Calypso Directive

by Brian Andrews

  “I’m not sure, why?”

  “Toxic shock syndrome is most prevalent in persons with weakened immune systems, and there is a documented correlation of TSS occurring after physically stressful events such as childbirth, influenza, and the chicken pox,” AJ explained.

  “Actually, I remember hearing that this was supposed to be a bad influenza season, and we had panic in Prague over the new H1N1 virus spreading from the Baltic states. In fact, free inoculation clinics were held this year in the city, until the stockpile of vaccines were depleted,” Veronika said.

  AJ eyed VanCleave, his head cocked. VanCleave nodded. They were on the same page.

  “What is it?” Veronika pressed.

  “Ms. Viskaya, could you please pull whatever information you have on these free inoculation clinics? Specifically, we would like to know where the clinics were held and who was the supplier of the vaccines,” AJ said.

  Veronika nodded curtly.

  “Also, we’d like copies of any coroner’s reports that list toxic shock as the cause of death for all persons who died in Prague in the past five months,” VanCleave added.

  “Of course. I will have the digital scans transmitted to the Coordinator as soon as possible. Anything else?”

  AJ shook his head.

  “We should probably tend to the issue at hand, interviewing our plague victims. Ms. Mesnil, are you ready?”

  Albane nodded and began to walk away with Veronika, when AJ grabbed her upper arm. “Shouldn’t we wait for Kalen?”

  “No. Kalen has other matters to attend to.” She reached into her handbag, pulled out a thin leather case, and opened it. Inside was a pair of horned-rimmed glasses, similar to the ones worn by Veronika. Albane unfolded and donned the eyeglasses. She turned to AJ, tapped the frame of her glasses, and winked. “Superman has X-ray vision. We have Gucci with HD video capture.”

  “What? No contact lens camera?”

  “Abbey’s working on it, I’m told.”

  “I’m not surprised . . . Albane?”

  “Yes, AJ.”

  “Do you really think this is such a good idea? Can’t you interview the woman from behind the glass? You know, where it’s sterile, safe, and free from aerosolized plague bacteria.”

  Albane reached up and put her hand on AJ’s cheek. She looked deeply and tenderly into his eyes, and as she did he felt his pulse quicken.

  “AJ, it’s not the questions we ask, it’s how we ask the questions. I cannot show this woman compassion and tenderness from behind the glass. These people are dying. They need human interaction. They need human touch, even if that touch is separated by a yellow plastic biosafety suit.”

  He nodded, speechless.

  Albane withdrew her touch.

  “See, it works,” she said with a coy smile. As she walked away with Veronika, she looked over her shoulder at him and added, “But I appreciate your concern.”

  • • •

  “THE SUSPENSE IS killing me. What did you find out?” AJ asked.

  “I was only able to interview the woman; the one living American boy is in pretty bad shape, delirious with fever.”

  “Would she talk to you?”

  “Yes, but only after we had a good cry together,” Albane replied. “She is terrified that she is going to die. From what I could gather, her name is Sophie, and she is the proprietor of a youth hostel in Prague. She met Foster less than two days ago. A cab driver, who she is friendly with, brought Foster to the hostel in the middle of the night. She said that Foster was battered. The cab driver said that Foster told him he had been robbed and had his wallet and clothing stolen. The cab driver also warned her that the men who had attacked Foster could come looking for him. She took pity on Foster and gave him some old clothes and a bed in one of the dormitory rooms. When two other Americans, college students, checked in, she put them in the same room with Foster. Then the story gets a little fuzzy, but from what I could glean there was some sort of accident involving a glass tube shattering and spilling liquid in the room. She said Foster made her disinfect the room with bleach, but it didn’t matter. By that night, the two boys were exhibiting plague symptoms, and she and Foster tended to them. Of course she didn’t realize it was plague; she thought they had the flu.”

  “The broken glass tube must have been the plague sample Foster stole,” VanCleave said.

  “My conclusion as well.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “Two men showed up at the hostel with a picture of Foster asking if she’d seen him. Sophie lied to the men and said no. Then, she warned Foster and helped him escape out the back door.”

  “Were they the Czech police?” Veronika asked.

  “No. She said they looked like the mafia.”

  “Any more info about the stolen vials?” VanCleave asked.

  “She was light on the details. She said Foster was very upset because the tube had broken and the boys had touched it. Apparently, Foster had insisted that they all check into the hospital, which is why, when Miss Sophie started to feel symptoms, she called an ambulance.”

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” AJ asked rhetorically. “Unless Foster has another sample, he’s lost his leverage.”

  “That’s nothing to cheer about, AJ. God help us if this becomes an outbreak,” VanCleave said.

  “The Czechs are taking appropriate measures. The hostel has been cordoned off. Our two surviving victims are in quarantine, and according to Sophie, there were no other guests checked in at the time. It’s out of our hands,” Albane said.

  “What’s our next move?” AJ asked, feeling again like the rookie without a clue. He looked to VanCleave, who sniffed, but said nothing. He turned back to Albane.

  “It depends . . .”

  “On what?”

  “On whether we believe that our client has been telling us the truth.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Vienna, Austria

  “HERE WE ARE,” said Julie, as she opened the door and turned on the lights to her apartment. “Home sweet home.”

  “Cool place.”

  “Thanks. I love it. And it’s in a great location. We’re in the embassy district of Vienna, near the Karlskirche.”

  “Two bedroom?”

  “Yep. I have a roommate. Helps with the rent.”

  “Is she, or he, here?”

  Julie laughed. “No, she is on holiday in Greece. She’s not supposed to be back until tomorrow night.”

  “Oh. That’s good,” he replied awkwardly. “I mean it’s good that we don’t have to try to explain anything.”

  “You mean like the time my mom walked in on us over Christmas break our sophomore year in college.”

  He laughed. “Exactly.”

  She motioned to a vacant wooden chair next to her tiny kitchen table. “Sit.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Are you cooking breakfast? I’m starving.”

  “Help yourself to anything in the fridge. I’ll be back in a sec.”

  She went into her roommate’s bedroom and returned with a tiny syringe to find him gobbling down a leftover half of a sandwich.

  His eyes went wide at the sight of the needle. He shuffled in his chair, almost toppling over onto the floor.

  During his time in quarantine, he had grown to despise the hypodermic needle. Regular blood draws and injections, which in the beginning he viewed as a nuisance, morphed into something sinister. The hypodermic needle was designed for a single purpose: to violate. Pull the plunger to extract life essence. Push the plunger to impregnate with foreign material. For five months, he had been raped—again and again—by a twenty-gauge stainless steel hypodermic needle.

  “What are you doing with that? No way you’re going to inject me!”

  “Relax. I’m not going to inject you. My roommate is diabetic. This is an insulin syringe. Tiny needle. See?” she said holding it up in front of him. “It’s not designed for blood draws, but we’ll have to make do.”

  He eyed her wa
rily, but said nothing.

  She sat down next to him. “Remember what we talked about in the car? With your permission, I’d like to take that blood sample now.”

  He sighed and pulled up his sleeve exposing the white bare flesh of the inside of his elbow. This surrender was the ultimate act of trust. He would let her violate him—take a piece of him—but only because he did trust her. And because she had asked his permission.

  She smiled, a sweet innocent smile, and scooted her chair next to his.

  He turned his head to the side, averting his eyes from the needle.

  She positioned his forearm across her lap. “Make a fist.”

  He did as she instructed. She ran her finger gently over the yellowed bruises and needle marks dotting his arm.

  “Remember the time you serenaded me in front of my entire sorority house in your underwear until I agreed to go out with you,” she said, distracting him, while she tapped her fingers on a swollen blue vein.

  “I can’t take all the credit for that. Jack Daniels was involved.”

  “Yeah,” she chuckled as she slipped the needle under his skin with practiced efficiency. “And thirty of your fraternity pledge brothers egging you on.”

  He did not wince, but despondence washed over his face as he watched the syringe fill crimson. “What a rowdy bunch of hooligans we were.”

  “No argument here.”

  “Speaking of old memories, remember when we took our first road trip to Ashville, North Carolina?”

  She flashed him a knowing smile. “Are you kidding . . . that’s not the kind of thing a woman forgets.”

  • • •

  JULIE STOOD MOTIONLESS and watched the rhythmic rise and fall of Will’s chest as he slept in her bed.

  In her bed. She felt flushed. She had fantasized about this moment plenty of times since their break-up. Of course, in the fantasy, he was not asleep—at least, not until after the deed was done. A flood of old emotions she had tried to suppress had been reawakened in her. Her mind would run away from her, making plans, hopeful plans, about all things they would do together, until she reined her thoughts back in under the cool pragmatism of her scientific intellect. Yet no matter how hard she tried to deny it, a part of her could not help but trust to hope.

  Like a bucket of cold water dousing a fire, the exigencies of the present shook her from her daydream. She was getting ahead of herself. She needed be cautious with him, emotionally distant. It had been years since they had been together. Why was she letting herself be so vulnerable? Before entertaining anything other than friendship, she had to deal with the strange and preposterous mystery he had embroiled her in. Suddenly, she felt like Little Red Riding Hood standing at the threshold of a dark and portentous forest. Every instinct telling her not to tread forward, but knowing that the dangerous journey was necessary if she wanted to reach the Happily Ever After.

  She bent to kiss him on the forehead, but stopped short. A kiss, even the slightest caress of her lips, would probably wake him. He was in such a fragile state at the moment; he needed rest. She blew him a kiss instead and tiptoed out of her bedroom.

  Julie’s roommate, Isabella, was on holiday with her boyfriend and was not scheduled to return for another day. Hopefully, that would give her enough time to run the necessary tests, develop a plan, and depart with Isabella none the wiser. She went to the kitchen and picked up the Ziploc plastic bag holding the syringe full of Will’s blood. She pulled out a second Ziploc and decided to double-bag it just to be safe. She wrapped the bagged syringe in a dish towel and placed it gently in her purse. She made sure to lock the apartment door deadbolt when she left.

  She had only slept for two hours—hopefully it would be enough to carry her through the day.

  It was nine fifteen in the morning. She would arrive at the lab by a quarter to ten, at the latest. That would give her an hour to prep microscope slides before the lab emptied for lunch. But making blood smears was a colossal breach of biosafety protocol. If Will’s blood contained an unknown virus or other deadly microbes, then working with his blood would require Biosafety Level Four controls. The campus was only permitted as a BSL-3 facility. To complicate matters further, she was an oncology research scientist, not a virologist. Although her work involving the STAT protein overlapped with immune system function, she did not have the requisite experience to make proper diagnoses of bacterial or viral infections. Just as a circus acrobat has no business standing in for a lion tamer, she had no business delving into the realm of infectious diseases.

  A bead of cold sweat dripped from her underarm and ran, trickling over her ribs. She had never contemplated actions like those she was about to carry out, let alone violated company safety protocols before. Best-case scenario, she would be fired and professionally discredited. Worst-case scenario, she would unleash biocontamination that would result in the infection of thousands of people and then be prosecuted as a terrorist. She took a deep breath and tightened her grip on the steering wheel. She needed to find another angle.

  She tried to pay attention to the traffic instead of worrying. An idea would come to her; it always did. But as she drove, her mind drifted back to Will. She wanted so much to protect him. To shield him from the world and from the awful men who had done this to him. What could she do? How could she ever hope to stand up against the powerful and faceless foe that Will described as their enemy? The more she thought about it, the heavier the dread lodged in her abdomen became. What if Leighton-Harris Pharmaceuticals and the CDC were co-conspirators? Was Xavier Pope really a Dr. Frankenstein? The Julie Ponte of twenty-four hours ago would have thought the idea of illegal quarantines and illicit human experimentation preposterous. She had worked in the pharmaceutical industry for six years and had only known noble and dedicated scientists and staff. Was she naive? Was Will changing her into a conspiracy theorist kook?

  She was convinced that she did not possess the particular subject matter expertise to analyze his blood and generate a working hypothesis about what was happening to him. It had been unrealistic to think she could tackle a mystery like this without help. Whom could she trust? She startled rattling off names in her head. Heindrick Fabian. No, too nosey. Elizabeth Raynor. Maybe? No, too publication hungry . . .

  A name interrupted her internal monologue.

  Bart Bennett.

  She smiled.

  Bart Bennett was a hopeless genius who worked in virology. As one of only a handful of Americans working in her lab, it was inevitable that she and Bart would meet and become friends. Bart was from Seattle and was a proud and vocal coffee snob. Periodically, Julie and Bart would eat lunch together, swapping anecdotal tales about life as an American expat in Vienna. Once, she had even reluctantly agreed to meet him at a Viennese coffeehouse he frequented. A big mistake. By the end of the thirty-minute date, she feared he might drop down on one knee and propose to her—pulling forth a ring hidden beneath a layer of creamy froth atop his cappuccino. From that day forward, she had regularly affirmed their “only friends” status by limiting their interactions to cafeteria lunches and harmless hallway chitchat. Today, though, she might have to take advantage of poor Bart’s affections.

  She turned onto the laboratory campus driveway and drove past the marble sign at the entrance:

  Wien Bioscience

  a Vyrogen Pharmaceuticals Company

  She entered the parking garage and parked in her reserved slip. She placed the automatic transmission into “Park,” turned off the engine, and took a deep breath.

  “You can do this,” she mumbled to herself.

  • • •

  INSIDE THE LAB, Julie carefully drew a small volume of blood from Will’s test tube with a syringe. Next, she transferred it to another vial she had prepared with a dummy label. This was the sample she would give to Bart. Five minutes later, she knocked on the door to his office.

  “Hey, Julie,” Bart exclaimed. “You must have smelled the espresso. Check out the new machine I just got. It’s smal
l enough to fit on the corner of my desk. Now I can have espressos whenever the urge strikes.”

  “Wow. It’s a cute little guy, but are you sure that’s legal? If you drink four or five espressos a day, your blood-caffeine level will be above the legal limit and you’ll be SUI,” Julie teased.

  “SUI?”

  “Scientist Under the Influence.”

  Bart smiled and forced a polite laugh. “I’ve already had two espressos this morning and I’m still yawning. That must be a good sign, right?”

  “I guess so. Hey, um, do you have a second? I was hoping you could run some tests on a blood sample from one of my subjects in the STAT protein study I’m working on.”

  “What kind of tests?” Bart asked.

  “I noticed an elevated white blood cell count, and I’m worried this subject might have an infection. I spend my time looking at tumor markers, not viral or bacterial ones, so I’m way outta my league here. I was hoping you could run ELISA on the sample to see what antibodies are present.”

  “Sure, just drop the sample off in my lab with Jon, and we’ll get to it when things slow down a bit.”

  Julie grimaced. “I was hoping that you could maybe run it now. I’m really worried about this subject and feel it’s my responsibility to notify this person of their condition.”

  “You want me to drop everything and do it now? We’ve got a busy day planned,” Bart resisted.

  “Please,” she said, with puppy dog eyes. “As a favor to me?”

  He rubbed his beardless chin. “Since you haven’t given me any direction as to what virus or bacteria I am supposed to be looking for, I’ll need to check a fairly extensive list of possible diseases. And since this is such a small sample volume, I’ll need to amplify using real-time PCR and then run multiple assays. It’s not as easy as you think, Julie.”