The Third World War: A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict

66

Only an expert scientist's eye would recognize what Caroline was looking at — a genetically engineered bioweapon supervirus. On a computer screen in a level-four biocontainment laboratory at Fort Detrick, she examined the image being sent to her from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. She identified the familiar contours and shades of variola major, its graceful near-figure-of-eight curves, wrapped in its usual host-cell membrane, giving off grey shades, with faded pink and blue on the edges like an aura. She was looking at the most complicated type of animal virus, yet against what she had in the other microscope it was horribly simple.

In her own microscope was the same virus, but with the interleukin-4 gene. It had created an extra layer across the top lateral body, minuscule to the untrained eye, but deadly in its simplicity. Caroline saw immediately how it would be resistant to standard vaccine.

It was not difficult to buy interleukin-4 and put it into a virus. Yet Park Ho had jumped a number of stages by taking the samples from the Australian laboratory, whose scientists had done much of his work for him.

Caroline lifted her head and wanted to rub her eyes, but the mask and biohazard spacesuit prevented her. She should have anticipated this. There should have been a warning years ago. Pox viruses were wide open for genetic engineering, and any rogue state would know how to do it. What did they care that millions could be wiped out? They had different minds. Different motives. The argument was dead that no nation would do anything as horrific as deliberately to introduce a killer disease with no antidote. There was no longer any logic of restraint. But the reality was that the United States, let alone the rest of the world, had no drug to stop this disease.

Caroline, alone in the laboratory, absorbed this stark truth. Up at Camp David, she had got it so, so wrong. Six months, she had told Jim West. Yet Park Ho had had it already prepared then. America's vaccine, though, was no closer to being ready. And the standard vaccine, for all she knew, would, far from curing them, make people more susceptible to the disease.

She picked up the phone and called Tom Patton. 'It's confirmed,' she said. 'We don't know what we're dealing with.'

'OK,' said Patton slowly. 'We have more cases now. One checked into a clinic near Reagan National and is now at GW Hospital. Two cases in New York, three cases in Pittsburgh, one in Colorado, two in California — Sacramento and San Francisco.'

'You mean confirmed cases?'

'No, sorry, Caroline. These are symptoms.'

'Right, Tom. Symptoms,' she repeated. 'But damn certain to be actual cases. All health workers have already been immunized with the vaccinia anti-smallpox vaccine. Let's leave them as they are—'

'Even if it doesn't work?'

'Hold on. Let me finish.' She was too brittle. It had been a long day. A long week. 'The vaccinia vaccine does not contain the variola virus. It's a calf-lymph derivative. We need to try some quick experiments with reformulated vaccines. We can now get a DNA sequence from the IL-4/variola major virus. We should get all strains of the vaccinia virus — Temple of Heaven, Copenhagen, NYCBOH. We need the DNA sequences to all the variola major that we've mapped — India-1967, Yamata, Bangladesh-1975, Aralsk and whatever else they have done in Russia — to determine which, if any, we can draw from for the IL-4 element. Have we got anything in from Moscow yet? Remember I talked about it? The Soviets created a cloned library of variola DNA fragments. They have a complete analysis of the smallpox genome since it could be used as a biological weapon. We need all that data, right now. And we should start with Cidofovir as a new test vaccine. It's brilliant. It gets absorbed by the host cell and then converts into an agent which kills rogue cells. They've added a molecule of lipid or fat and it kills cowpox in mice. It's not so effective with monkeypox in macaques—'

'Stop,' shouted Patton. 'Caroline. Stop. You're losing me. I don't know what the hell you're talking about. And hold… I have another call coming in.'

Caroline drew a breath. Yes. He was right. She was gushing, trying to empty her mind all at once; trying to find some reason for optimism.

'Juliet Mary Diamond died with a seizure shortly after being vaccinated,' said Patton.

Caroline felt distant from the news, somehow disconnected — in the same way she had tried to make herself in the days following Peter's murder. 'She was our first patient? George Washington Hospital, right?'

'That's right,' said Patton tiredly. 'Juliet Mary Diamond. The first.'

'Then we have no antidote, Tom. In fact, it's worse,' she said slowly, hearing her own uneven breathing through the apparatus. She wished she could rip off the damn mask and take in air properly. 'She should have survived at least a week after admission. The vaccine strain killed her more quickly. We have no antidote, Tom.'

'I know.'

'So from now on, every patient who checks in will be our guinea pig.' Caroline was thinking as she was speaking, spacing her words, so they weren't rushed, and both she and Patton knew exactly what she was saying. 'We will test on them every variation of every vaccine we can create until one works. It might kill them. It might save them. We don't tell anyone. We don't tell anyone about IL-4.'

'As soon as we announce smallpox, they'll be queuing up for vaccines.'

'We inoculate them, but give the healthy ones water,' said Caroline. 'Because if we use the vaccinia vaccine we'll be killing people who might otherwise survive.'