She didn’t look him in the eye. “We’ve been pulled in, too. You better listen.”
Nervous conversations rose from pods of people around the table until Conway cleared his throat. “Listen up, everybody.” In a second, the crowd went silent. Paul could feel the electricity in the air.
“Folks,” Conway began, “this is Dr. Stanley Samson from the USAMRIID.”
“The what?” asked someone from the back.
A man who looked like a college professor stood up next to Conway. Short white hair bristled over his scalp. He wore a button-down shirt with a striped tie. He carried a coffee cup with stained brown edges from all the coffee it had held. Immense wire-rimmed glasses hid a small face with blue eyes. He moved slowly in contrast to Conway.
“I’m Dr. Samson from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Disease.” He lifted his eyes to look around the room. “Haven’t heard of us, huh?” He grinned. “Just call us RID.”
Dr. Samson lifted a thin arm and waved it toward a group of drab looking people who stood to the side of the conference table. “My team. We don’t have much time, so I’ll cut the crap and make this short. We’ve been in existence since 1969. Our mission is to research biological threats to the military and develop strategies for medical defense against the threats that require containment. Of course, our work usually includes the defense of the civilian population, also.”
Conway, always needing attention, stepped forward. “You’d be surprised to learn they have over 200 scientists working in their labs at Ft. Detrick, in Maryland. We got involved in the wake of nine-eleven. Remember, there were several anthrax threats in the form of mailings to senators and people in Washington?”
When heads nodded, Dr. Samson continued, “As a result, we evaluated over 30,000 samples. We initiated Operation Noble Eagle, which required our country to expand its capacity for threat agent identification by tenfold.” Dr. Samson’s face lit-up. “And we did it.”
Valentini spoke, “Is this about an anthrax scare? I haven’t heard anything.”
Dr. Samson furrowed his eyebrows and shook his head back and forth. “Not so simple, I’m afraid to say.” He sipped coffee.
Paul felt his insides squeeze tighter. Something bad was coming.
Looking around him, Dr. Samson said, “Don’t repeat this, but we were taken by surprise, frankly. Until the message came from our Russian counterparts at Vector, we would never have guessed …”
“Vector?” Conway asked.
“Sorry. I’ll back up, but we don’t have much time so keep your questions short,” the doctor said. He shifted from one leg to the other and looked down into his coffee cup.
When he looked up, he spoke quickly. “Smallpox was eradicated from the planet in 1979 according to the World Health Organization. However, two repositories were established to contain the smallpox virus, called by its scientific name Variola, for future research purposes. One is located in Atlanta at the Center for Disease Control and the other is in eastern Russia. It’s called Vector.”
Paul glanced at the people around him. No one moved or sat down.
Dr. Samson continued, “Vector was chosen because the Soviets had established a top-secret biological warfare research lab there during the Cold War. It was only natural to continue to use the facilities. President Richard Nixon officially halted all biological warfare research in this country in 1969. The Soviets agreed to halt theirs also.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “They lied. In fact, as late at the 1980s, they were actively assembling biological weapons.
“Once the communists fell, our government moved into Vector and set up joint research projects, mostly to monitor their work. In fact, the complex is under military guard and has a security system built by the Bechtel Group and paid for by our government. Today, Vector stills conducts research as we do in our labs in Atlanta and Ft. Detrick.”
Conway asked, “I thought you said only Atlanta has the small pox virus?”
“That’s correct. We just do research. Atlanta and Vector are the only places on earth where the virus is kept in deep freeze storage. By the nineties, we learned the old Soviet Union had a culture collection of extremely virulent Variola strains and they were manufacturing it by the ton.”
“So, what’s the problem?” Valentini said.
“I’m getting to that. Our defense department actually funds much of the present research at Vector in order to have access and to control it. We received word two weeks ago that a sample of the smallpox virus and the vaccine against it had been stolen from the secured facility.”
“Where’d it go?”
Samson shrugged. “Disappeared. The Russians are questioning all employees but that’s a lot of people. As of now, they don’t have any answers.”
“So … what’s that mean for us?” Valentini asked slowly. “After being frozen, are these samples dangerous?”
“As a rule, the Soviet scientists preferred to manufacture their viruses in dry, powder form. That wasn’t true of Variola because the liquid form retained its viability for months when deep frozen and would be extremely stable if converted to aerosol form. That means the stolen samples are probably extremely hot.”
“Huh?”
“Dangerous, contagious,” Dr. Samson said. “The Soviets had a three hundred gallon tank that looked like the hot water heater in your home. I’ve seen it. They filled it with live kidney cells from African green monkeys and pumped in smallpox. They ran it at warm temperatures and in a few days, the reactor became hot with amplified smallpox.”
Paul could tell people still failed to catch on to the danger. When Dr. Samson looked around the room, he didn’t get any reaction.
Dr. Samson continued, “A single run of the reactor could’ve produced one hundred trillion lethal doses of smallpox-enough to give everyone in the world about two thousand infective doses. It would be easy for someone to draw off samples that could’ve been freeze-dried in small vials and easily carried anywhere in the world. I’m sure you remember that smallpox invades the respiratory system from human to human. It’s spread by coughing, sneezing, saliva, anything that can be airborne. So, it’s easy to transmit and wouldn’t take a lot of the sample to start a pandemic.”
“And,” Conway interrupted, “you think the samples are here.”
Dr. Samson stopped to sip his coffee. He swallowed slowly. “Yes.”
“What evidence do you have?” Valentini demanded.
“When the young Somali man was killed a few months ago, the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were alerted, as they’d been tracking these young men for months. Agent Cortez,” he nodded at Joan, “worried there may be something more to the murder since he returned to the country, rather than stay in Somalia to fight like the others. In turn, she alerted our contract scientist in Minneapolis to accompany her to the crime scene.”
Paul stared at Joan. She refused to catch his eyes. He was furious. When they’d met, she hadn’t lied exactly, but certainly left out big chunks of what she knew. Paul forced himself to calm down. He’d deal with that problem later.
Dr. Samson continued, “Several things struck us as odd-the use of the medical mask. Of course, it could’ve been a disguise, but the killer used a respirator designed to prevent the spread of air borne contaminants. He wore glasses. We also found latex gloves, worn by the killer, at the crime scene. To prevent fingerprints? Maybe, but could they have been worn as a further protection against a contagious disease?”
“I still don’t see how this evidence is conclusive,” Valentini said.
“We agreed. Up to that point, the evidence was curious but not much more. For a while we stopped our investigation. We really didn’t know what else to do until we remembered an autopsy had been done on the victim. We contacted the Medical Examiner’s office here and obtained the records and specimens from the autopsy. When we viewed the tissue remains, we clearly saw the results of a Variola invasion.”
“What? You’re saying the victim had smallpox?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Dr. Samson answered. “So, the question became-if small pox doesn’t exist in the world, how did the young man contract it? Again, we were shocked but didn’t know where to turn.”
“Wouldn’t the victim infect others?” Conway said.
“Depends on the incubation period. Normally, it’s two weeks. It takes a while for the patient to be
