House of Acerbi

Diaz only four hours in the Toulouse biohazard lab to learn that his fears about the pathogen were well-founded. The prospect that the virus could mutate was no longer a theoretical exercise, but a very real possibility.

“How could they have been so stupid?” Diaz said, pounding his fist on the armrest of his seat. “A first-year graduate student in molecular biology could have spotted the flaw!”

“So what are we looking at?” Lev asked. “I mean, worst case scenario.”

“Worst case scenario?” Diaz paused to stare out the window at the blue patches of ocean scattered between the intermittent breaks in the clouds below. “Everyone on the planet dies.”

“Even the ones who haven’t eaten the genetically modified wheat?”

“Yes … everyone. They used a mouse pox.”

“A what?” Leo asked.

“A mouse pox, Cardinal … they used data from mouse pox research to engineer the thing. The Russians perfected the technique when they came up with the bright idea of weaponizing smallpox a few years back.”

“Weaponizing? You mean they actually created a biological weapon from smallpox?”

“Yes … I know … it’s unimaginable, and evidently Acerbi got his hands on the research.”

The thump of clear air turbulence prompted Lev to grab onto the orange cargo netting hanging next to Diaz’s seat. “But I thought smallpox had been eradicated back in the ‘70’s.”

“It was, at least in nature. In 1975, a team from the World Health Organization tracked down the last known naturally occurring case of smallpox in the world. They had been summoned by the Indian government to Bhola, a small island off the coast of India in the Bay of Bengal, where they found a three-year-old girl covered with smallpox pustules huddled under a burlap sack. Luckily, the child survived, and before they returned home, the team followed up by inoculating the entire village. Back at the CDC, those who had been on the WHO team waited for months for news of another outbreak, but nothing happened. No more cases were reported. It was a major turning point in world history that most people are still unaware of, because after that, no more cases of smallpox appeared anywhere else in the world. We were finally able to say that smallpox had been eliminated from the face of the earth. Scientists began pleading with governments all over the world to destroy any remaining samples of the disease saved in freezers for future research. No one wanted to take the chance that it might somehow escape its frigid prison and begin its rampage through the human race once again. Even those who had dedicated their lives to the research of smallpox believed that the risk of allowing it to survive anywhere in the world was too great. They all insisted that it had to be destroyed.”

“Well, did they?” Ariella asked.

“Did they what?” Diaz answered. He was looking out the window again.

“Did they destroy the samples?”

“Of course not. Remember, we’re dealing with human beings here. In 1995, the World Health Organization voted unanimously to destroy all remaining stockpiles of smallpox, but unfortunately, they were dealing with people who had their own agendas. Supposedly, only two labs held the disease-the CDC in Atlanta and a lab outside Moscow, but we all knew there were many more. Another thing they didn’t realize at the time was that the Russians had three other secret labs scattered around the country dedicated to weaponizing the disease. They were making the stuff by the ton to load into rockets aimed at the United States and other places. I know, because the Acerbi Corporation hired several Russian scientists after the Soviet Union collapsed. I worked with a couple of them at the lab in Toulouse, and they told me that a few of their co-workers had left Russia with canisters full of the stuff. They planned on making a fortune by selling it to the highest bidder in the Middle East. Apparently, there is no moral high ground when it comes to bioweapons. Just think of it, a team of dedicated virologists and molecular biologists had finally eliminated a scourge that had stalked humanity for thousands of years, and some geniuses wanted to keep it around in freezers to study, while other geniuses were busy making weapons out of it and selling it to suspected terrorists on the side. Most people would call that the definition of insanity, but it was insanity mixed with evil … always a bad combination.”

Standing in the jet’s large cargo bay next to Ariella, John’s face was masked in a frown that indicated he was deep in thought. “But what’s all of this got to do with mice?”

“I beg your pardon?” Diaz responded, looking up at John like he was a waiter that had just spilled coffee on an expensive dinner jacket.

“You were talking earlier about something called a mouse pox.”

“Oh, yes … of course. I was talking about the method Rene’s team of molecular biologists and virologists used to engineer the pathogen. The story behind the discovery is quite fascinating, actually.”

“We have the time, Doctor,” Lev said. “We still have six more hours of flight time before we cross over the Central American coast and head north.”

“I think I need to stretch my legs and have a drink first.” Diaz stood and walked to the front of the plane before returning with a bottle of Merlot and several glasses. As he poured the wine and handed it out, he surveyed the surprised faces staring back at him and smiled. It seemed that Dr. Diaz possessed some social graces after all.

“Ok, let me explain,” Diaz said, leaning back on the bench-like seat. “Viruses are some of the most ancient life forms on the planet, and all pox diseases are viruses. There are hundreds, if not thousands of poxviruses that occur in nature. They infect almost every species known to man. Besides mouse pox, there is cow pox, monkey pox, deer pox, horse pox, canary pox … the list is endless. There’s even dolphin pox and gerbil pox … even snakes catch snake pox. Insects are really affected by pox viruses. In fact, many are starting to believe that modern-day vertebrates are actually descendants of insect pox viruses. Viruses are an essential part of nature, because if all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, insects would overwhelm the planet and destroy our ecosystem. Viruses are nature’s fail-safe system to prevent overcrowding, so you can see why there’s so much interest in them, which brings me to the Poxvirus Symposium.”

“The Poxvirus Symposium?” Leo asked.

“Yes, Cardinal. Back in 2002, an American microbiologist was attending the International Poxvirus Symposium in Montpellier, France. The event was held at Le Corum, the largest conference center in the city, because over six hundred poxvirus experts from around the world had been invited. The lobby was filled to capacity with scientists displaying their research on large posters …you know, the way kids do in science fairs at school. Anyway, the microbiologist bumped into another American researcher he knew and the two just happened to be standing next to a poster describing the research being done in Australia by the Co-operative Research Center for the Biological Control of Pest Animals. The Aussies were using viruses in an attempt to slow the large population increase of mice, specifically the mouse pox virus, which is closely related to smallpox but cannot infect humans. The Australians had been infecting mice with a mouse pox they had engineered to make the mice sterile, but instead, to the researcher’s surprise, it killed them.”

“Doesn’t mouse pox kill mice anyway?” Ariella asked.

“No, mice have a natural resistance to mouse pox, and although it can make them sick, it usually doesn’t kill them, but just to be safe, the researchers had vaccinated some of them as a precaution. They were shocked to discover that their engineered virus not only killed all of the naturally resistant mice, but wiped out sixty percent of the vaccinated ones as well.”

Lev leaned closer so he could hear Diaz over the background noise of the roaring engines outside the window. “What happened?”

“The Aussies had added a single foreign gene, the mouse IL-4 gene, to the natural mouse pox virus. It produced a cytokine that acted as a signal to the immune system, so by inserting a single foreign mouse gene into a natural mouse pox, their scientists had created a vaccine-resistant pox that was super lethal to mice.”

“What’s this got to do with humans?”

“Those two American scientists at the symposium also noticed a Russian scientist looking at the same poster, and they knew right away that the world was in trouble. If an engineered pox can smash through a vaccine made for mice, then an engineered pox could do the same thing to humans. As with a lot of discoveries, the Australians had accidentally stumbled on a way to genetically engineer any poxvirus so that it would remain unaffected by vaccines. In other words, they had given the world a way to weaponize a virus against a vaccinated population that thought it was safe. Against a new, engineered version of the smallpox virus, no one would have immunity. A world that had been vaccinated against smallpox would now be vulnerable, and that’s exactly what the Russians counted on when they went to work creating a new, engineered strain of smallpox we have no vaccine for.”