'Black Monday': Are We Addicted to Oil?

Feb. 16, 2007 — -- In his debut thriller "Black Monday," R. Scott Reiss writes about a virus that is eating the world's oil supply. The book's main character, Greg Gillette, is an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who must track the virus and try to stop it. The following is an excerpt of the book.

Chapter One

October 27th. 6 hours before outbreak.

A plague that will cause the death of millions. A plague that will destroy countries. A plague that will plunge the world into a dark age.

A plague that will make nobody sick.

Lewis Stokes -- or so the false name on his Nevada driver's license reads -- feeds another dollar into the Wheel of Fortune machine in the lobby of hotel New York-New York in Las Vegas and feels his heartbeat pick up, but not because of the game. The onetime beggar boy -- whose mother was publicly beheaded -- has just spotted the twenty-year-old University of Nevada English major that he's flown six thousand miles to kill.

The boy -- slovenly-looking and dark-haired -- is weaving toward him, past the single-deck blackjack tables, heading for the reception desk. He's drinking from a foot-long glass beaker filled with bright red liquid, probably a Singapore Sling or mix of rums and fruit juices. The boy looks tipsy, unaware, alone.

The kid must be killed by 12:14 tonight.

"Not one minute later," Lewis's mentor had said when he'd provided the usual range of perfectly made false IDs.

Lewis tenses to stand, to follow. But he realizes that the boy is too tall to be Robert Grady.

He just looks like Grady.

Lewis curses under his breath and puts another dollar in the machine.

Normally a handsome blond, Lewis is disguised as a balding dark-haired man today. Normally lean, he looks heavy and clumsy from the belly-extender bladder and black-framed glasses. His posture is slumped. He walks with a limp. The few people who notice him register a nerd in a box-cut sports jacket. A cheapo off-the-rack design.

Playing slots enables him to sit within view of the reception desk, invisible to the bellboys, desk clerks and house detectives. One more gambler among hundreds. But this gambler conceals a Glock under his jacket and a serrated K-bar knife in the pit of his back. Lewis killed his first person at age twelve, in self-defense, in a tent.

"Wheel...of...Fortune," shouts a chorus of tinny mechanical voices in his machine as the wheel spins on top and multicolored lights flash, and potential amounts of winnings, $800, $100, $20, rotate in pie-wedge shapes on the wheel.

He hates Las Vegas, the brashness, the noise, the anarchy that reminds him of the refugee camp where he grew up. The damn ground floor is the worst. It's like Fellini designed the place. It's a madhouse of rock music, kids running, machines clanging, drunks laughing. No windows to the outside world. No glimpse of anything except the asylumlike gaming area, laid out in a maze through which flows a never-ending human jackpot. People spilling like coins from the elevators and heading out toward other local traps; the Riviera and the Paris, the Monte Carlo, the Gold Coast, none of them remotely resembling the romantic spots for which they've been named.

More to the point, where is Robert Grady?

"Make it look like robbery if possible," Lewis's mentor had said. "But if that boy is standing in a crowded lobby at 12:14, walk up and shoot him in the face. Can I depend on you to sacrifice yourself if necessary, my old and special friend?"

"What happens at 12:15 if he's still alive?"

"The world may -- unfortunately -- stay the same."

"Why will killing a college student make so much difference?"

"I want you to know his exact role. You deserve to. But if the Americans catch you, if they figure out who you are, they will do anything to make you tell."

Five hours and thirteen minutes left.

Lewis arrived in Las Vegas two days ago. Plenty of time to work. But he's been unable to locate Robert Grady. The boy has not gone home. He's not attended class. His telephone answering machine is so filled with messages that it refuses to accept new ones. Does he know Lewis is here? Who the hell is he, anyway? His girlfriend, when Lewis phoned her apartment, pretending to be from the school, said she'd not seen Grady in a week.

"He's a degenerate gambler, and I'm through with him," she'd snapped. "He only applied to your stupid school so he could play craps in casinos. When he disappears it means he won money. He'll keep playing until he loses it back."

Finally, an hour ago, Lewis had made a fourth round of calls to casinos that the kid frequented and learned that a Bobby Grady had a reservation to stay here tonight. So Lewis reserved a room too. The file said the kid always stays on the eleventh floor, Century tower, because he considers that tower "lucky." So Lewis checked in to that tower too. It was the only way to obtain key-card access to the elevators leading upstairs.

Lewis checks his watch, takes a break at the machine and calls the hotel operator on the house phone.

"Mr. Grady just called. He said he'll be checking in a little late," she tells Lewis.

"How late?"

"He didn't say."

"Did you talk to him?"

The operator seems offended that he's asked. "I'm telling you all I see on my screen, sir."

Lewis curbs his irritation, slumps his shoulders to remain inconspicuous, ambles back to the Wheel of Fortune machine.

A white-haired old lady in a wheelchair now sits beside him at another machine. She balances a plastic cup filled with quarters on her skinny lap.

The lady smiles at him. "This place is so exciting!"

He doesn't answer. She'll remember him less accurately that way. He's remembering his last visit to see his mentor, in August, transported in his mind to a more quiet, beautiful place. They'd sipped orange juice in a cool green garden. Mist-shrouded oaks had rimmed the vast lawn. The crash of the nearby ocean had mixed with the cry of wheeling terns as the mentor and younger man sat on nine-hundred-year-old stone benches. Everything around them, the private forest and green mountains and the sprawling home beyond the sculpture garden, had been solid, lovely, old.