The Darkness Drops Read online

  “Hey! Do you have a result?”

  “Yeah, we have a result.” The man’s raspy voice sounded even more pissed off. “For what it’ll be worth.”

  Terry stepped back into his house and switched the call to a secure landline. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the Bacillus anthracis strain that we got in Boca and the one cultured from the NBC News employee in New York are pretty close.”

  DNA analysis involves identifying the sequences of its nucleic acids. In humans, attributing a specific tissue sample to its owner is simple. No two people have the same pattern. Recognizing bits of the parents’ chains in those of the offspring is similarly clear cut. Recognizing the progeny of microbes, however, can be another matter. They constantly exchange genetic material and replicate every few hours. Therefore saying they come from the same batch can never be an exact science. As in old-time fingerprint forensics, they’ll have points of comparison. The greater the number of similarities, the more likely a match, but the results won’t ever be certain.

  Terry took a pass on hearing the technical description of what constituted pretty close. “Any similarities to the Russian sample?” he asked.

  “Some, but not as many.”

  “Enough to say they could have come from that strain?”

  “Sure. Certainly enough to say it was possible, but if the current stuff did originate from there, it’s gone through a hell of a lot of generations.”

  Which would make sense, if someone had kept growing cultures to increase the supply. But why buy Russian when you can go American? “How about similarities to the Ames strain?” Terry asked. He referred to the anthrax samples kept under lock and key at specifically authorized research centers in this country. Initially obtained from Japan’s and Nazi Germany’s bioweapon stores at the end of World War II, then salvaged when Richard Nixon publicly abandoned the US’s own bioweapons program in the seventies at the urging of Henry Kissinger, they were now used for the specific purpose of developing and producing anti-anthrax vaccines. At least that had been how veterans of the cold war era who’d given Terry his hot-zone training told the story. Officially, the samples never existed in the first place.

  “There a match is slightly more likely,” the raspy voice continued. “Where the Russian stuff is sixty to forty against, Ames is a fifty-fifty proposition. I figure it’s where the FBI will point their investigation, at least publicly.”

  Terry agreed. Americans would be less afraid, relieved even, if they thought the anthrax attacks were the work of a homegrown nut who parceled out death on a small scale in the style of a uni-bomber, not al Qaeda. So when the odds pointed even a little more in that direction, why not catch a break? Spin the most reassuring conclusion in the most positive light possible. He could see the headline already: Anthrax evidence points to a rogue American scientist as source. Right up there with the lone gunman theory.

  One thing was certain. Whether Russian or American, the strain used to seed those envelopes had been coddled through so many replications that the person responsible could only have done it in the protected environment of a level four biohazard lab. Terry’s “creepy, wonderfully suspicious mind” might be losing its touch, but he considered it unlikely that Anna, or Yuri for that matter, had one of those hidden away. Nor would either of them know anybody in Sverdlovsk with access to the facility there. The military had destroyed it, once they discovered that the Americans were onto them.

  Terry could categorically tell the general to back off Anna and Yuri.

  He thanked the overburdened supervisor for his work, and received a gruff, “You’re welcome.”

  Walking back out on the deck, he sipped a fresh cup of coffee, and thought of Anna. The words pigheaded, stubborn ice-queen came to mind. He’d often wondered if she were to stand here beside him, would the majesty of where he’d chosen to live redeem him in her eyes, at least a bit? Cause her to think that a man who appreciated such beauty couldn’t be all bad. After all, she’d thawed toward Yuri after a year or two. Her fury at a fornicating sleaze-bag had had a statute of limitations. Why not give him the same break? Instead she’d cut him off with a fifteen-month silent treatment.

  His own anger kicked in, fueled by jealousy and feelings of being betrayed. Then he got mad at himself for having sunk so low as to be jealous of a sleaze like Yuri. He winced, and tried to shut down the images of it all as they played helter-skelter in his head. With strong emotions, his imagination skipped the switch that sorted out past events from real-time experience. He didn’t just endure a painful memory. He relived it.

  A prickle of cold sweat broke out between his shoulder blades despite a molten sunrise brimming the sheer barrier of rock behind him. His skin glistened under the flood of light, as did the dew-soaked foliage in the valley below. It reminded him of an ominous line from a poem by Keats, upon which his own imagination riffed:

  As if summer days would never end, we played,

  Until the sun o’erbrimm’d our clammy cells.

  “And I’m a love-sick idiot!” he said to the birds.

  The following Thursday, October 18, 2001, 4:30 P.M. EST

  Tenth Floor, Park Medical Building, New York City

  “Everything seems perfectly normal. You’re a healthy woman, Tania” Yuri said, snapping off his latex gloves.

  Tania Yurskovitch looked dreamily up at him from the examining table. Her face glowed crimson. A few tendrils of blonde hair had pasted themselves to the moist skin of her forehead, and her slightly parted lips pouted much fuller than usual. She hadn’t yet caught her breath, and the green gown covering her upper body clung to her stomach, spot welded to where a circle of perspiration had soaked through. She brought her respirations under control, lifted her legs out of the stirrups, and started to get off the table. Its white paper cover came with her, stuck to the sweat on her back. “I look like a partially unwrapped gift.” She laughed nervously, then added, “And here I thought you didn’t like me, Dr. Yuri.”

  “Now what gave you a crazy idea like that?” he said, helping her to stand.

  “My girlfriends tell me their doctors give them exams like that all the time.”

  Yuri loved hearing about the indiscretions of colleagues. It made the job of forgiving his own screw-ups so much easier. “Well, I don’t do that exam with my other patients. You were a special case.”

  She flushed anew, still trying to keep all the green and white paper bundled around her. “I hope you’ll examine me regularly now.”

  “If it’s indicated.”

  “Oh, it will be, Dr. Yuri . . .” She stopped speaking, and her face hardened. As with most middle-aged women who’d lost too much weight trying to compete with teenagers, her features had acquired a wooden, hollowed-out-by-a-chisel appearance. “Wait a minute. Did Boris make you do that? To prove there was nothing wrong with me, so I couldn’t refuse--” Her hand flew to her mouth as if that could stop the ugly thought from completing itself.

  Yuri immediately felt sorry for her. “That wasn’t it, Tania, I swear. Nobody tells me what to do as a doctor. Absolutely nobody, including Boris.”

  She stood motionless, halfway between anger and tears. “Really?”

  The frail hope invested in that one word nearly broke his heart. It made her seem so fragile. “Yes, really,” he lied, it being the most humane act of healing he’d done all day.

  “Can I come here to see you again?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you can . . . you know . . . do that again--”

  “If it helps you.”

  Her features softened, and tears began to flow down her concave cheeks. “You’re an angel, Dr. Yuri. An angel sent from heaven. I haven’t felt so good . . .” She trailed off, and went crimson to the tips of her earlobes. “Sorry,” she said, crumpling a corner from the paper gown into a wad and dabbing it against her eyes. “It’s just Boris is such a pig, and don’t think I don’t know about those sluts he imports. But I’m afraid to leave him, afraid f
or my life, and those siloviki of his make it impossible to have my own . . .” The crimson deepened to scarlet. “Well, you know. A woman has needs.” She ran out of words, and just looked at him with faded blue eyes that begged him to say it was all right for her to feel the way she did.

  He wanted to help her. At the same time he wondered what the hell he could tell Boris and not get strangled by those massive hands. “I’ll be masturbating your wife once a week. That’s what she needs to fix her right up. Will you be paying with Visa or Mastercard?”

  He said some reassuring words and stepped out of the examining room into his office, wondering why the hell he’d been crazy enough to cross that line anyway.

  Because it felt good to cross Boris, said the little inner voice that never lied. And he loved giving women pleasure. The care he’d taken to make certain Tania enjoyed herself sure as hell wasn’t the cold clinical act Boris had had in mind.

  But there was another reason. His nose for a longshot told him if anyone wanted out from that big Russian’s clutches as badly as he did, it had to be Tania. Somehow it just made sense for them to be friends. Maybe they’d be able to help each other get free of the bastard.

  “You know, Dr. Yuri, this office is the only place I feel free out from under him and his damn siloviki,” Tania called from the examining room as she continued to get dressed. “It scares me how they can find out anything for him.”

  Yuri suddenly found himself glancing about the room, wondering about hidden cameras and microphones.

  “He’s even got people in the FBI,” she continued.

  “Boris would boast that kind of thing,” Yuri said, “but I doubt they’d take ex-KGB.”

  She walked back into his office, still adjusting her sweater. Her skin color had cooled to a radiant gold that made her appear pretty. The afterglow, Yuri thought. It had given more than one woman away.

  “Oh, I think he’s got somebody with the Feds, all right,” she persisted, and went over to her purse, a Gucci bag the size of a garbage sack. Pulling out a copy of USA Today, she laid it on his desk and tapped the front page. “See this?”

  The headlines were all about more positive skin tests for anthrax, one involving a producer at ABC, another the assistant to Dan Rather at CBS.

  “It doesn’t say so in here, but Boris’s contact told him that the FBI now thinks the mailer is Russian.”

  Yuri felt the room grow chilly. “Russian?”

  She nodded and tapped the paper again. “Apparently they got a tip about these cases from a guy with a Russian accent.”

  Yuri had taken pains to speak English as flawlessly as possible when he’d phoned in the warning. No accent at all. And he’d muffled the receiver with a handkerchief, using a pay phone in Times Square where there’d been a lot of background noise. They must have picked out traces of his mother tongue anyway. He should have known they would, given all the sophisticated voice recognition equipment they had today.

  What really came as a shock was that Boris knew!

  And had sent Tania to pass on the news that he knew. Why else would he tell her what his spy had learned?

  Maybe he’d even counted on Yuri phoning in the tip.

  Son of a bitch!

  Because now, if Boris ever carried out his threat to turn him in, Yuri had provided the FBI with a phone recording of his own voice claiming knowledge of the anthrax.

  Hell, maybe it hadn’t been their clients who’d launched the anthrax attacks in the first place, but Boris himself, the better to ensnare his Yuri.

  Son of a bitch!

  Son of a bitch!

  Son of a bitch!

  “What’s the matter, Dr. Yuri?” Tania said, after she gathered up her belongings and kissed him goodbye on both cheeks. “You look a little white.”

  The following week, Friday, October 26, 2001

  In the southern province of Guangdong, China, the sun climbed toward high noon over a tiny, freshly dug grave. It lay beneath a eucalyptus tree at the back of a muddy field, and when an occasional breeze stirred the leaves, they shimmered with the flash of a million steel blades, shredding the light into jagged shards that flickered across the mound. In its own way, this was a war memorial, for the grave’s occupant had been killed by what would be seen as the opening chapter to a great global conflict.

  Except this unwitting casualty had only been four years old, and the sole visitors to his memorial trudged through the muck wearing yellow biohazard suits and carrying shovels.

  “Don’t play with the chickens,” his father had told him. “There’s something wrong with them.”

  At night farmers all over the district beheaded sick hens and burnt the carcasses, hoping to cut the disease’s spread and prevent inspectors at the agriculture station from finding out there’d been a problem. Otherwise some official would order the slaughter of every bird in the province, and not pay a penny to the owners.

  The inspectors, in turn, knew about the clandestine culls, easily spotting the fires dotting the countryside after dark, but let them go on. Every agriculture official in China had learned the hard way to turn a blind eye to the problem rather than risk the wrath of superiors in Beijing. There the official line was that the country’s poultry supply remained free of disease.

  The chicks had scooted about the boy’s feet, looking as cute as ever, and he forgot his father’s instructions.

  When they’d pooped on his hands, he laughed, and rinsed off his fingers in a puddle. But not before he rubbed his nose that had been bothering him all day. His cousin had given him her sniffles.

  In twenty-four hours he’d developed a fever.

  “The flu,” his mother had pronounced.

  The virus he’d inherited from his cousin had done what viruses do, subverted the chemistry of his cells to reproduce itself. A protein coat provided the mirror-image match to receptor sites lining his respiratory tree and allowed it to lock onto the cells lining his nose. The microbe then flooded those cells with its own RNA, the genetic blue print that instructed its new host how to make more virus. The resulting progeny repeated the process, flooding his system with yet another generation of offspring, and the invasion progressed down to the back of the nose, through the pharynx into the lungs. By then he’d had a sore throat and racking cough, the usual sequence of symptoms when he caught a cold from his cousin.

  Except this time, something different had happened.

  Wiping his nose with chicken poop had inoculated him with a strain of influenza specific to birds. And the two strains lying side by side did something else that viruses do, they exchanged RNA. All of a sudden the bird strain could lock into his respiratory tree, and a second wave of infection advanced toward the lungs.

  But he’d no immunity to this one.

  Unchecked, it ravaged the tissues, plugged the boy’s bronchioles, and flooded his alveoli with pus, until twenty-four hours later, he asphyxiated, drowning in the liquefied remains of his own cells.

  That had been a week ago.

  Three days later authorities from the experimental agriculture station had come for his parents.

  “Endangering the state by concealing a reportable outbreak,” the uniformed officer wearing the most braid had charged, and led them away.

  The half dozen figures in biohazard suits who slogged through the mud this morning wore no such distinguishing marks of rank. They entered the shadowy bower and, surrounding the patch of turned earth, proceeded to dig.

  As they worked, a man wearing civilian clothing watched from several hundred yards away.

  “Soviets!” one of the shovelers said, evoking the politically outdated term that still found popular use among Chinese bent on insulting all Russians. He uttered the epithet in the nasal, dissonant tones of the local Cantonese dialect. “They still just stand around and observe, never lifting a finger themselves, exactly like in the old days.”

  “I know what you mean,” the man next to him added, a little less at ease with the rural localisms, his own a
ccent more common to the educated classes in the officially classless society of Beijing. “Except now they are better dressed. Did you see that Armani suit of his? If you ask me, he’s part of their new mafia.”

  Chapter 7

  Three weeks later, Sunday, November 18, 2001, 4:45 P.M. EST

  Seneca Pharmaceuticals, North of Watertown, New York State

  Slime Season--the one time of year Terry Ryder didn’t miss snow country.

  Trees stripped to their bare black skeletons, the ground coated with a slick yellowing layer of downed leaves, skies thick with heavy gray clouds rolling in on icy north winds--the world drained itself of light and color. Even the feel of the forest floor beneath his shoes disgusted him. By the slippery squashiness of it, he might have been treading on the backs of slugs.

  Well, not slugs exactly. Just mud. Time to rein in the imagination. But there was no exaggerating the unpleasantness of the storm that had blown in. Freezing rain drilled against his face with the sting of needles, an ordeal made all the more irritating by the real reason behind his foul mood--he was on a fool’s mission.

  Only six weeks into Terry’s new job as chief advisor on Bioterror Preparedness, and the general had set his sights on their favorite Russian a second time, all because Yuri had seduced a CEO.

  The low sprawling complex loomed into view, and he ran toward the back door. Seconds later he’d circumvented the alarm system and slipped inside.

  Working for the general had given him skills no medical school ever taught.

  He stepped out of his boots so as not to leave muddy tracks and, having previously memorized the schematics of the place, set out for the woman’s office, the route worked out to avoid any security cameras. That the place did not have more top-rate safeguards against intruders told him he wouldn’t be likely to find anything significant.