MAJOR GENERAL JOHN Pickett, it turned out, was a graduate of Yale Medical School, added to which were a pair of doctorates–molecular biology from Harvard, and public health from UCLA. He was a pale, spare man who looked small in his uniform–he hadn’t had time to change and was wearing camouflage BDUs–making his parachutist’s wings look very out of place. Two colonels came with him, followed by Director Murray of the FBI, who’d raced over from the Hoover Building. The three officers came to attention as they walked in, but now the Oval Office was too small, and the President led them across the hall into the Roosevelt Room. On the way a Secret Service agent handed the general a fax that was still warm from the machine in the secretaries’ room.
“Case count is now one hundred thirty-seven, according to Atlanta,” Pickett said. “Fifteen cities, fifteen states, coast-to-coast.”
“Hi, John,” Alexandre said, taking his hand. “I’ve seen three of them myself.”
“Alex, glad to see you, buddy.” He looked up. “I guess Alex has briefed everybody in on the baseline stuff?”
“Correct,” Ryan said.
“Do you have any immediate questions, Mr. President?”
“You’re certain that this is a deliberate act?”
“Bombs do not go off by accident.” Pickett unfolded a map. A number of cities were marked with red dots. One of his attending colonels placed three more down: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.
“Convention cities. Just how I would have done it,” Alexandre breathed. “Looks like Bio-War 95, John.”
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“Close. That’s a wargame we played with the Defense Nuclear Agency. We used anthrax for that one. Alex here was one of our best for planning offensive bio,” Pickett told his audience. “He was Red Team commander for this.”
“Isn’t that against the law?” Cathy said, her face outraged at the revelation.
“Offense and defense are two sides of the same coin, Dr. Ryan,” Pickett replied, defending his former subordinate. “We have to think like the bad guys do if we’re going to stop them.”
“Operational concept?” the President asked. He understood that better than his wife did.
“Biological warfare at the strategic level means starting a chain reaction within your target population. You try to infect as many people as possible–and that’s not very many; we’re not talking nuclear weapons here. The idea is for the people, the victims, to spread it for you. That’s the elegance of bio-warfare. Your victims actually do most of the killing. Any epidemic starts low and ramps up, slowly at first, like a tangential curve, and then it rockets up geometrically. So, if you’re using bio in the offensive role, you try to jump-start it by infecting as large a number of people as you can, and you opt for people who travel. Las Vegas is the tip-off. It’s a convention city, and sure enough they just had a big one. The conventioneers get infected, get on the airplanes to fly home, and they spread it for you.”
“Any chance of discovering how they did it?” Murray asked. He showed his ID so that the general would know who he was.
“Probably a waste of time. The other nice thing about bio weapons is–well, in this case the incubation period is a minimum of three days. Whatever distribution system was used has been picked up, bagged, and trucked off to a landfill. No physical evidence, no proof of who did it to us.”
“Save that for later, General. What do we do? I see a lot of states with no infection–”
“That’s just for now, Mr. President. There’s a three- to ten-day lead time on Ebola. We don’t know how far
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it’s gotten already. The only way we can find out is by waiting.”
“But we have to initiate CURTAIN CALL, John,” Alexandre said. “And we have to do it fast.”
MAHMOUD HA) I WAS reading. He had an office adjoining his bedroom, and actually preferred working here because of the familiar surroundings. He did not enjoy being disturbed here, however, and so his security people were surprised at his response to the telephone call. Twenty minutes later, they let the visitor in, without an escort.
“Has it begun?”
“It has begun.” Badrayn handed over the CDC printout. “We will know more tomorrow.”
“You have served well,” Daryaei told him, dismissing him. When the door was closed, he made a telephone call.
ALAHAD DIDN’T KNOW how circuitous the link to him was, merely that it was an overseas call. He suspected London, but he didn’t know and wouldn’t ask. The inquiry was entirely routine, except for the time of day–it was evening in England, after business hours. The variety of the rug and the price were the key parts, telling him what he needed to know, in a code long since memorized and never written down. In knowing little, he could reveal little. That part of the tradecraft he did fully understand. His own part came next. Placing the Back in a Few Minutes sign in his window, he walked out, locked the door, and went around the corner, proceeding two blocks to a pay phone. There he made a call to pass on his last order to Aref Raman.
THE MEETINGS HAD started in the Oval Office, were transferred to the Roosevelt Room, and were now all the way down the hall in the Cabinet Room, where more than one image of George Washington could watch the proceedings. The Cabinet secretaries arrived almost together, and their arrival couldn’t be a secret. Too many official
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cars, too many guards, too many faces known to the reporters.
Pat Martin came, representing Justice. Bretano was SecDef, with Admiral Jackson sitting on the wall behind him. (Everyone brought a deputy of some sort, mainly to take notes.) Winston was SecTreas, having walked from across the street. Commerce and Interior were survivors from the Durling presidency, actually having been appointed by Bob Fowler. Most of the rest were of undersecretary rank, holding on from presidential apathy in some cases, and in others because they appeared to know what they were doing. But none of them knew what he was doing now. Ed Foley arrived, summoned by the President despite CIA’s previous loss of Cabinet rank. Also present were Arnie van Damm, Ben Goodley, Director Murray, the First Lady, three Army officers, and Dr. Alexandre.
“We will be in order,” the President said. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. There’s no time for a preamble here. We face a national emergency. The decisions we make here today will have serious effects on our country. In the corner is Major General John Pickett. He’s a physician and scientist, and I will now turn the meeting over to him. General, do your brief.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. Ladies and gentlemen, I am commanding general at Fort Detrick. Earlier today, we started getting some very disturbing reports …”
Ryan tuned the general out. He’d heard it all twice now. Instead he read over the file Pickett had handed him. The folder was bordered in the usual red-and-white-striped tape. The sticker in the center read TOP SECRET -AFFLICTION, rather an appropriate code name for the special-access compartment this one was in, SWORDSMAN thought. Then he opened the folder and started reading OPPLAN CURTAIN CALL. There were four variants of the plan, Jack saw. He turned to Option Four. That was called SOLITARY, and that name, too, was appropriate. Reading through the executive summary chilled him, and Jack found himself turning to look over at George, hanging there on the wall, and wanting to ask, Now what the
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hell do I do? But George wouldn’t have understood. He didn’t know from airliners and viruses and nuclear weapons, did he?
“How bad is it now?” HHS asked.
“Just over two hundred cases have been reported to CDC as of fifteen minutes ago. I emphasize that these have all appeared in less than twenty-four hours,” General Pickett told the Secretary.
“Who did it?” Agriculture asked.
“Set that aside,” the President said. “We will address that issue later. What we have to decide now is the best chance we have to contain the epidemic.”
“I just can’t believe that we can’t treat–”
“Believe it,” Cathy Ryan said. “You know how many viral diseases we know how to cure?”
“Well, no,” HUD admitted.
“None.” It constantly amazed her how ignorant some people could be on medical issues.
“Therefore containment is the only option,” General Pickett went on.
“How do you contain a whole country?” It was Cliff Rutledge, Assistant Secretary of State for Policy, sitting in for Scott Adler.
“That’s the problem we face,” President Ryan said. “Thank you, General. I’ll take it from here. The only way to contain the epidemic is to shut down all places of assembly–theaters, shopping malls, sports stadia, business offices, everything–and also to shut off all interstate travel. To the best of our information, at least thirty states are so far untouched by this disease. We would do well to keep it that way. We can accomplish that by preventing all interstate travel until such time as we have a handle on the severity of the disease organism we are facing, and then we can come up with less severe countermeasures.”