The Complete Strain Trilogy Page 5

  Nora checked his seal, and he did hers. Biohazard investigators operate on a buddy system much the same as that of scuba divers. Their suits puffed a bit from the circulated air. Sealing out pathogens meant trapping sweat and body heat, and the temperature inside their suits could rise up to thirty degrees higher than room temperature.

  “Looks tight,” said Eph, over the voice-actuated microphones inside his mask.

  Nora nodded, catching his eye through their respective masks. The glance went on a moment too long, as if she was going to say something else, then changed her mind. “You ready?” she said.

  Eph nodded. “Let’s do this.”

  Outside on the tarmac, Jim switched on his wheeled command console and picked up both their mask-mounted cameras, on separate monitor feeds. He attached small, switched-on flashlights on lanyards from their pull-away shoulder straps: the thickness of the multilayered suit gloves limited the wearer’s fine-motor skills.

  The TSA guys came up and tried to talk to them some more, but Eph feigned deafness, shaking his head and touching his hood.

  As they approached the airplane, Jim showed Eph and Nora a laminated printout containing an overhead view of the interior seat assignments, numbers corresponding to passenger and crew manifests listed on the back. He pointed to a red dot at 18A.

  “The federal air marshal,” Jim said into his microphone. “Last name Charpentier. Exit row, window seat.”

  “Got it,” Eph said.

  A second red dot. “TSA pointed out this other passenger of interest. A German diplomat on the flight, Rolph Hubermann, business class, second row, seat F. In town for UN Council talks on the Korean situation. Might have been carrying one of those diplomatic pouches that get a free pass at customs. Could be nothing, but there is a contingent of Germans on their way here right now, from the UN, just to retrieve it.”

  “Okay.”

  Jim left them at the edge of the lights, turning back to his monitors. Inside the perimeter, it was brighter than day. They moved nearly without shadow. Eph led the way up the fire engine ladder onto the wing, then along its broadening surface to the opened door.

  Eph entered first. The stillness was palpable. Nora followed, standing with him shoulder to shoulder at the head of the middle cabin.

  Seated corpses faced them, in row after row. Eph’s and Nora’s flashlight beams registered dully in the dead jewels of their open eyes.

  No nosebleeds. No bulging eyes or bloated, mottled skin. No foaming or bloody discharge about the mouth. Everyone in his or her seat, no sign of panic or struggle. Arms hanging loose into the aisle or else sagged in laps. No evident trauma.

  Mobile phones—in laps, pockets, and muffled inside carry-on bags—emitted waiting message beeps or else rang anew, the peppy tones overlapping. These were the only sounds.

  They located the air marshal in the window seat just inside the open door. A man in his forties with black, receding hair, dressed in a baseball-style button-up shirt with blue and orange piping, New York Mets colors, the baseball-headed mascot Mr. Met depicted on the front, and blue jeans. His chin rested on his chest, as though he were napping with his eyes open.

  Eph dropped to one knee, the wider exit row giving him room to maneuver. He touched the air marshal’s forehead, pushing back the man’s head, which moved freely on his neck. Nora, next to him, teased her flashlight beam in and out of his eyes, Charpentier’s pupils showing no response. Eph pulled down on his chin, opening his jaw and illuminating the inside of his mouth, his tongue and the top of his throat looking pink and unpoisoned.

  Eph needed more light. He reached over and slid open the window shade, and construction light blasted inside like a bright white scream.

  No vomit, as from gas inhalation. Victims of carbon monoxide poisoning evinced distinct skin blistering and discoloration, leaving them with a bloated, leathered appearance. No discomfort in his posture, no sign of agonal struggle. Next to him sat a middle-aged woman in resort-style travel wear, half-glasses perched on her nose before her unseeing eyes. They were seated as any normal passengers would be, chairs in the full and upright position, still waiting for the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign to be turned off at the airport gate.

  Front-exit-row passengers stow their personal belongings in mesh containers bolted to the facing cabin wall. Eph pulled a soft Virgin Atlantic bag out of the pocket before Charpentier, running the zipper back along the top. He pulled out a Notre Dame sweatshirt, a handful of well-thumbed puzzle books, an audio-book thriller, then a nylon pouch that was kidney shaped and heavy. He unzipped it just far enough to see the all-black, rubber-coated handgun inside.

  “You seeing this?” said Eph.

  “We see it,” said Jim over the radio. Jim, TSA, and anyone else with enough rank to get near the monitors were watching this whole thing on Eph’s shoulder-mounted camera.

  Eph said, “Whatever it was, it took everyone completely unaware. Including the air cop.”

  Eph zipped the bag closed and left it on the floor, straightening, then proceeding down the aisle. Eph reached across the dead passengers in order to raise every second or third window shade, the harsh light casting weird shadows and throwing their faces into sharp relief, like travelers who had perished by flying too close to the sun.

  The phones kept singing, the dissonance becoming shrill, like dozens of personal distress alarms overlapping. Eph tried not to think about the concerned callers on the other end.

  Nora moved close to a body. “No trauma at all,” she noted.

  “I know,” said Eph. “Goddamn spooky.” He faced the gallery of corpses, thinking. “Jim,” he said, “get an alert out to WHO Europe. Bring in Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health on this, contacting hospitals. On the off chance this thing is transmissible, they should be seeing it there too.”

  “I’m on it,” said Jim.

  In the forward galley between business and first, four flight attendants—three female, one male—sat buckled into their jump seats, bodies pitched forward against their shoulder belts. Moving past them, Eph had the sensation of floating through a shipwreck underwater.

  Nora’s voice came through. “I’m at the rear of the plane, Eph. No surprises. Coming back now.”

  “Okay,” said Eph as he walked back through the window-lit cabin, opening the segregating curtain to the wider-aisle seats of business class. There, Eph located the German diplomat, Hubermann, sitting on the aisle, near the front. His chubby hands were still folded in his lap, his head slumped, a forelock of sandy silver hair drooped over his open eyes.

  The diplomatic pouch Jim mentioned was in the briefcase beneath his seat. It was blue and vinyl with a zipper along the top.

  Nora approached him. “Eph, you’re not authorized to open that—”

  Eph unzipped it, removing a half-eaten Toblerone bar and a clear plastic bottle full of blue pills.

  “What is it?” Nora asked.

  “My guess is Viagra,” said Eph, returning the contents to the pouch and the pouch to the briefcase.

  He paused next to a mother and young daughter traveling together. The young girl’s hand was still nestled inside her mother’s. Both appeared relaxed.

  Eph said, “No panic, no nothing.”

  Nora said, “Doesn’t make sense.”

  Viruses require transmission, and transmission takes time. Passengers becoming sick or falling unconscious would have caused an uproar, no matter what the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign said. If this was a virus, it was unlike any pathogen Eph had ever encountered in his years as an epidemiologist with the CDC. All signs instead pointed to a lethal poisoning agent introduced into the sealed environment of the airplane cabin.

  Eph said, “Jim, I want to retest for gas.”

  Jim’s voice said, “They took air samples, measured in parts per million. There was nothing.”

  “I know but … it’s as if these people were overcome by something without any warning whatsoever. Maybe the substance dissipated once that door opened. I want to test
the carpeting and any other porous surfaces. We’ll test lung tissue once we get these people in post.”

  “Okay, Eph—you got it.”

  Eph moved quickly past the widely spaced, leather-appointed seats of first class to the closed cockpit door. The door was grated and framed in steel along each edge, with an overhead camera in the ceiling. He reached for the handle.

  Jim’s voice in his suit hood said, “Eph, they’re telling me it works on a keypad lock, you won’t be able to get—”

  The door pushed open under his gloved hand.

  Eph stood very still at the open doorway. The lights from the taxiway shone through the tinted cockpit windshield, illuminating the flight deck. The system displays were all dark.

  Jim said, “Eph, they’re saying to be very careful.”

  “Tell them thanks for the expert technical advice,” said Eph before moving inside.

  The system displays around the switches and throttles were all dark. One man wearing a pilot’s uniform sat slumped in a jump seat to Eph’s immediate right as he entered. Two more, the captain and his first officer, were seated in the twin chairs before the controls. The first officer’s hands lay curled and empty in his lap, his head drooped to the left with his hat still on. The captain’s left hand remained on a control lever, his right arm hanging off the armrest, knuckles brushing the carpeted floor. His head was forward, his hat resting in his lap.

  Eph leaned over the control console between the two seats in order to push up the captain’s head. He checked the captain’s open eyes with his flashlight, the pupils fixed and dilated. He eased the man’s head back down gently onto his chest, and then stiffened.

  He felt something. He sensed something. A presence.

  He stepped back from the console and scanned the flight deck, turning in one complete circle.

  Jim said, “What is it, Eph?”

  Eph had spent enough time around corpses not to be jumpy. But there was something here … somewhere. Here or nearby.

  The strange sensation passed, like a dizzy spell, leaving him blinking. He shook it off. “Nothing. Claustrophobia, probably.”

  Eph turned to the third man inside the cockpit. His head hung low, his right shoulder propped up against the side wall. His jump seat harness straps hung down.

  Eph said aloud, “Why isn’t he belted in?”

  Nora said, “Eph, are you in the cockpit? I’m coming to you.”

  Eph looked at the dead man’s silver tie pin with the Regis Air logo. The nameplate over his pocket read REDFERN. Eph dropped to one knee before him, pressing his thickly gloved fingers against the man’s temples to raise his face. His eyes were open and down turned. Eph checked his pupils, and thought he saw something. A glimmer. He looked again, and suddenly Captain Redfern shuddered and emitted a groan.

  Eph jerked backward, falling between the two captains’ chairs and against the control console with a clatter. The first officer slumped against him, and Eph pushed back at him, trapped for a moment by the man’s limp, dead weight.

  Jim’s voice called to him sharply, “Eph?”

  Nora’s voice held a note of panic. “Eph, what is it?”

  With a surge of energy, Eph propelled the first officer’s body back into its chair and got to his feet.

  Nora said, “Eph, are you all right?”

  Eph looked at Captain Redfern, spilled onto the floor now, eyes open and staring. His throat, though, was working, bucking, his open mouth seeming to gag on the air.

  Eph said, wide-eyed, “We have a survivor here.”

  Nora said, “What?”

  “We have a man alive here. Jim, we need a Kurt isolation pod for this man. Brought directly to the wing. Nora?” Eph was talking fast, looking at the pilot twitching on the floor. “We have to go through this entire airplane, passenger by passenger.”

  INTERLUDE I

  Abraham Setrakian

  THE OLD MAN STOOD ALONE ON THE CRAMPED SALES floor of his pawnshop on East 118th Street, in Spanish Harlem. An hour after closing and his stomach was rumbling, yet he was reluctant to go upstairs. The gates were all pulled down over the doors and windows, like steel eyelids, the night people having claimed the streets outside. At night, you don’t go out.

  He went to the bank of dimmers behind the loan desk, and darkened the store lamp by lamp. He was in an elegiac mood. He looked at his shop, the display cases of chrome and streaked glass. The wristwatches showcased on felt instead of velvet, the polished silver he couldn’t get rid of, the bits of diamond and gold. The full tea sets under glass. The leather coats and now-controversial furs. The new music players that went fast, and the radios and televisions he didn’t bother taking in anymore. And there were, here and there, treasures: a pair of beautiful antique safes (lined with asbestos, but just don’t eat it); a suitcase-size wood-and-steel Quasar VCR from the 1970s; an antique 16mm film projector.

  But, on balance, lots of low-turnover junk. A pawnshop is part bazaar, part museum, part neighborhood reliquary. The pawnbroker provides a service no one else can. He is the poor man’s banker, someone people can come to and borrow twenty-five dollars with no concern as to credit history, employment, references. And, in the grip of an economic recession, twenty-five dollars is real money to many people. Twenty-five dollars can mean the difference between shelter or homelessness. Twenty-five dollars can put life-prolonging medicine within reach. So long as a man or woman has collateral, something of value to borrow against, he or she can walk out of his door with cash in hand. Beautiful.

  He trudged on upstairs, turning out more lights as he went. He was fortunate to own his building, bought in the early 1970s for seven dollars and change. Okay, maybe not for so little, but not for so much either. They were burning down buildings for heat back then. Knickerbocker Loans and Curios (the name came with the shop) was never a means to wealth for Setrakian, but rather a conduit, a point of entry into the pre-Internet underground marketplace of the crossroads city of the world, for a man interested in Old World tools, artifacts, curios, and other arcana.

  Thirty-five years of haggling over cheap jewelry by day, while amassing tools and armaments by night. Thirty-five years of biding his time, of preparation and waiting. Now his time was running out.

  At the door, he touched the mezuzah and kissed his crooked, wrinkled fingertips before entering. The ancient mirror in the hallway was so scratched and faded that he had to crane his neck in order to find a reflective patch in which to view himself. His alabaster white hair, starting high up on his creased forehead and sweeping back below his ears and neck, was long overdue for a trim. His face continued to fall, his chin and earlobes and eyes succumbing to that bully named gravity. His hands, so broken and badly mended so many decades before, had curved into arthritic talons that he kept permanently hidden behind wool gloves with cut-off fingertips. Yet, beneath and within this crumbling facade of a man: strength. Fire. Grit.

  The secret of his interior wellspring of youth? One simple element.

  Revenge.

  Many years before, in Warsaw and later in Budapest, there was a man named Abraham Setrakian who had been an esteemed professor of Eastern European literature and folklore. A Holocaust survivor who survived the scandal of marrying a student, and whose field of study took him to some of the darkest corners of the world.

  Now, an aged pawnbroker in America, still haunted by unfinished business.

  He had good soup left over, delicious chicken soup with kreplach and egg noodles, that a regular had brought him all the way from Liebman’s, in the Bronx. He put the bowl in the microwave and worked at his loose necktie knot with his gnarled fingers. After the beeping, he carried the hot bowl over to the table, pulling a linen napkin—never paper!—from the holder and tucking it snugly into his collar.

  Blowing on soup. A ritual of comfort, of reassurance. He remembered his grandmother, his bubbeh—but this was more than mere memory; it was sense, a feeling—blowing on it for him when he was a boy, sitting next to him at the rick
ety wooden table in the cold kitchen of their house in Romania. Before the troubles. Her old breath stirring the rising steam into his young face, the quiet magic of that simple act. Like blowing life into the child. And now, as he blew, an old man himself, he watched his breath given shape by the steam, and wondered just how many of these respirations he had left.

  He took the spoon, one of a drawer full of fancy, mismatched implements, into the crooked fingers of his left hand. Blowing onto the spoon now, rippling the tiny pool of broth there, before taking it into his mouth. Taste came and went, the buds on his tongue dying like old soldiers: the victims of many decades of pipe smoking, a professor’s vice.

  He found the thin remote for the outdated Sony TV—a kitchen model finished in white—and the thirteen-inch screen warmed up, further illuminating the room. He rose and walked to the pantry, leaning his hands on the stacks of books squeezing the hallway into a narrow tread of worn rug—books were everywhere, piled high against the walls, many of them read, all of them impossible to part with—and lifting the cover off the cake tin to retrieve the last of the good rye bread he had been saving. He carried the paper-wrapped loaf back to his cushioned kitchen chair, settling heavily, and went about picking off the little bits of mold as he enjoyed another tender sip of the delicious broth.

  Slowly, the image on the screen claimed his attention: a jumbo jet parked on a tarmac somewhere, lit up like an ivory piece upon jeweler’s black felt. He pulled on the black-rimmed glasses that hung at his chest, squinting in order to make out the bottom graphic. Today’s crisis was taking place across the river, at JFK Airport.

  The old professor watched and listened, focused on the pristine-looking airplane. One minute became two, then three, the room fading around him. He was transfixed—nearly transported—by the news report, the soup spoon still in his no-longer-tremulous hand.