Immortality (7 page)

“Is an EIS team there yet?”

“Same team, same pictures, same test results. What the hell is going on?”

“I’m telling you Jeffrey, it’s got all the symptoms of a chemical, not a disease. Mobility like this also rules out any kind of contagion vector unless we’ve got a walking-wounded that came from the Brazilian village, boarded a jet, and flew to Cabo-whatever to spread the disease there.”

“I ran all the tests again,” said Jeffrey. “There’s no trace of chemical agents. It’s biological and the director agrees with me.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, you’ll get a chance to prove it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I just finished talking with the director. He’s instructed me to give you all the assistance I can. You’re the new head of this investigation. He’s probably got his secretary trying to get you on the phone right now.”

“Why me?”

“It’s the antibody levels of the victims. It’s the only lead we’ve got and you’re one of the best when it comes to reverse engineering a pathogen from immune system responses. Kathy, I’m certain it’s a bug. There’s more proof than you know. I’m not authorized to share this, but you’re going to know it all in a few hours anyway. There was a third incident. The Navy is sending us the body of a diver who died in this third incident. There’s a lot of secrecy surrounding what happened. All I know is that this diver left port in a submarine two weeks ago and was swimming in a couple hundred feet of water when he died. The spooky thing is he died at nearly the same time as villagers of Cabo San Diego; but he was in the Antarctic, six hundred miles south of Cabo San Diego.”

“That’s impossible,” said Kathy. “What are we dealing with here – simultaneous exposures of a Navy diver and villagers in Cabo San Diego plus an exact two-week onset period? What kind of bug acts like that?”

“I haven’t slept in days. Now it’s your turn to lose some sleep.”

“Where’s the body being sent?”

“The safest place in the world for it... the BVMC lab. Cadavers are also coming from Cabo San Diego.”

Kathy took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. She was upset and confused. There was something very wrong going on here. Government agencies didn’t go all out like this over events in poor countries unless there was a mountain of political pressure, so this was all about the Navy diver.

“Jeffrey, have you asked yourself why the United States government is suddenly moving so hard on this? I don’t want to sound insensitive but, to politicians, what we have are a lot of dead South Americans and one Navy sailor. South Americans don’t get to vote in U.S. elections. You practically have to kidnap a politician before they’ll listen to you about any public health issue unless it’s bio-weapons related. Remember the assistance we got with drug resistant TB? Zero. That monster had hospitalized or killed a hundred times more than this disaster. No, there’s got to be something horrible that we don’t know and the Pols do.”

“I don’t want to add to your paranoia,” said Jeffrey. “But there’s a media blackout in effect; national security has been invoked. This could turn into a stealth operation before you even get your hands on it. Someone very high up in the political food chain is worried about this bug, someone much higher than Director Shaw.”

The moment Kathy hung up from Jeffrey, the phone rang again. Director Shaw’s secretary was on the line; Shaw himself came on a few minutes later. Kathy knew the drill. The director was a very predictable political animal. He delivered a bit of the carrot, a bit of stick, and a not-so-subtle request to work twenty-four hours a day. Oh, and one more thing. The kicker and probable reason for the personal call: she was to funnel everything through his office, and that meant everything.

Kathy got dressed and packed a suitcase. She coaxed the kids, Tolstoy and Socks, into their kitty cage and took them out to her Jeep. She knew she wouldn’t be home for days. The kids were used to the drill. They had a lot of human friends on the fourth floor of the BVMC lab.

~

The room was growing dark. Kathy looked around the ruin of her office. The floor was covered with papers. Her desk was a minefield of half empty coffee cups and partially eaten food; and worse, Jeffrey was snoring on her couch. At daybreak, he would be on his way to South America to supervise the field operation. His wife had called just before lunchtime. It had sounded like they were arguing about him leaving. When he’d hung up, Kathy had asked him if he was okay and had gotten only a shrug in response.

Kathy decided to let him continue napping. There was a backlog of work waiting for her. The analysis of blood and tissue samples would be available on her computer within the hour. Everything done at the lab revolved around the CDC WAN and Secure-Net. All data, both visual and written, was stored in massive servers. All laboratory equipment was computer remote-controlled. All lab work was monitored by digital video cameras and archived.

Kathy had ordered a full workup of the respiratory and cardiac control regions of the Navy diver’s brainstem, including cross-sectional scanning of the regions, using the lab’s newest 3D Microscopic-MRI imaging equipment. Since the sailor died because his lungs stopped operating and there were no other clues, Kathy decided to start reverse engineering by investigating the area of the brainstem that controlled respiration and heart. Maybe the chemical agent targeted this nerve tissue; and if it did, there would be traces. She was still convinced the cause of death was chemical and not biological.

Kathy clicked a bookmark on her desktop. A live video feed from the BVMC lab appeared inside a browser window. Her screen was twenty-five inches across and capable of displaying images with many times the resolution of the best high definition television. The BVMC lab had been designed so the scientists never had to enter the containment room. They typed work orders into their computers. From there, lab technicians wearing special biohazard containment suits, who staffed the facility twenty-four hours a day, carried out the procedures. The technicians were called lab rats by the staff and they wore this title with pride. The name strips on each of their personal containment suits read “Lab Rat” in small lettering below their name as if it were a title. By CDC policy, access to the lab was restricted to essential personnel only. Doctors and scientists were almost always considered nonessential. Kathy often broke this rule. It required thirty minutes to complete the entry procedure to the containment lab – and even longer to exit, but she didn’t mind. Sometimes she needed to do things herself. She felt subtle details were missed if her hands couldn’t touch the work.

She clicked opened the report on tissue and blood toxicology for the sailor’s brainstem. After reading and re-reading the report, she couldn’t find anything that appeared abnormal. This just didn’t make sense. There had to be something. She knew she was staring at the answer and just not seeing it.

She opened the recorded images from the Microscopic-MRI and leaned back in her chair. The detail was amazing. The results of 3D Microscopic-MRI never failed to leave her in awe. In front of her eyes was an alien world she could navigate with a computer screen and mouse. The imaging equipment delivered about one micron of resolution. She could see great detail in structures only a few cells in thickness, and even see the shapes of the cells themselves. She started by examining nerve bundles that exited the respiratory and cardiac regions of the brainstem.

A half hour into her exploration, something caught her eye. A few nerve fibers in a bundle were severed. The fibers were so thin that it would take thirty of them to equal the thickness of a human hair. She looked but could not find evidence of trauma or penetration of the bundle’s outer protective sheath. This eliminated the possibility of mechanical damage from a weapon or accident.

Minutes after discovering the first cut, she was identifying one cut after another. While the nerve bundle had not been severed entirely in any one location, all the microscopic cuts added up to the same thing. The bundle had been effectively severed. This was clearly enough nerve damage to cause death. She knew she was on the trail of the killer. The satisfaction of catching and stopping this thing was like a drug that had just flowed into her veins. Even if she had wanted to stop, she could never stop now.

Kathy ordered twenty different samples of damaged nerve fibers prepared for the electron microscopes and for toxicology testing. In the past, the task of locating and sampling microscopic regions would have taken days. Now this job was completely automated. All Kathy had to do was mark the coordinates on the screen; and within minutes, micro-surgery robots were at work taking samples with needle-like bores. Her adrenaline flowed. She was going to nail this killer in hours, not days.

On the computer screen, Kathy watched as a lab technician wearing a containment suit inserted specimen carriers into a pair of electron microscopes. One of the instruments was a Scanning Electron Microscope, a SEM. The SEM was used to view intricate surface structure using a magnification power of up to nine hundred thousand times. The other instrument was a Transmission Electron Microscope, a TEM. The TEM didn’t show surface structure but instead was used to see through a prepared cross-sectional slice of a specimen revealing internal details. The TEM worked in the same way a flashlight shining through a piece of paper would show its grain; except instead of light, it used a beam of electrons. This specific TEM had a magnification power of up to two million times, which was enough to show the vague shape of a single atom. A message appeared on her screen acknowledging that her work order was completed and the first specimen was loaded.

Kathy double clicked on the control panel for the SEM. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for in the damaged nerve fiber. With the SEM she would be able to see tremendous detail. The instrument could show shapes in even the smallest viruses that were three nanometers in size (0.000 000 000 118 inches). The cellular tissues of the sample looked normal in every aspect. Kathy moved the magnification up and down as she examined an edge that had been left from the robotic bore. Several minutes passed before she realized she was mistaken in what she was looking at. The cellular structure was normal, but this edge was not. The precision-cut edge she was looking at was not the result of slicing and mounting the sample – she’d just found that cut; it was in a different plane and far more ragged. Whatever severed these nerve fibers had cut them with laser-like precision. No, better than laser precision. This was a microscopic cut that was clean to way below the level of cellular structure. A chemical cut could do something similar over a small distance but not over the length of this hundred micron cut she was examining. This definitely meant something, but what?

Kathy ordered examinations and samples taken from the same region of the brainstem on all the victims. The request took only minutes to fill out on a webpage; the task itself would take days to complete for every cadaver. Her only consolation was that she would start receiving results from the five cadavers at the lab within hours; and those five would be more than enough to uncover a pattern if one existed. Now that the lab had her orders, she returned her attention to the microscopic samples she already had in her possession.

Hours later, Kathy was still at her desk. She had been staring blankly for over an hour at the same microscopic view of damaged nerve fiber. Nothing was going through her mind; she just stared. Every detail had been scrutinized long ago.

~

Midnight had come and gone. Kathy had tried to sleep after reading reports on three of the cadavers. She’d been unable to shake off a psychosomatic tingling in the back of her neck where her brainstem ended and the damage had been done to all those people. Sleep was impossible. She was at her desk. A pot of coffee was in her stomach and a fresh cup was in her hands. Her thoughts were locked in arguments over a small set of facts that were not providing any useful answers. A lined pad of paper covered with her rambling thoughts was staring back at her. There had to be something obvious she was missing.

A soft rapping came from the other side of her door. Kathy looked up. There was a shadow under the doorway from a pair of shoes. She knew it had to be Jeffrey. He’d left his bags for safekeeping while going out to pre-mission briefings and dinner. An Air Force transport that would race him to a small piece of hell in the southern hemisphere was due to leave soon at a painfully early hour of the morning. Kathy straightened herself up a bit.

“Its open,” she called.

“I though you’d be asleep,” said Jeffrey as he peered in through the partially opening doorway. “Sorry, about not collecting my bags earlier.”

“I may have found a link between our victims,” said Kathy.

Jeffrey appeared to have completely forgotten why he was in her office. There was a stunned expression on his face.

“What link?” he finally asked.

Kathy picked up a stack of lab reports she’d printed for him and handed them over.

“A little light reading for your flight,” she said. “All the victims I’ve examined so far have the same nerve damage in their brainstems. The region controlling respiration and heart were disconnected by microscopic cuts to key nerves. Toxicology is completely negative. This nerve damage is the cause of death, but I have no idea how it happened. The microscopic incisions were not caused by anything mechanical, and I can’t figure out how a chemical agent could have dissolved fibers without affecting adjacent tissue.”

“So you’ve decided it’s not a chemical toxin,” said Jeffrey. “The only thing left is biological. Does this mean you’ve come over to my side?”

“I can’t see how a bacterium or virus could have done this either. It’s just too clean.”

“What, no little teeth marks?” said Jeffrey.

The Army helicopter bucked through an air thermal, dropping a good ten feet. General James H. McKafferty didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, he barely even noticed. The same was not true for the other four passengers who sat opposite him in the forward facing seats. Their faces were pale and clammy, as if all the blood had drained to lower parts of their bodies. McKafferty smiled at their weakness. Civilians, he thought. He was a bear of a man at six three and two hundred forty pounds.