Daniel’s left side, hand, and arm were more or less useable, though his ribs were a bit compressed. His spine must have been broken as well, and healed in this hunched-over position. Fortunately his legs seemed to function reasonably well, so he struggled to move over onto the toilet. He was clothed in orange pajamas, with a convenient elastic waistband.
The necessaries finished, he drank from the faucet and lay back down on his bunk, on his side in a semi-fetal position, and tried to ignore the cat-claws in his gut. The Plague wanted to be fed.
Booted feet tramped outside his door. The little window opened, then shut, and the locking mechanism opened with a heavy clunking sound. The door slid back, then sideways on rails, and three men in blue hazardous material suits, filter masks and face shields came in.
Two of them had those huge-barreled revolver-blunderbuss things. The enormous tubes pointed his direction, naked threats. The other man carried a stainless steel chair.
The two guards took positions in the corners to the left and right of the door, and the man in charge sat down on the chair across from Daniel’s bunk, in front of the door.
“It’s not airborne, you know,” Daniel said without moving. “And I’m hardly in a position to jump you.” He held up a twisted arm.
“It’s just precautionary,” a familiar rich voice said, and his fears – his expectations rather – were fulfilled. It was Jenkins, the Third.
“I’ll say it again, Mister Jenkins. I am sorry about your son. I take full responsibility, and I’ll say so in front of any court or tribunal you care to convene.”
Jenkins chuckled, a deep, cruel sound. “You’re never going to see the inside of a courtroom. You’ve just become a lab rat. A guinea pig. You’re going to bless the days when it’s just my scientists experimenting on you, because on the other days, I’m going to test the limits of your suffering.”
“It’s our suffering that defines us, Mr. Jenkins.”
“What?”
“C. S. Lewis. Loosely quoted.”
“Then you are about to be defined quite vigorously.” He laughed again, a naked, evil thing.
“It sounds to me like you’re afraid. What is it that scares you?” Daniel tried to hold the man’s eyes.
“If I fear anything, it’s the wanton disruption of the American way of life that you are trying to bring about. Have you thought about the chaos you might have caused had we not caught you in your little scheme?”
“What part of today’s ‘American way of life’ do you love so much? What part did the Founding Fathers sacrifice so much for? Is it our citizens dying of cancer? Heart disease? Or just traffic accidents? Is it the rampant violent crime, or alcoholism, or the PTSD of veterans like me? The drug use and mental illness that caused me to lose control and kill your son? We can get rid of all that if you just stop fighting it.”
Jenkins snorted. “Listen to yourself! You want to surrender the destiny of the human race to an untested virus that might mutate and wipe us all out. Or this thing could be a Trojan Horse designed by aliens or the godless communists to destroy the Free World. What if everyone welcomes it, and after a certain amount of time, or the deployment of some trigger mechanism, kablooie! Everyone infected with it dies or goes crazy, and the old Soviets win the Cold War from their graves while the Russians and Chinese and Al Qaeda laugh and cheer.”
“Plausible. Plausible, Mr. Jenkins, but I don’t think so. If you cared so much about your country you would have informed our elected leaders when you discovered it. There would be a multibillion-dollar program to deconstruct the virus already in place, to defend against misuse of it, and to genetically engineer it so it could be used for the good of everyone, under controlled circumstances, as a cure. Instead, you kept it hidden on an island, owned by a shell company, run by your own personal mad doctor and secured by amoral thugs who kept their own researchers prisoner. So even if I didn’t get half of Los Angeles infected, now it’s too big for just INS, Incorporated. You had to call in Homeland Security. People will talk. There’s nothing more of an oxymoron than a ‘government secret’ in the age of the internet.”
“You know Markis, I let you blather on because it amuses and gratifies me to see you lying there like a twisted freak.”
“So you must trust these men implicitly? You’re not afraid of them hearing anything you say?”
“They are utterly loyal to me.”
Daniel glanced at them, seeing nothing to contradict what Jenkins had to say. Still, the longer he kept Jenkins talking, the more time the other parts of the plan had to succeed. Maybe he might even get through to one of the minions.
“Did you tell them it will cure anything? And give them functional immortality? Live a thousand years like a man of twenty? Never have to watch what you eat, or worry about all the pains of growing old? Do they think a couple of grunts like them will get a piece of that? That it won’t be reserved exclusively for the rich and powerful?”
“They will get it, just as soon as I do. As soon as the bugs have been worked out. They don’t want to end up in a pathetic situation like you are now.”
Daniel chuckled. “Just a little longer, and everyone will have a better world, right? It’s always just a little bit longer, until they find a cure for cancer, or nuclear fusion gives everyone clean energy, or we balance the budget. But those things never come, Jenkins, because the rich and powerful don’t want them to come. If they did, the little people wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore, and people like you would have no leverage. Nothing to hold over their heads. But the Eden Plague can free them now, and we can still work on making the virus better as we go along.”
Daniel wasn’t sure how convincing he was, or how much of this he even believed himself, but he had committed himself to the course and he wasn’t going to back out now. And maybe this was penance for his crime, even if it accomplished nothing else.
“You think I’m evil, Markis? You’re a pie-in-the-sky raving lunatic. You want to just roll the dice on a slice of Soviet-designed biological warfare and hope it all turns out all right.”
Daniel shrugged, as well as he could. “At least I put my money where my mouth is. What have you risked, Jenkins?”
“As little as possible. That’s how great things are achieved.”
“Really? I think truly great people would say just the opposite.”
Jenkins stood up. “We’ll just have to see who achieves greatness, then,” he sneered. “Good luck from that position.” He picked up the chair, backing out of the room. The other two followed.
“I could use some food, if you want more than a corpse to torture later.”
He laughed. “I think I’d rather see you suffer some more the way you are. Bon appétit.”
The door shut with a heavy slam. Bon appétit’s cat-claws ripped at his guts.
Eventually he slept.
-26-
Infection Day.
Jervis A. Jenkins III sat in the command vehicle half a mile from the terrorist’s underground lair. Outside, C Squadron, Special Forces Detachment, Delta – commonly known as Delta Force – deployed across the mountain. Measurement and signals intelligence, MASINT, had identified the hidden entrances using infrared and radar imagery comparisons, and each was being covered by a squad of elite special operators.
Jenkins looked down at the piece of paper in his hand, almost orgasmic every time he read it. The President’s signature at the bottom, handwritten, not autopenned, authorized him to take control of the counterterrorism operation under the “clear and present danger” clause of the Patriot Act. It was probably extralegal, perhaps illegal, as it severely bent if not broke the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibiting the use of Federal troops for law enforcement within the United States.