she stuck out her tongue. It was childish but satisfying. Turning the corner, she confronted the airtight security door. Involuntarily, she held her breath as she inserted Tad’s card and tapped out his access number: 43-23-39. There was a resounding mechanical click and the heavy door swung open, Marissa caught a whiff of the familiar phenolic disinfectant.
Marissa felt her pulse begin to race. As she crossed the threshold, she had the uncomfortable feeling she was entering a house of horrors. The dimly lit cavernous two-story space, filled with its confusion of pipes and their shadows, gave the impression of a gigantic spider web.
As she’d seen Tad do on her two previous visits, Marissa opened the small cabinet by the entrance and threw the circuit breakers, turning on the lights, and activating the compressors and ventilation equipment. The sound of the machinery was much louder than she’d recalled, sending vibrations through the floor.
Alone, the futuristic lab was even more intimidating than Marissa remembered. It took all her courage to proceed, knowing in addition that she was breaking rules when she was already on probation. Every second, she feared that someone would discover her.
With sweaty palms, she grasped the releasing wheel on the airtight door to the dressing rooms and tried to turn it. The wheel would not budge. Finally, using all her strength, she got it to turn. The seal broke with a hiss and the door swung outward. She climbed through, hearing the door close behind her with an ominous thud.
She felt her ears pop as she scrambled into a set of scrub clothes. The second door opened more easily, but the fewer problems she encountered, the more she worried about the real risks she was taking.
Locating a small plastic isolation suit among the twenty or so hanging in the chamber, Marissa found it much harder to get into without Tad’s help. She was sweaty by the time she zipped it closed.
At the switch panel, she only turned on the lights for the main lab; the rest were unnecessary. She had no intention of visiting the animal area. Then, carrying her air hose, she crossed the disinfecting chamber and climbed through the final airtight door into the main part of the lab.
Her first order of business was to hook up to an appropriately positioned manifold and let the fresh air balloon out her suit and clear her mask. She welcomed the hissing sound. Without it the silence had been oppressive. Orienting herself in relation to all the high-tech hardware, she spotted the freezer. She was already sorry that she’d not turned on all the lights. The shadows at the far end of the lab created a sinister backdrop for the deadly viruses, heightening Marissa’s fear.
Swinging her legs wide to accommodate the inflated and bulky isolation suit, Marissa started for the freezer, again marveling that with all the other “high-tech,” up-to-the-minute equipment, they had settled for an ordinary household appliance. Its existence in the maximum containment lab was as unlikely as an old adding machine at a computer convention.
Just short of the freezer, Marissa paused, eyeing the insulated bolted door to the left. After learning the viruses were not stored behind it, she had wondered just what it did protect. Nervously, she reached out and drew the bolt. A cloud of vapor rushed out as she opened the door and stepped inside. For a moment she felt as if she had stepped into a freezing cloud. Then the heavy door swung back against her air hose, plunging her into darkness.
When her eyes adjusted, she spotted what she hoped was a light switch and turned it on. Overhead lights flicked on, barely revealing a thermometer next to the switch. Bending over she was able to make out that it registered minus fifty-one degrees centigrade.
“My God!” exclaimed Marissa, understanding the source of the vapor: as soon as the air at room temperature met such cold, the humidity it contained sublimated to ice.
Turning around and facing the dense fog, Marissa moved deeper into the room, fanning the air with her arms. Almost immediately a ghastly image caught her eye. She screamed, the sound echoing horribly within her suit. At first she thought she was seeing ghosts. Then she realized that, still more horrible, she was facing a row of frozen, nude corpses, only partially visible through the swirling mist. At first she thought they were standing on their own in a row, but it turned out they were hung like cadavers for an anatomy course—caliperlike devices thrust into the ear canals. As she came closer, Marissa recognized the first body. For a moment she thought she was going to pass out: it was the Indian doctor whom Marissa had seen in Phoenix, his face frozen into an agonized death mask.
There were at least a half-dozen bodies. Marissa didn’t count. To the right, she saw the carcasses of monkeys and rats, frozen in equally grotesque positions. Although Marissa could understand that such freezing was probably necessary for the viral study of gross specimens, she had been totally unprepared for the sight. No wonder Tad had discouraged her from entering.
Marissa backed out of the room, turning off the light, and closing and bolting the door. She shivered both from distaste and actual chill.
Chastised for her curiosity, Marissa turned her attention to the freezer. In spite of the clumsiness afforded by the plastic suit and her own tremulousness, she worked the combination on the bicycle lock and got it off with relative ease. The link chain was another story. It was knotted, and she had to struggle to get it through the handle. It took longer than she would have liked, but at last it was free and she lifted the lid.
Rubbing the frost off the inner side of the lid, Marissa tried to decipher the index code. The viruses were in alphabetical order. “Ebola, Zaire ’76 was followed by “97, E11-E48, F1-F12.” Marissa guessed that the first number referred to the appropriate tray and that the letters and numbers that followed located the virus within the tray. Each tray held at least one thousand samples, which meant that there were fifty individual vials of the Zaire ’76 strain.
As carefully as possible, Marissa lifted tray 97 free and set it on a nearby counter top while she scanned the slots. Each was filled with a small black-topped vial. Marissa was both relieved and disappointed. She located the Zaire ’76 strain and lifted out sample E11. The tiny frozen ball inside looked innocuous, but Marissa knew that it contained millions of tiny viruses, any one or two of which, when thawed, were capable of killing a human being.
Slipping the vial back in its slot, Marissa lifted the next, checking to see if the ice ball appeared intact. She continued this process without seeing anything suspicious until finally she reached vial E39. The vial was empty!
Quickly, Marissa went through the rest of the samples: All were as they should be. She held vial E39 up to the light, squinting through her face mask to make sure she wasn’t making a mistake. But there was no doubt: there was definitely nothing in the vial. Although one of the scientists might have misplaced a sample, she could think of no reason a vial might be empty. All her inarticulated fears that the outbreaks had stemmed from accidental or even deliberate misuse of a CDC vial filled with an African virus seemed to be confirmed.
A sudden movement caught Marissa’s attention. The wheel to the door leading into the disinfecting chamber was turning! Someone was coming in!
Marissa was gripped with a paralyzing panic. For a moment she just stared helplessly. When she’d recovered enough to move, she put the empty vial back in the tray, returned it to the freezer and closed the lid. She thought about running, but there was no place to go. Maybe she could hide. She looked toward the darkened area by the animal cages. But there was no time. She heard the seal break on the door and two people entered the lab, dressed anonymously in plastic isolation suits. The smaller of the two seemed familiar with the lab, showing his larger companion where he should plug in his air hose.
Terrified, Marissa stayed where she was. There was always the faint chance that they were CDC scientists checking on some ongoing experiment. That hope faded quickly when she realized they were coming directly toward her. It was at that point she noticed that the smaller individual was holding a syringe. Her eyes flicked to his companion, who lumbered forward, his elbow fixed at an odd angle, stirring an unpleasant memory.
Marissa tried to see their faces, but the glare off the face plates made it impossible.
“Blumenthal?” asked the smaller of the two in a harsh, masculine voice. He reached out and rudely angled Marissa’s mask against the light. Apparently he recognized her, because he nodded to his companion, who reached for the zipper on her suit.
“No!” screamed Marissa, realizing these men were not security. They were about to attack her just as she’d been attacked in her house. Desperately, she snatched the bicycle lock from the freezer and threw it. The confusion gave Marissa just enough time to detach her air hose and run toward the animal area.
The larger man was after her in less than a second, but as he was about to grab her, he was pulled up short by his air hose, like a dog on a leash.
Marissa moved as quickly as she could into the dark corridors between the stacked animal cages, hearing the
