The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  The light from the skylight came down around the scene, a cool light, illuminating Alice Austen’s red hair. She thought of Kate’s red hair, and of the autopsy.

  She looked around the room. What is the air-circulation system in this room? She noticed a steam radiator. Good. Forced-air heating ducts might carry the room’s air all over the building. She noticed an air-conditioning vent on the ceiling. She would have to make sure the Morans didn’t turn on the air-conditioning system.

  Austen locked Kate’s door from the inside and then went out, and the door clicked behind her. She removed her mask and gloves but didn’t know what to do with them. Finally she just put them in a pocket of her knapsack. She also took the magnifying loupe with her.

  She found Nanette and warned her not to let anyone go into Kate’s room. “I think I found something in there that may be extremely dangerous. I’ve locked the door. The authorities are going to investigate. Please keep that door locked until they arrive.”

  Nanette promised that she would stay out of the room and would keep people from going in. “Mr. and Mrs. Moran won’t be home until tomorrow,” she said.

  “Whatever you do, don’t turn on the air-conditioning.”

  AUSTEN WENT OUT to the street and got a taxi to the medical examiner’s office. There, in her office, beside her desk, she had left the bag of Harmonica Man’s possessions. She put on a clean pair of surgical gloves and a clean button mask. She opened the mouth of the garbage bag and pulled out the black sweatshirt. There was a lump in the front pocket. She reached into the pocket and pulled out a small box. It was nearly identical to the one from Kate’s room. She examined it in the fluorescent light. There was another tiny piece of paper glued to the bottom of this box. With the magnifying loupe, she examined it. This paper contained a picture. It was a very small engineering drawing. A picture of something she had never seen before. It looked like some kind of jar. The jar contained something that looked like a dumbbell or an hourglass. Under the picture was written, in very small print:

  Human Trial #1, April 12

  ARCHIMEDES FECIT

  The boxes reeked of a plan, and a precise mind.

  She locked her office, went up to the histology lab, and asked for several sealable plastic biohazard bags. Telling no one what she needed them for, she returned to her office and bagged the two cobra boxes. She didn’t open the tea can. Then she went to the basement and got some large plastic bags, and she triple-bagged Lem’s clothing. She realized that her knapsack had been hopelessly contaminated by the rubber gloves and the mask, and she triple-bagged the whole thing and tied it up.

  She went to the ladies’ room and looked into a mirror over the sink, afraid that she would see something in her eyes. Her eyes stared back at her, gray-blue. There was no change of color. No pupillary ring.

  DR. NATHANSON LIVED on the Upper East Side in the Fifties. Austen took a taxi there, and in five minutes she was at the door of his apartment. His wife, Cora, answered the bell. “Oh, yes, you’re the doctor from the C.D.C.,” she said. “Come in.”

  Nathanson had a small office in the apartment. The desk was piled with papers. On the shelves were works of philosophy and medicine. The room smelled of cigars. He shut the door.

  She said: “I’ve found the source.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “The source. The cause of death. It’s a human being. This isn’t a natural outbreak. This is the work of a killer.”

  There was a long pause. In a careful voice, Nathanson said, “What makes you think so?”

  On his desk she placed the orange-and-red plastic biohazard bags that held the tea can and Harmonica Man’s box.

  “I have found two devices. They are biological dispersion devices—bombs, Dr. Nathanson, I found one in Harmonica Man’s clothing. I found the other in Kate Moran’s bedroom. Penny Zecker was a junk dealer. She sold the device to Kate. Her notebook indicates that somebody traded the box with her for some postcards. That somebody is a murderer.”

  She placed her laptop computer on his desk and turned it on. “Look at these images.”

  The chief bent over to stare at her photograph of the Zecker-Moran box.

  “This is the device that infected Penny Zecker. She sold it to Kate Moran.” Then Austen held up one of the plastic biohazard bags. “There’s the other device—you can see it in here. It’s the device that ended up with Harmonica Man. I think someone may have given it to him in the subway. These boxes are designed to release a small amount of dust into the air when the lid pops open. I think the dust is a dried biological agent. It may be crystallized virus particles, I’m not sure.”

  Nathanson said nothing for a long time, staring at the boxes. He picked up the plastic bag, and looked through the plastic at the box inside, at the painted crystal, the featureless gray wood. Suddenly he seemed like an old man. He put down the bag. “This is criminal evidence. You should have left it where you found it.”

  “I—I guess I wasn’t thinking about evidence. This is a bomb. I wanted to get it out of there.”

  “You’ve been exposed.”

  “So have Glenn Dudley and Ben Kly. You, too. You were present at the Moran autopsy.”

  “Jesus! They’re doing the teacher now!”

  “What?”

  “The art teacher. He was killed on the subway tracks.”

  “Oh, my God. How?”

  “We don’t know what happened. I tried to reach you. Your phone wasn’t working. I called Glenn and asked him to come in. He’s in the autopsy room now with Kly.”

  Nathanson called over to the O.C.M.E. and reached a morgue attendant, and asked him to get Dudley on the phone. Soon the man came back, saying that Dr. Dudley was busy and would call later.

  Knife

  O.C.M.E. MORGUE

  GLENN DUDLEY AND KLY were alone in the Pit when Austen arrived there, out of breath. She stopped at the door of the main autopsy room and cried out to them. “Wait! The body is infected with a hot agent.”

  Ben Kly took a step backward.

  “It’s very dangerous, Dr. Dudley,” Austen said.

  “Then get yourself suited up before you come in here,” he replied. “Note my findings.” His gloved finger pointed at Talides’s head. “The facial skin is cratered with blackened pits in the jumping-arc pattern we observe in subway electrocutions. The eyes remain open, milky due to heating. The right temple bulges outward, where we see a cracked-oyster fracture, and here we see traces of cooked brain material spilling out. The smell of cooked brain is distinctive. Why can’t I smell it?” Now he looked up at her. His nose was running with a clear mucus, which was flowing over his breathing mask.

  “Ben,” she said, backing away.

  Kly had been holding the stock jar. He looked at Dudley and the jar dropped from his hands and broke on the floor with a crash.

  The sound of the breaking glass may have upset Dudley. A jacksonian twitch rippled across his face. He grunted and opened his mouth. He sighed.

  Dudley raised his prosector’s knife, hefting it in an expert hand. He turned toward Austen and sighted along the blade, looking at her with shining, alert eyes.

  The blade was honed carbon steel, more than two feet long, sharpened to the cutting edge of a straight razor, with a wooden grip. It was a weapon of real power, held in the hand of a man who knew how to use it. It was slick with infective blood.

  Austen moved backward, keeping her eyes on the blade. Very slowly she raised her hands to protect her neck and face. “Dr. Dudley, please put the knife down. Please,” she said.

  Slowly, gently, Dudley moved the knife toward her. She screamed and jumped back, and the knife passed under her arm. He was playing with her, it seemed.

  “Over here!” Kly said.

  Dudley turned and faced Kly.

  “Go!” Kly hissed to her.

  She did not move. She picked up a pair of lopping shears, but Dudley spun around and tapped the shears away with his blade. It made a tiny clink.


  Dudley turned and moved toward Kly, who backed up, keeping his eyes on Dudley’s face, talking to him. “Calm down, Doctor. Put the knife down. It’s all right, Doctor. Let’s pray together, Doctor.”

  Dudley backed him into a corner. Kly had nowhere to go.

  “Let’s not pray,” Dudley said, as he swung the knife with all his strength. It passed through Kly’s neck with a wet sound, almost beheading him.

  An arterial jet from his neck hit the ceiling. His head flopped over sideways, the muscles cut. He went down with a slumping sound.

  Austen ran out of the room, shouting.

  DUDLEY LOOKED DOWN at Kly, then looked around calmly. His neck arched. His back curved and swayed. The basal writhing intensified. He went over to a supply table and picked up a sterile scalpel blade in a wrapper. He stripped off the wrapper and fitted the little scalpel blade into a handle. He reached above his left ear with the scalpel and poked it into his skin until the tip touched bone, then drew the blade swiftly over the crown of his head, making a coronal incision from ear to ear, the blade tip bumping against the hard bone of his calvarium. He poked the scalpel into his thigh and left it quivering in the muscle—the muscle being a convenient sticking place for the scalpel. With both hands, he reached up and grasped the flap of skin that had opened across his head. He tugged it forward sharply. There was a tearing sound. He pulled his scalp off his skull and turned it inside out. He kept going—expertly, he pulled his face off his cranium. His eyes sagged as he pulled. His scalp fell down over his face inside out, like a slippery red blanket, the dome of his calvarium ivory-colored and red and wet, his hair draped in a fringe down over his mouth. His lips moved behind his hair. He screamed. He was eating his scalp. There was no seizure at the end.

  Part Four

  DECISION

  Masaccio

  THE JACOB K. JAVITS FEDERAL BUILDING at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan sits along Broadway, overlooking a complex of courthouses and city government buildings around Foley Square, with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. The Federal Building is faced with dark gray stone. It has smoked windows. The offices inside include the New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is the largest F.B.I. office in the United States, except for F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. Eighteen hundred special agents and staffers work out of the New York office. It occupies eight floors of the Federal Building.

  Alice Austen and the chief medical examiner of New York City entered a darkened conference room on the twenty-sixth floor. The room was full of desks arranged in concentric half-circles, facing a bank of video display screens. It was the Command Center of the New York field office. Various agents and managers and technical people were standing around or sitting at the desks, and there was an unmistakable scent of sour law-enforcement coffee in the air.

  A stocky man in his forties came over to them. He had curly brown hair and dark intelligent eyes. He wore a blue oxford shirt under a gray V-neck sweater vest, and khaki pants and L.L. Bean loafers. He had an ample gut.

  “Hello, Lex,” he said, and he shook Austen’s hand. “Frank Masaccio. I’m glad to meet you, Doctor. We’ll talk in my office.”

  As they walked out of the Command Center, Masaccio gestured to the video screens. “We’re just wrapping up a bust. Insurance fraud.” He shook his head. “Some of the suspects are doing the fake-heart-attack routine. Half the cardiac-care units in this city have organized-crime figures dying in them as we speak. Drives us nuts.”

  Frank Masaccio was the head of the New York field office and an assistant director of the F.B.I. When they got to his office, three floors above, he said to them, “All right, run this by me again.”

  Nathanson’s voice was shaky. “My deputy is dead, infected with something in the autopsy room. He killed our best morgue attendant with a knife, and then he killed himself in a way that is difficult to describe.”

  Austen placed her laptop computer on a coffee table. “Something seems to be causing people to attack themselves or others. We’ve had six deaths, and it looks like someone is planting the agent in a premeditated way.”

  Masaccio said nothing. He got up and crossed the room and sat down on the couch in front of her computer, so that he could see the screen, and he gave her a sharp look. “The first question I’m asking, is this F.B.I. jurisdiction?”

  “This is murder,” she said. She was met with a neutral gaze that was impossible to read as she began to summarize what had happened, what she had found.

  Masaccio listened without comment, then suddenly put up one hand. “Hold on. Have you notified anybody at C.D.C.?”

  “Not yet,” Nathanson said.

  “I want to do a dial-up with C.D.C.,” Masaccio said. He went over to his desk. Without sitting down, he tapped the keys of his computer, and stared at a list of numbers and names. “Here’s our contact in Atlanta.” He punched up a telephone number and then tapped in a string of digits with one finger. “Skypager.”

  Within two minutes, the phone rang back. Masaccio put the call on his speakerphone and said, “Is this Dr. Walter Mellis? Frank Masaccio here. I’m the director of the New York field office of the F.B.I. I don’t know if we’ve ever met. I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday. We have a little problem. Where are you right now?”

  “I’m at my golf course. In the clubhouse,” Mellis said. They could hear him breathing hard. It sounded as if he had run for a telephone.

  “Walt? It’s Alice Austen.”

  “Alice! What’s going on?”

  There was some confusion for a moment about who knew whom, but Walter Mellis quickly explained things to Masaccio.

  “Dr. Mellis, it looks like we may be in the middle of a—biological event of some kind,” Masaccio said. “Your researcher seems to have uncovered something.”

  “Wait—what’s Walt’s involvement?” Austen said.

  “He’s a consultant to one of our special units. It’s called Reachdeep,” Masaccio said. He explained that Reachdeep was a classified operation, and that he would arrange for her to have security clearance.

  Austen wasn’t sure she grasped what was going on.

  “Reachdeep is a special forensic unit of the Bureau,” Masaccio said. “It deals with nuclear, chemical, and biological terrorism. Dr. Mellis here is the C.D.C. contact for Reachdeep. He’s a consultant for us.”

  “Were you in on this?” Austen asked Lex Nathanson.

  Nathanson was embarrassed. “Walt has involved me a bit,” he said.

  “So he lined you up, Lex?” Masaccio said.

  “He asked me to watch for unusual cases. This one seemed unusual.”

  Austen was annoyed about being deceived, but she tried to calm herself down. She described to Masaccio in greater detail what she had found, speaking carefully. He interrupted her occasionally to ask questions. She found that she did not have to explain anything twice to him.

  “Why did Dr. Dudley become so violent?” Masaccio asked. “That high school kid didn’t.”

  “The agent seems to exaggerate underlying aggression,” Austen answered. “Kate Moran was a peaceful person, and she bit her lips. Glenn Dudley was—”

  “Very unhappy,” Nathanson filled in, “to begin with.”

  “It’s doing damage to primitive parts of the brain,” Austen said. “If this is an infectious agent, it is one of the most dangerous infective organisms I’ve ever seen or heard of.”

  Masaccio shot a look at Austen. “How infective? A lot or a little?”

  He is asking the right questions, she thought. “The blistering process in the mouth and nose is an important detail, and it’s particularly frightening,” she said. “You get blistering with very infective agents like smallpox or measles. The agent is not as contagious as the influenza virus. But it is more contagious than the AIDS virus. I would guess it’s about as infective as the common cold. It actually starts like a common cold, but then it invades the nervous system.”

  “So what is the bug?” Masac
cio asked.

  “Unknown,” Austen said.

  “This has to be federal jurisdiction,” Lex Nathanson broke in. “The City of New York can’t possibly handle this.”

  “All right,” Masaccio said. “What we have is an apparent series of homicides using an unknown biological agent. That’s covered under Title 18 of the federal code. That’s ours. That’s F.B.I. jurisdiction. Can the C.D.C. identify this thing for us?”

  “It could be difficult,” Mellis said.

  “What about a cure?”

  “Cure?” Mellis said. “How can we cure something if we don’t know what it is, Mr. Masaccio? If it’s a virus, there’s probably no cure. Most viruses are untreatable and incurable. Usually the only defense against a virus is a protective vaccine. It takes years of research, and maybe a hundred million dollars, to invent a vaccine for a new virus. We still don’t have a vaccine for AIDS.”

  Masaccio said, “Okay, but how long will it take to identify this?”

  Mellis answered on the speakerphone, “Weeks to months.” Masaccio stared at the speakerphone as if he were trying to burn a hole in it with his eyes. “We have hours to days to deal with this.” He turned. “So—tell me what you think the virus is, Dr. Austen.”

  “I don’t know what it is. We’re not even sure it’s a virus.”

  There was a silence, and then Masaccio said, “I have the impression that there’s a lot on your mind you’re not telling me, Dr. Austen.”

  “I don’t have much evidence.”

  “Bullshit. You pulled off a very complex criminal investigation with no backup. Are there any cops in your family? Is your dad a cop, by any chance?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Come on,” he said, coaxing her.

  “My father, yes. He’s a retired chief of police, but what difference does that make?”

  Masaccio chuckled, delighted with himself. “All right, now—good cops work their hunches. Tell me your hunches. One cop to another.”