Immortal

59

Doug Jarvis made his way to the corner of 46th Street, on the intersection with First Avenue and close to the United Nations Headquarters complex. The Secretariat Building towered over the East River, a 550-foot-tall wall of aluminum, glass and marble, the south facades of the building faced with countless tons of Vermont marble. Jarvis turned aside to an identification office that supplied grounds passes to officials pre-cleared to enter the United Nations. He hurried inside, his path cleared after a swift call to General Mitchell at the DIA. A pass and an identification tag were waiting for him at the main desk, and he was already out of the door when his cell phone rang. Jarvis took the call, straining to hear the voice on the other end of the line.

‘Special Agent Devereux, FBI.’

‘Jarvis. What have you got for me?’

The reply, when it came, was distorted by both digital encryption and distance. Jarvis could hear the snap and thump of frigid winds in the background.

‘We’ve finished excavating the target site,’ came the reply. ‘We think we know what they were up here for.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘There’s the body here of a researcher of some kind who was working out here. He was shot in the chest, and buried in a cemetery of Spanish Flu victims who died in 1918.’

Jarvis stopped walking.

‘Do we know who the victim is?’

‘Not yet,’ Devereux replied. ‘It could take weeks. He doesn’t have any identification on him, nothing to say who he was working for or if he has any family.’

Jarvis thought for a moment.

‘Start by working through current and former employees of USAMRIID, out of Maryland,’ he replied. ‘My money’s on there being a link between Donald Wolfe, SkinGen and this victim of yours in Alaska. We need ballistics from the bullet as soon as possible.’

Devereux spoke again, clearly struggling to make his voice heard above the howling winds sweeping across Brevig Mission.

‘The body that originally occupied the grave is missing some tissue from the chest cavity, almost certainly taken from the lungs.’

Jarvis felt his heart miss a beat as he digested Devereux’s revelation.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive, sir,’ Devereux replied. ‘What the hell would Donald Wolfe want with a hundred-year-old flu victim’s tissues?’

‘USAMRIID often works with lethal biogens,’ Jarvis mused out loud, ‘and I’ve been told that researchers occasionally dig up victims of disease to study tissues and such like, but nothing like this. Spanish Flu killed eighty-five percent of Brevig Mission’s inhabitants in 1918. Whatever strain it belongs to, it’s damned near lethal.’

Jarvis stood on the sidewalk and watching the passing traffic and the flowing waters of the East River beyond as he spoke.

Devereux’s voice was laden with apprehension as he replied.

‘Whatever the reason, it’s important enough for him to have snuck up here to the ass of the world, kill a man and steal infected tissues. I don’t want to know what he might have in mind. About the only consolation is that he’s got no way of infecting people worldwide, if that’s his plan. I mean, how could he be able to infect people in so many countries all at the same time? It would be impossible to cause a pandemic that way.’

Jarvis nodded, turning slowly as he did so, and then his eyes settled on the United Nations Headquarters Building, the flags of its one hundred ninety-two member states arranged in alphabetical order in front of the building, fluttering on their high poles.

And a sudden, terrible realization shot through him.

‘I’ve got to go.’

Jarvis clicked off the phone as he struck out across 46th Street toward the UN Building, glancing at his watch and hoping against hope that he was wrong. He dialed another number, this time getting Butch Cutler on the other end, sounding as though he was traveling in a vehicle.

‘Doug? What’s the story?’

‘Get the New Mexico sheriffs office and get them into the SkinGen building as fast as you can. We’ve got the evidence you need, but there’s no time to collate it all and present it to the attorneys. Just go in and find out what the hell they’ve been up to in there.’

‘Any idea what they’ll be looking for?’ Cutler asked.

‘Tissues belonging to a victim of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic,’ Jarvis said as he jogged down the street. ‘I think Donald Wolfe’s planning to infect the United Nations General Assembly during his speech there. I need to know how he might do that.’

Butch Cutler didn’t reply for what felt like a long time as Jarvis jogged toward the vast edifice of the United Nations General Assembly, wishing with every step that he exercised more regularly.

When the reply came, it was tinged with horror.

‘There’s only two ways he could do it,’ Cutler replied. ‘It’s either going to be in the air, or it’s going to be in the water. My guess is he’ll infect the water that they’re drinking, either through the water supply or directly into their glasses somehow. Viruses don’t survive long in the open air.’

‘Got it.’

Jarvis shut off his phone and broke into a run toward the north entrance of the complex that opened onto a landscaped plaza, where the curved façade of the General Assembly Building and its rows of international flags loomed. Translucent glass panels set into marble piers gave the public lobby a subdued glow as Jarvis burst through the doors and found himself surrounded by memorials to men who had worked, or even sacrificed their lives, for world peace.

He headed for the stairs that led to the second-floor ceremonial entrance to the General Assembly Hall, passing a huge stained-glass panel, symbolic of man’s struggle for peace and dedicated to the memory of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and others who died with him in a plane crash in 1961. Adjacent to the panel were four bronze plaques commemorating members of the Secretariat who had died in the line of duty while serving the United Nations. Nearby, a facsimile of the United Nations Charter stood proudly, and Jarvis felt a nausea descending on him as he realized that such a building was about to become the latest stage for an act of international terrorism.

He rushed up the stairs, praying his heart wouldn’t give out as he passed a Foucault pendulum, a gift of the Netherlands Government, offering visual proof of the rotation of the earth, suspended from the ceiling above the stair landing connecting the lobby with the second floor.

He had almost reached the entrance to the Assembly Hall when two uniformed security guards stepped out and caught him between them in mid-stride.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t enter the hall right now.’

Jarvis gasped for breath as he wheezed a response.

‘You don’t let me in there, right now, half of the world’s leaders will be dead within a week.’

‘Of course they will, sir.’ One of the guards smiled and rolled his eyes at his colleague. ‘The assembly is in a closed session, and you’ll have to wait until it’s finished before you can save the world.’

Jarvis gathered his breath and slipped his identification card from out of his jacket pocket.

‘Doug Jarvis, Defense Intelligence Agency,’ he rasped. ‘You don’t help me, I’ll have you both reassigned to a radar station in goddamned Labrador within twenty-four hours!’

The security team looked at him curiously.

‘Where’s your evidence?’ the taller of the two demanded.

‘It’s being collated,’ Jarvis replied. ‘There’s no time for this. We need to—’

‘The hell we need to do anything,’ the guard replied. ‘We have our own security force, and this building is secure. You got a problem with that take it to my boss, but there’s no way in hell I’m letting you in there without a damned good reason.’

Jarvis stared at the guards in despair for a long beat, then turned away and dashed toward the adjoining Conference Building.