The Leaves in Winter

by M. C. Miller

  “That’s right. Frankly, I still don’t see how you missed that fact back at USAMRIID. You had to do blood work on her…”

  “We went over this already,” snapped Faye. “At the time staff were on a tight regiment. Our research was restricted. We were instructed to operate within narrow parameters.”

  “Sounds like standard procedure to me.”

  “No. We all thought it was odd, Janis in particular. She was sure we weren’t being told everything. I told you – she suspected a dual-use project for weapon development. That’s why as soon as she got well and we released her from quarantine, she quit. When she left, we weren’t on speaking terms.”

  “It doesn’t matter now. Go on.”

  Faye stepped closer. “We know the virus doesn’t sterilize the parents. But it does something to the parents that affects the children. The children wind up sterile.”

  Colin nodded, waiting for Faye to bring herself to the point.

  “…so I got the idea of pulling up everything I could about Alyssa.”

  Hearing his daughter’s name struck a nerve in Colin, both personal and professional. He kept quiet even though he suspected what was coming.

  Faye was intense. “Janis was pregnant with Alyssa when she was in quarantine. So I checked the RIDIS database and every other source I could find. The results are conclusive. Of all the parents carrying the Ghyvir-C marker, Janis is the only one to have a child with a genetic variance from the others. Alyssa carries a different marker from all the other children with Ghyvir-C parents.”

  Colin said nothing.

  Faye was startled by Colin’s lack of response.

  “You realize what this means? Alyssa might be the only child of her generation to be exposed to the Ghyvir-C marker – and not be sterile!”

  “That’s a relief.” Colin stood and took a breath. “We were hoping you’d come to an independent verification of what we’ve known for a couple weeks.”

  Faye felt a chill down her spine. “You knew this?”

  “We found out just before you got the call to join The Project. It’s one of the reasons why we wanted you on the team.”

  “What’s the point of keeping me in the dark! How am I supposed to work?”

  “I don’t make the rules of who gets to know what.”

  Faye spun around, incredulous. “That doesn’t make sense! Everyone on this project is handcuffed by ridiculous security rules!”

  “Including me! You were there fourteen years ago. Until you told me, I had no idea Janis had been infected or was placed in quarantine. Someone scrubbed that from the record, remember?”

  “But you knew Alyssa wasn’t sterile!”

  “We knew she carried a unique marker. We weren’t sure what it meant.”

  “But you suspected it.”

  Colin shouted back, “I didn’t know Janis had been infected in the lab! There are lots of kids in the RIDIS database who aren’t sterile. Any child conceived before their parents got infected with Ghyvir-C is normal. As the virus spread, more couples were affected. The RIDIS database shows the trend line. It took a few months before all live births contained the marker. Alyssa was born in that closing window of time when it was still possible to have a normal pregnancy. We had to be sure!”

  “There’s more to it than that! Janis is a special case, her infection’s unique.”

  “How so?”

  “I told you. USAMRIID removed the sputnik. The giant virus I studied fourteen years ago was missing its parasite. Janis was infected by a modified virus. Her infection was a rare if not singular event.”

  The realization hit Colin. “That’s right…and the sputnik is the key element.”

  “Janis passed the Ghyvir-C infection to Alyssa when she was still a fetus – but it got passed without the interaction of the sputnik being present.”

  “So how would that work?”

  “Don’t you see? Alyssa was exposed to Ghyvir-C in utero. Her system either developed or received antibodies to the giant virus before she was born. She also got her mother’s immune response. As she grew up, like everyone else she was exposed to the fully-functional Ghyvir-C in the wild, the one that contains the sputnik. But by then her system already knew how to attack it. With Ghyvir-C under attack, the sputnik inside never got a chance to go viral inside of her.”

  “And that explains why Alyssa isn’t sterile…?”

  “In part. It also explains why Alyssa’s future children might be protected. Like her, they won’t be sterile.”

  “That’s a whole other line of testing…”

  “Janis and Alyssa are the key! Their systems might contain the exact combination of elements we need to reverse sterility. The modified virus that infected Janis gave Alyssa the key marker. It’s unique. No other child has it. We need to study both of them.”

  Colin paced back and forth before facing Faye again. “We might have to make do with just one of them.”

  “Who?”

  “Alyssa. According to my boss, The Project has her at a place called The Nest.”

  “What!” Faye was enraged and nonplussed. “You kidnapped Alyssa!”

  “I didn’t kidnap her. The Project did. Once I showed them her RIDIS markers were different from everyone else’s, they knew she was special. We had to protect her.”

  “Protect her from what?”

  “Riya Basu had just been killed and Janis worked with her. Some people might be crazy enough to want sterility if they found out it had happened. If there was any chance Alyssa was the key to this, we couldn’t leave her out in the open. We weren’t certain what was going on inside groups like New Class Order. We had to secure her just in case. Like you said, we needed to study her.”

  “And kidnapping was the only way? When were you going to tell Janis about this? Were you ever going to tell me? Didn’t you think this might have a bearing on my work?”

  “I was told it would be better if we tried working out a solution without you knowing.”

  Faye crossed her arms and looked away, refusing to engage.

  “They needed your expertise. They weren’t sure how you’d react.”

  “Perceptive of them – the bastards.”

  Colin held up a hand of truce. “Before you go off on this, let me explain.”

  “What – more acceptable lies? Another necessary cover story?”

  “You have to understand, the kidnapping was a spur of the moment thing. Lots of ideas were floated on how to gain access to Alyssa. Some inside The Project wanted to approach Janis; get her approval to do some testing. Others wanted to bring Alyssa in using trumped-up medical excuses. Nothing clicked.”

  “Did you even try?”

  “It seemed certain whatever we did would only have people asking too many questions. Above all, we weren’t going to risk exposure. If anyone snooped into why we needed Alyssa, our excuses had to hold up to scrutiny. The truth about sterility had to stay a secret to prevent a panic. The decision got put off.”

  “Until Riya was shot. Then you saw an opportunity.”

  “It made sense. Everyone’s attention was on NovoSenectus and New Class Order. Blame for the kidnapping went right to them. But we had to move fast. We never had plans to do it but it turned out to be the perfect cover for getting access to Alyssa for as long as we needed.”

  “Meanwhile, you put Janis through hell and blindfolded the very people like me who need to figure this out!”

  “It had to be done.”

  “Oh, really? Well, here’s something else that needs to be done. I need to go back home. I need to get away from here.”

  “Now, wait – let’s think about this.”

  “If you’ve got anything to say, say it. Otherwise, I know what I need to do.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Yes it is. I won’t work under these conditions!”

  “I don’t believe you’ll walk away, not when you know sterility is real.”

  Faye shouted, “What else are you hiding?�
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  “It’s not your place to design security for The Project.”

  “I don’t even know what The Project is anymore. Do you? Have you figured out why there are animal fertility studies in Manhattan, Kansas? What else are they keeping from you?”

  “I looked into it. There may be an answer for that.”

  “Like what?”

  “There’ve been some studies coming out in scientific journals explaining the drop in teenage pregnancies around the world. The studies claim there are chemicals in the environment that appear to be causing delayed fertility in some mammals.”

  “Delayed….fertility.”

  “They say the findings are preliminary.”

  “You don’t actually believe that, do you?”

  “At this point, we can’t discount anything. It would make sense for The Project to run their own trials on animals just in case. It could be a factor in what we’re seeing. If so, we have to isolate it and determine how it fits in.”

  “Where were these studies done?”

  “I’m not sure…Germany, Japan. The only study like it in the U.S. that I know of is in Manhattan, Kansas.”

  Faye heaved a sigh. “I don’t get it. We already know why there’s a drop in pregnancies. It sounds like another cover story. Something else must be going on inside The Project.”

  “Nothing that I know about.”

  “That’s not reassuring.”

  “At least it explains one thing. To do my job, I don’t need to know about the lab in Kansas. There’s nothing sinister about me not being told about animal trials in Manhattan. As it should be, everyone knows only what they need to know.”

  “Your bosses aren’t scientists. How do they know what I need to do my job?”

  “You’re not the only scientist working on this. I imagine everything you find is being routed to The Nest. Someone, somewhere is probably putting it all together.”

  “That makes me sound pretty expendable. There should be no problem letting me go home.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Then we have a problem.”

  “What can I say to convince you?”

  “For once, you can tell me the goddamn truth! Tell me what you know about this or I walk. I won’t be kept in a box, fed lies, and made to wonder if I’m helping to save the world or ruin it.”

  “I don’t know what you want to know!”

  “You picked the wrong person to team up with. I know you. I can tell when you’re holding back. We’ve been too close to think you can lie to me.”

  “Nothing I say will make any difference. The children will still be sterile.”

  “I don’t care. I want to know. Tell me or take me to the surface. I’ll walk out of here. I swear it. At this point, I don’t care how big the desert is up there. It’ll be on your head.”

  The two of them glared at each other. Faye was heartbeats away from bolting.

  Colin blinked first. He spun a chair around and offered it to her.

  “Here. You better sit down.”

  Faye held up until she sensed the offer was genuine. As soon as she sat down, Colin leaned back on the desk opposite her.

  “What I’m about to tell you I’ll deny. You want to know? So be it. I still think some things are better left alone.”

  “I don’t need your disclaimers. I get it.”

  Cut short, Colin nodded his acceptance of terms. He took a long breath and looked up at her with an expression drained of emotion. It was a game face, hollow of feeling like she had never seen before. It seemed fitting in such a place.

  “Fourteen years ago, I was liaison between an intelligence task force and the RIDIS project. My work was at GeLixCo in Puerto Rico. Because of my USAMRIID background, I got recalled to Washington to be briefed on a special assignment. Little did I know then, but that assignment was where a deeper side of The Project began.”

  “I thought The Project was all about the RIDIS database.”

  “That’s my part of it now. It’s been so much more.”

  “Go on…”

  “I was told with high confidence that someone was using a lab in another part of the Puerto Rico complex to synthesize a new virus combination. The two labs were strictly insulated from each other. We didn’t know who was behind it, but it was obvious they planned on releasing it worldwide.”

  “What was the point? A pandemic?”

  “Yeah. What else could it be?”

  “So why didn’t the Feds just shut them down?”

  “Maybe we should have. The problem was, if we had done that the only people we would have stopped were the mercenaries, the bit players. My bosses wanted to catch the masterminds behind this. By letting the lab stay open and watching it, infiltrating it, we hoped to find out more about who or what was behind it.”

  Faye was ahead of him. “So what went wrong?”

  “We didn’t find out about some key information until it was almost too late. We thought the U.S. lab was the only place working on this. It turned out they had several locations, all but one in other countries. We were blindsided. By the time we got confirmation, we discovered their schedule to release the pandemic was farther along than we thought. We had the impression they were midway; in fact, they were almost finished.”

  “You didn’t move in and stop it?”

  A shake of the head. “By then, shutting them down wouldn’t have made any difference. The plot was international. Any one of the other labs would have completed the plan. We couldn’t get to them all. Luckily, the U.S. lab was their synthesis point – that’s where they merged what the others had done.”

  “What happened?”

  “We did the only thing we could. We hatched a plan to sabotage the final agent.”

  “Wouldn’t they find out and just start again someplace else?”

  “That’s why we had to do it in a way they wouldn’t suspect. We wanted them to go through with their plan – only, we had to make the released agent harmless.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “We substituted a benign payload – into the sputnik.”

  “Sputnik! You’re talking about Ghyvir-C!”

  Colin nodded.

  “You knew Ghyvir-C was engineered all along.”

  “The difficulty was – it wasn’t engineered by us.”

  “So how was it supposed to work?”

  “As you’d suspect. The common cold was the best way of spreading the virus. The sputnik parasite went along for the ride. It was designed so Ghyvir-C going active in a host would signal the sputnik to hijack Ghyvir-C. That’s when the real damage would start.”

  Faye stood and paced. “Wait a minute. If you sabotaged it, then why are we here? Why are we facing sterility in children?”

  “You’ve hit upon the big question.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Colin’s half-shrug was noncommittal. “We had operatives on the inside. At the last minute, they switched payloads in the sputnik. Everything went as planned. The benign agent replaced the deadly one. Ghyvir-C got released. For fourteen years nothing happened – nothing but the common cold. There was no pandemic. For The Project, that was success. It appeared our sabotage worked.”

  For Faye, another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Until a few months ago. That’s when you found the sterility markers in RIDIS.”

  Colin nodded. “Only weeks ago we traced the markers back to Ghyvir-C.”

  “Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place. Maybe those studies about a chemical in the environment are right. What if it’s not sterility, just delayed fertility.”

  “Don’t patronize me. You’ve been in the lab. You’ve seen the markers. We’ve done enough test cases on children. You know sterility is real.”

  “Then why is the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility doing animal trials? You’re still holding something back.”

  Colin shouted, “I’ve told you what I know!”

  “Don’t lie to me, Colin! It
doesn’t add up. What are we really dealing with? If you succeeded in stopping them fourteen years ago, then what is going on?”

  “You want to know what’s going on? Extinction! Is that clear enough for you! Stop chasing your tail. All the dirty little secrets in the world won’t change the fact that unless we do something – the last human generation has been born.”

  For Faye, the gaps filled in. “I see now why back at USAMRIID we were under such a tight regimen. Janis was right – it was all about dual-use. They gave us a modified virus because The Project didn’t want us to inspect their benign sputnik. But why? Why hide something so benign from their own government lab?”

  “Don’t overthink it. There were good reasons to separate the two viruses. It wasn’t sinister – it was simply good lab procedure.”

  “Is that the way you were told to spin it?”

  Colin stepped close to confront her. “Listen, we need you here to help solve this. It’s got to be done with or without you. What good is it to win the point and lose the game? Arguing with me may give you some satisfaction, and you can go home and pat yourself on the back for being so assertive – but how long will that last? How long can you sit and home, doing nothing, and watch the children grow up?”

  Faye was torn between storming out and staying.

  Colin added, “In a few months, your baby will be born. Are you going to be all right with that?”

  Tears filled Faye’s eyes.

  Colin didn’t let up. “You have a choice. You can sit at home smug, knowing you won the argument – or you can help do something about this. What’s it going to be?”

  The silence between them raised the intensity to an unbearable level.

  For Faye, something about being that deep, that isolated, that surrounded by penetrating cold and impersonal electronic hum evoked feelings of oppressive dread.

  She had truly reached the bottom of the hole.

  She gathered all the strength she had left and stared back at Colin. “If you want me on The Project, I have one condition…”

  “Name it.”

  “Janis and Alyssa need to be part of the research. I want access to both of them.”

  “You expect me to bring Janis into this?”

  “What’s the matter? Afraid to face her after what you did to Alyssa – what you did to her?”