The Outlaws: a Presidential Agent novel Read online

  There was a short reply.

  “The minute he comes out of that laboratory, put him in your helicopter and bring him here.”

  He put the telephone handset into its cradle.

  “And now we wait,” Clendennen said. “The President of the United States, the secretary of State, and the director of National Intelligence wait for some lousy colonel to find time for us. ...”

  [FOUR]

  U.S. Army Medical Research Institute

  Fort Detrick, Maryland

  1035 4 February 2007

  Colonel J. Porter Hamilton, Medical Corps, U.S. Army, came through the outer portal of Level Four BioLab Two wearing only a bathrobe. The crest of the United States Military Academy was on the breast, and the legend WEST POINT was on the back.

  He found in the room the garrison commander, the director of Central Intelligence, the assistant secretary of Homeland Security, the special agent in charge at the Department of Homeland Security, the Fort Detrick provost marshal, two Secret Service agents, and Master Sergeant Dennis.

  “You’ll have to pardon my appearance, Colonel Russell,” Colonel Hamilton said.

  “Not a problem, Colonel,” Colonel Florence Russell replied.

  Hamilton turned to DCI Powell, and said, “I can only surmise that those people relayed my message to you.”

  Powell nodded.

  “Colonel, my name is Mason Andrews. I’m the assistant secretary of Homeland Security. I would be grateful—”

  “First things first,” Hamilton interrupted. “Sergeant Dennis, could I impose upon you to take your car and get me a uniform from my quarters? I’m afraid the keys to my car are in there, in my uniform.”

  “Way ahead of you, Colonel,” Dennis said. “Fresh uniform’s in the lobby. I’ll go get it.”

  “Good man,” Hamilton said. “Mr. Powell and I will be in the locker room.”

  He looked at Colonel Russell. “Colonel, would it offend you if I suggested that you come with us? You could turn your back while I dress.”

  “Not at all,” she said.

  “The President’s really curious about what’s going on here, Colonel,” DCI Powell said. “He wants to see you at the White House. There’s a helicopter—”

  “Would you prefer to wait until we’re at the White House?” Hamilton said. “I have to bring Colonel Russell up to speed on this before I go anywhere.”

  “I’ll go with you and Colonel Russell,” Powell said.

  “So will I,” Assistant Secretary Andrews said.

  “I think not,” Hamilton said.

  “Excuse me?” Andrews bristled.

  “I can tell you what you need to know right here: There is no immediate threat.” He turned to the provost marshal, and added, “As soon as you can, you’re to establish a guard around, one, where the package was originally examined; two, my office; and three, this building, to which no one is to enter without the specific approval of myself, Master Sergeant Dennis, or of course Colonel Russell. And you may lift the shut-down. Colonel Russell will have more details after we have spoken.”

  “Yes, sir,” the provost marshal said.

  “You had better impound the golf cart on which the package was moved—bring it and the two security people who drove it here. Dennis will see to their bath. Just a precaution. Better safe than sorry, I always say.”

  Master Sergeant Dennis came back into the room carrying a plastic bag in his prosthetic hand. He handed it to Hamilton.

  “Good man,” Hamilton said as he took it. Then he said, “Dennis, they are going to bring the golf cart and the security drivers here. See that they get a complete bath. Then do the same to the golf cart.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Colonel Russell, Mr. Powell, if you’ll be good enough to come with me?”

  “Am I correctly inferring, Colonel, that I was not included in that invitation?” Mason Andrews asked icily. He didn’t wait for Hamilton to reply, and—obviously on the edge of losing his temper—went on: “Perhaps you didn’t hear me, Colonel, when I told you that I am the assistant secretary of Homeland Security.”

  If he had intended to cow Hamilton, he failed.

  “Mr. Secretary ... or is it Mr. Assistant Secretary?” Hamilton replied. “I know that Mr. Powell is cleared for this sort of information. I don’t know how much the President wants you to know. I am not about to risk the ire of the President by telling you any more than I already have.”

  Andrews flared: “Now, goddamn it, you listen to me, Colonel—”

  “Mr. Andrews,” DCI Powell interrupted, “why don’t you let the President settle this? You’re welcome to ride with us to the White House.”

  The assistant secretary of Homeland Security took a moment to get his temper under control.

  “Perhaps that would be best,” he said finally. “Thank you.”

  [FIVE]

  The Oval Office

  The White House

  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

  Washington, D.C.

  1205 4 February 2007

  “Thank you for coming so quickly, Colonel,” President Clendennen said.

  The sarcasm was lost on Hamilton.

  “I came as quickly as I could, Mr. President,” Hamilton said.

  “I know. You were on Wolf. We all saw you both taking off from Fort Detrick and landing here. And we all saw C. Harry Whelan, Jr., tell his several million viewers he believes you were coming here to deliver the bad news. Please tell me he’s wrong.”

  “Actually, Mr. President, it’s a mixed bag. The news could be much, much worse.”

  “Well,” Clendennen drawled, pronouncing the word whale, “tell me the good news.”

  “There is no cause for immediate alarm. I told Colonel Russell what was necessary for her to do, and that once she had done that, she could lift the shut-down. I have changed the Potential Level Four Biological Hazard Disaster to Level Two Biological Hazard Incident.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “That, in my judgment, there is reason to believe that all Congo-X under my control is contained in a safe environment, and there is no immediate risk to the general public.”

  “‘Congo-X’? What is that?”

  “It is what I call this virus. Or organism. Or whatever it is. What I brought from the Congo just before the Fish Farm was attacked.”

  “Which is it, an organism or a virus?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t really know, sir. More than like a combination of both. An ‘organismus,’ perhaps. Or a ‘virusism.’ Those are terms I made up in the last week or ten days. There is no scientific terminology that I know of to describe Congo-X.”

  “Colonel,” Press Secretary John D. Parker said, “did I understand you to say there is no immediate danger to the public?”

  “I was speaking with the colonel, Parker,” the President said unpleasantly.

  “Mr. President, if the colonel can assure us that there is no immediate danger to the public, I think—to counter that comment of C. Harry Whelan, Jr., on Wolf News—you should make a statement to that effect. And as soon as possible. Immediately. We really have to control this before it gets out of hand.”

  The President glared at Parker.

  “Mr. President,” Ambassador Montvale put in, “I think Porky’s right.”

  Parker glared at Montvale, which wasn’t lost on the President.

  “What do you think I should say, Porky?” Clendennen asked.

  “Mr. President, if you make any statement, it carries great importance. I mean to suggest that it will give the impression that this situation is more serious than the colonel suggests it is.”

  “In other words, you want to make the statement?”

  “That would be my recommendation, Mr. President.”

  “I agree with Porky,” Ambassador Montvale said.

  “That makes it twice, doesn’t it?” the President asked, and then went on: “And what would you say, Parker?”

  “Sir, something alo
ng the lines of this: ‘There was an incident early this morning at Fort Detrick that has attracted a good deal of media attention. The President has just spoken with the chief scientific officer at Fort Detrick, who has assured him there is no cause for concern. What it was was the routine triggering of a safety system, erring on the side of caution. To repeat, there is no cause for concern.’ Something like that, Mr. President.”

  The President was thoughtful for a long moment. Then he asked, “Read that back, please.”

  A female voice came over a loudspeaker and recited Parker’s suggested statement.

  “At the end of the first sentence, where it says ‘has attracted a good deal of media attention,’ strike that and change it to ‘has apparently caused much of the media to start chasing its tail once again. Arf-arf.’ The rest of it is fine. Type that up for Mr. Parker.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that, Mr. President?” Secretary of State Natalie Cohen asked.

  The President ignored her, and gestured for Parker to leave the office. Then he turned to Hamilton.

  “Okay, Colonel. Now let’s have the bad news.”

  Hamilton inhaled audibly before he began to speak.

  “I think we have to presume, Mr. President, that the attack on the establishment—the laboratory-slash-manufacturing facility—in the Congo was not successful. There is a quantity—I have no idea how much—of Congo-X in unknown hands.”

  “How do you know that?” the President asked, softly.

  “Because a quantity of it—several kilograms, plus another several kilograms of infected tissue—was delivered to me at Fort Detrick this morning. It is identical to the Congo-X and the infected tissue I brought out of the Congo.”

  “Where did it come from?” the President asked, then interrupted himself: “No. Tell me what this stuff—Congo-X—is and what it does.”

  “I don’t know what it is. I’m working on that. As to what it does, it causes disseminated intravascular coagulation, acronym DIC.”

  “And can you tell me what that means? In layman’s terms?”

  “DIC is a thrombohemorrhagic disorder characterized by primary thrombotic and secondary hemorrhagic diathesis, usually fatal.”

  “Try it again, Colonel,” the President ordered, not unpleasantly, “and this time in layman’s terms.”

  “Yes, sir. DIC is sometimes called consumptive coagulopathy, since excessive intravascular coagulation leads to consumption of platelets and nonenzymatic coagulation factors—”

  The President interrupted Hamilton by holding up his hand and shaking his head.

  “You might as well be speaking Greek, Colonel. Try it again, please, keeping in mind that you’re dealing with a simple country boy from Alabama.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hamilton said, paused in thought, and then announced, almost happily: “Sir, DIC causes coagulation to run amok.”

  “Coagulation, as in blood?”

  Hamilton nodded.

  “Go down that road, Colonel, and see where it takes us,” the President said.

  “Coagulation is the process, in this connection, which causes liquid human blood to turn into a soft, semisolid mass.”

  He looked at the President to see if the President was still with him.

  The President responded by smiling encouragingly, and making a gesture with both hands for him to continue.

  “If you think of the vascular system of the body, Mr. President, as a series of interconnected garden hoses, and of the heart as a pump that pushes blood through that system.”

  He paused to see if his student was still with him, and when the President nodded, went on: “Imagine, if you will, sir, that the blood is transformed into a very thick mud. The pump cannot push the mass through the vascular system. It is overwhelmed; it stops.”

  “And death occurs? By what a layman might call a heart attack?”

  “That, too, Mr. President,” Hamilton said.

  “‘That, too’?” the President parroted.

  “The mud, the now-coagulated blood, then begins to attack the garden hose. As sort of a parasite. It feeds on it, so to speak.”

  “Eats it, you mean?”

  Hamilton nodded. “And when it’s finished, so to speak, with the vascular system, it begins to feed on the other tissues of the body. In some sort of unusual enzymatic manner, which I have so far been unable to pin down.”

  “You’d better run that past me again, Colonel,” the President said. “‘Enzymatic manner’?”

  Hamilton considered for a moment the level of knowledge the President might have.

  “Think of meat tenderizer, Mr. President. Do you know how that works?”

  “I can’t say that I do,” Clendennen confessed.

  “Meat—and that would of course include human flesh—is held together by a complex protein called collagen. This makes it quite tough to chew in the raw state.”

  “I’ve noticed,” the President drawled dryly.

  “Cooking destroys these proteins, making the meat chewable. But so does contact with certain enzymes, most commonly ones extracted from the papaya. These proteolytic enzymes break the peptide bonds between the amino acids found in complex proteins. Such as flesh.”

  “What you’re saying is that Congo-X is some sort of meat tenderizer?” the President asked. “Why is that so dangerous?”

  “Unlike the enzymatic tenderizers one finds in the supermarket, which lose their strength after attacking the peptide bonding between the amino acids of meat, the Congo-X enzymes—if they are indeed enzymes, and I am not yet prepared to make that call—seem to gather strength from the collagens they attack. In a manner of speaking, they are nurtured by it.”

  “What happens when they run out of meat?” the President asked, and then corrected himself: “Out of something to eat?”

  Hamilton didn’t answer directly.

  “Grocery store tenderizer doesn’t work on bones,” he said. “Congo-X does. Whenever it finishes turning the meat into sort of a mush—perhaps strengthened by taking nutrition from that process—it attacks bones. They are turned into mush. When the entire process is completed, what is left is a semisolid residue, which then enters sort of a coma. Forgive the crudeness, Mr. President, but what remains bears a strong physical resemblance to what one might pass when suffering from diarrhea: a semisolid brown, or brownish black, mass.”

  “And what happens to that?”

  “It apparently receives enough nutrients from the atmosphere to maintain life—I hesitate to use that term but I cannot think of another—for an indefinite period. If it is touched by flesh, the process begins again.”

  “The only way it is contagious, so to speak, is if there’s physical contact with it? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “When it is in the dormant, coma stage, yes, sir. But when it is feeding, so to speak, on flesh, it gives off microscopic particles which, if inhaled, also start the degenerative process.”

  “How can it be killed?”

  “My initial tests suggest the only way it can be killed is by thorough incineration at temperatures over a thousand degrees Centigrade. The residue, I am coming to believe, may then be encased in a nonporous container. Glass or some type of ceramic would work, I think, but there one would have the risk of the glass or ceramic breaking. Aluminum seems to form a satisfactory barrier. As a matter of fact, I used simple aluminum foil to isolate the material I brought out of the Congo; I had nothing else. And the Congo-X material that was sent to my laboratory today was wrapped in aluminum foil.”

  “Like a Christmas turkey?” President Clendennen asked.

  “More like, I would say, Mr. President, cold cuts from a delicatessen. Very carefully, so there was little or no risk that the foil could be torn. The people who sent me the Congo-X obviously seem to know what they are doing.”

  “And who, would you guess, Colonel, were the people who sent you the Congo-X? More importantly, why do you think they did?”

  “I’ve given that some thought, Mr.
President,” Hamilton said.

  “And?”

  The tone of impatience in the President’s voice was clearly evident.

  “They wanted us to know that the attack on the Fish Farm was unsuccessful,” Hamilton said. “That they have Congo-X. We have to presume they know a great deal more about it than I have been able to learn in the few days I’ve had to work with it. They are making the point that the threat which existed before we learned of the Fish Farm and attempted to destroy it exists now.”

  “Why wouldn’t they try to keep that secret, so they would have the element of surprise if they decide to use Congo-X on us?”

  “That’s the question to which I have given the most thought,” Hamilton said. “It was self-evident that they wanted us to know we failed, and that they have Congo-X. The question is, why?”

  “That’s the question I asked, Colonel,” the President said.

  “I think they want something from us,” Hamilton said, very seriously.

  “And what, Colonel, do you think that might be?”

  “I have no idea,” Hamilton said. “Absolutely no idea.”

  President Clendennen looked around the Oval Office.

  The Honorable Natalie Cohen, secretary of State; Ambassador Charles M. Montvale, director of National Intelligence; the Honorable John J. Powell, director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and the Honorable Mason Andrews, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, were sitting on the chairs and couches around a glass-topped coffee table. Not one had said a word during the “bad news” exchange between the President and Colonel Hamilton.

  “Odd,” Clendennen said to them. “I would have bet two bits to a doughnut that y’all would be falling all over yourselves to offer sage political advice and profound philosophical opinions concerning our little dilemma.”

  No one responded.

  The President grunted, then announced: “One, I believe everything Colonel Hamilton has told us about this terrible substance. Two, we are not about to react to this threat the way my predecessor did. We bombed everything in a twenty-square-mile area of the Congo into small pieces and then incinerated the pieces. Since somebody still has enough of a supply of this stuff to share it with us, I think we have to concede that the only thing that bombing did was bring us within a cat’s whisker of a nuclear exchange and give those people who don’t like us much anyway good reason to like us even less.