“Yes, humans can give it to humans. It can be transmitted directly and indirectly. A touch. A cough, once it’s gone to the lungs and taken its pneumatic form. Pneumonic is considerably more contagious. Aerosol transmission is possible. Think Xuan.”
“And second?”
“Second, stop thinking Europe. The brown rat that carried all those fleas? It migrated there across Asia from Vietnam.”
“Has the cabbie shown any symptoms?”
“When I spoke to the hospital a few minutes ago, the cabbie was dying.”
Quang closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples. “And that other lab tech?”
“No symptoms yet. Take some comfort in that,” the coroner told him. “I am. But…”
“Go on.”
“But whatever was in that American’s energy gel? It’s a lot more fucking dangerous than good, old-fashioned plague.”
* * *
. . .
Quang asked that the phone records of the dead food chemist be checked to see if there were any calls between her and Austin Harper. He wanted to know if they had spoken the day he’d died—but also at any point in the last six months, perhaps before or after she and her sister had visited New York City. Then he joined the bio team at the site where the woman and two others were massacred, but he wasn’t allowed inside what remained of the small building. Given the dozen or so people who had already been inside there without hazmat suits, including Quang himself, he didn’t expect they’d find anything deadly. Still, he watched the team climb inside their lemon-yellow gear—gas-tight—and butyl gloves and respirator hoods, and was glad they were taking these precautions. While they were searching for traces of plague, Quang also wanted to know whether there was any trace of the American, such as fingerprints, inside the building. He wanted to know if Austin Harper had been with the victims before he had ridden Highway One on his bike. The blaze hadn’t obliterated the building—far from it—because the fire department had arrived quickly. The ceiling still stood and much of the structure was cinder blocks and concrete. But between the damage from first the inferno and then the water, he wasn’t confident they’d find much. But you never knew and you had to try.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health thought they had this thing contained, but the investigators he had met with that morning couldn’t be sure. The plan was to visit every place that the bike tour had gone, and they already had teams scouring every location—every hotel, every restaurant, every spa, every tourist attraction—that day. They would see if anyone else had gotten sick or even evidenced any of these symptoms. But as far as they knew, no one else had shown up at any hospitals or clinics with signs of the plague.
And so while it was devastating that Xuan was dead, it was a blessing that he had been the one to open the gel, because he had been in a lab and gone straight to the ER. Moreover, Xuan had been the cabbie’s last customer that day and he lived alone. That, too, was a break. Still, he shouldn’t have taken a cab. He should have called for an ambulance. He was either in denial or he had panicked.
But it seemed that the pathogen had been confined to the energy gels, so the Ministry had no plan at the moment to send out a nationwide advisory and risk rattling the general population. They didn’t believe it would spread any farther than it already had.
“Is that an expectation or a hope?” he had asked one of the investigators.
The investigator, a slender bureaucrat his age with long hair she parted in the middle, shook her head and shrugged. “It’s a hope,” she said, adding after a beat, “maybe a prayer.”
* * *
. . .
It was nearly seven o’clock at night by the time the bio team had finished north of Da Nang, the vans awash in samples and swabs, and filled with items they were taking from the building, including a couple of the small animal cages that hadn’t melted, a couple of microscopes that were still intact, and some garbage from cans that had been outside. They’d removed the fire-blackened refrigerator, the remnants of a couple of particle air filters, and the cleaning products and every petri dish and container in the small building that had been spared. But, they reassured Quang, they didn’t feel there was anything dangerous there. This was all precautionary.
“The flames weren’t meant to cover up the murders,” Quang observed to one of the fire marshals, who, like the police captain, was reduced to a spectator as the bio team worked. “Whoever did this didn’t care. We knew the minute the smoke had been cleared and the firefighters had gone in that the victims had been executed.”
“That’s right. My guess is that this was both justice of some sort—retribution—and a message.”
“So why the fire? We know there was an accelerant and it was arson. It was deliberate.”
“We do,” the marshal agreed. “But what we don’t know is what was lost in the fire.”
“An incubator?” Quang asked.
“Like for babies born prematurely?”
“No,” he said. “For cell cultures. For growing…shit.”
“It’s possible. There’s a lot of debris that someone will have to examine to see what it once was.”
Quang was about to ask another question, but he stepped away when he heard a text and looked at his phone. He read it and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Before going home, he was now going to go to the hospital, and he was going to visit there with a heavy heart: the cabbie had died in the afternoon. He’d died exactly the way Xuan had, though he’d hung on a bit longer. He’d managed to last a little more than a day before succumbing to whatever the American had brought to Vietnam.
27
Douglas Webber didn’t know if Oscar Bolton would be an obedient and responsive animal. He had thought Austin Harper was, and clearly he had misjudged him. But he was about to find out.
Now that a PI had discovered where he lived and connected him to Harper, Douglas knew there was no way in hell they could meet anymore at his apartment. That wasn’t happening.
And so early in the morning, before the sun was up, he walked past the black wrought-iron gate with the elegant filigree that was the original entrance to Bellevue Hospital, now an ornament before a green, and on a column below the B in Bellevue used a piece of white chalk to make a long swipe. Bolton was supposed to check the column daily on his way in to work. If he saw a mark, he was supposed to meet Douglas at twelve thirty at the bench near the statue of Peter Stuyvesant in the little park between Fifteenth and Seventeenth Streets. This was the first time Douglas had resorted to this sort of seriously old-school way of connecting, but until he had decided what to do about Ken Sarafian or Austin Harper’s old girlfriend, he wanted no further digital trail—no texts or phone calls or emails—linking them.
* * *
. . .
He was watching two squirrels when Bolton arrived. The animals were interesting to him, but not as interesting as rats were these days. They were playing. At least it looked like they were playing by the way they chased each other around the roots of a hearty linden tree, but Douglas tried not to anthropomorphize any creature. Still, he decided today he would err on the side of optimism and view what they were doing as entertaining themselves, not grubbing for survival in an endless search for shelter or food as winter drew near. Bolton was a couple of minutes early, which pleased him.
“Well done,” he said simply to him when the other man collapsed beside him on the bench, his arms folded across his chest. He was wearing a gray overcoat. Douglas was in a heavy, navy-blue hoodie.
“What if I’d had a lunch meeting I couldn’t get out of? What if I had any meeting I couldn’t get out of? What if I was out of town?” he asked petulantly.
Douglas shrugged. “I would have tried again tomorrow.”
“Not very efficient.”
He turned to him and smiled. “I pay you well. You’re here. Can we move on?”
“Sure. But that stupid chalk mark scared the piss out of me.”
“I doubt that.”
“It meant you couldn’t text me.”
“I rarely text you. I hate texting you. I used to call your office phone—sometimes. You used to call my cell. Sometimes. It’s unlikely that either of us will do even that now for a long, long while.”
Bolton nodded, but he was still glowering as he stared straight ahead. Douglas had a dart with a plastic sheath on the tip in his kangaroo pocket, and he fingered the sheath now. Attitude annoyed him. Attitude in a newbie especially irritated him. But he took a breath and remembered to keep his eye on the prize. It was what he did.
“So,” he said, hoping his tone evidenced not a trace of alarm because the last thing he wanted was for Bolton to panic on him, “I had a visitor.”
“The PI who called me?”
“One and the same. Thank you for alerting me.”
“That scared me, too.”
“It shouldn’t. Remember, he’s a private detective. Not a real cop. Not the police. Remember, he was hired by Austin Harper’s girlfriend.”
“What does she know?”
“I assume nothing, but I don’t know. So, the first reason I wanted to see you today was simply to alert you to what this development means. And that is this: absolutely no communication except in person. No more phone calls on landlines and never any texts or emails or cell calls.”
“Fuck.”
“That’s an overreaction, Oscar.”
“Is it? There’s a PI involved, a guy I worked with is dead, and you tell me he might have been trying to bring a sample to Vietnam—”
Douglas put his hand on Bolton’s forearm. “I am telling you to relax. That’s what I’m telling you. You need to be careful—and I will help you in that regard. But you’re in no danger if you listen to me. And I will deal with the PI, if it should ever become necessary.”
“Deal with him? What does that mean?”
“Really, why would you want to know?”
Bolton snorted and Douglas took back his hand. “Fine,” Bolton said.
“You’re going to be okay? You’re good?” Douglas asked.
“No.”
“Good enough?” he continued, and he felt like he was talking to a toddler.
“Sure,” Bolton grumbled.
They sat in silence for a moment while two mothers with small children in strollers passed them, chatting casually about a new restaurant that had opened in their neighborhood. When they were no longer in earshot, Douglas said, “As a matter of fact, yes, I am still concerned that your friend smuggled something out of the labs.”
“I told you, I found nothing in his apartment. Absolutely nothing. I looked for everything you said to look for, and there was nothing like that there. No biohazard bags, no needles, no syringes. None of those crazy weird vials.”
“The term is parasitology transport system.”
“None of them. No bioboxes.”
“I understand.”
“I can’t go back. I don’t think the doorman would even let me in again.”
“Well, you could. I could make that happen. But it’s not necessary. His parents have been there by now.”
“Then what? You just wanted to tell me there’s a private investigator looking into all of…all of this? I mean, I knew that. I called you.” Douglas heard exasperation in the other man’s voice, but he knew that in fact it was fear.
“Have you scheduled a tour of Myung’s lab?”
“Yes. Monday.”
“Good. Thank you. Now, you asked me what Alexis Remnick knows, and I told you that I don’t know. So that brings me to the other reason why we’re here. Let’s find out. I’m adding a little more to your plate. I want you to take the ER doctor out on a date.”
“I have a girlfriend.”
“I don’t care.”
“I can’t.”
Douglas ignored him and pulled the dart from the hoodie’s front pocket. He held it before him and studied it as if he didn’t know what it was. Then he removed the plastic sheath. He was confident that Bolton would view this gesture as threatening and would respond accordingly, but Douglas had no plans to hurt the guy. At least not right now. “I’m a reasonable man,” he reassured him. “You don’t want to take a hot doctor on a date. I get it. But you can suggest to her that you two grab a cup of coffee together. Tell her you want to talk about Austin. Share some memories. Share how traumatized you are by the guy’s death.”
“We’ve never spoken.”
“But you know who she is?”
“Yes, of course. I saw her nosing around the offices this week. I played dumb.”
Douglas resisted the straight line he’d been given and said instead, “Good. It means you have an introduction already. A…connection.”
“So, I see her for coffee or lunch or something. Then what?”
“You become her friend. You find out what she knows. You find out what she’s doing.”
“Fine,” he agreed, properly defeated.
“Let’s meet again on Sunday. Same bat channel, same bat time.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means this bench at twelve thirty. That should give you plenty of time to find out for me—for us, Oscar, for us—what she knows.”
He put the sheath back on the tip of the dart and returned it to his pocket. Then he reached for the envelope thick with one-hundred-dollar bills—too thick for a wallet—and handed it to Bolton.
“I was surprised you don’t use wire transfers. I always thought that was how these things worked,” Bolton said.
Douglas stood up and stretched his lanky body. “It’s how they work if you want to wind up in jail,” he told him, and then he left the man alone on the bench. He passed a poster with a drawing of a rat and a rose and he found himself smiling.
The university had BSL-3 labs at the hospital, but no BSL-4s—which is the highest. The most secure. But that was fine because, believe it or not, the plague is only a BSL-3 pathogen. Not four. It responds to existing drugs. The NIH sent us a sample to begin with, because of our above-board work. (Of course, even if they hadn’t, it wouldn’t have been hard to get one. Vials of it, along with anthrax, sit in the storerooms. Want to be scared? Watch the TED talks on how easy it is to steal some of these pathogens.)
Still, there are plenty of safety protocols at a BSL-3 lab. Protective equipment, respirators, scrub suits, the biosafety cabinets. I can still hear the ticking of the air filters. You can imagine how difficult it was to get in and get out. The key codes. The pass cards. The cameras.
The pathogen itself was treated like uranium and monitored just as carefully: far more carefully than at the NIH. I’m serious. After all, it was a new strain of plague, and we were in the middle of Kip’s Bay. Manhattan. Blocks from the subway and yards from the East River
But, again, we were only biosafety level three. If people on the outside knew what we were doing, I’m honestly not sure whether rage or fear would have been the defining characteristic of the news cycle.
But we knew the risks.
Or, at least, we thought we did.
28
Ken Sarafian had listened to Alexis’s voice mail about what he was already calling in his mind—an admittedly brusque and not especially accurate shorthand—the rat research. He’d reached out to Viet Nam National University and found a young male assistant in what the website called “Media” who spoke English and was willing to FaceTime with him. He had the distinct sense early into the conversation that the research had been censored. It had been taken off the university’s website, which was where, he presumed, Austin Harper had gotten the abstract. The spokesperson wasn’t prepared to say it had been censored; instead, he denied it existed. Said there was no study like that. When Ken asked abo
ut the two scientists whose names were on the research, he was told they no longer worked at the school and the assistant had no forwarding addresses for them. Insisted that he had no idea where they were now.
And so Ken thanked him and did a little digging online. It was pretty clear why the lead researcher hadn’t responded to his client’s emails. He had a feeling if Alexis checked her spam filter, she’d find that it had caught an automated email from Vietnam and quarantined it. And quarantine was precisely the right word, in this case, an inadvertent pun. The word in the subject line, he was quite sure, would be undeliverable. The scientist was dead. Died of an undisclosed illness. Ken wouldn’t have been surprised in the slightest if the other one was dead, too.
* * *
. . .
Next he called Sally Gleason.
“You actually took the case?” she asked, incredulous, when he told her.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I told you not to.”
The tenor of her voice surprised him. It was sharp, accusatory. He’d never heard that tone from her, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it. He didn’t like the way it had caused his antennae to twitch.
“You didn’t know all the facts when you encouraged me not to,” he said carefully.
“I snapped at you just now, didn’t I?”
“Little bit.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I was just shocked. And it’s been one of those days.”
“How so?”
“Too boring to recount. But suffice to say that Austin’s death does mean we’re a man down here. Same amount of work, fewer people. More fires, fewer firefighters.”
“Got it.”
“So Alexis called you,” she murmured. “And it’s not just a fool’s errand?”
“Nope. It’s actually kind of interesting.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
The Red Lotus Page 26