She had only slept for two hours — hopefully it would be enough to carry her through the day.
It was nine fifteen in the morning. She would arrive at the lab by a quarter to ten, at the latest. That would give her an hour to prep microscope slides before the lab emptied for lunch. But making blood smears was a colossal breach of biosafety protocol. If Will’s blood contained an unknown virus or other deadly microbes, then working with his blood would require Biosafety Level Four controls. The campus was only permitted as a BSL-3 facility. To complicate matters further, she was an oncology research scientist, not a virologist. Although her work involving the STAT protein overlapped with immune system function, she did not have the requisite experience to make proper diagnoses of bacterial or viral infections. Just as a circus acrobat has no business standing in for a lion tamer, she had no business delving into the realm of infectious diseases.
A bead of cold sweat dripped from her underarm and ran, trickling over her ribs. She had never contemplated actions like those she was about to carry out, let alone violated company safety protocols before. Best-case scenario, she would be fired and professionally discredited. Worst-case scenario, she would unleash biocontamination that would result in the infection of thousands of people and then be prosecuted as a terrorist. She took a deep breath and tightened her grip on the steering wheel. She needed to find another angle.
She tried to pay attention to the traffic instead of worrying. An idea would come to her; it always did. But as she drove, her mind drifted back to Will. She wanted so much to protect him. To shield him from the world and from the awful men who had done this to him. What could she do? How could she ever hope to stand up against the powerful and faceless foe that Will described as their enemy? The more she thought about it, the heavier the dread lodged in her abdomen became. What if Leighton-Harris Pharmaceuticals and the CDC were co-conspirators? Was Xavier Pope really a Dr. Frankenstein? The Julie Ponte of twenty-four hours ago would have thought the idea of illegal quarantines and illicit human experimentation preposterous. She had worked in the pharmaceutical industry for six years and had only known noble and dedicated scientists and staff. Was she naive? Was Will changing her into a conspiracy theorist kook?
She was convinced that she did not possess the particular subject matter expertise to analyze his blood and generate a working hypothesis about what was happening to him. It had been unrealistic to think she could tackle a mystery like this without help. Whom could she trust? She startled rattling off names in her head. Heindrick Fabian. No, too nosey. Elizabeth Raynor. Maybe? No, too publication hungry…
A name interrupted her internal monologue.
Bart Bennett.
She smiled.
Bart Bennett was a hopeless genius who worked in virology. As one of only a handful of Americans working in her lab, it was inevitable that she and Bart would meet and become friends. Bart was from Seattle and was a proud and vocal coffee snob. Periodically, Julie and Bart would eat lunch together, swapping anecdotal tales about life as an American expat in Vienna. Once, she had even reluctantly agreed to meet him at a Viennese coffeehouse he frequented. A big mistake. By the end of the thirty-minute date, she feared he might drop down on one knee and propose to her — pulling forth a ring hidden beneath a layer of creamy froth atop his cappuccino. From that day forward, she had regularly affirmed their “only friends” status by limiting their interactions to cafeteria lunches and harmless hallway chitchat. Today, though, she might have to take advantage of poor Bart’s affections.
She turned onto the laboratory campus driveway and drove past the marble sign at the entrance:
Wien Bioscience
a Vyrogen Pharmaceuticals Company
She entered the parking garage and parked in her reserved slip. She placed the automatic transmission into “Park,” turned off the engine, and took a deep breath.
“You can do this,” she mumbled to herself.
Inside the lab, Julie carefully drew a small volume of blood from Will’s test tube with a syringe. Next, she transferred it to another vial she had prepared with a dummy label. This was the sample she would give to Bart. Five minutes later, she knocked on the door to his office.
“Hey, Julie,” Bart exclaimed. “You must have smelled the espresso. Check out the new machine I just got. It’s small enough to fit on the corner of my desk. Now I can have espressos whenever the urge strikes.”
“Wow. It’s a cute little guy, but are you sure that’s legal? If you drink four or five espressos a day, your blood-caffeine level will be above the legal limit and you’ll be SUI,” Julie teased.
“SUI?”
“Scientist Under the Influence.”
Bart smiled and forced a polite laugh. “I’ve already had two espressos this morning and I’m still yawning. That must be a good sign, right?”
“I guess so. Hey, um, do you have a second? I was hoping you could run some tests on a blood sample from one of my subjects in the STAT protein study I’m working on.”
“What kind of tests?” Bart asked.
“I noticed an elevated white blood cell count, and I’m worried this subject might have an infection. I spend my time looking at tumor markers, not viral or bacterial ones, so I’m way outta my league here. I was hoping you could run ELISA on the sample to see what antibodies are present.”
“Sure, just drop the sample off in my lab with Jon, and we’ll get to it when things slow down a bit.”
Julie grimaced. “I was hoping that you could maybe run it now. I’m really worried about this subject and feel it’s my responsibility to notify this person of their condition.”
“You want me to drop everything and do it now? We’ve got a busy day planned,” Bart resisted.
“Please,” she said, with puppy dog eyes. “As a favor to me?”
He rubbed his beardless chin. “Since you haven’t given me any direction as to what virus or bacteria I am supposed to be looking for, I’ll need to check a fairly extensive list of possible diseases. And since this is such a small sample volume, I’ll need to amplify using real-time PCR and then run multiple assays. It’s not as easy as you think, Julie.”
“I know, but if you were this patient, wouldn’t you hope that a brilliant guy at Wien Bioscience named Bart Bennett was willing to do the right thing to save your life?” she asked.
“Okay fine. But I want you to know, your Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me.”
“Is that so?” she said, smiling as she grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out of his chair. “You will take me to Jabba now.”
“What did you find?” Julie asked.
Bart and his Austrian lab technician Jon Henning were standing together talking when Julie approached them.
Barely able to contain his excitement, Jon spoke first. “I don’t know where you found this sample, but it’s either from a laboratory primate or a special forces soldier who’s been inoculated against biological warfare.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“This blood is packed with antibodies. Exotic bugs, too. I ran a broad serological workup and found smallpox, anthrax, even Yersinia pestis antibodies. Check out this list I compiled,” Jon said. “But that’s not even the most exciting thing we found.”
She took the printed page from Jon, and scanned the list. It took all her willpower not to gasp at the report. She looked at Bart who seemed uncharacteristically melancholy, especially when contrasted to Jon’s bravado. Bart would not look at her and instead was staring off at some imaginary point in space. “What’s the exciting part?” she said.