Rather than offering the expected rubber stamp on the program, he’d fired off a salvo advising its cancellation. Sending uncharacterized bioweapons out into the world, even to the most remote parts of the world, was crazy. The mass poisonings, the devastation of innocent populations in an effort to rout out the few . . . weren’t they past all that?
But now, he was sure the vehemence of his response hadn’t gone unnoticed. No doubt Blankenship had been dissatisfied. As he caught the elevator and traveled the three floors down, he steeled himself for the inevitable reprimand.
The elevator door buzzed open, and he headed down the dim corridor. A first lieutenant was waiting for him near the door to the general’s office. As the man came to attention, Rick caught sight of the glimmer of a rifle. An armed guard. A cold sweat dampened his shirt.
“Sir.” The younger man saluted him. Stopping short, Rick saluted back. “Sir, you’ll need to repeat your oath.”
“Here?”
“Yes. Strict orders.”
The hairs at the back of his neck prickling in the close air, Rick repeated the oath he knew so well. “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic . . . I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same . . .” As he spoke the words, his pulse kept double time in his ears. “. . . so help me God.”
The young officer latched his hand around the doorknob, waiting for the decisive click that signaled acceptance. The door swung open, and Rick slipped inside.
“Have a seat,” Blankenship said. It was an order. Rick lowered himself onto an old wooden desk chair, then looked up to take in the two others in the room with them. With a jolt, he realized that one was Henrietta Forbes, the president’s secretary of defense. The other was a short, balding man in a faded brown suit.
Blankenship coughed—an unproductive cough, more of a grumble. “Rick,” he said, “we have a situation.”
Rick glanced at his boss, General Joseph Blankenship—hero of two wars, winner of the Purple Heart, now director of the CIA. The general, normally sanguine, sat gripping his leather armrests, his mouth set in a tight grimace.
“Dr. Rudy Garza has been so kind as to come down from Fort Detrick. I’ll let him explain.” Turning, Blankenship nodded to the balding man, who promptly shuffled a thin tablet up from his lap.
“Thank you, General.” Dr. Garza’s voice was low, lost in the rumpled collar of his white shirt. “I understand that you are all aware of Tabula Rasa?”
“The project you people started a few years back? The initiator caspase–specific NAN?” Rick edged forward, his gaze still focused on the general. “I recommended it be canceled.”
The doctor looked up from his notes, his eyes surprisingly blue above a pair of old wire-framed reading glasses. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Garza,” Blankenship said, returning Rick’s gaze with his own steely glare. “Please go on.”
“The IC-NAN was deployed on June 5, a little over six months ago now, in a remote region of southern Afghanistan,” Dr. Garza said.
“Deployed? But—” Rick felt his heart picking up speed, his leg throbbing in response as he struggled to stay seated. He’d been wasting his time. By the time his opinion on Tabula Rasa had been solicited, IC-NAN had already been deployed.
It was Secretary Forbes’s turn to intercede. “Despite the truce, the region west of Kandahar still wasn’t under control. Enemy combatants were entrenched in caves, sniping at our peacekeeping troops . . . We were losing as many as five men a day. We needed a targeted weapon that wouldn’t leave a mark. No trace of itself, no trace of its origin. Just kill, then disappear.”
“As you know,” Dr. Garza said, “IC-NAN was designed for this purpose. A synthetic nucleic acid nanostructure, or NAN, mimics the activity of a virus, but it cannot be replicated by the contaminated individual. So it is not contagious. In addition, this NAN was engineered so that if it was not inhaled within a few hours, it would degrade.”
“Degrade . . .” Rick repeated. He remembered this feature, a significant one.
“Yes. Once released into the air, the infectious nanoparticulate form, which is synthesized to take on the shape of a tiny sphere, will eventually denature, or degrade, to its linear form. This linear form cannot enter human cells. After intensive study, our IC-NAN was deemed safe to release as an aerosol, via drone.”
Rick closed his eyes. He remembered Garza’s name on the reports he’d read—a chemist, a doctoral graduate of the molecular biology program at the Instituto Politécnico in Mexico City. His trained ear picked up a slight Spanish accent, almost musical in tone. It was difficult to be angry at this meek purveyor of bad news. But was it his anger or his confusion that had set the room spinning? “So, did the NAN do what it was supposed to do?” he asked, his own voice sounding faint in his ears.
Dr. Garza adjusted his glasses with one nervous forefinger. “Normally, the cells on the human lung’s surface are replaced every two to three weeks with fresh cells. But within five weeks of our attack, all of the targeted individuals were found dead. Their lung biopsies showed no evidence of uninfected, normally functioning lung surface cells. So yes, the NAN appeared to have behaved as expected.”
Rick felt a catch at the base of his throat. From Blankenship’s immaculate desk, a tiny snowman smiled at him, trapped there in the stagnant atmosphere of his own small globe. They wouldn’t have called him down here if all had gone according to plan. “And the residual? The material that wasn’t inhaled?”
Dr. Garza swallowed hard, and Rick detected a slight tremor in his voice as he continued. “As you seem to have surmised, this is the issue. Those who did reconnaissance—the GeoBot team who located the bodies—some of them suffered . . . sequelae. And they found more individuals dead at the scene, and over a wider area, than had been expected based on aerial photos taken before deployment of the spray.”
“The NAN didn’t degrade?”
“It did degrade, in the sense that it reverted to the noninfectious linear form. But . . .”
“But?”
Looking up from his notes, Dr. Garza confronted the room. “But that form, while not able to infect human cells, was taken up by a receptive species of archaebacterium present in the desert sands. It inserted itself into that genome. And it appears that these microbes were capable of replicating it each time they divided.”
Rick found himself clutching the arms of his chair. “These things made more copies of the NAN DNA? How do you know this?”
“We analyzed samples taken from the victims’ clothing. The NAN DNA sequence was present in the archaebacterial DNA. But . . . the problem is worse than this. We discovered that some of these microbes were packed with reconstituted spherical NANs.”