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THE PLAN

“Turn right at the corner. Then we’re there.”

“I remember,” Rawley said casting a glance across at Kirby. “Relax.”

He pulled the RV over to the side of the road. It was the same one he had been sleeping in all week, for ten dollars a night. It looked like a gray shanty on wheels. And it was probably only running because the owner was forced to move it around the park on occasion.

It was running, but only just. The shell of the RV was shuddering as if it were suffering from an acute cold.

They stopped at the curb and Kirby took a pink rubber glove out of the paper bag he was holding. He pulled the glove over his right hand.

“You know what you’re doing?” Rawley said looking at him again.

“On the horn.”

“On the horn.” Rawley held up Parker’s cellular phone. “And if you hear this…”

“I get out of there as fast as possible.”

Kirby opened the door and got out, taking the bag with him. He went around to the back of the vehicle and climbed into the rear. Rawley also got out, allowing Parker to slide into the driver’s seat. He then got back in on the passenger side and they set off again.

When they turned into Kirby’s home street Rawley caught sight of two heads in a Cadillac just beyond the house. As he’d expected, the FBI car was parked on the other side of the road.

“Here we go,” Parker said. She drove the RV past the house and slowed down when she got to the Cadillac.

“Put it right next to them,” Rawley told her.

Parker stopped directly beside the car, blocking the agents’ view of the house. The two middle-aged men in the car looked up at the RV in obvious annoyance. The driver rolled his window down and asked them to move it.

“Maybe you can help us?” Parker yelled back. She twisted in her seat to see the other driver. At the same time her elbow appeared to accidentally come into contact with the horn on the steering wheel.

“OOPS!”

When Kirby heard Parker’s signal he tightened his grip on the paper bag and slipped out the back of the RV, closing the door behind him. He ran across the street, and up the path leading to his house, stopping at the top just long enough to scoop a smooth-edged rock from the garden. He then climbed the stairs to his front porch.

Gaining access to the house would not be difficult. All he had to do was break out a thick glass panel beside the front door, and then reach in with his arm to unlock it. Kirby placed the rock on the porch at his feet.

Moving quickly, he pulled a carton of solidified honey out of the paper bag and yanked the lid off. Using his gloved hand he scooped out a hand­ful of the sticky brown gunk and smeared it over the glass. Next, he pulled the glove off, turning it inside out as he did so. He tossed it in the bag and brought out a crumpled piece of heavy paper which he smoothed out over the honey until the window was covered.

Kirby glanced over his shoulder. The RV was still there. So far, he had taken about thirty seconds.

He picked up the rock again and, making almost no noise at all, punched out the glass. The broken pane fell with the paper in one sticky mess to the floor inside the house. Seconds later Kirby was inside as well. Too easy! he thought to himself. It had been too easy. If he could get in with little difficulty then so could have anyone else.

The alarm beeped quietly and he punched in the access code to turn it off, hoping that by doing so he might delay the dispatching of a patrol car by another minute. He glanced at Rawley’s watch, which he had brought with him, and saw that the time was 2:05. The clock was running. To be sure he wouldn’t be there when the car showed up, the plan called for him to be out of the house within four minutes. That meant he had until 2:09 to find the files and copy them.

Kirby heard the RV roar off down the street as he started along the hallway.

He hadn’t taken more than a few steps, however, when he realized someone had been through the house already. The place had been trashed. Books and papers lay scattered on the floor, furniture had been moved. In the living room a shiny pile of CDs lay at the center in a discarded mess. Even the picture frames hung crooked on the wall.

It took a moment for Kirby to understand what had happened.

The alarm had been on when he came in. That meant whoever had been through the place had deactivated the alarm first, only to switch it on again on their way out. He realized now that he hadn’t lost his belongings in that alley. Not his keys anyway. Somebody had taken them from him before dropping him off in El Centro — somebody who knew that they would need to get inside the house. And they had anticipated that he would try return­ing to it. That was why they had reset the alarm. They had laid a trap for him.

Had Anders been the one to go through his house? If so, how much did he know about what Kirby had stumbled onto? Did he know about the disk?

Kirby moved quickly through the living room to his den. He found the room in even greater disarray than the rest of the house. After picking loose pages off the keyboard, he sat down at his PC. Already he had used up a full minute inside the house.

He booted up the computer. While waiting for the system to load he took an unopened box of pre-formatted disks from a drawer. He took one disk out of its sleeve and inserted it into the drive. But something was wrong. He could hear the disk drive spinning, but so far the screen was still blank. By now the system should have loaded the login software into memory.

Kirby stood up. He began clearing away the mess on his desk to check whether the hard disk and the monitor were properly wired. He pushed more paper aside. Then he saw it. Someone had attached a heavy magnet to the side of the hard disk. He didn’t bother trying to remove it. It was already too late for that. Every byte of information on the hard disk was gone. Scrubbed. Erased.

The files were gone.

He stepped back. “You bastards.”

Those files had been his only hope, and now they were gone. Suddenly he was filled with an overwhelming anger and he lashed out, smashing his hand through a box of disks and a coffee mug holding pens at the edge of the desk. They crashed against the nearby wall and fell to the floor. “Damn!” he said.

Kirby checked the time and saw that it was 2:08. He had a minute to get out of there. But it almost didn’t matter any more. What was he supposed to do without those files? Rosen had Cassie. He was sure of that now. But without proof of Imtech’s involvement in some dubious scheme to resur­rect an extinct microbe better left alone, Kirby was in no position to de­mand anything of Rosen — let alone that he return his wife safely to him.

There has to be another way.

He was about to make his way through to the back of the house when he noticed one of Rebecca’s drawings on the wall of his office. He hadn’t seen it before but there was something familiar about it.

It was the paper.

Somehow she had gotten hold of the translucent map that he had given Cassie. Rebecca had used the back of it to draw on, and now there was another of her orange dragons staring at him from behind his PC. Whoever had ransacked the house had overlooked it. Kirby took it down, folded it, and placed it in his pocket.

He went out through the living room on the way to the back door. He passed through the kitchen, noticing as he went the unwashed dishes on the bench from the previous morning. Vaguely, his mind registered the fact that she must have been in a hurry to leave — the margarine container was still out. So was the bag of bread he had used to make toast for himself and Rawley before the drive out to Imtech.

He came to the back door, opened it, and… stopped.

He couldn’t leave. He had the feeling that he was forgetting something. But it was already 2:09. He knew that he should go. Nonetheless, he turned and glanced about the kitchen. Something was keeping him there. But what? He stared at the bread on the bench.

No, he thought. It wasn’t bread, it was something to do with bagels.

I cut myself.

That was it. Now he remembered.

Kirby went to the freezer and opened it. The packet of bagels was still there. But before he could even pull it out to examine it his eye was drawn to several dark red drops on the top of the ice tray. He had found what he was looking for!

Kirby took the tray of ice from the freezer and carefully removed one of the cubes. He held the ice up to the light from the window. The fat round drop of blood glowed like a ruby. Better yet, there were three other pieces of ice to which Cassie’s blood had stuck.

Kirby’s heart was thumping wildly.

Maybe, he thought. Just maybe!

He placed the ice cube back on the tray. Now he had been in the house a full five minutes. His time was up.

He rummaged quickly through the cupboards — pots and pans clattered loudly as they tumbled out onto the linoleum. Finally he found a big silver thermos flask under the kitchen sink and popped off the cap. Into that he placed five of the uncontaminated ice cubes. On top of those he put in the four that were marked with blood. With luck, they would stay frozen for another six hours. With a lot more luck and a little skill, he might actually be able to do something with those four drops of blood. It all depended on whether he was carrying a sample of the virus in that makeshift cooler. But it was a possibility. And it was all he had to go on.

The phone began to ring in the other room, startling him. It was their prearranged signal, and it meant that Rawley had spotted a patrol car turning off the main road.

Kirby didn’t need any encouragement to leave. He grabbed the thermos and went out the back door. He ran across the backyard and jumped the fence at the back of the property. Then he headed out across the golf course toward Otay Lakes Road where Parker and Rawley were waiting for him.

FORMOSA SUNRISE

On the opposite side of the Pacific it was approaching six in the morning. Dozens of wooden fishing junks from the Chinese mainland bobbed peace­fully in the waters of the Formosa Strait, and would not have looked out of place had they been transported back in time six hundred years.

At their closest points, the Formosa separated the People’s Republic of Taiwan from the Chinese mainland by more than one hundred and thirty kilometers, and provided an unofficial meeting ground for fishermen who wished to exchange goods between the two homelands. The medicinal herbs smuggled east from the mainland were highly prized by the citizens of Taiwan. In return, transistor radios, portable CD players, and wrist­watches flowed in the other direction to the fishing villages of the south­eastern mainland.

The motorized fisherman from Taiwan came and went, oblivious to the seasons, unlike their ruddy-faced counterparts from Fujian who depended on quilted sails and the fortunes of wind to carry them across the water. But for the fishermen from either of the two Chinas, the morning began the same. The sky was clear and blue. A gentle breeze stirred the water, which then lapped rhythmically at the hulls. Crew members moved back and forth across the junks in their bare feet. They stretched their nets along the timber decking and spat loudly over the side of the boat. On one of the larger boats the netting remained below deck, the crew watching in silence as two Taiwanese vessels jockeyed for first trading rights.

Several hours earlier the youngest crew member of the big junk had come up on deck to urinate over the side. He had been startled at the time to see a large knuckle of water moving in from the mainland side of the boat. It set the junk in motion and he jumped excitedly across to the other side to get a look at the cause of this strange disturbance. When he gazed down into the black waters he imagined that he could make out a long object passing beneath the boat, but really it had been impossible to make out anything. It mattered not to him. In his own mind he had seen it, and — believing it to be his first encounter with a whale — had scooped his fist bravely in the direction of the receding hump. “Next time, big fish!”

The crews of the two Taiwanese boats engaged in a heated exchange before the smaller vessel relented and moved off to a safe distance. Today it was their turn to watch in quiet frustration as the premium medicinal stocks were offloaded from the junk into the hands of their competitors.

In return, the prevailing Taiwanese crew lowered crates of portable CD players over the side of their own boat. But they had only just started trading when several of them became aware of an unusual noise. A low hum was building. Soon everyone on the Taiwanese boat had stopped what they were doing. Now they searched the sky for the source of the noise. It seemed to be coming from the mainland.

Almost at once they spotted the planes high overhead. Their eyes wid­ened as they moved back slowly across the sky, intercepting tens, then hundreds of the pale-bellied aircraft. The Taiwanese fishermen looked petrified. But the provincial crew did not at first seem to comprehend what it was that had so alarmed their richer cousins — until one of them looked back over his shoulder and spotted more jet aircraft low on the horizon headed straight for them.

Seconds later the boats began to shake as the small fighters burst over them, sending the crews of both scattering. The boxes of CD players splashed into the sea. Some of the terrified mainlanders even jumped overboard in the confusion. By the time they surfaced again the Taiwanese crews had already powered up and were scrambling to turn the boats around, readying themselves for a mad dash home.

Stark closed the door behind him and turned to look at the President. He shook his head. “Not good,” he announced.

Stark had just returned from an hour-long meeting with the ambassador to Mexico, and Coleman was now gesturing with his hands, as if to say, “Well?”

The chief of staff noticed how tired the President looked, and he was momentarily thankful that the man was out of the public eye for now. “You really should get some rest,” he said pulling up a chair. “You’re going to need it.”

Coleman squeezed his hands together tightly. “Don’t tell me they’re still going with this conspiracy bullshit!”

“Well it’s not surprising,” Stark said matter-of-factly. “Judging from his behavior in the Gulf this morning, I think we can say Solano’s playing by his own set of rules. At least with Montoya we knew where she stood. Frankly, this guy worries me. Did you notice the crowd during his speech? They were lapping it up. He might have been only one man on the brink last night, but today he’s managed to bring the entire nation to the edge with him.”

“He’s a sham artist!” Coleman roared. “Who was that kid with the turban supposed to be?”

Stark shrugged. “Does it matter? I’m sure they have a story to go with it.” He frowned. “You have to admit, it was a clever move. People are more likely to take the word of a kid in an instance like this than of an adult. The bottom line is he says he saw Montoya killed and that we’re somehow responsible for it. Like it or not, it’s going to be up to us to disprove that.”

“It never happened, Goddamn it!”

“But we can’t prove that. At least, not until we find her.”

“Then we find her! What did their ambassador have to say?”

Stark’s brow furrowed as he recalled his meeting with the ambassador. “Before I begin,” he said, “I should warn you that finding Montoya may turn out to be the least of our problems.”

The President waited for him to continue.

“First of all, the oil companies may take a complete loss. The ambassa­dor feels that in the long run they ought to be able to negotiate some sort of compensation package for the platforms that were confiscated, but it will probably take years. Personally, I doubt that it will ever happen. Solano’s government simply can’t afford it.”

“Compensation? Jesus. Can’t we take them back?”

“How? By force?” Stark gave a dismissive shake of the head. “I’m afraid that’d be like trying to wrestle a grenade off a man who’s already pulled the pin.”

“What do you mean?”

“Simply that by their very nature oil rigs are volatile resources. They don’t stand up that well under fire. More to the point, the ambassador assures me that unless we wish to see a repeat of the oil field disaster in the Persian Gulf we had better show some restraint here.” Stark was referring to the hundreds of oil wells set alight in 1991 by the Iraqi army as it was being ejected from Kuwait by U.S. armed forces.

“They’re threatening to destroy them?”

“That was the message,” Stark said. “Though it’s more complicated than that. They’re detaining the oil crews stationed on the rigs at the time of Solano’s takeover. They’re claiming a hurricane in the area effectively rules out any attempt on their part of ferrying foreign oil workers to the mainland for return home. They say it’s too dangerous, but I don’t think we’ll see much improvement in the situation even if the weather goes our way. Basically I’d say we’re looking at a hostage situation.”

“How many people are we talking about? Fifty? A hundred?”

“More like eight hundred, I’m told. About a third of them ours.”

“Good God.”

“There’s more. Apparently Solano sent the army into Monterrey this morning. We got a call from the general manager of the Rapaz Corpora­tion. He says they’re preparing to move some of our backlog of completed aircraft off the property. These are the ones we were hoping to get Mon­toya to release. Actually, I believe the pilot we lost this morning was flying the same type of plane, an F-22N. I don’t know the exact numbers in Monterrey, but we’re talking considerable fire power.”

Coleman was aghast at the thought. “You mean they could turn around and use this stuff against us if they were mad enough to try it?”

“Actually no,” Stark assured him. “And that’s the one bit of good news in all this. They have neither the munitions nor the pilots who know how to fly them.”

“Then what good are they to them?”

Stark shrugged. “That’s the thing I don’t understand. With those hos­tages in the bag, Solano has us pretty much where he wants us. So why go even further out on a limb and risk the consequences of denying the most powerful nation on earth the right to its own arms? Either the man’s an incredible fool, or…”

“Or?”

“Or he has something in mind we don’t know about yet.”

“You know, I almost pity them,” Coleman said narrowing his eyes. “Because if push comes to shove… I swear. I’ll bring us down on that country like a ton of bricks.”

Parker stared at the silver flask. Kirby had it sitting upright on the floor of the RV between his feet while Rawley drove them back through the city. For the last ten minutes she had listened as Rawley criticized an ambitious plan on Kirby’s part to extract and then possibly sequence the viral genome directly from the few drops of blood he had collected from the house. Kirby was equally adamant that, unless Rawley proceeded quickly to come up with a more viable course of action to get his wife back, this ought to be the path they pursued. And he was convinced that he could pull it off, if he could only get access to a good lab. Rawley had responded with, “That’s a big if.”

Kirby refused to be swayed. He said he knew someone by the name of Keller who might be able to help them. He was an acquaintance of Kirby’s from the summer he had spent working at Merck. They were on their way out to Keller’s home now.

“Let me get this straight,” Parker said. “You just picked this stuff out of the freezer with your fingers and put it in there.” She pointed to the ther­mos flask.

“Uh-huh.” Kirby didn’t seem to understand what she was driving at.

“This killer virus…” Parker said raising her eyebrows.

“Don’t worry. It’s safe enough.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, for one thing it would be trapped in the blood,” Kirby said. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the squeaking of the van. “That’s frozen. It would only be potentially dangerous if it became aerosolized. Influenza is an airborne disease.”

“So what exactly are you going to do with it?”

“I admit it may be a long shot, but if I can isolate it — ”

“Presuming there’s anything in the can, that is,” Rawley broke in.

“If I can isolate it then there’s a good chance I can show what it is,” Kirby went on. “If it’s what we think it is, Rosen’s going to want it back. Clearly an actual copy of the virus is a lot stronger proof of its existence than a disk with a hypothetical blueprint of how it’s put together.”

“Why do you say hypothetical?” Parker asked. “Why else would they have bothered to wipe your hard disk if those files had nothing to do with the virus?”

Kirby shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. The problem is, who’s to say that the strain those protein sequences code for is the same one that was responsible for the Spanish Flu Epidemic? To do that you’d need to compare the sequences on that diskette with those found in a copy of the virus taken from a person known to have been infected with it back in 1918. But we don’t have all that information yet. The science is incomplete.”

Parker shook her head. “So why did you risk going back for the files if you couldn’t prove what they actually were?”

Kirby mulled it over for several seconds before answering.

“Well… All the information about the virus is contained in those pro­tein codes. All the important information anyway. And if they were pre­pared to stop Arnie from going public with that information, then you can be sure they’d prefer I not have access to it either. Like I said, it’s not as good as physical proof. But in a sense it’s not that different. I mean, in theory you could simply build the thing.”

“Build it?” Rawley said looking across at Kirby. “Fuck me. You can do that?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it before. But in principle — ”

“Isn’t that like trying to put together an egg after someone tells you what the shell, white and yolk are made of?”

“I guess so. But in another decade or two — ”

“That’s my point,” Rawley said shaking his head. “You don’t have a decade.”

He turned off the I-5 and drove them west toward the beach. They could see blue water in the distance and, to their right, the campus of UCSD.

“Forget about the theoretical shit for a moment,” Rawley said. “How long is it going to take to find what you’re looking for, even if there is something in that canister? Because I’ll tell you now. Growing viruses is an art. And that’s what you’re going to have to do if you want to know what this thing is. Grow millions of them. Billions. I’ve watched guys at the CDC. It’s not something you learn overnight. You ever done that before, Richard?”

“No. But… Hey, we’re here. Turn into that driveway beyond the hedge.” Kirby was looking at a residential property walled off from the road by a dense row of bushes. It was opposite the University of Califor­nia, San Diego, and within a few minutes walk of the Salk Institute.

“Then you have to break them up with chemicals, sort the proteins, look for the antibody match — ” He stopped when he saw Kirby’s face. “What? Why are you looking at me like that. That’s what these guys do!”

Kirby put a hand on Rawley’s shoulder. “You know what your problem is, don’t you?”

“What?” Rawley turned up a drive that led to a white Victorian-style house.

“You think like somebody who’s been out in the field too long.”

Kirby picked up the silver flask and pushed it into Parker’s hands as the RV came to a stop in the drive. “Keep it upright,” he told her. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.” Then he jumped out of the van and ran up to the house.

KELLER

In a sense, Saul Keller was what many people would have considered a modern doomsday prophet. Yet he did not fit the prevailing image of a grim-faced, balding and bespectacled scientist in a white lab coat who appeared on PBS documentaries shaking a finger at a scoffing public. That was not his style. “It is all very well to get on the TV and warn people about the coming plague,” he had once told a visitor to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. “But until it actually arrives, I assure you they will pay it no attention.”

Keller had served for twenty-five years as chief of the respiratory virus laboratory at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, after which he had taken a position as professor of epidemiology at the Salk Institute. He was known in the medical community for his outspoken views on which lethal virus he considered was likely to next go global. As head of the committee on emerging microbes convened by the National Academy of Sciences in 1997, Keller had concluded in the final report that:

The popular nightmare of an emerging Andromeda Strain may well come to pass within our lifetimes. But, in all likelihood, it will turn out to be nothing so exotic as an airborne cousin of Marburg or Ebola which devastates the global population. It will be a potent form of a very familiar enemy. It will be influenza…

Keller, in fact, was a national authority on influenza, and although a cau­tious man by nature, he had come to the unfashionable conclusion early on in his career that the human species was long overdue for a serious bout with the flu. So convinced of this was he that, when a strain was detected in January of 1976 bearing the hallmarks of the one known to have caused the 1918 outbreak, Keller tried to mobilize the nation against the threat. He became one of the most outspoken proponents of President Ford’s precau­tionary plan to vaccinate “every man, woman, and child in the United States” before the coming flu season in November.

But the virus never reappeared. The hundreds of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress for the vaccination program had apparently been wasted, and many tried to quickly distance themselves from the whole affair.

But not Keller.

“People failed to realize,” he said, “that it was better to have erred on the side of caution than to have faced the possible consequences unpre­pared. The common strains of flu kill between twenty thousand and fifty thousand Americans every year. If we had been dealing with the culprit responsible for 1918, that number might reach two million.”

This explained why Keller was now standing at his front door with his mouth hanging open while Kirby moved nervously back and forth across the porch conveying his predicament.

Keller had met Kirby during a two month stint as an infectious disease consultant for Merck. The two men had taken an immediate liking to one another; Keller who seemed to know everything about one of the oldest known of diseases, Kirby who was learning about one of the newest. At the time Keller was working on a series of essays about emerging diseases which he hoped to have made into a book. He had also been a close friend of Rosen’s, although the two had gone their separate ways more than twenty years earlier.

Kirby finally stopped pacing. He looked at Keller who had been listen­ing attentively to his every word. “So what do you think?” he said. “Can you help me? Can you find me a place to work?”

Keller looked toward the driveway. “You have the flask with you?” he asked, his voice an astonished quiver.

“It’s in the truck.”

Keller nodded to himself for several seconds, as though thinking it over. “Well then,” he said at last. “I guess you’d better bring it in.”

Parker handed the thermos flask out the door to Kirby.

“What now?” she asked.

He said he needed some time to check out the facilities at Salk, and arranged with them to meet back at Keller’s place in a couple of hours. He looked at Rawley. “It’ll give you a chance to get rid of this thing,” he said, nodding at the RV.

“You really think you can pull this off?” Rawley said as he twisted the key in the ignition.

Kirby slammed the passenger door shut and stared back at them. “If that’s what it takes to get my wife back. Yeah.”

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