Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

“Okay, so you’re a professional.”

“Jessica and I were both bizogenetic researchers for the army.”

“Our army?”

He smiled. “I’m not a foreign terrorist, Dixie.”

Maybe not, but I had a feeling he might be a native terrorist, which in some ways is even worse.

“In the beginning, we were trying to develop vaccines or antidotes for a host of animal diseases that we expect to see in humans in the future. Some of them have already popped up here and there, like the outbreak of SARS, which originated in an obscure wild animal in China, or the West Nile virus, which originates in horses. A disease that’s benign in animals can be fatal to humans, and when a disease leaps from animals to humans, it can become highly contagious. Look at what happened with the bubonic plague. It spread from rats to humans via fleas, and in five years it wiped out a third of the European population. The next plague will probably come from poultry in Southeast Asia.”

His eyes had taken on the shine of enthusiasm that people have when they talk about something that gets their juices flowing. Even his voice seemed stronger and more confident.

I hated to be the ant at his picnic, but I said, “And then what happened?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said you were developing vaccines in the beginning. What happened after the beginning?”

He took a deep breath, and the shine left his eyes.

“Then somebody in a position of power decided that a disease that began in animals and was fatal to humans could be a useful weapon. If we could find a way to create and disseminate an interspecies disease in a controlled way, we could wipe out an entire nest of terrorists or an entire population that we believed posed a threat to world peace.”

Hearing somebody talk about widespread killing in order to bring about world peace always makes me want to projectile vomit, but I kept quiet.

He said, “The army contracted with a civilian company to take responsibility for the work, but basically the same researchers continued doing what we had always been doing. We just had different employers. Our assignment was to develop a fatal disease that we could test on an isolated island in Southeast Asia.” Looking quickly at my face, he said, “Fewer than a thousand inhabitants, virtually no outside contact. It was an ideal testing locale, especially in the event that biocontainment was breached. That happens sooner or later in any animal disease lab, but in our location any accidentally released virus would disperse over the ocean.”

With a bitter grimace, he added, “We never expected the ocean to turn on us.”

“You lived there, on the island?”

“Yes, we lived among the people we planned to kill.”

“And did you? Did you kill them?”

A ripple of pain moved across his face. “We were just doing our job, Dixie. But no, we didn’t kill them. We killed our fellow researchers instead. Not by intent, of course—it was purely accidental. I imagine you find a poetic justice in that.”

I shrugged. “What’s the quotation, He who lives by the sword dies by the sword ? I suppose that applies to those who live by diabolical research too.”

“You call it diabolical. We thought of it as exploring the limits of genetic engineering.”

“Okay. So what happened?”

Wearily, he said, “Our biocontainment lab was in a secret underground installation under a concrete complex that housed legitimate biotechnology laboratories. Our basement lab was divided into zones separated by heavy air-lock doors that opened and closed by a computer code known only to the senior researchers. The air pressure steadily decreased toward the central zone, where we kept freezers full of frozen viruses. That way, any stray pathogens would flow inward and up through a large particulate filter.”

He fell silent for a moment, as if he had to summon the courage to tell the rest of what he intended to say. I didn’t pressure him. I know all too well that some memories are too awful to tell all in one burst.

He said, “From the beginning, those of us in charge of the project were concerned about the fact that the air locks couldn’t be opened manually. We wanted a manual option in case of a power failure, but every time we complained, we got a runaround about the expense, or the possibility of losing our secrecy, or some other bureaucratic crap.”

As he talked, his arms began to cross over his chest until he was hugging himself against some chilling memory.

“The same tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia hit the island. The thing came out of nowhere, a wall of water that destroyed everything in its path, including the concrete building above the lab. Water flooded every zone of the basement and knocked out the backup generators that allowed the air locks to open. Without manual controls, everybody in the innermost chambers drowned, along with the infected animals in their holding chambers.”

He put a quivery hand to the side of his face and held it there for a moment, either to calm the twitching tremors under his skin or to calm his own obvious fury at a company whose negligence had cost lives.

“If the goddamned company had listened to us and put in manual controls, they could have survived. Rescuers had to push their way through contaminated water to reach the dead, and many of the rescuers sickened and died too. My own theory is that they either had open sores or accidentally ingested some of the water. They all died within twenty-four hours.”

He turned his tortured gaze to meet my eyes.

“Jessie was supposed to be on duty in the biocontainment lab when the tsunami hit, and she was listed as one of the dead. I have always believed she died there.”

I felt like Alice after she ate the cookie that made her become enormous. The overheated room seemed to be shrinking, and Kurtz was beginning to look like somebody seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Why not you? Why not Ziggy?”

His face took on a sly, crafty look. “I was using that particular iguana for some special research. I had taken him to my private residence that was farther inland.”

“And when the tsunami hit?”

“Near the shoreline, it was pure chaos. But higher up, where I was, some people weren’t even aware it had happened. I heard the news on the radio and knew our lab would have been destroyed, along with all our work. I knew if any of the researchers survived, they would do what they could to keep the work secret. I did the only thing I could do. I put the iguana in the helicopter the army provided and got the hell out of there.”

As delicately as I could, under the circumstances, I said, “That doesn’t explain what caused your—”

He gave that braying pseudo-laugh again. “Funny thing about creating diseases to use for espionage. We can manipulate cells to cause blood to boil or bones to crumble or the brain to implode. But we never consider the long-range consequences to the creators. One careless moment, and you can be seeing a death mask in the mirror for the rest of your life.”

“I’m just guessing here, but does that mean you were careless?”

“You get so familiar with the animals, you know? You sort of forget why they’re there and why you’re there. Sometimes you’re too tired to do things exactly the right way. You don’t put on gloves or you accidentally stick yourself with a contaminated needle or you inhale particulate in the air after an animal sneezes or coughs. In the early days we used silver nitrate to attenuate the viruses we were working with, and I was exposed to so much of it that my skin was beginning to turn bluish even before the tsunami. It’s become a lot more pronounced in the past few months. The neural spasms and the episodes of debilitating pain didn’t appear until after I left the island. That’s why I need heat too. My body’s temperature regulator has been destroyed.”