Fallout

35

“And I tell you, as surely as Allah’s will binds us all, the modern world and the disease of technology cleaves us from all that is holy. It is a pervasive evil, one that infects every person and every culture it touches. Above all others, this is the greatest danger to Islam—”

Fisher pressed the remote’s REWIND button and watched for the third time Bolot Omurbai’s latest speech. He paused it, Omurbai’s face filling the screen.

“That’s what you’ve got in mind, don’t you?” Fisher murmured.

Unable to sleep, he’d driven to Fort Meade at three a.m., signed in with the duty officer, and then gone to the situation room and made coffee. Two hours and four cups later, he’d reviewed all the speeches Omurbai had given since beginning his second reign as Kyrgyzstan’s president.

“Technology cleaves us from all that is holy…”

“A pervasive evil…”

“Infects every person and every culture…”

Omurbai was insane, that much seemed clear, but however irrational his thoughts, his reasoning was well-ordered: The modern world is evil; technology is an infectious agent — it is the greatest enemy of Islam.

And what, Fisher thought, is the essence of the modern world? Of technology? What is the engine behind it all? Answer: oil, and everything that flows from it. A plus B equals C. Oil is the enemy of Islam; oil itself must be destroyed.

The scourge of Manas.

And where better to launch the opening salvo in his war but beneath his own country, which shares one of the world’s greatest untapped reservoirs of oil? Conservatively, the fields beneath Central Asia were estimated to contain 300 billion barrels — a third of a trillion — of recoverable oil.

It was a mind-boggling number, Fisher admitted, and without the Chytridiomycota (or, as Fisher and Lambert had started calling it, Manas), Omurbai would have as much luck destroying the fields as he would trying to knock the air from the sky. But now…

He laid the remote aside, sat back, and rubbed his temples. How had all this started? With one man, his brother, dead. It seemed surreal, the twisting course he’d followed to this point, and somewhere along the way Peter’s death had been pushed into the background. Despite what his instincts had told him, Fisher had hoped, in some small part of his mind, that Peter’s death would turn out to be a simple — if that word could be used — murder. Faced with that, Fisher would have simply tracked down those responsible and seen them either dead or locked up. Done. But it had turned out to be anything but a simple, thoughtless murder, hadn’t it?

Instead, here he was, sitting alone in the dark and staring at the face of a madman who planned to let loose a plague that could in one fell swoop turn the planet back to the Stone Age.

Fisher awoke to a hand shaking his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw Lambert standing beside his chair. “Morning,” Lambert said. “How long have you been here?”

“What time is it?”

“Six.”

“A few hours. Couldn’t sleep.”

“Join the club.” Lambert nodded at Omurbai’s frozen face on the screen. “Not a good image to have in your head when trying to nod off.”

Fisher took a sip from his coffee cup; it was cold. “You know what he’s got planned, don’t you, Lamb?”

Lambert nodded and sat down in the next chair. “There are still a lot of ifs. We don’t even know if that stuff is what we think it is. Or if they’ve managed to enhance it. That’s what they needed Stewart for. Something wasn’t working, something they couldn’t get right. The question is, did they fix it?”

“Good question. I’ve also been thinking about Carmen Hayes,” Fisher said. “She’s gotten lost in all this.”

“And Peter.”

“Him, too. But at least now we know why they grabbed her in the first place.”

The biggest hurdle Omurbai and the North Koreans would have with Manas was deployment: how to introduce it where it would have the biggest impact and spread the quickest. Fisher assumed they’d long ago broken Carmen down and that she’d been cooperating. She’d been gone four months — plenty of time to study the subterranean rivers and streams beneath Kyrgyzstan and its neighboring countries, then map the points where they intersected the oil fields and tell Omurbai exactly where to drop Manas.

Like a virus in the bloodstream, Fisher thought.

“You have any thoughts on the North Koreans?” he asked Lambert.

“I do. There are three reasons for them getting involved, I think: one, a sword to hang over our heads; two, a preemptive move for an invasion of South Korea.”

“And the third?”

“Kim Jong-il is nuts, and he just feels like wreaking havoc.”

“I’ve got a fourth scenario,” Fisher said. “It’s a little bit out there, but it may fit.”

“Tell me.”

“North Korea’s found its own oil reserves, but as long as they’re a pariah, they’ve got no chance to exploit them. Then along comes Omurbai. Somehow, somewhere, he’s gotten ahold of this very interesting fungus that does a very interesting thing: It eats oil, which just happens to be the devil’s own invention. He wants to use the fungus, but as long as he’s an outcast from his homeland, he can’t.

“So the North Koreans help him retake Kyrgyzstan, which happens to sit smack-dab on top of one of the world’s greatest deposits, then sit back and watch as Omurbai releases Manas and destroys three hundred billion barrels of untapped oil. The world panics. North Korea announces it just happens to have found its own reserves.”

Lambert considered this for a few moments, then said with a grim smile, “Any other country or leader, and I’d say that’s an exceedingly implausible scenario. Well, since we’re playing doom-and-gloom, try this: North Korea watches Omurbai release Manas in Central Asia, then they secretly do the same elsewhere — in the Middle East, in Africa, in Russia — but North Korea’s fields remain untouched. Omurbai gets the blame, and suddenly they’ve got the only surviving oil source on the planet.”

Fisher caught on, finishing the scenario. “Because, while they were working on Manas, they also found a neutralizing agent for it.”

“You got it.”

Fisher squeezed the bridge of his nose between his index finger and his thumb. “And right now, we’ve got nothing. No leads, no clues, no idea where Manas is — nothing.”

Lambert gave him a weary smile, then stood up and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Sam, we’ve had less than that before and still come through the other side.”

Redding arrived twenty minutes later, poured himself a cup of coffee, and joined them at the table. “Who wants to know how Omurbai probably found out about Chytridiomycota?”

Fisher raised a weary finger.

“Remember Oziri, Wondrash’s man Friday?”

Fisher and Lambert nodded.

“Well, Grim asked me to do a little genealogy detective work. Here’s the short version: Oziri was the grandfather of Samet, Omurbai’s right-hand man and second-in-command of the KRLA. My guess, Oziri knew what Wondrash was looking for and had bragged or blabbed to a family member before they headed to Africa.”

“Which means Wondrash had had some inkling of what Chytridiomycota was capable of even before he found the source,” Fisher said.

Redding nodded. “That’s part two. Quantico was able to restore most of Wondrash’s journal you found aboard the Sunstar. He doesn’t describe how they found the cave in the first place, or how he got onto the trail of the fungus in the first place, but he talks about the night they spent inside there. Evidently, some of the stuff must have rubbed off on their gear. The next morning they woke up, and everything made of rubber or plastic had dissolved.”

A few minutes later, Lambert’s cell phone trilled. He picked it up, listened for a moment, said thanks, and disconnected. He walked to the nearest computer workstation, tapped a few keys, and one of the monitors glowed to life. The DCI’s face filled the screen.

“Morning,” he said. “I’ve got Dr. Russo’s report in front of me. She’s confident that Chytridiomycota is a type of petro-parasite.”

Lambert told the DCI about Wondrash’s journal and Omurbai’s link to Oziri.

“Then I’d say that’s proof enough,” the DCI replied. “Russo also sent along a computer simulation. Worst-case scenario. I asked her to make some assumptions — namely that Manas has been enhanced for longevity and reproduction. Take a look.”

The DCI’s face disappeared and was replaced with a computer-generated Mercator projection of the earth. The camera zoomed in until it was focused on Central Asia, then paused. A clock graphic in the right-hand corner appeared and, beside it, the notation, DAY 1. A red dot appeared in the center of Kyrgyzstan, then expanded, doubling in size. The clock changed to DAY 5. The red dot expanded again, doubling again, and then again, and again, until the whole of Kyrgyzstan was covered, and the clock read DAY 11.

Fisher and the others continued to watch as Manas spread beyond the borders of Kyrgyzstan, north into Kazakhstan, east into China, south into Tajikistan, then India…

Thirty seconds later, half the globe had turned red, and the area was still increasing in size.

The clock read DAY 26.

Grimsdottir pushed through the door ten minutes later and stopped short as she saw the three of them sitting around the table. “Did I miss a memo?” she asked.

Lambert shook his head. “The Insomniacs’ Club.”

“Sign me up,” she said, then poured her own cup of coffee, sat down, and powered up her laptop. Lambert briefed her on their discussion so far. She paused a few moments to take it all in, then said to Fisher, “Sam, you’re sure that Stewart died at Site Seventeen?”

Fisher nodded. “Either there or in the water a few minutes later.”

“Then we’ve got a mystery on our hands. I just heard from the comm center. Stewart’s beacon is still active, and it’s transmitting from Pyongyang, North Korea.”