Spirova must have seen the same thing Larry and Stuart Kiel had—Shirley’s drunken rages, incessant fights between Shirley and Nathan. She was a refugee, though, and Kiel was her lifeline; she had turned Shirley and Nate into the all-American family.
The Herald had included her picture, a small, slender woman with fair hair pulled into a loose knot at the back of her head, curls falling out to frame an elfin face. In the photograph of Dr. K’s Fighting Germs, Spirova was in the first row, her arm around Kiel. Camaraderie in the moment of victory, no doubt.
I couldn’t find any other references to Spirova. I came on a September 1984 interview with Dr. Kiel, part of a series called “Hill and Valley,” which presented alternating university and town personalities. Dr. Kiel was passionate about his work, about play, and about human rights. He and his wife, Shirley, had been involved in open-housing initiatives in Lawrence, but he had also opened his lab to a refugee from Communism—neither the refugee nor the country mentioned by name. His children got similarly short shrift: two sons away in college, nothing at all about Sonia, the bi-polar bear.
I hunted for Spirova’s name in scientific databases. She’d co-authored four other articles with Kiel, the latest in April 1983. And that was the last mention I could find: no news stories, no work on phosphorylation, no membership in professional societies.
Shirley said she thought she’d been rid of Magda for good. Maybe Shirley had reported her to the FBI or INS and made sure she’d been sent back home, where she would have been incarcerated. The wheel turned; in 1989 Czechoslovakia became independent and political prisoners were being freed. If Magda had popped back up in Lawrence, though, why was it a quarter century after Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution?
My databases only skim the surface of international queries. They didn’t turn up an M. Spirova at any Czech or Slovak research facilities. Magda could have gone underground, or changed her name, or married and taken her husband’s name—this was fruitless. I closed the apps.
I walked over to Free State Dogs to collect Peppy. She was happy to see me, but she kept turning back to twine herself around the staff member who’d groomed her yesterday.
I walked her to the car with a firm hand on the leash. “You’re all that stands between me and a meltdown, girl, so don’t go leaving me for some young woman with a bouncy ponytail. It’s bad enough having Jake swooning over foreign cellists without losing you, too.”
Back at the B and B, with pasta, cheese, and salad from the market, I talked it over with Peppy. Dr. Kiel hadn’t worked with anthrax, but whatever he’d studied, he’d been funded by the army as well as the National Institutes of Health—the NIH whose initials he’d flung at me.
Shirley said he’d been called on the carpet after the Matt Chastain experiment disaster. Kiel denied it. He’d shown me a photo of himself with Reagan and Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s defense secretary. It was meant to prove that he hadn’t done anything wrong, and I supposed it did—no president poses with someone who’s going to be a liability.
But why would a secretary of defense meet with a cell biologist, unless that biologist was doing something for the national defense? I brought my computer into bed and sat cross-legged in my underwear, trying to find out what work Kiel had done thirty years ago for the national defense. Not even my expensive databases could get Pentagon information.
I was frowning at the screen when Lotty called, her voice sharp. “Victoria! Thank goodness I’ve reached you. I’ve just been speaking with the clinical team looking after Dr. Hitchcock. He’s suffering from pneumonic plague.”
“Is that like bubonic plague?” I asked uncertainly.
“It’s the most lethal form of it,” Lotty said grimly. “Do you know him? Do you have any idea how he could have contracted it?”
I explained the chain of connections that had led me to his name but added that I’d never met him. “Is that what killed Dr. Roque? They were both handling some soil samples from a nearby farm.”
“I don’t know about Dr. Roque, but you don’t contract plague from handling dirt. With bubonic plague you are bitten by a flea that has been dining on an infected rat or prairie dog. For pneumonic an infected person can cough or sneeze on you. If it had been anthrax, yes, the spores can lie dormant in the soil, but not Y. pestis.”
“Why what?” I asked.
“Not ‘why,’ ‘what,’” Lotty said dryly. “Y for Yersinia. The organism’s formal name.”
I pulled out the offprint that Kiel’s student had given me. “Is it the same as Y. enterocolitica?” I had no idea how to pronounce it, so I spelled it for her.
“That’s a related bacterium,” Lotty said. “It’s relatively harmless—can give you stomach cramps and fever for a few weeks but usually doesn’t need antibiotics. How did you hear about that? You’re not playing with germs now, are you?”
“I’m playing with people who play with germs,” I said. “I just don’t know what game they’re playing.”
“No one at the Cleveland Clinic knows how Dr. Hitchcock contracted pneumonic plague,” Lotty said, “but if he was close to people you’re dealing with, I want you to start a course of antibiotics right now. Get me the number of a twenty-four-hour pharmacy near you and go pick up the prescription as soon as you hang up. I’m going to start you tonight with a double dose. I’m also notifying the CDC in Atlanta, although I’m sure the Cleveland Clinic has already done so.
“If you’re going to be near people or places that may be contaminated, wear a high-grade face mask. Don’t drink alcohol while you’re taking the drug: it lowers its efficacy. If you start spiking a fever or have shortness of breath or pain in breathing, get to the nearest ER at once. This is not a joke: left untreated, pneumonic plague has essentially a one-hundred-percent mortality rate. Do you understand?”
48
Late Night at the Library
I picked up the doxycycline prescription and took two tablets as Lotty had commanded. On my way back to the B and B, I drove downtown to look at the library: I was curious about the story in yesterday’s Herald criticizing the library management for leaving its lights on in the middle of the night.
I parked across the street, my own lights off. There was one car in the lot, a late-model Acura, parked in one of the staff spaces. A light was on in the main reading room, but as I watched, it went out. A moment later Phyllis Barrier, the head librarian, emerged. She didn’t look around but walked quickly to the Acura and drove off.
There seemed to be a reflection of a light in the basement. Many buildings leave lights on at night, for security or for the cleaning crew. Perhaps Ms. Barrier was monitoring the library, to make sure they kept on the right number. Perhaps the suspicions she seemed to harbor toward me made her want to check on whether the foreign detective was sneaking into her library after hours to use the computers.
I walked over and crouched to look in the basement window. A door was closing. I tried to visualize the library layout. There was a music lab down there, without windows, which held an industry-standard sound board. Ms. Barrier doubtless was letting music enthusiasts hold an overnight recording session.
Back at the B and B, Bernie had returned. I’d asked Lotty whether she should also be taking the antibiotic. Lotty, who usually opposed handing out antibiotics like Halloween candy, said in this case it was essential to err on the side of caution. I handed Bernie her own prescription, explaining the danger.
Her eyes widened. “Dr. Lotty seriously believes that one can become ill from the dirt on that farm?”
“Dr. Lotty is worried about our being around such a lethal organism. You’re going home tomorrow, of course, but on the off chance that I’ve been in touch with whatever the source of the Y. pestis is, she thinks you should take a course of the drug.”
Bernie nodded thoughtfully and took two of the tablets. I poured out the rest of the wine so we wouldn’t be tempted to drink it. Bernie curled up in bed with me to watch To Catch a Thief, a movie designed to make y
ou go to sleep happy. Instead, long after I’d turned off the lights, I kept feeling rats scurrying across the bedclothes. My arms and head itched from phantom fleabites.
In between the antibiotics and Cary Grant, I’d looked up pneumonic plague; the Web confirmed what Lotty had said, that it was transmitted via droplets in the air from an infected person or animal, but my semiconscious mind didn’t believe that. At five-thirty, when I woke gasping for air, sure that pneumonia was clogging my lungs, I gave up on the pretext of rest.
I watched Peppy and Bernie enviously. Peppy opened one eye when I turned on the bedside lamp but fell instantly asleep again when she saw I was only sitting up with my phone, not going anywhere; Bernie didn’t even stir.
I’d texted Aanya Malik as soon as Lotty and I finished speaking, to warn her of the possible cause of Roque’s death: you and ruby and anyone else who’s been in contact with his body should be taking antibiotics prophylactically. She hadn’t responded yet. I hoped that didn’t mean she was already ill, too ill to look at her messages. The gestation period was one to three days, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s website, and Aanya had last seen Roque on Thursday. I looked again at the clock—5:37, too early to call her.
If Dr. Roque had contracted plague and sneezed on the containers he sent Dr. Hitchcock, it’s possible Hitchcock had picked up the disease simply from handling the jars.
But where had Roque contracted it? Not from the baby’s bones: I’d asked Lotty that. Apparently Y. pestis wasn’t as hardy as the anthrax bacillus. It wouldn’t live in the ground or in a corpse for decades, so it couldn’t have been in the soil samples.
I started a more serious search into scholarly articles about germ warfare. Much of the language was beyond me, but I gathered that the plague bacillus could be dried and sprayed over a targeted population, which made it possible to use Y. pestis as a weapon. Even though it was less stable than anthrax, it was so efficiently lethal that it remained a perennial favorite among germ warriors.
My eyes were dry and gritty. I turned off the light and lay back down, but I couldn’t turn off the feverish churning in my head.
How had Shirley Kiel described Chastain’s “colossal blunder”? He’d cultured the wrong specimen or switched specimens. Had he exchanged Dr. Kiel’s pet organism, Yersinia enterocolitica, for Y. pestis?
If that was what had happened, it was criminal sabotage, not a blunder. I didn’t know anything about Chastain, except that Sonia had been in love with him. I was guessing he was Cady Perec’s father because in Sonia’s youthful journal she’d recorded seeing him with Jennifer Perec, but I had to admit that was a leap. Gertrude and Kiel both thought he was a loser, but it was hard to believe Chastain would be so embittered by Kiel’s endless insults that he would have started working with the plague instead of the stomach bug.
“Maybe he was a clumsy SOB,” I said to Peppy, “but surely he wouldn’t knowingly have endangered Jenny Perec or baby Cady.”
I wondered about Sonia: she’d been a dishwasher in her father’s lab. She was lovesick, she was jealous of Jenny. But even if she’d been unstable enough to try to hurt Jenny, I couldn’t believe she would have known how to make a switch. You wouldn’t leave Y. pestis sitting around in an air-freshener can where random people could spray themselves with it.
Magda Spirova, though . . . Kiel’s sons thought she’d slept with their father when they met in Czechoslovakia. Say she came to Kansas expecting the affair to continue and instead found herself in a cauldron of Shirley’s fury and Kiel’s fears of exposure. She could have switched the bugs and then blamed Kiel’s whipping-boy student. After all, she’d worked at a bioweapons installation in eastern Czechoslovakia.
I sat up again and went back to the Douglas County Herald story on Magda Spirova. Těchonin. The Web revealed that this was a dot on the map, not even a thousand inhabitants. The Russians made it famous, or infamous: after they consolidated control of Eastern Europe, they’d set up a bioweapons research site there. Among other things, they built giant fermenters to produce cool things like anthrax and typhus in huge quantities. Then they dried the bugs and figured out how to spray them over civilian populations. Magda brought that knowledge with her to Kansas.
Sonia had written in her journals that Chastain had been lying on the ground shaking and gasping for air. Maybe he’d been dying of pneumonic plague. Sonia had flung herself on him as fire was sweeping the field, and Kiel, in a rare moment of parental attention, had pulled her away. Her description of what happened next—I couldn’t remember it exactly.
I got up and went to the drawer where I’d put her journals. They weren’t there. I ransacked the room. The suitcase I’d brought from St. Raphael’s was gone, Sonia’s journals were gone, the sketches of Chastain—everything was missing. The only remaining proof that I’d ever seen those papers was the drawing of Sonia as a polar bear, floating in a cup of lithium; it had ended up facedown under the bed.
I shook Bernie awake, to ask if she’d removed any papers and drawings from the room.
“No, Vic, I know you think I am a vandal, but really—that is too much! Turn off your death-ray eyes, please!”
“Sorry, Bernie. But that means that someone broke in here while we were both out yesterday.”
Bernie watched while I examined the locks on the outer door, but the invader had been knowledgeable: no scratches or inept traces. I should have laid a trap. Should have, could have—didn’t.
I was tired of pretending I wasn’t under surveillance. I went out to the little common area and found the owner laying out boxes of dry cereal for breakfast. I asked her if anyone had come around yesterday looking for me, but she’d worked in Topeka the whole day; all she could tell me was that no one had left a note or phone message.
“Your reservation ends the day after tomorrow,” she reminded me. “I have a family coming in Friday, and they’ll be using my other room and the one you’re staying in. And is that a relative with you? That will be an extra twenty-five a night for every night she’s here.”
I agreed absently. Basically I had two days to find out whatever I could and then—I guess look for another room or go home. I asked the woman if she had any peanut butter, and she showed me a drawer I hadn’t noticed that held foil containers of jelly and peanut butter. I took several back into my room and smeared peanut butter over the mike under the desk. This got Peppy’s attention: she climbed out of bed and gave the mike a thorough scouring. I’d love to know what my eavesdroppers made of that.
Bernie watched, giggling, and went back to sleep.
I sat back down, feeling Peppy’s ears. I didn’t usually examine her lymph nodes; how could I tell if they were swollen?
“We’ll get through this together, girl, and none of that ‘or die trying.’ We are not going to die, and our enemies will be sorry they ever thought they could make us run or blink first, or whatever they thought we might do. We are tougher, smarter, stronger.” I was only shivering because of the early-morning cold, not because I was scared.
I couldn’t figure out any reason my predators had taken Sonia’s papers. They didn’t contain secrets. Or maybe they did, hints of something that people—Kiel?—had spent thirty years keeping under wraps. I rubbed my forehead. Think, Warshawski. People do it all the time. You can, too.
Matt hadn’t been camping at the silo. Shirley said Kiel expected total loyalty from his students, no dividing your time with your family. Assuming Matt was Cady’s father, surely he would have spent—most? much?—some of his time with Jenny and Cady. The plague bacillus could have been at the silo, not just in Kiel’s lab. Matt carried it inadvertently perhaps?
Or—Sonia had cut out the innards of a book that dealt with secret tests on civilian populations.
I couldn’t remember the exact title. Clouds and tests on human populations, I told Google. Yes, here it was: Titheridge, Edelwart, and Zehner, Clouds Without Witnesses: Secret Weapons Tests on Human Populations.
A review in the j
ournal Science said:
If you wanted to test the spread of disease agents in a lab the size of the Central Plains, the Department of Defense was eager to oblige. From 1940 until Richard Nixon outlawed bioweapons development in 1969, the United States Army and Navy conducted tests of how to spread anthrax. They diffused clouds of allegedly harmless anthrax analogs from airplanes over South Dakota, from generators on the tops of cars in St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg. They sprayed the California coast from ships in San Francisco Bay, and dropped lightbulbs filled with organisms into the New York subway system. “It spread pretty good,” according to one DoD observer.
The reviewer added:
Since President Bush reinterpreted the Nixon directive in 1989 to allow for defensive bioweapons research, the United States has been involved in tinkering with genomes of a number of disease agents. Some of this work has been outsourced to private labs.
The old Buffy Sainte-Marie song went through my head: My country ’tis of thy people we’re dying. I hadn’t known that the United States conducted those tests: when I’d seen the book in Sonia’s room, I’d assumed it referred to Russian tests.
I went back to the articles I’d found that explained how you turned a microbe into a weapon. You needed fermenters to brew large numbers of germs, then you dried them out, then you put them in lightbulbs or crop-dusting planes.
One of the articles had an illustration of a fermenter. It was a giant vat, the kind you see in beer breweries. If Kiel had been using something that big back in the eighties, where would he have put it? Out by the Kanwaka silo?
Too many things to put together. Short sleep and high anxiety didn’t make my brain work faster.
“Time to be up and about,” I told Peppy. “Run the riverfront, get some sheets of newsprint so we can write down our known knowns and our known unknowns.”
I checked my messages. A reminder from Lotty to take my pills. With food. I woke Bernie again.
Fallout Page 33