The Virus (29 page)

If he survived! In his heart, Kaplan knew that he had little or no chance of survival. He didn’t know how long the residual air in the Hot Lab would last but it couldn’t, he imagined, be more than an hour or two at the most. Because of the system of negative pressure under which the Hot Lab operated, the room in which he now was, was virtually airless. They tried to achieve a near-vacuum. When you were clipped to the airline, that obviously didn’t matter. Once off the airline, anyone who stayed in the Hot Lab would quickly suffocate. As he lay there, Kaplan reflected that some people might regard quick suffocation as a preferable alternative to the lingering and painful death that could be induced by some of the pathogens present in the laboratory. He looked at his watch. It was midnight. The first technicians would not arrive at the lab until seven a.m. at the earliest. That meant he had to hold out for seven hours! He lay totally still. Every movement, even turning his head, would use up the air quicker. His breathing was so shallow as to be almost imperceptible.

Susan Wainwright lived some twenty-five miles outside Atlanta. It normally took her around three-quarters of an hour to get home. Sometimes more, sometimes less. It depended on the traffic.

She was about five minutes from her door when something odd struck her. It was to do with the appearance of the young man, Philip Mason, late that day.

She knew that Kaplan had been analysing the sample vaccine. She knew that he had spoken to Ed Werner in Pittsburgh. She listened in to all Kaplan’s conversations and took notes on them. That was part of her job. She had heard Werner say that his assistant Philip Mason had ‘caught a flight with a new load’ of vaccine. But she knew for a fact that there
was no plane in the late afternoon from Pittsburgh to Atlanta.
She had been there the other day at some toxics conference and she had tried to catch a plane home for the evening, only to find that they had changed the schedule. Yet Werner had certainly implied that Mason had taken an ordinary commercial flight, not some executive jet.

She jammed her foot on the brake and steered the car round in a U-turn.

She hit ninety m.p.h. on her way back to the Center for Disease Control. It was after midnight and fortunately the road was clear. Her mind raced like the engine. If Mason hadn’t come down on the afternoon flight, because there was no afternoon flight, then he must have been in Atlanta all the time. He must have been staying nearby — at the Sheraton Emory across the street? And he had obviously been in communication with Werner. What did it mean?

She tried to puzzle it out as she drove. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

She pulled into the parking lot outside the Hot Lab and ran across to the building. The lights were still on. That meant that Kaplan would still be there, thank God!

She opened the door of the control room and looked across into the Hot Lab the other side of the glass wall.

The flashing red of the wall panel caught her attention immediately.

NO AIR ENTERING LAB

The lab appeared to be empty. The airlines were hanging free, unconnected to any human body. She frowned. Kaplan and Mason must have finished their work and gone home. But why had the warning lights come on? Perhaps there was some electrical malfunction. She would have to report it in the morning.

As she turned to go, she noticed the figure on the floor. She recognized Kaplan immediately. The shock of steely grey hair was unmistakable. She saw that his eyes were closed. From where she stood, behind the glass partition, it was impossible to tell whether Kaplan was still breathing.

Susan Wainwright was a decisive woman trained to think quickly in emergencies. She realized at once what had happened. The air supply had been cut off. Kaplan had had to unclip. He had possibly been exposed to the pathogens present in the Hot Lab. And now he risked suffocation through the exhaustion of the air supply within the lab unless, indeed, he had already succumbed. She realized also that, dead or alive, Kaplan was now an extremely dangerous commodity. Her immediate instinct might have been to open the door and simply drag the man out. But she knew that wouldn’t do. You had to respect the drill otherwise the whole thing would go up the spout.

She spoke into the intercom. “Lowell, can you hear me?”

The voice came to him, it seemed, from a long way down. He had sunk through caverns where green beasts swam. Lights burned on coral walls and weird shapes formed and reformed in his imagination. He thought he heard Susan’s voice booming round the vast empty spaces. But he knew that this was absurd. Susan had gone home. And, anyway, he was dead.

Susan repeated the question, louder and more urgently.

“Lowell, can you hear me? Am I coming through?”

This time he was sure that it was Susan’s voice. He roused himself with a great effort of will, clawed his way back through the caverns of time towards a state resembling consciousness.

“I hear you, Susan.” Kaplan’s voice was barely more than a hoarse whisper.

“I’m unlocking the doors and turning the air supply back on. Can you manage to clip yourself on to the line?”

Kaplan raised his head from the floor. He saw the flashing red light go out, to be replaced by the green signal which indicated that the air supply was back to normal. He tried to rise to his feet but he found he was unable to go beyond a kneeling position.

“I can’t make it, Susan.” Kaplan fell back to the floor.

She wondered, then, whether to throw out the rule book. If Kaplan couldn’t clip himself back on the line, there was no other way of getting air to him quickly enough to make a difference except by opening the airlock. If she put on a pressure suit herself and went in there to help, it would be too late.

She saw him rise to his knees again. Once erect, he swayed uncertainly. Then, slowly, painfully, he began to inch his way towards the dangling airlines. Twice the plastic pipe slipped from his grasp as he reached for it. The effort seemed to exhaust him. He bowed and almost fell.

Susan watched in agony. “Go on, Lowell. You’ve almost made it,” she urged him.

For the third time, Kaplan grabbed at the pipe and at last he had it. With his remaining strength he plunged the nozzle into the clip-on socket and pulled up the face mask.

The relief was instantaneous. Kaplan could literally feel the oxygen flooding into his blood, pumping into his brain. He could feel the clouds dispersing, the pain receding.

For a few moments he knelt, allowing himself the luxury of recuperation. When he spoke, his voice had regained much of its customary firmness and vigour.

“Thanks, Susan,” she heard him over the intercom. “I’ll never forget that.” He smiled at her across the partition. “And now you had better come in here with an airbottle. Mine ran out some way back as you may have guessed. And I want to get out of here.” Kaplan smiled. When she saw that smile, Susan knew her man was on the way home.

Before leaving the Hot Lab, Kaplan underwent the full decontamination procedure. He also received a complete range of preventive inoculations with Susan herself acting as a calm and competent nurse.

“I’m going to suppose that you were exposed to most of the pathogens we’ve got in the Hot Lab and I’m going to pump you full of antidotes. That’ll do for a start. Then I propose to call the emergency team into action. They’ll have to take a look at you and decide what to do.”

Kaplan had shaken his head vehemently. “You’ll do no such thing. I don’t want anything to come out about tonight’s accident. I don’t want to give anyone an excuse to put me into convenient quarantine for the next few weeks. I don’t trust anybody. Not now. No, Susan,” he concluded. “I’m alive. I’m free and I propose to stay that way.”

Later, when they were back in his office, Susan had asked him:

“Why did Mason try to kill you? He
was
trying to kill you, wasn’t he?”

“Of course. He wanted to kill me because I discovered that Pharmacorp have produced a dud vaccine. There’s no anti-Marburg protection in any of that stuff, Susan. Pharmacorp are pushing two hundred million units of ordinary flu vaccine onto the unsuspecting American public while maintaining that it’s an effective way of dealing with the Marburg virus.”

Susan Wainwright went pale. “Why should Pharmacorp do that? I simply don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand everything, Susan,” Kaplan replied slowly. “But I’m beginning to have an idea.”

He pulled the telephone towards him.

“Who are you calling?” Susan asked.

“Ed Werner in Pittsburgh. Make sure you have the recorder on.”

Susan switched on the taping device which Kaplan used to record all his important calls. They heard the ringing tone and then a sleepy voice came on the line.

“Hello? Who is it?”

“Is that Ed Werner? This is Lowell Kaplan speaking.”

“Lowell! . . .” the voice exploded at the other end of the line. “I thought you were . . .”

“Dead?” Kaplan smiled grimly into the mouthpiece. “No, I’m not dead, but I might well be.” His voice took on a hard, almost savage note. “Listen, Ed. You’re in trouble. Big trouble. They could be booking you for attempted murder. We have a tape of every one of your conversations with Mason, including this evening’s.”

Ed Werner gave an audible gasp. Kaplan continued mercilessly. “I can’t promise anything, Ed. But you may be able to help yourself if you cooperate now.”

“How?”

Kaplan knew he had his man hooked.

“Just tell me
why
Pharmacorp produced a dud vaccine. Weren’t you and your people able to attenuate the virus? Or couldn’t you find a suitable medium to culture it in?”

“Jesus, Lowell.” Ed Werner spoke so softly that he was barely audible. “Don’t you understand? There
was
no virus. We didn’t have anything to work with. They brought back two monkeys but
those monkeys were clean.”

He began to whine: “I told Woodnutt, right from the start, that the whole idea was mad.”

Kaplan didn’t listen to the end. The police would pick up Werner and Mason later. And Woodnutt too if it came to that. He banged down the receiver.

“He says the monkeys were clean, Susan. You heard him. That means one of two things. Either not all the green monkeys carry the Marburg virus and those damn fools who run the CIA managed to come up with two specimens who didn’t have an ounce of poison in their veins. Or . . .” Kaplan paused, working it out.

“Or what?” Susan Wainwright prompted him.

“Or
we killed the wrong monkeys.”
Kaplan clapped a hand to his forehead. “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed. “That SABENA man at Brussels. The one who gave me the details of cargo movements at Zaventem the day Diane Verusio was there. Tim Boswell told me they tried to trace him later — without success. Perhaps Delgrave was a phoney. Perhaps he was deliberately feeding me misleading information.”

Susan looked sceptical. “I don’t understand. I thought Delgrave’s information about the provenance of the green monkeys exactly confirmed the information you had in Marburg. Even the map references were the same.”

Kaplan banged the desk. “My God, how blind I’ve been! You’re right, Susan. If Delgrave is a phoney, then those old records in Marburg castle were phoney too.”

“You mean, there never was any outbreak of disease in Marburg in 1967?”

“Oh no, the disease happened all right. That’s a historical fact.”

“Then, you mean it wasn’t transmitted by green monkeys in spite of the fact that some people, somewhere, for reasons of their own, seem to be trying to prove that it was.”

“No,” Kaplan replied slowly. “The disease was transmitted by green monkeys. I’m sure of that. But it wasn’t transmitted by the monkeys in Zaire, by the monkeys we massacred. I’m sure now that the whole Zaire business was a deliberate red herring designed to divert our attention from the fact that somewhere in Africa the real green monkeys exist — I mean the monkeys which really were, and are, the source of the Marburg virus.”

He sat there at his desk, trying desperately to make sense of nonsense. He wished his mind was clearer. His brain, thanks to events earlier that evening, seemed quite literally to be suffering from a lack of oxygen. At last, he made up his mind. He looked at her across the desk.

“Susan?”

“Yes, Lowell.”

“I’m going to go to Germany.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

“How will you go? There are no planes.”

“The military are still flying. I’ll talk to the commander of the USAF base at Atlanta. He’ll understand. He’s a friend of mine. Anyway, this is an emergency.”

“What do I do?”

“Warn the President. Get hold of the White House. Tell them that the vaccine is a dud. Tell them we don’t have any anti-Marburg vaccine, that they can forget about the whole inoculation program. Get the police onto Mason and Werner.”

“Do you really have tapes of Werner’s conversations with Mason?”

“No, that was just bluff. To draw him out. But we have one tape,” Kaplan pointed to the recording device attached to the telephone. “That ought to be enough to start with.”

Another thought struck him. “Make sure they pick up Woodnutt too. He had to know about this.”

Kaplan shook his head as he contemplated the enormity of Woodnutt’s offence. “That man must be unbelievable! You know, his own wife would have been visiting the internment centre with the President — today, just a few hours from now!” A hard expression crossed his face. “Make sure they really nail Woodnutt, won’t you. And put McKinney in the picture. Tell him everything. Don’t talk to Cheek. I don’t trust Cheek with this one.”

“What if people ask where you are?”

“Stall ’em. For twenty-four hours at least. You’ll hear from me before then.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You will.”

Susan looked at him with concern. She couldn’t help wondering whether the strain of recent days might not have taken its toll of Kaplan’s mental stability.

He put his hand on top of hers. He was suddenly calm and confident. “Susan, there are more ways than one of fighting an epidemic. There are plenty of people here who will do what needs to be done. Personally, I don’t believe we have a snowball’s chance in hell of containing this thing without new weapons at our disposal. We have fifty thousand suspected contacts in isolation at the moment. And each contact may himself or herself have infected twenty or thirty people. We can’t bring them all in. It just isn’t feasible. The dam is about to burst, Susan.”