Calypso Directive (21 page)

She tried to pay attention to the traffic instead of worrying. An idea would come to her; it always did. But as she drove, her mind drifted back to Will. She wanted so much to protect him. To shield him from the world and from the awful men who had done this to him. What could she do? How could she ever hope to stand up against the powerful and faceless foe that Will described as their enemy? The more she thought about it, the heavier the dread lodged in her abdomen became. What if Leighton-Harris Pharmaceuticals and the CDC were co-conspirators? Was Xavier Pope really a Dr. Frankenstein? The Julie Ponte of twenty-four hours ago would have thought the idea of illegal quarantines and illicit human experimentation preposterous. She had worked in the pharmaceutical industry for six years and had only known noble and dedicated scientists and staff. Was she naive? Was Will changing her into a conspiracy theorist kook?

She was convinced that she did not possess the particular subject matter expertise to analyze his blood and generate a working hypothesis about what was happening to him. It had been unrealistic to think she could tackle a mystery like this without help. Whom could she trust? She startled rattling off names in her head. Heindrick Fabian. No, too nosey. Elizabeth Raynor. Maybe? No, too publication hungry . . .

A name interrupted her internal monologue.

Bart Bennett.

She smiled.

Bart Bennett was a hopeless genius who worked in virology. As one of only a handful of Americans working in her lab, it was inevitable that she and Bart would meet and become friends. Bart was from Seattle and was a proud and vocal coffee snob. Periodically, Julie and Bart would eat lunch together, swapping anecdotal tales about life as an American expat in Vienna. Once, she had even reluctantly agreed to meet him at a Viennese coffeehouse he frequented. A big mistake. By the end of the thirty-minute date, she feared he might drop down on one knee and propose to her—pulling forth a ring hidden beneath a layer of creamy froth atop his cappuccino. From that day forward, she had regularly affirmed their “only friends” status by limiting their interactions to cafeteria lunches and harmless hallway chitchat. Today, though, she might have to take advantage of poor Bart's affections.

She turned onto the laboratory campus driveway and drove past the marble sign at the entrance:

Wien Bioscience
a Vyrogen Pharmaceuticals Company

She entered the parking garage and parked in her reserved slip. She placed the automatic transmission into “Park,” turned off the engine, and took a deep breath.

“You can do this,” she mumbled to herself.

•     •     •

INSIDE THE LAB
, Julie carefully drew a small volume of blood from Will's test tube with a syringe. Next, she transferred it to another vial she had prepared with a dummy label. This was the sample she would give to Bart. Five minutes later, she knocked on the door to his office.

“Hey, Julie,” Bart exclaimed. “You must have smelled the espresso. Check out the new machine I just got. It's small enough to fit on the corner of my desk. Now I can have espressos whenever the urge strikes.”

“Wow. It's a cute little guy, but are you sure that's legal? If you drink four or five espressos a day, your blood-caffeine level will be above the legal limit and you'll be SUI,” Julie teased.

“SUI?”

“Scientist Under the Influence.”

Bart smiled and forced a polite laugh. “I've already had two espressos this morning and I'm still yawning. That must be a good sign, right?”

“I guess so. Hey, um, do you have a second? I was hoping you could run some tests on a blood sample from one of my subjects in the STAT protein study I'm working on.”

“What kind of tests?” Bart asked.

“I noticed an elevated white blood cell count, and I'm worried this subject might have an infection. I spend my time looking at tumor markers, not viral or bacterial ones, so I'm way outta my league here. I was hoping you could run ELISA on the sample to see what antibodies are present.”

“Sure, just drop the sample off in my lab with Jon, and we'll get to it when things slow down a bit.”

Julie grimaced. “I was hoping that you could maybe run it now. I'm really worried about this subject and feel it's my responsibility to notify this person of their condition.”

“You want me to drop everything and do it now? We've got a busy day planned,” Bart resisted.

“Please,” she said, with puppy dog eyes. “As a favor to me?”

He rubbed his beardless chin. “Since you haven't given me any direction as to what virus or bacteria I am supposed to be looking for, I'll need to check a fairly extensive list of possible diseases. And since this is such a small sample volume, I'll need to amplify using real-time PCR and then run multiple assays. It's not as easy as you think, Julie.”

“I know, but if you were this patient, wouldn't you hope that a brilliant guy at Wien Bioscience named Bart Bennett was willing to do the right thing to save your life?” she asked.

“Okay fine. But I want you to know, your Jedi mind tricks don't work on me.”

“Is that so?” she said, smiling as she grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out of his chair. “You will take me to Jabba now.”

•     •     •

“
WHAT DID YOU
find?” Julie asked.

Bart and his Austrian lab technician Jon Henning were standing together talking when Julie approached them.

Barely able to contain his excitement, Jon spoke first. “I don't know where you found this sample, but it's either from a laboratory primate or a special forces soldier who's been inoculated against biological warfare.”

“I don't understand. What do you mean?”

“This blood is packed with antibodies. Exotic bugs, too. I ran a broad serological workup and found smallpox, anthrax, even
Yersinia pestis
antibodies. Check out this list I compiled,” Jon said. “But that's not even the most exciting thing we found.”

She took the printed page from Jon, and scanned the list. It took all her willpower not to gasp at the report. She looked at Bart who seemed uncharacteristically melancholy, especially when contrasted to Jon's bravado. Bart would not look at her and instead was staring off at some imaginary point in space. “What's the exciting part?” she said.

“I have several scanning electron microscope images to show you. I false colored the image so you can tell the different cells apart. The flattened donut-shaped cells are of course red bloods, and these little cream-colored blobs are platelets. This green cell is a monocyte. All normal,” he said and advanced the screen to a new image. “In this image, over here you can see two more lymphocytes, again normal. But this cell, colored blue, I don't know what it is. It appears to be a lymphocyte, but it is too big. Lymphocytes are seven to eight micrometers, this cell appears to be twelve or thirteen.”

Julie bent over and rested her palms on the desk, bringing her face closer to the monitor for a better look. “Is it neutrophil?”

“No. It's not a neutrophil, basophil, or eosinophil. Granulocytes have multi-lobed nuclei; this cell is mononuclear.”

“Maybe it's a monocyte then?”

Jon advanced to another image with higher magnification. “I don't believe so. Because if you look closely at the microvilli on the surface of the cell they resemble those of a lymphocyte. Monocyte microvilli are longer, more densely packed, and . . .” He gestured with his hand in the air in a motion like a car traveling over a hilly stretch of road. “What's the word in English?”

“Wavy?”

“Yes, wavy,” he said.

“Are you sure about the size?”

“Yes, I'm sure,” Jon said. “Since your are the cancer expert here, I was hoping you could tell me if you think it could be a cancerous lymphocyte?”

“It's hard to identify cancer cells when viewed in isolation, but the shape of this cell is uniform. From outward appearance, I'd say it looks like a healthy cell.”

“That's what I thought too,” Jon said, with schoolboy excitement. “So I decided to run more tests, and I found something else.”

Julie nodded.

“There are five major categories of antibodies: IgA, IgG, IgM, IgE, and IgD. The IgG anti-bodies are the most common type, found in all bodily fluids and tissues, and comprise about seventy-five percent of the antibodies in circulation at a given time. IgA antibodies make up about ten percent and are found predominantly in the entry and exit orifices of the body—nose, ears, eyes, etcetera. IgM antibodies are . . .”

“I'm up to speed on my antibodies, Jon. You can skip to the something else part,” she interrupted.

“Ya, okay. I ran a quantitative immunoglobulin screening, and I found an immunoglobulin that doesn't fit into any of the existing classes or subclasses. I don't know what it is or what it does.” He minimized the SEM images and pulled up a data table.

Julie looked at the screening results. “If you had to guess, what do think it is?”

“Maybe it's new subclass of IgG, but I have no way to test this right now. So, I was thinking about running an IgY test just for the hell of it?” Jon replied.

“IgY? Isn't that an avian antibody?”

“Yes, bird and reptile. I don't think this is IgY, but I have the EIA to test for it. It could be a starting point. After that, I was thinking about performing a TCR diversity assessment on the lymphocytes in the blood sample.”

“What's a TCR diversity assessment?'

“TCR stands for T cell Receptor. Analyzing the receptors on a lymphocyte is one way to identify what kind of lymphocyte it is. T cells and B cells are so morphologically similar that scanning electron microscope images don't provide a reliable means of distinguishing them. So, I need to analyze them chemically. Maybe the mystery lymphocyte in the SEM image is responsible for generating this new antibody . . . we could be looking at a breakthrough discovery.”

“Bart, what do you make of all this?” Julie asked.

“It's definitely an anomaly, but at this point it's nothing to get too excited about. Where did you say you got this sample from?”

“From a clinical subject in the STAT protein study I'm working on. Why?”

“Oh, just curious.”

This was not the response she had expected from Bart. He was usually excitable and talkative, especially when it came to questions in his specialty. The more she thought about it, the more Bart's behavior made her nervous. First, she would have expected him to be downright euphoric over the discovery of this strange new lymphocyte. Second, she had expected him to panic about her violating BSL safety protocols given the antibodies found in the sample. The one response she had not expected from him was indifference.

“Jon, can you print copies of the SEM images and the other test results for me?” she asked.

“Not a problem,” Jon said. “Hey, maybe we can get this subject in for some tests. Is this a local subject pool, or are these samples being shipped in from somewhere else?”

Julie hesitated and then replied, “The samples are from our UK office, but I'll call over there this morning, report what we've found, and lobby for this subject to fly here for tests.”

“Great! I'll go grab the pages off the printer for you.”

“Julie?” Bart put his hand on her shoulder. “I'd like you to turn over the rest of the blood samples you have from this patient to me this morning. With the antibodies we found in the blood, this subject's blood needs to be controlled with Biosafety Level Three protocols.”

“If I recall, you said this was nothing to get too excited about.”

“I did, and it's not. But safety is paramount, and with the type of antibodies present in this sample it would be prudent to treat it as an infectious agent.”

Julie paused, trying to formulate her response. “The vial I gave you this morning was all I have left from this week's delivery, after running all my usual tests. I'll contact the UK branch this morning, however, and instruct them that biosafety hazard protocols need to be implemented regarding this subject.”

Bart looked if he was about to speak when Jon returned from the printer holding the pages she had requested.

“Here you go, Julie. If you're not busy, you are welcome to help us. Bart and I have plenty of other tests we can run this morning. This is very, very exciting.”

“I need to discuss this with the folks in my department and call the UK office, but I'll pop back in later. This could be huge if we've discovered a new lymphocyte,” she said. She folded the printed pages in half, tucked them inside her purse, and headed for the door. On her way out, she called back over her shoulder, “Thanks, guys. I really appreciate you jumping on this for me.”

Bart stood in silence and watched her leave with a scowl. Then he turned to his assistant. “I'm going need the rest of that sample, to run some more tests. Oh and Jon, until we know what we're dealing with here, I think it would be best if you not discuss this with anyone. Okay?”

“Ya, okay,” Jon replied with a raised eyebrow. “You're the boss.”

•     •     •

JULIE WALKED AS
swiftly as she could, without running, through the corridors toward the west exit. Something was wrong; her intuition was burning like a five-alarm fire. This was not the first time Bart had seen antibodies like the ones in Will's blood. He was hiding something from her . . . and she was certain that something had to do with Will.