“Jessie was here last night?”
“She said you ran out on her, that you left her to die. Evidently she loves you anyway, because she wants to warn you about them, whoever they are.”
“I wouldn’t have left her there! I thought she was dead. They said she was dead.”
“Would these they be the same they who are watching you now?”
He wiped his hand against his face. “Jesus. I have to see her.”
“I don’t think so. From what she said, she can get in a whole lot of trouble from them if they find out she’s trying to help you.”
“Of course. Good God.”
I said, “Okay, I’ve delivered the message, and I’ve told you everything she told me. That’s all I’m going to do. It’s all I can do. You people have used me sixteen ways from Thursday, and I’m going home now and leave you to whatever it is that you’re doing. There’s just one thing—I saw the catheter in Ziggy. If you’re hurting him, I won’t be so nice and cooperative. You understand?”
He gestured toward the chairs in front of the fireplace. “Please, I’d like to explain.”
Okay, now we were getting somewhere. I dropped into a chair and waited until Kurtz had shuffled to a chair across from me. The fireplace was unpleasantly warm, but in its flickering amber light Kurtz didn’t look so sick.
He said, “Not that it makes what I’m going to tell you any more palatable but I’m a veterinary microbiologist and pathologist with a long list of degrees and appointments.”
I raised an eyebrow, meaning What the heck does that have to do with anything?
“I just want you to know that I’m not a mad scientist, never have been.”
“Okay, so you’re a professional.”
“Jessica and I were both bizogenetic researchers for the army.”
“Our army?”
He smiled. “I’m not a foreign terrorist, Dixie.”
Maybe not, but I had a feeling he might be a native terrorist, which in some ways is even worse.
“In the beginning, we were trying to develop vaccines or antidotes for a host of animal diseases that we expect to see in humans in the future. Some of them have already popped up here and there, like the outbreak of SARS, which originated in an obscure wild animal in China, or the West Nile virus, which originates in horses. A disease that’s benign in animals can be fatal to humans, and when a disease leaps from animals to humans, it can become highly contagious. Look at what happened with the bubonic plague. It spread from rats to humans via fleas, and in five years it wiped out a third of the European population. The next plague will probably come from poultry in Southeast Asia.”
His eyes had taken on the shine of enthusiasm that people have when they talk about something that gets their juices flowing. Even his voice seemed stronger and more confident.
I hated to be the ant at his picnic, but I said, “And then what happened?”
“Excuse me?”
“You said you were developing vaccines in the beginning. What happened after the beginning?”
He took a deep breath, and the shine left his eyes.
“Then somebody in a position of power decided that a disease that began in animals and was fatal to humans could be a useful weapon. If we could find a way to create and disseminate an interspecies disease in a controlled way, we could wipe out an entire nest of terrorists or an entire population that we believed posed a threat to world peace.”
Hearing somebody talk about widespread killing in order to bring about world peace always makes me want to projectile vomit, but I kept quiet.
He said, “The army contracted with a civilian company to take responsibility for the work, but basically the same researchers continued doing what we had always been doing. We just had different employers. Our assignment was to develop a fatal disease that we could test on an isolated island in Southeast Asia.” Looking quickly at my face, he said, “Fewer than a thousand inhabitants, virtually no outside contact. It was an ideal testing locale, especially in the event that biocontainment was breached. That happens sooner or later in any animal disease lab, but in our location any accidentally released virus would disperse over the ocean.”
With a bitter grimace, he added, “We never expected the ocean to turn on us.”
“You lived there, on the island?”
“Yes, we lived among the people we planned to kill.”
“And did you? Did you kill them?”
A ripple of pain moved across his face. “We were just doing our job, Dixie. But no, we didn’t kill them. We killed our fellow researchers instead. Not by intent, of course—it was purely accidental. I imagine you find a poetic justice in that.”
I shrugged. “What’s the quotation, He who lives by the sword dies by the sword? I suppose that applies to those who live by diabolical research too.”
“You call it diabolical. We thought of it as exploring the limits of genetic engineering.”
“Okay. So what happened?”
Wearily, he said, “Our biocontainment lab was in a secret underground installation under a concrete complex that housed legitimate biotechnology laboratories. Our basement lab was divided into zones separated by heavy air-lock doors that opened and closed by a computer code known only to the senior researchers. The air pressure steadily decreased toward the central zone, where we kept freezers full of frozen viruses. That way, any stray pathogens would flow inward and up through a large particulate filter.”
He fell silent for a moment, as if he had to summon the courage to tell the rest of what he intended to say. I didn’t pressure him. I know all too well that some memories are too awful to tell all in one burst.
He said, “From the beginning, those of us in charge of the project were concerned about the fact that the air locks couldn’t be opened manually. We wanted a manual option in case of a power failure, but every time we complained, we got a runaround about the expense, or the possibility of losing our secrecy, or some other bureaucratic crap.”
As he talked, his arms began to cross over his chest until he was hugging himself against some chilling memory.
“The same tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia hit the island. The thing came out of nowhere, a wall of water that destroyed everything in its path, including the concrete building above the lab. Water flooded every zone of the basement and knocked out the backup generators that allowed the air locks to open. Without manual controls, everybody in the innermost chambers drowned, along with the infected animals in their holding chambers.”
He put a quivery hand to the side of his face and held it there for a moment, either to calm the twitching tremors under his skin or to calm his own obvious fury at a company whose negligence had cost lives.
“If the goddamned company had listened to us and put in manual controls, they could have survived. Rescuers had to push their way through contaminated water to reach the dead, and many of the rescuers sickened and died too. My own theory is that they either had open sores or accidentally ingested some of the water. They all died within twenty-four hours.”
He turned his tortured gaze to meet my eyes.
“Jessie was supposed to be on duty in the biocontainment lab when the tsunami hit, and she was listed as one of the dead. I have always believed she died there.”
I felt like Alice after she ate the cookie that made her become enormous. The overheated room seemed to be shrinking, and Kurtz was beginning to look like somebody seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
“Why not you? Why not Ziggy?”
His face took on a sly, crafty look. “I was using that particular iguana for some special research. I had taken him to my private residence that was farther inland.”