by Alex Ryan
“Hurry, Dash,” he urged, reaching to remove his goggles.
“Wait, we have to decontaminate,” she said, her voice frantic.
“How?”
“With this,” she said and blasted him head to toe with a fog of hospital disinfectant. She tossed him the spray bottle. “Now me.”
Nick returned the favor, making sure to cover every square inch of her body.
“We gotta go, Dash,” he said, ripping off his mask and goggles. “Right fucking now.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, stripping down to her underwear right in front of him. Nick did the same, both of them too stressed to waste time gawking. Moments later, they were dressed, out of breath, and headed for the door.
Dash stopped and looked back.
“What about the gear and the PPE?” she asked.
“No time,” he said and grabbed her by the hand.
“But they can be analyzed. They will find our DNA,” she argued.
“Maybe, but right now, we have to go. We’ll deal with the consequences later.”
She looked over her shoulder and then into his eyes.
“You are right, Nick,” she said simply. “We’ll work it out later.”
He tugged her by the hand out of the apartment. They sprinted down the stairs and used the fire escape door to exit at the back of the building. Five minutes later, they were walking south on Shanglong Xili East Street. As they walked, he felt eyes on his back—watching, judging, following. He tried to resist the urge to look back over his shoulder but failed. No Chet Lankford. No Snow Leopard commandos, no Beijing police.
“Are we being followed?” Dash asked, keeping her gaze straight ahead.
“No.”
They each exhaled a long, slow breath in unison, which made them both smile.
He slowed their pace, and after two more blocks, he stopped at the corner to hail her a taxi.
“How much time do you need for the analysis?”
“To do a thorough investigation will take days,” she said. “Maybe weeks.”
“We don’t have that kind of time,” he said. “How long to just get an idea what the hell we’re dealing with? Enough to prove that things are not as your government and the CIA want us to believe?”
She shrugged.
“Four hours perhaps.”
Nick looked at his watch.
“Okay. Meet me at nine thirty,” he said. “You choose the location.”
“There is a small shop known as Emily’s Coffee,” she said. “It is on Jinghua Street, not far from here. Can you find it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, at nine thirty then.”
She slid into the cab with her large lunch box.
“Please text if you’re running late,” he told her.
“I will,” she said, patting him on the hand through the open window. “I promise.”
He watched her through the back window as the taxi sped away. Just before disappearing from view, he saw her turn and look back at him.
She waved.
He waved.
And for the second time that day, he wondered if he would ever see her again.
Chapter 24
Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
1543 hours local
Dazhong’s left eyelid twitched furiously as she approached the employee security checkpoint. She resisted the urge to jam a knuckle into her eye socket and instead smiled furtively at the security attendant on duty. She did not recognize this guard. That, coupled with his young face, meant he was probably new. By her observation, new guards tried to conceal their inexperience behind a maniacal adherence to protocol. She watched his gaze lock onto the lunch cooler she carried in her left hand. A bead of cold sweat trickled down her right armpit. The cooler contained six plastic containers—Tupperware, Nick Foley had reminded her—with snap-tight plastic lids. Two of the six containers held actual food, the other four contained pieces of Jamie Lin.
“Good afternoon,” she said to the guard, swiping her ID badge through the card reader.
The guard checked the computer monitor and then made brief eye contact with her. “Good afternoon, Dr. Chen.” Then, pointing at the lunch bag, he said, “What do you have there?”
“Just my lunch,” she replied.
He checked his wristwatch. “A little late for lunch.”
“I know,” she laughed. “I worked through lunch, and now I’m starving.”
“Can you open it for me please?”
“Of course.”
She set the little cooler on the counter in front of him, unzipped the top flap, and tilted it toward him. “See, just lunch,” she said and, after a beat, began to zip it closed.
“Stop,” he said. “Please remove all the contents, one at a time.”
She squinted her disapproval at this instruction and said, “Are you serious?”
“Yes, Dr. Chen, I’m quite serious.”
Clenching her jaw, she removed the first container and handed it to him.
“Noodles and sprouts,” she said.
He tilted the container to look through the glass side. Satisfied, he set it down.
“Next.”
She handed him the second container.
“Roasted chicken.”
“Okay, next.”
She hesitated an instant, before selecting the container with fifty grams of Jamie Lin’s liver. “Beef liver,” she said.
With a grunt, he repeated the same process of tilt and inspect.
“Next.”
“Kidney.”
“You like organ meat?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Very strong healing properties.”
“My mother says the same thing, but I don’t care. I don’t like it.”
“Jellyfish,” she said and handed him the next container with twenty grams of Jamie Lin’s pancreas and abdominal fluid.
This time, he took his time surveying the container. “You eat this?” he asked, crinkling his nose at her.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Jellyfish is considered a delicacy. What? You don’t like seafood?”
He shook his head. “No, I hate it. Especially shellfish. Oysters make me sick.”
“That’s too bad,” she said, her mind racing to think of her final menu item. With her new insight into the guard’s culinary preferences, she handed him the final container and said, “Sea cucumber.”
He took the container and held it up to the light. While scrutinizing Jamie Lin’s brain tissue, he said, “This doesn’t look like a sea cucumber to me.”
“Well, that’s what’s inside,” she said, her cheeks flushing.
“You must be really hungry,” he said, smirking at her. He set the container on the counter and repositioned his thumbs to open the lid. “I’ve got to see this.”
“No,” she blurted, stopping him.
“Excuse me?”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she said.
“Why not?”
“The smell is very strong. Just like oysters.”
“Oh,” he said, thrusting the offensive container back at her. “In that case, take it.”
Her eyelid twitch went into overdrive as she repacked the cooler.
“Are you okay, Dr. Chen?” he asked, gesturing to her left eye. “I have never seen someone’s eye twitch like that.”
“Too much caffeine and too little sleep,” she chuckled. “It will stop after I eat something. I should not have skipped lunch.”
“Hmm,” he grunted with a shrug. “Have a nice day, Dr. Chen.”
“Thank you.”
She managed to keep her composure all the way to her office, but the moment she shut the door, a wave of light-headedness forced her to the floor. Sitting with her head between her knees, Dazhong squeezed her eyes shut and fought hyperventilation as images of Jamie Lin—flayed open in autopsy on the bathroom floor—flooded her mind. The grisly truth of what she had done hit her like a semitruck.
Be brave and b
e strong and everything will be okay.
When she finally felt her self-control returning, she opened her eyes. Slowly, she got to her feet and took a deep, cleansing breath. Both the light-headedness and the twitch were gone, and she felt ready to push on. Her first priority was to reserve microscope time. To reduce the risk of interference by a curious colleague, she would wait to view the samples until after the general staff had gone home for the day. That would just barely give her time to prepare the slides anyway. She logged onto the network to check microscope availability. Everything was booked until eighteen hundred hours. She reserved two hours on the CDC’s recently acquired microsphere nanoscope—a novel optical microscope that permitted wet sample viewing at a magnification down to fifty nanometers.
While not possessing the extreme magnification of a scanning electron microscope, or SEM, the microsphere nanoscope possessed one critical advantage—its user could view wet slides at ambient temperature and pressure. Whereas SEM required chemical fixation or cryo-vacuum preservation of the subject tissue, the nanoscope could be used to observe living tissue. Equally important, the nanoscope could view viruses, bacteria, and cellular structures previously not visible at the two-hundred-nanometer threshold of traditional light microscopes. In Dazhong’s mind, being able to see below the two-hundred-nanometer threshold would be critical to determining the nature of the pathogen that killed Jamie Lin. If she was really lucky, she might even catch the pathogen interacting with a host cell. The trick now was simply finding a way to do her work without getting caught.
Protocol dictated that any work involving the manipulation and handling of an organism as dangerous as this should be carried out in a biosafety level-four laboratory. However, the Chinese CDC headquarters did not have a BSL-4 laboratory. The only civilian BSL-4 laboratory in China was located a thousand kilometers away at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Hubei province. The CDC did have several BSL-3 laboratories, so that would have to suffice. Besides, she and Nick had just performed an autopsy on Jamie Lin on a bathroom floor using safety controls barely up to BSL-1 standards, so having access to a BSL-3 cabinet with a containment hood suddenly felt indulgent.
Maybe it was a fool’s hope, but her experience in Kizilsu made her think this pathogen did not actually qualify as a BSL-4 agent. Yes, it was lethal, and yes, there was no cure or vaccine for it, but she suspected that the transmission mode for this particular organism was neither airborne nor direct contact. In Kizilsu, she’d found no evidence that the infected patients functioned as vectors. Granted, Major Li had confiscated all the lab data and patient records shortly after his arrival, but to her knowledge, there had not been a single case of the disease being transmitted person to person. Nick Foley was living proof of this. He had been in prolonged direct contact with a terminal victim and managed to avoid infection. Her present transmission hypothesis was based on Nick’s insightful comment during interrogation—the scourge of Kizilsu behaved more like a chemical toxin than a pathogen.
She smirked.
She wouldn’t be surprised if Major Li had gotten his bogus cover story idea of an “industrial accident” from her interrogation notes. She looked down and noticed her clenched fists. Just thinking about Major Li sent her blood pressure soaring.
None of that matters now, she told herself. Major Li is a thousand kilometers away, and I have the tissue samples and equipment necessary to finally learn the truth. All I need now is to be left alone to work.
But being left alone proved more difficult than she imagined. Everywhere she went in the building, someone wanted to talk to her. Apparently, CDC division directors can’t fly below the radar at headquarters, no matter how hard they try. Covertly transferring sample material from her lunch box containers to actual sample vials was an absolute nightmare, taking her two hours and three aborted attempts. By the time she was actually able to prep and view the first slide, it was after 7:30 PM.
The nanoscope was physically located behind a glass partition under a BSL-3 containment hood. Unlike a traditional tabletop light microscope with an eyepiece and manual focus adjustment knobs, this microscope was equipped with state-of-the-art automation and controls, including a slide caddy and mobile microscope head. The actual lens image was digitally encoded and displayed on a 4K HD monitor with joystick-style pan and zoom controls, making it simple to change viewfinder position and magnification. She had never used this microscope before, but once she figured out how to load the sample, using the controls was as intuitive as using an iPad for the first time.
Dazhong played for a moment with the joystick until she got the feel for the gentle motions required. She centered on the grayish-brown, hazy blob and then raised an eyebrow as the system autofocused for her. Very impressive. Once the most superficial layer was in focus, she was able to control the depth of focus with the controller and scan across the specimen like a spaceship skimming across the surface of a strange planet.
It was strange indeed, since the specimen looked nothing like the normal histology slides of human liver. Dazhong looked away and checked again that she had loaded the correct sample.
She had sectioned the sample thinly, but a gross specimen—unpreserved and unstained—should still retain the normal architecture of liver tissue. However, this specimen held no organization whatsoever. It looked like a disorganized lump of tissue—nothing like the elegant architecture of the liver. A normal liver sample would present layers of parenchyma, neatly organized and divided into blocklike regions, surrounded and separated by monotonous lines of septae and bands of connective tissue to support the blood vessels and the biliary structure meant to collect and transport the products of liver metabolism. There was no such structure here.
The sheets of connective tissue should have organized the liver tissue into thousands and thousands of lobules—hexagonal structural units of the liver with portal triads at the vertices and then a central vein. This tissue had no resemblance at all to the familiar and predictable pattern of a healthy liver.
“Damn,” she sighed, but she decided to keep looking at the sample anyway.
Fully adjusted now to the new machine, she tapped the zoom button twice. She watched the magnification flash twice and then the autofocus began to sharpen the new, greatly magnified image. When the image became clear, she raised both her eyebrows and then wrinkled them in confusion.
In the center image, she saw the very distinctive, polygon-shaped image of a mature, adult hepatocyte—a liver cell. Around it were scores of other, also easily recognizable hepatocytes, but they were clumped in piles of totally disorganized cells. It was as if a city had been destroyed, but the buildings were left intact, lying in a jumbled heap on top of one another. The liver cells were there—as were the blood vessels and the bile ductules—but they were no longer held together.
“Ah . . .” she said softly. “I was right.”
Her earlier supposition had been correct. It was as if all the connective tissue—the sheets and bands of fibrous tissue that provide structure throughout the body, forming everything from tendons, to the basement membrane beneath tissues, to the tissue holding liver cells together—had somehow been dissolved away.
She increased the magnification again with the simple click of a button and let the machine scan slowly over the clumps of jumbled cells. She watched intently, her finger poised to stop the image once an organism—whatever the hell organism could have resulted in such chaos—came into view.
But there was nothing—just piles of useless, disorganized cells. She saw not one bacterium or even any macrophages. Either would be easily seen at this magnification, as they were in the same range as the hepatocytes—of roughly twenty to thirty micrometers. There was some much smaller, scattered, black debris—perhaps in the five micrometer range or less—but she assumed that was just debris from their incredibly crude tissue collection.
Using the microscope’s menu controls, she selected the next sample for viewing. Barely audible in the background, electric mot
ors hummed and precision gears whirred as the automated slide caddy indexed to the second tissue sample. A few seconds later, a chime sounded, indicating the slide was in position. She took the joystick controls in hand. With a twist of her right wrist, the screen image blurred as she dove deep into the hidden universe of the microscope—life and death at fifty-nanometer resolution.
The brain tissue came into focus and then shifted out of focus as something zoomed across the image from left to right, disturbing the computer’s depth perception a moment. Dazhong blinked and rubbed her eyes. Probably a floater, she thought, or some contaminated debris floating in the tissue prep. She had seen that thousands of times. The computer scanned in and out a moment and then the picture became crisp and clear. In the center of the screen, she saw the triangular-shaped gray-matter neuronal cells, and to the right was a clump of unidentifiable tissue. Again, she saw a flash of movement just to the right of her field of view. She tapped the joystick and scanned a fraction to the right.
In the center of the clump of cellular debris was something out of a science-fiction movie—a black orb with spiderlike appendages coated in something that appeared more biologic. The two smaller legs were feeding tissue into the center of the orb, where bits of debris spread outward from the microscopic machine. Whatever the machine was, it was destroying everything in its path. Wait. No, not everything. The neuronal cells were intact, untouched and scattered among chunks of what looked like blood vessel wall. What she was witnessing was the targeted destruction of human connective tissue.
Dazhong sat back on her stool and shook her head in disbelief. If she had not seen it with her own eyes, she would not have thought it possible—a fully automated, cell-sized nanobot operating inside the human body capable of seeking specific tissue types for destruction. Someone had invented a synthetic macrophage! Absolutely incredible. The clinician in her thought immediately of the therapeutic applications. The possibilities were limitless: precision treatment of cancer, removal of arterial plaque, dissolving of blood clots, destruction of resilient parasitic organisms such as malarial Plasmodium and Naegleria fowleri amoeba, or even the hunting down and destruction of cells infected with viruses before the commandeered cell could churn out more viral copies. But in Jamie Lin’s case, the nanobot macrophage had not been programmed to do any of those things. It had been programmed to seek and destroy healthy connective tissue cells, analogous to how native viruses and bacteria attack the body. Just like with the victims in Kizilsu, Jamie Lin’s nanobot infection had spread quickly—very quickly—which indicated that the nanobot macrophages were self-replicating. For micromachines operating at the scale of fifty micrometers to consume hundreds of millions of connective tissue cells in less than eight hours, an exponential replication rate had to be at work.
