The Swarm (60 page)

‘I suppose not.'

‘We haven't had a chance to talk yet,' said Rubin. ‘You must tell me about the worms. It's a shame we had to meet in such circumstances, but you can't say it's not thrilling…Have you heard the latest news?'

‘I guess that's why I'm here.'

Rubin pointed to the steel door. ‘Unbelievable, isn't it? These used to be storerooms, but the army had them turned them into a hermetically sealed laboratory. I know it sounds a bit makeshift, but there's nothing to worry about - the whole thing conforms to Biosafety Level 4. We can examine the organisms without putting anyone at risk.'

BSL-4 was the highest level of containment.

‘Will you be joining us inside?' asked Johanson.

‘It'll be me and Dr Oliviera.'

‘I thought Roche was the expert on crustaceans.'

‘Everyone's an expert on everything here.' Vanderbilt and Oliviera had joined them. The CIA agent smelt faintly of sweat. He thumped Johanson jovially on the shoulder. ‘We picked our boffins very carefully - it takes a mix of flavours to make a good pizza. But Li's got a thing about you, Dr Johanson. I bet she can't stand letting you out of her sight. She'd love to know what's going on inside your head.' He guffawed. ‘Unless it's something else she's after…What do you reckon?'

Johanson smiled distantly. ‘Maybe you should ask her.'

‘Oh, I have,' said Vanderbilt, serenely. ‘I hate to disappoint you, but she's only interested in your brain. She thinks you know something.'

‘Really? Like what?'

‘You tell me.'

‘I don't know anything.'

Vanderbilt looked at him disparagingly. ‘No neat theory?'

‘I thought yours was neat enough.'

‘Well, so long as you haven't got any better ideas. And while you're in there, Dr Johanson, here's something for you to think about. We call it Gulf War Syndrome. Back in 1991, America kept her losses to a minimum on the ground in Kuwait, but guess what? Nearly a quarter of our veterans developed a weird bunch of symptoms. Looking back on it, their complaints were like a mild version of the damage caused by
Pfiesteria
- memory loss, concentration difficulties, damage to internal organs…We think they were exposed to some chemical. After all, our men were in the vicinity when the Iraqi weapons depots were blown up. At the time we suspected it was sarin, but maybe the Iraqis were developing a biological agent as well. Half the Islamic world has a stockpile of pathogens. It's not difficult to genetically modify harmless bacteria or viruses and turn them into killers.'

‘And you think that's what's happened here?'

‘I think you'd be well advised to open up to Auntie Li.' Vanderbilt winked. ‘Between you and me, she's nuts.
Capisce?
And you should never get in the way of someone who's nuts.'

‘She seems perfectly sane to me.'

‘That's your problem. Don't say you weren't warned.'

‘
My
problem is that we still don't know what's going on,' said Oliviera, gesturing towards the door. ‘It's time to get to work. Roche is coming too, of course.'

‘What about me? Are you sure you can't use a bodyguard?' Vanderbilt grinned. ‘I'd be happy to volunteer.'

‘That's very kind of you, Jack, but we're right out of suits in your size.'

The four made their way past the steel door and into the first of three airlocks. A camera poked down from the ceiling. Four bright yellow protective suits were hanging up, with transparent hoods, gloves and black vinyl boots.

‘Are you all familiar with working in containment labs?' Oliviera asked.

Roche and Rubin nodded.

‘Only in theory,' Johanson admitted.

‘No problem. We'd normally have to train you, but there's no time for that. In any case, the suit is one third of your protection. You can rely on it 100 per cent. It's made of impermeable PVC. The other two thirds are caution and concentration. Wait, I'll help you put it on.'

The suit was pretty bulky. Johanson pulled on a kind of waistcoat, designed to distribute the intake of air evenly round his body, then struggled into the yellow overall, keeping pace with Oliviera's explanations.

‘Once you're safely in the suit, we'll hook you up to the air system and fill your overall with dehumidified, tempered air. The charcoal filter supplies it under positive pressure. That's important, since it stops air entering in the event of a leak. Any surplus air exits via the exhaust valve. You can regulate the supply yourself, but that shouldn't be necessary. OK? How do you feel?'

‘Like the Michelin man.'

Oliviera laughed and they walked out of the first airlock. Johanson could hear Oliviera's muffled voice in his ears and realised they were all wired up: ‘The air pressure in the laboratory is maintained at fifty pascals below atmospheric pressure. Not a single spore will ever find its way out. If we lose power to the facility, there's an emergency back-up so there's unlikely to be any problem. The floor is made of sealed concrete and the windows are bulletproof. The air inside the laboratory is decontaminated using high-tech filters. There aren't any drains because we sterilise liquid waste within the building. We can communicate with the outside world via radio, fax or computer. The freezers and the air-regulation system are fitted with alarms that will go off simultaneously in the control room, the virological lab and at Reception. Every last corner of the facility is under video surveillance.'

‘Too right,' Vanderbilt boomed, through the speaker system. ‘So if any one of you drops dead down there, there'll be a great home movie for the kids.'

Johanson saw Oliviera roll her eyes.

They walked through the other sealed chambers and into the lab. The room covered an area of about thirty square metres and looked rather like a restaurant kitchen, with its freezers, fridges and wall-mounted cupboards. Lined up against one of the walls large metal barrels contained viral cultures and other organisms preserved in liquid nitrogen. There was plenty of space to work on the various benches. The interior of the lab had been designed so that there were no sharp edges to damage the suits. Oliviera pointed to three big red buttons that allowed them to sound the alarm, then led them over to one of the benches. She opened a tub-shaped container. Little white crabs sat in thirty centimetres of water, showing no sign of life. Oliviera picked up a metal spatula and prodded them, but none moved. ‘They're dead, I reckon.'

‘Unfortunate,' said Rubin. ‘Didn't they promise us live specimens?'

‘According to Li, they were alive at the start of the journey,' said Johanson. He leaned forwards and studied them one by one. He patted Oliviera's arm. ‘Second to the left. Its leg twitched.'

Oliviera ferried the crab to the work surface, where it sat for a few seconds, then raced at speed towards the edge of the bench. Oliviera brought it back. It allowed itself to be pushed across the table without protest, then tried once more to flee. Oliviera repeated the procedure a few times, then replaced the crab in the tub. ‘Any immediate thoughts?' she asked.

‘I'd have to look inside it,' said Roche.

Rubin shrugged. ‘It's behaviour seems normal enough. I'm not familiar with the species, though. Can you identify it, Dr Johanson?'

‘No.' Johanson thought for a moment. ‘But its behaviour
isn't
normal. Under normal circumstances it would see the spatula as its enemy. You'd expect it to splay its claws and wave them threateningly. In my opinion, its motor activity is normal, but there's a problem with its senses. It looks to me—'

‘Like a clockwork toy,' said Oliviera.

‘Right. It scuttles like a crab, but it doesn't behave like a crab.'

‘Do you know what species it could be?'

‘I'm not really a taxonomist. I can tell you what I think, but you shouldn't take my word for it.'

‘Go on.'

‘There are two interesting features.' Johanson picked up the spatula and touched a few motionless shells. ‘First, the crabs are white. Colourless. Nature never uses colours for decoration, always for a purpose. Most colourless organisms live in places they can't be seen, which is why they don't need colour. The second feature is the lack of eyes.'

‘You mean they come from caves or from the depths?' said Roche.

‘Yes. Some creatures that live in darkness have traces of eyes - atrophied, of course, but you can see where they used to be - but these crabs, well, I'd say they never had eyes in the first place. If that's the case, then their habitat must be pitch-black. In fact, they must have evolved in the dark. As far as I'm aware, that applies to only one species of crab that looks anything like these.'

‘Vent crabs,' nodded Rubin.

‘And where do they come from?' asked Roche.

‘Deep-sea hydrothermal vents,' said Rubin. ‘Volcanic oases of life.'

Roche frowned. ‘Then they shouldn't be able to survive on land.'

‘The real question is,
what
has survived?' said Johanson.

Oliviera fished a dead crustacean out of the tub, turned it on its back and laid it on the bench. She gathered up a series of implements resembling crab picks, and cut into the side of the carapace with a tiny, battery-driven circular saw. A transparent substance spurted into the air. Oliviera continued unperturbed until the shell was divided in two. She picked up the underside, with the legs attached, and moved it to one side.

They stared at the dissected creature.

‘That's not a crab,' said Johanson.

‘No,' said Roche. He pointed to the semi-fluid, clumpy mass of jelly that filled most of the shell. ‘It's the same gunk we found in the lobsters.'

Oliviera spooned the jelly into a jar. ‘Look at this,' she said. ‘Behind the head it still looks like a proper crab. See these fibres running down the middle? They're its nervous system. The crab's got all its senses, just nothing to help it use them.'

‘Actually,' said Rubin, ‘it's got the jelly.'

‘It's not a crab in the normal sense.' Roche peered at the transparent gunk in the jar. ‘It functions, but it's not alive.'

‘Which explains why it doesn't behave like a crab - assuming we don't identify the stuff inside it as a new type of crab meat.'

‘No way,' said Roche. ‘It doesn't belong to the crab. It's a foreign organism.'

‘In that case, the foreign organism is responsible for making these crabs come on land,' said Johanson. ‘What we need to find out is whether the crabs were dead and it slipped inside to try to bring them back to life or…'

‘Whether they were bred like that,' Oliviera finished for him.

There was an uncomfortable pause. Finally Roche broke the silence. ‘Well, wherever this stuff is coming from, you can guarantee we'd all be dead without these suits. I'm willing to bet that these crabs are bursting with
Pfiesteria
or maybe something worse. The air in this laboratory is almost certainly contaminated.'

Johanson remembered what Vanderbilt had said. Biological weaponry. He was right, of course. Spot on. Just not in the way he'd assumed.

Weaver

Weaver felt a rush of euphoria. She only had to enter her password and the laptop gave her access to more information than she'd ever imagined. Under normal circumstances it would have taken her months to gather the kind of data she had here - and even then the military satellites would always have been off-limits. But this was amazing! She could sit on the balcony of her suite, log into NASA's server and immerse herself in the American military's satellite maps.

In the 1980s the US Navy had begun to investigate a remarkable phenomenon. Geosat, a radar-imaging satellite, had been launched into a near-polar orbit. There was no provision or possibility for it to map the ocean floor - radar was incapable of penetrating water. Instead, Geosat's mission was to measure sea-surface heights to within a few centimetres. It was thought that by charting great expanses of water it would be possible to show whether the sea level - tidal fluctuations aside - was the same across the planet.

Geosat's findings exceeded all expectations.

Scientists had suspected that the oceans were never completely smooth, even in conditions of perfect calm, but Geosat's images made
the planet look like an enormous, lumpy potato. The oceans were full of dents, humps, bulges and troughs. For a long time scientists had assumed that the water in them was spread evenly across the globe, but the map offered a different picture. Off the south coast of India, for example, the sea level was 170 metres lower than it was in the waters around Iceland. To the north of Australia, on the other hand, it rose up to form a peak eighty-five metres above the mean sea level. The oceans were vast mountainscapes whose topography seemed to follow the lie of the underwater landscape. Towering underwater mountain ranges and deep ocean valleys replicated themselves on the surface with only a few metres' difference in height.

It all came down to variations in gravity. An underwater mountain gave the sea floor additional mass, so its gravitational field was stronger than that of a deep-sea valley. It pulled the surrounding water towards the mountain and made it pile up in a hump. The water surface bulged above a mountain - and dipped above a trench. For a short while, a number of exceptions kept the scientists guessing - for example, when water piled up above a deep sea plain - but in the end it transpired that some of the rock on the seabed was denser and heavier than average, and with that the gravitational topography fell into place.

The slopes of the water's mounds and valleys were too gentle for any sailor to detect. In fact, if it hadn't been for satellite mapping, no one would have stumbled on the phenomenon, but now scientists could use their knowledge of the surface to deduce what was happening in the depths. It was more than just a new method of charting the topography of the seabed: it was a key to understanding ocean dynamics. Geosat had revealed that powerful currents circled in the oceans, forming eddies that measured hundreds of kilometres across. Like coffee being stirred in a mug, the rotating masses of water formed a depression at the centre, while the outer rings rose upwards. It became apparent that these eddies also caused the ocean's surface to rise and fall, independent of gravitational variations, and that they themselves were part of far larger rings of water - oceanic gyres. From the long-distance perspective of satellite mapping, it became clear that all the world's oceans were rotating. In the northern hemisphere, enormous networks of rings spun in a clockwise direction, while in the southern hemisphere the flow was anti-clockwise. The speed of rotation increased with proximity to the poles.