Plague Maker - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tim Downs is the author of nine novels including the Christy Award-winning PlagueMaker and the highly acclaimed series of Bug Man novels. Tim lives in North Carolina with his wife Joy. They have three grown children.

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Chapter One

Special Agent Nathan Donovan lifted his tray table and peered down at the small plastic case wedged between his feet, just as he had done a hundred times before. It was a beverage cooler, really, nothing more, the kind he might have smuggled into a Mets game or taken to the Jersey shore. The simple red lid was unceremoniously duct-taped to the chalky white body, giving it an altogether unassuming appearance--as though it might contain nothing more than a frigid six-pack or a picnic lunch for two.

Well-meaning scientists at the University Hospital in Kuala Lumpur had plastered the thing with every cautionary label imaginable. Long strips of neon-green tape flashed the wordBIOHAZARD at regular intervals; fluorescent orange stickers warned of CORROSIVE MATERIALS and CHEMICAL HAZARD ; even the Radiology Department chipped in, adding a series of triangular black-and-yellow labels declaring: DANGER ! THIS EQUIPMENT PRODUCES IONIZING RADIATION WHEN ENERGIZED.

Donovan had carefully removed all of them, for the same reason that half of his fellow counterterrorism agents in New York City declined to wear their FBI windbreakers: It just doesn't pay to advertise. The Malaysian authorities thought the shrieking labels would hold the curious at bay--Donovan knew they would have just the opposite effect. He might as well hang a sign around his neck that says, "Look what I've got!"

Only a fool or a novice stamps SECRET on the front of a secret document.

A professional will take a plain blue cover every time.

At the University Hospital, words had buzzed around Donovan's head like Malaysian fruit bats. Microbiologists and disease specialists tossed around terms that he could barely pronounce, let alone comprehend--words likepanenterovirus , cytomegalovirus , and respiratory syncytial virus .

All he understood--all that was explained to him--was that Malaysian pig farmers were dying by the hundreds and no one knew why. The disease began with raging fever, followed by delirium, then sudden and irreversible coma. Those were the lucky ones; the less fortunate were left conscious to face the wasting agonies of vomiting, diarrhea, and internal hemorrhaging. Each path was different, but the destination was ultimately the same: a violent and certain death.

No one knew what it was, how it was carried, or how it was transmitted.

The disease resisted all known antibiotics, even the big guns like streptomycin.

That's what set off all the bells and whistles at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta: That kind of antibiotic resistance rarely occurs in nature. It suggests intentional genetic manipulation, and that raises the possibility that some idiot, or group of idiots, might be trying to play dice with the universe again.

No one knew what do. On Malaysian hog farms, gas-masked soldiers trained their assault rifles on squealing pigs, decimating entire herds, while across town other farmers smuggled their own pigs past roadblocks to markets in other states, allowing the disease to leapfrog from region to region and, inevitably, from country to country. That's why the CDC wanted a look. It was only a matter of time; in the global village of the twenty-first century, there is no such thing as a local outbreak.

A local pathologist had managed to isolate the virus from the blood and spinal fluid of two cadavers before becoming one herself. Before her own brutal demise, she succeeded in growing a fist-sized lump of the stuff in a culture of porcine kidney cells. Scientists at the University Hospital placed the mucosal mass in an airtight metal container, surrounded it with dry ice, and packed it carefully in a simple red-and-white cooler, addressing it to the CDC's Division of Vector-Borne Diseases in Fort Collins, Colorado.

But one courier company after another turned the shipment down. No one would take the risk. No one was willing to say, "We'll absolutely, positively have it there by 10:30 tomorrow morning--unless we happen to drop it, in which case half the western U.S. will begin vomiting blood."

That's why the CDC called the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and that's why they called New York: because N.Y. agents are known as the best and the toughest in the Bureau. And that's why the job went to Nathan Donovan: because no one was better, and no one was tougher.

He glanced down at the box for the hundred-and-first time. Maybe no one was dumber,he thought.

At the hospital, they had handcuffed Donovan to the cooler like a diplomatic courier. For most of the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles, he sat with the box in the center of his lap, clutching the handle with both hands like an old woman in Battery Park. But it occurred to him that a single inadvertent gesture, like reaching out to a flight attendant for a bag of peanuts, could jerk the cooler off his lap and onto the floor.But it can't fall off the floor , he decided, so he removed the handcuff and slid the cooler between his feet.

He felt the aching stiffness in his back and legs again. He arched backward, and his 220-pound frame flexed the back of his seat like a beach chair. Behind him he heard an expletive in some unknown tongue, like the bark of a small dog.

For eighteen hours he had unconsciously squeezed the cooler between his legs, as if it might somehow squirt out and slide down the aisle like a wet bar of soap. Only now, on the final leg of his journey, did he begin to relax--but only a little.

The 737 lifted off from a westbound runway and headed out over the Pacific one last time before turning northeast on its two-and-a-half-hour route to Denver. Donovan surveyed the sea of heads around him: Some slumped back in restless slumber; others nodded together in intimate conversation.

Some seats appeared empty, until a tiny pair of hands gripped the top of the seat and then quickly vanished again. There were heads of all shapes and colors and sizes; there was long hair, short hair, and hair long gone; there were streamlined ears tucked tightly back against skulls, and large, curling ears that jutted out like diving planes on a submarine.

Donovan didn't care. He was looking for eyes--eyes that turned away when he looked at them, eyes that lingered a little too long. He turned his left leg slightly and raised it until it bumped the seat above; he felt a reassuring metallic tap from the Glock beneath his pant leg. He hated the ankle holster; it made the gun too hard to reach. But in the current social climate, allowing fellow passengers to catch a glimpse of gunmetal from beneath a blazer was a definite faux pas, and Donovan found himself wearing the ankle holster more and more. Better than no gun at all , he thought.

They were passing directly over Santa Monica now. Out his window, in the distance, he could just catch a glimpse of the cliffs at Malibu. They continued to climb over the sprawling San Fernando Valley, gaining altitude for the hop over the San Gabriel Mountains ahead.

Then it happened.

Donovan heard the blast before he felt the concussion--from somewhere in the forward baggage compartment, he thought. The floor in the first-class galley buckled wildly and then flattened again. The shock wave traveled back the full length of the plane, causing the entire fuselage to ripple visibly. Donovan was astonished that the airframe could contort that far without disintegrating--yet somehow, the plane was still intact. Overhead compartments sprang open like a line of mousetraps, vomiting out carry-on luggage, briefcases, shopping bags, and a blizzard of coats and sweaters. Above each row of seats a rectangular door dropped open, and a tangle of tubing and bright yellow plastic dangled down like a sea of jellyfish.

In his mind, Donovan could see the...