Jeff Buick - Lethal Dose

Evan Ziegler rose and stood over the man. It had played out exactly as Bruce Andrews had said it would. Connors was trying to discredit Veritas by pinning Rousseau’s murder on someone inside the company. And a scandal of that magnitude would surely result in all research work grinding to a halt. With the Phase I trials for the brain chips slated to begin in less than two months, way ahead of schedule, that would spell disaster. And his son Ben was at the top of the list for one of the experimental chips. No goddamn way some piece of crap like this was going to keep his boy in that wheelchair.

He unscrewed the silencer and replaced the pistol in his shoulder holster. One more glance at the corpse and he was gone, wiping the door handle clean of all fingerprints on his way out. It was late, and he encountered no one on his way out of the building or on the street as he walked to his car. He put the windshield wipers on intermittent and pulled away from the curb with one thought on his mind.

Two more months until the tests were to begin. Ben was almost out of the chair.

“Gentlemen, we have a real problem this time,” J. D. Rothery said. He paced the carpeted floor of his office while he spoke. Present were Jim Allenby, Tony Warner, and Craig Simms. The task force against America’s latest terrorist threat was assembled and listening as the head of the scientific arm of the Department of Homeland Security brought them up to date on the latest viral outbreak.

“A group of Boy Scouts was having a picnic in Franklin Park in Boston. Five of them are sick. We’ve isolated the cause of the infection to the Pepsi cans they were drinking from. Five of the nine boys drank Pepsi, and they’re the ones contaminated. We quarantined the remainder of the cans and found traces of the virus on the metal rim next to the pop-up tab. Plus someone had written a message on the inside of the cardboard case.”

“What was the message?” Warner asked.

“ A small mouse can cause great damage if let loose in the elephant’s tent. Right now, we have no idea what the hell that’s supposed to mean.”

“Where did the Pepsi come from?” Allenby asked.

“One of the parents bought it at a corner store close to their home in Roxbury. It’s a suburb just south of Boston, and most of the kids in the Scout troop live there.”

“What’s the status of the kids? How bad are they?”

“All five are going to die, probably sometime today. They ingested the pop five days ago, on September fourth. But we’ve got problems with their families this time. Two of the kids have infected their parents, and one sibling is showing symptoms. The press is all over this. Two of the kids were admitted to the hospital, so we’ve got our work cut out for us just trying to contain the virus from spreading.”

“Any signs the virus is loose in the hospital?” Warner asked. The NSA man was working on his computer, calculating the collateral damage.

“Not yet,” Rothery said, “but we’re monitoring the situation hour by hour.”

Warner hit a button and glanced up. “If two kids are in the hospital for two full days, they encountered six shifts, each with three nurses and attendants in direct contact. If the two days hit on the end of a workweek for the staff, then we have thirty-six health care professionals at risk. And they would have been in close contact to at least three or four people in triage and emergency.

“Then there are the cloths and towels from the kid’s rooms. They’ve been mixed in with the laundry from other wards. And at least a couple of workers would have been in contact with the dirty sheets and towels before they went in for sterilization. All told, the peripheral contact, just in the hospital alone, is over fifty people. And each of those individuals has now had time to go home, kiss their spouse, share a fork over a piece of pie, hug their kids, and sneeze on the clerk at the 7-Eleven. Let’s assume each of the fifty has been in close contact with six other people. That’s three hundred. And the more time that passes, the more cases of intimate contact those three hundred will have with others.”

“We’ve got to get this contained, and fast,” Rothery said. He turned to Allenby. “What resources can the FBI contribute, Jim?”

“Whatever you need. We can free up an agent or two from field offices across the country. That would give us up to two hundred agents we could place in Boston within twelve hours. Each of our agents is well trained in this exact scenario-they know how to interview the victims and potential victims, and how to trace the disease as it moves through the population.”

“Do it,” Rothery said. He turned to Tony Warner. “Tony, get your people over at Crypto-City to map out every possible route the virus could travel. I want to be proactive on this, not reactive. Let’s cut it off before it gets into the general population.”

“I’ll have mock-up scenarios to Jim inside six hours,” he said.

“Craig,” J.D. said, turning to the CIA director. “You know what I need. It’s time.”

Craig Simms nodded, just a slight movement but enough to acknowledge that years of clandestine operations were about to go up in smoke. “All of them?” he asked.

“Every lab you know that’s actively producing toxins at this time. No exceptions. Even the ones in hostile territory if you can get SEAL units in place quickly enough.”

“We anticipated it may come to this and we’ve called in a few favors. Mossad and MI6 are both ready to assist with the raids. The British have one SBS unit and two SAS units they can free up immediately. We’ll use those for the raids on the Eastern European countries. The Israelis are anxious to shut down the labs operating in Egypt and Libya. I think we have enough SEAL and Delta Force teams to hit the rest. I’ll know in a few hours.”

Rothery stopped pacing and said, “I’m sorry it came to this, Craig, but we’ve got to stop this in its tracks. And finding out where this virus is coming from is number one. Getting a cure is a close second.” He looked at Tony Warner. “You were talking with Dr. Henning on this yesterday, Tony. What did he have to say about a possible antiserum against the virus?”

“His take on it was that this virus, although hemorrhagic like Ebola, is different enough that there may be the possibility of finding something to combat it. One of the keys is in the actual diameter of the virus itself. It’s double the size of Ebola, so genome replication is completely different. He thinks that some sort of viral protein, processed on the intracellular level, might stop the virus from attaching to the host cell.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Rothery asked.

Warner looked perturbed at Rothery’s lack of technical expertise but explained. “We have to treat the patient once they have the virus, J. D. And the best possibility we have to stop the virus from spreading inside the body is to keep it from attaching to host cells. If the virus can’t attach, it’s finished.”

“Okay, I get what you’re doing.” Rothery was thoughtful. “We have a lot of scientists in the government sector we can draw on for answers, but we’re missing an entire slice of the academic community.” He focused on Jim Allenby. “What about the pharmaceutical companies? Could we give them a hypothetical and see if they have an answer?”

Allenby thought about the impact of revealing the virus to the public sector for a minute, then said, “It’s a possibility. If Marcon or Frezin or one of the big guys has something in the pipeline, it’d be lax of us not to exploit that technology. But every company we ask for help would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement. We don’t need this getting out to the general public.”