Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 28

Dawes pointed. "There's a light up there."

She looked past him and saw something. Not a train light or a service light. This was small and red. And as they approached they saw that it was a small security camera of a kind they'd never seen before. Very compact and brand new, stuck to a pillar with some kind of adhesive.

"Since when are they putting CCTV down here?" asked Dawes. "And what for? To watch rats f.u.c.k each other?"

"Hey, watch your language," cautioned Faustino in a whisper. She pulled him away from the camera. "You don't know who's watching. Don't want to get written up."

He nodded and they pressed on, but soon found a second camera. And a third.

"Must be something new," decided Faustino. "Quality control or something."

"Not our problem," said Dawes. Then he stopped and squinted into the shadows. "Wait ... you hear that?"

Faustino listened.

She heard nothing.

And then she heard something.

Very faint, very far away. Soft. Distorted by distance and ...

"You hear that?" asked Dawes.

"Yeah. But I can't..." Her words trailed off as the sound came again, a little louder now.

It wasn't a scream or a yell for help. Nothing like that.

But it was a human sound.

Almost like ... singing. Faustino frowned, trying to understand what she was hearing. No, not singing. This noise was not musical. Not humming either, though that was a little closer to the quality of the sound that drifted on the fetid breaths of bad air.

It was like someone was keening.

The way old women do sometimes at funerals. The way her aunt Maria used to do. A steady, keening sound that chilled Faustino to the marrow.

Whatever it was, it was wrong in ways she could not identify.

Something worse than any malfunction of motors or generators.

"Call this in," whispered Dawes. "We need someone else down here."

This time Faustino did not argue. She keyed her mike for dispatch.

And got a burst of sharp static.

Faustino adjusted her squelch and tried it again.

More static, but this time she could hear a voice.

"... at ... ituation ... all back and..."

Just pieces.

Then nothing as the signal faded and died.

Faustino could feel Dawes's breath on her cheek and throat. As close as a lover, the exhaled air warmer than anything down in this tunnel.

"What is that?" she asked.

They both knew she wasn't asking about the message from dispatch.

The sound filled the tunnel, rolling in waves, rising and falling.

Human voices.

Not singing.

Not humming.

They were ... moaning.

Chapter Forty.

Tactical Operations Center The Hangar Floyd Bennett Field Brooklyn, New York Sunday, August 31, 1:20 p.m.

Bug perched on his chair, eyes darting from screen to screen as his slender fingers danced like hummingbird wings over the keys. A lot seemed to be happening in the world, and none of it was good. Bombings in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, a bizarre spike in random violence ranging from gang attacks in upscale neighborhoods in five states to eight separate attacks on salespersons in stores in different parts of the south, and arson in three sporting goods warehouses in Indiana. Individually, they were the kind of events that would make headlines and be top stories on any news broadcast. Collectively, they were likely to make this the most violent day in the country in a decade. News services were already slanting their coverage that way.

Bug and his team were running it all through MindReader's pattern-recognition software. There was no known connection and no reason to believe that these events were connected, but Bug didn't like coincidences any more than his boss did. Also, the Mother Night cyberhacking had everyone on edge. Her message used anarchist rhetoric, and the craziness sweeping the country felt like things were falling apart. So Bug created a search argument for anarchistic behavior and asked MindReader to create a list of possible connections. Sadly, this being America, the list of apparently random acts of violence grew too rapidly to read.

Sighing, Bug let that compile and worked on ways to refine the search so it didn't include everything from road rage to jaywalking.

His intercom buzzed and he hit a key to take a call from his senior a.s.sistant, Yoda-which, sadly, was his real first name. Yoda's parents were ultrageeks even by Bug's standards.

"Bug!" gasped Yoda. "Jesus, man, you have to see this."

"See what?"

"It's from my friend at the NYPD. He sends me stuff when there's something hot. This is direct from the subway in Brooklyn. You have to see this s.h.i.+t to believe it."

"I'm really swamped here, Yoda, and..."

Bug's words trailed off as a video feed filled the main screen with dozens of smaller windows, each one showing a crowd of civilians crammed into a tight s.p.a.ce. It was clear that the crowd was standing in darkness and lit only by the glow from cell phones and tablets. The pictures were erratic. People were screaming, yelling for help, shouting at one another.

Then one by one most of the phones fell or were knocked from the hands of the people making the calls. Instead of normal angles, the phones lay on the floor or on seats of what was obviously a subway car.

"What the h.e.l.l...?" whispered Bug.

The people on the subway car were tearing one another to pieces.

They were eating one another.

Chapter Forty-one.

Joseph Curseen, Jr., and Thomas Morris, Jr., Processing and Distribution Center 900 Brentwood Road, Northeast Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

Sunday, August 31, 1:21 p.m.

The mailroom at the Brentwood processing center receives tens of thousands of pieces of mail each day addressed to the White House and Congress. It operates twenty-four hours a day and rarely pauses for holidays. Items marked for the personal attention of select individuals in the succession of powers were culled from the ma.s.s and sorted separately, put in sacks and sent by cart to a senior sorter for screening.

On Sunday morning, Jorge Cantu loaded the fourth mail sack onto the conveyor belt that fed the sacks through a high-tech scanner. There were several sections of the scanner, including an X-ray, a metal detector, an explosives detection system-EDS-and a bio-aerosol ma.s.s spectrometer typically called a BAMS unit. If any of these machines so much as coughed, Cantu stopped the belt and hit an alert b.u.t.ton. Different alerts resulted in different kinds of responses.

The nitrite sniffer never, in Cantu's experience, beeped, because there were similar explosives detection devices used by the Post Office and Secret Service before the bags were ever sent to the mailroom. Ditto for the metal detectors. Once in a while something like a bolo tie from a western resident or a tin of chocolates from a sewing club in New England would make it as far as the White House mailroom, but never any farther. No matter how well-intentioned, gifts of that kind sent through the mail seldom made it even as far as the president's staff. Never to the desk in the Oval Office.

The same scrutiny was afforded to the vice president, Speaker of the House, and other notables. There had been enough problems, even before 9/11, that no one took chances. And there were so many stages of screening that Cantu seldom encountered anything more dire than junk mail. Once, though, a load of dog c.r.a.p sealed in plastic made it to the desk of the press secretary's a.s.sistant before it was discovered. The package included a note that said, "At least this s.h.i.+t is honest."

No return address.

There was a rumor that the press secretary had the letter framed.

Otherwise, the mailroom at Brentwood was busy but not particularly interesting.

Until the morning of August 31.

A warning light flashed red and a small bell suddenly started ringing.

Not the bomb alert.

Not the metal detector.

This bell was one that had never rung once in the seven years Jorge Cantu had sorted mail for this administration.

It was the warning alert for the ma.s.s spectrometer.

The device whose sole purpose was to detect dangerous particles. It had four colored lights. Green for normal. Yellow for suspicious. Orange for likely toxins.

And red for a verified hit on one of four possible threats.

Spores.

Fungi.

Bacteria.

Or viruses.

Cantu stared at the light as the bell jangled in his ear. He said, "Oh my G.o.d!"

He hit the stop b.u.t.ton and stumbled backward from the scanner, kicking his chair over with a crash, heels slipping on the floor in his haste.

"Red light on four!" he yelled. "Red light on four."

There was instant motion, the slap of shoes on the hard floor, shouts as Secret Service agents hustled in his direction.

"Step back from the scanner," ordered the lead agent even though Cantu was already as far back as he could go.

Within minutes the mailroom was cleared as were adjoining offices in that part of the mail processing center. Dozens of people flooded in, however. Police first, then within minutes agents from Homeland arrived. Soon techs in hazmat suits descended on the center accompanied by squads of supervisory personnel.

The bag was removed from the scanner and placed very gingerly into a portable steel biocontainment unit. The scanner was draped in chemically treated cloth and the entire area was sprayed with a ferociously dangerous antibacterial, antiviral agent.

The biocontainment unit was loaded onto a specially designed truck, and it roared off with heavy support from Secret Service and Homeland officers in riot gear. The motorcade went lights-and-sirens to a facility in Arlington where scientists and technicians waited.

The bag was offloaded, scanned again for explosive devices, and when it was conclusively determined that nothing was going to blow up, the bag was opened and the contents each placed in a separate biohazard container. The pieces were then scanned by a much more acute BAMS unit, and although several pieces of mail were deemed to have secondary contamination, the techs quickly identified an envelope that they separated out. It was a standard white greeting card envelope sealed with clear adhesive tape. No bulges, no metal or plastic components. The envelope was moved to a special containment chamber and a scientist used Waldo gloves to slit the envelope open and remove the card. A Hallmark card.

On the front of the card was a photo of a field of flowers that rose up to the crest of a gently sloping hill. Beyond the hill were trees and puffy white clouds. In flowing script across the top of the card were the words So sorry for your loss. It was obvious that the sentiment was printed as part of the card's professional design.

The card had no preprinted message inside. Instead there was a handwritten note.

Payment in kind.

Seems only fair.

Hugs and kisses, Mother Night Inside the card, compressed between the cardboard covers, contained by the heavy grade envelope and tape, was a fine-grained white powder.

High-res digital images of the card, envelope, and message were sent to the Secret Service and Homeland. Laser scans of the card were initiated to capture any fingerprints. Small samples of the card, the envelope, and the tape were taken for separate a.n.a.lysis.

But that was secondary to the rush to a.n.a.lyze the white powder.

The BAMS unit had provided a preliminary identification, but the techs at the Arlington lab were able to discover much more about it. So much more that the BAMS reading was later viewed as "inadequate."

Yes, the BAMS unit correctly identified it as Bacillus anthracis.

Anthrax.

But that description did not and could not fully describe the bacterium in that powder. It was like nothing the Arlington lab had ever seen. A mutation of anthrax so virulent that it was terrifying.

Data and samples were flown by armed couriers to military laboratories at Fort McNair in D.C. and Fort Myer in Virginia, next to Arlington Cemetery.