by Betsy Ashton
Muzzy-headed or not, I had a vivid image of someone pushing a needle into the port on the back of Johnny’s hand. I turned to Leena. “I saw Toby doing something to the port earlier. He said he was cleaning it with saline. Could he have been injecting Johnny with morphine at that time?” I asked as I paced the diagnosis room. Pacing had become my favorite activity when I was thinking through a problem. I had picked up one of Whip’s habits.
“No. That was too long before Johnny coded. The amount of morphine in his system put him into near-instant cardiac arrest,” Dr. Running Bear said.
“I’ve asked everyone on duty last night to tell me who came into the ICU. No one saw anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there,” Leena said, putting her arm around my shoulders.
I shook my head. “Then we should be looking for someone who was supposed to be there, shouldn’t we?”
“None of the ICU patients is on morphine,” Dr. Running Bear confirmed.
Dr. Duval interjected, “We are also looking for the syringe used to inject the morphine, if that was going to be your next question. It has not left the hospital. All our waste is separated and stored until it is safe to be destroyed.”
“It wasn’t the next, but that would have come up sooner or later.” I paused mid-stride. “Could someone have tampered with a saline syringe? Drained it and replaced the liquid with morphine? Or dropped a morphine syringe on a tray that normally holds only saline?”
“It’s possible, although the labels are different colors. Both liquids are colorless. Operating as quickly as we have since the crisis began, mistakes can happen, although it’s highly unlikely,” Dr. Running Bear said.
“Mistakes? Or deliberate?” Dr. White planted her fists on her hips, daring anyone to tell her she was imagining bogeymen. Even though she’d suggested as much when I mentioned Toby’s spraying something in the ICU, it was impossible to completely dismiss anything as conspiracy theory run amok now.
“It could be either, Tick. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions or name someone without provocation, but I, too, lean toward a deliberate, inappropriate use of an opioid,” Sharon said.
I took a lap around the room, hands clasped behind my back in imitation of Dr. White. Each board held a clue that I was this close to deciphering.
I froze in front of the plague board. “What if Johnny wasn’t targeted? What if the person with the pathogens doesn’t care who gets sick? What if he doesn’t care who dies as long as someone does?”
“That would be one sick puppy,” Dr. Klein said. “It’s not unheard for medical professionals to accidentally administer an overdose. And others have acted as angels of death to end a patient’s suffering.”
“I dismiss all ideas of an angel of death here. Whoever this is, he’s infecting healthy people, not trying to kill sick ones,” Dr. Running Bear said.
“Not only is San Felipe ground zero for the outbreak, it’s also a laboratory experiment.” Sharon closed her eyes. “But what does he hope to gain?”
“If it were a single pathogen, I’d suggest he is testing delivery mechanisms to see if it could be weaponized to infect masses of people,” said Dr. Duval.
Dr. White added, “With three pathogens, that makes no sense.”
“He isn’t testing a new super-pathogen, because we’ve been able to treat most of the cases.” Dr. Klein again studied a wad of papers in his hands.
My bitterness flared. “All except Johnny.”
Dr. Running Bear was direct.
“Johnny’s case is different. I think the person, whoever it is, is afraid you and Johnny were getting too close to an answer. I think he or she saw you as a threat and acted to stop you through the attack on Johnny. And if that’s the case, no way should either of you be alone without one of us with you. I know it’s an imposition, but it’s for your own sake.”
I agreed.
“We cannot follow the money like they do in movies, so we must follow the origin of the pathogens,” Dr. Duval said. “When we find that out, we find who had access to them.”
“Do they have DNA?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Might these pathogens have some signature that would identify who was conducting research? Or where they came from?” I’d hung around Alex and Ducks too long. I felt a rush of warmth, like an answered prayer. Welcome back, Em.
“Yes and no,” Dr. White said. “Indicators would point us to the strain we’re facing, except these pathogens have been manipulated. I’ve been talking with several of my contacts at headquarters. I sicced a whole passel of them on the mystery.”
Sharon had a sly look in her eye. “I sicced someone else on the problem. What you may not remember is that my husband, Milt, used to sit on several intelligence committees when he was a senator, and still has dinner with the current leadership at least twice a month. He has resources even I don’t know about. I asked him to sniff around.”
Well, now. This should be interesting. I pulled up a stool and perched on its edge. Dr. White leaned against the unmade hospital bed she slept on nightly.
Dr. Klein picked up a pen and opened a fresh page in his notebook. “Let’s hear what you have.”
“Okay, first, my husband’s warning. This is all highly classified. We aren’t officially read in to the situation, so you can’t talk about it to anyone outside our circle of trusted co-conspirators.”
She looked at each of us. We nodded, and she continued.
Ten years earlier, teams of doctors in several undisclosed locations conducted government-sponsored research on some of the worst diseases in history. Their charter was to determine what would happen if they could be weaponized, become part of a biological warfare inventory, and possibly be used to attack the U.S. All work was conducted in BSL-4 labs.
“These buildings have every safety procedure, from space suits to special, pressurized entrances, to air scrubbers and much more.” Dr. White said. “It’s a pain in the ass to get in and out. No one—but no one—without a specific clearance and a demonstrable need to know even knows these exist.”
“How do you get a clearance?” I asked.
“It’s a long process. Let’s keep it to if you don’t have a need to know, you won’t have to go through vetting by the FBI and other government agencies,” Dr. Klein said.
“Milt says even he doesn’t know where they all are. I choose to believe him. It makes for a happier marriage if he gets to keep some of his secrets,” Sharon grinned. “The general population wouldn’t know if they were working next door to such a lab.”
“That’s right. Most of the buildings are nondescript. You don’t want neon signs saying ‘Warning. Bad bugs inside!’ They’d be a magnet for all terrorist groups, foreign and domestic,” Dr. Klein said.
I laughed. “I remember the hysteria when Ebola was on the loose in a monkey lab somewhere in Virginia years ago.”
“In Reston in Northern Virginia. No matter how hard the scientists tried to contain news of the outbreak, it slipped out. If it had not been handled so quickly, if the virus had not been restricted to the lab itself, and if it had been a strain that easily infects humans, we could have had a total panic,” Dr. Duval said. “I was just entering medical school at Emory University when it happened. I studied the outbreak through to resolution. That is when I decided to apply to the CDC.”
“Years later I read a book about this subject. Fascinating as much as it was frightening.” I said. I resumed pacing. “Do you think this could be terrorist related?”
“I don’t know, but I doubt it. So does Milt. He’s keeping his options open, though,” Sharon said.
Since 9/11, our collective consciousness had been focused on foreign terrorists, primarily those who infiltrated from safe havens in the Middle East or South Asia. How soon we forgot that one of the worst terrorist attacks on our own soil was Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Though the attack occurred early in the modern terrorist narrative, news reports claimed that the police we
re looking for a Middle Eastern man. Turned out to be a home-grown terrorist with blue eyes and light brown hair.
No one at San Felipe appeared to have Middle Eastern origins. I dismissed the possibility of a foreign terrorist. If we had a terrorist, it had to be someone born in the good old U.S. of A.
Sharon referred to her notes. “So, according to my husband, somewhere in the Midwest a BSL-4 lab reported a protocol breach. An unauthorized individual without the proper clearance penetrated the interior of the facility. My husband says these labs all have panic buttons. The protocol is to hit the button and get out through the decontamination chambers.”
“Beat cheeks is the official term for such evacuation procedures,” Dr. Klein said. “Was that protocol followed?”
Sharon consulted her notes and confirmed it.
Dr. White said, “We’d either escape if any pathogens were released or arrest an intruder if he was unauthorized. I was in our main lab when a power outage shut down the air locks. Scary time until the generators kicked in. I was happy I didn’t have to evacuate.”
“Anyway, no one at the time knew who the intruder was or where he was in the building. Some of the doctors and scientists fled through back exits into decontamination chambers. The intruder, the lab itself, and presumably the pathogens were likely destroyed when the building exploded. Everything and everyone inside were incinerated within minutes,” Sharon said.
“Are you suggesting our own government blew up the building?” I tried not to look shocked.
“I mean the building exploded. No one reported seeing anything other than the building explode. The official report stated a buildup of natural gas was the cause,” Sharon said.
“You said the official cause was a gas leak and a spark. What was it really?” Dr. Klein stopped making notes on various boards and pages.
Sharon shrugged. “Whatever it was, it did a damned thorough job.”
We chewed on this news silently. If a BSL-4 lab had been destroyed, hadn’t all the dangerous agents inside been destroyed too?
“Could the government have destroyed its own lab?” I had great difficulty accepting what Sharon said. “Isn’t it more likely that someone inside purposefully or accidentally set off an incendiary device?”
Dr. Klein stared off in space. “Is there any way of knowing if any samples were stolen prior to the fire?”
Another lengthy period of silence followed the question.
“That’s the part of the classified report that was redacted. My husband used political leverage to see the original. No one knows for certain if all the biological agents were destroyed. What was never made public was that two bodies were found in the ashes. The government identified one as the intruder. He’d been a construction guy working on one of the rooftop scrubbers. His buddy thought he went to the porta-potty. Seems he went through the front in search of a cleaner toilet. He may have brought Armageddon down on the lab.” Sharon rubbed her hand across her eyes. We women had long since dispensed with makeup.
“And the second body?” A dead body was something I could understand.
“Incinerated beyond recognition, but one of the research doctors is unaccounted for. He may be dead. He hasn’t been seen since. Nothing in the report identified the second victim,” Sharon said.
“Wouldn’t forensic scientists be able to extract DNA to identify the second victim?” I asked.
Dr. Klein wasn’t buying it either. “So, the report said a John Doe died, huh? Bunk.”
“And how do we get from a bombed-out lab somewhere in the Midwest to an Indian Health Service hospital on the San Felipe Reservation outside of Santa Fe?” I asked.
Dr. Klein added more information from his autopsies on various charts.
“I have no idea,” Sharon said.
“Well, if one of the doctors or scientists stole some of the agents before the fire or when he fled through the decontamination room, that would explain why we have multiple diseases in this outbreak,” Dr. White said, springing from the bed to one of the white boards that listed diseases.
“It also explains why I have fragments of bacteria and viruses in the same samples. My guess is the agents weren’t kept frozen. If the person who stole them didn’t have a freezer handy, they would have begun to degrade,” Dr. Klein said.
“That makes sense,” Dr. White said. “We have this soup of diseases bubbling away. Who was it? Who was the doctor who escaped the fire?”
“He has to be someone who is now in this hospital or in the community at large.” Dr. Klein finished adding his data points.
“Or she. Don’t we have to keep an open mind? It could be anyone,” I said. Once more, I didn’t like where this was heading.
Dr. Duval moved toward Sharon. “The CDC has not lost any labs. It might have been subcontracted from Fort Detrick in Maryland. Can you ask the vice president to find out whose lab it was and what pathogens they were researching?”
“I can, but I can’t guarantee he can or will tell me.” She pulled out her phone.
“Well, if he can’t, ask him to find out if the three pathogens we’re fighting were sent to that lab,” Dr. Running Bear said. Sharon left the room, phone at her ear.
“When was the fire?” I asked. Again, the people in the room stared at me. “What?”
Dr. Duval looked puzzled at first but then turned to Nurse Leena. “As soon as we know the date, Leena, can you look at personnel records to see who was hired after that time?”
Nurse Leena looked troubled, but nodded.
“Remember, we cannot talk to anyone else about this,” Dr. Duval said.
My phone vibrated with a text: Too late. Ducks.
How do I tell these people that the number of people not read in on highly classified data has increased by two?
Sharon returned to the diagnosis room, glanced at her phone, and sent a text. “I need Keith’s help, even if he’s not read in.”
“What would they do to you if they found out? Fire you?” I laughed.
“Not likely, although Milt can get really angry when he feels he’s been crossed,” Sharon shrugged. “Anyway, I sent Keith a head’s-up that I need to talk with him. He’s watching the door to the loading dock. Time for a stroll over there.”
“It’s nice to have connections, isn’t it?” Dr. White continued scrutinizing the boards. If she looks long and hard enough, will the answer appear like a specter in front of her?
“Sure is.” Dr. Klein left for his lab.
Dr. Running Bear and Dr. Duval stayed, as did I. I had no idea where Dr. Gupta was, and Leena left to care for patients before investigating the personnel records.
“We haven’t had any new patients in two days, have we?” I asked, fairly certain of the answer.
Dr. Running Bear shook his head. No new patients was good news, but if the person responsible for the infections worked in the hospital, no one inside was safe. I thought about what happened to Johnny—if the person was sneaking out, the public wasn’t safe either. I bet he was lying low to lure us into a state of false security.
I looked up in time to see a strange look cross Dr. Running Bear’s face. He glanced over his shoulder, but no one was close to him. He stared at me. I shrugged. I didn’t know if one of my watchdogs had reached out or not. The spooks were silent on my side.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
SPLITTING MY TIME between the diagnosis room and the ICU, I gradually spent more time away than in. Alex was healing well, both his lungs and the incision in his leg. He’d be well enough to leave for Johnny’s ranch in a day or two, were it not for the quarantine. Johnny grew stronger and itched to get “back on the case,” as he called it.
“Whip, Alex is doing fine,” I said on my daily call.
“I know. He’s been texting non-stop,” Whip laughed. “What’s this about a hat?”
I explained Alex’s obsession with the Stetson. “We need to think through when you can come out. It should coincide with Alex leaving for the ranch, but we have to
wait until the CDC says it’s safe to lift the quarantine.”
We chatted a while longer before ringing off with a plan. Whip would fly out with Emilie on my private jet as soon as we knew Alex’s transfer date. I called the leasing company to have one prepped and waiting at the general aviation airport outside of Biloxi. Once we were free to leave, the family could be here in a few hours.
Dr. Running Bear couldn’t send Alex and any other healing patients home. Not yet anyway. He advised the ICU nurses that no one was to be moved from the unit unless another critical case arrived. I overheard his discussion with the parents.
“We can watch for setbacks if they are here,” Dr. Running Bear told them.
What he didn’t say was that a trusted individual was deliberately contaminating the hospital—until we identified and stopped whoever was turning the hospital into a giant test lab, no one was really safe. The restless father of the dead baby would have gone ballistic, literally.
“Once the crisis is over, the hospital out of quarantine, and you are all released, the CDC will send in a special cleaning crew to sanitize the entire hospital from ceiling to floor.”
He assured the parents that it would be safe to bring their families back to San Felipe in the near future.
###
Alex made excellent progress with his crutches. He was once again the terror of the ICU. When he was done for what I hoped was his final CT scan, I received a call from Johnny’s sister-in-law
“I have something for Alex. Can you come to the loading dock and pick it up?”
I had no idea what she meant, but I made my way to the dock. She stood at the end with a hat in her hand. “Johnny ordered it. It was supposed to be a surprise for Alex when he came home.”
She put the hat on the ramp and climbed back into her truck to leave. When she was gone, I fetched the hat, went back upstairs, and hung it in Alex’s room before returning to Johnny’s. An hour later, Alex returned and went back to bed. Before he could disappear into his Game Boy, he spotted the addition.
“Oh wow! My Stetson.”
“I’m glad you did this, funny man,” I told Johnny. “He needed that.”