[2001] Public Enemy Zero Read online

  The SWAT team commander walked around the living room and looked at the floor. There were impressions on the carpet where it looked like the furniture had just evaporated. He looked for any footprints, but the carpet fiber was too resilient to hold them for very long. There was a dime in the middle of the floor. He bent down and picked it up. He tossed it into the air and caught it.

  He checked all the bedrooms and the kitchen for any sign that somebody had been there. There was nothing. He walked into the master bathroom and looked around the sink and into the toilet.

  He called one of the men over. “Gentry.”

  Gentry, the red team leader, walked into the bathroom. He still had his helmet and gear on. “Yes, sir?”

  The commander pointed at the toilet. It was an easy thing to overlook.

  “Huh,” Gentry finally noticed it too. In a house that was unoccupied, the water in the toilet bowl would evaporate over time. This bowl looked like it might have been flushed in the past few days. The water level was still high.

  “What do you think? Was he here?” asked Gentry.

  “I dunno. We’ll tell the detectives it was possible someone was here in the last few days. They can decide what to do with that. Either way, he’s not here now.”

  The commander walked back outside the house and looked at the neighborhood. There were a lot of empty houses. There were dozens of places for Mitchell to hide. Getting search warrants on all of them would be impractical. The best they could do would be to keep at least one marked car in the area to look for anything suspicious. Maybe Mitchell would come back or do something stupid.

  From his hiding place, Mitchell got his first clear view of the SWAT team commander as he walked out the front. Over six feet tall, with a bald head, he looked like a former college linebacker. Pure testosterone.

  The commander looked at the house across the street and walked over to it. Mitchell tried not to piss himself when he looked right in his direction. He slowly leaned back from the vent and remained still.

  He heard the doorbell ring. Mitchell slowed his breathing. There was a knock. Mitchell almost passed out from not breathing at all. He allowed himself a slow breath. He became suddenly aware of every itch and sore muscle. The doorbell rang again. Mitch tried to ignore the feeling as sweat tickled the back of his neck. He focused on just breathing slowly. He tried to ignore everything else.

  The commander pulled his business card from his pocket and scribbled a note for the occupant to call him or one of the detectives. They needed to let them know that there was a possibility Mitchell might be in the area and could be coming back. A tip from a neighbor could be all that it took to get the guy. He turned back to the van and went to see what they needed to finish up.

  Mitchell watched the commander walk back into the street and then stop.

  Halfway to the van, the commander felt something strange. It was a flash of anger that just lasted a millisecond. He looked down and his fingers were curled up in claws.

  What the hell was that? He wondered to himself. He guessed he was more pissed about not getting the guy than he realized.

  As soon as he saw the man turn, Mitchell pulled away from the vent and swore at himself silently. Just because people couldn’t see him, he realized, didn’t mean they couldn’t smell him or be affected by whatever was going on. For a moment, the commander looked like he was going to hulk out in the middle of the street.

  Mitchell wondered what would happen if the man had full-out freaked out. While Mitchell was nowhere to be seen, he feared that when that animal side of people took over, deeper senses were used. If dormant instincts involving scent and sound took hold, nothing would help him.

  The commander’s hands relaxed and he felt his head clear.

  23

  Steve Baylor, PhD, looked out the eighth-floor window of his office located in an industrial park on the outer edge for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. His employer, Athena Biomedical, was ostensibly one of scores of satellite businesses that provided services to the agency that was the United States’ front line against infectious disease. The truth was a little bit murkier. The company was a de facto government agency unto itself. Created under a presidential order that had been renewed under the last three administrations, the purpose of its charter, the actual one kept inside a locked safe no one saw, was to take proactive measures against the creation and distribution of biological agents that may pose a threat to the citizens of the United States. Those proactive steps included everything from developing rapid vaccines outside the normal channels of government approval to recommending targets for predator drone strikes. As Baylor liked to described it, it was the medical equivalent of a SEAL team.

  He was in the middle of typing his comments concerning a research paper on which he’d been asked to be an anonymous referee. Baylor had convinced himself the reason he was asking the journal to reject the paper wasn’t because he was co-author of a forthcoming paper dealing with a similar subject but because the evidence was lacking. Petty, perhaps, but when he controlled the largest off-the-books budget for biomedical research, he was entitled to some of the privileges that came with that. Besides, he told himself, if he spent less time dealing with the political side of science, he’d have more time to do actual research.

  When he clicked send, one email in his flooded inbox caught his eye. It was from a mailing list with only a few dozen recipients, all of them involved in different agencies that dealt with biological and chemical warfare threats. The purpose of the list was to bring potential “patient zero” incidents to their attention. If a Pakistani man checked into the hospital after arriving at JFK with strange spots on his body that looked infectious or an elementary school in Chechnya came down with an extremely virulent form of the flu, these cases would be forwarded to the list if they had a friendly health worker on the scene. The CDC had official channels for those kinds of reports. This list was a back channel one.

  It was the headline that grabbed his attention first. “Rigor mortis symptoms similar to Factor 9.”

  Baylor opened up the email. An attachment contained several cell phone images of people who were killed earlier that day in a riot at a shopping mall in South Florida. There were close-ups of their hands and faces.

  The peeled-back lips baring teeth like fangs and the hands curled into claws sent a chill down his spine. He’d seen lots of horrific imagery, on an almost daily basis; bodies didn’t concern him. He’d lost any fear of that after his first dissection. What worried him here was the familiarity of it all. He’d seen those expressions and the twisted cruel fingers before.

  He read the rest of the email. It was sent by a doctor who was a first responder for the Department of Homeland Security. The responder thought the circumstances of the riot were unusual and the physical condition of the deceased worth passing on to the list. He didn’t know what Factor 9 was other than a few slides he’d been shown at a seminar on different things to look for in the field.

  Factor 9 was a code word for the symptoms of a condition caused by what was known to only a few people as the Mongolian Flu.

  But it couldn’t be that, thought Baylor. They made sure of that. He’d pushed for extraordinary measures to be taken to prevent an outbreak of Mongolian Flu. He looked at the images again. They were identical to Mongolian Flu.

  Baylor had read the report of the mall riot as it went national. Nothing about it sounded like what an outbreak of Mongolian Flu would cause. He’d just dismissed it as panic and ignored it. He opened up his web browser to read the latest reports and made a note to ask his assistant for the field reports as soon as possible.

  Ten minutes later, he’d read enough to know this wasn’t Mongolian Flu or at least not exactly the same thing. For starters, the crowd in the mall didn’t attack the first responders. The deaths appeared to have been caused by people getting trampled and not intentionally. He couldn’t find any examples of direct violence between the crowd. It was just
a violent outcome.

  Baylor felt relieved. He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window again. Mongolian Flu was one of the many nightmare scenarios he had to deal with on a daily basis. It was horrific in that it affected a lower part of people’s brains and switched on the fight reflex. It was dangerous because all evidence indicates it was manmade.

  The first case was brought to their attention by a Red Cross worker in Mongolia. His team was immunizing children in a yurt village when they told him about a “wild man” that chased them back to the village. When the worker went with two other men to look for him, they found his body with a bullet to the head. An old woman said she’d seen a military helicopter in the area. When he asked the local military commander, he said he didn’t know anything about it but oddly came back later that night to seize the body. Fortunately, the aid worker had taken blood samples before soldiers in masks took the body away.

  The blood samples sat in a refrigerator in the CDC until a Chinese defector passed along some documents including a video of a gruesome experiment apparently performed in a Chinese-controlled prison in Mongolia.

  Baylor had used the video to get funding and push through programs that otherwise saner minds would have said no to. Shot with a handheld camera, it showed forty Asian men in prison uniforms led into the center of a prison yard wearing blindfolds. Six men in green hospital gowns injected the kneeling men with a handful of syringes and then quickly left the yard. At first, nothing happened. The men sat there obediently awaiting further instruction. Then a handful began to make growling sounds and pull away their blindfolds like animals. The camera zoomed into bloodshot eyes and the claw-like way they held their hands. Within moments it was pandemonium as men leaped to their feet and attacked one another with teeth and claws. They opened up huge gashes in throats and clawed at each other’s eyes. Two men would attack another and then attack another when he was down. The camera tried to capture as much of the blood frenzy as was possible, but it was all over in under four minutes. The dead lay there with their fingers held out like claws and their lips pulled back in an angry expression. Calm, dispassionate voices spoke in Chinese making clinical observations.

  When the blood samples from the “wild man” were examined, they discovered a new pathogen. Rapid genetic sequencing revealed a simple virus that pulled an interesting trick. When the body’s autoimmune system went to fight it, instead of just reprogramming it to make more copies of itself, like retroviruses did, it had a payload of genetic information that tricked an older immune system, one we shared with reptiles and sea animals. This system is what researchers believed evolved into the fight part of the fight-or-flight reflex.

  Instead of just causing the body to fight off the infection and inadvertently make copies of it, this virus actually caused a physical fight response. A fight response so powerful and primitive, it overpowered all the higher brain functions.

  In the Mongolian prison, the men didn’t discriminate; they tried to kill their best friends. They went after anything that moved and didn’t stop.

  The mall panic subsided without anywhere near the high mortality rate of the prison. The fact that it subsided at all was more evidence that this wasn’t the Mongolian Flu.

  From later experiments with the pathogen, off-the-books experiments Baylor oversaw, they discovered victims wouldn’t stop trying to kill other people. They kept going until physical fatigue stopped them or they went into cardiac arrest.

  The version of Mongolian Flu they obtained from the “wild man” was transmissible through an open wound but not airborne. Baylor had to explain to his oversight panel that that could be changed with just a few keystrokes on a genetic sequencer. If someone had malevolent intent for the virus, they could infect a lot of people very quickly.

  Baylor tapped his fingers on his desk. Although this wasn’t the Mongolian Flu they were familiar with, there was nothing saying that the people who made the first version hadn’t come up with a variation. If they’d found out about the preventive measures Baylor and his team had taken, they may have tried to engineer a work-around.

  China was the obvious guess for the creator, but there was credible evidence to suggest the virus was something they had accidentally discovered and the prison experiment was just their own cruel way of finding out what it did. The problem of trying to have indirect communication with the Chinese was that each branch of the military kept secrets from the others. It could have been a project by a group like his own.

  Cold War political machinations aside, Baylor had second thoughts and decided the photos were enough reason to take precautions. He picked up a secure line and dialed the research center.

  Thirty miles away in a 60,000-square-foot building that said “NitroFertilizer Inc.” on the front, a phone rang. A 52-year-old molecular biologist with curly gray hair and a well-manicured beard answered the phone.

  “Ari, you following the mall thing down in Florida?” asked Baylor.

  Ari Steinmetz replied, “Not really. What’s up?”

  “I’m going to have some blood samples sent to us. I need you to stay late to look at them. I’ll have a courier waiting at the CDC for when they get their batch.”

  Steinmetz looked over at two of his lab assistants who were leaning over a piece of hardware while referring to a manual. “Hey guys, we’ve got to stay late.”

  They nodded and then went back to trying to figure out how to get the new automated sequencer to work.

  “Anything I should be on the lookout for? I can get some lab tests ready to go,” asked Steinmetz.

  Baylor paused for a moment. “It’s just a precautionary thing. Nothing we need to worry about. And it’ll be a good exercise for your team.” He tried to make his voice sound as matter of fact as possible. “I just want to follow up on something relating to Mongolian Flu.”

  “The virus or the vaccine?”

  “The virus,” replied Baylor.

  “No problem.” Inwardly, Steinmetz swore.

  “Thanks, Ari.” Baylor hung up and then dialed another number.

  “What’s the current prep time for one of our go teams?” he asked.

  “Three hours,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

  “OK. What if we need a site containment in South Florida? Say five hundred people?”

  “Six hours.”

  “Thank you. Just updating my files.” Baylor hung up and then called over to the executive airport they used outside of Atlanta and told them to keep a plane ready.

  24

  Mitchell watched the front of the other house for another two hours after the SWAT team left. Periodically a patrol car would pass through the neighborhood. Mitchell suspected this wasn’t their usual beat.

  Although he wasn’t experienced at how the police tracked down fugitives, he would bet that there was probably another car, maybe an unmarked one, parked near the entrances or, worse yet, hiding in plain sight in a driveway, masquerading as one of the neighbor’s cars.

  For a moment, he thought he was being too paranoid and then realized that was the whole point. He had to be extra paranoid. Getting out of the house was going to be tricky. He needed to make it from there to his next location while avoiding whatever surveillance there was. At least they would be looking for someone heading to the house and not away from it. Maybe there was something to that.

  The attic was starting to feel more claustrophobic. He was tempted to go down into the house but didn’t want to take the chance of being seen through a window or have the owner come home early. He needed to sit tight for another few hours.

  Mitchell pulled the pocket radio from his bag and put in an earbud. He used one ear to listen to the street and the other to find out what was being said on the news. He hoped in vain that he’d hear newscasters explaining that the manhunt was all a mistake and that Mitchell was in the clear.

  He turned to an all-news AM station and caught the middle of a broadcast.

  “... while the search continues
for South Florida radio personality Mitchell Roberts after an apparent one-man rampage that led to a riot at Park Square Mall where at least 18 people are believed to be dead, authorities have downplayed rumors the riot was caused by some kind of unknown chemical or biological agent. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that their personnel on site are there merely as a precaution.

  “Meanwhile, news outlets have continued to press for access to security camera footage, hoping it could shed some light on how the actions of one man could lead to such a tragic event.”

  While the news overall was depressing, hearing the phrase “chemical or biological” made Mitchell feel like there was a chance of finding out some kind of explanation that didn’t involve him being a sociopathic mass murderer.

  The newscast came back from the commercial break, “Earlier today we spoke with University of Miami psychology professor Jeff Keating in a phone interview.”

  Keating spoke with a precise tone. “What we may have here may be a case of mass hysteria. We see this all the time in news footage from the Middle East and places like India and Pakistan, where crowds of people are so angry by what they see that, in the comfort of the crowd, they feel empowered to take actions that otherwise morally they’d never do.

  “Ultimately, they’re not responsible for their actions. This man who caused the riot by threatening a mother and her child is the one who has to pay the price for these actions.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Mitchell replied to the radio.

  Sick of hearing people who weren’t there, describing something they didn’t know anything about, Mitchell turned off the radio. He decided to try to catch a nap in the attic before he departed.

  To keep on the safe side, he set the alarm on the stolen iPod for two hours. He used his backpack as a pillow and placed the iPod inside of it. Wedged between old boxes and itchy insulation, he somehow managed to fall asleep.