Brendan DuBois - Final Winter

Frozen. The car, the traffic, the frantic white-gloved hands of the traffic cop. Not moving.

Brian said, ‘Play it back, slow.’

Like some comedy newsreel from the 1930s, the traffic moved backwards, and Brian stood up, leaned into the plasma screen, tried to see what was happening. Something flew up into the outstretched hand, and—

‘Reverse it, right now.’

And the object was dropped.

Brian sat down. ‘Okay. You can keep playing it.’

The tape ran for another thirty minutes, and twice more the white Toyota stopped at an intersection, and the passenger’s hand reached out to drop something on the sidewalk. The bustling lines of people, pressed up against the walls of the buildings or the edge of the crumbling sidewalk, seemed to pay no mind for what was being dropped at their feet.

The plasma screen went blank. Brian turned and was surprised to see the team members looking at him, especially Adrianna. She said, ‘There was something there you noticed, Brian.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What was it?’

He paused for a moment, wondered if he was being tested again. If so, what the hell. ‘The guy in the passenger side of the Toyota. Looked like he was dropping something off.’

‘What was it?’

He rubbed at his face, realized he had missed a spot on his chin while hurriedly shaving that morning. ‘If this was in the States, and if there was a radio car on its ass, lights flashing and siren sounding, then I’d guess it’d be a couple of drug perps. And that they’d be dropping off little baggies of whatever it is they were selling that day, to dump the evidence. But these clowns weren’t being chased, near as I could tell.’

A pause. The group still looked at him. Made him still feel like he was trying to prove something to them, that even a non-Fed like himself could do the job, and he pressed on. ‘Another thing, too. Perps in a situation like that, they’re panicking. They’re tossing out their merchandise, tossing it far, hoping that the cops on their ass won’t find it. These guys weren’t doing this. It was deliberate. It was—’

There. It came to him.

Brian looked over to Adrianna, now feeling slightly nauseous, wishing he hadn’t had those two cups of coffee this Sunday morning on an empty stomach, and he said, ‘They’re deliberately dropping these plastic baggies. At intersections. Knowing that traffic and people walking will move over the baggies, rip open the plastic, distribute what’s in there.’

Monty whispered, ’Holy shit.’

Victor said in a shaky voice, ‘The perfect delivery system.’

Now everyone was looking at the doctor, whose face seemed even more pale. Victor went to his laptop and said, ‘You get weaponized anthrax. You have a lot of weaponized anthrax. All right. What’s the delivery system? The US Post Office? Good if you want to create panic like the fall of ‘01, not good if you’re looking for mass casualties. Crop dusters over cities? Not good enough. Too much of a wide distribution, too much dispersal. A few people get sick and that’s it. A bit of a panic but life goes on…Good Christ.’

Victor waited, and then bulled on, his voice coming quick now, syllables rolling over each other, as he looked up at the blank plasma screen, as if recalling what had just been viewed up there. ‘That’s how you do it. You have a crew, ten, thirty, forty guys. Whatever number you need. You immunize them before they go in. They each get twenty or thirty baggies of anthrax. Respiratory kind. Anthrax spores weaponized so it’s finely milled. Drive out to the middle of cities, Manhattan, Boston, LA, maybe three or four teams per city. Christ. Drop off the baggies at crowded intersections, during lunch. Baggies get broken, clouds of anthrax spores rise up, get spread around the streets. Infect scores -shit, no — hundreds, maybe even thousands. In a single day. The perfect delivery system. Time it right and you get respiratory-anthrax outbreaks in a dozen major cities, tens of thousands of causalities within a week. Maybe more. Holy fucking Christ.’

Now the silence was thick, still, just the hum of the laptops working merrily along. Brian had a sudden thought, the four of them clustered around this table, wheezing themselves to death, while the laptops merrily went on with their powered lives, outliving their owners by years.

Adrianna said, ‘Monty?’

‘Yeah,’ he grunted. Brian thought the man looked ill.

‘Seems to be a likely scenario, doesn’t it? Question is, how can we defend against it?’

Monty looked at all of them and then shook his head.

‘Bottom line, we can’t.’

‘Come on, there has to be something that we can do,’ Brian said. ‘I mean, look at it—’

Monty turned to him, glaring. ‘Don’t lecture me on my job, ‘kay? Here’s the deal, and you all know it, even if I have to spell it out for you. You heard what the good doctor said, what we’re up against. Okay. Maybe ten, fifteen teams out there. Ready to hit us in less than a month. What do we do? Close down the borders? Do person-by-person, vehicle-by-vehicle searches for everything coming up through Mexico and down through Canada? Is that it? Clog up the airports? Or the seaports? And that’s assuming these assholes aren’t here already. Maybe they came here last year. Maybe they all got jobs at 7-Eleven and the local gas stations and they’ve blended in so well, they’re acting like good citizens. What do you do then?’

Adrianna said quietly, ‘At about four a.m. this morning, I left a department meeting of the Tiger Team director. There’s a full-court press to pick up those Syrians, start interrogating them, start looking at what other intercepts and records might be out there. We even got the Canadians on board. One working theory is that the gentleman dumped at the Vancouver hospital was exposed to the respiratory anthrax before being fully immunized. But even if we do get some breaks, there’s a good chance that we’ll miss a number of these teams. It just stands to reason.’

Darren shook his head. ‘Dark Winter.’

Brian said, ‘Excuse me?’

‘Dark Winter,’ Darren said, and Brian noticed that Adrianna seemed to flinch. ‘Terrorism scenario, run by the National Security Council, the summer of 2001. Before September eleventh.’

Brian said, ‘Talk about timing.’

‘Yeah, talk about it,’ Darren said, now bent over his laptop, fingers moving rapidly along the keyboard. ‘Scenario was held at Andrews Air Force Base in Virginia and was hosted by the John Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. Reps from most federal agencies and three hospitals were in attendance. Former Senator Sam Nunn played the role of the president. Even had the governor of Oklahoma there. Scenario started with the usual Middle East bullshit. Rising tensions, threats here and there. And one fine day, smallpox outbreak in three areas: Oklahoma, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Started off small and then spread quickly. Didn’t have enough vaccine for the population at large. There was conflict over who’d get the vaccine. People living near the outbreak areas, or National Guard and health-care workers? Casualties started to mount. Schools were closed and public gatherings were banned. Tens of thousands were infected within a month. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Shit.’

Brian’s mouth was dry and he suddenly felt thirsty, but nothing before him was appealing. He had the feeling that if he drank another cup of coffee, water or orange juice, he’d puke up his guts under the conference-room table.

Darren stopped for a moment, as if not wanting to read any more from his laptop screen. Then he sighed and went on. ‘The scenario got worse. Not enough smallpox vaccine could be produced in time. Canada and Mexico sealed their borders. So did some of the states. Governors declared martial law, the stock market collapsed, and there were food shortages in some of the larger cities. By the time the war game was completed, there were nearly a million deaths. A million.’