“Human beings do the same thing.”
“You see my point, then. The steers and hogs that we turn into steaks and pork chops have better medical treatment than many humans. We even load those animals down with antibiotics and other medicines to keep them as healthy as possible until we can eat them.”
“Animal husbandry isn’t my strong suit, Doc. Where are you going with this?”
“The blue medusa toxin is the most complex naturally produced chemical I’ve ever seen. It puts up a wall that keeps pathogens at arm’s length. The doomed prey enjoys the best of health while it waits to be devoured.” Kane leaned across the table and dropped his voice. “Now, just suppose we could put those same protective qualities in a drug for humans.”
Austin pondered Kane’s words.
“You’d have an all-purpose pill,” Austin said. “What the snake oil salesmen used to call a cure-all.”
“Bingo! Only this was no snake oil. We had found a medical miracle that just might neutralize some of the greatest scourges of mankind, the ailments caused by viruses, from the common cold to cancer.”
“So why all the hush-hush?” Austin asked. “If people knew you had discovered a cure-all, the world would build statues in your honor.”
“Hell, Kurt, at first we were nominating ourselves for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. After the initial euphoric thrill, we realized that we were about to open Pandora’s box.”
“You wouldn’t get any love letters from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries,” Austin said. “But, in the long term, you’d get a healthier world.”
“It’s that long term that worried us,” Kane said. “Say we give this boon to the world, no strings attached. An easily accessible cure-all goes into production. The average life span increases stratospherically. Instead of six billion souls on the planet, we’d have ten or twelve billion. Picture the pressure that would put on land, water, food, and energy resources.”
“You could have riots, wars, governments toppled, and starvation.”
Kane spread his hands apart as if to say Voila!
“Now imagine what would happen if we kept the discovery secret.”
“Nothing is secret forever. Word would leak out. Those who didn’t have access to the medicine would resent those who did. People with life-threatening diseases would be pounding down the doors of city hall. Chaos again.”
“The scientific board reached the same conclusion,” Kane said. “We were in a quandary. So we compiled a report, which we transmitted to the government. Then fate intervened. An epidemic broke out in China, an influenza-type virus with the potential to set off a worldwide pandemic that would kill millions. And guess what? Our crazy little lab held the key to the cure.”
“Blue medusa?”
“Yup.”
“Is that what you meant when you said your research could impact everyone on the planet?”
Kane nodded.
“Turns out our research held the only hope to fight this thing,” he continued. “The government took over the lab, locked the doors, and worked with the Chinese government to keep the research under wraps until we could come up with a synthesized form of the chemical. They put out a cover story suggesting that the new virus was simply an outbreak of SARS and thus controllable. Which it isn’t. It’s a mutated strain that’s even more virulent than the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic. In one year, that virus killed millions.”
Austin let out a low whistle.
“With the ability people have to globe-hop now,” he said, “that 1918 figure would be a drop in the bucket.”
“This time, it’s the whole bucket, Kurt. The feds classified our findings and made all the lab people government employees, so that anyone talking out of turn could be prosecuted for treason. They also added White House and military people to the board. Then they moved most of the research to a secret undersea lab.”
“Why not stay at Bonefish Key?” Austin asked.
“Too public, for one thing. But there were practical reasons too. We wanted to be near the resource. The blue medusa once covered a wide area, but now it is found primarily in and around a specific deepwater canyon. And we wanted to quarantine our work. We were developing an enhanced version of the medusa, a sort of superjellyfish, a dangerous predator, not the kind of thing you’d want to find in your swimming pool.”
“Are you saying you were working with malignant mutant life-forms, Doc?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“What would happen if they got in the wild?”
“Don’t worry, there’s no danger of them wiping out the ocean’s biomass. They can’t reproduce and would eventually die out in the open. We took great care during the genetic engineering to prevent the possibility of proliferation.”
“That’s still playing with dynamite, Doc. Mother Nature doesn’t like to be upstaged.”
“I know, I know,” Kane said, his voice tightening. “But we were under intense pressure from the government. We had to have greater quantities of the toxin to conduct our synthesis experiments, so we simply grew bigger medusae. The enhanced creatures proved to be more aggressive than the original, and the toxin they produced went off the charts.”
“Before you came to the Beebe, you were in the Pacific Ocean,” Austin observed. “Is that where they put the lab?”
“Yes. Micronesia, to be more exact. The government used an undersea observatory under development for the Navy. We call it Davy Jones’s Locker. I was working there when I heard I’d been nominated for the B3 dive. The project was about to be wrapped up, so I left my assistant, Lois Mitchell, in charge and took a leave of absence. You know the rest.”
“Only up to the point when the Coast Guard snatched you from the deck of the Beebe.”
“The call I got on the Beebe was to tell me that the secret lab had vanished around the same time as the attack on the B3. The security ship guarding the lab was heavily damaged by a missile that may have been launched from a submarine. The whole undersea complex of labs and living quarters, along with the staff, disappeared from the bottom. The Navy’s still searching.”
Austin gazed at Kane as if he’d seen the little man who wasn’t there.
“You’re just full of surprises, Doc.” Stavros was coming from the kitchen with plates in his hands. “Why don’t you tell me about it over appetizers?”
In between bites of pita bread, Kane told Austin about the attack on the support ship and described the depressions left in the ocean floor. When Kane asked Austin if he had any idea how the lab could have been moved, Austin said he’d run it by Zavala. Then he asked a question of his own.
“How far had the research gone when the lab disappeared?”
“We had identified the microorganism that produced the chemical in the jellyfish. With that done, we were on the verge of being able to produce the synthesized version in quantity. We were going to skip over the clinical trials and rely on lab tests and computer models even as we distributed it. There wasn’t time otherwise. We had to have the medicine manufactured and in place if and when the virus broke out of China and spread to other countries.”
“Have you thought of who might be behind the lab’s disappearance?” Austin said.
“I’ve been turning the question over in my mind for days. All I’ve got in return has been a headache.”
“You said that a missile was used to knock out the support ship and that it probably was launched from a submarine. Only a government or a big organization would have the resources to attack the bathysphere and move the lab,” Austin said.
“My thoughts exactly. It follows that only a government would have the resources to untangle this mess. Without that lab, we have no defense against the pandemic. The virus is spreading in China. Once it hits urban areas there, it will break out beyond her borders.”
“The Navy must have ships searching,” Austin said.
“They’re combing the area. But the people who did this would have expected a Navy search and done something to forestall it. A White House guy at my board meeting said he had heard Vice President Sandecker sing your praises, and I saw what you did when the bathysphere was all but lost. So I put out the word that I wanted to see you. And here we are.”