Pestilence (Jack Randall #2) (28 page)

When the syringe was ready she retrieved the pinning stick from between her legs and handed it to the professor. They carefully circled each other and untangled their hoses before taking up their positions in front of the cage.

“Ready?” the professor mouthed silently through his face shield.

Getting a nod from Lynda he pushed the business end of the pole through the opening and maneuvered it toward the monkey. The monkey eyed the pole but did little to avoid it. A few grunts of protest and a brief struggle ended with the monkey pinned to the corner of his cage. Lynda quickly inserted the pole into the cage, worked the mechanism to inject the monkey with a fatal dose of sedative. The professor held the monkey firm until he went limp. They waited for two minutes with the monkey not moving before touching helmets again.

“I think he’s down!”

Lynda carefully opened the cage and reached out a hand to pinch the monkey’s leg. When she got no response she pulled the animal toward her and flipped him on his stomach. Pinning his arms to his sides, she carefully lifted him clear of the cage. Monkeys had been known to come back to life if the dose had been too little and she took every precaution in case that was to happen.

The professor carefully examined the monkey for any signs of life. Finding none he opened the door for her and she carried the monkey out and placed him on the necropsy table they had set up in the lab. Before entering the monkey cage, they had carefully laid out every item listed on a printed checklist sealed in plastic. There were no unnecessary blades or other sharp instruments. A variety of hemostats sat in a tray ready to clamp off any bleeding. The only glass in the room consisted of slides and blood tubes. Everything else was plastic. Glass could break and produce shards capable of piercing a space suit, so they were kept to a minimum.

The professor placed a large bowl at the head of the table and poured EnviroChem into it. It resembled antifreeze with its pale green color. They would periodically dip their gloved hands into the liquid as it destroyed viruses. Once finished, he reached around to crimp his hose before leaning his helmet across the table. Lynda mirrored his movements until they could speak.

“I’ll prep the samples, you do the cutting?” he asked.

“Okay.”

Lynda smiled as they broke away. The professor was senior to her in every way, yet he was wise enough to know she was the better person for this and was giving her the lead. She dismissed the compliment until later and gloved up before reaching for the scalpel. The professor stepped back and held his hands in the classic safety stance—clasped together and on his chest. Both to show her where they were, and keep him from reaching in.

Lynda carefully performed a Y incision and opened the monkey’s chest and abdomen. She performed each cut in steps, never cutting toward her opposite hand. Once the initial incisions were made, she traded the scalpel in favor of a pair of blunt tip scissors to expand the opening until the monkey’s internal organs were fully exposed.

She forced herself to work slowly and methodically, stopping frequently to rinse her gloves in the bowl and the blood turned the mixture a dark brown color. She paused whenever the professor’s hands entered the carcass to clamp off blood vessels or sponge away fluids. They soon developed a good working rhythm and Lynda began removing organs and cutting them open. They would carefully inspect each as it was removed.

The spleen was engorged and split easily with a touch of the scalpel. She sliced thin specimens from it and the professor carefully pressed them onto slides. The intestines were laid open and showed no signs of blood or other abnormalities. The stomach, while unusually empty, also showed no problems. The liver was cut into wedges and prepared for later viewing. Samples were also placed in plastic jars of alcohol and chemical preservative. The small ribcage was cut away with pruning shears and the lungs were removed. Here Lynda first noticed the problem.

As she held the lungs in her hand the problem was clearly evident, but she needed numbers. She looked at the professor and mouthed one word: scale. He retrieved it from a nearby bench and laying a steel pan on top zeroed the display.

She laid the lungs in the pan and watched the number climb. As she suspected, the lungs were grossly overweight. They were full of fluid. The monkey had been slowly drowning in his own secretions. As the professor recorded the number she opened the lungs with the scalpel. Clear fluid, with a tinge of blood, poured forth and covered the bottom of the tray. She exchanged a look of horror with the professor. What they were seeing was unlike any flu virus they had ever seen. Only two days into the infection and this monkey was already close to death. She felt the sudden urge to rinse her hands and did so.

“Get a hold of yourself, girl,” she told herself inside the suit. She took a couple of deep breaths before looking up to see the professor watching her. He offered a reassuring smile before leaning his head forward. She did likewise and they butted heads over the table.

“You’re doing fine. Take a minute if you need to. We have all the time in the world.”

She smiled and nodded. “I can finish.”

Nevertheless, they took a short break and checked each other’s suits. A fresh bowl of EnviroChem was poured as a confidence booster and they returned to the table.

Lynda steeled herself over the monkey and gave herself a pep talk. “You owe it to the monkey,” she told herself. The monkey had given his life so that they might discover the mechanism of this disease. As a vet she felt obligated to finish the necropsy. But every drop of blood held a potential million viruses. The sight of the lungs had spooked her and she felt a slight tremor in her hands. She willed the shaking to stop and it did.

The professor pulled the monkey carcass up the table and clamped the head into a set of blocks. Once in place he hosed down the table, clearing it of any fluids. He then made a show of organizing the instruments on the tray. Lynda watched patiently until it dawned on her what he was doing. His little display of housekeeping was his way of giving her a few moments to collect herself without embarrassing her. For some reason it struck her as funny and by the time he was done, she was biting her lip to keep from grinning. She looked at her hands. The shaking was gone.

Taking up a position at the head of the table, she reached for the gnawer. Using it to open the skull, the professor helped until they were able to pop it with a pair of pliers. The brain showed no signs of disease and they quickly removed it as well as the eyes and spinal cord before dropping them all in preservatives.

At this point they were done and both were glad. They quickly triple-bagged what was left of the monkey and cleaned the table and instruments, both of which would be autoclaved before being used again. The decontamination shower seemed to take forever and the professor made a mental note to install a timer in the damn thing so at least one knew how long they had left to go.

He found Lynda sitting on a bench in the locker room, her hair matted and her scrubs sweaty. The air pumped into the suits was cool and very dry so as not to fog their space suits. It took some stress to produce sweat.

“How ya doing, kiddo?”

“I’ve never seen lungs like that before, not after a two-day infection. Just what the hell is this thing?”

“I’m not sure yet.” He sank down onto the bench next to her, “But I aim to find out.”

•      •      •

Murphy strode into the room with several thick files under his arm. He laid them on the table before sitting back in a chair and rubbing his eyes. Jack took in the rumpled suit and the shadow of beard on his face. Evidently he had pulled an all-nighter.

“So what do you have?” Jack asked.

Murphy shot a questioning look toward Sydney, Larry and Eric before he answered with a question of his own. “They in the loop now?”

“Yeah, she’s got some information for you, too. You can speak freely here.”

“Okay, well, as you may have guessed I was up most of the night digging into our friend Heather. She appears to be as advertised. I could only find one gap in her history. Six months before she came to the CDC she fell off the earth. She explains it away in a letter as an extended backpacking trip to Asia and parts of Europe. So I called a few friends at some embassies and I can’t find one visa or any record of her traveling during that period of time. Her address at that time was listed as Raleigh, North Carolina, but that turned out to be an old roommate who was working at Duke and collecting her mail for her. This roommate said she would show up once a month or so and pick it up. So that blows the backpacking trip out of the water. Whatever she was doing it was in the North Carolina area. That’s about it. Everything else checks out.”

“You have three files there?” Sydney pointed out.

“Yup. One for Mom and one for Dad. It makes for some interesting reading.” He shoved the files down the table. Jack opened one while Sydney flipped open the second while Murphy continued his briefing.

“Daddy was a professor of biology at Berkley. Published several papers and did a fair amount of research. Was pretty well respected for a while.”

“For a while?” Jack asked.

“Seems he went off the deep end after a trip to the north slope of Alaska. Came back a soldier for the environment. Started making speeches and publishing articles. It got worse over a few years and eventually his classes started turning into nothing but environmental propaganda. He got booted out of Berkley and wound up joining Greenpeace. His wife was an oceanographer and she joined him. They gave the movement some much needed credibility. Anyway, Heather was brought up in this environment until they got even more radical and Greenpeace threw them out. Sometime after that they got involved in all kinds of other groups. There were raids on labs doing research on animals and sabotage to some fishing vessels in New England. Nothing they could tie them to, but their name was on it. Finally they got caught burning the ski resorts down out west to save the lynx and did some jail time. Heather went to live with an aunt, then changed her name and went to school. Evidently she no longer has contact with them, but we can’t be sure.”

Jack thumbed through the pages before addressing Sydney. “You grilled her on the plane, Syd, she mention anything like this to you?”

“No. I think she described them as hippies from the Midwest. Never let on about any of the environmental stuff. Can’t say I blame her though. If my parents were in jail I don’t think I’d be volunteering that information to everyone either.”

“I wonder just how much the parents influence dug in?” Murphy asked.

“Now that I think about it, she didn’t have any leather on. I remember her shoes were canvas. So were her bags and purse. She never wore makeup either. I just thought it was due to the climate.”

“They test makeup on animals, and leather goes without saying. Anything else you remember?”

She shook her head and stayed silent as they all read the files. After several minutes, they had all skimmed through them and were contemplating the information. Murphy was doing his best to stay awake. His eyes snapped open when Eric broke the silence.

“I remember one thing she said. It sounded like nothing at the time but after reading all this, I’m not so sure.”

“Go ahead,” Jack prompted.

“Well, it was right when we pulled up to the hospital and we had fought our way through all those people. I had never seen anything like it before and I made a comment.”

They waited while he gathered the memory together.

“I’m paraphrasing here, but I remember I said something like, ‘I can’t imagine or I never imagined.’”

“What did she say?”

“There’re too many people.”

They all sat in silence for a moment. Murphy saw the looks on their faces and didn’t quite understand.

“So what does that mean?” he asked.

“Tell him about the vials, Syd.”

Murphy listened intently until he too had the same look on his face.

“So what’s our next move?”

“Let’s get her in here,” Jack said.

•      •      •

The Deliveryman sat in the airport bar, his bag in a pile at his feet with the strap wrapped around his ankle. He nursed his beer slowly and watched the eyes of the people behind him in the mirror behind the bar. Usually his size and appearance were enough to change the minds of most thieves, but the ones here in Sao Paolo were especially brazen. He couldn’t afford to lose the bag right now.

He finished his scan and moved his eyes back to the letter in front of him. He read it over and decided it was enough. Twenty million dollars was a nice round number. More than he could possibly need in his life. He would need some to change his appearance and to find a corner of the world he could hide in. The rest would provide a comfortable but not lavish lifestyle. No reason to get greedy. No, twenty million was enough. A small figure to the people he was sending the letter to.

He sealed the letter and affixed the stamp. The address he had already penned on the front along with the proper mail code number, assuring it would get to the person intended without delay. He had read the pick-up times on the mail box and had watched as it was collected just a few minutes ago. He would drop the letter on the way to his gate. The letter would follow him to the States in two days, giving him plenty of time to put things in place for when it arrived. He had already spent the morning making phone calls and had been assured everything would be ready as he had requested.

They called his flight in Portuguese and then again in English. He drained his beer and retrieved his bag before striding to the mailbox and dropping the letter. He couldn’t help but grin as he slung the bag of vials over his shoulder and walked down the gateway toward his plane. He was about to be a rich man.

Ebola found in Philippine pigs for first time.
July 10, 2009—AP
 

—TWENTY-THREE—