Biowar

37

Dean’s legs wobbled as he went up the steel steps at the back of the large white trailer. From the outside, it looked like a generic trailer, the sort that would be used in the States to transport any number of things, the kind that clogged the nation’s highways and byways. The only hint that it might be something more than a trailer was the second door behind the folded-out rear gate.

“Just turn the handle,” said Hercules, behind him on the steps.

Dean fumbled with the inset steel ring. The door opened with a slight hitch, and Dean felt a rush of crisp air hit him at the side of the face. The cold air helped, and his legs steadied as he walked inside.

Natural-hue fluorescents filled the interior with a soft light. Dean stepped across the threshold into a paneled room that could have been a waiting area for a dentist. A tall young man with a goatee stood at the door opposite the entrance. He had a smirk on his face and said something to Hercules that Dean didn’t understand.

“They’re going to quiz you,” said Rockman in Dean’s head. “They’re speaking Greek, but it’s not their first language. It may be for Hercules’ benefit, or it may be to cross you up since they know you don’t know it. We’re working on getting IDs here.”

Dean coughed as an acknowledgment. Hercules looked at him with some concern, then led him through the door into a room with computers, through that room, and into another set up like a small classroom or lecture center, with a white board at the front and six student desk-chairs crammed together. Hercules gestured at the front row and Dean sat down. A clean-shaven man in his late twenties came out from a door at the end of the room; he had a large metal detector in one hand and a device to search for bugs in the other.

Hercules started to object, speaking quickly in Greek.

“That’s been done twice,” interpreted the Art Room.

The man continued anyway, ending by directing Dean against the wall and patting him down. Finally satisfied, he directed Dean back to the chair.

“Tell me about your work with viruses,” he said.

“You don’t work with viruses, you work with bacteria,” said the Art Room specialist.

“What really are you looking for?” answered Dean.

“Perhaps you’d like something to drink,” said Hercules. “Coffee? Tea?”

“Water’d be good,” said Dean. “Boil it first, though.” The others laughed.

“Afraid of catching germs?” said the clean-shaven man.

“E. coli’s everywhere,” said Dean.

The man smirked. “Any strand in particular?”

Dean suddenly felt angry at being jerked around. He was tired, and the fever that had started earlier now burned through him like a barn fired by kerosene on a hot July afternoon. He couldn’t deal with this anymore.

“You want to talk about water, or you want the antidote? What the hell is it that you want? One guy asks me about E. coli, the other guy wants me to build him a DNA sequencer.”

“We want to make sure you’re not a spy,” said the clean-shaven man. “We understand Dr. Kegan has already been visited by the FBI.”

“Who says?”

“Don’t act for us.”

Dean held out his hands. “Do I look like the FBI? Would they send someone with a hundred-and-four fever?”

“Is your fever really that high?” asked the voice in Dean’s head.

The clean-shaven man glanced over at Goatee, but neither man said anything.

“Dr. Kegan assured us he would be here himself,” said the clean-shaven man. “And yet he is not. And he has not answered our E-mails.”

“I’m not sure about his plans,” said Dean. “He asked me to come to Europe in his place.”

“Then how do you know about our business?”

“I don’t,” said Dean. “I don’t know anything beyond what I’ve been told.”

The clean-shaven man frowned. The two men started talking. Even before Rockman told him that they were arguing whether it would be better just to get rid of him, Dean realized he was in trouble.

“Let’s take a guess,” said the Art Room scientist, whispering in his ear. “S. moniliformis. Rat-bite fever.”

Oh sure, you take a guess and I end up in the sewer, Dean thought.

“My fever’s not part of your problem,” Dean told the two men. “Unless there are a lot of rats running around.”

The two men looked at each other.

“Moniformis?” said the clean-shaven man.

Dean looked at him, trying to puzzle out what the man expected as the answer.

“The bacteria is S. moniliformis,” said the voice in Dean’s head. “He said it wrong. He’s trying to trip you up.”

Or it was an innocent mistake, thought Dean.

“Mon-il-i-form-is,” said Dean, sounding out the syllables. “You left out il. Ill.” He started to laugh. “Get it? Don’t worry. I have food poisoning, nothing else.”

“Moniliformis or spirillum?” said Goatee, in English.

“Different type, related disease,” said the voice. “Both types of rat-bite fever.”

“Why?” asked Dean, stalling.

“You can identify the type of disease by doing a blood culture,” said the Art Room expert.

“Tell me difference.”

“To me or the rat?”

“Moniliformis is a gram-negative rod; spirillum is a spiral,” said the voice.

“Spiril-lum,” said Dean, remembering part of the lecture he’d heard on the way over. “Spiral. See? You can tell the difference with a microscope. It jumps out at you, right away.”

“How?” asked Goatee.

“They’re no more than grad students, if that,” said Rockman. “They’re asking real simple questions, but they’re looking for answers they’ve memorized. We think Hercules is the real expert, but these guys are working for the muscle people. They don’t really understand what you’re saying. Hercules is the one you have to worry about.”

Dean had reached the same conclusion about the men’s level of knowledge, but he didn’t agree that he couldn’t worry about them. On the contrary.

“I don’t know how to tell you more clearly than that,” he said to Goatee.

Hercules returned with Dean’s water. Dean took it, nodding in gratitude.

“How can you tell the difference?” asked Goatee again.

“You can use white blood count numbers to diagnose the disease in a patient,” said the expert in Dean’s head, guessing what the man had been told was the answer.

But Dean played it beyond the crib sheet.

“Between bacteria that look like springs all wound up and others that look like pencils or little rods?” he said with exasperation. He looked at Hercules. “You know what I’m trying to say, right? They’re both gram-negative bacteria. One looks like — a string of beads, maybe. The other—” He spun his finger as if demonstrating.

“The relationship between S. moniliformis and streptococcus,” said Hercules. “That’s the sort of question you should be considering.”

“None,” said the expert.

Dean knew instinctively that wasn’t the right answer, even if the textbooks might declare it to be. He held Hercules’ gaze. “If I could answer that as precisely as Dr. Kegan,” said Dean, “then I’d be the genius and he’d be the assistant. But even to know that’s a valid question means you’re a step ahead.”

Hercules smiled and pulled over one of the chairs. “No, he’s far ahead.”

“Penicillin resistance,” said the voice in Dean’s head. “Oh, wow — now I see what they’ve done.”

“Let’s get on with it,” said the man with the goatee.

“Let’s,” said the clean-shaven man. “You will take us to the antidote now, Dr. Dean, or we will kill you.”

“I’m not a doctor,” said Dean as the man with the goatee grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him out of the seat.

Lia watched the Fokker feed on the handheld while the guards who had trailed Dean and Hercules to the trailer settled into their posts below the steps, then ran around the side of the building to the door at the front. It was locked, and though the lock itself was easily picked, she wasted time checking for an alarm system — none — before she could get inside. By then, Telach was already telling her to hide because Hercules and Dean were coming in at the far end.

Hiding was not quite an easy matter — the door nearest the entrance was locked and equipped with an alarm system, as was the second. As the outside door at the end of the hallway opened, Lia threw herself down to the floor. This time, she had her silencer-equipped Mac 11 ready.

“In here, first,” said Hercules in English at the far end of the hall. “Let’s take care of nature.”

Lia caught a glimpse of Dean as he followed the Greek into a room at the left at the far end of the hallway.

“Two more outside — they’re coming,” said Telach.

“The alarm system, have you compromised it yet or what?”

“It’s not hooked into a computer. Use your stomper.”

The “stomper” was a glorified alarm buster that could figure out the circuit configuration and disable it, usually — though not always — without detection. It was definitely only a second choice, but there was no alternative now. Lia pulled the cigarette box-sized device from the flap on her jacket and pulled off the end, exposing a magnetic coupler. She got up, slapped it on the door where the sensor was, and pushed in as the indicator bar flashed.

“In,” she said, sliding the door closed as gently as she could. Footsteps approached; neither of the two men spoke.

She swung up the machine pistol, ready to fire.

Neither man stopped. She heard the door at the front of the building open.

“Where’s Dean?” she hissed.

“He’s with Hercules at the other end of the building. There’s a bathroom there.”

“I’m getting him.”

“No, Lia,” said Rubens firmly.

“Yes. You don’t have an antidote. They’ll kill him.”

“We need to get as much information as we can,” said Rubens. “Mr. Dean is not our highest priority.”

“Bull.”

“We want you to look in the trailers and see if there are samples you can remove. We’ve located what looks as if it’s an incubator in one of them.”

“They’re coming,” said Rockman.

Rubens stood holding Chaucer’s headset to his ear. He looked down at the scientist, then covered the mouthpiece so his voice couldn’t be heard over the circuit.

“What is the antidote?”

“Well, assuming they’re talking about a cure, ordinarily it’s penicillin. Rat-bite fever responds pretty well. But they’ve found some way to make it resistant, either by breeding or, I think, recombinant DNA that combines elements from a different bacteria. That’s what the business of streptococcus was all about. Streptococcus is the same organism that causes, among other things, strep throat.”

“Kegan worked with that?”

“Twenty years ago or more. But the important thing is that we understand what he’s doing now — he designed the bacteria. That’s incredible. Even a designer virus—”

“So it could be amazingly contagious,” said Rubens, cutting him off.

“Or not. It depends on what the characteristics are. We don’t know what they might have done. We really need to examine the organism. The people who have already been infected — they’re gold mines.”

“Is it likely it’s in the lab?” asked Rubens.

“I don’t know,” said Chaucer. His face clouded suddenly. “What if there is no cure?” he added, the situation finally dawning on him. “What if this can’t be stopped?”

“Talk to Johnny Bib up in Kegan’s house,” said Rubens. He couldn’t encourage pessimism. “Tell him what you’ve found. Let him babble on until he comes up with something.”

Chaucer gave him a blank look.

“He’s quite crazy,” said Rubens. “But he’s a genius at finding connections. And there’s some sort of connection here between Thailand, these germs, and the odd books he’s looking at.”

“Okay,” said Chaucer, clearly not convinced.

“Stay where you are, Lia,” Rubens said, taking his hand from the mike. “Mr. Dean will be safe, I assure you.”

“Fuck yourself.”

Rubens sighed. “Such language from a professional.”

“Fuck yourself twice.”

Dean followed Hercules down the hallway. His headache had actually started to recede. The foreigner seemed genuinely concerned for his health, though Dean wondered from some of his reactions if he thought he’d caught whatever disease this was from Kegan.

Obviously Keys had been working on something very bad.

Evil. That was the word.

Keys? Evil? The guy who’d gone to the jungles of Asia to save people? When Dean went to kill people?

Actually, they’d both gone to save people. Keys was just more obvious about it.

“We’re with you, Charlie Dean,” said Rubens, the words seeming to echo in his feverish head. “Just relax and go along. You’re going to drive into Vienna. We’ll be with you the whole time; just follow our directions. We have a team working on preparing something for you right now. The more information you can get from them, the easier it will be.”

Jesus, thought Charlie — we’re not talking about a milk shake, for cryin’ out loud.

His headache flashed back with the force of a freight train.

Lia stood poised by the door as they approached. It would take three seconds, no more — push the door open, step out behind them, blast Hercules in the head.

And then?

Grab Charlie and run down the hall, back to the room where he had just been. Out the window — no, go right out the door and wax the two guards, who were still in the back by the trailer.

Then over the fence, take out Beard Boy and Clean Face.

She could look in the trailers at her leisure.

Probably not. But it would be easier than sneaking into them.

Of course, whoever was behind this would know their operation was compromised.

So what? Would they move up their timetable, unleash some superbug on the world?

Maybe Charlie already had it. Maybe that was what Rubens was worried about.

The handheld computer showed they were three yards away.

Lia’s hand was on the doorknob. She had been in the Army — technically, she was still in the Army, just on semi-permanent loan to Desk Three. She was programmed to follow orders.

Sensible, legal orders.

Which these weren’t. Sensible, that is. They were legal.

God, Charlie, I don’t want you to die. I love you, baby.

It was that thought — the realization that she did feel for him — that kept her from saving him now. She knew it was possible that her emotions might be interfering with her instincts. She hesitated for that reason, and in the space of that hesitation, her chance was gone.