The Cobra Event

Monkey Room

The weather in Atlanta had turned glorious, blue, sunny, and hot. The late April air was filled with a drifting scent of loblolly pines. Northeast of the city center, Clifton Road winds through hilly wooded neighborhoods and goes past the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control, a warren of buildings made of brick and concrete. Some of the C.D.C. buildings are new, but many are old and deteriorating and stained with age, offering visible evidence of years of neglect by Congress and the White House.

Building 6 is a stained brick monolith, almost without windows, that sits in the middle of the C.D.C. complex. It was once an animal-holding facility that stored populations of mice, rabbits, and monkeys used for medical research. The C.D.C. grew and became so short of space that eventually the animals were moved elsewhere, and the animal rooms were converted to offices. They are the least desirable offices at the C.D.C., and therefore they are occupied by the youngest people. Many of these people are in the C.D.C.'s Epidemic Intelligence Service — the E.I.S., everyone calls it. About seventy officers enroll in the E.I.S. every year. During a two-year fellowship, they investigate outbreaks of diseases all over the United States and, indeed, the world. The Epidemic Intelligence Service is a training program for people who want to go into public health as a career.

On the third floor of Building 6, inside a windowless former monkey room, Alice Austen, M.D., a twenty-nine-year-old E.I.S. officer, was on phone duty. She was taking calls, listening to people talk about their diseases.

'I got something bad,' a man was saying to her. He was calling from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 'And I know where I got it, too. From a pizza.'

'What makes you think that?' she said.

'It was a ham and onion. My girlfriend got the disease, too.'

'What do you think you have?' she asked.

'I don't want to, like, get too specific. Let's just say I got a V.D.'

'Have you seen a doctor?' she asked.

'I'm installing Sheetrock for this guy, and he don't give us no medical,' the man said. 'That's why I have to call the C.D.C.' The man went on to describe how he had been eating a pizza at a local restaurant with his girlfriend when he'd found himself chewing on a piece of plastic. He'd pulled it out of his mouth and discovered it was a bandage strip stained with yellow pus. He was convinced that it had given both him and his girlfriend certain symptoms that he was reluctant to describe.

'You could not get a sexually transmitted disease from eating a bandage,' Austen said. 'You should go to an emergency room and get an exam, and your girlfriend, too. If it turns out you have gonorrhea, we recommend treatment with Cipro.'

The man wanted to talk, and Austen couldn't get him off the phone. She was a slender woman of medium height, with wavy auburn hair, a fine-boned face, and a pointed chin. She was a medical pathologist by training — her specialty was death. Her eyes were gray-blue and thoughtful, and seemed to absorb the light, considering the world in a careful way. Her hands were slender but very strong. She used her hands to probe among organs, bone, and skin. She wore no rings on her fingers, and her fingernails were cut short, so as not to break surgical gloves. It was Wednesday, uniform day at the C.D.C., and Austen was wearing a Public Health Service uniform — pants and a short-sleeved khaki shirt, with the gold oak leaf of a lieutenant commander on the right shoulder. It looked like a Navy uniform. The U.S. Public Health Service is an unarmed branch of the U.S. military.

One would not describe Alice Austen as a lonely person, or a person incapable of love, for she had many friends, and she had had her lovers, including a man who had wanted to marry her, but there always seemed to be a distance between her and the world. Like many pathologists, she was a loner by temperament, independent minded, curious about how things worked. She was the daughter of a retired chief of police in the town of Ashland, New Hampshire.

'We got a lawyer. We're gonna sue over that pizza,' the man was saying.

'The bandage would have been sterilized by heat in the oven. It couldn't hurt you,' Austen explained.

'Yeah, but what if the pus didn't get cooked?'

'Those ovens are pretty hot. I think the pus was probably cooked,' she answered.

An older man walked into Austen's office. He raised an eyebrow. 'Since when has the C.D.C. been advising people on how to cook pus?'

She pushed the mute button. 'Be done in a minute.'

'A minute? The C.D.C. advises people to cook pus for a minimum of five minutes. Tell the guy to use a meat thermometer. The pus is done when it says "pork."'

Austen smiled.

The man sat down at an empty desk. He was holding a file folder, slapping it against his hand restlessly. His name was Walter Mellis. He was a public-health doctor in his late fifties, and he had worked at the C.D.C. for most of his career.

Meanwhile, on the phone: 'I got the pizza in my freezer. You folks want to check it out in your hot zone?'

When she hung up she said, 'Wow.'

'You burned up a lot of time with that guy,' Mellis remarked.

Austen did not know Walter Mellis very well, but she knew that something was up. He wanted something from her.

'Anyway,' he went on. 'I'm looking for someone to observe at an autopsy. You're the only E.I.S. officer trained in pathology.'

'I'm pretty busy writing up my last outbreak,' she said.

'I just had a call from Lex Nathanson, the medical examiner of New York,' he went on, seeming to ignore her. 'They've had two cases of something pretty unusual. He asked me if we had anyone to send up there to help him out. Quietly.'

'Why don't they use the city health department?'

'I don't know why.' He looked a little annoyed. 'I know Lex from way back, so he called me.'

Walter Mellis had a pot belly, gray frizzy hair, and a mustache. He refused to wear his Public Health Service uniform on Wednesdays, and today he had on a shirt the color of mud, with frayed cuffs. She found herself imagining Mellis as a younger man, grooving at a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert, believing the world was about to change. Now he was getting close to retirement. He had become an aging federal official, stuck at the same government pay scale forever, while the world had changed far more than his generation had expected.

'This could be something good,' he said. 'You never know. It could be a John Snow case.'

Dr John Snow was one of the first great disease detectives, a founder of the science of modern epidemiology. He was a physician in London in 1853 when there was an outbreak of cholera. Snow found a cluster of cases. He began interviewing the victims and their families, carefully tracing their activities during the days just before they became sick. He discovered that the sick people had been using the same public water pump on Broad Street. The paths of the victims crossed at the water pump. Something in the water from that pump was causing the disease. Snow did not know what substance in the water was making people sick, because the microorganism that causes cholera had not been discovered, but he removed the handle from the water pump. It stopped the outbreak. He did not need to know what was in the water. This is the classic story of epidemiology.

The C.D.C. has a coveted award called the John Snow Award. It is presented each year to the E.I.S. officer who is judged to have done the best case investigation. Walter Mellis was suggesting to Alice Austen that there was a possibility that the New York case could lead to a John Snow Award.

She did not buy it. 'Is this case part of your project?' she asked. Mellis had some kind of a mysterious project going, a project that no one at the C.D.C. wanted to be involved with, or so she'd heard.

'My project? The Stealth Virus Project? Yes — it is. My idea is that there may be unknown viruses out there. They don't cause obvious outbreaks. They sneak around. They're not very contagious, so they just hit one person here and one person there. They're Jack the Ripper viruses, serial killers — stealth viruses. Lex Nathanson knows a little bit about the Stealth Virus Project, and I've asked him to keep an eye out for anything like this.'

She noticed that he was wearing a beeper on his belt. She wondered why he needed a beeper.

'Are you telling me everything?'

Mellis put his hand up. He sighed. He was accustomed to people ducking his project. It didn't seem to be going anywhere. 'Look,' he said, 'if you don't want to do this, I'll call Lex and tell him we just don't have anyone available right now. He'll understand. It's no big deal.'

'No. I'll go.'

Mellis looked a little surprised. He opened up his file folder and pulled out a Delta Air Lines ticket and a government expense sheet. He put them on her desk. 'I appreciate this,' he said.

Vision

Alice Austen drove her Volkswagen Jetta back to her rented condominium in Decatur, a few miles from the C.D.C. She changed out of her uniform and put on a blue silk-and-wool skirt and a silk blouse.

She put some extra clothing into a travel bag, along with a book to read, although she knew she'd never read it. A big chunk of space in the bag was taken up by her leather work boots, which were encased in a white plastic garbage bag tied with a twist tie. The boots were Mighty-Tuff boots, the kind construction workers wear, with steel toes and nonskid waffle soles. They were her autopsy boots. She put her laptop computer, a cellular telephone, and a green federal-issue cloth-covered notebook — an epi notebook, they called it — into her briefcase. The green epi notebook was for keeping all her data and records of the investigation. She packed a small digital electronic camera. It took color photographs and stored them in memory cards. The memory cards could be plugged into her laptop computer, and she could review the images on the screen.

She placed a leather folder containing her autopsy knife and sharpening tools on top of the things in her travel bag. The knife is a pathologist's main piece of professional equipment. She also threw in a Boy Scout knife, fork, and spoon set, for eating meals in a rented room. She would not be staying in a hotel. The C.D.C. travel allowance was ninety dollars a day for accommodations in New York City. You can't get much in the way of a hotel room in New York for ninety dollars, so she would be staying in a bed-and-breakfast.

Her flight took off in clear weather. The moon was down, and the stars were bright in the dark sky. Austen watched North America move slowly below the aircraft, a cobweb of lights imposed on blackness. Cities approached and fell behind — Charlotte, Richmond, then Washington, D.C. The Mall was visible from thirty thousand feet, a luminous rectangle against the Potomac River. The federal government looked small and helpless from up here, like something you could step on with your foot.

They went into a holding pattern around Newark Airport, and when they turned and prepared to land, coming in from the north, they passed close to Manhattan. Looking out her window, Austen unexpectedly saw the organism called New York City. The beauty of it almost took her breath away. The core of the city seemed to emerge from the black waters that surrounded it in a lacework of light and structure, like a coral reef that glowed. She saw the buildings of midtown Manhattan shimmering in the Hudson River, so remote and strange as to seem almost imaginary. The Empire State Building was a spike washed with floodlights. Beyond Manhattan lay expanses of Brooklyn and Queens. To the south she recognized the luminous bulge of Staten Island, and the lights of the Verrazano Bridge hanging in a chain. Closer to the airplane, the waters of Upper New York Bay spread out like an inky rug, devoid of light, except for the sparkling hulls of ships at anchor, their bows pointed to sea with an incoming tide.

Austen thought of a city as a colony of cells. The cells were people. Individually the cells lived for a while and were programmed to die, but they replaced themselves with their progeny, and the organism continued its existence. The organism grew, changed, and reacted, adapting to the biological conditions of life on the planet. Austen's patient, for the moment, was the city of New York. A couple of cells inside the patient had winked out in a mysterious way. This might be a sign of illness in the patient, or it might be nothing.

The bed-and-breakfast apartment where the C.D.C. had rented a room for Alice Austen was in Kips Bay, on East Thirty-third Street, between Second and First avenues. Kips Bay is a seventies-era development of blocklike concrete buildings surrounded by gardens, nestled up against a huge complex of hospitals. Her hostess was a German widow named Gerda Heilig, who rented out a room looking toward the New York University Medical Center and the East River. It was a pleasant room with a desk and an antique carved German bed that squeaked when Austen sat on it. The room was full of books in German. There was no telephone.

Austen placed her knife pack on the desk and opened it. Inside the leather folder were two short knives and a long knife. They were her autopsy blades. The short knives were like fish-fillet knives. The long one was a prosector's knife. It had a straight, heavy, carbon-steel blade. The knife was two and a half feet long. It was almost like a short sword. It had a comfortable handle made of ash wood, the same wood used in axe handles. She kept a diamond sharpening stone in her prosection pack and a round edging steel. In case they asked her to participate in the autopsy, she wanted to be ready with her own knife. She wet the stone with water under the bathroom faucet, and ground her knife on it, testing its edge on her thumbnail. When you touch the edge of a prosector's knife to your thumbnail, you want it to stick, to grab the nail, the way a razor grabs. if the edge slides or bounces over your thumbnail, it is not sharp.

The long knife made a whisking sound as it passed over the diamond block. Then she refined its edge on the steel rod — zing, zing, zing.

West of Babylon

April in Iraq is normally dry and blue, but a cool front had moved down from the north, bringing an overcast sky. The United Nations Special Commission Biological Weapons Inspection Team Number 247 — UNSCOM 247, it was called — was traveling along a narrow paved highway at the edge of the desert to the west of the Euphrates River, with its headlights on, moving slowly. The convoy consisted of a dozen four-wheel-drive vehicles. They were painted white, and they displayed large black letters, 'U.N.,' stenciled on their doors. The vehicles were plastered with gluelike dust.

The convoy arrived at a crossroads and slowed to a crawl. All the vehicles' turn signals went on at the same time, blinking to the right. Vehicle by vehicle, the UNSCOM 247 convoy turned to the northeast. Its destination was the Habbaniyah Air Base, near the Euphrates River, where a United Nations transport aircraft waited to fly the inspectors out of the country to Bahrain. There they would split up and go their separate ways.

A white Nissan Pathfinder 4 × 4 in the middle of the convoy slowed when it came to the crossroads. Its right turn signal came on, like the others. Then, suddenly, with a roar and a whipping whirl of tires, the Nissan broke out of line. It swung left onto a ribbon of cracked tar heading west, and departed at high speed into the desert.

A hard voice broke over the radio: 'Snap inspection!'

It was the voice of Commander Mark Littleberry, M.D., U.S. Navy (Retired). Littleberry was in his sixties. He was a tough-looking man ('the indestructible Littleberry,' his colleagues called him), but his age showed in the gold-rimmed half-glasses perched on his nose and in the silver at his temples. Littleberry worked as a paid consultant to various U.S. government agencies, most especially to the Navy. He had top security clearances. Through his Navy connections, he had been appointed an UNSCOM biological-weapons inspector. Now he was sitting in the passenger seat of the breakaway Nissan, with a military map of Iraq draped across his knees. He was holding a small electronic screen in his hands.

The Iraqi minders had been traveling behind the UNSCOM convoy in a rattletrap column of vehicles — beatup Toyota pickup trucks, smoking dysfunctional Renaults, hubcapless Chevrolets, and a black Mercedes-Benz sedan with tinted windows and shiny mag wheels. Most of these vehicles had been seized in Kuwait by Iraq during the Gulf War, and they had seen constant use by the Iraqi government in the years afterward. Some of the cars had been cannibalized from junk parts, and they had body panels of differing colors.

When the Nissan broke away and Mark Littleberry's words 'snap inspection' crackled over the radio, it created confusion among the Iraqi minders. Their vehicles came to a grinding halt, and they started yelling into hand-held radios. They were reporting the breakaway to their superiors at the National Monitoring Center in Baghdad, which is the Iraqi intelligence office that supplies minders to U.N. weapons-inspection teams. There was a pause. The minders were waiting for orders, since no minder who valued his life would do anything without orders.

A snap inspection is a surprise weapons inspection. Inspectors suddenly change their itinerary and go somewhere without giving advance notice. But this time there was a problem. Commander Mark Littleberry did not have permission from the chief inspector, a French biologist named Pascal Arriet, to do a snap inspection. This was a rogue snap.

Suddenly four Iraqi vehicles detached from the column and took off after the Nissan, which had picked up considerable speed. Its engine howled. The Nissan hit sand drifts that covered the road in places, flinging out boiling yellow-brown puffs of dust. It seemed to leap out through the dust with its headlights glowing, surfing waves in the road, nearly becoming airborne.

'Damn it, Hopkins! We're going to roll overl' Mark Littleberry said to the man driving, Supervisory Special Agent William Hopkins, Jr, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Will Hopkins was a rangy man in his early thirties. He had brown hair, a square face, and a seven-day beard. He wore baggy khaki trousers and a formerly white shirt (now streaked with dust), and Teva sandals with green socks. There was a plastic pocket protector in his shirt pocket. It was jammed with pens and pencils and bits of junk. The belt that held up his trousers was a length of nylon webbing. Slung on the webbing was a Leatherman MultiTool, a combination pliers and screwdriver and knife and various other tools. The Leatherman on his belt identified Hopkins as a 'tech agent' — an F.B.I. agent who deals with gadgets. Anything secret, especially if it's high-tech, is guaranteed to break down, and a tech agent never goes anywhere without a Leatherman tool.

Hopkins had earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the California Institute of Technology, where he had become adept with the machines and gadgets that are used in biology. He was a Caltech gadgeteer. His current job title was Manager of Scientific Operations — Biology, Hazardous Materials Response Unit, Quantico.

As the vehicle lurched and bounced, Littleberry watched the screen mapper in his hands, and he compared it to the military map on his knees. The mapper was a glowing panel that showed a changing outline of the terrain. It was linked to some Global Positioning Satellites overhead. The current location of the car appeared on the screen.

The Nissan hit a dip in the road. Two black metal Halliburton suitcases sitting on the back seat went bouncing into the air.

'Watch it!' Littleberry yelled.

'Are you sure this is the right road?'

'I'm sure.'

Hopkins mushed his foot on the accelerator and the Nissan moaned, the tires whomping over cracks in the road. The engine was running hot and hard, just under the redline. He looked in the rearview mirror. Nothing. He could almost hear the satellite calls to New York and Washington, Paris, Baghdad, Moscow: two UNSCOM inspectors had just gone out of control in Iraq.

A long line of vehicles stretched behind the Nissan. First came the four-Iraqi chase vehicles, which seemed to be losing hubcaps and bits of metal every time they hit a bump. Next came the entire UNSCOM 247 convoy, lumbering at a more dignified pace. Pascal Arriet had given orders for the rest of the convoy to follow Littleberry and Hopkins, and now he was speaking in French and English to various relay contacts on his shortwave radio, telling them there was a problem. As the leader of the convoy, Pascal Arriet had the same authority as the captain of a ship. He was supposed to be obeyed without question. Behind the U.N. convoy came yet more Iraqi vehicles. In all, there must have been at least twenty vehicles following them.

In the Nissan, a hand-held shortwave radio beeped; it was sliding around on the dashboard.

Hopkins picked it up. 'Hello?'

A crackly voice came out. 'This is Arriet, your commander! Turn back! What are you doing?' He was speaking on a secure radio channel. The Iraqis couldn't hear him.

'We're taking a shortcut to Habbaniyah Air Base,' Hopkins said.

'I command you to turn back. You have not permission to leave the group.'

'We're not leaving. It's a temporary detachment,' Hopkins said.

'Nonsense! Turn back!' Arriet said.

'Tell him we're lost,' Littleberry said, staring at the electronic mapping screen.

'We got lost,' Hopkins said to the radio.

'Turn back!' Pascal Arriet shouted.

'It's impossible,' Hopkins said.

'Turn back!'

Driving with one hand, Hopkins popped a panel from the shortwave radio with his thumb. He fiddled with some wires. His fingers moved rapidly, with precision. Abruptly some grunting shrieks came out of the radio.

'You're breaking up,' Hopkins said to the radio. 'We've got trouble with the ionosphere.'

'L'ionosphère? Crétin! Idiot!'

Hopkins placed the radio on the dashboard, wires dangling out of it. It continued to squawk and squeal. He reached into the radio with his fingertips and yanked out a part the size of a sunflower seed. It was a resistor. The squeals were transformed into a weird rubbery sound. The car swayed as he worked on the radio.

'I hope you can fix that,' Littleberry said.

The French voice was sounding more and more hysterical on the shortwave radio.

'Our Iraqi friends can't hear our radios,' Littleberry said to Hopkins, 'so they don't know Pascal is ordering us to turn back. If I know Pascal, he won't dare tell the Iraqis we've gone AWOL. He'll follow us, because he's under orders to keep the group together at all costs. So the Iraqis are gonna think this is an authorized inspection, since Arriet is following behind us. They may let us in.'

'Are we going to wear any safety gear?'

Littleberry turned around and reached into the back seat, next to the black suitcases, and pulled out a full-face biohazard mask, equipped with purple HEPA filters. He gave it to Hopkins to clip on his belt.

'We're not interested in the whole building,' Littleberry went on. 'There is a door I want to have a peek at. The folks at the National Security Agency have some information on that door.'

'You're sure you know how to get to the door?'

Littleberry pushed a button and held up the screen mapper. It showed a detailed diagram of a building. 'We pretend to stumble into the door by accident. Don't follow me in there, Will. Give me a minute and I'll come out.'

'Then what?'

'Big apology. We rejoin Pascal. He will be furious, but he'll have to pretend the thing was authorized. We'll be in Bahrain by tonight.'

Hopkins didn't ask Littleberry what they were looking for, but he knew it was not a chemical weapon. He assumed it was bacteria or a virus. A bacteriological weapon is grown in a fermenter tank, and it gives off a yeasty smell, somewhat like beer, or sometimes a meaty smell, like a meat broth. Virus weapons are not grown in fermenter tanks, because a virus doesn't cause fermentation when it grows. A virus converts a population of living cells into more virus. What happens is called amplification of the virus. The machine that amplifies a virus is called a bioreactor. Nothing ferments inside the tank, and no gases are let off, so there is no odor.

A bioreactor is a rather small tank with a sometimes complicated interior. The tank contains a warm liquid bath that is saturated with living cells. The cells are infected with a virus that is replicating. The cells leak virus particles, and the bioreactor becomes charged with them. A virus particle is a tiny nugget of protein (sometimes with a membrane) that surrounds a core of genetic material, which consists of strands of DNA or RNA, the ribbonlike molecules that carry the master software code that directs the activities of life. A typical virus particle is a thousand times smaller than a cell. If a virus particle were an object about an inch across, a human hair would be a thousand feet across. Viruses use their software code to take over a cell and direct the cell's own machinery to make more virus particles. A virus keeps a cell alive until the cell is full of copies of virus particles, and then the cell explodes and releases hundreds or even thousands of copies of the virus.

A wide variety of viruses are made into weapons. Hopkins understood that there were many possibilities as to what they might find in the building they were headed for. Keeping track of what strains of weapons the Iraqis were working with in their laboratories was exceedingly difficult. Some of the possibilities included VEE and EEE (brain viruses), Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, Ebola virus (highly infective in the lungs when it's freezedried), Marburg, Machupo, Rift Valley fever, Lassa, Junin, Sabia, enterovirus 17, camelpox, monkeypox, and smallpox. And there was always the possibility that you would run into a virus that no one had thought could be used as a weapon. You could also run into a virus that you had never heard of before.

The Nissan was a speck moving fast, trailing dust, on a road that went straight over a landscape of browns and grays. The road bent north now. It went through scattered patches of desert brush, and it crossed pans of chalk-white earth. In the distance ahead of them, a line of date palms appeared and passed at an angle. Hopkins noticed headlights behind them, shining through dust in the Nissan's wake. The Iraqi vehicles were closing the gap.

Hopkins realized that he had just driven past a singlelane service road. It was unmarked. He spun the wheel and pulled the emergency hand brake at the same time. The Nissan went off the road into some dry flats and spun around in a boil of dust. It disappeared in its own cloud. Suddenly it popped out of the cloud going in the opposite direction, headlights shining, bouncing over open land. With a lurch, the Nissan veered onto the service road. Hopkins gunned the engine. The road headed east.

'Go left, Will, God damn it!'

Will swung onto another road. It passed among cotton fields. The plants were green, the cotton bolls ripening in the gray desert air.

A metal prefabricated building loomed at the end of the road. It was windowless, about forty feet tall. It looked like a warehouse. Silvery vent pipes stuck up from the roof. The structure was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and there was a gate and a very strong-looking guard post.

Hopkins removed his foot from the gas pedal and began to slow down.

'Don't!' Littleberry said sharply. 'Come up to the perimeter like you are not prepared to stop.'

Hopkins floored the gas. Suddenly, up ahead, there were flashes of light at the guard post. The guards had opened fire in their direction.

Hopkins gasped. He ducked sideways on the seat. The Nissan slid down the road, out of control.

Littleberry stared straight ahead into the gunfire, holding the steering wheel for Hopkins. 'Get your face out of my lap. They aren't going to pop a U.N. vehicle.'

Hopkins peered over the dashboard and took the wheel again. The car was going very fast.

'The brakes, Will.'

He jammed on the brakes. Too late. The Nissan spun around backward and slid into the gate, ballooning the wire mesh, punching out both taillights. The gate broke open wide. An instant later, the Iraqi chase cars came screeching and sliding in behind the Nissan in a great cloud of dust.

A rear door of the Mercedes opened, and a thin young man wearing acid-washed blue jeans and a white short-sleeved polo shirt stepped out. He was wearing an ostentatious gold wristwatch, and he had an anxious expression on his face.

'Wow, you are really scaring us, Mark,' the young man in jeans said. His name was Dr Azri Fehdak, but the U.N. inspectors referred to him as the Kid. He was a molecular biologist educated in California. He was believed to be one of the top scientists in Iraq's bioweapons program.

'It's a snap inspection,' Littleberry said to the Kid. 'Our chief inspector ordered it.'

'But there is nothing here,' Azri Fehdak said.

'What's this building?'

'I believe this is the Al Ghar Agricultural Facility.'

A door to the building stood wide open. Inside, in the dim shadows, the inspectors could see ultramodern, gleaming stainless-steel biological production equipment.

A woman came scurrying out of the door, wearing a white lab coat. She was accompanied by several men. 'What is this?' she demanded sharply. Under^-her lab coat she had on an expensive-looking dress. She wore cat-eye designer glasses, and her wavy brown hair was tied back in a loose roll.

'United Nations weapons-inspection team, ma'am,' Will Hopkins said.

'We're on a snap inspection,' Littleberry added. 'Who are you?'

'I am Dr Mariana Vestof. I am the consulting engineer. This is the manager-général, Dr Hamaq.'

Dr Hamaq was a short, stubby man who apparently spoke no English. His eyes moved searchingly across their faces, but he said not a word.

She protested: 'We have already been inspected here.'

'We're just doing a quick follow-up,' Littleberry said. 'What are you making here, currently?'

'These are virus vaccines,' she said, waving her arm.

'Oh, good, okay. What kind, exactly?'

The Kid said, 'I will check.'

'Does Dr Vestof know?'

'Our work is medical!' she said.

'Let's go,' Littleberry said. He reached into the car and grabbed one of the black metal suitcases and took off running for the building. The minders parted to let him by. Everyone seemed thoroughly confused.

'Mark! What about our biohazard suits?' Hopkins called after him.

'Never mind the goddamned space suits!' Littleberry yelled back. 'Come on, move it, Will! On the Q.T.!' Littleberry wanted to get what he was after before the minders went berserk and shot someone.

Hopkins grabbed his suitcase and the shortwave radio and ran after Littleberry, a motorized Nikon camera slopping around his neck, a face mask dangling by a hook on his belt. A crowd of people followed them into the stainless-steel jungle. There was no smell in the air. The building, which was windowless, was lit with fluorescent lights. The floor was a kind of pebbled terrazzo. All around them were stainless-steel tanks and tangles of pipes and hoses. The tanks were bioreactors, and they were on wheels. Workers reached them by standing on movable catwalks. The equipment in the Iraqi plant was portable. The entire plant could be moved.

Dozens of workers were tending the equipment. They were wearing surgical masks and white coats and latex rubber gloves, but no other safety equipment. When they saw the inspectors, they drew back and stood around in groups, staring.

Littleberry hurried toward one of the larger bioreactors. He snapped on a pair of rubber surgical gloves. Hopkins also put on a pair of rubber gloves.

'Has this equipment been tagged?' Littleberry said. He addressed his question to Dr Vestof.

'Yes. Of course!' She showed him the big U.N. tags with identifying information on them. UNSCOM was attempting to put tags on all pieces of biological-production equipment in Iraq, so that the equipment could be traced, its movements and locations known.

Littleberry studied a tag. 'Interesting,' he said. There was a warmth coming out of the tanks, a warmth of body heat. 'Nice equipment you have here,' he said to Dr Vestof.

She stood very primly, her feet close together, her hair neatly arranged. Her calm was in marked contrast to the agitation of the Iraqi minders.

'We'll just take a couple of samples and we'll be out of here,' Littleberry said. He opened a plastic box and pulled out a wooden stick about four inches long with an absorbent pad on the end, like an oversized Q-Tip. It was a swab stick. He popped open the flip-top lid of a plastic test tube that was half-filled with sterile water. He dunked the soft tip of the swab stick in the tube to wet it, and then rubbed the tip — scrubbed it hard — on a valve on one of the warm bioreactors, trying to pick up dirt. Then he jammed the swab back into the test tube, snapped off the wooden stick, and closed the flip-top lid. He handed the tube to Hopkins. It contained a broken-off swab tip and a few particles of dirt sloshing around in the water. 'That's Al Ghar large tank sample number one,' he said.

With a laundry pen, Hopkins wrote 'Al Ghar large tank #1' on the tube. He dated it and wrote down the tag number of the tank as well. He then photographed the tank with his Nikon camera.

In a low voice, Littleberry said to him, 'Stay close.'

Littleberry moved fast. He was heading deeper into the building, quickly, purposefully. Littleberry wasn't taking many samples, but he seemed to know his way around.

'Who built this plant?' Hopkins asked Dr Vestof.

'BioArk. A respected concern.'

'Is that a French company?' Hopkins asked.

'We are headquartered near Geneva.'

'I see. But you personally, are you French?' Hopkins asked.

'I am from Geneva.'

'So, you are a Swiss citizen, Dr Vestof, is that correct?'

'What are you — the police? I am born in St Petersburg! I live in Geneva.'

Littleberry had almost gotten away during this exchange. His figure was nearly lost among the tanks and pipes. He was moving through the middle part of the building now, heading somewhere. He stopped at a metal door with no markings on it.

'Don't go in there!' Mariana Vestof called.

Littleberry pulled open the door.

Everything happened fast. Hopkins saw a hallway beyond Littleberry. In the hallway there were stainless-steel shower stalls — they looked like biohazard decon showers. The decon showers would be for decontaminating biohazard suits and equipment. It looked like a Level 3 staging room, an entry chamber leading to a Level 4 biocontainment zone. 'Mark, don't!' he said.

Littleberry ignored him. He unclipped his mask from his belt and fitted it over his head, and suddenly he had gone into the staging room.

'Stop!' Dr Mariana Vestof said. 'This is not permitted!'

The far door of the staging room had a circular handle on it, like the handle on a pressure door on a submarine. Littleberry reached the door and spun the handle. There was a sucking sound of rubber seals giving way. It opened to reveal a narrow set of rooms, jammed with equipment, and two people wearing biohazard space suits. It was a Level 4 hot zone, and Littleberry had just opened it wide.

'United Nations!' Littleberry yelled. He hurled himself toward the hot zone, a swab stick held in front of him. He was like a terrier going into a rathole.

Frantic activity exploded in the hot zone. The space-suited researchers must have had some advance warning that a U.N. inspection team was in the area, and just as Littleberry started to cross the threshold into the zone, there was a rumbling roar, the sound of a diesel engine revving up.

A crack of gray desert sky opened up over Littleberry's head. It widened.

The hot lab was inside a truck. It was a mobile hot zone, and it was beginning to pull away from the building.

Littleberry slipped and fell to the ground. Hopkins saw him go down, and he ran for the newly opened space in the wall as if he were in a dream, dragging the suitcases. His camera was banging wildly around his neck. The truck was beginning to move away, and a rear door was swinging. A gloved hand was pulling the door shut. Hopkins jumped to the ground and dropped the suitcases near Littleberry. He fitted his mask over his face and vaulted into the moving truck.

He was standing inside the truck. He saw gleaming equipment, dim lights. There was a clap of rubber seals coming together. One of the men had shut the back door of the truck. Hopkins was shut inside a Level 4 virus-weapons lab, wearing only a mask, and the lab was moving.

There were two men inside the truck, both of them wearing green space suits of a type he had never seen before. They backed away from Hopkins. He could hear the dull hissing sound of air circulating. The older of the two men had tangled gray hair and a lined face and blue eyes. The younger man — who seemed to be an Iraqi — began to circle around behind Hopkins, his suit making shuffling sounds.

Hopkins had to get a sample fast. From his pocket protector he removed a swab stick. He ripped the wrapper off it and looked around for something to swab. His gaze took in control consoles, computer screens. At the far end of the hot zone there was a small cylindrical glass vessel about two feet high. It had a heavy stainless-steel top that looked like a hat. The metal hat had steel and plastic tubes coming out of it that ran in all directions. He recognized it as a virus bioreactor. A very small one. Inside the reactor vessel there was a translucent core shaped like an hourglass. The reactor was full of a reddish-pink liquid that looked like watery blood. The core would be producing some kind of virus.

The bioreactor was too far away to reach. But next to him stood a safety cabinet — a piece of equipment you'd find in any biological laboratory. It was designed for handling infective materials. It had a wide opening in it. Inside the safety cabinet he saw trays full of clear hexagons — six-sided flat crystals, like coins. The hexagons shimmered with rainbow colors.

He touched the swab to one of the crystals.

The younger man had circled around behind him. He grabbed Hopkins, pinning Hopkins's arms at his sides. The older man, the blue-eyed man, wagged his finger at Hopkins and said, 'Nyet trogaite!' He suddenly reached up with one hand and tore off Hopkins's mask — and with his other hand hit Hopkins in the stomach. Not very hard. Just hard enough to make him lose his breath. The air flew out of Hopkins's lungs with a whoosh. He doubled over and threw himself against the rear doors of the truck, one hand flailing for the handle. There was a thunk and a burst of sunlight, and Hopkins was flying through the open air.

He landed in the dirt and rolled, gasping, taking in huge breaths of fresh air. He ended up lying on his back, coughing, keeping his body curled around the swab stick to protect it. He had not had time to take a photograph, but the swab might be the bearer of important DNA. The doors of the truck slammed shut, and it roared off down the road.