The Chimera Sequence (17 page)

Sohrab shook his head slowly.

“I know this comes as a surprise to you,” his boss continued. “But we must be proud. Our creation is now free to serve its purpose in the world.”

“Purpose? What purpose?” He couldn’t restrain himself any longer. “It was never meant to be free, you know that as well as I do.”

“What purpose, Sohrab?” The old scientist’s tone now carried the hint of a threat. “The same purpose behind all our work, of course.”

Sohrab stood.

“Today,” Dr. Rahmani said, “we bring great honor and power to the Persian people.”

Three short beeps meant the real-time thermal cycler had finished its analysis. Cole stepped across the tiny room that served as his lab and selected
Print Results
on the touch-screen monitor in front of him.

He and Leila had been reviewing all the monkeypox papers they could find online while they waited. Cole wasn’t convinced that a simple swab of those lesions on the roof of Marna’s mouth was going to yield enough DNA to give any definitive answers, but he agreed that it was still worth trying. They had to wait for her flight anyway—might as well see if they could actually confirm this crazy diagnosis.

And it
was
crazy, even if Leila didn’t seem to think so. No one had ever reported on a pox-like disease with this short of an incubation period. These viruses usually needed weeks to get established in their hosts’ bodies before they started causing any real signs of illness. But here they were, only two days since the big adventure in Virunga, and Marna was sick.

The phone call from Goma gave them even more reason to be suspicious, there was no question about that. Still no word from their director and his journalist friend, and the crisis at the hospital itself wasn’t leaving the rest of the staff much time to get serious about tracking them down. Three nurses and one physician so far, along with about a quarter of the other inpatients at the facility, all experiencing early stages of what seemed to be a scarily familiar disease process. Fever, malaise, and body aches, followed quickly by this steady progression of the rash and nodules across their bodies.

Cole pulled a single piece of paper off the printer.

Crap.

“So what do you think?”

Leila stood up and reached for the page.

“Not good, for Marna, at least.”

Not good at all. What was this going to mean for her, for them? He let Leila take the paper from his hands. Did she even know what she was looking at?

“I guess this will make your outbreak investigation a little more exciting, though.”

Cole didn’t make much of an effort to keep the cynicism out of his voice. Ever since Marna’s collapse in the office the day before, he’d been doing a lot of thinking about things. He would quite willingly give up every shot at infectious disease fame, his PhD, and a whole lot more, if he could somehow get a guarantee that she was going to make it through alive.

He watched Leila skim over the summarized results from the two real-time PCR assays.

“Can you tell me what I’m looking at?” Leila asked. “I’m not going to pretend to be much of a molecular biologist here—I’ve focused more on the field work part of the job.”

No surprise there. For some reason, a lot of the physicians Cole had worked with over the years seemed to look down on those who spent any time toiling over the bench. It didn’t make sense, since it was here in the lab that diagnoses were confirmed, vaccines designed, and medications discovered. Although he could appreciate the sentiment, and he personally liked the hands-on animal work more than pipetting solutions from one vial to another, he was still glad he could play both sides.

“So basically, we ran two unrelated assays, each of them targeting a totally different gene that is part of the monkeypox virus’s DNA.” He took the paper back and pulled a pen from behind his ear. “I’m about to get kind of technical on you here, so feel free to stop me at any point.”

“Go for it.”

“Here’s the first one.” He circled a spot on the page. “The E9L-NVAR probe is looking for a particular DNA polymerase gene found in all the Eurasian orthopoxviruses except our favorite extinct cousin, Mr. Smallpox himself.”

“And I assume that graph is showing a positive?”

“Yep, that tall peak means that the probe successfully found its target gene and caused it to multiply out a bunch of times over the course of each heat cycle. So we can check that box: yes it’s in the orthopox family, but no it’s not smallpox.”

“Go on.”

“The second set here is a hybridization assay,” he said. “It uses a different type of probe that targets the B6R envelope protein gene.”

“In English, please?”

“Well, the important thing is that this gene is totally specific to the monkeypox virus. The fact that our probe found its target yet again means we can be almost one hundred percent confident in our identification.”

“Two different assays, two different genes, both pointing to—”

“Monkeypox, yep.” At least she didn’t need it explained more than once. “That’s what’s currently growing on the roof of Marna’s mouth. And most likely circulating through the rest of her, too.”

“It does make sense,” Leila said. “But have these assays been verified and published anywhere? Or is it a method you’ve just developed on your own here in Rwanda?”

“Please, I’m not that much of a prodigy.” He could understand her skepticism, but that didn’t mean he liked it. “The whole system was actually developed by some of your CDC colleagues to help track the 2003 outbreak. I think I’ve got the paper saved on my hard drive here if you really want to see it.”

“Don’t worry about it, no.” She kept looking back to the print-out, now resting on the lab bench in front of them. “I might give my friend in the virology lab a call, just to see what he thinks.”

“Because you still don’t believe that I know what I’m doing.”

“Cole, get over yourself.” She rolled her eyes. “This is science. Regardless of what you find here, we’ll still need to grow this thing out in culture and run a full genomic sequencing back in Atlanta. There’s got to be something different that can account for these superpox symptoms, right?”

There was a knock at the door.

“Dr. Cole, are you in there?”

It was Innocence Kambale’s vibrant voice. Cole opened the door a crack.

“Yeah, what’s going on?”

“We just now heard from Akagera Aviation, and they will not be coming.”

“What do you mean, not coming?” Cole looked over his shoulder at Leila. “They’re the only air ambulance service in the country.”

“The owner himself expresses his sincerest apologies, but the helicopter is grounded for maintenance, waiting on a part to arrive from Nairobi.”

Sincerest apologies, right. Always with the superlatives here, but sometimes that just wasn’t enough. This would make things a lot more difficult. Cole had been counting on the company’s new Augusta A109 helicopter, brightly painted in Rwandan blue, yellow, and green, to get Marna to the airport. The fledgling service recently evacuated a tourist off a gorilla trek, bravely landing right in the little clearing at the Karisoke research station. The overweight American had apparently suffered a mild heart attack when a playful young blackback mock charged him. Should have settled for
National Geographic
if he wasn’t prepared for the real thing, but there wasn’t a good system in place for properly screening tourists before sending them up on the mountain.

Now they would have to get a ground ambulance for Marna, and he knew that could be totally hit or miss. Why was it that the only pilot among them was the first person to get sick?

“One more thing,” the tall park ranger said. “Not such bad news, this part. Little Endo’s fever has broken.”

Leila still couldn’t believe she agreed to take a closer look at this sick gorilla. They had passed by an outdoor enclosure on the way across the Gorilla Doctors compound, interrupting the three healthy orphans in the middle of a rambunctious play wrestling session. When she and Cole stopped to watch their antics through the fence, all three jumped up on their hind legs and stood there staring right at her, as if they knew she didn’t belong. They looked more like children in gorilla costumes than the actual animals themselves, and the irrational fear that had been nagging at her ever since she stepped off the plane reached its climax. These creatures were just too much like humans for their own good.

“Try to imagine that he’s one of your sick infants on the NICU.” Cole looked up at her from across the small entryway that had been turned into their biohazard prep area. “At this age there’s really not much of a difference at all, right? I mean, some babies are even born with that weird dark hair all over their bodies.”

“Lanugo, you mean?” Leila pulled the Tyvek coveralls over her clothes. No stripping down and showering in here, fortunately, even though she knew it would probably be a safer bet. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to suggest it.

“Guess so,” Cole said. “Can’t say I have a whole lot of experience with human infants yet.”

“You mean you didn’t leave some poor woman back home taking care of your mini-McBrides when you ran off to Africa?”

“Come on, what kind of a guy do you think I am?” He stood up and stepped into tall rubber boots. “Last time I spent much time with baby humans was after my little brother and sister were born.”

“Twins?”

“Yep, they’re the last of us five, and I was the first, so there’s ten years between us.”

For some reason he struck her as just the type that would come from a big family. Too much American wholesomeness there for her taste, thank you very much. And of course, he had to be polite and ask her right back.

“How about you? What’s your family like?”

She bit the inside of her cheek. Why were they talking about this again?

“I’m not really in touch with them anymore.”

That usually did the trick, but Cole seemed like the annoyingly persistent type.

“Oh wow, I’m sorry. That must be tough.” He stood up and placed a hand on the doorknob.

A pleasant surprise—he was going to let it rest. She got up to follow him and suddenly found herself sharing something she hadn’t even told Travis yet.

“I do hear from my brother over e-mail every now and then, though, so that’s nice.”

She regretted saying it even as the words left her mouth. But her brother’s name and the subject line of the message she had just seen on her phone burned brightly at the front of her mind. When was she going to be able to read it, in the middle of all this chaos?

“Cool, that’s a start at least,” Cole said. He looked into her eyes for just a second beyond what was comfortable, and then opened the door. “Welcome to Endo’s world!”

Leila expected the wafting nastiness of a zoo’s great ape house to envelope her the moment she stepped inside the room, but she was happy to be wrong in this case. It really looked more like a baby’s nursery than an animal cage. An old plush recliner sat in one corner next to a dim incandescent floor lamp. Along the other wall was a changing table, and in the far corner a big pile of blankets.

Sitting in the blankets was a tall black man she hadn’t met yet. This must be the other brother from Virunga. He looked up at her and nodded, a kind smile on his face.

“Proper Kambale, meet Dr. Leila Torabi.” Cole stepped forward and immediately knelt down on the blankets. “She’s from the Centers for Disease Control, back in the U.S., and she’s going to help us figure out what killed those gorillas.”

The man made a move to stand but Leila held up a hand.

“Please, don’t get up. It’s very nice to meet you.”

“And you, Madame.”

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim green light filtered through a single window on the opposite wall.

Then she saw it.

The tiny creature was huddled against the man’s chest, two beady eyes staring out at her from a ball of fluffy black hair. Leila felt her throat tighten, and her heart started pounding more quickly. This was the moment she had been dreaming about and dreading ever since she was a child.

Deep breath.

She was a doctor, a scientist. There was no reason this irrational physiological response should be so crippling.

“Well, aren’t you going to come and say hello?” The dizziness subsided, and she saw Cole looking up at her, a quizzical expression in his goggled eyes. The baby gorilla squirmed in his hands, looking for all the world as if it was trying to get back to the warmth and safety of Proper’s comforting hold.

“I hate to admit this now,” she said, still frozen to the ground just inside the closed door. “But I’m actually not much of an animal person. I can say hello from here.”

She waved uncertainly.

Cole let out a muffled snort from behind the mask. “Oh come on, poor Endo here is about the least scary animal you could imagine. Unless you just can’t stand a good pus-filled nodule, but I can’t believe that’s the case.”

Leila did want to see the lesions, and she could already imagine the hard time Dr. Shackleton would give her if she told him she didn’t even take a look at the sick gorilla.

She took a hesitant step forward, then another. The infant must have seen her moving—he froze in Cole’s hands and turned his head in her direction. What was she afraid of, anyway? Not that it was going to bite her. There couldn’t be any teeth in that tiny mouth yet. The disease didn’t bother her either. The same virus was coursing through Marna’s body, and she hadn’t had any problem with that. Maybe she could do this.

The gorilla pulled one frail arm out of Cole’s hand and lifted it toward her.

“Look at that,” Proper said quietly.

“See, he’s trying to tell you there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Cole shifted in the blankets and motioned with his free hand. “Keep on coming, looks like he’s asking for some female attention.”

Leila took another step and then crouched down beside the nest of blankets. She felt her fear dissipating into the peaceful stillness of the quiet room. The gorilla still held his arm out, tiny fingers waving slowly in the air in her direction. Now she could really see his face, the tiny wrinkles around his pouty mouth and shining eyes full of life. Something in her cracked as she gazed at this innocent creature, and somehow the likeness to humans that had always been so scary and off-putting now seemed a comfort. She knew what to do. This sick little boy was just like all the others she had toiled over through her residency.