7:03 p.m. EST
Quinn was in his office on the Linz campus in Wilton, working late. He was waiting for the other buildings to empty, and in particular, Building C.
The first thing he did after logging in at his office was use the modified thumb drive containing the “mirror program” his friend at Anonymous had sent him the night before to find out who was monitoring his activity. He was not surprised to learn that Andrei Guryakin himself was his watcher. The mirror program worked beautifully, pinging back to Quinn the passwords and access codes Guryakin had stored. A quick scan of the numbers told Quinn what he wanted to know. Guryakin changed his passwords once a week, a standard security procedure, but he did so every Monday morning, usually between seven and eight. It meant that the passwords Quinn had accessed, sixteen in all, were still likely to work.
He spent the day answering e-mails, taking calls, and dealing with the pain in his head. It was getting worse, clearly. He wanted to “look busy,” in the likelihood that Guryakin was monitoring him. At the same time, Quinn monitored Guryakin’s activities, including his backlogs for the last month. By midmorning Quinn knew that Guryakin arrived every day before dawn, at five o’clock, and often worked until midnight.
He also learned that while Guryakin’s on-campus movements were unpredictable, one off-campus activity was quite predictable. According to his corporate credit card activity, Guryakin spent every Wednesday evening at a motel outside of Bridgeport, after which his card was billed $129 for the room and $500.00 for something called Western Connecticut Entertainment Services. It was the only day of the week that Guryakin left work at the normal time, according to the gate logs. Using his GPhone, Quinn sent a text to Detective Casey, asking him if he could find out what Western Connecticut Entertainment Services was. A few minutes later Casey got back to him.
ESCORT SERVICE. BUSTED FOR PROSTITUTION 3 TIMES IN LAST 12 MO. CAUTION ADVISED.
By four o’clock the pounding in Quinn’s head was more than he could bear. Perhaps it was because he’d been focusing on the computer screen all day. He had access to more powerful painkillers, but he was worried that anything strong enough to numb the pain would hinder his lucidity, so he took three ibuprofen—which was like trying to put out a volcano with a cup of tap water. He turned off the lights and lay down on the floor with his head under his desk, wrapping his scarf around his head to cover his eyes and block the light. At six thirty he felt better. He couldn’t be certain if he’d fallen asleep or blacked out.
He logged off the system and left his office. He drove his rental car out of the garage, using his flash drive to open the automated gate. If Guryakin was still monitoring him, it would appear that he’d gone home for the evening. He parked in a wooded area down the street, crossed back over the road, and cut across campus on foot, pulling his hat down low over his eyes and staying out of the light so no surveillance cameras could pick him up. Turning his coat collar up, keeping his head down, he entered Building C.
There was a uniformed guard at the security desk.
The guard frowned. “She doesn’t work here anymore.”
“You’re quite right. Dr. Guryakin wanted me to look at her files. He said if I had any trouble getting access that you should call him,” Quinn said with a pleasant smile.
The guard held up a finger, telling Quinn to wait, then made two phone calls, the first probably to Guryakin’s office and the second to his cell phone. As Quinn suspected, both calls went to voice mail, Guryakin no doubt unwilling to be interrupted in the middle of a transaction with Western Connecticut Entertainment Services.
The guard eyed Quinn suspiciously.
“I’ve got the pass code,” Quinn added, holding up his thumb drive.
“All yours,” the guard said.
On the elevator Quinn used his GPhone to dial the number for the campus’s central switchboard and asked to speak to reception in Building C. He waited for the guard to answer and then, knowing the guard was distracted, plugged his debugged flash drive into the USB port and used the ninth of Guryakin’s sixteen passcodes to take the elevator to the basement.
Just as the elevator reached the bottom, Quinn felt a sudden, sharp pain in the back of his skull that nearly dropped him to his knees. He pressed the button to keep the doors closed and waited for the attack to subside, praying that the pain wouldn’t cause him to black out or have a seizure.
For a moment he considered waiting for a better time. But there might not be a better time.
The pain abated, changing from agonizing to merely unbearable. He lifted his finger from the button, and the elevator doors opened.
He stepped out and into a small glassed-in, dimly lit lobby. There was a caution sign on the far wall.
WARNING
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS AREA.
BIOSAFETY LEVEL 4
He moved a chair to block the elevator doors to keep them from closing, then crossed quickly to an access control station near the lab entrance, where he encountered another USB port. He plugged his thumb drive in again, grateful that there wasn’t a retina scan or voice recognition lock to get past.
Once the doors opened, he removed his thumb drive and entered a locker room, where researchers and technicians could change into surgical scrubs. He moved forward through a double airlock and entered a work area with a half dozen desks and computer stations, all of them unoccupied. Nothing here was of interest to him. He crossed the room quickly to another door with another Access Restricted sign molded to it. When he used the thumb drive to enter, he found a second set of air locks, and beyond that, a room filled with pressure suits for entering the lab properly.
He donned a suit, attached the temporary oxygen bottle (noting he had fifteen minutes of breathable air), then stepped into the ultraviolet room. There he activated a bank of decontamination lights on a timer. If he had been concerned about bringing microbes into the lab, he would have raised his arms and rotated, but he saw no need to bother. Instead, he waited. The ultraviolet lights shut off after a minute, and he moved into a chemical decontamination room. Nozzles on the wall there showered him with bleach, then blasted him with jets of hot air to dry him off. He’d once heard a BSL4 technician call the process “going through the car wash.” The term seemed completely apropos.
Finally the doors opened to the BSL4 lab itself.
Quinn detached the portable oxygen bottle and attached his pressure suit to the lab’s air supply via a yellow oxygen tube coiling down from the ceiling. He had to stop again, his head throbbing anew. This time he needed to brace himself against a centrifuge to keep from falling. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, objects seemed to be swimming and floating. He squeezed his eyes and slowed his breathing. The throbbing lessened, and when he opened his eyes after a moment, he was able to focus. He had to hurry because he knew he was running out of time, in every sense of the word.
At the far end of the room Quinn saw a glass wall, and beyond it an octopus-like array of surgical arms similar to the surgical robot “DaVinci” that he’d briefly trained on in medical school. Beyond the robot he saw, through a glass door, a rack of test tubes inside an industrial freezer unit. The Doomsday Molecule. It had to be.
He went to the robot’s operation console and turned it on. A message window on the LCD screen asked him to insert his thumb drive. When he did, the screen flashed the words ACCESS DENIED.
He tried manually entering one of Guryakin’s access codes, then another. He tried again and again, until he’d entered all sixteen.
ACCESS DENIED
Quinn took a deep breath. He wondered, What would Tommy do if he were here? He’d probably just throw something through the window, Quinn thought, and then laughed as he realized that was actually a very good idea.
The heaviest thing he could find was a tank containing liquid bleach under pressure, to be used in emergencies when immediate localized decontamination was required. He lifted the tank over his shoulder, aimed the blunt end at the glass, and rammed the window as hard as he could.
A crack appeared in the Plexiglas, and simultaneously a piercing alarm sounded.
He had perhaps a minute. Maybe less. Company was on the way.
He rammed the glass again. The second blow cracked it even further, and the third blow brought it crashing down. Tommy would have escaped unscathed somehow, but Quinn wasn’t Tommy, and he wasn’t able to get out of the way of the glass fast enough to avoid a shard that ripped into his suit and pierced his thigh.
It hurt, but it didn’t matter.
He pulled the shard of glass from his leg, cast it aside, ignored the bleeding, and climbed through the broken window, then used the tank again to break the glass door to the freezer. He removed the rack of test tubes, emptied the contents of each onto a sterile tray, set the tray on the floor, and was about to hit it with the bleach when he stopped. He had to be sure that this was the Doomsday Molecule.
He took the tray back through the broken window. The alarms made his head throb. He found an electron microscope and quickly prepared a slide, ripping off his gloves because they made his movements clumsy and time-consuming.
The virus he saw most closely resembled the rotavirus, looking a bit like a dimpled golf ball with hairs, except that the hairs were moving. It was an ugly thing, and it was alive.
He took the sample and the tray, placed both in a sink, and then emptied the bleach tank into the sink. When he finished, he made another slide and inserted it into the microscope. This time, the golf ball had collapsed like a month-old jack-o’-lantern, and the filaments that had been motile before were still.
It was dead.
Quinn smiled. He’d killed it. The Doomsday Molecule was dead.
He stepped back and noticed that his right shoe had filled with some sort of liquid that made a squishing sound when he walked. The bleach, probably. He ripped the pressure suit off and saw that the bleach was red. Not bleach. Blood.
He took a moment to collect his thoughts, then sent Dani a text: VIRUS LOCATED AND DESTROYED.
He stumbled out of the BSL4 lab, back the way he came. Back through the car wash. He made it as far as the locker room before he had to stop, his head pounding.
He leaned against the wall to brace himself, and instead slid to the floor.
Well, this certainly isn’t good, Quinn thought. You appear to be dying. You’ve got to tell Dani and Tommy what you’ve learned. Think!
He found his phone and dialed 911. When the dispatcher answered, he gave her his name and location and said he’d accidentally stabbed himself in the leg with a piece of glass.
“Yes,” he repeated. “Linz Pharmazeutika campus in Wilton. Building C. Yes. It’s the first building on your right after the gate. I will do my best to meet you in the lobby.”
He struggled to his feet and kept going, realizing that now he was only seeing out of his left eye and had no depth perception. All he could do was keep going for as long as he had the power to move. The vision in his left eye was getting dimmer.
At the elevator, he kicked the chair aside and allowed the elevator doors to close, pressing a button marked G. When it reached the ground floor, he kept the elevator doors closed by pressing the button to override the automatic opening. He tried to think. He heard someone pounding on the doors. His head throbbed. More pounding. He saw the tip of a crowbar trying to pry the elevator doors apart, but he kept his thumb on the button. He waited as long as he could. Just keep moving. One foot in front of the other, for as long as you can.
He allowed the doors to open.
“Put your hands in the air!” someone shouted. It was the security guard, and he was aiming his weapon at a spot between Quinn’s eyes.
“What’s all the excitement?” Quinn asked. He realized three other security guards had their guns drawn and pointed at him. “I’m unarmed.”
“Shoot him,” a voice said. He recognized the voice as Guryakin’s.
Then someone shouted, “Wait!”
When Quinn looked up, he saw the lights of an ambulance flashing in front of the building and a pair of EMTs pounding on the door.
He turned to Guryakin.
“Checkmate,” he said.
Then the pain in his head increased, and the room started to spin and whirl.
Quinn’s legs gave way as everything went black, and he felt himself falling.