Unsafe Haven

by Betsy Ashton

  Now that Johnny knew about the potential of a second person, an ounce of responsibility shifted from my shoulders to his still-weak ones. I felt a rush of warmth, almost a warning not to put too much on him all at once. Don’t worry, Em, I won’t.

  “Alex doesn’t know anything about any of this.” I held up a raised finger before folding my hand like a clam. “We can’t let on that someone may be intentionally hurting people, because he has no filter on his mouth. He’s liable to blurt out a question to Toby and inadvertently warn him that the FBI has him under surveillance.”

  A whoop in the hall warned nurses that Alex was galloping along on his crutches. “Avast, matey!” I poked my head out of Johnny’s room and saw he had a handkerchief over his head and a black eye patch covering one eye.

  “Look what Nurse Paula made for me, Mad Max.”

  I didn’t know who Nurse Paula was. I caught the eye of a mousy woman taking inventory of the locked drug cabinet, the same mousy woman who’d stood next to me. I mouthed “Thank you” and winked.

  I watched her count syringes for a moment or two. I closed my eyes and rewound mental tapes of the people I’d met. She was the kind of woman who faded into the background, who didn’t initiate conversations like the other nurses. I took a step in her direction to thank her for making Alex’s pirate costume. Once again, she turned her back and disappeared, this time into a linen closet.

  I wanted to follow her, but Johnny’s cough called me back to his side. Before I returned to the co-conspirators in the diagnosis room, I checked the monitors, which I had finally learned to read nearly as well as the nurses could. Nothing out of normal. I kissed him and told him where I was going.

  “Go. I think I’ll nap a little.” Johnny’s eyes half closed to underscore how weak he was.

  I turned back at his door. “Have you seen Toby around lately?”

  Johnny shook his head.

  Odd. Toby had been omnipresent during the run-up to and at the height of the multiple outbreaks. “Is he even still in the hospital?” I asked the empty air. Johnny was asleep.

  Nurse Paula, Alex’s new pirate buddy, entered with a tray of syringes. She didn’t introduce herself or make eye contact. “I’ll draw his blood today.”

  She was as mute as a stuffed rabbit and about as scared looking. I stepped aside to let her work, but I didn’t leave Johnny’s side. I fussed with his pillows, all the while watching to be sure the nurse followed all protocols.

  Leena met Paula outside the room. “Thanks. I’ll take the samples when you’re finished. I’m going down to the lab.”

  A few minutes later, Leena and I walked toward the diagnosis room, the vials of blood safely resting in her pocket.

  “I don’t remember seeing Paula—that’s her name, isn’t it?—in the ICU.”

  Leena slowed and stopped. “She wasn’t on duty when the CDC quarantined the hospital. She came in after we put out the call for additional help. She usually works on the maternity ward, but with no babies being born and all deliveries diverted to other hospitals, we pushed her onto Med-Surg. She’s helping wherever we need her.”

  “If she’s usually in the maternity ward, I’d expect a bit more positive interaction with the patients and their families. She seems so cold and distant,” I said.

  “Now that you mention it, she’s all about TLC with the new mothers and babies. Not here, though. She’s really timid,” Leena mused before leading the way forward once again. “Maybe she’s terrified of contagion.”

  A feather tapped my cheek. I stepped in front of her. “What’s troubling you? Paula arrived after the lab fire, didn’t she?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. I stared into her eyes before stepping aside so we could walk on in silence, each working out our own individual plot twists.

  ###

  “We have a bit more intelligence on that fire,” Dr. Duval said as soon as the group reassembled. Because of the critical nature of our situation, she’d been able to unlock the name of the dead man on the BSL-4 floor. “Stephen Robert Byers, a post-doctoral research assistant, was killed.”

  We looked at each other, but the name meant nothing. He was apparently well-regarded as a virologist—just like Dr. White—but wasn’t a medical doctor. Dr. Duval continued. “His degree was in microbiology. From what I learned through a few discreet inquiries, he was a rising star. A terrible loss to the research community.”

  Dr. Gupta frowned. “I worked with a Robby Byers, a grad student doing research for his doctorate out of the University of Washington. He was brilliant . . . I haven’t thought about him in years.”

  “Byers had a twin who at one time had been an equally rising star, until he was fired from a lab conducting research for the military. He left his lab unsecured overnight once. He apparently had a crisis of conscience, because he protested in front of the facility and proselytized against biological weapons research.” Dr. Duval looked at a couple of printouts in her hand.

  “Did he try to sabotage the lab or project?” Dr. Klein asked, now fully buying into conspiracy theories.

  “I have seen no evidence that what he did in the lab was designed to destroy the research,” Dr. Duval said.

  “Robby never mentioned a brother,” Dr. Gupta said.

  “He lost his security clearance and was blackballed by most of the research community. Given what his colleagues remember about him, he hated that the government was conducting highly classified research on weaponizing some of our most lethal pathogens. Our public position was that we were conducting no research of biological agents,” Dr. Duval continued.

  Click. Another piece fell into place.

  “But we are, evidently.” I began doing more laps around the room.

  “Max, don’t speculate on what we may or may not be doing,” Sharon said.

  “Could it be possible, although unlikely, that the good brother brought the black sheep into the lab-that-wasn’t for reasons we haven’t yet unraveled?” I pressed.

  “I can’t see that happening. I can’t imagine anyone being so irresponsible as to bring in an unauthorized person, even his brother,” Dr. White said.

  “Stupid, too,” Dr. Klein spat. “Dr. Byers would have lost his security clearance quicker than a hummingbird’s heartbeat.”

  “Do we have the brother’s name?” Dr. White flexed her fingers. Does she see herself taking down the brother in a fight to the finish in the main lobby? I couldn’t see her doing anything of the kind, but she was passionate about research.

  “Tobias Ogden Byers.”

  “Toby,” Dr. Gupta breathed.

  “Now we have to prove he’s behind the attacks,” Sharon said. “And why the hell he’s doing it.”

  We froze for several long seconds to absorb Sharon’s information. Silence filled the room; we would normally be talking over each other. My thoughts bounced around like pachinko balls, never still, never finding the slot where I would score a point or find an answer.

  Concentration shattered as first one cell then another rang or buzzed. Sharon, Leena, and Dr. Running Bear snatched at their pockets. I started for the door but stopped mid-step when my phone buzzed with two text messages. Not Uncle Johnny, texted Emilie. Not Alex, texted Ducks.

  Sharon listened to the speaker and nodded. “Damn it!”

  Dr. Running Bear barked a few orders, while Leena said, “You’re sure. Nothing in the house?”

  “What the hell is going on?” I fumed.

  Doctors Gupta and White huddled in a corner, Dr. White gesticulating, Dr. Gupta murmuring under her breath, both staring at messages on their phones.

  Dr. Running Bear hung up first, his face revealing a rare display of raw anger. “Stay here, everyone. Leena, come with me.”

  “I may have to stay, but I’m going to get some damned answers.” Sharon punched a number on her phone so savagely she broke her nail. “Shit!” She listened, punctuating the speaker’s words with encouraging “uh huh,” “okay,” and “thanks.” She thumbed the phone off
and fell back in her chair.

  Questions flew at her like bees from an upended hive.

  “Who was that?’ I asked.

  “What happened?” Dr. Gupta moved closer to us.

  “Keith,” Sharon said. “Someone sneaked up and attacked him from behind.” She ran her hands across her eyes.

  “Is he all right?” I asked. Keith, our symbol of strength and safety. I couldn’t imagine how I’d feel if he were seriously injured.

  “He says he is, but Dr. Running Bear and Leena are going to check him out.”

  “Does he know who hit him?” I started for the door, prepared to track down and stop the attacker myself, if necessary.

  Sharon grinned in spite of the attack. “You bet he does. Keith was part of Seal Team Six before he retired and joined the Secret Service. He’s in his element with hand-to-hand combat. We laugh all the time about how guarding me is the most boring job he could have.”

  “Not anymore,” Dr. White said.

  “You’re right, not anymore. The man who attacked him is under control,” Sharon said.

  “Toby?” It had to be. He had to have made a foolish move and been caught.

  “You were right all along, Max. Toby tried to leave the hospital. He ran into Keith on guard duty at the loading dock and struck him with a bat or something equally solid.”

  Sharon’s phone buzzed with a text. She opened the attached document and scanned it.

  “Okay, Toby attacked Keith, but do we have proof he’s behind the release of the pathogens?” I asked.

  “We’re almost there, Max. Let me tell you what my husband learned.”

  Milton Anderson had thrown his considerable political weight around to unlock a secret file of personnel clearances in the burnt-out lab. Volumes of information about each one included background checks, polygraphs, and fingerprints.

  “He skimmed the bulk of the data but read the Robert Byers’s file in its entirety,” Sharon said. A congressional committee studying the incident found no anomalies in the clearance process. “The only lapse of security protocol occurred when the construction worker went looking for a bathroom, but that in and of itself was not enough to put the lab in lockdown.”

  The committee raised the red flag when an unauthorized person was discovered in the lab itself. According to the report, this person breached the uppermost floor where the most critical weapons research was being conducted.

  “How do you know this? If the lab was demolished, wouldn’t all evidence turn into ash with it?” Dr. Klein asked.

  “Not if there were closed circuit television cameras in the critical areas,” Dr. White said.

  “But—” Dr. Klein got no further. Sharon held up a finger for silence. I grinned, because three of us used similar gestures to command silence.

  “The labs have built-in redundancies. Data is stored locally and at a remote site with acres of server farms,” Dr. White said.

  “A few days ago, Milt called in a favor from a friend in Justice, who subpoenaed the videos.” Sharon smiled for the first time that day. “He says the images are fuzzy, but after they were enhanced, Robby is recognizable. At first, it appeared the intruder broke in or was let in by a worker with clearance. He might even have used a false or stolen ID badge. He was discovered in the frozen storage room packing samples into an ice cooler. When Byers tried to apprehend him, the intruder shot and killed him.”

  “I thought the body was incinerated. I thought it couldn’t be identified,” I said.

  “That’s what the redacted report said, but the secret report with the images from the closed-circuit cameras captured the murder.” Sharon slumped in her chair.

  “First, you said the report didn’t identify the man in the lab. Then, you said people in the government or on the committee knew his identity. And now, you know he was shot because it was on television?” I plowed ahead.

  “Welcome to Washington, Max. It can be harder than hell to get a complete, factual answer on anything. Even what my husband ate for breakfast this morning,” Sharon said.

  “Well, unless the body was completely incinerated, what was left would have been autopsied,” Dr. Klein said. “Even with the most badly burned bodies, it’s possible for some tissue to withstand the fire. And if that tissue held a bullet or traces of a bullet’s path, we’d be able to tell if the body was shot and, therefore, murdered.”

  Dr. Klein beamed at the direction the investigation was moving. For the briefest moment, he reminded me of Alex, who was always ready to don his super hero persona and ride to the world’s rescue.

  “What about fingerprints?” My gut boiled overtime on possibilities we hadn’t voiced. “Is there any way we can see if they match Toby’s?”

  “Why would they match Toby’s? The dead man was Robby, wasn’t he?” Dr. White hadn’t followed the zig when my brain zagged.

  “Was he? The man who had the clearance was Robby Byers.” I swiveled to face Dr. Klein. “Was the dead man Robby? Jerry, can you lift prints from charred skin?”

  Dr. Klein shook his head. “If it’s too badly burned, we can’t. But we can match prints from samples of people here in the hospital to those in the file. That would rule out Toby being Robby. His prints will still be on file, even though he lost his security clearance.”

  Keith’s team had collected prints from all of the staff, family members, and the adult patients. The FBI had run them through their databases. What we needed should be in their read out. When the team took Johnny’s prints he told them they’d find them in Department of Defense files. “I served eight years in the Army, he said”

  “Let’s go back to that unauthorized person in the lab. How did he get in, and who was he?” Dr. White returned to her concern with the origin of the pathogens. “And, if what the committee reported is true, why would he steal samples?”

  “Were either of the Byers’ brothers responsible for stealing them from the burned-out lab?” I asked. “In my mind, that’s the key question. If we agree the origin of the pathogens traces to the lab, shouldn’t we move to the next question? The why?”

  While I loved peeling away the layers of the onion to solve a crime—God knows I’d done it more than I ever thought I would—it was time to move to the next step. “Why would anyone want to steal them in the first place?”

  Dr. Gupta picked up the thread. “You wouldn’t, unless you’re going to continue research on them or release them into a community.”

  “So, the fire in the lab-that-wasn’t happened in 1999?” Dr. White asked as she added more “supposes” to what we already knew on a flip chart.

  Sharon consulted the wad of paper in her pocket. “That’s right. October 1999.”

  “Where were those samples kept since October 1999? Were they properly preserved to avoid contamination?” The epidemiologist added a cryptic mark to a new section of her chart. “Wherever it was, without proper handling, it’d be a miracle if any of the pathogens were still viable. Jerry found a fair amount of degradation in the blood tests. Could that be explained away through improper preservation?”

  “Who says these were the original samples? What if these samples were multiple generations away from the originals?” Dr. Gupta’s face lit up as if she’d seized upon a major clue.

  Dr. White added even more scribbles to her latest chart. “That would mean the thief has a lab where he could continue his research. If he works here, his lab has to be in the community or fairly nearby. We know it’s not in the hospital itself.”

  “Keith and his team left no corner unsearched. Multiple times,” Sharon confirmed.

  “Not that a researcher works all day every day to modify bacteria. If I were secretly working on enhancing an existing organism, I’d want my lab to be near enough to visit every couple of days to see how the cultures were developing,” Dr. White said.

  “Wouldn’t he need a climate-controlled facility?” I asked.

  “As long as he has uninterrupted power to run his refrigeration units, he’d be
fine.” Dr. Klein almost pushed his nose against a chart, the better to read Dr. White’s mouse-sized printing. “Look, all he’d need is a reliable generator and a fuel source.”

  “Some tests take weeks or even months to show results,” Dr. Gupta said. “After all, modifying DNA takes patience, knowledge of what you’re doing, and a whole lot of luck. Forget what you see on television. None of this work happens in forty-five minutes.”

  “Viruses and bacteria have DNA, too. With knowledge in microbiology and some good microscopes, hypothetically, someone in a garage lab could conduct the kind of gene-splicing research that led to these becoming larger pathogens. Especially if he’s an expert in virology. I mean, it’s not like he’s sequencing the Yersinia pestis genome, after all.”

  “Yersinia pestis?”

  “Plague.”

  Why would Toby, who was fired for protesting research on biochemical weapons, steal samples and work to make them more potent? I scratched my head. “What’s his motive?”

  “That’s the crux of the matter.” Dr. Klein turned his back on the flip charts and white boards. “If he worked with contaminated samples, though, it might explain why the incubation periods are so crazy.”

  “Yes, like Alex getting sick so quickly. We all noticed the accelerated incubation periods. It’s all right here,” Dr. White said, nudging a piece of paper with a toe.

  Dr. Gupta shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense. Toby weaponizing these pathogens would be in direct conflict with his earlier position.” I was in her camp.

  “He could have changed his mind after 9/11,” Dr. White said. “My fellow virologists spent hundreds of hours speculating about terrorists having biological weapons of mass destruction at their disposal.” The airwaves had been so flooded with alarm that half the population was scared witless and the other half was sick to death of the whole mess. Anthrax had indeed been weaponized and mailed to government officials, killing some innocents in the process. Speculation about dirty bombs replaced anthrax, as did claims that if the U.S. had biological and chemical weapons, we’d somehow be safer. It wasn’t unrealistic to think a pacifist would change his mind under those circumstances.