The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 19

Melody was furious. She showed it with a kind of quiet energy that did nothing to mask the inferno behind her eyes, a furnace I expected to explode on the first person not in her inner circle who did something she thought was stupid. She had been a kind of queen of intelligence, bullying the bureaucracy into effectiveness and solving the unsolvable. Now, her agency was utterly failing to anticipate the enemy, and none of the tactics she relied on were working.

“We need to test everybody,” she said. “All the agents, all the soldiers, the general staff, everybody. We need to know they’re on our side.”

Melody and Shaunessy and I were crammed into the closet-sized room they’d allocated her for an office. “Is that practical?” I asked.

“Not if we have to do PET scans or MRIs. We need a blood test, preferably one that doesn’t take a week of analysis in a lab to reach a conclusion. That’s your task for tomorrow. Check with the Brazilian docs who examined Ms. Andrade and see what they can tell you. Then find the Army docs and tell them we’ve got a potential epidemic on our hands. You said your brother has cultures of this thing?”

I yawned. I couldn’t help it. It was two o’clock in the morning, and the last time I’d slept had been in the back seat of a taxi. “He does, in his lab at UMD. I’m not sure if he’ll be willing to give them up, though.”

“He’ll have to. This is an infectious disease issue, so we need to get USAMRIID involved, and the FBI as well. This is a threat we can’t ignore.”

“Does Deputy Director Clarke know?” Shaunessy asked. “And General Cardiff?” Cardiff was the commander of the US forces in Brazil.

“They know,” Melody said, “but they don’t really believe me. The evidence is pretty thin, and it’s not something they’ve been trained to expect. If people were dying, and I said ‘pandemic,’ they’d have docs in HAZMAT suits swarming the place like flies. But people betraying their country because of an infection? It doesn’t compute. They don’t have a category to put it in.”

One thing they had in Brazil was good coffee. I refilled my disposable cup from the pot Melody kept going day and night.

“What was she like when you talked to her?” Melody asked, meaning Mariana de Andrade. “Could you tell? Did she seem drugged, or high, or like anything was wrong?”

“No,” I said. “She didn’t, and it was pretty creepy. She seemed perfectly lucid and rational. On the other hand, she considered it perfectly normal to have a fungal parasite sending tendrils through her brain, to the extent that she seemed surprised I would question it.”

“She knew?”

“Yeah. And get this—she said her doctor was infected, too. That he was giving her tips for how to help it grow.”

“We need to find that doctor. Shaunessy, contact the local police tomorrow. They should know how to pull her medical records.”

“My brother didn’t mind the idea of a fungal parasite either, but I didn’t think it was weird coming from him. I mean, it was weird, but fungi is his thing. It’s like a herpetologist kissing snakes. It wasn’t out of character. From Andrade, though…”

“To be fair, we don’t know what her character was to begin with,” Melody said. “But I agree. Weird.”

“I’ll call home first thing in the morning,” I said. “If Paul won’t give up his cultures, maybe my dad will allow a blood sample to be sent to USAMRIID.”

“I know a guy there,” Melody said. “You get your father to give his consent, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

I followed Shaunessy to the hotel where they were housing American staff, and the cheerful desk clerk informed me that all the rooms were full. “Come on,” Shaunessy said. “My room has a pull-out couch. Not much more than a foam cushion, from what I can tell, but it’ll be better than nothing.”

I felt awkward. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll call another hotel. There’s got to be some place that—”

“There won’t be. They’ll be booked for miles around, and by the time you find a place, it’ll be morning. Come on. I promise I won’t take advantage of you.”

I smiled. “Well. In that case.”

By the time we reached the elevator, my yawns were coming so fast I could hardly close my mouth. I walked into her room, lay down on the couch without pulling out the bed, and shut my eyes.

After what seemed like only moments, the gray light of morning filtered through the curtain, and the phone was ringing with a jarring tone loud enough to split rock. Shaunessy answered it. She made a few one-syllable replies, then set the phone in its cradle.

“We’re at war,” she said.

We made it back to the Palácio do Anhangabaú in time for the general staff’s daily briefing, which was held in one of the largest rooms and packed with people, both American and Brazilian. An Air Force colonel stood at the front, illustrating his summary with a series of pictures taken from satellite and drone imagery. I recognized the format as the same one used by the intelligence agencies to produce the president’s daily briefing. It was the end of the analysis chain, a carefully selected meal of easily digested tidbits linked to maps and statistics.

I also knew how biased it could be.

“Ligados forces initiated hostilities twenty miles west of São Luis at 0300,” the colonel said. “The attack was a coordinated land and air assault including a combination of Brazilian and Venezuelan forces. US casualties were light, and the attacking forces were almost completely neutralized. Our fighters followed retreating air units back to Val de Cans airfield in Belém. At 0450, B-52s from the 11th Bomb Squadron commenced a retaliatory strike. Bomb assessment confirms complete neutralization of Val de Cans as a future staging area for air assault.”

Melody watched the briefing with heavy lids and unfocused eyes. She wore the same clothes as the day before, and I wondered if she had slept at all. The colonel switched to a summary of drone coverage of the Amazon states, noting that the vast area and thick ground cover made thorough enemy identification problematic.

“He means we have no idea what we’re up against,” Melody said. She didn’t really lower her voice, so half the room heard her.

The colonel wrapped up his briefing with a series of “happy snaps,” imagery selected more for its wow factor than its intelligence value. We saw an F-22 ripping past the explosion of an enemy aircraft it had just destroyed, the ravaged remains of a Val de Cans airstrip, a ragged line of enemy troops running into the trees away from an unbroken US emplacement.

“Stop!” Melody stood, her eyes suddenly sharp. “Whose are those?” She indicated the bottom right corner of the most recent image, where I could just make out two blurry aircraft.

The colonel’s smile was patronizing. “Commercial craft, ma’am. Single-pilot turboprops, from the look of them, maybe agricultural planes. Non-military.”

“And what possible reason would a pair of crop dusters have to be flying through a war zone in the middle of a dogfight?”

“I assume they just found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Melody rolled her eyes and turned on her heel, not waiting to hear General Cardiff’s closing remarks. Shaunessy and I traded glances and then jumped up to follow her.

“What’s up with the crop dusters?” I said when we caught up with her.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

I considered. “They’re requisitioning civilian planes for military purposes?”

She stopped and faced me so suddenly I almost collided with her.

“What do crop dusters do?” she asked.

I opened my mouth, then shut it again, feeling foolish. “You think they’re using them to spread fungal spores,” Shaunessy said. “They’re trying to infect more people.”

“I think,” Melody said, biting off each word, “that this whole suicidal attack might have been engineered for the sole purpose of getting those crop dusters close to our troops.”

The radar data confirmed Melody’s suspicions. It was obvious, once you were looking for it. Ten crop dusters in total, flying in pairs from different angles, their approach timed to coincide with attacks by military aircraft. They stayed low and never approached directly, but their course always brought them upwind of the US base of operations or São Luis. In the darkness, the clouds of particles they released wouldn’t have been visible.

“I’m talking about biological warfare,” Melody said. She stood in General Cardiff’s office, which she had entered without knocking, completely ignoring the fact that he was in conference with his top commanders. She had thrown the data on the desk in front of him and insisted that he treat every soldier in São Luis as a potential hostile until they could be tested.

The general was lean and tough-looking at sixty years old. His hair was still dark, with only a touch of gray at the temples, and the deep lines of his face cut sharply, giving him an intense, hardened look. I doubted he could have slept much either, but he seemed energetic and ready to take on the world. “We have a process for this, Ms. Muniz. I have a Theater Army Medical Laboratory on site staffed with doctors trained to recognize biological agents in the field. There has been a significant sickness rate, I’ll admit, and they’re testing regularly. But the chief doc out there tells me he’s not seeing any of the warning signs. Just a bad respiratory infection making the rounds, not uncommon with troops on a different continent.”

“This is something different,” Melody said. “Mr. Johns here has seen it at work.” I was already nervous, standing behind her surrounded by the top brass. Now I wanted to sink into the floor. It was a theory, one that seemed to fit the facts, but hardly backed up with any significant scientific research. If they challenged me on it, I had nothing to back Melody’s claims but my uneasiness with my brother and father, and a lot of unconfirmed pattern matching. “It’s not designed to kill,” Melody continued, when I didn’t speak up. “At least not many. It’s more subtle than that. It’s going to affect their minds, erode their patriotism, influence their choices. It’s like Ms. Andrade. Until they’re tested, you can’t trust them.”

“Andrade was a traitor, pure and simple,” the general said. “I don’t need any viral voodoo to explain that one. And what do you expect me to do? Give brain scans to three thousand servicemen? We don’t have the equipment, and we don’t have the time. If you want me to take this more seriously, you’ll need to provide more concrete intelligence than the appearance of a few turboprops on the outskirts of an air battle. I’m not discounting what you’re saying, but it’s not enough.”

“At least let me speak with the ranking corps officer,” Melody said.

“Be my guest. You’re welcome to convince him with whatever data you have available. In the meantime”—and here an ironic note slipped into his voice—“may I have your permission to continue meeting with my senior staff?”

Melody didn’t even blush. “Of course, General,” she said.

As they shut the door behind us, I heard Cardiff say, “So that’s why they call her the Major.” His senior officers laughed.

If Melody heard them, she gave no sign.

Melody delegated to me the task of contacting Captain Suharto, the ranking medical corps officer at São Luis. I called him and explained my suspicions over the phone as convincingly as I could. He was polite, but unimpressed. He asked what medical background I had, what laboratory tests had been performed, what field studies with substantial statistical findings. The longer I talked to him, the more I started to doubt my own theory.

“General Cardiff said you’ve seen a lot of respiratory illness,” I said. “Has that been fungal in nature?”

“I expect so, but it’s mostly a presumptive diagnosis,” Suharto said. “Fungal etiology is hard to prove and generally unnecessary to treat in less serious cases. But as you probably know, fungal infections are endemic in this region. The rainforest, the humidity, combined with a large pool of previously unexposed subjects, and a high incidence of minor infection is inevitable.”

“Did the number of cases go up this morning?”

I heard him typing on a computer, presumably checking the data. “They did, as a matter of fact, by a good margin. Not epidemic proportions or anything, but a definite increase. What do you know that I don’t?”

I explained to him about the crop dusters and our suspicion that they were raining spores down on the camp.

Next to me, Shaunessy typed rapidly at a computer, nested lines of software code that I didn’t comprehend spidering across her screen. On two other screens beside her, she monitored the feeds from a dozen drones. The live video tracked military movements, zoomed in on specific buildings or out to view square miles at a time. Shaunessy wasn’t controlling them; she had just accessed the streaming data. Before I called Suharto, she had muttered something about training a deep learning network to recognize anomalous activity, but I barely understood what she meant.

“If it’s biological warfare, they’re not doing a terribly good job of it,” Suharto said. “I appreciate the call, and we’ll keep our eye out. A little respiratory infection isn’t going to destroy our will to fight, though. I had an infection myself a few days ago. Unpleasant at the time, but I felt better after forty-eight hours. That’s what it’ll be for most of these soldiers.”

I paused. “You were infected, sir?”

“Nasty cough, bloody nose, high fever. Knocked me off my feet for a day and a half, and I felt miserable, let me tell you. It’s the price you pay when you enter a new microbial ecosystem. Lots of opportunistic organisms happy to find a new home. Life-threatening for immunocompromised hosts, but not a serious danger for the rest of us.”

He was so confident, so articulate, that I found it hard to doubt him. But what if he, too, was under the influence of the fungus? Would he even know it himself?

An idea occurred to me. “I suppose it won’t matter once Cardiff’s plan to raze the rainforest goes into effect,” I said. Shaunessy looked up from her typing long enough to give me an odd look.

“What did you say? Raze the forest? As in, burn it?” Suharto said.

“Yeah. I don’t think it’s classified or anything. He’s planning to take out as many acres of rainforest as he can. Use accelerants to make it burn faster, get some real forest fires going. Of course, the Amazon basin is as big as the United States. Obviously he’s not going to burn all of it. He’ll concentrate on those areas where there’s suspected enemy activity, burn as much as he can. Part of the whole ‘shock and awe’ strategy, right?”

When Suharto replied, his voice was shaking. “He wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t.”

“I’m pretty sure he could.”

“The Amazon is priceless. It’s the only place like it in the world. The number of unique species, the ecological complexity, the carbon and oxygen contribution to the planet. He can’t burn it. I’d rather lose this war than see it won through such means.”

The strength of emotion behind Suharto’s speech chilled me. I didn’t even disagree with anything he said—it would be a crime to burn acres of rainforest, and the Amazon was valuable for all the reasons he mentioned and more. Furthermore, I had no way of knowing if Suharto had been passionate about ecological preservation before his infection. But the fact that my little test had been so dramatically passed frightened me more than I wanted to admit.

“I apologize,” I said. “A staffer here just corrected me. That strategy was apparently suggested but ultimately rejected by the general.”

“I should hope so,” Suharto said.

“I’m not really privy to policy. Sorry if I upset you. I guess that’ll teach me to listen to gossip.”

“No harm done.” The emotion vanished from the captain’s voice. “I’ll keep a watch on those infection rates, but really, I think there’s nothing to worry about.”

Shaunessy waved to get my attention. She looked alarmed. She clicked on one of the Reaper drone’s camera feeds so that it filled one of the screens.

“I’m sorry, I have to go now,” I said into the phone. “Sorry to trouble you, Captain.”

“No trouble,” Suharto said. “Good day.”

I ended the call and gave Shaunessy my attention. “What is it?”

She pointed to the feed. The way the Reaper’s camera was angled, I could see one of the wings, its underside loaded with Hellfire missiles, black with yellow stripes. I could also spot the edge of its 150-kilowatt laser—a new addition to the Reaper weapons catalog that enabled it to attack other aircraft, not just ground targets. The rest of the camera’s field of view showed a small city, studded with office block towers and surrounded on three sides by water. The ocean was turquoise and the wide bay beyond the city’s bridges a sparkling blue.

“Is that São Luis?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “but this drone is assigned to monitor Belém, three hundred miles away. Why is it here?”

I shrugged. “Coming back to refuel?”

Shaunessy tapped on the screen, where a column of numbers and abbreviations overlaid the edge of the image. “It’s still got three-quarters of a tank.”

“Maybe it’s malfunctioning, and they’re bringing it in for repairs?”

The drone slid over the city and crossed the bay. The precisely ordered tent city of the US Marine camp came into view, the rows of dark green canvas surrounded by sandbag walls. The camera swiveled to locate the vehicle area, where tanks, trucks, armored earth movers, and tactical vehicles of all kinds sat parked in neat lines.

“I’m sure they have it on radar,” I said. “Nothing gets within a hundred miles of that camp without them knowing it. The guy flying it is probably in that camp.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“You don’t think…” I started to say, but I trailed off when a white box appeared in the center of the screen and a red light started flashing in the lower left corner.

“No,” Shaunessy said. “No no no no no no.”

I snatched the phone and redialed Suharto’s number. Reaching the field commander or some other combat officer would probably have been better, but I didn’t know how to reach them, and I didn’t have time to find out.

“Hello?” The voice that answered was female, stressed, and not Suharto. “This is HQ in São Paulo,” I said. “Be advised that a friendly drone is targeting your position. Repeat, a friendly armed drone is about to fire on your camp.”

The voice on the other end laughed, high and panicked. “Is that all?” she said. “We’ve got bigger problems here right now.”

With a jet of white contrail, one of the Reaper’s Hellfires rocketed off the rails and dropped toward the ground. Seconds later, it hit the side of an Abrams tank and tore it open in a silent explosion. On screen, it seemed tiny, just a distant flash with no color or sound to give it power.

The woman on the line started swearing. “What’s happening there?” I demanded.

“Traitors,” she said, her voice an anguished growl. “Soldiers all over the camp just opened fire, without warning, killing their commanding officers, their friends, anyone. It was coordinated, sir. They planned it. I don’t know why. I barricaded myself in medical, but I don’t know how long that’s going to last.” I could hear the staccato bursts of automatic weapons in the background. “What should I do, sir?”

“I’m not an officer,” I said, weakly.

“You said you were HQ!”

“I’m just an analyst.” I stared at the screen, numb, as another Hellfire turned the camp’s command building into burning rubble. I could see the blurry forms of men running from the blast. The woman on the phone with me disconnected the call, but I kept it to my ear, imagining I could hear the screams. Shaunessy shouted into a headset, telling the brass on the floor above us what was happening. “I don’t know what you should do,” I said into the dead phone. “I just don’t know.”

The drone’s wide-angle lens gave us a clear view of the camp as five-hundred-pound bombs fell from the sky by the dozens. We found out later that a single B-52H from the 11th Bomb Squadron had failed to release any ordnance on the attack on Val de Cans. Instead, it returned to São Luis and dropped its entire load of eighty-one bombs and twenty cruise missiles on the US camp before flying straight into the ocean.

Of the three thousand soldiers stationed at São Luis, less than two hundred survived.

The combination of shock and exhaustion made my head spin. I felt like a fog was creeping around the edge of my vision. I kept seeing the bombs fall, the military tents erupt into gray clouds of smoke. When I stumbled upstairs to find Melody, she grabbed me by both arms and stared me down until my vision cleared and I looked her in the eye. “Get your brother on the phone. Talk to your father, to the doctors who treated him, anyone you can find. We need to be able to test for this thing. Something simple we can do for thousands of soldiers in the field. That or we need a cure.”

“My brother and father are infected,” I said. “They’ll be just like the traitors in São Luis. We can’t tell them anything, or trust anything they tell us.”

“Your brother has answers we need. If not him, then maybe his university. Somebody. We need to know how this thing works, how it spreads, and how to know who’s infected and who isn’t.”

“Okay. I’m on it,” I said.

I found a free phone out in the big room and made the call. My mother picked up halfway through the first ring. “Neil?” Her voice sounded tinny, and there was a faint echo on the line.

“I need to talk to Paul,” I said. “Is he there?”

She said something I couldn’t make out.

I cupped my hand over my other ear, trying to block out the bustle and conversation of the office around me. “What?”

“I said he’s missing!”

“Who is? Paul?”

“Both of them.” Her voice shook with emotion. “They walked out of here together, shortly after you called. When I got back, his room was empty. Neil, you have to come home. Your father’s gone.”