Spiral

Solomon went in, going straight to the epicenter of the explosion, scanning the wreckage for the item mentioned in the email. The fire chief filled in the details. As best they could tell, the explosive was fitted inside a fake section of piping. Thankfully, the student who saw it had survived, though he’d lose an arm and sight in both eyes. He’d told them that it had started to make a noise. It had likely been set off remotely.

But it wasn’t the details of the bomb that interested Solomon. It was another item, one that no one else had yet noticed, partially obscured by a piece of plaster. Just like the anonymous email had said, right there on the floor, glinting in the rescue spotlights.

A goddamn brass cylinder.

27

MAGGIE WAS BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND HOW FUSARIUM spirale could be turned into a devastating biological weapon.

During World War II, genetics was still a new science. No one was even sure that DNA was the basis for genetic information until the Hershey-Chase experiments on T2 viruses in 1952. Even with today’s techniques for splicing and dicing genomes, creating a successful genetically modified organism was a huge undertaking.

But the scientists at Unit 731 had chosen well.

Fusarium spirale was relatively harmless when it lived in your gut, viciously dangerous when it infected a corn plant. If you want to make a monster out of it, all you had to do was scramble its genetic programming. Turn off a few genes, turn on a few others, get its signals mixed. Make it pump out toxins when it was living inside you. Maggie shuddered at the thought. You’d have a chemical weapons factory killing you from the inside out.

Maggie could guess how they’d done it. They could have used chemicals or radiation to induce mutations, then test them on human subjects. Cultivate the ones that killed the quickest. If you were a sadistic monster willing to use live human subjects, you didn’t need biotechnology.

Maggie felt the mysteries shrouding her grandfather dissolving away, the pieces of his life coming together. Her grandfather had gone to work at Detrick right after the war. Liam never talked about it, but she had gathered threads from what her grandmother Edith had told her. In the months before she died, Edith and Maggie spent a great deal of time together. Maggie loved to get her talking, to tell the stories of her life. It made Edith happy, distracting her when she was in great pain from the treatments. Edith said that Liam had insisted that they move to Maryland so he could continue his work at Camp Detrick. “He never was quite the same after the war,” she said. “He had nightmares. It must have been terrible. I can’t imagine.”

Maggie was willing to bet that those nightmares were about Fusarium spirale.

Bam! Bam! Maggie nearly jumped out of her skin at the thudding noise. Someone was banging on the front door.

She started toward the reception area. Could it be Jake?

Bam!

But why wouldn’t he have called?

She stopped, pulled out her phone, and flipped it open. The main display showed no messages. But she hit the key that took her to her voice mail. To her surprise, there were seven. All from Jake, all in the last half-hour. Why hadn’t her phone rang? Something was wrong with her phone.

The banging grew louder, a steady thump, thump, thump. She retrieved the gun that Vlad had left her, suddenly thankful to have it.

“Jake?” she asked, standing across the reception room from the front door, gun pointed toward it. Her hand was shaking. “Is that you?”

The banging stopped.

Complete silence. Her heart was pounding.

She forced herself to check the window. The parking lot was empty.

She leaned in close to the glass, trying to see the front door, but the angle was wrong. The window frame blocked her view.

Then she heard a voice: “Mom?”

“Dylan?”

No answer.

“Dylan?” She quickly flipped the deadbolt, turned the knob. He sounded scared. Really scared.

The door exploded open, catching Maggie square in the chest. The next thing she knew, she was on her back, stunned, staring up at the ceiling. The back of her skull screamed in pain, her right arm bent behind her. She shook her head to clear her thoughts, pulled herself up.

The gun barrel was less than six inches from her forehead.

JAKE PULLED TO A STOP ON THE ROAD LEADING TO THE herbarium, a good two hundred yards away. He picked up the Beretta from the passenger seat, released the safety.

He jogged to the building, staying out of sight of the front door. When he got close, he felt his heart jump into his throat. The front door was ajar.

Maggie would not have left that door open.

His pulse raced as he slid through the open door and into the waiting area, gun in the lead, ready to shoot. A weapon always upped the stakes. If you showed deadly force, you had to be willing to use it.