introduced us. I had confided in Watson about my search for Noah’s Ark, and he mentioned that your father was a leading authority. Hasad worked for me for two years, and then we had a breakthrough. Or he did. He wasn’t as forthcoming as I would have liked. But without that discovery, none of this would have been possible. It was a sign from God that I was to be His messenger. His instrument.”
This guy was nuts, but Locke was right. He was an incredibly smart nut. Dilara had to calm herself and hold back her disgust of him. She sat back down and smoothed her dress.
“What could a flood 6000 years ago give you that would make all this possible?” she asked mildly. “So what if a river overflowed its banks or the Black Sea filled up when the Mediterranean burst through the Bosporus, or whatever the true origin of the story was?”
“Ah, we now get to the really interesting part. You assume the Deluge was a flood of water.”
“What else could it be?”
“As much as I would like the Bible to be a literal, infallible document,” he said, “it is truly useful for its metaphor. You are thinking literally.” Garrett spoke as if he were talking to a child rather than a PhD archaeologist, but Dilara ignored the patronization.
She quoted from the Douay-Rheims Bible, Genesis chapter six. “‘Behold, I will bring the waters of a great flood upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life under heaven. All things that are in the earth shall be consumed.’ Seems pretty clear to me.”
“The key phrase is ‘to destroy all flesh,’” Garrett said. “The water was an agent of destruction, but it wasn’t the cause of death. Think about it. What have you seen lately that fits that description?”
Dilara’s mind immediately went to the wreckage of Rex Hayden’s airplane. The gleaming white bone they’d found stripped of all flesh.
“The plane crash…” she said, gasping in dawning recognition. “The passengers dissolved.”
“Exactly,” Garrett said. “Their flesh was literally consumed. That’s because the Flood wasn’t a deluge. The waters merely carried it. The Flood was a disease.”
FORTY
Three hours after leaving the Genesis Dawn with the device from Garrett’s cabin, Locke was in an observation room at the CDC. Space-suited doctors were visible on the closed-circuit cameras inside the Level 4 containment lab.
First, the tube was plugged to prevent material from being released. Then a hole was drilled in the case, and a tiny camera was snaked inside to make sure there were no explosive materials. When they were satisfied it was safe, the case was opened. As Locke suspected, the countdown timer immediately reset to zero, set off by circuitry inside the lid.
Inside the case was a complicated device. Three clear cylinders, each the size of a two-liter soda bottle, were connected to one another by metal tubing and were ringed with colors to distinguish them: red, blue, and white. The blue cylinder was connected to the external tubing.
Opening the case had started several mechanisms in the device. A clear liquid was being pumped from the white cylinder into the blue one. The red cylinder was disgorging its contents in a stream of air. The lab technicians stepped back, but whatever was being ejected didn’t seem to be affecting their safety garments.
Within seconds, the pumping into the blue cylinder stopped, and the stream of air from the red cylinder slowed to a hiss. They capped each cylinder and drew samples from all of them.
Locke had already briefed the technicians that whatever was inside was probably related to the bioweapon that had been used on Rex Hayden’s plane, so it was exceedingly lethal. He noticed that the technicians had heeded his warnings and were proceeding cautiously, although not as fast as Locke would like.
Now that the danger of explosion was over, Locke’s expertise was no longer needed. He was escorted to a waiting area while the technicians analyzed the samples. The adrenaline drain of the day’s events finally caught up with him, and Locke dozed off on a break room couch.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, and his eyes popped open. He glanced at his watch. It was almost 10am Friday morning. Locke saw a slim, balding Indian man in a white lab coat hovering over him. Next to him was Special Agent Harris.
“Dr. Gavde has the test results,” Harris said. “Since you’re involved with the Hayden crash, I thought you should hear them. Remember, this is all classified, but you’re cleared for it.”
“Did you find out what the bioweapon is?” Locke asked as he stood. Harris seemed edgy. She must had heard some of this already.
“I’m afraid so,” Gavde said in a slight accent that sounded like a combination of Hindi and BBC British. “Of course, we have only done preliminary tests, but the findings are quite disturbing. This is very scary stuff we are dealing with here.”
“So is it a bacteria or virus?”
“Neither. The active agent inside those cylinders are prions. Do you know what they are?”
“Vaguely. They’re what cause mad cow disease.”
“Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the best known disease, yes, but there are many others. Prions are not well-understood. They’re infectious agents that are composed entirely of proteins. One thing that prion diseases all have in common is that they are fatal, and this one is no different. But in other ways, it’s like no prion disease I’ve ever seen.”
“Why is that?” Locke asked.
Gavde sounded like he was in awe of it. “The way this one works is quite insidious. It attacks human cadherins, the proteins that hold together your body’s cells. However, it does nothing to animal cadherins. We tested samples of mouse, rat, and monkey cells. They remained unharmed. But human cells were attacked with vigor.”
“What happens when the cadherins are attacked?”
“All the cells in your body are bound together with these cadherins. If they break down, the cells no longer hold together, and the cells themselves burst open. The only part of the human body that wouldn’t be affected would be the skeletal system because the osseous tissue in bones is mineralized.”
Locke thought back to the pilot of Hayden’s airplane. In the transcript of his communication with LA Control, he had screamed that they were melting. But just like the Wicked Witch of the West, he had used the wrong word. They hadn’t melted. They had dissolved. Only in this case, their bones were left.
“Is there any way to stop it once you’re infected?” Locke asked.
“I asked the same thing,” Harris said.
Gavde shook his head. “Other than being fatal, the other thing this prion has in common with others is that it’s untreatable. As a byproduct of its attack on the cadherins, more prions are produced, so it’s self- sustaining.”
One part of this didn’t make sense to Locke. The prions in Hayden’s plane had reduced everyone on board to bones in a matter of hours. If the same thing happened on the ship, it would have been depopulated long before it got to New York. That would defeat the purpose of transmitting it to a widespread population.
“How fast would this stuff work?” Locke asked.
“That’s an interesting question,” Gavde said, clearly fascinated by the prion. “As you saw, there were three cylinders inside the case. When the case was opened, a valve was switched on, so that the red cylinder was emitting prions, and the blue cylinder was injected with saline from the white cylinder.”
“Salt water?”
Gavde nodded. “At first, we couldn’t figure out why. When we tried to obtain a sample from the blue and white cylinders, we could only find a few active prions. The rest had been destroyed by the saline. Under the microscope, the prions from the blue cylinder looked virtually identical to the ones in the red cylinder. But they weren’t. When we tested them, one type of prion was much faster acting than the other. A more thorough examination of the device showed why.”
“I’m guessing the red cylinder had the prions that were faster acting,” he said.
