The Hades Factor (2 page)

Covert One 1 - The Hades Factor

TWO

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9:57 A.M., Sunday, October 12

Fort Detrick, Maryland

Located in Frederick, a small city surrounded by western Maryland's green, rolling landscape, Fort Detrick was the home of the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. Known by its initials, USAMRIID, or simply as the Institute, it had been a magnet for violent protest in the 1960s when it was an infamous government factory for developing and testing chemical and biological weapons. When President Nixon ordered an end to those programs in 1969, USAMRIID disappeared from the spotlight to become a center for science and healing.

Then came 1989. The highly communicable Ebola virus appeared to have infected monkeys dying at a primate quarantine unit in Reston, Virginia. USAMRIID's doctors and veterinarians, both military and civilian, were rushed to contain what could erupt into a tragic human epidemic.

But better than containment, they proved the Reston virus to be a genetic millimeter different from the extremely lethal strains of Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. Most important was that the virus was harmless to people. That exciting discovery skyrocketed USAMRIID scientists into headlines across the nation. Suddenly, Fort Detrick was again on people's minds, but this time as America's foremost military medical research facility.

In her USAMRIID office, Dr. Sophia Russell was thinking about these claims to fame, hoping for inspiration as she waited impatiently for her telephone call to reach a man who might have some answers to help resolve a crisis she feared could erupt into a serious epidemic.

Sophia was a Ph.D. scientist in cell and molecular biology. She was a leading cog in the worldwide wheels set in motion by the death of Maj. Keith Anderson. She had been at USAMRIID for four years, and like the scientists in 1989, she was fighting a medical emergency involving an unknown virus. Already she and her contemporaries were in a far more precarious position: This virus was fatal to humans. There were three victims--- the army major and two civilians--- all of whom had apparently died abruptly of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) within hours of one another.

It was not the timing of the deaths or the ARDS itself that had riveted USAMRIID; millions died of ARDS each year around the planet. But not young people. Not healthy people. Not without a history of respiratory problems or other contributing factors, and not with violent headaches and blood-filled chest cavities.

Now three cases in a single day had died with identical symptoms, each in a different part of the country--- the major in California, a teenage girl in Georgia, and a homeless man in Massachusetts.

The director of USAMRIID--- Brig. Gen. Calvin Kielburger--- was reluctant to declare a worldwide alert on the basis of three cases they had been handed only yesterday. He hated rocking the boat or sounding like a weak alarmist. Even more, he hated sharing credit with other Level Four labs, especially USAMRIID's biggest rival, Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control.

Meanwhile, tension at USAMRIID was palpable, and Sophia, leading a team of scientists, kept working.

She had received the first of the blood samples by 3:00 A.M. Saturday and had immediately headed to her Level Four lab to begin testing. In the small locker room, she had removed her clothes, watch, and the ring Jon Smith gave her when she agreed to marry him. She paused just a moment to smile down at the ring and think about Jon. His handsome face flashed into her mind--- the almost American Indian features with the high cheekbones but very dark blue eyes. Those eyes had intrigued her from the beginning, and sometimes she had imagined how much fun it would be to fall into their depths. She loved the liquid way he moved, like a jungle animal who was domesticated only by choice. She loved the way he made love--- the fire and excitement. But most of all, she just simply, irrevocably, passionately loved him.

She had had to interrupt their phone conversation to rush here. “Darling, I have to go. It was the lab on the other line. An emergency.”

“At this hour? Can't it wait until morning? You need your rest.”

She chuckled. “You called me. I was resting, in fact sleeping, until the phone rang.”

“I knew you'd want to talk to me. You can't resist me.”

She laughed. “Absolutely. I want to talk to you at all hours of the day and night. I miss you every moment you're in London. I'm glad you woke me up out of sound sleep so I could tell you that.”

It was his turn to laugh. “I love you, too, darling.”

In the USAMRIID locker room, she sighed. Closed her eyes. Then she put Jon from her mind. She had work to do. An emergency.

She quickly dressed in sterile green surgical scrubs. Barefoot, she labored to open the door to Bio-Safety Level Two against the negative pressure that kept contaminants inside Levels Two, Three, and Four. Finally inside, she trotted past a dry shower stall and into a bathroom where clean white socks were kept.

Socks on, she hurried into the Level Three staging area. She snapped on latex rubber surgical gloves and then taped the gloves to the sleeves to create a seal. She repeated the procedure with her socks and the legs of the scrubs. That done, she dressed in her personal bright-blue plastic biological space suit, which smelled faintly like the inside of a plastic bucket. She carefully checked it for pinholes. She lowered the flexible plastic helmet over her head, closed the plastic zipper that ensured her suit and helmet were sealed, and pulled a yellow air hose from the wall.

She plugged the hose into her suit. With a quiet hiss, the air adjusted in the massive space suit. Almost finished, she unplugged the air hose and lumbered through a stainless steel door into the air lock of Level Four, which was lined with nozzles for water and chemicals for the decontamination shower.

At last she pulled open the door into Level Four. The Hot Zone.

There was no way she could rush anything now. As she advanced each step in the cautious chain of protective layers, she had to take more care. Her one weapon was efficient motion. The more efficient she was, the more speed she could eke out. So instead of struggling into the pair of heavy yellow rubber boots, she expertly bent one foot, angled it just right, and slid it in. Then she did the same with the other.

She waddled as fast as she could along narrow cinder-block corridors into her lab. There she slipped on a third pair of latex gloves, carefully removed the samples of blood and tissue from the refrigerated container, and went to work isolating the virus.

Over the next twenty-six hours, she forgot to eat or sleep. She lived in the lab, studying the virus with the electron microscope. To her amazement, she and her team ruled out Ebola, Marburg, and any other filovirus. It had the usual furry-ball shape of most viruses. Once she had seen it, given the ARDS cause of death, her first thought was a hantavirus like the one that had killed the young athletes on the Navajo reservation in 1993. USAMRIID was expert on hantaviruses. One of its legends, Karl Johnson, had been a discoverer of the first hantavirus to be isolated and identified back in the 1970s.

With that in mind, she had used immunoblotting to test the unknown pathogen against USAMRIID's frozen bank of blood samples of previous victims of various hantaviruses from around the world. It reacted to none. Puzzled, she ran a polymerase chain reaction to get a bit of DNA sequence from the virus. It resembled no known hantavirus, but for future reference she assembled a preliminary restriction map anyway. That was when she wished most fervently that Jon was with her, not far away at the WHO conference in London.

Frustrated because she still had no definitive answer, she had forced herself to leave the lab. She had already sent the team off to sleep, and now she went through the exiting procedure, too, peeling away her space suit, going through decontamination procedures, and dressing again in her civilian clothes.

After a four-hour on-site nap--- that was all she needed, she told herself firmly--- she had hurried to her office to study the tests' notes. As the other team members awakened, she sent them back to their labs.

Her head ached, and her throat was dry. She took a bottle of water from her office mini-refrigerator and returned to her desk. On the wall hung three framed photos. She drank and leaned forward to contemplate them, drawn like a moth to comforting light. One showed Jon and herself in bathing suits last summer in Barbados. What fun they had had on their one and only vacation. The second was of Jon in his dress uniform the day he'd made lieutenant colonel. The last pictured a younger captain with wild black hair, a dirty face, and piercing blue eyes in a dusty field uniform outside a Fifth MASH tent somewhere in the Iraqi desert.

Missing him, needing him in the lab with her, she had reached for the phone to call him in London--- and stopped. The general had sent him to London. For the general, everything was by the book, and every assignment had to be finished. Not a day late, not a day early. Jon was not due for several hours. Then she realized he was probably aloft now anyway, but she wouldn't be at his house, waiting for him. She dismissed her disappointment.

She had devoted herself to science, and somewhere along the way she had gotten extremely lucky. She had never expected to marry. Fall in love, perhaps. But marry? No. Few men wanted a wife obsessed with her work. But Jon understood. In fact, it excited him that she could look at a cell and discuss it in graphic, colorful detail with him. In turn, she had found his endless curiosity invigorating. Like two children at a kindergarten party, they had found their favorite playmates in each other--- well suited not only professionally but temperamentally. Both were dedicated, compassionate, and as in love with life as with each other.

She had never known such happiness, and she had Jon to thank for it.

With an impatient shake of her head, she turned on her computer to examine the lab notes for anything she might have missed. She found nothing of any significance.

Then, as more DNA sequence data was arriving, and she continued to review in her mind all the clinical data so far on the virus, she had a strange feeling.

She had seen this virus--- or one that was incredibly similar--- somewhere.

She wracked her brain. Dug through her memory. Rooted through her past.

Nothing came to mind. Finally she read one of her team members' reports that suggested the new virus might be related to Machupo, one of the first discovered hemorrhagic fevers, again by Karl Johnson.

Africa pushed none of her buttons. But Bolivia...?

Peru!

Her student anthropology field trip, and---

Victor Tremont.

Yes, that had been his name. A biologist on a field trip to Peru to collect plants and dirts for potential medicinals for... what company? A pharmaceutical firm ... Blanchard Pharmaceuticals!

She turned back to her computer, quickly entered the Internet, and searched for Blanchard. She found it almost at once--- in Long Lake, New York. And Victor Tremont was president and Chief Operating Officer now. She reached for her phone and dialed the number.

It was Sunday morning, but giant corporations sometimes kept their telephones open all weekend for important calls. Blanchard did. A human voice answered, and when Sophia asked for Victor Tremont, the voice told her to wait. She drummed her fingers on the desk, trying to control her worried impatience.

At last a series of clicks and silences on the far end of the line were interrupted by another human voice. This time it was neutral, toneless: “May I ask your name and business with Dr. Tremont?”

“Sophia Russell. Tell him it's about a trip to Peru where we met.”

“Please hold.” More silence. Then: "Mr. Tremont will speak with you now.

“Ms.... Russell?” Obviously he was consulting the name handed to him on a pad. “What can I do for you?” His voice was low and pleasant but commanding. A man clearly accustomed to being in charge.

She said mildly, “Actually, it's Dr. Russell now. You don't remember my name, Dr. Tremont?”

“Can't say I do. But you mentioned Peru, and I do remember Peru. Twelve or thirteen years ago, wasn't it?” He was acknowledging why he was talking to her, but giving nothing away in case she was a job seeker or it was all some hoax.

“Thirteen, and I certainly remember you.” She was trying to keep it light. “What I'm interested in is that time on the Caraibo River. I was with a group of anthropology undergrads on a field trip from Syracuse while you were collecting potential medicinal materials. I'm calling to ask about the virus you found in those remote tribesmen, the natives the others called the Monkey Blood People.”

In his large corner office at the other end of the line, Victor Tremont felt a jolt of fear. Just as quickly, he repressed it. He swiveled in his desk chair to stare out at the lake, which was shimmering like mercury in the early-morning light. On the far side, a thick pine forest stretched and climbed to the high mountains in the distance.

Annoyed that she had surprised him with such a potentially devastating memory, Tremont continued to swivel. He kept his voice friendly. “Now I remember you. The eager blond young lady dazzled by science. I wondered whether you'd go on to become an anthropologist. Did you?”