They’d had all sorts of false positives. The antibody swabs they were using were a sort of general “flu” test. They pinged as soon as they hit anything that looked anything like influenza. Which turned out to be half the organic chemicals on earth. Up until today they’d had to send them all back to various labs to be tested.
Today they had, finally, delivered a more precisely tuned antibody test. You still used the strips for initial test but a field re-test was now possible. Drop the strip in a test-tube, squirt in magic antibody fluid and wait for results.
“I’ve got another,” Luiz Lopez said, holding up a strip. Sure enough it was bright red.
He’d been swabbing the inside of one of the stalls. The good news was that anything in there was kept out by the moon suit. The bad news was that about half their false positives came from in the stalls. There was everything in those stalls. It was tough to be a germophobe and work in biology. This job was making him a germophobe. He certainly didn’t ever want to have to use a public restroom again.
“And we have a…” Nate said, shaking the test-tube. The liquid was red as blood. “Positive? Seriously?”
“Did we get a sample to cross-test?” Luiz asked.
“You think they’re going to hand me F7?” Nate said, looking in the stall. There wasn’t much graffiti. The problem with the stalls was that they were, yeah, cesspits on one level but they were also cleaned regularly. They just weren’t cleaned well. So most of the trace evidence, including any H7 should have been removed or degraded by the environment. Even if there had been some sort of vector there a couple of weeks ago, the F7 should have been cleaned away or basically broken down from heat and humidity. And there wasn’t any sort of aerosol canister. That had been the first check. “I’d be too likely to slip it to our ‘handlers.’”
“Don’t even joke,” Luiz said. He was from Argentina working, like Nate, on his masters at UCLA. “You they’d at least give some rights. They even suspect it’s me and I’m on a plane to Guantanamo.”
“Where’d this come from?” Nate asked, looking around the stall.
“Walls and door,” Luiz said.
If there was F7 in the stall something had put it there. Recently. It had clearly been recently scrubbed. Two more tests showed that the walls, door and even floor were contaminated. According to the swab and tube.
What there was was a deodorizer on the door. A round, green, deodorizer with the motto: “Save the Planet. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. SaveThePlanet.org” stamped into the plastic.
He’d swabbed those before. They were the first thing he’d hit the first stall he’d seen. And gotten back that the material in the deodorizer was giving a false positive. Which just might have been a false negative. If the carrier had enough chemical similarities to the protein coat of the virus it could be construed as a false positive depending on the test. If the evaporative coating was still coating the virus as one example.
He reached out, carefully, and cracked open the deodorizer.
“I want you to, personally, run this back to Dr. Karza,” Nate said, using a scupula to pull out some of the beigish substance in the deodorizer. “Tell him I suggest he run it through the portable SEM…”
* * *
“Why didn’t you identify that immediately?” the FBI Supervisory Special Agent asked. “Those canisters had been tested, right? I mean, they were obvious…”
“Because microbiology isn’t as easy as POINTING A GUN AT SOMEONE!” Dr. Azim Karza shouted, his eyes glued to the SEM screen.
“There’s no need to get…” the agent said, then coughed and sniffed. “Oh…shit…”
“GET THE HELL OUT OF MY LABORATORY!” Dr. Karza said. As the agent left he gave himself a quick blood test, then sighed in relief. Still no trace of H7D3. He’d seen the special agent using poor transmission protocols but was forced to work with him in close quarters. Which meant that the agent’s sniffles were something other than H7D3. Karza could have cleared that up for him with the same sort of test. But let the myrmidon bastard sweat it for a while.
“Cune.”
* * *
“FBI sources have found the source of the Pacific Flu virus. Anyone observing green deodorizers imprinted with the words ‘Save The Planet’ in public places should avoid them and immediately report their location to their local police or the FBI tipline…”
* * *
“The evaporative material was giving a false negative reaction to the antibody tests,” Dr. Dobson said, wearily. “We’d checked the deodorizers and given them a pass. Yesterday. Then when we got the new antibody strips one of the techs realized that there had to be a continuous source. Looking at the material under SEM…” He gestured to the image and shrugged. “I don’t know if that was part of the culprit’s plan but it was effective. They’ve now identified them in over sixty locations. At least one per bathroom mostly stretching up and down the West Coast…”
“So this was an eco-terrorist attack?” Dr. Xiu Bao asked. The current representative from the Chinese Ministry of Health was clearly convinced on the subject. If for no other reason than the Chinese government was already using the assumption to crack down on their environmental activists.
“The FBI isn’t really commenting but it’s possible,” Dr. Dobson said. “On the other hand, if you just wanted the finger pointed at eco-terrorists it would be a simple way to do it. Honestly, Doctor, I just hope nobody points out that the canisters were made in China…”
“We assuredly did not have anything to do with this…”
“I know that,” Dobson said. “Everyone with any sense knows that. It doesn’t mean it’s not going to get pointed out by idiots…”
* * *
“This was NOT eco-terrorism,” the Greenpeace spokesperson insisted. “No decent environmentalist is going to do something like this! And even if one was so insane as to infect humanity with a deadly plague they wouldn’t have used a nonrecyclable container! And might I point out, the canisters were made in China! One of the greatest eco-terrorists on the planet!”
“Whoa,” O’Riley said. “Whoa! Whoa! So is most stuff these days. Pointing a finger at the Chinese government is premature to say the least…”
“I didn’t say the…”
“Out of time. Next on the O’Riley factor…”
“If there is a next time,” Dr. Curry said, shaking the popcorn bag to get at the bits in the bottom. The laboratory he’d been handed by BotA was nicely complete but at the moment he was mostly using the microwave. Mr. “Smith” had looked at him oddly when he’d requisitioned six hundred cases of microwave popcorn. But he figured that even if they lost power BotA had generators. With water, decon showers and enough popcorn he was good till doomsday. Or till they totally lost power. “I love a front row seat to the apocalypse.”
* * *
“You all know what the big issue is right now,” Lieutenant Simmons said. “Fortunately, other crimes are down. However, we’re starting to get heavy traffic…”
“Rats fleeing the ship,” Patterno said.
“People are scared,” Simmons said, shrugging. “The TV’s staying away from the Z word but it’s all over the internet. That and it being a real and really big bioterror attack has people worried. We just work the problem. Some of the people in traffic are going to neurological stage while driving. Night shift had a lot of accidents. Every reserve officer who’s responding has been called in…”
Young tuned the brief out. He was still pending a shoot review. There had been a few words at first but by the end of his shift so many officers had had to use their weapons that they didn’t even take his in for the investigation. So far he’d had to shoot three “afflicted” to wound and two more to kill. They were still being ordered to “subdue and restrain” but there were more and more ten sixty-four hotels every shift. And subduing them took two officers at a minimum. Then there was the at least two hours of paperwork per ten sixty-four…