Exposed (21 page)

The Slammer

“I want to know what I’ve been exposed to,” Maggie said without wasting any time.

“We don’t know,” Platt answered quickly and it reminded Maggie of the woman in the blue space suit. Was this USAMRIID’s mantra of the day? All the latest technology and they didn’t know.
Right.

“By now you must have some idea.” She gave him another chance.

“No, not yet.”

She thought he might be convincing except that he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Instead, his eyes glanced to the side at the wall monitors, flashed over her head, swept back to the counter, like they were preoccupied but really were evasive.

“You’d make an awful poker player,” she said and this time his eyes flew back to hers. Now that she had his attention she couldn’t help thinking they were intense eyes, the kind that when focused could see deep into your soul. “Knowing can’t possibly be worse than not knowing.”

He rubbed at his jaw but his eyes stayed on her, as if now he was searching for something in her face that would guide him. Did he hope for a glimpse of courage from her or was he waiting for his own?

“I haven’t heard anything from the lab.”

“But you must have some ideas of your own.” She tried to see if he might be hiding something. He was making this harder than she expected. It had to be bad. By now they would have been able to eliminate a few of the obvious things.

“It’s pointless to guess,” he said. “Why go through that?”

“Because you’ve left me with nothing better to do.”

He nodded, an exaggerated up and down, showing okay, yes, he certainly understood. “You have cable TV.”

“Basic. No AMC. No FX. How about a computer with Internet service?”

“I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime let’s find something better for you to do.”

She thought he was patronizing her, but he looked serious.

“I spent four days quarantined in a tent,” he said, “just outside Sierra Leone. No cable. Not even basic. Not much to do. Count dead mosquitoes. Wish that you had enough gin or vodka to pass out.”

“Guess I should put in a request for breakfast to include some Scotch.” She was joking. She could tell he was not. “So what did you do to while away the hours in your tent just outside Sierra Leone?”

“Okay, don’t laugh,” he said, arching an eyebrow as though to test her. “I tried to replay
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
in my head.” He paused and rubbed his eyes as if needing to take a break before he dived into a lengthy explanation. She didn’t give him a chance.

“Hmm…
Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
quite the heady commentary about the dark side of human nature. Not a bad movie,” she said, enjoying his surprise. “But not my favorite Humphrey Bogart.”

He stared at her, caught off guard, but only for a second or two. “Let me guess, you prefer your Bogie with Bacall.”

“No, not necessarily. If memory serves, he won the Oscar for
The African Queen
but I think he deserved it much more for
The Caine Mutiny
.”

“Crazy Queeg?” He offered her a lopsided grin then readjusted himself in the cheap, plastic chair, rolled his shoulders, stretched his legs as if satisfied with her answer and preparing to stay for a while. “So if you had to choose, who would it be, Bogart or Cary Grant?”

Without missing a beat, Maggie said, “Jimmy Stewart.”

“You’re kidding? You’d choose clumsy and gawky over debonair and charming?”

“Jimmy Stewart
is
charming. And I like his sense of humor.” She sat back in her own uncomfortable plastic chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “So how ’bout you? Bacall or Grace Kelly?”

“Katharine Hepburn,” he answered just as quickly with the raised eyebrow again, only this time it seemed to be telling her he could play this game.

She nodded her approval. “Did you ever watch
The Twilight Zone?
”

“Yes, but my mom didn’t like me watching it. She said it’d give me nightmares.”

“My mom didn’t care what I watched as long as it didn’t interrupt her drunken stupors.” As soon as Maggie said it, she was sorry. She saw a subtle change in his face and wished she hadn’t revealed so much. What was she thinking? Now he was quiet, watching her. He’d say something like, “I’m sorry,” which never made sense to Maggie. Why did people say they were sorry when it clearly had nothing to do with them?

“Do you remember the episode with the woman in the hospital and her face is all bandaged?” he asked

He surprised her. It wasn’t at all what Maggie had expected.

He continued, “She’s waiting to have the bandages removed and she’s worried that she’ll be horribly scarred and disfigured.”

“And the medical staff is all standing around the bed,” Maggie joined in. “But the camera focuses only on her. Sometimes you see the backs of the staff, but that’s it.”

“The bandages come off and they all gasp and turn away in disappointment and horror.”

“But she looks normal.” Maggie said. “Then you see that everyone else’s face is warped and deformed with pig snouts and bulging eyes.”

“Sometimes normal is simply what you’re used to,” he said. Then he waited for her to catch up with him. His way of telling her he understood. Maybe his way of telling her that no matter how dysfunctional her childhood experiences were they didn’t make her some sort of freak.

The door behind him opened into his room and a woman in a lab coat interrupted. Maggie couldn’t hear her over Platt’s receiver and the glass was soundproof. He nodded and the woman left.

To Maggie he said, “Gotta go.” He stood to leave.

She wanted to go with him. Did they finally know something? Maybe he saw a glimpse of panic in her face, in her eyes, because he hesitated.

“So Lieutenant Commander Queeg mistakenly directs the
Caine
over its own towline. Start there,” he said with another lopsided grin. “I should be back before you get to Queeg’s search for the pilfered strawberries.”

He waited for her smile. Then he hung up the receiver and left. Suddenly her small, isolated room seemed even quieter than it was before.

Platt’s heart pounded with every footstep. He felt the kick of adrenaline in his gut, a mixture of dread and anticipation countered the exhaustion.

The hallways were quiet, some dark. He avoided the elevators. Took the stairs instead. He needed the motion. He caught himself taking two steps at a time. Slow down, he told himself when he really wanted to break out in a run.

Dr. Drummond had told him that, “Dr. McCathy needs you on the fourth floor. He said you have to see this for yourself.”

Best-case scenario, McCathy was being his melodramatic self. Worst-case scenario, McCathy found something worthy of his melodrama, something to justify his pent-up anger.

Despite what he had told Agent O’Dell, Platt’s limited examination and observations of Ms. Kellerman had led him to draw some conclusions. She had been coughing up blood and had problems breathing, along with red eyes and obvious severe abdominal pain. Her fever had been high enough and had lasted enough days to cause fever blisters inside her mouth.

Her soiled bedding indicated bouts of vomiting and diarrhea that in the last twenty-four hours had rendered her so weak she hadn’t been able to get out of bed. She was in shock and remained unresponsive and incoherent. Early tests indicated that her kidneys had begun to shut down. If his preliminary assessment was correct, her other organs would soon follow.

Because of the severity of her symptoms he had narrowed the cause down to three possibilities, three biological weapons that a terrorist might use. None of them would be easy to treat. An anthrax infection, depending on what form, might be controlled with antibiotics. Hopefully they might be able to contain the spores to Ms. Kellerman’s house and to those already infected. Ricin would need minimal containment, as well. But if ingested, ricin was a deadly toxin and caused a painful death. The third possibility he didn’t like to even think about. If the terrorist had managed to use an infectious disease like thyphoid or a virus like Marburg or—heaven forbid, Ebola, then treatment and containment might be impossible. Ms. Kellerman’s house would be a hot zone and anyone within reach of her or it could be a walking epidemic.

Platt slowed when he got to the fourth floor. The procedure would be for McCathy to prepare and seal his sample slides while in a space suit inside a Level 4 suite. Once preserved and sealed they would be able to look at the slides without fear of exposure. Platt knew he’d find McCathy now in the Level 3 suite where the electron microscope was kept. The expensive contraption was a metal tower as tall as Platt. It’s beam of light allowed them to see microscopic cells and view them like geographic landscapes.

Platt changed in the outer staging area from his jeans and sweatshirt to surgical scrubs, latex gloves, goggles, a paper mask and shoe covers. Then he joined McCathy.

The microbiologist sat at the counter, hunched over the binocular eyepiece of a microscope. When he looked up at Platt his eyes looked wild and enlarged. He wore thick eyeglasses under the goggles. His face and even his paper mask were damp with sweat. His neatly trimmed beard stuck out from behind the mask, giving him a crazy-scientist look that, ordinarily, Platt would have shrugged off as part of McCathy’s melodrama. This time it added to the thump already banging inside Platt’s chest.

“It’s not good,” McCathy said. “This is absolutely amazing. In fact, it’d be absolutely beautiful if it wasn’t so goddamn deadly.”

“What is it?”

“The cells from Ms. Kellerman. They’re busting open with worms.”

“Worms?” The banging in Platt’s chest invaded his head, as well. “Impossible. There must be a mistake.”

“Take a look for yourself,” McCathy told him, bolting up and sliding his stool aside, offering Platt a look through the microscope’s eyepiece.

Platt swallowed hard and moved in. Adjusted the focus. Tried to ignore his sweaty palms inside the latex gloves. He took a deep breath and clanked his goggles against the microscope’s eyepiece. What he saw looked like spaghetti or thin curlicue snakes with threads unraveling from their sides. They pushed against the cell wall, breaking away from a clump, or what they called a brick, in the center of the cell.

Platt forced himself to breathe slowly. Without moving, still staring, he said, “What about our own lab contamination?”

“Impossible. Our samples are in freezers, separated from this lab by three walls of biocontainment.”

“There are other things this could be.” But Platt couldn’t think of a single one. The cell had been invaded and was exploding with what looked like worms, snakes tangled in a pile. “This agent, this invader doesn’t loop much. And it’s too long. Shouldn’t there be a shepherd’s hook?”

“There’s only one thing I know of that looks like that, whether there’s a loop, curl or hook,” McCathy said. “I saw Marburg years ago. Samples taken from an outbreak along the Congo. Wiped out a whole village in a matter of weeks.”

Platt had seen something similar. The quarantine he had told Agent O’Dell about was one enforced from an outbreak of Lassa fever, another single RNA virus. But Lassa didn’t make cells explode like this.

“How can we confirm it? I don’t just mean running the cells through the electron microscope. I mean inexplicably. We have to be certain, without a doubt,” he told McCathy. They couldn’t waste any more time.

“We can test Ms. Kellerman’s cells against the real thing.”

“What do we have to do?”

“We take more of her blood serum and drop it on cells, on samples from our freezers, samples that we know have the real thing. If any of them glow…” McCathy shrugged. “Then you have your confirmation, beyond a doubt.”

“What do we have in the freezer?”

“Marburg, Ebola Zaire, Lassa and Ebola Reston.”

“How long will that take?”

“I can suit up now.” McCathy glanced at his wristwatch. “Take about thirty to forty minutes to prepare the samples from the freezer. Once I drop Ms. Kellerman’s cells onto the real deal it’s a matter of minutes.”

“Okay, let’s do it.”

“Wait a minute. I work alone in Level 4.”

Platt wasn’t surprised that McCathy would balk even at a time like this. He kept calm and steady. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t allow a hint of anger when he said, “Not this time.”

Platt’s heart pounded with every footstep. He felt the kick of adrenaline in his gut, a mixture of dread and anticipation countered the exhaustion.

The hallways were quiet, some dark. He avoided the elevators. Took the stairs instead. He needed the motion. He caught himself taking two steps at a time. Slow down, he told himself when he really wanted to break out in a run.

Dr. Drummond had told him that, “Dr. McCathy needs you on the fourth floor. He said you have to see this for yourself.”

Best-case scenario, McCathy was being his melodramatic self. Worst-case scenario, McCathy found something worthy of his melodrama, something to justify his pent-up anger.

Despite what he had told Agent O’Dell, Platt’s limited examination and observations of Ms. Kellerman had led him to draw some conclusions. She had been coughing up blood and had problems breathing, along with red eyes and obvious severe abdominal pain. Her fever had been high enough and had lasted enough days to cause fever blisters inside her mouth.

Her soiled bedding indicated bouts of vomiting and diarrhea that in the last twenty-four hours had rendered her so weak she hadn’t been able to get out of bed. She was in shock and remained unresponsive and incoherent. Early tests indicated that her kidneys had begun to shut down. If his preliminary assessment was correct, her other organs would soon follow.

Because of the severity of her symptoms he had narrowed the cause down to three possibilities, three biological weapons that a terrorist might use. None of them would be easy to treat. An anthrax infection, depending on what form, might be controlled with antibiotics. Hopefully they might be able to contain the spores to Ms. Kellerman’s house and to those already infected. Ricin would need minimal containment, as well. But if ingested, ricin was a deadly toxin and caused a painful death. The third possibility he didn’t like to even think about. If the terrorist had managed to use an infectious disease like thyphoid or a virus like Marburg or—heaven forbid, Ebola, then treatment and containment might be impossible. Ms. Kellerman’s house would be a hot zone and anyone within reach of her or it could be a walking epidemic.

Platt slowed when he got to the fourth floor. The procedure would be for McCathy to prepare and seal his sample slides while in a space suit inside a Level 4 suite. Once preserved and sealed they would be able to look at the slides without fear of exposure. Platt knew he’d find McCathy now in the Level 3 suite where the electron microscope was kept. The expensive contraption was a metal tower as tall as Platt. It’s beam of light allowed them to see microscopic cells and view them like geographic landscapes.

Platt changed in the outer staging area from his jeans and sweatshirt to surgical scrubs, latex gloves, goggles, a paper mask and shoe covers. Then he joined McCathy.

The microbiologist sat at the counter, hunched over the binocular eyepiece of a microscope. When he looked up at Platt his eyes looked wild and enlarged. He wore thick eyeglasses under the goggles. His face and even his paper mask were damp with sweat. His neatly trimmed beard stuck out from behind the mask, giving him a crazy-scientist look that, ordinarily, Platt would have shrugged off as part of McCathy’s melodrama. This time it added to the thump already banging inside Platt’s chest.

“It’s not good,” McCathy said. “This is absolutely amazing. In fact, it’d be absolutely beautiful if it wasn’t so goddamn deadly.”

“What is it?”

“The cells from Ms. Kellerman. They’re busting open with worms.”

“Worms?” The banging in Platt’s chest invaded his head, as well. “Impossible. There must be a mistake.”

“Take a look for yourself,” McCathy told him, bolting up and sliding his stool aside, offering Platt a look through the microscope’s eyepiece.

Platt swallowed hard and moved in. Adjusted the focus. Tried to ignore his sweaty palms inside the latex gloves. He took a deep breath and clanked his goggles against the microscope’s eyepiece. What he saw looked like spaghetti or thin curlicue snakes with threads unraveling from their sides. They pushed against the cell wall, breaking away from a clump, or what they called a brick, in the center of the cell.

Platt forced himself to breathe slowly. Without moving, still staring, he said, “What about our own lab contamination?”

“Impossible. Our samples are in freezers, separated from this lab by three walls of biocontainment.”

“There are other things this could be.” But Platt couldn’t think of a single one. The cell had been invaded and was exploding with what looked like worms, snakes tangled in a pile. “This agent, this invader doesn’t loop much. And it’s too long. Shouldn’t there be a shepherd’s hook?”

“There’s only one thing I know of that looks like that, whether there’s a loop, curl or hook,” McCathy said. “I saw Marburg years ago. Samples taken from an outbreak along the Congo. Wiped out a whole village in a matter of weeks.”

Platt had seen something similar. The quarantine he had told Agent O’Dell about was one enforced from an outbreak of Lassa fever, another single RNA virus. But Lassa didn’t make cells explode like this.

“How can we confirm it? I don’t just mean running the cells through the electron microscope. I mean inexplicably. We have to be certain, without a doubt,” he told McCathy. They couldn’t waste any more time.

“We can test Ms. Kellerman’s cells against the real thing.”

“What do we have to do?”

“We take more of her blood serum and drop it on cells, on samples from our freezers, samples that we know have the real thing. If any of them glow…” McCathy shrugged. “Then you have your confirmation, beyond a doubt.”

“What do we have in the freezer?”

“Marburg, Ebola Zaire, Lassa and Ebola Reston.”

“How long will that take?”

“I can suit up now.” McCathy glanced at his wristwatch. “Take about thirty to forty minutes to prepare the samples from the freezer. Once I drop Ms. Kellerman’s cells onto the real deal it’s a matter of minutes.”

“Okay, let’s do it.”

“Wait a minute. I work alone in Level 4.”

Platt wasn’t surprised that McCathy would balk even at a time like this. He kept calm and steady. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t allow a hint of anger when he said, “Not this time.”