The Azadi Tower. Leila Torabi peered through a grimy cab window at the giant white marble structure looming ominously over a wide expanse of manicured green lawn. It was the first real vegetation she’d seen since they left the airport. She reached up to adjust the
hijab
’s thin fabric pressing into her forehead. One duty free shop in Amsterdam had clearly embraced its role of supplying headscarves to all the imminently repressed women heading for the Muslim world, and Leila picked up a plain-looking three-pack in the
rusari
style.
“You know the Azadi Tower?” The driver spoke Farsi, but she could tell he was suspicious. Why was this woman in Western dress traveling alone in Tehran? The black sedan behind them probably had something to do with his wary looks, too. “Built in 1973 to celebrate the 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire. Very nice museum inside.”
Azadi was the Farsi word for freedom. Leila bit down hard on the inside of her cheek.
If only
. She hadn’t been back to Iran in almost fifteen years, all in the pursuit of this shadowy ideal. Freedom. Was it really worth everything she’d given up?
The rest of the drive was a blur of drab buildings and crowded streets. There were pretty parts of Tehran, she knew that. But this was not one of them. The cab slowed, and Leila caught sight of a large white sign proudly identifying her destination. The sprawling brick campus of the Imam Khomeini Hospital Complex took up several city blocks.
“Which entrance do you need?” The cab crept along with a line of cars approaching the hospital.
“I didn’t know there was more than one,” Leila said. “My mother is at the Cancer Research Center.” That would give him something to tell those guys in the sedan, at least.
“You should have said so—it’s on the other side.” He tapped twice on the horn and pulled back out into the road. Leila caught his glance in the rearview mirror. “She will be glad to see you.”
“Sorry?”
“Your mother. She must be happy that you have come home.”
Leila blinked back unwelcome tears. “Hope so.”
The warmth of the summer evening surprised her. Tehran was a cold and barren place in her memories. She knew this was simply because most of her childhood trips home had been during the winter, but Leila still had a hard time reconciling this hardened vision with the reality now before her. She climbed a set of stairs and paused outside a more modern glassed foyer.
Here goes.
“I’m here to see a patient, Yasmin Torabi.”
The man at the reception desk looked past her to the two men in dark suits she knew were standing conspicuously just outside the entrance. The corners of his thin lips turned downward. “You are alone?”
“Yes.”
His fingers moved quickly on an ancient keyboard across the desk. For all its external grandeur and proud proclamations of collaboration with a variety of European universities, the research center had clearly been short on funding for more than a few years. That would be hard for Maman, always the self-proclaimed sophisticate and proud global citizen. Paris, New York, Tokyo, and now this, her final vigil, in an outdated hospital of the world’s pariah state.
“Fourth floor. Room 415.” The man stared at her, his bushy graying eyebrows raised. “You are a friend? She also has other visitors.”
“I’m her daughter.” She stepped away and turned towards the single elevator just visible through a doorway. “Thank you.”
The sterile smell of sanitizing chemicals hit her nose sharply as the elevator opened on the fourth floor. It was a familiar relief. Leila had spent time in hospitals all over the world during med school and residency—another benefit of the American passport—and this artificiality was much preferable to the more natural odors wafting through many of those overcrowded wards.
A young woman in pressed blue scrubs sat at a long desk just opposite the elevator. The charge nurse.
“Can I help you?” Again, the curious, prying eyes. How did they all know, so immediately, so instinctively, that there was something different about her? Was her fifteen-year absence really that transparent? Leila had made a concerted effort to stay away from nosy Persian-American communities over the years—to do away with anything that might identify her with the family and country she’d rejected so completely—and now she could see that her efforts had been successful.
“I’m here to see my mother, Yasmin Torabi.”
The woman inhaled quickly, her wide eyes glancing down the hall.
No.
Leila tasted vomit in the back of her throat. She followed the woman’s look and saw a small group of people leaving one of the rooms. Maman.
“Excuse me,” Leila managed to mutter, already walking in their direction.
“Wait!” The nurse’s shrill voice rang out behind her. “You can’t—”
Leila followed the numbers. 407. 409.
A female doctor reached for her arm, but she pulled away.
411.
And then she saw him. Baba. He was outside the room, talking quietly with a man she didn’t know.
413.
He looked up and met her eyes. In that first instant, his face seemed more fragile than she’d ever seen it.
415.
She was there, standing next to him.
“Baba.”
In the pause that followed, she saw a hundred internal debates playing on repeat over a thousand sleepless nights, all coming to a climax deep within his piercing eyes. This was their only chance.
His mouth tightened, followed by a quick, almost involuntary jerk of his head to the side.
“No,” he said, straightening up and looking back into the room. “No.”
The simplest of words, and yet it meant so many different things in that instant.
And he moved past her down the hall.
“Maman!” Leila choked on the word as she flew through the open doorway. “Where is she?”
There were others in the room, crowded around a simple hospital bed, and they stared at her silently. Even after fifteen years, she instantly knew their faces. Uncles, aunts, cousins, and there, at the head of the bed, was her brother, Sohrab. But none of them mattered now. The only one she cared about was stretched out on the sheets, unmoving, her beautiful wilted face already frozen in what every physician would immediately recognize as the deceptive peace of the newly dead.
“No, Maman.” She sobbed, pushing in beside her brother and stroking a cool wrinkled cheek before finally lowering her face into the crook of her mother’s frail arm. “I’m sorry.”
Bill Shackleton dug through the dark leather briefcase at his feet for a pair of Ray-Bans. Relief. It was bright out there. Bright, hot, and humid, now that the last rains trailing behind the hurricane had made their exit. He stared out at the wall of lush green summer foliage pressing in along both sides of the highway. The park-like setting made it hard to believe they were just minutes outside the nation’s capital.
“You know Ken Alibek?” Colonel Sam Simmons had been talking almost non-stop since picking him up at Baltimore-Washington International Airport half an hour earlier. “Russian guy, mostly does his own consulting these days.”
“Not personally,” Shackleton said. “But I know his story, yes.”
“Then you probably see where I’m going with this.”
Shackleton leaned back into his seat as the USAMRIID commander stepped on the gas and pulled the wheel left, easily passing an old minivan with Missouri plates. The new Audi R8 GT purred contentedly. A pre-retirement gift to himself, Simmons had said. After thirty years in the Army, he was finally scheduled to take off the uniform next month. And then this, the unlikely event his Research Institute for Infectious Diseases had been preparing for since it first came into being almost fifty years earlier.
“Yeah,” Shackleton replied. “And now I’m afraid he was right.”
Ken Alibek, formerly Colonel Kanat Alibekov, was a Kazak military scientist who defected from the USSR in the early nineties, bringing with him a treasure trove of information on the secret Soviet biological weapons program. There were doubters, though, and Shackleton himself had always wondered if some of the man’s reports might have been exaggerated for the benefit of his overzealous debriefing interrogators. Alibek claimed that the Russians had been experimenting with weaponized smallpox all along, producing huge quantities of aerosolized virus capable of being loaded into a warhead and sent across the Pacific. Not just smallpox, but Ebola, Marburg, and anthrax too. It was every infectious disease scientist’s worst nightmare, and even more so for Shackleton and Simmons, charged as they were with protecting their country from superbugs like these.
“
Long as we’re on the same page for this afternoon’s briefing, then,” Simmons said.
“Unfortunately, yes.” Shackleton looked back out the window just in time to see a large blue sign towering over the narrowing highway.
Welcome to Washington, D.C.
It marked a change in scenery as well, the thick Maryland forest replaced by a grungy industrial area.
“Sorry,” Simmons said. “Not the prettiest route into the city this way, but it’ll get us to the White House in fifteen minutes flat.”
Shackleton glanced at his watch. “Should be right on time.”
“Why don’t you start us off, Bill. How about a two minute summary of what you found in those samples this morning.” The president looked at him intently.
Bill
. So now he and the POTUS were on a first-name basis? That relationship probably only went one way. He’d heard that President Rogers was unique in this regard—he liked to get his information directly from the source. But it was still surprising when he got the call that morning.
The President wants you up here ASAP
. Not his boss, or his boss’s boss? Hell, it really should be the Secretary of Health and Human Services herself giving this briefing. But no, the president wanted to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, and that’s how he found himself sitting at a long mahogany table in the White House Situation Room.
“Well sir, I really only need about thirty seconds.” The president raised his eyebrows. “We analyzed a variety of gorilla and human tissue samples from this outbreak in the Congo, and they all revealed infection with the same chimera pox virus.”
“Chimera?” The president leaned in, elbows on the table. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
“It’s basically a monkeypox virus that has been artificially manipulated with the addition of a number of smallpox genes.” There it was, the simple truth that would change everything. “A single organism created from two genetically distinct sources.”
“I hope,” a hard voice said from the other end of the table, “you’ve selected those words carefully.”
It took Shackleton a second to identify its source. Retired General Charles Howard—the new national security advisor. He looked just as mean in person as he always did on TV. Shackleton tried to contain a nervous smile.
“What he means,” the president said, “is that this allegation has serious implications for all of us.”
“Trust me, Mr. President,” Shackleton said. “Those implications have been clear to me from the very beginning. My team is running the virus through another sequencing machine now, just to confirm what we’ve already seen. And Colonel Simmons here has his folks at USAMRIID doing the same thing.” He’d handed off the samples to the colonel’s deputy at the airport in Baltimore.
“How can you be so sure that this is a manmade virus?” the president asked. “Don’t these things happen in nature all the time? Seems like a day doesn’t pass without your type sending up another briefing about some hybrid new bird flu.”
Shackleton paused. How to explain these fairly high-level molecular biology and genetics concepts in this context?
Colonel Simmons jumped in just as he was about to start talking. “Sir, as you know, the smallpox virus is only supposed to exist in two places in the world: Bill’s lab at the CDC, and Russia’s VECTOR lab.”
“That’s what I’ve been told.”
“The gene sequences that Bill’s team identified this morning—they’re smallpox genes. Previously mapped, recognized the world over as such. So in order for these genes to find themselves within a Congolese monkeypox virus, they first have to get to the Congo. That’s a long way to go for a lonely little virus, all the way from either Atlanta or Siberia. Yes, there are a few small changes in the coding sequences, but we believe those are also artificial modifications, developed in a lab specifically to cause the extreme behavior we’ve already seen in the chimera virus.”
“Like?” General Howard again.
Simmons continued, “Short incubation period for one. Natural monkeypox viruses need almost two weeks from the time of infection to the first signs of disease. And the increased mortality rate, of course. Based on the initial rough data coming out of the hospital in Goma, we’re talking about over ninety percent of victims dead within three days.”
“But how do we know,” President Rogers said, “these changes are not just natural mutations of a free-living monkeypox virus?”
“I wish that were the case, sir. I really do.” Shackleton was impressed—the president had all the right questions. “First, viruses with this combination of characteristics simply don’t occur in nature. They would burn through their host populations too quickly. Once the last victims died, what’s the virus going to do next? No, they have to leave enough survivors to allow continuous reproduction and transmission over time.”
“Just because it’s rare,” General Howard said, “doesn’t make it impossible.”
“True.” Shackleton turned to look him straight in the eye. Time to pull out the trump card. “But there’s something else. People have been playing around with the DNA of viruses and bacteria for a few decades now, long enough that the scientific community has come up with a bunch of generally accepted rules governing how we do things. There’s also a whole toolbox of commercially available products that make the work of splicing and dicing these genes a lot easier than you might expect.”
“And that means what?”
Shackleton could see the impatience written across the national security advisor’s face. “It means that when we see certain sequences of nucleotides—the building blocks of DNA—at the start and end of a given gene, we know that it was inserted into that genome artificially. Kind of like a signature for whichever method of molecular manipulation is being used.” He paused. Had he lost them? “Now, if I were going to create my own biological weapon, I might choose to get rid of those signature sequences—make my genome look a little more natural. But that’s not the case here.”