Containment

by Kirkland, Kyle

  "There will always be corruptible agents," said Burnett. He waved a hand. "Not the government's fault, I guess. But it's a fact." After a pause, he added, "What did you say they died of?"

  "What? Oh, the Medburg victims." Gordon had to think a minute. "The story I read didn't say. Maybe they know something more by now."

  "Could be. Or maybe they already know and aren't telling the journalists." Burnett called up his address file. "Media contacts," he muttered.

  Gordon sat quietly, watching Burnett's worried face as the boss flipped through screens of names and numbers. Suddenly Gordon felt a twinge of sadness and frustration.

  "Times sure have changed," he said out loud.

  Burnett didn't look up. He'd apparently found a media contact he believed to be discreet, and was quietly composing a message.

  Gordon glanced around the office. He patted the comfortable chairs. "It's not like old times, Burnie. I remember having many conversations with you, though not like this. You remember the good old days? Back when you were a postdoc and I was a struggling graduate student. We'd get together for coffee late at night, sit on hard seats or benches, and talk about how our experiments were going."

  Burnett's gaze drifted to Gordon. "Under the circumstances, a wave of nostalgia is not the best—"

  "I was just thinking. You know, it's funny. The old Burnie I used to know...." Gordon frowned. "If I'd told the old Burnie about two deaths, he would have said something like, 'We need to find out what happened to those people. I hope it's nothing we did.' But now, the new Burnie, he's quite a bit different. Burnie the CEO, I'm talking about. When Burnie the CEO hears about two deaths, he says, 'We need to find out what's going on. I hope nobody steals our company's data.'"

  There was a pause. Burnett blanked the screen, then leaned back in his chair. "Five years is a long time, Gordon. We've got almost 40 employees who've invested a lot of time, effort, money, and careers in this company. And you and I...we've invested what seems to me a lifetime of sweat and tears."

  Gordon nodded.

  "And still," said Burnett Sellás, "you're suggesting we open ourselves up to potential theft."

  "Yes." Gordon was pleased that the word came out clearly and firmly. "Two people died, Burnie, and there's just the remotest chance that it's something we did. God, I hope not, and I don't think so. If it is, then it was surely accidental. But no matter, we have to convince ourselves—and other people—that we've done nothing wrong. Or, if the unthinkable has happened, we have take responsibility. And we have to make sure it doesn't happen again."

  Another pause followed. For Gordon it stretched uncomfortably long.

  Finally Burnett said, "Noble sentiments indeed." He sighed deeply. "Very well. We'll do it your way. I suppose you'll want us to contact the government ourselves, just to make sure that no one overlooks us?"

  Gordon detected a hint of sarcasm in Burnett's voice. He ignored it as best he could. "It wouldn't hurt."

  "Then I'll send out a message shortly." Burnett nodded and went back to work.

  Gordon left the office with mixed emotions. He knew he'd done the right thing and was proud of it, though he realized that it had taken a while for the right thing to suggest itself to him. The image of Burnett, his long-time colleague and friend, fretting about the company—that image had shaken him out of his worry about his patent application. Burnett, a man who'd previously always placed a priority on people rather than things, had acted selfishly, and when Gordon saw his own selfishness reflected in Burnett's behavior he'd been able to shake loose from it. Still, it had been a close call.

  But there were other thoughts crowding into Gordon's mind.

  Some of the thoughts were alarming. One of them was absolutely petrifying. And if it were true....

  The sinking feeling Gordon had gotten earlier returned in full force. Was he really so sure that the company had nothing to do with the two deaths?

  Breaking into a run, Gordon raced down the hallway toward the company laboratories.

  Medburg, Pennsylvania / 11:45 p.m.

  They are creatures of the night. Hardly ever seen by humans, they spend their year or two of life—if they're lucky—feverishly supporting their racing metabolism. And making lots of babies, litters of them, which mature in eight weeks. Enough of them for a population explosion, if left unchecked.

  They're rarely left unchecked, even in the city. They are preyed upon by rats, owls, and cats, and some of them end their days in a steel-spring trap. But mice are an important part of the ecosystem even though they are generally concealed from human eyes, except in the worst tenements and aging row homes, whose cracked foundations invite infiltration.

  Aggressive and territorial, an adult male mouse can weigh upwards of 30 grams and uses his sixteen teeth to their fullest advantage. Yet on this night, throughout several blocks of the city, the normally busy and metabolically active mice were quiescent. They failed to roam, they did not hunt, they ignored their young.

  Gary Winters knew nothing of this. Lying in his bed, in the room he shared with his little brother, he fell into a half-asleep, half-awake state. His thoughts flitted from topic to topic without the usual constraint of logic or practicality. He thought about driving; driving a Mustang, and then driving another kind of car, a four-door sedan in which he could take the family somewhere, out to eat, or to the park. He thought about learning to drive, and about Alicia, his sister. His mother. Graduation. Job. College. Ha, fat chance, why even think about it? Scholarship. Yes, it was possible. College. Gradually his mind drifted more into sleep than waking, and finally out of waking altogether and into a deep but fitful sleep.

  All the while, something was happening that Gary Winters failed to notice. And also Alicia Winters, who was carrying on a whispered conversation with one of her friends on her cell phone while trying to keep from waking her little sister. Alicia and her friend Bella weren't discussing boys—their usual topic—or school or the latest Hollywood fashions, but instead they talked about a movie Bella had seen that night in which every woman in the world abstained from sex, and soon women dominated the planet and ran the government of all the countries. Loretta Winters failed to notice too. She had returned home an hour earlier and fell into an exhausted sleep in front of the television, which quietly played old reruns of Married...With Children. Unobserved by the Winters family and the rest of the people of Medburg, the mice of their city were dying.

  14 April, Wednesday

  Medburg, Pennsylvania / 12:30 p.m.

  "Mondays are always the worst," said the medical examiner through his mask.

  Lisa Murdoch's eyebrows shot up to her hair net. "It's Wednesday."

  Cecily poked her not too gently in the ribs. "He means when the bodies came in. After the weekend."

  The M.E. didn't appear to have heard. A large, rotund man clothed in scrubs, he stood beside two bodies and looked at them with worried eyes. The worry had broken out all over his face the moment that Lisa and Cecily had appeared, and it hadn't let up.

  Cecily glanced from one body to the other. Both were males, one in his fifties, the other younger, maybe by a decade. On their torsos they had the characteristic Y-incision of an autopsy. Cecily didn't have to ask whether the next-of-kin had given permission. Autopsies were automatic in cases like these. Should have been automatic, that is, if there hadn't been a mistake somewhere along the processing that had sent the bodies to the morgue.

  The M.E. shook his head. "Well, it's up to the lab guys now. I can't find anything wrong and I've spent almost all of last night rummaging around in there." He gestured toward the corpses. Then he turned and walked away, still shaking his head. "I'm giving up."

  Cecily and Lisa followed him into the wash room. After a thorough scrubbing the M.E. seemed to wander aimlessly away.

  Cecily caught him in the hallway. "Got somewhere I can make a private call with my cell phone?"

  The M.E. nodded and ushered them into an office. The pictures of a robust and large famil
y, including the M.E. as a ruddy sort of patriarch, made Cecily guess that the office was his. On the wall was a sign, Erin Go Bragh.

  "If you've got a magic wand," he said gruffly, "we could sure use it now."

  Lisa said, "Maybe the CDC doesn't have the right antigen."

  Cecily glanced at the M.E., who gave her a sharp look back. "She's new," said Cecily.

  They'd gotten the news an hour ago that the CDC had exhausted their diagnostic reagents and found nothing.

  "Look," said Lisa, "just because all of the CDC tests turned up negative doesn't mean it's a new bug."

  Cecily finished punching the numbers on her phone. She looked at Lisa. "Honey, if the CDC doesn't have the right diagnostic reagent, it doesn't exist."

  Lisa's face reddened. "You can stop calling me 'honey.'"

  The M.E. coughed politely. "We'll find out what killed those men. Somebody will, anyway. It's just going to take a little spot of time. Cell by cell, chemical by chemical, we'll take 'em apart and put 'em back together again if we have to."

  Kraig Drennan answered Cecily's call. She gave him a summary of what the M.E. had told her.

  Kraig interrupted her. "Were some of the physiological tests spoiled by the processing of the bodies?"

  Glancing at the M.E., Cecily said, "Possibly. It's hard to tell. But I think most of the new data are good."

  Kraig didn't sound convinced.

  "We've initiated corrective action," said the M.E. "Too late for those two, I know."

  Cecily relayed his remark to Kraig.

  "That's all right," said Kraig acidly. "We'll just have to wait for more bodies to show up."

  Cecily changed the subject. "I suppose you heard about the CDC." After Kraig told her he had, Cecily glanced at Lisa. Then into the phone she said, "I don't suppose they could have missed one. I mean, they did it awfully fast."

  "It's all automated these days. And I told them it was a rush job. Forget it. They used their whole repertoire of reagents. I got the list. If there's a bug still hiding in the tissues of those bodies, it's a new one. And remember, the immune systems of the victims were relatively quiet, so maybe there's no virus, no bug at all. But we can't be sure. It might be a slippery one."

  "Lisa's going to check on the local hospital and clinics, and some of the other hospitals in the county. Maybe we'll call Philadelphia too while we're at it. I'll be trying to backtrack the victims. Any special instructions?"

  Kraig said "No," and killed the connection.

  "Not very encouraging?" observed Lisa.

  "What'd you want him to do, honey? Shake some pom-poms and give us a cheer? We're doing what we can." Cecily glided toward the door. "Thanks, doc. We'll be in touch."

  The M.E. held up a big hand and Cecily stopped.

  "If you want some humble advice...."

  Cecily grinned. Her grin clearly made the M.E. uneasy, but he grinned back. He said, "Not that you need it, you understand."

  "I understand. And I never turn down advice. Hit me."

  "Well...I appreciate how you'd be thinking about bugs in all of this, what with the epidemics of the last few years, and thanks to the faster way folks are traveling around the world nowadays, and the terrorists, and the new bugs in Asia and all...."

  "But?" prompted Cecily.

  "But I don't think it's a virus. There's no indication of infection. You want my opinion, it's going to turn out to be a chemical. And probably something they ate or breathed. We got lots of chemicals floating around in the air here, and we do get temperature inversions—not as much of a problem as, say, Los Angeles, but it happens. It'd be enough to stop natural air circulation."

  "Thanks, doc. But I already checked with the weather people."

  The M.E. smiled. "No inversion?"

  "Not much wind either," added Lisa.

  "I guess you two are well ahead of a tired old man like me."

  "We like to cover all the bases," said Cecily. "It's a process of elimination. It was easy to check the bodies for a previously identified virus, and it was easy to check the weather. Both turned out negative. But I agree with you. The lack of any identifiable antigens in the victims is the most puzzling thing about this case. And the most worrying." She paused. "We might need the luck o' the Irish to solve this one."

  "If I find a four-leaf clover, cailin, it's yours."

  As they were leaving the building and walking out into the chilly afternoon, Lisa said to Cecily, "I don't get it. We've only got two bodies and everybody, including Kraig, is acting like it's an epidemic."

  Cecily gave her an annoyed glance and hopped into the rental car. She started up the engine and did a jackrabbit start as soon as Lisa's door closed.

  "Two's not enough for you, honey?"

  Lisa gave her a dirty look and adjusted her seat belt and shoulder harness.

  A red light caught them near the hospital.

  "The problem," said Cecily, staring at the traffic light, "isn't the number of cases. At least not right now. The problem is that we don't know what killed those men. And if we don't know what killed them, we have no idea if it'll kill again, and how many people are susceptible. That's what worries me. It worries Kraig. It worries the M.E. It worries Roderick Halkin, or it will whenever he puts on his nitrile gloves and starts thinking like a scientist again. It doesn't worry Chet but that's because it doesn't have anything to do with golf. It should worry you, but I see that it doesn't. And that bothers me as much anything else."

  Montgomery County, Pennsylvania / 2:00 p.m.

  He'd waited all day for Jennifer to arrive at the lab. Obviously she wasn't coming in today. Gordon sat on an uncomfortable, unpadded stool and watched as Jennifer Rason's lab workers busied themselves under the harsh ultraviolet lamps, transferring cells. One of Pradeep's technicians was nearby, pipetting solutions.

  Pradeep Rumanshan, one of the first scientists Gordon and Burnett had hired, walked by. "Gordon?"

  Gordon looked up and smiled. Pradeep's dark face made a stark contrast with his bright white labcoat. Pradeep spoke English with a pronounced accent, very clipped. Gordon's name sounded like "grdun."

  "Still no trace of Jen?" asked Pradeep.

  Gordon shook his head.

  Glancing at the hood where Jennifer's workers were busy, Pradeep said, "She left them plenty to do, it would appear."

  Gordon's gaze went to the hood. It was one of the newest models, a huge rectangle of metal measuring 12 feet long, five and a half feet tall, and three feet in depth. The sliding glass enclosure on the front was open just enough for the workers to get their hands and arms inside the working area.

  Turning back to Pradeep, Gordon looked at the young scientist's face. Still well under 40, Pradeep was a chemist with an excellent background in organic synthesis. They'd recruited him from the University of Pennsylvania; his job at Vision Cell Bioceuticals was to hunt for biologically active compounds. Since no one knew what, exactly, to look for, they had to take a shotgun approach, which was what made Pradeep perfect for the job. He had a lot of experience in combinatorial chemistry, cooking up hundreds or even thousands of compounds at a time.

  But although Pradeep and Jennifer were good scientists—and good people, as far as Gordon knew—he was worried. At Vision Cell, space was at a premium; they rented the building instead of buying, and they couldn't afford a big place. And even with the limited room they'd gotten, utilities could eat you alive. Sharing was essential. The hood, for instance: the technicians of both Pradeep and Jennifer used it. Therein lay the problem—competition.

  Pradeep put his hand on Gordon's shoulder, sensing trouble. "I see something haunting that boyish face," said Pradeep.

  Gordon shrugged. "Have you talked to Jennifer lately?"

  Pradeep's expression changed subtly. Gordon tried to catch its meaning, but couldn't quite make it out.

  "No. Not lately," answered Pradeep.

  Whatever it was that passed over Pradeep's face had disappeared quickly. But the chemist had lowered his g
aze. Suddenly he seemed to have other things to do. He lifted his hand from Gordon's shoulder. "I have some experiments to attend to."

  "Wait," said Gordon. He paused. "Is something wrong?"

  Pradeep smiled. "No. Funny you should ask that question. I'm not the one who looks like his best friend walked out with the wedding ring."

  "What?"

  "Nothing," said Pradeep, waving a hand. "I made a small joke."

  Gordon rose. "Listen...there may be a problem here in the lab."

  "A problem?"

  "Yes. Some people will be coming soon. Burnett's going to make an announcement later today."

  "Who? What people? This is all very vague, Gordon."

  Gordon sighed. Why was he being so evasive? "There were two unexplained deaths in Medburg, not far from Moshatowie Creek. Although I'm sure we had nothing to do with it, some medical investigators and government agents will want to come and talk with us."

  Pradeep looked shocked. "But we do not work with anything dangerous here!"

  "I know, it's just routine."

  Pradeep eyed him suspiciously. "Then why do you look so worried? This is what alarms you, is it not?"

  "It's just that...." Gordon spread his arms out wide, as if to encompass the whole building. "All of us are crammed into this small space and...."

  "Go on."

  "Well, we all have patents on our mind. Burnie set up the company so that individuals benefit from their own work. That's all well and good, it's a strong incentive, and...." Gordon felt himself floundering again. He took a deep breath. Might as well come out and say it. "I know you and Jennifer have had issues with each other."

  Everybody knew they'd been fighting. Not the usual tiffs and petty jealousies that often invade laboratories. It had gone beyond the casual comments in the hallway to the effect that so-and-so's work seems to be slipping, and what could be the matter? Pradeep and Jennifer had argued openly and loudly.

  "I've exchanged unpleasant words with Jennifer, yes," said Pradeep. "Does it have a bearing on this investigation you're talking about?"