A mental image formed of the man, staring down at the dying pachyderm, his face blank, a stark contrast to the mortified expression on the woman’s.
Lauren gathered her sample-filled case and exited the tent. She had just veered toward the path that would lead her back to her car when she heard someone shout from the eastern side of the grounds, past a series of smaller tents and a row of decrepit rides. A group of agents was already running in that direction. She followed out of curiosity, passing bumper cars and a toddler-size Ferris wheel and various concessions booths until she reached the edge of the forest. Voices carried through a maze of sycamores and cypresses bearded with moss. Moonlight glinted between the trunks from a large body of water. When she finally emerged from the wilderness, she found the agents fanned out along a stretch of muddy bank bordering a lake. She could barely see the wall of trees on the other side. Several men crouched at the water’s edge, while others passed around binoculars.
Small waves shushed toward the low-water mark. In the spring, there would be standing water throughout the woods.
“Well,” Cranston said. He separated from the others and walked over to her side. “That’s one problem solved.”
She raised her eyebrows and waited for him to elaborate.
He simply pointed at the sloppy ground. She hadn’t noticed it at first. The waves carried small black wasp carcasses onto the shore, where they formed a ridge several inches deep, like the ring of scum around a bathtub.
All of them dead, all missing their stingers.
“Grab as many as you like, doc,” Cranston said. He clapped her on the shoulder and rejoined his team.
Lauren fished a collection bag from her case and stuffed it full of soggy wasps. What could possibly have caused the entire swarm to drown itself?
She loaded the bag into her briefcase and stared out across the lake in the same direction as the agents with their field glasses. There was something out there, low on the water. A dark shape with a shallow profile. She strolled over to the man who held the binoculars.
“May I?” she asked.
The man passed them to her without a word. Lining up the lenses with her eyes through the plastic shield was a difficult proposition, but she finally succeeded and zeroed in on the black silhouette. Magnified, she could tell exactly what it was.
A small rowboat gently rose and fell on the waves in a shimmering reflection of moonlight. Its cargo consisted of two large rectangular shapes.
Massive black boxes.
Amplifiers.
CHAPTER TWO
I
Atlanta, Georgia
Lauren returned to her lab on the third floor of the Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory, forty-two miles from the fairgrounds, in time to watch the sun rise. It was the perfect time to be there, the only time when she could clearly think. The CDC was adding more than twenty thousand square feet onto the building to accommodate the new class IV cleanrooms necessary to keep up with the slew of nasty diseases that seemed to crop up in increasing numbers every year. The construction crews with their infernal hammering and drilling and pounding, which positively made the floor vibrate, wouldn’t be arriving for more than two hours, so they needed to take full advantage of the opportunity.
Physically, she was exhausted, but mentally she was firing on all cylinders. There was so much to be done that she could hardly slow down to think about it while moving from one task to the next. The entire lab was a frenzy of activity. Lab techs bounced from one station to the next. Centrifuges whirled and mass spectrometers hummed. Carcasses were dissected with microscopic guidance. Tissue samples were stained and run through a gamut of tests. It was a precisely orchestrated performance that undoubtedly looked chaotic to the untrained eye, but to Lauren, it was poetry in motion; an elaborate dance by men and women who had never rehearsed this particular version. There was no protocol in place for evaluating this specific vector. Wasps had never been known to transmit such a nasty pathogen, and their toxin wasn’t especially aggressive. Even people who were deathly allergic to bee stings rarely reacted to those of a wasp. And yet here they were, improvising as they went, attacking these little black creatures on the atomic level.
So far, they had yet to find the presence of any viral or bacterial agents, which was the most important step. It was ultimately too soon to conclusively rule out the presence of any or all pathogenic processes, but Lauren figured it was only a matter of time now.
What they had found, however, was truly extraordinary.
With the help of Dr. Reginald Wilton, professor of Agricultural Technology and resident entomologist at Georgia Tech, they had thoroughly examined the anatomy of the wasps and made some startling revelations. This was no naturally occurring species they were dealing with here, but an amalgam of several. The general body type was consistent on a macroscopic level with that of the common paper wasp—minus the structure of the stinger array—while the coloration more closely resembled that of a parasitic digger wasp. That was where it passed from strange to remarkable.
A wasp’s stinger was more than simply a mechanism for delivering venom. It was an ovipositor, a functional tube used to deposit eggs. Thus, only the females of any given species had stingers. Colonial wasps produced a single queen capable of laying eggs, while all of the other females were essentially born sterile. Apparently wasps had a staggering amount of control in determining the sex of their offspring. Every egg was naturally haploid, which meant it would always yield a female. After fertilization, however, it became diploid and always produced a male. And all of the carcasses they had found were viable females, as evidenced by their missing stingers and the fully-developed egg sacs in their abdomens. This suggested that the wasps weren’t colonial at all, like their hive-building cousins, but parthenogenic, capable of reproducing entire generations of females asexually. In that regard, they were like the parasitic wasps of the Apocrita suborder, which were commonly released in fields of crops to control the infestation of pest insects. These species of wasps used their stingers to deliver a paralyzing dose of venom into other insects like caterpillars and spiders, and while the insect was incapacitated, laid their eggs directly into its body. The larvae then developed until they were effectively able to kill and consume their host.
The structure of this new hybrid’s ovipositor assembly mimicked that of a honey bee. All stingers have microscopic hooks along the stylet called lancets that enable them to latch onto their prey long enough to deliver their venom before retracting. Bees have larger lancets. That’s the reason they lose their ovipositors after stinging a human being; the skin is too thick and tough to allow the lancets to disengage, which causes the bee to simply tear off its entire reproductive system in an effort to fly away. From there, it’s only a matter of time before the insect dies.