The Gemini Virus (25 page)

He was almost to the stairs when the adjusted realization struck. The whole picture, bright and colorful, flashed through his mind.
The meat … the other neighbor … the lantern …
There had been a large Coleman lantern next to the ice chest, which the maggots had more or less ignored.
The shotgun … the one he used to kill his wife …

Beck took off running, bounding up the stairs two at a time. He was shouting for Hollis before he even reached the front door.

FIFTEEN

Cara Porter slipped another grid into the electron microscope and peered into the viewer at the image produced by the electron-dense. Today she would use the microscope’s tiny screen; tomorrow she’d view everything on a larger desktop computer.

She had seen the virus so many times now that she could draw it from memory. Even the fascination of coming face-to-face with the very thing that was causing so much suffering and discord had faded. She and her colleagues—there were twenty others in this lab, divided into teams of seven in three shifts—were trying everything from orthodox to bizarre and getting nowhere; none of the potential medications were having any effect. And the people working on the vaccine weren’t doing any better. It was becoming a long and costly battle, and all they had to show for it was the frustration of being toyed with by a far-superior adversary.

She pulled away from the microscope, closed her eyes, and set her chin in her hands. This lab had become her second home. She had tried endless combinations of drugs, studied thousands of samples, and entered a zillion bits of data into the online repositories. She had grown used to these tasks, grown used to her colleagues, grown used to the long hours and the headaches. She’d grown used to everything … except the animals.

She looked at them without really wanting to, then just as quickly looked away. Some were suffering so badly, whining and groaning and scratching at their cage doors. How could the others go about their business and barely notice? They ran tests, wrote reports, even talked and laughed with one another, all against the lachrymose cacophony of their torment; it was amazing. For her own part, she brought along her iPod every day and played it nonstop. And she made sure it was charged every night at the hotel before she went to sleep; she didn’t want to have to make the decision of not coming in because it wasn’t ready.

She opened her eyes and saw that it was nearly eleven—time to leave. Everyone else was gone. She would go back to the hotel, put the iPod in its charger, slip a DVD into her laptop, and fall asleep during the first fifteen minutes. Then she’d dream of reaching the end of this crisis and taking a vacation. Maybe Rome or Paris. Perhaps São Paulo. She’d heard Brazil was interesting.

With Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” chugging in her head, she removed her lab coat, grabbed her bag, and headed out. She willed herself not to look directly at the animal room, but then something caught her attention—the ferret in cage 32 was lying on its side, motionless. Porter turned and saw that it was dead. Not surprising, considering the poor thing had been twisting and screeching for the past twenty-four hours.

She couldn’t just let it lie there. The next shift might not bother with it right away. They were the worst. There were some mornings when she came in and found animals who had died during the night but had been ignored. At best, the techs would cut them open, record whatever data they needed, then toss their carcasses into the incinerator. One time she found a severed mouse head stuck to the top of a pencil. It was propped in the animal room with a Post-it Note that read,
YOU COULD BE NEXT
. Bunch of comedians, those guys.

She put on her protective gear and stepped inside. The iPod’s volume was maxed out, which was painful enough but better than the alternative. She opened the cage door and lifted out the lifeless body. It was still warm and somewhat pliable, which meant it had died during her shift. Something about this was particularly depressing. She set the body into a plastic bag, zipped it shut, and put it in the freezer at the far end of the room. She’d leave a note outside so they’d know.

As she closed the empty cage, she noticed that the ferret above it was sticking its little pink nose through the tiny chrome bars. When Porter looked up, the animal sneezed explosively.

As the moisture sprayed onto her face, a grim realization struck.
My goggles aren’t on. Oh my good God …

She didn’t have to turn around to know where she’d left them—on the table by the electron microscope; she had to remove them to look into the eyepieces. She spent so much time training herself not to look from the workstation to the animal room. Now she was unable to do the reverse.

She dashed into the decontamination area, stripped off the protective gear with much less delicacy than was recommended, and turned on both faucets at the scrub sink. There was an official eye-washing station in the prep room outside and down the hall, but there was no time for that.

She took the plastic bottle of sanitizer from its little pedestal above the spigot and squeezed a generous portion into her palm. As the shuffle engine in her iPod followed “Kashmir” with “Black Country Woman,” she rubbed her hands together like a mad scientist, took a deep breath, then forced her eyes to open as wide as they would go and slapped the gel into them. The scream that followed was like something out of a horror movie. Nevertheless, she rubbed the gel in harder, then leaned down and washed it all out with clumsy, frantic movements. She kept splashing water in there long after all the sanitizer was gone, making bovine grunting noises with each shot.

She found the roll of paper towels and dried her face. Then she willed herself to look into the small mirror hanging on the wall by the garbage can. A doctor might think she had the worst case of pinkeye in history, or maybe she’d been beaten up pretty good by her boyfriend. She began crying, and a part of her thought this was good—maybe the tears would wash out any remaining contagion.

She returned to the workstation, whispering in a quivering voice.
Please, God, please don’t let this happen. Please, I’ll do anything … anything you want
.

Then she picked up her cell phone.

SIXTEEN

DAY 16

MSNBC had the numbers correct thanks to a single sheet of paper handed to Dr. Nancy Snyderman, its chief medical editor, just as a commercial break was ending—roughly 12,700 dead and more than 31,000 infected. This was according to the CDC, which was now updating its dedicated webpage every twenty minutes. The webmaster resisted the urge to put up a counter, feeling it would be a bit too game show–esque, and instead continued to embed all new information within ordinary text.

The virus had found a home in thirty-seven states, and few had any doubt it would run the table in the continental United States. Alaska and Hawaii were still unaffected, the latter suffering dearly for minimizing all commercial air travel from the mainland. Tourism constituted the bulk of its revenue, and some experts were already predicting the island group would not recover from the losses for at least a decade.

Deaths were also being reported for the first time in other countries, spreading the fear worldwide and sparking continuing talk of the infection being “the Black Plague of the twenty-first century.”

Almost all the cases in Mexico were traced back to the Pryce couple and other passengers from the Princess Line cruise. Some, however, likely also came in through Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, ultimately driving the Mexican government, somewhat ironically, to close the border.

In China, all commercial flights from the United States were banned after an infected couple from Maine was discovered at the Zhaolong Hotel in Beijing. The hotel was subsequently sealed until all other guests could be screened. In spite of these efforts, cases began appearing almost immediately in the surrounding area, then spreading quickly outward.

In Japan, commercial airline flights were permitted to continue, but incoming passengers had to submit to a twenty-four-hour quarantine period. While this caused great consternation among travelers, it did also appear to have the desired effect—nineteen infected individuals were identified before they could enter Japan’s greater population, the latter of whom also protected themselves through the use of gloves and masks. Commercial shipping ports were also rigidly monitored in spite of the loss of billions in trade revenue on both sides.

The first case in Canada involved a single mother and her two-month-old son, who lived in St. Catharines, Ontario, and had recently returned after a brief visit with relatives in Buffalo, New York. They showed up at the local hospital already well into Stage Two, the baby barely able to breathe. He died hours later of cardiac arrest, and the mother passed away the next evening. The Canadian government immediately dispatched hundreds of health-care workers to all border crossings, but within a week, more than fifty new cases had been confirmed.

The first six victims in England were reported in Guildford, just southwest of London, by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. In typically civilized fashion, little public furor resulted as the patients were quietly removed from the population and kept comfortable. Meanwhile, health officials requested that anyone else exhibiting symptoms of the disease kindly report to the nearest hospital for “interview and treatment.” Seventy-two individuals would do so.

The American media continued its relentless coverage of all developments, gradually stripping away each layer of editorial integrity until the daily reports seemed more like scenes from a horror movie. Bodies were shown lying in streets in broad daylight, disfigured and decomposed, because no one wanted to go near them. In Mississippi, someone took a blurry cell phone clip of a corpse being torn apart by a pack of coyotes in the wooded stretch behind a convenience store. In the Bronx, the dead body of a black woman lay slumped out the window of her ninth-story apartment all night long. She was noticed early the following morning by a jogger.

The suicides had also become particularly grisly. A thirty-four-year-old Delaware man rammed the paired prongs of a geared rotisserie wheel into his eyes. A Maine woman of about the same age swallowed every pill in her bathroom cabinet, then got on her knees and drank from the bottles of cleaning fluid under the sink until she went into convulsions. A night watchman in a Tennessee junkyard sat in his beloved ’69 Mustang convertible while the crusher reduced it to the size of a washing machine. No one witnessed the incident, but it took the local fire department nearly an hour to hose away all the blood.

One Miami newspaper ran what it called a “local interest story” about an elderly widower who, once he realized he had acquired the infection, decided to spend his remaining three days running through a bizarre bucket list—he smoked a joint, wrote an anonymous note to the woman next door telling her about the affair her husband was having, called the IRS to say he had cheated on his taxes more than a dozen times and wished them good luck in getting the money, and recorded a video for YouTube confessing his love for Kirsten Dunst. When the symptoms began, he journaled the illness on his computer until he was no longer able, leaving the message that the information should be sent to the CDC in case it might be useful.

*   *   *

At exactly 3:36
A.M.
local time in Tehran, a Saipa 141 sedan—one of thousands seen on Iranian roads every day—pulled into a dimly lit backstreet two blocks from the Presidential Palace. The driver, the only one in the car, got out and didn’t bother to lock it. He walked at a steady, deliberate pace, hunched slightly forward with his hands in his pockets. His appearance was as unremarkable as the vehicle: just another local going about his business. There was no one else around. If there had been, they might have noticed the way his eyes moved about restlessly, surveying everything.

He reached the rear entrance to the palace, where two guards were milling about. When they saw him approach, they paused. They did not, however, demand that he identify himself; they were expecting him. He passed between them wordlessly, continued through the courtyard, and was greeted on the back portico by Sanjar Hejazi, a man he’d known only a few months but had come to like enormously.

Sanjar brought him up a winding staircase to the second floor, then into an ornately decorated room with tall curtains, gilded chandeliers, and a magnificent silk rug that covered almost the entire floor. President Baraheri was sitting in an antique chair reading a copy of
The New York Times
.

The president rose when he saw his guest. “Good evening, Mushir. What have you learned?”

Mushir Garoussi had spent the first sixteen years of his adult life in the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. He distinguished himself in the Iran–Iraq War through extensive undercover work and was afterward moved to Iran’s Intelligence Ministry. He rose to a midlevel position before internal politics slowed his progress, mostly due to his superiors’ suspicion that he was, at heart, a moderate rather than a fundamentalist. He climbed a few more rungs during President Khatami’s reformist administration, then hit another snag when Khatami was replaced by hardliner Ahmadinejad in 2005. When Baraheri succeeded Ahmadinejad following his startling dark horse victory, he appointed Garoussi head of the Intelligence Ministry. Garoussi had not even heard of Baraheri prior to the election, much less expected anything from him. But he had come to learn there was a great deal more to the man than a cursory examination would suggest. He was, in Garoussi’s opinion, Iran’s only hope for the future.

“We discovered Shalizeh’s old laboratory, Mr. President. It was an abandoned house on the northern edge of the Darakeh neighborhood. We broke down the front door and found papers strewn about everywhere, mold growing throughout the kitchen, and about a million flies. There were bare mattresses in almost every room, stained and disgusting. There were two computers on the first floor, which we took away for examination.” Garoussi shivered. “Then we went into the basement.…”