Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

Scopes paused. “I knew the woman well. She was—how shall I say it?—an original. Dedicated to her work. In certain ways, perhaps a bit difficult. But undeniably brilliant. You know, it’s very difficult to be a brilliant woman in science, even today. She had a rough time of it until she got to GeneDyne. I lost a friend as well as a scientist.” He looked briefly at Bannister, then dropped his eyes. “The CEO is ultimately responsible. This is something I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.”

Bannister watched him, genuinely moved. “How did she—?” he began,

“She died of a head injury,” Scopes said. Then he looked at his watch. “Damn! I’m running late. Anything else you’d care to ask, Edwin?”

Bannister picked up his tape recorder. “Not at the moment—”

“Good. I hope you’ll excuse me. Call me if you have any questions.”

Bannister watched the thin, slight figure of Scopes walk out of the room, toes pointing toward the walls, lugging the briefcase that seemed three sizes too large for him. An amazing fellow. Worth an amazing amount of money.

As Bannister wound his way back along the Atlantic headlands, he kept returning to that fifteen-billion-dollar figure, and what such an announcement would do to the value of GeneDyne stock. He wondered what GeneDyne was trading at right now. Come to think of it, he’d have to check that out. It wouldn’t hurt to put in a call to his broker and stick his money in something a little more exciting than tax-free munis.

Carson glanced up, peering through his visor at the oversized clock on the lab wall. The amber LED display read 10:45 P.M.

An hour earlier, the Fever Tank had been full of frenzied sound, as the shriek of the alert siren sounded the drill and the suited bodies tramped down the low corridors. Now the lab was once again deserted and almost preternaturally quiet, the only audible sound the whisper of air in Carson’s bluesuit and the faint hum of the negative-airflow system. The chimpanzees, disturbed by the drill, had finally ceased their hooting and screaming and had fallen into troubled sleep. Outside his own brightly lit lab, the corridor glowed a subdued red, and the cramped spaces of the Fever Tank were full of shadows.

Because the Fever Tank was decontaminated each week-night and again over the weekend, Carson had rarely been inside this late. Although the red nocturnal illumination was creepy and a little disorienting, he preferred it to what had come just before. The full-scale stage-one alert drills—which had begun to supplant the less severe stage-two and stage-three drills since Brandon-Smith’s death—were grim affairs. Nye was now personally supervising the drills, directing events from the security substation on the bottom level of the Fever Tank, and his brusque tones had rung irritatingly through Carson’s headset.

The one advantage of the frequent drills was that Carson had become more adept at moving around the Fever Tank in his bluesuit. He found that he could maneuver quickly through the corridors and around the labs, avoiding protrusions deftly, hooking and unhooking his air hoses to his suit instinctively, like breathing.

He looked away from the clock toward de Vaca, who was staring skeptically back at him.

“Just how do you plan to test this theory of yours?” came her voice over the private channel.

Instead of taking the time to answer, Carson turned to the small lab freezer, dialed its combination, and removed two small test tubes containing X-FLU samples. The tops of the test tubes were covered with thick rubber seals. The virus existed as a small white crystalline film at the bottom of each tube, If I handle this stuff a million times , he thought, I’ll never get used to the fact that it’s potentially more lethal to the human race than the largest hydrogen bomb . He placed both tubes inside the bioprophylaxis table and sealed it carefully, waiting for the samples to reach room temperature.

“First,” he said, “we’re going to split open the virus and get rid of the genetic material.”

Moving to a silver cabinet on the far wall of the lab, he removed some reagents and two sealed bottles labeled DEOXYRIBASE.

“Give me a number-four Soloway, please,” he said to de Vaca.

Since hypodermics were considered too dangerous for anything other than animal inoculation in the Fever Tank, other devices for transferring materials had to be used. The Soloway Displacer, named after its inventor, used blunt-ended plastic vacuum-needles to siphon liquid from one container to another.

Carson waited for de Vaca to place the instrument inside the bioprophylaxis table. Then, moving his gloves through the rubber openings in the front end of the table, he inserted one nozzle of the Soloway device into a reagent and the other through the rubber seal in one of the two test tubes. A cloudy liquid squirted into the tube. Gingerly, Carson swirled the tube in one gloved hand. The liquid became clear.

“We just killed a trillion viruses,” Carson said. “Now to undress them. Take off their protein coats.”

Using the device, Carson added a few drops of a blue liquid through the rubber seal, then removed .5 cc’s of the resulting solution, injecting it into the deoxyribase container. He waited while the enzyme broke up the viral RNA, first into its base pairs, then into nucleic acids.

“Now, to get rid of the nucleic acids.” He tested the precise acidity of the solution, then performed a remote-assist titration with a high-pH chemical. Then he drained off the solution, centrifuged out the precipitate, and transferred the pure, unfiltered X-FLU molecules that remained to a small flask.

“Let’s see what this little old molecule looks like,” he said.

“X-ray diffraction?”

“You got it.”

Carson carefully placed the X-FLU flask into a yellow bio-box and sealed it. Then, holding the box carefully in front of him, he removed his air hose and followed de Vaca down the corridor toward the central hub of the Fever Tank, ducking at last through a hatchway into a deserted lab. A single red light glowed from the ceiling. Already small, the compartment was cramped by the eight-foot stainless-steel column that dominated the center of the room. Next to the column was an instrument housing that contained a-computer workstation. There were no knobs, switches or dials on the column; the diffraction machine was controlled entirely by computer.

“Warm it up,” Carson said. “I’ll prepare the specimen.”

De Vaca sat down at the workstation and began typing. There was a click and a soft, low hum that gradually increased in pitch until it disappeared into inaudibility, followed by the hiss of air being evacuated from the interior of the column. De Vaca typed in additional commands, tuning the diffraction beam to the correct wavelength. In a few moments, the terminal beeped its readiness.

“Open the mount, please,” Carson said.

De Vaca typed a command, and a titanium-alloy stage mount slid out of the base of the column. It contained a small removable well.

Using a micropipette, Carson removed a single drop of the protein solution and placed it in the well. The stage mount slid shut with a hiss.

“Chill.”

There was a loud drumming noise as the machine froze the drop of solution, lowering its temperature toward absolute zero.

“Vacuum.”

Carson waited impatiently as the air was removed from the specimen chamber. The resulting vacuum would force all water molecules from the solution. As it did so, a faint electromagnetic field would allow the protein molecules to settle into a lowest-energy configuration. What remained would be a microscopic film of pure protein molecules, spaced with mathematical regularity on the titanium plate, held steady at two degrees above absolute zero.