He caught up with her, took her by the elbow, and steered her back toward the air lock.
“Now, if people boiled the corn,” she continued, her pitch rising further still, “that might denature the Ebola, but bake it like a cornmeal—hell, genetic vectors are put together at those temperatures—both RNA and DNA would survive just fine. Of course, even more effective would be if it got eaten uncooked, like feed corn.”
He found her sudden chattiness to be another bad sign. She also looked paler than before, though he wouldn’t have figured that possible. “Right,” he said, and sped up the pace. They were halfway to the exit.
“Richard, what’s the usual vector for Ebola?”
“Nobody knows.” Ten more strides.
“Maybe they wanted the vector to get it, and pass it on to humans that way.”
“Could be,” said Steele, stepping up to the number plate and entering the code to open the door.
Nothing happened.
“What the hell?” He entered it again.
Still nothing.
The pupils of Kathleen’s eyes dilated in alarm. “You’re sure you’ve got the code right?”
“Yes.” He tried it a third time.
Nothing again.
“Oh, God!” moaned Kathleen.
Steele stayed silent, but felt himself break out in a sweat from head to toe.
“So what now, Richard?” She sounded very frightened.
“I don’t know. See any sign of an override switch or control panel anywhere?”
They scanned the walls, but to no avail.
“There’s got to be another way out, some kind of emergency exit, in case of fire, no?” Her voice betrayed desperation more than hope.
“I don’t think these people are the kind to worry about building codes. Where’s your cellular?”
“In the antechamber, along with everything else God didn’t give me, remember?”
He spotted a metal lab stool against one of the counters and started to walk over to it. “Maybe we can smash these windows with something like this, get to your phone, and call for help—”
Her scream interrupted him.
He spun around, and through the windows saw the door of the main entrance already open. Six swarthy men dressed in security uniforms stepped inside, one after the other. Two of them carried guns with silencers. Over the speakers in his helmet came orders the guards uttered to each other in the same tongue he’d heard on the video.
“A goddamn trap!” Kathleen muttered, her words strained through clenched teeth.
The heavy stool already in his hands, Steele immediately hefted it over his shoulder and heaved it at the window. “Help me break the glass before they get in their suits. It might scare them off!”
The projectile hit the clear surface and bounced off as though he’d thrown it against brick. Plexiglas, he remembered, and knew he’d never smash through. The men on the other side, initially startled by the sound, finished changing into OR clothing, then walked over to the moon suits and began to put them on.
Kathleen picked up another stool and climbed up on one of the counters with it, as if she intended to clobber anyone who came near her. Steele thought of another weapon. He ran over to the autopsy table, pulled open one of the drawers filled with dissecting tools, and grabbed some scalpels. Racing back to the area in front of the air lock, he handed some up to Kathleen. “Hold them like this,” he said, gripping a pair in his fist so the blades stuck out each end, then did the same in his other hand. “I’ll greet them at the door. If I can cut the suit of the first one into the lab, it ought to make the others think twice about coming through.”
She gave him a wan smile of encouragement, but looked terrified.
One of the guards noticed what he was doing. The man smirked and walked over to the control panel where all the pressure gauges were. Steele watched him reach up and turn something, then felt his air supply shut down.
“Bastards!” he heard Kathleen mutter.
His mask immediately started to fog over from his breath again, and he saw a similar opaque film appear inside hers. Soon they wouldn’t be able to see at all. “Get back to back!” he ordered.
As she jumped down from the counter and moved into position behind him, the same man strode over to the radio console and turned off their speakers.
Alone with the sounds of his breathing again, Steele fought to keep from panicking. Though his visor continued to steam up, he could still make out his and Sullivan’s reflection in the window, the two of them weaving and flashing their blades. It made him think of an eightlimbed creature in Chet’s video games, one that always brandishes its stingers before an enemy the way a scorpion does its tail. The man who’d rendered them virtually mute, deaf, and nearly blind stood watching, his smirk fading into a look of concern as the steel glinted under the overhead lights.
At least we’ll go down fighting, Richard thought.
In minutes he could see only white shapes through a blurry haze. It took so much yelling to communicate that he stayed silent, conserving air, but he felt her back pressed to his as they waited. It already had gotten difficult to breathe, the closed-in heat of his own body suffocating him as much as the lack of oxygen or the mounting carbon dioxide levels.
More seconds ticked by. He began to feel light-headed and knew neither of them would last much longer. He tried listening for any sounds that might signal the suited men were on their way in, but could hear only the maddening noise of his increasingly jagged respirations. When he tried holding his breath in brief intervals, hoping that way he’d pick up some sound of their approach, the absolute silence so overwhelmed him it filled his ears like dirt and made him feel they’d buried him alive.
Another minute passed and his head began to swim. As he sank to his knees, a black figure lunged at him from the right without warning. “They’re here!” he screamed, swiping at the form with a sideways swing of his blade. He felt solid contact and instinctively pressed the point of the scalpel in, completing a sweeping crosscut the way a surgeon opens an abdomen with a single stroke. Not even the suits could mask the shrieks of pain that followed.
He lurched to his feet and lashed out at a second attacker on his left. But a savage pull on his air hose from behind and a forward kick to the calves of his legs slammed him backward onto the floor knocking the wind out of him. Immediately someone stomped on his wrists, forcing him to drop his weapons. Before he could even breathe again, they yanked off his helmet and slammed his head against the floor. A starburst of light exploded behind his eyes, but he didn’t lose consciousness. He could still see the white points dancing in his head when he felt the muscles in his chest give a reflex heave and fill his lungs with whatever the air in that room contained.
“You bastards,” he heard Kathleen scream from nearby and knew that they’d taken her helmet off as well.
Two men dragged him over to the vats where they tied him up with masking tape below a big overhead nozzle that he hadn’t noticed before. Seconds later they dumped her beside him, hands and feet also bound despite her valiant writhing and kicking.
“Ya’ cowardly creeps,” she bellowed. “Gutless is what ya’ are! Gutless . . .”
As she raved at them, they ignored her and turned to their wounded comrade. Blood flowed from a diagonal cut across the chest of the man’s protective suit. Two of the men attending him struggled to tape it up, their gloves quickly turning red as they worked. The remaining three went over to the dangling hoses and gestured into the antechamber that they wanted the pressure turned back on. A shadowy form on the other side of the window moved to comply.
Watching all this, Richard desperately cast around for a way he and Kathleen might still survive, and only vaguely realized that a seventh person must have joined their attackers. But his thinking disintegrated into little more than a flurry of partial thoughts from which he could barely stitch together anything coherent. Ebola’s not airborne, he told himself. Only bird flu is. And the i
nfected monkeys themselves are isolated.
The air lock hissed as the latest arrival, having donned a moon suit, stepped into the lab.
Richard again ignored the newcomer, continuing to concentrate on whether the air he and Kathleen were breathing would necessarily kill them. Only the technicians working with the animals might spread the vectors into the lab itself, he thought. But no one’s been here all weekend. So if we’re breathing bird flu right now, maybe it’s a limited exposure and won’t be fatal, especially if we can get our helmets back on. Maybe if I promise these creeps we won’t struggle . . .
But before he could beg for their lives, a white spray cascaded down onto their heads from the nozzle above them, covering their faces and hair.
Caught by surprise, he tried to squeeze his eyes shut and clamp his mouth closed in time to keep the mist away from his mucous membranes, but he reacted too late. He could already feel its slipperiness on the inside of his lips, and though it had no taste, the oily texture of the liquid on his tongue made him want to gag. Neither could he detect an odor while breathing through his nose, but could tell that he’d begun to inhale the greasy droplets by the slimy sensation accumulating at the back of his throat whenever he swallowed.
Kathleen had once described what now permeated their eyes, lips, and skin as genetic worms. Yet the bland liquid basically felt no more noxious than if they were deluging him with soapy bathwater. Somehow that innocuousness made its invasion of their bodies seem all the more insidious.
Her screams were suddenly cut off with a sickening thud. His eyes sprang open. “No!” he roared, instantly twisting around and straining toward where she lay. But he found himself looking from behind at the man who’d just smashed her head into the floor. Crouched over her, he lifted it again by its short auburn-gold hair. The way it lolled lifeless under his hand must have convinced him that a second blow would be redundant. He simply let go, and it fell with a soft klunk. Then he turned, bringing his face into view.
Steele felt his stomach pitch forward until he thought it would turn inside out. “My God!” he said, barely above a whisper.
The sight before him made no sense. The spray must have scrambled his vision. He shook his head to try and clear away what had to be a hallucination. But when he looked again, his mind still felt as if it had catapulted into a blender. Because from behind the visor, an owl-like stare continued to blink back at him. Then Steve Patton reached over, lifted his head by the hair, and smashed it backward. Richard saw a flash more brilliant than the first, followed by blackness. Like dark blood it spilled through his brain.
Chapter 21
6:25 P.M.
Azrhan Doumani’s pulse quickened as he looked into his microscope.
For the last two weeks he’d been thinking like a terrorist. Specifically he’d been trying to imagine how he would advise someone like Saddam Hussein about a way to use bird flu, or H5N1, as a weapon. Not that he intended to. What got him obsessing on the subject was a spate of recent newspaper articles about New York’s problem with the West Nile virus, a pathogen originating in Uganda and previously unknown to the United States until last year. At that time it had infected sixty-nine people in the metropolitan region, killing seven of them, and because the pathogen is transmitted from birds to humans by mosquitoes, the outbreak had set off a controversial program of spraying with insecticides. The discovery of an infected chicken in Queens last week had led to calls for a resumption of spraying, but what interested Azrhan were recent reports that the Iraqi dictator himself had once boasted of having developed a strain of West Nile virus that he would unleash on the United States as a weapon. Nobody believed that he’d actually caused this current problem, including Azrhan, but it got him wondering what this type of fanatic might try and do with bird flu.
Azrhan had been coming into the lab after hours to search through the Rodez slides and electrophoretic gels, trying to find if they held some trace of anything that could be Pierre Gaston’s second secret, the “something even deadlier” hinted at in the letter to Dr. Sullivan. This he’d been doing almost every night since the attack on the laboratory had so poisoned his relationship with his mentor.
For as much as those suspicions hurt, the recent articles about terrorism had forced him to consider the possibility that the hooded men with silencers speaking Farsi suggested a far darker dimension to this business than he or anyone else had ever considered. And after watching her go over segment after segment of the Rodez material to no avail, he figured if he could uncover that second secret when she couldn’t, it would be the first step toward regaining her trust. Because her friendship mattered so much to him, he’d pursue any dark avenue, no matter how disquieting, and endure any amount of work.
And at four A.M. he’d found something. A solitary electrophoretic gel on which the parts of an H5N1 bird flu vector had been spread out also contained a small extra smudge of debris at the bottom of the strip that wasn’t on the other slides. According to the records the sample came from a blade of grass outside a single vent in the Rodez building.
He’d admitted the possibility existed that such an isolated find of extra genetic material could simply be the result of contamination. But since they’d found the attenuated bird flu genes in a similar anomaly, he couldn’t possibly not test it.
And because he’d been thinking like a bioterrorist, he knew exactly what primers he’d use to unlock its secret. Because what would have interested a terrorist had to be the infectivity of the hybrid strain. But they wouldn’t want to rely on a spontaneous recombinant event to produce it, as had happened in Taiwan and Hawaii with the help of genetic vectors. They’d want to make and use the hybrid itself. For what could be even deadlier than a genetic vector carrying an already combined, fully viable hybrid strain of human and bird influenza. Theoretically, it could have the killing power of the Spanish flu epidemic.
Fourteen hours ago, as the sun came up, he’d treated the smudge with primers for both bird flu, H5N1, and human influenza, H2N3. “By the dawn’s early light,” he half hummed, half sang as he worked before bedding down on a cot to get some sleep.
This evening his hand trembled as he focused his microscope on the resulting electrophoretic gel.
A pattern of horizontal streaks representing both strains greeted his eyes. He had the hybrid.
He grabbed the phone and punched in the number for Sullivan’s cellular.
“I’m sorry. The person you have dialed is not available. Please leave a message at the beep.”
He immediately tried her private number at home. “She’s not here, Dr. Doumani,” said Lisa. “Left early this afternoon to work on something in the lab with Dr. Steele.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“But I’m at the lab. She’s not here.”
“Oh, gee! I’m sorry. Maybe they stepped out?”
“No, Lisa, I’ve been here all last night and today. This is very urgent. Do you have any idea where else she could be?”
“Did you try her cell phone?”
“She’s turned it off.”
“Um, well, you say it’s really urgent?”
He sensed something in her question, as if she might have a way of reaching her mother after all. “It’s a matter of life and death, Lisa, I promise you.”
“Oh, gee, I don’t know what to suggest. The only other thing my mother said was that she’d try to be back this evening in time for the fireworks, but couldn’t promise anything.”
It sounds like she’s already enjoying another kind of fireworks, he thought, suspecting that he’d blown the woman’s alibi for a tryst with Steele. There were rumors flying around the building that the night the attack occurred the two had left the lab in a state of undress. “Lisa, you’re sure you can’t reach her?”
“I told you, I can’t.” Her voice had started to waver.
Should I press harder? he was wondering when she added, “Is she in some kind of danger? What�
��s happened to her—?” Her voice cracked before she could finish.
Damn! Now I’ve frightened her, he thought. I should have known to be more careful. The kid must be a nervous wreck what with two attempts on her mother’s life already. “No, Lisa, she’s not in danger at all. It’s just that I discovered something she’s been looking for.”
“But you said it was ‘life and death.’ ”
“Sorry. I got carried away. It’s just some new genes that I found. I guess you know from your mom how that kind of stuff always is life and death to us geneticists. But still give her the message to phone me right away. She’ll want to know.”
He hung up, wondering who else he should call about this. Racine in France must be told immediately that a genetic weapon might be at the heart of why Gaston was murdered, not an industrial cover-up as he suspects. The Honolulu police also had to be alerted. His thoughts racing, he decided that the quickest way to deal with it all would be to call McKnight and let him handle it. He fished the detective’s card out of his pocket. “Better cops talk to cops,” he muttered, dialing the number. “No one’s going to believe such a wild tale from an Iranian immigrant anyway.”
“The party you have reached is not available right now . . .”
6:57 P.M.
Lisa Sullivan paced nervously by the phone, uncertain about what to do. She’d been trying to reach her mother every five minutes for the last half hour, but repeatedly got only a recording. Why haven’t you checked your messages? she fretted, absently chewing her nails as was her longtime habit. When she passed in front of a mirror and caught herself in the act, she whipped her hand down to her side.
She usually loved the intrigue of playing backup to her mom’s crazy exploits. Today she felt scared and kept thinking of when they’d said good-bye.
“By eleven P.M., if I haven’t called you, phone Detective McKnight and tell him where Dr. Steele and I really are,” her mother had instructed on her way out the door that afternoon.
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