Chapter Thirty-Six
Knight
We had just spent the last two hours making sure that everything in Reed Security was in tip top shape. We had maybe a day before the feds came back with a search warrant. The faster we figured this out, the better prepared we would be for what came next.
Becky and Rob were working in Cazzo’s security room that he had set up in his house. Becky had transferred all the files there and that would be our base of operations for the time being. If the feds got a warrant to search the houses, which was less likely, we would have to find a new place to set up. The most likely spot would be my house in Colorado. I knew that it was secure and the feds would have no reason to search there. Hell, they didn’t even know about it. I had made sure that it not only wasn’t linked to me, but anybody at Reed Security. However, I wasn’t ready to make that trip back out there yet. The last time we had been there, it had been for a year, and that was a year too long.
“What do you have, Becky?”
“Well, a lot of this jargon took me a long time to sort through, but I think I have a general understanding of what they were working on in that lab.”
“What is it?” Cap asked.
Sinner, Cazzo, and Burg were there, mostly because it was Cazzo’s house and he wouldn’t leave his team out of what was happening. And then I had brought Hunter in from the beginning, so his team was there also. Plus, Derek was a founding member of Reed Security. It felt like too many of us were involved. If this thing went south, the fewer people that knew about it, the better they would be. I had created this mess when I started digging, and I didn’t want everyone caught up in it.
“Well, it appears to be a virus,” she said hesitantly.
“They were studying it?” I asked. “Is this a virus that’s currently circulating?”
“It can’t be,” Cap said. “Remember, she said that this virus wasn’t registered with the CDC.”
“And I’m not finding any records that any kind of virus like this is currently circulating anywhere in the world,” Becky said. “It’s only in this lab as far as I can tell.”
“So, they created it.”
“That’s what it looks like.”
It felt like Becky was holding back. Usually, she just flew off the handle, rambling through all the information she had found. Now she was dead silent.
“Becky, what aren’t you telling us?”
She bit her lip, fidgeting as she stared down at her computer. “Look, I’m not sure on this. I mean, I could have it wrong-”
“You’re never wrong,” Cap pointed out.
“Yeah, but this is…I mean, I really hope I’m wrong.”
“Just spit it out,” I said frustratedly. “We don’t have time to beat around the bush.”
“Okay,” she took a deep breath. “Remember that I told you that I found a list of people in the system? They were attached to the lab, but not to any trials. They’re random people, people that no one would miss. I mean, no one is looking for these people. Some are listed as missing, but I looked into the records and after just a day of investigating, the police department pretty much wrote them off as people that disappeared for absolutely no reason. I dug through the files and all I could find were a bunch of excuses, like they were drug addicts or they had a history of disappearing.”
“Becky, you already told us this part.”
“I know, right, but…it appears the virus was being tested on these people.”
I thought back to our earlier conversation about this. That didn’t add up. It couldn’t. “But all those tests showed that the people died. So, they were testing a virus to test its mortality rate?”
She nodded. “Yeah, and it’s bad. I mean, it’s not like this is just a simple virus. This infects people with a combination that’s similar to having the Hantavirus, Ebola, SARS, small pox, influenza, and rabies all wrapped into one. It’s like someone decided to take the world’s worst viruses and combine them all in one. Only, if I’m reading the journals right, when they created this disease, it created something far beyond anything they could have imagined. It morphed into something even deadlier then what those do. The trials show a ninety-nine percent mortality rate. This was created to kill and it kills fast.”
“How fast?” I asked.
“In patients that already have compromised immune systems, they start to show symptoms within two hours. They’re usually dead within three days. The patients that were healthy didn’t succumb to the virus for a week.”
“How does it spread?” Hunter asked.
Becky’s eyes slipped closed. “It’s airborne.”
A silence filled the room as we all processed what she said. It was impossible. Why would anyone create a virus like that? The mortality rate alone suggested that this was being created as a weapon.
“Do we have any idea from the notes how long this thing will last?” Hunter asked.
“Wouldn’t it just keep killing people off as it was spread?” Sinner asked.
“Viruses like influenza usually slow down during warmer months.”
“This doesn’t sound like influenza,” Burg pointed out.
“In the lab, they infected twenty percent of the patients with the actual virus. Then they put another twenty percent of them in the same room with them. Within hours, all of the patients were infected, showing varying degrees of symptoms. Then they put another batch of patients in another room. The rooms had connecting air vents, and even though they were separated, the particles were in the air, so within a day, those patients were infected also.”
“So, it took longer for them to be infected-” Cap started.
“But the point is, this is like a super virus. It spreads quickly and can last in the air for long periods of time. Imagine if you released this in a skyscraper full of offices. Within a
