Chimera

by Sonny Whitelaw

  Despite his inherent dislike of volcanoes, Nate had been as fascinated as the vulcanologist by the strange landscape. It wasn't until they'd surfaced in the driving rain that Nate's sense of disquiet had set in. The dirt road back to the village was already a morass, which did not bode well for the condition of the landing strip. If this was an overture to the wet season, he could be stuck down here for months.

  Late that afternoon, as Nate stood tending a patient, the ground shuddered. Glass jars clinked against one another, and the steel instruments on the surgical tray rattled noisily. Like most of Vanuatu, Mathew Island was the exposed apex of an underwater volcano that extended miles beneath the ocean. Someone had once compared the archipelago to a dragon whose spiny back erupted blood and death from the Pacific waters.

  Nate shook off the grim image and concentrated on cleaning pus from the boil on his patient's leg. The storm had done nothing to relieve the damned humidity, and the oppressive atmosphere was getting to him. "Okay, bubu , Sister will bandage it," he said to the old man. When Katie took over, he added, "Now remember, stop pinching the pikinini's bonbons and you shouldn't get so many boils."

  The textbooks said that there was no relationship between sugar consumption and boils, but in the tropics, textbook answers didn't always apply. When Nate had arrived five years earlier, he'd been appalled at the rudimentary operating theatres and equipment. He'd soon learned to view the situation as a challenge, not only to his medical training but also to his personal ingenuity.

  The ancient screen door of the clinic squeaked open, then banged shut behind Mike Warner. He was scowling and his clothes were filthy.

  "What's up, rained out?" asked Nate. He went to the sink to wash his hands.

  "Yeah." Warner smeared the mud off his face-and into his beard. "I got halfway to the top when a lahar stopped me."

  Katie's head shot up. "You what?" she demanded.

  "Heard it coming, got out of the way real fast." Warner grinned.

  "Not fast enough, huh?" Ash from the volcano accumulated during the dry season. After a rainstorm, on flat areas it set like concrete, but on the steep slopes of the volcano it would rush down narrow gorges in deadly torrents.

  "I had to get back down through it." Warner's nose wrinkled in frustration. "There's no way I'm going to replace the sensor up near the crater this year. Still," he scratched his beard, smearing the gunk around some more, "the seas don't look too bad, and the weather forecast for tomorrow is good." He turned to Katie. "If it's okay with you, I'd like to take one of the boys and the launch to Hunter Island, to retrieve the data and replace the sensor."

  "Sure," she replied. "There's plenty of diesel and it needs a good run, clean out the cobwebs. Why don't you go, too, Nate?"

  "Can't." Nate dried his hands and glanced outside. The sun was setting and the sky was beginning to clear.

  "Go on, take the launch and have a day off." Katie helped the old man off the table. "We've already got everyone's blood samples, and you'll still be here another four days. I'll have Nettie make you a picnic lunch."

  A trip to Hunter Island might relieve his sense of claustrophobia, still- "The villagers are going to want to see me at clinic tomorrow."

  "Nate, you've seen everyone who wanted to see you today," Katie countered, helping the old man to the door.

  Outside, Nate noticed the bubu's grandson waiting. He nodded and called, "Good night, Samson."

  " Gudnaet , Dr Nate," the boy replied, handing his bubu a boiled sweet.

  Katie chuckled knowingly, closed the door and turned to him. "Really, everyone in the village is fine. As long as you go and visit the chief tomorrow night, have a shell or two of kava with them, they'll be happy."

  The clinic was empty but for a woman who'd given birth earlier that afternoon. Both she and the baby were fine. The only reason she was still there was because her husband was up on the northern side of the island, fishing. "Okay," he said, smiling at Warner. "You twisted my arm."

  Later that evening, Nate sat on a camping chair beside the hot springs. Using a length of split bamboo, he held two pre-packaged meals in the water. The sun had long since set, but the glow from the volcano provided enough light to see. He generally ate whatever meals the villagers served him, having distributed his relatively exotic food and precious tins of coffee as payment in kind, but the rain had saturated everything, including the outdoor kitchens.

  "Girls don't want dinner," said Warner, joining him. "I think they ate all of the chocolates. They're in the cottage, huddled over the computer and chatting to their buddies."

  Nate accepted a beer and raised it in salute. "And you thought you could use it to get Katie into bed." The beer wasn't exactly icy, but it beat the hell out of water tainted with the stench of sulphur.

  "Gimme a break."

  "Katie's going to Vila on the same flight as you." Nate eased the packets out of the water. "You think they're done?"

  "Yeah, drop 'em in this." Warner held out a large wooden bowl. "She's goin' back to the States for Christmas?"

  "On Air Pacific. I confirmed her reservation before I left Vila." The ground rumbled and shifted alarmingly. Swearing, Nate made a quick grab for his beer. "Doesn't that ever bother you?"

  Warner chuckled. "Nope." He pried the food packets apart and poured their contents into bowls. "You don't much like it, huh?"

  "Why do you think I left New Zealand?"

  "There's a valley on the island of Crete that's supposed to be full of ghosts, or demons or ancient gods, depending on your beliefs." Warner handed him a bowl of food. "When you go there, it fills you with such an overwhelming sense of dread that the hairs on your neck literally stand up. Animals won't go near the place, not even birds. Just like Vanuatu, there's almost continuous seismic activity on Crete. Most of the time you don't notice the tremors-except in this one particular valley. The seismic waves and unique geological configuration creates an unusual subliminal harmonic-which happens to resonate with the part of our brain that triggers a fear response. You feel dread, even terror, and every one of your instincts is screaming for you to get the hell outta there, but only because of the harmonics, not because there's anything to fear. Still," he mused, "try telling your brain that."

  "So you're saying the only reason I don't like volcanoes is the harmonics?"

  "Nah." Warner downed the last of his beer and pulled a fork from his shirt pocket. "There's nothing unhealthy about fearing 'em. Vulcanologists have a higher job-related mortality rate than New York cops." He paused with his fork over the meal, thoughtful. "I like 'em because they're alive, creative and yet they're staggeringly violent. They're the one thing on this planet that nothing, absolutely nothing can stand up against. You can hide in the basement from a tornado, build a structure to withstand a cyclone, even a big earthquake or tsunami, and you can put out forest fires. Sure, there's been some success in diverting lava flows from smaller eruptions. But for the most part, when a volcano blows its top, you get out of their way or you die. It doesn't get any simpler than that. But they don't scare me because they're not malevolent. And I respect them. You wanna know what really frightens me?"

  "Having all six of your computers crash at once?"

  "Bugs, your bugs." He pointed his fork at Nate. "You can't see 'em, can't feel 'em until it's too late. They attack using-what did you call haemorrhagic dengue? Stealth technology?"

  Nate nodded. "It fools the immune system, especially if you've had the non-haemorrhagic type first."

  "Bugs scare the crap out of me." Warner glanced over his shoulder at the glowering volcano. "A hell of a lot more than that."

  Later that night, Nate stretched out on one of the beds in the clinic and stared through the window at the pulsating clouds over the volcano. The sound of the surf on the shingled beach failed to relax him. Every time he closed his eyes, he could see the lava hissing and thrashing against the rim of the crater, like surf rolling up the shore, trying to reach him. Sleep, when it came at last, was restless and
troubled.

  -Chapter 7-

  Quantico

  Dispersal: Plus 27 hours

  Jordan hadn't had time to do more than skim over the file that Brant had given her. Appalled by her ignorance, or more correctly, her gross naivety, she had sat through the morning's briefing in a state of shock. This was her profession, and yet it seemed she knew nothing of what had been going on.

  After the meeting, Brant directed her to go with Tina Giovanni, a surprisingly youthful CIA library researcher. Giovanni led her through a warren of cubbyhole offices down into a massive archive room, and handed her a bundle of classified files. Jordan's immediate job was to bring herself up to speed on the latest research, and make herself available for round-the-clock consultation.

  With Giovanni's help, she sorted the files into a grid pattern across the floor. At the top was a time line beginning in 1938, down the side countries by alphabetical order. Within an hour, Jordan realised she would need weeks, not days, to absorb the material. Giovanni, bless her, reminded Jordan that they weren't asking her to write a paper for Nature , they needed a virologist with the proper security clearances, and, in the worst case scenario, a pathologist qualified in a Racal suit and experienced with working in a hot zone.

  Scanning the briefs and summaries of the files, Jordan zeroed in on research by the Soviets. The more she read, the angrier she became. It wasn't the screaming, tortuous rage that had set up residence in her soul since Oklahoma, but a quieter, deeply rooted anger at the actions of a latter-day Josef Mengele.

  When her stomach began grumbling she realised that she'd missed breakfast and lunch. Grabbing a Science journal featuring articles on transposons-genes that jumped from place to place-Jordan left Giovanni snacking on her fourth candy bar and headed upstairs to the cafeteria.

  "Why did Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer win the Nobel Prize?"

  Startled, Jordan looked up from her half-eaten lasagne. McCabe's boyishly handsome face was only inches from hers. The low buzz of conversation, scraping of chairs, and the clatter of eating utensils seemed louder. She suddenly felt crowded, but refused to back away from him. "They envisaged using recombinant DNA as a delivery method to target certain areas of the body, like cancer cells, with specific drugs," she replied. "They succeeded with E. coli ."

  "By placing foreign genes inside E. coli to make them resistant to antibiotics," McCabe replied, glancing down at the Science journal. "Two microbial Frankensteins were awarded the Nobel Prize for cutting and pasting genetic material from many life forms to create a new life form-a chimera. Just what the world needed, antibiotic resistant E. coli . I bet when Cohen and Boyer were kids they had those little books where you flip page sections back and forth to make an animal with the with the head of a lion, body of a goat and tail of a dragon."

  Could the damned man read her mind? "Your metaphor stinks."

  "If you knew your Greek mythology, you'd know it wasn't a metaphor, and are your buttons always this easy to push?"

  Jordan winced. Not normally. "Einstein, Oppenheimer and Fermi suffered the same moral dilemmas with the atomic bomb. It pays never to forget that in the wrong hands, every tool can be a turned into a weapon."

  "And there'll always be wrong hands, even amongst the good guys."

  "So, what can I do for you, Special Agent McCabe?" She closed the journal.

  Instead of sitting down opposite, he sat beside her, close to her, then leaned even closer and whispered, "Think like a bad guy, then tell me your fantasies."

  She blinked and moved back just far enough so that he was still in focus. "I'm sorry?"

  "Bad guy molecular biology fantasies," McCabe added. "What chimera would you build with the credo 'more bang for your buck'?"

  "Haven't you already decided it's Ebola-smallpox?"

  "I never take anything for granted. Sure, the Soviet's developed an Ebola-smallpox chimera, but we don't know how far they progressed. I want to know why-microbially speaking-they would choose that particular combination. Maybe they ended up developing a hybrid from four viruses. Or five. What bits go where? Why?"

  The morning's presentation had left Jordan struggling with the notion that a virologist would make an already horrific microbe deadlier. It was an obscenity that defied the most fundamental tenet of medicine, primum non nocere , first do no harm. Jordan pushed her plate aside and finished her juice. "Okay." She turned to face him. "You obviously know more about virology than your average forensic psychologist."

  "Psychiatrist."

  "You're a psychiatrist?" He hardly looked old enough. But then he'd been in Zaire-

  "And you're a virologist and board certified pathologist," he shot back. "Dr Spinner, I'm not here to play one-upmanship or analyze your emotional state; I have my own issues to deal with. All I want is to pick your professional brain."

  Now he was pushing the right buttons. Did he know that? Did he care? He wasn't even looking at her. Jordan crossed her arms. It was like sitting beside a coiled spring in an expensive suit.

  The analogy was driven home when he abruptly stood and walked out of the cafeteria, his dark overcoat flapping behind his long legs.

  "Agent McCabe?" she called. When he kept walking, Jordan glanced at her half-finished meal, tossed the napkin on the table, picked up the journal and followed him. "McCabe? Wait up!"

  He didn't stop until she grabbed his sleeve. "I said-" She placed herself directly in front of him. "Wait!" At one hundred and eighty centimetres she rarely had to stare up at a man, but McCabe had at least seven centimetres on her.

  "We don't have time to wait." He stepped around her, pushed open the double glass doors, and walked outside.

  "Fine." It irked her that he had climbed inside her head and knew exactly what was going on in there. She didn't want sympathy; she wanted to be treated like the professional that she was. But because he was doing just that, she was looking for a hidden agenda.

  "Where do you want to have this conversation?" she said, catching up with him outside.

  He swung around. "Right here."

  A few flakes of snow landed on her face. No overcoat. Great. "My head's freezing. Let's get somewhere warmer."

  "Why don't you let your hair grow back?" he said, walking back inside with her.

  "I will, now." Jordan rubbed a hand over her spiky blond stubble. "Couple of places the bone was chipped, might've needed a small plate inserted, but it's okay now. Keeping it shaved made more sense, then it sorta became a habit." She knew exactly what his psychologist's- psychiatrist's -mind would do with that, but she didn't much care. And if she was right about him, neither would he.

  They passed the elevators to the stairs, went up two flights and through a bullpen alive with activity. McCabe opened a glass-paned office door and stood back for her to enter first.

  The office was surprisingly large. Wooden slat blinds were pulled low over all the windows. The bookshelves were half empty, and the notice-board barren except for a lonely cluster of rainbow-coloured pin-tacks. No framed certificates or awards, no trophies, desk ornaments, or family snapshots. Either McCabe didn't have a life, or he kept it out of working hours, or this was a temporary office. "Yours?"

  "For the moment." He pulled off his coat, hung it on a rack, went to the desk and opened a drawer.

  Jordan sat in one of the two-seater leather lounge chairs opposite the desk. She looked up when something landed on her lap: a velvet-soft black beanie. Despite the central heating, her ears were cold, so she pulled it over her head. "Better." She offered him a quick smile. Brant had employed her to act as a consultant, conditional on her being able to work. And that meant instead of cadavers, she'd have to work with live people, even those who had a chip on their shoulder larger than hers.

  "Talk to me." McCabe came around the desk and sat in the chair opposite. "I'm meeting the team leaders in half an hour."

  "Stop me if I'm telling you stuff you already know. Do you want to take notes?"

  "I have a good memory."

/>   Douglas had said the same thing when they'd met. Jordan gripped the journal she was carrying, anchoring herself in the feel of the paper under her fingers. "I examined the Soviet research papers on combining viruses. They weren't as detailed as I would have liked, but at this time I see no reason to refute their claims. Thing is, the work is old, three, four years old, so they've likely progressed.

  "What you need to understand is that viruses and bacteria swap genes so fast that microbiologists don't talk of species, but clades. Microorganisms live together in a sort of soup. Sure, they compete with each other for an ecological niche, but they can also exchange genes via a direct recombination, or a transposon-a jumping gene for want of a better term."

  Tapping the journal for emphasis, she added, "It's well-documented that a bacterium can become instantly resistant to antibiotics by getting the necessary gene from other organisms within this microbial soup. It can then pass this gene to other bacterium until, often within hours, we have a massive colony of antibiotic resistant bacteria. So, what we once thought of as a well-understood, normally harmless microbe can, under the right circumstances, become instantly lethal and highly resistant to drugs.

  "Viruses are much smaller. In fact they're just bits of protein and nucleic acid. Because they're so tiny, they don't have space to carry much genetic baggage. They don't feed, breathe, or mate, but they do reproduce-by getting inside a cell and inserting genetic material that instructs that cell's manufacturing components to recreate copies of the virus. The copies, or progeny, then leave to infect other cells in a replication process that, unchecked, can turn a human body into a seething viral mass within an alarmingly short period of time."

  Jordan scratched her head under the beanie. The material was soft, but the stubble caught it here and there. "The reason that this replication process doesn't normally happen is because our bodies have evolved defence mechanisms. Our skin and the mucous membranes in our nose, throat and lungs provide the first barriers. Viruses that get through are then confronted by a sophisticated immune system patrolling our blood stream. Any virus that evades detection has generally done so by acquiring a few specialty genes from the microbial soup I mentioned. Once inside the host cells, the viruses then dump these unwanted genes in exchange for the genes to replicate. Think of them as having genetic weapons to slip past our defensive lines until they're safe inside our body's cells. Then they exchange their weapons for the ability to have offspring."