Plum Island (22 page)

No one said anything, then Dr. Zollner said, “Simian Ebola, of course. Monkey Ebola.” He added, “I would have told you sooner,
but I thought you’d want it explained more fully by one of the Gordons’ colleagues.” He nodded to Dr. Chen.

Dr. Chen continued, “The Gordons were trying to genetically alter a simian Ebola virus so that it would not cause disease,
but would produce an immune response in the animal. There are many strains of the Ebola virus, and we’re not even sure which
strains can cross the species barrier—”

“You mean,” Max asked, “infect people?”

“Yes, infect humans. But this is an important first step toward a human Ebola vaccine.”

Dr. Zollner said, “Most of our work here has traditionally been done with what you’d call farm animals—food- and leather-producing
animals. However, over the years, certain government agencies have underwritten other types of research.”

I asked, “Such as the military doing biological warfare research?”

Dr. Zollner didn’t answer directly, but said, “This island is a unique environment, isolated, but close to major transportation
and communication centers, and also close to the best universities in the nation, and close to a highly educated pool of scientists.
In addition, this facility is technically advanced. So, aside from the military, we work with other agencies, here and abroad,
whenever something very unusual or potentially … dangerous to humans comes along. Such as Ebola.”

“In other words,” I said, “you sort of rent rooms here?”

“It’s a big facility,” he replied.

“Did the Gordons work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture?” I asked.

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Where did their paychecks come from?”

“All paychecks are from the USDA.”

“But not every scientist who gets a USDA paycheck is a USDA employee. Correct?”

“I don’t intend to get into a semantic duel with you, Mr. Corey.” He looked at Dr. Chen. “Please continue.”

She said, “There are so many separate tasks and steps to this sort of work that no one can see the whole picture except the
project supervisor. That was Tom. Judy was the assistant project supervisor. In addition, they were both excellent researchers
themselves. In retrospect, I can see what they were doing, which was to ask for tests on procedures that were something like
a red herring, and sometimes they’d tell one of us on the project that they’d reached a dead end. They closely monitored the
actual clinical tests on the monkeys, and the animal handlers were not well informed. Tom and Judy were the only ones who
were privy to all the information.”

She thought a moment, then said, “I don’t believe they started out to deceive … I think when it hit them how close they were
to a workable vaccine for simian Ebola, they saw the possibilities of transferring the technology to a private laboratory
where the next logical step was a human vaccine. Maybe they believed that this was the best thing in the interests of humanity.
Maybe they thought they could develop this vaccine more quickly and effectively outside this place, which is—like most government
agencies—prone to red tape and slowness.”

Max said, “Let’s stick to the theory of profit motive, Dr. Chen. The interests of humanity isn’t cutting it for me.”

She shrugged.

Beth motioned toward the microscope. “Can I take a look?”

Dr. Chen said, “Those are dead Ebola, of course. Live Ebola is only in Zone Five. But I can show you live Ebola viruses safely
on videotape.” She turned to a TV monitor and hit the VCR. The screen brightened to show four almost transparent crystals,
tinted a sort of pink color, three-dimensional, reminding me of a prism. If they were alive, they were playing possum.

Dr. Chen said, “I’m mapping the molecular structure, as I said, so that the genetic engineers can cut and splice this or that
piece, then the altered virus is propagated and injected into a monkey. The monkey has one of three responses—it contracts
Ebola and dies, it doesn’t contract Ebola but doesn’t produce Ebola antibodies, or it doesn’t contract Ebola and
does
produce Ebola antibodies. That is the response we’re looking for. That means we have a vaccine. But not necessarily a safe
or effective vaccine. The monkey may develop Ebola later, or more commonly, when we later inject the monkey with natural Ebola
virus, the antibodies aren’t effective in overcoming the disease. The immune response is too weak. Or the immune response
does not protect against all strains. It’s very frustrating work. Viruses are so simple, molecularly and genetically, but
they are more challenging than bacteria in that they are easy to mutate, hard to understand, and hard to kill. In fact, the
question is—are those crystals really alive as we understand life? Look at them. They look like ice chips.”

Indeed, we were all staring at the crystals on the screen. They looked like something that dropped off a chandelier. It was
hard to believe that those guys and their cousins and brothers had caused so much human misery and death, not to mention animal
deaths. There was something scary about an organism that looked dead but came to life when it invaded living cells, and reproduced
so fast it could kill a healthy two-hundred-pound man in forty-eight hours. What was God thinking?

Dr. Chen turned off the TV monitor.

Beth asked Dr. Chen about the Gordons’ behavior yesterday morning, and Dr. Chen said that the Gordons seemed somewhat tense.
Judy complained of a migraine, and they decided to go home. This did not surprise any of us.

I asked Dr. Chen directly, “Do you think they took anything out of here yesterday?”

She thought a moment, then replied, “I don’t know. How can I say?”

Beth asked, “How difficult is it to smuggle something out of here? How would
you
do it?”

“Well … I could take any test tube here, or even in another lab, go into the ladies’ room and insert the tube or vial in one
of two orifices. No one would miss a single vial, especially if it hadn’t been logged and identified. Then I go into the shower
room, throw my lab clothes into a hamper, shower, and go to my locker. At this point I could remove the vial from wherever
and put it in my handbag. I get dressed, leave through the lobby, get on the bus to the ferry, and go home. No one watches
you shower. There are no cameras. You’ll see when you leave here yourself.”

I asked, “And larger items. Items too big to … well, too big.”

“Whatever will fit under your lab clothes can make it as far as the shower room. It is there where you have to be clever.
For instance, if I took a sequencing gel into the shower room, I could hide it in my towel.”

Beth said, “You could also hide it in the hamper with your lab clothes.”

“No, you can never go back. The clothes are contaminated. In fact, after you use the towel, that must also go into a separate
hamper. It is here that anyone who is looking would see if you were carrying anything. But if you shower out at an odd time,
the chances are you will be alone.”

I tried to picture this scene, of Judy or Tom smuggling God knew what out of this building yesterday afternoon when no one
else was in the shower room. I asked Dr. Chen, “If it’s assumed that everything in here has some degree of contamination,
why would you want to put a vial of something in your whatever?”

She replied, “You practice some basic decon first, of course. You wash your hands with the special soap in the rest rooms,
you may use a condom to wrap a vial or test tube, or use sterile gloves or sheet latex for larger items. You have to be careful,
but not paranoid.”

Dr. Chen continued, “As for computer information, it can and is electronically transferred from biocontainment to the offices
in the administration area. So it’s not necessary to steal disks or tapes.” She added, “As for handwritten and typewritten
notes, graphs, charts, and so forth, it’s standard procedure to fax all of that out of here and into your own office. There
are fax machines all around, as you can see, and each office outside of biocontainment has an individual fax. That’s the only
way you can get notes out of here. Years ago, you had to use special paper, rinse it in a decontaminating fluid, leave it
to dry, then retrieve it the next day. Now, with the fax, your notes are waiting for you when you return to the office.”

Amazing, I thought. I’ll bet the folks who invented the fax never thought of that. I can picture the TV commercial—“Laboratory
notes covered with germs? Fax them to your office.
You
have to shower, but they don’t.” Or something like that.

Beth looked at Dr. Chen and asked her directly, “Do you think the Gordons took anything out of here that was dangerous to
living things?”

“Oh, no. No, no. Whatever they took—if they took anything—wasn’t pathogenic. Whatever it was, it was therapeutic, helpful,
antidotal, however we want to term it. It was something good. I would bet my life on that.”

Beth said, “We’re all betting our lives on that.”

We left Dr. Chen and the X-ray room and continued our tour.

As we walked, Dr. Zollner commented, “So, as I said before, and as Dr. Chen seems to agree, if the Gordons stole anything,
it was a genetically altered viral vaccine. Most probably a vaccine for Ebola since that was the main thrust of their work.”

Everyone seemed to agree with that. My own thinking was that Dr. Chen had been a little too pat and perfect, and that she
didn’t know the Gordons as well as she or Zollner said she did.

Dr. Zollner gave a commentary as we strolled the labyrinthine corridors. He said, “Among the viral diseases we study are malignant
catarrh, Congo Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and bluetongue. We also study a variety of pneumonias, rickettsial diseases, such
as heartwater, a wide range of bacterial diseases, and also parasitic diseases.”

“Doc, I got a C in biology and that’s because I cheated. You lost me on the rickshaw disease. But let me ask you this—you
have to produce a lot of this stuff in order to study it. Correct?”

“Yes, but I can assure you we don’t have the capacity to produce enough of any organism in the quantities needed for warfare,
if that’s what you’re getting at.”

I said, “I’m getting at random acts of terrorism. Do you produce enough germs for that?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“That word again, Doc.”

“Well, yes, enough for a terrorist act.”

“Is it true,” I inquired, “that a coffee can full of anthrax, spritzed into the air around Manhattan Island, could kill two
hundred thousand people?”

He thought a moment, then replied, “That could be. Who knows? It depends on the wind. Is it summertime? Is it lunchtime?”

“It’s like tomorrow evening rush hour.”

“All right …two hundred thousand. Three hundred thousand. A million. It doesn’t matter because no one knows and no one has
a coffee can full of anthrax. Of that, I can assure you. The inventory was quite specific on that.”

“That’s good. But not as specific on other things?”

“As I told you, if anything is missing, it is an antiviral vaccine. That is what the Gordons were working on. You’ll see.
Tomorrow you will all wake up alive. And the day after, and the day after that. But six or seven months from now, some pharmaceutical
company, or some foreign government, will announce an Ebola vaccine, and the World Health Organization will purchase two hundred
million doses to start with, and when you discover who is getting the richest from this vaccine, you will discover your murderer.”

No one replied for a few seconds, then Max said, “You’re hired, Doctor.”

Everyone smiled and chuckled. In fact, we all wanted to believe, we
did
believe, and we were so relieved that we were walking on air, giddy over the good news, thrilled that we weren’t going to
wake up with terminal bluetongue or something, and in truth no one was focusing as closely on the case now as we had been
earlier. Except me.

Anyway, Zollner continued showing us all sorts of rooms and talked about diagnoses and reagent production, monoclonal antibody
research, genetic engineering, tick-borne viruses, vaccine production, and so forth. It was mind-boggling.

It takes an odd type to go into this sort of work, I thought, and the Gordons, whom I considered normal people, must have
been considered by their peers as somewhat flamboyant by comparison—which was how Zollner described them. I mentioned this
to Zollner and he replied, “Yes, my scientists here are rather introverted … like most scientists. Do you know the difference
between an introverted biologist and an extroverted biologist?”

“No.”

“An extroverted biologist looks at
your
shoes when he talks to you.” Zollner laughed heartily at this one, and even I chuckled, though I don’t like it when people
upstage me. But it
was
his lab.

Anyway, we saw the various places where the Gordons’ project had been worked on, and we also saw the Gordons’ own lab.

Inside the Gordons’ small lab, Dr. Zollner said, “As project directors, the Gordons mostly supervised, but they did some work
here on their own.”

Beth said, “No one else worked in this lab?”

“Well, there were assistants. But this laboratory was the private domain of the Doctors Gordon. You can be sure I spent an
hour in here this morning looking for something that was not right, but they wouldn’t leave anything incriminating around.”

I nodded. In fact, there may have been incriminating evidence at any previous time, but if yesterday was to be the culmination
of the Gordons’ secret work and final theft, then they would have sanitized the place yesterday morning or the day before.
But that supposed that I believed all of this stuff about an Ebola vaccine, and I wasn’t sure I did.

Beth said to Dr. Zollner, “You are
not
supposed to enter the workplace of homicide victims and look around, remove things, or touch anything.”

Zollner shrugged, as well he should under these circumstances. He said, “So, how was I supposed to know that? Do you know
my
job?”