“I don’t think so, sir. He sent an e-mail last night from the defense attaché’s house in Kigali, but I’m not sure what he was planning to do next. The South African woman who died was a close friend of his.”
President Rogers looked back to the national security advisor. “Chuck, if this guy, this Cole—”
He paused.
“Cole McBride, sir,” Anna said. “Captain Cole McBride.”
“If Captain McBride is really military, this falls right in your lane.”
“Roger, sir.”
“I want you to track him down, make sure he’s healthy and safe, and see if there’s anything else we can do, within reason, to keep this virus from getting out of control.”
Howard looked back at Anna and shook his head slowly. The look in his eyes made her feel like vomiting. After what seemed like minutes, he turned back to the president. “Yes, sir. I can tell you, though, this Captain McBride isn’t going to be too happy to find out about his kid sister’s meddling. It’s never a good thing to have someone like me on your tail.”
“Mr. President.” Anna gripped the edges of her suit jacket. Why couldn’t she have just minded her own business? “General Howard is right. Maybe it would be better—”
“I’m sorry, Ms. McBride, I’ve spoken my mind, and that’s that. Thank you for letting me know about your brother.” The president looked down at his desk and picked up another paper. “Now if you’ll excuse us.”
Anna stood frozen in place until she felt a tug on the sleeve of her jacket. She turned to see that Mills was already on his way out of the room.
So that was that.
It really wasn’t very different from so many of the video games he’d grown up with. Thumb-operated controls, handheld touchscreen device, obstacles to avoid, and even bad guys to look out for. Except this was real life, and Captain Jake Russell was controlling a miniature drone currently circling a few hundred feet above a terrorist camp deep in the Congolese jungle.
“Now if only this thing was armed,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind taking out a few of these guys right now.”
“I hear ya.” Master Sergeant Mike Denison sat beside him, eyes on the ground control station’s screen even as he steadily typed their observations into another laptop sitting on his own knees. Rico lay quietly on the other side, head resting across a front paw, eyes closed. “You’re pretty convinced they’re LRA, then? Too bad we can’t just get a clear photo of Kony himself and be done with it. Bring in the big guns and call it a day, right?”
“Exactly.” Jake turned the screen slightly. “You see that?”
He pointed to a spot on the bottom edge of the live video feed from the Puma UAV’s camera.
“Yeah. See if you can zoom in a little.”
Jake pushed a tiny joystick forward with his left thumb to make the adjustment. “Visitors, you think?”
“No, they’re walking right up like they own the place,” Mikey said. “Must have been a group that left before we got on target this afternoon.”
They’d been watching the drone’s footage for a couple hours already, and it was almost time to bring her back for another battery swap. Not much seemed to be happening in the camp itself, but they had done some exploring of the surrounding area and found what appeared to be an active pit mine just a few kilometers away.
This was interesting, though—a small group of men approaching the camp along a freshly bulldozed dirt road. “Looks like they got a couple wounded.” Jake hit a button to bring up the menu again. “I’m going to lower her down to two hundred feet.”
“Go for it.”
The tiny moving shapes got blurry as the Puma lost elevation over a couple slow circles. Jake tapped a finger against one leg.
Come on already
. A video game wouldn’t make you wait so long for something simple like that.
“Woah, woah, not too low or they’ll be able to hear her.” Mikey leaned in closer, and Rico opened one eye. How did the dog always seem to detect even the slightest tension in his partner’s voice?
“There we go.” The picture focused, and Jake strained his eyes to take in every detail. Something wasn’t right. “What’s up with the packs those two guys are wearing?”
“Nice gear,” Mikey said. “But not just the packs. See this one’s hair?” He pointed to the screen. “Hundred dollars says he’s not black.”
“Shit, you’re totally right.” The textured brown on top of the man’s head stood out in stark contrast to the uniform black of all the others. “Those two are walking kind of funny too. No motion in the arms, almost like their hands are tied.”
Jake brought a hand to his forehead and pushed it through his own hair.
“That would be bad.” Mikey nodded as Rico stood up on all fours, tail raised. “Very bad.”
“You have the sat phone?”
“Right here.” The master sergeant set his laptop down and picked up the phone.
“Okay, see if you can get him.”
Jake looked back to the screen. The group was only about a hundred feet outside of the barricaded entrance to the main camp.
A series of tones, then long beeps. Mikey had turned the speakerphone on.
Fifty feet from the camp’s entrance, the group stopped. A chaos of movement, and then it was clear. The packs were off the two men’s backs, their contents strewn across the ground.
A click from the phone, followed by a chorus of shouting voices. Rico turned to the phone and whined softly. He knew. Then it went silent.
“Oh man,” Mikey said softly. “Things just got seriously complicated.”
Bill, I could do this with my eyes closed.” Travis Grinley stood up. Time to get the ball rolling.
“I’m sure you could. Promise me you won’t try it tonight, though.” Bill Shackleton sounded tired, and Travis knew he had probably woken his boss with the phone call.
“I’ll be fine. But yes, I promise. No blinking for me tonight. You have my guarantee.”
“Let me know as soon as you get anything.” Bill paused. “And be careful.”
It was a ten minute walk through a maze of aging corridors from Travis’s office to the Special Pathogens Branch’s Biosafety Level 4 laboratories. The styrofoam sample box in his hands was just like so many others he had processed over the last few years. One more treasure chest waiting to spill its secrets. Monkeypox? Probably. But there were sure to be some surprises hidden away in the virus’s genetic code. There always were. It was amazing how even one little mutation, a random error in the transcription of a single base pair, could end up changing a sleepy virus in equilibrium with its environment into a bloodthirsty killer like this one. But that’s all it took—natural selection at its finest. Travis shook the box gently. Only a few more hours, and this virus would be a mystery no more. His little piece of the disease detection puzzle would be complete, and he could pass the results over to the rest of the team. People like Leila, who didn’t really give a damn about the DNA but might be able to use the information he delivered to stop this thing from spreading any further.
Leila. Their reunion at the airport had been a total flop. She barely looked at the roses and only managed a half-hearted side hug before pushing the box into his hands and turning away.
“Don’t want to miss my flight.” She pulled her hand out of his and walked off toward the line for security.
“Leila.” He didn’t quite shout, but it felt loud, his voice echoing across the vast space of the departure hall. No response, and a minute later she was gone.
Sure, he got it. She was tired and stressed out. Her mother was sick. But still. That wasn’t the Leila he’d been dating for almost a month. Yes, it had taken a while to break through her outer shell, the general aura about her that most people incorrectly assumed was straight-up bitchiness. He’d gotten to know the real Leila, a surprisingly affectionate genius who had finally spent the night for the first time before leaving for Africa a week ago.
That’s who he’d been expecting at the airport. And who did he get instead? Something in her expression—that final look at the airport—made him wonder if she would ever be back.
BSL-4: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY! The large red words printed across the door were followed by an oversized universal biohazard symbol. Three interlocking circles with a fourth at the center—kind of like a leaky Venn diagram. Even after all this time, it was still hard to believe that he was actually one of those authorized personnel. Travis Grinley, a one-time high school dropout from the backwoods of eastern Tennessee. He swiped his ID card and waited for a click before pushing firmly on the heavy door.
Fluorescent lights flickered on as he stepped into another hallway. He was alone. It had taken some convincing, but Travis knew his boss didn’t really want to spend all night twiddling his thumbs in BSL-4 just to meet the buddy system requirement. Emergency situations called for emergency measures, and that sometimes meant bending the rules. Not that he was worried—the tasks ahead only required the most basic laboratory skills—stuff molecular biology grad students across the country were doing every day. True, they rarely got their hands on pathogens like this one, but the techniques didn’t change.
Travis stopped at the end of the corridor in front of a heavy-duty transparent airlock door set at waist height in the wall. He swiped his card again and entered a six digit PIN on the adjoining keypad. There was a hiss as the door to the fumigation chamber swung open. He set the sample box on a conveyor belt, pressed a button, and closed the door. The chamber’s decontamination cycle of poisonous gas and ultraviolet radiation would kill everything except the samples themselves, bagged and sealed safely inside the box. When the cycle ended, the box would arrive at an identical door on the other side of the chamber, where Travis could retrieve it after he got inside the lab. This complex system sometimes seemed like overkill, but its design was necessary to ensure the biological purity of the working spaces inside. No living thing of any size could enter or exit the laboratory without Travis’s full knowledge and cooperation.
A minute later, he was undressing inside a small locker room. Undressing all the way. The first time through, he’d glanced up in shock to see his older female mentor stripped down to her birthday suit right in front of him. But now it was simply another part of the daily routine, and he was usually quite content to keep his eyes to himself.
He put his street clothes into a locker and stepped into the next room. Shower in and shower out. The hot water pounded against his shoulders and back, clouds of steam filling the small room. He tried to clear his mind of everything but the tasks ahead.
It was going to be a long night.
The water turned off seven minutes later. All the showers were on automatic timers—a necessary control the scientists implemented to keep themselves from cheating by not staying in long enough. He stepped into another changing area. Disposable socks and underwear, then a fresh pair of scrubs from the shelves beside the door.
Ready for stage two.
Travis wrestled a biohazard suit off its resting place on the wall in the next room. The thick blue polyurethane provided necessary protection, yes. After seeing those videos of the dead and dying from the hospital in Goma, he was glad for that. But it was also incredibly heavy. Travis was a pretty average guy in the size and strength department, and getting into the suit by himself was always a hassle. How did Leila manage to do it so easily?
Leila.
She’d be in the air now, flying overnight all the way back to Amsterdam. Would she be able to sleep? Or could she ever sleep on planes? They hadn’t been together long enough for him to know even this most basic fact.
Getting the hood on was easy compared to the rest of the suit, but it marked the real transition into the alternate reality of BSL-4. Once it was zipped and sealed into place, Travis popped the end of his air hose adaptor into the complementary piece on a coiled green hose snaking down from the ceiling. With a loud whoosh, the whole suit began to fill. It was fully inflated in seconds, and he took a deep breath of the cool dry air. The process was kind of like getting geared up for a dive—wetsuit, weights, and tank, all heavy and awkward—but then slipping into the water and feeling like a new man.
Travis started waddling across the room. “Shit!” He tripped over the long end of an overboot and grabbed for another hose hanging above him. Catastrophe averted. Wouldn’t have been the first time to completely bite it, but at least no one was there to laugh at him this time. He smiled, remembering a less fortuitous experience involving an escaped rat that ended with him sprawled across the floor. He’d taken crap for months over that one. So maybe the diving analogy wasn’t perfect—unfortunately, the addition of pressurized HEPA-filtered air into the biohazard suit did not provide nearly as complete a transformation. He passed through the chemical shower, its stainless steel walls covered in nozzles that would foam the contaminated suit with a deadly mix of sanitizing agents on the way out. The final door into the lab always seemed to take forever to open. Even without a shower, the settings in the room required a full circulation of air before letting anyone through.
BSL-4 was not a fun place for those in a hurry, but then, that had never really been a problem for him.
You can take the boy out of the South, but you can’t take the South out of the boy.
His mom’s favorite phrase, repeated ad nauseam every time she called him during those five years of grad school in New York. He’d shot her down each and every time.
No, Momma, sorry to say I’ve fully converted
. But when the job offers came through, and it came down to Boston versus Atlanta, the familiar call of home was just too strong to turn away.
The heavy door slid open, and Travis stepped through. He disconnected his air supply from the shower room’s hose, now stretched taut behind him, and popped it into a new one inside the lab. The silence of his late-night sojourn was gone, replaced by the steady loud hiss of air that served to drown out any other sound. In the past, this constant white noise made it nearly impossible to communicate using anything but hand signals, but the recent addition of a pretty decent integrated headset developed by NASA made a big difference. Of course, that was assuming there was someone else in the room, or at least in the building, on the same channel.