The Deep Zone: A Novel (9 page)

“You ever read about D.C. Jail?” Rivers seemed to know her thoughts, spoke while examining the wart on his palm. “I been there, Doc, dropping perps off. Terrible things happen. Especially to people like you.”

“You can really do this?” She ignored Rivers, addressed Rhodes. There were not many things she feared, but Hallie was honest enough to admit that being locked in the District of Columbia Jail
was one. The stories that came out of that place—broom-handle rapes, mutilations, medieval things.

“Yes. We can.”

She could fight but, as Rhodes said, even if she won, she lost. Or she could sign. Go quietly. Live to fight another day.

Hallie had never been the kind of person who agonized over decisions. Weigh risks and benefits, figure the calculus, make the call. Another day always came. She looked up. Rhodes was holding out a pen. Rivers leaned back, smirking, fat hands folded on his paunch.

A part of Hallie wanted to curse them. Instead, she reached into the pocket of her lab coat and took out the Mont Blanc Meisterstück Solitaire her father had given her when she’d received her doctorate at Hopkins.

“I have my own.”

Without hurrying, she uncapped the pen, signed her name, ignored Rivers, and looked Rhodes in the eye.

“You’re doing a bad thing here, Mr. Rhodes. Sooner or later, we all pay for the bad things we do.”

The fly buzzed around Rivers’s head, and he still seemed oblivious to it. Rhodes kept his eyes locked on hers, saying nothing, but he rubbed his Penn State ring as if it were an amulet and she saw a flicker in his dark eyes, sudden and bright and quickly gone, that told her he knew it to be true.

NOW, IN BARNARD’S OFFICE, IT WAS NOT LOST ON HER THAT
she could simply say,
Sorry, gentlemen, BARDA screwed me royally
, and walk right out.

But really, she didn’t even come close to that. Instead, she sat thinking of the thousands of young soldiers. And not only young ones. Old ones, too, from older wars, hanging on in VA hospitals all over the country, living out their lives with whatever remnants of bodies and minds their wounds and wars had left them. And soldiers’ families. It went on and on.

“You said Al is still working on the project.”

“That’s right.”

“How much biomatter does he have left?”

Barnard looked embarrassed. “None, I’m afraid.”

“It’s all gone? Every last
milligram
?”

The basis of their research had been an extremophile from the
Archaea domain. She had retrieved the biosamples while on an expedition exploring a monstrous cave in Mexico called Cueva de Luz. She had brought almost 100 grams of viable organism out of the cave with her. Half of that had expired before they learned how to keep it alive. When she had left over a year ago, more than 20 grams had remained. In microbiological terms, that was a ton.

“I’m afraid so. Al’s worked himself near to death, Hallie. I worry about him sometimes. And he took your departure hard. But at some point, science goes from craft to art. Al’s a fine craftsman, but he’s not an artist.”

“Can we synthesize replicant?”

Lew Casey broke in: “We’ve tried for months. Can’t get the mitochondrial dissemination right. It could be more months—or never.”

“While thousands of hospitals become …” She searched for the right word.

“Death camps.”

Hallie took a deep breath, sat back, rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t slept now for almost eighteen hours, and the cave rescue had been exhausting. She needed fresh clothes, a hot meal, a shower, sleep. But others were in much, much worse shape. Sleep could wait.

“We have to go back to Cueva de Luz.” She stared at Barnard. “There’s nothing else.”

“You cannot imagine how much I was hoping to hear you say that.”

She’d said it, but not without dread. Cueva de Luz was a true supercave, thousands of feet deep and many miles long, located in the high, remote forest of southern Mexico and filled with bizarre and exotic dangers.
Journey to the Center of the Earth
but worse, and for real.

“It’s not going to be as easy as it was last time.” Barnard’s voice was grim.

She gaped. “
Easy?
Don, it was a nightmare. I didn’t think any of us were getting out. Two didn’t, as you know.”

“I know that expedition was hellish. But there are other complications now.”

“Such as?”

Lathrop looked at his gold wafer of a watch. “Dr. Leland, we can fill you in later. Just now, however—”

She ignored Lathrop, addressed Barnard: “We’ll need a team. That will take a week at least.”

Lathrop smiled for the first time since she’d walked into the office. “Already done!”

“What? Where? When do we meet them?”

“Right now. You’re the last to arrive. The others are waiting downstairs.”

It was past nine
P.M
. when the four of them took a secure elevator to the lowest level that BARDA acknowledged publicly and then dropped on down to Sublevel 1, the first of four classified levels that it did not acknowledge. The elevator stopped. Barnard entered an alphanumeric code on a keypad, the elevator door opened, and they walked forward into a biosecure chamber with gray walls and blue germicidal UV lights. The door slid closed behind them and there was a soft hiss as the chamber’s airtight seals engaged. Clicks and whirs, integrated sensors and analyzers scanning them for pathogens, explosives, biological material. Presently a group of lights on the air lock’s far wall glowed green and the inner door slid open.

The limited access was essential, for reasons well known to Hallie. In January 1989, chimpanzees infected with Ebola Zaire virus had gotten loose inside a research facility in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. They, in turn, had infected hundreds of other chimps. Before long, the entire complex became one vast Ebola-Z growth medium. Hot animals were running amok, others going crazy in their cages, still others breaking out.

Hallie did not routinely work with chimps, but she knew that they were eight times stronger than a human and could eat a man’s face in ten seconds. If any of those animals had escaped, a pandemic
of hemorrhagic fever with a 90 percent mortality rate and no known cure would have burned through Washington’s civilian population in two weeks. It would have obliterated the constitutional line of succession like a wet sponge wiping chalk marks off a blackboard. There would not have been an executive, legislative, or judicial branch of government, nor any military command to speak of. Washington, D.C., would have been a cauldron of death.

In the end, only the work of some very brave people and more sheer luck than humanity had any right to expect had averted disaster. But the Monkey Business, as it was known forever after, had had lasting effects. To ensure that nothing like that
ever
happened again, the CDC had imposed fail-safe security precautions. Now a hot pathogen break might kill many BARDA people, but the bug would find no further hosts. Those BARDA lives would be the price of containment.

They stepped into a long corridor flooded with more watery UV germicidal light, cream-colored walls, tan floor. Though mostly administrative work was done here, some research was ongoing and the air carried odors of alcohol and formaldehyde and disinfectant. People in white lab coats and business suits moved in both directions, some pushing carts, others speaking into Bluetooth-style microphones attached to earpieces. It could have been a hallway in any government building, except that it was almost ten
P.M
. and everyone was in a hurry.

“How on earth were you able to get me back in here?” Hallie was a little surprised by how good it felt to be back in a place where important science was being done—
dangerous
important science, at that.

“Friends in high places.”

“But … even after what happened?”

“I couldn’t stop that at the time.” Barnard’s voice tightened with anger every time the subject came up. “But now that we have a
situation
, they were more willing to listen to reason.”

“You put your career on the line for me, in other words. Again.”

“And I never had a better use for it, Hallie.”

“Hear, hear.” Lew Casey reached up to pat her shoulder reassuringly.

They passed through an unmarked door that opened onto a sparsely furnished anteroom with another inner door, guarded by a U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant wearing a crisp uniform and a green beret. He carried a sidearm and had a Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun slung across his chest.

Barnard said his own name out loud, pronouncing the syllables carefully, and a green LED light came to life on a panel on the sergeant’s desk.

“Good evening, ma’am, sirs.” The sergeant nodded to each in turn. “Please go right in.”

They walked through the inner door into a rectangular conference room. White ceiling, beige carpet, big flat-screen monitors on sky-blue walls. On a long mahogany table sat pitchers of water, juice, coffee, and plates filled with sandwiches and cookies. Five men sat at the table, and among those was her old research partner, Albert Cahner.

“Hallie!” He jumped out of his chair and came around the table to give her a hug, which she returned, laughing.

“Al! I’m so glad to see you again!” She thumped him on the back.

“It’s wonderful to see
you
, Hallie.”

They stood there grinning. He was as she remembered, though perhaps with a little more gray in the comb-over now, the circles under his eyes darker. Otherwise, he was the same old Al, wearing a wrinkled blue shirt with a flyaway collar and a skinny tie that had gone out of fashion ten years earlier. He gave her shoulder a final pat and went back to his place at the table.

She took an empty chair and poured herself more coffee. Don Barnard leaned against a wall. Lathrop addressed them.

“I know that you all have traveled hard and must be tired. So let me make a few things clear right away. My name is David Lathrop.
Officially I work for Central Intelligence, but for now I report to the secretary of Homeland Security, Hunter Mason. Directly. He reports to the president. Directly. They both know we’re here.”

Lathrop introduced Barnard and Casey, then turned back to those seated at the table.

“We thank each of you for responding to our requests, which must have seemed strange, to say the least. We are grateful beyond measure for your presence here.”

While Lathrop spoke, Hallie eyed the three men at the table she did not know. She pegged them in her own mind as Blond Man, Dark Man, and Big Man.

“More introductions are in order.” Lathrop gestured toward Blond Man. “Dr. Haight”—he pronounced it
height
—“is a medical doctor from Tennessee. Emergency medicine specialty. An accomplished technical climber, caver, and diver.”

Hallie had thought he looked familiar, and now realized why. “You’re
Ron
Haight!” she blurted. “You were on the cover of
National Geographic
last year. They called you ‘the caver saver.’ ”

“Well, yeah, I was.” Haight looked down at the table, grinning and shaking his head.

“Dr. Haight is justly famous for his rescue work,” Lathrop said.

“Please call me Ron.” Haight looked uncomfortable with all the attention, which Hallie found positively endearing.

“You were all muddy, with a helmet and dive mask on. It took me a minute to recognize you,” she said.

“Hard to believe they’d put an ugly mug like this’un on the cover of such a fine magazine, I know.” Haight’s accent was Tennessee thick, his words flowing softly and slowly.

But Hallie thought he had a right nice mug. Haight’s hair was almost as light as hers, worn in a ponytail. He was one of those rare blonds who have dark eyebrows; his were perched high on his forehead and far apart, like quotation marks at the ends of a sentence, making him look perpetually, pleasantly surprised. Beneath those eyebrows were angular features in a lean, open face. He was not tall
but had the build of a serious climber, a compact bundle of muscle with about 5 percent body fat. He looked to be in his late twenties.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Dr. Haight,” said Hallie. “Sorry, I mean Ron. You saved a couple of friends of mine once.”

Haight nodded, formal, graceful, as if he were bowing to a princess, the deathless courtesy of southern men.

Lathrop turned to Dark Man. “Dr. Rafael Arguello is a paleoanthropologist from the University of New Mexico and a member of the Cuicatec Native American population in Oaxaca, Mexico. He speaks several languages but, most importantly, Cuicatec.”

Arguello was perhaps thirty years older than Haight. He had high cheekbones, olive skin, black eyes, and neatly barbered, shining black hair. His unshaven cheeks looked like someone had smudged charcoal over them. He wore a rumpled business suit and a white shirt with no tie, a professor whisked all the way from New Mexico on the strange wings of power.

“Dr. Arguello has done groundbreaking research on Native American shamanic practices. He underwent shamanic preparation and initiation himself. He also served as a cultural liaison officer with Mexico’s military. And as a paleoanthropologist, he has explored many very serious caves.”