A Heartbeat Away

by Michael Palmer

DAY 5

  4:00 P.M. (EST)

  “You wish something drink or you like order?” Sylvia Chen said in a heavy accent.

  She was rail-thin, with dark eyes that were nearly lost in shadow, but Angie had no doubt whatsoever that it was she. Her uniform, a black dress shirt and black slacks, was a size too large. The nametag above her breast pocket read simply BAO.

  “Sylvia,” Angie whispered, “please don’t react. I know who you are and I know why you are here. I need to speak with you. I came from Kalvesta to find you.”

  The steel pitcher in the waitress’s hand began to shake. Dollops of brown tea splashed out from the spout and stained the white tablecloth.

  “No understand,” Chen said, avoiding any eye contact.

  “Stop it,” Angie said harshly. “This is urgent.”

  The color drained from Chen’s face. Her body stiffened.

  “No … please…”

  Her eyes were wild with fear as she made a furtive scan of the restaurant. Either she was searching for an exit, or perhaps, even more terrifying to her, Angie’s accomplice.

  “Easy,” Angie said. “Please don’t call attention to yourself. I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “Are you police? Military?”

  The words were said softly. The accent was gone.

  “No, I’m not. Trust me.”

  “Are you them? Are you Genesis?”

  The woman kept trembling.

  “I’m a reporter with The Washington Post. The Capitol has been quarantined. Griffin Rhodes has been asked by the president to develop a treatment for WRX3883. I’m helping him keep a record of everything that he does. We know about how he was set up before, and we know you were involved. The president has gotten him out of prison and reopened your lab. There is little time. People are dying from the virus.”

  Chen’s knees buckled, as though mention of the past had placed too much stress on her joints. Angie reached up, supported the woman by her arm, and encouraged her to sit down. Chen refused, straightened up, and pointed to the menu on the table.

  “Is there any chance that you were followed?” she asked.

  “I don’t see how,” Angie said. “I flew in from Kansas earlier today via Denver.”

  “Genesis is very resourceful. I should never have agreed to cooperate with them, but they knew all about my work, and they knew that their financing was the last chance I had to keep my research going. They are also very dangerous. I am a loose end for them now. All they want is the virus. They don’t care about controlling it. They tried to kill me, but I escaped and came here. If they find me, I assure you, both my mother and I are dead.”

  “I can help you, Sylvia. That’s why I came to New York—to help you and to see if there is any way to control the virus. I’m working with Griffin Rhodes at your lab.”

  “He’s out of prison, you said?”

  “Yes, he’s been out for just a few days.”

  “That is wonderful news. Listen, stay here. Study your menu.”

  Angie did as she was asked, but went on red alert in case Chen bolted.

  The Ph.D. scientist went to service a table of four, then returned.

  “I’m going to ask you again. Is it possible you were followed?”

  “I know the people who are after you are resourceful,” Angie replied, “so I suppose anything’s possible. But I really don’t see how.”

  Chen looked unconvinced.

  “How did you find me?”

  “The brochure in the peach cookbook,” was all Angie needed to say.

  “Did my mother tell you I was here in the restaurant?”

  “I didn’t find your mother. Where does she live?”

  “Riverside. I thought you knew that.”

  “On close inspection, the woman I thought was your mother—a woman named Li—didn’t look like her.”

  Angie’s puzzled expression seemed to clarify the mystery for Chen.

  “Ah. Li is the name I made up for her. Her real name is Chen, same as mine. Chen Su. You went looking for the woman in the picture on my desk, yes?”

  Angie nodded. “I checked every patient in Riverside.”

  “Do you know how Alzheimer’s disease can ravage the body? Alter the appearance?”

  “I do. How long has your mother had Alzheimer’s?”

  “It’s been progressing for several years. She still floats in and out, and is sometimes quite lucid, but it is getting worse. The woman in the photograph in my office is the woman I want to remember. This is what my mother looks like now.”

  Chen fished out a picture from her pocket and handed it to Angie. Then she went off again to take orders. When she returned, she set a steaming bowl of some sort of seafood soup in front of Angie.

  “This is the best thing on the menu,” she said, “especially on a cold winter’s day like today. I hope you like it. You just came in here by chance, then?”

  “I was starved and this was the closest place to the Riverside. Mei, the nurse there, said the daughter who visits Mrs. Li was badly scarred by a fire.”

  “When I go there I am wearing a hat. My face is covered by a scarf. My hands are hidden by gloves. I lie to protect my mother and myself.”

  “You have to help us,” Angie said.

  Chen paused for a time.

  “I know,” she said finally.

  She took another nervous look about the restaurant, and even glanced several times out the front windows. Droplets of perspiration had appeared like condensation on her brow.

  “So you will help us?”

  “I’ve done terrible things,” the virologist said in a shaky voice. “I did not know they would do this. The attack on the Capitol. How could I have known?”

  “What were you told would happen? Do you know who these people are? Do you have any idea how we can stop this?”

  Chen shut Angie off.

  “Eleven o’clock the restaurant will be closed,” she said. “It is too busy here for the rest of the evening. Too dangerous to talk now. Come into the alley at the back of the restaurant. Red door with Chinese lettering on it. Knock three times so I know it is you. I have some papers that might help. I’ll tell you everything that I know then.”

  “Eleven o’clock,” Angie said.

  Chen nodded grimly, turned, and vanished through the swinging kitchen doors.

  CHAPTER 36

  DAY 5

  10:00 P.M. (CST)

  Sleep.

  Griff’s eyes stung with a persistent gritty burn that he knew only sleep could relieve. He felt desperate to rub at them, to coax some moisture out of the tear glands, but the plastic face shield on his biosuit made it impossible, and the forty minutes it would take to remove his helmet, massage his eyes, and get suited up again were an unacceptable waste of time. Relief would have to wait. The same with sleep.

  Thirty-six hours straight now since his last nap.

  Gratefully, the concentration involved with his work eased the time along.

  His limbs felt leaden, and his joints ached inside the bulky protective suit. Every twenty minutes or so, he took a brief walk through the Kitchen to Sylvia Chen’s office, and back to his own. Perhaps he had gone without sleep this long during his months in solitary confinement, but it was hard to track time in such an utterly monotonous place. Here, more than two hundred feet underground, he had the added reminder of wall-mounted digital clocks in every room.

  He took a break, went online, and looked up the record for continuous sleep depravation. Eleven days by a seventeen-year-old student in the sixties. Guinness had subsequently closed the category for fear of causing serious health problems in those attempting to get their bit of immortality, although no adverse effects were reported in the high schooler.

  Back to work.

  Griff adjusted the electron microscope until it projected crystal-clear images of WRX3883’s submicroscopic world onto an attached television monitor. Despite the screen’s high-definition resolution, he had to strain to keep the image in f
ocus. Forty-five minutes slid by. He rose from his chair, but knew it had been too long. His knees had gone to Jell-O and he stumbled twice before managing his brief walk.

  I’ll just close my eyes for a few seconds, he decided.… Just a few seconds.

  Griff’s head dropped forward onto his arms, and in moments, his thoughts began to fade. Then, just as suddenly, they reappeared, centering about horrific images from the Capitol—snapshots of people whose lives he had vowed to try and save. As if he were at the wheel on a long-distance drive, he snapped his head from side to side until he produced a jet of renewed consciousness that did the trick—at least for the moment. If he had to stay alert for another thirty-six hours, he would do it.

  It had taken several hours of painstaking effort to get his lab operational again, but things seemed to be working remarkably well. The computers had sparked back to life and were picking up where he had last left off some ten months ago. Cultures of the blood brought from the Capitol were cooking in cell lines Melvin had prepared.

  WRX3883 was a hearty, rapidly multiplying microbe, and after several hours of growth, they were able to move samples of the virus from the incubator to the electron microscope’s airless vacuum chamber. Griff proceeded to collect data from those samples, which he then input into his software application. From there, he could simulate the response to variations of his antiviral treatment. The end result, if successful, would be a new approach to interfering with WRX3883 replication.

  During the early days in Sylvia Chen’s lab at Columbia, flushed with a series of successes, he had nicknamed his program Orion, in honor of the legendary great hunter of Greek mythology. Griff’s Orion had only one mission: hunt WRX3883 to extinction, without harming the host. For now, Orion was computer-generated, but if Griff could map out the right RNA design, it could be synthesized in a lab or even inserted into a cell line.

  For a time, the excitement surrounding his work was dizzying.

  Then, the failures began.

  In every computer simulation he ran, WRX3883 battled his creation with the same lethal ferocity of the gods’ assassin, Scorpius, the scorpion, who eventually felled the great hunter Orion.

  This scorpion’s lethal weapon: mutation.

  WRX3883 was as quick as it was deadly. From a germ with effects limited to the deep central nervous system, suddenly there were computer indications of disastrous damage to tissue cultures grown from blood and gastrointestinal cells as well.

  Again and again, Griff’s attacking protein seemed close to working. But in this battle, Orion’s near successes were still the equivalent of abject failure. The missing link, he knew, might be something as close as a minor RNA sequence modification, or something as distant as Orion, the constellation. No matter how close the breakthrough was, according to Griff’s models the result for the infected host remained the same—death.

  Another stroll through the Kitchen, and he shifted his attention from the television screen of magnified WRX virus to Sylvia Chen’s laboratory notebooks, which were laid open and stacked atop one another on the stainless steel table beside the electron microscope. He flipped through pages of notes dictated into a computer program, or written in his former boss’s small, irregular hand, but as with the images generated by the microscope, exhaustion blurred the words. He’d come to the last of the three-ring binders, and was flipping through old lab notes searching for anything of interest to his work, when one report in particular caught his breath.

  The report, titled simply “The Macaque Incident,” and dated a year and a half ago, detailed the most horrific account of animal testing Griff had ever seen. A simple protocol mistake by an animal keeper in Hell’s Kitchen—Sylvia Chen’s animal lab—infected thirty Rhesus monkeys with exceedingly high doses of WRX3883. Their decline, stunningly rapid, was captured on video for later study.

  Chen’s documented account was disturbingly graphic, and evoked in Griff memories he had long wished to forget. It was his policy never to go near the animal lab unless he positively had to. But the cries for help from the caretaker had brought him down there. He tried to help the animals with a variety of antiviral drugs, and even one of his more advanced serums. But there was nothing he, or anybody, could do to save them. He could still hear screams of dying monkeys, some so sick that they used their rapier-like nails to slice their own bodies to ribbons, trying to scratch the virus out.

  The disastrous Macaque Incident notwithstanding, Sylvia Chen remained convinced that her work with primates held the answer to terminating a WRX3883 infection before the microbes could mutate. Griff constantly considered incorporating elements of Chen’s research findings with his own, but could not bring himself even to appear to endorse her methods. Now, as much as it sickened him to read through her notes, he knew they might contain useful nuggets that could help uncover Orion’s missing piece.

  Griff had read a survey in which 90 percent of the general public accepted the use of animals in medical research, so long as that research involved serious medical conditions, and all alternatives had been fully considered before sacrificing the experimental subjects. He argued that WRX3883 was a weapon, without any true medical gain to be had. He also pushed his own methods as a viable alternative.

  Chen’s only concession was to keep him employed and provide him a platform for proving or disproving his hypotheses.

  Forbush entered the lab and set a box of pipettes on the counter by the stainless steel sink.

  “After Sylvia vanished, the FBI wanted to take those notebooks,” he said. “Two guys who looked like Michael Douglas and Harvey Keitel searched her lab and office. They hated the biosuits and ended up knocking over just about everything that wasn’t screwed down. When I told them they couldn’t take anything out of here, they were really upset. They read the notes in Sylvia’s office, but I don’t think they got much out of them. How about you?”

  “There are things here and there that might be useful, but I just don’t know if I want to study them. It makes me sick to have to relive that monkey disaster.”

  “Now that you mention it, my friend, you really do look a little sick. Can you take a break?”

  Griff rejected the suggestion, even though his stomach felt hollow and his body as though Novocain had been pumped in as a replacement for his blood.

  “We’ve got to push ahead, Melvin,” he said, “at least for a few more hours. Then maybe I’ll take a short break.”

  “Good idea. When you walk, you’re starting to look like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein.”

  Arms out front, Forbush dramatized the remark.

  “Thanks, Melvin,” Griff said. “You know, I’ve been wondering. What if Sylvia had the wrong animals?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She tested on Rhesus monkeys, but never on chimpanzees, partly because she knew I would have drawn the line at that and left the project. Their immune system is closest to our own. I wonder now if that would have made a difference.”

  “I can get the chimps,” Forbush said. “Just say the word. It may take a little while, though.”

  The notion of working on chimpanzees soured Griff’s stomach. Even assuming Melvin could procure the animals reasonably quickly, Griff would have to abandon Orion to chase another path—one that could prove costly in terms of time, just to satisfy some SWAT—a Scientific Wild Ass Theory.

  Would it be worth it?

  CHAPTER 37

  DAY 5

  11:00 P.M. (EST)

  The alley behind the Sechuan Hop smelled of rotting vegetables. Frozen towers of cardboard boxes, stacked taller than Angie stood, abutted two Dumpsters overflowing with garbage and refuse. Dense overcast and the buildings themselves obscured any moonlight, and steel fire escapes protruding from the buildings made the narrow passageway seem even more foreboding.

  Angie pulled the red knit hat she had bought from a street vendor down over her ears to shield them from a biting wind. At precisely eleven o’clock, as instructed, she knocked three times on
the cold steel of the restaurant’s alleyway entrance. On the second knock, the door budged. On the third, it swung open several inches, grating on rusted hinges. Angie took a cautious step inside and glanced about the basement, which was minimally lit from a source ahead and to her right. No one was there to greet her. She was unwilling to close the door any further.

  “Sylvia?” Angie called out.

  Nothing.

  She was forced to clear her throat to speak again.

  “Sylvia, are you here?”

  But for the wind down the alley, the silence was absolute.

  Floor-to-ceiling metal shelving, stocked with dried goods and restaurant supplies, created the feeling of claustrophobia that Angie had recently found so disturbing. Ahead of her, the shelves split to form three narrow aisles, two of which were dark. Angie took a tentative step down the center one, then another. Ahead, she could now make out a bare, low-wattage bulb, suspended on a short cord. A shaft of light from the bulb cast a long, distorted shadow across the cement floor. Angie’s heart was hammering now. She sensed another presence in the basement. She wanted to leave—to simply turn and run. Instead, she took another step forward.

  “Sylvia? Sylvia, please. Are you there?”

  The shadow ahead seemed to waver slightly. Angie could make out the shape of long arms and fingers. As frightened as she was, she was also transfixed.

  “Please?” she said, her voice now little more than a whimper.

  She took another half step toward the shadow, then another, pausing to listen and to check between the shelves on either side, as well as behind her. She had reached the end of the aisle. The shadow extended almost to where she was standing, although a shelf blocked her from seeing the source. Jaws and fists clenched, she peered around the shelving. Then she gasped. Sylvia Chen was hanging by an electric cord wrapped around her neck. The toes of her black work shoes, pointing down, were several inches off the concrete. The other end of the cord had been tossed over an exposed pipe, and then secured to a nearby steel support column.

  The scientist’s head was bowed, obscuring her face. Angie moved numbly to Sylvia’s side and took her hand. Her skin was warm.