The Devil on Chardonnay

by Ed Baldwin

  My last thought will be of you.

  Jacques

  To the World:

  Mosby is a middle-age American, slender and bald, who said he was trying to produce a vaccine for Ebola. I don’t know why. He paid me to wait in the Congo for two years for an outbreak of Ebola. When I found it, I collected it and brought it here. I isolated the virus in monkey tissue culture and reproduced a small quantity of live, freeze-dried virus. I gave that to him in February. I produced more, and separated pure RNA from the protein coat. I prepared a vaccine by splicing a segment of the RNA he had identified with a plasmid he provided.

  The project to test immune response to the vaccine is what has gone wrong. We vaccinated 10 Macaques and then exposed them to Ebola. Several got sick, and one died. We brought in 10 more and vaccinated them, and some of them got sick when we exposed them, but none died. When we brought in the third group, monkeys started getting sick before we vaccinated or exposed any of them. One of the previous monkeys must have had a subclinical infection. All the fresh monkeys got sick and eight of them died. Then Franz and I got sick. The vaccinated monkeys are all still alive.

  If evil can be personified in a submicroscopic particle, Ebola is it. It is primitive and constantly mutating. I saw it become dormant to await a fresh group of monkeys, and then jump from Macaques to humans before the illness was recognized. Mosby spent $2 million to secretly acquire viable virus, purified RNA, and a vaccine. He knows exactly what he has.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Albatross

  Raybon Clive dove nude into the Indian Ocean and savored the cool water on a warm day. He let the dive take him deep, then kicked to return to the surface with a surge of power using his specially adapted flipper prosthesis and a dive flipper on his good leg. He broke the surface like a swordfish and splashed on his side. He’d been a competitive swimmer in college and mentioned that to the VA therapist during his rehab. They’d made him a special flipper attachment for his prosthetic leg. Now he turned on the speed, freestyle, and swam the length of the Albatross, turned and swam back with the backstroke, then butterfly, then breast stroke.

  Watching from the cargo door, Davann held their “shark gun,” a bolt action .30-caliber rifle with a 7-power scope loaded with hollow-point, 180-grain bullets. Their AR-15 assault rifle would throw out lead faster, but it was high velocity and only .223-caliber. The shark gun’s bullet would explode on impact, blowing a volleyball sized hole in the fin of shark. That would teach even the largest great white a lesson.

  Raybon swam in leisurely circles admiring the Albatross, now owned by the United States of America for the second time.

  “A toast! To the United States Air Force,” he’d proposed two nights before at the Yacht Club, standing and holding up one of the three shots of bourbon he’d ordered. They’d been drinking beer throughout the early evening as Boyd explained his mission and what their part would be. Boyd had been honest about the danger. Raybon didn’t care, and he knew Davann didn’t care, and he knew Davann wouldn’t let an Air Force toast stand without toasting the Marine Corps, and then Raybon was going to toast the Army, then the Navy and then the Coast Guard. He was eager to be a part of the action again, but first he was going to negotiate the terms.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Fort Belvoir, Virginia

  “Let’s just go right to the data,” General Ferguson said, impatient as ever. Joe Smith set up his laptop on the conference table and hooked it into the flat screen TV in a crowded office conference room of the US Strategic Command’s Center for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction at Fort Belvoir in suburban Virginia, less than 20 miles from the Pentagon. A handful of other officers found seats. Boyd and Joe had driven down from Fort Detrick, Maryland, where they had debriefed with USAMRIID and spent their first weekend back from Diego Garcia, rested and apparently free from any contagion.

  “They were here,” Boyd said, pointing as a map of the Indian Ocean came up on the screen. He described the buildings and the island.

  “How long do you think they were there on the island?” Ferguson asked.

  “Four months.”

  “Based on what data do you make that assumption?”

  “The amount of shit in the privy, sir,” Boyd responded with a straight face.

  A wave of suppressed laughter crossed the room. Ferguson smiled faintly, and then cut it off. “Colonel Smith, what do you have?”

  “There were two men on the island, and seven monkeys, all dead.” With that, Joe opened the first picture of the charred skull with Joe’s finger pointing out the gaping defect where the steam from the boiling brain had blown out the back of the head. The ghastly picture filled the 60-inch flat-screen on the wall.

  “The crispy critter was gravely ill with Ebola but died of two gunshot wounds to the back,” as he showed the open chest with the bullet hole in the heart.

  Ferguson sat up a little straighter, as if he hadn’t expected such a graphic report.

  “The purpura is clearly seen here on the liver,” Joe went on. “And spleen,” and changed again. “This electron photomicrograph shows filovirus in liver tissue taken at autopsy. Cultures of blood were positive, and radioimmunoassay showed an immune response to filovirus.” He closed the file and opened another. After years of lecturing to medical students, using material much duller than this, Joe was a master at arranging slides to document and highlight his monotone lectures.

  “The bullets were .32-caliber, and the ballistics matched perfectly the French MAB .32-caliber automatic found in the pants of the second subject.” He showed a picture of Jacques and the automatic beside his right front pants pocket.

  “Judging from the angle of the entry and exit wounds, the assailant stood behind the victim while he was seated and fired two shots, the same number missing from the magazine. Death was within two minutes, though incapacitation would have been immediate. The fire came later.”

  “Was there any sign that anyone else was on the island, either then or before?” asked one of the officers at the other end of the conference table.

  “No sign of anyone else. Two plates, two cups, two sleeping bags. Of course, there could have been someone else at some time in the past. The buildings were over a year old,” Boyd answered.

  “The other individual provided us with the interesting narrative you have read,” Joe returned to the slides. The picture showed Jacques, now nude, supine on the ground, his long skinned penis draped across his lower abdomen and pointing to a small tattoo of a leopard on his hip. The laboratory notebook was just beyond, open to the handwritten notes. Joe went on to show the internal organs and describe the positive cultures and immune response to Ebola. He ended the section with the brain, exposed by the electric saw and exhibiting “typical petechial and subependymal hemorrhages.”

  When the bloated monkey, chest and brain exposed, appeared, Ferguson excused himself and went to the bathroom down the hall. Boyd and Joe exchanged smiles.

  A strong friendship had begun when they took off their biohazard suits and stood there in urine soaked undershorts, feeling dirty and exhausted. Boyd stripped off nude and walked to the edge of the rocks and jumped into the ocean. Joe followed, and when Raybon got there with the Zodiac, they were splashing about like kids. They’d landed with half a ton of equipment, and were leaving nude with two body bags and a sealed box no bigger than a briefcase. The rest burned brightly on the island. Raybon and Davann, napping all day, now preflighted the Albatross, and they were off on a seven-hour flight to Diego Garcia and three weeks of drinking beer and fishing while checking each day for a rash to develop; a rash that would signal the end of their days.

  Feguson returned. “So, what made that man’s face so grotesque?” he asked, as if he’d not been puking in the bathroom for 10 minutes. The monkey picture was still on the screen.

  “Gulls, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Seagulls, sir. They pecked his eyes out. Ate his lips, sir. He was sitting there on the beach for n
early a week,” Boyd responded, respectfully but fighting to maintain a straight face.

  Joe said, blandly, “The clinical information is pretty standard from here on, sir. We can skip the next six monkeys and go right to the equipment, if you like.”

  “Ah, good idea. Yes. Can’t get bogged down here. Press on.”

  “This is a tissue incubator,” Joe said, closing the monkey file and opening another, the first picture of which showed a burned stainless steel cabinet that looked like a small refrigerator. “They used it to grow Ebola in a cell culture, probably monkey kidney, as that’s common and they had a full supply of monkeys.” He changed to a picture of charred plastic and metal box, about 3 feet square.

  “This isolation chamber is really too small for their purposes, but they apparently used it to make inoculations and to work with cultures. They isolated the virus in this centrifuge.”

  Joe changed slides rapidly now.

  “And freeze dried it in this. This is an ultracentrifuge, which will separate RNA from the protein cover of the viral cell.”

  “Wait, why would they do that?” Ferguson asked, recovered from the monkey pictures and back to his job as a general officer, stopping the show and asking questions.

  Joe frowned, stopped changing pictures, and looked at Ferguson. “That’s what’s bothering me. What did Mosby want with RNA? I can think of a couple of harebrained ways he might use it for a vaccine. I get sweaty when I think about some of the other things he might do with it.”

  “Like what?”

  “He could start cutting it up into segments and trying to splice them into something else to see what each segment does. He might have the idea that some feature of Ebola, if separated from the rest of it, might be worth something. Very, very dangerous thing to do. Especially if he isn’t any better at it than these two clowns were at what they did. He could end up putting Ebola’s worst trait into some common virus, like herpes, and letting it get out.”

  “Herpes?” Ferguson asked, quizzical look on his face.

  “In addition to a cold sore, you’d get purpura and hemorrhages like we saw on Jacques there,” Joe responded, pointing to the flat-screen.

  Ferguson frowned, then added, “OK, go on. What next?”

  “This next slide shows the back of the centrifuge where the manufacturer puts a plate telling which model it is and where it was made. You can see there, it’s been ground off. Everything was like that. They knew going in they were going to leave the equipment, and they didn’t want it traced.”

  “How much is all that worth?”

  “Two hundred thousand dollars, maybe a little less. Some of it was old.”

  “Not state of the art?”

  “No, but adequate.” He paused, waiting for more questions. “OK, that’s what I have. Boyd, you’re up.”

  He closed his files and opened Boyd’s.

  Boyd went through a brief summary of the interesting volcanic birth of the island only a hundred years before and showed some slides of the cone and the lava flow to the sea. Then the generator house came up.

  “See those nails bent up. A slow explosive, like gunpowder or dynamite, would have built up pressure slower and blown the building apart. Plastique is hot and fast. It acts as an incendiary when it’s not contained, and a very fast explosive when it is.” He flicked through the sequence of the roof, summarizing a week’s work with some army bomb experts while on Diego. “The detonator was an electronic blasting cap, initiated by a satellite phone. Someone simply called a number and blew the place up. That had been built into it from the beginning, and Jacques and Franz probably didn’t know it. Jacques shot Franz to stop him from sending the distress signal and then had a change of heart and radioed the warning about Ebola. Someone in Victoria heard it and made the call to blow everything up. By then, Jacques was outside. Seeing the place go up, he retrieved the notebook and wrote the note, then went down to the beach to die. At least, that’s what I think happened.”

  Boyd stopped, waiting for comment.

  “So, we have someone who knows viruses, vaccines, RNA, and explosives, and isn’t afraid to kill a few people to get what he wants. Now he has it,” Ferguson said. “What will he do with it?”

  “Actually, we know more than that,” Joe replied, no dry humor, and he had those wrinkles that Boyd had first noticed on Diego when they’d talked about Ebola. “He’s well financed. He knows the world community of infectious-disease experts well enough to recruit a journeyman researcher like Jacques. He’s been patient, waiting two years for Ebola to surface again in the Congo. What worries me the most is the effort he’s made to keep the secret. If his researcher hadn’t panicked and broadcast the news to the entire world, Jacques and Franz would still be dead on that island, but nobody would know it except him. He could burn the buildings and the next storm would wash or blow everything away.”

  “A vaccine for Ebola would be worth a lot,” an officer interjected.

  “Yes, millions,” Joe responded. “If you were a research company trying to turn a buck on a vaccine, your profit would come when you announced your discovery and sold your idea to a large pharmaceutical company to bring to market. Or, you could sell stock at this point. Secrecy only helps if others are on the same trail. But nobody wants anything to do with Ebola, so this guy is on the trail alone, yet secrecy is still his top priority.”

  “So, he’s not going to sell a vaccine,” the officer responded.

  “Not to the general public. Someone else wants it, and is paying for it. That brings us to the dark side of the business we’re all in: biologic warfare. Virtually every dictator taken down in the Arab Spring uprisings had a biological ace up his sleeve. Saddam Hussein used it against the Kurds between Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and it eroded his prestige in the world so he didn’t use it again. Mubarak had some that he didn’t use. Khadafy had some that he didn’t use. Assad had some that he didn’t use. Using a biological weapon destroys whatever reputation a government has, so it’s pretty much a last-ditch option, and not a good one.”

  “Are we jumping to a conclusion that this vaccine is to be used in biological warfare?” Ferguson asked.

  “That’s the only use for a secret vaccine that I can think of. With something as dangerous as Ebola, you wouldn’t need a sophisticated delivery system to spread it, so it could look accidental. If it looks accidental, the strongest disincentive to using a biological weapon is taken away. The second disincentive to using bioweapons is that your own people can get the illness, which is removed if you have a vaccine. If it’s a secret vaccine, now you could quell an uprising or occupy territory and it just looks like your soldiers are foolhardy, fastidious hand-washers going into a natural outbreak of a dangerous disease.”

  “And your reputation remains intact,” the officer in the back finished the sentence.

  “Exactly. And if the world finally figures out you have the vaccine, you can claim you cooked it up in response to the natural outbreak and retain your reputation – enhance it, actually, as you’d have an ace nobody else had. A secret vaccine to Ebola would be better than a nuclear arsenal.”

  “If it worked,” Ferguson said darkly.

  “It worked on some of the monkeys, but not all, so he’s not done yet,” Joe said. “And that’s really the big danger here. He has more work to do, and he’s playing with something that’s been hiding in that Congo jungle for a long time. There is a lot about Ebola we don’t know. Jacques’ note stated the virus went dormant after the first two groups of monkeys. That’s a pretty big assumption from the data he had but, if he’s right, Ebola is more dangerous than we ever thought. We need to heed Jacques’ warning.”

  “Back to clients, for a moment,” the officer in the back interjected. “We ought to keep that open, list as many possibilities as we can. If we assume it’s a government and it isn’t, we might miss the chance to find him.”

  “Good point,” Ferguson said, turning to look back at the rest of the roo
m.

  “One thing that came up while we were in quarantine in Diego,” Boyd said. “Raybon Clive and Davann Goodman, the two disabled veterans we contracted to fly us in and out of the island, have been in Mombasa for a couple of years. They said the jihadists are thick there, and they all see themselves as holy warriors bent on returning the whole planet to righteous rule under the Prophet’s law. Imagine what a boost it would give them if they were immune to Ebola and the infidel was not.”

  Ferguson shook his head and sighed.

  “What about an attempt at worldwide extortion, a doomsday weapon so terrible it will bring the world to its knees unless we send someone all the gold in Fort Knox. That’s the plot in most of the James Bond movies.”

  “That makes a better plot for a movie than it does in real life,” Joe said. “How would you spend the money? You’d have to have some way to hide and then spend a huge amount of cash. Money laundering is a clandestine, intricate business.

  “Still, we’ll put that on the list.” Joe said, writing on a legal pad.

  They added some more possibilities over the next 10 minutes, and then Ferguson rose to close it out.

  “Governments, terrorists, criminals. It looks like anyone would like to get their hands on some Ebola vaccine, so we’ll have our work cut out for us. Homeland Security has alerted the air-freight companies and the post office to watch for anything that looks like a biological specimen. The CDC is going to start spot checking all the companies licensed to do any kind of biological work, but that’s a slow process with no guarantee of success. Boyd, go over to the Secret Service office and get your Special Agent status reactivated, then go to France and talk to Jacques’ boyfriend, Henri. The embassy has already contacted him and told him his buddy is dead and that we want to talk in more detail before releasing the body. He should cooperate.”