Authors: Wil Mara
“Speaking of vaccines, is there any progress on creating one?” This came from Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
“We now have teams working in three separate locations around the clock. But this is time consuming because it’s so hit-and-miss. Since this virus is new, creating a vaccine is like reinventing the wheel. It could take a week, a month, or a year. The reason people still get the flu is because the virus mutates from year to year, making it all but impossible to produce a permanent vaccine. Let’s hope this one doesn’t have that capacity. Also, we can experiment on animals only, which means whatever we eventually come up with might have no effect on humans—or, like other vaccines that have been hastily formulated, it could end up doing as much damage as the disease itself.”
She was thinking of the Fort Dix incident. In February of 1976, a young military recruit at New Jersey’s Fort Dix died unexpectedly from an unfamiliar strain of the influenza virus that also had characteristics of a contagion infecting domestic hogs. Then it was discovered that thirteen others were infected. The government, fearing the public could not adapt quickly enough to the new variant, ordered a vaccine be developed and delivered as soon as possible. Just weeks after the population began receiving inoculations, however, more than two dozen recipients were dead while others developed nerve damage, some to the point of permanent paralysis. Further inoculations were cancelled, and the government became the target of lawsuits totaling more than a billion dollars. Ironically, no other deaths from the original Fort Dix outbreak occurred, and the illness passed. Nevertheless, many people became gun-shy about vaccines thereafter, never realizing that the great majority worked exactly as intended and were completely safe.
“Okay, Sheila,” the president said, “thank you for the update. Keep your people working on this around the clock.”
“I will, Mr. President. Thank you.”
* * *
The screen went blank and most of the attendees filed out of the room. The president, however, remained seated, as did CIA Director Leon Panetta.
“Leon, do you have reason to believe there’s a terrorist connection to this?”
Panetta, the affable son of Italian immigrants who would go on to nine terms in the House of Representatives and serve as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff before becoming Obama’s “top spy,” said, “There is no evidence to suggest it as of yet. Naturally, several groups are claiming responsibility, but none are credible. In the upper levels of terrorist society, no one’s saying a word.” The president didn’t seem eased by his comments. “Do you have a specific concern, sir?”
Obama shook his head. “No, but it’s something we have to consider. I’m trying to improve our relations around the world, but it would naïve to think that it could be accomplished everywhere. Syria, Iran, North Korea … Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas … the Taliban, the remaining fragments of Al-Qaeda … There are still plenty of people who would like to see America brought to its knees.”
“No doubt.”
“If this does turn out to be something manufactured rather than natural, I’ll have no choice but to respond.”
Panetta nodded. “Yes, Mr. President.”
“Not what you want to be doing with one hand while holding out an olive branch with the other.”
“No, sir.”
The president spent another moment in his private thoughts. Then, “Okay, keep the agency’s ear to the ground, and the rest of us will keep our fingers crossed.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“And please operate
quietly
. If the press gets wind of any suspicions on our part…”
“Of course, Mr. President.”
“Thank you.”
* * *
Ahmed Aaban el Shalizeh stood watching a large CRT television propped on a munitions trunk turned on its side. A small cadre of men lingered around him, but he was the one a random observer would notice first. His robes were tattered and filthy, the leather on his bullet belt dried and rotted. His black turban matched his beard almost perfectly, although the latter was starting to show the first signs of silver. It was his eyes, however, that frosted everyone he met—the left one was as blue as the Pacific, whereas the right was cloudy and lifeless, an orb of dead tissue. Shalizeh had constructed the legend of losing half his vision in the first battle of his career, a firefight in the Malakand region of Pakistan where he was born and raised. The truth was a bit more prosaic—his mother, naturally left-handed, destroyed it through repeated strikes to that side of his head. Shalizeh had cultivated many dramatic stories about himself over the years, to the point where even he had begun to forget where the facts ended and the fiction began.
The makeshift camp was located in a remote desert sector of Iran’s southwestern province of Khuzestan. It was originally intended as a hydroelectric plant until construction ceased due to lack of funding. The main building had a slanting, corrugated roof and large bay doors at either end. A twin pair of smaller buildings, made from cinder blocks and with no glass in the windows, stood on either side. Beyond that were about two dozen canvas tents of varying sizes. A gravel road snaked its way to the site, and a pair of aging RVs were parked at the spot where it abruptly terminated. A swift river bordered by scant shrubbery hugged the encampment on the eastern side, and a rope bridge had been built immediately after the current residents arrived. About a hundred yards beyond the adjacent shore lay the foothills of a nameless mountain, and within those foothills was a network of caves that provided suitable cover when necessary. Shalizeh said they could hide in the caves when foreign intelligence agencies flew overhead, either in manned or unmanned planes, to take pictures of them. But they had been here just under one year and so far that hadn’t happened yet.
Al Jazeera reported the latest figures from America. On the screen, they showed random images from around the country to underscore the horror—bodies being taken out of a home in shiny black bags, a screaming baby with a hideously swollen face, the unsteady cell phone movie of an infected man jumping from the top of an apartment building. A middle-aged woman in a business suit was crying as someone off camera held out a microphone. Between hitches and sobs, she said that her husband and twelve-year-old son had contracted the illness while she was away on a company trip, and when she got back she found them both dead. It wasn’t the illness that had ultimately taken their lives, however, but a bizarre joint suicide in which they pointed shotguns at each other’s heads.
Shalizeh turned, grinning. “Wonderful,” he said in his native Urdu. “Simply wonderful. This is truly a sign from the heavens.” He walked over and draped his arms around two of his men. “Did I not tell you? Did I not foresee it?”
A graduate of Bahria University with a degree in psychology, he was charismatic, intelligent, passionate … and thoroughly crazy. He could quote the Koran from memory and was a superb storyteller, dazzling his followers with battlefield tales whose authenticity was doubtable at best. But beneath the intriguing exterior he was a sociopath, plain and simple. He and his men had killed on many occasions—the difference was they believed they were doing it for a cause, whereas he did it largely for pleasure.
“Your faith has not been misplaced,” he continued, addressing the entire crowd now. “All is happening as I have predicted, and Lashkar-al-Islam will rise once again.
We will rise again!
” He removed his rifle from his shoulder and fired it into the ceiling. There were hundreds of holes in the corrugated surface from similar outbursts.
The others did likewise, cheering like giddy children. They were twelve miles from the nearest settlement, mostly to discourage escapees. Shalizeh had already tracked down two. It was rumored he shot both in the legs, then buried them up to their necks in the sand. It was this kind of over-the-top lunacy that had slowly diminished his standing in the fundamentalist community. At its peak, Lashkar-al-Islam received weaponry, training, and financial aid from sympathetic factions as diverse as Abu Sayyaf, Islamic Jihad, and the Palestine Liberation Front. But Shalizeh’s ultraradical tactics, too gruesome even for “mainstream” terrorists, drove away these supporters one by one until the organization was hanging by a single thread—a thread held by the government of Iran. Then the Iranian people elected a new president, and Shalizeh was not only cut off but targeted as well. He narrowly escaped capture and soon became obsessed with two objectives—revenge against Iran’s new reformist administration, and returning Lashkar to its former glory. The opportunity to do both would come, he had said repeatedly.
Now he believed that opportunity had finally arrived.
He walked over to one of his lieutenants, a Syrian named Ashur, and said, “Contact Abdulaziz and send him what he needs.” The others braced themselves. The two men had not been getting along lately, mostly on this point.
“My leader, please, this is not a good idea.”
“My friend, trust m—”
“I beg of you, do not do this.”
“I assure you—”
“Please, don’t.”
They squabbled for a few more seconds—an eternity to the spectators—until, in one startlingly swift motion, Shalizeh struck Ashur in the chin with the butt of his rifle. Ashur collapsed with a groan, blood leaking from his mouth.
Shalizeh stood over him for a moment, his eyes wild. Then he turned to another of his followers and said, “Are
you
willing to follow my orders?”
The unfortunate soul he had picked, a relatively low-ranking soldier named Kala, nodded quickly. “Then
go
!” Shalizeh barked, and Kala fled.
Ashur got to his feet slowly. Shalizeh took no notice of this, turning back to the television instead. Now they were showing a night clip of several buildings on fire in the Chicago area. The caption read,
WIDESPREAD LOOTING IN MAJOR CITIES AS ILLNESS SPREADS
.
A smile returned to Shalizeh’s lips.
SEVEN
It was one of those dreams where you knew you were in it, knew you couldn’t escape it, and—perhaps worst of all—knew what was coming.
Beck was in the rented convertible—the one that should’ve been returned to Avis after the conference in Connecticut but was now costing the CDC $29.95 per day plus gas and mileage—motoring along northern New Jersey’s Route 17. The top was down on another postcard-perfect day, the Appalachians majestic in the distance. Route 17 was a major artery, all the land on either side developed within an inch of its life. Car dealerships, home-improvement centers, anonymous office buildings, health clubs, strip malls. Since this was a dream, most of it was a blur.
Cara wasn’t in the passenger seat; she had decided to spend another day at the lab working on vaccines. He wasn’t sure where he was going; that information had not been included. He had heard once that dreams were, in fact, complete in their chronologies. But the mind protected the soul by blocking out most of the hurtful segments. If they didn’t, many of us would wake with our sanity erased. We’d end up in state institutions, strapped to beds and screaming at the ceiling.
There were a few other vehicles around. He’d been on 17 many times now, and the thickness of traffic had steadily diminished. People went into hiding, or packed their things and moved on. The state had issued warnings not to do so. Roadblocks had been set up, but mostly as a bluff. Unless a federal order was handed down, law-enforcement agencies couldn’t actually stop anyone from traveling. Even if they tried, the locals knew every obscure back road. It was said you could go anywhere in New Jersey without touching a highway. Beck had thought it was a myth, but not anymore. It was the most densely populated state in the nation, and with that swollen population came excessive development. Aside from the Pine Barrens in the southern third, the Garden State was now a landscape of concrete and steel. If you wanted to leave and knew your way around, no one was going to stop you.
The stereo was on, spinning one of his beloved ’70s CDs. Strangely, though, the song playing was Michael Martin Murphey’s “Wildfire.” Released in June of 1975, it ostensibly told the story of a lost horse and its owner but was metaphorically a reference to escaping a miserable life for something better. While melodically stunning, certain lyrical passages had always disturbed him. It was one of the few ’70s classics that, even now, he could not stand to hear. For this alone he wished he could force himself awake.
An eighteen-wheeler roared past him on the left. The driver blew the horn in several frantic bleats, as if trying to communicate a coherent thought. Beck glanced over and saw that the windows were smoked, giving the rig a sinister appearance. As it rattled past, he saw the letters
D.O.A.
painted huge on the side of the trailer. A chill blew through him, and his heart began drumming. Then, as the rig dropped its clutch and began barreling away, he tried to scream—
No!
—but only hot air came out. He tried again and again. A distant part of him knew you couldn’t muster any vocal force in a dream, any more than you could stop yourself from falling or outrun the swarm of killer bees that was just behind you, their tiny eyes trained on the soft flesh of your neck. But he kept trying.
The rig swerved into the middle lane, in front of him, the horn still blasting. Beck pressed the gas pedal to the floor, and that helped close the distance somewhat. But it wasn’t enough … wouldn’t be enough.… He kept on blowing hot air with his useless dream-voice.
The overpass was coming up quickly. It was a pedestrian bridge, with an inward-curved cage along the flanks. He saw the woman running up the steps on the right. When she reached the top she looked to the road, to the rig. As it drew closer, she moved toward the middle. There was a gap in the cage for some reason. She stopped there, and Beck could see she was holding a baby in her arms.
The truck driver stopped working the horn. Then all other sounds ceased—no wheels rattling, no Michael Martin Murphey singing “Wildfire,” not even the hoarse whisper of his attempted screams. He had become frozen now and could do nothing but watch. He felt a peculiar pressure on both sides of his head.