The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  He had a pleasant lunch of a vegetable pocket pita sandwich on the train, and he enjoyed the green countryside. He delighted in the bridge over the Susquehanna River where it drained into Chesapeake Bay, and he drank a glass of white wine to help himself relax and to steady his resolve. Bridges are beautiful. They are constructive and mathematical. They are one of the good things that humans make.

  IN THE METRO CENTER STATION of the Washington Metro, at midday, a man was sitting on one of the concrete benches along the wall of the station platform. He was breathing rather heavily, as if he was short of breath. A train came along. The man took a deep breath and stood up. As he was walking toward the train, he threw something along the platform, casually, as if he was discarding a bit of trash, and he stepped onto the train. The trash was a shiny bit of plastic, perhaps. It broke into pieces and was quickly trodden underfoot by passing crowds. No one noticed that the man was wearing a flesh-colored latex rubber glove on his right hand or that he was holding his breath when he got on the train. He continued to hold his breath for almost a minute afterward. “Ah,” he said, letting out his breath as the train proceeded along the tunnel, heading in the direction of Union Station, where Amtrak trains will take you anywhere. He dropped his rubber glove in a trash can somewhere in Union Station.

  Dust

  GOVERNORS ISLAND, TUESDAY

  THE FACE of an F.B.I. metallurgist appeared on a screen in Reachdeep. “This Q dust you sent us is a type of medium-carbon steel. The annealed structure of the particles would indicate they formed through a pressure process such as the hot rolling process.”

  “Railroad track,” Austen said to Hopkins.

  “There’s more,” the metallurgist said. “We found a grain of something that looks like pollen.”

  “Pollen? What kind?”

  “We’re trying to find out right now.”

  THE F.B.I. consulted Dr. Edgar Adlington, a palynologist (pollen expert) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. A special agent named Chuck Klurt walked across the Mall from F.B.I. headquarters to the brown towers of the Smithsonian. Klurt took an elevator to the basement.

  Dr. Adlington was hunched over his desk in a windowless room that smelled of old books and dried leaves. He was examining a flower under a magnifying lamp.

  Special Agent Klurt placed some microscope photographs of a single grain of pollen in front of Dr. Adlington. “We have a little problem. Can you tell me what this is?”

  “Well, it is a pollen grain.”

  “Any idea what it came from, Dr. Adlington?”

  “Why do you people have to give me just one grain? Do you take me for a psychic? This is not the kind of thing I can just look up in a book.”

  “But could you help?” Special Agent Klurt asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” he answered. “The problem, while challenging, is not insurmountable. What did you say your name is?”

  “Klurt.”

  “Now, Mr. Klurt.” Adlington flipped through the photographs, studying them. The pollen grain looked like a wrinkled football that had grooves running down the seams of the ball. He took a ruler and laid it on the photograph, while his finger traced features on the pollen grain and he glanced at Klurt every now and then to make sure that Klurt understood. “See, here—what we have here is a colporoidate sporomorph, actually three-colpate, about thirty microns long on the polar axis, in a prolate spheroid with a polar-to-equatorial axis ratio of approximately 1.5, I would say, while the sexine—do you see the sexine, Klurt?—you have to bear in mind that the sexine, here, is thicker but not terribly much thicker than the nexine, and it is densely reticulate with heterobrochate form, viz, muri simplibaculate—do you follow me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This pollen grain may come from one of several families of the Caprifoliaecae or certain of the Celastraccae, but if I had to say, I would place it in the family Oleaceae.”

  “Mmmm—”

  “Yes. And I would venture to say we are looking at intermedia or japonica. Perhaps I am going too far out on a limb, here, Mr. Klurt, but I would hazard a guess—just a guess!—that this pollen grain comes from none other than Forsythia intermedia ‘Spectabilis.’ ” He handed the photographs back to Special Agent Klurt.

  “So what is it?” the agent asked.

  “I told you, it’s forsythia! A flowering shrub. ‘Spectabilis’ is the most beautiful type of forsythia, with large vivid yellow flowers that bloom in April. It is the most popular forsythia in America.”

  Forsythia blooms in many places around New York City in the spring. Knowing that the pollen came from forsythia could not help pin down the location of the Unsub. The grain of pollen seemed untraceable.

  THE COBRA boxes themselves came under the scrutiny of a consultant in tropical wood, a middle-aged professor of plant cellular biology from American University in Washington named Lorraine Schild. She arrived at Governors Island in a state of terror.

  Professor Schild stood in the decon room before the door that led into the Evidence Core. She was dressed in surgical scrubs. Austen and Tanaka were helping her step into a black F.B.I. biohazard space suit.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” she said. Her voice quavered.

  They pleaded with her. They shooed Hopkins and Littleberry away while they tried to reassure her.

  “It’s my worst fear,” she said. “There’s a horrible virus in there, isn’t there?”

  “We’ve been all right, so far,” Tanaka said.

  “We really need your help,” Austen said.

  Finally they prevailed on Dr. Schild, and she suited up and went into the Core. She sat down at a microscope and looked at the wood in the boxes. Austen sat next to her. Dr. Schild’s voice came out of her Racal hood, muffled and weak. When she had signed a consulting contract with the F.B.I. two years earlier, she had had no idea it could lead to this. She kept turning her faceplate this way and that, trying to see into the microscope. “The wood cellular structure is extremely fine-grained,” she said “This is a very hard wood. The darker streaks are heartwood. The curvature of the rings indicates that it’s the center of a small trunk. I believe this is a flowering legume. A wood this hard would suggest it is a type of acacia tree. I can’t tell you exactly the species of acacia. There are so many acacias.”

  “Where does it grow?” Hopkins asked.

  “In habitats all over eastern Africa. Can I leave now?”

  They took her out and deconned her in the decon room, spraying her with bleach. Dr. Schild refused to get back on the Black Hawk helicopter. She asked to be put on a civilian flight back to Washington.

  Nairobi

  WEDNESDAY

  FRANK MASACCIO had taken to sleeping in the Federal Building, where he had a bed in a room the size of a closet. At one o’clock in the morning, he put in a telephone call to Nairobi, to the Old Norfolk Hotel, where two agents from his office, Almon Johnston and Link Peters, had checked in some hours earlier. It was now Wednesday morning in Kenya. Masaccio told them about the wood. He suggested they look for shopkeepers selling cobra boxes made of acacia wood.

  Special Agent Johnston was a tall African-American who had lived in Kenya for a year when he’d been posted there as a sales manager for an American company that did business in Africa, before he’d joined the F.B.I., so he knew his way around. Peters worked in the foreign counterintelligence division of the Bureau. He had never been to Africa in his life.

  They were joined by an officer from the Kenya National Police, Inspector Joshua Kipkel, who provided them with a car and a driver. Neither agent knew where to begin looking, but Inspector Kipkel suggested they try some of the better shops—they are called houses—on Tom Mboya Street and Standard Street in downtown Nairobi. So they drove down the streets, stopping at the shops. They looked at the goods for sale. Occasionally the F.B.I. agents purchased something in order to sweeten relations with the shopkeepers. The agents showed them photographs of the cobra boxes. All of them said they had seen such boxes, but
they said that they were out of stock at the present time. One shopkeeper offered to ship a cargo container full of cobra boxes to New York but he said he would need a large cash deposit up front. “I shall have this container shipped to you at a special price.” Inspector Kipkel spoke to the man sharply in Kiswahili.

  “M’zuri sana,” Johnston said to the shopkeepers. To Peters and Kipkel, he said, “This isn’t panning out.”

  Next, Inspector Kipkel suggested they try the Kenya National Museum. He said, “It has a good tourist shop, and it has collections you may find interesting.”

  They explored the National Museum and its gift shop, but they found nothing like the cobra boxes on display or for sale. Inspector Kipkel said, “We will go to the City Market.”

  “Sounds okay to me,” Link Peters said.

  “It will be difficult for you there. You will see,” Inspector Kipkel said to them.

  Their driver took them to a rotting concrete structure in downtown Nairobi, on a dusty street across from a supermarket. The Nairobi City Market had been built many years earlier by the British, when they had been the colonial rulers of Kenya. It resembled an aircraft hangar. They entered through the front entrance, and immediately they were surrounded by a knot of shopkeepers waving leather goods and carved chess pieces and jewelry. When Johnston showed the shopkeepers photographs of the cobra boxes, the shopkeepers were certain they had seen such boxes. They were certain they could get more boxes for the Americans. In the meanwhile, would Johnston and Peters like to buy anything else? A beaded belt, perhaps, or a set of napkin rings? Silver jewelry? A carved mask?

  “Some of this stuff is really beautiful,” Link Peters said to Almon Johnston. Peters stopped to buy some wooden carvings of lions and hippos for his kids. It took the agents two hours to explore the City Market. They circled around the building, stopping at each shop in turn, showing the photographs. It created an unbelievable sensation, a churning knot of commercial hysteria that followed them everywhere they went. Yet no one could show the agents a box of the right type.

  It was getting near five P.M., closing time for the Nairobi City Market. Almon Johnston turned to Peters and said, “I’m beginning to think we should try Tanzania.”

  Inspector Kipkel said there was one more possibility. He said they should try outdoors behind the building. They went out through a back door to a dusty open lot jammed with booths of people selling trinkets, people who couldn’t afford the rent inside the market building.

  Kipkel made the break. He spotted an old lady with some small carvings. She was sitting in a booth off to one side. He went over to her. The boxes looked familiar. “Gentlemen, come over here.”

  Her name was Theadora Saitota. She was selling baskets woven from baobab bark. She also had on display a number of small boxes that were not unlike the cobra boxes, except that they were made of gray soapstone, not wood.

  Johnston showed her photographs of the boxes. She eyed the Kenyan police inspector. Then she said, “I know these things.”

  “Where do they come from?” Johnston asked her.

  “Voi.”

  “What?”

  “Voi,” she said.

  “This is a town,” the Kenyan police inspector said. “There are many woodcarvers in this town.” It was a town on the road to the coast.

  “Do you know who in Voi makes these boxes?” he asked her.

  She looked at the Kenyan inspector, and hesitated.

  Johnston removed a wad of paper shillings from his pocket and handed the banknotes to the lady. They were worth a few dollars.

  She tucked the money away in the blink of an eye and said: “He was a good man. He was a woodcarver in Voi. He carve things.”

  “What is his name?” Johnston asked.

  “His name Moses Ngona. He was my cousin. He passed away. Of Slim. Last year,” she said.

  “And you sold his boxes until he died?” Johnston asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any more of Mr. Ngona’s boxes?”

  She looked hard at him and said nothing.

  He handed her more banknotes.

  She reached down to a shelf beside her knees. She pulled out a roll of old newspaper. She unrolled the newspaper and placed one wooden box on the plank.

  Johnston opened it, fiddling with the catch. A snake popped out. A king cobra.

  “Do you remember selling any of your cousin’s boxes to any tourists?” Johnston asked.

  “Not many tourists here,” she said. “There was a man from Japan. There was a lady and a man from England. There was a man from America.”

  “Can you describe the American, the man?”

  “He was small.” She began to laugh. “He had no hairs on his head, he was a little mzungu.” Mzungu means white man and it also means ghost. “He offer me many dollars, this little mzungu. We have a big business.” She smiled. “I give him two of my cousin’s box! He give me twenty dollars! Ha, ha! This little mzungu! I did have the best of him!” Twenty dollars had made her month.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Oh, last year.”

  ALMON JOHNSTON TELEPHONED Masaccio from the Old Norfolk Hotel. It was by then Wednesday morning in New York. Johnston explained what they’d found. “A man paid the lady twenty dollars. That’s way too high a price. And that’s why the lady remembers. It suggests the guy may have been planning this crime a year ago, Frank. She’s down at police headquarters now. They’re getting a composite artist. The lady’s saying that all small hairless white men look the same to her. But I think they’ll get a face. Link and I could start cross-checking with the Foreign Ministry’s visa records. The problem is, about fifty thousand male Americans were issued visas to Kenya during the time period. It’ll be a bitch going through them.”

  “It’s kind of a stretch, guys, but suck it in and start sifting through those fifty thousand visas,” Masaccio said.

  That afternoon, a fax machine in the Reachdeep unit beeped and extruded a composite drawing of a man’s face. He wore glasses. He had a narrow nose and rather puffy cheeks. He was nearly bald, and he looked to be in his thirties or forties. He was a possible suspect. On the other hand, he may have been just another American tourist. Hopkins taped the drawing to the wall, where all the team members could see it.

  Case

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29

  SUZANNE TANAKA studied the drawing of the face on the wall. Like all of the Reachdeep team members, she couldn’t keep her eyes off it. Was this really the man? Feelings of great terror engulfed her, terror that she couldn’t describe, and the feelings kept her awake all the time now. She said not a word to the others of her fear.

  In the biology room of the Evidence Core, Tanaka inspected her mice. One animal seemed more active than the others, and began grooming itself for long periods of time, but the periods of grooming activity were interspersed with periods of what looked like paralysis, when the mouse wouldn’t move. Then it attacked itself. It gnawed at its front paws, and pulled out some of its hair, especially in the belly. But the animal did not die.

  With Austen watching, Tanaka killed the mouse and dissected it. She placed it on a cutting board, and, wearing triple gloves and full biohazard gear, she opened the mouse with a scalpel and obtained a sample of the mouse’s brain. She prepped the brain material and scanned it in the electron microscope. Some of the mouse’s brain cells contained Cobra crystals, but on the whole, the brain tissue seemed less damaged than with humans infected with Cobra. The virus seemed to produce a nonfatal infection in a mouse.

  Then another mouse got sick. It curled up and groomed itself for hours on end. Two other mice also seemed trembly. Tanaka wanted to look through an optical microscope at brain cells of the mouse she had sacrificed. She made thin slices of mouse brain, stained them, and looked at the slices through the doubleheaded microscope. Austen stared into the other set of eyepieces.

  “When did you see the first signs of illness in this mouse?” Austen asked.

 
; Tanaka didn’t answer.

  “Suzanne?”

  “Oh, ah, last night, I guess. It was agitated. That was the first sign. I guess.” She took her eyes away from the microscope and bent over.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” She went back to looking into the eyepieces.

  Austen kept looking at Tanaka. “I haven’t seen you sleep since we arrived, Suzanne. I haven’t seen you eat.”

  “I don’t seem to have time.”

  “You need to find the time. I mean this,” Austen said gently.

  Austen moved the slide and replaced it with another one. They were looking, now, at the mouse’s midbrain. It was not unlike the human midbrain, a core of material with a lot of branching nerves coming out of it, at the top of the animal’s spinal cord.

  Austen moved the slide. “I think we’re looking at the basal ganglia,” she said. That was a bundle of nerve fibers in the mouse’s midbrain. The cells contained crystals in the center, and they were hairy with branches. “It’s as if the basal ganglia started to grow. Like there’s been some kind of reorganization of all the connections. What do you think?”

  “Think? I…can’t think.”

  “Suzanne?”

  Austen looked up across the top of the doubleheaded microscope. She was not two feet away from Tanaka’s face. Suzanne’s lips were trembling. A drop of clear liquid fell from her nose.

  “Suzanne!”

  THE ARMY MEDICAL MANAGEMENT UNIT placed the first team casualty, Technician Suzanne Tanaka, in a biocontainment hospital room on the second floor. They set up an access vestibule, where nurses and doctors could change into protective clothing before they entered. They started Tanaka immediately on an IV drip of ribavirin, a drug that is known to slow down the replication of some viruses. They told her not to worry, that they hoped her illness would prove treatable. Yet with all their technology, they were as helpless as doctors had been in the Middle Ages in the face of the Black Death. They set up monitoring machines in her room and started her on Dilantin, an antiseizure medication. When she tried to chew on her wrists and fingers, they tied strips of gauze around her hands, but she tore them off with her teeth, so they had to restrain her arms with nylon straps tied to the bed frame. She was not incoherent, and she was deeply apprehensive of the future. Most of all she was afraid of dying alone, but she didn’t want her family to see her in this condition. “Will you stay with me, Alice?” she said in a thick voice. A nurse wearing a mask and protective suit wiped the sweat off her face.