Spiral

Robbins hit a few keys and an image on a second screen appeared, the time stamp showing seven-twenty-two a.m. Kitano was doing some kind of knee bends. “Every morning he performs a half-hour of calisthenics. After that he reads until the gates open and he’s allowed to visit the common room. There he watches television. Give me a second. We’ve got a camera in there, too. I’ll bring up the video from this morning.”

The image shifted. The time stamp said eight-oh-four a.m. Kitano sat alone in a chair, watching television, rapt. The rest of the prisoners sat as far away as possible, clearly avoiding him.

Dunne knew why. Soon after arriving at USP Hazelton, a prisoner stole Kitano’s lunch, thinking him to be a powerless old man. Kitano didn’t react. But two days later, the guy’s wife, a waitress in East Fishkill, New York, was bludgeoned almost beyond recognition. They had to use DNA to make the identification. The next day, the prisoner himself was found dead, bled out from a massive cut across the belly. Kitano’s alibi was unassailable: he was locked in his cell. There was no evidence connecting Kitano to any of it, but after that the other inmates avoided Hitoshi Kitano like the plague.

Dunne focused on the screen. Kitano was watching the television with great concentration.

“What’s he watching?”

“Just a second.” He hit a few more keys, and the screen split, the right showing a feed from CNN, with a time stamp that matched the one from the camera showing Kitano.

CNN was showing footage of Bellevue. The reports ran on, a talking head, pretty and blond, with a little curl to her lips. “Can you get audio?”

“Sure.”

Her voice came on, too loud until Robbins turned it down: “… is denying that this is connected to a case earlier in the day of a crazed young Japanese man found in Times Square, but an unnamed source who is an employee at the hospital challenges this assertion. The Japanese man, who sources identify as an undergraduate at Columbia University named Hitoshi Kitano, was missing his right middle finger…”

Kitano stiffened at the mention of his name. The other inmates looked toward him.

“Hey, that’s you!” someone said. “Kitano! Your name’s on the TV!”

Kitano stood, but he seemed shaky, holding on to the chair a moment, steadying himself. He watched the news piece to the end. Then he walked purposefully out of the room, the other prisoners parting before him.

“And that’s that,” Robbins said, and clicked them back to the live view of Kitano’s cell. “He came back to his cell, turned on his radio to a news site, sat down, and hasn’t moved since.”

Dunne kept thinking of a conversation with Kitano, almost ten years ago now. It was one of the most important conversations of Dunne’s life, before or since. The thirty-six-year-old foreign-policy wonk and the seventy-five-year-old billionaire were discussing the geopolitical consequences of biological weapons, drinking a very fine scotch, as was their custom. Both men believed that biological war was a near inevitability. The technology was moving so fast, sooner or later biological attacks could become commonplace between adversaries.

It was unlikely that Europe would ever attack America with such weapons, nor would Japan. The Soviets had a huge biological-weapons program, but they had the good grace to collapse.

The Chinese wouldn’t hesitate, both men agreed. Not if they felt threatened. Dunne believed the only way to avoid it was Pax Americana. To decapitate the Chinese Communist leadership and replace them with others woven into the U.S. tapestry.

But how? How could one derail the China juggernaut before it became unstoppable?

They’d danced around it for quite a while before Dunne finally said it: the Uzumaki.

With the Uzumaki, they both agreed, it would be straightforward, once the United States had developed a cure.

Although a decade had since passed, Dunne could remember the conversation word for word. “Where would you release it?” Kitano had asked.

“One option is Harbin. Like construction stirred it up. Or near one of the Chinese agriculture ministry’s biological research facilities south of there. Make it look like the incompetent fools were working on the Uzumaki, accidentally released it themselves.”

“Like the Soviet anthrax incident at Sverdlovsk in ’79?”

“Exactly.”

Together they’d sketched out how it would go from there. The Uzumaki spreads, the country is isolated. Every other nation, fearful of a pandemic, shuts off travel, closes down trade with China. The Communist Party’s hold on power was already tenuous, propped up by the twin sticks of nationalist pride and the promise of economic growth. Robbed of that prosperity and angry at a leadership impotent before the spreading horror, the people would riot, first in the countryside, then in the cities. The State Council would collapse within weeks, the country plunging into chaos. The stage would be set for a joint United States-Japanese force to step in and restore order, backed by a cure and a bayonet.