by Marc Cameron
He threw on the Vanson jacket and glanced up at the forlorn Thibodaux. The mountainous Cajun studied him, cocking his head.
“Somethin’s eatin’ at you, ain’t it, Chair Force?”
“I was just thinking.” Quinn shrugged. “You know I grew up in Alaska, right?”
“Always wanted to see the place ... in the summer, mind you.”
“The year before I left for the Academy,” Quinn said, “I went on this big deer hunt with my brother and dad on Kodiak.”
Thibodaux raised an eyebrow. “There’s some mighty big bears on that island, beb.”
Quinn put his hands in his pockets against the chill. “It was dark and cool ... just like tonight. We took three Sitka blacktail deer about dusk and were covered with blood by the time we headed back to camp with the meat in our packs.”
Thibodaux gave a low whistle. “Not a good way to be in bear country.”
“You’re telling me,” Quinn said, remembering the event as if it had just happened. “On the way back, we came around a corner in the alder brush next to a little mountain stream and there was this live salmon lying in the middle of the trail. Its skin had been peeled off right before we happened along and it was still flopping around in the mud. It had some pretty serious teeth marks in its tail. The bear was still nearby and pissed, thrashing around in the alders, close enough we could smell him. No doubt, he wanted to get back to his meal of freshly skinned salmon.”
“You feel that way now?” Thibodaux asked. “Like a hunter covered with blood in the middle of bear country?”
“Nope.” Quinn sighed, walking toward the darkened brick house. “I feel like the fish.”
CHAPTER 18
0700 hours
Fort Detrick, Maryland
U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for
Infectious Diseases (Usamriid)
A half dozen blue Chemturion suits hung on pegs along the cold tile wall, looking like the flayed skins of gargantuan Smurfs.
Dressed in a fresh pair of green hospital scrubs complete with paper slippers, Mahoney stepped into her rubberized suit just as the heavy bass beat of “Short Skirt and Long Jacket” began to thump in her earpiece. Cake was Justin’s favorite band and playing the song on the intercom was just another one of his ways of paying homage to her. He clipped the iPod onto the drawstring of his scrubs and stepped into his own anti-exposure suit—a larger version of Mahoney’s.
She checked the gaskets at her wrists, stretching fingers inside the heavy-duty rubber gloves. They were the first line of defense in a series of three layers, the next being cut-resistant Kevlar, followed by purple nitrile gloves. Nitrile ripped easier than latex when it was punctured, but in the deadly stuff they worked with, that was a plus. A glove with an unnoticed hole, even a tiny one, could spell a slow and agonizing death. Better the thing just fell to pieces once it was compromised.
Turning slowly, one at a time, each checked the other’s gear, looking for correct closure on all the zippers and latches on the bulky full-body suits.
Justin did an ungainly pirouette but, thankfully, kept his mouth shut.
Mahoney punched her code into the pad beside the first airlock. The heavy steel door slid open with a sucking whoosh. She had to pass through four doors to get to the Biosafety level-four containment lab, the place where scientists worked on the nastiest bugs—animalcules, the pioneers had called them. Past the second door, down a long hall to the left, was the airlock to the infamous Slammer, the quarantined medical unit where researchers were sentenced if they suffered exposure, or even possible exposure, to one of the booger bugs in BSL-4—highly contagious and with no known cure. The place got its name from the sound the heavy door made when they sealed you inside for observation—maybe to never again come out and breathe fresh air.
A visit to the Slammer wasn’t exactly a death sentence, but the only two people she’d seen go in had cracked under the isolation, emerging three weeks after their initial interment with no symptoms of the threatened disease but a multitude of facial twitches and body tics they hadn’t had when they went in. Mahoney had been inside once, on a tour, and found it to be like the inside of a sterile submarine with grom-meted armholes for unseen medical staff to work on isolated patients. One of the Slammer veterans had described it as living for three weeks inside an empty bleach bottle. Even the outer door gave Mahoney the creeps and she shuffled past as quickly as her blue suit would let her.
“All right,” she said, moving through the third lock. “Time to get to work. Two monkeys dead, two still alive?”
“That’s what the instruments read,” Justin said.
“Curiouser and curiouser ...” Mahoney mused as she moved toward the last door. “I thought they’d all have crashed by now.”
With roughly five minutes of air in her sealed suit, Mahoney’s first order of business was to attach one of the red air hoses that hung coiled from the ceiling every twelve feet. The hose provided her suit with a positive air flow and kept her face shield clear from fog. More importantly it gave her clean air to breathe.
Those who worked the Special Pathogens Branch followed safety precautions to the letter, but deadly viruses had to be kept alive in order to be studied. Working in a BSL-4 was like swimming in a feeding frenzy with billions of invisible, microscopic sharks—except it was far more dangerous.
Mahoney’s suit filled with a constant stream of air, turning her into a hissing blue version of the Michelin Man.
The French had done a remarkable job of packaging the samples. There were two, each in a separate, unbreakable tube, sealed in foam tape and stored with a chemical gel coolant that would keep anything, virus or otherwise, viable. One of the samples was easily identifiable as blood. Primary tests revealed it was human, but a mix containing the DNA and blood types of at least four individuals.
The second sample, also taken from the Roissy lab according to the French, was not so easy to identify. It was clear and viscous, the consistency of syrup, with microscopic flecks of black and red Mahoney had supposed was occult blood. It turned out to be vitreous gel, the fluid from inside a human eye, again from multiple donors.
Inside the BSL-4, the stainless steel surfaces and shatterproof glass equipment were dazzling in their sterility.
Mahoney, followed by a very serene Justin, made her way across the spotless tile floor—it was severely uncluttered, devoid of anything that might pose a trip or cut hazard. Two Pyrex vials sat in separate airtight glass containment boxes on her workbench, right where she’d left them.
It took hours to ready samples for study. They’d started the process as soon as they’d arrived from Miami. Now, Mahoney put Justin in charge of slicing dried droplets of amber resin containing cultures from each of the two specimens and studying them under an electron microscope.
She would deal with the macaques.
A long row of eighteen enclosures, connected by a series of metal and PVC piping ran along the walls of yet another sealed room inside the BSL-4. Only ten of the enclosures contained macaques.
Mahoney had never been able to bear naming the animals involved in her research and called them by the control number tattooed on their chest. The primates were the worst, with their intelligent eyes and human expressions—it was far too easy to become attached to them. She’d spent months in the jungles of Africa and South America staring the world’s deadliest diseases square in the face, watched people in the worst forms of pain and human agony, and still it was the monkeys that haunted her dreams.
She told herself the work she did was so important. The deaths of a few had the potential to save millions of lives. Mahoney listened to the muffled thump as the doors leading to the monkey unit slid shut behind her and wondered if the man who gave the order to shoot down Northwest 2 had used the same line of reasoning.
All eight of the surviving monkeys broke into a chorus of “Krraa! Krraaa!” as soon as Mahoney walked in and attached her breathing hose. Though slightly muffled by their airtig
ht pens, the monkeys’ screaming cries filled the room. She always tried to be gentle, but brought the creatures little but pain. She knew it and they knew it. Though each monkey could see the animals in the enclosures on either side of it, the air going in and out of the cage only mixed with that of the adjacent animals if Mahoney wanted it to.
In the far corner of the room the enclosures for C-08 and C-11 were quiet.
Five hours before, Mahoney had injected C-08 with a serum made from the Roissy blood mixture, then connected the air ducts from that cage to the cage of C-11. No other contact was allowed. Megan groaned when she looked in the metal enclosures and found each animal slumped dead with uncoagulated blood still dripping from their old-man faces. C-11 had had no direct contact with the Roissy virus, but seven hours after beginning to breathe common air, he had crashed and bled out, just as surely as C-08.
She’d have to do a necropsy, take some blood and liver samples for further study, but first she needed to check on her two other test subjects.
Mahoney had given C-45 two cc’s of a serum made from a sample of the vitreous eye gel found along with the blood in the terrorist lab in Roissy. C-45 was a robust, bearded male tipping the scale at thirty-one pounds—much of it teeth and claw. It had taken a double dose of ketamine to sedate the animal long enough to give him the test serum. It was one thing to get poked with a needle containing an anesthetic, quite another to get even a nick from a syringe containing a deadly agent like Ebola.
Though heavily sedated with a drug that should have had amnesiac effects, C-45 had stared up at Mahoney during the short procedure with pure, unblinking hatred right up to the time Justin had returned him to the enclosure.
Now the big macaque paced his tiny metal prison, still very much alive. C-6, whose enclosure shared the same air system as C-45, screamed and scolded Mahoney as she approached for a better look. C-45’s huge brown eyes still burned with hatred, but he was unsteady, apparently under residual effects of the ketamine. She wondered vaguely if he was having a bad trip. Ketamine, known as Special K on the street, could send humans into wild hallucinations.
Mahoney made a note in the chart hanging below the enclosures while she worked to connect the dots in her mind. Maybe the eye gel was just some byproduct at the lab. Vitreous gel was mostly water with a few proteins; maybe it had been used as a culture medium. The thought of where anyone had gotten such a thing turned her stomach. If the stuff had contained the same variant as the blood, C-45 and C-06 would be goners by now. Maybe it was something else altogether. Inside the cumbersome blue plastic suit, Mahoney shook her head. Hers was not a job where you could afford to miss things....
“Boss ...” Justin’s voice crackled across her earpiece. “You’re gonna want to see this.”
It was his favorite trick—to lure her to the microscope with the promise of something interesting and use the opportunity to slide his arm around her while they stood cheek to cheek, or at least bubble to bubble.
“I’m really busy in here, Justin,” she said. “What have you got?”
“Okay, but I’m telling you—”
“Just tell me what you see.”
“Okay,” Justin groaned, sounding slightly bored. To him, this was just another of many brushes with killer animalcules. He could never know the particulars of Northwest Flight 2. “The Roissy blood contains large amounts of filovirus... . Looks a lot like Ebola Zaire—shepherds’ crooks and spaghetti worms everywhere.”
Mahoney leaned against a metal table, stretching her back. “That’s what I suspected. And the vitreous gel ... nothing, right?”
C-45 suddenly went berserk, banging his head against the front of his enclosure.
“Kraaa! Kraaa!” The enraged macaque bared long yellow fangs, focusing all his anger on Mahoney.
Justin paused from his rundown. “You all right in there?”
“We’re fine.” Mahoney turned away from the cage, hoping that might calm the enraged beast. “You were telling me about the second sample.”
“That’s what you’ll want to see, Meg.” He had to throw in her name. “The vitreous gel is teaming with virus, more even than the blood. The thing is, each strand in the gel appears to be encased in some sort of heavy sheath ... maybe a protein.... I’m guessing that’s why C-45 and C-6 aren’t showing any symptoms. Maybe it affects them same way Ebola Reston hits humans—communicable but not deadly. I’m thinking what we have here is one of the bad guys’ failures in the bioweapon department.”
“Good.” Mahoney nodded, tapping the clipboard with her pen. “Failure is a good thing when it’s them doing it. Of course, we don’t know how the stuff will affect a human... .” She looked up to see Justin on the other side of the window, his young face drawn tight in abject terror.
“What?”
“Dr. Mahoney, you need to get out of there now!”
“Justin,” Mahoney said, glancing up to make certain she was still attached to an air hose. “What the hell are you talking about? Is my su—”
The metal clang of a cage door behind her answered her question. She turned slowly, to find C-45—all 31 pounds of him—hunched on the spotless tile floor. In his fist, he held his wooden gnawing stick like a club.
“Justin, honey,” Mahoney said, voice sticky as a Georgia peach. “Did you remember to fasten the door after you put C-45 back in his cage?”
“I ... I ... thought I did,” the boy stammered. “I’m sorry, Doctor. I’ll come in and help you get him caught.”
“Stay put!” Mahoney barked. Justin underfoot was the last thing she needed. The horny idiot would flirt on his way to the guillotine.
Mahoney clutched the clipboard in front of her chest. The tiny square of Formica would work about as well against a running chainsaw when C-45 attacked, but it was all she had.
The big macaque heaved as it squatted on the floor not ten feet away. She’d been the one to give him the needle full of virus-laden juice. The scowling face said he held a grudge. Blue lips pulled tight. Fangs dripped ribbons of thick saliva down the green numbers tattooed across his pink chest—saliva that was surely hot with an unknown strain of hemorrhagic fever.
Mahoney reached slowly to unhook her breathing hose, then began to ease—inch by inch—toward the door. She didn’t think about the pain of teeth ripping into the flesh under the flimsy layer of her rubberized suit. The agony and almost certain death from exposure to the virus didn’t even cross her mind. One sound dominated her thoughts, a sound that pressed at her chest and made it impossible to catch a full breath. The whooshing thud of a three-hundred-pound metal door echoed in her imagination like a recurring nightmare—the Slammer.
The angry macaque didn’t even have to break her skin. A simple tear of her suit—one breath of ambient air—and her next stop would be the stuff of nightmares. She could already hear the door crashing shut behind her, trapping her in the empty bleach bottle that would be her prison—possibly for the remainder of a very short and agonizing life.
CHAPTER 19
“I don’t think she likes me very much.” Thibodaux grunted, tossing back a liter bottle containing a mixture of water, chocolate protein powder, and a cup of raw oatmeal he’d let soak long enough he could chew it.
Across the breakfast table, Quinn made do with granola and soy milk. “Why do you say that?”
“I dunno ...” The Marine wiped his mouth with the back of his forearm. “Because I can’t do a handstand on my nose or some shit like that.”
Mrs. Miyagi had woken them before five with an entire new wardrobe, including T-shirts, running shorts, and shoes. They’d arrived with literally nothing more than what they had on their backs and had given their sizes to Palmer the day before, but neither expected to have the promised clothes by the next morning.
Each man was accustomed to a strict regimen of exercise and they put the new gear to use without being told. Thibodaux didn’t look like a runner, but as big as he was, he stayed shoulder to shoulder with Quinn for six miles through th
e neighborhoods around Mt. Vernon at a blazing seven-minute-mile pace. When they sprinted up Mrs. Miyagi’s tree-lined driveway, they found her in the backyard, resting serenely in a sort of handstand on her forearms; her back arched slightly, legs straight up in the air. It was, she explained, a yoga move called Pincha Mayurasana and the sooner they mastered it the better for everyone involved.
It was impossible to tell the mysterious woman’s age. She was compactly built, just a breath over five feet tall. Her black leotard revealed the muscular upper body of an Olympic gymnast, the defined hips and thighs of a sprinter. She moved like an athlete with a sort of fluid, feline confidence that took immediate control when she was present. Her coal-black hair was pulled back in a short ponytail. She wore no nail polish or any apparent makeup; her only adornment was the fleeting, crimson edge of an unidentifiable tattoo, barely visible at the scoop neck of the leotard over the swell of her left breast.
Her workout over, she dressed in faded jeans snug enough to accentuate the curves of her figure, and a white oxford polo that left the tattoo a hidden mystery. Under some lights, her flawless skin and ever serene demeanor made Quinn guess she was still in her thirties, but in momentary flashes, particularly when she spoke, the deep, ageless wisdom in her eyes said she was much older.
Miyagi joined the two men in the dining room just as Thibodaux finished his protein and raw oats. She carried an aluminum Zero Halliburton briefcase in each hand.
“The DNI tells me I am to issue your equipment immediately,” she said.
“Arigato gozaimasu.” Quinn accepted his case with both hands and a slight bow. It was large, at least five inches deep, and it had some heft to it.
“You are welcome.” Mrs. Miyagi’s lips perked into just the hint of a smile, the first Quinn had seen of such sentiment in the mysterious woman. “Palmer San said I should watch what I say around you.” There wasn’t the slightest trace of a Japanese accent in her words. Her teeth and her emotions vanished as quickly as they had appeared. “Now, if you gentleman will please open your cases, I will explain your new weapons.
