The Resurrector (The Dominic Grey Series)

by Layton Green

  Grey’s visit to the Peach Shack earlier in the day was still fresh on his mind, a sharp contrast to this paragon of medicine and progress. All the advances in the modern world, and places like the Peach Shack still exist.

  The nation’s first line of defense against deadly pathogens, the CDC was one of a handful of Biosafety Level 4 facilities in the world, and one of only two places where smallpox was stored. Grey was not surprised to find one of the center’s leading epidemiologists, Dr. Hannah Varela, spearheading the charge to investigate the mutations.

  Jacques Bertrand had asked Viktor to attend the briefing, but since Grey was in Atlanta, Viktor had sent him. Jacques trusted Grey, and approved the arrangement.

  After passing through security so tight they checked under the hood of his Jeep, a guard led Grey on foot down a winding concrete path that led through the miniature cityscape to an office building accented by a reflecting pool. Grey signed in. A different guard led him to Dr. Varela’s office. The modest space was decorated with a slew of professional certifications, photos and knick-knacks from countries around the world, and a quilt that covered half of one wall. Below the quilt, a handwritten note accompanied a photo of Dr. Varela and an African woman hugging on the bank of a muddy river. The note thanked Dr. Varela for curing the woman’s daughter.

  Willowy and pale, Dr. Varela had a warm smile and the hint of a Spanish accent, enough for Grey to peg her as Argentinian. He had learned Spanish for his Bogotá posting and was familiar with the major dialects. He also knew Dr. Varela’s thin nose and blond hair were not uncommon among the privileged families of Latin America, many of whom traced their heritage directly to European colonial powers.

  Generals. Latin America. It seemed like every stray thought, every chance encounter, was designed to force Grey to confront the ghost of Nya, wailing a soundless scream inside his head.

  As if he needed a reminder.

  When Dr. Varela greeted him, Grey saw hints of surprise and disappointment, even pity, in her turquoise eyes. She was probably wondering why Interpol had sent someone covered in bruises and who resembled an out-of-work hipster on a three-day coffee bender.

  “Please,” she said, motioning for him to take a seat.

  Grey slipped into the armchair in front of her desk and regarded her with stony silence. If Viktor and Jacques had wanted an ambassador of charm, they should have sent someone else.

  “I was expecting you an hour ago,” she said.

  Grey checked his watch. She was right. “I got caught up.”

  “Visitor hours end at eight. Even for a case like this, it takes time to procure an after-hours pass.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “All right, then,” she said, after a long moment. “We’ll get through what we can.”

  Grey leaned forward. “To be honest, I don’t really get this meeting. If a deadly pathogen caused the mutations, then this would be over my head. You wouldn’t have the time to meet with me. Not unless and until there was a more direct link to Viktor’s specialty.”

  Dr. Varela gave him a sharp look. “I requested this meeting, after I learned of Interpol’s involvement.”

  “Why?” Grey asked bluntly.

  “Because everyone else denied my request.”

  That caught him off-guard. “I don’t understand. Are we dealing with a communicable pathogen, or not?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  Dr. Varela glanced at a manila folder on her desk. “I’ve read your CV. You seem like a smart guy. Is there any medical training not listed?”

  “Just basic emergency.”

  She looked through him as if making a calculation in her head, then slipped into a white lab coat. “Come with me.”

  The lights from the high-rise gleamed golden in the reflecting pool. After walking across campus to a domed building, Grey followed Dr. Varela through more security, down a set of concrete hallways, and into a second-story interior room full of computers and whiteboards and file cabinets. A large window overlooked a futuristic stainless-steel laboratory on the level below.

  “That’s BSL4 down there. I can’t take you in, but we view our slide images from here.”

  Bio-safety Level Four, Grey knew, was for agents that cause severe-to-fatal disease and for which no known vaccine existed. The worst of the worst.

  “That’s a lot of ductwork,” he said, staring down at the lab.

  “Powerful air filters. We can’t exactly have particles escaping.”

  “I suppose not.”

  Dr. Varela sat in front of a monitor and brought up an image of a three-foot-tall microscope that looked like a mini space rocket attached to a computer.

  “An electron transmission microscope,” Dr. Varela said. “The only tool powerful enough to see a virus particle, which are one-millionth of an inch long. One hundred times smaller than bacteria.”

  “So a virus caused the mutations?”

  “Most likely, yes.”

  “You don’t know for sure?”

  “Scientific proof, especially in epidemiology, is far more elusive than people imagine. I’ll explain after a brief overview. Stop me if I’m giving you stale information.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Dr. Varela clasped her hands behind her back and paced the room. She had a habit of biting the left side of her bottom lip during a pause. “Viruses are the most common biological unit on earth. In fact, they outnumber all the other types put together. The human immune system is incredibly adept at fighting viruses, but given the sheer number and adaptability, there are always ones that slip through.”

  “Do you think we’ll ever eradicate them?”

  “No.”

  Her answer was swift and decisive. Grey took her at her word. “How do they . . . work?”

  “Unlike cells,” she said, “which are self-sustaining, viruses need a host to survive. When they enter an organism, they hijack a cell’s replication apparatus, make copies, then burst out of the cell and destroy it. This will continue until—unless, I should say—the immune system puts a stop to it.”

  “So they travel from host to host to survive?”

  “That’s right. Different viruses—there are more than five thousand known species—have different survival rates outside the host.”

  “So how did they start?”

  She stopped pacing. “Clever question. We’re not quite sure. Maybe evolved from plasmids, or bacteria. Viruses occupy an evolutionary grey area, somewhere between the living and the dead.”

  The morbid choice of words reminded Grey of the South African teenager stumbling into his village a month after his own funeral.

  Dr. Varela waved a hand at the electron microscope. “Take a look.”

  She changed the slide, and Grey saw an organism that resembled a set of spindly spider legs, connected via a metal screw, to a multifaceted gem with spikes sticking out of it. It looked, he thought, like an evil lunar lander.

  “That’s our guy?” he said.

  “That’s a virus we found in samples from the victims. I’m calling it PX-1 for now. Phage for eater, X-1 for the unknown.”

  “Eater?”

  “Have you heard of a bacteriophage?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a virus that infects and replicates within bacterium. Eats it, in cruder language. A phage. The structure of our virus resembles a bacteriophage, but we don’t yet know what it uses to replicate. We assume a bacterium of some type.”

  “Why don’t you know?”

  “We’ve only examined dead tissue. A live specimen is essential to further the research.”

  “Gotcha.”

  She pointed at the screen. “Normally, bacteriophages are our friends. They’re even used to target superbugs. But they can also turn normally harmless organisms lethal.”

  After a detailed description of virus substructures that made his head start to spin, Grey put a hand up. “Let’s relate this to the victi
ms, so I can get a footing. I assume you found the same virus in two of the victims, which caused the deformities?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Okay.”

  “I said most likely. Given the problem of control, not to mention the lack of a live virus, it’s impossible to be one hundred percent certain that a particular condition is linked to a particular virus.”

  “Since you’d have to experiment on human beings.”

  “Yes. That’s why controversy still exists over Zika causing infant encephalitis. We can’t prove that. But demonstrable evidence and the use of reason tells us there’s a link. You’re a detective. Imagine a body is found in a locked cell with a gunshot wound to the head and no gun. It can’t possibility be a suicide, right?”

  “Bad example.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s just say you don’t live in my world. But I’ll accept your reasoning and assume the virus is causing the deformities. Any theories there? Why do the victims mutate and then die?”

  “Scientifically speaking, the engorged muscles and the dagger-like growths on the fingers, which are formed of keratin, are termed hypertrophic myopathy and keratinopathy.”

  Grey frowned. “The victims change so quickly.”

  “A good hard anaerobic workout can engorge the targeted muscles, not to mention steroids and growth hormones. Add in gene editing, CRISPR or another technique, and the science is there. Our virus simply causes an overproduction of certain cells, producing viral proteins to perpetuate its life cycle. Rapid cellular expansion can result in hemorrhaging and a cerebral edema. And that is what killed our victims.”

  He shuddered. In the span of forty-eight to seventy-two hours, each victim had swelled like a piece of overripe fruit and then burst.

  “How deadly of a virus are we talking?” he asked, again wondering why she was telling him all of this, and not a roomful of federal agents.

  She said, “We have no evidence yet that our mystery virus is highly contagious—but we don’t know that it isn’t. It’s too early to tell. I hate to phrase it like this, but we’d need more victims to judge.”

  Grey saw hidden knowledge in her eyes. “But you have a guess, don’t you?”

  She bit her lip longer than usual. The suspicion looked awkward on her, not part of her scientific universe. “In terms of mortality rate, I’d say somewhere north of small pox, maybe as bad as Ebola. We’re talking eighty, ninety per cent.”

  He put his hands to his temples. “So back to the original question. Why am I standing here?”

  She regarded him with an unreadable expression, glanced at the camera in the far left corner of the ceiling, and then checked her watch. “Our time’s up.”

  After they left the lab and started walking across the grassy space leading to her office, she said quietly, “I eat dinner at Café Magnolia most nights after work. I have a few things to wrap up, but would you care to join me in an hour?”

  Unsure what had spooked the epidemiologist, but curious, Grey gave no reaction other than a murmured acceptance.

  Later that evening, Grey settled into a quiet corner of an upscale vegetarian restaurant a few miles from the CDC. Located in a strip mall on a busy artery leading to the suburbs, it did not seem like the type of place that would be popular on a Friday night. Dr. Varela arrived ten minutes later, wrapped in a sapphire shawl that matched her eyes.

  “Did you know,” she said after they ordered, “that rabies has a mortality rate of nearly one hundred per cent in unvaccinated patients?”

  “So why aren’t we all dying of rabies?”

  “The better question is, before the vaccine, why was there never a rabies pandemic? Mortality rate isn’t the whole story. The Spanish flu had a 2.5% kill rate but claimed more lives in one year than the Black Plague did in four, more than the entire number of casualties in World War I. The difference between rabies and the Spanish flu? Transmission rates. Rabies lives in the saliva of an infected host. The flu is airborne.”

  Grey rubbed his beard. “Okay.”

  “All viruses are infectious by nature, but Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers are so deadly because they combine an extremely high mortality rate with facile transmission. A viral nuclear bomb.”

  “So no one is panicking right now because the virus that killed our victims is hard to transmit?”

  “It’s too early to pinpoint a vector. But as of yet, there’s no evidence of human to human transmission.”

  “So how did they get it?”

  She met his eyes over her wine glass. “Precisely. We can hardly declare a pandemic before evidence of transmission surfaces. But they got it somewhere. And the rapid onset and mortality rate—one hundred per cent thus far—is highly disturbing.”

  “I’d think that would be enough.”

  “Again, rabies. And we haven’t established a causal link between the deformities and the virus. But this is something so new, so bizarre, that one would think I’d get the resources I’ve requested. Instead I’m getting pushback.”

  He thought about it. “Is it the victims? Poor and not white?”

  “That certainly makes it easier to ignore, or to blame on a variable like water source or radioactive exposure.” She gave the room a nervous glance, then lowered her voice. “Nature is strange. Stranger than you could ever imagine. But this . . . it doesn’t feel right.”

  The food arrived, a green curry for Grey and a beet and goat cheese salad for Hannah. Grey took a few disinterested bites as he waited for her to continue.

  “One example in particular: instead of hair loss, one would expect hypertrichosis, or abnormal hair growth, to accompany the myopathy and overproduction of keratin. The lethal structure of this virus, the bizarre effects that almost feel pieced together . . . it makes me think that it was manufactured.”

  Grey’s eyebrows shot up. “Manufactured? By whom?”

  She lifted a palm, as if to say, I’m just a scientist.

  But her eyes, the nervous glances around the restaurant, told a different story. Whoever the culprit was, Dr. Varela obviously suspected they might have eyes on the lab.

  On her.

  “Whatever the nature of this virus,” she said, “it’s going to take some time to get a handle on it, especially if there are roadblocks. I’m worried the transmission could be latent or the virus could mutate into a more mobile form.” She took a breath and looked at him. “If it truly is natural, there’s not much you can do to help. But if it’s not . . .”

  She finished her meal in silence. Grey heard her loud and clear.

  When the check arrived, Grey paid in cash and asked Hannah if she had pen and paper. She took a pen and a green notepad from her purse, and he scribbled his email and cell number down.

  “If I find something I think you should know,” he said, “I’ll call you.”

  She brushed a nervous hand through her hair, then flashed a smile that almost broke the tension. “Keep the pen. There’s a rabies vaccine inside.”

  Grey chuckled.

  Her phone rang, and she looked down. “That’s my pager. Listen, thanks for meeting me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Good luck.”

  “You, too.”

  The parking lot was located behind the storefront. Hannah left via the back door, the phone cradled to her ear. Grey started to hit the restroom on the way out when he stopped and cocked his ear towards the parking lot. A car door had just slammed shut.

  He and Hannah were the last two patrons. No one had left the restaurant in the last ten minutes. The other shops in the strip mall were all retail, closed for the night.

  Grey reached into his pocket and gripped the pen.

  Knowing there was probably a good explanation, an argument between teens making out in a car or a night cleanup crew, Grey stepped outside to be sure. As the door opened, exposing his ears to insect chatter accented by the low hum of a fluorescent light, he scanned the rectangle of blacktop walled in by dying kudzu.


  And saw four men he had never seen before, one of them with a hand clamped over Dr. Varela’s mouth, forcing her away from her silver Jetta.

  -10-

  The day following his visit to the township, Viktor decided to travel thirty minutes afield, alone and without prying eyes, to the forensic pathology lab servicing Bonniecombe. The tiny but gleaming medical facility, which shared space with a cattle embryo transfer center, sparkled under an azure sky.

  The medical examiner in charge of Akhona’s body, a heavyset woman with solemn eyes and freckled brown skin, greeted Viktor with all the enthusiasm of a scout reporting to his general that the opposing army had just snuck through the mountain pass in the fog. Once Viktor assured her that he was not there to railroad her, but to help solve the crime, she opened up.

  No, she said, she had no idea how this could have happened. The body disappeared between midnight and six a.m., when she had arrived for her shift. The only people with the key to the morgue were herself, the Director, and a janitor who had worked there for twenty years and who everyone held in the highest regard. Moreover, her preliminary notes on Akhona had been stolen, and the janitor was illiterate and couldn’t possibly have known what to take.

  No, she continued, she had never seen Akhona’s tattoo before and had no idea what it meant.

  No, she had not had time to adequately examine the body. What little she had seen defied logic, especially the clawed hands and the engorged muscles and the lack of tissue damage from the live wires—unless, she muttered with an uneasy glance at a crocheted cross on her desk, that tissue was already dead.

  And no, she said after Viktor had thanked her and was reaching for the door, she had no idea what God was trying to say by sending that poor boy back to his parents in such a state, whether dead or alive or in some limbo which no one understood.

  Viktor believed her, on all accounts. Before he left the facility, he secured an audience with the Director. The theft of the body and the medical records was an important development that needed to be explored. A risky maneuver that told Viktor that Akhona’s case was no freak of nature or environmental accident.