The Deep Zone: A Novel (17 page)

Barnard cleared his throat. “Good evening, Mr. President, Madam Vice President, Secretary Rathor, Secretary Mason,” he said respectfully.

“Hello, Dr. Barnard.” A quick flash of the famous presidential smile that, in the early years of his tenure, had lit up an entire country. “I’m sorry that our earlier conference had to be cut short. And for taking too long to reconnect. I need to learn more, and a lot of people say you are the best person to help me do that.”

He felt himself blush. “Thank you, sir.”

“In our previous discussion, you said that this germ might have the potential to destroy our armed forces from the inside out. Has that proved to be an accurate assessment, Doctor?”

“More accurate than when we last spoke, sir. Its contagion factor appears similar to that of smallpox. Its mortality rate is worse—something like ninety percent thus far.”

“Ninety percent?” Eileen Washinsky’s eyebrows shot up. “Is that really possible?”

“I’m afraid so, Madame Vice President. No other known pathogen, possibly excepting Ebola, is so deadly. It’s too early, and our sample size is too small, to make final determinations, of course.”

The president spoke. “Doctor Barnard, we have every CDC lab not otherwise engaged in critical national security at work. We also have the military’s biowarfare people involved. We have not brought in any private-sector entities because of security concerns.”

“Thank you, sir. I concur that letting the bad news out before we have any good to counter it with could trigger a panic.”

“We agree on that, Doctor,” rasped Hunter Mason. He was a massive man, not tall but plated with muscle from years of weight lifting, his personal passion. He had a shaved head shaped like an artillery shell, and even in a tailored business suit he looked like he could bench-press a refrigerator. His voice sounded like gravel sliding out of a dump truck. “But when
do
we start to talk about this?”

Barnard took a deep breath. “Sir, we have received cultures of the pathogen from Afghanistan. Our own laboratories are just beginning their work. Until we’ve had some time with the thing, I would respectfully suggest that it would be best to maintain silence.”

The president nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Barnard. We value your opinion highly because, as I understand it, your laboratories were very close to formulating promising new antibiotics. That puts you closer than anyone else to producing something that might be effective against this germ.”

“Thank you, sir.” Barnard thought,
Rock and hard place. If he keeps it quiet and there’s a pandemic, they’ll say he should have told the world. If he goes public and there’s a panic, they’ll say he caused it. Glad I’m not in his seat
.

The president spoke again, bringing that part of their discussion to a close. “Now. Can you brief us quickly on what’s being done over there at BARDA?”

“Of course, sir. Since we first learned of the crisis, we’ve employed a three-pronged approach. One of our lab groups has been trying to synthesize an antibiotic that might prove effective. Another is trying to synthesize moonmilk itself—the extremophile that we had been working with earlier. And a third will now begin looking for a way to disrupt ACE’s genetic codes.”

Barnard waited for questions. Lathrop had told him and the others that his boss, Hunter Mason, and the president both knew about the moonmilk mission to Cueva de Luz. Barnard assumed that Rathor and Washinsky had been briefed as well. But events had been unfolding very quickly, and no one had verified that fact for him. Because of the Cueva de Luz mission’s secrecy and, given its unusual nature, the potential for political backlash, he had decided not to speak of it until the president did.

No one asked him any questions. The president leaned forward, looked down at his notes, then up again. “Doctor, I understand you also have people looking for that extremophile in its natural form.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How would you estimate their chances of success?”

Barnard had been anticipating this question, but he still wasn’t sure how to answer it. The fact that the president and his people were not actually in the room did nothing to lessen Barnard’s awareness of their inestimable power. It was like sitting next to explosives that might detonate at any moment without warning. In his whole life, the only comparable experience had been his reaction to combat in Vietnam, an intoxicating brew of fear, awe, and ecstasy. The adrenaline affected heart rate and respiration and, as he well knew, could bend judgment as well.
Always tempting to overpromise. Better to underpromise and overdeliver
. He also recalled Haight’s words during their briefing: “a desperate thing.” He thought,
Occupy the middle ground
.

“I would say their chances are good, sir.”

It was as neutral as he could be without raising false hopes of success or leaving the impression that failure was preordained. O’Neil just nodded. Washinsky and Mason remained expressionless because, Barnard assumed, as nonscientists they placed little stock in what must have sounded something like science fiction to them. Nathan Rathor’s eyebrows went up, wrinkling his forehead, and he frowned. The expression was visible only for a millisecond, but long enough to reveal itself as surprise, and that, in turn, surprised Barnard.

“I thought that those people in the cave were a pretty long shot,” Rathor said.

Why?
Barnard wondered. He had had no direct communication with Rathor about this.
But not yours to question why, old man. A cabinet officer has sources you can’t even dream of
.

“They will face—
are
facing—many challenges, Mr. Secretary,” Barnard agreed. He hesitated, struggling for some right way to say this, and then found the words. “I can tell you that if any team on earth could accomplish such a mission, it is this one.”

Rathor looked as though he were about to ask another question, but then put his flat, cabinet officer face on again and said only, “I understand. That’s all from me, Mr. President.”

The president, though, was not quite finished. “I have two last questions, and then we will let you go. If your laboratory does come up with a drug that is effective against ACE, won’t it take many months to produce enough vaccine? You have to grow it in eggs, don’t you?”

“Vaccine you do, yes sir. An antibiotic is different. Once we understand its genetic code, we can produce essentially unlimited amounts relatively quickly. Something like a million doses in two weeks if we involve private-sector assets. Then the real problem would be further down the pipeline. In other words, how do we get the drug quickly to the millions who might need it by then?”

The president looked hugely relieved. “Doctor, I have to tell
you, that’s the first piece of good news I’ve heard in a week. Distribution is a problem we can handle. Now my second question: how many casualties are we talking about?”

“Worst case, Mr. President?”

“Of course. There’s no other way to plan.”

Barnard got up from behind his desk and walked to a whiteboard on the wall. The system’s motion-sensitive telecom camera tracked him all the way. David Lathrop moved to stay out of the frame.

“Mr. President, our best information at this point is that ACE’s contagion factor is faster than that of smallpox. Here’s what that looks like.”

With a red marking pen, Barnard drew a numeral:

“This scenario assumes that ACE has broken containment. The pathogen appears to reach contagion stage after three to five days. It’s about seven to ten with smallpox, by the way—a significant difference between the two. Once contagious, that first person—the index case—will transmit the infection to about twelve people every day in your typical urban setting.”

Beneath the 1, Barnard wrote

“Those twelve will become contagious within the same time period, and each of them will infect another twelve.”

After that he stopped talking and just drew:

Barnard stepped to one side of the board and waited. Absurdly, he worried for a moment about the dimple in his tie knot. Then that he might have forgotten to raise his zipper after his last trip to the bathroom.
Stress
, he thought.
Stay focused
.

No one spoke. No one in the Situation Room would until the president did. O’Neil stared at the whiteboard for a long time.

“You’re telling me,” said the president, “that if this thing breaks out, absent some countermeasure, we will have three million infected people in three weeks? And that nine out of ten of them could die?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what
are
you telling me?”

“That it’s not
if
ACE will break out, sir. It’s
when
.”

The president’s normally rich skin tone had turned to ashen gray. His mouth opened, closed. He put a hand on his forehead, let it drop. “What in God’s name will we do with three million infected corpses?”

For that, Barnard had no answer. Apparently, neither did any of the others.

The screen went blank.

• • •

“The man of the hour,” David Lathrop said, pushing off from the wall where he had been leaning, out of camera range, while the teleconference went on. Possibly excepting Lew Casey, Barnard was closer to David Lathrop than he was to any other person in government. Lathrop was younger, but they had much in common, including war. Barnard’s had been Vietnam, Lathrop’s the First Gulf War, special operations. After the war, Lathrop migrated to the CIA. He completed several tours as a field operative, moved up to running his own stable of agents, and finally came in to serve as CIA’s senior liaison with BARDA.

Barnard heaved up from behind his desk and motioned for Lathrop to follow him. They went to the big, comfortable leather chairs where Barnard had sat with Hallie. Barnard stopped at his credenza to pour black coffee for both of them. He handed a mug to Lathrop, who spoke:

“Did you brief Rathor on the moonmilk mission?”

“No. I assumed you had,” Barnard said. “But I wondered about it.”

Lathrop studied his mug. “I didn’t. He seemed familiar with it, though.”

“The president must have involved him before the telecon,” Barnard said.

“Probably so. Given his contribution to O’Neil’s campaign, it wouldn’t be politic for the president to keep him in the dark, would it?”

“Fifteen million, wasn’t it?” Barnard mused.

“I heard more. And you know what? The same to Steeves. So I heard.” Lathrop grinned at Barnard over his coffee mug. Harold Steeves had been O’Neil’s Republican opponent in the last presidential election.

“Covering all bases.”

“Wish I could cover bases like that. You ever meet him?” Lathrop kept his expression neutral.

“Rathor? Couple of times, official functions, nods and handshakes.
He’s not known for making nice.” Barnard remembered mostly the small man’s big head and scrawny neck.

“You hear stories. People calling him ‘Rat-whore’ and such.” Lathrop chuckled, shook his head. “Washington.”

“Well, he came from Big Pharma. Not the most popular folks,” Barnard said.

Lathrop nodded. “He did bring some of those Big Pharma people into O’Neil’s fold. That was probably more important than the money.”

Barnard thought about it. “
As
important, maybe.”

Lathrop laughed. “Point taken.”

“O’Neil’s people spun it pretty well, don’t you think? ‘Another of the president’s open-armed attempts to reach across aisles and build bridges between business and government.’ Or whatever they said.”

“Sure. But we both know O’Neil just wanted to keep a close eye on the bobble-headed little bastard.”

Lathrop leaned back in his chair, took in and let out a deep breath.

“I’m guessing you didn’t come by just to swap tales about the pols, Late.” His friend hated the name David, disliked Dave even more so. Since Phillips Exeter, people had called him Late, which was more than a little ironic because he never was late—was always early, in fact.

“We have a problem, Don.”

“What is it?” Barnard tried to brace himself for yet another piece of bad news. But even so, he was not prepared for what he heard.

“Someone tried to send encrypted data out of BARDA.”

“What?”
Barnard shot forward in his seat. “What was it? How do you know that?”

“I can’t answer the second question. As for the first, it was damned good encryption, so we don’t know yet. Analysts are trying to break it down now.”

“Do we know who sent it?”

“Not specifically. We just know it came out of BARDA.”

“So it must have come from a computer here. That should be easy to track.”

“That’s the thing. It didn’t come from a specific BARDA computer. It came directly from the organization’s mainframe. Someone was able to get a torpedo into BARDA’s central unit.”

“You’d better explain that.”

“BARDA and other ultrasecure sites use poison-pill comm configurations. The computers can only send to and receive from computers with similar configurations. Alien data, incoming or outgoing, is destroyed at the portal. That keeps unauthorized sources from receiving BARDA information, and also keeps outside sources from penetrating BARDA’s systems. But it is possible—theoretically—to get around that by coding to wrap the data in a protective capsule. I’m speaking metaphorically here. It’s data hidden inside other data, like explosive inside a torpedo casing. The information can then be received by an outside computer source and will survive while its self-destruct programming is deactivated.”

“So we’re talking about a security breach. Here at BARDA.”

“Yes.”

“You know, we had something like this happen over a year ago.”

“Sure. Hallie Leland’s case. You thought it was all crap. Based on the available facts, I was inclined to agree.”

“Right.”

“So maybe we were wrong. Have you ever considered that?”