The First Horseman Read online

  ‘I understand,’ Voorhis replied. ‘But we’re not talking “theoretically.” We’re talking about this bug in North Korea. And what I’m wondering is: just how deadly is it?’

  ‘Okay. Let me put it this way,’ Karalekis said. ‘In the fall of 1918 the Spanish flu killed more than half a million Americans. That’s more than died in the two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam put together. And it happened in four months.’

  ‘What about the plague?’ Fitch asked. ‘That had to be worse.’

  Karalekis rocked from side to side, weighing the proposition. ‘Maybe. But the plague took twenty years to do what it did. The Spanish flu killed twenty or thirty million people in twelve months.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Fitch whispered.

  Epstein turned to Voorhis. ‘You mentioned Ebola,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s a terrible microbe, of course, but . . . it’s stable. And the truth is, it’s really quite difficult to contract.’

  ‘It’s as hard to get as AIDS,’ Karalekis said.

  ‘There has to be an exchange of fluids – and I don’t mean a sneeze,’ Epstein continued. ‘But, influenza . . . well! It’s just as you said: “Everybody gets it.”’

  ‘And it’s anything but stable,’ Karalekis added. ‘We don’t have a vaccine for next year’s flu –’

  ‘Even more to the point,’ Epstein said, ‘we don’t have a vaccine for yesteryear’s flu. And the simple truth is, the Spanish Lady was the most lethal medical event in history.’

  ‘And that was in its natural state,’ Karalekis added.

  ‘What do you mean, it’s “natural state”?’ Fitch asked.

  ‘Well, I’m just speculating, but . . . if the Koreans started playing with the bug, tweaking the genes . . . they could create a chimera virus that had an even greater lethality.’

  ‘A “chimera virus”!’ Voorhis exclaimed.

  ‘He’s talking about gene-splicing – creating a monster by melding one bug to another,’ Epstein said.

  ‘Yeah, but – you’d have to have a pretty sophisticated lab to do something like that, wouldn’t you?’ Voorhis asked.

  Epstein shook his head. ‘Genentech sends kits to magnet schools. Or you can buy them for about forty bucks.’

  No one said anything for a moment. Then Fitch broke the silence. ‘So what you’re saying is, we’re up Shit Creek.’

  ‘In layman’s terms,’ Epstein replied, ‘yes, that’s quite possible.’

  As they thought about that, Janine Wasserman got to her feet and, ever so languidly, walked around the table. Finally, she stopped beside the map of North Korea that was hanging from the wall and studied it for a moment. ‘There are two problems,’ she mused. ‘The first is to locate where the accident occurred.’

  ‘DOD can help with that,’ Fitch said.

  ‘I’m sure we can get some overflights,’ Voorhis suggested. ‘U-2s, at least.’

  Fitch nodded. ‘And ECHELON.’

  Everyone murmured agreement, except Epstein. ‘What’s “echelon”?’ he asked, looking from one CIA employee to another,

  Fitch squirmed in his seat, chagrined by the mistake he’d made with an outsider in the room. Finally, he said, ‘It’s a . . . uh, classified program,’ he explained. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’

  In fact, the ECHELON dictionary program was one of the intelligence community’s most sensitive and secret operations, a worldwide, electronic eavesdropping network of astounding proportions. Linking satellites and ‘listening posts’ to a series of massively parallel computers, the U.S. intelligence community and its allies were able to intercept and decode virtually every electronic communication in the world – in real time, as they were being transmitted. Then, searching for key words, the same program identified and segregated messages of particular interest.

  ‘So, what words do we use?’ Voorhis asked, pen at the ready.

  Fitch shrugged. ‘There’s not much we can use. ‘Influenza’ won’t get us anywhere . . .’

  ‘Yeah, but . . . “influenza” and “North Korea,” or “influenza” and “Tasi-ko” . . . in fact, anything with Tasi-ko in it would probably be of interest.’

  Fitch nodded. ‘That ought to do it.’

  ‘Even if we do find the lab,’ Voorhis said, ‘what are we going to do about it? I mean, it is North Korea.’

  ‘If we get to that point, it’s a diplomatic issue. State can handle it,’ Fitch said.

  ‘What about a vaccine?’ Wasserman asked. ‘How long would it take to develop one?’

  Epstein’s answer was unhesitating. ‘Six months. Soup to nuts.’

  ‘Could you do it any faster if you had to?’

  Epstein looked at Karalekis, who raised his eyebrows. Finally, Epstein said, ‘If we could make it at all, we might be able to knock a month off. But it’s hypothetical in any case. You can’t make a vaccine without the virus, and –’

  Karalekis finished the sentence for him. ‘We don’t have the virus.’

  Wasserman leaned forward and squeezed Karalekis’s shoulders so hard that he almost winced. ‘Well,’ she whispered, ‘that’s the second problem. I think we’d better find it.’

  If the virus was to be found anywhere, Karalekis thought, the most likely place was a windowless building on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. This was the National Tissue Repository – or as the tabloids sometimes called it, ‘the library of death.’ A warehouselike structure, it was packed with row upon row of metal shelves piled high with cardboard boxes. Inside each of the boxes were bits of human tissue that had been preserved in formaldehyde and encased in little blocks of paraffin wax. All in all, the building held more than 2.5 million pieces of diseased but dormant flesh, most of which had been culled from soldiers who’d fallen in their country’s wars.

  Karalekis suspected that in one block of wax or another, traces of the virus could be found. And the most likely place was among the lung tissues. These were paper-thin slices of flesh harvested from soldiers who’d died of respiratory ailments in the fall of 1918. Even there, however, the likelihood of finding a useful sample was negligible. Because the influenza virus begins to decompose within twenty-four hours of its host’s death, the probability was great that, even if it were found, it would be useless for making a vaccine.

  Still, the effort had to be made, and so it was. Backed by a National Security Research Priority Directive, Karalekis initiated a tedious and time-consuming search that threatened to take years. It was all that he could do. He had little confidence that the U-2s would find anything: bio labs were easily disguised. And the ECHELON program, however massive, was only as effective as the enemy was indiscreet. If North Korean communications failed to mention Tasi-ko, ECHELON would come up empty. And the CIA would be fucked.

  Or maybe not.

  On a brilliant February afternoon, while seated at his desk in the Directorate of Science & Technology, Karalekis was startled by Fitch’s sudden appearance in his doorway.

  ‘I think Epstein may have solved our little problem,’ Fitch said.

  Karalekis looked skeptical. ‘Reeee-ally?!’ He drew the word out, as if he were pronouncing it on a water slide.

  ‘Yes, really.’ Fitch dropped into a chair and tossed a file onto Karalekis’s desk.

  The physician regarded it mistrustfully. ‘And this would be . . . what?’

  ‘It’s a grant proposal,’ Fitch replied. ‘An old one. Epstein told me about it, and I got a copy from the NSF.’

  Karalekis glanced at the cover page:

  ‘In Search of “A/Kopervik/10/18”’

  Submitted by

  Benton Kicklighter, M.D., Ph.D. (NIH)

  Anne Adair, Ph.D. (Georgetown University)

  ‘“A-Kopervik, ten-eighteen”’ he said. ‘What the hell is that?’

  Fitch grinned. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that, my friend, is the Big Kahuna.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You bet it is,’ Fitch said. ‘Whatever you want to call it, the Spani
sh flu is the Spanish flu.’

  Karalekis frowned. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Look, this is a grant proposal, a rejected grant proposal, from a doctor at the NIH. Guy named Kicklighter, somebody named Adair. Turns out, there’s these dead Norwegian miners –’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘– and they want to dig ’em up. They’re in a graveyard way the hell up in the Arctic Circle.’

  ‘And this is going to hell us . . . how?’ Karalekis asked.

  ‘They died in 1918. And according to this, it’s pretty obvious what killed them: the symptoms are classic. High fever, cyanosis, projectile-everything . . . And from what this says –’ Fitch tapped the proposal with his forefinger, once, twice, three times. ‘– they’ve been buried in the permafrost ever since.’

  Karalekis leaned forward in his chair. ‘Reeeally?!’ he said. ‘In the permafrost . . .’ He repeated the word as if he were pronouncing it for the first time. ‘And . . . they think . . .?’

  Fitch shrugged. ‘They don’t know. No one knows. Until an expedition gets there, there’s no way to tell. But what it looks like, this whole area around Kopervik – which I guess is some kinda ghost town – is crawling with polar bears. Polar bears, right?’

  ‘Yeah. So what?’

  ‘So they buried ’em deep,’ Fitch said. ‘They buried ’em cold.’

  4

  MURMANSK

  MARCH 23, 1998

  ‘ITEM FOUR,’ THE tall, gangly man in the front of the room was saying, ‘arctic goggles.’ Hand aloft, he dangled a pair from one finger. ‘Don’t under any circumstances go out during daylight hours without them, not even for a minute.’

  Annie Adair glanced down at the long equipment list with alarm. If, as it seemed, each piece of gear was going to require its own fifteen minute lecture, they’d be sitting in this cramped and stuffy cabin for hours.

  The tall man bent forward from the waist to demonstrate the preferred procedure for putting the goggles on, jiggling his head in an exaggerated way to set the eyepieces firmly against his face. When he straightened up, with the black and bulbous goggles on, his head resembled that of a large insect. ‘The fit should be snug – like swimming goggles,’ he elaborated. ‘The gaskets at the temples should not admit any light whatsoever.’

  Annie stifled a yawn and glanced at Dr. Kicklighter. He was famously impatient, and from the signs – tapping his foot in irritation, gnawing on a knuckle – she could tell that he was going to blow. And she couldn’t let that happen. Doctor K had zero people skills and no concept of professional courtesy. He just didn’t seem to get it – that it was better to endure a couple of hours of tedium than to antagonize people you were depending on.

  And who, after all, were doing you a favor.

  Icebreakers were routinely booked years in advance. So finding one that was flying the right flag in the right place at the right time, and which, moreover, was willing to accommodate the Kopervik expedition was . . . well, it was asking a lot. And yet, somehow, it had all fallen into place. The grant proposal she’d given up on more than a year ago had been suddenly and finally funded – and space had somehow been found aboard the Rex Mundi, a vintage icebreaker leased to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

  How Doctor K had arranged this was baffling, though she had no intention of looking a gift horse in the mouth. The one time she asked him about it, he grinned a cryptic little grin and said, ‘Well, Annie, it turns out we have friends in high places.’ And so they must have: among other things, Annie’s piggyback ride on the Rex Mundi meant that the Snowmen – NOAA’s team of snow and ice physicists – would have to give up five days of shore leave in Oslo.

  The last thing they needed, then, was friction with either the physicists or the crew. The latter, of course, were a problem in their own right. Despite the promise of a generous bonus, a number of the crew had left the ship on learning that the Kopervik leg of the trip would involve the exhumation of bodies. Replacements had been found, but not without difficulty. There were sailors’ superstitions, she’d been told, about transporting a cargo of corpses.

  The man in the goggles was droning on about angles of refraction and solar intensities in the Arctic. On her own, she would have sat there patiently all day long, but one of her jobs as a protégé was running interference for her mentor. Doctor K could be truly offensive, and seeing the tempo of his foot accelerating, she suddenly plunged in. ‘I think we get the picture,’ she said in what she hoped was a bright and conciliatory voice – Katie Couric breaking for a commercial.

  ‘Excuse me?’ The Snowman couldn’t quite believe that she’d interrupted him.

  ‘I . . . we . . . I mean we understand that we should wear the goggles whenever we go outside.’ Annie clumsily faked a yawn, hoping he’d get it: These people are tired. They just got off a transatlantic flight.

  Instead, he looked as if she’d slapped him in the face. She knew she’d violated an unwritten rule – when experts briefed ‘civilians,’ even when those civilians were scientists themselves, the expected behavior was polite attention, if not obeisance. It was a turf thing. If Doctor K were to host strangers in the lab and instruct them on the proper way to handle a viral smear, he’d expect rapt attention. A little nervous laugh escaped her, but she pushed on. ‘Look, I’m the last person you have to lecture about going snow-blind,’ she said breathlessly. ‘It actually happened to me once.’

  ‘Oh really.’

  ‘Uh-huh. At Vail. I dropped my goggles off the lift.’ God, now she sounded like an airhead. ‘There was a moment, up above the treeline, when I couldn’t see a thing.’

  There was a pause and then the physicist’s voice took on an acid tone. ‘Well, real snow-blindness is a whole different magnitude. We’re not talking about disorientation. We’re talking about pain, intense pain – as if your eyes were filled with ground glass. It can disable you for days, even weeks, if your exposure is severe enough.’

  For a moment there was silence, and then the foot-tapping started again – albeit in a slower cadence.

  ‘No-ted,’ Doctor K said in a cold voice.

  ‘Excellent.’ The NOAA physicist tore off the goggles – which left red welts around his eyes – and picked up a neoprene face mask. ‘Item five. When the temperature falls below –’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Dr. Kicklighter interrupted, ‘it’s your business, I suppose, but – just . . . by the by, won’t you have to repeat all this for our scribe when he arrives? Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait? I mean, he’ll need to preserve his vision and so on every bit as much as we do.’

  ‘What “scribe”?’ The physicist glared at them, and Annie thought, That’s it. We’re done. He hates us.

  ‘A man named Daly –’

  There was a sharp rap on the door and a thin, blond man stepped into the room, not waiting for a reply. Annie recognized him as the senior physicist.

  ‘You’re gonna have to finish the briefing on board, Mark. There’s a mother of a storm heading this way, and the captain says either we get out of here in a couple of hours – or we’ll be in port for three or four days.’

  ‘We’re leaving?’ Doctor K asked. ‘But –’

  The blond man shrugged. ‘We do what the captain says,’ he said.

  ‘And anyway, he’s doing us a favor. If he wanted, he could make us sit. And then where would we be? You’d lose your slot.’ He paused a moment to let the words sink in, and then, with a grin, said, ‘Twenty minutes! We’ll have the van in front of your hotel.’

  And with that, the blond man left, the way he’d come.

  Mark the Physicist was already stuffing the equipment into a large, blue duffel bag.

  ‘But . . . what about Frank Daly?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Who’s Frank Daly?’ Mark asked.

  ‘Our scribe,’ Kicklighter replied.

  ‘We had an arrangement,’ Annie said. ‘I mean . . . God, he’s come a million miles!’

  Mark looked up with a smile
, shrugged, and, straightening, hitched the duffel bag onto his shoulder. ‘Offhand, I’d say Mr. Daly’s gonna miss the boat.’

  ‘Blessing in disguise,’ Kicklighter muttered as he got to his feet. ‘We need him like we need an abscessed tooth.’

  Mark chuckled and slipped out the door, leaving Annie to ponder the irony of Frank Daly being left behind. After all the agonizing about the desirability (or maybe it was the inevitability) of a reporter on the expedition, now he’d arrive in Murmansk – only to find the Rex Mundi gone.

  Half an hour later Annie stood outside her hotel waiting for the van that would take them to the ship. The air was heavy, warm, and still, filled with a hushed malevolence that painted her frustration with fear.

  She’d tried to reach Daly, to get a message to him, tell him not to come. But the connections were horrible, and now . . .

  The temperature was rising, from twelve to twenty-two, and by the time they arrived at the docks, snowflakes were shooting back and forth in a damp and gusty wind.

  She was a little afraid as she stepped onto the swaying walkway that led to the ship’s deck. The thick swags of rope that served as handrails were slick with ice, and when she looked down (big mistake), there was nothing but black water. For a moment she hesitated, and Dr. Kicklighter clasped her elbow and propelled her forward.

  Then she was safely on the deck, and the two of them stood for a moment, hands on the railing, watching a litter of plastic cups rise and fall against the seawall.

  ‘We’re on the edge of the world,’ Kicklighter said, nodding toward the city. ‘That’s what the Saamis call it.’

  Annie nodded politely, but she didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘Call what?’ she asked.

  ‘“Murmansk.” It means “the edge of the world.”’ His brow wrinkled and he paused. ‘Or maybe it’s “the end of the world.” I’m not really sure.’

  Annie looked at him. ‘Well, it’s a big difference,’ she said, and flushed to see the doctor smile.

  Slowly, he raised his arm and waved, the wind plucking at the fabric of his parka. ‘So it is,’ he said to no one particular, and added, ‘Bon voyage.’