Greg Rucka - Alpha

He just wants this to be over. He just wants to get through this. Then he’ll have done what the Uzbek wanted, what the Shadow Man has required, and he can make his way back to Dana, and never leave her again.

He can make his way back to Dana, and be Gabriel Fuller for the rest of his life.

If he can just get through this day.

Bell has just signed the authorization allowing time and a half for Dana Kincaid, the ASL interpreter he’s brought in for Athena and Amy and Howe and the rest, when Nuri shoves his office door open. There’s no knock, and he looks up and sees it in her eyes, and before she’s finished speaking he’s out of the chair and moving, feeling the dread bursting in him like exploding glass.

“The Spartan,” Nuri says, backing up as he approaches, then pivoting, falling into step. “Alarm just spiked in the southwest of the park, near Terra Space.”

“Bio or chem?”

“It’s reading botulinum.”

A cold fear latches onto Bell’s back, begins trying to claw its way into his chest. “Got to be a false positive.”

“And just wouldn’t that be nice? Struss is running a diagnostic now, but we don’t know how long it’s going to take.”

“What’s the wind?”

“Blowing from the south-southwest, about three knots.”

“Botulinum?”

“Yeah.” Her voice is flat, the doubt and the concern canceling one another out, Bell imagines.

They’re coming down the stairs, now, from the third floor to the command post on the second, and Bell is taking them two, three at a time. Nuri, a handbreadth shorter but long-legged, nonetheless struggles to keep up. Bell runs the numbers in his head, three knots an hour, 156 acres, converts to metric, says, “Little over eight minutes before it covers the park.”

“Closer to seven, if we assume even distribution, constant wind speed, which we can’t. But we’re talking about an unknown, it could be less, could be more.”

Nuri leans ahead of him, shoves the door open into the second-floor command post. Heads turn, and Bell can see the fear, hear the silence of the room as he moves to the air monitoring station, where a middle-aged Norman Struss is working a shift that’s on the verge of turning into a nightmare. Bell ignores the man, feels eyes on him, Nuri’s among them, as he stares at the monitor. The Spartan’s screen lists chem and bio agents in columns, has its own section for radiation, and it’s flickering through readings as though it were flipping through a slide show. Then it settles, displaying an image much like an EKG, with multiple color-coded lines running across a horizontal axis. Negative anthrax, negative sarin, negative cyanogen, negative radiation, negative, negative, negative, negative.

Except this one, this line that is flexing and spiking and pulsing in bright red, marked BOTULINUM. A callout, recording estimated concentration per sample taken. Lethality is measured by median lethal dose, or LD50, the amount of any given agent that will kill 50 percent of a population exposed to it. Bell is thinking about botulinum, thinking about context, remembering VX nerve agent. A lethality of roughly thirty micrograms to one kilogram of human being, or, to put it another way, in aerosol form, one breath of it delivers enough toxin to kill 150 people.

That’s VX, Bell remembers.

But botulinum toxin, appropriately weaponized, has a theoretical LD50 of three nanograms per kilogram. That’s a thousand times more lethal. This is the same stuff that Aum Shinrikyo tried to manufacture before giving up on it and switching to sarin when they attacked the Tokyo subway system. They gave up on it because they could never get the vector to work properly.

A problem somebody else seems to have solved.

It’s not an instant death. Symptoms on average begin to present at six hours to two days after exposure, but there have been cases of incubation within two to three hours, and within as long as four days. Unlike VX or sarin, which cause seizure and paralysis, botulinum causes muscle atrophy, loss of control, and, inevitably, respiratory failure. Victims suffocate, their diaphragms literally unable to work their lungs.

Bell doesn’t know how many people are in the park today. He doesn’t know how many people are at Disneyland, or Knott’s Berry Farm, or even how many live in Irvine and its environs. But he’s pretty damn sure that if the Spartan II is reading botulinum and if it’s telling the truth, then there’s more than enough traveling in the air to spread far and wide beyond the confines of WilsonVille.

Nuri has the phone ready, hands it to him as he reaches out, then puts an extension to her own ear. Bell doesn’t look away, staring at that monitor. The Spartan II that he just doesn’t trust. The Spartan II that maybe is lying to him, but is maybe telling him the truth, and he has to push, and push hard, to keep the thoughts of Amy and Athena from overwhelming his reason. Nuri at his elbow, and she’s watching him carefully, and he shakes his head just barely.

Marcelin’s voice on the line now. “Jad? What’s going on?”

“Waiting on Porter,” Bell says.

“I’m here. We’ve got alarms relaying through the office, I was just about to-”

“The Spartan tripped for airborne botulinum, now at forty-three micrograms per sample.”

“Jesus Christ,” Marcelin says.

“We’ve got a diagnostic running, but it’s going to be”-Bell looks at Norman Struss, who holds up his left hand, shows him five fingers, then five fingers again, then five fingers a third time-“fifteen minutes before it’s completed, before we know whether it’s a system fault or not.”

There’s a fraction’s pause, both men at the ends of the lines absorbing, digesting. Marcelin speaks before Porter, his voice controlled. “Could it be a false positive?”

“No way to tell at the moment.”

“It doesn’t fit the profile,” Porter mutters, speaking more to himself than to them. “It doesn’t fit their profile, you can’t just weaponize botulinum, it’s not something you can do in a high-school chem lab, it’s not in their profile.”

On the monitor, the pulsing line jumps, the machine bleats again, repeatedly. Norman Struss taps keys quickly, silencing the Spartan. “New readings, now central north side, from Fort Royal to the coaster. It’s spreading. Jesus, it’s spreading.”

“You guys hear that?”

“It doesn’t make sense. If this is retribution, they’d take a suicide run at the gates, blow themselves and take whoever they can with them, go out like true believers shouting it to the clouds. Run a truck loaded with ANFO into the parking lot, that’s the profile. This doesn’t make sense!”

“How long will it take to evacuate the park?” Marcelin asks.

Bell looks to Nuri, about to ask her, sees that she’s been writing on a piece of paper. She holds it up before he can ask the number: 49K AS OF 1030H.

“We’re over forty-nine thousand,” Bell says into the phone. “Best case, we can clear the park in twenty minutes. That’s best case, Matt. And I’d want to second-sweep for stragglers.”

“Shut it down, evacuate the park,” Porter says. “Jesus Christ, shut it down now, Matthew!”

“Jad?”

Bell is still staring at the monitor. His head believes what he’s seeing, but he can feel it in his gut, there’s something not right about this. Something about the way the sensors are tripping, the way the toxin seems to be spreading, but he can’t articulate it, can’t find words to fit the feeling.

“You’re going to have to intake, treat, nearly fifty thousand people,” Bell says, the image, unbidden and imagined, Athena lying on a gurney, pumped full of antitoxin, unable to even gasp for breath behind a bag valve mask. “You’re talking about men, women, children, the elderly, all the staff-”