CHAPTER 37
“Megan?”
“Yes…”
“It’s Justin. Where are you?” His voice was frantic as if he was bursting with information. At first, she was afraid he was calling with bad news about his symptoms from the needle stick. Then she remembered he should have been in the Slammer, incommunicado.
“Justin?” she said. “Where did you get a phone?”
“I was going crazy in there, Meg,” he said. “I convinced Dr. Kraus to let me out.”
“Roberta let you out of the Slammer?” Mahoney gasped, throwing a puff of condensation on her face shield. Justin must have been putting some serious moves on the tall German scientist for her to cave in against such strict protocols. Kraus had always joked that she had a thing for his dimples.
“I’m not even feeling sick. Anyway, I promised her I’d stay in the BSL-Four containment and do some work.”
“I’ll bet you did.”
“Anyway,” Justin said, “that’s not the important part. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be fine.”
“Justin, I’m kind of busy here,” Mahoney sighed.
“I know, but I think you’ll want to hear what I’ve got. Check this out, Megan. We injected C-06 with the optic jelly on the eleventh and paired him with C-12 as a breathing buddy, right?”
Mahoney looked at her watch, doing the math. She felt her legs go a little wobbly, wondering where such a conversation was heading. “Right. That would have been about ninety-six hours ago-roughly four days…”
“A little over that,” Justin said. “But here’s the deal. I couldn’t sleep so I checked C-12 last night around midnight and he was clean. Then, I ran another test about three hours ago. He’s got it, Megan. His blood is swimming with filovirus. The virus is contagious, but not right away. My blood is still okay so it looks like I’m home free.”
“Symptomatic?” Megan found herself chewing the inside of her cheek, an awful thought working its way to the fore in her exhausted brain.
“C-12?” Justin said. “No, he’s fine. But I when I went to check on C-06 half an hour ago, he had blood literally gushing out of his nose. He’s crashing, Megan, and he’s crashing fast. The virus in his blood has changed. The protein sheaths are dissolving. I think that’s what makes it turn contagious.”
“It’s been a long time since my head’s seen a pillow,” Mahoney said. “Run down the timeline with me so I can make sure I have it straight.”
Justin plowed ahead, unaware that he was talking about anything but captive crab-eating macaques.
“Okay, Meg, here’s what we’ve got. The macaque we injected after we had to put C-45 down-C-06-didn’t become symptomatic after we injected him until the fifth day, but his breathing buddy in the next cage, sharing nothing but air, caught the virus sometime during the fourth night…”
Mahoney’s eyes fell to the overturned wastebasket. She was struck by a sudden, sickening thought. Justin had no idea about the real ramifications of what he was saying.
“Do me a favor,” she said weakly. “Check the contents of the glass vial we brought in yesterday.” Going from call to call on suspected terrorists she’d not had time to look at it herself.
“Already done,” Justin said. “It’s not a virus at all. It’s some kind of shellfish toxin. There’s enough in the vial to kill one man almost instantly, but that’s all.”
“A suicide drug…” Mahoney’s voice trailed off. Her eyes shot around the room. The carpet around Hamid was soaked in a dark, rapidly spreading stain. Droplets of the Arab’s blood had splattered like rain both during the fight and subsequent shooting. Chaffee’s face and hair were flecked in red. The customs inspector looked like a Civil War surgeon after a brutal amputation. “You’re saying C-06 passed the virus before he showed any symptoms whatsoever?”
“Yes. Do you know what this means?” From the jubilant tone in Justin’s voice, it was obvious all he was thinking about was that it meant he was clear of any infection from his needle stick.
Megan teetered on her feet, clutching at the edge of the table with her glove to remain standing.
“Everything all right, Doc?” Quinn took her arm to steady her.
The bulky hood moved back and forth slowly, swishing as Mahoney shook her head. She whispered, feeling as if she might vomit.
“Pandora…”
CHAPTER 38
“If I’m not mistaken the Soviets already have something like this,” Win Palmer said, leaning back in the customary thinking spot behind his heavy desk to stare at the ceiling. Quinn was beginning to think the man had answers to all his problems etched somewhere up there. “Didn’t they get some kind of airborne hemorrhagic virus?”
“Supposedly,” Mahoney said. “I think they had better luck with Marburg…” She sat hunched over on the couch, elbows on her knees. She was still stunned from the discovery that Arab terrorists had found a way not only to make a variant of the Ebola virus airborne, but contagious before-if only just barely, according to Justin-the carrier showed any symptoms of the disease.
Her head snapped up. “Don’t y’all see? A person with this… this Pandora form of Ebola would be the mother of all Typhoid Marys. We… I mean the CDC… the government has all kinds plans in place for quarantine in case of plague, tularemia, smallpox-all sorts of biological pandemic. But we’ll never even see this coming. People won’t even know they’re sick while they’re passing it to their families… the checkout lady at the grocery store, the guy who holds the door open for them at the bank… Imagine the underground Metro stations with their moist crowded air…” She took a deep breath, nodding her head as if to bring her thoughts into focus. “Over the last two decades HIV/AIDS has crept like a slow burn over the entire world. It’s infected tens of thousands of people-most generally transmitted through unprotected sex. Even the most flagrant individual is more discreet about having sex than he is with his breathing. We’re such a mobile society, in a matter of hours after Zafir becomes contagious, hundreds of people he has infected will get on airplanes and buses, taxis and subways…” Megan slumped as if she had already lost.
“How long?” Thibodaux asked, pacing beside the door. He was a doer and all this talking made him visibly twitchy. “How long do we have until Zafir is hot?”
“These guys aren’t stupid,” Quinn offered. “Megan, you think it’s safe to say they’d wait until they were out of their own country before they infect themselves with Pandora?”
“I’d think so,” she said. “This virus is so deadly I’m sure the guys who don’t want to be martyrs will insist on it.”
Palmer, who generally seemed content to sit back and listen, tapped a pencil on his leather desk blotter. “You called that one correctly. The Saudi deputy foreign minister sent word six hours ago that he was closing the borders to all incoming traffic. They’ve stationed Saudi military personnel at all border crossings. Trains, buses, and aircraft coming into the country have been halted until further notice. They’re blaming it on swine flu. It’s stirring up quite a scare over there. Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran have all followed suit. Egypt is bound to be next.
“We need to play this extremely close-hold.” Palmer continued. “We could end up with ten dozen more FBI Agent Chaffees staring down our necks if we let other agencies get involved in the reality of this thing.” Palmer leaned back and stared up at the ceiling some more. At length, he let the chair tip forward and rested his forearms on his desk. “I’ll work up a story for all the networks. Zafir is the biggest terrorist since Carlos the Jackal; that ought to get their juices flowing. I’ll release his photograph to all the wire services and get everyone in the country looking for him. We’ll leak it that he has nuclear material. There’s no such thing as a kill order on NCIC, but we’ll let everyone know he should be considered armed and much too dangerous to approach. Scary enough to keep local law enforcement at a respectable standoff distance.”
“That’ll work if we find him before he goes contagious on us,” Mahoney mused. “You say the Saudis shut their
