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THE NEXT DAY, NYDIA came by to take him to lunch in the cafeteria again.
“My treat this time.”
“It’s actually easier for me to do it. You can buy meals when we’re out on the road next week.”
“We’re going out on the road?”
“You’re almost done here, right?”
“I am, yes. Maybe an hour more to wrap it up.”
“We’re going to be interviewing scientists who could be the guy.”
“If there is a guy.”
She nodded. “If there is a guy. And if he’s domestic. I’ve been tasked to operate on the supposition there is and he is.”
“I assume the CIA is out there operating on the supposition that there is and he’s foreign.”
“Right.”
“Do they have their own CDC guy?”
“If they’re smart. I honestly don’t know.”
“So you’re interviewing suspects and you want me to—to what? Review tapes or audio recordings? Or give you questions to ask beforehand?”
“No. I want you with me.”
“During the interviews?”
“It isn’t entirely without risk,” she said. “You knock on the wrong door or ask the wrong question—or the right question—and reveal the guy, and—” She shrugged. “It might be dangerous.”
“I can do dangerous.” He shook his head. “Sounded like a bad movie line. I can do dangerous, sweetheart.” He tried a Cagney imitation.
She shook her head at him. “There are newer movies, you know. You could do Liam Neeson instead.”
“Who’s he?” Glenn said, pasting on an innocent expression.
“Anyway,” she said, rolling her eyes, “back to the topic at hand. Are you interested?”
“Yeah, I am.” It was far better than getting mired in politics at the taskforce. Not as good as directly working with public health people or hospitals. But interesting.
And it offered him the bonus of staying around Nydia. Maybe he shouldn’t be thinking of such things during such a crisis, but he couldn’t help it. He found her incredibly attractive, more with each passing day.
“I want you to let me lead the interviews, though. I’ll ask you if I need your help, and we’ll work out some questions beforehand that you’ll be able to understand answers to and I won’t. Do you know anything about interview technique?”
“I’m an investigator.”
“Of diseases.”
“Of people with disease,” he said, feeling a little miffed. “Tell me who you’ve had sex with in the past six months.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “I’m sorry?”
“That’s the kind of question I ask people, looking them straight in the eye. And I get them to answer. I know how to ask questions. I know how to detect lies. I know how to offer them another chance to correct the lie while saving face. In a lot of ways, I’m a detective.”
“But you’re not FBI. That’s clear, right?”
“I understand. You’re in charge, and I should do only what you say.”
“Okay. So I’ll give you some stuff to read this afternoon about interviewing, and some audio recordings to listen to of interviews we did on a similar subject a few years back.”
“There was a bioterror attack a few years back? I never heard of it.” He wondered if his aversion to television news had kept him from hearing about it.
“No. There wasn’t, as it turns out. But interviews were conducted. And I’ll need you to sign some additional forms about secrecy regarding those tapes.”
“All right.” It seemed ridiculous, as he was a commissioned officer in a uniformed service and wearing his uniform, and she’d already checked his security clearance, and he’d already signed about ten things for her this week, but every agency loved its forms. “You want me in uniform, by the way, or out of it? In civvies, I mean,” he said, “rather than stark naked.”
“I’ll decide before Saturday. There are benefits to each, though my first inclination is to say in uniform because of where I want to start.”
“When and where are we going?”
“Monday morning we’ll start at Fort Detrick. Do you know anyone there?”
“A few people, none of whom are going to be your terrorist.”
“We need to cover all bases.”
“Was that a pun?”
“Certainly not.” She sounded too innocent.
“Oh, good. I wouldn’t want you to lower yourself to punning.” He grew serious again. “I really don’t think you’ll find your terrorist there.”
“It’s where the anthrax terrorist was. We need to keep an open mind. People in the military can—have—committed terrorist acts. Timothy McVeigh was a veteran. I could name thirty others with less fame.”
Glenn knew he would have a hard time suspecting his friends and colleagues of such an act. “It could be an accidental release too. I mean, we know it’s an engineered virus, but the release of it might have been accidental. You don’t mind if I keep an ear open for a hint of that, do you?”
“I thought you said your people had been hunting for that already. Had interviewed and done on-site inspections.”
“They have, as well as reviewed paperwork and procedures twice over. But I was thinking, if you’re trying to hide an accident and someone comes looking for the accident, you’ll probably be able to fool them. But if you’re trying to hide an accident and someone starts to hint you’re a terrorist, in denying that more serious accusation, you might let your guard drop and reveal the accidental release.”
She cocked her head and said, “You might not make a half-bad agent, at that.”
––––––––
ON MONDAY MORNING, she drove them up to the security gate at Fort Detrick, where the USAMRIID lab was situated, officially the nation’s biodefense headquarters. It had grown out of a bioweapons program, and in fact the work of disease defense and disease offense were not entirely unrelated. There was more than a little debate in the international community about the work done here at Detrick, but a majority of it was beyond questioning, to Glenn’s mind.
She pulled up to the main gate and handed over their IDs. While the guard checked them out on a computer, she said, “Who do you know here?”
“I probably know Priscilla Glover best. She’s working on developing a vaccine for chikungunya. We share an alma mater.” And one night of tipsy sex at a conference, though there was no reason to mention that.
“So what I hear is that they’re in the lead here, not you guys, if it’s officially acknowledged it is a biological weapon.”
The guard handed back their ID and waved them ahead.
Glenn said, “I’m sure all resources would be—and already are—fully engaged. It might be officially different, but practically, I doubt much will change. The CDC will still be working hard on every aspect of it.”
Nydia said, “Do they develop new flu strains here?”
“At some low level, they’re always working on flu. However, until now, viral hemorrhagic fevers got the bulk of defense attention. Not all of it. There are a number of other pathogens that they think can be weaponized.”
“How about the flu?”
“Yes, they have a defense program for influenza. Some of what we’re doing now comes of ideas developed here over the years. But other diseases have taken precedence.”
“If they’re feeling foolish about that, they’re feeling defensive, I’d imagine.”
“Possibly. Scientists try not to let emotion sway them, but we’re human. People working on other diseases entirely wouldn’t feel culpable. A rabies expert would need to be working on rabies, not flu.”
She stopped at an intersection, looking confused by the signs.
“It’s to the left, there. See the construction crane? They should be close to done with the expansion.” He wondered for the first time how many construction projects would, in the next few months, lose so many workers to flu that construction cranes and half-finished buildings would stay just as they were today, maybe for years and years. He wondered, considering what was done here and how important this work was, if this project might be one of the few in America that was finished on time.
She pulled up to the visitor parking lot and said, “Ready? Remember everything I said?”
“Yes’m,” he said. “Once you start asking questions, I’ll be good.”
“Implying you’ll be bad before that?”
“I meant I’ll be normally friendly with anyone I know until you start grilling them, and I’ll let you do your job the way you want to do it.”
“Are these people trained against hand-shaking too?”
“Very much so.”
“Let’s go then.”
They spent nearly the whole day there, safely out of the biocontainment areas, interviewing everyone involved in researching influenza and respiratory diseases. Everyone was cautious with what they said. What happened to Hatfill—the researcher falsely accused of the anthrax attacks at first—was part of the institutional memory here, and it was obvious to Glenn that no one here wanted to go down that road and be the next Hatfill. He’d looked up the investigation into that online and refreshed his memory. The man now assumed to be the real perpetrator of that act of bioterror had also worked here. He had killed himself before he could be tried, and there were some who doubted his guilt too.
“What’s up with them?” Nydia said in exasperation when they took a break for lunch. “I’ve talked to actual foreign spies with more to say.”
“They don’t want to be falsely accused, I imagine.” He reminded her of the anthrax attacks and the falsely accused scientist. The FBI’s mishandling of the situation so many years back had not helped the FBI’s cause today.
“Tell me what you’ve been hearing in these interviews that I haven’t.”
“That nothing they’ve been doing here suggests they were on this path, of developing a killer form of H5N1. Not even of defending against it. Until now, that is. They’ve been working on aspects of the vaccine since Atlanta gave them what they had discovered about the virus’s structure. What I mean is, the interest here at Detrick comes after the fact of the release, not before.”
“Does that seem right to you? Should they have been preparing for it?”
“In the broadest sense, they were. Some of what they discover about viral disease transmission can apply to many diseases. But specifically H5N1? No, they weren’t focused on it, and no, it wasn’t irresponsible not to be. There are only so many hours of research available in a year, so many hours of scientist time, so many positions funded. They prioritize.”
“Would we have been better off had they chosen differently?”
“Not much, honestly. We might have cut a week off getting the vaccine into production had they concentrated on this to the exclusion of, say, hanta and Ebola. There might have been a few tens of thousands of doses of it on hand a week earlier. But it still might not have been the right vaccine. You know there will be future evolution, but you might not entirely guess right about specific future mutations. And then if the vaccine on hand works or not on new mutations is something of a crapshoot.”
“For a science, this field sure has a lot of uncertainty.”
“We know a lot but not everything. If you consider how little we knew a hundred twenty years ago, when we didn’t even know viruses existed, the progress has been remarkable. Realize, there are a lot of possible combinations of genes that might comprise a new virus. It’s like—well, like code-breaking work once was, I imagine. You might have a billion possible codes. And today we could use supercomputers to list every possible combination, but that wouldn’t put vaccine on shelves for a billion possibilities. The code-breaking analogy falls apart at that point, when you need to do something practical with the decryptions. If the FBI or NSA is trying to decrypt English language, or Arabic sentences, they know when they have something that makes sense. A lot of viral decryptions would make sense. Most of them. Many of them might exist one day. But which ones will exist next year? No one could predict.”
“I get it, I get it.” She unclipped and re-clipped her hair. “I’m just feeling a little frustrated. I know every single one of these people might have to be re-interviewed if we can trace the release back to here.”
“Maybe we should change how we do it this afternoon.”
“How so?”
“Let the good cop begin. Let me get talking shop with them first. Then when they’re used to talking freely, you ask your questions. Or maybe by that point, you’ve discounted the possibility of their being responsible and don’t have to ask a thing.”
“It can’t be any worse a result than what we learned this morning, which is nothing.”
“I admire that in you, you know.”
“What? My incompetence at interviewing today?”
“No. Your ability to say, ‘My plan is not working and I’ll try something else.’ You’d have made a good epidemic investigator.”
He phoned Priscilla and asked her if she were free to have lunch with him and Nydia. She was, and the three of them met and ate together. “The green chili isn’t half-bad here,” Priscilla said.
“So what’s up with chikungunya?”
“We’re still hopeful about VLPs.”
Glenn said to Nydia, “That’s virus-like particles, an alternative to dead or live virus vaccines.”
Priscilla said, “And they’ve made some progress with a rapid-read test, have you heard that? We might have one in a year or two.”
“No. That’d be great news.”
Priscilla said to Nydia, “This disease takes forever to diagnose in the lab.”
“Hardly forever,” Glenn said.
“Two weeks. A damned eternity if you’re sick with it and in pain.”
Nydia’s interest had obviously been aroused. “How do people get it?”
“Mosquitoes.”
Nydia said, “Are mosquitoes of any use at all in nature? Or do they only carry disease?”
That got them all talking about the risks of messing with Mother Nature. “We have some of the diseases we have because of trying to fix one problem,” Priscilla pointed out. “All we did was create a worse problem.”
“We know too little about how nature works,” Glenn said, “to exterminate all mosquitoes, even if we could. And we can’t, so there’s no reason to dream of it happening.”
“Besides,” said Priscilla, “in the past we thought of only short-term human gain. Now we know that’s a stupid, destructive, and ultimately suicidal way to view nature.”
They circled back around to chikungunya. Priscilla described the disease and its progression. “I’m sorry,” Nydia said, “but if it doesn’t kill many people, then why are you researching it here?”
“It’s on the list of weaponizable diseases,” Priscilla said. “It doesn’t kill many now, but someone might be able to manipulate it in ways that would make it lethal. So we need the knowledge and the vaccine ahead of that moment, which of course everyone hopes never comes.”
“Isn’t there the same problem you told me about with flu, Glenn? That tiny differences could render a vaccine developed now ineffective?”
“Yes and no with chikungunya,” said Priscilla, and launched into an explanation of the specifics of the virus she was expert on.
Glenn watched Nydia frown as she concentrated, trying to understand the often technical information she was hearing. Her dark eyes sparked with intelligence and her cheeks held a hint of a natural flush.
“This has been fun,” Priscilla said. “I love teaching people.”
Glenn said, “Why don’t you do it then? Teach?”
She laughed. “I love research too.”
“So many options, such a short human life,” Glenn said.
“Ain’t it the truth?” Priscilla stood and addressed Nydia. “It was a pleasure to meet you. Will you both be around tomorrow? I’d love catching up more, Glenn.”
He looked to Nydia for the answer.
“We’ll be done Thursday, I think,” she said.
Glenn said to Priscilla, “I’ll be in DC for a while, I imagine. Especially with air travel no longer an option, I’m pretty much stuck here.”
“Great. You have my cell. Give me a call if you get a free night.”
Nydia and Glenn returned to the room they’d been loaned for interviews. She said, “Any other scientists here you slept with? It might be useful to start with them.”
“What?”
“It’s obvious you two have been intimate.”
“It is?”
“She’s still into you. You, not so much.”
“How do you know this?”
“It’s my job. I read people.”
“It was only a—no, wait, why am I telling you this?”
“So there aren’t more of them? Because you might be able to get more information from a former lover than some random guy you’ve never met. I know there’s institutional paranoia here because of the anthrax investigation.”
“No, there isn’t anyone else. Not here,” he said.
She cocked an eyebrow at him.
“Where else am I likely to meet women but through my work? I often work fifty-hour weeks. Right now, more like eighty hours. And why am I feeling defensive all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know. Why are you?”
“In any case, the answer is no. Just Priscilla.” He wanted to leave this topic. “Do you have a list of who else we need to talk to?”
“Yeah, here.” She poked twice at her tablet and handed it to him.
“Blake Demopolous,” he said. “I know him. Platonically.”
“Okay,” she said, unruffled. “Let’s see if we can get him in here next.”
The afternoon was spent talking to another four scientists. One was former EIS. He recognized the name but he’d never worked directly with her.
Blake had been busy directly after lunch. He came in for his interview just before three. “Glenn, I hear you were there at the start of it.”
“Until we know of an earlier start to the outbreak, yeah, I was.”
“Gossip has it that you found the vector.”
“I had the thought to collect bird excreta on a rag. I’ll be known as the bird poop guy forever, won’t I?”
“I’ll remember to introduce you that way, if it ever comes up.”
“Seriously, though, it was a team effort. There’s this state worker up in New York that got us onto crows, and then one of our vets and the Fish and Wildlife people got the samples that confirmed it.”
“You heard about the chicken flocks, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“There was film on the news this morning—a bunch of guys in hazmat suits with flamethrowers, burning down a chicken farm.”
“There’s a calming image,” Glenn said.
“Really. It looked like the trailer for a sci-fi thriller.” Blake said, “So what can I do for you and the Special Agent?”
“We are looking at two things. Accidental release, and planned release.” He didn’t even glance at Nydia because he suspected that he was overstepping and didn’t want to see her glare at him. “I know, I know, you didn’t do it personally. But can you think of anyone in the community who did? Nationwide, even. Rumors about anyone? Lab techs who left here under unpleasant circumstances? Anything at all that could give us someone to look at.”
“I know the Colonel already hunted down two lab techs who would qualify as just that—possibly disgruntled former employees. He found nothing there, but he might be willing to pass along the names to the FBI.”
“You know the names?”
“It’s not for me to say,” Blake said, with a glance at Nydia.
“I get it. How are you all holding up? Long hours?”
“Yeah. You too, I’m sure.”
“I’m reading reports and memos and email until ten or eleven every night. Haven’t gotten in a run or any kind of exercise this week so far.”
“Easy to do. Quit taking care of yourself, though, and the virus will hit you harder if you get it.”
“I know.”
“Prophylaxis or no?”
“No. I decided to hang on to some pills in case I get it. Let someone with kids at home be on the prophylactic dose.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Glenn worked the conversation back to the USAMRIID response to the Rotterdam experiments, listening for any hint that there was genetic manipulation of the flu virus happening here today, but he heard nothing that worried him. “Okay, I know I’m keeping you from important work. Nydia, anything to ask?”
“If you have any inkling of who might have done this, please call me,” she said, handing Blake a card. “I’ll keep it in the strictest confidence. Your name never will be mentioned or written down in my reports.”
Blake hesitated a second before taking the card. He nodded to her, gave Glenn a casual salute, and left.
“I suppose this is a better approach,” said Nydia, “but we’re still getting nowhere fast.”
“I’ve always wondered, is that better than getting nowhere slowly?”
“If that isn’t a Zen koan, it should be,” she said. “I need a break. I’m frustrated and need to clear my head so I can observe people better.”
“Sure. Want to go get coffee or...?”
“No. Can we walk outside, on the grounds? Is it allowed, I mean?”
“I’m sure we can. You want me with you or to be alone?”
“Come with me. Distract me from thinking in circles.”
They went for a rapid walk around the edges of parking lots. “Tell me about your family,” he said. “If that’s distracting enough.”
“I’m an only child. Mom is a psychologist, part-time clinical and teaching part-time as well. Dad is a structural engineer—or was. He invested wisely, retired young, and now he fishes and hunts all over the world.”
“Big animals? Rhinos and so on?”
“No. Just antelope and elk and that sort of thing, whatever in the deer family. He hunted kangaroos once but didn’t much like it. Fly fishing is his real passion.”
Glenn hoped the man was careful with eating local meat. “I bet he knows something about vaccines, then, at least on the receiving end. Must get dozens every year.”
“He’s never mentioned it, but I suppose so.”
“Your mom still works, though?”
“They’ll have to drag her out of her office at the end of her life. She’ll never stop.”
“Is that where you got your interest in psychology?”
“Partly. Partly because I knew a kid who killed his brother and parents. You’d have never guessed it in advance. And it was in trying to figure that out for myself that I really got interested. Why didn’t I see it? Why didn’t anyone? That’s when I got hooked on the psychology of the criminal.”
“Were you close? With the kid who killed his family?”
“No, thank God. I’m sure his closest friends back then still have moments where they lie in bed all these years later, unable to sleep, wondering why they didn’t see it coming.”
“Then—” Glenn stopped himself. She was trying to clear her mind, not talk about what they were doing. He wanted to ask, what was the point in asking people to pick out the culprit, if there was a culprit at all? Wouldn’t everyone say afterward, “Wow, never saw that coming?”
But she had anticipated the question. “The anthrax guy was well known to be mentally ill, remember.”
“Yeah. But it could go the other way, right? That no one would guess until it’s revealed, just like that murdering kid you knew.”
“It could.”
“I wish we could know for sure if it were intentional or not. Natural mutation is extremely doubtful, accidental seems most likely to me, but intentional release is possible. Obviously, or you wouldn’t be investigating it.”
“Would you do me a favor tonight?”
“Sure.”
“Try and talk me through why you guys know it’s not natural one more time. I know I’m not up on viruses, but I’d like to be.”
“How are you on genetics?”
“Just basic undergrad stuff, survey courses. Will that make it impossible for me to understand?”
“A little harder. But you’re a bright person. I think in a few hours of lecturing I can get you most of the way to understanding what you need to know.” He was curious. “Is it that you don’t trust our assessments? Chanchal and the lab people know what they’re doing. And I’ve been straight with you about what I know.”
“No, it’s not that at all. I just feel frustrated not understanding this as well as I might. I might be missing some clue because I don’t know what clues to look for.”
“I feel like that a lot. Even when I do know the sorts of clues to look for. The answer is always there. Half the time, you’re staring right at it. It’s the mosquitoes on the net over your bed when you fall asleep. It’s the bird call in the tree overhead. It’s the odd stew you’re offered for dinner and can’t refuse without offending some headman.”
“Sounds like dangerous work.”
“At least I don’t have to carry a gun.” He gestured to her side, where he’d seen a holster a couple times in the past. Not right now. She hadn’t tried to get her weapon into the army base.
“We need to finish up here. Ready?”
“If you are.”
It took three more days to work themselves through the lowliest of lab assistant, and then they drove halfway to their next location for interviews, north up the coast. Over take-out sub sandwiches, he presented his final class on virus mutation, RNA, and sequencing the genes of a virus.
The following evening, after another day of interviews that yielded nothing of interest, they met in his hotel room again. She had more good questions, as if she’d been thinking hard about what she’d learned.
Smart was sexy, and the longer he spent in her presence, the more his attraction to her made itself felt. As she studied the screen of illustrations of viral structure he’d pulled up on the FBI tablet, it was all he could do not to lean over and pull her in for a kiss.
If she realized he felt this, she didn’t indicate she knew—or shared—his urge.
“So,” she said, “it really all comes down to how far it jumped from its original form. The virus, I mean.”
“In a sense, that’s it. There’s how—and where—involved too, but genetic drift often is slow drift. A molecule here, a molecule there. If you put the RNA profiles side by side, to an experienced virologist, it looks wrong at a glance. Wrong. Unnatural.”
“Okay, I believe you.” She smiled. “Sorry, I mean I always believed you. If it’s something nature did on her own, then I’m running around bothering people for no good reason, making them hate the FBI. If we need their cooperation five years down the road, I don’t want to have blown their good will over nothing.”
“That makes sense,” he said. “Has nothing at all come up on the other work your department is doing? The email searches and keyword stuff?”
“Not so far. You don’t want to know how many emails are sent every day worldwide.”
“Actually, I would like to know.”
“Well over two hundred billion. Most of it’s spam, but....”
“But?”
“We need to look at spam too. If I wanted to send a coded message, I might well send out ten thousand copies of it to hide the one important one.”
“Label them ‘Nigerian Prince needs your help,’ eh?”
“Something very much like that, yes. If you’re gullible enough to open that, you’re likely to scan right over technical information, even if it isn’t in code, and probably it is.”
“So since we saw the flu in Trenton—or since we suspected it wasn’t a natural strain—then what, six trillion messages have been sent?”
“We’re looking six months back, remember, not just one.”
“Man. Okay, you win. That’s harder than figuring out which rodent is carrying some pathogen. There aren’t thirty-six trillion rodent species in any one place.”
“We have computers to do the heavy lifting. You actually have to trap animals one by one and test them, right?”
“Right. We often pay local hunters to live-trap and bring them in. Then we swab them, take blood, and so on.”
“You kill the animals?”
“Not usually. If the animal is sick, yes, kill, take samples, and burn the carcass. But we often drive a bunch of live animals back into the woods or jungle every morning and let them go again.”
“Isn’t that dangerous? For everyone involved?”
“Yes, particularly the locals who are handling the animals. As long as they aren’t finding the right one, they’re fine. But the guy who finds the right animal, one carrying the disease? Yeah, he’s probably not so lucky.”
“But you ask them to anyway.”
“We pay them well, and we buy them gloves and masks and traps, and we warn them not to bring the animals into their homes or let their children near them. But we can’t control how well they listen to all that.” He felt like squirming. “It’s a sore point, to be sure. But what we gain—knowing the host and vector—will save thousands or millions of people down the road. And we don’t downplay the risk to the hunters.”
“And if I offend a handful of scientists but find the bad guy, I feel much the same on a lesser scale, that I’ve put people in harm’s way, but if I got the suspect in the end, it was worth it.”
“You’re right.”
“I didn’t mean to accuse you of doing anything wrong, Glenn. I appreciate what you do for us. It sounds scary.”
“Huh, and you haven’t even heard the stories about the marauding bands of army lunatics, or the drunken pilots, or being called a witch who can curse people with the disease.”
“All that, eh?”
“Most of it is entirely routine. But there are moments when you think maybe you should have run a pharmacy in some nice peaceful college town instead.”
“That’s what they say about warfare. Long days of tedium broken by moments of sheer terror. Sounds like your job in those kinds of places.”
“I’ve felt a bit of that in my lifetime.”
“Did you feel afraid when this flu started? For yourself, I mean? And you realized how dangerous it was, that you’d been right there in the same room with sick people?”
“No. I guess I should have been, or might have been. But at that point, I was far too busy to be worried about anything but getting through my to-do list and figuring out the disease.”
“Anyway,” she said, standing up. “I have to catch up on mail and get some sleep. See you tomorrow? Maybe we can have lunch together.”
“I’d like that.”
When she was gone, her scent remained. Glenn did some push-ups and sit-ups, a few slow stretches, and then got undressed and climbed into bed.
A pounding at his door woke him in the middle of the night.
He was nude. “A second!” he said, scrambling to find his shorts. “Who is it?”
“Nydia.”
He opened the door, pulling a T-shirt down as he did. “What’s up?”
“We found him.”
