by John Case
‘What –’
She was up and pacing. ‘I just talked to a friend from CDC. Most of us have access to a genomic database that stores the nucleotide sequences of flu strains – it’s how we track what’s out there, how we do comparative studies, how we spot new variants. Well, the results from Wisconsin and Florida are in now, and they match what we found out about the bugs in L.A. and D.C. All these people who got sick, Frank – people in four different geographical locations – they got a flu that is genetically identical to a strain called . . .’ She paused, to look at the white pad next to the telephone. ‘A/Beijing/2/82.’ She threw her hands out to the side. ‘Well, that just doesn’t happen.’
‘Why not? What’s “A/Beijing –”’
‘It’s a strain of influenza that was first identified in China. In February, ’eighty-two. And here it is again. But that can’t happen, Frank. Influenza is in a constant state of mutation. That’s what influenza does. It’s unstable. It mutates. You don’t get exact replicas of sixteen-year-old strains.’
‘But we did.’
‘Down at CDC – this is the mystery du jour. When it was just the outbreak out in L.A., they thought it was an accidental lab release and the epidemiologists were giving all the labs hell, trying to track down the source.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Virologists, pharmaceutical labs, epidemiologists, people in the vaccine industry – we all work with old strains of flu sometimes, to study them. Occasionally, there’s an accidental release. It’s happened. That was the logical explanation for the L.A. outbreak – until the same strain popped up in Washington. And then in Wisconsin. And then in Florida.’
‘But what if people infected with the strain in LA. got on a plane? Wouldn’t that explain it?’
‘No because the pattern’s wrong. If that happened, you’d get little clusters of infection here and there. That probably has happened, in fact. But no one’s going to notice it because people are not getting terribly sick. And it’s not the flu season, so most of the cases will just go down as respiratory infections. But these outbreaks –’ She picked up the MMWRs. ‘None of these was caused by an infected carrier, or even a jumbo jet full of carriers, Look at the numbers from Madison, Wisconsin. You have over twenty-eight hundred cases in a single week. And the onset isn’t staggered, it doesn’t start with a case or two and build, it’s boom – all at once. And in Florida there’s almost as many and it’s the same thing. And then look at these numbers right here, in D.C. There are almost four thousand cases reported! My God, it’s probably what we had!’
‘Is that a lot?’
‘Yes it’s a lot! It’s a hell of a lot. Because it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Most people with a mild flu don’t even go to the doctor.’
‘So what are we talking about?’
‘Tests!’
‘What tests? What do you mean?’
‘They’re dispersion tests.’
‘What?!’
She pointed to the MMWRs. ‘And this is how they found out which method was the most successful. CDC puts this out on the Web, every week. The Temple – they didn’t even have to tabulate results. All they had to do was check out the MMWRs to see how it went, and which method produced the greatest infection.’ She picked up the papers, held them up and rattled them in the air. ‘And the winner is: your nation’s capital. Washington, D.C.!’
‘How would they do that? Disseminate the virus, I mean.’
‘There are lots of ways. All you have to do is put it in the air. You could use a plane, a car – you could throw it off a rooftop.’ She sighed. ‘All you have to do is get the virus in the air where it will be inhaled.’ She took a breath. ‘I don’t know what to do. Maybe if we go see Gleason –’
‘Right. Why does that not inspire confidence? If I remember correctly, the last time we knocked on Mr. Gleason’s door, he more or less threatened to charge us with treason.’
‘But if we take all the work you’ve done since then, and these MMWRs, and maybe if I talk to Doctor K – and get him to come with us.’ She looked at the ceiling. ‘I’ll show Doctor K the Temple’s logo – the horse! He’ll remember that from Kopervik. And he was in Atlanta, too. He’s as puzzled by these outbreaks as everyone else. If Gleason won’t listen to me, maybe he’ll listen to Doctor K. Maybe even Benny Stern – he could help explain about the Temple.’
‘Stern seems to be out of town.’
‘Well, I still think we have to try. With Gleason, I mean.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’m going to the lab and look at this sample I brought back.’
‘What for?’
‘Because there’s something funny about it.’
‘What do you mean?’
She picked up the MMWR. ‘Where is it? Here it is.’ She read:
‘“Unusual prolongation of acute phase noted in many patients, along with attenuated recovery.” What they’re saying is that a lot of people aren’t getting better as fast as they should. The symptoms just drag on. So something is making the infection persist, or somehow preventing the immune system from kicking in. It’s as if the virus had been camouflaged somehow.’
‘Is that possible?’
She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. ‘I’m worried that whoever did this has tinkered with the genome in a way that inhibits the immune response. With A/Beijing/2/82, it’s no big deal. It was a mild strain. But if they did this to the 1918 flu . . .
‘What?’
She stared at him.
‘Annie. What?’
‘Well, you’d kill almost everybody who got it. The only recourse would be global immunization.’ There was a beat, and then Annie smiled and waved her hand crazily in the air and started talking too fast. ‘I’m probably just a lunatic. Maybe the Beijing strain was a particularly long-lasting flu, and we just don’t have enough data about it because it was so mild.’ She stopped. ‘But I want to take a look – because one thing’s for sure.’ She slapped the MMWRs. ‘These were tests!’
‘I’ll call Gleason,’ Frank said.
On the way back to his apartment from Annie’s, he stopped at Mixtec and grabbed some lunch. While Annie was at the lab, he’d print out his notes about the Temple. He intended to fashion some concise document about the chain of events and evidence – something even Gleason couldn’t ignore.
And if they got nowhere with him, he was thinking maybe they’d go to FEMA. Call Tom Deer. Whatever.
His door was open.
At first he thought maybe he’d forgotten to lock it. And then he went into the room that was both his bedroom and his study. Even then it took him a second to register what was wrong. His keyboard was there, his monitor was there, his printer was there – but the CPU was gone. And so was his laptop. His filing cabinets were empty. His zip drive was gone. There were no diskettes at all, not anywhere – his entire archive was missing.
‘Fuck,’ he said, and just stood there for several moments, thinking about how much of his life was now missing. It wasn’t his current work he was worried about – or not much – because most of that would be on the backup diskettes he kept in the refrigerator. It was everything else. His personal letters. His running log. His address book. Tax records.
The rage rose in his chest. It was a primitive, powerful feeling, akin to the way a dog or a wolf might feel on returning to its lair and finding the scent of an interloper. If he were a dog, his hackles would have been up.
Instead, he followed the conditioned response of a citizen of the late twentieth century: he headed for the telephone to complain to the police. Not that it would do any good. It was just what you did, a routine he knew personally because two years ago, his stereo and TV had been ripped off. The call was made, not because the police would find his stolen stuff and punish those who took it. It was made because the insurance company required a police report or it wouldn’t pay.
It was only then, as he was reaching for the telephone, that it dawned on him that this wasn’t a garden-var
iety robbery, that the theft had been a theft of information, that his television, monitor, stereo, and speakers – none of those had been touched. And in the instant he composed that thought, he knew who was responsible.
It was just then, as he lifted the receiver to call the police, that something slammed into the back of his head, driving him toward the floor. On the way down, his head hit the telephone table and a spray of sparks fanned across his eyes.
A second later the man was on him, and Frank could feel his breath. An arm went around his neck, and there was a whiff of something sickly sweet, a hospital smell that could only be chloroform. A hand went over his mouth, clamping a damp rag to his face.
Frank thrashed. Rolled. Struggled. And, finally, went limp, holding his breath.
He lay that way for what seemed a long time but could only have been a relatively few seconds. His lungs were in a panic, his heart pounding, but he could feel his attacker relaxing, just a little, just enough.
Frank exploded beneath him, driving his head into the man’s face, sending him sprawling. Then he lurched to his feet, intending to kick the guy while he was still on the ground. But the man was too quick, and Frank too woozy. The intruder spun away from the kick, rolled and scrambled to his feet.
Frank got a look: black jeans and T-shirt, gingery hair, and a round white face with a bright stain of blood around the mouth and nose. Frank lurched after him, but was slowed by the pain in his ribs, which didn’t allow him to straighten up. The man got to the door before him and yanked it open. ‘Claude!’ he shouted then stepped outside and slammed the door shut.
Frank reached for the doorknob, but it wouldn’t turn. His assailant was pulling from the other side and the door wouldn’t open, until, an instant later, it exploded inward, driving its sharp edge into Frank’s forehead. He reeled backward, and in the wide-open doorway, caught sight of his assailant’s bloody face, and behind him, another man, dark and scowling. The stink of chloroform filled the air.
It was fear that drove him forward, but it was football that saved him. He knew how to hit. He saw that round face in the doorway, and the other man’s behind it, saw the chloroform rag in his hand – and he put his head down and drove into them.
The attack took them by surprise; they were off balance and stumbling backward near the top of the stairs. He kept driving until, in the end, the three of them were tumbling down the stairs in a pained tangle of knocked heads and flailing limbs.
Then a quavering voice threaded itself into the din: ‘Hey! What the hell is going on here?’
Frank’s assailants were on their feet by the time they hit the ground floor. They launched themselves at the front door, bouncing Carlos – his neighbor – out of the way and sending his groceries flying. ‘Hey!’ he squeaked.
Frank pulled himself up by the banister and rushed out into the street, but it was too late. He watched the men jump into a black van, double-parked halfway up the block. He started after them, hoping he could get close enough to catch the license number, when the truck pulled out and accelerated.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he moaned. This was getting painful.
Carlos came up alongside, holding a head of lettuce and breathing hard. ‘Frank,’ he said in a beseeching tone, ‘what is going on?’
27
OZZIE VILAS HAD done most of the prep work at CDC, and Annie was glad he had.
An electron microscope scans a field of approximately one millionth of a millimeter. Viruses are exceedingly small – several million virions could fit inside a comma. But in tissue or blood, they were dispersed, and moreover, the number present depended on the status of the infection. In order to be able to find virus to look at, without a frustrating and lengthy search, viral samples were cultured, often in layers of green monkey kidney cells and then concentrated through the use of high-speed centrifuges. Sometimes, virus was replicated through a technology called PCR.
The viral sample Ozzie provided to herself and Dr. Kicklighter had already been concentrated and then pelletized, the viral material dispersed within a resin. The resulting tiny, hard pellets were put in tubes, the tubes packed in cotton, and encased inside a metal container with the biohazard flower imprinted on the exterior.
NIH had any number of electron microscopists who were skilled at preparing grids and searching for pathogens. Annie used them extensively, because she was not fond of spending time with the electron microscope looking for viral footprints. The microscope itself was a clunky affair, about the size of an old-fashioned telephone booth, and always housed in its own separate room – which was usually in the basement.
Because of the need for absolute steadiness, the room was heavily insulated and balanced on struts. That’s what Annie disliked about it. It was a dead room with the ambience of a bell jar. Spending time in it was like being buried alive.
She stashed her belongings in her office and went through the laborious procedure of dressing to deal with an infectious agent. That done, she put a pellet into place and rotated the diamond blade of the resin machine toward it, shaving off a number of tiny, angstrom-thick slices of the viral pellet. The machine dispensed these onto a pool of liquid. Then came the tricky part – picking up the tiny round ‘grid’ that would be inserted into the microscope and trying to get one of the viral samples onto it. The ‘grid’ itself was a tiny disk, an eighth of an inch in diameter, the size of a very small button or pill. It was scored with a viewing matrix. The trick was to grasp the curved lip of this disk with micro-dissection tweezers and ‘catch’ or ‘scoop’ one of the floating slices of viral material off the liquid so that the slice adhered properly to the surface of the viewing grid. She stared at the floating slices of virus and looked for one with the glint of gold. The gold ones were the thinnest slices, and therefore the best. The thinner the slice, the more likely you were to isolate a recognizable viral sample from what was always a distracting mess of visual material.
Two samples draped over the lip of the disk and had to be discarded. A third tore when she tried to float it onto the grid. And then, on the brink of success, she started to cough at the worst possible moment, just as she maneuvered the grid under a perfect gold slice. She lost it, of course, and it took three more tries before she got one. God, she was sick of this flu.
And now, she was going to see what it actually looked like. She placed the grid into place in the ‘box,’ and snapped the box into the microscope and turned it on. It took almost an hour to find what she was looking for and, of course, when she did, and ratcheted up the magnification, she couldn’t find it for a while. When she finally located it again, she frowned.
Influenza virus resembles a round ball with a large number of spikes and knobs protruding from its surface. The spikes are the antigens, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, and they grab onto the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract. In each strain of virus, the spikes are shaped differently. When the immune system is alert to a particular strain through previous infection or vaccination, the body’s immunoglobulin recognizes the spikes, and responds to their presence by locking onto them and neutralizing them. But in the case of the viral sample she was looking at, the spikes looked . . . strange. They were unlike any influenza sample she’d ever seen. They seemed almost slimy – sort of gooey and indistinct, as if the surface proteins were covered by a viscous gel.
She frowned. Often, you couldn’t really be sure of what you were looking at when on the microscope itself. Things tended to become clearer when you made a print. She went through the process of producing a micrograph. Some of the newer machines were hooked up to computers, allowing the operator to simply store a series of images – which could then be colorized and put through various visual manipulations that clarified the images. Time on those machines was strictly rationed, apportioned like viewing time on a famous telescope. Annie was working with an old machine. It was fitted out so that it made a glass plate negative, which could be exposed through an enlarger just like any other photographic negative. She made s
everal positive prints – certain the CDC would want a copy – hung most of them to dry, and took one of the wet prints out to her office. She wanted to compare it with existing micrographs of A/Beijing/2/82 – which were on a computer database.
She logged onto the central NIH database and maneuvered her way into the visual archive of influenza virus samples. She tapped in the search term, then waited for the graphic display to fill in. This took a maddening amount of time because her computer was old and poky. When A/Beijing/2/82 was there on the screen in front her, she shook her head. It was identical to the image on her micrograph and yet – it was not the same. The image on the screen was sharp and clear, without the indistinct look of its counterpart. Yet their structure was the same. She didn’t get it. She tapped a few keys and made a print of the computer sample.
Ozzie had also given her slides from immunofluorescence tests on the virus. This was the way most strains of influenza were identified. Samples were subjected to antibodies from known strains that had been tagged with radioactive markers that made them fluorescent. Under a fluorescent microscope, when the antibodies from a particular strain encountered antigens of the same strain, the virus lit up brilliantly, bright as neon.
In this case, what she saw was very strange. A few viral particles lit up, but with a dim glow, not the bright radiance that was normal. There should also have been many, many more viral particles than she was seeing in the faint scatter of light. It was as if some of the virus was invisible to the antibodies, and even when it was visible, the marker effect was tremendously diminished.
She practically ran to Doctor K’s office, where they talked, and then took turns peering at Ozzie’s samples under the fluorescent microscope. Doctor K wanted to make sure that the initial slide wasn’t anomalous. But there they were again – not a dense cloud of bright stars, but a scattering of dim ones.
‘I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘It’s as if the receptors are somehow inhibited from locking onto the antigens.’