Crime Zero (44 page)

Four days after infection the Crime Zero virus had unloaded its DNA into the cells lining his lungs and respiratory passages. It had moved to the cells in his testes and the hypothalamus in his brain. Each of these target sites was now an amplification zone, reproducing more and more for the virus's DNA.

His younger brother had also been infected, but he had not yet reached puberty. The virus was benevolent. He would be corrected and spared.

But as far as Crime Zero was concerned the older brother was a man, distinguished from other men only by the fatally long telomeres of youth. His life was about to be over before it had begun.

Chapter 43.

Smart Suite, ViroVector Solutions, Palo Alto. Saturday, November 15, 2:18 P.M.

Kathy held up the test tube in her right hand and all twelve pairs of eyes in the Smart Suite, including those of the U.S. President, stared at it. There were still two huge issues to resolve, but Kathy found it amazing that this inch-high sample of cloudy liquid in her hand could contain the salvation of humankind.

"How does it work?" asked the President from the White House. Pamela Weiss's face looked out from one of the four screens on the wall in the Smart Suite. Todd Sullivan, her chief of staff, sat with her. Jack Bloom of the National Security Agency's Doomsday Committee and General Linus Cleaver, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, looked out from two other screens, and Director McCloud from a fourth. All were in Washington.

In the Smart Suite itself the rest of the core team sat around the conference table. The only absentee was Luke Decker.

"The vaccine works on two levels," said Kathy. "First it cancels out the harmful DNA instructions being sent by Crime Zero, then it inserts new instructions." She turned to the screen wall. "TITANIA, show the hologram." Immediately a multicolored spiral of DNA appeared, rotating above the holopad at the end of the table. The rungs that made up the spiral staircase suddenly split, and each side of the double helix broke away like a zipper opening. These then linked with another shorter piece of DNA with opposing nucleotide bases to form two spirals. "As cells divide, the DNA inside the chromosomes splits and reforms as you see here. Each side of the rungs, or nucleotide pairs, can bond only in a certain way. By using a matching antisense section in the vaccine, it tracks down and binds to the sequence of genetic material Crime Zero has changed, canceling it out." Again the DNA hologram began to split, but this time a new section of DNA floated in and bonded itself to the unzipping sequence, effectively neutralizing it. "Once this has been achieved a second section is introduced to recalibrate the gene expressions back to safe levels."

"Excellent, but how do we know it works?" asked Bloom. His usually pale face was chalk white, and his eyes were sunken in puffy, darkened sockets. Kathy could only guess what he and his team had been doing to plan for Armageddon since their last meeting. "Have you tested the vaccine yet?" he asked.

She paused before explaining how Decker had received it from Alice Prince, emphasizing that saving Pamela Weiss's family, particularly Alice's godson, had been a key motivator. The President nodded at this, but if she was moved by Alice's gesture she didn't show it. "When Luke came around, he told me what had happened. And to test whether he did indeed have the vaccine in his blood, he asked me to infect him with Crime Zero Phase Three; so I did."

"And what happened?" asked the President.

"See for yourself." Kathy walked to the main door of the Smart Suite and opened it, letting Decker enter and take the seat next to her. His left arm was in a cast, and he had a slight limp, but the bandage on his head had been removed. "Luke is unaffected by Crime Zero," said Kathy. "Just as you saw on the hologram, the virus is canceled out because the vaccine in his blood identifies and repairs any cells affected by Crime Zero."

There was a sudden spontaneous round of applause around the room. Even Jack Bloom smiled.

"So what now?" asked Pamela when the commotion died down. She had the look of someone who had just received good news but knew that there was more bad news wrapped up inside it. "I assume that little drop of stuff isn't going to save the world."

Kathy nodded. "You're right. But before we get on to how we get the vaccine into the population, you should be aware of a small twist, which explains why we thought Luke had originally been infected with Crime Zero." She cleared her throat. Decker knew what she was going to say next, and she knew he was pissed off about it. "This vaccine was developed by Alice Prince, and she's given it an interesting side effect. The vaccine does cure men of the lethal effects of Crime Zero, but it also gives them what amounts to a treatment of Project Conscience. Men and boys aren't returned to how they were before being infected. Instead the vaccine modifies their genomes to stay within certain tolerances in a virtually identical way to my FDA-approved Conscience serum--except it affects their germ cells. In essence all males will become recombinant organisms. They will contain foreign DNA."

"Meaning what exactly?" asked Todd Sullivan.

Decker answered him. His voice was calm, but Kathy could hear the strain underlying every word. "Meaning that you can't save men without changing them forever. Men and boys and their children will no longer be as naturally violent or aggressive as they once were. In short, men will never be the same again. I will never be the same again."

There was silence for some moments before Pamela Weiss asked, "How do you feel, Luke?"

"I feel OK, I think. Believe you me, I still feel anger and aggression--especially about this. But apparently I'm now instinctively more likely to choose less violent options. Only time will tell what that means."

Pamela Weiss turned back to Kathy. "And what's the alternative?"

Kathy exchanged a quick look with Bibb and Allardyce and the others. "We've discussed this," said Kathy, "and we reckon that with luck we could probably create a new antisense construct within a few months, but there's no guarantee it won't have other, possibly worse side effects."

"By then, of course," said Allardyce, "we'll have already lost hundreds of millions of men. Whatever we do, people are going to start dying in the next couple of days. This compromise is the only way to save the bulk of lives."

"And," said Kathy, holding up the test tube, "the serum we got from Luke is designed to be injected into the patient. Even if we agreed to go with it and accept the side effects, it would take us years to produce and distribute enough to inject into every infected individual in the world." She turned to Jim Balke, who was nodding vehemently.

"So," continued Kathy, "the only way around this problem is not to rely on injections but to insert the antisense DNA vaccine into a genetically engineered viral vector that is spread and caught in the same way as the disease. That's what Sharon's team has been working on."

Kathy turned to Sharon Bibb and retook her seat. The twins, Bibb, and she had been up most of the night discussing the options. They had all ended up at the same place. If they went with the imperfect vaccine, they still needed quickly to find a vector that was not only airborne but robust enough to survive for long periods in air, as well as being highly infectious. The one vector they all came back to seemed perfect in every way, except for two major drawbacks. The first could be overcome with genetic engineering, but the second was more serious. Their only hope was that Pamela Weiss might know a way around it.

Bibb stood and brushed back her black hair. Like all of them, she looked pale and tired, but there was an underlying strength in her voice. "In essence," said Bibb, "we need to use a vector even more infectious, rapid, and robust than the influenza vector used by Crime Zero. This would allow Tom's people in conjunction with other world air forces to distribute relatively small amounts of bomblets over major population centers using known weather systems. We could also use the same airport air purifier tunnels Prince and Nay-lor used to spread Crime Zero."

"So have you found it yet?" asked General Cleaver. "This wonder vector for Reprieve?"

"We think so, but there are two issues with it. First it's lethal--to both males and females. We need to ensure we remove all the virus's harmful genes before replacing them with the therapeutic DNA vaccine. Otherwise we could end up not only failing to save men but endangering women too."

"OK, let's assume you stop the cure from killing the patient," said Bloom. "What's the other problem?"

Bibb cleared her throat. "The virus we need to spread the cure is smallpox. But according to international law, it was made extinct back in June 1999. We at the CDC and the Russians at Koltsovo had the only remaining stocks, but now all have been destroyed." Bibb paused and looked meaningfully at the President. "Apparently."

"What do you mean, 'apparently'?" asked Weiss. "As far as I'm aware, we destroyed all our stocks."

"We did," confirmed Bloom. He spoke as if expressing a fact, not an opinion. It was clear that he knew things that even the President was protected from. "The question is, did the Russians destroy theirs? Their biological warfare program was always more aggressive than ours, and they were frequently caught breaking the Biological Warfare and Toxin Convention of '72--by both us and the British."

President Weiss paused for a moment and then frowned in concentration. "Let's get this straight. I've got a meeting with the UN Security Council scheduled later, and I want to make sure I know what our options are. Basicially, in order to stand any chance at all of saving the male population, we're going to have to use an antidote that will genetically alter them forever. Whether they like it or not?"

Kathy nodded, as did Bibb beside her.

"And even if we do go with this imperfect antidote," continued Weiss, "the only way to ensure it gets through the population fast enough to save anybody is by getting hold of some of the smallpox virus, so you can genetically tame it to become an infectious carrier of the cure?"

"Right," said Bibb.

Weiss let out a deep breath. "OK, I need to speak to the Russian president."

Allardyce nodded. "We'd already taken the liberty of locating President Tabchov. We've explained that you need to speak to him regarding the crisis." Immediately the fifth screen on the wall dividing the Smart Suite from TITANIA's Cold Room fizzed into life, and a heavily jowled face stared out at them.

"President Tabchov, this is President Weiss," said Pamela Weiss. "You know the urgency of the situation, and there is little time for pleasantries. We need your help with a pressing matter." Briefly Weiss outlined what had been discussed. She spoke clearly and with a firm grasp of the issues. The Russian president listened silently, and when Pamela Weiss finished, his broad face broke into a half-smile.

"So you wish to ask whether the Russians destroyed their stocks of smallpox as agreed? Or whether we lied."

"I wouldn't put it so bluntly," said Weiss with a similar smile. "Let's just say that any remaining stocks of the smallpox virus need to be located for the benefit of all mankind. Any help in locating those stocks would be to our mutual advantage."

For a moment the huge face froze on-screen, showing no emotion or expression of any kind. Then it flickered into life again, and Tabchov turned to his left. There followed a heated debate in Russian with an off-screen adviser that lasted almost five minutes before the Russian president turned back to face them. Kathy could feel her heart racing, hoping. It seemed contradictory then that they were relying on a dreaded plague from the Middle Ages to help combat the most technically advanced genetically engineered virus ever created.

"I am sorry," he said with a slow shake of his head. "But despite your obvious prejudices, we did indeed destroy our stocks." Kathy could feel a palpable slump in the room's morale. "However," said Tabchov, raising a large hand, "a number of our best scientists defected from our virological research program in the late nineties. Many were not entirely scrupulous and went for money. We suspect that some took more than their expertise with them." Tabchov turned again to his unseen adviser as if to confirm something. "There is one such person who may have what you seek." He paused then, and the heavy slabs of his face shifted to form a sad smile of acknowledgment. "What we all now seek."

Sutter Street, San Francisco. Sunday, November 16, 3:00 A.M.

Lana Bauer always slept naked. She had done so ever since she was a kid. And now she slept like a baby in her apartment on Sutter Street. For the first time in weeks she had the whole weekend to herself. Tonight she had gone out for a few drinks and actually got drunk.

As she slept, she dreamed of her job. It had been even more tiring than usual recently. It was only her third major assignment, and it was weird. She didn't know exactly what was going on at the place, but it was important. She knew that much.

The window by her bed was open, and the night air blew the curtains into the room. The gentle movement had become background noise. So when the figure on the fire escape outside pulled the window open a few inches more and climbed into the room, Lana Bauer barely stirred.