"Sounds like the 'my dog doesn't bite' crap."
Dr. Zollner ignored me and continued on, "It is the mission of the United States Department of Agriculture to prevent foreign animal pestilence from coming to these shores. We are the animal equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. As you may imagine, we work closely with Atlanta because of these crossover diseases-animal to human, and vice versa. We have a huge quarantine complex in Newburgh, New York, where all animals coming into this country must stay in quarantine for a period of time. You know, it's like a Noah's Ark of animals arriving every day-foreign race horses, circus animals, zoo animals, breeding stock, exotic commercial animals such as ostriches and llamas, exotic pets such as Vietnamese potbellied pigs, and all sorts of birds from the jungle… Two and a half million animals each year." He looked at us and said, " Newburgh has been called the Ellis Island for the animal kingdom. Plum Island is the Alcatraz. No animal that comes to us from Newburgh or from anywhere leaves here alive. I must tell you, all these animals being imported into this country for recreation and amusement have caused us here a lot of work and much anxiety. It's only a matter of time…" He added, "You can extrapolate from the animal kingdom to the human population."
I certainly could.
He stayed silent a moment, then said, " Plum Island 's cannons once guarded the shores of this country, and now this facility does the same."
Rather poetic, I thought, for a scientist, then I recalled reading that line in one of the press releases that Donna handed me.
Zollner liked to talk, and my job is to listen, so, it was working out okay.
We walked into a room that Zollner said was an X-ray crystallography lab, and I wasn't about to argue with him.
A woman was bent over a microscope, and Zollner introduced her as Dr. Chen, a colleague and good friend of Tom and Judy. Dr. Chen was about thirty, and rather attractive, I thought, with a long shock of black hair, tied back with a sort of netting, suitable for close microscope work by day, I guess, and who knew what at night when the hair came down. Behave, Corey. This is a scientist, and she's a lot smarter than you are.
Dr. Chen greeted us, and she looked rather serious, I thought, but probably she was just upset and sad over the deaths of her friends.
Once again, Beth made sure that it was understood that I was a friend of the Gordons, and on that level, if no other, I was earning rny buck a week. I mean, people don't like a bunch of coppers hammering them with questions, but if one of the cops is a mutual friend of the deceased, then you have a little edge. Anyway, we all agreed that the Gordons' deaths were a tragedy, and we spoke well of the dead.
The subject shifted to Dr. Chen's work. She explained, in lay terms so that I sort of understood her, "I am able to X-ray virus crystals so that I can map their molecular structure. Once we do that, we can then attempt to alter the virus to make it unable to cause disease, but if we inject this altered virus into an animal, the animal may produce antibodies that we hope will attack the natural, disease-causing version of the virus."
Beth asked, "And this is what the Gordons were working on?"
"Yes."
"What specifically were they working on? What virus?"
Dr. Chen glanced at Dr. Zollner. I'm not happy when witnesses do that. I mean, it's like the pitcher gets the signal from the coach to throw a curve or a slider or whatever. Dr. Zollner must have signaled for a fast ball because Dr. Chen said straightforwardly, "Ebola."
No one said anything, then Dr. Zollner said, "Simian Ebola, of course. Monkey Ebola." He added, "I would have told you sooner, but I thought you'd want it explained more fully by one of the Gordons' colleagues." He nodded to Dr. Chen.
Dr. Chen continued, "The Gordons were trying to genetically alter a simian Ebola virus so that it would not cause disease, but would produce an immune response in the animal. There are many strains of the Ebola virus, and we're not even sure which strains can cross the species barrier-"
"You mean," Max asked, "infect people?"
"Yes, infect humans. But this is an important first step toward a human Ebola vaccine."
Dr. Zollner said, "Most of our work here has traditionally been done with what you'd call farm animals-food- and leather-producing animals. However, over the years, certain government agencies have underwritten other types of research."
I asked, "Such as the military doing biological warfare research?"
Dr. Zollner didn't answer directly, but said, "This island is a unique environment, isolated, but close to major transportation and communication centers, and also close to the best universities in the nation, and close to a highly educated pool of scientists. In addition, this facility is technically advanced. So, aside from the military, we work with other agencies, here and abroad, whenever something very unusual or potentially… dangerous to humans comes along. Such as Ebola."
"In other words," I said, "you sort of rent rooms here?"
"It's a big facility," he replied.
"Did the Gordons work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture?" I asked.
"I'm not at liberty to say."
"Where did their paychecks come from?"
"All paychecks are from the USDA."
"But not every scientist who gets a USDA paycheck is a USDA employee. Correct?"
"I don't intend to get into a semantic duel with you, Mr. Corey." He looked at Dr. Chen. "Please continue."
She said, "There are so many separate tasks and steps to this sort of work that no one can see the whole picture except the project supervisor. That was Tom. Judy was the assistant project supervisor. In addition, they were both excellent researchers themselves. In retrospect, I can see what they were doing, which was to ask for tests on procedures that were something like a red herring, and sometimes they'd tell one of us on the project that they'd reached a dead end. They closely monitored the actual clinical tests on the monkeys, and the animal handlers were not well informed. Tom and Judy were the only ones who were privy to all the information."
She thought a moment, then said, "I don't believe they started out to deceive… I think when it hit them how close they were to a workable vaccine for simian Ebola, they saw the possibilities of transferring the technology to a private laboratory where the next logical step was a human vaccine. Maybe they believed that this was the best thing in the interests of humanity. Maybe they thought they could develop this vaccine more quickly and effectively outside this place, which is-like most government agencies-prone to red tape and slowness."
Max said, "Let's stick to the theory of profit motive, Dr. Chen. The interests of humanity isn't cutting it for me."
She shrugged.
Beth motioned toward the microscope. "Can I take a look?"
Dr. Chen said, "Those are dead Ebola, of course. Live Ebola is only in Zone Five. But I can show you live Ebola viruses safely on videotape." She turned to a TV monitor and hit the VCR. The screen brightened to show four almost transparent crystals, tinted a sort of pink color, three-dimensional, reminding me of a prism. If they were alive, they were playing possum.
Dr. Chen said, "I'm mapping the molecular structure, as I said, so that the genetic engineers can cut and splice this or that piece, then the altered virus is propagated and injected into a monkey. The monkey has one of three responses-it contracts Ebola and dies, it doesn't contract Ebola, but doesn't produce Ebola antibodies, or it doesn't contract Ebola and does produce Ebola antibodies. That is the response we're looking for. That means we have a vaccine. But not necessarily a safe or effective vaccine. The monkey may develop Ebola later, or more commonly, when we later inject the monkey with natural Ebola virus, the antibodies aren't effective in overcoming the disease. The immune response is too weak. Or the immune response does not protect against all strains. It's very frustrating work. Viruses are so simple, molecularly and genetically, but they are more challenging than bacteria in that they are easy to mutate, hard to understand, and hard to kill. In fact, the question is-are those crystals really alive as we understand life? Look at them. They look like ice chips."