“America is a massive stabilizing force in the world, and you know it as well as I do. How many countries with our military and economic power would have shown the same restraint? What would
Farrokh sipped his tea for a few moments before taking a step away from philosophy and toward something more concrete. “Do you know where Dr. van Keuren has been taken?”
“No. Our intelligence-gathering capabilities inside Iran are pretty much a joke.”
“Ah, so this is to be left up to me too?”
“It’s your country, and I’m guessing you keep up with these kinds of things.”
Another shrug. “I hear whispers.”
The words were enigmatic, but the tone wasn’t. Farrokh’s network had undoubtedly been digging into this from the moment Klein’s people first contacted him.
“Where? Where is she?”
Farrokh browsed the food on the tray between them, crinkling his nose and finally smearing something unidentifiable on a piece of flatbread. “There has been recent activity at an abandoned research facility in the central part of the country. Also, a number of academics have been called away on government business and have been out of touch with their families ever since. The timing seems more than coincidental.”
“How heavily protected is it?”
“It’s underground and the entrance is well guarded.”
“I don’t know if I can get us air support, but I can sure as hell try.”
Farrokh frowned and lay back in the pillows. “Do you really think I would coordinate a foreign attack on my own country? I am a reformer, not a traitor.”
“But—”
The Iranian held up a hand, and a moment later the man who had let them in appeared in the doorway. This time he looked less cheerful and his weapon was no longer safely shouldered.
“Teymore here will take you to your quarters. I hope we have an opportunity to speak again soon.”
73
Sarie van Keuren guided the scalpel carefully as she cut a cross section from the brain on the table in front of her. Its small size made it more difficult to work with, but she was grateful she’d been able to convince Omidi that working with animals would be more productive. The glassed-in room bordering her lab was now full of a bizarre variety of caged monkeys — some lab animals but others appearing to have been snatched from zoos and private owners.
Each individual cage was covered with cloth draping, something she’d accurately said was necessary to prevent them from dying of injuries sustained trying to get to the people on the other side of the glass. The real reason, though, wasn’t to keep them from seeing her new colleagues, but to keep them from seeing each other — a subtle distinction easily missed by Omidi and his scientific lapdogs.
Sarie glanced up and noticed that the canvas covering a number of the cages in the middle section of animals had blood on it. She jotted down the time on a pad next to her and went back to working on the brain.
There were a number of potential strategies for making the parasite less dangerous, but almost all fell apart under the weight of any serious thought. The most obvious was to nurture the mutation that attacked the victim’s corneas in order to cause blindness. Biologically straightforward, but it was a bit far-fetched to believe that a bunch of infected animals wandering around bumping into things would escape notice. Omidi’s toadies weren’t world- class, but they weren’t
Improving attention span had been her second plan. At first it had seemed perfect in a somewhat horrifying way. If she could reduce the infected’s ability to be distracted during an attack, she would increase the probability that they would kill their victims and stop the chain of infection. Unfortunately, though, the areas of the brain responsible for that type of focus were too diffuse to target. The parasite had been working on the problem for millions of years. Her time was somewhat shorter.
The answer, surprisingly, had been lurking in the mirror neurons. The pattern of damage was easy to change, and she’d already managed to affect the way that parasite victims identified with each other — creating the first seeds of reciprocal animosity. While the plan had many obvious weaknesses, if she could get them interested in attacking each other, she estimated that she could reduce the rate of spread by as much as forty percent.
Even more important, she’d discovered that the parasite had a significant exposure-response relationship — the higher the initial parasitic load, the faster the onset of symptoms. She’d used that to convince Omidi that she was actually making progress in reducing the time to full symptoms when, in actuality, she was just giving progressively larger doses of infected blood to the test animals.
What he wasn’t happy about, though, was that this was creating a corresponding effect on the time to death. The fact that the believers were starting to slowly disappear seemed to indicate that Omidi was setting up an alternate group somewhere else in the facility to review her research and work on the time-to-death problem. She also had to assume that they would be testing her “modifications” on humans and that it wouldn’t be long before they figured out that they didn’t actually work.
That’s why it was so important that phase two of her plan be enacted quickly and decisively. Unfortunately, she hadn’t yet been able to come up with a phase two.
Sarie finished with the brain and went through the primitive decontamination procedures before entering the large room next to the lab. Five softies manning somewhat-dated computers watched her as she took a seat in front of the only terminal with an English operating system.
She was just starting to enter her notes when Yousef Zarin slid his chair up next to her.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said, leaning close and keeping his voice barely above a whisper.
“Excuse me?” she responded, continuing to enter numbers into a matrix of bogus mortality rates.
“I’ve been looking at your data and examined some of your samples myself.”
She smiled weakly through clenched teeth, refusing to let her growing fear affect her ability to think.
“Mirror neuron damage is evolving very quickly.”
“I have to apologize for my ignorance of neurology, Dr. Zarin. What are mirror neurons again?”
It was his turn to smile. “You might be surprised to know that I actually read your paper on the effects of toxoplasmosis on human behavior. Your intellectual gifts and grasp of brain function were very much on display.”
“I appreciate the compliment,” she said, sounding a little too cheerful for a woman in her position but finding it impossible to get the right balance. “It’s just that I’m not sure what—”
His voice lowered even more. “I believe that if these changes continue, victims of the parasite will no longer be able to differentiate between infected and healthy people.”
She stopped typing, but her fingers seemed frozen to the keyboard.
“It’s very clever,” Zarin continued. “I would have thought you’d simply try to reduce aggressive impulses, but of course that would have been too obvious, wouldn’t it? How do you say…I take my hat off to you.”
“I think you’re misinterpreting—”
“I don’t pretend to be your equal, Doctor, but I am not an uneducated man.”
“You…,” she stammered, trying to come up with something credible to say. “Maybe it’s a side effect of decreasing onset times that I missed. We could—”
He shook his head and she fell silent.
“No, the more I think about it, the more I see the brilliance of it. Given time, it could have a significant effect on the spread of the infection. Unfortunately, time is something we don’t have.”
“What?”
“We are not all fundamentalists and fanatics, Sarie. The time for more and more horrifying weapons is done. It must be. Technology has put too much power into men’s hands — the power to destroy everything that God has created.”
