James Tabor - The Deep Zone

“I’m telling you, Doc, you’re better off taking what we’re offering.” Rivers’s smile showed yellow smoker’s teeth and a serious lack of flossing. She almost screamed at him to shut up. But she knew that Rhodes was right.

She could not afford a pricey lawyer. Her mother had some money, but Hallie would never ask for it. Even if she got a lawyer, the story would be in the Post and on the news programs for days. National news. International, probably. The media liked few things better than espionage stories. Genocide, maybe, and senators getting caught with bimbos or, even better, seducing pages of the same sex, but not much else. The stories would include her side, of course, but their allegations would have the real weight. She could see the headlines:

LEAKS FROM SECRET BIORESEARCH LAB

WOMAN SCIENTIST IMPLICATED

“You ever read about D.C. Jail?” Rivers seemed to know her thoughts, spoke while examining the wart on his palm. “I been there, Doc, dropping perps off. Terrible things happen. Especially to people like you.”

“You can really do this?” She ignored Rivers, addressed Rhodes. There were not many things she feared, but Hallie was honest enough to admit that being locked in the District of Columbia Jail was one. The stories that came out of that place—broom-handle rapes, mutilations, medieval things.

“Yes. We can.”

She could fight but, as Rhodes said, even if she won, she lost. Or she could sign. Go quietly. Live to fight another day.

Hallie had never been the kind of person who agonized over decisions. Weigh risks and benefits, figure the calculus, make the call. Another day always came. She looked up. Rhodes was holding out a pen. Rivers leaned back, smirking, fat hands folded on his paunch.

A part of Hallie wanted to curse them. Instead, she reached into the pocket of her lab coat and took out the Mont Blanc Meisterstück Solitaire her father had given her when she’d received her doctorate at Hopkins.

“I have my own.”

Without hurrying, she uncapped the pen, signed her name, ignored Rivers, and looked Rhodes in the eye.

“You’re doing a bad thing here, Mr. Rhodes. Sooner or later, we all pay for the bad things we do.”

The fly buzzed around Rivers’s head, and he still seemed oblivious to it. Rhodes kept his eyes locked on hers, saying nothing, but he rubbed his Penn State ring as if it were an amulet and she saw a flicker in his dark eyes, sudden and bright and quickly gone, that told her he knew it to be true.

NOW, IN BARNARD’S OFFICE, IT WAS NOT LOST ON HER THAT she could simply say, Sorry, gentlemen, BARDA screwed me royally , and walk right out.

But really, she didn’t even come close to that. Instead, she sat thinking of the thousands of young soldiers. And not only young ones. Old ones, too, from older wars, hanging on in VA hospitals all over the country, living out their lives with whatever remnants of bodies and minds their wounds and wars had left them. And soldiers’ families. It went on and on.

“You said Al is still working on the project.”

“That’s right.”

“How much biomatter does he have left?”

Barnard looked embarrassed. “None, I’m afraid.”

“It’s all gone? Every last milligram ?”

The basis of their research had been an extremophile from the Archaea domain. She had retrieved the biosamples while on an expedition exploring a monstrous cave in Mexico called Cueva de Luz. She had brought almost 100 grams of viable organism out of the cave with her. Half of that had expired before they learned how to keep it alive. When she had left over a year ago, more than 20 grams had remained. In microbiological terms, that was a ton.

“I’m afraid so. Al’s worked himself near to death, Hallie. I worry about him sometimes. And he took your departure hard. But at some point, science goes from craft to art. Al’s a fine craftsman, but he’s not an artist.”

“Can we synthesize replicant?”

Lew Casey broke in: “We’ve tried for months. Can’t get the mitochondrial dissemination right. It could be more months—or never.”

“While thousands of hospitals become…” She searched for the right word.

“Death camps.”

Hallie took a deep breath, sat back, rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t slept now for almost eighteen hours, and the cave rescue had been exhausting. She needed fresh clothes, a hot meal, a shower, sleep. But others were in much, much worse shape. Sleep could wait.

“We have to go back to Cueva de Luz.” She stared at Barnard. “There’s nothing else.”

“You cannot imagine how much I was hoping to hear you say that.”

She’d said it, but not without dread. Cueva de Luz was a true supercave, thousands of feet deep and many miles long, located in the high, remote forest of southern Mexico and filled with bizarre and exotic dangers. Journey to the Center of the Earth but worse, and for real.

“It’s not going to be as easy as it was last time.” Barnard’s voice was grim.

She gaped. “ Easy? Don, it was a nightmare. I didn’t think any of us were getting out. Two didn’t, as you know.”

“I know that expedition was hellish. But there are other complications now.”

“Such as?”

Lathrop looked at his gold wafer of a watch. “Dr. Leland, we can fill you in later. Just now, however—”

She ignored Lathrop, addressed Barnard: “We’ll need a team. That will take a week at least.”

Lathrop smiled for the first time since she’d walked into the office. “Already done!”

“What? Where? When do we meet them?”

“Right now. You’re the last to arrive. The others are waiting downstairs.”

It was past nine P.M. when the four of them took a secure elevator to the lowest level that BARDA acknowledged publicly and then dropped on down to Sublevel 1, the first of four classified levels that it did not acknowledge. The elevator stopped. Barnard entered an alphanumeric code on a keypad, the elevator door opened, and they walked forward into a biosecure chamber with gray walls and blue germicidal UV lights. The door slid closed behind them and there was a soft hiss as the chamber’s airtight seals engaged. Clicks and whirs, integrated sensors and analyzers scanning them for pathogens, explosives, biological material. Presently a group of lights on the air lock’s far wall glowed green and the inner door slid open.

The limited access was essential, for reasons well known to Hallie. In January 1989, chimpanzees infected with Ebola Zaire virus had gotten loose inside a research facility in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. They, in turn, had infected hundreds of other chimps. Before long, the entire complex became one vast Ebola-Z growth medium. Hot animals were running amok, others going crazy in their cages, still others breaking out.

Hallie did not routinely work with chimps, but she knew that they were eight times stronger than a human and could eat a man’s face in ten seconds. If any of those animals had escaped, a pandemic of hemorrhagic fever with a 90 percent mortality rate and no known cure would have burned through Washington’s civilian population in two weeks. It would have obliterated the constitutional line of succession like a wet sponge wiping chalk marks off a blackboard. There would not have been an executive, legislative, or judicial branch of government, nor any military command to speak of. Washington, D.C., would have been a cauldron of death.

In the end, only the work of some very brave people and more sheer luck than humanity had any right to expect had averted disaster. But the Monkey Business, as it was known forever after, had had lasting effects. To ensure that nothing like that ever happened again, the CDC had imposed fail-safe security precautions. Now a hot pathogen break might kill many BARDA people, but the bug would find no further hosts. Those BARDA lives would be the price of containment.