The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  Near the bioreactor stood the drying trays. He mixed the virus sludge with a special kind of glass in liquid form. It was rather like making candy. He poured the molten glass into the trays. It dried and hardened into coin-sized hexagons of viral glass.

  He bought the viral glass mix through the mail. It was great stuff. A little pricey, but it seemed to work.

  With his double-gloved fingertips, he gently picked up a glass hexagon. He enjoyed holding viral glass in his fingers. He could see the rainbow colors of his virus—

  His thoughtful reverie was interrupted by a squeaking sound, a dry, metallic squeal. He heard voices and then a crash.

  He put the crystal back in the tray. Those kids were being disruptive again.

  He pulled back the metal curtain an inch and looked down. His laboratory overlooked an empty lot that was surrounded by a chain-link fence. People in the neighborhood had planted a garden there, with flowers and shrubs (and a little bit of alfalfa, which he had planted). They had put in an old swing set and a children’s slide and a small rotating merry-go-round. It was made of metal. The large boys were standing on the merry-go-round, pushing it, shouting. They were making it go too fast, and it was squealing again. They were ten or twelve years old, rough-looking city kids. One of them hurled a rock into the fence. Then the rest of them jumped off and went running, throwing rocks.

  At a cat!

  It was a brown and white stray cat, one of the animals that people left tins of food for in the informal park below his window. The cat leaped up the fence, but a rock crashed into the fence, and the cat went to the ground and shot off, more rocks pounding around it, and it twisted and screeched when a rock hit it. And then it ran through a hole under the fence, and escaped.

  It made him angry, but there was nothing he could do, because he was stuck in Level 3.

  Samples

  GOVERNORS ISLAND

  THE CITY MORGUE TRUCK was backed in behind the Coast Guard hospital, its rear end facing a hospital loading dock. Inside the truck was a bank of refrigerated crypts. There was also a mortuary gurney on wheels—a pan. The bodies of Peter Talides, Glenn Dudley, and Ben Kly were triple-bagged in white body pouches that were plastered with biohazard symbols. The morgue attendants at the O.C.M.E. had splashed large amounts of bleach inside the pouches and around the bodies, to kill the hot agent on the exterior of the bodies.

  Lex Nathanson and Austen suited up in a storage room near the loading dock, a room that Littleberry had designated the autopsy decon room. They wore chain-mail gloves on both hands. When they got in the truck, they started with Glenn Dudley.

  Without removing Dudley from the biohazard pouches, they lifted him by his shoulders and feet out of a crypt. It was a struggle. He was a heavy, muscular man. They transferred his bagged cadaver to the gurney. Nathanson unzipped the bags but did not remove the body. This was going to be a minimal autopsy in a biohazard shroud. Dudley’s blood and fluids would collect inside the shroud, and would not flow anywhere else.

  No one had removed Dudley’s clothing. He was wearing surgical scrubs. His scalp hung down over his face, exposing the dome of the skull. Dudley had prepared his cranium for opening.

  Austen lifted up the scalp, and Dudley’s eyes came into view. They had developed gold rings in the irises, with flamelike offshoots. She opened his mouth and looked carefully. She found a half-dozen blood blisters, mainly inside the upper cheeks.

  Austen cut his scrubs off with blunt scissors, laying the shirt back, opening the trousers.

  “I spoke with Glenn’s wife,” Nathanson said. “They have three children. The oldest is fifteen. It’s the children I think about.”

  “Do they know what happened?” Austen asked him.

  “I believe she has told them something but not all of it.”

  He did the Y incision on Dudley’s chest and abdomen, and opened up his chest. He cut Dudley’s ribs with loppers, and removed the sternum plate. He remained ice-calm. Austen watched him with respect. She saw no external sign of emotion.

  “Do you want me to take over, Dr. Nathanson?”

  “I’m all right.”

  The two pathologists worked carefully. Nathanson did not remove any of Dudley’s organ blocks. He and Austen examined the organs in place in his body cavity, and they took biosamples. Removing the organs and sectioning them would splash around a great deal of blood and fluid, and Nathanson felt that the safety risk did not justify the procedure.

  Nathanson wrapped Dudley’s head in a clear plastic bag. He plugged in a Stryker saw, then put the saw inside the bag, and tightened the bag with a string around Dudley’s throat. The bag would prevent blood and bone dust from flying into the air; it would splash inside the bag. This was standard procedure for opening a biohazardous brain.

  The saw chattered away, spewing wet bone dust and bloody material on the inside of the bag until the top of the skull could be removed. Nathanson’s mask was now completely misted with sweat. Austen watched him carefully. He appeared to be holding himself under tight but fragile control, but suddenly he said, “Would you take over now, Dr. Austen?”

  She nodded. She snipped open the dura mater—the gray leathery membrane that covers the brain.

  Dudley’s brain resembled that of Kate Moran: glassy, jellylike, swollen, bloated.

  “I splashed a drop of blood in his eyes. It was my fault.”

  “Put that out of your mind forever,” Nathanson said.

  What she could not put out of her mind was her last sight of Ben Kly alive. Kly had given her a chance to escape, and he had done it knowing it might well cost him his life. He had also accompanied her and protected her in the tunnel under Houston Street. He was a city morgue attendent, one of the anonymous handlers of the dead, yet she saw him as a man of perfect courage. The investigation had turned on his help. He left a wife and a small child. Austen felt the unworthiness of a survivor. She could hear Dudley’s voice saying, “You work around it.”

  She removed Glenn Dudley’s brain, taking great care with the scalpel, cutting the nerves. The brain spread out on the cutting board. It resembled a silvery bag of jelly. The color amazed her. She touched the brain with her fingertips. Protected by the chain-mail gloves, her fingers didn’t register the subtleties of the texture, but the brain almost melted under her touch.

  With a scalpel, she took small chunks of the underside of the brain and tucked them into biosample jars.

  “I’m going to take his eye, Dr. Nathanson,” she said.

  He nodded.

  Using a forceps and scalpel, she lifted Dudley’s eyelid and chipped and cut bone around the orbit of his right eye. Eventually she freed up the eyeball and lifted it out of the socket. A bit of optic nerve dangled from it. She put it in the stock jar.

  Austen made triple sets of samples. One set was for Walter Mellis to carry back to the Level 4 hot labs at the C.D.C.; one was for USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick; and the third set was for Reachdeep.

  WHEN THEY HAD FINISHED collecting samples and the postautopsy cadavers were back in the crypts in their bags, the two pathologists exited from the morgue truck and went into the autopsy decon room, where they sprayed their suits down with bleach, using hand-pump sprayers. Mark Littleberry supervised the deconning process. They disposed of their suits in biohazard bags. Then Dr. Nathanson returned to the O.C.M.E. by helicopter. The autopsied bodies of Peter Talides and Glenn Dudley would have to remain in the refrigerated truck for the time being. They could not be given burial or cremation. They had become federal evidence. The murder weapon was inside their bodies.

  ALICE AUSTEN carried a box of sample jars containing tissue from the autopsies into the Reachdeep laboratory area. She entered the Level 2 decon vestibule, where she had to suit up again before proceeding inward. She put on a black biohazard suit, marked with the letters F.B.I. She put on lightweight rubber boots and double rubber gloves, and a Racal hood over her head, and then she pushed through a door into the Evidence Core. Hopkins and Lesdiu were bent ov
er the two cobra boxes, which sat on a table under bright lights. Both men wore F.B.I. space suits.

  Austen’s sample jars contained fresh brain tissue, liver tissue, spinal fluid, vitreous humor from the eye, and blood. She gave the samples to Suzanne Tanaka, who took them into the biology room for culturing, and for examination in the electron microscope. Austen went with her.

  Tanaka wanted to try to make the virus grow in flasks of living cells. If she could get it to grow, then it could be studied more easily. Using a simple mortar and pestle, she mashed up a bit of Glenn Dudley’s brain and dropped the mush into a series of plastic flasks containing living human cells. The flasks were used for growing viruses in culture. The virus in Dudley’s brain tissue might infect the cells in the culture, and the virus would multiply in the cells, until the flask was enriched with virus particles. Then she could put a sample of it in an electron microscope and see the particles. The shape and structure of the particles might help identify the virus.

  Nearby, Tanaka had some clear plastic boxes that held white laboratory mice. She made a water preparation of Dudley’s brain tissue and injected it into several mice. “This is our mouse biodetector system,” she explained to Austen. Mice are used in virus labs somewhat like canaries in a coal mine. When you are trying to identify a virus, you may want to inject it into mice. If the mice get sick, you can observe the signs, and then examine the mice by necropsy (that is, kill the mice, cut them up, and look at the mouse tissue through a microscope). “We’ll see if they get sick,” Tanaka said.

  Next, Tanaka prepared some samples for the electron microscope. She wanted to try to make a direct image of the virus particles in Glenn Dudley’s brain. Working with a scalpel, she cut away tiny bits of brain tissue. Her cuts made samples of brain the size of pinheads. She put the samples into small test tubes and filled the tubes up with a fast-drying plastic resin. The resin would penetrate the brain sample and harden it. Then Tanaka could make slices of it.

  She also wanted to look at the powder in the cobra boxes. She went into the materials room, where Hopkins and Lesdiu were still examining the boxes, and, with a fine pair of tweezers, she obtained a small amount of dust from the Zecker-Moran box, which she dropped into a tiny plastic sample tube. She poured quick-drying resin into the tube.

  All of the samples—brain tissue and dust—became fixed in a hard plastic resin. Now she had some small cylinders of resin. She cut the resin blocks with a diamond-bladed slicing machine known as a microtome. A microtome is somewhat like a deli’s meat-slicing machine, except that the blade is a diamond and the slices it makes are the size of the head of a common household ant. While she worked, she explained to Austen what she was doing.

  “Investigations like this get me really fired up,” she said. “I can hardly sleep when we’re on a big case.”

  “Have you been on big cases before?” Austen asked her.

  There was a little pause. “Well,” Tanaka said, “not really. I’ve…dreamed about this, Alice. It feels like what I’ve wanted to do all my life.”

  Tanaka placed the slices on copper sample screens that were the size of this letter o. “Do you want to look with me, Dr. Austen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s look at the Cobra dust first,” Tanaka said. She dropped a copper-screen sample into a sample holder, a kind of steel rod. She slid the holder into the electron microscope, and it made a clinking sound as it locked into place. She threw some switches, adjusted a dial, and a screen glowed. Tanaka dimmed the lights in the imaging room so that they could see the images on the screen more clearly.

  IN THE MATERIALS ROOM, Hopkins performed a delicate operation. With a fine pair of tweezers and a hand-held magnifying glass, he took a nearly invisible pinch of dust out of the Zecker-Moran cobra box. He had a hard time seeing what he was doing—his Racal hood interfered with the view. He dropped the dust into a plastic test tube that contained a few drops of salt water and a disinfectant. The tube was about the size of a circus peanut.

  Two rooms down, in the darkened imaging room of the Evidence Core, Tanaka and Austen looked into the screen of the electron microscope. Before their eyes hovered an image of the dust particles in the cobra box. Tanaka spun the dials, and the image moved sideways. She was scanning. “This is weird,” she said. The particles were angular crystals. They had slightly rounded sides, rather like angular soccer balls.

  “That’s not a virus,” Austen said. “There’s no way it could be a virus. The crystals are way too large to be a virus.”

  Tanaka found something inside a crystal. She zoomed the image, moving into the field.

  “Look, Alice. Look at that.”

  There were dark rods of material inside the crystals. The rods were scattered about. In places they formed bundles.

  Tanaka pointed to a bundle of rods. “Those—I’d bet those are the virus particles themselves. They’re surrounded by these crystals. You’ve got virus particles embedded in crystals.”

  “What do you think the crystals are made of?” Austen asked.

  “I don’t know. They appear to be a protective coating around the virus particles—if those little rods inside the crystals are virus, which I think they are.”

  Tanaka put another sample in the electron microscope. “We’re looking inside one of Dr. Dudley’s brain cells,” she said. She spoke of his cells in a personal way, as if she might be speaking of a hand or an arm. The crystals inside the cells were chunks of material sitting in the cell’s nucleus. Some of the crystals were cracking open and seemed to be releasing particles into the cell’s cytoplasm, the cell’s interior. The particles resembled rods or batons. In places, Tanaka found the rods floating around inside a brain cell without any crystal material near them.

  “Dr. Dudley’s brain cells are a mess,” Tanaka said to Austen in a low voice. “This is as bad as Ebola.”

  “Have you seen Ebola?” Austen asked.

  “Sure. Part of our training. This isn’t Ebola.”

  “Do you think you know what it is?”

  “I’m not ready to say, Alice. I think I know.”

  Austen was standing behind her, looking down at the screen. She felt dizzy, as if she were falling into the depths of a microscopic universe that extended inward to infinity.

  “I have to be careful here,” Tanaka went on. “There is a type of virus that makes crystals like this. It lives in butterflies and moths.”

  “It lives in butterflies?”

  “Yup,” Tanaka said.

  Tanaka had brought reference textbooks with her. When you are looking at virus particles in a microscope, trying to make a visual identification of the virus, you check the images against photographs in a book, in the same way that a bird-watcher might look up photographs of birds in an Audubon field guide.

  Tanaka went over to a military transport box sitting in a corner of the imaging room. She threw the catches, and pulled out a textbook on viruses. She closed the box and sat down on it, and opened the volume on her lap. Austen sat beside her. Tanaka flipped through the table of contents, then turned to a page about halfway into the book. “There,” she said, putting her finger on a photograph.

  She had come to a section on insect viruses. The photograph showed images of crystals.

  “This is nuclear polyhedrosis virus,” Tanaka said to Austen. “That’s kind of a mouthful. Let’s call it N.P.V. You know, like H.I.V.? This is N.P.V. This virus scares the hell out of me.”

  Austen saw that Tanaka wasn’t kidding when she said the virus frightened her. Tanaka’s breathing hood had misted up, a sure sign of upset. “The crystals are a kind of protein, I think,” Tanaka said, her voice not strong. She said that the virus particles were clumped inside the crystals. “The crystals are like—kind of—protective shells around the virus. They protect the virus from harm. This thing is an engineered weapon, Alice.”

  Tanaka returned to the microscope and began snapping photographs with an electronic camera that was attached to it. Image by ima
ge, huge crystals appeared on a video screen. The two women looked at cells from the golden areas in Dudley’s irises. The cells were full of crystals. It was the crystals, forming in the pupillary ring around the iris, that gave the eyes the yellow-gold color. There were crystals in the optic nerve leading to the eye. The virus had either migrated through the eyes into the brain along the optic nerve, or it had spread out of the brain to the eyes.

  They were seeing a life-form that Austen had seen earlier through the optical microscope in Glenn Dudley’s office, when she had first looked at Kate Moran’s brain tissue in a microscope. Then she had seen fuzzy shapes, without much clarity. Here, the clarity was superb, and the crystals loomed like planets.

  “We have to tell Will,” Tanaka said.

  The Code

  WILL HOPKINS, now dressed in surgical scrubs but not a space suit, had set up a work area on a table in the conference room. While Tanaka was attempting to make an image of the virus particles, he would try to “see” the DNA of the virus using his machines. In this way, he hoped to get a rapid identification of the virus.

  He hooked up the two Felix machines on the table. He deployed several other small machines as well. He also put out a bagel with cream cheese, which he munched while he worked. Wires and cables trailed everywhere.

  Hopkins had a sample of Cobra dust in a small plastic test tube the size of a baby’s finger. The dust had been sterilized with chemicals and mixed with a few drops of water. It wasn’t dangerous. It contained a quantity of DNA from the virus. He held the tube up to a bright light and swirled it around. Sometimes you could actually see DNA with your naked eye—it formed milky lumps in a test tube. This time, he couldn’t see any, but the water in the test tube was nevertheless full of strands of DNA, like a soup made with angel hair pasta. He put a droplet of the water (containing DNA from the virus) directly into a sampling port in one of the Felix machines.