“What sort of oversight is there?”
“Very little, mostly independent and piecemeal. Right now there are some fifteen thousand scientists authorized to work with deadly pathogens, but there are zero federal agencies charged with assessing the risks of all of these labs, let alone even keeping track of their number. As a consequence, there’ve been countless reports of mishandling of contagious pathogens, of vials gone missing, of poor records. So when it comes to an accident like this one, it was not a matter of if but of when it would happen.”
He stared out the window, toward the south, toward that pall of toxic smoke. He had already been informed about the countermeasures released by the base: an engineered blend of a paralytic agent and a nerve gas, all to thwart what might have escaped, to kill any living vector that might transmit it or allow it to spread.
“The genie’s out of the bottle,” he mumbled, referring not only to events here but also to the rapid escalation of bioengineering projects going on across the country.
He turned back to Lisa. “And it’s not only these sanctioned facilities we must worry about. In garages, attics, and local community centers, homegrown genetics labs are sprouting up everywhere. For a small price, you can learn to do your own genetic experiments, even patent your creations.”
“How very entrepreneurial. It sounds like the cyberpunks of the past have become the biopunks of today.”
“Only now they’re hacking into genetic code instead of computer codes. And again with little to no oversight. At the moment, the government depends on self-policing of these grassroots labs.”
“The sudden escalation in the number of labs doesn’t surprise me.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“The cost of lab equipment and materials has been plummeting for years. What once cost tens of thousands of dollars can be done for pennies now. Along with that, there’s been a corresponding increase in speed. Right now, the pace of our ability to read and write DNA increases tenfold every year.”
He calculated the implication in his head. That meant in ten short years, genetic engineering could be ten billion times faster.
Lisa continued. “Things are moving along at breakneck speeds. Already a lab has managed to create the first synthetically built cell. And just last year biologists engineered an artificial chromosome, building a functional, living yeast from scratch, with gaps in its DNA where they plan to insert special additions in the near future.”
“Designer yeast. Great.”
Lisa shrugged. “And there are darker implications about that genie getting out of the bottle. It’s not just accidental releases we need to worry about. I was reading about this Kickstarter program — where for forty dollars, a group of enterprising young biopunks will send you a hundred seeds for a type of weed that incorporates a glowing gene.”
“Glow-in-the-dark weeds? Why?”
“Mischief mostly. They want their funders to spread the seeds into the wild. They already have five thousand backers, which means over five hundred thousand synthetic seeds could be cast across the United States in the near future.”
Painter knew such actions were merely the tip of a dangerous iceberg. General Metcalf — the head of DARPA and his boss — had expressed that one of homeland security’s greatest fears was how vulnerable U.S. labs were to foreign agents. A terrorist organization could easily insert a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow into one of these bioweapon facilities, either to obtain a deadly pathogen or to get the necessary training to run their own labs.
Painter studied the fog-shrouded mountains in the distance.
Had something like that happened here? Had it been an act of terrorism?
To answer that very question — along with surveying the site firsthand — General Metcalf had ordered Painter to fly out to this remote Marine base. The Mountain Warfare Training Center had become the official staging ground for overseeing this disaster. He was to coordinate with the colonel who ran the center, where assets were already being gathered.
Painter could have left Lisa behind, but her knowledge and keen insight had already proved invaluable. Plus she had insisted on coming, her eyes aglow with the challenge. He reached his hand over to hers, their fingers entwining as if they were bound together forever. How could he refuse his future bride anything?
Such indulgence was part of the reason they had a third companion for this flight. Josh Cummings — Lisa’s younger brother — sat up in the cockpit, carrying on an animated conversation with the flight crew. Josh was presently pointing to the airstrip below. It was the main airfield for the Marine base, a site the young man had visited often in the past, and the other reason he was along on this ride.
Like his sister, Josh was lean and blond-haired. He could easily be mistaken for a typical California surfer, but Josh’s passion was less about sea and sun than it was about heights and sheer cliffs of rock. He was a renowned mountaineer, summiting a majority of the world’s tallest peaks in his twenty-five years, garnering accolades for his skill and building a small business from several of his patents on equipment design.
As a result, he had developed a working relationship with this base as a civilian consultant. He even wore the red knit cap of a Mountain Warfare Instructor, known simply as Red Hats. Few civilians ever earned the right to wear that cap, to teach soldiers the ins and outs of working a mountain. It was a testament to Josh’s skill.
But other than that cap, few would mistake Josh for a U.S. Marine. He wore his hair to his shoulders and had a casual disregard for authority. Even his garb was anything but military. Under a sheepskin jacket — something Josh had won from a Sherpa after a night of poker inside a tent on a slope of K2 during a snowstorm — he wore a gray expedition-weight thermal shirt with his company’s logo. It was a silhouette of a set of mountains with the centermost one the tallest. It looked distinctly like a fist giving you the finger.
Definitely not military approved.
For most of the year, Josh lived out of his backpack, but he had been in town for the wedding and had insisted on accompanying his sister to the base. Painter had agreed without reservations. Josh knew most of the personnel up here and could vouch for Painter, hopefully helping to smooth any ruffled feathers from Sigma’s trespassing into their territory. Plus from Josh’s training exercises in the past, he had intimate knowledge of the local terrain, which could prove useful.
Josh demonstrated that now, calling out loudly to be heard over the engines. “Land at the north end of the airfield. You’ll cough up less sand. That’s where the Marines do most of their V/STOL training.”
Lisa glanced at Painter with a quizzical arch of an eyebrow.
“Vertical takeoff and landing,” he translated. If the armed forces loved anything more than their guns, it was their acronyms.
Still, Painter couldn’t dismiss a bit of excitement as their aircraft readied itself to land. They were flying aboard an MV-22 Osprey, courtesy of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, outside of Los Angeles. The unusual vehicle was known as a tiltrotor, named for its ability to transform from a traditional prop-engine plane into a helicopter-like craft by rotating the engine nacelles at the ends of each wingtip.
Twisting in his seat, Painter watched the propellers slowly swing from vertical to horizontal. The plane’s forward speed rapidly slowed until it was expertly hovering over the airfield; then the massive craft lowered toward the ground. Moments later, their wheels touched down.