City Under the Moon Read online

  “Special Agent Tildascow, I’m Daniel Milano, Chief of Desk for Security Coordination.” He extended a firm, no-nonsense handshake.

  “Good to meet you,” she said. He couldn’t see it, but she was casing the dual-door weapon caches stationed between each of the room’s four entrances. Handprint locks, smart stuff.

  “We’ve been reviewing the tapes for December 29th, the night of Mrs. Cooke’s attack. Nothing jumped out as overly suspicious, but we were asked to show you everything.”

  Tildascow followed Milano, grateful that they didn’t have to slow down so he could sniff her. The tapes were queued up on sequential monitors. A media tech ran the deck for what seemed like a rehearsed presentation. The UN Security Force was solid.

  Milano directed Tildascow to the first monitor, where they’d prepared various angles of Cooke emerging from her room in the Secretariat Building. The raw footage was marked with time code.

  KAM5422 UNSECINT 122910 21:56:10 showed Cooke negotiating the baby carriage through her room’s door. KAM5418 caught her stepping through the hallway. On, KAM5401, she pushed the stroller onto the elevator.

  “She was staying here?” Tildascow asked.

  “Temporarily. She was to move into the Millenium Hotel on the second of January. The hotel was booked for New Year’s Eve.”

  Indeed, Tildascow had seen Cooke’s reservation on the computer at the Millenium Hotel. Everything appeared to be on the up and up, but that’s what she’d expected. Despite the suspicious interview, she’d all but eliminated Cooke as a potential perpetrator of this… whatever this was. After all, the woman had been shredded to within inches of her life.

  No, Cooke was the first infected, but she wasn’t the one doing the infecting. Still… her prominent standing, the brazen location, the missing kid… it all seemed too measured for a random attack. She was part of a plan.

  And there had to be a trail. It started somewhere. If not from Cooke, then maybe the UN.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary the whole night?”

  “Nothing at all in the interiors,” said Milano. “We’ve left a message for our nightshift custodial manager, but he hasn’t returned and he has tonight off for the holiday. When we hear from him, we’ll put him in touch with you. You can feel free to examine our surveillance footage at your leisure, but we’ve prepared a time-lapse presentation for you, with the exclusion of classified areas, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  He’d made the time-lapse video sound like a couples’ massage. And sure enough, it held nothing of interest. Security patrolling, custodians cleaning, administrators administrating, and a graduate student reviewing artwork for a thesis.

  “Did anything out of the ordinary happen outside?” Tildascow asked.

  “Well, there’s no barometer for ‘ordinary’ on the streets of New York. We have a constant flow of eccentrics—homeless persons, tourists, activists, drugged-up wackos and, well, New Yorkers. Nothing in particular stood out, but we do have time-lapse footage.”

  “Let me see the exterior of the Secretariat Building, where Cooke exited.”

  She watched carefully as the tech sped through the tape at high speed until he found Cooke.

  “Wait—go back.”

  He rolled the tape back to KAM0233 UNSECEXT 122910 21:09:10, an hour before Cooke emerged through the security gate.

  At that moment, a man steps in front of the camera and pauses before moving on.

  “Have you ever seen that man before?”

  Milano hummed as he thought. “No, not that I recall. We logged him, but I couldn’t see how he might pertain to an animal attack.”

  Tildascow seized the image. “Play it again.”

  He moves with the precision of a dancer, his keen eyes staring directly into the camera.

  She’d seen this man before.

  As Milano droned on, she delved into her recollection of the Bellevue Hospital’s security footage, recreating the images through spatial mnemonics. There was Holly Cooke, her master locus. There was Dr. Kenzie. Each detail evoked the next: Nurse Nancy Laurio, the EMTs, the IVs and the monitors, the walkway…

  As she hunted him in her memory, Tildascow studied his image on the monitor. Age 38 to 45. 5’ 10”. Dirty and unkempt, suggesting homelessness, but with an air of confident intelligence.

  Dichotomies always held interesting tales.

  Rooted determination in his eyes, which were so pale they nearly glowed beneath his burly eyebrows. His beard was thick and lightly salted, but his hair was a hood of sheer black. The utility muscles on his lithe body were shaped by labor, not the gym. Americans with this man’s disposition rarely did manual labor. Light skin and bright eyes suggested she should start with a European origin.

  His clothing was patchwork and dark. His formal button-down shirt was heavily weathered, likely worn for weeks. But it may have been hand-made. Dark pants, dark shoes. She couldn’t make the cut of the cuffs, which were usually the most useful detail in pinpointing the etymologies of clothing.

  More often than not, the prime characteristic of a mark—a thick beard, bold sunglasses, a dark hat—was an intentional misdirect, a countermeasure too loud to be useful. Given this leisurely amount of time to study the still image, Tildascow preferred to examine the proverbial elephant last.

  This man had a plain white tee shirt stretched tightly over his formal shirt. Something was haphazardly written on the tee, probably with a black marker. It was impossible to read in this distant, grainy shot.

  And now she found him in the hospital footage.

  He’d been skulking near the ambulance entrance in Bellevue’s ER, observing the doctors as they worked on Holly Cooke. She had mistaken the tee shirt for scrubs and written him off as a janitor.

  Again, he stared right at the security camera. In this image, the text on his shirt was far from legible.

  Three stacked lines. The middle contained only one letter. The top and bottom were similar in length, each four or five letters.

  That was her man.

  And he had a message for her.

  Four

  President’s Briefing Room

  The White House

  December 31

  1:45 p.m.

  President Weston took his trademark deep breath and settled into his seat. The briefing room’s soft overhead lighting, blue carpets, neutral walls, and mahogany paneling were designed to calm stress. If only it worked.

  Rebekkah Luft had just delivered a comprehensive summary of the security routine in Times Square, using a John Madden-style telestrator to draw circles and arrows on satellite maps. Sadly, Madden had the technology long before the government.

  “Options?” Weston asked. As always, he posed the question first to his Chief of Staff, Teddy Harrison. They’d met almost 30 years ago in the bullpen of the Harvard Law Review, and their relationship spanned business ventures, politics, and family life. They were each other’s best men. When they coined the phrase, “I couldn’t do it without him,” they were thinking of Teddy “Bear” Harrison.

  “Calling the event off wouldn’t deter the revelers at this point,” Teddy lamented. “They’re already in transit. If we restrict access to Times Square, they’ll spill out all over the city in a less manageable manner.”

  Weston’s National Security Council was seated around the long mahogany table. The dunderheaded but attractive Vice President Allison Leslie; Secretary of State Anthony Michaelson; Ronald Greenberg, Secretary of Defense; Attorney General Michael Shinick; Darryl Turner, the Director of National Intelligence; and Teddy Harrison. He also had Dr. Jessica Tanner, the Director of the CDC, via closed circuit on a monitor.

  He looked to General Alan Truesdale, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his military advisor. “We have a sufficient military presence?”

  “We’ll have spec ops all ready in place for the ball drop,” Truesdale said. “There isn’t enough time for a Rapid Deployment Force. NORTHCOM is scrambling, but we might not make it t
ill daybreak.”

  That was followed by the loudest silence Weston had ever heard.

  The presidential briefing room was part of the five thousand square feet of intelligence complex beneath the West Wing, which included the Situation Room, several conference rooms and the all-important Watch Center, where round-the-clock teams monitored worldwide events.

  At the moment it felt like a life raft.

  Luft chimed in with some optimism: “Mister President, it’s been two hours since any fresh reports of injuries. NORTHCOM, the FBI and the CDC have been working closely with the NYPD, and they feel confident they’ve detained everyone who might have been infected last night. It may very well be contained.”

  “They hope it’s been contained,” interjected Jessica Tanner. Weston had her pegged as an alarmist, but that was her job. “If not, it will spread fast. If there were two last night, there may be a dozen tonight. Tomorrow there could be hundreds.”

  “The timing of this,” Weston lamented.

  “Too perfect to be a coincidence,” agreed Truesdale. “This is by design.”

  “But whose design?”

  The silence returned.

  Jessica jumped back in. “We have to quarantine the city, sir.”

  Murmurs passed across the table.

  “We can’t do that in time,” said Leslie, the VP.

  “We can prepare for a safe evacuation. The infected will be easy to identify if we have properly secure conditions—“

  Leslie interjected: “That would disrupt every facet of life, not only in the city, but the entire country—“

  “The disruption is already here. We can’t ignore it.” Jessica had come prepared with a white board behind her seat. “It will be like the Lytic Cycle, the same method of reproduction as the virus. Think of Manhattan as a blood cell.”

  She drew a circle on the board.

  “A cell that has been penetrated by a virus.”

  Small stars inside the circle.

  “In its incubation period, the virus replicates within the cell.”

  Arrows from the stars, each pointing to two new ones.

  “Two become four. Four become eight. This is what our werewolves will do every night. In fact, it’ll be even faster as each one leaves whatever number of infected—maybe dozens—in its wake. Once the virus is strong enough to assault the larger body…” She drew a sunburst exploding from the cell, followed by arrows spilling out in every direction. “It will become a global threat.”

  “Good Lord,” Weston muttered. He’d been so preoccupied with security for the revelers in Times Square that he hadn’t considered the bigger picture.

  “It must be contained,” Jessica implored.

  “We’ll make arrangements.” Weston nodded to Truesdale, who silently excused himself. Teddy ducked out as well.

  “Dr. Tanner,” said Luft, “our werewolf expert said that only silver bullets could kill them?”

  “Yes, well, our patient seems to have newly manifested a severe allergic reaction to silver and silver compounds. This morning, we witnessed a rash forming on her skin almost immediatley upon epidermal contact with her own sterling silver necklace. We tested a sample of her blood against pure silver, and the result was catastrophic to—“

  “So that’s a yes?” Greenberg interrupted.

  “Yes. Exposure to silver kills the virus-infected cell and sends self-destruction orders to nearby infected cells. The virus begins to consume its host.”

  “Can we put silver in the water? Or something?” asked Leslie.

  “I don’t know if we could find enough silver to effectively contaminate a water supply of that size,” Jessica said politely. “The level of exposure from the penetration and fragmentation of a silver bullet is more likely to result in death.”

  “Regular bullets won’t kill them?” asked Luft.

  “It’s still a biological creature. If you do enough damage to any physiological system it’ll shut down. But the virus pumps up the heart rate and lowers the pain threshold. It’s similar to the effect of methamphetamines, but significantly stronger. It’ll be like trying to stop the worst speed freak ever.”

  “Good work, Dr. Tanner,” Weston said. “Keep going and keep us informed.”

  “Mister President, you have to quarantine—“

  “We’re working on it. Have your people ready. We’ll be in touch soon.” Weston signaled to Luft to shut the closed-circuit link.

  Everyone started talking at once. Weston raised a calm hand. “I’ll listen to each and every one of you in a moment.”

  The president nodded to Greenberg. The Defense Secretary moved toward the door while receiving his instructions.

  “We need every warm body armed with silver bullets. RDFs, cadets, reserves, veterans, boy scouts with good aim.”

  “Yes sir,” Greenberg said as he exited.

  “How much time do we have?”

  “The moon rises at 9:58,” said Luft.

  Five

  The United States military didn’t have enough time.

  Under military command, five thousand silver bullion coins were transferred from the United States Mint facility at West Point (once known as the Fort Knox of Silver) to the Radford, Virginia manufacturing facility of Alliant Techsystems, the military’s preeminent supplier of ammunition. There, silver would be added to the molten lead alloy used to produce bullet cores.

  Ballistic experts were charged with determining exactly how much silver could be introduced into the lead-based, ball-point 9x19mm Parabellum round, easily-produced ammunition for the ubiquitous 9mm service pistols favored by the NYPD. There wasn’t enough time to develop refined equations, so they took an educated guess.

  There wasn’t enough time to determine the precise quantity of silver needed to catalyze the virus’s self-destructive cycle.

  Wasn’t enough time to safely refit the machinery of the bullet factory.

  Not enough time to properly test the viability of the new ammunition cartridges.

  Or to properly explain to the law officers why they were being issued last-minute ammunition reassignments.

  The federal government took every possible shortcut, issuing blanket warrants and orders of dubious legality. Because the sun wouldn’t stop dropping.

  By quarter after four, the sky over New Jersey burned crimson and purple. NYPD began closing the 45th Street pens, securing revelers under the moving lights of the electric circus. As the mercury plummeted, the party simmered.

  The president and his advisors watched the clock. The moon would rise at 9:58. That was a truth they could rely on. Everything else was speculation.

  At sunset, Holly Cooke’s cell in the basement of 26 Federal Plaza filled with an anesthetic gas, putting her to sleep so her restraints could be reinforced. Nine other “dog attack” victims slept in adjacent cells.

  Just before 5:30, a call was issued to the two hundred NYPD members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Soon after, they assembled for a briefing at the Midtown South Precinct on West 35th Street, the triage station closest to Times Square. In a packed conference room, an FBI Special Agent named Elmore Cahill explained that the previous night’s animal attacks were the result of a street gang’s pack of fighting dogs that had broken loose. The dogs had been juiced with adrenaline and a normal shot might not put them down, so five bullets laced with “animal tranquilizers” were issued to each officer. No word on how many dogs were still out there, but Cahill said they might be rabid and should be shot on sight.

  As the officers spilled out into the cold and hopped into a paddy wagon for transport to Times Square, most of the chatter was about the all-girl pop band’s skimpy outfits.

  A couple of the men were curious about these new bullets. Very shiny.

  NYPD Officer and JTTF member Mack Meely warned them that these dogs were no joke. He’d seen them himself. Last night, he and his rookie partner had responded to a breaking & entering at the Gramercy Meat Market. One of those things was cleaning ou
t the inventory. He took a couple shots at it, all hits, but the fucker barely flinched. Barreled right past him and took a swipe at his chest. Left him with four stitches and a helluva nightmare. He was still pissed that he couldn’t get tonight off.

  Most of the guys loaded the new ammo right then and there.

  But these bullets were really goddamn shiny. One of the guys asked what a lot of them were thinking: “How the hell do you put tranquilizer into lead?”

  “I don’t care,” Meely responded. “As long as it works.”

  And now his shoulder was aching for no damn reason. What a week.

  Just before six, Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest appeared on the large screen in front of the Disney-owned Times Square Studios, which neighbored One Times Square. They thanked the crowd for coming, but it was drowned out by the cheers.

  Opening ceremonies began after six. Two Latino stars of a popular telenovela joined a representative of the Phillips Lighting Company as they flipped a giant ceremonial switch. Fireworks lit the sky and the New Year’s Eve ball began its glittering ascent.

  Meanwhile, FBI Special Agent Brianna Tildascow hunted.

  Six

  CDC Containment Room

  Atlanta, GA

  December 31

  6:58 p.m.

  Melissa Kenzie awoke to hammering in her skull. The aches wracking her body were surely the work of the Devil.

  She was strapped onto a gurney, tilted upright and facing a mirror. Her fog parted to remind her of a terrible thing she had seen in there: herself, her body, transforming into a monster.