Genetic Bullets: A Thriller (A Rossler Foundation Mystery Book 3)
Page 28
“Yes, please,” was the subdued answer from a thoroughly shaken Neville. If he got out of here, he was going to go for early retirement and a nice, stress free job at home. Walmart greeter, maybe.
Daniel accompanied Neville to Summer’s lab, where he was consulting with Angela and poring over one of her maps, deciding where the group could set up camp inside the valley with the least ecological and archaeological impact.
“Charles, I’d like you to meet Cmdr. Jack Neville, US Navy. He’s in charge of our babysitters. Would you mind taking him into the valley and showing him the ruins? While you’re there, if you’ve decided already, you can show him where he and his men can set up their camp and store their food.”
“Not at all. We haven’t actually decided that, but we can take a look at some places we’re thinking of while we’re in there. Ready to go now, Cmdr. Neville?”
“Won’t it be too dark?” Neville asked. Summers and Daniel looked at each other and chuckled.
“I doubt it,” Summers responded, without further explanation. “Come on, there’s no time to waste. Angela, would you like to come with us?”
“No, I think I’d better finish our project. You go ahead.”
Moments later, Summers and a very confused Neville were bundled into cold-weather gear and approaching the rail cars that would take them into the valley.
Upon arrival within the square where the ruins were located, Comdr. Jack Neville stared at the spires and domes, remembering a video in a cold conference room. He’d been told to forget he ever saw it, and now the real thing was before him, as fantastic and strange as the video footage had been. Eleven years had passed, during which his previously stellar military career had stalled like a junkyard car. Even though the temperature was warm, impossibly warm, he couldn’t suppress a shiver. And what the heck was lighting the place up like mid-day? Dr. Summers didn’t notice his reaction.
“I’m curious, Cmdr. Neville. I haven’t had much contact with military personnel, but I haven’t been under the impression that they are particularly interested in archaeology. What’s your interest here? Besides containment, of course.”
Neville paled. Even though the world now knew of this place, he had no reason to believe he was free to speak of classified information. With a wan smile, he fell back on a silly saying that had become popular because of spy movies.
“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” A dry chuckle for effect, and Summers was mollified.
“Classified, eh?” Summers joked. Neville saw no reason to answer.
“Shall we go?” Summers asked. “Or would you like to see where we think the virus originated?”
“No need for that,” Neville said. His hasty answer amused Summers.
“There’s no need for you to be nervous; you can’t be made ill, and you’re already exposed. You’re stuck with the rest of us until the quarantine is lifted.”
Neville had a rather more frightening understanding of just how stuck he was, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He and his men were here, not to keep sick people from getting out. The poor bastards they’d brought with them had little hope of that. No, he and his men were here to keep the well ones from getting out, perhaps permanently. And if a permanent solution were required, he now understood that he and his men would be victims just as surely as the people they guarded. At least he now knew why he’d drawn the short straw. Neville reflected on his career while following Summers back to the train. What had he done to deserve this? He was well and truly up shit creek without a paddle, and had been for the last eleven years.
~~~
Daniel was acutely aware that in a matter of days it would be impossible to expect any more supplies from McMurdo for the next six months. Already, the weather was worsening, and the constant sunlight of December had become a dull red glow on the horizon only for those who had business at the mouth of the canyon. Within the narrow Purgatory Canyon itself and at camp, it was already perpetual darkness. On a personal level, he was already depressed, knowing he’d miss being with his family for Nick’s first birthday, and that communications might be spotty. The most advanced comms network in the world was no match for the winter winds of Antarctica, though Robert assured him that he and Cyndi had thoroughly secured their Iridium Pilot unit at the top of the volcanic cone when they’d arrived. In the face of the worldwide tragedy, now approaching a death toll of over one hundred million with seventy million more falling ill, it was trifling, but to Daniel it was everything.
Nevertheless, he had a duty to his people to hold it together, help JR make sure supplies were adequate while they could still get them, and keep a calm demeanor regarding the Marines in camp. No matter how ridiculous it was that someone had thought it necessary to send them, they were still a threat to normal operations if they weren’t given something constructive to do. It was time to have a talk with Rebecca and see what they could do about the five new patients the CDC had saddled them with. Shaking his head at the shortsightedness of sending those patients here at this time, Daniel agreed with Rebecca’s anger, but needed to curb it for the sake of peace while they were all trapped here.
Knocking on Rebecca and JR’s door, Daniel entered at Rebecca’s invitation. JR wasn’t there.
“Rebecca, what have you decided about the patients?” he asked.
“Well, so far we’re doing okay caring for them in their rooms, but next week is going to be a problem. I guess we’re all moving into the valley?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“It’s too hot there, it will drive their fever up. We’re going to have to put them somewhere on the edge of the valley, but close enough to the cave system to move them there for their cold treatments. I guess it won’t be like packing them in ice, but I don’t see how we can move enough ice inside to get it done. Could you get Robert or someone to find a spot with a mean temperature of about sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, but close enough to carry them to a cooler room?”
“I guess we can have him look. What’s your backup plan?”
“I don’t know. Maybe load them on the rail cars and run them back to a spot where the temperature stays around fifty. I don’t want to freeze them, but we’ve got to keep their fever down on a consistent basis.”
“Okay, I’ll get Robert started on that project. Summers is working with Angela to locate less ecologically fragile areas for the tents. We have to get moved soon, preferably by the end of the week, but definitely before mid-March. Our fuel supplies will be completely depleted by then.”
“I’d like to go ahead and move my patients this week, if that’s okay,” Rebecca answered. “I don’t want to wait until they’re in the worst part of it.”
“Good idea. I’ll notify Summers.”
“Daniel, I’m sorry I made it more difficult with Cmdr. Neville,” she said. Daniel waved off the apology.
“Never mind that. He was too arrogant about it. But since JR and I had our little chat with him, we seem to have come to terms now. I’d suggest you press his men into service to help you care for the patients. The president made it clear to him that he should spend his time here helping instead of interfering.”
“I’m glad. Is there anything else you need?”
“Yeah, I’m not clear on what Hannah’s doing. She’s not the best at explaining it to a layperson. Do you know what she’s up to?”
“When Ben first got here, he and I talked about an article I read that said our genome was made up of about ninety percent what they call junk DNA. It’s mostly fragments of old viruses, retroviruses, that don’t have any function. The article said that some scientists were exploring the idea that some of them were responsible for certain diseases, like cancer and some diseases that have an autoimmune aspect, like rheumatoid arthritis and MS. Do you follow?”
“Yeah, so far. We’re all carrying DNA that’s not good for anything but making us sick.”
“Well, no, we just don’t know what it’s all for. Anyway, now that we’v
e got a survivor in Ben, and all these new people to use as test subjects, Hannah’s looking for something in that DNA that is prevalent in Middle Easterners and not present in others, or that responds to the CCR5 allele that Ben has in common with Middle Easterners. She thinks that if she can locate it, the steps to create a gene therapy are already well-known and will work faster than a vaccine.”
“Oh. Well, when you put it that way, it makes perfect sense. But didn’t she say that the CCR5 gene has something to do with immune response?”
“She did. However, that can be a double-edged sword. CCR5 can help make you sick just as fast as it calls white blood cells to attack the illness, because that’s what causes fever, and the fever is what’s killing people.”
“Damn, that’s confusing.”
“I know. Try not to think about it, that’s what I do,” she laughed.
“Okay. So, will you keep me posted, so I can inform the president?”
“Sure, but Hannah’s in touch with the CDC daily.”
“That’s as may be, but did they tell her they were sending these patients before they arrived?”
“Well, no.”
“Then why would you think they’d keep the president in the loop the way he wants to be? I’m beginning to wonder about the damn CDC.”
“Join the club.”
That night was the first time in weeks that Rebecca hadn’t been under too much stress to even think about romance. When JR arrived in their room after his long day, he found her freshly showered and dressed in a sexy nightgown he hadn’t seen since Haraz el-Amin got sick. Surprised, he stopped short.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“This is a sexy nightgown,” she answered. “I trust you remember what that means?”
“Hmmm, I’m not sure,” he deadpanned. “Can you give me a hint?”
“How about this?” she purred, reaching for his shoulders and pulling him down for a long kiss.
“I’m beginning to remember,” he whispered, as he moved to a more comfortable position on the bed.
She hoped he’d also remembered to lock the door, but asking was now impossible because he had her lips covered in another kiss. And then she stopped thinking about it as the bliss of once more being wrapped in the arms of her hero overtook her.
~~~
The logistics of moving the camp for winter were complicated by the needs of the various groups who were involved. The last-minute arrival of the military, a squad of thirteen Marines, Neville and two UN observers plus five flu patients had thrown Summers’ and JR’s planning into chaos. True to his word, Harper had arranged for the military to bring their own food. They would be eating MREs for six months, a fact they were bitter about considering that the expedition had much better food. Harper hadn’t taken into account food for the flu patients, an add-on that the CDC sprung on him with no time for arrangements to be made. It was true that they would not be eating much for the two weeks while their illness ran its course, and he’d probably assumed they wouldn’t survive. Rebecca, though, had other ideas. She intended to save them.
Summers’ task was to find spots that wouldn’t impact the ecology to pitch tents for fifty-two people inside Paradise Valley. Per Rebecca’s directions, five of them would need accommodations close to the entrances to the cave system, where they could be moved in and out to keep them cool enough to survive their fevers. In the end, it was decided that the camp could be strung out along the edge of the valley in groups of two or three tents between the cave opening and the waterfall, which would supply both their drinking water as it fell and their bath in the pool below. One by one, every problem of logistics was solved.
Summers was ecstatic, because without other distractions, his work could continue uninterrupted. Most of the other scientists felt the same, though they understood that the inconveniences would probably get old. The only regret that Robert had, and Nyree with him, was that they hadn’t determined what made the substance they’d found on the ledge near the waterfall glow as it did. The hadn’t had an answer from Robert’s solid state chemist friend after he acknowledged receiving the rock they’d sent him and said he didn’t have a clue what it was either. Last they’d heard, he intended to send it along to Caltech, to a colleague there, to have it further analyzed.
Chapter 30 - There you are, you son of a bitch!
With the window of opportunity quickly closing and the rest of her lab already moved, Nyree decided to take another look at the algae cultures she’d been growing and studying for several weeks now, this time under the more powerful 10th Cycle imaging device. Each time she’d done this before, she had seen nothing out of the ordinary. This time, there was a difference. Puzzled by what she could see in the attached monitor, Nyree thought back over the previous tests. Not one had shown any foreign substance within the fine structure of the algae. This one must have been contaminated by something. She selected another sample.
After verifying that every sample had the same “contamination”, Nyree sat back on her chair and thought hard about the structure of the substance she was seeing. It was a microbe of some sort; that was certain. And the shape was so familiar…then she gasped.
“My God, I’ve found it!” she whispered, almost reverently. For another moment, she hugged the knowledge to herself, then ran shrieking down the hall.
“Hannah! Hannah! I’ve found it—the vector!”
Doors flew open throughout the area. Summers and Angela were inside the valley, but Daniel, JR, Rebecca and Cyndi came running, arriving at the door of the lab Hannah had taken over at about the same time. She had just registered that someone was calling her name, and was in the act of flinging open the door when everyone converged on it.
“Wha…?”
“I’ve found it!” shouted Nyree again. “Come, come with me. You have to see this. I’ve found the vector!” Catching her excitement, the whole crowd followed her to her lab, where, on the screen, they could see an entire colony of the H10N7 virus, looking very much like the head of a dandelion after it had gone to seed.
“This came from the algae that Robert collected from the fumarole,” she said. “It took all this time to culture it, but there’s the proof. Every single sample has it.”
Hannah was nodding her head vigorously. “Yes, there’s no doubt. That’s where it came from. Congratulations, Nyree.”
Daniel spoke from behind them. “Does that mean we can develop a cure?”
“Oh, no,” Hannah said, unwittingly dashing his hopes. “We still don’t know why this little bugger makes Middle Eastern people deathly ill and doesn’t even cause symptoms in us. No, there’s something else at work here. I’m still looking for it. This just confirms that the origin of the virus was in the valley; the workers didn’t carry it here. ” Hannah strode rapidly back down the hall to her own lab, leaving the others staring after her in dismay.
Daniel, in particular, was thinking that they had just swept the rug out from under their own feet. That was one of the arguments Harper had made against nuking the valley, and now it was gone.
As one, the rest turned their stare on Rebecca, who had some idea of what Hannah was doing, and the monumental task it was without Ben’s help. To help them understand what was still left to be done before they could develop a cure, she explained in the simplest terms she could, drawing a simplified diagram of the DNA molecule on a whiteboard to help her explain.
“You know that Ben discovered one gene, the CCR5, which has two different forms. One form is normal for us, and one that’s normal for Middle Easterners, but different from ours. You remember that he had a heterogeneous form of CCR5, with a mismatched pair that had one of ours and one of theirs, right?”
The others had all been told of Ben’s discovery, but those whose expertise wasn’t in the field of biology or medicine had not had a clear understanding of it in the first place, so they had put it out of their minds. With Rebecca’s reminder, they were listening curiously for the other shoe to drop.
 
; “So, Hannah and I talked about an article I read awhile back, about a lot of fragments of inactive DNA, some of which appears to be borrowed from old viruses, in the human genome. Remember, Daniel, we talked about that the other day. Hannah contacted her colleagues at the CDC to learn who was working on that, and they more or less told her it was a long shot and she’d be wasting her time. That made her realize that no one else was researching the possibility that something had activated some of those fragments, so she took it on herself.
“She and Ben narrowed down where on the sequence they might find differences in that material between us and them, and started comparing them visually. It’s a huge job—human DNA has more than three billion base pairs. Obviously they couldn’t look at every one of them, but the function of some huge sections are already well known, so like I say, they narrowed it down. She’s maybe halfway through. What she hopes to find is a section of that junk DNA that’s active and doing something in the Middle Easterner’s specimens and inactive in ours. If she does, that will explain why they’re sick and we’re not, and will also give her a target for gene therapy.”
“Is there any chance she’ll find it before they’re all gone?” Nyree asked.
“Not at the rate she’s been going since Ben got sick. Unless she just stumbles on it. It could be anywhere, so who knows?”
“I’d better help,” said Nyree, surprising everyone.
“How could you help?” Rebecca asked.
“At least I know how to use the machine, and distinguish between two things that don’t look the same. I’m going to see if she’ll show me how to help.” With that, Nyree followed Hannah, and Rebecca shooed the rest back to their work. Daniel and JR lingered with her in the hallway.