Crystal Ice

by Warren Miner-Williams

  It was a long time before the door opened again. When it did, Pete came through the door with his fly zipper open. Standing before Lisa, he waved his penis in her face. Lisa closed her eyes and turned her head away.

  “I’ve got plenty for you bitch, if you want some. What’s the matter? Frightened of a real man’s dick? If I’d got the time, I’d take you here and now. You’d soon be screaming for it like your little sister. I’ll come back for you; you’ll keep.”

  Something wet and slimy smacked against Lisa’s forehead. She let out a scream, and found herself retching. By the time she opened her eyes ‘Pete-the-Prick’ had gone, the street access door banging shut marked his departure. Picking up her bag, Lisa quickly stepped inside Sharon’s flat and swiftly slammed and locked the door behind her.

  “What the fuck was all that about Sharon? Why did you plead with me to come and help you? You don’t need my fucking help; you need a pimp.”

  Lisa pounded on the bedroom door, screaming at her sister for some kind of explanation. Lisa was furious with her sister. It was obvious from her shocking appearance that she was hooked on methamphetamine. She had quickly recognised that Sharon was gaunt, resembling an anorexic, her cheeks were sunk and her skin was grey. Her hair was tatty and her teeth, or what was left of them, were stained black. She was a wreck, just as Lisa had been before she had been imprisoned. It was no wonder that “Pete-the-Prick” or whatever his name was didn’t recognise her as Sharon’s sister. Sharon had aged twenty years. Lisa was in a state of shock. Sharon was her little sister; Lisa should have protected her from the evil drug.

  Exhausted Lisa, slid to her knees, still weakly banging the door. Sharon was “snorting” or “shooting up,” she was sure of it. Lisa began to plead.

  “Shaz, let me in please. Let me help you. Please don’t take any more of that shit. Can’t you see it’s killing you? Shaz, please, for God’s sake, let me in!”

  There was no answer, just an ominous silence. Lisa looked for anything that she could use to break into the bedroom. She took a large knife from the kitchen and returned to the door. Holding the knife in two hands, she hacked at the wood around the lock, but apart from chipping off small splinters, her frantic efforts had little effect. Back in the kitchen again, she tried to find something else. What though? She was blind to anything of use. Picking up a large Le Creuset frying pan from the hob she returned to the bedroom door with renewed determination to break it down, but her assault on the door was completely ineffective.

  In blind panic Lisa raced out of the apartment and down the stairs to the floor below. On reaching the first door she pounded her fists on it, screaming for help. When the door swung open, Lisa fell into the arms of Alex MacLean.

  “Whoa, what’s happened to you?”

  Just for an instant Lisa pounded the chest of this stranger as she had been doing to his front door. Then Alex caught hold of her wrists.

  “Stop, stop and tell me what’s wrong?”

  “It’s my sister I think she’s unconscious in the flat above. I’m sure she’s in danger. Please, come with me.” pleaded Lisa, tears welling up in her terrified eyes.

  Alex was decisive. “Come with me and call the police while I see to your sister.”

  Alex ran towards the stairs to the floor above, leaving Lisa in his wake. Seeing him disappear around the first corner of the stairway, Lisa slowly became cognisant of what the neighbour had said to her. Slowly at first, then at a run, she started to follow him. Alex was already kicking at the bedroom door when Lisa re-entered the flat and grabbed at the telephone.

  When the bedroom door eventually gave way, splinters from the doorjamb temporarily barred the way into the room. Brushing these aside Alex ran to the bed on which the half-naked body of Sharon Davis lay. On the bedside table there was white powder and a straw. Alex immediately felt for a carotid pulse. Her heart was beating, but it was very weak. Alex quickly dragged the body of the girl onto the floor and positioned her head to resuscitate her. Pinching her nose and extending her neck, Alex tried to breathe for Sharon. After three quick breaths he tried again to detect a carotid pulse.

  “Is she alive? Tell me she’s still alive, please, tell me?”

  It was Lisa, at the shattered bedroom door. Alex didn’t reply, he gave his patient another three breaths. Sharon was starting to go blue, so either he wasn’t getting air into her lungs or her heart had stopped beating. Alex didn’t hesitate. Imagining a cross on Sharon’s chest, its axes along the sternum and across the nipples, he placed the heel of his left hand just below the intersection of these two lines and then, interlacing the fingers of his other hand, pushed down sharply. Fifteen compressions then two quick breaths. Fifteen compressions, two quick breaths and feel for a pulse. Alex repeated the cycle over and over again.

  “What’s happening? Tell me, tell me?”

  Lisa now kneeling beside her sister was distraught.

  “Do you know how to do this?” asked Alex.

  “No.”

  “Is an ambulance coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look at what I am doing. Can you breathe for her or do the heart compressions? It’s better if two people do it.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “Come alongside me here and I’ll show you what to do.” Commanded Alex.

  In seconds he showed Lisa how to compress the heart while he maintained the breathing rhythm. Watching her work he said,

  “You’ll need to push much harder than that.”

  “I’ll hurt her if I do.”

  “She’ll die if you don’t.”

  Together Alex and Lisa maintained the proper rhythm until the ambulance crew arrived twenty minutes later. They quickly took over the compressions and used an Ambu-bag to administer oxygen. Directing Alex to resume the compressions, one of the paramedics prepared to attach the electrodes for the defibrillator so they could electronically monitor Sharon’s heart. It was beating, but very weakly and without rhythm. Having put in an intravenous line, the paramedic gave Sharon a shot of adrenaline, and then prepared the defibrillator. Sharon responded to the first shock and her heart settled into a weak but more normal sinus rhythm.

  “Is she going to be, OK?” Asked Lisa weakly.

  “I think she’s stable enough for us to get her to the hospital now,” said the senior paramedic.

  “Can you come too? We need to get all the details?”

  “Yes.” Said Lisa, holding her head in her hands.

  The paramedic pointed to the white powder on the bedside table. “Is this the substance that she was using?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  Lisa looked across at Alex, who was just getting up off his knees.

  “Thank you for all you’ve done. I don’t even know your name.”

  “Alex, Alex MacLean. It’s no bother, I was glad to help, err...?”

  “Lisa Davis. That’s my sister, Sharon.”

  “We’ve got to go quickly now Ms Davis,” said the paramedic, “if you are coming with us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t worry about the apartment Lisa.” Said Alex, “I’ll lock up and come over to the hospital when it’s all sorted.”

  “The police will be along in a minute sir,” said the paramedic. “Someone should be here when they arrive. If you could stay till then sir, that would be good.”

  Not waiting for a reply, the two paramedics wheeled the gurney on which Sharon Davis lay, out to the lift, with Lisa trailing behind.

  “Don’t worry Lisa,” said Alex, “once things are sorted here, I will meet you at the hospital”

  Lisa didn’t reply, she just gave a half smile through her tears before following the paramedics.

  As the ambulance pulled away from the car park below, its siren competed with that of the arriving police car.

  9.

  The Weapon

  As the Great War came to a close in 1918, a viral scourge ravaged the globe. A pandemic of an exceptionally aggressive strain of in
fluenza infected 20% of the world’s population and killed an estimated 20 to 40 million people. Cited as the most devastating pandemic in world history, it killed more people in a single year than in four years of the Black Death in medieval Europe. The so-called “Spanish flu” had not only a high capacity to cause severe illness, but also a strong propensity to kill young fit adults between the ages of 20 to 40, a pattern of morbidity unusual for influenza, which is usually a killer of young children and the elderly. Doctors treating the Spanish flu patients were powerless to prevent their deaths, “struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth,” symptoms reminiscent of the gas attacks of the trenches. Its mortality rate was 25 times higher than any other strains of the disease.

  In 1997 Jeffrey Taubenberger, an American virologist working for the United States Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, isolated RNA fragments of the 1918 influenza strain from the preserved lung tissue of a 21-year-old soldier who had died at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in 1918. By 2002 four of the eight viral RNA segments had been completely sequenced, including two that are thought to be the key to its virulence. Since that time virologists have continued mapping the genome of this deadly virus in an effort to understand why the Spanish flu was so deadly.

  Scientists around the world are fully aware of the dangers involved in the reconstruction of this virus, but the voices of those who object echo on the deaf ears of the researchers involved. Unbeknown to the scientific community at large, similar research was being carried out at the Institute of Immunology in Zagreb. Dr Frančiška Ribič was the head of a team of virologists who saw that any country without a vaccine for this deadly disease would be at the mercy of the US drug companies, who, if they patented the only vaccine, could hold the world to ransom. Tissue samples from patients who died of Spanish flu in the post-World War I Slavic states had been kept at the Institute of Immunology in Zagreb for nearly ninety years. Although they had not been initially stored in such a way that would have preserved any intact virus, the Croatian virologists did have a much greater genetic pool from which the viral RNA sequences could be obtained. What took Taubenberger and his US team years to achieve, i.e., sequencing the viral genome, Frančiška Ribič accomplished the same in a fraction of that time. However, cloning the 1918 strain of this potentially devastating disease had taken much longer. By the spring of 2004 Ribič and her dedicated team of virologists had succeeded in reconstructing the virus well before their peers in America. However, the Croatian team did not publish their findings, as fears of bio-terrorism may have had repercussions that the Institute of Immunology in Zagreb could ill-afford.

  Although copies of the virus were stored under the strictest of biosafety conditions, Dr Frančiška Ribič, a Muslim, had almost free access to them. As she and her team were now working on a vaccine against the disease, cultures of the virus were being tested every month. Originally an avian disease, the 1918 strain was presumed to have jumped the species barrier in Asia, from ducks to pigs, before it then took hold in the human population. Indeed, in a parallel study using a newly discovered swine flu virus, one of Frančiška Ribič’s colleagues, Aleksander Primožič, was trying to determine how such a jump from one species to another could occur. Dr Frančiška Ribič was the sister-in-law of Captain Goran Sumovich.

  ***

  The New Zealand news pages were full of the demise of Daniel Tua, the Skorpions co-leader. Though the papers couldn’t show photographs of the body, the description of his wounds and a leaked picture of the bloody mess that remained in the bedroom, where he was found, left nothing to the imagination. Police were all over the house, literally taking it apart after a member of a rival gang said that the Skorpions had buried some of their victims in the garden.

  The following day, Sonny Rewaka was trying to find Daniel’s girlfriend, Sarah Heta, and the gang’s caretaker of the property, Andrew Kuri. But both had gone to ground. Sonny was confident that he would find Kuri before the police did, because the man was stupid. He would probably soon forget why he was hiding and suddenly turn up at the gang’s headquarters in Jewson Street, Otara. Kuri was always high on weed or drunk or both. He was a liability and would have to be kept out of sight. Sonny though was concerned that Sarah Heta, who may have witnessed the death of Daniel Tua and his bodyguard, might know something that would help identify the murderers.

  Because Tua had withheld money from the Sutic brothers Sonny Rewaka suspected they might be behind the killings. Yet it was unbelievable that the so-called ‘Croatian Mafia’ could even contemplate killing anyone in the Skorpions, let alone one of the leaders. However, Sonny forever the pragmatist had realised long ago that Tua was a liability, and his refusal to pay the brothers their part of the drug profits was stupid and dangerous. To stay in business the Skorpions needed the brothers. In any case, with Tua gone, Sonny would be in sole charge of the gang. For him to appear blameless for any part of the killing he would have to direct suspicion onto a third party. So, he very carefully let it be known that Daniel had been talking to a Papakura police detective, telling her that the “New Reich,” a neo-fascist group, and the sworn enemies of the Skorpions, were going to run a brothel in the Mount Wellington area.

  The facts about the brothel were true; that Daniel would commit the cardinal sin of being a police informer of course was false. The style of the killing though, the necktie, gave a loud and clear message that anyone who spoke to the “pigs” would pay dearly for it. Semi-publicly, Sonny sent a message to the New Reich that he abhorred squealers, even those of his own brotherhood, and that no reprisals would be taken. Most of the flack came from his own gang, who almost to a man, said that Daniel Tua would never talk to the cops and that they should take their own revenge for his killing. One of the loudest voices was Danny’s de facto wife, Ngaire Rakena. Though she suspected that Sonny had something to do with the death of her partner, she could never voice her thoughts; that would endanger not only her life but that of her children as well. Even though Danny was a vicious, arrogant, cheating son-of-a-bitch, and that the scars on Ngaire’s face were testament to his violent temper, she still mourned his loss. She was fiercely loyal and she hid her suspicions carefully, but one day, in the future, she would unleash her anger on the person she believed was responsible for Danny’s death – Sonny Rewaka.

  ***

  Tony Graham-Collins collected the vacuum flask that had been smuggled into the country by Goran Sumovich, the day after Dino Sutic had received it. Though Graham-Collins was strictly a biochemist he had been trained in the rudimentary skills of virology when he had been employed at Britain’s chemical and biological weapons research centre at Porton Down. Using clear polycarbonate sheeting, combined with an ultra-violet light source, a butane burner and a kitchen extraction system, Graham Collins had made a large rudimentary glove box. In this he could carry out the basic virus manipulation necessary to multiply the quantity of live viruses he had been supplied with.

  Placing the flask inside the glove box he carefully sealed it to ensure that no live viruses could escape from the box. Dressed in a hooded plastic boiler suit, a mask and latex gloves, Graham-Collins was ready to start. He was proud of his DIY glove box and trusted that it would protect him from any virus containing aerosols that might be created once he had started the procedure. Nearly all the paraphernalia Graham-Collins used was genuine farm equipment that would not raise any suspicion from authorities.

  Putting his hands into the, heavy duty rubber gloves attached to the front of the box, he deftly opened the flask and rolled out the six embryonated hen’s eggs that it contained. Ignoring the taped hole through which the eggs were initially inoculated, Graham-Collins opened the first egg and carefully separated the ‘white’ albumin from the yolk. The albumin he placed into a 500 mL glass beaker and the yolk into a second beaker, before repeating the process with the other five eggs. After adding 100 mL of Triton-X-100, a surfactant that would help disperse the egg white, he th
en used a Magi-mix wand to homogenise the albumin from all six eggs. Using a 250 μL glass syringe, Graham-Collins inoculated a dozen trays of fresh fertilised hen’s eggs. A total of over 430 eggs inoculated with the deadly virus. The virologists in Zagreb had already modified the viruses so that they would grow well in eggs. The ultra-sharp syringe needle penetrated the eggshells without cracking them and left just a tiny hole that Graham-Collins sealed with Scotch invisible magictape.

  Having put the new eggs aside, Graham-Collins put all the rubbish into a cardboard box and sealed it with packing tape. Then he opened the glove box and took the cardboard carton into the orchard, throwing it onto a large bonfire he had already started. The freshly inoculated eggs were then put into an incubator which would keep the eggs at the correct temperature and rotate them automatically. Finally, Graham-Collins washed out the glove box with a virucidal liquid used by vets to clean the wounds of the farm’s pigs.