Plum Island

by Nelson DeMille

  I nodded. “Incredible. And how did they smuggle this stuff out? I mean, how big is a Jell-O plate?”

  “Gel plate.”

  “Right. How big?”

  “Oh … perhaps a foot and a half wide, and two and a half feet long.”

  “How do you get that out of biocontainment?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “And their notes?”

  “Fax. I’ll show you later.”

  “And the actual vaccine?”

  “That would be easier. Anal and vaginal.”

  “I don’t want to sound crude, Doc, but I don’t think they could get a thirty-inch gel plate up their ass without attracting a little attention.”

  Dr. Zollner cleared his throat and replied, “You don’t actually need the gel plates if you could photocopy them or take a photo with one of those little spy cameras.”

  “Incredible.” I thought of the fax machine in the Gordons’ office.

  “Yes. Well, let’s go see if we can figure out what happened and how it happened.” He stood. “If anyone does not want to go into biocontainment, you may sit in the lobby or in the cafeteria.” He looked around, but no one said anything. He smiled, more Burl Ives than Colonel Sanders, I think. He said, “Well, everyone is brave then. Please, follow me.”

  We all stood and I said, “Stay together.”

  Dr. Zollner smiled at me and said, “When you are in biocontainment, my friend, you will naturally want to stay as close to me as possible.”

  It struck me that I should have gone to the Caribbean to convalesce.

  CHAPTER 12

  We returned to the lobby and stood before the two yellow doors.

  Dr. Zollner said to Beth, “Donna awaits you in the locker room. Please follow her instructions, and we will meet you at the rear door of the ladies’ locker room.” Zollner watched her go through the yellow door, then said to us, “Gentlemen, please follow me.”

  We followed the good doctor into the men’s locker room, which turned out to be a hideous orange place, but otherwise typical of any locker room. An attendant handed us open locks without keys and freshly laundered lab whites. In a plastic bag were paper underwear, socks, and cotton slippers.

  Zollner showed us to a row of empty lockers and said, “Please remove everything, including underwear and jewelry.”

  So, we all stripped down to our birthday suits, and I couldn’t wait to tell Beth that Ted Nash carried a .38 with a three-inch barrel and that the barrel was longer than his dick.

  George Foster said, apropos of my chest wound, “Close to the heart.”

  “I have no heart.”

  Zollner pulled on his oversized whites and now he looked more like Colonel Sanders.

  I snapped my padlock on the locker hasp and adjusted my paper underwear.

  Dr. Zollner looked us over and said, “So—we are all ready? Then please follow me.”

  “Hold on,” Max said. “Don’t we get face masks or respirators or something?”

  “Not for Zone Two, Mr. Maxwell. Maybe for Zone Four, if you want to go that far. Come. Follow me.”

  We went to the rear of the locker room, and Zollner opened a red door marked with the weird-looking biohazard symbol and beneath the symbol the words “Zone Two.” I could hear rushing air and Dr. Zollner explaining, “That’s the negative air pressure you hear. It’s up to a pound per square inch less in here than outside, so no pathogens can escape accidentally.”

  “I hate when that happens.”

  “Also, the particulate air filters on the roof clean all exhaust air from in here.”

  Max looked stubbornly skeptical, like a man who doesn’t want any good news to interfere with his long-held belief that Plum Island was the biohazard equivalent of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl combined.

  We went into a concrete block corridor, and Zollner looked around and asked, “Where is Ms. Penrose?”

  I replied, “Doc, are you married?”

  “Yes. Oh … of course, she may take longer to get changed.”

  “No ‘mays’ about it, feller.”

  Finally, from the door marked “Women,” Lady Penrose appeared, dressed in loose-fitting whites and cotton slippers. She still looked sexy, more cupid-like in white, I thought.

  She heard the rushing air sound, and Zollner explained the negative air pressure, gave us some instructions about being careful not to bump into carts or racks of vials, or bottles filled with lethal bugs or chemicals, and so forth.

  Zollner said, “All right, please follow me, and I will show you what goes on here so you can tell your friends and colleagues that we are not making anthrax bombs.” He laughed, then said in a serious tone, “Zone Five is off-limits because you need special vaccinations, and also training to put on the biohazard suits and respirators and all of that. Also, the basement is off-limits.”

  “Why,” I asked, “is the basement off-limits?”

  “Because that’s where we hide the dead aliens and the Nazi scientists.” He laughed again.

  I love being the straight man for a fat Ph.D. with a Dr. Strangelove accent. Really. More to the point, I knew that Stevens had indeed spoken to Zollner. I would have liked to have been a tsetse fly on that wall.

  Mr. Foster attempted humor and said, “I thought the aliens and the Nazis were in the underground bunkers.”

  “No, the dead aliens are in the lighthouse,” Zollner said. “We moved the Nazis out of the bunkers when they complained about the vampires.”

  Everyone laughed—ha, ha, ha. Humor in biocontainment. I should write to Reader’s Digest.

  As we walked, Dr. Zany said, “It’s safe in this zone— mostly we have genetic engineering labs, some offices, electron microscopes—low-risk, low-contagion work here.”

  We walked through concrete block corridors, and every once in a while Dr. Zollner would open a yellow steel door and say hello to someone inside an office or laboratory and inquire as to their work.

  There were all sorts of weird windowless rooms, including a place that looked like a wine cellar except the bottles in the racks were filled with cultures of living cells, according to Zollner.

  Zollner gave us a commentary as we walked through the battleship-gray corridors. “There are newly emerging viruses that affect animals or humans or both. We humans and the higher animal species have no immunological responses to many of these deadly diseases. Present antiviral drugs are not very effective, and so the key to avoiding a future worldwide catastrophe is antiviral vaccines, and the key to the new vaccines is genetic engineering.”

  Max asked, “What catastrophe?”

  Dr. Zollner continued walking and talking very breezily, I thought, considering the subject. He said, “Well, regarding animal diseases, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, for instance, could wipe out much of this nation’s livestock and ruin the livelihoods of millions of people. The cost of other foods would probably quadruple. The foot-and-mouth virus is perhaps the most contagious and virulent in nature, which is why the biological warfare people have always been fascinated by it. A good day for the bio-warfare gentlemen is a day when their scientists can genetically engineer the FMD virus to infect humans. But worse, I think, some of these viruses mutate on their own and become dangerous to people.”

  No one had a comment or question on that. We peeked in on more labs, and Zollner would always say a few encouraging words to the pale eggheads in white who labored in surroundings that made me nervous just looking at them. He’d say things like, “What have we learned today? Have we discovered anything new?” And so on. It appeared that he was well liked, or at least tolerated by his scientists.

  As we turned down yet another in a series of seemingly endless corridors, Zollner continued his lecture. “In 1983, for instance, a highly contagious and deadly influenza broke out in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There were seventeen million dead. Chickens, I mean. Poultry. But you see what I’m getting at. The last big deadly human influenza epidemic in the world was in 1918. There were
about twenty million dead worldwide, including five hundred thousand in the United States. Based on our present population, the equivalent number of dead now would be approximately one and a half million people. Could you imagine such a thing today? And the 1918 virus wasn’t particularly virulent, and of course, travel was much slower then and less frequent. Today, the highways and skyways can spread an infectious virus around the world in days. The good news about the deadliest viruses, such as Ebola, is that they kill so fast, they barely have time to leave an African village before everyone in it is dead.”

  I asked, “Is there a one o’clock ferry?”

  Dr. Zollner laughed. “You are feeling somewhat nervous, yes? Nothing to fear here. We are very cautious. Very respectful of the little bugs in this building.”

  “Sounds like the ‘my dog doesn’t bite’ crap.”

  Dr. Zollner ignored me and continued on, “It is the mission of the United States Department of Agriculture to prevent foreign animal pestilence from coming to these shores. We are the animal equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. As you may imagine, we work closely with Atlanta because of these crossover diseases—animal to human, and vice versa. We have a huge quarantine complex in Newburgh, New York, where all animals coming into this country must stay in quarantine for a period of time. You know, it’s like a Noah’s Ark of animals arriving every day—foreign race horses, circus animals, zoo animals, breeding stock, exotic commercial animals such as ostriches and llamas, exotic pets such as Vietnamese potbellied pigs, and all sorts of birds from the jungle…. Two and a half million animals each year.” He looked at us and said, “Newburgh has been called the Ellis Island for the animal kingdom. Plum Island is the Alcatraz. No animal that comes to us from Newburgh or from anywhere leaves here alive. I must tell you, all these animals being imported into this country for recreation and amusement have caused us here a lot of work and much anxiety. It’s only a matter of time….” He added, “You can extrapolate from the animal kingdom to the human population.”

  I certainly could.

  He stayed silent a moment, then said, “Plum Island’s cannons once guarded the shores of this country, and now this facility does the same.”

  Rather poetic, I thought, for a scientist, then I recalled reading that line in one of the press releases that Donna handed me.

  Zollner liked to talk, and my job is to listen, so, it was working out okay.

  We walked into a room that Zollner said was an X-ray crystallography lab, and I wasn’t about to argue with him.

  A woman was bent over a microscope, and Zollner introduced her as Dr. Chen, a colleague and good friend of Tom and Judy. Dr. Chen was about thirty, and rather attractive, I thought, with a long shock of black hair, tied back with a sort of netting, suitable for close microscope work by day, I guess, and who knew what at night when the hair came down. Behave, Corey. This is a scientist, and she’s a lot smarter than you are.

  Dr. Chen greeted us, and she looked rather serious, I thought, but probably she was just upset and sad over the deaths of her friends.

  Once again, Beth made sure that it was understood that I was a friend of the Gordons, and on that level, if no other, I was earning my buck a week. I mean, people don’t like a bunch of coppers hammering them with questions, but if one of the cops is a mutual friend of the deceased, then you have a little edge. Anyway, we all agreed that the Gordons’ deaths were a tragedy, and we spoke well of the dead.

  The subject shifted to Dr. Chen’s work. She explained, in lay terms so that I sort of understood her, “I am able to Xray virus crystals so that I can map their molecular structure. Once we do that, we can then attempt to alter the virus to make it unable to cause disease, but if we inject this altered virus into an animal, the animal may produce antibodies that we hope will attack the natural, disease-causing version of the virus.”

  Beth asked, “And this is what the Gordons were working on?”

  “Yes.”

  “What specifically were they working on? What virus?”

  Dr. Chen glanced at Dr. Zollner. I’m not happy when witnesses do that. I mean, it’s like the pitcher gets the signal from the coach to throw a curve or a slider or whatever. Dr. Zollner must have signaled for a fast ball because Dr. Chen said straightforwardly, “Ebola.”

  No one said anything, then Dr. Zollner said, “Simian Ebola, of course. Monkey Ebola.” He added, “I would have told you sooner, but I thought you’d want it explained more fully by one of the Gordons’ colleagues.” He nodded to Dr. Chen.

  Dr. Chen continued, “The Gordons were trying to genetically alter a simian Ebola virus so that it would not cause disease, but would produce an immune response in the animal. There are many strains of the Ebola virus, and we’re not even sure which strains can cross the species barrier—”

  “You mean,” Max asked, “infect people?”

  “Yes, infect humans. But this is an important first step toward a human Ebola vaccine.”

  Dr. Zollner said, “Most of our work here has traditionally been done with what you’d call farm animals—food- and leather-producing animals. However, over the years, certain government agencies have underwritten other types of research.”

  I asked, “Such as the military doing biological warfare research?”

  Dr. Zollner didn’t answer directly, but said, “This island is a unique environment, isolated, but close to major transportation and communication centers, and also close to the best universities in the nation, and close to a highly educated pool of scientists. In addition, this facility is technically advanced. So, aside from the military, we work with other agencies, here and abroad, whenever something very unusual or potentially … dangerous to humans comes along. Such as Ebola.”

  “In other words,” I said, “you sort of rent rooms here?”

  “It’s a big facility,” he replied.

  “Did the Gordons work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture?” I asked.

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Where did their paychecks come from?”

  “All paychecks are from the USDA.”

  “But not every scientist who gets a USDA paycheck is a USDA employee. Correct?”

  “I don’t intend to get into a semantic duel with you, Mr. Corey.” He looked at Dr. Chen. “Please continue.”

  She said, “There are so many separate tasks and steps to this sort of work that no one can see the whole picture except the project supervisor. That was Tom. Judy was the assistant project supervisor. In addition, they were both excellent researchers themselves. In retrospect, I can see what they were doing, which was to ask for tests on procedures that were something like a red herring, and sometimes they’d tell one of us on the project that they’d reached a dead end. They closely monitored the actual clinical tests on the monkeys, and the animal handlers were not well informed. Tom and Judy were the only ones who were privy to all the information.”

  She thought a moment, then said, “I don’t believe they started out to deceive … I think when it hit them how close they were to a workable vaccine for simian Ebola, they saw the possibilities of transferring the technology to a private laboratory where the next logical step was a human vaccine. Maybe they believed that this was the best thing in the interests of humanity. Maybe they thought they could develop this vaccine more quickly and effectively outside this place, which is—like most government agencies—prone to red tape and slowness.”

  Max said, “Let’s stick to the theory of profit motive, Dr. Chen. The interests of humanity isn’t cutting it for me.”

  She shrugged.

  Beth motioned toward the microscope. “Can I take a look?”

  Dr. Chen said, “Those are dead Ebola, of course. Live Ebola is only in Zone Five. But I can show you live Ebola viruses safely on videotape.” She turned to a TV monitor and hit the VCR. The screen brightened to show four almost transparent crystals, tinted a sort of pink color, three-dimensional, reminding me of a prism. If they were ali
ve, they were playing possum.

  Dr. Chen said, “I’m mapping the molecular structure, as I said, so that the genetic engineers can cut and splice this or that piece, then the altered virus is propagated and injected into a monkey. The monkey has one of three responses—it contracts Ebola and dies, it doesn’t contract Ebola but doesn’t produce Ebola antibodies, or it doesn’t contract Ebola and does produce Ebola antibodies. That is the response we’re looking for. That means we have a vaccine. But not necessarily a safe or effective vaccine. The monkey may develop Ebola later, or more commonly, when we later inject the monkey with natural Ebola virus, the antibodies aren’t effective in overcoming the disease. The immune response is too weak. Or the immune response does not protect against all strains. It’s very frustrating work. Viruses are so simple, molecularly and genetically, but they are more challenging than bacteria in that they are easy to mutate, hard to understand, and hard to kill. In fact, the question is—are those crystals really alive as we understand life? Look at them. They look like ice chips.”

  Indeed, we were all staring at the crystals on the screen. They looked like something that dropped off a chandelier. It was hard to believe that those guys and their cousins and brothers had caused so much human misery and death, not to mention animal deaths. There was something scary about an organism that looked dead but came to life when it invaded living cells, and reproduced so fast it could kill a healthy two-hundred-pound man in forty-eight hours. What was God thinking?

  Dr. Chen turned off the TV monitor.

  Beth asked Dr. Chen about the Gordons’ behavior yesterday morning, and Dr. Chen said that the Gordons seemed somewhat tense. Judy complained of a migraine, and they decided to go home. This did not surprise any of us.

  I asked Dr. Chen directly, “Do you think they took anything out of here yesterday?”

  She thought a moment, then replied, “I don’t know. How can I say?”

  Beth asked, “How difficult is it to smuggle something out of here? How would you do it?”