Plum Island (21 page)

“Right. Vaccine.” I asked Dr. Zollner, “And you say they’d have had to plan this for some time?”

“Oh, yes. As soon as they realized they were on to something, they’d begin making false notes, false test results, and at
the same time, keeping legitimate notes and so forth. It’s the scientific equivalent of double bookkeeping.”

“And no one would realize what was going on? There are no checks or controls?”

“Well, there are, of course. But the Gordons were each other’s research partner, and they were very senior. Also, their area
of expertise—viral genetic engineering—is somewhat exotic and not easily checked by others. And finally, if there’s a will,
and there’s a genius IQ at work, then there’s a way.”

I nodded. “Incredible. And how did they smuggle this stuff out? I mean, how big is a Jell-O plate?”

“Gel plate.”

“Right. How big?”

“Oh … perhaps a foot and a half wide, and two and a half feet long.”

“How do you get that out of biocontainment?”

“I’m not sure.”

“And their notes?”

“Fax. I’ll show you later.”

“And the actual vaccine?”

“That would be easier. Anal and vaginal.”

“I don’t want to sound crude, Doc, but I don’t think they could get a thirty-inch gel plate up their ass without attracting
a little attention.”

Dr. Zollner cleared his throat and replied, “You don’t actually need the gel plates if you could photocopy them or take a
photo with one of those little spy cameras.”

“Incredible.” I thought of the fax machine in the Gordons’ office.

“Yes. Well, let’s go see if we can figure out what happened and how it happened.” He stood. “If anyone does not want to go
into biocontainment, you may sit in the lobby or in the cafeteria.” He looked around, but no one said anything. He smiled,
more Burl Ives than Colonel Sanders, I think. He said, “Well, everyone is brave then. Please, follow me.”

We all stood and I said, “Stay together.”

Dr. Zollner smiled at me and said, “When you are in biocontainment, my friend, you will naturally want to stay as close to
me as possible.”

It struck me that I should have gone to the Caribbean to convalesce.

W
e returned to the lobby and stood before the two yellow doors.

Dr. Zollner said to Beth, “Donna awaits you in the locker room. Please follow her instructions, and we will meet you at the
rear door of the ladies’ locker room.” Zollner watched her go through the yellow door, then said to us, “Gentlemen, please
follow me.”

We followed the good doctor into the men’s locker room, which turned out to be a hideous orange place, but otherwise typical
of any locker room. An attendant handed us open locks without keys and freshly laundered lab whites. In a plastic bag were
paper underwear, socks, and cotton slippers.

Zollner showed us to a row of empty lockers and said, “Please remove everything, including underwear and jewelry.”

So, we all stripped down to our birthday suits, and I couldn’t wait to tell Beth that Ted Nash carried a .38 with a three-inch
barrel and that the barrel was longer than his dick.

George Foster said, apropos of my chest wound, “Close to the heart.”

“I have no heart.”

Zollner pulled on his oversized whites and now he looked more like Colonel Sanders.

I snapped my padlock on the locker hasp and adjusted my paper underwear.

Dr. Zollner looked us over and said, “So—we are all ready? Then please follow me.”

“Hold on,” Max said. “Don’t we get face masks or respirators or something?”

“Not for Zone Two, Mr. Maxwell. Maybe for Zone Four, if you want to go that far. Come. Follow me.”

We went to the rear of the locker room, and Zollner opened a red door marked with the weird-looking biohazard symbol and beneath
the symbol the words “Zone Two.” I could hear rushing air and Dr. Zollner explaining, “That’s the negative air pressure you
hear. It’s up to a pound per square inch less in here than outside, so no pathogens can escape accidentally.”

“I hate when that happens.”

“Also, the particulate air filters on the roof clean all exhaust air from in here.”

Max looked stubbornly skeptical, like a man who doesn’t want any good news to interfere with his long-held belief that Plum
Island was the biohazard equivalent of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl combined.

We went into a concrete block corridor, and Zollner looked around and asked, “Where is Ms. Penrose?”

I replied, “Doc, are you married?”

“Yes. Oh … of course, she may take longer to get changed.”

“No ‘mays’ about it, feller.”

Finally, from the door marked “Women,” Lady Penrose appeared, dressed in loose-fitting whites and cotton slippers. She still
looked sexy, more cupid-like in white, I thought.

She heard the rushing air sound, and Zollner explained the negative air pressure, gave us some instructions about being careful
not to bump into carts or racks of vials, or bottles filled with lethal bugs or chemicals, and so forth.

Zollner said, “All right, please follow me, and I will show you what goes on here so you can tell your friends and colleagues
that we are not making anthrax bombs.” He laughed, then said in a serious tone, “Zone Five is off-limits because you need
special vaccinations, and also training to put on the biohazard suits and respirators and all of that. Also, the basement
is off-limits.”

“Why,” I asked, “is the basement off-limits?”

“Because that’s where we hide the dead aliens and the Nazi scientists.” He laughed again.

I love being the straight man for a fat Ph.D. with a Dr. Strangelove accent. Really. More to the point, I knew that Stevens
had indeed spoken to Zollner. I would have liked to have been a tsetse fly on that wall.

Mr. Foster attempted humor and said, “I thought the aliens and the Nazis were in the underground bunkers.”

“No, the dead aliens are in the lighthouse,” Zollner said. “We moved the Nazis out of the bunkers when they complained about
the vampires.”

Everyone laughed—ha, ha, ha. Humor in biocontainment. I should write to
Reader’s Digest
.

As we walked, Dr. Zany said, “It’s safe in this zone— mostly we have genetic engineering labs, some offices, electron microscopes—low-risk,
low-contagion work here.”

We walked through concrete block corridors, and every once in a while Dr. Zollner would open a yellow steel door and say hello
to someone inside an office or laboratory and inquire as to their work.

There were all sorts of weird windowless rooms, including a place that looked like a wine cellar except the bottles in the
racks were filled with cultures of living cells, according to Zollner.

Zollner gave us a commentary as we walked through the battleship-gray corridors. “There are newly emerging viruses that affect
animals or humans or both. We humans and the higher animal species have no immunological responses to many of these deadly
diseases. Present antiviral drugs are not very effective, and so the key to avoiding a future worldwide catastrophe is antiviral
vaccines
, and the key to the new vaccines is genetic engineering.”

Max asked, “
What
catastrophe?”

Dr. Zollner continued walking and talking very breezily, I thought, considering the subject. He said, “Well, regarding animal
diseases, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, for instance, could wipe out much of this nation’s livestock and ruin the
livelihoods of millions of people. The cost of other foods would probably quadruple. The foot-and-mouth virus is perhaps the
most contagious and virulent in nature, which is why the biological warfare people have always been fascinated by it. A good
day for the bio-warfare gentlemen is a day when their scientists can genetically engineer the FMD virus to infect humans.
But worse, I think, some of these viruses mutate on their own and become dangerous to people.”

No one had a comment or question on that. We peeked in on more labs, and Zollner would always say a few encouraging words
to the pale eggheads in white who labored in surroundings that made me nervous just looking at them. He’d say things like,
“What have we learned today? Have we discovered anything new?” And so on. It appeared that he was well liked, or at least
tolerated by his scientists.

As we turned down yet another in a series of seemingly endless corridors, Zollner continued his lecture. “In 1983, for instance,
a highly contagious and deadly influenza broke out in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There were seventeen million dead. Chickens,
I mean. Poultry. But you see what I’m getting at. The last big deadly human influenza epidemic in the world was in 1918. There
were about twenty million dead worldwide, including five hundred thousand in the United States. Based on our present population,
the equivalent number of dead now would be approximately one and a half million people. Could you imagine such a thing today?
And the 1918 virus wasn’t particularly virulent, and of course, travel was much slower then and less frequent. Today, the
highways and skyways can spread an infectious virus around the world in days. The good news about the deadliest viruses, such
as Ebola, is that they kill so fast, they barely have time to leave an African village before everyone in it is dead.”

I asked, “Is there a one o’clock ferry?”

Dr. Zollner laughed. “You are feeling somewhat nervous, yes? Nothing to fear here. We are very cautious. Very respectful of
the little bugs in this building.”

“Sounds like the ‘my dog doesn’t bite’ crap.”

Dr. Zollner ignored me and continued on, “It is the mission of the United States Department of Agriculture to prevent foreign
animal pestilence from coming to these shores. We are the animal equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
As you may imagine, we work closely with Atlanta because of these crossover diseases—animal to human, and vice versa. We have
a huge quarantine complex in Newburgh, New York, where all animals coming into this country must stay in quarantine for a
period of time. You know, it’s like a Noah’s Ark of animals arriving every day—foreign race horses, circus animals, zoo animals,
breeding stock, exotic commercial animals such as ostriches and llamas, exotic pets such as Vietnamese potbellied pigs, and
all sorts of birds from the jungle…. Two and a half million animals each year.” He looked at us and said, “Newburgh has been
called the Ellis Island for the animal kingdom. Plum Island is the Alcatraz. No animal that comes to us from Newburgh or from
anywhere leaves here alive. I must tell you, all these animals being imported into this country for recreation and amusement
have caused us here a lot of work and much anxiety. It’s only a matter of time….” He added, “You can extrapolate from the
animal kingdom to the human population.”

I certainly could.

He stayed silent a moment, then said, “Plum Island’s cannons once guarded the shores of this country, and now this facility
does the same.”

Rather poetic, I thought, for a scientist, then I recalled reading that line in one of the press releases that Donna handed
me.

Zollner liked to talk, and my job is to listen, so, it was working out okay.

We walked into a room that Zollner said was an X-ray crystallography lab, and I wasn’t about to argue with him.

A woman was bent over a microscope, and Zollner introduced her as Dr. Chen, a colleague and good friend of Tom and Judy. Dr.
Chen was about thirty, and rather attractive, I thought, with a long shock of black hair, tied back with a sort of netting,
suitable for close microscope work by day, I guess, and who knew what at night when the hair came down. Behave, Corey. This
is a scientist, and she’s a lot smarter than you are.

Dr. Chen greeted us, and she looked rather serious, I thought, but probably she was just upset and sad over the deaths of
her friends.

Once again, Beth made sure that it was understood that I was a friend of the Gordons, and on that level, if no other, I was
earning my buck a week. I mean, people don’t like a bunch of coppers hammering them with questions, but if one of the cops
is a mutual friend of the deceased, then you have a little edge. Anyway, we all agreed that the Gordons’ deaths were a tragedy,
and we spoke well of the dead.

The subject shifted to Dr. Chen’s work. She explained, in lay terms so that I sort of understood her, “I am able to Xray virus
crystals so that I can map their molecular structure. Once we do that, we can then attempt to alter the virus to make it unable
to cause disease, but if we inject this altered virus into an animal, the animal may produce antibodies that we hope will
attack the natural, disease-causing version of the virus.”

Beth asked, “And this is what the Gordons were working on?”

“Yes.”

“What
specifically
were they working on? What virus?”

Dr. Chen glanced at Dr. Zollner. I’m not happy when witnesses do that. I mean, it’s like the pitcher gets the signal from
the coach to throw a curve or a slider or whatever. Dr. Zollner must have signaled for a fast ball because Dr. Chen said straightforwardly,
“Ebola.”