The Chimera Sequence (28 page)

Not tonight.

Travis retrieved the box of samples from the airlock chamber and brought it over to one of several cabinet hoods inside the laboratory. The hoods each had their own vacuum filtered air system, making it that much harder for any adventurous virus to even think about escaping. Layer upon layer of safety precautions, each one building on and adding to the one before it—that was BSL-4. They didn’t make his job very easy, but he had seen what these pathogens could do. The oozing skin, bloody coughs, and dissolving internal organs. Not just in pictures, or videos, either. He welcomed the redundancy.

Travis set the box under the hood and began pulling away too many layers of packing tape with practiced double-gloved fingers.

Finally, the real work could begin.

There were eight sets of sealed bags, each labeled with a fine-tipped black Sharpie in Leila’s neat handwriting. Travis picked them up, one by one, and set them out across the counter. First in line: blood and viral culture tubes from Marna Van Wyk, the now deceased South African helicopter pilot. He wished he could have heard more from Leila about what happened that night on the drive to Kigali. How did a healthy young woman like her crash so quickly? But he knew Leila wouldn’t want to talk about it, not yet at least. She was too quick to blame herself when something went wrong, even if there was nothing she or anyone else could have done to prevent this woman’s death.

Next up were the blood, scab, and tissue samples from the infant mountain gorilla. This little orphan was still alive and on the road to recovery, according to the last e-mail from the Gorilla Doctors vet in Musanze. And finally the scabs, tissue biopsies, and viral culture tubes collected from the dead adult gorillas in Virunga National Park.

The viral culture tubes would go into an incubator. Pretty unlikely that anything would turn up there—viruses were tough to grow outside a real animal body. Still worth a shot, though, and they would need to get their hands on live virus eventually either way.

The rest of the samples would all be processed in basically the same way. Travis picked up a small biopsy cup holding a tiny piece of black tissue floating in a transport medium. This was supposed to be straight from an active lesion on the infant gorilla’s skin. Of all the samples, this one had the best chance of revealing the mysterious culprit. He unscrewed the lid and used a sterilized set of stainless steel forceps to lift the tissue out of the biopsy cup. It could be anything, this little piece of unidentifiable gunk at the end of the forceps. He brought it up right in front of the hardened clear mask of his biohazard suit’s hood. Crazy to think that this was really diseased skin from an endangered baby mountain gorilla, taken from the poor little patient himself less than twenty-four hours earlier on the other side of the world in Rwanda. And even crazier that the minuscule piece of tissue could hold the key to halting the continued spread of what was rapidly turning into an outbreak with genuine pandemic potential.

Travis carefully placed the skin biopsy into a new container, this one filled with a special solution of chemicals that would extract the DNA and break it up into standardized lengths in preparation for purification and genomic sequencing. The technology advanced every year, and he loved working in a place that stayed well-supplied with all the newest equipment. Whether or not the federal government could afford these fancy toys was a question way above his pay grade. Pretty sweet, though, to know he would have answers before the night was over, rather than the days or even weeks of waiting the sequencing process might take somewhere else.

The next hour passed by in a focused blur of meticulous activity. Pipetting minute amounts of liquid from vial to vial, concentrating the target DNA into ever more purified solutions. These repetitive manual steps of preparation could quickly get boring, but Travis had been doing it long enough to know how important it was not to let his mind wander. Even the smallest mistake would mess the whole process up and require starting over from the beginning. At least there were no live animals, needles or scalpels required this time—that’s when things could really get dangerous when working alone.

He squeezed the automatic pipette’s trigger one final time and watched as the last drops of liquid were deposited into an open well. The plate looked almost like a miniature muffin tin, each tiny depression in the plastic holding a library of purified DNA fragments just waiting to be read.

“And done,” he said out loud, placing the plate into a sliding tray on the side of the HiSeq 2500 genome analyzer. He pushed a button and watched the samples disappear into the imposing million-dollar machine. Literally. The complete set-up had a sticker price of just over a million dollars, even if the CDC probably didn’t pay full price.

A flat screen display lit up with a new message. TIME TO COMPLETION: 5 HOURS, 23 MINUTES.

Travis yawned and unsuccessfully tried to bring his hands above his head in a stretch.

Damn suit.

Time to get some sleep.

Morgan Andrews brought both hands to her face, covering her eyes for a soothing five-second break from the glowing panel of screens in front of her. She moved her fingers over her temples and massaged in slow firm circles. The headache had been growing steadily more intense over the last few hours, and now it was almost unbearable.

A deep breath, and she opened her eyes.
This is what I signed up for
. No way a little sleep deficit was going to stand in the way now. Morgan had accepted this entry-level position at the National Security Agency’s Central Africa desk straight out of Caltech three years earlier. And for the first time in those three years, she finally felt like she was really contributing to something important.

The fun started when she showed up for what was supposed to be just another day at the office, almost forty-eight hours earlier. The automatic alert was waiting on her main screen: a target level had been hit, and exceeded. This time it was outgoing calls from the DRC to Iran. Interesting, but not necessarily worth getting excited about yet. The week before it had been calls from Rwanda to Pakistan. That one turned out to be a brother’s death and the ensuing coordination with extended family who owned a restaurant in Kigali. Did she ever imagine turning into such an expert on the cost of a fancy religious funeral in Islamabad? No, but that’s what made the job fun. Something different every day—looking for needles in the haystack. Anytime the number of calls crossed a pre-set limit for each combination of countries, she would get one of these alerts.

This one stood out almost immediately. All the calls routed through a couple of towers in rebel-controlled North Kivu, and all of them going to a hot-listed number in the Iranian government. That wasn’t normal. Now she had spoken with everyone from the CIA’s chief of station in Kinshasa to a special ops colonel in Djibouti, and the NSA’s global surveillance capabilities were sharpening their focus on her forgotten little region. She had gotten home to sleep for a few hours the night before, but no such luck this time around.

Morgan took another swig of her lukewarm coffee.
Beep beep
. Another message popped up, but this was a different type.

Target number detected. Connecting now.

She slammed the paper cup down on her desk, sending a geyser of coffee up across one screen. Whoops
.
Good thing no one was there to see it. She reached for a headset and pulled the earpieces over her dark hair. Not quite fast enough.

“—never mentioned that this plague would also spread outside of Virunga. Do you know we now have several cases even here in my own city? Am I to die also?” The words spilled quickly from a heavily accented male voice. Morgan had listened in on enough conversations to immediately place the accent as foreign-educated Congolese, and a large world map spread across a second tier of three screens confirmed this conclusion. Large red orbs pulsed silently over both Kinshasa and Tehran.

“My friend, calm down please. You should not have called me here.” This voice was smoother, more polished.

“Simply suffer in silence, then, until you have wiped out my entire country? No, Dr. Torabi, that will not do.”

Morgan looked from one screen to the next as new information appeared with every passing second. The number in Tehran was the same one that had been tried again unsuccessfully just twenty minutes earlier from their unknown location in Virunga National Park. Someone was screening calls. And now this new mobile phone in Kinshasa was publicly registered to Mr. Frederic Mulumba, Minister of Mines. Could someone in the government really be so completely off his rocker, clearly up to no good but not even following the most basic rules of international intrigue?

“Enough. I told you never to use my name.” Apparently the Iranian agreed with her assessment. “We made an arrangement, and the operation is moving even more efficiently than we thought.”

“Yes, but —”

“When the gorillas are gone, there will be no further objections to our project. You have my guarantee of that.”

“It is not only the gorillas that are dying. You —”

“Will it really be such a tragedy if a few among your trouble-making population don’t survive? And you will be a rich man, you must not forget this most important detail.”

No response. Morgan checked the connection. Still active.

“We both have much to lose,” the minister finally said. “You must not forget that, either.”

A click, and the connection went dead. Morgan sucked in deeply, not realizing she’d been holding her breath.

This was big time.

Cole woke with a start. They were back. He heard the shuffling of footsteps on the tent’s dirt floor and tried to open his eyes. No luck. His captors had tied on a snug blindfold almost immediately after the incident with the satellite phone, and his whole head throbbed with an aching pain from the constant pressure on his eyeballs. He shifted his body and felt the dead weight of both arms flop across his back.
Come on hands, stay with me now
.

How many times had the man come back during the night? The visits all blended together in a fuzzy blur. Why couldn’t he just accept that Cole wasn’t going to change his story? He was a scientist, investigating a disease outbreak among the mountain gorillas, escorted by two Virunga park rangers and their detection dog. It really was as simple as that. But this mysterious boss man was smart, that much was obvious. He was also scared, too desperate for someone who was supposed to have the upper hand. And that was the only weapon Cole had to work with. It wasn’t much, but he would keep exploiting it with every bit of psychological strength he could muster.

“So you’re an American?”

Cole lifted his head from the dirt. This was someone new.

“Don’t worry, I’m on your side.” The voice sounded European. Maybe German? “You’re lucky to be alive, from what I hear.”

A firm hand touched his burning shoulder, then moved up the back of his head to begin working at the knot in the blindfold.

“Is that right?” Cole said. The canvas fell away from his face, and he slowly opened one eye. It hurt, but not unbearably so. A patch of bright sunlight danced across the dirt floor, streaming in from the tent’s half-open door flap. The man was still behind him. “Help me up?”

“Let me finish with your hands, first.” Cole felt a slight tingling sensation at the tips of his fingers. “Must be careful not to free them too quickly. You know about reperfusion injury?”

“Yeah, pretty classic in horses that get stuck on the ground for any length of time.”

“Huh?”

“A hoof gets caught in a halter, or the legs are jammed up against a stall wall—happens all the time. The weight of their own bodies cuts off circulation to the limbs, and then that rush of blood when they’re finally helped up can totally destroy the muscles.”

“Not a lot of horses out here in the jungle, you know.”

“Same thing happens transporting big game, if you’re not careful. Never let a rhino lie down in the back of a moving vehicle.” The tingling spread up his fingers. No pain yet—that was good.

“And what do you know about that?”

“I’m a veterinarian, an animal doctor.”

“You bloody kidding me?” The man stood and stepped around Cole, then crouched down right in front of him. He had a deeply tanned face with close-cropped blond hair and stubble. “Monkeypox outbreak in the gorillas. You know something about it?”

“I guess you could say that.” Cole nodded. What was that doctor’s name, from Doctors Without Borders in Goma? “Cole McBride, working out of Musanze with the Gorilla Doctors. I’d shake your hand if I could.”

«And I’m Lars. Lars Olsson.»

“Wow.” This was definitely him.

“My thought exactly,” the doctor said. “We were supposed to be making each other’s acquaintance under different circumstances three long days ago. As you can see, I ran into a slight problem along the way.”

“We were worried, but there was nothing to do. No one can get into Goma right now.”