The Cobra Event by Richard Preston
“Every time I hear you say that word gadget, Hopkins,” Littleberry said, “I know we’re in trouble.”
The Reachdeep team gathered in the conference room. Hopkins spoke to them. “You could think of this lab as a spaceship,” he said. “We’re going to lose touch with the world for a little while, with our families and friends. We are going on a voyage to explore a crime.”
“And to go where no man knows what he is doing,” Suzanne Tanaka said.
“One question, Will,” James Lesdiu said. “Is this really going to work?”
“I have no idea,” Hopkins said.
“Is it really safe, is what I’d like to know,” Walter Mellis said. He was waiting for samples that he could fly back to Atlanta.
“It’s as safe as we can make it,” Mark Littleberry said.
Elsewhere in New York City it was a calm spring evening. In the cafés in Greenwich Village, people were gathering at the outdoor tables, drinking and eating. There had been nothing in the newspapers, as yet, about F.B.I. teams landing on Governors Island. The news media had not noticed the increased activity. The Coast Guard had used the island for years as a staging place for rescue operations, and the neighborhoods in Brooklyn closest to the island were accustomed to helicopters coming and going. People did not focus on the fact that the Coast Guard was no longer there, and that the helicopters were from the F.B.I. and the U.S. Army.
HOPKINS PONDERED the question of where to put the Felix gene scanners. They did not need to be operated inside the Core. The Felix system had been developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, as a system for use by military forces in identifying unknown biological agents. Biological samples for reading in the gene scanners could be sterilized with chemicals before being brought out of the Core. Certain chemicals would kill a virus without disrupting the virus’s genetic material. You could put a sterile virus sample into Felix and it would analyze the DNA successfully, even when the organism was dead.
Hopkins found some tables and began setting up the Felixes in the conference room. He placed a few chairs around the tables, and he ran data cables from the Felixes over to the communication center. In that way, Hopkins joined Felix to the World Wide Web.
At seven o’clock in the evening, a Coast Guard ferryboat had arrived at the island bearing a refrigerated morgue truck, courtesy of the City of New York. With the truck came Dr. Lex Nathanson. For any autopsies that fell under the jurisdiction of the chief medical examiner—and any deaths in New York City related to Cobra were of that type—Nathanson would be present at the autopsy and would sign the death certificate and seal the evidence.
The morgue truck contained the bodies of Peter Talides, Glenn Dudley, and Ben Kly, sealed in triple body pouches. Nathanson rode in the front of the truck with an F.B.I. evidence specialist who was carrying a large NATO biohazard tube containing the two cobra boxes. They also brought a red plastic biohazard drum containing Harmonica Man’s clothes and harmonicas.
Frank Masaccio’s people had taken control of Kate Moran’s bedroom, the art classroom at the Mater School, Peter Talides’s house, and Penny Zecker’s shop on Staten Island. The agents were evidence specialists. They were not trained in biohazard work, but they wore respirator masks and coveralls and hoped for the best. It would take them days to sift these locations for further evidence. It was standard operating procedure for a criminal investigation. It had to be done.
“I THINK WE’RE READY to go hot,” Hopkins said.
Outside the windows of the meeting room came the continual flutter of helicopters bringing in Army hospital equipment, and the Reachdeep team could hear the voices of Army doctors and medical staff moving through the halls of the hospital, setting up rooms for patients as yet unknown.
The team members put on surgical scrub suits and filed into the staging room for the Core. They opened some fiberglass boxes and pulled out black F.B.I. biohazard suits made of Tyvek. They put on rubber boots, and drew on double surgical gloves. The staging room was crowded with team members bumping into one another.
“This is not my idea of fun,” James Lesdiu said, shaking out an extra-large black suit and stepping into it.
Hopkins slung a nylon belt around his suit and hung his Leatherman pocket tool on that. They put on soft, flexible breathing helmets known as Racal hoods, transparent plastic head-bubbles with a filtered air supply. A battery-powered blower, worn at the waist, drives filtered air into the helmet, keeping it under postive pressure, so that infective bioparticles in the air will not sneak in. The batteries for the blowers last eight hours and supply a large volume of filtered air, enough for a person exerting himself heavily. Unlike the Racal hood, the space suit itself is not pressurized. It is a neutral-pressure whole-body suit. The lungs and the eyes are the most vulnerable membranes exposed to the air, so they require the superior protection of a pressurized helmet.
Hopkins fitted a Racal hood over his head, showing the others how to do it. The hood had a kind of double flap that went down over the chest and shoulders. He zipped his suit up over the shoulder flaps of the hood, closing it at the neck. “We should be able to do a complete suiting procedure in four minutes or less,” he said. “It’s going to be important for us to move in and out of the Core quickly.” He turned to Austen. “This is a lot easier and simpler than those dinosaur Level 4 space suits you guys have at C.D.C.”
“The dinosaurs work,” Austen said.
“Reachdeep is a small, furry mammal,” he said. “Go light, move fast, and have sharp teeth.”
“And get stepped on, Hopkins?” she said.
Littleberry pushed open the door, and the team members went into the Core, deploying for their tasks.
Hopkins placed the NATO canister on a table. He opened it. He removed a plastic cylinder and opened that. He removed some paper-towel wadding, and then pulled out the two cobra boxes. They looked exactly alike. The only visible difference between them was the different paper labels glued to their bases. Once the boxes were out in the air, the Core had officially gone hot.
He put the boxes on the table and wrote the word COBRA on a couple of evidence tags. Then he dated the tags and wrote down the laboratory control number of the Reachdeep lab (every evidence lab is assigned a number in the F.B.I.). The sample numbers were 1 and 2.
“I’ve been thinking about something, Will,” Littleberry said. “Whoever made those boxes used a lab setup much like this one. Somewhere in this city there’s another lab, another Core. And it’s running hot, like this one.”
“I like your concept, Commander Littleberry,” Hopkins said. “It’s an Anti-Core. The Anti-Core is out there. And these little things”—he indicated the cobra boxes—“are going to lead us to it.”
By putting the elements of the forensic investigation together in one place, in a forward field deployment, with living quarters nearby, with an operations group ready, Will Hopkins believed—hoped—that the investigation could be speeded up and run to a quick conclusion. The idea was to compress a universal forensic operation into a continuous, silent, catlike movement at high speed, culminating in an accelerative explosive rush. The quarry should not know where the hunter was moving. The quarry should not even know that there was a hunter.
Insectary
MANHATTAN, SUNDAY
ARCHIMEDES LIVED in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor. He kept the shades drawn at all times. The shades were lined with metal foil, to block the sunlight and also to keep snooping eyes from looking into his laboratory with heat-sensing cameras. There were times when he thought he was being watched. At other times he thought he must be paranoid.
He had to keep the apartment dark. He could not allow direct sunlight to enter the laboratory, because sunlight might destroy his virus cultures. He was eating lunch now, in the kitchen. His lunch was a frozen vegetarian burrito, with a tortilla that was free of animal fats. He did not eat meat. He was a parasite on the plant kingdom, but we all have to eat. The problem is that too man
In the staging area, he kept a plastic tub full of water and laundry bleach. That was for washing—deconning—objects that were contaminated. There were also some cardboard boxes holding biosafety equipment that he had ordered through the mail from an 800 number. He had his equipment sent to a mail service in New Jersey. Then he drove out and picked up the things in his car.
He pulled a clean Tyvek suit out of a box and put it on. Tyvek was not a natural fiber, but it was necessary to wear around the brainpox virus or you would get infected pretty quickly. He had been around brainpox for a long time and had never become infected. He was careful. He had also come to believe that he might very well be one of the people who, for some reason, were less susceptible to infection by brainpox. He put on double latex rubber gloves, a head covering, surgical booties, and a full-face respirator mask. Then he opened the door to Level 3.
He entered the bedroom and shut the door behind him.
His weapons lab was a comfortable working environment. There were some old Formica tables he had bought at a flea market. It was the flea market where he had traded the box to the woman who had tried to cheat him. He had enlisted her in the human experimental trials. Afterward, he had scanned the newspapers and watched the television news, but nothing about her was mentioned. Also in his lab there was a bioreactor, which was humming away softly, and the virus-drying trays, and the insectary.
The laboratory was situated in the back of his building. He had installed an air-filter system, a quiet little fan, set in a window. It had a HEPA filter. It pulled air out of the Level 3 laboratory, passed it through filters, and discharged it outdoors, clean and safe. This created negative air pressure inside his lab, so that no infective particles would escape. Air was drawn into the lab through a little vent in another window. He had sealed the windows with tape. Nothing fancy, but it worked.
The insectary, which sat on a table, was a colony of moths. He kept the colony for philosophic reasons; he didn’t really need it to carry out his work. But it was fun. The insectary was a collection of clear plastic boxes where his moths lived. He pulled open the lid of a box and inspected the green caterpillars inside. He dropped in some pieces of lettuce. They ate vegetables. He had planted a few alfalfa plants in the garden next to his building for them to eat; no one even seemed to notice.
The natural strain of his brainpox virus lived in moths and butterflies. The moth caterpillars crawled around in the boxes eating leaves. They ate until they died. They became paralyzed with the insect strain of his brainpox virus—not the human strain; human brainpox wouldn’t grow in insects. The moth caterpillars became listless, but they kept eating. Then, suddenly, the melt occurred. It was a technical term for a virus-triggered meltdown of a creature. It happened in an explosive final wave of virus replication, and in less than two hours the caterpillar was transformed into mostly virus. He understood that pretty much the same type of virus amplification melted the human brain.
He reached inside the insectary and pulled a dead caterpillar off a leaf. The dead caterpillar had turned into a liquid bag full of glassy, milky ooze. It was 40 percent pure virus crystals by dry weight. It was almost half virus. He squeezed the dead caterpillar and the crystalline ooze popped out of it. This melt was a fascinating thing to see. The transformational power of a virus never failed to impress him, even when it worked inside caterpillars.
It was interesting to see how the virus could turn an insect into a bag of virus crystals. The virus could take over its host and keep the host alive—still hungry, still feeding—even while it converted the host’s body almost entirely to virus crystals. The virus also stopped the molting process of the insect, so that it never became an adult. It stayed young and ate and ate until it was nothing but crystals. The human strain of the virus could transform the human brain into a bag of virus crystals and make the human eat and eat and eat.
The human species is hungrier than a hungry insect. With its monstrous, out-of-control appetite, it is ruining the earth, he said to himself. When a species overruns its natural habitat, it devours its available resources. It becomes weakened, vulnerable to infectious outbreaks. A sudden emergence of a deadly pathogen, an infectious killer, reduces the species back to a sustainable level, These mass dyings happen all the time in nature. For example, gypsy moth caterpillars sometimes overrun forests in the northeastern part of the United States; they eat the leaves off the trees. Eventually the population of caterpillars becomes so large that the caterpillars use up their food supply, and then all kinds of viruses break out among the caterpillars. Sooner or later some virus crashes the population of gypsy moths, and for years afterward the trees are relatively free of caterpillars. Viruses play an important role in nature: they keep populations in check.
Now consider man, he thought.
Look at the AIDS virus. People go on talking about the depletion of the population because of AIDS, saying what a disaster it is, yet in the next breath they talk about how the environment is being damaged by overpopulation. The fact is that AIDS is an example of the kind of disease corrective that always appears when a population booms out of control. It is necessary. The real problem is that AIDS has not done its work well enough. And what’s worse, public health doctors are trying to develop a vaccine for it.
There is no more dangerous human being than a public health doctor, he thought. Public health doctors are largely responsible for the uncontrolled boom in the human population that is destroying the earth. The public health doctors are environmental criminals of the highest degree. Even now they are trying to cause an extinction of a natural species, the extinction of the smallpox virus. Smallpox is a beautiful white tiger, and it has a place in nature. Who are we to presume to destroy a white tiger? The Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth should defend smallpox!
Natural thinning events are positive. History shows what I mean, he liked to point out in his mind. In the year 1348 or thereabouts, the Black Death, an infective airborne bacterial organism called Yersinia pestis, wiped out at least a third of the population of Europe. It was a very good thing for Europe. The survivors prospered. They inherited more land and more property. A great economic boom followed the Black Death, and it culminated in the Renaissance. In the wake of the mass dying, the survivors were richer and had more to eat. There were fewer poor people crowded into the towns, because so many of the poor had died. With the numbers of poor reduced, a labor shortage developed in the towns during the years following the Black Death. New machines and new manufacturing processes were invented to make up for the loss of unskilled laborers. This led to increasingly free capital flow. It led to the creation of the first true investment banks, in Florence and in other cities, and great wealth was created, great art, new ideas. One could say that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel came out of the Black Death.
Historians describe the Black Death as something that just “occurred” at the end of the Middle Ages. They don’t make the connection: the Black Death did not just “occur”; it was the biological event that ended the Middle Ages. And the world is overdue for another biological event. If it doesn’t happen soon, how many species will disappear, how many beautiful tracts of primeval rain forest will vanish forever? If the public health doctors keep up their work, they will practically destroy the world.
Hence the need for a new disease.
Brainpox was beautiful. It was a biological rocket that destroyed the central nervous system. Driven by its rocketing proteins, brainpox raced along nerve fibers in the skull. Brainpox transformed the brain into a virus bioreactor. The brain went hot. Brainpox melted the brain in the same way that the natural form of the virus melted insects.
The brain bioreactor went hot, and it filled up with virus particles until it melted down inside the skull. The reactor began leaking fluids and biting and thrashing and hemorrhaging and generally running out of control, spreadi
He imagined brainpox turning New York City into a hot bioreactor, a simmering cauldron of amplifying virus. From there brainpox would amplify itself outward along invisible lines, following airline routes, spanning the globe. New York was the seed bioreactor, the cooker that would start the other cities going. This was not exactly the revenge of the rain forest; this was the revenge of molecular biology. From New York, brainpox would rocket to London and Tokyo, and it would fly to Lagos, Nigeria, and it would land in Shanghai and Singapore, and it would amplify through Calcutta, and it would get to São Paulo and Mexico City and Dacca in Bangladesh and Djakarta in Indonesia and all the great supercities of the earth. The cities would go hot, for a while. But it would not be the end of the human species, not in the least. It would merely remove one out of every two persons; or perhaps one out of three persons might vanish. Maybe even less. He didn’t know exactly. A biological weapon never exterminates a population. It merely thins. The greater the thinning, the healthier the effect on the species that has been thinned.
He checked on the bioreactor. It was a microreactor called a Biozan. It was running smoothly, the pumps humming gently, making about as much noise as a fish-tank. It was making concentrated brainpox virus. The output liquid, saturated with virus particles, ran through a flexible tube to a jar on the floor. As the liquid settled, a white sludge would form on the bottom of the jar. That sludge was mostly virus. He would pour off the liquid from the jar, and the sludge that remained was incredibly concentrated brainpox. He scraped it out with a spoon. It was unbelievable how one little bioreactor could make so much virus.