The Immortalist

by Scott Britz

  “Give me a second here, Wig,” said Cricket, as she studied the printout. “I’m a clinical field researcher. This isn’t my area. I want to be absolutely sure I understand what you’re saying. You extracted and purified DNA from my daughter’s blood, and then used PCR—polymerase chain reaction—to amplify specific pieces of that DNA?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the agarose gel?”

  “It’s like a sieve. Big molecules, like DNA PCR products, can pass through it, but there’s enough resistance to slow them down. DNA has a negative electrical charge, so if we run an electric current, the PCR products will all head for the positive pole. But the bigger molecules will move slower, because of the sieve. By also running a ‘ladder’ of standard DNA pieces of known size, we can compare the speeds and estimate how long a product is.”

  “And what does that tell us?”

  “That we have human herpesvirus, type 1.”

  “That’s impossible.” Cricket shoved the printout back at him. “My daughter’s symptoms are those of a highly virulent hemorrhagic virus. Not herpes.”

  “You said the same thing about Yolanda Carlson.”

  “It was true then, also. There’s something wrong with this analysis.”

  Waggoner’s eyes opened wide. “The analysis is indisputable!” He pushed the printout back toward Cricket and again ran his finger back and forth over it. “As always, I carried out both positive and negative controls. Here in this lane you can seen the human hemoglobin A gene, positive exactly as it should be. The next lane is a unique intron sequence from the SUS1 gene of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. That lane is empty, as it should be, since your daughter is not a yeast. This proves that the PCR reaction worked perfectly.”

  “And these other lanes?”

  Waggoner pointed to the lanes one by one with his forefinger. “Ebola, negative. Marburg disease, negative. Yellow fever, negative. Eastern equine encephalitis, negative. And so on. But here, three out of three lanes are positive for herpes simplex. Two of them are of the exact length predicted.”

  “Two? What about the third?”

  “It runs longer. It’s from a capsid protein in the unique long region of the herpes simplex genome. It should run four hundred sixty-­five base pairs long. Instead, it’s about twenty-five hundred.”

  “That’s a big difference.”

  “It happens. There can be secondary structure in the DNA—twisting on itself—that can interfere with the binding of one of the primers. In cases like that, the blocked primer sometimes finds another binding site somewhere downstream. Then you get a product of abnormal length. But it still proves that at least one of the primers found herpes simplex. It’s still positive, in that sense.”

  “Did Yolanda’s PCR have a product of the same abnormal length?”

  “Almost.”

  “What do you mean, almost?”

  “Yes, there was a long product. But it ran a little bit slower.”

  “Slower? That means it was longer, right?”

  “Yeah, by a couple hundred base pairs.”

  “Wig, help me out here. Does that mean they were different viruses?”

  “No. Both were human herpesvirus, type 1. But your daughter’s virus is a mutant. Somehow, it lost about two hundred base pairs from the capsid region.”

  “Can you explain that?”

  “Viruses do that kind of thing all the time. They’re really messy replicators. But what it does suggest is that your daughter didn’t catch the virus from Yolanda Carlson. The mutation occurred inside of a third host. That host and Yolanda could have caught it from yet another source, but your daughter had to have come later in the chain of transmission.”

  “Finally, you and I agree on something, Dr. Waggoner.”

  “We do?”

  “From the condition of my daughter’s hand, I believed she was infected by a dog bite. Not by Yolanda.”

  Waggoner jerked back his printout. “That’s impossible. Dogs don’t get human herpes, or vice versa.”

  “But this isn’t normal human herpes, is it? The capsid protein is twenty-five hundred base pairs long, not four hundred sixty-five.”

  “Th-that’s an artifact.”

  “You don’t really know that. You haven’t actually sequenced the DNA of these PCR fragments, or of the virus itself, have you?”

  “No, of course not.” Waggoner chuckled. “The genome of human herpesvirus 1 is one hundred and fifty-two thousand base pairs long. I don’t have equipment or manpower to sequence that. It would take me six months if I tried.”

  Freiberg cleared his throat. “Perhaps I could be of some help. In my lab I have a dozen automated DNA sequencers. Busy little buggers. With their help, we contributed over three million base pairs to the Drosophila melanogaster fruit-fly genome project. I would estimate that to sequence the whole of a virus of herpes length would take less than two days. We could have partial results within a few hours.”

  Cricket grabbed his hand and kissed his fingertips. “Oh, Erich! You’re a lifesaver.”

  Freiberg blushed. “Well, we’re all in the same boat, aren’t we? Any of us could be next. We could be infected already and not know it. Even Dr. Waggoner.”

  “That’s statistically unlikely,” said Waggoner. “I only work with cold viruses.”

  “Wig,” asked Cricket, “can you work with Dr. Freiberg’s people on this?”

  “As long as they don’t touch anything in my lab.”

  “You have my sacred word,” said Freiberg. “Not a test tube shall be molested. And, Cricket, my dear, I’ll have my graduate students take samples from the dogs Emmy cared for in the animal facility. I’m told that none of them look sick—but it wouldn’t hurt to run the test.”

  “All right, let’s get to work.”

  The three of them stood up. As Freiberg started out the door, Waggoner reached for his sheaf of papers. Cricket put her hand down to block him. “One question, Wig, before you go. Did you by any chance happen to run PCR for the Methuselah Vector?”

  “That would have been a waste of time. Neither Yolanda Carlson nor your daughter have been treated with it. The only person who has, Subject Adam, is in perfect health. Besides, the Methuselah Vector’s not a normal virus. It has only a limited capability of replicating itself.”

  “It’s a singularity, Wig.”

  “A what?”

  “Something very rare and very unusual. A black swan, so to speak.”

  “So?”

  “The disease my daughter has is a singularity, too. Two black swans in the same pond? It’s hard to think they’re not related.”

  “The statistics won’t—”

  “Forget the statistics. I want you to retest my daughter’s blood for any trace of the Methuselah Vector. Can you do that?”

  “Methuselah Vector? It’s vanishingly improbable.”

  “Good! Then think of it as another negative control. To prove the integrity of your PCR.”

  Waggoner frowned, but Cricket had made it a point of honor. “Okay. It’ll take two or three hours,” he mumbled, as he followed Freiberg out of the office.

  Cricket swept the remains of her sandwich into the trash. She couldn’t think of eating now. She was in a race against death. Emmy’s life would end when her lungs ceased to function—when even breathing 100 percent oxygen would no longer be enough so sustain her body. That would be the final, cataclysmic event. Cricket had been carefully watching the blood oxygen saturation on Emmy’s monitor. That number was trending downward inexorably at an almost constant rate of 1 percent per hour.

  It was simple arithmetic.

  In little more than twenty-four hours, her daughter would be dead.

  Ten

  THE ELEVATOR DOORS OPENED AND NIEDERMANN entered Gifford’s lab, following the hum of a centrifuge toward the back. He fo
und Gifford sitting on a step stool. Beside him, Hannibal lay on a thick blanket on the tiled floor, craning his neck to lick an IV line taped against his foreleg.

  “No, boy! You don’t want to do that.” Gifford’s voice was firm but reassuring, as he gently pushed Hannibal’s muzzle away from the IV. “Only a few more minutes. Then we’ll have the answer.”

  Hannibal laid his head back down upon the blanket, his pink tongue drooping out of his half-open mouth.

  “What’s with the dog? You never bring him up here.”

  “I’m running a test. He’s sick and I want to know what he has.”

  The hum of the centrifuge stopped. Gifford stood up, opened the lid, and took out one of two carefully balanced glass tubes. With a needlelike glass pipette, he drew up the amber-colored serum that floated atop the heavier, dark-red layer of blood and released a drop of it into each of ten wells of a clear plastic microplate. Snapping a cover onto the plate, he placed it on a gently rocking platform inside an incubator.

  “I’m running something called an ELISA test,” said Gifford, as he picked up a bench timer and twisted the dial to the five-minute mark. “It’s a rapid way to check for the presence of viral protein in the blood.”

  Gifford sat down again next to Hannibal, who rolled up onto his stomach and rested his muzzle on his master’s lap. With his thumb, Gifford stroked the bridge of Hannibal’s nose and the little rectangular space between the bony ridges that overhung his eyes.

  Niedermann was annoyed. “We have a problem, Charles. I just spoke with the guard on duty at the BSL-4 lab. He says the place is like Grand Central Station. All kinds of people are coming in and out. Hank Wright, Erich Freiberg, Wig Waggoner—they’re running a full-scale investigation, with Rensselaer-Wright at the center of it. It’s got to be stopped.”

  “It’s Cricket’s daughter. She’s doing what she can to save her.”

  “It’s dangerous. With the Lottery less than forty-eight hours away, the timing couldn’t be worse.”

  “Just keep an eye on it, Jack.”

  The bench timer dinged. Gifford took the microplate out of the incubator and gently rinsed the serum from the wells. He then refilled them with a variety of solutions from a rack of plastic tubes. “These are antibodies to suspect viruses. We have distemper, parvovirus, ebola, canine herpes, and the two human herpes simplex viruses, type 1 and type 2—”

  “Ebola, for God’s sake?”

  “I’m trying to cover every base.” After replacing the microplate in the incubator, Gifford once again sat down and fell to stroking Hannibal’s head.

  “Why are you so concerned about this dog?”

  “Emmy’s hand. Hannibal bit her yesterday. I’m trying to eliminate him as a source of infection.”

  “The dog gave her herpes?”

  “No, not ordinary herpes. Certainly not. I had a case of that myself long ago, back in high school. Missed a few days of class, nothing more. No, this has to be something unprecedented. Herpes reborn, perhaps. More deadly than anything we’ve ever seen.”

  “The dog doesn’t look that sick. Not like Yolanda was.”

  “There’s a big genetic difference between a human and a dog. What gives one indigestion might kill the other.”

  Again the timer dinged. Gifford took out the microplate, rinsed it, and began dispensing a new solution to each well. “This is a secondary antibody. It reacts with each of the ten antibodies I added a moment ago. One end of it has been engrafted with an enzyme called horseradish peroxidase, which will give off a visible signal if it finds anything to bind to.”

  Gifford returned the microplate to the incubator and set the timer again. This time, all was quiet. Hannibal lay with his eyes closed, breathing slowly, almost sighing.

  One last ding of the timer. Niedermann watched Gifford rinse out the wells and add four drops to each from a vial of developing solution. Almost immediately, some of the wells began to turn blue.

  “It’s working. Now let’s get an exact measurement.” Gifford slipped the microplate into a toaster-size machine and locked the inner test compartment shut. “This is a spectrophotometer. It passes a beam of light through each well to check the amount of blueness in the solution.”

  A moment later, the machine spit out a paper printout of its readings.

  Gifford frowned. “Something is wrong,” he muttered.

  “What? What is it?”

  Gifford showed Niedermann the strip of thermal paper:

  Canine immunoglobulin control ++

  Canine herpesvirus–

  Human herpesvirus, type 1 ++

  Human herpesvirus, type 2

  Methuselah Vector, canine prototype–

  Methuselah Vector, human prototype ++

  Canine distemper–

  Parvovirus–

  Ebola–

  “I have no idea what this means, Charles.”

  “It says that Hannibal is infected, not with canine herpes, but with human herpesvirus, type 1—exactly the same virus that we know infected Yolanda and Emmy.”

  “So Wig Waggoner and USAMRIID were right.”

  “Yes. But this still leaves us with a mystery. How did Hannibal catch the virus? From Yolanda? Transmission of human herpes back and forth through a dog has never before been reported in all the medical or veterinary literature of the world.”

  “Forgive my ignorance, but why is it positive for the Methuselah Vector?”

  “Oh, that . . .” Gifford shook his head. “I just threw that in as a control—like the canine immunoglobulin. To prove that the test is working. It should have been negative.”

  “But it’s not.”

  “Well, it’s undoubtedly a contaminant. It happens all the time with ultrasensitive tests like this. Every surface in this lab is coated with residue from the Methuselah Vector. Only a microscopic speck of dust is needed to turn the test positive. It was a poor choice for a negative control.”

  “You’re certain of that?”

  “Of course. It’s a nonsensical result. There was a special canine form of the Vector that we tested in some of the laboratory dogs a year ago. But the ELISA test didn’t find any of that. It’s only positive for the human version.”

  Niedermann yanked the slip out of Gifford’s hand. “Then this printout needs to disappear.”

  “Why? What—”

  “Suppose Dr. Rensselaer-Wright got ahold of it? Have you forgotten what we discussed this morning over breakfast? That e-mail to Bob Keyhoe? She’s out to get you, Charles. She and Hank Wright.”

  “She’d just be making a fool of herself. The tests Wig Waggoner and USAMRIID ran prove that herpes simplex is the killer. The Methuselah Vector is . . . just an innocent bystander whose fingerprints happened to be found at the scene of the crime.”

  “Tell that to the FDA. Tell it to 60 Minutes and the Washington Post.”

  “No! That would be a public relations disaster. It could take years to get the project back on track.”

  “While a shitload of money went down the drain.”

  “Never mind the money. Do you know what mankind’s annual death rate is? Fifty million a year. That’s how many would die needlessly if the release of the Methuselah Vector were delayed for just one single year. Fifty million. More than the population of Spain or South Korea.”

  “Then you know what you have to do.”

  Gifford knocked open the lid of a biohazard waste container and angrily flung the ELISA plate into the jumble of spent tubes and culture flasks and pipette tips. Grabbing the spectrophotometer printout from Niedermann’s hand, he marched to his office.

  A moment later, Niedermann heard the grind of a paper shredder. Good. But that still leaves us with one piece of evidence—the most damning of all.

  Hannibal lay on the floor panting, looking up at Niedermann with one eye. As ev
er, Niedermann had the Sig Sauer P290 nestled in his left jacket pocket. He pulled it out. It gave a soft, well-oiled click as the slide racked back. Hannibal lifted his head and whined as Niedermann pressed the muzzle between his two eye ridges.

  A bang—and a puff of red filled the air. Hannibal’s legs stiffened and his head dropped to the floor with a thud. From behind the dog’s massive skull, there came a few arterial spurts that quickly dwindled. A pool of blood spread silently over the tiles.

  Then a force like a pile driver knocked Niedermann off his haunches and sent him bouncing against the darkroom door. The gun went flying out of his hand. As if he were at the bottom of a well, he heard a man screaming at him, “What in God’s name have you done?”

  He struggled to stay conscious. “I did what you should have,” Niedermann gasped.

  Gifford grabbed the knot of Niedermann’s red silk tie and lifted him into the air. “I could kill you, you son of a bitch.”

  Niedermann felt as if he were about to wet himself. “Kill me?” he gasped. “I just saved the lives of fifty million people.”

  “You had no right!”

  Suddenly Gifford let go. A whoosh of air filled Niedermann’s lungs as he dropped to the floor. Gifford went and knelt by the body of Hannibal, cradling the dog’s bloody head in his lap.

  “I wouldn’t hold him like that if I were you,” Niedermann warned. “If he infected Emmy Wright through his saliva, his blood’s probably even more dangerous.”

  “Go to hell.”

  Niedermann crawled across the floor to retrieve his gun and shoved it into his pocket. “You know who’s to blame for this. Not me. She made this happen.”

  Gifford said nothing, only hunched closer over Hannibal, rocking him in his lap.