She checked the gaskets at her wrists, stretching fingers inside the heavy-duty rubber gloves. They were the first line of defense in a series of three layers, the next being cut-resistant Kevlar, followed by purple nitrile gloves. Nitrile ripped easier than latex when it was punctured, but in the deadly stuff they worked with, that was a plus. A glove with an unnoticed hole, even a tiny one, could spell a slow and agonizing death. Better the thing just fell to pieces once it was compromised.
Turning slowly, one at a time, each checked the other’s gear, looking for correct closure on all the zippers and latches on the bulky full-body suits.
Justin did an ungainly pirouette but, thankfully, kept his mouth shut.
Mahoney punched her code into the pad beside the first airlock. The heavy steel door slid open with a sucking whoosh. She had to pass through four doors to get to the Biosafety level-four containment lab, the place where scientists worked on the nastiest bugs—animalcules, the pioneers had called them. Past the second door, down a long hall to the left, was the airlock to the infamous Slammer, the quarantined medical unit where researchers were sentenced if they suffered exposure, or even possible exposure, to one of the booger bugs in BSL-4—highly contagious and with no known cure. The place got its name from the sound the heavy door made when they sealed you inside for observation — maybe to never again come out and breathe fresh air.
A visit to the Slammer wasn’t exactly a death sentence, but the only two people she’d seen go in had cracked under the isolation, emerging three weeks after their initial interment with no symptoms of the threatened disease but a multitude of facial twitches and body tics they hadn’t had when they went in. Mahoney had been inside once, on a tour, and found it to be like the inside of a sterile submarine with grom-meted armholes for unseen medical staff to work on isolated patients. One of the Slammer veterans had described it as living for three weeks inside an empty bleach bottle. Even the outer door gave Mahoney the creeps and she shuffled past as quickly as her blue suit would let her.
“All right,” she said, moving through the third lock. “Time to get to work. Two monkeys dead, two still alive?”
“That’s what the instruments read,” Justin said.
“Curiouser and curiouser…” Mahoney mused as she moved toward the last door. “I thought they’d all have crashed by now.”
With roughly five minutes of air in her sealed suit, Mahoney’s first order of business was to attach one of the red air hoses that hung coiled from the ceiling every twelve feet. The hose provided her suit with a positive air flow and kept her face shield clear from fog. More importantly it gave her clean air to breathe.
Those who worked the Special Pathogens Branch followed safety precautions to the letter, but deadly viruses had to be kept alive in order to be studied. Working in a BSL-4 was like swimming in a feeding frenzy with billions of invisible, microscopic sharks — except it was far more dangerous.
Mahoney’s suit filled with a constant stream of air, turning her into a hissing blue version of the Michelin Man.
The French had done a remarkable job of packaging the samples. There were two, each in a separate, unbreakable tube, sealed in foam tape and stored with a chemical gel coolant that would keep anything, virus or otherwise, viable. One of the samples was easily identifiable as blood. Primary tests revealed it was human, but a mix containing the DNA and blood types of at least four individuals.
The second sample, also taken from the Roissy lab according to the French, was not so easy to identify. It was clear and viscous, the consistency of syrup, with microscopic flecks of black and red Mahoney had supposed was occult blood. It turned out to be vitreous gel, the fluid from inside a human eye, again from multiple donors.
Inside the BSL-4, the stainless steel surfaces and shatterproof glass equipment were dazzling in their sterility.
Mahoney, followed by a very serene Justin, made her way across the spotless tile floor — it was severely uncluttered, devoid of anything that might pose a trip or cut hazard. Two Pyrex vials sat in separate airtight glass containment boxes on her workbench, right where she’d left them.
It took hours to ready samples for study. They’d started the process as soon as they’d arrived from Miami. Now, Mahoney put Justin in charge of slicing dried droplets of amber resin containing cultures from each of the two specimens and studying them under an electron microscope.
She would deal with the macaques.
A long row of eighteen enclosures, connected by a series of metal and PVC piping ran along the walls of yet another sealed room inside the BSL-4. Only ten of the enclosures contained macaques.
Mahoney had never been able to bear naming the animals involved in her research and called them by the control number tattooed on their chest. The primates were the worst, with their intelligent eyes and human expressions — it was far too easy to become attached to them. She’d spent months in the jungles of Africa and South America staring the world’s deadliest diseases square in the face, watched people in the worst forms of pain and human agony, and still it was the monkeys that haunted her dreams.
She told herself the work she did was so important. The deaths of a few had the potential to save millions of lives. Mahoney listened to the muffled thump as the doors leading to the monkey unit slid shut behind her and wondered if the man who gave the order to shoot down Northwest 2 had used the same line of reasoning.
All eight of the surviving monkeys broke into a chorus of “Krraa! Krraaa!” as soon as Mahoney walked in and attached her breathing hose. Though slightly muffled by their airtight pens, the monkeys’ screaming cries filled the room. She always tried to be gentle, but brought the creatures little but pain. She knew it and they knew it. Though each monkey could see the animals in the enclosures on either side of it, the air going in and out of the cage only mixed with that of the adjacent animals if Mahoney wanted it to.
In the far corner of the room the enclosures for C-08 and C-11 were quiet.
Five hours before, Mahoney had injected C-08 with a serum made from the Roissy blood mixture, then connected the air ducts from that cage to the cage of C-11. No other contact was allowed. Megan groaned when she looked in the metal enclosures and found each animal slumped dead with uncoagulated blood still dripping from their old-man faces. C-11 had had no direct contact with the Roissy virus, but seven hours after beginning to breathe common air, he had crashed and bled out, just as surely as C-08.
She’d have to do a necropsy, take some blood and liver samples for further study, but first she needed to check on her two other test subjects.
Mahoney had given C-45 two cc’s of a serum made from a sample of the vitreous eye gel found along with the blood in the terrorist lab in Roissy. C-45 was a robust, bearded male tipping the scale at thirty-one pounds — much of it teeth and claw. It had taken a double dose of ketamine to sedate the animal long enough to give him the test serum. It was one thing to get poked with a needle containing an anesthetic, quite another to get even a nick from a syringe containing a deadly agent like Ebola.
Though heavily sedated with a drug that should have had amnesiac effects, C-45 had stared up at Mahoney during the short procedure with pure, unblinking hatred right up to the time Justin had returned him to the enclosure.
Now the big macaque paced his tiny metal prison, still very much alive. C-6, whose enclosure shared the same air system as C-45, screamed and scolded Mahoney as she approached for a better look. C-45’s huge brown eyes still burned with hatred, but he was unsteady, apparently under residual effects of the ketamine. She wondered vaguely if he was having a bad trip. Ketamine, known as Special K on the street, could send humans into wild hallucinations.