Cobra Event

by Preston, Richard

  'The victims look like they have a cold, when they first get sick,' Austen remarked to him. 'Kate Moran, espe­cially, had a streaming cold.'

  'No doubt she felt as if she had a cold,' Hopkins said. 'This bastard of a virus probably attaches itself to the eyelids - cold viruses do that - or to the membranes in the nose. That would explain the design of the cobra box - it blows virus in your face. I just wonder if it's engineered to get into the lungs, too.'

  'But how does.it move to the brain?' Austen asked. 'It likes nerves,' he said. 'The optic nerves and the olfactory nerves in the nose are hard-wired straight into the brain, aren't they, Alice?'

  She nodded.

  'So Cobra hits a mucus membrane and it zooms for the brain,' he said. 'Cobra is a biological missile designed to take out the brain. There's no cure for the common cold. The common cold is very contagious. Cobra is the ultimate head cold.'

  One of the two Felix machines beeped. His fingers

  danced over the keys, and he stared at the screen. 'Yup. Here's another cold gene. It's surrounded by expression cassettes of unknown biologic function. Hm, hello? What's this? Hm.' His fingers clacked away, and genetic code unreeled across the screen, the language of life twisted into a secret poem of death.

  Dawn MONDAY, APRIL 27

  Alice Austen was assigned a simple Coast Guard officer's room as a bedroom. It overlooked the quiet waters of the bay, where the running lights of container ships flickered in the moving air. The only furniture in the room was a metal folding cot with blankets and sheets. Someone, probably an F.B.I. agent from Masaccio's office, had gone over to Kips Bay, gathered up her personal things, brought them here, and left them sitting on the bed. That vaguely embarrassed her. She turned on her cell phone and debated calling her father, but decided not to. She would wake him up again if she called now. Then she lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. She was too tired to take off her clothes. She began to doze off. Suddenly it was five-thirty in the morning, and the birds were singing in the gray light.

  Suzanne Tanaka stayed up most of the night, working alone in the Core. Most of the team had gone off to get some sleep. But she could not sleep. She was too keyed up. She looked at more electron-microscope images for a while, then decided to look at the mice again. It would be too soon to see any symptoms, but you never knew.

  She bent over the boxes. They were clear plastic, and the mice were white mice, and they were moving around, because mice are active at night. They seemed fine. Except for one male mouse. He seemed wobbly. She

  looked at him more closely. He was very active. He was chewing on a wooden nibble block. Chewing and chewing. But mice normally chew a lot: chewing is rodent behavior. She looked at the clock on the table. She had injected the mice with Glenn Dudley's brain material just last night, and now it was the early hours of the morning. That was too little time for a mouse, even with its fast metabolism, to be showing clinical signs of infection by Cobra. And there was no evidence to show that Cobra could infect rodents anyway. Neverthe­less, the mouse's chewing behavior bothered her: then again, this was probably her imagination talking to her.

  She did not want to make any mistakes. She had begged Will Hopkins to put her in the group. She decided, finally, that she would bleed all the mice - take blood samples from all of them. Maybe the blood would show signs of infection, maybe not.

  She went over to a cargo box that held her animal kits, and she got a soft leather glove and some disposable syringes. She pulled the leather glove over her surgical glove. She opened a box and removed the first mouse, holding it in her gloved hand in a practiced way. The mouse struggled.

  She placed the needle under the mouse's skin and withdrew a few drops of blood. The mouse was strug­gling wildly. He's as afraid as I am, in his dim little way, she thought. Just then the mouse flipped out of her gloved hand and landed across her right hand, the one without the leather glove. For just an instant the mouse bit through the latex rubber and hung on with its teeth and let go.

  Tanaka gasped and juggled the mouse back into its box.

  It was just a nip. For a moment she didn't think the animal had drawn blood. She inspected her rubber glove. Then she saw it: two red dots on her right index finger,

  where the mouse's front teeth had penetrated. The slightest smear of blood welled up under the rubber. 'Damn!' she said.

  It could not be. Was there any virus circulating in the mouse's bloodstream? We don't even know if Cobra can infect a mouse. Yet she had heard stories of people pricking their fingers in the Army hot tabs. If it was a hot agent, incurable, you had between ten and twenty seconds to remove the finger with a clean scalpel. Otherwise the agent would move down your finger and enter your main blood system, and it could go anywhere. You had a twenty-second window of opportunity to save your life by cutting off your finger.

  She dashed over to a cargo box, found a scalpel, stripped it, fitted the blade - quick! - and slammed her hand down on the box. She held the scalpel clumsily with her left hand, poised to slash it down on her finger. And didn't do it. Couldn't.

  This is crazy, she told herself. I don't want to lose my finger.

  And then the twenty seconds had passed, and the choice was no longer hers to make. She put the scalpel down. Sweat poured from her face. Her Racal hood fogged up, and Tanaka realized that she was weeping.

  Stop this, stop this. I'll be all right, she told herself, I'll be all right. This was not an exposure, she told herself. We don't even know if it can live in mice. I'll just have to wait and see, but I know I'll be all right. I will not tell anyone. Because they'll take me off the investigation, and this is my first big case.

  Morning

  Alice Austen returned to the Reachdeep unit shortly after the sun came up, and she found Suzanne Tanaka sitting in the meeting room drinking coffee. Tanaka looked exhausted.

  'You need to get some sleep, Suzanne,' Austen said to her.

  'I wish I could.'

  Hopkins was talking on the telephone to John Letersky of the Navy's Biological Defense Research Program in Bethesda. It was six o'clock in the morning, and Letersky was still there. 'What I need, John, are some antibody probes for insect nuclear virus. Do you have any probes like that?'

  'No way,' Letersky said.

  'It would be good if we could program the hand-helds to detect Cobra,' Hopkins said. 'We'd like to be able to test blood and tissue, and we want to do quick environmental sampling for the presence of Cobra.'

  A hand-held biosensor device requires special antibody compounds known as probes in order to register the presence of a given hot agent. The probes are molecules that lock onto proteins in the hot agent. They change color as they lock on, and the biosensor device reads the color change.

  'I hear you, Will. Let me start calling around. You stick to the investigation.'

  Hopkins hung up. 'Whew. Coffee. I need coffee.' 'Did you get any sleep last night?' Austen asked him. 'A couple of hours.' He went over to the electric coffee machine. The pot was empty. 'I need some breakfast,' he said to Austen. 'What about you? Hey, Suzanne! Break­fast?'

  'I'm not hungry. I'll eat later.'

  Austen and Hopkins caught a helicopter up the East River. It let them off at the East Thirty-fourth Street Heliport. A few minutes later they were sitting in a coffee shop on First Avenue.

  'A four-star breakfast, if you add in the airfare,' Hopkins remarked. It was an old-style coffee shop, with a short-order cook flipping eggs behind a stainless-steel counter, and a waitress who went around refilling disposable plastic cups in reusable holders.

  Austen took a sip of coffee. She said, 'How did you end up doing this?'

  'What, Reachdeep?'

  'You don't seem like the type.'

  He shrugged. 'My father was in the Bureau.' 'Is he retired now?'

  'No. He's dead.' 'I'm sorry,' she said.

  'He was a field agent in Los Angeles, where I grew up. He and a partner went to talk with an informant, and they walked into a murder i
n progress. One of the subjects panicked and opened fire through the door when they knocked. My father was hit in the eye. I was thirteen. I grew up hating the Bureau for taking my father away.'

  'But - never mind.'

  'You were going to ask me why I joined the Bureau?' She nodded.

  'I guess at some point I realized I was a cop, like my father.'

  'You're not a cop.'

  'I'm a type of cop, and I'm scared this investigation isn't going to work.' He looked at the table and played with a spoon.

  'I don't think we've diagnosed the disease yet,' she said. 'The self-cannibalism. We can't explain that.' 'You put an insect virus in a human system, you get a complicated result,' Hopkins said.

  The waitress brought over a plate of fried eggs with bacon for Hopkins, and fruit and an English muffin for Austen.

  'You need to eat more, Alice,' Hopkins said. 'Bacon is good for you.'

  She ignored him. 'If we could just see through the disease, maybe we could see the person who's spreading it.' Her voice trailed off.

  'But we do have a diagnosis. It's Cobra.'

  'No. We don't. Will, you're looking at the genetic code. I'm looking at the effect of the virus on people. We don't understand Cobra as a disease process. There is no diagnosis.'

  'That's a funny idea.' He took a slow sip of coffee, looking dismayed.

  She thought: So many details to hold in your mind. If you could fit them together, the pattern would emerge. 'WilL' she said. 'How about the dust in the glue - the dust that James Lesdiu found? I'm wondering if it's steel dust from the subway.'

  'Steel dust? What's that?' Hopkins asked. He loaded egg and bacon into his mouth. Traffic went past outside the window.

  'Ben Kly showed it to me. It's all over the subway tunnels. Two homeless men have died of Cobra, and they

  were neighbors living in a subway tunnel. I wonder if Archimedes lives in the subway.'

  'Impossible,' Hopkins said. 'You can't do lab work in the subway. A virus lab has to be spotlessly clean, and you need some sophisticated equipment. You just couldn't put that stuff in the subway.'

  'If he had any steel dust on his fingertips, he might have spread some of it into the glue when he was making the box.'

  'Sure. But a lot of people take the subway, and they probably get dust on their fingers. All the dust shows is that Archimedes took the subway the day he made the box. Big deal.'

  '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 wide-mouthed 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 cafe. 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 bode
ga signs, Caribbean pinks, and the purples and whites and blacks of hand-painted signs on junk stores and dry-cleaning shops and cafes 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 merry­go-round.