The Cobra Event (39 page)

Mark Littleberry recognized a Biozan reactor. “It’s not running. I’d guess he’s finished making his virus stocks. But the liquid in that reactor is probably hot with Cobra.”

They could see Cope’s boxes of moths and caterpillars, and his photograph of the Amazon rain forest, but they could not see Cope. He remained outside the laboratory, visible in the thermal imagers only as a ghostly orange figure sitting on the couch or moving restlessly around the living room, mostly keeping the long tube-thing in his hands, as if he couldn’t let go of it. In stereo sound, they heard him talking to himself, saying, “You idiot, you idiot, this is too important to fail.” A fuzzy shape rested on a table in front of the couch. Hopkins and Austen thought it was probably the bag he’d been carrying when they’d seen him. Then he opened it—it
was
the bag—and he seemed to play with another long tube-thing and a couple of smaller objects, and then he pulled out something recognizable.

“He has a gun,” Caroline Landau said. “Could be a .45. Oo-ee, it’s got a nifty sight on it.”

He placed the gun on the table, and lay back on the couch not ten feet from a massive F.B.I. surveillance and SWAT group, with no apparent inkling of the weight of agonized law enforcement that pressed up against his living-room wall like a flood swelling behind a dam that was getting ready to burst. They were fascinated with the large cylinder that he held in his hands: it had to be a biological bomb. They counted possibly two large bombs, they weren’t sure, including one that seemed to be in the bag all the time. They debated trying to drill another fish-eye lens through the wall to get a clearer picture of him and his bomb or bombs but decided not to, afraid he might notice. They had been lucky up to now, and the last thing they needed was a surveillance boo-boo, something not unheard of in operations of this type.

HE SAT ON THE COUCH
. What to do? Were they watching him? Or was he imagining this? He went to the window and peeked out, but he was afraid to stay there for more than a few moments. Soon he would have to make his move. He went back into the living room and picked up one of the small bio-det biological grenades. Despite the fact that the explosive was a low-velocity type, the grenade would be absolutely devastating inside a closed space, such as in a room or a tunnel. The two grenades were both a defense and an offense; he could use them either way.

AT THE
F.B.I. Command Center in the Federal Building, Frank Masaccio and his people monitored the situation and stayed in touch with S
IOC
in Washington, which was in full operation. Masaccio had command: he would call the moves. He was not going to burst in on Tom Cope. Not if the man had a bomb, not if he was barricaded in an apartment. That was far too dangerous. He was going to wait until Cope came out of the building, then swoop on him and make the arrest. The idea was to take him so fast he would not have time to detonate anything.

Snipers with Remington .308 rifles would be standing by on the rooftops. If they received an order to shoot, the snipers would aim for his eyes. This is standard procedure in a sniper takedown. You try to hit a two-inch band around the eyes. The bullet enters through the eyes and explodes the brain stem and sends it out through the exit wound. With the brain stem gone the body relaxes—the muscles don’t tense. So if the person is holding a finger on a trigger or on a detonator, the finger relaxes spontaneously.

Masaccio instructed the snipers not to shoot without orders. He didn’t know how Cope’s bomb worked. It might go off if Cope collapsed. If there were indications that Cope was going to detonate a bomb inside his apartment, then the Reachdeep operations people had orders to move through the wall as quickly as possible and try to stop Cope. The goal was the same as always: not necessarily to kill Cope, but first and foremost to render him harmless.

They needed a man known as a master breacher to prepare the way for them into Cope’s apartment. The F.B.I. has several master breachers. They work out of Quantico. While the surveillance operation was getting under way, Oscar Wirtz had called Quantico, and a master breacher named Wilmot Hughes had been put in the air, flying to New York on an F.B.I. plane. He arrived at ten o’clock. Cope was still in his apartment and had not made a move.

Wilmot Hughes was a small, wiry man who had spent a lifetime devising ways of entering secure locations rapidly, often with help from explosives. He could enter airplanes and boats and cars and bunkers.

The master breacher inspected the brick wall, running his hands over it, tapping it lightly. “Fortunately this is trivial,” he remarked. He began laying shaped plastic explosive charges in a pattern over the bricks. An oval portion of the brick wall that led to Cope’s living room would disappear in a fraction of a second whenever the master breacher wanted it to disappear. He gave instructions to the Reachdeep team to lie flat against the wall on either side of the charges when they went off.

COPE SEEMED INDECISIVE
. At one point he went into the bathroom and urinated, and they saw and heard that, and an hour later he urinated in the bathroom again. He seemed increasingly nervous. Every now and then Cope’s image—a warm human-shaped form—would cross the living room to a window and peek out. The curtains showed up as black rectangles on the imaging screens.

Masaccio spoke to Wirtz on a headset. He told him to get ready to move, now that the breacher had prepared a way. Wirtz and the Reachdeep ninjas began putting on space suits and body armor.

Littleberry said: “I’m going in. I want to see his lab.”

“You’re too senior for this kind of action,” Hopkins told him.

“You can’t deny me.” Littleberry turned to Austen. “You comin’ too?”

“Sure am, Doctor,” she said to Littleberry.

“Hey—” Hopkins said.

He gave orders for the doctors to stay behind him, but he thought he was fighting a losing battle to keep them out of it altogether. Everyone pulled on black Racal biohazard suits, and Wirtz made them wear body armor. They had lightweight radio headsets. Wirtz told Hopkins to stay well back. “You and the doctors come in after we’ve secured the place.”

“I’ll be climbing over your back, Oscar,” Hopkins said. He buckled a pouch to his waist, which he filled with certain essentials: swabs, his pocket protector full of pens and other junk, his Mini Maglite flashlight, and a Boink biosensor. He strapped on his SIG-Sauer nine-millimeter semi-automatic. He ran his radio headset wire down to a transceiver at his waist, which operated over a wide variety of channels. This piece of equipment made it possible for members of the team to talk with each other and with the command center. Finally he put a Racal hood over his head, running his radio wire under the hood’s shoulder shroud. He switched on the battery-powered blower for the Racal filters, and the hood pressurized. The blowers made a low hum. The battery would keep the hood pressurized for up to eight hours. He jumped up and down lightly on the balls of his feet, feeling keyed up and wanting to move.

“Take it down, Will!” Oscar Wirtz said. “You’re shaking the floor, man.” Wirtz thought: He would not do well in a shooter. But I don’t have the heart to tell him.

Hopkins turned off his blowers and removed his Racal hood. There was no sense in wearing it while they were waiting for Tom Cope to make a move.

On the rooftops nearby, the snipers kept the windows of Cope’s apartment under surveillance with infrared zoom scopes. They could see Cope occasionally, when he moved close to the metal curtain. They put the crosshairs on his eyes when he peered out, but they couldn’t shoot. He always seemed to be carrying the bomb. He moved often and seemed fearful of going near the windows.

A little over a mile away, Frank Masaccio sat in the Federal Building wondering what to do. He had the S
IOC
in Washington watching his every move, second-guessing him, and the White House seemed ready to have some kind of heart attack. The President had not given the news conference; it had been put on hold while the situation in New York unfolded. Frank Masaccio was pondering his options.

Steven Wyzinski’s voice came to him: “Frank? Frank? Do you hear me? The attorney general is here at S
IOC
.”

“Mr. Masaccio.” It was the voice of Frank Masaccio’s ultimate boss, second only to the President in the chain of authority. “Any decisions you make will be reviewed and cleared by me.”

Masaccio continued to recommend that no sudden moves be made. He didn’t want to commit his forces to an action or to reveal their presence to Cope. Certainly trying to open negotiations with Cope would be a risky thing to try—it might set him off. It wasn’t clear what Cope suspected, but Masaccio planned to wait for him to leave the building, then to take him. Trying to take people inside apartments was a recipe for a shooter gone bad, and if the guy had a weapon of mass destruction in his apartment, you had to suck the egg through a pinhole—so ran Masaccio’s thinking.

IN THE APARTMENT
, Cope went into the bathroom again, carrying the mother bomb. He placed it on the floor. Then he unraveled a long piece of toilet paper and blew his nose. He wiped his face with more toilet paper. He went over to the sink and rinsed his face with cold water.

The surveillance team knew it was cold water, because they could see the color of the water in the thermal imagers.

He was so nervous that he was trembling. Why am I so afraid? He looked into the mirror. His eyes had a strange color. Was that a golden ring around the pupils? He looked into his pupils reflected in the mirror. His nose was running. His upper lip was glistening wet.

No. It could not be. He knew that brainpox was selective in its infectivity. He knew that it infected only about half of the people exposed to it in low doses. It was like so many virus weapons. He had been around the virus for months and he had not become infected. This was impossible. He wondered if he had made a mistake. Maybe when I did the release in Washington I didn’t hold my breath in that subway car for long enough. Maybe some of it stuck to my clothes or my hair. No, that’s impossible, I’m immune. I’m imagining things.

There is nothing wrong with my mind, nothing. I don’t feel anything. If I was infected with brainpox, my mind would feel different. I am a normal paranoid schizophrenic, he said to himself, and he almost smiled, but he wondered again if he had made a big mistake when he had done the Phase II trial in Washington.

COPE HAD A BIOREACTOR
full of liquid Cobra virus. Littleberry believed that the reactor was very hot, and that led to a discussion of what to do if some kind of biological meltdown occurred in the apartment during an action. People from the mayor’s Emergency Management Office were in the command center with Masaccio, and they had an idea that sounded as if it might just work. It was to fill some fire-department pumper trucks with disinfectant and spray the entire building if Cope’s bioreactor dumped its contents. The fire department found a chemical shipper in Brooklyn who had a lot of sodium hypochlorite on hand—that’s common laundry bleach. Several pumper trucks went over to Brooklyn and were filled with bleach and water. They then lined up, as discreetly as possible (which wasn’t very discreetly) on a street around the corner from Cope. The fire department also had decontamination trucks, which are used to decontaminate firemen or citizens who have been exposed to chemicals or asbestos, and those trucks were stationed nearby.

It was now one o’clock in the morning. Cope had not been able to fall asleep. He was still indecisive. Part of the reason for that was that he was no longer completely him. The transformation was occurring rapidly now. Crystals were forming in his brain stem.

“Move the fire trucks in as close as possible without making them visible in any of Cope’s windows,” Hopkins said, speaking to Masaccio. “Get them ready to start spraying bleach into the building if we call for it. Wirtzy is dying to move. If we go through the wall, start the spray. If the bomb goes off, let’s hope the spray will decontaminate the building.”

“That’s a big hope, Hopkins,” Masaccio said.

Down

IT WAS NOW
three o’clock in the morning. Alice Austen had been watching Cope on the screens of the thermal imaging cameras. He had not gone to sleep. When he stood up from the couch and began to move across the room, she made a tentative diagnosis. Cope seemed to be making some involuntary gestures. Jerky movements. He was talking to himself. And moaning. “I’m not sick. Not sick.”

“Listen, Will. I think he’s infected,” Austen said.

They studied his body movements, but Austen couldn’t be sure.

Then Cope seemed to make up his mind. “Option two,” he said.

“What was that?” Hopkins said.

“He’s losing it,” Littleberry said.

The blurry thermal image showed Cope bent over the object in his hands. They heard a sound. It was the sound of the metal end piece being unscrewed from the glass bomb tube. He fiddled with something. They heard a dry, rustling, cracking sound. It was the sound of wires being pulled through a packed mass of viral hexagons in the tube. He was re-arming the bomb.

Hopkins stood and put his hand up. “Wirtzy! He may blow something! Get ready!”

Everyone put on Racal hoods, which took a few seconds. They zipped up their suits and started their air filters running. If the building goes hot with that bomb, Hopkins thought, it could kill all of us, space suits or not. The air near bioground zero would be so thick with virus, it might overwhelm the suit’s protection. Quick as cats, Oscar Wirtz and five Reachdeep operational ninjas positioned themselves against the thinned wall, on either side of the charges. The master breacher, Wilmot Hughes, readied his controls. Everyone was wearing full space-suit battle dress with body armor. The ninjas were carrying flash grenades and Heckler & Koch assault weapons.

In Washington, as it dawned on the S
IOC
group that Reachdeep was getting itself poised to move, a number of people began shouting contradictory things at the same time.