CHAPTER 96

IT’S OUT.

Elizabeth Sinskey stood at the bottom of the cistern stairwell and gazed at the void of the evacuated cavern. Her breathing felt strained through the respirator she was wearing. Although she had probably already been exposed to whatever pathogen might be down here, Sinskey felt relieved to be wearing a hazmat suit as she and the SRS team entered the desolate space. They were dressed in bulbous white jumpsuits that locked into airtight helmets, and the group looked like a team of astronauts breaching an alien spacecraft.

Sinskey knew that upstairs on the street, hundreds of frightened concertgoers and musicians were huddling in confusion, many being treated for injuries suffered in the stampede. Others had fled the area entirely. She felt lucky to have escaped with only a bruised knee and a broken amulet.

Only one form of contagion travels faster than a virus, Sinskey thought. And that’s fear.

The doors upstairs were now locked, hermetically sealed, and guarded by local authorities. Sinskey had anticipated a jurisdictional showdown with the arriving local police, but any potential conflicts had evaporated instantly when they saw the SRS team’s biohazard gear and heard Sinskey’s warnings of a possible plague.

We’re on our own, the director of the WHO thought, staring out at the forest of columns reflected in the lagoon. Nobody wants to come down here.

Behind her, two agents were stretching a huge polyurethane sheet across the bottom of the stairwell and sealing it to the wall with a heat gun. Two others had found an open area of boardwalk planks and had begun setting up an array of electronic gear as if preparing to analyze a crime scene.

That’s exactly what this is, Sinskey thought. A crime scene.

She again pictured the woman in the wet burka who had fled the cistern. By all appearances, Sienna Brooks had risked her own life in order to sabotage the WHO’s containment efforts and fulfill Zobrist’s twisted mission. She came down here and broke the Solublon bag …

Langdon had chased Sienna off into the night, and Sinskey had still not received word regarding what had happened to either of them.

I hope Professor Langdon is safe, she thought.

Agent Brü der stood dripping on the boardwalk, staring blankly out at the inverted head of Medusa and wondering how to proceed.

As an SRS agent, Brü der had been trained to think on the macrocosmic level, setting aside any immediate ethical or personal concerns and focusing on saving as many lives as possible over the long term. Threats to his own health had barely registered on him until this moment. I waded into this stuff, he thought, chastising himself for the risky action he had taken and yet knowing he’d had little choice. We needed an immediate assessment.

Brü der forced his thoughts to the task at hand—implement Plan B. Unfortunately, in a containment crisis, Plan B was always the same: widen the radius. Fighting communicable disease was often like fighting a forest fire: sometimes you had to drop back and surrender a battle in hopes of winning the war.

At this point, Brü der had still not given up the idea that a full containment was possible. Most likely Sienna Brooks had ruptured the bag only minutes before the mass hysteria and evacuation. If that were true, even though hundreds of people had fled the scene, everyone might have been located far enough away from the source to avoid contamination.

Everyone except Langdon and Sienna, Brü der realized. Both of whom were here at ground zero, and are now someplace out in the city.

Brü der had another concern as well—a gap in logic that continued to nag at him. While in the water, he had never found the actual breached Solublon bag. It seemed to Brü der that if Sienna had broken the bag—by kicking it or ripping it or whatever she had done—he would have found the damaged, deflated remnants floating somewhere in the area.

But Brü der had found nothing. Any remains of the bag seemed to have vanished. Brü der strongly doubted that Sienna would have carried off the Solublon bag with her, since by this point it would have been no more than a slimy, dissolving mess.

So where did it go?

Brü der had an uneasy sense that he was missing something. Even so, he focused on a new containment strategy, which required him to answer one critical question.

What is the contagion’s current dispersal radius?

Brü der knew the question would be answered in a matter of minutes. His team had set up a series of portable virus-detection devices along the boardwalks at increasing distances from the lagoon. These devices—known as PCR units—used what was called a polymerase chain reaction to detect the presence of viral contamination.

The SRS agent remained hopeful. With no movement of the water in the lagoon, and the passage of very little time, he was confident that the PCR devices would detect a relatively small region of contamination, which they could then attack with chemicals and the use of suction.

“Ready? ” a technician called out through a megaphone.

Agents stationed around the cistern gave the thumbs-up.

“Run your samples, ” the megaphone crackled.

Throughout the cavern, analysts crouched down and started their individual PCR machines. Each device began analyzing a sample from the point at which its operator was located on the boardwalk, spaced in ever-widening arcs around Zobrist’s plaque.

A hush fell across the cistern as everyone waited, praying to see only green lights.

And then it happened.

On the machine closest to Brü der, a virus-detection light began flashing red. His muscles tensed, and his eyes shifted to the next machine.

It, too, began blinking red.

No.

Stunned murmurs reverberated throughout the cavern. Brü der watched in horror as, one by one, every PCR device began blinking red, all the way across the cistern to the entrance.

Oh, God … he thought. The sea of blinking red detection lights painted an unmistakable picture.

The radius of contamination was enormous.

The entire cistern was teeming with virus.

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