McKean 02 The Neah Virus

by Thomas Hopp

“Lost Souls!” I gasped. “The Lost Souls disease the old man talked about!”

  McKean raised a long index finger for silence. “That’s one possible interpretation, Fin. But let’s not jump to conclusions.”

  Curtis shrugged. “I don’t know, Peyton. After what happened to Pete, I’m thinking the way Fin’s thinking.”

  “Me too,” Janet interjected.

  “I’ll wait for more data,” McKean countered. “Once you get that scroll photographed, please e-mail me a copy immediately.”

  “Sure, Peyton,” Curtis replied. “But I’ve got to tell you I’m definitely with Fin and Janet on this one. You may not have heard this, but they’ve got two new cases of people going berserk at Neah Bay.”

  The three of us exchanged concerned glances.

  “I hadn’t heard,” said McKean. “Who?”

  “Two fishermen.”

  “White guys?” I asked.

  “Not sure,” said Curtis. “Probably. I know they’re from out of town. They had a boat moored in the marina and were staying at the King Salmon Motel. In the middle of the night they both went crazy. Ran screaming through the streets naked. The reservation police thought they were drunk and arrested them after quite a tussle. Maced one, tasered the other. They’re under watch now at the Makah Clinic. Restrained and raving like wild animals, both of them. If it was drugs or alcohol it should have worn off, but it hasn’t. They’re to be transferred to the hospital in Port Angeles.”

  “Other symptoms?” McKean asked.

  “Delirious, feverish, I don’t know what else. I didn’t see them. I got all this from the folks at the Makah Museum when I stopped by on my way out of town this morning.”

  “Anecdotal evidence cannot be considered scientific proof of anything,” said McKean. “But I’ll go along with the three of you. We can test some viral DNA probes to see if the Spaniard was infected with a known pathogen, just to keep you all from getting too upset.” He eyed each of us significantly as he spoke.

  “Good,” said Janet. “I’ve got some viral-probe microchips left over from the jihad virus experiments. I can get a result by tomorrow.”

  “Excellent,” said McKean. “And just as a precaution, let’s keep the remainder of the our bone sample under tight bio-containment.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Janet. “I’ve been handling it as a biohazard ever since you gave it to me.”

  Curtis said goodbye a moment later. McKean switched off the phone link and leaned back in his chair. After a contemplative pause he said, “Personally, I’m more interested in the man’s origins than his death. I’ll bet he was a Spanish nobleman.”

  “What makes you think that?” I asked. “How can you even distinguish Spanish from Mexican?”

  “With a high-resolution ethnicity-testing microchip,” McKean said confidently, “we could probably trace him back to his relatives in some village in Andalusia. But for the moment, the DNA says he is definitely Spanish and not Native American. I’ll go a step further and suggest he was probably a gentleman of the King’s court. Maybe even royalty. Perhaps the captain of a ship or an officer of the garrison at Neah Bay.”

  “You can’t tell all that from DNA,” I scoffed. “Can you?”

  “Answer: no,” McKean agreed. “But allow me a little interpretation. You see, Fin, by the time the Spanish came to Neah Bay, they had been in the New World for generations. A common seaman or garrison soldier would most likely have been of mixed Spanish and Indian descent - a mestizo. But this gentleman was not one of those. According to Janet’s results, he was a full-blooded Spaniard with no New World DNA in him at all. Hence, he must have been from the ruling class. And that meant Spaniard in those days.”

  “Okay,” I admitted. “I’ll accept that interpretation. But I’m more interested in what killed him.”

  McKean smiled. “I know you’re worried about Gordon Steel’s Lost Souls disease, Fin. But I’m not so easily swayed by the raging of an angry old man. Nevertheless, I’m willing to look for viruses. Given the history of smallpox and other diseases that ravaged Neah Bay in those times, we might illuminate history a little if we find this man was carrying something dangerous.”

  He turned to Janet. “Let’s shoot the works. Do a full analysis with every pathogenic-organism microchip we’ve got. See if anything turns up positive. Of course,” he said, smiling at me, “we have no microchip for Lost Souls disease, or any other hypothetical or metaphysical disease.”

  Janet made a few notes on a pad of paper and then went back to the lab. McKean turned back to his desk and picked up the article he had been reading, but paused to look at me inquisitively. “Something else on your mind, Fin?”

  “All this talk of viruses has me nervous,” I said. “What if we were exposed to something - smallpox, for instance?”

  He looked at me slyly. “Maybe we’ll die.” And then he laughed.

  “That’s a cavalier attitude,” I remarked.

  “Why worry over something I know nothing about, and therefore can do nothing about? Viral particles in a two-hundred-year-old sample are unlikely to retain their infectiousness, at least not without passage through an animal host or tissue culture. Neither one of those conditions apply in this case. The Lost Souls disease just isn’t real to me. If I thought we were threatened, I would react. What would you have me do, Fin?”

  I shrugged.

  “Clearly,” McKean said in a lecturing tone, “the events of yesterday have made you a little irrational. I think you should put speculations out of your mind. Rest assured that my actions will be guided by thoroughly logical thought processes.”

  Still not entirely convinced, I left McKean working at his cluttered desk and went out and walked back to Pioneer Square. Approaching the five-story brick building that houses Cafe Perugia and my office, I strolled past the shops and art galleries without paying them much attention until something in one window caught my eye. The Ortman Gallery trades in Northwest Native art, its showroom displaying dozens of pieces sculpted from cedar logs and painted in geometric patterns of red, black, and green, set on white pedestals or standing tall from the hardwood floor nearly to the ceiling. I had paused many times to look over the carved figures of eagles, ravens and savage half-human spirits, but I had never taken much interest until this day. Now my attention was drawn to an object mounted on a white panel facing the window. It was a harpoon. Or rather, the wooden foreshaft of a harpoon, about three feet long and meant to be attached to a longer hindshaft via an overlapping notched joint. Its tip was made from the shell of a large mussel, the gray-black rim of which had been sharpened into a barbed, deadly-looking point. The tip was bound to the age-blackened wood of the foreshaft by cords of dark leather, and this leather continued into a short length of braided strap whose frayed end must have been part of a longer line that the whalers used to haul in their prey. A card on the wall read, “Makah Harpoon, circa 1850. Artist: unknown. Price: $2,500.”

  “Artist,” I murmured to myself. “This isn’t artwork. It’s a hunter’s weapon.”

  “You got that right,” a voice muttered not far from me.

  There is an alley adjacent to the Ortman Gallery and at its entrance a man sat with his back propped against a green garbage dumpster. He had his knees up in front of him with a plank of cedar wood between them, which he was whittling with a large jackknife. I caught the reek of whiskey from him and saw that his denim pants and red nylon parka were blackened with street grime. He glanced up at me and then resumed his carving, which he was going at with great intensity and precision. The plank’s rectangular corners had been rounded and sculpted into an oblong, chain-link shape that followed a serpent’s winding contour with two heads facing each other, just as I had seen on the coffin the day before.

  “I’ve seen that serpent at Neah Bay,” I said, surprised and a little disturbed to see it again so soon.

  He glanced at me again and I could see from his facial features that he was Native American. “I’ve seen it too,” he re
marked, but he said no more, returning to his sculpting and ignoring me despite my interest. His detailed whittling had brought out the three-dimensional shapes of the serpent’s heads and scales and dorsal ridges that outlined the body, all of which were subdivided into smoothly carved geometric patterns I wouldn’t have thought achievable with a tool as simple as a jackknife. The man, despite his pathetic appearance, clearly possessed a great talent. A logo printed on the breast of his jacket depicted a dugout canoe being paddled over the sea by half a dozen men. Words in large black letters encircled the design: “Makah Pride - Neah Bay - Washington.”

  I glanced back at the Ortman Gallery, wondering if this impoverished sculptor aspired to put his work on display inside, and he answered my unspoken question.

  “They give me a hundred bucks for one of these and turn around and sell it for two-fifty. ‘I’ll let you have this one for a hundred-fifty.’ He looked at me cagily.

  “No thanks,” I replied, moving on toward my office. I had suddenly developed a queasy feeling. Maybe it was the whiskey stink of the man, or the pungent odor of urine in the alley, or maybe it was the uncanny appearance of this emissary from Neah Bay when I was still afflicted by my own recent experiences. Whatever the cause, a sudden malaise clutched at my guts. I hurried along the street, quickly covering the last block to my office building as if I were fleeing a ghost. The thought of this fallen soul carving little planks in exchange for drinking money was appalling.

  Chapter 7

  The next morning I was at Peyton McKean’s office by 11 am, in time to see how the viral DNA probes had worked out. Janet came in from the lab, sat at the computer desk, and brought up an image of a DNA microarray chip on the screen. The chip was almost completely black. However, in one column near its right edge lay a series of green dots glowing with greater or lesser intensities against the dark background.

  McKean studied the screen minutely, explaining for my benefit, “This is a twenty-four-by-twenty-four array of viral DNA dots, Fin. The DNA of twenty-four well-known viruses, in columns of twenty-four probe dots each. Tiny by comparison to the array for human DNA we looked at before, but sufficient for these much simpler organisms. Most columns are dark and therefore no match. But the second-to-last column is clearly a match by virtue of quite a few bright green DNA dots.”

  Janet explained further. “Each dot is actually an area where a short DNA probe sequence has been attached to the glass surface of the microchip, trillions of copies of a different piece of viral DNA within each dot. When you attach a green fluorescent chemical to your DNA sample and wash it over the microchip, the dots light up where the sample DNA matches the DNA on the chip and sticks to it. Each green dot in that right-hand column is a different DNA match for the same virus. The dark columns on the left side of the chip are DNA probes for unrelated viruses. Our sample DNA didn’t match any of them.”

  “So you have twenty-three viruses that are misses, and one that is a hit?” I asked.

  “Good, Fin,” McKean said with a note of condescension. “You’re catching on.” He swept a finger over the many columns of dots so dim as to be lost in the dark background. “The mismatches are herpes virus, two common cold viruses, four recent strains of influenza, three avian flu viruses, and a dozen other viruses whose DNA probes make up one column each.” His finger stopped over the penultimate column. “Some dots in this column are definitely positive.” He leaned nearer the screen. “That is the most intriguing finding - some dots in this column are positive, but not all.” He pointed out several faintly-lighted dots and dark dots in the otherwise green-dotted column.

  “They’re sort of hit-and-miss,” Janet remarked.

  “I have seen results like this before,” McKean murmured, his face illuminated by the glow of the computer screen - and by insight. “There are three cases. Some dots are bright green and therefore exact matches. That is, every DNA code letter in the probe matches the corresponding code letter on the viral DNA. Dark dots mean the codes are entirely unmatched. Dim green dots are partial sequence matches. That is, most code letters match, but a few are mismatches. This is typically seen when two viruses are related but not identical.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense,” I said, “what virus is it?”

  “Lyssa?” McKean asked Janet.

  “Lyssavirus genotype one,” she confirmed.

  “But there’s a catch,” McKean elaborated. “If a normal lyssavirus were present in the Spaniard, then all of the dots in this column should light up brightly, not just some. I personally find this sort of odd result more exciting than a precise match. We may be dealing with a new virus here, one never described by science before.”

  McKean spoke with the enraptured tone of a scientist in the thrall of discovery. But I felt a deep qualm. I said, “It makes me nervous to think you’ve got something new when Gordon Steel is talking about Lost Souls disease. Is lyssavirus dangerous?”

  “Oh!” Janet said. “I was forgetting that you’re not an expert, Fin. The lyssaviruses are dangerous, all right. You already know the common name for lyssavirus one. It’s rabies.”

  “Rabies!” I exclaimed. “So that’s what made Pete Whitehall go mad!”

  “That makes some sense,” McKean allowed, “given Whitehall’s violent behavior. But this is not exactly rabies virus.”

  “That makes me all the more nervous,” I said.

  McKean stared hard at the column’s mix of bright, dark, and half-lit probes. “I would conclude that this virus is indeed a member of the lyssavirus family, but the half-lit probes say it’s not authentic rabies and the unlit probes suggest it’s a distant family member.”

  “Family member? You mean there are other rabies viruses?”

  “Oh, most assuredly,” said McKean. “Rabies belongs to a large group of related viruses, the mononegavirales, which include the rabies-like animal viruses Mokola, Duvenhage, and West Caucasian bat virus, as well as more distant cousins like measles, mumps and Ebola.”

  “Ebola!” I exclaimed. “Now you’ve got me scared.”

  Janet added, “We didn’t test for all those viruses because we didn’t have the full set of virus microchips.”

  “But you can get more?”

  “Certainly,” she replied. “And we can keep looking until we find a set of viral DNA probes that match this virus exactly.”

  “And if none match?”

  “Then we’re looking at a previously unknown virus,” said McKean. He put a hand on Janet’s shoulder and his eyes lit with inspiration. “Imagine discovering a whole new member of the lyssavirus family.”

  Janet smiled. “We could co-author a paper.”

  “A whole series of articles,” McKean replied enthusiastically. “Or publish a book!”

  “But wait a minute,” I said, interrupting their happy communion. “If it’s related to the rabies virus, it might be deadly. It killed the Spaniard, didn’t it?”

  “Deadly? Quite possibly,” said McKean, his smile diminishing.

  “If it killed the Spaniard,” I pressed him, “and if it killed Pete Whitehall, then - “

  McKean’s smile disappeared and the light of scientific excitement faded from his eyes. “Then,” he concluded for me, “you and I may have been exposed to something dangerous.”

  “And Gordon Steel’s claim of a Lost Souls disease - “

  “Might have a basis in fact. But let’s not get ahead of our data.” He turned to Janet. “You can get microchips from Kay Erwin at Seattle Public Health Hospital covering every known mononegavirus. Let’s rule them all in or out. After that, we can decide whether or not we’ve got something new.”

  My heart rate had kicked up several notches. “Are we in danger?” I asked.

  McKean stared at the screen for a moment and then murmured, “Answer: unknown.”

  McKean made a video call to epidemiologist Kay Erwin at Seattle Public Health Hospital. Kay answered at her office desk. She’s a thin, pale, short-haired, salt-and-pepper brunette, who was
dressed her white lab coat. McKean explained recent events and the nature of his sample from the grave. “You’ve got the most extensive collection of pathogen DNA microchips in the Northwest,” he said. “Can I send Janet to pick up a sample of every mononegavirus chip you’ve got?”

  “Yes, you may,” Erwin replied. “I’ll tell one of my people to have it all waiting by this afternoon.” She and McKean briefly discussed the idea of a contagious virus and Gordon Steel’s notion of a Lost Souls disease, but Erwin was as dubious as McKean and perhaps more so. “No one has informed me of anything going on at Neah Bay,” she said.

  “And as you are the local coordinator with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta,” McKean replied, “I suppose you would be the first to hear of anything really contagious.”

  Erwin said, “I’ll make a call to Neah Bay and see what their local clinic has to say. Thanks for the heads-up, Peyton. I hope the microchips help. Keep me posted on your results.”

  After ending the call, McKean turned to Janet. “Let’s move as quickly as possible. As soon as you’ve got the chips, get the tests running. Meanwhile, have our DNA synthesis lab make samples of the strongest-reacting lyssavirus probes. We’ll to use them to isolate the virus from the tissue sample - under strictest bio-containment in the BCL-4 lab.”

  As Janet took her note pad and jotted down her assignments, a crease of concern showed on her forehead. When she had gone to the lab I asked McKean, “So, are you starting to share my worries about the Lost Souls disease?”

  He thought a moment and then replied, “Answer: yes.”

  I had lunch with McKean in ImCo’s cafeteria, questioning him about details of his experimental plan and jotting his explanations in a black leather-bound notebook I had brought with me. Then I watched him and Janet and the others bustling around their lab for a while. Then I got bored. With no results immediately forthcoming and a heavy load of new information to write down, I excused myself and headed for my office. I walked away from ImCo slowly, my mind a tangle of new concerns. A nagging fear had been with me since Neah Bay. Despite Peyton McKean’s admonishment not to overinterpret the known facts, I couldn’t help feeling something horrific was in the air.