Cobra Event

by Preston, Richard

  'Could an engineered virus spread genetic changes through the human population?' Hopkins asked.

  There was a long pause. 'This is way off base,' Heyert said. 'Statements like that are frankly offensive to me. I am a physician, a medical doctor. What we are doing here is so remote from what you are suggesting that it is almost obscene. We are trying to alleviate the most terrible suffering. Have you ever seen a Lesch-Nyhan child?'

  Bio-Vek was a small company, all under one roof. Orris Heyert led the investigators into a back wing of the building where there was a cluster of surprisingly small rooms cluttered with benches and laboratory equipment. The labs were populated with young workers, most of whom wore casual clothes.

  'Who's financing you?' Littleberry asked Heyert, in his blunt way.

  'Private investors.'

  'Do you mind telling us who?' Hopkins said.

  'Well, myself for one. I did well in a previous start-up.' 'Who are the controlling shareholders?' Hopkins asked. He watched Heyert's body language.

  'I am a general partner. We have limited partners, of course.'

  'What's your cash-burn rate?' Hopkins asked.

  'You seem to have worked in biotechnology yourself, Dr Hopkins.'

  'Not really.'

  Heyert flashed a not-very-nice look at Hopkins. 'Didn't pan out, eh? So you went to work for the government?' 'It has its ups and downs.'

  They went into a laboratory. The benches were cluttered with research equipment, flasks and table shakers and incubators and small centrifuges. Biosafety cabinets stood against the walls. As they were passing through the lab, Littleberry whispered to Hopkins, 'Those vent stacks we saw on the roof. They're coming from somewhere near here. There's a Level 3 unit around here, but we haven't seen it yet.'

  They went around a corner and entered a small waiting room. There were a few stuffed chairs, and a door that said CLINIC.

  'We have a patient in the observation room with his mother,' Heyert said. 'His name is Bobby Wiggner.'

  Bobby

  Dr Heyert entered the room first and asked Mrs Wiggner if two visitors could meet her son. 'Would Bobby like to be restrained?' he said to her.

  The mother glanced at her son, and she shook her head.

  Heyert brought Austen and Hopkins into the room. Littleberry chose to stay outside.

  Bobby Wiggner was a young man. He looked some­what like a boy. On his chin appeared the faintest beginnings of a beard. He lay in a wheelchair in a half­straightened posture. His back was sharply curved; his body was rigid. A rubber strap went around his chest, holding him in the wheelchair.

  Austen watched. She observed Bobby Wiggner with the care of a medical doctor trying to see what was going on with a patient.

  His mother sat on a chair facing him - out of striking distance of his arms. She was reading to him from a book. The book was David Copperfield.

  The man-boy was thin, bony, stiff. He was wearing a T-shirt and a diaper. His legs were bare and his kneecaps stuck up like points. His legs were crossed - scissored and rigid. His feet were bare, and they were wrapped around each other. One of his big toes was extended straight up at a peculiar angle.

  He had no lips. His mouth was a hole consisting of bulbous wet scar tissue that extended across the lower half of his face: these were biting scars. His upper teeth were gone - probably extracted to prevent him from doing damage when he bit, but his lower teeth remained in place. His jaw was very flexible and seemed to move a lot. Over the years, in episodes, he had reached up with his lower teeth and had cut and sawed away his upper lip and the lower part of his nose. He had also eaten away his upper palate bone by gnawing it with his lower teeth, breaking off the palate bone bit by bit. In this way, reaching up with his lower teeth and using them as cutting tools, he had opened a hole in his face that extended from his palate up through his nose. He had eaten away the septum of his nose - the cartilage and flesh that divides the nostrils from each other. His breath whistled in and out of his mouth. He was missing several fingers; they were stumps. His right thumb was gone.

  His eyes were bright. They moved under deep-set, heavy eyelids, tracking Alice Austen and Will Hopkins. He had scruffy, chopped hair. From his wheelchair dangled an array of Rubatex straps. His hands were not tied down.

  Mrs Wiggner stopped reading for a moment. She looked up at Austen and Hopkins. 'My son sees you more clearly than you see him,' she said.

  They introduced themselves.

  'Wha uh uh wah?'Bobby said. What do you want? Air whistled through his mouth. He had trouble making words because he had no lips or upper teeth or upper palate.

  'We just wanted to see you and to say hello,' Austen said.

  'Huh uh am.' Here I am.

  'How are you feeling today?' Hopkins said. 'Uh guh tuh uh.' Pretty good today.

  His body went into a writhing motion, the back arching and twisting, the legs twisting. Suddenly his arm lashed out, aiming for Austen's face. She jerked her head back, just in time, and his clawlike mangled hand whipped past.

  Bobby Wiggner moaned. 'Sorry. Sorry,' he said. 'It's okay.'

  'Guh tuh hell.'

  'Please, Bobby,' his mother admonished him.

  He lashed out at his mother, trying to strike her, and cursed violently at her. She did not react.

  'Sorry, sorry, sorry,' he said to her.

  'He needs his restraints,' his mother said.

  Quickly, with deft movements, the mother and Dr Heyert tightened the Rubatex straps around the young man, fastening his wrists to the chair, and they placed and tightened a wide Rubatex band across his forehead. That helped restrain the back-and-forth writhing of his head.

  'Tha is wetter,' Bobby Wiggner said. 'Huck you, I sorry.'

  'This is a vertically divided mind,' Dr Heyert said. 'The brain stem has been deranged and wants to attack the things it loves. The higher cortex - the conscious, thinking part of the mind - hates this but can't control it. In these battles between the higher brain and the brain stem, the brain stem wins, because it is primitive and more powerful.'

  'Nuh wuh ook! Nuh!'

  'Are you sure, Bobby?' Mrs Wiggner tried to keep reading.

  'I wanh sohsing tuh drink. Wlease.' 'Do you want milk?'

  'Nuh. Nuh.' No. No. That probably meant yes.

  The young man's mother held a plastic cup up to his mouth. It had a feeding spout. She got some milk down

  his throat. Suddenly he vomited it up. His mother wiped him with a towel, dabbing it around the scarred remains of his lower face.

  Bobby turned his head and looked at Austen, his eyes bright. He was completely tied down. 'Uhr yuh uh Stuh Tuk hwuhnh?'

  'I'm sorry. Could you say that again?' she said.

  'My son is asking if you are a Star Trek fan,' the mother remarked. 'He always asks people that.'

  'Hopkins is,' Austen said.

  Hopkins went over and sat down on a chair next to Bobby Wiggner. 'I like that show,' Hopkins said. 'Wee, too,' Bobby Wiggner said.

  Hopkins listened. He found that he could understand the words.

  Wiggner said (his words are translated now): 'My favorite episode is "City on the Edge of Forever." 'Right! Mine, too!' Hopkins said. 'When Captain Kirk ends up in Chicago.'

  'He was sad when the woman died,' Bobby Wiggner said.

  'Yes. He couldn't save her.'

  'Or history would be changed,' Wiggner said. 'Captain Kirk loved that woman. He should have saved her, and to hell with history,' Hopkins said. They were deep in conversation, Hopkins hunched over, seeming to forget the fact that he was supposed to be conducting an interview for the F.B.I.

  Austen stood back, watching Hopkins. He was leaning forward. She could see the muscles of his back and shoulders through his jacket. She thought: He's very gentle.

  Abruptly she realized that she had stopped seeing Hopkins in a purely professional way. This did not seem to be the moment for that kind of thing, and she put it out of her mind.

  In the waiting room, Mark Li
ttleberry asked an employee where the men's room was, and he went off in that direction. Carrying the Halfiburton briefcase, he hurried down a hallway toward the center of the building. Once again, Littleberry had gone AWOL. He found an unmarked door. It opened inward through a partition wall. On the far side was a short corridor leading to another door. This door was marked with the numeral 2.

  He opened it. Now he was in a corridor even shorter than the first one. There were some white Tyvek coveralls on a shelf, and some masks hanging on a wall. The masks were full-face respirator masks with purple virus filters. At the end of this corridor was yet another door. This one had a window in it, with a biohazard sign on the window, and the numeral 3. The door led inward toward the center of the building.

  'The ring design,' Littleberry said. He looked through the window.

  It was a small room, gleaming white, antiseptic. On a table in the center of the room sat a bioreactor. It was a top-hat model with a core in the shape of an hourglass. The unit was marked with the name of a manufacturer, Biozan.

  He reached up and took one of the masks, and put it on. He opened the door, carrying the briefcase.

  The Biozan reactor was running. He could feel the warmth coming from it. There was no smell in the air. He placed his hand on the glass surface of the Biozan unit. It was exactly the temperature of the human body, 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 37 degrees Centigrade. The temperature of living cells. The hourglass core was full of cells, and the cells were sick with a virus. From the top hat (the upper lid) of the bioreactor came tangles of flexible tubing. A liquid was draining out of the Biozan slowly into a sealed glass collection jar, which sat on the floor. The liquid inside the reactor was a pinkish red. The

  cells in the reactor were sick and dying, and were bursting and pouring out virus particles into the liquid, and then the virus-saturated liquid was running slowly out of the Biozan.

  'Caught a fly,' he said out loud.

  He opened the Halliburton and pulled out a sterile swab. He stripped the wrapping off the swab. Just then he heard footsteps in the corridor. Quickly Littleberry ducked down against the wall, below the level of the window in the door. The Halliburton was sitting open and in view.

  Someone looked into the room but didn't enter. He heard sharp-heeled shoes. It sounded like a woman. He got to his feet and jammed the swab into and around the exit port of the Biozan, where liquid was flowing out of the bioreactor and into the collection jar. He held a Boink biosensor unit in his hands. He stuck the swab into the sample port of the Boink.

  It beeped. The screen read 'COBRA.'

  He jammed the swab into a sample tube, to preserve it, and dropped it into the Halliburton. He had seen enough. Time to get out of here before the stuff gets into my brain and turns me into a human bioreactor. He put the mask back on the wall and went out through the vestibule. He emerged in the main hallway and turned a corner, looking for Hopkins and the others.

  That was where he encountered the woman. She came around the corner heading in the other direction. Their eyes met.

  It was Dr Mariana Vestof.

  He blurted out, 'I was looking for a men's room.' Time hung suspended. Her face held no expression. Then she smiled, but her face was drained of blood, and she said, 'Still inspecting toilets, Dr Littleberry?' She laughed a musical laugh, but her face hardly moved, and was without emotion.

  'Still making vaccines, Dr Vestof?' he said. 'Only for you, Dr Littleberry.'

  At that moment, Hopkins and Austen appeared, coming down the hall, followed by Heyert.

  The sight of Hopkins seemed to paralyze Dr Vestof for a few seconds.

  Hopkins reacted not at all.

  'I will attend to some business,' Dr Vestof said, turning away.

  Hopkins looked at his watch, 'Well, thank you, Dr Heyert. You've been very generous with your time.'

  'I wish I could help you more.' 'You've been very helpful.'

  Hopkins, Austen, and Littleberry dove into the waiting F.B.I. car. Hopkins was on his cell phone immediately with Frank Masaccio. He asked for perimeter surveillance to be thrown around the Bio-Vek building. 'We need this building covered completely. Mark says it's a weapons facility. He took a sample from a bioreactor and it came up positive for Cobra.' He explained who Dr Vestof was. 'I saw her last week in Iraq. She's an international type, Russian-born, lives in Geneva, she told me. She is in this thing deep.'

  'If that's a biological weapon they're making, we can bust them now,' Masaccio said. 'That's a Title 18 crime. Except that sample Mark took might not hold up in court.' Masaccio was thinking about the way Littleberry had gathered the evidence. It may have been an illegal search.

  The question was whether to raid Bio-Vek immedi­ately or to hold perimeter surveillance and gather more evidence. Masaccio finally decided to hold surveillance for the night. 'Remember, our main goal is to get the Unsub before he kills more people. The company could lead us to the Unsub.'

  The helicopter crossed Red Bank, New Jersey, and bent out over Raritan Bay. It headed up the eastern side of Staten Island, vectoring on Governors Island. Whitecaps whipped the sea below; a strong onshore breeze buffeted the helicopter.

  'Bio-Vek may be connected to BioArk, the company that Vestof said she works for,' Hopkins said. 'Maybe the two companies are swapping strains and technology.' 'Welcome to the global village,' Littleberry said.

  'I'll bet Heyert's telling himself he hasn't done any­thing wrong,' Hopkins said.

  'He's probably working both sides of the street,' Littleberry said. 'Making money curing diseases. Making money selling diseases.'

  At Bio-Vek, Dr Heyert, Dr Vestof, and two other managers sat in the conference room. The late-afternoon sunlight lit up the tinted amber window. There seemed to be no one around, and the fields outside were serene and beautiful. The F.B.I. was pouring surveillance into the area. The surveillance teams, which were coming out of Trenton and New York, were men and woman of varying ages and ethnic backgrounds, driving various kinds of cars.

  Outdoors a swollen female robin, gravid with eggs, bounded across a,stretch of manicured grass. Inside, Heyert was speaking. 'I want the production stopped. Immediately.' They were going to stop the Biozan, stop the centrifuges, stop everything. They would sterilize all liquid materials by mixing them with bleach, and when they were sure the materials were dead, they would pour them down the drains, followed by water. 'I want those rooms nuked with bleach, from top to bottom,' Heyert said. 'We will restart the production line with our nonweaponized virus. Destroy all weaponized product, including the master seed cultures. Destroy every trace of

  the weapon. Erase all data pertaining to the project from the computer hard drives.'

  'If they search you, I assume there will be nothing to trod,' Dr Vestof said.

  'The problem is Tom Cope,' Dr Heyert said. 'He's done something - I don't know what he's done, but they are looking for him. He was a sick man, Cope. I knew it at the time. When we fired him, that number-four Biozan went with him. He stole it. He must have taken a master seed culture of the weapon. Did he?'

  The managers didn't know.

  'How can you possibly tell me you don't know if Cope stole a master seed?' Heyert said angrily. 'Every single seed tube was bar-coded!'

  'He may have grown virus from a very small amount,' one of the managers said.

  'Do you think this employee stole a seed culture, Dr Heyert?' Dr Vestof said. She held him in a hard gaze. 'That is incredible. The Concern will be appalled.'

  Sweat was pouring from Heyert. The armpits of his shirt were dark and wet. 'This isn't my fault!'

  'You are the manager of this division, I believe,' she replied cooly.

  'Where is Cope now?' Heyert asked his managers. No one had any idea.

  'Is he in New York?'

  Dr Vestof had changed her plans. She would fly out tonight. She could see that the American subsidiary was about to blow up, and she didn't want to be anywhere near the United States when that happened.

  F
reeze

  That night, the Reachdeep unit went into a kind of stasis on Governors Island. Suzanne Tanaka was hovering between life and death in the medical unit. She had had a seizure. Her prognosis was terminal, according to Dr Aguilar.

  Oscar Wirtz readied his people for an operation. His squad consisted of a total of six agents from the Hostage Rescue Team who were trained in chemical, nuclear, and biological hot operations. It was clear that a freeze­and-seize raid would be made on Bio-Vek, but it was not clear when the raid would occur. Masaccio wanted to wait, to see if more evidence would develop, and he also hoped that the surveillance of the company might lead directly to the Unsub. But he realized that he might have to move at any moment to shut down the company, depending on what the surveillance revealed.

  There were fifteen Bio-Vek employees at the headquar­ters. The rule of thumb the F.B.I. uses for a freeze-and­seize raid is for the evidence team to outnumber the employees at the site. You assign one agent to each employee, including secretaries and mail clerks. The culminating rush of a freeze-and-seize raid should take perhaps sixty seconds. During that time, every employee of the company is frozen by an agent who finds the employee and orders him to stop his physical hand

  motions, to move his body away from any company equipment and then freeze his body. Most employees will be innocent of any crime and will not be subject to arrest. But the company in its entirety can become federal evidence. Masaccio thought the raid could be accomplished with about forty agents, including the Reachdeep operations squad. He gave Hopkins the job of talking to a federal magistrate, asking for a search warrant to be drawn up.

  At one o'clock in the morning, agents watching the Bio­Vek building reported lights and activity. It seemed that all the Bio-Vek employees had gone home, except Heyert, who had not emerged from the building. The fights and activity did not look good. Then, through a window, the agents observed Heyert putting paper into a shredding machine.

  'That's it! They're destroying evidence! Freeze them!' Masaccio shouted. He was sitting in the Command Center of the Federal Building in New York City. Helicopters took off from Governors Island. Bureau cars carrying agents converged on Bio-Vek.