It was becoming a zoo out there.
Distantly a rumble of thunder echoed over the mountains, rattling the steel roof of the hangar.
Even Mother Nature seemed determined to make matters worse.
Painter strode more quickly toward the BSL4 complex.
We need to catch a break… even a small one.
“Look at this,” Jenna called out from her computer.
Drake rolled his chair over from his workstation, bringing with him a musky scent of his masculinity. Bill stretched a kink from his lower back and stepped to join them. Even Nikko lifted his head from the floor, where he’d been working on an old Nylabone she kept in the station to distract him when she worked.
On the screen, she had captured the frozen image of a white Toyota Camry. The footage came from a weather camera along Highway 395, south of town. Unfortunately, the resolution was poor.
She pointed to the whiteboard on the back wall, which included a white Camry on the list of suspect cars. “I can’t make out the license plate, but the driver was going fast.”
She hit the play button and the vehicle in question zoomed down the stretch of highway.
“Seventy to eighty miles per hour,” Bill estimated.
“The car’s a common make and model,” Drake commented skeptically. “Could be someone just heading home.”
“Yeah, but watch as it passes another car in the opposite lane.”
She reversed the footage and clicked through more slowly, frame by frame. In one shot, a minivan crosses its path, traveling the other direction. The headlamps hit the windshield at the right angle to fully illuminate the driver. Again the resolution didn’t allow for much of an identification.
Drake squinted. “Dark blond maybe, medium to long hair. Still a blur.”
“Yeah, but look at what she’s wearing.”
Bill whistled. “Either she likes wearing white suits or that’s a lab coat.”
Jenna turned to the whiteboard. “Which researcher is listed as driving a white Camry?”
Drake rolled his chair over and grabbed his tablet computer from the desk. He scrolled through until he found the matching government employee file. “Says here that it’s Amy Serpry, biologist from Boston, recent hire. Five months ago.”
“How about a picture?”
Drake tapped at the screen, studied it, then turned it to face them. “Blond, hair in a ponytail. Still, it looks pretty long to me.” The Marine gave her a half-smile that made her feel much too warm. “I think this is when we say jackpot.”
Jenna wanted more assurance. “What do we know about her?”
Painter had given them everything he could about each researcher: records, evaluations, their background checks, even any papers published under their name.
Drake scanned through the highlights of her bio. “She’s from France, became an American citizen seven years ago, attended postdoctoral programs at both Oxford and Northwestern.”
No wonder Dr. Hess employed her. Plus from the photo, the woman was quite pretty, an asset that probably never hurts when it comes to getting hired by the boys’ club that was the scientific world.
Drake continued to read in silence, clearly looking for anything that stood out. “Get this,” he finally said. “She was a major figure in a movement that encouraged open access to scientific information. They advocated for more transparency. She even wrote an op-ed piece, supporting a Dutch virologist who had posted online the genetic tricks to make H5N1—the bird flu — more contagious and deadly.”
“She was okay with that being published?” Bill asked.
Drake read for a bit longer. “She was definitely not against it.”
Jenna took in a deep breath. “We should relay this to the sheriff’s department and Director Crowe. That Camry is an ’09 model. Likely equipped with a GPS unit.”
“And with the VIN number,” Bill said, “we should be able to track its location.”
“It’s worth checking out,” Jenna agreed.
Drake stood up and waved for her to follow. “In the meantime, we should get back to the helicopter. Be ready to move once we have a location.”
Jenna felt a measure of pride at being included — not that she would’ve had it any other way.
“Go.” Bill reached for a phone. “I’ll set everything in motion and alert you as soon as I hear something.”
With Nikko in tow, Jenna and Drake hurried out of the office and across the visitors’ center to the front doors. As she exited, a few cold raindrops struck her face.
She studied the skies and didn’t like what she saw.
A spatter of lightning lit the underbellies of a stack of black clouds.
Drake frowned, matching her expression. “We’re running out of time.”
He was right.
Jenna rushed for the waiting vehicle.
Somebody had better come up with some answers — and quick.
Lisa studied the rat in the cage, watching it root in the bedding, pushing its pink nose through the wood shavings. She empathized with the tiny creature, feeling equally trapped and threatened.
The test subject sat in a cage that was divided into two sections separated by a dense HEPA filter. On the opposite side was a black pile of dust — debris from one of the dead plants.
She typed a note into the computer, a challenging task with the thick gloves of her BSL4 suit.
FIVE HOURS AND NO SIGN OF TRANSMISSION.
They had run a series of trials with various pore sizes and thicknesses of filters, trying to evaluate the size of the infectious agent. So far this was the only rat that continued to show no signs of contamination. The others were all sick or dying from multi-organ failure.
She struggled not to think about her brother, entombed in the patient containment unit across the hangar.
Hours ago, she had performed a necropsy with a histopathologist on one of the rats in an early stage of infection. Its lungs and heart were the worst afflicted, with petechiae on the alveoli and rhabdomyolysis of the cardiac muscle fibers. Its heart was literally melting away. With initial lesions manifesting so dramatically in the chest, it suggested an airborne mode of transmission.
It was why they started this series of filter tests.
She continued to type.
ASSESSMENT: INFECTIOUS PARTICLE MUST
BE UNDER 15 NANOMETERS IN SIZE.
So definitely not a bacterium.
One of the smallest known bacterial species was Mycoplasma genitalium, which topped off between 200 and 300 nanometers.
“Gotta be a virus,” she mumbled.
But even the tiniest virus known to man was the porcine circovirus, which was 17 nanometers in size. The transmittable particle here was even smaller than that. It was no wonder they were still struggling to get a picture of it, to examine its ultrastructure.
Two hours ago, a CDC technician had finally finished setting up and calibrating a scanning electron microscope inside a neighboring lab in the hangar. Hopefully soon they’d get to confront the adversary face-to-face.
She sighed, wanting to rub the knot of a headache out of her temples, but suited up she could not even brush the few hairs away that were tickling her nose. She had tried blowing them to the side before finally giving up. She knew exhaustion was getting the better of her, but she refused to leave the suite of BSL4 labs that were conducting various stages of research.