science is all about uncovering evidence
after
a crime has been committed. Here we can use forensics to solve a crime of terror in progress. We have an incredible opportunity to stop a terror event before it happens, using Reachdeep.”

“The unit that doesn’t exist,” Hertog said.

Hopkins pulled a swab out of his pocket protector. “This is the heart of Reachdeep,” he said.

“What?” Hertog said.

“This little swab. The evidence is mainly biological. All terrorist weapons contain signatures—forensic signatures—that lead you back to the perpetrator. When someone makes a bomb, he leaves marks and clues all over it. We can analyze the infective agent, and it will lead us back to its creator.”

“This sounds off the wall,” Hertog said.

Hopkins waved his swab around as he talked. “The idea behind Reachdeep is universal forensics. You use all your tools, everything you’ve got, and you take the crime apart. You explore the crime with the limits of your intellect. Exploring a big crime is like exploring a universe. It’s what astronomers do when they look at the night sky with telescopes, or what biologists do when they explore a cell with their instruments of vision. You begin to translate the language, and the structure of the crime and the identity of the perpetrator are slowly revealed, like the structure of a universe.”

“For God’s sake, Hopkins!” It was Steven Wyzinski. He was embarrassed.

Hopkins put the swab back in his pocket and sat down abruptly. His face was red. He looked sideways at Austen, and then he looked down at the table.

“I’ve never seen a policy brief on this,” Hertog muttered.

Austen began to feel sorry for Hopkins.

“We need to be invisible,” Hopkins said in a louder voice. “The perpetrator may accelerate the killing if he, or they, know we’re closing in on them. We need to do a secret field deployment of a Reachdeep lab.”

The Army colonel from Fort Detrick said, “Wait a minute. This man is talking about isolating a hot agent using a portable field laboratory. That’s crazy. You need a full-scale Biosafety Level 4 research facility to do that.”

“We’re in the middle of an unfolding criminal event,” Hopkins replied. “We don’t have time to fly evidence down to Fort Detrick and then work on it there. Also, if we’re flying evidence all over the place, the chain of custody might be damaged. We might lose our ability to get convictions.”

The Justice Department attorney agreed with him. “We need evidence that can be used in a trial,” he said.

Hopkins went on: “We can move the crime lab to the evidence. I propose we set up a ring of investigative power around a Reachdeep lab. What I mean is, we’ll have a core science lab with a forensic team. Around that team, we’ll have a joint task force of agents and police officers. The science team will generate leads, but we’ll need hundreds of investigators to run out the leads. We need to do good, classical investigative work, and we need to merge it into a Reachdeep forensic operation.”

Jack Hertog of the White House broke in. “This is over the top. You’re asking for a hell of a lot of money and federal attention, and for what? Another Flight 800 media circus that ends up in a hopeless mystery—?”

“Hey!” Masaccio ripped in. “My people gave their heart and soul—”

“Shut up, Frank. The F.B.I. forensic lab doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record. You people spent twelve years looking for the Unabomber, and in the end, his
brother
turned him in. Now what do you want to do, act out a sci-fi movie in New York?”

Hopkins looked around the room, seeking support. Steven Wyzinski was hanging back, unwilling to commit himself to a fight with the White House. Frank Masaccio’s face was discolored with fury in the video, but he seemed to be reining himself in. There had been too many fights with the White House lately.

Mark Littleberry stood up slowly. “I think I have something to add here that may put things into perspective. We’ve never had a situation in this country on any large scale where a population is threatened with a biological weapon. But we’ve feared this type of event for a long time, and the technology for the development and use of biological weapons is being advanced constantly by people we have no control over, who don’t care about the consequences. We learned a lot about how these weapons work during tests in the Pacific in the late 1960s—”

“Excuse me—.” It was Jack Hertog. “I don’t think a discussion of those tests is germane here.”

Littleberry stared at him. “I don’t know if it’s
germane
, but you’d damned well better take it seriously.”

“Of course the President takes this seriously,” Hertog said.

“With a biological weapon,” Littleberry continued, “you can make people die like flies, depending on the weather and wind, time of day, the way the agent’s dried and prepared, the exact method of dispersal, and the nature of the agent itself. Ten thousand deaths in a matter of days would overwhelm all of the city’s hospitals. The hospitals would run out of beds and supplies. If the agent was contagious in human-to-human transmission, then just about the first people to die would be the medical caregivers and the first responders. The population of doctors, nurses, firemen, ambulance crews, and police—they’d disappear, fast as hell. There would be nobody left to transport the victims to a hospital and no medical people in the hospitals to treat them. A relatively low end of the range of numbers of possible deaths from a biological weapon could leave the city without any medical-care system at all, except for what could be flown in by the military. The high end of the range is unimaginable—but is technically achievable. And it could happen to any city in the world. Tokyo, London, Moscow, Singapore, you name it. You’ve got a situation here where any jerk with a hot strain and some understanding of biology can kill a large number of people.”

There was silence in the room. Even Jack Hertog seemed affected by the weight of what Littleberry had said.

It was Steven Wyzinski who finally spoke up. He had been taken aback by Hertog’s outburst against the F.B.I., and he wanted to suggest that the Bureau was in control. He said that he felt that even though there was reasonable doubt about the scale of the threat, particularly since there had been no specific target mentioned or demands made, there seemed to be no choice but to start a major investigation. He thought the best chance was Will Hopkins’s Reachdeep team.

Everyone agreed that it was so, more or less. “I can imagine this thing turning into a giant rat fuck,” Hertog said. “But I think we don’t have much choice. The bottom line is, we can’t take a chance of a big blowup in a place like New York.”

It was Frank Masaccio who came up with the idea that set the operation in motion. “I’ve got a place for you Reachdeep guys,” he said to Hopkins. “You know Governors Island?”

“Never heard of it,” Hopkins said.

“It’s in the middle of New York Bay, right off Wall Street. It’s a federal property. Very secure. No media, no people barging in on you. It used to be owned by the Coast Guard, but they’ve left. They left all their infrastructure there.”

“Okay,” Hertog broke in. “Hopkins, you put your science squad on the island. And don’t screw up. As for U
SAMRIID
and C.D.C., I want you to work in parallel. Both of you are national labs. Both of you will get samples to analyze. If the F.B.I. thing goes down the toilet,
both
national labs will be there to analyze the disease. Is this agreed?”

The director of the C.D.C. and the colonel from U
SAMRIID
were agreed.

“Sir.” It was the colonel from U
SAMRIID
, speaking to Hertog. “May I make a suggestion? There has to be some kind of on-site biocontainment field hospital. It could be placed on the island. You do not, repeat
do not
want any human cases infected with an unknown biological weapon to be put into any New York City-area hospitals. That is just incredibly risky.”

“He’s absolutely right,” an admiral from the Public Health Service said.

The Army colonel went on: “The Army has T
AML
units that can be palletized and flown under Black Hawk helicopters—”

“I’m sorry,” Hertog said, “I don’t know what a T
AML
is.”

“Sure—that’s a Theater Army Medical Lab. It’s a biocontainment hospital in a box. It’s rated Biosafety Level 3 Plus. You hang it under a helicopter and you can fly it anywhere.”

“Good.”

“One little item,” Frank Masaccio broke in. “Dr. Alice Austen here opened the Cobra case. We would call her the case agent. I want her sworn in as a deputy U.S. marshal, with full law-enforcement powers. Somebody from Justice get her sworn, okay?”

“Thank you, everyone. The first Cobra meeting is closed,” Wyzinski said.

People stood up; the technicians ran around undoing the shirt mikes and moving the video cameras; and the screens on the walls went dead, one by one.

Part Five

R
EACHDEEP

Quantico

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE SIOC
meeting, Austen and Hopkins took a Bureau car to the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Virginia, an hour’s drive south of Washington. Mark Littleberry called his wife in Boston, and then set out by himself in another Bureau car to Bethesda, Maryland, to the National Naval Medical Research Institute, to pick up some extra biosensor equipment at the laboratories of the Navy’s Biological Defense Research Program, which had been supplying Felixes and Boinks to the F.B.I.

Hopkins talked on his cell phone most of the way down to Quantico. He was “wickering together a team,” as he put it. He and Austen barely had a word to say to each other. At one point, he looked over and saw that she was asleep. Her hair had fallen off her face, a face that seemed delicate and tired to him, and he noticed faint circles under her closed eyes.

Quantico is a Marine Corps base, and the F.B.I. has an area inside the base. Hopkins turned off Interstate 95 and followed a road westward through rolling woods. He drove through an F.B.I. checkpoint and parked in front of a group of pale-brick buildings that were joined by glassed walkways. It was the F.B.I. Academy, where the Bureau trains new agents and maintains a number of its units, including Hopkins’s own group, the Hazardous Materials Response Unit.

“We’re here, Dr. Austen,” he said. His voice woke her up.

AUSTEN WAS GIVEN
a guest room in the F.B.I. Academy, where she changed into operations clothing—cargo pants and a blue shirt—and she ended up with Hopkins at a large gray building known as the Engineering Research Facility, or E.R.F. This building is the F.B.I.’s supersecret electronic-equipment facility. It is a complex of smooth, featureless blocks with smoked windows that reveal nothing of the building’s interior. The roof is a forest of radio antennas of all shapes and sizes.

In the lobby of the E.R.F., Hopkins collected a plastic badge for Austen. She entered her Social Security number into a keypad, and a computer system indicated that she had a national security clearance—Frank Masaccio had taken care of that.

She followed Hopkins into a corridor that extended through the center of the building. The corridor was two stories tall, and lined with windows. The windows were covered with black blinds, so that people walking in the corridor could not see what was going on inside the adjacent rooms. “A lot of these rooms are machine shops,” Hopkins remarked as they walked along. “We can make anything here. We can put a video camera in an ice-cream cone and take a picture of a mobster’s tonsils—just kidding.”

They came to a turnstile and a security door controlled by a computer. They both had to swipe their badges in the turnstile.

“The E.R.F. is divided into security pods,” Hopkins explained. “The Hazardous Materials Response Unit is scattered through two pods. We are podless. We’re kind of new. We’re still looking for a pod to call our own.”

They entered a vast indoor chamber, five stories high, called Pod D. The chamber was illuminated with bright lights on the ceiling, and the interior walls were shiny with aluminum foil and copper mesh. The floor of Pod D was crowded with piles of equipment in boxes.

“Is this Reachdeep?” Austen asked. “It’s huge.”

“Oh, no. Most of this is other F.B.I. stuff. We just have a little corner of Pod D.”

“What is this place?” Austen asked.

“It’s the radio-silence chamber. The Bureau does electronic work in here.”

Austen didn’t ask him what kind of electronic work he meant. She had a feeling she wouldn’t get a full answer.

Hopkins led her through a warren of makeshift corridors that zigzagged through stacks of boxes and metal storage shelves. They passed an old broken-down pickup truck. The dashboard was open. It was full of communications gear, with data cables hanging out. The truck was a surveillance vehicle.

They emerged into a warren in the middle of an area walled off by boxes where people were working furiously.

“Will! Hey, Will’s here!” A man came over to greet them. He was about fifty years old, very fit, with a seamed face and huge shoulders. He was Special Agent Oscar Wirtz, the Tactical Operations officer for Reachdeep—the weapons-and-space-suits man. He was also a logistics specialist. Oscar Wirtz knew how to pack aircraft with gear quickly. This turns out to be a valuable skill in the F.B.I. He was wearing a large black gun in a shoulder holster. He shook Austen’s hand with a grip that was not merciful. “Welcome to Reachdeep,” Wirtz said to her.

Austen met the other team members. They were people whom Hopkins had selected for the operation. Most of the selecting had happened over the telephone, while she had been asleep in the car and Hopkins had been driving.

The team’s imaging specialist and microbiologist was a pleasant woman in her late twenties named Suzanne Tanaka. She was not an F.B.I. agent; she was a civilian laboratory technician. Until recently she had been working for the United States Navy.

“Suzanne was bugging us to hire her,” Hopkins explained, “so we finally stole her away from the Navy.”

“Should I bring the mice, Will?” she asked.

“Sure, bring a few. Not too many,” he said.

Tanaka busied herself with some plastic boxes holding laboratory mice.

Austen said to her, “Do you know how to work an electron microscope? Because we need to look at tissue samples right away.”

“Sure,” she said. “That’s my specialty.”

“Suzanne, have we worked out where we’re going to get an electron microscope?” Hopkins said.

“The Army’s sending us one in a truck. They’re also sending someone to show me its quirks.”

“Good,” Hopkins said. “Those scopes all have quirks.”

Hopkins looked at his watch. “Where’s Jimmy Lesdiu? Our materials genius.”

“Right here.”

An extremely tall man stood up from behind a tower of boxes. Special Agent James Lesdiu was a forensic materials analyst. He analyzed hair and fibers, and surfaces and chemicals. He would be coordinating with the F.B.I.’s forensic group in Washington by videoconference during the operation.

“I don’t know if I can load this man on a helicopter—he’s too tall,” Oscar Wirtz said. Lesdiu was six feet eight inches tall.

“You’d better load me, Wirtzy, because Will can’t make this case without me,” Lesdiu replied.

“Here’s what I want, Jimmy,” Hopkins said to Lesdiu. “I want an infrared laser unit. A little weenie one, desktop size.”

“Got it already,” Lesdiu said. He pointed a long, skeletal finger at a gray military transport box.

“Mass-spec machine,” Hopkins went on. “For identifying materials.”

“Got that, too. It’s a little one. What else?”

“I want an X-ray diffraction machine. Small. Portable.”

“Got it. I’ve got everything you need.”

In a corner of the staging area, a half-dozen men and women, special agents, were sorting their biohazard space suits and body armor. The space suits were jet black, apparently for use in night operations. They were also making inventory of ten-millimeter handguns, pump-action .00 shotguns, and Heckler & Koch ten-millimeter MP5 assault rifles, along with ammunition, lights, and special breathing equipment. Oscar Wirtz called them up and introduced Austen to them. They were all with the F.B.I.’s Hostage Rescue Team, or H.R.T., which is stationed at Quantico. “They’re going to handle the operations side of this mission,” Wirtz said, “if we have an operation.”

They were known in the F.B.I. as ninjas.

“We take turns looking after Will,” said a ninja by the name of Carlos Pedernal.

“That’s because Will’s a scientist. He can’t look after himself,” Oscar Wirtz said.

“You know, we don’t need any ninjas,” Will said, stepping around the weapons and looking at them. “If I need you guys, I’ll call for you.”

“Get real, Will,” Wirtz said. “Look, you want to lean the operations squad forward. Lean ’em way forward. You want to bring them to the island now, Will. If there’s an action, it could develop fast.”

Wirtz turned to Austen. “The idea, in case Will hasn’t explained it to you, is that you scientists are the evidence gatherers. If a terrorist weapon goes off, you have to go into a hot zone to gather evidence fast. You may need to have ninjas around you to keep you out of harm’s way.”

Austen felt like saying that she could take care of herself, but she didn’t say anything.

Then Mark Littleberry entered Pod D, accompanied by two F.B.I. agents. They were carrying a total of five Halliburton suitcases. He’d picked up two Felix machines and three Boinks in Bethesda.

The Reachdeep team worked for an hour or so, organizing boxes, taking inventory. Oscar Wirtz and his people began moving equipment out through a door in Pod D to a truck, where the stuff was driven up to the helicopter landing field.

Austen took Littleberry aside. She said, “Dr. Littleberry, could we speak privately? Why do we have to have all the weapons?”

“That’s a good question. Hey, Will—come over here for a second. Do we need these armed people? I’m askin’ you, Will.”

Hopkins looked thoughtful. “Let’s hope we don’t need them.”

Littleberry said, “If we go into shooters in New York, I’m off the team. I don’t do shooters. Dr. Austen joins me in this position, I believe.”

Hopkins was exasperated. He was wearing a gun himself. “Look, Mark, I’m running this team. We’re going to do this by the book.”

“By the book, Will?” Littleberry said. “There isn’t any book.”

A man came in, looking surprised at the gear. He was a U.S. marshal from the Department of Justice. “Where is Dr. Austen? I’ve been sent to deputize her.”

“I don’t really want to be a marshal,” she said.

“The government requires it,” he said.

“I can’t use a gun.”

“You’re not
allowed
to use a gun,” Hopkins said. “You aren’t weapons-qualified.”

The man from Justice swore in both Austen and Littleberry as deputy U.S. marshals.

“Good for you,” Suzanne Tanaka said to Austen. “I wish they’d do it for me.”

The Hot Core

THE HELICOPTERS
churned north, strung out in a line, traveling at a steady 110 knots. The operations squad followed in helicopters behind the science squad.

“I like Hueys. They’re slow as hell but they get you there,” Oscar Wirtz remarked to a pilot.

“We should have taken the Black Hawks,” the pilot said.

Hopkins kept a Felix black box on his knees during the whole flight. For most of the time he worked on it, checking it out, fiddling with his Leatherman tool. He started the Felix and restarted it, testing it. Then he opened the second Felix and checked it out, too. He tested and retested the Boinks.

Littleberry had been sitting near Hopkins in the Huey, almost silent during the flight. “I’m kind of squirrelly over this, Will,” he said.

The helicopters came up New York Bay over the Verrazano Bridge late in the afternoon. Early that morning, when Austen had left in the F.B.I. plane, the city had been wrapped in clouds. The clouds had turned into fluffy cotton with soft gray undersides, the changeable clouds of spring, and they threw spots of shadow on the buildings below.

“These big operations,” Hopkins said, “there’s nothing like it on earth. The feeling is indescribable.”

Austen had become frankly terrified. She had never been in an air operation, had never seen so many weapons, and she was amazed at how quickly the F.B.I. had put things together. But she had a sense that whenever a government throws its people fast into an unfolding emergency, nobody is in control. Only history is in control, and the story never goes as planned.

As the Reachdeep Hueys approached Governors Island, which sat in the East River not far from Brooklyn, the team members saw that other parts of the federal government had already arrived. There was a landing zone in the middle of the island that had once been baseball fields. Two Army Black Hawk helicopters had landed, and a third Army Black Hawk was standing off to allow the Reachdeep helicopters to land first. The Black Hawks had pallets slung under them. They contained hospital gear for a theater medical lab. One by one, the Reachdeep Hueys touched down in the field.

Governors Island is a mile long. It is dotted with abandoned buildings from several historical periods. There are two forts dating from the War of 1812, and there are other buildings put up as recently as the 1970s. Before the American Revolution, Governors Island was where the British colonial governors of New York lived. They chose to live on the island because it put a distance of water between them and the noise and turmoil of the town. Recently the island was owned and operated by the U.S. Coast Guard, but the Coast Guard had moved its operations, leaving the place mothballed.

There were a number of large, graceful brick dormitories on the island. They were trimmed with white paint and had slate roofs, and the largest building had a cupola. The eastern side of the island was separated from Brooklyn by Buttermilk Channel. Three piers stuck out of the island into the channel. A couple of Coast Guard launches were tied up at the piers. Governors Island was so close to lower Manhattan that the towers of Wall Street seemed to loom over it.