Marc Cameron - National Security

With roughly five minutes of air in her sealed suit, Mahoney’s first order of business was to attach one of the red air hoses that hung coiled from the ceiling every twelve feet. The hose provided her suit with a positive air flow and kept her face shield clear from fog. More importantly it gave her clean air to breathe.

Those who worked the Special Pathogens Branch followed safety precautions to the letter, but deadly viruses had to be kept alive in order to be studied. Working in a BSL-4 was like swimming in a feeding frenzy with billions of invisible, microscopic sharks-except it was far more dangerous.

Mahoney’s suit filled with a constant stream of air, turning her into a hissing blue version of the Michelin Man.

The French had done a remarkable job of packaging the samples. There were two, each in a separate, unbreakable tube, sealed in foam tape and stored with a chemical gel coolant that would keep anything, virus or otherwise, viable. One of the samples was easily identifiable as blood. Primary tests revealed it was human, but a mix containing the DNA and blood types of at least four individuals.

The second sample, also taken from the Roissy lab according to the French, was not so easy to identify. It was clear and viscous, the consistency of syrup, with microscopic flecks of black and red Mahoney had supposed was occult blood. It turned out to be vitreous gel, the fluid from inside a human eye, again from multiple donors.

Inside the BSL-4, the stainless steel surfaces and shatterproof glass equipment were dazzling in their sterility.

Mahoney, followed by a very serene Justin, made her way across the spotless tile floor-it was severely uncluttered, devoid of anything that might pose a trip or cut hazard. Two Pyrex vials sat in separate airtight glass containment boxes on her workbench, right where she’d left them.

It took hours to ready samples for study. They’d started the process as soon as they’d arrived from Miami. Now, Mahoney put Justin in charge of slicing dried droplets of amber resin containing cultures from each of the two specimens and studying them under an electron microscope.

She would deal with the macaques.

A long row of eighteen enclosures, connected by a series of metal and PVC piping ran along the walls of yet another sealed room inside the BSL-4. Only ten of the enclosures contained macaques.

Mahoney had never been able to bear naming the animals involved in her research and called them by the control number tattooed on their chest. The primates were the worst, with their intelligent eyes and human expressions-it was far too easy to become attached to them. She’d spent months in the jungles of Africa and South America staring the world’s deadliest diseases square in the face, watched people in the worst forms of pain and human agony, and still it was the monkeys that haunted her dreams.

She told herself the work she did was so important. The deaths of a few had the potential to save millions of lives. Mahoney listened to the muffled thump as the doors leading to the monkey unit slid shut behind her and wondered if the man who gave the order to shoot down Northwest 2 had used the same line of reasoning.

All eight of the surviving monkeys broke into a chorus of “Krraa! Krraaa!” as soon as Mahoney walked in and attached her breathing hose. Though slightly muffled by their airtight pens, the monkeys’ screaming cries filled the room. She always tried to be gentle, but brought the creatures little but pain. She knew it and they knew it. Though each monkey could see the animals in the enclosures on either side of it, the air going in and out of the cage only mixed with that of the adjacent animals if Mahoney wanted it to.

In the far corner of the room the enclosures for C-08 and C-11 were quiet.

Five hours before, Mahoney had injected C-08 with a serum made from the Roissy blood mixture, then connected the air ducts from that cage to the cage of C-11. No other contact was allowed. Megan groaned when she looked in the metal enclosures and found each animal slumped dead with uncoagulated blood still dripping from their old-man faces. C-11 had had no direct contact with the Roissy virus, but seven hours after beginning to breathe common air, he had crashed and bled out, just as surely as C-08.

She’d have to do a necropsy, take some blood and liver samples for further study, but first she needed to check on her two other test subjects.

Mahoney had given C-45 two cc’s of a serum made from a sample of the vitreous eye gel found along with the blood in the terrorist lab in Roissy. C-45 was a robust, bearded male tipping the scale at thirty-one pounds-much of it teeth and claw. It had taken a double dose of ketamine to sedate the animal long enough to give him the test serum. It was one thing to get poked with a needle containing an anesthetic, quite another to get even a nick from a syringe containing a deadly agent like Ebola.

Though heavily sedated with a drug that should have had amnesiac effects, C-45 had stared up at Mahoney during the short procedure with pure, unblinking hatred right up to the time Justin had returned him to the enclosure.

Now the big macaque paced his tiny metal prison, still very much alive. C-6, whose enclosure shared the same air system as C-45, screamed and scolded Mahoney as she approached for a better look. C-45’s huge brown eyes still burned with hatred, but he was unsteady, apparently under residual effects of the ketamine. She wondered vaguely if he was having a bad trip. Ketamine, known as Special K on the street, could send humans into wild hallucinations.

Mahoney made a note in the chart hanging below the enclosures while she worked to connect the dots in her mind. Maybe the eye gel was just some byproduct at the lab. Vitreous gel was mostly water with a few proteins; maybe it had been used as a culture medium. The thought of where anyone had gotten such a thing turned her stomach. If the stuff had contained the same variant as the blood, C-45 and C-06 would be goners by now. Maybe it was something else altogether. Inside the cumbersome blue plastic suit, Mahoney shook her head. Hers was not a job where you could afford to miss things…

“Boss…” Justin’s voice crackled across her earpiece. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

It was his favorite trick-to lure her to the microscope with the promise of something interesting and use the opportunity to slide his arm around her while they stood cheek to cheek, or at least bubble to bubble.

“I’m really busy in here, Justin,” she said. “What have you got?”

“Okay, but I’m telling you-”

“Just tell me what you see.”

“Okay,” Justin groaned, sounding slightly bored. To him, this was just another of many brushes with killer animalcules. He could never know the particulars of Northwest Flight 2. “The Roissy blood contains large amounts of filovirus… Looks a lot like Ebola Zaire-shepherds’ crooks and spaghetti worms everywhere.”

Mahoney leaned against a metal table, stretching her back. “That’s what I suspected. And the vitreous gel… nothing, right?”

C-45 suddenly went berserk, banging his head against the front of his enclosure.

“Kraaa! Kraaa!” The enraged macaque bared long yellow fangs, focusing all his anger on Mahoney.

Justin paused from his rundown. “You all right in there?”

“We’re fine.” Mahoney turned away from the cage, hoping that might calm the enraged beast. “You were telling me about the second sample.”

“That’s what you’ll want to see, Meg.” He had to throw in her name. “The vitreous gel is teaming with virus, more even than the blood. The thing is, each strand in the gel appears to be encased in some sort of heavy sheath… maybe a protein… I’m guessing that’s why C-45 and C-6 aren’t showing any symptoms. Maybe it affects them same way Ebola Reston hits humans-communicable but not deadly. I’m thinking what we have here is one of the bad guys’ failures in the bioweapon department.”