The Cobra Event

Boy

Alice Austen was with Colonel Ernesto Aguilar and two Army nurses on board an Army medevac helicopter that had just lifted off from the Thirty-fourth Street Heliport. It was carrying a five-year-old boy named Hector Ramirez, who lived on Avenue B. Hector was conscious, lying buckled on a gurney and covered with blankets. His lips, behind a clear oxygen mask, were bloody and torn. He had been in grand mal seizure in the emergency room of Bellevue Hospital, but the seizures had abated. The boy stated at the ceiling of the chopper, and his brown eyes had a tawny gold center.

Austen had insisted on going with the evacuation team. She should not have been there, perhaps, but she had presented herself to Colonel Aguilar and told him that, as a physician, she should be with the boy as the representative of the Reachdeep team. He did not argue with her.

The helicopter was crowded. Dr Aguilar watched the boy's vital signs. They passed over the Williamsburg Bridge. The blade noise was high, and they spoke through headsets.

`Watch him! He's seizing again!' Dr Aguilar said. Hector Ramirez went into a flurry. He was buckled down, but his small body seemed incredibly strong. He turned diagonally under the straps, and his head lashed back and forth. He began biting his lips behind the oxygen mask, and a fresh run of blood spattered inside the mask.

An Army nurse named Captain Dorothy Each yanked off the boy's oxygen mask. She took his head in her hands. She was wearing rubber gloves. She held his head steady. It was impossible to control his jaws. The helicopter shook and the boy shook, and his jaw worked. The helicopter began its descent to Governors Island.

Austen, also wearing gloves, put her hands on the boy. She grabbed his wrists. They were the thin wrists of a five-year-old. She was impressed with how strong a boy could be.

The two women bent over the boy. Austen transferred her grip to the boy's head. 'There, there, steady, sweetheart,' she said to him. She could feel his neck tightening and writhing. It was basal writhing. This was the first time she had felt it happening in a patient.

Captain Each transferred her grip to the boy's jaw. She held his jaw tightly in both hands, clenched, to keep him from biting. That seemed to help.

Suddenly the boy arched his back. His teeth flashed, and he bit down hard on Captain Each's left hand. His teeth tore the rubber glove.

'Oh!' the nurse said. She pulled away momentarily, but then she was, back over the boy, holding his head and jaw. Austen saw how her hand bled. The blood from her hand ran onto the boy's hair. Austen did not say anything. Nobody said anything about it.

Everyone understood that Captain Dorothy Each would be placed in quarantine biocontainment in the Army Medical Management Unit.

The boy's mother, Ana Ramirez, the boy's aunt, Carla Salazar, and his ten-year-old sister, Ana Julia, were all admitted as patients in the Medical Management Unit.

They had been in close proximity with the boy. They were kept in separate containment rooms, attended around the clock by Army medical personnel. There was very little that could be done for them except monitoring and supportive therapy. The boy's mother exhibited symptoms of the common cold, with a clear mucosal effusion from the nasopharynx. Dr Aguilar ordered IV drips of an experimental Army drug, cidofovir, given to the patients. It was supposed to work on smallpox, but there was no evidence it would work on Cobra. Dr Aguilar also ordered a dose of Dilantin to help control the boy's seizures but decided not to go ahead with any heavier antiseizure drug therapy for fear that it would cause Hector to go into an irreversible coma. The only member of the family who had had seizures so far was the boy. His mother was alert, although deeply afraid and almost hysterical about her child.

The doctors had set up a biocontainment intensivecare unit, a group of rooms accessible through a vestibule in the north wing of the Coast Guard hospital. Hector Ramirez was placed there, along with Suzanne Tanaka.

Tanaka lay strapped in bed, receiving cidofovir, ribavirin, and Valium drips. She drifted in and out of consciousness, but she had not suffered any seizures.

The boy was strapped into a bed, and various monitoring machines were placed around him. One of the machines was a pressure sensor for real-time monitoring of the boy's cranial pressure. They had drilled a small hole in his skull and put in a plastic pressure sensor there. The machine could detect brain swelling. If the doctors saw signs of swelling, they might decide to put him into surgery to remove a portion of his skull, to give his brain space to swell. 'The mortality rate is awful, but it may be our only chance,' Dr Aguilar explained to Austen.

Hector uttered a sharp cry.

Austen drew closer. The boy was small for his age. His body shook as if a wind were rattling it. The nursing staff had tied soft cords of gauze around his wrists and ankles and across his chest. They'd done their best to immobilize his head, but his mouth was uncontrollable. He had torn off a part of his tongue and swallowed it. His eyes were half open, the pupils darting. 'Mama!' he said. 'Mama!'

Austen bent over the bed. 'We're doctors and we're here for you, Hector.'

'¿ Dónde estd Mamd?'

She touched his forehead. Through her glove, she could feel his facial muscles tightening and twitching. They couldn't give the boy a brain scan, because his condition was too unstable and because he was liable to go into seizure at any moment. The Army nurses and doctors moved around the room with great speed and desperation at times, but at other times they seemed to be moving through thick water.

Will Hopkins entered the intensive-care unit. He was dressed in a protective suit. The probe compounds had arrived from the Navy, and Hopkins had programmed them into a Boink biosensor. 'I've got a hand-held that'll detect Cobra, I think.'

The staff had been taking samples of the boy's blood. Hopkins mixed a few drops in a tube containing salt water, then put a drop of the bloody water into the sample port of the device.

It gave off a chiming sound. 'Cobra,' Hopkins said, looking at the screen.

Suzanne Tanaka was now suffering agonies in a bed on the other side of the unit. Hopkins tested her blood, and the answer was obvious. He stayed by her bed for a while. 'I'm sorry,' he said.

She could not answer, and it was not clear that she even heard.

As he walked out of the unit, he met Alice Austen. They spoke about what had happened to Tanaka. Hopkins told Austen that when he'd been driving down to Quantico, and she had been asleep in the car, Tanaka had begged him over the telephone to include her in the mission. 'I made the decision,' he said to Austen.

'Don't think back on decisions, Will.' 'I can't help it,' he said.

'I can't either. I should have put Peter Talides in the hospital.'

In the spread of an infective agent, chance plays a part in survival. Hopkins went down the hall and tested the blood of Aimee Dana, the wife of John Dana, who had been infected by brain material from Peter Talides. He did not get a reading. She seemed okay. Then he went to see Captain Dorothy Each.

She had been placed in a biocontainment room. She was sitting in a chair, reading a book, a bandage over the cut on her hand. She seemed calm, but she was very pale.

Hopkins tested her blood. So far, there was no sign of Cobra. 'Looks good, but it's really too early to tell,' he said to her.

'Thanks, anyway,' Captain Each said to him.

In Hector Ramirez's room, Austen continued to watch the boy. She felt that she was on the verge of understanding something important. The pattern was emerging, and then it slipped away.

She turned to Dr Aguilar. 'I still don't believe we've made a diagnosis,' she said.

'We know a fair amount,' he answered.

'But we don't understand the disease process. We're missing a diagnosis.'

'Okay, I can buy that,' he said. 'What are your ideas?' 'It's there, but I can't touch it.'

A doctor walked in with some test results. Hector's white-cell count, in his spinal fluid, was too high. 'His uric acid's high also,' the doctor remarked. 'What's the count?' Austen asked.

'Fourteen point six. Extremely high.'

'It's probably the result of his seizures,' Dr Aguilar said. People having muscle breakdown have high uric acid counts in their blood and urine.

Austen was remembering something. She ran the images of Kate Moran's autopsy through her mind. The kidneys. She remembered the golden-yellow streaks in the girl's kidneys. That was damage by uric acid. Something moved in Austen's mind. It was like a bird fluttering its wings, a bird with unusual markings.

'Could you please loosen the boy's straps?' Austen asked. 'I want to see how he moves his legs.'

The medical staff hesitated. She asked them again.

They loosened Hector Ramirez's straps. Austen got down on her knees. She took the boy's arm in her hand, grasping it firmly.

He was looking at her with yellow eyes. It was not easy to see where the personality of the boy was. His essential being seemed to have already died or partly died.

She let his arm go slightly. He drew it to his mouth. His teeth snapped. He moaned. He began crying, '¡No! ¡Basta! ¡Vaya! ¡Ay!'

'Oh, God,' one of the nurses said.

With the straps loosened, the boy's body assumed a peculiar posture. One arm was bent toward his mouth, and the opposite leg was bent. The other leg was straight. The boy's posture was like that of a fencer leaping in for a touch. One arm straight, the other bent. The opposite leg bent, the other leg straight. It was a diagonal thrashing of the human body.

A diagonal crisscross.

The posture indicated damage to areas of the brain where signals cross. That would be the midbrain. A deranged midbrain.

The boy squirmed, and his back arched. His legs crossed in an abrupt scissoring motion.

The diagnosis clicked.

'They eat themselves. They're children,' Austen said with sudden clarity and horror. 'They pull out their eyes. Lash. Lesch. What is it called, Dr Aguilar?'

'Oh, Jesus,' Aguilar whispered. Suddenly, he had seen it too.

'High uric acid,' she said.

'Yeah,' he said. 'This kid looks like he has LeschNyhan syndrome.'

'I had forgotten what it was called,' Austen said.

Lesch-Nyhan

Lesch-Nyhan syndrome is an extremely rare disease. It occurs once in a million births, and it occurs naturally only in boys. It is caused by a genetic mutation. Alice Austen did not make the diagnosis alone. She began the diagnosis. It was made by a team of physicians.

Frank Masaccio immediately flew to Governors Island with senior managers of his joint task force. They arrived just as Austen and the other doctors began giving a presentation to the assembled Reachdeep team.

Austen was speaking: 'Lesch-Nyhan syndrome may be the most terrible genetic disease known.' Lesch-Nyhan syndrome is caused by a mutation on the X chromosome, which is the chromosome that every child inherits from his or her mother. Lesch-Nyhan boys lack an enzyme that breaks down a metabolic waste product, and the end result is a huge excess of uric acid in the bloodstream. The enzyme they lack is called HPRT.

Lesch-Nyhan syndrome was first identified in 1964 by Michael Lesch and William L. Nyhan. Michael Lesch was then a sophomore medical student at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. Bill Nyhan was his research adviser.

A boy with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome seems normal as a baby, except that the parents begin to notice what they sometimes describe as 'orange sand' in the diaper. These are crystals of uric acid being passed from the kidneys. By the baby's first birthday there is something definitely wrong. The boy becomes spastic. He does not develop normal coordination. He does not learn how to crawl or walk. His limbs become stiff. The baby's body tends to assume the characteristic 'fencing' posture of LeschNyhan disease — one arm bent, the opposite leg bent. This is a sign of damage to nerve fibers in the midbrain. As the boy's teeth come in, he begins chewing on his lips. The chewing is uncontrollable. The child begins to eat off his lips. He begins to eat his fingers. He concentrates his gnawing on certain parts of his body; no one knows why.

The parents can't control their child. Often doctors have trouble making a diagnosis. The boy may not be retarded. He may have normal intelligence, but it's hard to tell, because his speech is poor. He can't speak well, although his eyes are bright and alert, and he seems to be taking in the world with understanding and intelligence. The boy may pull out his fingernails with his teeth. He attacks his body. As he grows older and stronger, he attacks the people he loves, lashing out with his arms and legs, biting at them, and using obscenities. It is clear that he is capable of love, and he forms strong attachments to his caregivers, even while he is attacking them.

The pain of self-injury is excruciating for Lesch-Nyhan children. It troubles them when they attack people, yet they can't resist doing it. They cry out with pain as they chew themselves. They know what they are doing but can't stop. They feel the pain, but the biting continues, and the more it hurts the more they bite themselves. They fear the pain, and their fear makes them bite themselves more violently. Thus the Lesch-Nyhan cycle of behavior literally feeds on itself. When they feel an episode of self-mutilation coming on, they beg to have their hands tied and their bodies restrained. The sudden appearance of a stranger in the room may make them bite themselves. They vomit upon themselves. They may blind themselves, tearing out their eyeballs. Selfenucleation, tearing out of the eyes, is rare, but it happens. There are not many Lesch-Nyhan adults. A Lesch-Nyhan boy may survive to young adulthood, but at some point he will die of kidney failure or self-injury.

The human genetic code consists of about three billion bases of DNA. A single change of one base in the entire human genome, at a particular location on the genome, causes full-blown Lesch-Nyhan disease. Scientists understand how the change in the DNA changes the resulting structure of the enzyme. That is simple. What is a complete mystery is how a change in one enzyme causes a radical shift in behavior. What kind of brain damage could cause an organism to try to eat itself? No one knows.

Austen told the group that the Cobra virus appears to trigger a kind of Lesch-Nyhan disease in humans, in both men and women. Lesch-Nyhan had become a contagious disease. Cobra probably had the ability to knock out the gene for the enzyme HPRT, and that somehow led to self-injury and autocannibalism. Natural LeschNyhan disease was a progressive disorder that came on slowly as the child developed. 'No one understands the exact kind of brain damage that causes Lesch-Nyhan children to engage in self-injury,' she said to the group. 'Cobra apparently causes the same general type of brain damage but very rapidly. The virus seems to engage in a massive burst of replication, just as the moth virus N.P.V. does, and that last burst almost melts the human brain, triggering the wild change of behavior in the hours leading up to death.'

Frank Masaccio had been listening to this. Listening with his hands in his pockets, and staring at the piece of fax paper on the wall of the meeting room that showed the face of an American tourist who might or might not be the Unsub. Masaccio had been trying to see how to use that information to move the investigation forward. Now he saw a new move in the chess game. He turned to his senior people.

'I see where we can go. We need to look at every biotech company that's doing research into this disease. We get lists of employees at these companies. We see if the name of an employee matches a name of any of the thousands of tourists to Kenya who were issued visas. If we get a match there, we've got Archimedes.'

Hector Ramirez died late Thursday afternoon. By that time Hopkins and Austen were working in the Reachdeep Core, confirming that Cobra virus disease was a type of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.

Meanwhile, the investigation had moved into financial territory. The New York field office's joint task force on Cobra studied recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings by companies in the biotechnology industry. They found nothing there. Agents telephoned the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in Maryland and asked for information on any new drugresearch applications involving Lesch-Nyhan disease.

There are three major geographic areas where biotechnology companies have settled in the United States. One is the San Francisco Bay area of California, where biology is mixed in with Silicon Valley and the high-tech computer and software industry. The second area is in Massachusetts, around Boston. The third area — the largest, the deepest — is a belt of biotech companies hidden away in small buildings scattered from central New Jersey south through Pennsylvania and down into Maryland to the outskirts of Washington, D.C. This is the

Middle Atlantic Biotechnology Belt, and it is where some of the leading-edge start-up companies in genetic engineering and biomedical research are situated. In all three geographic areas, the biotech companies are fueling economic growth, bringing jobs, making people rich, and developing drugs that help people live longer and have more productive lives. As a group they are fight-years ahead of the rest of the world in biotechnology.

In a matter of hours, investigators had determined that there were only two companies in the United States currently doing F.D.A.-reviewed research into LeschNyhan syndrome. One was a publicly held company in Santa Clara, California, outside San Francisco — a medium-sized company with public shareholders. The other was a privately held company in Greenfield, New Jersey, an hour's drive west and south of New York City. It was called Bio-Vek, Inc. Since it was a private company, it did not file financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But Bio-Vek had recently submitted a filing with the Food and Drug Administration for permission to go ahead with Phase I clinical trials of a bioengineered treatment for LeschNyhan disease in children, a so-called gene therapy protocol, in which healthy genes would be inserted into the brain tissue of sick children.

The Cobra investigators from New York enlisted the help of the Trenton, New Jersey, field office of the F.B.I. The Trenton office looked at the company's financial filings and registration statement with the stard of New Jersey, and they looked at the company's state department of labor filings. Bio-Vek was a very small company. It had just fifteen full-time employees. The president of the company was Orris Heyert, M.D.

'This feels right,' Frank Masaccio said. 'This Bio-Vek is where we want to look.' He discussed with his senior investigators and with Hopkins how they should proceed.

They could do what was known as a `freeze and seize' white-collar raid on Bio-Vek. They could move in with a huge white-collar-crime-analysis team, freeze the company's operations, and take over the company in its entirety as federal evidence. That would be an extreme measure. In order to do a freeze and seize of a company, federal investigators must show probable cause that a crime has been committed. They must get a search warrant from a federal magistrate, a warrant that enables them to enter the premises and seize evidence. That was impossible in this case. There was no probable cause for thinking a crime had been committed — no evidence whatever to link Bio-Vek to the Unsub or to any crime. No federal magistrate would permit a raid on Bio-Vek.

The right way to do things — the way the F.B.I. would proceed under normal circumstances — would be for the federal investigators to take their time to develop evidence, perhaps going undercover. They would conduct quiet interviews with low-level employees. They would contact the company's bankers for information. They would check out the company's dealings with suppliers and customers. They would try to get a sense of how the money was moving.

Masaccio understood that the movement of money is the blood supply of crime. Just seeing the way this company's name popped out so easily once Dr Austen had identified the type of disease the virus was causing, he now understood, he knew in his heart, with a lifetime's experience as an investigator, that money was somehow involved with the deaths in New York City. It was there, somewhere. The long green had entered the picture — but where?

Since everyone wanted the Unsub found and arrested in a matter of days, before any more people died, there was extreme pressure on Frank Masaccio to fly fast and hard into the case. There was no time to mount a careful investigation into Bio-Vek, no time to profile the company. Yet there was zero evidence to justify a raid. There was a good chance the company itself might be blameless. An employee or a former employee could be the Unsub. The company might not have anything to do with it, and they might be eager to cooperate. He decided to ask the company for help. Carefully. He would use some of the Reachdeep people for this, since they would know the right questions to ask.

Bio-Vek, Inc

Will Hopkins, Alice Austen, and Mark Littleberry took a Bell turbo helicopter across Raritan Bay and touched down on a grassy airstrip in a town not far from Greenfield, a few miles east of Bio-Vek. They were met by three F.B.I. agents from the Trenton field office in unmarked Bureau cars. The Reachdeep team got into a car driven by a female agent. The two other Trenton agents took the other car, and they moved discreetly to a remote part of the airstrip, where one of the agents wired Hopkins with a micro-tape recorder, hung down his back behind his jacket. Hopkins was wearing a charcoal-gray suit, with a blue shirt and a muted silk necktie, and he had on sunglasses. He looked every inch a federal agent. Austen thought: He's showing off. The only thing that spoiled the image was a lump under his jacket. He wore a SIG-Sauer nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in a holster. But that wasn't what made the lump. It was the pocket protector.

They drove over suburban roads to a business park, some low buildings constructed during the office boom of the 1980s. The buildings were not old, but they didn't look particularly new. They contained a mixture of businesses. There was a printer in one of the office blocks, with a civil-engineering firm next door.

The Bio-Vek, Inc., building had coppery dark windows that concealed what was behind them. The investigative team cruised past, keeping a low profile. Littleberry pointed to some tall silver pipes coming out of the roof. 'Vent stacks,' he said. 'Looks like they're venting a biocontainment lab. Level 2 or Level 3.'

'That's not unusual,' Hopkins said.

The two F.B.I. cars parked in a back lot beside a Dumpster, near the printing business, out of view. Hopkins, Austen, and Littleberry got out of the car. Mark Littleberry was carrying a small Halliburton case. It contained a hand-held Boink biosensor and a swab kit.

The Reachdeep team walked casually down a sidewalk. It was a faultless day, white clouds puffy and changing in a sky as blue as dreams. The air smelled like Colorado at nine thousand feet. The ornamental cherry trees had gone into fierce bloom, and though the bloom was past its peak, the trees flashed and moved brilliantly in the breeze. The trees and plants around the business park seemed to ache and sway with life. Above Bio-Vek, a sailplane swooped and banked on rising thermals under the clouds; a pilot having fun, and below the sailplane red-tailed hawks floated and turkey buzzards moved in slow circles, people and birds enjoying the air.

The Reachdeep investigators stopped before the company's nondescript brown door. There was a galvanized box by the door, for holding clinical samples.

Hopkins led the way in. He gave the team members' real names to the receptionist. He said that the group was from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was there to see Dr Orris Heyert, the president of Bio-Vek.

'Was he expecting you?' the woman said. 'I don't see your names on the calendar.'

'No, but this is important,' Hopkins said.

She called Dr Heyert on her telephone. In a moment he came out through a door into the lobby, with a puzzled expression on his face. He was a handsome man in his forties. He had dark hair, a smooth haircut, lively features. He wore a white shirt and a tie, but he was jacketless, and his sleeves were rolled up, and there were many cheap pens in his pocket. He had the start-upcompany look.

In Dr Heyert's office — small and cluttered, with pictures of his wife and children on the shelves — they got down to business.

'I realize this is unexpected,' Hopkins said. 'But we need your help. I am with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and my colleagues here are with the Centers for Disease Control and the United States Navy.'

'Can I see some identification, before we go any further?' Dr Heyert said.

Hopkins showed his creds. Austen showed her C.D.C. card.

'Do you guys want some coffee?' They said they did.

He called his secretary and asked her to bring coffee. He had an informal way about him that made Hopkins look stiff and uptight.

Hopkins did the talking. 'We need your help in an investigation.'

'My company is not the subject of this investigation, I hope?'

'No. We are searching for an unknown suspect who has been making terroristic threats involving an infective biological agent. We have reason to think that he's knowledgeable about Lesch-Nyhan disease. We need your expertise and advice.'

'This is very strange,' Heyert said.

'Why?' Hopkins said. He looked calmly at Heyert. Time passed. More time passed.

Heyert clearly expected Hopkins to say something more, but Hopkins did not. He just watched Heyert. Finally Heyert answered, 'Well, it just seems strange.'

'Have you fired any employees lately? Has anyone quit? Because we're wondering if by any chance a disgruntled former employee of yours might be the person making these threats.'

'Nobody has left the company in quite a while. Our employees are very loyal.'

Hopkins watched Heyert carefully, observing the man's body and his eyes at least as much as he listened to the words. The tape recorder would get the words anyway. 'Can you describe the research your company is doing?'

'A lot of it is proprietary,' Heyert said mildly.

'Are there areas you can talk about?' Hopkins asked. 'We are trying to find a cure for the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome,' Dr Heyert said. 'We are using gene therapy. Are you familiar with that?'

'Not totally. Could you explain it to us?' Hopkins said. 'Gene therapy is where we replace a damaged gene in human tissue with a working gene. This involves putting the new genes directly into cells. We use viruses to put the genes into the cells. These viruses are called vectors. If you infect tissue with a vector virus, it will add genes or alter the genes.'

'What kind of virus are you using?' Hopkins asked. 'It's just a construct,' Heyert said.

'A construct? What's that?' 'It's an artificial virus.'

'Is it based on a natural virus?' 'Several.'

'Which?'

'Principally the nuclear polyhedrosis virus.'

'Oh,' Hopkins said. 'Doesn't that virus live in insects?' 'Normally, yes.'

'Can you tell me, Dr Heyert, what strain you are using?'

'Autographa californica. It has been modified to enter human brain cells.'

'I'm curious, Dr Heyert,' Hopkins said. 'Could this virus be engineered so that it not only enters the brain but replicates there? Could it then spread from person to person?'

He laughed in a way that seemed to Austen rather forced. 'Good grief! No.'

'There have been indications that the suspect has such a use in mind. We're trying to evaluate the credibility of the threat.'

'Nothing has happened, then?'

'There's been what is perceived as a threat.' 'To do what?'

'To injure people with this insect virus.' 'Who's making the threat?'

'As I said, Dr Heyert, that's what we're trying to find out.'

'I don't think it's much of a threat,' Heyert said. 'The virus couldn't be used that way.'

'Could an engineered virus spread genetic changes through the human population?' Hopkins asked.

There was a long pause. 'This is way off base,' Heyert said. 'Statements like that are frankly offensive to me. I am a physician, a medical doctor. What we are doing here is so remote from what you are suggesting that it is almost obscene. We are trying to alleviate the most terrible suffering. Have you ever seen a Lesch-Nyhan child?'

Bio-Vek was a small company, all under one roof. Orris Heyert led the investigators into a back wing of the building where there was a cluster of surprisingly small rooms cluttered with benches and laboratory equipment. The labs were populated with young workers, most of whom wore casual clothes.

'Who's financing you?' Littleberry asked Heyert, in his blunt way.

'Private investors.'

'Do you mind telling us who?' Hopkins said.

'Well, myself for one. I did well in a previous start-up.' 'Who are the controlling shareholders?' Hopkins asked. He watched Heyert's body language.

'I am a general partner. We have limited partners, of course.'

'What's your cash-burn rate?' Hopkins asked.

'You seem to have worked in biotechnology yourself, Dr Hopkins.'

'Not really.'

Heyert flashed a not-very-nice look at Hopkins. 'Didn't pan out, eh? So you went to work for the government?' 'It has its ups and downs.'

They went into a laboratory. The benches were cluttered with research equipment, flasks and table shakers and incubators and small centrifuges. Biosafety cabinets stood against the walls. As they were passing through the lab, Littleberry whispered to Hopkins, 'Those vent stacks we saw on the roof. They're coming from somewhere near here. There's a Level 3 unit around here, but we haven't seen it yet.'

They went around a corner and entered a small waiting room. There were a few stuffed chairs, and a door that said CLINIC.

'We have a patient in the observation room with his mother,' Heyert said. 'His name is Bobby Wiggner.'

Bobby

Dr Heyert entered the room first and asked Mrs Wiggner if two visitors could meet her son. 'Would Bobby like to be restrained?' he said to her.

The mother glanced at her son, and she shook her head.

Heyert brought Austen and Hopkins into the room. Littleberry chose to stay outside.

Bobby Wiggner was a young man. He looked somewhat like a boy. On his chin appeared the faintest beginnings of a beard. He lay in a wheelchair in a halfstraightened posture. His back was sharply curved; his body was rigid. A rubber strap went around his chest, holding him in the wheelchair.

Austen watched. She observed Bobby Wiggner with the care of a medical doctor trying to see what was going on with a patient.

His mother sat on a chair facing him — out of striking distance of his arms. She was reading to him from a book. The book was David Copperfield.

The man-boy was thin, bony, stiff. He was wearing a T-shirt and a diaper. His legs were bare and his kneecaps stuck up like points. His legs were crossed — scissored and rigid. His feet were bare, and they were wrapped around each other. One of his big toes was extended straight up at a peculiar angle.

He had no lips. His mouth was a hole consisting of bulbous wet scar tissue that extended across the lower half of his face: these were biting scars. His upper teeth were gone — probably extracted to prevent him from doing damage when he bit, but his lower teeth remained in place. His jaw was very flexible and seemed to move a lot. Over the years, in episodes, he had reached up with his lower teeth and had cut and sawed away his upper lip and the lower part of his nose. He had also eaten away his upper palate bone by gnawing it with his lower teeth, breaking off the palate bone bit by bit. In this way, reaching up with his lower teeth and using them as cutting tools, he had opened a hole in his face that extended from his palate up through his nose. He had eaten away the septum of his nose — the cartilage and flesh that divides the nostrils from each other. His breath whistled in and out of his mouth. He was missing several fingers; they were stumps. His right thumb was gone.

His eyes were bright. They moved under deep-set, heavy eyelids, tracking Alice Austen and Will Hopkins. He had scruffy, chopped hair. From his wheelchair dangled an array of Rubatex straps. His hands were not tied down.

Mrs Wiggner stopped reading for a moment. She looked up at Austen and Hopkins. 'My son sees you more clearly than you see him,' she said.

They introduced themselves.

'Wha uh uh wah?'Bobby said. What do you want? Air whistled through his mouth. He had trouble making words because he had no lips or upper teeth or upper palate.

'We just wanted to see you and to say hello,' Austen said.

'Huh uh am.' Here I am.

'How are you feeling today?' Hopkins said. 'Uh guh tuh uh.' Pretty good today.

His body went into a writhing motion, the back arching and twisting, the legs twisting. Suddenly his arm lashed out, aiming for Austen's face. She jerked her head back, just in time, and his clawlike mangled hand whipped past.

Bobby Wiggner moaned. 'Sorry. Sorry,' he said. 'It's okay.'

'Guh tuh hell.'

'Please, Bobby,' his mother admonished him.

He lashed out at his mother, trying to strike her, and cursed violently at her. She did not react.

'Sorry, sorry, sorry,' he said to her.

'He needs his restraints,' his mother said.

Quickly, with deft movements, the mother and Dr Heyert tightened the Rubatex straps around the young man, fastening his wrists to the chair, and they placed and tightened a wide Rubatex band across his forehead. That helped restrain the back-and-forth writhing of his head.

'Tha is wetter,' Bobby Wiggner said. 'Huck you, I sorry.'

'This is a vertically divided mind,' Dr Heyert said. 'The brain stem has been deranged and wants to attack the things it loves. The higher cortex — the conscious, thinking part of the mind — hates this but can't control it. In these battles between the higher brain and the brain stem, the brain stem wins, because it is primitive and more powerful.'

'Nuh wuh ook! Nuh!'

'Are you sure, Bobby?' Mrs Wiggner tried to keep reading.

'I wanh sohsing tuh drink. Wlease.' 'Do you want milk?'

'Nuh. Nuh.' No. No. That probably meant yes.

The young man's mother held a plastic cup up to his mouth. It had a feeding spout. She got some milk down his throat. Suddenly he vomited it up. His mother wiped him with a towel, dabbing it around the scarred remains of his lower face.

Bobby turned his head and looked at Austen, his eyes bright. He was completely tied down. 'Uhr yuh uh Stuh Tuk hwuhnh?'

'I'm sorry. Could you say that again?' she said.

'My son is asking if you are a Star Trek fan,' the mother remarked. 'He always asks people that.'

'Hopkins is,' Austen said.

Hopkins went over and sat down on a chair next to Bobby Wiggner. 'I like that show,' Hopkins said. 'Wee, too,' Bobby Wiggner said.

Hopkins listened. He found that he could understand the words.

Wiggner said (his words are translated now): 'My favorite episode is "City on the Edge of Forever." 'Right! Mine, too!' Hopkins said. 'When Captain Kirk ends up in Chicago.'

'He was sad when the woman died,' Bobby Wiggner said.

'Yes. He couldn't save her.'

'Or history would be changed,' Wiggner said. 'Captain Kirk loved that woman. He should have saved her, and to hell with history,' Hopkins said. They were deep in conversation, Hopkins hunched over, seeming to forget the fact that he was supposed to be conducting an interview for the F.B.I.

Austen stood back, watching Hopkins. He was leaning forward. She could see the muscles of his back and shoulders through his jacket. She thought: He's very gentle.

Abruptly she realized that she had stopped seeing Hopkins in a purely professional way. This did not seem to be the moment for that kind of thing, and she put it out of her mind.

In the waiting room, Mark Littleberry asked an employee where the men's room was, and he went off in that direction. Carrying the Halfiburton briefcase, he hurried down a hallway toward the center of the building. Once again, Littleberry had gone AWOL. He found an unmarked door. It opened inward through a partition wall. On the far side was a short corridor leading to another door. This door was marked with the numeral 2.

He opened it. Now he was in a corridor even shorter than the first one. There were some white Tyvek coveralls on a shelf, and some masks hanging on a wall. The masks were full-face respirator masks with purple virus filters. At the end of this corridor was yet another door. This one had a window in it, with a biohazard sign on the window, and the numeral 3. The door led inward toward the center of the building.

'The ring design,' Littleberry said. He looked through the window.

It was a small room, gleaming white, antiseptic. On a table in the center of the room sat a bioreactor. It was a top-hat model with a core in the shape of an hourglass. The unit was marked with the name of a manufacturer, Biozan.

He reached up and took one of the masks, and put it on. He opened the door, carrying the briefcase.

The Biozan reactor was running. He could feel the warmth coming from it. There was no smell in the air. He placed his hand on the glass surface of the Biozan unit. It was exactly the temperature of the human body, 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 37 degrees Centigrade. The temperature of living cells. The hourglass core was full of cells, and the cells were sick with a virus. From the top hat (the upper lid) of the bioreactor came tangles of flexible tubing. A liquid was draining out of the Biozan slowly into a sealed glass collection jar, which sat on the floor. The liquid inside the reactor was a pinkish red. The cells in the reactor were sick and dying, and were bursting and pouring out virus particles into the liquid, and then the virus-saturated liquid was running slowly out of the Biozan.

'Caught a fly,' he said out loud.

He opened the Halliburton and pulled out a sterile swab. He stripped the wrapping off the swab. Just then he heard footsteps in the corridor. Quickly Littleberry ducked down against the wall, below the level of the window in the door. The Halliburton was sitting open and in view.

Someone looked into the room but didn't enter. He heard sharp-heeled shoes. It sounded like a woman. He got to his feet and jammed the swab into and around the exit port of the Biozan, where liquid was flowing out of the bioreactor and into the collection jar. He held a Boink biosensor unit in his hands. He stuck the swab into the sample port of the Boink.

It beeped. The screen read 'COBRA.'

He jammed the swab into a sample tube, to preserve it, and dropped it into the Halliburton. He had seen enough. Time to get out of here before the stuff gets into my brain and turns me into a human bioreactor. He put the mask back on the wall and went out through the vestibule. He emerged in the main hallway and turned a corner, looking for Hopkins and the others.

That was where he encountered the woman. She came around the corner heading in the other direction. Their eyes met.

It was Dr Mariana Vestof.

He blurted out, 'I was looking for a men's room.' Time hung suspended. Her face held no expression. Then she smiled, but her face was drained of blood, and she said, 'Still inspecting toilets, Dr Littleberry?' She laughed a musical laugh, but her face hardly moved, and was without emotion.

'Still making vaccines, Dr Vestof?' he said. 'Only for you, Dr Littleberry.'

At that moment, Hopkins and Austen appeared, coming down the hall, followed by Heyert.

The sight of Hopkins seemed to paralyze Dr Vestof for a few seconds.

Hopkins reacted not at all.

'I will attend to some business,' Dr Vestof said, turning away.

Hopkins looked at his watch, 'Well, thank you, Dr Heyert. You've been very generous with your time.'

'I wish I could help you more.' 'You've been very helpful.'

Hopkins, Austen, and Littleberry dove into the waiting F.B.I. car. Hopkins was on his cell phone immediately with Frank Masaccio. He asked for perimeter surveillance to be thrown around the Bio-Vek building. 'We need this building covered completely. Mark says it's a weapons facility. He took a sample from a bioreactor and it came up positive for Cobra.' He explained who Dr Vestof was. 'I saw her last week in Iraq. She's an international type, Russian-born, lives in Geneva, she told me. She is in this thing deep.'

'If that's a biological weapon they're making, we can bust them now,' Masaccio said. 'That's a Title 18 crime. Except that sample Mark took might not hold up in court.' Masaccio was thinking about the way Littleberry had gathered the evidence. It may have been an illegal search.

The question was whether to raid Bio-Vek immediately or to hold perimeter surveillance and gather more evidence. Masaccio finally decided to hold surveillance for the night. 'Remember, our main goal is to get the Unsub before he kills more people. The company could lead us to the Unsub.'

The helicopter crossed Red Bank, New Jersey, and bent out over Raritan Bay. It headed up the eastern side of Staten Island, vectoring on Governors Island. Whitecaps whipped the sea below; a strong onshore breeze buffeted the helicopter.

'Bio-Vek may be connected to BioArk, the company that Vestof said she works for,' Hopkins said. 'Maybe the two companies are swapping strains and technology.' 'Welcome to the global village,' Littleberry said.

'I'll bet Heyert's telling himself he hasn't done anything wrong,' Hopkins said.

'He's probably working both sides of the street,' Littleberry said. 'Making money curing diseases. Making money selling diseases.'

At Bio-Vek, Dr Heyert, Dr Vestof, and two other managers sat in the conference room. The late-afternoon sunlight lit up the tinted amber window. There seemed to be no one around, and the fields outside were serene and beautiful. The F.B.I. was pouring surveillance into the area. The surveillance teams, which were coming out of Trenton and New York, were men and woman of varying ages and ethnic backgrounds, driving various kinds of cars.

Outdoors a swollen female robin, gravid with eggs, bounded across a,stretch of manicured grass. Inside, Heyert was speaking. 'I want the production stopped. Immediately.' They were going to stop the Biozan, stop the centrifuges, stop everything. They would sterilize all liquid materials by mixing them with bleach, and when they were sure the materials were dead, they would pour them down the drains, followed by water. 'I want those rooms nuked with bleach, from top to bottom,' Heyert said. 'We will restart the production line with our nonweaponized virus. Destroy all weaponized product, including the master seed cultures. Destroy every trace of the weapon. Erase all data pertaining to the project from the computer hard drives.'

'If they search you, I assume there will be nothing to trod,' Dr Vestof said.

'The problem is Tom Cope,' Dr Heyert said. 'He's done something — I don't know what he's done, but they are looking for him. He was a sick man, Cope. I knew it at the time. When we fired him, that number-four Biozan went with him. He stole it. He must have taken a master seed culture of the weapon. Did he?'

The managers didn't know.

'How can you possibly tell me you don't know if Cope stole a master seed?' Heyert said angrily. 'Every single seed tube was bar-coded!'

'He may have grown virus from a very small amount,' one of the managers said.

'Do you think this employee stole a seed culture, Dr Heyert?' Dr Vestof said. She held him in a hard gaze. 'That is incredible. The Concern will be appalled.'

Sweat was pouring from Heyert. The armpits of his shirt were dark and wet. 'This isn't my fault!'

'You are the manager of this division, I believe,' she replied cooly.

'Where is Cope now?' Heyert asked his managers. No one had any idea.

'Is he in New York?'

Dr Vestof had changed her plans. She would fly out tonight. She could see that the American subsidiary was about to blow up, and she didn't want to be anywhere near the United States when that happened.

Freeze

That night, the Reachdeep unit went into a kind of stasis on Governors Island. Suzanne Tanaka was hovering between life and death in the medical unit. She had had a seizure. Her prognosis was terminal, according to Dr Aguilar.

Oscar Wirtz readied his people for an operation. His squad consisted of a total of six agents from the Hostage Rescue Team who were trained in chemical, nuclear, and biological hot operations. It was clear that a freezeand-seize raid would be made on Bio-Vek, but it was not clear when the raid would occur. Masaccio wanted to wait, to see if more evidence would develop, and he also hoped that the surveillance of the company might lead directly to the Unsub. But he realized that he might have to move at any moment to shut down the company, depending on what the surveillance revealed.

There were fifteen Bio-Vek employees at the headquarters. The rule of thumb the F.B.I. uses for a freeze-andseize raid is for the evidence team to outnumber the employees at the site. You assign one agent to each employee, including secretaries and mail clerks. The culminating rush of a freeze-and-seize raid should take perhaps sixty seconds. During that time, every employee of the company is frozen by an agent who finds the employee and orders him to stop his physical hand motions, to move his body away from any company equipment and then freeze his body. Most employees will be innocent of any crime and will not be subject to arrest. But the company in its entirety can become federal evidence. Masaccio thought the raid could be accomplished with about forty agents, including the Reachdeep operations squad. He gave Hopkins the job of talking to a federal magistrate, asking for a search warrant to be drawn up.

At one o'clock in the morning, agents watching the BioVek building reported lights and activity. It seemed that all the Bio-Vek employees had gone home, except Heyert, who had not emerged from the building. The fights and activity did not look good. Then, through a window, the agents observed Heyert putting paper into a shredding machine.

'That's it! They're destroying evidence! Freeze them!' Masaccio shouted. He was sitting in the Command Center of the Federal Building in New York City. Helicopters took off from Governors Island. Bureau cars carrying agents converged on Bio-Vek.

Alice Austen did not go on the raid. She was not trained in operations. She stayed with Suzanne Tanaka, sitting by Tanaka's bedside, wearing a protective suit. Tanaka was connected to monitoring machines and lifesupport machines, but they made no real difference, nor did any of the supportive therapy seem to make any difference. The virus had invaded Tanaka's midbrain, had nested itself at the top of the brain stem, where it could not be reached. Tanaka had bitten her lips, but what seemed to bother her the most were the poxlike blood blisters that formed and began to burst inside her mouth. She asked for water but could not coordinate her swallowing, and she spilled water mixed with blood from her mouth over the arms of Austen's biohazard suit.

Tanaka remained conscious until nearly the end. The virus had left the conscious part of her mind clear even while it destroyed her unconscious mind.

'Do you believe in God, Alice?' Tanaka said. Her voice was thick, difficult to understand. Her face twitched, covered with sweat.

'Yes, but I don't understand God,' Austen answered. A helicopter landed, carrying Suzanne Tanaka's mother, who had been flown up from North Carolina. Tanaka had finally asked for her mother to come see her. But by the time they got her mother dressed in a protective suit, it was too late. Suzanne Tanaka had died. The first unit of F.B.I. agents to move on Bio-Vek was a group wearing operational clothing but not space suits. They tried the door. It was locked, so they broke it with impact rams, and rushed in. They were followed instantly by Wirtz and the Reachdeep operations group, who were wearing space suits. They had suited up at the airfield. They peeled off down a corridor. Littleberry and Hopkins, both wearing protective suits, went with Wirtz to show him the way to the bioreactor room. Agents poured into the building, heading in all directions.

They found Heyert and one Bio-Vek manager. There was no one else on the premises. Heyert was in his office talking on the telephone when they entered. The team served him with a search warrant and informed him that all of Bio-Vek, Inc., was being confiscated as federal evidence, including all computer data. They did not place Dr Heyert under arrest. They asked him if he would mind waiting voluntarily in his office for a short while, because Hopkins wanted to speak with him. Even though he was not under arrest, they read him his constitutional rights and reminded him of his right to say nothing, and his right to have an attorney.

Heyert agreed to wait. He did not want to seem to be fleeing.

Littleberry led Hopkins and Wirtz straight to the bioreactor room. They entered it thirty seconds after they'd gone through the front door of the building. The bioreactors were shut down and the room stank of bleach. They could smell the bleach coming through their respirators.

They took out swabs and collected samples from a variety of spots in the bioreactor room. They filled two dozen small plastic tubes with swab tips. Hopkins swabbed the bioreactor and the equipment, while Littleberry swabbed the walls, corners of the room, and a light switch. Hopkins stood on a table and pulled down the HEPA filter units in the ceiling. There was fresh, new fiber material in them.

'Look in the trash,' Littleberry said.

They found a trash can stuffed with used HEPA filters and used bioprotective suits. Everything was drenched with bleach. It was a small room, and it was obvious that one or two people, working for an hour or two, could clean it up.

Hopkins ran samples through the hand-held Boink. It chimed and chimed, telling them that it saw Cobra everywhere in the room. The effort to clean the room had failed completely. The bleach had killed the virus but could not destroy all the DNA of the dead virus particles.

They went back to the office, where agents waited with Dr Heyert.

Hopkins sat down facing Heyert, with Littleberry next to him. They removed their face masks. Hopkins thought it might make medical sense to leave his mask on, but on the other hand, Heyert was not wearing a mask, and neither were most of the F.B.I. agents. It was one of those situations where you take your chances.

Hopkins said, 'I want to offer you an opportunity to make the right decision. It will be the most important decision you make in your life, Dr Heyert. We have found an overwhelming amount of evidence that you are making biological weapons here. You cannot justify this as legitimate medical research. Your company has been seized and you are under investigation. I believe you will be arrested. The charge will be violation of Section 175 of Title 18 of the United States Criminal Code. That's the biological weapons section. Conviction can result in life imprisonment. If the crime is connected to a terrorist act, then it is a capital crime, and the death penalty can be imposed. I want to repeat: the death penalty can be imposed.'

Heyert stared at him.

'We can't do a plea bargain with you,' Hopkins continued. 'But if you cooperate with us right now, we can recommend leniency to the sentencing judge. Otherwise I believe you are likely to spend most of the rest of your life in prison.'

'I haven't committed any crime. If there was anything wrong… it was an accident.'

'We took samples from your bioreactor yesterday when you were running hot, Dr Heyert. We found a virus. We have sequenced most of the genes in the virus and it is clearly a weapon. It is a weaponized chimera. It's a mixture of-an insect virus, smallpox, and the common cold. It's very nasty. It seems to alter a gene in the human body, creating Lesch-Nyhan disease in normal people. It is a lethal weapon.' ,

'This is a lie.'

'The evidence will be introduced at your trial.' 'I have not committed any crime!'

'You could be charged as an accessory to terrorism,' Hopkins said.

Heyert was deeply frightened now. 'There have been deaths?'

'You tell me,' Hopkins said.

Something began to fracture inside Heyert. It happened delicately at first, like an egg developing a crack. The egg did not exactly break, it only leaked. 'It isn't my fault,' he said.

Littleberry, who had been staring at Heyert with a fierce expression, yelled, 'Then whose fault is it?'

'We don't control things,' Heyert said. 'We are controlled by BioArk, the Concern. BioArk is our silent general partner. I'm an employee. I am only a middle manager.'

'How do we find BioArk?' Hopkins asked. 'Geneva.'

'It's a Swiss company?'

'It's a multinational. I don't know where the Concern comes from originally. It is headquartered in Switzerland.'

'There's n terrorist making threats in New York City. Who is he?'

Heyert almost shuddered. 'I don't know what you are talking about,' he said.

'Yes, you do. Please do the right thing, Dr Heyert. For your sake and that of your family.'

Heyert drew a long breath. 'His name is Tom Cope — Thomas Cope. He's a strange man. A good scientist. He helped develop… our… some of our… uh… strains.' 'What do you mean?' Hopkins asked.

'We hired him to do research on a — a particular aspect of the virus. It wasn't able to replicate in human tissue very well. He… fixed it.'

'Why? Why did you want the virus to do that? Replicate in human tissue?'

There followed a long pause, and Hopkins saw fit to let it drag on. Finally Hopkins repeated, 'Why?'

Heyert seemed on the edge of tears. 'I have a family,' he said. 'I am afraid for them.'

'Why?^,

'BioArk. I am afraid. Can you — I–I can help you. I can tell you about BioArk. But can you protect my family? And me? These BioArk people are… without pity.^,

'We can't make any promises,' Hopkins said. 'If you can help us in the investigation and agree to testify, there is a witness protection program.'

'I'm more afraid of BioArk than I am of you.' The words tumbled out. Heyert couldn't stop now. 'BioArk is a biotechnology company. A multinational. Part of the BioArk business — only part of it — is black research into weapons. They also make medicines. They do both. They work both sides of the street. They were paying me and my staff well, but if we talked we would be killed. They located a subsidiary here because this is — well, this is America, where the most talented people in biotechnology are. They set up this company, Bio-Vek, to do contract weapons-research into focused areas. One of them was the development of N.P.V. as a weapon. I–I hired Tom Cope to figure out how to get N.P.V. to infect humans. There is very big money in this, Mr Hopkins.'

'What about the patients, Dr Heyert, the kids with Lesch-Nyhan?'

'I am a doctor. I do want to help them. It's just that there's no money; it's a rare disease.'

'Cope — did he develop the virus?'

'No. Others at BioArk had mostly developed it already. But there were some problems, and it was felt that the Americans could solve them. Tom merely sharpened the edge of the weapon. I fired him because he was unreliable and seemed — really odd, kind of scary.'

'How much virus did he steal?' Hopkins asked. 'I don't know… He stole a Biozan.'

'A bioreactor?' Littleberry said.

'The number-four Biozan, yes.' Heyert was trembling.

'We need to see your records on Cope,' Hopkins said. The employee records of Bio-Vek were kept in a locked filing cabinet in Heyert's secretary's office. Heyert gave agents the key, and they soon pulled Cope's employment file and his resume. If his resume was accurate (a big assumption to make), he had a Ph.D. in molecular biology from San Francisco State University, and he had a troubled employment history. For a while he had worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He had never married.

Thomas Cope was the Unsub no longer. The file contained his Bio-Vek company photo ID. In his physical features he was what might be described as a gray man. He had no strong or defining characteristics — he was of medium height with rather pallid skin, hair thinning on top but not completely gone. He was thirty-eight years old, and he wore metal-framed eyeglasses.

A team of investigators continued to question Heyert, but soon after having given them Cope's name, he stopped talking and demanded to have access to his lawyer.

Hopkins telephoned the information on Cope to Frank Masaccio, who put his task force to work on it. The first thing they did was to run a credit check on Cope. This is one of the easiest and best ways to find someone. You can learn if they are using a credit card, and if so, you can find out which businesses they are shopping at and what they have been buying lately. The pattern of activity on a credit card can quickly pinpoint a subject's location.

They found out that Cope had been using a Visa card under his own name to order laboratory equipment from a variety of suppliers across the United States. The things were being shipped to a mail drop that Cope maintained at a private mail service in a strip shopping center known as the Apple Tree Center in East Brunswick, New

Jersey. There was no other activity on the credit card except for these orders. Cope was evidently picking up his equipment in a car or truck and driving it somewhere else.

Hopkins was now standing in the parking lot at BioVek, talking on his cell phone to Frank Masaccio. Masaccio said to him, 'We're going to have Cope in a day or two, maybe in hours. You Reachdeep folks have done great work.'

'Don't count on anything,' Hopkins said.

'Yeah, I know. Any operation can fall apart. But we're going to bust him. I can feel it. We're throwing up a massive surveillance operation around the Apple Tree Center. I've got half the agents from the Newark office on the case. Cope is going to be history. Hold on a minute, Will, there's a call I have to take.'

Hopkins waited. Just then, Hopkins's beeper went off. He checked it. It was the contact number for Sioc in Washington.

When Masaccio came back on the line, he sounded like a different man. 'We've got a problem in Washington,' he said.

Washington

The second Cobra Event Sioc meeting began thirty minutes later. It was ten o'clock in the morning when Hopkins and Littleberry landed on Governors Island. They went straight to the meeting room in the Reachdeep unit, where Austen was already in a videoconference with Washington. Frank Masaccio was sitting beside her.

From his office at the F.B.I.'s National Security Division, Steven Wyzinski had given the order — with White House approval — to deploy disaster medical groups in Washington. There had been eleven deaths from what looked like Cobra in Washington overnight. Victims had been showing up in emergency rooms all over the metropolitan area. The C.D.C. task force on Cobra was working on the epidemiology.

'The news media is starting to go berserk,' Jack Hertog said. He had just come from the White House, and he seemed extremely angry. The video screen made his polo shirt look chartreuse. 'They're saying it may be food poisoning. They're also saying it may be deliberate. What if we've just been bombed with a chemical weapon?'

Walter Mellis was in the Sioc room with him. 'We've got a team in place, and we're looking at the epidemiology now. I have a preliminary result,' he said.

'What is it?' Hertog asked brusquely, turning to Mellis.

'All the cases seem to have been commuters on the Washington Metro. There was a release of hot agent somewhere in the subway.'

'Goddamnit!' Hertog cried. 'What's the casualty projection?'

'We've seen only eleven cases, so far, which is telling us that this was a small release, not a large one,' Mellis replied.

'A warning,' Hopkins said.

'He must have popped a few grams of agent into the air,' Littleberry said. 'If it was a big release, you'd know it. You'd have thousands of cases.'

Mellis turned aside and listened. Someone was speaking to him. Then he said: 'We've been working on samples in Atlanta. We have preliminary confirmation that the agent in Washington is in fact Cobra virus.'

All the cases of Cobra were being moved by Navy and Army medevac helicopters into Bethesda Naval Hospital. That is, the survivors were being moved. The dead were being stored in a refrigerated biohazard truck that was making the rounds.

Jack Hertog laid down the White House line. He said, 'I am here to tell you that the President of the United States will hold a news conference later today. The President is going to explain to the American people what is happening. It seems that the Reachdeep operation has been a failure. It has failed totally, disastrously.'

'We have the Unsub's name,' Hopkins said. Silence fell over the Sioc.

'His name, we believe, is Thomas Cope. He is a molecular biologist, a former employee of Bio-Vek, Inc., a biotech company headquartered in Greenfield, New Jersey,' Hopkins said. 'We're getting background on him now.'

'Is he under arrest?' Hertog asked. 'Not yet,' Frank Masaccio said.

'That's not good enough,' Hertog said. 'Where is he?' 'Can we put Cope's image on the screen?' Hopkins asked. Cope's face appeared on screens in Washington. 'We just obtained this photograph during the seizure of Bio-Vek.'

Frank Masaccio said that Dr Thomas Cope's name appeared on the F.B.I. profile list of Americans who had visited Kenya around the time the cobra boxes were bought in Nairobi. Bio-Vek records indicated that Cope had never married and had no children, but he had relatives. The F.B.I. was trying to locate them. Then Masaccio explained about Cope's mail drop in New Jersey. 'When we checked the doctor's credit records,' he said, 'we found out that he recently placed an order for safety suits and breathing filters from a company in California. The shipment went by Federal Express, marked for Saturday delivery. It's due in today. They're telling us at the mail service that Cope usually picks his stuff up on the day it arrives. We've checked all the phone numbers he left on various forms, and none of them check out, so we can't trace him through phone calls. But he's coming to get that package. He's got a key that lets him in anytime, and we've already got nearly a hundred agents waiting to nail him.'

'Yes, but how soon?' Hertog demanded.

'Hours if we're lucky,' Masaccio said. 'The Reachdeep people will be suited up, just in case of trouble at the shopping center, if the guy's got a biological with him.'

'The director of the F.B.I. has authorized me to say that all, repeat, all of the Bureau's resources will be dedicated to this case,' Steven Wyzinski said.

'After the horse left the barn!' Hertog said, his voice rising. 'How do you know he's going to pick up his mail? How do you know it isn't a group?'

'I can't guarantee anything until he's in custody, but I'm confident we'll have him soon,' Masaccio said.

'Cut the bullshit!' Hertog shouted. 'People are dying in Washington, for chrissake. This is not Lubbock! This is Washington. This is the goddamned fucking capital of the country! The people who run the fucking world live here! You marshmallows dicking around with your test tubes have left us open to a real mess. I want some straight F.B.I. work here, coordinated with anybody else in the goddamned government who knows how to get some results in this situation. I want the Reachdeep dickheads on that island off this case, and I want your top guys, Frank, your pros, taking this one down fast.'

Littleberry suddenly broke in, shouting, 'The terrorist is going to cook New York while you are shifting gears and the President tries to save his own ass.'

'You're fired,' Hertog snapped. 'You can't fire me, I'm retired.'

'Then I'm going to take away your goddamned pension.'

Break

Austen and Hopkins sat facing each other in the meeting room outside the Reachdeep Core. They had had nothing to do for hours except talk about the case. Mark Littleberry was out on the deck, staring across the water at the city. He'd been there for a long time.

'I'm worried that Frank's going down a blind alley,' Hopkins said. 'What if Cope doesn't pick up his mail? He could be anywhere.'

Austen doodled with a pencil on her map of the city. 'You know, I've been thinking… there's such a tight cluster of cases here. Here, in this part of the city. It's weird. We've got cases in Washington, but all the other primary cases fall in one part of the city. Look.' She showed him on the map. Her finger moved over a part of Manhattan. It was lower Manhattan, and toward the eastern side. Her finger moved over Union Square, where Kate Moran had lived, and over East Houston Street, where Harmonica Man and Lem had lived, then over the Lower East Side, where Hector Ramirez and his family lived — and to the Sixth Avenue flea market on Twentysixth Street, where Penny Zecker and Kate Moran had met. 'There's a pattern here.'

'Sure, but what?'

'Cope is like a thread crisscrossing the area,' she said. 'You can see it in the cases. When you have a cluster of illnesses, you go out and find the threads that link them. Cope is the thread.'

'You can't go and check that out. We're grounded.' Hertog had made it very clear that Reachdeep was restricted to Governors Island and to doing lab work only.

Nagged by the possibilities, Austen went to the hospital wing, where the Army Medical Management Unit was situated, and she put on a protective suit and went in. She was headed for the rooms where the family of Hector Ramirez was quarantined. Hector's young mother, Ana, was now in critical condition and was not expected to live. High doses of Dilantin seemed to be preventing her seizures, but not the self-cannibalism, and she was under heavy restraint in the intensive-care unit.

In a room that overlooked an avenue of plane trees, Austen visited Carla Salazar, Ana's older sister. Carla had been tested and had shown no sign of Cobra infection, but she had been kept in quarantine. She was frightened, and distraught over the condition of her sister and the death of her sister's little boy.

Austen sat down with her and asked her how she was doing.

In a very small. voice she said, 'Not good. Not good.' 'Do you feel okay?'

'I am okay now. But what about later? I could be like my sister. I can't look at her.' She began to cry.

'I want to show you a picture, Mrs Salazar. Can you look at a picture?'

'I don't know.'

Austen handed her the color photocopy of Cope's face, taken from the company card. F.B.I. investigators had earlier showed Carla Salazar the composite image from Nairobi.

She studied the color image for a moment. 'Maybe I have seen this man,' she said. 'Maybe.'

Austen's heart turned over. I wish Hopkins was here, he'd know the right questions to ask.

`Is this who murdered my sister's son?' Mrs Salazar asked.

It is possible. Who is he?'

`I'm trying to think. I seen him a couple times, I think. I'm not sure. I think he's the guy that yelled at some of the kids. He yelled at some of the boys one time. I don't know. I don't know. No, it's not the same guy… You think it's the guy that poisoned Hector? He was real mad at the boys. It was something about a cat.'

Hopkins got on the telephone to Masaccio. 'Frank — listen. We have a possible identification. There's a lady here, one of the Ramirez boy's relatives, who thinks she remembers Cope in the neighborhood.'

'How strong is she about it?' 'Weak. But this could be real.'

'Will, look. I know it's tough being shut out of the investigation like this. But there's nothing I can do about the White House. You're not a street agent, you're a scientist. We're set up and going to take Cope. My guess is it's going to happen any minute now.'

'He could do a lot while you're waiting around there.' `The guy's modus has not been to try to destroy a city. He had his chance, and he didn't take out Washington.' 'Cope has been in the testing phase,' Hopkins said. 'What if he's finished with his tests?'

'All right! I'll send someone to run your lead for you. When I get someone available. Calm down, Will.' 'Let's do the important elements again,' Hopkins said to Austen. 'Just tell me the details you think are important.' They had been trying to find a pattern, but nothing was coming. She listed the pieces that she thought had meaning. She said: 'We have Hector's aunt, who thinks she saw him. That would be around Avenue B. We have Harmonica Man living nearby on Houston Street. We have the black dust in the glue — it's subway dust.'

'And there was a pollen grain in the dust, remember? Forsythia.'

'We need to go to that part of the city and look in the subway tunnels again,' she said.

He stood up and paced, then slammed his hand on the wall. They couldn't go off the island.

Austen turned and headed out of the meeting room. 'See you later, Hopkins.'

He looked around. Wirtz was off with the communications equipment. Littleberry was still standing out on the deck. Hopkins picked up his gun and holster, which had been sitting next to a Felix. He took a Saber radio — his last voice contact with the federal government. He picked up a hand-held biosensor, programmed to detect Cobra. He took one of the color Xeroxes of Tom Cope's photograph. The mild bespectacled face stared at nothing. Hopkins folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

Mark Littleberry saw what they were doing. 'Where are you guys going?' He said he would come, too. 'For once you're not going to go AWOL, Mark. Can you stay here and do the explaining if anyone asks where we've gone?'

Austen and Hopkins walked out of the front door of the hospital and down the long steps. The hospital was quiet now, the Army doctors gathered in the biocontainment suite. They passed down an avenue of plane trees, past abandoned buildings, and they arrived at a pier that stretched into Buttermilk Channel in the direction of Brooklyn. A police launch was tied up, manned by two cops. They were listening to a news-radio station that was carrying sketchy reports of some kind of outbreak of disease in Washington.

'Can you guys give us a lift over to the Battery?' Hopkins asked.

As far as the cops knew, Reachdeep team members still had a priority for anything they wanted, and the two policemen were happy to oblige.

The police launch swung out into Buttermilk Channel, moving fast. The tide was running out to sea, and the boat bucked slightly against the thrust of the East River. Austen and Hopkins looked around: the sun was going down.

On the terrace of the Coast Guard hospital, Mark Littleberry continued his thoughtful vigil. He saw the launch crossing the river. He looked up at the sky and saw mare's tails fingering in from the south. The west winds of the past few days had shifted and then almost died, and the air had gone soft and mild. He saw from the structure of the sky that an inversion of the air had occurred over the city, trapping dust and particles, holding them suspended. The moon was rising in the late day, and it reminded him of something he'd seen almost thirty years earlier. He had not heard the television and radio broadcasts, but he knew that news of the attack on Washington was beginning to fill the airwaves. The breaking news and the structure of the sky would force Thomas Cope to act. 'He'll do it tonight,' Littleberry whispered.

Bioprep

The early human trials were finished. A large glass tube with metal ends sat on the lab bench in his Level 3 containment zone. He had filled the tube with hexagons of viral glass. The glass pieces were thin and clear, about the size of quarters. He was wearing a white Tyvek suit with double gloves and a full-face respirator, and he was just filling the tube with the last of the little windowpanes, holding them with tweezers, lifting them out of the drying tray.

He held a piece of viral glass in the last of the day's light, which was shining through a crack in the curtain. The glass refracted all the colors of the rainbow. It reminded him of an opal.

He went to his supply of BX 104 biological detonator. This was one of his little treasures. Biological detonator, or bio-det, is a military low explosive. It is used in biological bomb cores. It's a biological dispersant. One kilogram of viral glass shattered and dispersed,in a fine cloud the size of a city block would plume out nicely in the city.

He tucked a lump of bio-det into the large tube full of viral glass, pushing it in with his thumb. The glass cracked and creaked. He added a blasting-cap detonator, with wires attached to it. You wanted to use about one part explosive to three parts dry virus. That was the standard ratio in bomb design of an explosive bioweapon. The explosion would kill some of the virus particles — he knew that, of course — but since each pane of viral glass contained a quadrillion virus particles, it hardly mattered. Plenty of virus would survive the explosion. Many of the particles, embedded and protected in the glass, would merely fly into the air, traveling outward in a fog of viral glass — a viral glass laydown that would grow into a cloud, diffusing like gas.

The blasting cap would set off the bio-det. For a timer, he used a microchip clock. And there was a nine-volt battery. He could set the timer for any length of countdown. It would set off the bio-det, and a kilogram of viral glass would balloon into the air. Three hours was enough time for him to get upwind and well out of the city. New York was about to send a new disease into the world. Of course, it might be two days before the city truly realized that it was sick, and in the meantime perhaps quite a few people who had been in the city would be somewhere else. Including him, Archimedes. He would stay in Washington for a few weeks and observe the situation while considering his next move. Then he would repeat the trouble in Washington. Maybe. It was good to remain unpredictable.

He set the timer, which started to run. He pushed everything into the large glass tube and sealed it with a metal end piece.

He repeated the process with a second large glass tube, so that he had two mother bombs. He would put them in different places. That was a fail-safe.

Next he armed his bio-det grenades. They were smaller than the mother bombs. He had two plastic lab jars, and he filled each of them with a mixture of viral glass and pieces of broken bottle glass. Each grenade contained almost half a pound of explosive. Anyone hit by the shock wave would have a skinful of broken real glass mixed with virus. The grenades operated on a simple push-button timer.

He carried the bombs out of Level 3 into the staging area, where he sprayed his external suit with bleach, and then unzipped his suit and stepped out of it. Deconning was easy. He removed the bombs from the plastic bag and washed them in bleach to sterilize their outside surfaces, and then placed them in a black doctor's bag — my little joke, he thought. I am the greatest public health doctor.

Now he went into his bedroom, carrying the black bag. From his bureau drawer he took out a tenmillimeter Colt Delta Elite semiautomatic handgun. He slid a magazine into it. The Colt Delta Elite was a slim, high-tech version of the classic Army Colt.45. It had a laser-beam sight. The sight threw a spot of red light on the target. That made it extremely accurate. He carried the gun for safety, in case he had to defend himself. Now he was ready to move into the bloodstream of the city. Austen and Hopkins boarded a Lexington Avenue train bound uptown. Austen, reading her subway map, led them off at the Bleecker Street stop. They walked east toward Bowery and over to First Avenue, where they entered the station for the F train on East Houston Street. This led to the tunnel where the homeless victims had lived.

They walked to the eastern end of the platform and down to the tracks, where they picked their way through piles of debris, edging around steel columns that were almost hairy with black steel dust. They went through the hole in the metal wall to the unused tracks, the stubend tunnel, which extended under Houston Street.

'It smells bad in here,' Hopkins said. Austen didn't say anything.

'I hate tunnels,' Hopkins said.

'Some people call them home.'

They arrived at Lem's place, the chamber. It had been washed rather casually by a city cleanup crew. Hopkins took out his Mini Maglite, and they looked around. There did not seem to be any way in and out of here, except through the subway station.

They continued walking down the tunnel. They were going deeper into the stub tunnel, farther away from the tracks that were in use.

'We must be almost in the East River,' Hopkins remarked.

It grew quieter. The sound of the trains was farther away. They picked their way past a mattress and chair. Finally the tunnel ended with a concrete wall and a steel door. The door was locked. A sign on it said HIGH VOLTAGE — DANGER — NO ENTRY.

Hopkins tried the door. It rattled. 'Anyone in there?' The only sound was a faint humming from electric current.

They retraced their steps and went up onto the street. People were flowing along the sidewalks, crossing the streets. Many of them were young, students or people in their twenties. There were gay men, the occasional homeless man or woman, and there were people who might be fashion models. Austen and Hopkins blended into the crowds. They walked slowly along Houston Street, watching the faces, studying people. Hopkins pulled the piece of paper from his pocket and looked again at the face of Archimedes. It was early evening, and people were going to restaurants, to movies, or wherever people go on a Saturday night.

At a small park on Houston Street, Austen sat on a bench. Hopkins was restless, pacing. He hovered over her. 'Are you feeling all right, Alice?'

'Stop staring at my eyes.' She looked up at the buildings, around at the people in the streets, and the city seemed to dissolve in her imagination. The buildings became empty bones, like a dead coral reef. The people vanished. The city had gone stinking and silent.

Hopkins finally sat down next to her. On the adjacent bench a drunk was asleep. Hopkins studied the color photocopy of Tom Cope's face.

'Did you ever read about Jack the Ripper?' Austen asked him.

'He was a pathologist, I thought. He cut up women.' 'I don't know what he was,' she said. 'He walked to his killings, and he walked away from them. I think Tom Cope is like that. The guy is a walker.'

They kept moving. They headed uptown, into the East Village. They looked left and right, staring into people's faces. Occasionally someone would notice Austen and Hopkins staring, and would look annoyed. They walked east until they reached Avenue B, and they passed the apartment building where Hector Ramirez's family had been living. They went into a bodega. Hopkins showed the photograph to the grocer; he didn't recognize the face.

'This is hopeless,' Hopkins said. 'There are nine million people in this city.'

'Maybe we should go back into the tunnel,' Austen said.

'He's not in a tunnel. He's blending in. Up here is the place to hide.'

They searched the East Village in a back-and-forth pattern, walking along numbered streets, turning up avenues. They went past the old Marble Cemetery, where celebrities from the time of Herman Melville are buried, and they crossed through Tompkins Square Park, while Hopkins, the F.B.I. agent, felt an odd pang of envy watching the kids hanging out on the benches with nothing to do but waste time and talk their talk about nothing in particular — it looked like fun. He glanced over at Austen, and he realized that he had stopped thinking of her strictly in professional terms, and it bothered him. They debated heading into Greenwich Village, but instead walked down the Bowery, past several restaurantsupply stores, most of which were closed. A Chinese man wrestled with a giant used bread-dough mixer that he'd had on display on the sidewalk, trying to move it in through the door of his shop so that he could close. They crossed below Houston Street and started to cruise through SoHo, but the neighborhood seemed too bright and full of tourists from out of town, not really a Cope kind of place. They debated walking around Little Italy, but thought they were moving too far afield, so they turned north and crossed Houston Street again, and found themselves back in the East Village.

It was a transitional moment in the day. A lively Saturday afternoon had tapered off, but the club scene had not gotten going. The people in the street on this spring evening seemed relaxed, their bodies moving gently as they walked, not in much of a hurry to get anywhere. Hopkins and Austen found themselves in the less fashionable part of the East Village, close to avenues C and D, where no trees grew on the streets, giving the neighborhood an empty look. This had always been a poor part of Manhattan, and the residents had never had much heart for planting trees. In the distance they heard the banging of a hammer, and a cat looked at them from a doorway. In a small repair garage, a man lay on a pallet underneath a sports car, and his hand dropped a tool, which clanked beside him. The cross streets were almost deserted; later at night things would be livelier. Hopkins stopped and looked around. 'Where are we now?'

'1 don't know,' Austen said. 'We're close to Avenue C.' 'Kind of a so-so neighborhood,' he said.

'Not so bad.'

The area had a funky look. The buildings were mostly nineteenth-century tenements. Some of them had been renovated, and others had been torn down, leaving empty lots where sumac bushes grew around brokendown trucks covered with graffiti. Some of the lots were surrounded by chain-link fences topped with razor wire. Others had been turned into gardens. They passed a fence that opened into a vacant lot where children's play equipment was scattered among raised beds of flowers. The little park extended between two buildings. Hopkins wandered in and sat down on a children's merry-goround. Austen sat next to him.

'They're going to nail us to the wall for doing this,' he said. He scraped his feet in the dirt. A stray cat walked past. It was a dirty brown and white cat, and it had found a can of food someone had left out. It crouched over the food, watching them while it ate. Traffic sounds and flickers of moving cars came through gaps in pieces of plywood that lined one side of the park.

Hopkins planted his feet on the ground and pushed, causing the merry-go-round to turn. It gave off a creak. 'Huh,' he said, and pushed harder, and he and Austen turned around. Creeaak!

'Cut it out, it's bothering me,' she said. Slowly they came to a halt.

Austen found herself facing a row of bushes. They had been recently planted behind a railroad tie. They had yellow horn-shaped flowers, now shriveled and fading with the coming of May. ,

'See, Will, that's forsythia…' She raised her eyes. The back of a brick building rose beyond the flower bed, a four-story building that had been renovated. Fairly new double-paned windows with metal casings had been installed on all the floors. On the third floor, the windows were covered with brilliant white shades, and there was a small, high-tech fan whirring in one of them.

They sat on the merry-go-round, stunned with surprise.

'Oh, my,' Hopkins said, 'oh, my.'

He stood up slowly. 'Don't stare. Walk casually.' They walked out of the park, moving like two people with nothing to do. They crossed the street and turned back, and looked at the front of the building. It was a small turn-of-the-century apartment building, faced with yellowish brick, with a heavy cornice running along the top. All the windows on the third floor were covered with white shades. It was a well-kept building, but it did not have an elevator. 'You'd have to carry equipment up and down the stairs, but it's doable,' Hopkins remarked. 'Let's check the buzzer.' They went up the steps and looked at names on the buzzer. None of them was Cope. The button for apartment number three said 'Vir.'

They crossed the street again and stood facing the building. Hopkins put his hands in his pockets and slouched.

'Vir means "man" in Latin,' Austen commented. The front door of the building suddenly opened. Tom Cope was carrying his black leather doctor's bag, his little joke. He saw them as he was going out the front door. A woman and a man standing across the street and staring intently at him. Instantly he changed his mind. He turned around and went back into the hallway. Am I imagining things?

Hopkins saw the door open, and he locked eyes with a modest-looking man wearing eyeglasses, with hair going thin, pale skin, and a face that was burned into his mind. He reached under his jacket for his gun and started to glide for the door, no pause between the identification of the suspect and the movement toward an arrest.

Austen grabbed him. 'Dammit. Don't. He was carrying something.'

Hopkins stopped. She was right. If a guy has a bomb, you don't just try to arrest him. 'Get off to the side,' he said to her. He half-pushed her back into a doorway. He pressed her into the corner of the door and kept his body over her, shielding her. 'He may be armed,' he told her. 'It's time for you to leave.'

'No.'

'Then sit down on the steps, Alice. Keep your body mass close to the wall.' He sat down next to her. 'Okay. We're waiting for a friend who lives here. We're just sitting on the steps, hanging out, okay? Blah, dee blah, blah, we're talking, okay? Smile. That's it, smile! I need to use my radio.' Hopkins twisted his body and hunched over. He switched his Saber radio to the emergency channel and got an F.B.I. dispatcher. 'It's Special Agent Will Hopkins. Get me Frank Masaccio! This is extremely urgent!'

Then: 'Frank! We're in the East Village, near Houston Street.' He looked around, gave the address. 'We've got him! Cope. We saw him carrying some kind of bag. We have him under surveillance. He seems to be going under the alias Vir. V–I-R. I need massive backup. Massive! He may have a bomb. I'm sitting in a doorway here with Dr Austen.'

'Hopkins. Number one: you're fired. Number two: you're a better street agent than your old man.' Frank Masaccio was standing in the Command Center of the F.B.I. offices in the Federal Building. 'I'm sending you everything I've got.'

Surveillance

Tom Cope raced up the stairs to his apartment, lugging his bag. He bolted the door and sat down on a couch in the living room, with the bag resting on the couch beside him. They were staring at me as if they knew. They just looked federal. They cannot possibly be the F.B.I. There's no way they can have found me. But why were they staring at me like that?

He stood up and went over to a shaded window. Do I dare look? He pulled back the shade an inch or so and looked out onto the street. Did they leave?

He saw them. They were sitting in a doorway across the street. They seemed to be talking.

He returned to the couch. This is crazy, he thought. I'm going crazy. Get ahold of yourself, you're being paranoid.

Oh, shit. The timers in the bombs were running. He should disarm them. To do that, he had to go.back into Level 3. Damn! Several minutes later, inside the hot lab, all suited up, he opened the bombs and removed the timers and disconnected the wires. Then he went out of Level 3, carrying the bombs. He washed his suit and the bombs with the bleach sprayer in the staging-area hallway before he took off the suit and discarded it in a plastic bag.

He sat down again on the couch to try to gather his thoughts. He placed a bomb tube full of viral glass on a coffee table in front of him. He removed the Colt Delta Elite from the bag and placed it where he could reach it in an instant.

Outside, Hopkins and Austen continued to sit in the doorway. A woman came along and had to practically step over them to get inside her building. 'Why do 't you sit somewhere else,' she said.

Hopkins said to Austen, 'Don't look at Cope's apartment.' It was getting dark.

He drew back the shade slightly, and looked up and down the street. He couldn't see the man and the woman now. Why do I feel so afraid? He debated whether to make his move downward through the emergency exit. He needed to go to ground. If he could get into the subway system he could disappear.

Still, he couldn't bring himself to move. If he failed, he would fall into the hands of either the F.B.I. or BioArk. He began to hope it was the F.B.I. He would rather go to federal prison than meet some of those people from BioArk. How can I have allowed myself to be trapped in my building? he thought. Am I trapped? Again he pulled aside a shade, and looked out the window. The man and the woman had moved. They were sitting in a different doorway. Why wouldn't they leave?

Frank Masaccio had called the Washington headquarters of the F.B.I. He explained that Agent Hopkins had gone AWOL from Governors Island but had apparently found the terrorist. 'He and the doctor are on site.' He said he was rushing a Surveillance Operations Group into the area. The Reachdeep operations people and additional Hostage Rescue Teams were moving into place. Essentially the entire New York field office was joining the operation, and he called for extra help from Quantico. At the same time, some of his agents were starting to run checks on people who lived in apartments near Cope. The agents were trying to get a sense of who the neighbors were and what the neighborhood was like. 'We're going to try to gain access to a common wall with Cope's apartment,' Masaccio said to the Washington SIOC group.

A cable television repair van pulled up on the corner of Avenue C. The driver looked straight at Hopkins, and nodded slightly. Hopkins and Austen stood up from the doorway. They walked to the corner, the back of the van opened, and they climbed inside.

Oscar Wirtz was sitting in the back of the van. He was dressed in a gray sweat suit. The van pulled away. Simultaneously, an old pickup truck full of junk furniture stopped in front of Cope's building and doubleparked on the street. A Hispanic man and an AfricanAmerican woman were sitting in the cab of the pickup. They were shabbily dressed. The woman had something in her ear that looked like a hearing aid. She was talking with Frank Masaccio, and her voice was carrying live into SIOC in Washington. 'There's no activity on the third floor,' she said.

The cable television van carrying Austen, Hopkins, and Wirtz double-parked on a quiet cross street two blocks from Cope's apartment. Suddenly a large furniture-delivery truck appeared and parked in front of the television van. Hopkins and Austen got out and climbed into the back of the furniture truck. Mark Littleberry and a number of Oscar Wirtz's people — the Reachdeep operational squad — were inside. There were many boxes of biohazard gear in the truck. For the moment, the furniture truck was a staging and supply area for a biohazard operation.

'Are we going into action?' Austen said. 'Not you, Dr Austen,' Wirtz said to her.

Hopkins was listening to Masaccio on a Saber radio. 'The lady below him is a shut-in and she has diabetes and a heart condition,' Masaccio was saying. 'We can't disturb her. We can't get into the apartment above him without risking discovery — he may notice us going past him. On one side of the building there's an open lot. It extends around the building and down to Houston Street. This is bad luck. It's open ground, and he could see us moving there. The good news is the building on the other side of him. This building shares a common wall with his building. So we're going into the building next to him. We're going to try to get as close to him as we can, Will Junior. You tell your guy Wirtz to get ready to move fast in a very hot mess.'

The sun had set. It was eight-thirty in the evening. Before making any move to arrest Cope, they wanted to learn more about his state of mind and his weapons, and look at him visually. Another truck pulled up near Tom Cope's building. It was a Con Edison repair truck. Three Con Edison employees in hard hats — one was a woman, the other two were men — entered the building next to his. When they got to the third floor, they knocked on an apartment door. A man answered. They pulled out their F.B.I. credentials. It turned out that he was a columnist for a rap music magazine.

The Con Edison woman held up her F.B.I. creds. 'My name is Caroline Landau. I'm an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.' She introduced her colleagues. 'What do you want with me?' the journalist said.

Landau was firm about needing his help. She. explained that there was a killer next door, through the wall. 'We think he has a bomb,' she said. 'This is no joke. We're appealing to you for help.'

The man seemed unable to speak. Finally he stammered, 'You've got to be kidding.'

'I swear to you this is the truth.' 'I can't believe this,' he said.

'I'm pleading personally with you, sir,' Caroline Landau said. 'Sir, you are in very great personal danger. We all are.'

He had a feeling that he wasn't really being given a choice. He went downstairs with one of the 'Con Edison' people, and the truck carried him away. He spent the night at a hotel, courtesy of the F.B.I.

Apartment by apartment, floor by floor, the F.B.I. evacuated the building next to Tom Cope's. They did not dare try to evacuate his building, for fear he would notice — except the first floor, where a single woman was living. They got her out. Debriefing her in the staging truck, they learned from her that the man on the third floor was going under the name of Harald Vir, and that he did not socialize with anyone in the building, although he was very polite. That was Tom Cope.

In the journalist's apartment, Caroline Landau set up her remote sensing gear, working with a group of tech agents. Out of their Con Edison repair boxes they took a silent drilling machine. It could cut through brick and stone without making a sound. They cut through a layer of Sheetrock on the wall, and removed the material in pieces and set it aside. Under it was insulation. They pulled out the insulation. The apartment was getting trashed. Next they came to a brick wall. It was a common wall. On the other side of the brick wall was Cope's apartment.

Caroline Landau set out an array of contact microphones on the brick wall. These microphones were the size of nickels. They picked up sounds in Cope's apartment and fed them into an analyzer. You could listen on headphones and hear everything happening in his apartment, in stereo sound, with a sense of brilliant depth.

The furniture truck containing Hopkins, Austen, Wirtz, Littleberry, and the Reachdeep operational ninjas in it swung around the block and parked on the sidewalk near Cope's building. Under cover of darkness, moving with great speed, they unloaded a series of duffel bags and brought them into the building next to Cope's. They hurried them upstairs to the third floor, where the F.B.I. technical surveillance operation was now getting started.

Special Agent Landau and her crew set up two thermal-imaging cameras on tripods. The cameras resembled video cameras, except that the lenses were huge and had gold mirrors in them. The lenses looked like giant golden frog eyes. The cameras could see in infrared fight, which is heat. They could see warmth through walls, and see it clearly.

Landau wired the thermal-imaging cameras to display screens. A thermal image of Tom Cope's apartment appeared on the screens. Now they could see Cope walking around. He was in the living room, holding an object in his hands. He moved quickly and smoothly from place to place. He seemed calm, at least from all they could tell by looking at his shape.

They saw a large, warm cylinder in another room, and they thought it might be a bioreactor. To get a better look at it, the tech agents silently drilled a cone-shaped hole in the bricks. It took a while for their cutter to penetrate the brick, and they were fearful that the faint humming noise it made would alert Cope. Eventually the cutter had driven the hole to a point just under the paint surface in Cope's apartment. They were looking at a bit of paint from the back side, from the inner surface of the paint. They broke through the. paint with a pin. This made a pinhole in the paint at the point of the coneshaped hole in the bricks. Then they slid a cone-shaped optical assembly into the hole, so that the point of the assembly just penetrated the pinhole in the paint. The point of the cone was actually a fish-eye lens as small as a pencil point. Everything else in the optical assembly was behind the wall surface and invisible to Cope. Even if Cope had looked directly at the fish-eye lens he might not have noticed it. He might have thought it was a speck of dirt.

'We're a fly on his wall,' Caroline Landau remarked. The optical cone was connected to an electronic imaging system. On a flat screen appeared a fish-eye view of Tom Cope's laboratory.

Mark Littleberry recognized a Biozan reactor. 'It's not running. I'd guess he's finished making his virus stocks. But the liquid in that reactor is probably hot with Cobra.'

They could see Cope's boxes of moths and caterpillars, and his photograph of the Amazon rain forest, but they could not see Cope. He remained outside the laboratory, visible in the thermal imagers only as a ghostly orange figure sitting on the couch or moving restlessly around the living room, mostly keeping the long tube-thing in his hands, as if he couldn't let go of it. In stereo sound, they heard him talking to himself, saying, 'You idiot, you idiot, this is too important to fail.' A fuzzy shape rested on a table in front of the couch. Hopkins and Austen thought it was probably the bag he'd been carrying when they'd seen him. Then he opened it — it was the bag — and he seemed to play with another long tubething and a couple of smaller objects, and then he pulled out something recognizable.

'He has a gun,' Caroline Landau said. 'Could be a.45. Oo-ee, it's got a nifty sight on it.'

He placed the gun on the table, and lay back on the couch not ten feet from a massive F.B.I. surveillance and SWAT group, with no apparent inkling of the weight of agonized law enforcement that pressed up against his living-room wall like a flood swelling behind a dam that was getting ready to burst. They were fascinated with the large cylinder that he held in his hands: it had to be a biological bomb. They counted possibly two large bombs, they weren't sure, including one that seemed to be in the bag all the time. They debated trying to drill another fisheye lens through the wall to get a clearer picture of him and his bomb or bombs but decided not to, afraid he might notice. They had been lucky up to now, and the last thing they needed was a surveillance boo-boo, something not unheard of in operations of this type.

He sat on the couch. What to do? Were they watching him? Or was he imagining this? He went to the window and peeked out, but he was afraid to stay there for more than a few moments. Soon he would have to make his move. He went back into the living room and picked up one of the small bio-det biological grenades. Despite the fact that the explosive was a low-velocity type, the grenade would be absolutely devastating inside a closed space, such as in a room or a tunnel. The two grenades were both a defense and an offense; he could use them either way.

At the F.B.I. Command Center in the Federal Building, Frank Masaccio and his people monitored the situation and stayed in touch with Sioc in Washington, which was in full operation. Masaccio had command: he would call the moves. He was not going to burst in on Tom Cope. Not if the man had a bomb, not if he was barricaded in an apartment. That was far too dangerous. He was going to wait until Cope came out of the building, then swoop on him and make the arrest. The idea was to take him so fast he would not have time to detonate anything.

Snipers with Remington.308 rifles would be standing by on the rooftops. If they received an order to shoot, the snipers would aim for his eyes. This is standard procedure in a sniper takedown. You try to hit a two-inch band around the eyes. The bullet enters through the eyes and explodes the brain stem and sends it out through the exit wound. With the brain stem gone the body relaxes — the muscles don't tense. So if the person is holding a finger on a trigger or on a detonator, the finger relaxes spontaneously.

Masaccio instructed the snipers not to shoot without orders. He didn't know how Cope's bomb worked. It might go off if Cope collapsed. If there were indications that Cope was going to detonate a bomb inside his apartment, then the Reachdeep operations people had orders to move through the wall as quickly as possible and try to stop Cope. The goal was the same as always: not necessarily to kill Cope, but first and foremost to render him harmless.

They needed a man known as a master breacher to prepare the way for them into Cope's apartment. The F.B.I. has several master breachers. They work out of Ouantico. While the surveillance operation was getting under way, Oscar Wirtz had called Quantico, and a master breacher named Wilmot Hughes had been put in the air, flying to New York on an F.B.I. plane. He arrived at ten o'clock. Cope was still in his apartment and had not made a move.

Wilmot Hughes was a small, wiry man who had spent a lifetime devising ways of entering secure locations rapidly, often with help from explosives. He could enter airplanes and boats and cars and bunkers.

The master breacher inspected the brick wall, running his hands over it, tapping it lightly. 'Fortunately this is trivial,' he remarked. He began laying shaped plastic explosive charges in a pattern over the bricks. An oval portion of the brick wall that led to Cope's living room would disappear in a fraction of a second whenever the master breacher wanted it to disappear. He gave instructions to the Reachdeep team to he flat against the wall on either side of the charges when they went off.

Cope seemed indecisive. At one point he went into the bathroom and urinated, and they saw and heard that, and an hour later he urinated in the bathroom again. He seemed increasingly nervous. Every now and then Cope image — a warm human-shaped form — would cross the living room to a window and peek out. The curtains showed up as black rectangles on the imaging screens.

Masaccio spoke to Wirtz on a headset. He told him to get ready to move, now that the breacher had prepared a way. Wirtz and the Reachdeep ninjas began putting on space suits and body armor.

Littleberry said: 'I'm going in. I want to see his lab.' 'You're too senior for this kind of action,' Hopkins told him.

'You can't deny me.' Littleberry turned to Austen. 'You comin' too?'

'Sure am, Doctor,' she said to Littleberry. 'Hey — Hopkins said.

He gave orders for the doctors to stay behind him, but he thought he was fighting a losing battle to keep them out of it altogether. Everyone pulled on black Racal biohazard suits, and Wirtz made them wear body armor. They had lightweight radio headsets. Wirtz told Hopkins to stay well back. 'You and the doctors come in after we've secured the place.'

'I'll be climbing over your back, Oscar,' Hopkins said. He buckled a pouch to his waist, which he filled with certain essentials: swabs, his pocket protector full of pens and other junk, his Mini Maglite flashlight, and a Boink biosensor. He strapped on his SIG-Sauer nine-millimeter semiautomatic. He ran his radio headset wire down to a transceiver at his waist, which operated over a wide variety of channels. This piece of equipment made it possible for members of the team to talk with each other and with the Command Center. Finally he put a Racal hood over his head, running his radio wire under the hood's shoulder shroud. He switched on the batterypowered blower for the Racal filters, and the hood pressurized. The blowers made a low hum. The battery would keep the hood pressurized for up to eight hours. He jumped up and down lightly on the balls of his feet, feeling keyed up and wanting to move.

'Take it down, Will!' Oscar Wirtz said. 'You're shaking the floor, man.' Wirtz thought: He would not do well in a shooter. But I don't have the heart to tell him.

Hopkins turned off his blowers and removed his Racal hood. There was no sense in wearing it while they were waiting for Tom Cope to make a move.

On the rooftops nearby, the snipers kept the windows of Cope's apartment under surveillance with infrared zoom scopes. They could see Cope occasionally, when he moved close to the metal curtain. They put the crosshairs on his eyes when he peered out, but they couldn't shoot. He always seemed to be carrying the bomb. He moved often and seemed fearful of going near the windows.

A little over a mile away, Frank Masaccio sat in the Federal Building wondering what to do. He had the Sioc in Washington watching his every move, secondguessing him, and the White House seemed ready to have some kind of heart attack. The President had not given the news conference; it had been put on hold while the situation in New York unfolded. Frank Masaccio was pondering his options.

Steven Wyzinski's voice came to him: 'Frank? Frank? Do you hear me? The attorney general is here at Sioc.' 'Mr Masaccio.' It was the voice of Frank Masaccio's ultimate boss, second only to the President in the chain of authority. 'Any decisions you make will be reviewed and cleared by me.'

Masaccio continued to recommend that no sudden moves be made. He didn't want to commit his forces to an action or to reveal their presence to Cope. Certainly trying to open negotiations with Cope would be a ri xxxxxxxxx thing to try — it might set him off. It wasn't clear what Cope suspected, but Masaccio planned to wait for him to leave the building, then to take him. Trying to take people inside apartments was a recipe for a shooter gone bad, and if the guy had a weapon of mass destruction in his apartment, you had to suck the egg through a pinhole — so ran Masaccio's thinking.

In the apartment, Cope went into the bathroom again, carrying the mother bomb. He placed it on the floor. Then he unraveled a long piece of toilet paper and blew his nose. He wiped his face with more toilet paper. He went over to the sink and rinsed his face with cold water.

The surveillance team knew it was cold water, because they could see the color of the water in the thermal imagers.

He was so nervous that he was trembling. Why am I so afraid? He looked into the mirror. His eyes had a strange color. Was that a golden ring around the pupils? He looked into his pupils reflected in the mirror. His nose was running. His upper lip was glistening wet.

No. It could not be. He knew that brainpox was selective in its infectivity. He knew that it infected only about half of the people exposed to it in low doses. It was like so many virus weapons. He had been around the virus for months and he had not become infected. This was impossible. He wondered if he had made a mistake. Maybe when I did the release in Washington I didn't hold my breath in that subway car for long enough.

Maybe some of it stuck to my clothes or my hair. No, that's impossible, I'm immune. I'm imagining things. There is nothing wrong with my mind, nothing. I don't feel anything. If I was infected with brainpox, my mind would feel different. I am a normal paranoid schizophrenic, he said to himself, and he almost smiled, but he wondered again if he had made a big mistake when he had done the Phase II trial in Washington. Cope had a bioreactor full of liquid Cobra virus. Littleberry believed that the reactor was very hot, and that led to a discussion of what to do if some kind of biological meltdown occurred in the apartment during an action. People from the mayor's Emergency Management Office were in the Command Center with Masaccio, and they had an idea that sounded as if it might just work. It was to fill some Fire Department pumper trucks with disinfectant and spray the entire building if Cope's bioreactor dumped its contents. The Fire Department found a chemical shipper in Brooklyn who had a lot of sodium hypochlorite on hand — that's common laundry bleach. Several pumper trucks went over to Brooklyn and were filled with bleach and water. They then fined up, as discreetly as possible (which wasn't very discreetly) on a street around the corner from Cope. The Fire Department also had decontamination trucks, which are used to decontaminate firemen or citizens who have been exposed to chemicals or asbestos, and those trucks were stationed nearby.

It was now one o'clock in the morning. Cope had not been able to fall asleep. He was still indecisive. Part of the reason for that was that he was no longer completely him. The transformation was occurring rapidly now. Crystals were forming in his brain stem.

'Move the fire trucks in as close as possible without making them visible in any of Cope's windows,' Hopkins said, speaking to Masaccio. 'Get them ready to start spraying bleach into the building if we call for it. Wirtzy is dying to move. If we go through the wall, start the spray. If the bomb goes off, let's hope the spray will decontaminate the building.'

'That's a big hope, Hopkins,' Masaccio said.

Down

It was now three o'clock in the morning. Alice Austen had been watching Cope on the screens of the thermalimaging cameras. He had not gone to sleep. When he stood up from the couch and began to move across the room, she made a tentative diagnosis. Cope seemed to be making some involuntary gestures. Jerky movements. He was talking to himself. And moaning. 'I'm not sick. Not sick.'

'Listen, Will. I think he's infected,' Austen said. They studied his body movements, but Austen couldn't be sure.

Then Cope seemed to make up his mind. 'Option two,' he said.

'What was that?' Hopkins said. 'He's losing it,' Littleberry said.

The blurry thermal image showed Cope bent over the object in his hands. They heard a sound. It was the sound of the metal end piece being unscrewed from the glass bomb tube. He fiddled with something. They heard a dry, rustling, cracking sound. It was the sound of wires being pulled through a packed mass of viral hexagons in the tube. He was re-arming the bomb.

Hopkins stood and put his hand up. 'Wirtzy! He may blow something! Get ready!'

Everyone put on Racal hoods, which took a few seconds. They zipped up their suits and started their air filters running. If the building goes hot with that bomb, Hopkins thought, it could kill all of us, space suits or not. The air near bioground zero would be so thick with virus, it might overwhelm the suit's protection. Quick as cats, Oscar Wirtz and five Reachdeep operational ninjas positioned themselves against the thinned wall, on either side of the charges. The master breacher, Wilmot Hughes, readied his controls. Everyone was wearing full space-suit battle dress with body armor. The ninjas were carrying flash grenades and Heckler & Koch assault weapons.

In Washington, as it dawned on the Sioc group that Reachdeep was getting itself poised to move, a number of people began shouting contradictory things at the same time.

'What the hell's Hopkins doing?' 'Masaccio! Answer us!'

Cope replaced the cap on the cylinder. The bomb was now armed. He slid it inside the carry-bag.

Hopkins stared at the thermal image, trying to read Cope's body language. Was this a man who was getting ready to blow himself up? Hopkins didn't think so. But what was he doing?

Carrying the bag, Cope walked into the corridor that led to the laboratory. He did not put on a protective suit. He opened the door of the lab. Now, in the fish-eye lens, they saw him clearly for the first time. He stood by the door, looking across the room toward the bioreactor, and suddenly he picked up a heavy glass beaker and hurled it.

The bioreactor, which was itself made largely of glass, exploded, its blood-warm contents splashing through the air in a spray of droplets. The pink contents poured out and flooded across the floor in a warm running meltdown of amplified liquid Cobra virus.

'It's gone hot!' Hopkins yelled. 'Go!' Masaccio responded.

Everyone pressed flat against the wall, and the master breacher detonated the charges.

The wall went down as if it were made of gravel, and an oval hole opened up. Wirtz and the ninjas poured through.

Austen, who was lying on the floor, couldn't look. She tucked her head down under her arm, and her stomach lurched. There were brilliant flashes at her back, from the flash grenades. The flash grenades blinded the thermal cameras.

Wirtz had led his team through the hole. They kept their guns ready but held their fire. Hopkins saw the screens go white when the flash grenades went off. Then the screens came back to normal. He saw Cope's thermal image, running across the field of view.

'Oscar, he's moving to your left!' he shouted over the radio link.

He saw Wirtz and his people moving through the apartment. Two of them detached leftward.

'Wirtzy, he's in the kitchen!' Hopkins shouted. Suddenly he saw the form of Tom Cope curl up in a ball — and, unbelievably, Cope dropped straight down through the floor and out of sight. 'He's going down!' Hopkins yelled. They pointed the imagers down through the floor. They saw Cope's form descending straight down through the building, until his image faded away.

Tom Cope had smashed the bioreactor, and he had backed out of the room and shut the door. An instant later, the apartment had filled with shocking explosions and flashes of light. He raced into the kitchen. Figures in black space suits were tumbling into his living room.

Many old buildings in New York City have dumbwaiter shafts that are no longer used or are used for trash disposal. The dumbwaiter was Cope's planned escape route. He had not dared to try it because he was afraid they would be in the basement waiting for him. Now he had no choice.

Carrying his doctor's bag, Cope had climbed through an opening in the wall of the kitchen and curled up on the dumbwaiter platform. He let the ropes go and the platform went down fast, the ropes singing in the pulley. He came to a halt with a bang in the basement, inside a closet. He flung himself out the door. No one around. He raced through a heating tunnel and came to a small opening in the brickwork covered with a sheet of plywood. He tore the plywood off. There was his crawl space, his escapeway. He went through it, scraping his knees on broken concrete. He cut his knee, ripping his pants. The crawl space was black with dust. Ahead, he heard the rumble of a subway train.

The F.B.I. Hostage Rescue Team coming in through the front door of the building was in a rush to get to the third floor, and they formed a strung-out deployment, team members stopping on every floor to cover the next wave. They had reached the third floor when they heard on their radio headsets that the suspect had gone down through the building, and was presumed to be hiding in the basement.

In the apartment, Oscar Wirtz and some of his team headed for the kitchen, where Hopkins was telling them that Cope had disappeared. In the kitchen they found the dumbwaiter shaft.

Seconds later, Hopkins entered. He was carrying a spray tank full of Envirochem, a powerful antibiological liquid. Austen followed behind him, and Littleberry after that. They headed for the bioreactor room, where Hopkins did his best to spray Envirochem all over the floor and walls, making a mist inside the room. Soon bleach would be pouring into the building from the fire trucks.

On his radio, Hopkins heard Wirtz calling to him. He headed for the kitchen, Austen and Littleberry behind him.

'He's gone down a shaft,' Wirtz was saying. 'We're heading after him.'

They followed Wirtz down the stairs, through tremendous confusion. The other H.R.T. teams in the building were wearing respirators but not space suits, and they were evacuating the building's residents. The elderly woman who lived below Cope had to be gotten out fast now, since the reactor was in a room above her.

Leaving these problems to the other teams, the Reachdeep group focused on getting Cope. Wirtz and his ninjas spearheaded a sweep of the basement, with the scientists hanging back but unable to stay out of the operation. Wirtz was swearing to himself about this, vowing that next time he would make sure the scientists were put in a box. For the moment, he could do nothing about it.

It didn't take him long to find the crawl space and the sheet of plywood lying on the floor. 'Cope! Are you in there?' he shouted.

No answer.

Wirtz noticed a spot of blood on the concrete floor of the crawl space, and near it were drops of some kind of moisture that was not blood. Hopkins swabbed the blood and jammed the swab into his Boink. The biosensor beeped. 'Cobra,' he said.

What now?

They shouted again into the crawl space. Silence. 'Scientists back off,' Wirtz said. 'Operations people in first.' He vaulted up into the crawl space. One by one his people followed him, squirming on their hands and knees, pushing their weapons ahead of them. They barely fit. They did not have flashlights; this was an unforeseen development.

Wirtz, the first in line, came to the end of the crawl space. It opened out into darkness and dropped down into a low, narrow passage running at right angles. He could still see a little.

'What's happening down there?' Frank Masaccio asked. He was sitting at his command post, listening to the audio feed, and he was quietly losing his mind. He did not feel as if he was in control of the team.

'What's happening in New York?' These words were spoken by Steven Wyzinski at Sioc in Washington. There was a rumbling sound, a roaring, and it grew louder. It was being picked up by Wirtz's mike.

They heard Wirtz's voice over the sound, saying, 'That's a subway train you're hearing. We're near the subway. I'm behind some kind of wall here.'

Cope had gone into the subway. He had slipped through the grasp of a huge F.B.I. operation, and he was carrying a biological bomb or bombs.

'This is fucking terrible!' Masaccio yelled.

'Maybe we can biocontain him,' Hopkins said into his headset.

'What do you mean?' Masaccio asked.

'The subway tunnels are a natural biocontainment area. If he blows a bomb in there, maybe we can seal the tunnels off and stop the trains. Maybe we'd rather have him down there than up in the open air. Let's try to trap him in the tunnels. Frank, you need to shut doyen the air-circulation fans in the subway. You don't want tunnel air being vented outdoors, and you don't want air being drawn in, either.'

Masaccio put through an emergency call to the Transit Authority Operations Control Center on West Fourteenth Street. This is a large control room, manned by dozens of subway system operators. He got a system supervisor on the line. They began stopping the trains. They turned off all the air blowers and fans. Masaccio went into a flurry of shouting and orders. The bottom line was that F.B.I. agents and New York City police officers were to seal off all the subway entrances in the neighborhood of East Houston Street, and then go down into the subway and sweep the tracks, to find Tom Cope. Almost none of these forces were equipped with any kind of biohazard masks or protection. If Cope's bomb went off, many of them would die. Masaccio was throwing in his reserves, but they were not prepared. He had no choice.

Reachdeep team members followed the crawl space that Cope had entered underneath his building. It led to the door at the far end of the Houston Street subway stub tunnel. The door was supposed to be locked, but what appeared to be a secure catch was in fact a mechanism that snapped open if you knew how to operate it. This was Cope's route of escape. The route went directly past the places where Harmonica Man and Lem had lived. They had died because they had seen Cope using the door.

Oscar Wirtz led the way, then five ninjas, and then, bringing up the rear, came Hopkins, Austen, and Littleberry. It is true that Mark Littleberry, or any man his age, did not belong in an operation of this kind, but no one could control Mark Littleberry; the man was fundamentally uncontrollable.

The tunnel was silent. The subway trains had stopped running.

Faintly, they heard Masaccio's voice on their headsets: 'What are you doing? Report?'

'I can't hear you, Frank. You're breaking up,' Hopkins said. 'We're coming into the Second Avenue station. You've got to seal it off.'

'We're doing it now, we're sending police into all the stations,' Masaccio replied.

They moved forward, running at a jog trot.

F.B.I. communications specialists told the Reachdeep group to switch their radios over to a frequency used by the Transit Authority. This improved the reception, which depended on wires strung inside the subway tunnels. When the Reachdeep people came up onto the Second Avenue platform they found it deserted.

Cutoff

He had come out onto the Second Avenue platform a few minutes ahead of his pursuers. Should he wait for a train? At three in the morning, he might have to wait a long time.

Don't wait for a train, that would be stupid. And the street up there will be crawling with agents. Don't go up to the street here.

Keep moving. He now believed that he might be infected, but he could still move. Perhaps he had developed some kind of resistance to the virus. Perhaps he could survive an infection.

He hurried along the length of the platform, carrying his doctor's bag. He climbed down the stairs at the end of the platform and got back on the tracks, heading west now, following the route of the F train toward the center of Manhattan. His feet pounded along on the ties. He noticed something that he did not like. The tunnels were silent. The power was off in the rails, and he couldn't hear any fans, although the lights in the tunnel were still on. Then he heard a sound behind him. He looked back. He saw five or six people in black space suits moving across the platform of the Second Avenue station, in the distance.

He broke into a run, his feet splashing through puddles, stumbling on the ties. They don't have me yet.

He felt a cool determination sweep over him. Have courage. You will be remembered by future ages as a man of vision and heroic will.

Heading westward through the main subway tunnel, he saw that he was approaching another subway station. He knew it was the Broadway Lafayette stop. He wanted to get out onto the street there. Or did he? W hat to do?

Set off the bomb right here? He had a better idea. He had explored this tunnel before, on foot — part of his research into the body of the city, looking for places to do a biological release.

He was looking for a side tunnel that he remembered, a little-used cutoff. He knew that it doubled back. He could circle around his pursuers, if he could just remember where the tunnel was. Here it was: a switch in the tracks, and a single-track tunnel breaking to his left. It headed south, toward the Lower East Side of New York City.

At that moment, Frank Masaccio was learning about the side tunnel. He was talking with subway system operators in the control room on Fourteenth Street. Masaccio had sent an F.B.I. team into the Broadway Lafayette subway station, and that team was now moving east toward the Reachdeep team, which was moving west. They were attempting to trap Cope in a pincer between the two stations.

'There's that BJ 1 tunnel,' a system operator told Masaccio. 'If you're trying to trap the guy, and he finds that BJ 1 tunnel, that will be his only way out.' 'Where's it lead?' Masaccio asked.

The BJ 1 tunnel led to a station at the corner of Delancey Street and Essex Street. Masaccio ordered a police or F.B.I. team — whichever was closest — to deploy there fast.

Meanwhile, the Reachdeep team arrived at the entrance of the BJ 1 tunnel. It was a curving tunnel, poorly lit.

'We think he's gone in there,' Masaccio told them. His voice was crackly and distant.

'You're breaking up,' Wirtz said to him. 'Turn left into that tunnel,' Masaccio said.

The Reachdeep team turned into the BJ 1 tunnel, moving quickly. They were in a rarely used tunnel that ran south and east under the Lower East Side. It was illuminated by lightbulbs at intervals, and it was coal black with steel dust. As they went deeper into the BJ 1 tunnel, their radio contact with the F.B.I. Command Center broke up and finally vanished. The team, at this point, consisted of six heavily armed ninjas including Oscar Wirtz, and three scientists — Will Hopkins, Alice Austen, and Mark Littleberry. Reachdeep was on its own.

Essex-Delancey

Tom Cope moved along cautiously but quickly through the BJ 1 tunnel, carrying the black bag with its explosive assemblages of crystallized Cobra virus-dispersal bombs. The Delta Elite handgun was also in his bag. The tunnel stretched out ahead, the single set of tracks gleaming in the occasional lights that burned in niches. He stopped every now and then to listen. At one point he thought he heard them coming behind him, but he wasn't sure.

The tunnel went down a slope, turning south. It passed underneath a parking lot and then underneath Bowery Street, and headed downtown along the Sara Delano Roosevelt Parkway, a strip of greenery and playgrounds on the Lower East Side. It was 3:20 on a Sunday morning, and when police cars and F.B.I. cars suddenly began pouring into the neighborhood, and police teams began running down into subway entrances, there were not too many people around to notice, although patrons of nearby clubs were drawn to the activity and stood out in the street wondering what was going on. Since reporters listen to the police radio, television news trucks soon headed for the Lower East Side, tracking reports of a possible terror incident. The Cobra Event had been kept a secret, but the moment Cope slipped away, and the operation turned into a chase, it started to blow into the media.

The BJ 1 tunnel was going deeper underground, and Cope followed it. At first it headed south, but then it curved eastward, away from the Sara Delano Roosevelt Parkway, and it passed in a swooping curve under the old heart of the Lower East Side, under Forsyth Street, Eldridge Street, Allen Street, under Orchard Street, and then it headed due east under Delancey Street.

Cope knew where he was going, in a general sense. He had explored these tunnels on foot, and he had memorized a variety of routes of escape. This route was perhaps his best bet, he thought. He was heading for the Williamsburg Bridge, which rises from Delancey Street, connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn. He felt that he could hide his explosive devices either somewhere in a tunnel, or perhaps he could leave them in the open air where they would blow and plume into the city. He did not want his pursuers to find the devices. That was the problem. If he left them here in the tunnel, the devices would be found and perhaps disarmed. His leg hurt, and it was slowing him down. He had cut his knee while scrambling out of his building.

The tunnel began to rise, and it curved to the northeast. He saw lights ahead. It was the platform of the Essex-Delancey Street subway station, a complicated station at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.

I will get out here, where I don't have to take the stairs up to the street.

The tunnel came out close to the Essex Street platform. A couple of hundred yards past the platform, the tracks headed up onto the Williamsburg Bridge. The platform was deserted. In the distance Cope could see lights. That was his way out. They wouldn't think to block this way.

Meanwhile, a group of New York City police officers were sweeping a set of stairs to the Essex Street platform. Cope was hurrying along the tracks by the platform. He heard a sound of running footsteps, voices shouting; he saw movement on the stairs, and he turned around and retreated the way he had come. He faded into a niche in the wall back in the BJ 1 tunnel, listening to their radios crackling. They were searching the platform. It was certain that any moment they would come into the tunnel looking for him. What to do?

He knew that an F.B.I. team was coming down the BJ 1 tunnel behind him. He was trapped between the F.B.I. and the New York City police department.

I should do it here. Set it off. He hesitated. But the issue _ wasn't so simple. He wasn't absolutely certain he was infected with the virus. Maybe he wasn't infected. It is hard to choose to die. It is easier to choose to be alive, as long as you have life left in you. There might be a way out.

He heard the rustling sound of the space suits, the pounding of their light rubber boots. They were coming fast.

He moved out of the niche and crept along the wall, and entered a dark area, some abandoned rooms. Ducking, moving fast, he hurried through the rooms. He was not more than forty feet from the police officers on the platform. He found some old air-blowing equipment, broken and unused machinery. A refrigerator. Where to go? For a moment he thought that he could climb inside the refrigerator. It had been painted black — weird. But it was too small; he couldn't fit in there. He got down on his knees and curled up against the wall, beside the black refrigerator.

He opened his bag and pulled out a bomb full of viral glass. He opened one end of the tube, and tugged out the detonator wires. If he crossed the wires, shorted them out, the bio-det would explode. He would die, but his lifeform would live and go into the world.

The Essex Street station contains a large abandoned area that was at one time a trolley-car station. The police officers, having swept the platforms, prepared to move out into the trolley area. At that moment, the Reachdeep team arrived at the Essex Street platform. The ninjas had a conference with some of the police officers. Cope seemed to have vanished.

'He could have gone onto the bridge, there,' a policeman said. 'Either that, or he's in that trolley area.' Meanwhile, he was wondering: If these agents are wearing space suits, what am I getting exposed to down here?

'You guys stay back. You don't have protective gear,' Wirtz said to the police officers. The F.B.I. people did not have flashlights, while the police officers did. They borrowed the officers' flashlights, and began to sweep through the trolley area, shining the lights left and right, moving among columns. Hopkins, Austen, and Littleberry remained where they were, standing on the subway tracks near the BJ 1 tunnel with no flashlights. In their suits, with the soft, clear helmets around their heads, it was difficult to pick up sounds, but Hopkins thought he heard something at his back. He spun around and found himself facing a group of abandoned rooms heaped with trash. He saw some air blowers and what looked like a black refrigerator. The sound seemed to have come from behind the refrigerator.

Hopkins drew his gun. He circled around the refrigerator. Nothing there. He looked around, and he looked down at the dust. The black subway dust. On the far side of the refrigerator, he found what appeared to be recent scuffmarks. Then he noticed blood. Several fresh drops of blood.

He opened his pouch and pulled out his Boink and a swab. He swabbed the blood and stuck it straight into the sampling port of the Boink. The device gave off its peculiar chime. On the screen it said 'COBRA.'

Hopkins spoke quietly into his headset. 'Breaker.

Emergency. It's Hopkins. We're on him. He's near us! Hey!' A veil of silence seemed to have fallen over his radio headset. This was a dead zone. Trankl Frank, come in!' he hissed. 'Anybody hear me? We're tracking on Cope!'

Hopkins heard fragments of Masaccio's voice. He couldn't understand what Masaccio was saying. 'Frank! Come in!'

While he was talking, Hopkins was turning around slowly, trying to see into the darkness. He turned to Austen and Littleberry. 'Lie down on the floor, please.' He moved forward, inching around some machines. 'Dr Cope! Dr Cope! Please surrender yourself. You will not be harmed. Please, sir.'

There was nobody there.

But on the far side of the machines he found an open doorway leading to an unlit area heaped with trash. Homeless people had been living there. Hopkins moved forward, creeping along the wall in semidarkness, wading through trash, ready to dive for cover. He came to an opening in the wall. It was a low tunnel, about three feet high, full of electrical cables.

Hopkins debated what to do. He could hear snatches of talk on his headset. 'Frank! Masaccio! Wirtzy!' he called. No dice. Should he go into the tunnel? He had his Mini Maglite flashlight, but it wasn't exactly useful for night operations. Nevertheless, he switched it on, getting ready to dive if the light drew gunfire.

Nothing happened. He shone the light down the tunnel.

He yelled over his shoulder: 'Mark! Alice! Go back and find Wirtz! There's a tunnel.'

He bent over and entered the tunnel, shining his minilight along the electrical cables. The tunnel went straight ahead. He moved quickly now, hunched over, concentrating on the problem at hand. Was Cope himself lost, or did he know a way out? He wondered if at any moment a shock wave would ram down the tunnel, from the bomb going off. It seemed pretty clear that Cope had been heading for the Williamsburg Bridge, but that his escape route had been cut off by the police. He had been heading for the open air. He wanted to blow his bomb outdoors at night.

Hopkins had gone an unknown distance down the tunnel when he realized that he was being followed. He stopped. It was Austen, directly behind him. He turned to face her. 'You don't have a gun! You don't have a light!' 'Get going,' she answered.

'You are a pain in the ass.'

'Get going, or give me your light.' 'Where's Mark?'

'He went back to find Oscar.'

Without another word, Hopkins surged forward, annoyed with Austen, but most of all angry with himself. He felt responsible for having let Cope get away. If a lot of people die… don't think about that. Keep on Cope. Find him.

Hopkins and Austen moved along through the tunnel. Sometimes they had to crawl on their hands and knees. The electrical cables were alive, no doubt, and Hopkins wondered if he or Austen would wind up being electrocuted if they touched a broken insulator. The only good thing about these power cables was that perhaps Cope would fry first.

Then Hopkins noticed something troubling. His flashlight was becoming fainter. The beam turned a distinct yellow.

The electrical tunnel led southwest from the EssexDelancey Street subway station under the Lower East Side, heading downtown. Hopkins and Austen came to a right-angle bend, and then another. The tunnel continued for several blocks, passing under Broome Street, under Ludlow Street, under Grand Street. Hopkins and Austen came to a crossing point in the tunnels — a choice of three routes to take, three tunnels.

They stopped. Which way to go? Hopkins got down on his knees and started searching for blood on the floor with his minilight. There was no blood. He noticed a puddle of water lying on the floor of the right-hand fork. The puddle had been recently splashed. Cope had gone this way. Hopkins was disoriented. He had lost his sense of direction, and he wasn't quite sure where he and Austen were headed. In fact, they were entering Chinatown.

Now the tunnel narrowed into a crawl space. The going became very difficult. Hopkins got down on his hands and knees and began to crawl forward on his belly, sliding over electrical cables. The cables felt slightly warm, and he could feel them vibrating. As he crawled, he talked with Austen on his radio headset.

'Dr Austen. Will you stop now, please? Just stop. You're going to get yourself hurt.'

She did not reply.

They had gone an unknown distance when they came to a steel plate blocking the way. It was a small access hatch. He tapped the hatch lightly with his gloved fingertips. It creaked and began to move.

'What is it?' Austen said behind him. 'Move your feet.' 'I can't move my feet. Lie down, please, there could be gunfire.' He pushed gently on the hatch, his gun ready, and the hatch opened with a drawn-out creak. The sound bounced away into deep echoes and then silence. A vast black space loomed beyond the hatch. Hopkins shone his minilight around the space.

It was an enormous underground tunnel. Where the hell are we? Hopkins thought. What part of the city is this? His flashlight beam did not penetrate far into the tunnel, which seemed to extend a great distance, lost in blackness. It was a double tunnel, with a line of concrete columns marching down the middle of it. Twisted and bent pieces of steel reinforcement bar stuck out of the walls like black thorns. The hatch opened out of a wall about ten feet above the floor of the tunnel.

Cope had a flashlight, but he didn't want to use it, because he thought it might give him away. At intervals he flicked it on and off, but mostly he moved through the tunnel with his hand on the wall, going by sense of touch. He had no idea where he was.

When he had arrived at the hatch he had turned on his fight and looked around. He lowered himself into the big tunnel, holding the bag in his hand, trying to protect it. He landed hard on the concrete floor, and an ominous cracking sound came from inside his bag. One of the large glass tubes had cracked. That was too bad. Best to leave it here.

He checked to make sure the chip timer was running, and then he placed the glass cylinder in a shadowy corner by a column. It contained some 435 hexagons of viral glass along with bio-det explosive. Then, flicking his light on and off, he moved along up the tunnel, his bag lighter now, but still containing one large bomb, the grenades, and the gun. The tunnel sloped upward, curving gently to the right. He knew where he wanted to be. He wanted to be outdoors. It was a soft gentle night out there, almost windless, a perfect night.

The tunnel was a stretch of unfinished subway running under Chinatown and the Lower East Side. It was one of a number of planned subway routes in New York City that had been partly built but never finished. This was a length of tunnel intended for the nevercompleted Second Avenue subway line.

Hopkins leaned out of the hatch door. What he saw looked like a subway tunnel, but there were no train tracks; the floor was smooth concrete. Hopkins swung himself out of the hatch, hung on the lip, and let go. He landed on his feet. Austen dropped down next to him.

He said: 'I'm giving you a direct order to freeze. I am the chief executive =

She brushed past him.

The unfinished subway tunnel ran from north to south under Chinatown. It headed toward the Manhattan Bridge, which spans the East River. As they proceeded along the tunnel, Hopkins played his light around, holding his gun at the ready. There seemed to be no exits from this tunnel.

Hopkins tried his radio again. 'Frank? Wirtzy? Are you there?'

There was no radio service in the tunnel. They kept walking, Hopkins shining his minilight around the columns, until they came to a set of metal stairs leading up to an open doorway. The question was whether Cope had gone up the stairs or had continued to follow the tunnel.

They continued along the tunnel until it ended at a blank concrete wall. Construction of the Second Avenue subway had ended here years earlier. There was no way out from here; it was a dead end. Cope must have gone up the stairs. They hurried back, having lost valuable time, but when they arrived at the stairs, Hopkins hesitated.

'Pull yourself together or give me your gun,', Austen said to him quietly.

'That's a bullshit statement! I'm terrified, Alice. You should be, too. He has a bomb and he's armed.'

He climbed the stairs, though, and found himself in an empty room. It led to a number of dark, open doorways. In the Command Center, Frank Masaccio was beginning to understand the situation. He had been having great difficulty maintaining contact with Reachdeep on the radio. Wirtz and Littleberry had reported that the team had become separated. Cope had disappeared in the Essex Street subway station. There had been much confusion and delay, with police officers running out onto the Williamsburg Bridge, stopping traffic, and sweeping the bridge. Now it appeared that Cope was still in the subway, still underground. He had apparently disappeared into an electrical service tunnel. Hopkins and Austen had followed him. After a delay, Wirtz and the ninjas had now also entered the service tunnel. As soon as they went in they dropped out of radio contact. Masaccio had lost contact with all elements of Reachdeep.

'Where's Littleberry?' he said to an agent on the radio. 'Dr Littleberry has gone into the tunnel with Wirtz.' 'What? My whole goddamned Reachdeep team has gone down a rat hole!' Masaccio shouted. 'Go in there and find them!'

Masaccio got on the telephone with engineers from Con Edison and with the subway system operators, demanding information. Where does that tunnel lead? People were telling him that it ended up in the Second Avenue subway line.

'What Second Avenue subway?' Masaccio yelled. 'Do you take me for a fucking idiot? I've lived in New York all my life and you can't tell me there's a Second Avenue subway. There isn't!'

But there is, the subway operators insisted. It's an empty tunnel.

'Aw, shit, an empty tunnel!' He turned to his managers. 'Send in our Hostage Rescue people. Jesus! How did this happen?'

The subway operators told Masaccio that the best access to the Second Avenue tunnel was a hatchway at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, in Chinatown.

Hopkins had to decide which of the empty doorways to choose. He tried to think the way Cope would think. Cope would be heading up for the street. He would want to get into the open air. Hopkins tried all the doors, and behind one he found a steel ladder leading upward. Hopkins climbed the ladder, with Austen following him. They reached another room. There was a dark open doorway on the far side. Then he heard a sound coming through the doorway — a metallic clink. A light blinked on and off.

He dove for the ground, dragging Austen down with him, and turned off his flashlight. He squirmed forward in the darkness, on his belly. He heard a sharp clattering and a muttered curse. He moved across the floor, gun ready, light off, afraid of dying, if the truth be told, and afraid that Austen might die. He thought to himself. I will never, ever join a Hostage Rescue Team. I don't know how those people do this kind of thing.

He had now arrived at the open, black doorway. He could hear and feel Austen moving behind him. He was so angry at her that he wanted to scream. It would serve her right if she took a gunshot, but he couldn't bear the thought of that happening to her.

He lay behind the edge of the door, for cover, and briefly flicked on his light into the space where the sound had come from.

The light revealed a deep chamber. The floor was twenty feet below the level of the doorway. It seemed to be some sort of air-circulation chamber. There was nobody in it. But on the floor of the chamber lay a flashlight. It was off.

Cope had dropped his flashlight! That was the source of the clattering sound and the reason for the curse.

On the inner faces of the chamber there were small openings, vent tunnels, reachable by ladders that ran vertically up the walls of the chamber. Cope had obviously been climbing on one of the ladders moments before — that was the metallic sound they'd heard, and then he'd dropped his flashlight. He must have gone into one of the vent holes. Which one? There were six holes. 'Dr Cope! Dr Cope! Give yourself up!' he shouted.

I have to go down in there, I guess.

He swung out into space and started climbing down a ladder into the chamber, holding his gun. He was going to try climbing up each of the ladders, looking into all the vent tunnels, one by one. What else could he do, except give up? But if Cope got away — . He reached the bottom of the chamber and stood looking up the ladders at the vent holes, pouring with sweat inside his space suit, getting ready to dive and shoot if Cope opened fire on him. He realized he was a vulnerable target, and he began to think that he had just done something stupid, something Wirtzy would never have done.

He was moving to pick up Cope's flashlight when Austen's voice on the radio burst in his ears. 'Will! Heads up!'

At the same moment he saw the plastic object. It flew past him. It had been thrown from one of the openings. It bounced at his feet, rolled a short distance, and came to a stop under a ladder. A red light was blinking on it.

Grenade. There was no way he could climb the ladder out of the chamber in time, It was going to explode in the chamber with him.

He heard Austen screaming.

He picked up the grenade and threw it on a hard, flat trajectory into one of the vent openings in the chamber. It disappeared into the opening. He heard it bouncing in there.

That wasn't good enough. He still had to get out of here. The explosion was going to come out of the vent hole.

He leaped for a ladder and climbed it like a chimpanzee being chased by a cloud of hornets from hell, dropping his gun in the process. He was trying to reach another vent hole, to get inside it for cover. He reached the opening and hurled himself in on his stomach.

There was a yellow-red boom. A thudding shock wave rolled down the tunnel and tugged at his biohazard suit. This was followed by a crunching, creaking sound, and a piece of concrete fell off the roof of his tunnel, trapping him.

He was left lying in total darkness, wedged face-first into a small vent tunnel. There was a whining, pinging sound in his ears, like a jet engine.

'Hello?' he called. There was no answer. 'Alice?'

He assumed that the grenade had had virus material in it, Cobra crystals.

He shouted, 'We're hot! I think we've gone hot in here!'

There was no answer.

He wondered if his suit had been breached. He wondered especially about his air filters, and if his headbubble had been' ripped. The lungs were the most vulnerable part of the body. Struggling against the tight walls of the tunnel, he put his hands up to his soft helmet and pushed on it and felt around. It seemed to be okay. The blowers were still humming. Good.

It was almost totally dark, but not completely. Where was the fight coming from? He realized that he was lying on his Mini Maglite. He got a hand under his chest and pulled it out. The light revealed his radio headset lying in front of his face, inside his helmet. He spoke into the mike. 'Alice? Are you there?' He waited. 'Hello, come in.' Nothing but a hiss of dead radio noise.

Alice Austen saw Hopkins throw the grenade up into the vent hole and then begin to climb a ladder, heading for another vent hole, trying to get away from the blast. Then she rolled back behind the doorway, to protect herself from the coming explosion. She saw the light, but heard no sound.

The flash died instantly, and now she was lying in total darkness. Hopkins had been carrying the only flashlight.

'Will? Will, are you there?' she called on her headset. She received an answer of white noise. Nothing but the sound of blood rushing in her head and her breath panting.

She did not want Hopkins to be in trouble. She really did not want him to be in trouble.

'Will!' she screamed. 'Please talk to me, Will! Will!' Nothing.

Then she thought: I'm making a lot of noise. If Cope is around here, he'll hear me.

She would climb down into the chamber, to help him if she could. She felt around in the darkness. She grasped the ladder that went down into the chamber. It came away in her hand, and leaned crazily away from the wall, or so it seemed from the way it felt in the darkness. The blast had done a number on the ladder, had broken it. There was no way to get down in there. No way to see if Cope's flashlight still worked, which was unlikely anyway.

Now what? She could either stay where she was, lying on the floor, waiting for help to arrive, or she could try to get back to the main tunnel. Soon there would be people and lights in that main tunnel. That was where she wanted to go.

She stood up in pitch darkness. Trying to remember which way she had come, she retraced their route, waving her hands back and forth in the blackness in front of her. She reached a ladder. Yes, we climbed up this ladder to get here. She called softly on her radio again: 'Will? Are you all right? Please answer me, Will. Can you hear me?' She inched down the ladder, working by sense of touch. Now she was standing in a room. Which way to go now? Ariadne had had a thread; she had her memory. She began feeling her way along the walls in pitch darkness.

Austen was playing her hand along the wall when it came into contact with some fabric. Then she felt his arm. It was Cope, and they were inches apart. He had been waiting against the wall.

He fired his gun twice. The muzzle flashes illuminated the two of them, frozen in the fight like nocturnal creatures caught in the flash of a naturalist's camera. Both shots went under her arm, missing her by inches.

She dove across the room, howling with terror, and leaped through a doorway into total darkness. Suddenly she was tumbling and falling. She fell down the metal stairs into the main tunnel, gasping with pain. She picked herself up and ran, and collided with something.

She found herself lying on her back in pitch darkness, weeping with terror. Everything hurt. She wondered if she had broken any bones. Stop it. Stop crying. She rolled over and stood up. Have to move away from here.

It was pitch dark again, but she knew she must be standing in the main tunnel. She moved off to one side, then crouched by what felt like a wall. She tried desperately to get her breathing under control. Her body ached from falling down the stairs. She could not make a sound. He would target his gun on any sounds. But maybe he was trying to get away. Maybe he was gone. He doesn't have a light. She listened. Heard nothing. She could not hear well, because her head was shrouded in the protective helmet, and her blowers were making a gentle hum.

She waited, straining her ears, in total darkness. She saw sparkles in her eyes — her optic nerves were firing with nothing to see. She heard something — a metallic rattle. Then nothing. Then a faint scraping sound. She waited, absolutely still, trying to avoid the slightest rustle of her suit, but she could not do anything about the hum of the Racal blowers. A great deal of time seemed to pass. Her muscles became stiff and sore. Trapped inside her space suit, she couldn't hear the sounds around her. She was tempted to rip open her hood so that she could hear better. But that grenade he had set off might have been full of Cobra.

Suddenly she noticed a tiny fight, a red spot on the wall. She did not know what it was. It moved rapidly, seeming to bounce over coffers and columns. It moved and jumped like a red firefly. She couldn't tell where it came from. It had a life of its own, unconnected to anything else.

It was seeking her.

It was a laser pointer.

She almost screamed. She hunched down.

The red light went bouncing around. She couldn't see Cope, but she realized he was standing in the doorway at the top of the stairs, aiming the laser out into the tunnel, over her.

The dot went down the tunnel. It came back. It went down the tunnel in the other direction.

'I can hear your suit humming,' he said. He had a calm voice, rather mild and high-pitched but strangely blurred, as if his mouth were full. 'I can't quite locate it. My ears are ringing.' The red dot hopped across the floor. 'Eventually this will find you,' he said.

The red dot hopped across some columns and turned and moved up the floor toward her. It touched her suit. She screamed and dove sideways. The gun roared, a flat deafening smack in the tunnel, with a bright flash. She found an opening between two columns, rolled through it, picked herself up, and ran in total darkness. The red dot hopped around, looking for her. She stopped running and crouched down low. She put her fingertips on the floor, in the stance of a runner at a starting block, trying to ready herself to jump in any direction.

His voice came sharply out of the blackness, echoing on the concrete around them. 'I am not wearing a mask.' The voice was about forty feet away, to her right. 'I can hear you better than you can hear me.'

On her radio headset she heard Hopkins say: 'Hey! Anyone there?' He's alive, she thought.

'Ah, your radio,' Cope said.

She reached for her belt and ripped the headset out of the jack, then tried to keep herself still.

'The gun is loaded with hollow-point bullets. Each bullet has a viral glass bead in the tip. BioArk is selling this technology, too. I have acquired a great deal of technology from the Concern.' His feet clanked down the metal stairs. 'You don't understand what I'm doing. I'm not trying to kill too many people. Just some of them.' In the F.B.I. Command Center in the Federal Building, Masaccio was talking with the subway system operators. 'You've got a lighting system in that tunnel complex? Well, turn on the goddamned lights! I've got people in there! What? What power transformer? Why is it a problem?'

In the darkness, she could almost feel the heft of the gun swinging toward her as he focused on the sound coming from her blowers. She tensed herself, preparing to explode from the starting block. She sensed the fragility of her body, the delicacy of her mortal being, and felt the jelly of her mind surrounded by hard bone, that can splinter -

Suddenly, with a humming sound, banks of fluorescent lights clicked on up and down the tunnel, bathing the tunnel in a blue-white glow.

He was holding the gun in a police stance. His face was glistening wet. Fluid was running from his nose and coating his chin. His lips were bloody, his eyeglasses flecked with bloodspatter. He had started chewing. He fired. The bullet splashed on the concrete. She was running fast. The lights went out again.

In total darkness she ran at full speed straight up the tunnel toward the dead end. Suddenly everything exploded. She saw purple flashes and she sprawled on the ground, certain she had been hit. She had tripped over a piece of concrete and was lying behind it. She stayed there, afraid to move.

Hopkins had been calling for help on his headset. When he got no answer, he concluded that his radio was broken. He was lying on his stomach in a low horizontal passage. The tunnel was not meant to fit a human body, especially someone wearing a space suit with chest armor. The tunnel went straight ahead into darkness. It was about eighteen inches high and two and a half feet wide. He could not possibly turn around in it. His feet were blocked by the chunk of concrete that had fallen. He had to go forward into the crawlway; he had no choice. He was now beginning to feel the first bad tremors of claustrophobia. If he stayed where he was, he might run out of breathable air. So he crawled forward, occasionally calling on his radio headset. Got to slip this armor off, somehow, that would give me more room in here. He tried. He found that he could undo the Velcro straps, but he couldn't take his arms out of it.

He was coming to a dead end. 'Oh, no,' he said. Now he would have to back up. But as he reached the end, his fingers felt a lip or corner of some kind. It was a shaft going down. The tunnel went straight downward into darkness. He pushed his face over the lip and pointed his light into a shaft that seemed to be about twenty feet deep. It ended with a flat dead end. A dead-end hole. Just looking at it made him feel sick. What now? I'm going to have to back up, get back to the blockage and wait for help.

He tried to back up. It was more diffIcult than pushing himself forward.

Then it occurred to him that there might be a way to turn his body around and reverse direction. Then I can maybe get more air, maybe shout around the blockage, and maybe someone will hear me.

It seemed that the vertical shaft, which joined the horizontal shaft at a right angle, might provide enough space in which to turn his body around. He squirmed and twisted and fought against the confinement. He tried every position he could think of, his face suspended over the hole, working his shoulders this way and that. 'It's a mathematical problem with no solution,' he muttered. The problem was-the damned armor vest. Again he struggled to remove his armor. Then a terrible thing happened.

He slipped. He fell headfirst down the hole, a plunge of twenty feet. He whumped to a halt facedown in the bottom of the hole with a sudden wedging jerk. He had almost broken his neck. He was jammed vertically in the shaft, his arms pinned at his sides. And it had gone pitchdark. He had lost his minilight. He was upside down, face-first in a dead-end hole, with no light and no air. There was no way he could back out.

The roaring in his ears was the sound of his own voice begging for mercy. The panic shook him like a series of electric shocks. He was screaming uncontrollably, howling from pure claustrophobic terror. He struggled, fighting the concrete walls, trying somehow to move up and backward again, but he was jammed face downward at the bottom of the tight, airless shaft. He could not get enough air in his lungs, and he could not force his body upward. He thrashed, moaning, screaming, kicking his feet.

Hopkins took a deep breath and held it. He held it for a while, then let all the breath out of his lungs.

He tried to hold his breath again. He wanted to make himself pass out. If he could pass out, then this would be ended.

He could not pass out, which meant that there was enough air in here to keep him alive.

For a week.

Don't think about that.

I've got to relax. I'm dying. If I'm going to die, I've got to come to some kind of peace.

Think of something. What is that Zen saying? A wise man can live comfortably in hell. Forget hell. Think of California. Think of the best beach in California. It might be Malibu Beach. No — those little sculpted coves at Laguna Beach. Yes. He tried to imagine himself lying on his back on the warm sand at Laguna, the smell of the salt air, the cries of the seagulls, the whush-haaa of the surf, the sun falling into the Pacific Ocean… So many lost opportunities… you geek, if you get out of this alive, you really should ask her out. Strike a blow for geekdom. The air really is depleted in here, it's making me slightly demented.

He realized that something was pressed against his cheek. It felt like — the Mini Maglite. But it was dead. He moved his hand. He got one hand around it, and twisted it, and it came on.

Light. This was progress.

He moved his neck left and right. He saw bare concrete a few inches from his eyes. His face was flushed and sweating, engorged with blood from hanging upside down.

That was when he got a shock. There was something dark and open behind his head. An opening! Twisting his head as far around as possible, he saw that it was a tight passage that went off into darkness. Wedging his flashlight around, he managed to get a view into the tunnel.

Then he got another shock.

He saw a large glass tube standing upright on the floor of the tunnel at the foot of a ladder. It was packed full of hexagons of viral glass. It was Cope's biological bomb.

It was several feet from his head, and it contained enough viral glass to render areas of New York City and downwind lethally hot.

He would have to try to disarm it. It must have a timer of some kind.

This was going to be difficult, because he was hanging upside down in the shaft. He turned his body and jerked it, and twisted and hunched and struggled. He managed to slowly rotate his body. He was still hanging upside down, but he was facing the bomb. By wrenching his shoulders, he managed to get one hand through the opening. He would try to grab the bomb with his fingers and drag it toward him, where he could work on it. He reached his fingers out for the glass tube… it was too far away. It was three feet away from his extended fingertips.

He moved his hand up to his waist, found his Leatherman Super Tool, and unfolded it to the pliers. Tried to grab the thing with his pliers.

Nope. Totally hopeless. I need almost three feet. Three feet might as well be three light-years.

At his waist he wore a pouch — he had used it to hold his minilight and his pocket protector. He got one hand up to it and unzipped it. The pocket protector fell out, scattering things. He said to himself: Think. A wise man can build gadgets in hell.

He looked down at the stuff that had fallen from his pocket protector and he tapped his fingers around, taking inventory, and speaking out loud: 'Mechanical pencil. Small box of pencil leads. Goober or Raisinet, not sure which. My Fisher space pen, writes in zero gravity. Swab. Another swab. Another swab. Length of duct tape wrapped around a pencil stub. Ticket stub from a Redskins game. Half an Oreo cookie.'

Nobody but a fool goes into a federal counterterrorism operation without duct tape. 'To build a sticky probe,' he said out loud.

With his head twisted to see what he was doing, and working with one hand only, he pulled a strip of tape from the pencil stub, and he began taping the objects together, trying to make a long stick. He debated trying to remove his glove for better coordination but decided against it; too much virus around here.

With one hand he began stripping small pieces of duct tape off the pencil. He taped the mechanical pencil to the Fisher space pen and the pencil stub, end to end, using strips of duct tape, making a kind of extended stick. A probe. Then he stripped the swabs from their wrapping paper, and taped them together, end to end. That made another stick. Next, he taped the swabs to the penciland-pen stick. What he had now was a long probe. The light, flexible, delicate end of the probe consisted of the three medical swabs, taped end to end. They flopped around, but they added length to his probe. He packed a small ball of tape to the soft tip of the leading swab, attaching it firmly to the swab with extra strips of tape. He was running desperately low on tape.

He had built a sticky probe of the classical Caltech design, approximately two feet long, using junk from his pocket protector. Such probes are commonly used to remove nuts and washers and other parts that have gotten loose deep inside tangles of high-tech equipment. He gripped the probe with his Leatherman pliers — that lengthened the probe somewhat more. He reached out toward the bomb. Nope. It wasn't long enough by about five inches.

'Damn, damn!' he said.

Think. Use your God-given brain.

'Jackass — your flashlight!' he blurted. Now he taped his Mini Maglite to the sticky probe, and then held that in the Leatherman pliers. He reached out. The tape ball touched the bomb. He let it sit for a moment, to allow the adhesive to bind to the glass of the cylinder. Then he pulled it toward him. The cylinder shifted and toppled over.

It thudded on the concrete with a loud sound, and the glass broke, dumping out hexagons of virus. They poured out in a heap, skittered here and there, gleaming like fire opal in the light of the flashlight.

'Excellent!' he said. The warhead material had spilled out, giving him access to the detonator.

He could see a chunk of explosive in the center of the pile of virus. There was a blasting cap stuck in it, and what looked like a chip timer. He couldn't see the timer. Boy, this was crude. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to make a virus bomb, as long as you had the virus material.

Then he saw movement and heard a sound. It was a rat, crouched and approaching the viral glass. It appeared to be about to eat some of the glass.

'Get away! Stupid rat!'

The rat looked at him, unafraid.

He found the piece of Oreo cookie. Pushed it at the rat. 'Eat that.'

The rat took it and waddled away.

Now to disarm the explosive. He could see the chip timer. It was a laboratory timer, not unlike an electronic kitchen timer. He touched the sticky end of the probe to the timer, and it stuck there. Good. He dragged the sticky probe toward him gently, and slowly the timer came along, pulling the blasting cap and the chunk of detonator with it.

He got the chip timer in his hand. Ahh! He sighed. He turned it over and looked at the numbers.

They were running. Currently they said: 00.00.02. 'Yaaaaahhh!' he yelled, and he pulled the blasting cap out of the explosive and flung the cap away, down the tunnel.

Whank!

The cap had gone off somewhere down there. I wonder if it killed the rat, he thought.

There was still a heap of viral glass lying by his face. But it was underground. It could be dealt with. There would be a biohazard cleanup. It would be a mess, but it might be manageable.

Now I have to get my living body out of here.

He had to rotate his body in the shaft. So he shifted his hips, jamming himself tighter in the shaft, twisting himself, and trying to crunch his body down. He got his head around enough to see into the angle more clearly. Then he got his head into the angle, into the tunnel full of hexagons of viral glass. He took a deep breath and let it out, his blowers still humming, still protecting him, he hoped — and got himself a little farther around the corner. By exhaling and pushing, he could slide along on his back.

'Yes!'

He propelled himself on his back out of the hole, and he stood up, his feet in viral glass. He checked his suit with the minilight. There didn't seem to be any holes or tears, though he wasn't sure. His Racal hood was still pressurized, and his filters were working, it seemed. He hoped he did not have any rips in the suit or cuts in his skin. I may be a walking dead man, he thought.

There was a ladder. Cope had climbed down the ladder and left the bomb here. There was also a tunnel leading off horizontally. He had no idea where it led.

Just then he heard gunfire — two shots. Faint. Coming down the tunnel. What was going on? It was a low tunnel. He hurried along it, hunched over, and came to a sheet of plywood across the tunnel. He pushed on it, and it popped and fell away into a large, dark, open space. 'Anybody there?' he said. He shone his light around and caught a glimpse of columns, a figure moving. 'Alice?' Suddenly a red light appeared on his chest. What was this?

Then he heard Austen scream, 'No!'

There was a roar in his ears and something slammed into his chest, driving him backward, with a sensation the likes of which he had never felt before. It was a bullet in his heart, and that was when it came to him that he had been shot and was dying.

Austen had heard Hopkins say 'Anybody there?' as she was lying in darkness. At the same moment she saw the gleam of his flashlight. He was waving it around, trying to determine where he was, and she saw Cope, fixed, bent, writhing slowly, taking aim at the light. The laser touched Hopkins.

When Cope fired into Hopkins she heard a smacking oof! The minilight flew away and rolled across the floor, throwing its beam around crazily. Cope fired again, and again, and again, using the laser to aim.

Shrieking, she got to her feet and raced across the space and fell on Cope, knocking him off balance. She tore at him. She had a glimpse of Cobra's eyes glittering in the light of the minilight. Then she had his gun, and she aimed it at his face, and she shoved the barrel into his mouth. A red laser light reflected out of his mouth, and she saw the blisters. Their faces were inches apart.

There was a clunking sound, and the lights in the tunnel came on.

She was lying across Cope with his gun jammed into his mouth.

He trembled. An arm lashed out, while the other bent suddenly, and his neck arched and lashed around. LeschNyhan writhing. In the light of the fluorescent lamps he looked shrunken, pathetic. 'You killed him,' she whispered. She stood up slowly, keeping the Colt aimed near those eyes. The red spot trembled on his forehead. Her finger tightened.

'Don't… Alice.'

She spun around. Hopkins was standing behind her, bent over, the wind knocked out of him. There were two bullet pocks in his armored vest. The other shots had missed him. He was holding what looked like a bunch of junk taped together.

'… Arrest…' he choked. The bullets had given him a good thump, knocking the wind out of him.

She shook her head.

'You… power,' Hopkins said, doubled over, looking at her.

To Cope she said, 'You're under arrest.'

Hopkins tried to straighten up, and coughed. 'Need to… charge —'

'You are charged with murder,' she said. Cope spoke. 'F.B.I. bitch.'

'Try again, sir. I'm a public health doctor.'

His eyes widened. His lips drew off his teeth, and his face rippled. Something she said may have triggered the seizure.

There was a growing chatter of voices on their radio headsets, and then they heard sounds in the air, culminating with a rush of people running up the Second Avenue tunnel. It was Oscar Wirtz with the operational group.

Simultaneously, a SWAT team of New York City police officers wearing respirators was moving down through the street hatch by the Manhattan Bridge, descending the stairs and ladders. You could hear the rattle of feet on steel gratings and the clink of their weapons.

As the operations groups converged on the scene they saw what had happened. The suspect was down in some kind of seizure. Hopkins told them that the tunnel might be biologically hot, because a grenade had gone off, and there was viral glass in the area.

'Where's Mark?' Hopkins asked.

'He was behind us, Will,' Wirtz said.

Just then they heard Littleberry. He was coming up the Second Avenue tunnel toward them. His voice sounded crackly on the radio, hard to understand. Then they heard him shout, 'Down! Get down! He left one back-' A flash ended his words.

They saw the blast wave come up the tunnel toward them. The wave came from the bomb that Cope had left sitting beside a column near the hatchway. No one had noticed it except Littleberry. He had been trying to warn them when it detonated.

The blast wave took the form of a meniscus, a thin, curved, bubble of powdered viral glass. It moved down the tunnel and passed over them and was gone. For an instant it showed them the face of Cobra virus in fully weaponized form. It filled the tunnel with a gray haze that was alive and aching to find blood.

The echo of the blast died down, leaving the tunnel in complete silence.

Cope turned his head and seemed to gaze down the tunnel.

Hopkins went down on his knees.

Austen knelt beside him. She placed her hand on his back. She saw the tears falling inside his faceplate. 'OUT! EVERYONE, OUT!' Oscar Wirtz was screaming. 'WE'VE GONE HOT!'

They made their exit through the steel hatch at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, into a maelstrom of emergency lights near Chatham Square, in Chinatown. Moments earlier, the deep booming thud of the explosion, which had occurred some fifty feet underground, had alerted emergency crews. The streets were jammed with emergency vehicles. There were people wearing Tyvek suits and talking on cell phones — managers from the mayor's Emergency Management Office. Television crews were not being allowed to get anywhere near the action. The area was awash in halogen lights, the air full of the chatter of hand-held radios and the constant deafening flutter of a half-dozen helicopters hovering overhead. Frank Masaccio had called every emergency unit he could think of, and he was still yelling into his headset at the Command Center, calling all units to converge on the hatchway at the Manhattan Bridge.

The Cobra Event had not been lost on New York City residents. Early-morning groups of onlookers were being pushed back by police officers. In the east over Brooklyn, a red thread of a cloud suggested that dawn was coming. There was no traffic on the Manhattan Bridge — the bridge had been blocked off — and most of the subway lines in lower Manhattan were out of service.

At the Command Center in the Federal Building, and at SIOC in Washington, a feeling was spreading that the situation was still dicey but might possibly be manageable. Fragmentary reports were coming in. A bomb had gone off, but the explosion had occurred underground in an abandoned tunnel, and an attempt would be made to keep the dust from the bomb contained in the tunnel. The reports were broken, confused, sometimes contradictory, coming from different places, but some things were beginning to emerge. Frank Masaccio listened to his headset. He said: 'He's what? The subject is under arrest? Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure? Who made the arrest?' He suddenly leaped to his feet. 'Austen made the arrest? Are you kidding me?'

Hopkins and Austen stumbled across tangles of fire hoses. She kept one arm around his waist, almost holding him up. The two of them were still dressed in their space suits, but no one paid much attention to them, because many people were wearing protective clothing, and no one knew who was who. Fire Department personnel swarmed around, putting on green chemical-hazard suits, shouting amid a crackle of radios. Crews from the New York City Fire Department began placing sheets of plastic tarpaulin over a half-dozen air vents that led to the underground structures of the Second Avenue tunnel complex. It was presumed that virus. particles would even now be flowing out of these vents. As soon as the tarps were laid down, the emergency crews began piling mats of fiberglass batting on top of them, and then fire trucks began pumping water mixed with bleach onto the batting, soaking the fiberglass with liquids that would kill a virus. Then the Fire Department's HEPA trucks moved in. They would eventually begin pumping air out of the Second Avenue tunnel, passing it through large, truck-sized filters.

Hopkins and Austen made their way over to a Fire Department truck that was bathed in lights. It was the New York City human-decontamination truck.

'Go ahead, Will,' Austen said.

He climbed inside the truck and closed the door. He stood in a decon chamber. A chemical spray went on. The chemicals bathed the outside of his suit. Finally the sprays stopped. Then he removed all of his gear, piling the helmet and filters and suit and boots and everything else into a biohazard disposal bag, until he was standing naked in the decon chamber. A water spray went on. It was a hot shower. He washed his body twice, the first time with a bleach solution, the second time with water and disinfecting soap. Whether any particles had been trapped in his lungs during the operation was something that would not be known for several days. He went through a door into the decon truck's change room. There, Fire Department people gave him a blue sweat suit to wear. It was marked with the letters N.Y.F.D.

Austen entered the truck and followed the same procedure.

Cope had been brought up by some of the Reachdeep ninjas. He was tied to a chair they had found in one of the empty rooms. They had lashed him to it with nylon rope, to control the biting and the thrashing. He was lifted up through the hatchway by the Manhattan Bridge. The chair was placed on the ground, the ropes were cut away, and he was lifted onto a gurney under bright lights. He seemed to be conscious but did not speak.

The gurney was loaded into an ambulance that screamed to the Wall Street Heliport, where a medevac helicopter lofted him to Governors Island. On the island, he made no statement to federal investigators. He died in the Medical Management Unit four hours later.

In the classified after-action report, the experts generally agreed that New York City had been very lucky. Fire trucks poured chemicals and water into the tunnels all day, and the air vents were piled with batting soaked with chemicals. Meanwhile, the HEPA filter trucks — they were essentially vacuum cleaners on wheels — drew air out of the tunnel system and passed it through filters. The filters accumulated stray particles of Cobra, and the air was discharged into the city.

In the end, fourteen citizens contracted Cobra virus infections at scattered locations around New York, for, inevitably, some particles escaped the chemicals and filters, and ultimately found a human lung. The fourteen cases were scattered across the Lower East Side and into Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and the plume of cases went as far out into Queens as Forest Hills. It created an epidemiological nightmare for the Centers for Disease Control. Almost all of the resources of that agency were used in tracing and managing the fourteen cases of Cobra that occurred following the blast in the tunnel. All active cases of Cobra were flown to Governors Island for treatment in the Army unit.

Five emergency workers who had been at the scene also came down with Cobra virus infection. They were mainly Fire Department people who had worked near the tunnel vents, who had laid down the tarps and fiberglass material, but who, in the chaos, had not had time to put on breathing masks. The number of deaths among emergency workers — just five — was considered miraculous. Many experts had been expecting the city's emergency personnel to be decimated during the Cobra Event.

Captain Dorothy Each, who had been bitten by Hector Ramirez, died on Governors Island. Of a total of nineteen cases of Cobra in New York resulting from the bomb blast, eighteen victims died. One eight-year-old girl survived but ended up with chronic Lesch-Nyhan disease and permanent brain damage. All of the patients were given anticonvulsants and the experimental antismallpox drug cidofovir, but the treatments had no effect. The overall toll of infections in the Cobra Event stood at thirty-two cases, including the index case of Harmonica Man, Kate Moran, and many others, and also counting Thomas Cope. Ben Kly did not count as a Cobra case, because he had not been infected, although he died as a result of the Cobra infection of Glenn Dudley. Mark Littleberry counted simply as a man lost in action.

The C.D.C. task force and the city department of health monitored people who had come into contact with active cases of Cobra. The United States Public Health Service invoked its long-standing legal powers to place people into quarantine. Those quarantined were held in the Coast Guard dormitories on Governors Island. In the nineteenth century, when there had been no cures for most infectious diseases, the only way to prevent the spread of a disease was quarantine. Quarantine is an old practice, and it can sometimes work.

Quarantine

Austen and Hopkins were put in a quarantine unit at New York University Medical Center on the East Side of Manhattan, where they remained in Level 3 biocontainment, under the observation of doctors, for a period of four days. They had done their work and they needed some peace. Frank Masaccio would not allow them to be held on the island. He felt that they had been through enough, and should not have to be kept near people dying of Cobra.

Hopkins called Annie Littleberry in Boston, the widow of Mark Littleberry. He explained to her that Mark had served his country to the end. He told her that in recent weeks Mark had made important contributions to the safety of people everywhere in the world. He had helped develop evidence for the existence of a continuing biological-weapons program in Iraq, a program that had apparently moved into the genetic engineering of viruses, and Mark had helped break open a case of a corporation involved in criminal activity in the United States. 'We think that some big prosecutions are going to occur as a result of Mark's work. One or more multinational biotechnology companies based in Switzerland and Russia are likely to end up with their top executives under warrant for arrest in the United States,' he said. 'It's going to be a nightmare for the diplomats. Mark would be proud, I know he would. It was something Mark always enjoyed doing — creating extra work for the diplomats, Mrs Littleberry.'

'I'm going nuts in here,' Hopkins said to Austen on the afternoon of the fourth day.

They were dressed in bathrobes and hospital pajamas, and they had been pacing in opposite directions across a small recreational room on the twentieth floor of the hospital, which looked out across the East River, where barges churned through the gray tides and traffic murmured along on the East River Drive.

They felt fine. They were the equivalent of the lucky monkeys in the Johnston Atoll tests, the survivors, who might have received one or two particles in the lungs but had remained healthy. It seemed hard to believe that both of them had had no exposure to the Cobra virus, especially Austen. Probably they had received an exposure. On the other hand, perhaps the protective suits had worked.

They had spent the past four days talking on the telephone, it seemed, to every senior official in the United States government. For the moment the news media knew little of the details of the operation: in press conferences, Frank Masaccio's people had been describing Austen and Hopkins merely as nameless 'federal agents' who had 'arrested the suspect Thomas Cope,' and no mention was made of Reachdeep. As far as the public knew, the Cobra Event had been one more brutal act of terrorism, resulting in somewhat more than a dozen fatalities. It had been nowhere near as bad as the bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. Few people understood just how grave the situation had been. Austen and Hopkins were grateful for Masaccio's efforts to protect their privacy.

In the relatively brief meetings they had had with each other, neither of them had mentioned a subject that had become increasingly obvious to both of them during the final days of the investigation and especially at the end.

The telephone rang. Hopkins picked it up. 'Supervisory Special Agent Hopkins speaking.'

He had a stiff way of answering telephones. It annoyed her, and she wondered if it was part of his Bureau training.

'Yes, Frank, she's here in the room. I don't think she wants to speak with you right now-'

She said: 'For the third time, tell him no.' 'But he's serious. He says you could rise fast.'

'I'm going back to work for Walter Mellis. That's it.' 'It's final, Frank. She's going to stay at the C.D.C. Okay, Frank. Okay, yeah, I know, I'm disappointed, too…

He hung up. He threw himself into a chair. 'Agh!' he said, apropos of nothing. He was wearing foam slippers, like the kind you get on airplanes, and he tapped them on the floor. Then he stood up, stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles, and walked over to the window. He sighed. 'I knew damned well from the moment they put us in here that we weren't going to get sick. It's a law of the universe. When they put you in quarantine, it guarantees your health.'

The sky was shining with a clear afternoon brightness that comes when the days are getting long but summer has not quite arrived.

He looked at his watch. 'They're letting us out at five. What are you going to do, anyway?'

'1 don't know,' she said.

He turned and faced her. 'Do you like sushi?' 'Yes, I love sushi.'

'So do 1. You know, there's this incredible sushi place downtown, in an old industrial neighborhood.

What do you say we ditch everybody and go eat some sushi?'

That seemed like a fine idea.

The Host

Toward the middle of summer, a three-year-old boy living on the Lower East Side developed Cobra brain virus infection and died at Bellevue Hospital. There was no indication of how he had become infected. It was possible that he had encountered some fingering crystals of virus. It was possible that in spite of days and weeks of treatment with disinfecting chemicals, some corners of the tunnels under the Lower East Side had remained hot. It wasn't clear how long Cobra crystals might survive in the open air, if the place was dark and dry and free of damaging sunlight.

Alice Austen flew up from Atlanta and interviewed the boy's family. She discovered that three days before his death, the boy had been bitten on the foot by a rat while he was asleep.

Then, in early September, a homeless man died of what later turned out to be Cobra infection in Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. He had been living in a subway tunnel under Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights. The abandoned tunnels in that area were vast, and obviously contained rats. The Jackson Heights tunnels connect directly to the east side of Manhattan through a tunnel under the East River. Possibly infected rats had migrated through the tunnel from Manhattan.

The homeless man's body showed no evidence of a rat bite. Nevertheless, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control captured dozens of rats and tested their blood for Cobra. One of the rats tested positive. The rat seemed to have pulled out much of its fur in the belly area. The rat had survived a Cobra infection and had become a carrier of Cobra.

C.D.C. investigators tested more rats from other areas of the city and found ^that Cobra had entered the rat population, where it could survive without killing its host. Cobra and the rat had made an adjustment with each other. Suzanne Tanaka had first uncovered evidence that Cobra can survive in rodents when her mice became infected but didn't die — and when one of the mice passed the virus to her, she inadvertently showed that transmission of Cobra can go from rodent to human. Viruses jump from one species to another all the time, and some researchers believe they have a tendency to fill ecological niches — habitats for disease. Cobra seemed to have found a niche in the rat population.

It wasn't clear how Cobra had entered the rats. Possibly rats living in the Second Avenue tunnel had become infected when the bomb went off. Alice Austen wondered if the rats that had fed on the body of Lem in Houston Street had been the original source. Probably no one would ever know. In any case, Cobra had entered the ecosystems of the earth, and its future course could not be predicted.

Like all viruses, Cobra had no mind or consciousness, although in a biological sense Cobra was intelligent. Like all viruses, Cobra was nothing more than a program designed to replicate itself. It was an opportunist, and it knew how to wait. Cobra had achieved a kind of stasis in the rat, a point of balance. The rat was a good place to hide for an indefinite time, since the human species would never exterminate the rat. In its new host Cobra would cycle through generations of replication, perhaps changing, taking on new forms and strains, awaiting a chance to make another move, a wider breakthrough.