The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  Dozens of workers were tending the equipment. They were wearing surgical masks and white coats and latex rubber gloves, but no other safety equipment. When they saw the inspectors, they drew back and stood around in groups, staring.

  Littleberry hurried toward one of the larger bioreactors. He snapped on a pair of rubber surgical gloves. Hopkins also put on a pair of rubber gloves.

  “Has this equipment been tagged?” Littleberry said. He addressed his question to Dr. Vestof.

  “Yes. Of course!” She showed him the big U.N. tags with identifying information on them. UNSCOM was attempting to put tags on all pieces of biological-production equipment in Iraq, so that the equipment could be traced, its movements and locations known.

  Littleberry studied a tag. “Interesting,” he said. There was a warmth coming out of the tanks, a warmth of body heat. “Nice equipment you have here,” he said to Dr. Vestof.

  She stood very primly, her feet close together, her hair neatly arranged. Her calm was in marked contrast to the agitation of the Iraqi minders.

  “We’ll just take a couple of samples and we’ll be out of here,” Littleberry said. He opened a plastic box and pulled out a wooden stick about four inches long with an absorbent pad on the end, like an oversized Q-Tip. It was a swab stick. He popped open the flip-top lid of a plastic test tube that was half-filled with sterile water. He dunked the soft tip of the swab stick in the tube to wet it, and then rubbed the tip—scrubbed it hard—on a valve on one of the warm bioreactors, trying to pick up dirt. Then he jammed the swab back into the test tube, snapped off the wooden stick, and closed the flip-top lid. He handed the tube to Hopkins. It contained a broken-off swab tip and a few particles of dirt sloshing around in the water. “That’s Al Ghar large tank sample number one,” he said.

  With a laundry pen, Hopkins wrote “Al Ghar large tank #1” on the tube. He dated it and wrote down the tag number of the tank as well. He then photographed the tank with his Nikon camera.

  In a low voice, Littleberry said to him, “Stay close.”

  Littleberry moved fast. He was heading deeper into the building, quickly, purposefully. Littleberry wasn’t taking many samples, but he seemed to know his way around.

  “Who built this plant?” Hopkins asked Dr. Vestof.

  “BioArk. A respected concern.”

  “Is that a French company?” Hopkins asked.

  “We are headquartered near Geneva.”

  “I see. But you personally, are you French?” Hopkins asked.

  “I am from Geneva.”

  “So, you are a Swiss citizen, Dr. Vestof, is that correct?”

  “What are you—the police? I am born in St. Petersburg! I live in Geneva.”

  Littleberry had almost gotten away during this exchange. His figure was nearly lost among the tanks and pipes. He was moving through the middle part of the building now, heading somewhere. He stopped at a metal door with no markings on it.

  “Don’t go in there!” Mariana Vestof called.

  Littleberry pulled open the door.

  Everything happened fast. Hopkins saw a hallway beyond Littleberry. In the hallway there were stainless-steel shower stalls—they looked like biohazard decon showers. The decon showers would be for decontaminating biohazard suits and equipment. It looked like a Level 3 staging room, an entry chamber leading to a Level 4 biocontainment zone. “Mark, don’t!” he said.

  Littleberry ignored him. He unclipped his mask from his belt and fitted it over his head, and suddenly he had gone into the staging room.

  “Stop!” Dr. Mariana Vestof said. “This is not permitted!”

  The far door of the staging room had a circular handle on it, like the handle on a pressure door on a submarine. Littleberry reached the door and spun the handle. There was a sucking sound of rubber seals giving way. It opened to reveal a narrow set of rooms, jammed with equipment, and two people wearing biohazard space suits. It was a Level 4 hot zone, and Littleberry had just opened it wide.

  “United Nations!” Littleberry yelled. He hurled himself toward the hot zone, a swab stick held in front of him. He was like a terrier going into a rathole.

  Frantic activity exploded in the hot zone. The space-suited researchers must have had some advance warning that a U.N. inspection team was in the area, and just as Littleberry started to cross the threshold into the zone, there was a rumbling roar, the sound of a diesel engine revving up.

  A crack of gray desert sky opened up over Littleberry’s head. It widened.

  The hot lab was inside a truck. It was a mobile hot zone, and it was beginning to pull away from the building.

  Littleberry slipped and fell to the ground. Hopkins saw him go down, and he ran for the newly opened space in the wall as if he were in a dream, dragging the suitcases. His camera was banging wildly around his neck. The truck was beginning to move away, and a rear door was swinging. A gloved hand was pulling the door shut. Hopkins jumped to the ground and dropped the suitcases near Littleberry. He fitted his mask over his face and vaulted into the moving truck.

  He was standing inside the truck. He saw gleaming equipment, dim lights. There was a clap of rubber seals coming together. One of the men had shut the back door of the truck. Hopkins was shut inside a Level 4 virus-weapons lab, wearing only a mask, and the lab was moving.

  There were two men inside the truck, both of them wearing green space suits of a type he had never seen before. They backed away from Hopkins. He could hear the dull hissing sound of air circulating. The older of the two men had tangled gray hair and a lined face and blue eyes. The younger man—who seemed to be an Iraqi—began to circle around behind Hopkins, his suit making shuffling sounds.

  Hopkins had to get a sample fast. From his pocket protector he removed a swab stick. He ripped the wrapper off it and looked around for something to swab. His gaze took in control consoles, computer screens. At the far end of the hot zone there was a small cylindrical glass vessel about two feet high. It had a heavy stainless-steel top that looked like a hat. The metal hat had steel and plastic tubes coming out of it that ran in all directions. He recognized it as a virus bioreactor. A very small one. Inside the reactor vessel there was a translucent core shaped like an hourglass. The reactor was full of a reddish-pink liquid that looked like watery blood. The core would be producing some kind of virus.

  The bioreactor was too far away to reach. But next to him stood a safety cabinet—a piece of equipment you’d find in any biological laboratory. It was designed for handling infective materials. It had a wide opening in it. Inside the safety cabinet he saw trays full of clear hexagons—six-sided flat crystals, like coins. The hexagons shimmered with rainbow colors.

  He touched the swab to one of the crystals.

  The younger man had circled around behind him. He grabbed Hopkins, pinning Hopkins’s arms at his sides.

  The older man, the blue-eyed man, wagged his finger at Hopkins and said, “Nyet trogaite!” He suddenly reached up with one hand and tore off Hopkins’s mask—and with his other hand hit Hopkins in the stomach. Not very hard. Just hard enough to make him lose his breath.

  The air flew out of Hopkins’s lungs with a whoosh. He doubled over and threw himself against the rear doors of the truck, one hand flailing for the handle. There was a thunk and a burst of sunlight, and Hopkins was flying through the open air.

  He landed in the dirt and rolled, gasping, taking in huge breaths of fresh air. He ended up lying on his back, coughing, keeping his body curled around the swab stick to protect it. He had not had time to take a photograph, but the swab might be the bearer of important DNA. The doors of the truck slammed shut, and it roared off down the road.

  Morgue

  OFFICE OF THE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER, NEW YORK CITY, THURSDAY, APRIL 23

  THE SUN HAD RISEN by the time Alice Austen finished a cup of coffee and a sweet roll in Gerda Heilig’s kitchen. She put her boots and her knife pack into a knapsack and went out onto First Avenue and turned south, walking quickly. She was en
tering a complex of hospitals lined up on the eastern side of Manhattan, overlooking the East River, like ships at dry dock—New York University Medical Center, with a number of research institutes; Bellevue Hospital; the Veterans Administration Hospital; and other medical institutions. At the northeast corner of First Avenue and Thirtieth Street, she turned up the steps of a gray building, number 520. It was six stories tall—small for this part of Manhattan. It had dirty aluminum-framed windows. The first story of the building was covered with blue glazed bricks, the color muted by dirt and dust. The building was the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. The front door was locked, and she pushed the night buzzer.

  A tall, somewhat overweight man in his sixties let her in. He had curly white hair at the temples and was going bald on top. He was dressed in a green surgical scrub suit. “I’m Lex Nathanson,” he said. “Welcome to the O.C.M.E.—the ugliest building in New York.” The marble walls of the lobby had a peculiar brownish, mottled, streaky color. It reminded her of a cancerous liver, sliced open for inspection. On the liverish wall ran a motto, in Latin, in metal letters:

  TAQUEANT COLLOQUIA EFFUGIAT RISUS HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE

  “How’s your Latin, Dr. Austen?” Nathanson said.

  “Hmm. Let’s see…‘Speech quiets the place where Death is happy…’? That can’t be right.”

  He smiled. “It means, ‘Let conversation cease, let the smile flee, for this is the place where Death delights to help Life.’ ”

  “ ‘Where Death delights to help Life,’ ” she murmured as she followed Nathanson into his office, a big, uncluttered room located near the front door.

  A man stood up to greet her. “Glenn Dudley,” he said. “Deputy chief medical examiner.” He shook Austen’s hand. Dr. Dudley had a massive grip and a tight mouth. He was a handsome, muscular man of about fifty. He had black hair and a square face, and he wore square metal-framed eyeglasses.

  Austen opened up her green federal notebook, her epi notebook. She wrote Nathanson’s and Dudley’s names on the first page. “Could I have contact phone numbers for you?”

  “Are you a forensic pathologist?” Glenn Dudley asked.

  “No. I’m a medical pathologist,” she said.

  “You’re not trained in forensics?”

  “I have worked on forensic autopsies,” she said. “I know basically how it’s done.”

  “Where?” Dudley asked.

  “In the Fulton County medical examiner’s office, in Georgia. The C.D.C. has a relationship with them.”

  “Are you board certified?”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  Dudley turned to Nathanson and said in a flinty voice, “They don’t even send us a certified pathologist.”

  “I’ll be taking my boards next year.” She concentrated on her green notebook.

  Nathanson said, “Well—as I imagine Dr. Mellis told you, we’ve had two very unusual deaths. The girl who died yesterday, and a similar incident five days ago. The first case we noticed—”

  “I noticed,” Dudley said.

  “—Glenn noticed, was an unidentified homeless man. He was known locally as Harmonica Man. He was about sixty years old, and he used to ride the subway cars playing a harmonica. He had a cup and he asked for handouts. He went all over the city. I live on the East Side, and I actually remember seeing him riding the Lexington Avenue local. He died a week ago at the Times Square subway station, on the southbound platform of the Broadway line, if you know where that is.”

  “I don’t know New York very well,” Austen said.

  “It doesn’t matter. He died in grand mal seizures,” Nathanson said.

  “It was a spectacular death,” Dudley said. “The guy seized in the middle of a crowd, he’s screaming, he bit off his tongue, he bit his hands, and he had a hemorrhage. He was D.O.A. at Bellevue. I did the autopsy, and found his tongue in his stomach. The Fire Department E.M.T. squad reported that he arched his back and froze and died on the platform that way, having eaten his tongue, and with a massive bleed from the mouth. He was with a friend of his—another homeless guy named…” He flipped through the case folder, glancing over the file. “Named Lem. No last name given. When I did the autopsy, I found that this Harmonica Man was an alcoholic with cirrhosis of the liver, and he had varicose veins in the esophagus. A vein had burst in his esophagus. That was the source of the bleed from the mouth, that plus bleeding from the tongue stump. He had brain swelling and brain damage, with hemorrhage in the midbrain. It could be a poison, a toxin. But nothing came up with the toxicology.”

  “What got my attention,” Nathanson said, “was the form of the seizure—that curvature of the spine.”

  “That’s less important, I think, Lex,” Dudley said.

  “It’s known as an arc de circle seizure,” Nathanson went on, in a thoughtful way. “I looked into this. The arc de circle seizure was identified by the nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot. It’s a fake seizure. A real seizure doesn’t make the spine curve. But the two decedents weren’t faking—they were dying.” He turned to Austen. “This second case has gotten into the news media, and we’re under some pressure to come up with answers.”

  “So you called the C.D.C., Lex—and you listened to Walt Mellis with his theories. He’s a nut,” Dudley said.

  Nathanson shrugged and flashed a smile at Austen. “You’re not a nut, are you, Doctor?”

  “I hope not,” she said.

  Dudley stood up suddenly. “Let’s get going.” He picked up a manila file folder that had been sitting on an empty chair. “We can talk in the morgue.”

  They stepped into a freight elevator. It went to the basement of the O.C.M.E. On the way down, Nathanson turned to her. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Kind of young for a fed,” Glenn Dudley remarked, standing behind them.

  “It’s a training job,” she said.

  THE MORGUE was in the first basement level, next to the receiving garage. A mortuary van had just pulled in, and a couple of dieners, or morgue attendants, were unloading a body covered with a sheet of blue paper. The attendants transferred the body to a mortuary gurney known as a pan, which is a sort of metal trough on wheels. The pan was shaped like a trough so that fluids would not drip out of bodies onto the floor.

  The receiving garage was crowded with bright red Dumpsters marked with biohazard symbols, spiky three-lobed flowers. A sign on the wall said:

  PLEASE DO NOT THROW LOOSE CLOTH OR BLOODY SHEETS ON THE DUMPSTERS.

  Nathanson approached a man dressed in a green scrub suit. “We’re ready, Ben,” he said. “Let me introduce you to our C.D.C. investigator. This is Dr. Alice Austen. And this is Ben Kly. He’ll be the attendant. Ben, we’re keeping quiet about Dr. Austen’s presence here.”

  “Sure,” Kly said, and smiled. His name rhymed with “fly.” He and Austen shook hands.

  Ben Kly was a slender man of medium height, an Asian-American with dark, creamy skin. He had a quiet voice. “I’ll be with you in a second,” he said. He wheeled the pan with the body on it into the hallway.

  They pushed through a pair of battered swinging doors into the morgue, where they were enveloped by a thick smell, sour and penetrating—a smell as old as the world. It hung in the air like a liquescent fog, and seemed to coat the back of one’s mouth. It was the smell of bacteria converting meat into energy. The bacteria were liquefying human meat and giving off gases. In the Manhattan morgue, this smell rose and fell and changed day by day, depending on the weather and events around the city, but it never went away. The Manhattan morgue emitted an endless Gregorian chant of smell.

  It was Charles Darwin who first understood that evolution is caused by natural selection, and that natural selection is death. He also understood that vast amounts of death (vast amounts of natural selection) are required to effect a small permanent change in the shape or behavior of an organism. Without huge amounts of death, organisms do no
t change over time. Without death, life would never have become more complex than the simplest self-copying molecules. The arms of a starfish could not have happened without countless repetitions of death. Death is the mother of structure. It took four billion years of death—a third of the age of the universe—for death to invent the human mind. Given another four billion years of death, or perhaps a hundred billion years of death, who can say that death will not create a mind so effective and subtle that it will reverse the fate of the universe and become God? The smell in the Manhattan morgue is not the smell of death; it is the smell of life changing its form. It is evidence that life is indestructible.

  THE MORGUE WAS ring-shaped, with a central rectangular core where bodies were stored inside crypts. You circled around the core to gain access to a particular crypt. The walls were made of bricks painted a pale green. The crypt doors were made of stainless steel. Various smaller rooms led off from the main room. Some of these smaller rooms were for holding severely putrefied bodies, so that the smell would not fill the morgue area.

  “There’s the ladies’ room,” Nathanson said, pointing to a door off the morgue. “You can change in there.”

  It was cleaner than most rest rooms in morgues. Austen found a shelf holding fresh surgical scrub suits. She removed her street shoes and took off her blouse and skirt and changed into the scrubs. Then she put on her Mighty-Tuff boots, and laced them up.

  She found Nathanson, Dudley, and Kly in a storage room on the other side of the morgue, putting on the next layer of clothing. The storage room was full of metal shelves holding biosafety equipment. They put on disposable surgical gowns over their scrub suits. Over the surgical gowns they tied heavy plastic waterproof aprons. They put surgical covers on their shoes, surgical caps on their heads.

  Glenn Dudley pulled a disposable button mask down over his nose and mouth. It was a soft cup made of biofilter material, like a surgeon’s mask. It had a blue button in the center. His voice came out of the mask. “Hey, Dr. Austen, where’s your space suit? I thought you guys from the C.D.C. have to work in space suits.” He laughed behind his mask.