Unnatural Exposure (26 page)

'USAMRIID has my medical bag and microscope: I didn't waste time. 'See what you can do about getting them shipped overnight. I'm at BWI, en route to CDC.'

'I've been trying to page you,' she said.

'Maybe they can return that to me, too.' I tried to remember what else I was missing. 'And the phone,' I added.

'You got a report back that you might find interesting. The animal hairs that turned up with the torso. Rabbit and monkey hairs.'

'Bizarre,' was the only thing I could think to say.

'I hate to tell you this news. The media's been calling about the Carrie Grethen case. Apparently, something's been leaked.'

'Goddamn it!' I exclaimed as I thought about Ring.

'What do you want me to do?' she asked.

'How about calling Benton. I don't know what to say. I'm a little overwhelmed.'

'You sound that way.'

I looked at my watch. 'Rose, I've got to go fight my way on a plane. They didn't want to let me through X-ray, and I know what's going to happen when I try to board with this thing.'

It was exactly what I expected. When I walked into the cabin, a flight attendant took one look and smiled.

'Here.' She held out her hands. 'Let me put this in baggage for you.'

'It's got to stay with me,' I said.

'It won't fit in an overhead rack or under your seat, ma'am.' Her smile got tight, the line behind me getting longer.

'Can we discuss this out of traffic?' I said, moving into the kitchen.

She was right next to me, hovering close. 'Ma'am, this flight is overbooked. We simply don't have room.'

'Here,' I said, showing her the paperwork.

Her eyes scanned the red-bordered Declaration For Dangerous Goods, and froze halfway down a column where it was typed that I was transporting 'Infectious substances affecting humans.' She glanced nervously around the kitchen and moved me closer to the rest rooms.

'Regulations require that only a trained person can handle dangerous goods like these,' I reasonably explained. 'So it has to stay with me.'

'What is it?' she whispered, her eyes round.

'Autopsy specimens.'

'Mother of God.'

She immediately grabbed her seating chart. Soon after, I was escorted to an empty row in first class, near the back. 'Just put it on the seat next to you. It's not going to leak or anything?' she asked.

'I'll guard it with my life,' I promised.

'We should have a lot of vacancies up here unless a bunch of people upgrade. But don't you worry. I'll steer everyone.' She motioned with her arms, as if she were driving.

No one came near me or my box. I drank coffee during a very peaceful flight to Atlanta, feeling naked without my pager or phone, but overjoyed to be on my own. In the Atlanta airport, I took one moving sidewalk and escalator after another, traveling what seemed miles, before I got outside and found a taxi.

We followed 85 North to Druid Hills Road, where soon we were passing pawnshops and auto rentals, then vast jungles of poison oak and kudzu, and strip malls. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention was in the midst of the parking decks and parking lots of Emory University. Across the street from the American Cancer Society, CDC was six floors of tan brick trimmed with gray. I checked in at a desk that had guards and closed circuit TV.

'This is going to Bio Level 4, where I'm meeting Dr Bret Martin in the atrium,' I explained.

'Ma'am, you'll need an escort,' one of the guards said.

'Good,' I said as he reached for the phone. 'I always get lost.'

I followed him to the back of the building, where the facility was new and under intense surveillance. There were cameras everywhere, the glass bulletproof, and corridors were catwalks with grated floors. We passed bacteria and influenza labs, and the red brick and concrete area for rabies and AIDS.

'This is impressive,' I said, for I had not been here in several years.

'Yeah, it is. They got all the security you might want. Cameras, motion detectors at all exits and entrances. All the trash is boiled and burned, and they use these filters for the air so anything that comes in is killed. Except the scientists.' He laughed as he used a card key to open a door. 'So what bad news you carrying in?'

'That's what I'm here to find out,' I said, and we were in the atrium now.

BL-4 was really nothing more than a huge laminar flow hood with thick walls of concrete and steel. It was a building within a building, its windows covered with blinds. Labs were behind thick walls of glass, and the only blue-suited scientists working this furloughed day were those who had cared enough to come in anyway.

'This thing with the government,' the guard was saying as he shook his head. 'What they think? These diseases like Ebola gonna wait until the budget gets straight?' He shook his head some more.

He escorted me past containment rooms that were dark, and labs with no one in them, then empty rabbit cages in a corridor and rooms for large primates. A monkey looked at me through bars and glass, his eyes so human they unnerved me, and I thought of what Rose had said. Deadoc had transferred monkey and rabbit hairs to a victim I knew he had touched. He might work in a place like this.

'They throw waste at you,' the guard said as we walked on. 'Same thing their animal rights activists do. Kinda fits, don't you think?'

My anxiety was getting stronger.

'Where are we going?' I asked.

'Where the good doctor told me to bring you, ma'am,' he said, and we were on another level of catwalk now, heading into another part of the building.

We passed through a door, where Revco ultra low temperature freezers looked like computers the size of large copying machines. They were locked and out of place in this corridor, where a heavy man in a lab coat was waiting for me. He had baby-fine blond hair, and was perspiring.

'I'm Bret Martin,' he said, offering me his hand. 'Thanks.' He nodded at the guard, indicating he was dismissed.

I handed Martin my cardboard box.

'This is where we keep our smallpox stock,' he said, nodding at the freezers as he set my box on top of one of them. 'Locked up at seventy degrees centigrade below zero. What can I say?' He shrugged. 'These freezers are out in the hall because we have no room anyplace else in maximum containment. Rather coincidental you should give this to me. Not that I'm expecting your disease to be the same.'

'All of this is smallpox?' I asked, amazed as I looked around.

'Not all, and not for long, though, since for the first time ever on this planet we've made a conscious decision to eliminate a species.'

'The irony,' I said. 'When the species you're talking about has eliminated millions.'

'So you think we should just take all this source disease and autoclave it.'

His expression said what I was used to hearing. Life was much more complicated than I presented it, and only people like him recognized the subtler shades.

'I'm not saying we should destroy anything,' I replied. 'Not at all. Actually, probably we shouldn't. Because of this.' I looked at the box I had just given him. 'Our autoclaving smallpox certainly won't mean it's gone. I guess it's like any other weapon.'

'You and me both. I'd sure like to know where the Russians are hiding their variola stock virus these days, and if they've sold any of it to the Middle East, North Korea.'

'You'll do PCR on this?' I said.

'Yes.'

'Right away?'

'As fast as we can.'

'Please,' I said. 'This is an emergency.'

'That's why I'm standing here now,' he said. 'The government considers me nonessential. I should be at home.'

'I've got photographs that USAMRIID was kind enough to develop while I was in the Slammer,' I said with a trace of irony.

'I want to see them.'

We took the elevator back up, getting off on the fourth floor. He led me into a conference room where staff met to devise strategies against terrible scourges they couldn't always identify. Usually bacteriologists, epidemiologists, people in charge of quarantines, communications, special pathogens and PCR assembled in the room. But it was quiet, no one was here but us.

'Right now,' Martin said, 'I'm all you've got.'

I got a thick envelope out of my purse, and he began to go through the photographs. For a moment, he stared as if transfixed, at color prints of the torso and those of Lila Pruitt.

'Good God,' he said. 'I think we should look at transpiration routes right away. Everybody who might have had contact. And I mean, fast.'

'We can do that on Tangier,' I said. 'Maybe.'

'Definitely not chicken pox or measles. No way, Jose,' he said. 'Definitely pox-related.'

He went through photographs of the severed hands and feet, his eyes wide.

'Wow.' He stared without blinking, light reflecting on his glasses. 'What the hell is this?'

'He calls himself deadoc,' I said. 'He sent me graphic files through AOL. Anonymously, of course. The FBI's trying to track him.'

'And this victim here, he dismembered?'

I nodded.

'She also has manifestations similar to the victim on Tangier.' He was looking at vesicles on the torso.

'So far, yes.'

'You know, monkeypox has been worrying me for years,' he said. 'We survey the hell out of West Africa, from Zaire to Sierra Leone, where cases have occurred, along with whitepox. But so far, no variola virus has turned up. My fear, though, is that one of these days, some poxvirus in the animal kingdom is going to figure out a way to infect people.'

Again, I thought about my telephone conversation with Rose, about murder and animal hairs.

'All that's got to happen is the microorganism gets in the air, let's say, and finds a susceptible host.'

He went back to Lila Pruitt, to her disfigured, tormented body on her foul bed.

'Now she was obviously exposed to enough virus to cause devastating disease,' he said, and he was so engrossed, he seemed to be talking to himself.

'Dr Martin,' I said. 'Do monkeys get monkeypox or are they just the carrier?'

'They get it and they give it where there is animal contact, such as in the rain forests of Africa. There are nine known virulent poxviruses on this planet and transmission to humans happens only in two. The variola virus, or smallpox, which, thank God, we don't see anymore, and molluscum contagiosum.'

'Trace evidence clinging to the torso has been identified as monkey hair.'

He turned to look at me and frowned. 'What?'

'And rabbit hair, too. I'm just wondering if someone out there is conducting their own laboratory experiments.'

He got up from the table.

'We'll start on this now. Where can you be reached?'

'Back in Richmond.' I handed him my card as we walked out of the conference room. 'Could someone maybe call for a taxi?'

'Sure. One of the guards at the desk. Afraid none of the clerical staff is in.'

Carrying the box, he pushed the elevator button with his elbow. 'It's a nightmare. We got salmonella in Orlando from unpasteurized orange juice, another potential cruise ship outbreak of E. coli O-one-five-seven-H-seven, probably undercooked ground beef again. Botulism in Rhode Island, and some respiratory disease in an old folks' home. And Congress doesn't want to fund us.'

'Tell me about it,' I said.

We stopped at each floor, waiting as other people got on. Martin kept talking.

'Imagine this,' he went on. 'A resort in Iowa where we've got suspected shigella because a lot of rain overflowed in private wells. And try to get the EPA involved.'

'It's called mission impossible,' someone sardonically said as the doors opened again.

'If they even exist anymore,' Martin quipped. 'We get fourteen thousand calls a year and have only two operators. Actually, right now we got none. Anybody who comes in, answers the phone. Including me.'

'Please don't let this wait,' I said as we reached the lobby.

'Don't worry.' He was into it. 'I got three guys I'm calling in from home right away.'

For half an hour, I waited in the lobby and used a phone, and at last my taxi was here. I rode in silence, staring out at plazas of polished granite and marble, and sports complexes that reminded me of the Olympics, and buildings of silver and glass. Atlanta was a city where everything aspired higher, and lavish fountains seemed a symbol of generosity and no fear. I was feeling light-headed and chilled and unusually tired for one who had just spent the better part of a week in bed. By the time I reached my Delta gate, my back had begun to ache. I could not get warm or think very clearly, and I knew I had a fever.

I was ill by the time I reached Richmond. When Marino met me at the gate, the expression on his face turned to abject fear.

'Geez, Doc,' he said. 'You look like hell.'

'I feel like hell.'

'You got any bags?'

'No. You got any news?'

'Yeah,' he said. 'One tidbit that will piss you off. Ring arrested Keith Pleasants last night.'