by Lisa Harris
“If I’m right about what the torn photo meant, I don’t want them linked to me at all.”
“Moreno told me how good you are at your job. You’ll be an asset to the great amount of work Charlie and I have to do.”
“I hope we’re not about to make a big mistake.”
He stared out at the night sky, working through the details in his mind as they flew across the water. With or without her, he knew this was what he was going to have to do. When they landed, he’d ditch this jet and charter another private flight to Istanbul. He’d need to get the required visas in order to get into Turkey, but it was all doable. They could be there in twelve hours, still giving them a small margin of time to work with their samples.
Maybe she was right and his solution was a big mistake, but as far as he was concerned, there was only one option. Charlie Zimmern.
Chapter Twelve
Three flights up, Aiden stopped in front of apartment 404. The click of a lock releasing silenced Rachel’s mental argument with herself. Whatever waited behind this door, she would not be a part of it if it crossed her ethical lines. The grate of a metal chain sliding through rings was followed by the releasing of several bolts. Finally, the knob turned and the door opened just a crack.
Huge gray eyes blinked behind the magnified lenses and heavy black frames perched upon the twitching nose of an old man assessing whether or not to take the bait. “Who is she?”
“Dr. Rachel Allen.” Rachel stepped forward. “Epidemiologist and viral researcher.” If he tried to pull something shady, she wanted him to know he wasn’t dealing with an untrained fool.
“We’ll see if you’re as smart as Aiden has always claimed you are.” Charlie opened the door wide enough for Rachel to get her first glimpse of the man whose formulas and theories she’d studied in school.
Charlie Zimmern, a man whose scientific contributions had made him as big as the universe in her mind, was in real life a short little fellow with a thick cloud of snowy white hair, meticulously parted and combed. He wore a heavy gray sweater with all five large black buttons neatly buttoned. But as her gaze took in the rest of him, the man she’d idolized seemed to deteriorate as if nothing but his brilliant mind and beating heart mattered. Wrinkled chinos hung from his twig-like bowed legs, and his wing-tipped shoes were scuffed and threaded with kite string instead of proper laces. The idea that the world’s greatest biochemist and geneticist was a mere mortal was a magnet that drew Rachel a step forward.
“Come.” He waved them in then stuck his head over the threshold and looked both ways. Satisfied they’d not been followed, he closed them in then bolted all the locks and refastened the chain.
The three of them stood just inside the locked door as she and Dr. Zimmern sized each other up. The smell of rancid olive oil, strong coffee, and takeout boxes that should have been trashed days ago pressed into Rachel’s evaluation. She clutched the handle of her carry-on. Aiden clutched the strap of the insulated cooler that held the virus, and Dr. Zimmern clutched the very real possibility they’d brought trouble to his door.
Rachel eased her gaze from Dr. Zimmern’s magnified scrutiny and slowly took in the room with the curtains drawn tight over the windows. Neat stacks of books and papers covered the floor, surrounding a small couch and rocking chair and two metal chairs at the sagging kitchen table. On the coffee table, she noticed an unfinished jigsaw puzzle of a map of ocean topography. A finished puzzle of a map of the Sahara filled the kitchen tabletop. On the small kitchen counter was a completed puzzle map of some sort of mountain range, perhaps the Alps. Aiden had warned her of Charlie Zimmern’s eccentricities. He’d been right.
Rachel’s gaze skipped over the organized clutter and traveled up the walls. Complicated formulas written in chalk, pencil, and black marker covered every available inch of the chipped plaster. She recognized E=mc², energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, but the rest were scribblings well beyond anything she could decipher. . .and she was good at math and chemistry.
“How have you been, Charlie?” Aiden asked.
“Busy.” He smiled. “My viruses keep me busy.”
“Viruses? Here?” The word croaked from Rachel’s suddenly very dry throat.
Charlie motioned for Aiden to hand over the insulated cooler draped over his shoulder. “Let me see the virus you wish to clone.”
“How did you know we wanted a virus cloned?” Rachel asked as Aiden deposited the insulated cooler on the table.
“You are here, aren’t you? Tell me what we have and what you need.”
Aiden filled him in on the frozen woolly mammoth with the strange anomalies in his heart, the subsequent death of the Tibetans who’d uncovered the extinct creature, and his suspicions that the two of these things were connected. “I need the virus stabilized so that we can develop a vaccine or an effective cure.”
Aiden told the old man about the loss of the original source of the virus and what Rachel had learned about the virus’s ability to replicate at a rapid speed in vertebrates. He left out the part about them stealing the last remaining sample from Gaumond Labs and being shot at twice.
“Cloning will give you that ability. But the process is highly regulated. Why come here? What aren’t you telling me?”
“There are people after this virus. People we believe plan to use it to develop a super virus.”
“The technology is already here. They don’t have to have the actual virus. All they need is the virus’s genomic blueprint.”
“So what do we do?” Rachel asked. “All it would take is an accidental leak or misuse during the research getting into the wrong hands, and this could spread.”
Charlie lifted his chin until his glasses returned to their proper place on his nose. “What is the viability of the virus?”
“Thirty-two hours at best,” Aiden said.
“And how many samples are left?”
Aiden hesitated. “This is it.”
“I’m assuming you’re funding this on your own, correct?” Charlie asked, grinning at Aiden.
“I’ll take care of you, old man.” The smile they exchanged confirmed Rachel’s earlier suspicions that Charlie Zimmern was more than a mentor to Aiden.
Charlie seemed lost in thought, about what Rachel could only guess.
Aiden nudged him. “We’re kind of in a hurry, Charlie.”
“Noisette first and something to eat.”
“Noisette?” Rachel asked.
“I work better with a fresh cup of espresso.”
Charlie headed toward the kitchen.
“Aiden?” Rachel whispered. “He’s a loose cannon.”
“Charlie marches to his own beat, but he can do this in his sleep.” He held out his hand. “I trust him.”
Rachel had no choice but to leave her suitcase and follow Charlie and Aiden to the small kitchen, but her nerves were too tightly wound to allow her to stand still while Charlie heated water on a hot plate. She wandered the maze of books and journals to work off her anxiety. Several of the scientific magazines had a younger Charlie Zimmern on the cover, and most of the textbooks had his name on the spine. Aiden was right. If anyone could accomplish what they were asking, it was Dr. Zimmern. She needed to relax. Trust the man God had led them to.
Once they’d finished a cup of Turkish coffee turned hazelnut color by all the milk Charlie had added and several thick slices of pistachio baklava, he motioned them to a door on the far side of the room.
“Come,” he said. “And bring your project.”
Charlie stopped outside the closed door, reached inside his sweater, and pulled out a key dangling from a string around his neck. He unlocked the door then stepped inside. Rachel was expecting a small bedroom, but instead she stepped into a huge, brilliantly lit, fully equipped state-of-the-art laboratory. Every piece of equipment on the well-organized eight-foot worktable was clean and precisely placed. Beneath the glass hood of the biosafety cabinet, several racks were filled with glittering vials, all
in different stages of replication.
“My work,” Charlie announced proudly as he shuffled to the biosafety cabinet and pointed to the vials.
Questions swirled in Rachel’s head. How did a man stripped of his research credentials end up with a fully-equipped lab? “What is this place?”
“My office,” Charlie said.
Across the room, Charlie’s framed medical school diploma hung askew on the pristine white wall. Rachel reached to straighten it and in doing so reminded her that the oath they’d all sworn when they had received their medical degrees meant they were to do good rather than harm. Charlie Zimmern should not be practicing any type of research.
“Leave it,” Charlie said as if he’d read her mind.
“But it’s crooked,” was all she could think to say. The only thing in the lab askew she wanted to add, but didn’t.
“It meant a lot to my mother when I became a doctor.” If Charlie was bitter, as she would have been after having so many years of study and unfulfilled dreams flushed down the toilet, it did not sound in his voice. Instead, he repeated the fact as if it were merely part of a solvable equation.
All of this, his life’s work, this lab in a forgotten corner of the world, his willingness to help them, all of it had been to please his mother? Realization that she’d devoted her own life to medical research in the hopes that somehow it would have made her father proud hit her hard in the gut.
Once they were all properly suited up, Charlie removed the tape sealing the cooler then asked Rachel to set a water bath to thaw the samples. To Rachel’s surprise, when she rattled off the number he was looking for from her earlier examination of the concentration of the virus in the fluid, Charlie smiled and said, “You’ll do nicely.”
She fought back the urge to say she wasn’t a first-year researcher, but allowing her preconceptions of a man to tank a possible solution, maybe even the only solution, to this big problem wasn’t the answer. She decided to put her aversions and suspicions aside and see what she could learn.
Charlie moved about the lab like a man half his age, as if being elbow deep in science was his personal fountain of youth. Between each dilution, she helped him change pipet tips.
He passed a vial to Rachel. “Rock gently to mix. Do not swirl.”
“Then incubate at 37°C for one to two hours,” Rachel said.
Charlie cut her a pleased glance. “I’ve experimented with different incubation periods. According to the data I’ve amassed, one hour exactly is the magic number.”
His precision in the lab gave her a remarkable sense of peace. His kindness as he directed her reminded her of how her father used to walk her through experiments of building volcanoes whose eruptions were fueled by baking soda.
Rachel set the timer then eagerly got to work helping Charlie microwave agarose to a boil and place the tubes in a water bath to prevent solidification of the base. When the timer dinged, Charlie checked the agarose. Satisfied that the base was not hot enough to kill the virus, he carefully overlaid the cells.
“Now we wait another hour.” He started the timer himself then perched upon a stool.
Needing something to fill the time, Rachel decided to tidy up the workspace. She discarded formaldehyde and unused agarose plugs into an appropriate chemical waste container. Then she added crystal violet staining solution to each plate, enough to cover the wells.
“What do you think we’re looking at, Charlie?” Aiden asked.
“Not a known adenovirus.” Charlie’s voice was muffled by the helmet he still wore. “Of the more than one hundred viruses in the Adenovirus genus, approximately forty-nine are known to cause human disease, heart muscle infection, and heart muscle dysfunction.” Charlie drummed his fingers on the counter, as if lost in thought. “You’re right. They’ll come for this one.”
Rachel dropped the empty beaker she held, glass shattering on the tiled floor. “Who will come?”
Charlie turned his helmet toward her. “The same people who came for me.”
Chapter Thirteen
They’ll come for this one.
Charlie’s words haunted Aiden over the next two days. While he continued to check the results of the yeast cell system which facilitated a rapid response to the fast-spreading virus, Charlie and Rachel poured over the data they’d accumulated. It was a game of hurry up and wait as the blossoming colonies started to appear on the plates.
The process of cloning a virus wasn’t new to any of them. The more labs working on diagnostic testing theoretically meant a quicker timeline of stopping the effects of a virus through drugs and vaccines. And the ability to stabilize the virus outside the body meant the possibility of developing those new treatments. The problem faced in creating a synthetic virus was that the very same technology behind stopping a pandemic could be used to create a bioweapon. In the wrong hands, a virus that had resurrected itself after lying dormant for centuries could be catastrophic. Which brought up another problem they were facing. Working on the virus in Charlie’s lab was only part of the solution. Until they identified whoever was behind the attempts to steal the virus, the world would remain at risk.
Aiden glanced at the clock on the wall when they finally stepped out of the lab and into the darkened apartment, surprised it was already past eight.
Charlie flipped on a few lights then pulled out his phone. “I’ll order some delivery. We’ve been cooped up in that lab long enough and besides, there’s nothing more we can do tonight but wait.”
Rachel tugged on the bottom of her T-shirt. “I think I’ll shower before dinner if no one minds.”
“Don’t forget, you have three minutes.” Charlie nodded toward the hallway as he placed the call. “Then hot water is gone.”
“Three minutes,” Rachel repeated. “Got it.”
Aiden smiled at Rachel’s easy acceptance of Charlie’s idiosyncrasies as he walked to the large window. The way they’d seamlessly fallen into working with each other had certainly made the time they’d spent in the lab valuable, but so many unanswered questions as to who was planning what with this virus remained. He rolled his shoulders slowly, trying to unravel some of the kinks the stress had formed.
He peered through the drawn curtains. Lights of a dozen apartment buildings and streetlights shone in the distance as night settled in around them. Coming to Charlie had been the right call. He was sure of it now. Not only was the virus safe, but they were making progress ensuring they had a viable clone. But time was running out. At some point they were going to have to trust someone outside their little circle.
He waited for Charlie to finish making their dinner order and get off the phone before he turned back to him. “I’m still paying Evan to find out who set you up.”
“Forget it.” Charlie waved off the suggestion. “You’ve already done enough for me, Aiden.”
“Clearly I haven’t.” He shook his head. “Going into hiding was supposed to be temporary.”
“As long as I can continue my research, does it matter that I no longer have the title that goes with that diploma on the wall?”
“But eventually it’s going to catch up to you. We don’t exactly have permission to do what we’re doing. Do you know how many regulations we’ve broken?” Aiden worked to keep the frustration out of his voice, but he was tired of feeling so out of control. “You need to be back in the States, leading our team.”
“At least we know we’re the good guys.”
Aiden frowned. He wasn’t sure that was going to be enough. “When this all comes out eventually, that’s not going to matter.”
“Thanks to you, this isn’t exactly a backstreet lab. We’re prepared to handle the work. Besides, what choice did you really have?”
Compromising biosafety had never been a risk either of them had been willing to take when they’d set up the workspace, but that didn’t relieve any of his uneasiness over what they were doing.
“Did you hear from your father?” Charlie asked, changing the subject.
“I messaged him on your encrypted line. He and Mom made it safely to Bermuda then returned to our island with the police. The damage done to the property was minimal, but the last I heard they still have no idea who was behind the attack. Dad’s working with the police to get answers.”
Charlie grabbed his coat, then hesitated. “Does he know you’re working with me?”
“He’s knows we’re safe, but I don’t want to take any chances. I figure the less he knows the better, for his own protection.”
Charlie took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You know we can clone the virus, but after that. . .We’re going to have to get a bigger team involved if we’re actually going to stop the virus. But in the meantime, I’ve an errand to run.”
“What about dinner? Aren’t you hungry?”
“I’m not exactly used to eating on a schedule. Though you won’t be alone.” Charlie nodded toward the bathroom. “I like her. If I were thirty years younger, I’d definitely have my eye on her.”
“My job doesn’t really have room for a relationship right now.”
“Haven’t you thought about settling down? Maybe try a more traditional job?”
“You sound like my father.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
“You never settled down, Charlie.”
“I’m far too set in my ways for most women.”
Aiden glanced around the cluttered apartment with its stacks of research papers and books. “I’ve seen behind that crusty shell of yours. You’re nothing but a teddy bear on the inside. I’m not ready for the office and a suit and tie.”
“You’re never going to be ready,” Charlie said. “You were born for fieldwork.”
“I learned from the best.”
Charlie’s gaze drifted toward the sounds of Rachel finishing her shower. “I’ve watched the two of you work together over the past couple of days. She’s good for you.”