The Cobra Event (11 page)

“I’m concerned.”

“About me? I feel okay.”

“I can’t give you an exam—I’m not a clinician.” She did not mention to him that she also did not have a license to practice medicine in New York, and so she was barred by law from doing a patient exam. “I’d like for you to go to a hospital emergency room with me. We’ll get a medical team to work you up.”

He looked startled.

“But it’s probably nothing,” she said.

“I really don’t want to go to the hospital. I feel okay.”

“If you don’t mind—may I just look at your tongue?”

She didn’t have a tongue depressor. But she reached into her knapsack, felt around, and found a small case. From it she removed a penlight. She switched it on and asked him to say “ah.”

“Ahhh.”

“Well, your tonsils are a little reddened. It looks like you have a cold,” she said. “Could I—I’m sorry—could I just look at your eyes?” He was reluctant. He seemed very nervous now.

She went around the room, closing the venetian blinds. Then she did what was called a swinging flashlight test. She pointed the beam of light first into one pupil and then into the other. The color of the irises seemed completely normal. He had deep brown eyes. She watched the responses of his pupils to the beam of light. She thought she saw a delayed response. That
might
be a subtle indication of brain damage.

This is ridiculous. I’m overreacting, she told herself. There’s no clear evidence that Kate had an infective disease. There’s been no human-to-human transmission.

She said, “If your cold changes in any way, would you please call me?” And she gave him her cellular-phone number and the number at Kips Bay. “Call me anytime, day or night. I’m a doctor. I expect calls.”

On her way back to the subway station, she wondered if she had done the right thing. As a lieutenant commander in the United States Public Health Service, Alice Austen had the legal power to order a person into quarantine. Even so, officers with the C.D.C. virtually never invoke this power. It is C.D.C. policy for field medical officers to work quietly, to avoid drawing attention to themselves, and to refrain from doing anything that might create a climate of fear in the public. She glanced at Socrates. He had no advice to give, except that she know herself.

Unknown

BACK AT KIPS BAY
that night, Alice Austen felt exhausted, and also ravenously hungry. You forget to eat during investigations. She found a Thai take-out restaurant and brought back boxes of food to her room. Mrs. Heilig gave her a disapproving look as she carried them into her bedroom. She sat at a desk and ate noodles and lemongrass chicken with her Boy Scout knife, fork, and spoon set. Meanwhile, she telephoned Walter Mellis at home on her cellular phone. She did not want Mrs. Heilig to overhear the conversation, and she had a feeling that Mrs. Heilig would try to listen if she could.

“So what’s up?” Mellis said.

“Walt—this thing has me scared. It could be an unknown infective agent that destroys the brain. It would be a virus, not a bacterial infection. I think—” She stopped. She put her hand to her forehead. It was covered with sweat.

He was silent on the other end of the line.

“I think we may have done a hot autopsy this morning. Without strong biosafety containment.”

There was a pause. “Good Lord!” he said. He hadn’t really expected anything like this.

“I’m going on observation, Walt.” She explained her findings, the rings in the eyes, the swollen, glassy brain covered with red spots, the blood blisters in the mouth and nasopharynx. She mentioned the unidentified lumps of material that seemed visible in the brain cells of the index case, Harmonica Man. “If it’s an infectious agent, it’s really bad,” she said.

“No lab results from the second case, the girl?” he asked.

“It’ll be another day.”

“What lab is doing the work?” he asked.

“I wanted to talk with you about that. The city health department’s lab is testing for bacteria. But it can’t test for viruses—they just can’t do that.”

“Look, if you think this is serious, then we need to get samples here to C.D.C. so we can start doing some testing.”

“That’s what I wanted to arrange with you.”

“I’ll take care of it through Lex. How soon can you return?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I still have some street work to do.”

“What kind of street work?”

“You were the one who preached John Snow at me.” There was a pause while she ate Thai noodles.

“All right,” he said.

She took a long shower, collapsed into the carved bed, and pulled the blankets up to her chin. When she was a girl, around ten years old, and the family was vacationing in a little resort motel on the seashore of New Hampshire, she had sometimes had trouble falling asleep. Her parents had put her on a folding steel cot in a room with her younger brother. She had loved to curl up with a Nancy Drew mystery book, her head nestled in the pillow, which smelled faintly of mildew and the sea. She had read all of the Nancy Drew mysteries as a girl. This made her think about her father, living alone now in Ashland, near the lake. I’ve got to call Dad, she thought.

She could hear Mrs. Heilig padding around the kitchen, and then a television went on. For a long time, she could not fall asleep. Her window looked out on First Avenue. Late into the night, sounds of traffic came through the glass, trucks rumbling, taxis honking, the occasional ambulance heading for one of the emergency rooms. The normal sounds of the city. She thought: this can’t be as bad as it seems. I haven’t shown any connection between these two cases. The Moran girl’s death may not have anything to do with Harmonica Man. The traffic moved on the avenue like blood swishing through an artery.

The Ladies’ Room

AL GHAR, IRAQ, THURSDAY

MARK LITTLEBERRY
was standing over Hopkins in the cloud of dust left by the truck containing the portable lab. He was holding a plastic sample tube. Without a word to Hopkins, he grabbed the swab out of his hand and jammed it into the tube. “Truck sample number one!” Littleberry put the tube in his shirt pocket.

Hopkins stood up, brushing dust off.

“Did you get a look, Will?”

“Yeah. What was it?”

“It was—”

The minders arrived and crowded around. They seemed almost hysterical.

“What was in that truck?” Littleberry demanded.

“I shall inquire,” Dr. Fehdak said.

Littleberry let loose a stream of unprintable language.

The Kid’s face darkened. He spoke in Arabic.

This was nothing, Dr. Mariana Vestof said. It was a routine delivery of a vaccine.

“I shall try to get information on this,” Dr. Fehdak said.

“Why did one of the men in the trucks speak Russian to me?” Hopkins asked.

“You must be mistaken,” Dr. Fehdak said.

Hopkins and Littleberry looked at each other.

“The inspectors need a rest room!” Littleberry suddenly shouted. “According to the terms of Security Council agreements, inspectors are to be accorded private use of rest rooms whenever they ask for them.”

Hopkins and Littleberry were led back into the building. When they arrived at the door of the rest room, they noticed that some of the minders were snickering. Others were jabbering on their radios.

“I think it’s a ladies’ room,” Littleberry said to Hopkins. “Just go in.” They closed the door after themselves and locked it.

DR. AZRI FEHDAK
was in a state of shock. He was seeing his life pass before his eyes. Hopkins had noticed one of the foreign advisers. And Fehdak wasn’t certain, but he thought he had seen Hopkins holding a swab inside the truck. He wondered if Hopkins had taken a photograph. It would be virtually impossible for these two inspectors to convince the United Nations that they had seen anything of a military nature. But the swab…if anything was proven, Dr. Fehdak was likely to be shot by his own government, for having allowed U.N. inspectors to take a swab inside that place.

Dr. Mariana Vestof looked grim. “That rest room is for the female technical staff,” she said. “It is not for those men.”

“Perhaps they are nervous,” Dr. Fehdak said.

One of the minders, an intelligence official named Hussein Al-Sawiri, pounded on the door. “Everybody healthy?” he asked.

No answer.

The Kid rattled the door. “It’s locked,” he said. “They locked it.”

THE LADIES’ ROOM
was gleaming and antiseptic, set with green and white tiles.

“This whole situation is gonna blow sky high,” Littleberry said. “I did not expect to find a
truck
. We have to do this fast.”

Hopkins stripped off his rubber gloves and put on a clean pair. Then he placed the Halliburton case on a sink. He crouched down until he was staring at the Halliburton, looking at a small optical lens near the handle. He brought his right eye close to the lens. The system recognized the pattern of blood vessels in his retina as that of “Hopkins, William, Jr., Reachdeep.” Any attempt to open the case without the eye-key would cause the self-destruct process to initiate.

The locks inside the case slid open, and he lifted the lid. Meanwhile, Littleberry placed his Halliburton case on a sink, and it popped open.

The two Halliburtons contained biosensors. They were used by the United States Navy for sensing and analyzing biological weapons. A normal laboratory that does this occupies several rooms full of machines.

“I’m gonna do a hand-held Boink, real quick,” Littleberry said. From the suitcase, he lifted out an electronic device about the size of a paperback book. It was a palm-sized biosensor. People called it a Boink because it let off a pleasant chiming sound if it detected a biological weapon. The Boink had a screen and some buttons and a sample port—a little hole. The Boink could test for the presence of twenty-five different known biological weapons.

Littleberry took the small tube that contained the truck sample from his pocket. He took out a disposable plastic pipette. It was a little droplet-sucker. He sucked up a droplet of the sample liquid and dropped it straight into the sample port in the Boink.

Then he waited a moment. He stared at the readout screen. He was hoping to hear a chiming tone. There was silence.

“Damn!” he said.

“What, Mark?”

He was staring at the readout screen. “No reading. It didn’t boink. I’ve got a blank screen here.”

“All right, Commander. Should I run Felix?”

“Yeah. Quick.”

There was pounding on the door. “Is somebody ill in there?” It was Hussein Al-Sawiri, the security man.

“It’s just taking a little time,” Hopkins replied. He took the truck sample tube over to
his
Halliburton case, which held a device called Felix, a black box the size of a big-city telephone book. It was a biosensor device known as a gene scanner. It was controlled by a laptop computer, and it could read the genetic code of an organism very fast.

Hopkins lifted the laptop from the Halliburton and placed it on a window ledge. Working very, very quickly, his hands moving fast, he ran a data cable back to the Felix black box and started the computer. The computer’s screen turned on and glowed. It said:

Felix Gene Scanner

Beta 0.9

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Enter Password:
•••••••••

Hopkins hammered in his password. “Come on, come on,” he said.

Using a pipette, Hopkins dropped a bit of liquid from the sample tube into the sample port in the Felix black box. He tapped the keys of the laptop computer.

“P.C.R. amplification has started, let’s hope,” he said to Littleberry.

He stared at the screen.

More pounding on the door.

“Not finished!” Littleberry shouted.

“Amplification of the DNA is completed,” Hopkins whispered. “The DNA’s moving onto the chip.”

The door began to shake. “Open up!” Hussein Al-Sawiri shouted.

“This is a United Nations toilet facility,” Littleberry yelled over his shoulder.

Hopkins gestured wildly to Littleberry. “We’ve gotta start beaming,” he hissed.

From his suitcase Littleberry removed a black panel about the size of a notebook. It was attached to a cable. It was a special satellite transmitting antenna. He plugged it into the laptop computer while Hopkins tapped the keys.

“We’re getting sequences!” Hopkins said.

Running cascades of letters appeared on Felix’s screen, combinations of A, T, C, and G. The combinations were sequences of raw genetic code from a life-form in the sample.

“Beaming it up, Scotty!” Hopkins said.

Felix was beaming chunks of DNA code into the sky through the transmitter panel. Overhead, a communications satellite operated by the U.S. National Security Agency was picking up the genetic code of the organism, whatever it was.

“I think we’re going to get some matches here,” Hopkins said. “Hang on.”

Felix was matching the DNA sequences with some sequences stored in its memory, trying to identify the organism. The names of viruses that it was supposedly “seeing” in the truck sample began to appear on the screen of the laptop.

TENTATIVE SEQUENCE MATCHES:

Goldfish virus group

Porcine reproductive virus

Hepatitis D woodchuck

Bracovirus

Spumavirus

Microvirus

Unclassified Thogoto-like agent

viruslike particle Cak-1

Humpty Doo virus

“Humpty Doo virus? What is this?” Hopkins whispered.

Then the screen said:

Felix is unable to process this sample.

The screen went blank. The system had crashed.

“You jerk!” he said to Felix.

“What happened?” Littleberry whispered.

“I think it’s giving me gobbledygook.”

The pounding on the door became very insistent.

Will Hopkins reached down to his belt and pulled the Leatherman tool out of its case. He opened it to alligator pliers and a screwdriver. From his pocket protector he pulled out a Mini Maglite flashlight. He hunched over Felix and lifted off the smooth black top of the box. Inside was a mass of tiny threadlike tubes and wires. He started pulling out wires, shining the flashlight in, twirling the screwdiver.