The Dolos Conspiracy

by Frank Perry

remained unreadable. “We’re just talking to people they know and work with.”

  For the next hour, the two men answered questions about Kelly and John’s work history, grudges or rivalries at work, disputes with management, and even their personal relationship. Charlie barely held his composure, listening to Jules talk about Kelly and John … “Two of our best employees” and “can’t imagine anyone disliking them,” on-and-on crap. Charlie was honest in his assessments; he didn’t need to fabricate answers. It was hard to avoid telling them about Jules’ intention to fire them, contradicting all the positive platitudes from his partner. He couldn’t conceive that Jules had actually tried to kill them … that would be too much to believe.

  In the lab, it took John several tries before remembering how to navigate through the complex file structure at GHI. The folder was under one of Lorne’s private passwords. John knew the password as a result of a telephone call from Lorne on one of his earlier trips to West Africa. He had needed some information and gave his password to John. If Lorne had intended to change it after his return, it never happened. Lorne was both trusting of John and careless about computer security. He had his files properly protected, but didn’t change things often enough. John had seen the file name “Dolos” among hundreds that Lorne listed in his project files weeks before. The name wasn’t consistent with the alpha-numeric labeling sequences of all other projects. He hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but had gone back to open the file folder weeks later when he was bored. Looking at the information now, it still made no sense; it was obviously encrypted. He then realized that someone could be running keylogging software. How else would Lorne have known John was snooping in the files? By going into this same folder now, his keystrokes could be watched by someone in the network. He hoped that he didn’t get shut out before he could figure out the project. If someone wanted to confront him at the Institute, it might be the one trying to kill him. Either way, he was back into the file.

  He scrambled to find a thumb-drive in his desk and quickly copied the file, half expecting someone to charge into the lab at any moment. It didn’t happen. He put the drive in his pocket and closed the file, returning to routine work at his computer.

  The police were gone shortly after that, and John expected someone to come after him for the breach of propriety. He had signed an agreement, forbidding any information from leaving the Institute, which could basically put him in jail, and they could sue him for the rest of his life. The key-logger program would have recognized the removable disc “save” instruction. But he and Kelly finished their work alone; nobody came to the lab, and they left at five o’clock, much earlier than normal.

  In the car, she started to speak, and he signaled for silence. They couldn’t be sure the car wasn’t bugged or being tracked. Instinctively, he looked for following cars, but couldn’t see any.

  Kambia

  The WHO doctors looked like aliens from space in their HazMat suits. These were not positive pressure suits, but were better protection than the native physicians normally had. Abagael Van Acker was certain that it was an outbreak. Her medical team was having difficulty talking to the patients. Their interpreter and guide, Victor, would not answer his phone, despite numerous attempts to call him. It didn’t matter; she knew what they were witnessing. She’d seen it before.

  She called her small team together, and they helped each other decontaminate. “We’ve got to go back to Conakry and request supplies.” One doctor objected and wanted to stay, but she was insistent. “We don’t have anything to treat them with, and the worst that could happen is that some of us get sick from this. If that happens, the world will panic and our countries will just send medical planes to evacuate us and quarantine us to protect the rest of the world. We won’t be able to help then.” They all finally agreed and drove away.

  When she had adequate phone connection, Van Acker made a call. He answered, complaining that it was the middle of the night. She ignored him. “Jules, we are declaring a medical emergency here. Do you have any more information about Lorne’s medical examination?”

  He sat upright. “Ah…yes, Abagael. We received the report today. He died of VHF, as you expected. But, I have some good news that I was going to call you about in the morning. It’s the mutation that we’ve been preparing for. It’s the same disease that we have been building vaccine and antidote for since the end of last year. We have a good supply.”

  “Jules, are you sure? This sounds like a miracle!”

  It sounds like money in the bank to me. He could hardly wait to get the news to Wall Street. He was waiting for this to happen. Now the Saudis would be throwing money at them! “Look, Abagael, I can arrange an air shipment later this morning. You should have the first batch by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “That would be wonderful, Jules. Is the payment to be the same as before?” She would need to contact the WHO, and get funded through the UN.

  “Let’s not worry about it now. We’ll work it out. Right now, it’s important to save lives.”

  The call ended, and he looked at his bed-stand clock, three-thirty in the morning. He couldn’t sleep with all the excitement. He got dressed and called Charlie, waking him and telling him to get to the Institute and call all the other people he needed to get the shipment together.

  At Kelly’s apartment, both were sleeping, but they had been awake only a couple hours earlier. They’d developed a coded way to talk and used written notes to discuss important matters: matters that could mean their lives. The Dolos file was apparently created by Lorne, who was a brilliant scientist and physician, but who didn’t have much tolerance for complex math problems. John was able to break the code after transferring the Excel file to his laptop. It proved to be a simple substitution of a letter to a fixed number of positions down the rows on the standard keyboard, commonly called a “Caesar Cipher.” That part was easy to figure out. The more complex problem was developing a key-shift routine for his computer that would do the decoding of the entire 54-page report automatically. Otherwise, it would take several long days to translate manually and would not be fault free.

  After a few failed trials, the program they’d done together began working, and the lines of the file began changing into logical letters and numbers. It was still in scientific jargon, but it was all familiar to Kelly and John. When it was finally done, both were exhausted and went to bed, uncertain about what it meant. They held onto each other in bed, but the confusion and threat both felt couldn’t be put aside. Both felt comfort being together, but they also knew they had already escaped death once. That thought pervaded every emotion. The data might unlock the mystery, but they were too tired to figure it out that night.

  The next day was Saturday, and they chose to stay inside her apartment and work at deciphering the file. The parking lot was full and no suspicious vehicles could be spotted, but it wasn’t easy to see them all clearly. Kelly lowered the blinds. Hours later, after five cups of coffee and a meager breakfast of toast and jelly, they were frustrated. Several theories were raised and disproven. The files were actually a log book broken into days. There were hundreds of days entered since the file originated. Each day was nothing more than a list of numbers which grew several times per month. The numbers included a three-letter prefix followed by numbers that represented production lots of medicines, antigens, antidotes, and virus cultures. There were only four or five different prefixes and the numbers sequenced each day by a higher four-digit extension, based on the date code. They agreed that it was a record of production which included thousands of entries or agents being produced in lab 4B. That explained the large size of the lab’s robotic storage compartments behind the glass wall in the chamber. Even working inside the chamber didn’t include access to the actual containers being stored.

  John brushed his hand through his short hair. “Kelly, I don’t get it. What are we looking at? What’s the big deal?
Why did Lorne make this file?”

  She just shook her head. “He had some reason. The operations records are done automatically, and this represents a lot of redundant work. Did he get you involved tracking this stuff?”

  “No. I’ve never been inside the chambers, and he never sent any data for me to enter. He must have done all this himself; but why?”

  At the institute, the Operations crew worked from before dawn on Saturday, carefully preparing a large shipment to Africa. As biohazard material, special paperwork and handling was needed. Everything was stacked carefully in special containers that could maintain constant temperature and pressure for air shipment. Everything was counted and documented in quadruplicate for records and billing purposes. The UN always paid GHI, but never quickly. This time, in the background, Jules wasn’t worried so much about payments. This could well be the last shipment before the Institute was sold. The whole packaging operation was done by robots under remote control, preparing the shipment inside the