He didn’t go in immediately, but paused to assess the place.
There was a strip of well-tended grass along the roadside here as well as around and, presumably, behind the lab, creating a civilized oasis. But where the grass ended, the swamp waited, pressing in on the little clearing, seemingly waiting to reclaim it. Removed as it was from the bustle of the city, one could reasonably expect it to be quiet, but it was spring and the frogs were in full throat. Adding to their green din was a loud mechanical hum from behind the lab.
There was a big vent above the glass doors at the entrance, and as Broussard went in, he saw a veritable moth museum plastered against its gridwork, apparently pulled to it and held there by the lab’s constant need for fresh air.
Inside, in a carpeted, windowless alcove, he found a grayhaired lady behind a chrome and black-metal desk backed by a row of black file cabinets. On the wall above the files hung a large photo display of geometric shapes with fuzzy protrusions all over them. The largest photo around which all the others were arranged looked like a child’s concept of an alien—a diamond-shaped head, a stick body, and six filamentous feet. Broussard recognized this as some sort of bacteriophage, a virus that preys upon bacteria. He could not call the names of the other viruses shown.
“Would you be Dr. Broussard?” the gray-haired lady asked kindly.
Broussard admitted his identity and she directed him through the double doors behind him to the first door on the left.
He entered a short hallway and knocked on a dark mahogany door with Mark Blackledge’s name and all his degrees displayed on a brass plaque.
From inside, he heard a booming, somewhat exasperated voice, say, “Come on.”
Blackledge was seated at the largest French bureau plat Broussard had ever seen, inlaid with tooled red leather, gleaming ormolu figures mounted on its delicate legs. And it wasn’t a reproduction. The man might be a bore, but he had excellent taste in furniture.
He waved Broussard into a gilt-trimmed French chair of pickled wood and resumed the phone call Broussard had interrupted.
“I don’t care if he is your best man—that hood is not drawing correctly. . . .”
From his chair, Broussard briefly admired the Boulle ebony cabinet intricately inlaid with brass and red tortoiseshell sitting a few feet to Blackledge’s left, then shifted his attention to a pair of matching two-tiered George III mahogany bookcases on the adjacent wall. Opposite the bookcases and against the other wall was a huge French bombe commode under an oil painting depicting an Amsterdam canal scene, the latter almost certainly done by Bartholomeus Van Hove. Van Hove was not a major star, but the painting was certainly a quality work worthy of the other furnishings. Three other items were totally out of keeping with the rest of the decor. But they were so interesting Broussard left his chair for a closer look.
One of those items was a black Moorish hat rack exhibiting three heavy scroll-carved brackets under a thick shelf that rested at each end on the back of a crouching, beaked gargoyle. On the shelf, held upright by a wire stand, was an African mask made of wood, but with a green patina that almost gave it the appearance of metal. It had a wide mouth full of sharp teeth and a wild head of flyaway hair made of some kind of dried grass woven into a mat where it rested on the skull.
“For years that was worn by a member of the Ekpo secret society of the Ibibio tribe in Nigeria,” Blackledge said, joining Broussard. “It was primarily used to exorcise demons at the yam harvest. They gave it to me in appreciation for my help in stopping an outbreak of chikungunya. This one”— he pointed to an adjacent dark brown mask shaped like a light-bulb; it was hairless and bore very simple features; a smooth band ran from the top of the head to the nose, but the rest was heavily grooved with parallel white lines—“is a Kif-webe mask from the Bena Mpassa tribe,” Blackledge continued. “Appropriately, the tribal priest wore this one in ceremonies to drive plague from the village. It was given to me for saving them from a particularly nasty strain of dengue hemorrhagic fever.”
“And how did you save ’em?” Broussard asked.
“By showing them that the mosquito vector was living in discarded water-filled tin cans in the village dump.”
Seemingly from nowhere, a bodiless voice said, “Dr. Blackledge, I’m about to look at those slides. . . .”
Blackledge returned to his desk and pressed an intercom button. “Give us a few minutes to get set up.”
He turned the Boulle cabinet so that it faced directly forward and opened the doors, revealing a TV and a VCR. He flicked on the TV and looked at Broussard.
“Pull a couple of those chairs over in front of the screen, will you?”
Broussard put the call book he’d been carrying on Blackledge’s desk and arranged the chairs. Behind the desk, a bank of drapes hung from floor to ceiling all along the back wall. Blackledge touched another button and the drapes opened. Behind them were two wide glass windows through which two laboratories could be seen.
On the right, a figure in a yellow space suit with an oxygen line plugged into the wall sat at a tissue-culture hood, pipetting a red liquid into a stack of petrie dishes. In the other, a technician dressed only in a blue lab coat was adjusting the settings on a microscope fitted with a TV camera.
“The lab on the right is a level-four containment facility,” Blackledge said. “On the left, it’s an ordinary lab. You’d be surprised how diligent your help is when they know you can see them anytime you wish. There’s a decontamination chamber in the wall separating the two labs to allow things to be passed from the hot side to the cold.”
“And the fellow at the microscope is working with slides from cultures exposed to D’Souza’s blood?”
“That’s right.”
“Why isn’t he doin’ that in the hot lab?”
“The slides have all been treated with gamma radiation, so they’re now harmless.” He leaned toward the intercom. “All right, we’re ready.”
The tech at the scope put a slide on it, bent his head to the eyepieces, and fiddled with the stage controls. On the TV screen, blurred ghostly images slipped by at a nauseating pace. Then the movement stopped and the image cleared, showing a field of translucent pancakes dotted with granules—the typical appearance of cells viewed with phase contrast.
“Those are green-monkey kidney cells,” Blackledge said, sitting in the chair beside Broussard. In his hand was a sheet of paper Broussard guessed was a list of the slides in the order they were about to be examined.
“And you think these cells are infected?”
“We wouldn’t be sitting here if they weren’t.”
“How can you tell? They look healthy to me.”
“That’s why I’m in charge and you’re not.”
The tech at the scope pressed a foot pedal and the lab was plunged into darkness.
“This first slide was treated with antibodies to the yellow fever virus. If we get a positive, it’ll show up as green dots.”
In the lab, a narrow beam of bright green light flashed on at the scope as the tech pulled the filter blocking the UV light source. But the TV screen remained black.
“One down,” Blackledge said, marking off the first entry on his sheet of paper.
The tech in the lab turned on the overhead lights so he could change slides.
“This next one is Lassa,” Blackledge said.
The lab lights went off and the green light came on. Still the TV screen remained black.
The third slide had been tested for Machupo, and again the screen remained black.
One by one, Blackledge called the roll of the most dangerous organisms on earth. . . .
“Junin.”
A black screen.
“Ebola.”
A black screen.
“Marburg.”
Black.
“Kyasanur Forest disease.”
Black.
“Hanta.”
Black.
“Dengue hemorrhagic fever.”
Bla
ck.
The lights in the lab came on again.
“We could be in trouble,” Blackledge said. “There’s only one left. If it’s negative, we’re dealing with something entirely new.”
The lab lights went out and the green beam flicked on. On the TV screen, the black universe lit up with dazzling green stars.
“Gotcha, you bastard,” Blackledge said, leaping out of his chair. “It’s CCHF,” he said, looking at Broussard. “Congo Crimean hemorrhagic fever. We got very lucky. The symptoms your technician had and the DIC on those slides you showed me—that’s not classic CCHF. So we’re probably dealing with a slightly altered form. Fortunately, it still has many of the same antigens as the parent strain. Now we know what we’re looking for.”
He went behind the desk and leaned into the intercom. “Good job, Dan.” He pressed the button for the drapes and they slid shut.
“So what are we lookin’ for?” Broussard said.
“Follow me and I’ll show you.”
Blackledge led Broussard to a door between the two mahogany bookcases. On the other side was another laboratory. He beckoned Broussard to an aquarium half-filled with sand and topped with a screen cover. “Wait there.”
He crossed the room to a bank of cages and came back with a hairless, pink-skinned newborn mouse. “Watch this.”
He lifted the screen and put the mouse in the aquarium, where it lay squirming and kicking on the sand. They watched the mouse for perhaps twenty seconds, during which nothing happened.
Broussard looked questioningly at Blackledge, who held up a cautioning finger.
“Don’t be in such a hurry.”
Suddenly, the sand began to boil and it came alive with wiggling legs thrusting upward. Soon, the sand was carpeted with tiny creatures that skittered toward the little mouse. In an astonishingly short time, the mouse was completely covered with them, until not one millimeter of pink skin could be seen.
“Ticks,” Blackledge said. “They’ll feed until he’s exsanguinated.”
Broussard turned away in disgust.
“Oh, come on,” Blackledge said. “You’ve seen worse things than that.”
“But none that I caused.”
“It’s a natural part of life—predators and prey. Get over it.”
As disgusted as Broussard was, he now knew what had made the small reddish nodule on Beverly’s brother and the obvious bite mark on the strangulation victim.
“Of course, these are soft ticks,” Blackledge said. “We’re probably looking for a hard tick, most likely Hyalomma. The virus is in their saliva. When they bite, there’s a transfer.”
“The heart attack case with early symptoms had a bite mark on his calf,” Broussard said. “This mornin’ we got in a strangulation victim with early stages of the same disease as the others and he had a bite mark in his pubic area.”
“Why haven’t I heard about bites before this?”
“Before today, I’d seen only one and I didn’t know what it meant.”
“Well, now you do.”
Blackledge went to a refrigerator and removed a transparent plastic vial whose top was sealed with gauze held on with a rubber band. He took it over to where Broussard was standing and held it up. Inside, near the bottom, was a large dark spot. He lifted the vial to his lips and exhaled into it. Immediately, the blob burst apart as tiny flyspecks scattered in all directions.
“Seed ticks,” Blackledge said. “Responding to heat and carbon dioxide. They’ve got receptors for both on their front legs. When they sense either one, they know there’s prey nearby and they go after it. They can also detect ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, so they could find a cow by its piss and its farts even if it was ice-cold and holding its breath.”
He put the vial back in the fridge.
“Even in the driest of climates, they never want for water, because they secrete a hygroscopic salt on their mouth parts and drink the water it draws. If there’s no food available, they’re very patient. There’s a cave in Africa where ticks have been known to lie dormant in the sand for twenty years, and then, when an animal wanders in, they come up out of the sand just like in the aquarium and feed. When a female becomes infected with something like CCHF, she passes the virus to all of her offspring, which, in the case of the species we’re most likely dealing with, can lay upward of fifteen thousand eggs.”
“Obviously, these ticks are found naturally in the Crimea and Africa . . .” Broussard said.
“Obviously.”
“We found an African coin in the pocket of the victim who died of a heart attack. Maybe he and the strangulation case were bitten in Africa and flew here before the disease progressed very far, which would mean there aren’t any African ticks in the city.”
“I don’t have a grasp of the chronology of events, so I can’t address that yet. Let’s reconstruct things over here.”
Eyes shining with excitement, Blackledge went to a calendar hanging on the wall and picked up a lab marker. “John Doe died when?”
At the moment, there seemed no point in telling him they now knew that victim’s name, so Broussard simply said, “Last Thursday.”
Blackledge entered this in the appropriate square on the calendar. “And Baldwin was found . . .”
“Yesterday, but he’d been dead four or five days and had been in the terminal stages another two before he died.”
“Which would mean he likely became seriously ill the previous Monday or Tuesday.” He entered it as Monday. “D’Souza cut herself the day John Doe died?”
Broussard nodded and Blackledge entered that data.
“And she became seriously ill yesterday.” He added that, briefly studied what he’d done, and turned back to Broussard. “It’s certainly not true that the incubation period will be the same for all routes of infection, and it will likely vary somewhat in different individuals infected by the same route, but let’s use D’Souza’s four days as the average time between exposure and advanced symptoms. That would place Baldwin’s exposure around the sixteenth.” He entered that and boxed it. “Now, John Doe was in the early stages, so let’s say he was exposed two days earlier, which would be the twentyfirst.” He put that on the calendar and boxed it. “Did you find a bite mark on Baldwin?”
“No, but his skin was so decomposed, there could have been one I didn’t see. The bites I found were on both the others.”
“Let’s put the strangulation on here. Died . . .”
“Late last night, early stages about like John Doe.”
Blackledge wrote the exposure date for the strangulation victim as the twenty-fifth. “And he had a bite?”
“Like I said.”
“Baldwin was exposed five days before John Doe was and nine days before the strangulation received his. So they couldn’t have passed it to him in any way. The timing is such that theoretically, Baldwin could have passed it to John Doe, but that guy had a bite mark to account for his exposure. There are just three ways Baldwin could have acquired the disease—from another person, from being bitten in Africa, or being bitten here. Where’s that book?”
“On your desk. I’ll get it.”
Broussard returned with his nose in the book. “On the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth, he made calls all day around the city.”
“So much for being bitten in Africa. It also tells us that if he was infected from someone else, it had to be someone nearby. But there’ve been no other cases reported in the entire state. I checked.”
“Maybe there were others but they weren’t severe enough to draw any attention.”
“We know of four cases so far, two in which the disease was the cause of death and two . . .”
“That looked like they were gonna be bad,” Broussard admitted.
“Even a fifty percent fatality rate suggests that any case would be severe,” Blackledge said. “Then, too, where are all the cases the salesman could have infected if it can be transmitted person to person? There should have been some fatalities from th
at by now. But there’s been nothing else. No . . . we’ve got ticks in the city—most likely that have come in on some animals.”
“Any particular kind?”
“They’ll parasitize almost anything.”
“So if the hosts come from a dealer who trades in animals from a lot of countries . . .”
“It wouldn’t have to be an animal indigenous to the Crimea or Africa,” Blackledge said quickly, seemingly not wanting Broussard to score any points in the conversation.
Broussard chalked it down as just another flaw in Blackledge’s character, forgetting all the times he’d done the same thing himself to Phil Gatlin. “Could those antibodies you analyzed the infected cells with also be used to treat the disease?”
“Possibly, if I had more of them. All I’ve got is enough for testing.”
“Let’s get some more.”
“We can’t. They came from a fellow in Zaire who nearly died from the disease. Two months after he gave us the blood we used to extract the antibodies, he fell out of a tree and broke his neck.”
“There must be other people there carryin’ ’em.”
“I’m sure there are. But it’s such a chaotic country—there are no records to tell us who they might be, and even if you knew who they were, you couldn’t find them. Hope you didn’t have any plans for tonight.”
“Why?”
“We’ll be busy tracking the source of those ticks.” Seeing Broussard’s surprised expression, he added, “Surely you’re coming along.”
Having never given this any thought, Broussard had no answer ready. At first, it seemed like an easy call. This was Blackledge’s responsibility, not his, and the sooner they parted company, the better. But then his frustration at not being able to affect in any way the events raging around him and the fact this disease was at the core of Kit’s disappearance caused him to say, “Of course I’m comin’.”
13
Teddy’s eyes flickered, then opened wide in surprise.
“Thank God,” Kit whispered. “I thought you might never wake up.” Kit had just been through the worst day and a half in her life and now, because of her, Teddy was in the same situation. She hated that and herself for finding comfort in his presence.
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