Gregg Hurwitz - Minutes to Burn

Tank followed Rex into the darkness. Cameron walked over and pulled herself up on the ledge beside Juan. The echo of the church bells lingered in the darkness. The air was thick, humid, foreign. It smelled sharply of bark, burning wood, and stale food.

"I come here often at night," Juan said softly.

Cameron gave him the silence, listening to the rush of cars beyond the high cemetery wall.

Juan pulled off his wedding band and set it on his knee. He regarded it for a few moments. "I lost my wife," he finally said. "And my baby girl. I was teaching at Universidad when the apartment building collapsed. That was…that was almost three years ago, but still I feel it sharply on quiet nights like this." He picked up the ring, tilted it so that he could catch the blur of his reflection in the gold, then slid it back on his finger.

When she realized that he was crying, Cameron wasn't sure what to do. She popped a stick of gum in her mouth and worked it over, waiting uncomfortably through the silence. Juan finally wiped his cheeks and raised his head.

"I am sorry. You do not need this. There's just something in your eyes, some softness that lets me talk where I haven't before. That's unusual for Americans. They often come down here and see our ways and the vio-lence, and think us primitive." He shook his head. "Death is part of our culture. During the conquest, half our population was killed by disease, civil war. But no country can endure this kind of disruption, this kind of…" With a sweeping gesture, he indicated the cemetery before them. "Loss."

A man stumbled by, his head lowered, carrying an armful of flowers. When he passed Cameron and Juan, he paused and looked up at them. Cameron couldn't make out his face, because he was wearing a hat pulled low over his eyes. "No, gracias," she said, waving him away.

The man spoke back to her in a soft but angry voice. He gestured at her several times, and she felt for the pistol, just to make sure it was still there.

"What did he say?" she asked Juan when the man finished speaking.

Juan slid off the ledge onto his feet. "He asked that we get off his family's mausoleum, that he can lay the flowers there for them."

He nodded an apology at the man and headed back toward the foot-bridge.

Rex leaned over the hotel phone as Tank stretched out on the bed. He had to dial three times before the call went through. Donald picked up on the first ring. "How is it?"

"Lovely as always," Rex said. "Puts Paris to shame."

"Some interesting news. Remember that seawater that Frank sent back?"

"Of course." Rex pulled off his shirt and turned so that he could see his back in the mirror. He pressed his hand to the back of his neck, and the white imprint of his fingers lingered a few moments before fading.

"I finally got it under a microscope. The sample from Sangre de Dios was highly unusual. Most of the plankton were dead. Clumped together. Mostly unicellular phytoplankton-dinoflagellates were most prevalent, but a lot of them I didn't recognize."

"Really?" Rex said. "Species you didn't recognize?"

"My guess is that they were nonviable mutations. Remember, plank-ton are extraordinarily sensitive to UV-B."

"Yes," Rex said, pulling a Natural History magazine from his bag and perusing the back cover, "but they live at depths that screen out most radiation."

"Ah," Donald said. "But this was a surface sample. So my thought was, seismically motivated shifting currents pushed them upward, and their composition was altered by UV exposure. But the range of the mutations was staggering-they couldn't be based on radiation alone."

"So?" The phone line cut out. Rex looked over at his sat phone, still charging at the outlet, cursed, and dialed again. This time, the call went through on the first try.

"So," Donald said, picking up right where they'd left off. "I did a gas chromatography mass spec to check for DDT, but that came back negative, so I isolated some dinoflagellate DNA, and ran a gel."

Donald checked his watch. His linen shirt was creased and wrinkled across the front, dotted with sweat. He'd spent the entire morning in the lab. The work required a precision that had quickly become tedious. First, he'd centrifuged the water samples, placing them in a rapidly spinning test tube so that the denser dinoflagellates would settle at one end of the tube. Then, he'd made genomic preps to isolate the DNA strands, cut specific segments, and ran those segments through ethidium bromide-soaked agar to see how they'd settle. When they did, their banding patterns were visible under UV light, and ready to be compared to the control.

From past studies, Donald was familiar with the banding pattern of dinoflagellate DNA from around Galapagos; generally it banded from three to five kilobases down to ten base pairs. The DNA from the island of Santa Cruz matched this banding pattern. However, the sample from Sangre de Dios was irregular, with several of the DNA segments remaining at the top of the agar, barely traveling downward.

When Rex heard the results, he sat down on the bed. "Holy shit," he said. "What are you thinking?"

"Those segments are swollen with something to be moving that slow," Donald said. "I'm guessing a virus got ahold of them, finding its way through the UV-weakened cell walls and inserting its own DNA into their structures."

Rex whistled. "Well, viruses are phenomenally bountiful in H2O."

"That was my understanding. But this is well out of our field. I'd like you to take plenty of water samples on Sangre de Dios. In the meantime, I've sent the sample off to Everett at Fort Detrick."

"Samantha Everett?" Rex rubbed his forehead. "Are you sure that's such a good idea? I've heard she's a little… " The line cut out. "Unpre-dictable."

Former Chief of Viral Special Pathogens Branch at the Centers for Dis-ease Control in Atlanta and current Chief of the Disease Assessment Division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Dis-eases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Samantha Everett was decked out in a blue full-body space suit, complete with neoprene gloves taped to her sleeves. The droning air circulation unit inside the space suit was mes-merizing, forming a low-pitched symphony with the other sounds of the Biosafety Level Four lab-the constant one-way airflow, the blowers sit-uated near the doors to ensure negative pressure, the HEPA filters working double-time overhead. To maintain her sanity, Samantha sang "Itsy Bitsy Spider" to herself, substituting her own lyrics where she forgot the words.

A short woman-five foot two in sneakers-Samantha had the slightly frazzled air of a mother of three. Having neglected the wash for the past month and a half, she'd shown up to work wearing her daugh-ter's T-shirt featuring the five smiling faces of NVME's members. Fortu-nately, she also fit into her six-year-old son's shoes-green Velcro Adidas with asphalt marks on the white rubber outsoles-as she'd run from the house barefoot that morning only to realize it when she'd pulled up to base. She'd found the Adidas in the back of the minivan, buried in a mound of camping equipment from a trip into the Catoctins that, having been planned for two months and canceled three times, had almost come to fruition the prior weekend, only to be interrupted by the emergency at hand. A pair of wire-frame John Lennon-style glasses perched on her nose, the thin metal arms disappearing back into her curly brown hair.

Having little use for a husband, she'd adopted all three of her children over the past nine years. Earlier in her career, she couldn't have even considered being a mother. She'd been dispatched for months at a time on various projects-bleeding horses in rural Costa Rica for Venezuelan equine encephalitis, chasing Machupo virus up the eastern slope of the Andes, trekking through mosquito breeding grounds in the Nile Delta. But after her stint at CDC in Atlanta, she was given an offer to run DAD at USAMRIID, and she'd vowed to attempt some form of a domestic life. Being a mother, she'd found, had toughened her considerably more than being a major and running a division of testosterone-poisoned, military-sanctioned control freaks. But she liked Fort Detrick nonethe-less, and the seasons in central Maryland.