Bio-Strike

“Probably didn’t want to get him in hot water with us,” Thibodeau said.

“I agree. But that doesn’t change anything,” Nimec said. “The sweeps aren’t a haphazard affair. If they become disorganized, we start to have countersurveillance lapses.”

“Exactly,” Ricci said. “Guys on these teams show up for duty at five-thirty, six o’clock in the morning. And unless it happens that one of them wakes up feeling too sick to come in, like Palardy did Monday—”

“Or a last-minute emergency comes up… car breaks down on the highway, kid’s got a fever—”

“Which wasn’t the case—”

“Then Hernandez has got to have his people give him notice the day before,” Thibodeau said, finishing Ricci’s sentence. “Arrange to pull a replacement off another team. Be sure every area in the building due for a sweep is covered.”

Ricci nodded.

“Especially when it’s a team leader who’s going to be out,” he said. “Hernandez is sticking with his man until he learns the score, and I’d do the same. But Palardy being MIA is a bigger deal than he wanted us to think.”

Megan shook her head. “I’m still not sure I understand what the three of you are saying—”

“What I’m saying is Palardy might be too sick to call. Might’ve passed out same as the boss.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

“You’ve made quite a huge leap,” she said. “It’s possible we’ve hit on a disciplinary problem rather than anything having to do with Gord.”

“Meg’s right,” Scull said. “Don Palardy appears for work tomorrow morning, fit as a fiddle, your whole discussion’s moot. Like I said before, I can’t see reading a whole lot into his absence. Not at this stage.”

Ricci looked at him.

“Maybe not,” he said. “But I tell you something, Scull. He doesn’t show bright and early, I want to know his home address. Because wherever he lives, I’m heading over there to see what’s up.”

* * *

Dr. Eric Oh thought they resembled water lilies.

Clusters of beautiful, perfectly formed lilies floating on the surface of a quiet pond.

This quality of simple structural perfection was the essence of the virus’s enduring success as a life form. It was also what made them ideally suited for comparison study with an electron microscope. Every virion of a type was identical. An intact specimen of a virus from the blood of a patient in Mozambique would be the mirror image of a specimen of the same family, genus, and strain grown in culture at a California research laboratory, assuming it was likewise undamaged. To an experienced researcher it would look as though they had been manufactured at a single factory, on a single, orderly assembly line. You saw one, you’d seen them all.

At three o’clock in the morning, Eric was still at the Stanford lab, examining the photographs he’d snapped with its state-of-the-art Hitachi instrument beside those he’d called up on his computer from the vast database of EM pictures compiled and shared by medical and biological research facilities around the globe.

As with any sort of photography, setting up the shot was the difficult part of the process; once you got to the shutter click, you were home free. From the moment he’d scanned Gordian’s case report, Eric’s mind had been whispering virus. After he’d inspected the first-generation X rays sent by Lieberman, that whisper became an urgent shout. But the problem in taking pictures of viruses was that they tended to be camera shy. The tiniest were dwarfed even by common bacteria. Scientists measured their size in nanometers— billionths of a meter. On this infinitesimal scale, a single droplet of blood became a vast, unmapped sea of crests and troughs where they could remain undetected unless present in great numbers. And the greater their numbers, the worse the infection. It was therefore easier when investigating deadly viral illnesses to find colonies in samples from autopsies of the dead or patients in late-stage disease than in samples taken from less advanced cases.

Eric had hoped from the start that Roger Gordian wasn’t going to make life easy for him. When his viewing of an unconcentrated drop of serum failed to reveal any viruses after nearly two hours, he considered it a break. Better he’d needed to take the extra step of placing a sample in a centrifuge to pack as many organisms as possible into a concentrate than have an abounding population instantly jump out at his eyes. Viruses were unsparing, mechanistic parasites that used up the living cells of their hosts as they bred. Given Eric’s fears about the nature of Gordian’s infection, a sample that teemed with virus particles might have suggested a bleak prognosis indeed.

After centrifugation, Eric had used filter paper to drain the circular grid bearing his concentrated sample, then stained it with a solution of 2 percent phosphotungstate that was conductive to electrons. He had known that his processing would damage whatever viruses might be displayed, and that further deterioration could be expected from the ionizing effect of the microscope’s electron beam. But while there were methods of cryogenic preparation that could have substantially reduced, if not altogether eliminated, the loss of a specimen’s structural integrity, these techniques were finicky and took time. And Eric’s goal was to aid in Gordian’s diagnosis and treatment, not his postmortem, which meant he had to be expedient. He had weighed the two options against each other and decided to go ahead with conventional EM, reasoning that an adequate amount of the sample remained for the lab’s regular staff to perform cryo EM later on, should his own examination indicate it was advisable.

Now Eric removed his glasses and sat rubbing his eyes, strained from too many long, sleepless hours fixed on the visual panel of the EM. The only reminder that his stomach wasn’t completely empty was an occasional repeating of the ketchup-sopped burgers he’d picked up for dinner. He knew he ought to go home, pop some antacid tablets, and climb into bed. But the pictures wouldn’t let him budge.

He put the glasses back on and looked at his micrographs. Then at the electronic library shots on his computer screen. His gaze moving between them again and again.

Lilies. On a quiet pond.

As an epidemiologist with the CDC in the midnineties, Eric had been one of the primary investigators who had worked to identify the mystery illness that scourged the Four Corners Navajo tribal reservation in the Southwest and then gradually made its way eastward, killing better than half its victims — many of them young, otherwise healthy individuals — within days of their first symptoms. The infections began with mild flulike respiratory problems and rapidly progressed toward systemic crash, the walls of the capillaries in the lungs breaking down, developing tiny leaks that bled out into the surrounding tissues until they became inundated with fluid and sometimes swelled to double their normal size. In many of the fatal cases there was a similar breakdown of stomach membranes. The external signs of terminal-stage disease were especially horrible as the blood vessels in the body’s mucous membranes and subcutaneous tissues deteriorated, causing petechiae, pinpoint hemorrhages of the eyes, mouth, and skin.

In the early days of the contagion’s spread, the inhabitants of Four Corners came to refer to the epidemic simply — and for Eric chillingly — as sin nombre. Without a name. That designation stuck with it after intensive scientific detective work eventually determined the disease was a new strain of hantavirus, a lethal hemorrhagic fever whose occurrence was never previously recorded in North America.

The tingles Eric had felt on first perusal of Gordian’s case report had stemmed from the combination of his respiratory problems and the abnormal lymphocytes and diving platelet count in his bloodstream. Platelets were essential to the body’s healing factor, minuscule patches that gathered to stop bleeding and release clotting agents. A normal platelet count averaged 150,000 to 350,000 per microliter of blood. Gordian’s count had been 120,000 per microliter when he was admitted to San Jose Mercy — borderline low. It had then fallen to 90,000 Monday morning. On the most recent workup, it declined even more pronouncedly to 50,000 per microliter.

Eric had seen nearly the same profile in sin nombre patients entering the pulmonary edema phase of the disease. And changes in Gordian’s chest X rays had also been discomfortingly familiar. The vague skeins of shadow across his lungs evident on Sunday’s pictures had become linear opacities of the airspaces within twenty-four hours, visible as short perpendicular white streaks at their bases. By Tuesday afternoon, there were longer lines developing from the hilum, the crowded interchange where the blood vessels, nerves, and bronchi emerged into the lungs.

Sin nombre, he thought.

Without a name.

The liliform viruses now on Eric’s computer screen were micrographs that he and his colleagues on the CDC investigative team had taken eight years ago… and the shots he’d gotten out of the EM’s photographic chamber tonight bore an undeniably striking similarity to them.