Seawolf End Game (46 page)

No army could reach it, no mere thief could breach it, and no terrorist could destroy it. Only someone trusted, someone educated, someone respected could ever enter.

As Dhann stepped from the elevator into the immaculately clean hallway that smelled of disinfectant, he couldn’t help but offer a wan, hapless smile to the destiny laid out before him. He could no sooner change the course of events fated for him than he could alter the orbits of the planets. It was as if the future were already written and he just a mindless participant.

“Good morning, Dhann,” a colleague coming from the Level IV Biosafety laboratory greeted him.

His name was Jamie Goldberg, a fellow bioengineer at the laboratory. Dhann had known Jamie for eleven years; they’d eaten dinner together, and they’d worked on charitable foundations together. But even Jamie hadn’t recognized Dhann’s anguish. Jamie and the others had, of course, known about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that had killed so many, but because they had suffered no loss, their lives had been remarkably unaffected by the calamity.

“Good morning, Jamie,” Dhann replied automatically upon seeing his friend. “Off to class?”

Jamie and Dhann, when not working in the National Laboratory, taught biological science as part of the university faculty.

“Yeah,” Jamie replied. “Off to nourish young, impressionable, and completely clueless minds.”

Dhann offered what he hoped was an understanding smile. “Have fun,” he added as an afterthought, hoping Jamie wouldn’t notice the perspiration on his forehead. The temperature in the building was deliberately kept operating-room cold to help prevent the spread of bacteria, and normally Dhann was cold even in a knit sweater.

But not this day.

“Oh, yeah,” Jamie replied cynically. “Like a root canal.”

Jamie disappeared behind the closing elevator doors and Dhann proceeded forward.

His security badge and a biometric scan of his iris gave Dhann access to the buffer corridor around the lab itself. As the door opened, he heard the familiar rush of air as the seal was broken and air was sucked inside. This positive air pressure outside the laboratory was just one of many safety measures to protect the world from the dangers within.

Dhann stepped through the door and then into the locker room where he removed his clothing and donned a simple jumpsuit. He placed his valuables in a locker and then stepped into the suit room where he stepped into the positive pressure suit necessary to go further into the lab itself. As he dressed, he kept the tiny tube hidden from view of the security camera that monitored this room. But he feared no savvy security guard here. Even the well-trained and hand-picked security guards at the National Laboratory didn’t have access here.

Only those who would never consider doing the unthinkable could get this far.

Dhann finished donning the level IV biohazard suit, secreting the unauthorized tube in his left hand. He then passed through the double airtight doors into the laboratory itself. He was now in an environment completely sealed off from the rest of the world. Nothing living could escape this room except through the airtight doors, and these were kept at higher pressure to keep whatever was in the lab from leaving.

Dhann saw two of his colleagues working diligently at their cabinets across the laboratory. They hardly noticed him as he entered, and he offered them just a brief nod in greeting when they bothered to look up from their work. There were several level II biosafety cabinets in the lab, and he carefully picked one a discreet distance from his two colleagues who were clearly focused—as they should be—on their delicate work.

Dhann gathered his equipment, setting everything he would need at his cabinet; once ready, he turned to a row of incubators. For the last three months he’d been working on a particularly virulent staph bacteria that was virtually invulnerable to anything short of an autoclave. He had nearly a dozen cultures growing in petri dishes in the third incubator.

But they weren’t what he was here for.

He stepped past the incubator holding his samples to a fourth incubator with a strip of red warning tape on the lid. The tape had been placed there by a select group of researchers who’d been tasked months earlier for this specific independent study. Dhann saw the warning; and knew that only those researchers assigned to the project were to handle the material within. The red tape clearly labeled the contents of the incubator as part of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) study.

He paused, glancing at his colleagues who were dutifully working, ignoring him. His hands shook as he opened the incubator, and looked at the fifteen petri dishes within. They were identical, but batch numbers identified the specific strain in each dish. They were all variations of the Ames strain. A misnomer. The original bacteria sample had come from a diseased cow in Texas in 1981, but with typical government efficiency, the strain had been misidentified as coming from Ames, Iowa, and the name had stuck. He knew there were at least eighty-nine different variations of the original culture.

He saw the batch he wanted, recognizing the number. To most people the number twenty nine had no significant meaning, but for Dhann and any other biological engineer, Ames-29 wasn’t just any bacteria culture. Just like Uranium-235 wasn’t just another metal to nuclear engineers.

Dhann carefully removed the single petri dish. He closed the incubator and stepped away, trying to appear casual with his movements but unable to stop his hands from shaking. He looked down at the petri dish and the harmless looking, mold-like culture in the red medium.

He would have to be careful. He had only one vial with the specially prepared transport medium. Dhann could ill afford to be careless now. He returned to his cabinet, concealing the petri dish from direct view. He was breathing heavily and sweating so much inside his biohazard suit that it fogged up slightly.

Dhann paused to steady his nerves, knowing this was the critical moment. It still wasn’t too late. He could return the dish. No one would ever know. A single thin strip of red tape provided a security seal on the petri dish. If he opened the dish the seal would be snapped, and anyone looking at the dish would know someone had accessed the contents without authorization. But the researchers weren’t scheduled to be back in the lab for another thirty-six hours, which meant, with karma on his side, he would have almost two days before his treachery was discovered.

His hands were trembling. He couldn’t possibly perform the simple, necessary steps with shaking hands. He had to be precise. He couldn’t afford the slightest mistake.

Dhann forced himself to take deep, steadying breaths. He needed to be calm. In his life, he’d worked with virtually every deadly bacteria and virus known to man, and he’d never broken a sweat. Now the inside of his biohazard suit felt like a tropical forest. He was literally dripping with nervous perspiration.

He set the USAMRIID sample inside his cabinet out of view. The work area was designed to protect him and the world from anything he might be working on. Although his gloved hands could reach inside the cabinet, his face and body were protected by a shatter-proof view screen. Air ducts sucked air into the cabinet itself and then through a series of HEPA filters so any airborne particles wouldn’t be able to escape into the rest of the laboratory. Therefore, by necessity, the cabinet was relatively enclosed, meaning only someone looking directly over his shoulder would be able to see the petri dish.

Dhann glanced at his colleagues, needing to be certain he wasn’t being observed, but they were absorbed in their own work. He checked the observation room, separated from the lab by heavy safety glass. It was empty.

Dhann opened his hand and saw the Eppendorf tube with his transfer medium waiting. His rapidly dying humanity was screaming within him. Don’t… don’t do it! Return it. Take a leave of absence. Think about the consequences!

But those who’d ruthlessly slaughtered his family hadn’t considered the consequences. Dhann had identified his dear family in the morgue. He’d seen the effects of the monstrous act. His children’s bodies ripped and torn, poor little Amita barely recognizable as human from the blast that had disfigured her. The terrorists had never paused to think what their act might unleash, what horrible justice would be the reckoning of their crime.

He took a final deep breath to steady himself, set the tube down, and picked up the petri dish containing his messenger of justice. As expected, the security seal broke as he twisted the lid. He set the dish back inside the cabinet and picked up a plastic transfer loop. He opened the wrapper and removed the sterile loop. The slender handle led to a tiny loop hardly visible to the human eye. Then, he briefly brushed the transfer loop across the bacteria culture. With his naked eye, he could see nothing on the tip of the loop. But thirty-five years of experience as a biological engineer told him there would be hundreds, maybe even thousands of microscopic spores on the transfer loop.

He set the petri dish down and picked up the Eppendorf tube. He’d used similar tubes more often than he could count. Since his days in high school biology he’d been opening and closing similar tubes hundreds of times a day. It was as natural to him as any action could be. He positioned it between two fingers of his left hand and opened it with a simple flick of his thumb. Dhann hesitated, knowing he had to be careful not to contaminate the outside of the tube. It was absolutely vital that nothing touch the outside of the tiny tube.

He took another steadying breath and then carefully placed the hoop of the transfer loop inside the tube and into the transport broth. He didn’t need to swirl it, but he did so just the same, making a few minute sweeps with the hoop to transfer as many spores as possible. He carefully removed the transfer loop and, using his thumb, resealed the vial.

Dhann felt sweat trickling down his spine and stinging his eyes as he looked back into the cabinet at the innocent-looking vial. He knew its potential. Dhann briefly marveled at what nature had wrought. No man could have created something so biologically perfect. Deceptively simple. The elegant design. Virtually immortal. It could survive extremes of temperature. It could exist without sustenance for hundreds of years in a dormant state. Yet so horrific when aroused from its slumber.

Man fancied himself a killer… but Dhann knew better. He understood only too well the amateurish nature of man’s feeble ways. Nature was death’s true master.

He closed the petri dish, doing his best to line up the broken tape, hoping no one would see his crime. He returned the dish to the incubator. He knew the consequences if caught. If someone, by chance, noticed the broken seal too soon, his carefully laid plan would be foiled. But, he reminded himself as he closed the incubator, he’d surrendered himself to karma. If it was his fate to be caught before his horrible plan came to fruition, then he would be thankful for the mercy of the fates.

He returned to his cabinet and sterilized it, taking the contaminated transfer loop and disposing of it properly. He’d been in the lab barely ten minutes, and he knew his colleagues would take note of him leaving after such a short stay.

“Everything okay, Dr. Singh?” one of them asked via the headsets that allowed them to communicate despite the totally enclosed suits.

Dhann had expected someone to notice him leaving after only a few minutes in the lab, and he’d prepared an excuse.

“Yes,” he replied and waved toward the two fellow researchers. “I must have eaten something that has disagreed with me.”

The others nodded in understanding in their bulky pressure suits. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I ate at that new burrito joint just off the campus last week. I thought I’d never get out of the bathroom.”

Dhann nodded his head in mock understanding, waved goodbye, exited the laboratory, and entered the first of two showers. It took eight minutes of first a chemical shower and then a rinse to disinfect the suit itself. He exited this shower, removed the suit and left it behind in the suit room. He then stripped naked for the final shower, keeping the tiny vial hidden from view in the palm of his hand. He knew what would happen to him if so much as a single spore was on the exterior of the vial. One spore, barely four microns from tip to tip, would be all it would take. He wasn’t on the team scheduled to experiment with the Ames strain, thus he wasn’t—yet—on the regimen of antibiotics necessary to provide any protection from the perfectly harmless-looking mixture sealed inside the tube.

He scrubbed his body with the strong, antibacterial soap. Once certain he was bringing no unwanted pathogens with him, he stepped from the shower, towel dried, dressed, and then returned to his office, knowing that he was still not out of danger. He could still be caught. The broken USAMRIID seal would, quite likely, be noticed the moment the incubator was opened. Of course, they might assume someone had simply been clumsy. But this was unlikely. Everyone who worked at the lab had been meticulously trained on safety procedures. What was truly ironic, Dhann thought as he reached the elevator, was that he was one of the few people certified to train people to work in the laboratory. He had actually served at the lab’s biosafety officer for a year.

Karma.

He reached his office and went to the gym bag he carried to and from work every day. He carefully slipped the Eppendorf pipette into the metal sleeve of an ink pen. The metal sleeve would further protect the vial from damage during transport. Plus, it would be perfect camouflage. He then secreted the pen in his gym bag, hiding it within a sweaty set of gym clothes. For two months he’d been exercising at work every day, and he knew the security guards who searched his bag when he left the facility would never root through his sweat-soaked gym clothes. He closed the bag and then removed his lab coat for the last time and withdrew into his lavatory where he paused briefly in front of the mirror, barely recognizing the ashen face reflecting back at him. Then, with the enormity of what he had done washing over him, he turned, fell to his knees, and retched into the commode.