Outbreak

by Robin Cook

  Throughout her monologue Dubchek nodded to indicate that he was listening, but somehow he seemed distracted, concentrating more on her face than on what she was saying. With so little feedback, Marissa trailed off and stopped speaking, wondering if she were making some fundamental professional error. After a sigh, Dubchek smiled. “Good job,” he said simply. “It’s hard to believe that this is your first field assignment.” He stood up at the sound of a knock on the door. “Thank goodness. That must be dinner. I’m starved.”

  The meal itself was mediocre; the meat and vegetables Dubchek had ordered were lukewarm. Marissa wondered why they couldn’t have gone down to the dining room. She’d thought that he’d intended to talk business, but as they ate, the conversation ranged from Ralph’s dinner party and how she came to know him, to the CDC and whether or not she was enjoying her assignment. Toward the end of the meal Dubchek suddenly said, “I wanted to tell you that I am a widower.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Marissa sincerely, wondering why the man was bothering to inform her about his personal life.

  “I just thought you should know,” he added, as if reading her mind. “My wife died two years ago in an auto accident.”

  Marissa nodded, once again uncertain how to reply.

  “What about you?” asked Dubchek. “Are you seeing anyone?”

  Marissa paused, toying with the handle of her coffee cup. She had no intention of discussing her breakup with Roger. “No, not at the moment,” she managed to tell him. She wondered if Dubchek knew that she had been dating Tad. It had not been a secret, but it wasn’t public knowledge either. Neither of them had told people at the lab. Suddenly Marissa felt even more uncomfortable. Her policy of not mixing her personal and professional lives was being violated, she felt. Looking over at Dubchek, she couldn’t help but acknowledge that she found him attractive. Perhaps that was why he made her feel so uncomfortable. But there was no way she was interested in a more personal relationship with him, if that was what this was leading up to. All at once she wanted to get out of his room and return to her work.

  Dubchek pushed back his chair and stood up. “If we’re going back to the clinic maybe we should be on our way.”

  That sounded good to Marissa. She stood up and went over to the coffee table to pick up her papers. As she straightened up, she realized that Dubchek had come up behind her. Before she could react, he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around. The action so surprised her that she stood frozen. For a brief moment their lips met. Then she pulled away, her papers dropping to the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t planning that at all, but ever since you arrived at CDC I’ve been tempted to do that. God knows I don’t believe in dating anyone I work with, but it’s the first time since my wife died that I’ve really been interested in a woman. You don’t look like her at all—Jane was tall and blond—but you have that same enthusiasm for your work. She was a musician, and when she played well, she had the same excited expression I’ve seen you get.”

  Marissa was silent. She knew she was being mean, that Dubchek certainly had not been harassing her, but she felt embarrassed and awkward and was unwilling to say something to ease over the incident.

  “Marissa,” he said gently, “I’m telling you that I’d like to take you out when we get back to Atlanta, but if you’re involved with Ralph or just don’t want to . . .” his voice trailed off.

  Marissa bent down and gathered up her notes. “If we’re going back to the hospital, we’d better go now,” she said curtly.

  He stiffly followed her out the door to the elevator. Later, sitting silently in her rent-a-car, Marissa berated herself. Cyrill was the most attractive man she’d met since Roger. Why had she behaved so unreasonably?

  4

  February 27

  ALMOST FIVE WEEKS LATER, as the taxi bringing her home from the airport turned onto Peachtree Place, Marissa was wondering if she would be able to reestablish a pleasant, professional relationship with Dubchek now that they were both back in Atlanta. He had left a few days after their exchange at the Beverly Hilton, and the few meetings they’d had at the Richter Clinic had been curt and awkward.

  Watching the lighted windows as the cab drove down her street, seeing the warm family scenes inside, she was overcome with a wave of loneliness.

  After paying the driver and turning off the alarm, Marissa hustled over to the Judsons’ and retrieved Taffy and five weeks’ worth of mail. The dog was ecstatic to see her, and the Judsons couldn’t have been nicer. Rather than making Marissa feel guilty about being gone for so long, they acted truly sad to see Taffy leave.

  Back in her own house, Marissa turned up the heat to a comfortable level. Having a puppy there made all the difference in the world. The dog wouldn’t leave her side and demanded almost constant attention.

  Thinking about supper, she opened the refrigerator only to discover that some food had gone bad. She shut the door, deciding to tackle the job of cleaning it out the next day. She dined on Fig Newtons and Coke as she leafed through her mail. Aside from a card from one of her brothers and a letter from her parents, it was mostly pharmaceutical junk.

  Marissa was startled when the phone rang, but when she picked up the receiver, she was pleased to hear Tad’s voice welcoming her home to Atlanta. “How about going out for a drink?” he asked. “I can pop over and pick you up.”

  Marissa’s first response was to say that she was exhausted after her trip, but then she remembered on her last call from L.A. he’d told her he had finished his current AIDS project and was hard at work on what he called Marissa’s Ebola virus. Suddenly feeling less tired, she asked how those tests were going.

  “Fine!” said Tad. “The stuff grows like wildfire in the Vero 98 tissue cultures. The morphology portion of the study is already complete, and I’ve started the protein analysis.”

  “I’m really interested in seeing what you’re doing,” said Marissa.

  “I’ll be happy to show you what I can,” said Tad. “Unfortunately, a majority of the work is done inside the maximum containment lab.”

  “I’d assumed as much,” said Marissa. She knew that the only way such a deadly virus could be handled was in a facility that did just what its name suggested—contained the microorganisms. As far as Marissa knew, there were only four such facilities in the world—one at the CDC, one in England, one in Belgium and one in the Soviet Union. She didn’t know if the Pasteur Institute in Paris had one or not. For safety reasons entry was restricted to a few authorized individuals. At that time, Marissa was not one of them. Yet, having witnessed Ebola’s devastating potential, she told Tad that she was really eager to see his studies.

  “You don’t have clearance,” said Tad, surprised by what seemed to him her naiveté.

  “I know,” said Marissa, “but what could be so terrible about showing me what you’re doing with the Ebola in the lab right now and then going out for a drink. After all, it’s late. No one will know if you take me now.”

  There was a pause. “But entry is restricted,” said Tad plaintively.

  Marissa was fully aware that she was being manipulative, but there was certainly no danger to anyone if she were to go in with Tad. “Who’s to know?” she asked coaxingly. “Besides, I am part of the team.”

  “I guess so,” Tad agreed reluctantly.

  It was obvious that he was wavering. The fact that Marissa would only see him if he took her into the lab seemed to force his decision. He told her that he’d pick her up in half an hour and that she wasn’t to breathe a word to anyone else.

  Marissa readily agreed.

  “I’m not so sure about this,” admitted Tad, as he and Marissa drove toward the CDC.

  “Relax,” said Marissa. “I’m an EIS officer assigned to Special Pathogens for goodness sakes.” Purposefully, Marissa pretended to be a little irritated.

  “But we could ask for your clearance tomorrow,” suggested Tad.

  Marissa turned to
ward her friend. “Are you chickening out?” she demanded. It was true that Dubchek was due back from a trip to Washington the next day and that a formal request could be made. But Marissa had her doubts about what his response would be. She felt that Dubchek had been unreasonably cold over the last few weeks, even if her own stupidity had been the cause. Why she hadn’t had the nerve to apologize or even say she’d like to see him one evening, she didn’t know. But with every day that passed, the coolness between them, particularly on his side, increased.

  Tad pulled into the parking lot, and they walked in silence to the main entrance. Marissa mused about men’s egos and how much trouble they caused.

  They signed in under the watchful eyes of the security guard and dutifully displayed their CDC identity cards. Under the heading “Destination,” Marissa wrote “office.” They waited for the elevator and went up three floors. After walking the length of the main building, they went through an outside door to a wire-enclosed catwalk that connected the main building to the virology labs. All the buildings of the Center were connected on most floors by similar walkways.

  “Security is tight for the maximum containment lab,” said Tad as he opened the door to the virology building. “We store every pathological virus known to man.”

  “All of them?” asked Marissa, obviously awed.

  “Just about,” said Tad like a proud father.

  “What about Ebola?” she asked.

  “We have Ebola samples from every one of the previous outbreaks. We’ve got Marburg; smallpox, which otherwise is extinct; polio; yellow fever; dengue; AIDS. You name it; we’ve got it.”

  “God!” exclaimed Marissa. “A menagerie of horrors.”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “How are they stored?” she asked.

  “Frozen with liquid nitrogen.”

  “Are they infective?” asked Marissa.

  “Just have to thaw them out.”

  They were walking down an ordinary hall past a myriad of small, dark offices. Marissa had previously been in this portion of the building when she’d come to Dubchek’s office.

  Tad stopped in front of a walk-in freezer like the kind seen in a butcher shop.

  “You might find this interesting,” he said, as he pulled open the heavy door. A light was on inside.

  Timidly Marissa stepped over the threshold into the cold, moist air. Tad was behind her. She felt a thrill of fear as the door swung shut and latched with a click.

  The interior of the freezer was lined with shelves holding tiny vials, hundreds of thousands of them. “What is this?” asked Marissa.

  “Frozen sera,” said Tad, picking up one of the vials, which had a number and a date written on it. “Samples from patients all over the world with every known viral disease and a lot of unknown ones. They’re here for immunological study and obviously are not infective.”

  Marissa was still glad when they returned to the hallway.

  About fifty feet beyond the walk-in freezer the hall turned sharply to the right, and as they rounded the corner, they were confronted by a massive steel door. Just above the doorknob was a grid of push buttons similar to Marissa’s alarm system. Below that was a slot like the opening for a credit card at an automatic bank teller. Tad showed Marissa a card that he had around his neck on a leather thong. He inserted it into the slot.

  “The computer is recording the entry,” he said. Then he tapped out his code number on the push button plate: 43-23-39. “Good measurements,” he quipped.

  “Thank you,” said Marissa, laughing. Tad joined in. Since the virology building had been deserted, he seemed more relaxed. After a short delay, there was a mechanical click as the bolt released. Tad pulled open the door. Marissa felt as if she had entered another world. Instead of the drab, cluttered hallway in the outer part of the building, she found herself surrounded by a recently constructed complex of color-coded pipes, gauges and other futuristic paraphernalia. The lighting was dim until Tad opened a cabinet door, exposing a row of circuit breakers. He threw them in order. The first turned on the lights in the room in which they were standing. It was almost two stories tall and was filled with all sorts of equipment. There was a slight odor of phenolic disinfectant, a smell that reminded Marissa of the autopsy room at her medical school.

  The next circuit breaker lit up a row of portholelike windows that lined the sides of a ten-foot-high cylinder that protruded into the room. At the end of the cylinder was an oval door like the watertight hatch on a submarine.

  The final circuit breaker caused a whirring noise as some kind of large electrical machinery went into gear. “Compressors,” said Tad in response to Marissa’s questioning look. He didn’t elaborate. Instead, with a sweep of his hand he said: “This is the control and staging area for the maximum containment lab. From here we can monitor all the fans and filters. Even the gamma-ray generators. Notice all the green lights. That means that everything is working as it is supposed to be. At least hopefully!”

  “What do you mean, ‘hopefully’?” asked Marissa, somewhat alarmed. Then she saw Tad’s smile and knew he was teasing her. Still, she suddenly wasn’t one hundred percent sure she wanted to go through with the visit. It had seemed like such a good idea when she’d been in the safety of her home. Now, surrounded by all this alien equipment and knowing what kinds of viruses were inside, she wasn’t so certain. But Tad didn’t give her time to change her mind. He opened the airtight door and motioned for Marissa to go inside. Marissa had to duck her head slightly while stepping over the six-inch-high threshold. Tad followed her, then closed and bolted the door. A feeling of claustrophobia almost overwhelmed her, especially when she had to swallow to clear her ears due to the pressure change.

  The cylinder was lined with the portholelike windows Marissa had seen from the outer room. Along both sides were benches and upright lockers. At the far end were shelves and another oval airtight door.

  “Surprise!” said Tad as he tossed Marissa some cotton suits. “No street clothes allowed.”

  After a moment’s hesitation during which time Marissa vainly glanced around for a modicum of privacy, she began unbuttoning her blouse. As embarrassed as she was to be stripping down to her underwear in front of Tad, he seemed more self-conscious than she. He made a big production of facing away from her while she changed.

  They then went through a second door. “Each room that we enter as we go into the lab is more negative in terms of pressure than the last. That ensures that the only movement of air will be into the lab, not out.”

  The second room was about the size of the first but with no windows. The smell of the phenolic disinfectant was more pronounced. A number of large, blue plastic suits hung on pegs. Tad searched until he found one he thought would fit Marissa. She took it from his outstretched hand. It was like a space suit without a backpack or a heavy bubble helmet. Like a space suit, it covered the entire body, complete with gloves and booties. The part that covered the head was faced with clear plastic. The suit sealed with a zipper that ran from the pubic area to the base of the throat. Issuing from the back, like a long tail, was an air hose.

  Tad pointed out green piping that ran along the sides of the room at chest height, saying that the entire lab was laced with such pipes. At frequent intervals were rectangular lime green manifolds with adapters to take the air hoses from the suits. Tad explained that the suits were filled with clean, positive-pressure air so that the air in the lab itself was never breathed. He rehearsed with Marissa the process of attaching and detaching the air hose until he was convinced she felt secure.

  “Okay, time to suit up,” said Tad, as he showed Marissa how to start working her way into the bulky garment. The process was complicated, particularly getting her head inside the closed hood. As she looked out through the clear plastic face mask, it fogged immediately.

  Tad told her to attach her air hose, and instantly Marissa felt the fresh air cool her body and clear the face piece. Tad zipped up the front of her suit
and with practiced moves, climbed into his own. He inflated his suit, then detached his air hose, and carrying it in his hand, moved down to the far door. Marissa did the same. She had to waddle to walk.

  To the right of the door was a panel. “Interior lights for the lab,” explained Tad as he threw the switches. His voice was muffled by the suit; it was difficult for her to understand, especially with the hiss of the incoming air in the background. They went through another airtight door, which Tad closed behind them.

  The next room was half again smaller than the first two, with walls and piping all covered with a white chalky substance. The floor was covered with a plastic grate.

  They attached their air hoses for a moment. Then they moved through a final door into the lab itself. Marissa followed close behind Tad, moving her air hose and connecting it where he did.

  Marissa was confronted by a large rectangular room with a central island of lab benches surmounted by protective exhaust hoods. The walls were lined with all sorts of equipment—centrifuges, incubators, various microscopes, computer terminals, and a host of things Marissa did not recognize. To the left there was also a bolted insulated door.

  Tad took Marissa directly to one of the incubators and opened up the glass doors. The tissue culture tubes were fitted into a slowly revolving tray. Tad lifted out one and handed it to Marissa. “Here’s your Ebola,” he said.

  In addition to the small amount of fluid the tube contained, it was coated (on one side) with a thin film—a layer of living cells infected with the virus. Inside the cells, the virus was forcing its own replication. As innocent as the contents looked, Marissa understood that there was probably enough infectious virus to kill everyone in Atlanta, perhaps the United States. Marissa shuddered, gripping the glass tube more tightly.

  Taking the tube, Tad walked over to one of the microscopes. He positioned the airtight specimen, adjusted the focus, then stepped back so Marissa could look.