The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  “Maybe he’s been exploring the subway to look for the best place to do a big release,” she said.

  Wanderer

  NEW YORK CITY, MONDAY, APRIL 27

  HE SLEPT LATE (by his own standards) and was out of bed by seven o’clock in the morning. First he went into the staging area and suited up in a Tyvek suit and entered Level 3. He checked on the bioreactor. It was running smoothly. It might run for another day or two before he would have to replace the core. He checked on the drying of the viral glass. It had hardened nicely during the night. With double-gloved fingertips he picked out a hexagon, a sliver of brainpox viral glass. He loaded it into a widemouthed plastic flask. The flask would fit in his pocket. He screwed a black cap on the flask, and tightened it hard. He dipped the flask in a pan full of bleach and water. That was to sterilize the outside of the flask. The inside of the flask was hot, in a biological sense. The hexagon contained perhaps a quadrillion virus particles.

  He went down the stairs and out onto the street. He walked for a while. It was a cool Monday morning, with a high overcast, almost motionless air. He could see a tinge of brown in the sky, a hint of summer’s coming smog. It was the right kind of weather for a biological release. You wanted slow-moving air and a weather inversion, with a haze of pollution.

  He ended up in Greenwich Village, where he stopped for breakfast at a café. He ordered a goat-cheese omelette with fresh-baked sourdough bread and wildflower honey and a cup of coffee. No meat, but today eggs were acceptable. He took the flask out of his pocket and put it on the table next to his food. It looked harmless. Only a bottle wrapped in a plastic bag. If you looked closely at the flask you would see a pane of viral glass sitting inside the bottle. The waiter didn’t notice; no one noticed.

  He mulled over his possibilities. The question was not just the power of the hot agent, but how it was to be dispersed. The boxes were okay for the Phase I human trials, and it was clear that they worked. The low-key warnings about them that were now being broadcast on TV proved that. Good. It was time to move on.

  He reached into the pocket of his windbreaker, which was draped on the back of his chair, and pulled out a photocopy of a scientific report. He placed it beside the flask and unfolded it and smoothed it and put his coffee cup on the paper to hold it there. Then he began to read. “A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Action with Biological Agents”—he was reading it for about the hundredth time. Department of the Army, Fort Detrick, Maryland. It had been published in 1968.

  The study described how Army researchers had filled glass lightbulbs with a dry, powdered bacterial-spore preparation, finer than confectioner’s sugar. The particles were in the size range of one to five microns, the lung-friendly particle size. The bacterial agent was Bacillus globigii, an organism that normally doesn’t cause disease in humans. It forms spores. The Army researchers had gone to various locations in the New York subway, including the Times Square subway station, and they had dropped the lightbulbs full of spores on the tracks. The lightbulbs had shattered and the spores had flown up into the air in puffs of gray dust. Just a few lightbulbs were broken this way, not many, and they contained altogether perhaps ten ounces of spores. Then the Army researchers fanned out and found that within days the spores had disseminated throughout New York City. Spores from Times Square were driven far into the Bronx by the plunger action of the subway trains whooshing through the tunnels—those trains were like pistons, driving the spores in the air through the tunnels for many miles. The spores drifted out of the subway entrances into the neighborhoods. He read: “A large portion of the working population in downtown New York City would be exposed to disease if one or more pathogenic agents were disseminated covertly in several subway lines at a period of peak traffic.”

  “More coffee?” the waiter asked him.

  “No thank you. Too much coffee makes me jittery.”

  “I know what you mean,” the waiter said.

  He left the waiter a generous tip; the waiter was a nice fellow. Outdoors on the sidewalk, he wondered which way to go. East or west? North or south? He headed eastward along a tree-lined street. The trees were flowering, but they had not yet put out leaves.

  He had conceived a strategy: he would not plan ahead, except in a general sense. Then they couldn’t predict his moves. He himself did not know exactly what he was going to do next. He had a pane of viral glass in his pocket. By the end of the day, it would be out in the world. In his apartment, at last count, he had an additional 891 panes of viral glass, sitting in jars. They would go into the world too. Most of them all at once.

  LOOKING FOR a place to let the crystal go, he walked from Washington Square Park eastward along Waverly Place, past the gracious buildings of New York University. He liked being lost among the students. Their energy pleased him. He walked up Astor Place past the Cooper Union, and then headed along St. Marks Place through the heart of the East Village.

  Here he reached into his jacket and removed a rubber surgical glove from the pocket and put the glove on his right hand as he walked. No one paid any attention. The glove was to protect his skin from coming into contact with any brainpox particles when he opened the flask and released the crystal into the city.

  Continuing eastward across First Avenue, he came to where Manhattan extends in a bulge into a curve of the East River. The avenues there are named A, B, C, and D. The predominant color of Alphabet City is gray, in contrast to the brickreds and greens of the sleeker and richer Greenwich Village to the west. Yet the gray of Alphabet City is mixed with the yellows and greens of bodega signs, Caribbean pinks, and the purples and whites and blacks of hand-painted signs on junk stores and dry-cleaning shops and cafés and music shops and clubs. Many buildings have been torn down over the years, and so the neighborhood has abandoned lots, some of them with homemade gardens.

  As he passed through Tompkins Square Park, he had an idea. The park has a playground for children, and grassy areas with benches and walks. There are public toilets there, and so it is popular with homeless people and stray teenagers. He thought that he might leave the piece of glass on a bench where a drunk or a messed-up teenager would encounter it, sit on it, break it, shatter it, throw particles in the air, particles that would get on the test subject’s clothes and eventually perhaps into the lungs. It would be a therapeutic execution.

  He cruised past the benches. He saw a couple of drunks lying on their stomachs or backs on the benches, dead to the world. They don’t move enough. A group of teenagers were sitting on the ground in a circle, some of them drinking beer out of paper bags. They couldn’t be more than sixteen years old. They stared at him as he passed, giving him that nasty, knowing look of teenagers. He had better not do anything in front of them. They would notice.

  He was feeling frustrated; he had been walking for a while, and he hadn’t encountered anything quite right.

  Then he had another idea. It might be taking a chance to do it so close to home, but as far as he could tell, they had not figured out the human trials. He turned south, heading for Houston Street. This might bring more peace to his laboratory. He arrived at the little people’s park surrounded by a chain-link fence that lay next to his building. It was a nice little park, to be sure, with its gardens. Interestingly, it was deserted. Good.

  He sat on the children’s merry-go-round. It creaked under his weight. I could also come down here with a little bit of oil; that might help too. Then, using his gloved hand, he unscrewed the cap of the flask. He tipped the flask, and the piece of viral glass slid out onto the merry-go-round.

  They will be back. They will jump on the merry-go-round, and they will yell and throw rocks at the cats, and meanwhile, their feet will be pounding the crystal to dust. Shake the dust from your feet, children. You are a burden to the earth.

  HECTOR RAMIREZ, five years of age, was just about to climb up the slide when he changed his mind and went over to the merry-go-round. His mama sat on a bench talking with a
nother lady. He climbed up on the merry-go-round and stood there for a moment. You needed to have more kids to get it moving, but he thought he could get it moving anyway. He climbed down and pushed it, and it began to turn with a squeaky sound, but not much.

  “Mama! Mama! Spin me.”

  His mama didn’t want to spin him. He was about to run off to the slide when he saw the little nice thing.

  He thought it might be candy. It looked like…sugar? He picked it up. It had colors in it, like a rainbow. He sniffed it, but there was no smell. He put it in his mouth.

  It seemed to turn rubbery and melt in his mouth real fast, but it didn’t taste like candy. “Ew!” he said. He spat out some rubbery bits.

  It had tasted like…nothing.

  He bent over and spat again, and again, and looked over at his mother.

  “Hector! What are you doing?”

  “Nothing, Mama.”

  She was young and pretty. She wore a short skirt and a denim jacket and black boots. “What are you doing?”

  He couldn’t give her any kind of answer, so she gave up and went back to talk with the other lady. Oh, well. He went off to slide down the slide.

  The cold symptoms come on in a matter of hours. The eclipse phase—where no obvious symptoms appear in the central nervous system—lasts from one to three days. Meanwhile Cobra is rocketing along the wires. The infected brain cells switch into crystal-phase production, and the cells plump up with crystals. The transformation of the personality is abrupt and devastating. The shift to autocannibalism happens explosively. It often occurs when the infected host is momentarily startled or confused, or is experiencing strong emotions.

  Briefing

  THE FORENSIC OPERATION had been going flat out on Governors Island for nearly eighteen hours. The Reachdeep team had generated a lot of information, but the information was leading nowhere fast.

  An epidemic task force from the C.D.C. had arrived and set up shop in an empty Coast Guard building, and they had been making telephone calls and going around the city, looking for any new cases of Cobra and locating people who had been in close contact with those who had died. Walter Mellis had flown down to Atlanta with samples from the autopsies for the C.D.C.’s molecular biology labs, and USAMRIID was also starting an analysis.

  Reachdeep worked in isolation. Frank Masaccio believed that the team needed to focus on the criminal evidence. No one was allowed to telephone Reachdeep without placing the call through Masaccio’s office, but Reachdeep could phone out anywhere. No one was allowed to land on the island and enter the Reachdeep unit unless it was okayed by Masaccio or Hopkins, but Reachdeep team members were given standby helicopters ready to fly them anywhere they wanted, or ready to fly in experts. “I’ve put you guys in an ivory tower,” Masaccio had told them. “An ivory tower with a helicopter landing zone.”

  Seagulls perched on the railings of the observation deck outside the Reachdeep conference room. The gulls looked in the windows at the racks of communications gear, at the people in black biohazard suits.

  Two helicopters lifted off from the heliport in lower Manhattan and crossed the East River. They passed over the Coast Guard hospital and touched down in the middle of the island. Five minutes later, Frank Masaccio appeared with a group of men and women, F.B.I. agents and New York Police Department investigators. They were the managers of his Cobra task force. They had arrived for the daily briefing. They were carrying boxes of take-out Chinese food. Lunch.

  THE NEW YORK F.B.I. IS EXPERIENCED in the matter of catering food. The Bureau supplies take-out food to safe houses and stakeouts, since the agents don’t have time to prepare their own food or to go out to a restaurant (eating in a restaurant also might draw attention to them). The food must be delivered by other F.B.I. agents, since food-delivery people would be a danger to the security of an operation. Not surprisingly, the New York F.B.I. has the best take-out food capability of any field office in the United States.

  The food was excellent. It included Peking duck.

  There weren’t enough chairs to go around. People sat on the floor. For a time there was no conversation in the room, only eating. Eventually Masaccio brought the meeting to order.

  “You start, Hopkins,” he said.

  Austen had been sitting curled up against the wall, feeling comfortably alone with herself for the first time in days. Masaccio’s voice woke her from her reverie.

  Hopkins stood up in front of the Felix devices and summarized the state of the Reachdeep investigation. He said that Reachdeep had made a tentative identification of the Cobra agent. It was a chimera, a recombinant virus engineered in a laboratory. He said it was a mixture of an insect virus and the common cold. Mixing the two viruses had produced a monster. “But that’s not all that’s going on in this virus,” Hopkins said. “We’re going to find more engineered DNA wetware in this virus. I’m sure of it.”

  Alice Austen gave her autopsy findings. Suzanne Tanaka showed photographs of the virus particles and the crystals in which the particles were embedded. James Lesdiu reported the results of his analysis of the materials in the boxes.

  “My number one question is this,” Frank Masaccio said to the Reachdeep team. “Are you any closer to the perpetrator?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Hopkins answered.

  “That answer sucks, Hopkins. I want the Archimedes perp. I want him yesterday.” Masaccio summarized what had been happening outside Reachdeep. State health officials and the city health commissioner had been brought in and quietly informed of the situation. “The mayor’s Emergency Management Office has been geared up,” Masaccio said. “We have fire department chemical-hazard and decon teams standing by on Roosevelt Island. We’ve got New York City Police Department SWAT teams on standby. We are doing our best to keep the news media out of this…. One other thing: the mayor is unhappy.”

  “With whom?” Hopkins asked.

  “With me. He’s bouncing off the walls in City Hall. He’s yelling on the telephone. Most of the Cobra task force is idle, and it’s driving the mayor nuts. You guys aren’t giving us enough leads to push. I’ve got agents running around the city looking for more of those little wooden boxes, but nothing’s turned up.” He mentioned that his office had done “a tiny little news release” to the media.

  “What?” Hopkins blurted.

  “We had to warn people about the boxes, Will. We’re saying it’s a poison. We’re not giving out that it’s a germ weapon. But we can’t keep a lid on this thing forever. The minute you guys find something real, you get in touch with me.”

  “I need an art historian,” Hopkins said.

  “What?”

  “An art historian, Frank. Someone who can look at the boxes and tell us where they came from.”

  A Brief History of Art

  FRANK MASACCIO flew back to Manhattan, where he stationed himself in the Federal Building. Within the hour a helicopter landed on Governors Island carrying a professor of folk art from New York University. His name was Herschel Alquivir.

  The New York office of the F.B.I. had called Professor Alquivir on the telephone and reached him at his apartment on the Upper West Side. They wanted to know if he could help them identify a work of carved wooden folk art. Could he do it right now? Would that be too much trouble?

  He agreed to help. He was stunned when, less than sixty seconds after he hung up the telephone, a team of federal agents knocked on the door of his apartment. They had been waiting in cars on the street. He was rushed in a Bureau car with police escort—three police cars moving ahead, breaking up traffic with their sirens and lights—to the West Side heliport. Professor Alquivir was flown to Governors Island, in a state of increasing alarm at what he had gotten himself into.

  They brought him into the meeting room and showed him the door that led into the decon room and the Core. The door was plastered with biohazard signs. Hopkins showed Professor Alquivir how to put on an F.B.I. biohazard suit, and then the professor examined the boxes. He was a sle
nder man, middle-aged, with a passion for carved wooden objects. He maintained a calm demeanor. Finally he said, “These boxes are children’s toys. I think they were made in East Africa. I’m quite sure of it. Cobras don’t live in East Africa, they live in Egypt, India, and other parts of southern Asia. But the king cobra is known, of course, to many people around the world. And there is a large Indian population in East Africa. I see Indian influences in this box, but the type of object is fundamentally African. This is a type of toy that’s not uncommon, I believe, in East Africa. Because of the Indian influence—the cobra—I should say the place of manufacture might be near the coast of the Indian Ocean, where Indian influence is strongest.”

  At 9:30 that night, two agents from the New York office of the F.B.I. departed on a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, with a connection to Nairobi.

  Washington

  TUESDAY, APRIL 28

  ARCHIMEDES HAD COMPLETED the first phase of his human trials. The boxes were Phase I trials. During a course of medical experimentation upon humans in a Phase I trial, you test small amounts of a new experimental drug on subjects. Phase I trials are safety trials. Having seen the announcement of the boxes on the television news, Archimedes understood that the Phase I safety trials of brainpox showed it was unsafe for humans. Given this success, he would move into Phase II. During Phase II, you increase the dosage and the numbers of people tested. He felt reasonably confident that the results would be satisfactory, but he wanted to have more assurance. After that would come the Phase III trial, when he would give a huge loading dose of brainpox to the human species.

  He was uncertain about whether they were looking for him by now, uncertain as to what they might have conjectured about him, if anything.

  He was walking through the concourse of Penn Station with a flask containing one hexagon of viral glass tucked in his pocket. He stood looking at the Amtrak departures on the big display board. A Metroliner train was due to be leaving in ten minutes for Washington, D.C. He paid cash for a round-trip ticket to Washington. I have not seen Washington in weeks, he thought. Human trials can occur anywhere humans live.