The Devil_s Workshop

Chapter 10

They were seated in the old parole board hearing room in the big, rectangular pale brick administration building. Out the windows across the yard they could see the high tower that contained the gas chamber in center block.

Admiral James G. Zoll was seated with his back to the windows that streamed sunlight past him and lit the unhappy faces of Dexter DeMille, Charles Lack, and Colonel Laurence Chittick. Seated at the end of the room, with his back to a large map of Vanishing Lake, was Captain Nicholas Zingo. He and his "Torn Victor" Delta Force Rangers were assigned to Admiral Zoll for program security and had arrived with the Admiral and Colonel Chittick half an hour ago from Fort Detrick, in three unmarked Blackhawk helicopters.

Captain Zingo was a muscular thirty-year-old, who Dexter DeMille feared would be ordered one day to kill him. Torn Victor was a unit combat designation and included ten event-trained Delta Force Rangers, who immediately upon arriving had commandeered the available jeeps and two half-tracks at the prison, then quickly deployed them around Vanishing Lake. Captain Zingo had an earpiece attached to a belt radio and was monitoring his deploying Rangers through his headset, while at the same time listening to what was going on in the briefing room.

"I assume it's your cocktail that caused this?" Admiral Zoll asked Dr. DeMille, his sandpapery voice filling the room and raising the hair on the back of Dexter's neck.

"Before we know that for sure," Dexter said, "we'll need to do a brain slice and examine the tissue under an electron microscope at forty-seven thousand power to see if unusual amounts of amyloid plaque are present in the cells and if-"

"Cut the shit, Doctor," Admiral Zoll interrupted. "I don't need a buncha nano-chat. Is it our stuff that caused this or not?"

Dexter couldn't bring himself to answer. He looked around the room and his eyes accidentally caught Dr. Lack's.

"It's us, Admiral," Charles Lack said, as if invited in by Dexter's helpless look.

Admiral Zoll got to his feet and walked around the table slowly. He moved over to the map. "How did the goddamn mosquitoes get out?" he asked, and when Dexter hesitated again, Charles Lack answered.

"We did a colored smoke test an hour ago. There's a leak in one of the vents. It appears that there were bad exhaust seals in the old gas vents that were never properly addressed."

"Why didn't we do a smoke test before we put those two grunts in there?" Admiral Zoll asked softly.

"Good question, sir," Charles Lack said. Then he looked to Dexter as if he should suddenly have the answer.

Dexter had no answer. It was a mistake, and the Crazy Ace was not a man you confided your mistakes to.

Dexter was beginning to slide into one of his deep depressions. The room seemed to be getting smaller. It was almost as if the walls were closing in. Even his breath was coming faster; his heart was slamming so uncontrollably in his chest that he was alarmed he might actually have a coronary.

"Okay, forget it," Zoll snapped. "We got the problem now, either way. What I need is a varsity play from the deck," he said, using an old aircraft carrier expression. "I want full containment on that little town over there. Nobody leaves. How many people live there?"

"A few hundred or so," Dr. Lack said.

"I also want the phone system shut down. We need to impose a total information blackout. If any word of this slips out, this whole program goes back to the taxpayers and all of us are gonna be up on the Hill trying to find a way to explain it." They were all quiet, but everyone knew if this got out, they wouldn't be going to Capitol Hill, they would be going to Leavenworth. "First priority is containment, then we need to make sure we kill all of the escaped mosquitoes," Zoll continued.

Captain Zingo got out of his chair and moved over to the map. "We have ultra-sensitive directional microphones set to the exact high frequency female mosquitoes make when they fly. They've been tested on mosquito vectors before, so they're accurate, and efficient. My men are checking the marshy areas around the lake to see if we can determine where they're breeding."

"What makes you say they're breeding?" Dexter asked. "They're sterilized females. They can't breed."

Dr. Lack got to his feet. "Not to disagree, Dex, but apparently they weren't sterilized properly."

"The hell they weren't," Dexter snapped. "I did it myself."

"After this happened, I took some unhatched larvae out of your lab and hatched them. You have unsterilized females, and, I regret to say, I also found quite a few functioning males."

"That's impossible!" Dexter exclaimed. But he was now beginning to suspect that Dr. Lack had been sabotaging the mosquito experiment. "Those insects and the larvae were hit with huge x-ray exposures. There's no way they could reproduce."

"Well, one way or another, that's what they did," Charles Lack said, his face grim. He had chosen this moment, with Admiral Zoll present, to destroy Dexter DeMille.

"If they're breeding," Captain Zingo said, "we've got an even bigger problem. We need to find the places where they're nesting on the lake, and get in there immediately with either insecticides or defoliants. I think we should set fire to the marsh areas and burn them. That way we'll get the unhatched larvae."

There was a cold, angry silence in the room. Finally, Captain Zingo spoke again. "I have half my team working the high-frequency mikes, looking for breeding areas. The other half are doing phone and field containment."

"Mosquitoes swarm at sunset," Dr. Lack said. "I think we need to hit them before that."

"Okay," Captain Zingo said, looking at his watch, "that gives us two hours." Then he turned back to the map. "As far as civilian containment, we deployed our people here and here," he said, pointing to the two roads that surrounded the lake. "I've got the Angel Track parked across the main road leading up here," he said, referring to a half-track ambulance that could travel off-road on treads. "We're going about two miles down the highway and cutting some lumber so the trees will fall across the road. We'll put a two-man team there and turn all traffic around, but this probably buys us less than a day. Then the county cops are gonna chopper in here."

"What about phones?" Admiral Zoll asked.

"We're working on that." Captain Zingo had a shoulder mike, which he now clicked on and spoke into: "This is Zippo-i to Zulu Field Command. Gimme a communications update." He listened for a minute through his earpiece, then triggered the mike again. "Okay, roger that. Stand by." He looked at Admiral Zoll. "We've just shut down the main cellphone pod on this hill, here"-he pointed to a low hill on the west side of Vanishing Lake-"and we've located the main telephone junction box. It's off Highway 16. They're in the process of disabling it."

"Anything else?"

"One of our scout teams said they just learned there's some kind of hobo camp up by the rail line, to the east. Soon as they can, they'll go up there and secure those people."

Dexter DeMille straightened up abruptly when he heard that. Fannon Kincaid was a delusional, heavily armed fanatic. He doubted that two men in a jeep would have much luck securing one of God's four revolutionary angels.

Stacy and most of the other residents of Vanishing Lake Village had heard the three Blackhawks coming up the canyon, heard the heavy whomp-whomp-whomp of the rotors as they reverberated against the hills and mesas. Ten or twelve townspeople came out, stood on the wharf, and watched through binoculars as the combat helicopters landed a mile away on the baseball diamond, which the soldiers had cleared on the far side of the prison.

"What the hell are those people up to?" Barney said, a nervous sense of impending doom gripping him.

They were all trying to comprehend the bizarre events of that afternoon. Stacy stood on the edge of the dock, looking across the lake at the unmarked choppers through her camera's telephoto long lens. She snapped a few shots as they landed and tried to decide what she should do next. She had little doubt that they were in the middle of some kind of aerobiologic outbreak that was mosquito-borne. She wondered if all of the people in Vanishing Lake would end up dying, following the same horrible homicidal paths set by poor Sid and Mary Saunders. She suspected that the strange neural encephalitis that had claimed Sid was a Prion very much like the rare New Guinea disease Kuru, discovered in the early seventies by Carleton Gajdusek and Dexter DeMille. Max had told her that Kuru was caused by a rogue protein that, when ingested or injected, wasn't broken down by the body's enzymes, as all other such proteins were. The Prion eventually went to the brain, where it attacked the mood center, eating holes, turning the midbrain to jelly, causing a condition called spongiform encephalitis. If Dr. DeMille had developed some juiced-up strain of Kuru, it could constitute the worst strategic weapon ever conceived. She also knew if mosquitoes were the vector, and if they were breeding, it might be only a matter of hours before more people went berserk.

One other thing that Max had included in his e-mail had been rattling around in her head. He had said that what made a protein bio-weapon so dangerous was that it adapted to the target victim's own body chemistry. It didn't cause an infection or swelling, like a virus, so it often went undiagnosed. It became, in effect, a stealth weapon that silently and efficiently attacked your brain. Your immune system would not even be aware that it had infiltrated your body. It could therefore spread quickly, with the body producing no anti-toxins to fight it.

Twenty minutes later the first jeep full of bio-garmented soldiers appeared in the sleepy fishing village. The troops drove slowly down the street. One of the soldiers in the back of the jeep was holding a very scientific-looking long-nosed directional mike.

"What happened to Sid? Is he dead?" Barney asked the driver of the jeep when it slowed at the town's only intersection.

"Go inside, sir. We'll take care of it," the soldier said.

Stacy was standing nearby, and she saw a cold menacing look in the three soldiers' eyes. It was a look of complete disregard for all of them. Stacy knew as the jeep pulled away that this was going to escalate. She knew that if she was going to remain viable, she had to get out of Vanishing Lake Village immediately.

She went back to her cottage and tried to dial Wendell at the University of Southern California. Her phone wouldn't work-she couldn't even get a dial tone. She tried her cellphone, snapping in a ftesh battery. Again… nothing.

"Shit," she said softly, realizing that they had already cut off communications. She figured she wouldn't be able to drive out either. The one road out would be blocked. She grabbed her backpack and her science notebook and began throwing everything she thought she would need on her bed. She found a few Power Bars she had kept in the room for snacks. She fished an empty Evian bottle out of her wastebasket, rinsed it, filled it, and screwed the plastic cap back on. She grabbed her nylon windbreaker and last, but not least, her long-lens camera and all of her unshot film. She put everything in the backpack and then stripped the blanket off her bed, rolled it as tight as she could, and lashed it to the backpack with her extra leather belt.

"Max, what did you get us into?" she said softly. Then she checked the room one last time for anything that might be useful. She could see nothing else to take, so she slipped out of the cottage.

She took the wooded path that led up to the trash area, behind the restaurant. Once there, she set off across the hillside, staying in the trees, making her own trail. She went around the lake, moving toward the old prison. She didn't know whether she would die from deadly mosquito bites or at the hands of the cold-eyed soldiers. All she knew was that these were the same pricks who had killed Max, and they were about to kill more innocent people.

Stacy Richardson intended to make a photographic record of their crimes.