Crime Zero (46 page)

"As well as the data all the samples, including those produced by Jim Balke in the BioSafety Level Four pilot plant area, are now here in the safe or with the test subjects down in the slammer. Effectively every piece of data and material relating to the vaccine now resides here in the central core of the lab complex."

"In that case," said Decker with a wry grin, "if the vaccine works, let's hope nothing happens to this place."

Allardyce smiled behind his visor. "I wouldn't worry about that. This is one of the most secure places on earth."

Kathy was more concerned about timing. "Can't we test the vaccine faster? You said you had to wait to test it on men before testing it on women. Why?"

Sharon Bibb answered, "Female volunteers are less easy to find, and frankly we don't want to risk women's lives until we know Reprieve works on men. Crime Zero won't harm women, but Reprieve could--especially if we haven't properly attenuated the smallpox vector Krotova gave us."

Kathy frowned at this. "But every minute could be crucial. There are almost three hundred million teenage men in the world. The youngest of these will die a week after infection. That means that anytime now our youngest males are going to start dropping like flies. We've got to test women now. Each hour represents hundreds of thousands of lives."

"Hang on a minute," said Allardyce. "Wait till we get an OK from the men. If Reprieve doesn't work or, worse, it kills them, then there's no point putting women at risk."

Suddenly the computer by Alice Prince's safe began to beep.

"What the hell's that?" growled Allardyce, turning to view the monitor.

"It's a message," said Bibb as Kathy watched the short terse report come up on screen.

"Shit," said Decker softly as he read the text.

On the screen was a picture of a young Indian boy. According to the classified report, he was the first recorded casualty of Crime Zero and had died a little over an hour ago. Time had run out. The death toll had begun.

Then Kathy made a decision.

Chapter 46.

ViroVector Solutions, Palo Alto. Monday, November 17, 2:12 A.M.

No one challenged the tall FBI ninja in the black biological suit. At the main gate where her suit militated against using the DNA sensor, she knew the correct personal access codes to punch into the ancillary keypad. Once inside the campus she gave her personal call sign and knew all the pass codes when challenged by central security via her headset.

It was after two in the morning, and the campus was dead. The ninja, with the badge "Special Agent Lana Bauer" on her suit, knew from her headset where most of the other agents were and how to avoid them. Hardly anyone passed her as she made her way to the silent dome. Those who did ignored her.

Madeline Naylor felt no fear, only a cold sense of purpose, as she paused outside the dome and adjusted her grip on her bag. Ahead of her a scientist in a white coat left the doors of the dome open for some fresh air. He made no move to approach her or even acknowledge her. It was as if her suit depersonalized her, made her invisible. She had found Lana Bauer's address in her FBI personnel files. She lived alone and in San Francisco. Her apartment had been easy to find. Before she died, Bauer had told her all she needed to know about security on-site, including all the codes and guard movements.

Between one and six in the morning the place was deserted, with people sleeping in the departments in the upper part of the dome. TITANIA was relied on to alert the guards who patrolled the grounds if there was an intruder. But Bauer had said that no intruders were really expected.

Naylor hadn't wanted to kill her, but she had no option. Anything else was too risky. She put two bullets in her head, then wrapped her body in a rug and rolled it under her bed. Bauer would be found soon enough, but after tonight it wouldn't matter.

Madeline Naylor thought again of Luke Decker and Kathy Kerr. Alice Prince had told her she was going to give the vaccine to Decker. And Naylor knew Kerr had the knowledge to exploit it. Between them they were dangerous.

Naylor couldn't see how Kerr could stop Crime Zero at a global level, but she might be able to create a vaccine that would seriously limit its impact. And unless Crime Zero was total, it was pointless. If some malignant cells remained-- however few they were--then in time the cancer would return.

Biosafety Level 4 Hospital, ViroVector Solutions

Kathy Kerr checked the clock on the instruments by her bed:

2:25 A.M. She hadn't slept a wink. Her decision may have been a terrible error.

Since no one could do anything until the test results on the twenty men came in, the core team had taken the opportunity to get some sleep in the dome. When they had gone, she'd stolen back to the Womb and taken a sample of the Reprieve vaccine. Leaving a note by the Genescope explaining what she'd done, she'd then come down here to one of the isolation rooms.

She had inhaled the Reprieve Smallpox vaccine four hours ago and had been lying in her bubble ever since. Ever since she learned that the first victim of Crime Zero had died, she knew she had to act, to test the vaccine on herself. If she was OK and it worked on the men, they would save time and hundreds of thousands of extra lives. She hadn't told the others what she'd planned because they would have tried to prevent her. Back then she'd been so sure it was the right thing to do and felt so confident Reprieve would work.

Now she wasn't sure at all.

She checked the chrome bracelet on her left wrist. A small sensor and needle on its inner edge were monitoring her blood and her DNA. The bracelet had a liquid crystal display with two small windows about the size of a digital watch face. One LCD window would show the status of her blood, and the other her genome. Currently both were blank. In two or three more hours the screen would flash with information telling her if she was OK or there were complications. Those complications could be immediately lethal or longer-term genetic mutations that would affect her later in life--however brief that life might be.

She knew that elsewhere in the large ward of the slammer, twenty men were also being tested. But she felt no real kinship with them. They were infected, effectively dying, taking the Reprieve vaccine as a last resort. She, on the other hand, was under no threat. And she knew only too well the terrible complications that could arise if the genetic vaccine went AWOL and played havoc with her DNA. What she was doing was right, she was sure of it, but the thought of contracting a mutant strain of smallpox or some awful hybrid of that disease and Crime Zero chilled her blood. She felt the urge to scratch her face just at the thought of smallpox bubbling under her skin.

Until this moment she'd had little time to think of anything but fighting the disease. Every waking moment had been focused on that aim, and any chance to sleep had been taken without any real thought. But now sleep wouldn't come, and her mind was free to reflect on matters beyond the virus. For the first time since this began she felt overwhelmed by the enormity of what had happened, by what was happening.

She found it hard to believe that fewer than three weeks had elapsed since Madeline Naylor tried to lock her away in the Sanctuary. If she died, who would tell her family in Scotland what had happened? Would it matter anyway if Crime Zero ravaged the planet? And what would she do if she survived and the Reprieve vaccine worked? Her dream of Conscience would have been realized in a way far more ambitious and absolute than she'd ever dreamed or wanted. What would she do next?

By asking herself these questions and dwelling on the future, she managed to keep at bay her fear of the present. But only just.

Then she saw the door to her isolation room open and a tall figure in a space suit slip inside. Squinting in the half-light, she peered through her creased plastic bubble at the approaching figure. It seemed to pause for a moment, and Kathy craned to see the person's face, but in the shadowy reflective glow she couldn't see into the visor. She tensed when the figure reached for the plastic wall of her bubble. Then, when the helmet turned, she saw the face.

"I thought you'd be doing something stupid like this," said Decker.

Kathy didn't know what to say.

"Anyway," Decker said, sitting down on the chair beside the bubble, "since you've gone and done it, I thought you could do with some company. I know what it's like being stuck in there. It certainly isn't a barrel of laughs."

Chapter 47.

The Decontamination Room, ViroVector Solutions,Palo Alto.Two Hours Later

Sharon Bibb felt exhausted as she pulled on her blue biohazard suit in the decon room between the Biohazard Level 3 laboratories and Level 4. The room consisted of a row of lockers, showers, and toilets, and a rack of biohazard space suits. There were two basins at one end with a row of bleach bottles and various virus-killing chemicals lining the wall. It was four-thirty in the morning, and everywhere was quiet. After her earlier meeting with Allardyce, Kathy Kerr, and Luke Decker, she had gone up into the main dome to grab a bite to eat and a few hours' sleep in the makeshift sleeping quarters set up in the dome.

She had agreed with Allardyce that at five o'clock this morning she would check on the twenty male subjects. If the results were good, she would alert Allardyce. After presenting their results to the core team and gaining permission from the President, they could then key in the code to the Secure Data Unit and send the protected gene sequence and production specifications of the Reprieve vector to the various production sites around the world. Only Allardyce, Kathy Kerr, and she knew the code.

She yawned twice. God, she hadn't been this tired since handling the Ebola breakout in the Congo back in '99. She hadn't seen her husband or two kids back in Atlanta for almost two weeks either. Just the thought of losing her husband to Crime Zero brought a rush of panic to her thoughts. The Reprieve vaccine would work. It must work.

Instinctively and carefully checking her suit for any tears, she paused before the door that led to the central Hot Zone of the complex, containing the BioSafety Level 4 labs and the Womb and the elevator going down to the BioSafety Level 4 hospital and morgue.

She became aware of someone else being in the decon room with her only after she'd keyed in the six-character password and presented her eye to be scanned through the faceplate of her helmet. With mufflers on her ears to protect her from the suit's rushing air supply she only just heard the rustle behind her. But before she could turn, the door began to open in front of her, and she felt something hard push into her back.

"Don't turn around," snarled a cold female voice behind her. "I saw you key in the code, so I need only one of your eyes to get the rest of the way. I can either come with you as your guest or you can refuse to cooperate. In which case I'll take out your eye and get into the Womb alone. The choice is yours."

Sharon Bibb was too shocked to say anything, and before she could even frame a response, she had been pushed through the door into the glass corridor beyond. Wildly she looked through the glass partitions into the Level 4 laboratories, but she was alone. Everyone else was up in the dome asleep.

"Go on," said the woman behind her as they passed the elevators to the slammer and the submarine below, pushing her toward the door at the end of the corridor.

A wave of relief flowed through Madeline Naylor. She was so close now. The black biohazard symbol and the large red BioSafety Level 5 emblazoned on the glass door of the Womb seemed to beckon her on.

After getting into ViroVector, Naylor had patiently made her way to the center of the biolab complex, using the radio to avoid any other agents. It seemed as if the agents had been placed at all the key points on the perimeter, but few, if any, were in the lab complex itself at this time of night--proba-bly to avoid getting in the scientists' way. However, the difficult part was still to come: She had to gain access to the central Hot Zone of the complex, where the Womb was. She didn't have access codes for that and would need retina identification.

Using her knowledge of the labs from the numerous times she had accompanied Alice Prince to the Womb, she made her way through the less secure outer rings of the complex. As she stole her way from BioSafety Level 1 to 3, each lab had been a deserted white library of chrome and glass with only the hum of apparatus and air conditioners to disturb the silence. Eventually she had reached the decon room, the gateway to the Hot Zone, and waited patiently behind the row of lockers for someone to arrive and take her in.

Dr. Sharon Bibb--her name written on the front of her suit--had been that person.

"Go on," Naylor said, pushing her toward the door of the Womb. "Open it. I'm right behind you."

Bibb paused for a moment, and Naylor could tell that the shock was wearing off and the scientist was thinking of self-preservation.