Cobra Event

by Preston, Richard

  relations with the shopkeepers. The agents showed them photographs of the cobra boxes. All of them said they had seen such boxes, but they said that they were out of stock at the present time. One shopkeeper offered to ship a cargo container full of cobra boxes to New York but he said he would need a large cash deposit up front. 'I shall have this container shipped to you at a special price.' Inspector Kipkel spoke to the man sharply in Kiswahili.

  'M'zuri sana,' Johnston said to the shopkeepers. To Peters and Kipkel, he said, 'This isn't panning out.' Next, Inspector Kipkel suggested they try the Kenya National Museum. He said, 'It has a good tourist shop, and it has collections you may find interesting.'

  They explored the National Museum and its gift shop, but they found nothing like the cobra boxes on display or for sale. Inspector Kipkel said, 'We will go to the City Market.'

  'Sounds okay to me,' Link Peters said.

  'It will be difficult for you there. You will see,' Inspector Kipkel said to them.

  Their driver took them to a rotting concrete structure in downtown Nairobi, on a dusty street across from a supermarket. The Nairobi City Market had been built many years earlier by the British, when they had been the colonial rulers of Kenya. It resembled an aircraft hangar. They entered through the front entrance, and immediately they were surrounded by a knot of shop­keepers waving leather goods and carved chess pieces and jewelry. When Johnston showed the shopkeepers photographs of the cobra boxes, the shopkeepers were certain they had seen such boxes. They were certain they could get more boxes for the Americans. In the meanwhile, would Johnston and Peters like to buy anything else? A beaded belt, perhaps, or a set of napkin rings? Silver jewelry? A carved mask?

  'Some of this stuff is really beautiful,' Link Peters said

  to Almon Johnston. Peters stopped to buy some wooden carvings of lions and hippos for his kids. It took the agents two hours to explore the City Market. They circled around the building, stopping at each shop in turn, showing the photographs. It created an unbeliev­able sensation, a churning knot of commercial hysteria that followed them everywhere they went. Yet no one could show the agents a box of the right type.

  It was getting near five P.M., closing time for the Nairobi City Market. Almon Johnston turned to Peters and said, 'I'm beginning to think we should try Tanza­nia.'

  Inspector Kipkel said there was one more possibility. He said they should try outdoors behind the building. They went out through a back door to a dusty open lot jammed with booths of people selling trinkets, people who couldn't afford the rent inside the market building.

  Kipkel made the break. He spotted an old lady with some small carvings. She was sitting in a booth off to one side. He went over to her. The boxes looked familiar. 'Gentlemen, come over here.'

  Her name was Theadora Saitota. She was selling baskets woven from baobab bark. She also had on display a number of small boxes that were not unlike the cobra boxes, except that they were made of gray soapstone, not wood.

  Johnston showed her photographs of the boxes. She eyed the Kenyan police inspector. Then she said, 'I know these things.'

  'Where do they come from?' Johnston asked her. 'Voi.'

  'What?'

  'Voi,' she said.

  'This is a town,' the Kenyan police inspector said. 'There are many woodcarvers in this town.' It was a town on the road to the coast.

  'Do you know who in Voi makes these boxes?' he asked her.

  She looked at the Kenyan inspector, and hesitated. Johnston removed a wad of paper shillings from his pocket and handed the banknotes to the lady. They were worth a few dollars.

  She tucked the money away in the blink of an eye and said: 'He was a good man. He was a woodcarver in Voi. He carve things.'

  'What is his name?' Johnston asked.

  'His name Moses Ngona. He was my cousin. He passed away. Of Slim. Last year,' she said.

  'And you sold his boxes until he died?'Johnston asked. 'Yes.'

  'Do you have any more of Mr Ngona's boxes?' She looked hard at him and said nothing.

  He handed her more banknotes.

  She reached down to a shelf beside her knees. She pulled out a roll of old newspaper. She unrolled the newspaper and placed one wooden box on the plank.

  Johnston opened it, fiddling with the catch. A snake popped out. A king cobra.

  'Do you remember selling any of your cousin's boxes to any tourists?' Johnston asked.

  'Not many tourists here,' she said. 'There was a man from Japan. There was a lady and a man from England. There was a man from America.'

  'Can you describe the American, the man?'

  'He was small.' She began to laugh. 'He had no hairs on his head, he was a little mzungu.' Mzungu means white man and it also means ghost. 'He offer me many dollars, this little mzungu. We have a big business.' She smiled. 'I give him two of my cousin's box! He give me twenty dollars! Ha, ha! This little mzungu! I did have the best of him!' Twenty dollars had made her month.

  'When did this happen?' 'Oh, last year.'

  Almon Johnston telephoned Masaccio from the Old Norfolk Hotel. It was by then Wednesday morning in New York. Johnston explained what they'd found. 'A man paid the lady twenty dollars. That's way too high a price. And that's why the lady remembers. It suggests the guy may have been planning this crime a year ago, Frank. She's down at police headquarters now. They're getting a composite artist. The lady's saying that all small hairless white men look the same to her. But I think they'll get a face. Link and I could start cross­checking with the Foreign Ministry's visa records. The problem is, about fifty thousand male Americans were issued visas to Kenya during the time period. It'll be a bitch going through them.'

  'It's kind of a stretch, guys, but suck it in and start sifting through those fifty thousand visas,' Masaccio said. That afternoon, a fax machine in the Reachdeep unit beeped and extruded a composite drawing of a man's face. He wore glasses. He had a narrow nose and rather puffy cheeks. He was nearly bald, and he looked to be in his thirties or forties. He was a possible suspect. On the other hand, he may have been just another American tourist. Hopkins taped the drawing to the wall, where all the team members could see it.

  Case WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29

  Suzanne Tanaka studied the drawing of the face on the wall. Like all of the Reachdeep team members, she couldn't keep her eyes off it. Was this really the man? Feelings of great terror engulfed her, terror that she couldn't describe, and the feelings kept her awake all the time now. She said not a word to the others of her fear.

  In the biology room of the Evidence Core, Tanaka inspected her mice. One animal seemed more active than the others, and began grooming itself for long periods of time, but the periods of grooming activity were inter­spersed with periods of what looked like paralysis, when the mouse wouldn't move. Then it attacked itself. It gnawed at its front paws, and pulled out some of its hair, especially in the belly. But the animal did not die.

  With Austen watching, Tanaka killed the mouse and dissected it. She placed it on a cutting board, and, wearing triple gloves and full biohazard gear, she opened the mouse with a scalpel and obtained a sample of the mouse's brain. She prepped the brain material and scanned it in the electron microscope. Some of the mouse's brain cells contained Cobra crystals, but on the whole, the brain tissue seemed less damaged than with humans infected with Cobra. The virus seemed to produce a nonfatal infection in a mouse.

  Then another mouse got sick. It curled up and

  groomed itself for hours on end. Two other mice also seemed trembly. Tanaka wanted to look through an optical microscope at brain cells of the mouse she had sacrificed. She made thin slices of mouse brain, stained them, and looked at the slices through the doubleheaded microscope. Austen stared into the other set of eyepieces.

  'When did you see the first signs of illness in this mouse?' Austen asked.

  Tanaka didn't answer. 'Suzanne?'

  'Oh, ah, last night, I guess. It was agitated. That was the first sign. I guess.' She took her
eyes away from the microscope and bent over.

  'Are you all right?'

  'I'm fine.' She went back to looking into the eyepieces. Austen kept looking at Tanaka. 'I haven't seen you sleep since we arrived, Suzanne. I haven't seen you eat.' 'I don't seem to have time.'

  'You need to find the time. I mean this,' Austen said gently.

  Austen moved the slide and replaced it with another one. They were looking, now, at the mouse's midbrain. It was not unlike the human midbrain, a core of material with a lot of branching nerves coming out of it, at the top of the animal's spinal cord.

  Austen moved the slide. 'I think we're looking at the basal ganglia,' she said. That was a bundle of nerve fibers in the mouse's midbrain. The cells contained crystals in the center, and they were hairy with branches. 'It's as if the basal ganglia started to grow. Like there's been some kind of reorganization of all the connections. What do you think?'

  'Think? I ... can't think.' 'Suzanne?'

  Austen looked up across the top of the doubleheaded microscope. She was not two feet away from Tanaka's

  face. Suzanne's lips were trembling. A drop of clear liquid fell from her nose.

  'Suzanne!'

  The Army Medical Management Unit placed the first team casualty, Technician Suzanne Tanaka, in a biocon­tainment hospital room on the second floor. They set up an access vestibule, where nurses and doctors could change into protective clothing before they entered. They started Tanaka immediately on an IV drip of ribavirin, a drug that is known to slow down the replication of some viruses. They told her not to worry, that they hoped her illness would prove treatable. Yet with all their technol­ogy, they were as helpless as doctors had been in the Middle Ages in the face of the Black Death. They set up monitoring machines in her room and started her on Dilantin, an antiseizure medication. When she tried to chew on her wrists and fingers, they tied strips of gauze around her hands, but she tore them off with her teeth, so they had to restrain her arms with nylon straps tied to the bed frame. She was not incoherent, and she was deeply apprehensive of the future. Most of all she was afraid of dying alone, but she didn't want her family to see her in this condition. 'Will you stay with me, Alice?' she said in a thick voice. A nurse wearing a mask and protective suit wiped the sweat off her face.

  Austen stayed with Tanaka as much as possible. Tanaka said that she didn't feel very sick, just very 'coldy.' She did not know why she wanted to, do 'that thing.' She could not find a word for wanting to destroy herself with her teeth.

  A team of four epidemiologists from the C.D.C. had been stationed on Governors Island in their own quarters. They had spent the past two days interviewing case contacts, taking blood samples from people who might

  have been exposed to the virus, and calling area hospitals. One of the C.D.C. people, an epidemic intelli­gence officer named Gregory Katman, found a new case.

  At New York Hospital, a man had been brought into the emergency room having continual seizures. He had begun biting his mouth severely while having dinner with his wife in a restaurant on the Upper East Side of New York. His name was John Dana. An Army medevac helicopter was sent to New York Hospital from Gover­nors Island. By the time the patient-transfer documents had been filled out, John Dana was dead.

  Alice Austen and Lex Nathanson did the autopsy and made a diagnosis of Cobra virus infection. Dana's body was federal evidence and could not be released to the family.

  C.D.C. investigators, working with some of Masaccio's task-force agents, interviewed the Dana family. They lived in Forest Hills, Queens. The investigators discovered that John Dana had been walking across the subway platform in downtown Brooklyn on the Saturday morn­ing when Peter Talides was killed on the tracks. Dana was the man who had wiped specks of brain material from his glasses. He had been infected with Cobra through the eyes. The United States Public Health Service put his wife under quarantine. She was installed in a hospital room on Governors Island, where her two daughters were allowed to visit her.

  John Dana had been infected with the Zecker-Moran isolate of Cobra virus. It had passed from Kate Moran to Peter Talides, and from Talides to John Dana. It had undergone three generations of infection in humans. It did not seem to become weaker as it moved from person to person. Austen found that the clinical signs of Cobra in Dana at autopsy were very much like those in Kate Moran.

  Mrs Helen Zecker, the mother of Penny Zecker, was

  found dead in her house in Staten Island by a C.D.C. investigator. Mrs Zecker's body was lying on her recliner. 'It' had gotten her, as she had feared and predicted. The deaths led Austen to believe that Cobra was capable of sustaining itself in the human species, in a perhaps unlimited chain of human-to-human transmission.

  Recombination

  Hopkins continued to use the Felix machine to decode the genetic material in Cobra. The DNA of the Cobra virus contained roughly 200,000 bases of code. That made it one of the longest and most complicated genetic codes in any virus. Many viruses, especially those that use RNA rather than DNA for their genetic material, contain some 10,000 bases of code. A DNA virus with a long genetic code, like Cobra, is eminently usable as a genetically engineered weapon, because a lot of extra code can be added to it without damaging the virus and rendering it incapable of being able to multiply.

  All day and much of the night, Hopkins ran samples of blood, tissue, and dust through Felix, pulling up genetic sequences from Cobra and trying to identify them. The process was like putting together a very large jigsaw puzzle. Gradually the structure of the organism's genes became clearer to him, yet parts of it mystified him. Cobra was a recombinant virus that had been engi­neered with skill and subtlety.

  'It's a world-class weapon,' Hopkins said to Littleberry and Austen one day. 'It didn't come out of somebody's garage, that's for sure.'

  Hopkins was staring at the screen. 'Uh-oh. Look at this,' he said. He had just fed a piece of code into GenBank. This is what had come up on the screen:

  Sequences producing High-scoring Segment Pairs:

  Variola major virus (strain Banglade . 3900 0.0 1

  Variola virus (XhoI-F, O,H,P,Q genome. . . 3882 0.0 1 Variola virus Garcia-1966 right near. . . 3882 0.0 1 Variola major virus (strain Bangladesh-1975)

  'Wow! Variola major! That's smallpox,' Hopkins said, pointing to the screen. 'Cobra's part smallpox. That is really clever.' He turned to look at Littleberry and Austen.

  Littleberry wasn't answering. He was staring at the screen.

  Littleberry made a fist. He brought his fist down on the table with a crash. 'God damn it!' he said. 'God damn it! Those sons of bitches!' He turned and walked away. He went out on the deck by the conference room and stood by the rail, staring across the waters of New York Bay. He stayed there for a long time. The other members of the team decided not to disturb him. Hopkins carried on into the night, analyzing the code with Felix, muttering strange terms to himself - 'Open reading frame ... virulence factor A47R...'

  Invisible History (III. ) WEDNESDAY NIGHT

  Security matters in the federal government are compart­mentalized. Information from one agency flows to another agency through top managers. The flow is controlled by bureaucrats and intelligence people. This means that parts of the federal government don't know what other parts are doing. Files are routinely destroyed, for security purposes, and people retire and die. The United States government does not know parts of its own history. The knowledge remains hidden in pockets.

  In times of emergency, someone in one branch of the federal government may suddenly need information from someone in a different branch. Then people have to sit down in a room with each other and trade sensitive information by means of an informal conversation. This is secret oral history. It is not supposed to happen. It happens all the time.

  Mark Littleberry telephoned Frank Masaccio and told him there was an area of knowledge that he, Masaccio, needed to become aware of, under conditions of security. Shortly afterward, Littleberry and Masaccio entered the F.B.I.
Command Center in the Federal Building. It was night, and the room was deserted except for one agent, Caroline Landau, who was working on some video feeds. Masaccio stopped before a steel door on the west wall of the Command Center. It was the door to a room known

  as Conference 30-30. It is a secure room - actually a Mosler steel safe. He touched a combination keypad, and the two men settled in chairs around a small table, and the door clicked shut.

  From the corner of her eye, Caroline Landau had watched the two men go into the secure room, and she had understood that it had to do with Cobra. I wonder if an operation is going down? she thought. She could feel an operation gathering in the air, like a weather front coming, bringing a gentle pickup of the wind, and the smell of a building electrical storm.

  'We've found a lethal smallpox gene in the Cobra virus,' Littleberry said to Masaccio.

  'Yeah?' It didn't mean much to him.

  'Will calls it the rocketing gene. It makes a protein that rockets the virus particles around the infected cell. You could think of it as fireworks going off inside the cell. It destroys brain cells while it shoots the virus everywhere. That's why these people die so fast, Frank. The virus is rocketing through their brains. Cobra is part smallpox.'

  Masaccio sucked his teeth and played with his class ring on his finger. 'Fine, but when are you guys going to find me the perp?' he said.

  'What you're trying to do is change the outcome of history, you know,.' Littleberry said.

  Masaccio replied that he was well aware of that. Littleberry settled back in the chair, feeling tired in his bones, and he wondered how long it would be before he could see his grandchildren and feel a wind from fhe Gulf of Mexico on his face. Finding a piece of smallpox in the Cobra virus was like ... dying.

  'It's strange, Frank. I'm proud of what I did as a scientist. But I'm sorrier than ever for what I did as a human being. How do you reconcile that?'

  'You don't,' Masaccio said.

  'Something happened to me late in the program. I mean in the American biological-weapons program. Late 1969. Just before Nixon killed it.'