The Calm Before The Swarm

I

Atlanta, Georgia

The spectacle was like nothing she'd ever seen before. The tailgating had begun in earnest the day before, and by the time she arrived not long after sunrise, the parking lot was shoulder-to-shoulder with people as far as she could see. There were news crews from around the world, speaking in languages ranging from every possible dialect of English to some she had never heard in her life. The NFL Experience---a fantastic exhibit where everyone, from kids through adults, could learn what it was like to play in the pros through the use of pseudo-virtual reality technology---had drawn nearly as many patrons as the game itself. There were people drinking, grilling, fighting, playing, swearing, and cavorting everywhere she looked. They wore jerseys and face and body paint and reminded her of infantries preparing to go into battle. And all of them were blissfully unaware of the threat that could at any moment kill every single one of them.

The police and military presence was relatively unobtrusive, at least more so than she had hoped. While every access point was strictly controlled and every vehicle subjected to search, there was still too much foot traffic for her liking. The Georgia Dome had become a city unto itself, a teeming metropolis of nearly a hundred and fifty thousand crammed into a space of no more than five square miles. Even with the more than three thousand army, national guard, FBI, and police personnel, working the crowds was a task so daunting that Lauren feared they had lost the race before it even started.

Drab olive helicopters thundered overhead and a squadron of F-22 Raptors at Dobbins Air Reserve Base, twenty miles away in Marietta, was ready to scramble at a moment's notice. The airspace was being carefully monitored and any aircraft that deviated as much as an inch from its flight plan was to be unceremoniously grounded. The president's own secret service contingent numbered more than a hundred. Their instructions were to form an eight-man cordon around him at all times. The windows of his luxury box had been replaced with bulletproof glass and all ventilation ducts had been sealed. The door had been reinforced with several inches of solid steel and more than thirty monitors showing live footage of every emergency exit route from the suite had been installed. It was a panic room that could theoretically withstand anything shy of a nuclear detonation.

Still, Lauren had a bad feeling that disaster loomed on the horizon. Whoever created the wasps hadn't done so overnight. It had surely taken years of trial and error, multiple previous incarnations, and unerring foresight to produce this particular species. Was it so difficult to think that these people could have been preparing for this very event since the moment the Georgia Dome was announced as the host of the game more than two years ago? Was it impossible to believe that a single faceless man could walk right through every single one of their checkpoints and martyr himself on national television?

Everyone on security detail had memorized the pictures of the man taken at the circus prior to the catastrophe. Even the employees manning the concession stands had a picture of him taped behind their counters. Every section had a dozen agents assigned to watch it, and there would be more than a hundred on the field itself, many of them posing as cameramen who would film the crowds and relay the feeds to computers that had been specifically programmed to analyze and detect erratic or inconsistent behavior. The fire suppression system had been modified to divert from the dry chemical tanks to ancillary drums containing more than five thousand gallons of insecticides at the flip of a switch. Even the PA announcer had been thoroughly vetted and his equipment had been modified so that it was incapable of producing any sound with a frequency higher than fourteen kilohertz, a full eight thousand hertz lower than the established sound trigger.

If there was anything they had missed, Lauren couldn't think of it, and yet, at the same time, she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something obvious they had overlooked.

She passed through security for the fourth different time that afternoon on her way into the stadium once again. The agent studied her face and her body before letting her pass into a gated section where she was patted down and her ID carefully scrutinized by two men in army fatigues before being allowed to pass. She worked her way through the mad throngs toward the command center, which had been set up behind the visiting team's goalposts, directly under the lower tier of stands and between the tunnels from which the players would emerge onto the field through smoke and fireworks. Popcorn crunched underfoot and she nearly slipped in a puddle of beer. The entire place reeked of body odor, barley and hops, and processed meat products. The plainclothes forces blended into the woodwork all around her, betrayed only by the ceaseless motion of their eyes across the masses. And by the bulges of their shoulder holsters beneath their civilian attire.

After once again producing her credentials, she was admitted to the command center. There were people in motion everywhere she looked. Every console was manned by a red-eyed, harried agent swilling coffee and fearing to so much as blink. There had to be two hundred monitors, each divided into four different live-action quadrants. Facial recognition programs zeroed in on one individual after another, searching for Patel or any known person of interest. Every man or woman wore either a headset or an earpiece, depending upon their designated mobility. The tension had ratcheted up several notches since she was last here. She feared that if the man wasn't apprehended before kickoff, the whole scene might boil over into aggression and mistakes would be made.

Special Agent Antonio Bellis, FBI liaison between the command center and the military, police, and secret service teams, broke away from a gathering and hustled to her side.

"Are all of your preparations in place?"

"The four containment vehicles are ready and waiting for transport. Each has been checked and double-checked to confirm the patency of the air-tight seals. Not even a single oxygen molecule could get out of their cabs. And all of the EpiPens have been distributed to their pre-arranged locations. They're well within range if we factor in a full minute for the manifestation of symptomatology, but I still worry that mass panic will prevent their timely administration."

"That can't be helped. Besides, it won't come to that. If this guy's anywhere near here, my men will find him."

"You're assuming he's working alone."

"We've been over this and I'm tired of repeating my position, Dr. Allen. Your sole responsibility now is to maintain your level of preparedness and stand silent vigil. If things get out of hand---which they won't---your people are to minimize casualties. That's all. Leave the rest of this to the professionals. We have this under control."

He turned his back on her and waded into the frenzy of activity again.

Lauren shook her head. No amount of preparation could impose order upon chaos.

And even if they did manage to prevent catastrophe today, what were they going to do tomorrow? The next day? The one after that? Pandora's box had been opened and there was no way of predicting when or where the next attack would occur. They couldn't police every sporting event, every mall, every Broadway play, every school or every government installation on the off-chance that it might come under siege by swarms of killer wasps or some other surprise threat they couldn't even imagine. If men were to the point of engineering wasps like this, then who's to say they couldn't infect nearly invisible dust mites with hemorrhagic fever or seed the clouds with anthrax or the botulinum toxin that with the first rain would make the land uninhabitable for generations?

They'd already lost the war and they didn't even know it yet. All that remained was to determine the method of their ultimate extinction.

And the clock was ticking.