O’Hara dropped to his knees, still clutching the gun. Blood dripped onto the tile floor and a part of his mind thought, Blood Spatter Patterns 101. I hated that subject.
The floor rose up to meet him and he was still.
45
Ben Zataki stood next to Sharon Jaxon in the animal room of the Level IV facility and felt his heart sink. For a long, hopeless moment he leaned against the far wall and just stared at the cages. Sharon clumped over to him, pushed her face plate next to his and pinched shut her air hose to decrease the roar. “Any ideas?”
Zataki was close to her, eyes only inches away. For a moment he felt something that was probably despair. Nineteen of the twenty monkeys had died. The twentieth monkey would soon be dead. Their plan for a possible vaccine had failed and failed miserably. As far as they could tell, none of the weaker versions of the virus had even slowed down the contagion.
And what an ugly, evil disease, he thought. There were similarities to Ebola, severe hemorrhagic fevers, internal bleeding. But the animals seemed in so much pain… His horrified gaze took in the slack, bloody corpses of all the monkeys. Even more troublesome was the astonishing speed of the infection. Ebola took four days before symptoms started to show. Chimera symptoms began in hours. They had engineered this bug to target vascular tissue systems and made it so energy efficient it was frightening. He’d never seen anything like it. From a purely technical point of view, he was impressed. It had been a technical tour de force to create this monster.
“Anyone working on a weakened virus?” he asked, knowing that they were.
“Yes. It’s slow work.” She hesitated. “Too late to help Liz.”
Zataki nodded. He had checked on Dr. Vargas before he entered Level IV. She was showing signs of mild internal bleeding. They were providing her with clotting factor and saline and three types of antivirals. They had put her on a Valium drip. She was sleeping. It had occurred to Zataki that the most humane thing to do might be to overdose her. But he was a physician and he couldn’t do that. She was still alive and there was still hope. Not much, he had to admit, but some.
“What did Hingemann say?” he asked, wondering what Liz had been thinking when she asked the immunologist from Michigan State University to consult. It had been several hours since the talk and Liz had gotten much worse. At first Liz had resisted the tranquilizer, but then it became obvious she wasn’t thinking clearly and was, in fact, becoming hysterical.
“He said he’d read the papers and see if he had any ideas. I hope he calls back soon.”
“Let’s ring him.“
”We e-mailed him all the information on Chimera. It’s a ton of material. He won’t have been able to get through it all.”
“We don’t have time for him to get through it all. We’ll call him.”
“Okay,” she said.
He and Jaxon moved out of the Level IV containment area into the disinfectant shower — seven minutes under a stream of Lysol.
They called Hingemann from Zataki’s small spartan office. They had a high-speed Internet hookup and the university professor looked tired on the screen of the computer.
“How is Liz doing?” Hingemann asked.
“She’s hanging in there, but her condition is deteriorating rapidly. Do you have any ideas, Doctor?”
Hingemann hesitated. “I don’t know if it will work.”
Jaxon said, “We’re grasping at straws here, Doctor. Nothing we’ve tried has worked. What’s your idea?”
“Well,” Hingemann said, frowning. He scratched at his beard. “I understand we were pressed for time, so I couldn’t read as carefully as I had hoped to…”
“None of us have,” Zataki said.
“Yes, of course. This is a very interesting organism, Chimera. You understand that they grafted a number of odd things into its genome, taking sections of various viral and bacterial genomes and merging them into a viral genome. It’s the possible antigens that caught my attention.”
All living cells had molecules on their surfaces called antigens. Antigens did a number of things, but what their primary purpose seemed to be was to act as keys. Those keys were designed to fit in locks in other cells — a way for cells to interact. The human immune system responded to antigens by producing antibodies specific to the antigen’s key. Those antibodies were designed to kill the cells with the specific keys that fit their lock. It was how vaccines worked. The immune system was alerted to the specific key, then churned out more antibodies to kill those specific cells if they should show up again. It was like a flu shot. The flu vaccine had specific antigens. If those cells appeared, the body’s immune system recognized the bug and mounted an immune attack.
“Are they in the files?” Zataki asked.
“Well… some of them. But, as you may know, your own institution has done work on Yersinia pestis and vaccines using recombinant V antigen. I don’t know for a fact that the V antigen is present on Chimera M13, but they used quite a large section of the Yersinia genome in piecing together their virus. I think it’s possible.”
Yersinia pestis was the bacterium that caused Bubonic plague. Slowly Zataki said, “You think we should inject Liz with the plague vaccine?”
“No,” Hingemann said, leaning earnestly toward the camera. “I think you should inject her with Yersinia. With the plague itself.”
46
Aaron Pilcher parked his car and raced into the Walter Reed Emergency Room, chastising himself for not having ridden in the ambulance. They were just wheeling the pilot out of the ambulance when he approached.
“Has she said anything?” he asked, flashing his badge.
The paramedic, a woman with thick black hair she wore tied back in a bun, looked up from where she was double-checking an IV line. “No. She’s been out the whole ride.”
“Will she make it?”
The paramedic shrugged. “Pretty messed up.”
“I need her awake.”
As they rolled the gurney in, they were met by a pair of doctors in green scrubs, who took one look and began to roll Cynthia Black deeper into the bowels of the E.R. One of the doctors, a woman with red hair and purple-framed glasses, said, “Prep the O.R., call Jamieson.” The other doctor nodded and scribbled notes.
Pilcher said, “I need to talk to her.”
“She’s not talking to anybody,” the female doctor said, not paying him much attention.
“I’m with the FBI and she’s a witness in this terrorist event—”
The doctor glanced up. “You’ll have to wait. She’s not talking. She’s unconscious.”
“Can you wake her?”
“No, and if I could I wouldn’t. You’ll have to wait.”
“She may have information about this attack on the White House.”
The doctor steeled herself. She pointed to a waiting area. “The answer is still no. You can wait. I’ll talk to you when I can.”
“But—”
She turned and walked away, leaving Pilcher to stew in his own juices. Staring at a sign that warned not to use cellular phones inside the hospital, he scowled and walked outside, pulled out his phone and punched in the number for Spigotta. Nobody answered and he was shunted to voicemail. Damn it! What was going on? He left a message saying where he was and what he was doing and that he would check in every fifteen minutes or so.
Feeling helpless, he clicked off his cell phone and went back inside to wait on news about the Coast Guard pilot.