The White Iris

by Susanne Matthews

  “Son of a bitch. And you know this how?”

  “The women we rescued told us about the Great Burning and the way the cult members are getting ready to go to a place called the Promised Land. The leader has pharmaceutical expertise, so I have no doubt he’d be capable of bioengineering something.”

  “And how does Julie fit into this?”

  “She’s one of the CDC’s top virologists. If anyone can stop a super bug, it’s her. She can tell us how to treat it and maybe come up with a vaccine. My gut tells me that’s why he wants her dead.”

  Keith whistled. “Have you got any proof that someone’s after her? I mean, I thought so because of the way her loft had been searched, but my captain’s convinced it was a robbery gone bad. Maybe Lenore heard something and called out.”

  “Was anything stolen? Julie mentioned her television, a laptop, and her cell phone. She told me there’s also a portable safe in her closet.”

  “I didn’t see any computers or cell phones, but the television was still there, I’m sure of it. As far as the box in the closet…Lenore’s purse was on the floor near her dresser. It didn’t look as if anyone had touched it, but the guy could’ve missed it. But you said you spoke to Julie. When?”

  “A short time ago,” Trevor said, measuring his words carefully. “She’s staying with some old friends. For the record, she flew out of Atlanta at ten last night, on a flight to Vegas. You can verify that. She tells me she’s convinced someone has been following her for months, and that’s not all. Ellie’s death may not have been an accident. Julie was supposed to be in that limo.”

  “Damn. I’ll have to run this by the captain, but if you make it an official request from the FBI…”

  “Consider it done. Is Grayson still in charge?”

  “He is.”

  “Okay. I’ll send something to him as soon as I get off the phone.”

  “What do you need us to do?”

  “Have you contacted Lenore’s family yet?”

  “No. From what we can see, she doesn’t have anyone. There’s no emergency contact person listed in her passport. I was going to contact the British Embassy in the morning.”

  “I’m certain her mother’s in England. I’ll find out more when I talk to Julie again. Will you be the one questioning the staff at the CDC tomorrow?”

  “I will.”

  “I want you to look for anything suspicious. Talk to everybody. See who’s reluctant to talk to you and who’s overly friendly. It’s critical we figure out who might be working on the inside, because the Prophet needs to stay on top of things, and he’d have a mole in the CDC for sure. I specifically want you to ask about any missing pathogens.”

  “You mean stolen germs?”

  “Yes. If the Prophet has a biological weapon, some kind of super disease, he had to get the basics for it somewhere.”

  “Will do. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, Julie says she left a note for Lenore on the fridge, saying she’d be out of town for a while. Did you find it?”

  “Let me look. I took a few pictures, including some in the kitchen.” He stopped talking.

  Had Keith placed him on hold? People could die on hold and nobody would care. Well, at least he didn’t have to listen to any insufferable music.

  “I’m sorry, Trevor. I have a shot of the fridge, and there’s no note. Maybe Lenore took it down and threw it in the garbage. The can was empty, so she might’ve tossed it down the garbage chute. Someone is going through the trash tomorrow. I’ll have them look specifically for it.”

  “Thanks. Julie’s concerned about her cats.”

  “Tell her not to worry. Sandy Wyatt is taking care of them. I’d better get over to see her first thing in the morning, and that’s … three hours away. Great. I’ll have to tell her what we’re doing, or the truth will get out and keeping this quiet will be like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube. I’ll have the tech guys ping her phone and computer. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Trevor chuckled, feeling more hopeful than he had since speaking to Julie. If the Prophet didn’t know she was alive, Trevor might buy them some time, and if the body she was examining did turn out to carry some unexpected virus, then, for the first time since he’d started working on this damn case, he might be ahead of the game.

  “Thanks, Keith. I owe you one.”

  “By the way, where is she?”

  “Better you don’t know that. The fewer people who know, the safer she is.”

  “You’re right. Maybe when this is all over, we can get together. I hope this gets the two of you talking again. Goodnight, or should I say, good morning.”

  Trevor hung up the phone, opened the Atlanta Police Department database in his computer, and composed a request for Captain Mike Grayson asking that the identity of the victim in last night’s murder be withheld as it might be mixed up in another case. He added a few details concerning Ellie’s accident, then electronically signed the request and sent it off, copying Keith in the process and letting him know that he could fill in his captain as necessary. Trevor trusted Keith and Grayson, two men he’d worked with, but after the incident with Pierce, he couldn’t be sure there wasn’t another of the Prophet’s men out there. And if the CDC was critical, then there’d be a mole there and in the Atlanta police department, too. Trevor would arrange for an FBI team to collect Lenore’s body and bring it here. If someone wanted to verify he’d done the job, Trevor didn’t want to make it easy for him.

  The snow didn’t appear to be falling as heavily. He glanced at the couch in his office. It wasn’t the best place for a nap, but he needed sleep. He’d have to stay sharp if he wanted to remain on top, and with Julie’s life in the balance, that was all the incentive he needed.

  • • •

  Frustrated, Julie stared through the binoculars of the electron microscope at the spinal fluid on the slide. There appeared to be degraded parts of a pathogen there, and while it bore similarities to a number of influenza A strains, it wasn’t one she’d seen before. The red blood cells clumped together were typical of the swine flu virus, but the ribbons binding the virus to the cells more closely resembled those of the avian flu strains, something she’d seen when working with the HPAI strain before Ellie’s accident. What remained of the virus was too badly deteriorated to yield enough viable material for a culture. Her stomach roiled.

  “Son of a bitch,” she cursed aloud, causing the techs around her to look up. Straightening from the microscope, she rubbed her lower back. Was this a new mutation? It looked as if someone had grafted RNA from one flu strain onto the other, but there was a third pathogen in the mix being used as a bonding agent … How was she supposed to stop that?

  Who the hell has the ability to do this? There were a couple of European scientists who might, possibly one of the Chinese or Japanese virologists, but here in the United States only two or three people could do it, and she was one of them.

  She needed more information. Despite how tired she’d been, she hadn’t been able to sleep after Trevor’s call. She’d brought up the ten plagues of Egypt on the tablet she’d borrowed, wondering if the Great Burning could be one of the plagues, but water to blood, frogs, gnats, flies, diseased livestock, boils, thunder and hail, locusts, darkness, and death of the firstborn didn’t really fit eliminating vermin to save Eden. Now, if there’d been something about snakes it might have worked. She seemed to remember Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit at the urging of the slithering reptile. The good news was that there weren’t any snakes, or any other reptiles for that matter, in Alaska. She hated snakes.

  According to what Trevor had said on the news the other day, the Prophet had made good on plagues one and two. Insects could carry disease that would make life difficult for people and animals, and since his first two attempts had been deadly, having insects carry a bug that could result in cytokine storms would fit the agenda. Of course, not everyone would die, but a lot of people would be downright miserable. So, what was she looking at
here?

  Trevor had said he expected the third plague within the next two days. Just how would the Prophet use gnats to kill? One thing was certain: He wouldn’t use whatever this virus was. His plagues struck quickly and efficiently. The Prophet would need more than one case to prove the effectiveness of his virus, and he’d have to consider incubation time. Even if the fifteen men on the boat had died of cytokine storms, too, it wouldn’t be a definitive sampling. He’d need more—maybe two or three times as many. Not to mention he’d need a larger area, because he’d be watching the contagion at work. How awful Trevor must feel knowing people were going to die and he was powerless to stop it.

  But so am I.

  Stymied, upset by the fact so many deaths could be on her shoulders, she’d inserted her secret USB drive and called up the research she’d been working on before the accident, verifying the behavior of each of the missing pathogens, checking its properties, and like it or not, the data she had at the moment conflicted with everything she had.

  “What? Did you find something?” Cassie asked, coming over to the table. The bags under her friend’s eyes were proof she hadn’t slept well either.

  “Something, yes, but I can’t tell you what it is. It’s too badly degraded. In fact, I’ve never seen a pathogen break down and disappear this quickly. Usually spinal fluid keeps the infected cells intact, but not this time. It’s definitely a strain of influenza A, but that doesn’t tell me anything. I’d guessed that from the condition of John Doe’s chest. The virus most likely settled there, overstimulating the immune system and causing a migration of leukocytes to the lungs. Those white blood cells destroyed pulmonary tissue and secreted liquid into the organs, resulting in pneumonia and death. The thymus is confusing. Normally, by the time a person reaches John Doe’s age, it’s producing fewer T-cells. There was an incredible amount of cytokines there, far more than I’d expected. I’d say this virus followed typical influenza A protocol, but I can’t tell you what triggered or overstimulated the thymus, and that would’ve increased the virus’s fatal effect.”

  “Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. Luke called while you were studying those slides. He spoke to the doctor at the clinic in Seward. There haven’t been any deaths in the last three months and no one’s come in with flu symptoms. As well, they’ve identified our man. That tattoo on his back gave him up. He’s Felix Leclerc, first mate on the Alaskan Gold, the snow crab fishing boat, so we know the body’s from that wreck. The base commander is going to send out vessels with sonar and bow-towed metal detectors to search the area where the Salmon Hunter was fishing. They want to find that boat and figure out what happened to it almost as much as we do. From what we discovered yesterday, an explosion destroyed the ship, and since explosions aboard fishing boats are rare…”

  “Do we know if Felix was near any farms recently?”

  “I can ask Luke to look into it. Leclerc’s wife would know. They had five kids, too. She’s going to want to see the body—hell of a way to remember the man you loved, but she needs closure. I just wish we could give her answers, too.”

  “So do I,” Julie said. “Maybe she can tell us exactly who was aboard the boat. If this was a test run, the Prophet would’ve planted a host on board, someone infected with the virus who’d have spread it to the rest of the crew.”

  “How would anyone know? If the ship blew up…”

  “Whoever’s behind this had to be monitoring the ship, boarded the boat once everyone was dead or dying, recorded their data, and then got off the vessel before they sank it. I need to talk to Whitey again. Maybe he can explain how a ship could be blown apart like that.”

  “Here’s the bad news, and you aren’t going to like it. Leclerc had his flu shot the day before the ship left port.”

  “And you think this is an adverse reaction to the vaccine? No way.” Julie’s voice echoed in the lab and drew everyone’s attention to her. “I worked on this year’s serum. While this reaction could be from H1N1, it’s more likely to be from something with traces of H5N1 in it, too, and we didn’t have anything even close to that in our serum. This is something else.”

  “Calm down, Julie. I’m only asking because Luke mentioned it. You know, Felix could’ve come into contact with wild birds or infected droppings. There are a lot of eagles around here. Since you’ve had me reading about avian flu, I’ve discovered that they’ve found some wild birds that carry a variation of it, but to date, they’ve had no proof it crossed species. So, are we good? You didn’t find what you were afraid of, right?”

  Julie shook her head. “I wish I could answer that. The good news is, other than protecting us from the smell, there’s no reason for contamination protocols. There’s nothing contagious left in the body, but that means there isn’t enough of the pathogen left to identify it or rule it out. I don’t understand that. There’s always been plenty of evidence in the spinal fluid.”

  “Maybe you didn’t get a satisfactory sample. We could try another just below the neck.”

  “Let’s get Felix and give it another shot. I promised to call Trevor with the results, and right now, I’ve got nothing to tell him.”

  “It’s midafternoon in Boston. Call and tell him we’re waiting for more data, and then we’ll go talk to the captain. After that, I’m taking you for a makeover and a manicure and pedicure. You need to relax before you have a breakdown. Doctor’s orders. We have a top-notch spa on the base. I’m getting the full treatment, and you should, too. Make your call while I get Felix to give us another sample.”

  “Fine.” Julie reached for her cell phone. Maybe having her nails done would soothe her. There was no way this poor man had died because of her vaccine.

  “Oh my God,” she cried, bringing Cassie racing back to her side.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Felix has no pathogens.”

  Cassie frowned. “You just told me that.”

  “No, you don’t understand. There are none, and if he had his flu shot, there should be four. I know how he got sick. Someone replaced the vaccine. Call Luke. I need to know how many people received an injection there, and every one of them needs to be checked.”

  Cassie lifted the phone and called the hospital medical officer.

  “Luke, we have a problem. Julie and I will be up in a minute to tell you about it.” She hung up. “I’ll get Felix. Looks like the spa will have to wait for a bit.”

  Julie nodded. Opening Cassie’s cell phone, she punched in the numbers she’d copied from their home phone and waited for the call to connect. It answered on the first ring.

  “You’ve reached Special Agent Trevor Clark. I’m unable to take your call at the moment. Please leave a message at the tone, and I’ll get back to you shortly.”

  The electronic message disappointed her. She’d wanted to deliver the news directly, but this was too important not to share, and she could do it without mentioning the errant viruses.

  The beep sounded. “Trevor, it’s Julie. I had a look at some of the data this morning, and so far the results are inconclusive. I’m going to run a few more tests. What I can tell you is that this is a highly virulent strain of influenza A. What’s puzzling is that the virus itself breaks down or degrades far more quickly than it should, but it somehow overstimulates cytokine and T-cell production. We’ve tentatively identified the man. There’s a chance he was injected with the virus, and if that’s the case, I may know how the Prophet plans to distribute his Great Burning. If I’m right, this will create widespread panic and lead to even more deaths. If this is what we’re looking for, I’ll need to find someone alive suffering from it just to be able to see what the virus looks like, and that will make creating a vaccine even more difficult—not impossible, but hard.”

  • • •

  Trevor sat back, not at all pleased with how slowly the cab moved along the crowded Washington street, but with the weather … Getting a wake-up call from D.C. at eight this morning was the last thing he’d needed. He had too many th
ings to do, too many puzzles and unanswered questions. L.D. Hamilton had seen the news about the second plague and insisted they meet today, not next week. With less than three hours of sleep under his belt, Trevor wouldn’t be at his best. As it was, he was hyped up on caffeine and his ulcer knew it. Hamilton must’ve seen the lambasting the press had delivered, but like so many politicians, he probably wanted to hear it from the source.

  Well, so be it, but the Great Burning was still off the table. Hamilton might be the president’s advisor on homeland security, but he wasn’t the head of the department. If Cartwright, who was, wanted to tell him everything they had, there wasn’t any way Trevor could stop him, but the more people who knew, the more likely it would slip out and take away their slight edge. As far as he understood, the Prophet wasn’t aware they had any idea about his plans.

  Thank God the weather had improved and the commuter flights were up and running; otherwise, he’d have had to take the train and would’ve lost the whole day kowtowing to some bureaucrat. Politicians were all the same. They didn’t give a damn about anything but their own popularity and what made them look good.

  At least he’d been able to get a few things done this morning. He’d talked to Amos, who was tracking down information on Ellie’s accident. Why didn’t other agencies understand that when the FBI requested a file, they wanted the whole damn thing? Amos had verified that the sarin present in both the sorority sisters’ bodies and the food had been too diluted to kill. So, what had the Prophet been doing? Of course, it was possible the Harvester and his henchmen, at least those who’d actually murdered the girls, had screwed up. The ME was certain three people had been involved.

  Trevor sighed. All of Boston was in a panic. At the mayor’s request, the major colleges and universities in and around the city had canceled classes for the rest of the week. Coeds were encouraged to leave the dorms and residences and go home to their families, but his gut said this was what the Prophet wanted—to scare the girls away from school.