The 6th Extinction (17 page)

It was becoming a zoo out there.

Distantly a rumble of thunder echoed over the mountains, rattling the steel roof of the hangar.

Even Mother Nature seemed determined to make matters worse.

Painter strode more quickly toward the BSL4 complex.

We need to catch a break . . . even a small one
.

7:56
A
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.

“Look at this,” Jenna called out from her computer.

Drake rolled his chair over from his workstation, bringing with him a musky scent of his masculinity. Bill stretched a kink from his lower back and stepped to join them. Even Nikko lifted his head from the floor, where he’d been working on an old Nylabone she kept in the station to distract him when she worked.

On the screen, she had captured the frozen image of a white Toyota Camry. The footage came from a weather camera along Highway 395, south of town. Unfortunately, the resolution was poor.

She pointed to the whiteboard on the back wall, which included a white Camry on the list of suspect cars. “I can’t make out the license plate, but the driver was going fast.”

She hit the play button and the vehicle in question zoomed down the stretch of highway.

“Seventy to eighty miles per hour,” Bill estimated.

“The car’s a common make and model,” Drake commented skeptically. “Could be someone just heading home.”

“Yeah, but watch as it passes another car in the opposite lane.”

She reversed the footage and clicked through more slowly, frame by frame. In one shot, a minivan crosses its path, traveling the other direction. The headlamps hit the windshield at the right angle to fully illuminate the driver. Again the resolution didn’t allow for much of an identification.

Drake squinted. “Dark blond maybe, medium to long hair. Still a blur.”

“Yeah, but look at what she’s wearing.”

Bill whistled. “Either she likes wearing white suits or that’s a lab coat.”

Jenna turned to the whiteboard. “Which researcher is listed as driving a white Camry?”

Drake rolled his chair over and grabbed his tablet computer from the desk. He scrolled through until he found the matching government employee file. “Says here that it’s Amy Serpry, biologist from Boston, recent hire. Five months ago.”

“How about a picture?”

Drake tapped at the screen, studied it, then turned it to face them. “Blond, hair in a ponytail. Still, it looks pretty long to me.” The Marine gave her a half-smile that made her feel much too warm. “I think this is when we say
jackpot
.”

Jenna wanted more assurance. “What do we know about her?”

Painter had given them everything he could about each researcher: records, evaluations, their background checks, even any papers published under their name.

Drake scanned through the highlights of her bio. “She’s from France, became an American citizen seven years ago, attended postdoctoral programs at both Oxford and Northwestern.”

No wonder Dr. Hess employed her. Plus from the photo, the woman was quite pretty, an asset that probably never hurts when it comes to getting hired by the boys’ club that was the scientific world.

Drake continued to read in silence, clearly looking for anything that stood out. “Get this,” he finally said. “She was a major figure in a movement that encouraged open access to scientific information. They advocated for more transparency. She even wrote an op-ed piece, supporting a Dutch virologist who had posted online the genetic tricks to make H5N1—the bird flu—more contagious and deadly.”

“She was okay with that being published?” Bill asked.

Drake read for a bit longer. “She was definitely not against it.”

Jenna took in a deep breath. “We should relay this to the sheriff’s department and Director Crowe. That Camry is an ’09 model. Likely equipped with a GPS unit.”

“And with the VIN number,” Bill said, “we should be able to track its location.”

“It’s worth checking out,” Jenna agreed.

Drake stood up and waved for her to follow. “In the meantime, we should get back to the helicopter. Be ready to move once we have a location.”

Jenna felt a measure of pride at being included—not that she would’ve had it any other way.

“Go.” Bill reached for a phone. “I’ll set everything in motion and alert you as soon as I hear something.”

With Nikko in tow, Jenna and Drake hurried out of the office and across the visitors’ center to the front doors. As she exited, a few cold raindrops struck her face.

She studied the skies and didn’t like what she saw.

A spatter of lightning lit the underbellies of a stack of black clouds.

Drake frowned, matching her expression. “We’re running out of time.”

He was right.

Jenna rushed for the waiting vehicle.

Somebody had better come up with some answers—and quick
.

8:04
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Lisa studied the rat in the cage, watching it root in the bedding, pushing its pink nose through the wood shavings. She empathized with the tiny creature, feeling equally trapped and threatened.

The test subject sat in a cage that was divided into two sections separated by a dense HEPA filter. On the opposite side was a black pile of dust—debris from one of the dead plants.

She typed a note into the computer, a challenging task with the thick gloves of her BSL4 suit.

FIVE HOURS AND NO SIGN OF TRANSMISSION.

They had run a series of trials with various pore sizes and thicknesses of filters, trying to evaluate the
size
of the infectious agent. So far this was the only rat that continued to show no signs of contamination. The others were all sick or dying from multi-organ failure.

She struggled not to think about her brother, entombed in the patient containment unit across the hangar.

Hours ago, she had performed a necropsy with a histopathologist on one of the rats in an early stage of infection. Its lungs and heart were the worst afflicted, with petechiae on the alveoli and rhabdomyolysis of the cardiac muscle fibers. Its heart was literally melting away. With initial lesions manifesting so dramatically in the chest, it suggested an airborne mode of transmission.

It was why they started this series of filter tests.

She continued to type.

ASSESSMENT: INFECTIOUS PARTICLE MUST
BE UNDER 15 NANOMETERS IN SIZE.

So definitely not a bacterium
.

One of the smallest known bacterial species was
Mycoplasma genitalium
, which topped off between 200 and 300 nanometers.

“Gotta be a virus,” she mumbled.

But even the tiniest virus known to man was the porcine circovirus, which was 17 nanometers in size. The transmittable particle here was even smaller than that. It was no wonder they were still struggling to get a picture of it, to examine its ultrastructure.

Two hours ago, a CDC technician had finally finished setting up and calibrating a scanning electron microscope inside a neighboring lab in the hangar. Hopefully soon they’d get to confront the adversary face-to-face.

She sighed, wanting to rub the knot of a headache out of her temples, but suited up she could not even brush the few hairs away that were tickling her nose. She had tried blowing them to the side before finally giving up. She knew exhaustion was getting the better of her, but she refused to leave the suite of BSL4 labs that were conducting various stages of research.

The radio crackled in her ear, then the lead epidemiologist, Dr. Grant Parson, spoke. “All researchers are to report to the central conference room for a summary meeting.”

Lisa placed a rubber palm on the plastic cage. “Keep hanging in there, little fella.”

She stood, unhooked her oxygen hose from the wall, and carried it with her through the air lock that led out from the in vivo animal-testing lab to the rest of the complex. Each lab was cordoned off from the other, both compartmentalizing the research and further limiting the chance of an outbreak spreading through the facility.

She stepped into the central hub. Every other hour, the lab’s scientists gathered in the room to compare notes and confer about their progress. To facilitate these meetings, a long table had been set up with additional monitors to aid in teleconferencing with researchers across the United States. A window behind the table looked out into the dark hangar.

She spotted a familiar face out there, standing at the glass.

She lifted an arm toward Painter and pointed to her ear. He wore a radio headpiece and dialed into a private channel.

“How’re you doing?” he asked, resting his hand on the window.

“We’re making slow progress,” she said, though she knew he was asking about her personal status, not an update on the research. She shied away from that and asked a more important question. “How’s Josh?”

She got regular updates from the medical staff, but she wanted to hear it from Painter, from someone who personally knew her brother.

“Still sedated, but he’s holding his own. Josh is tough . . . and a fighter.”

Painter was certainly right. Her brother tackled mountains, but even he couldn’t battle what couldn’t be seen.

“The good news is that it looks like the surgeons were able to salvage the knee joint,” Painter added. “Should help his recovery and physical therapy afterward.”

She prayed there was an afterward. “What about . . . is there any sign of infection?”

“No. Everything looks good.”

She took little comfort from this news. Josh’s contact with the agent had been via a break in the skin versus being inhaled. The lack of symptoms could just be due to a longer incubation period from that route of exposure.

A fear continued to nag at her.

Had I gotten his leg off in time?

Dr. Parson spoke up behind her. “Let’s get this meeting started.”

Lisa settled her gloved palm over Painter’s hand on the window. “Keep an eye on him for me.”

Painter nodded.

Lisa turned to join the other researchers. Some sat, others stood, all in their BSL4 suits. Over the next fifteen minutes, the head of each lab module gave an update.

An edaphologist—a soil scientist who studied microorganisms, fungi, and other life hiding in the earth—was the first to report. Anxiety fueled his words.

“I finished a full soils analysis from the dead zone. It’s not just the vegetation and wildlife that’s being killed. To a depth of two feet, I found the samples to be devoid of any life. Bacteria, spores, insects, worms. All dead. The ground had been essentially sterilized.”

Parson let his shock show. “That level of pathogenicity . . . it’s unheard of.”

Lisa pictured those dark hills, imagining the same shadow penetrating deep underground, leaving no life in its wake as it slowly rolled across the landscape. She had also heard about the inclement weather descending upon the Mono Lake Basin. It was a recipe for an ecological disaster of incalculable proportions.

A bacteriologist spoke up next. “Speaking of pathogenicity, our team has run through a gamut of liquid disinfection traps, seeking some way to sterilize the samples from the field. We’ve tried extremes of alkalinity and acidity. Lye, various bleaches, et cetera. But the samples remain infectious.”

“What about extreme heat?” Lisa asked, remembering Painter’s belief that they might have to scorch those hills to stop the blight from spreading.

The researcher shrugged. “We thought we initially had some success. We burned an infected plant to a fine ash—and at first it seemed to work, but after it cooled, it remained just as infectious. We believe the heat merely put the microbe into some type of spore or cyst-like state.”

“Maybe it takes something hotter,” Lisa said.

“Possibly. But how hot is hot enough? We’ve discussed a nuclear level of heat. But if the fires of an atomic bomb don’t kill it, the blast could scatter and aerosolize the agent for hundreds of miles.”

That was definitely not an option.

“Keep searching,” Parson encouraged.

“It would help if we knew what we were fighting,” the bacteriologist finished, which earned him many nods from his fellow scientists.

Lisa explained her own findings, confirming that they were likely dealing with something viral in nature.

“But it’s exceedingly small,” she said, “smaller than any known virus. We know Dr. Hess was experimenting with extremophiles from around the world, organisms that could thrive in acidic or alkaline environments, even some that could survive in the molten heat found in volcanic vents.”

She looked pointedly at the bacteriologist. “Then to make matters worse, we know Hess was also delving into the very fringes of synthetic biology. His project—Neogenesis—sought to genetically manipulate the DNA of extremophiles in an attempt to help endangered species, to make them hardier and more resistant to environmental changes. In this quest, who knows what monster he created down there?”

Dr. Edmund Dent, a CDC virologist, stood up. “I believe we’ve caught a glimpse of that monster. Under the newly installed electron microscope.”

All eyes turned to him.

“At first we thought it was a technical glitch. What we found seemed too small—unimaginably small—but if Dr. Cummings’s assessment concerning the size of the infectious particle is accurate, then perhaps it’s not a mistake.” Dent glanced to her. “If you’d be willing to join us . . .”

“Of course. I think we should also bring in a geneticist and bioengineer. Just in case, we—”

A loud klaxon sounded, drawing all their gazes to the window. A blue light flashed in the darkness, spinning in time with the alarm. It came from the patient containment unit.

Panic drew Lisa to her feet.

12

April 29, 3:05
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Brunt Ice Shelf, Antarctica

“Hold on tight!” the pilot called out.