Minutes To Burn Part 8

Szabla leaned back against the bed. She ran one of her hands up the curve of her arm, gripping her biceps. Justin had overheard Savage's remark. "You sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he muttered. "Rape, that's admirable."

Savage c.o.c.ked his head, looking into Justin's handsome blue eyes. "Who ever told you war was admirable?"

The sunlight was dwindling, the brief equatorial dusk already under way. Tank and Cameron flanked Rex. Cameron was grateful to Rex for qui-etly letting the matter of the dog go. Frustration was setting in-they were beginning to realize just how difficult it was to locate one man in this neighborhood of dark streets and broken buildings. If they didn't find Juan to alert him of the take-off time tomorrow, Rex's survey would be compromised.

Cameron shooed away beggars as they approached, and watched for eyes darting to her boots so that she could thwart advancing shoe shin-ers. A woman walked by peddling newspapers-El Comercio's headline announcing another 120 dead in a Quito landslide.

They stopped at a vehicle underpa.s.s before Julian Coronel, a thor-oughfare with four lanes of quickly moving traffic. Across Coronel, an enormous white wall ran in both directions for as far as Cameron could see, broken only by large arches with locked metal gates. Ahead and to the left stretched a white pedestrian bridge, which Rex indicated with a gesture. "Might as well try there."

Underneath the bridge, colorful advertis.e.m.e.nts for ice cream were peeling from the concrete in strips. One strip ran through the smiling face of a light-skinned woman.

Steering wide of a group of homeless men, they climbed the pedes-trian bridge and walked over the busy thoroughfare. When they got halfway across, the land on the far side of the wall became visible, and Cameron gasped out loud. It was perhaps the most breathtaking sight she had ever seen. Against the backdrop of several small hills, white marble gravestones, tombs, and mausoleums stretched up into the air, forming what appeared to be a miniature city. Some of the tombs were so extravagant that they resembled residential buildings with distinct floors, each one featuring gates for the ornate caskets. A few others were domed, fronted with immense tinted-gla.s.s doors with polished metal handles. Paved walkways ran between the tombs, some of them as wide as small streets. Shrines, statues, and trees gave the cemetery a jagged skyline. Only a couple gravestones had fallen over; for the most part, the cemetery had been resistant to the tremors. It almost glowed in the dark-ening air, a small forest of white stone.

Even Tank stopped dead in his tracks.

"They call this 'La Ciudad Blanca,'" Rex said. "The White City." He grinned. "For obvious reasons."

Rex walked down the far set of stairs, descending down into the cemetery. It was almost nightfall, and Cameron glanced ahead at the rows of tombs, the myriad hiding places for muggers and thieves. Tank felt for the pistol in the back of his pants, so Cameron knew he was thinking the same thing.

"This is the history of Ecuador," Rex said. "Every important name, every important date, is here. Buried, gilded, commemorated."

As they walked through the grounds, Cameron noticed the family names carved into the white marble. Palm trees lined a slender, marble-paved lane, the trunks painted white. The silhouette of a man appeared in the middle of the path. He was genuflecting, staring up at the humbler monuments dotting the dark hillside.

Rex drew closer. "Juan?"

The man rose and threw his arms wide in greeting. He was an ugly man, with wide, uneven features, his cheeks deeply pocked. His skin was dark, his arms covered with hair. "Dr. Williams," he said in heavily accented English. "You are here in one piece, no?" He nodded to Cameron and Tank. "And the soldiers. A pleasure to meet you. Thank you for your offer to escort us."

"Offer?" Tank said, but Cameron elbowed him in the ribs.

"You might have waited at the lab," Rex said. "We've spent hours searching for you."

"I am sorry. It is hard for me to be in the lab now, you see." Juan fid-dled with his wedding ring nervously, rotating the gold band around his thick knuckle. Despite his warmth, he exuded a gentle sadness. "I do not know how much longer it will exist. There is no funding. I've had to let go my a.s.sistants. Many of the experiments will not be finished. And the islands are in bad shape, my friends. I was doing a longitudinal study, tracking a population of masked b.o.o.bies on Espanola..."Heshook his head. "But with the feral goats taking over the past few years..."

"They're bad?" Cameron asked. "The goats?"

"Animals aren't good or bad. They're just sometimes in the wrong place. If they don't belong, they can threaten the entire ecosystem. Gal-pagos are especially fragile. Many of the animals evolved on the islands with no enemies, so they have no way to contend with predators if they arrive. And man has brought many predators, most of them seemingly benign, protected by their very...how do you say?...ba.n.a.lity. Puppies and kittens, hamsters...all killers. All capable of wiping out whole pop-ulations of endemic species. Like the goats on Espanola with my masked b.o.o.bies...eating the eggs, the chicks..." He sighed heavily. "All dead. I received a report from a friend at the Darwin Station telling me not to bother coming back." He tapped his hand against the corner of a nearby gravestone, his wedding band making a soft clicking noise. "There's so much we've lost." He looked away, his eyes growing moist.

Tank dug something out of his teeth with a finger.

"We really should get back," Rex said.

Cameron reached out and touched Juan gently on the sleeve. "I'm sorry," she said.

Juan's smile was a faint, dying thing. He looked back up at the hillside. "Those graves up there, those are the graves of the poor." Evidently, the families of the dead buried on the hills couldn't afford marble; the gravesites were decorated with bright fabrics and flowers. A number of these plots were recent additions, with dark, freshly turned soil. "So much death, so quickly."

"Let's be honest," Rex said. "This is nothing new. Life has always been cheap here. Children succ.u.mbing to preventable diseases, poison-ous snakes in the Oriente, buses colliding on windy pueblo roads. Death happens here."

Juan shook his head, studying the fresh graves in the hills. "Not like this."

A church bell tolled somewhere in the distance, and Rex glanced down at his watch. "I need to get back and check in with Donald." He shoved a slip of paper with the flight time and survey procedures into Juan's hand. "See you tomorrow."

Juan nodded and walked off a short ways, sitting on the ledge of a particularly broad mausoleum. Cameron found Rex's abruptness in the face of Juan's grief to be offensive. "Tank'll escort you back," she said. "I'll be along in a minute."

Tank followed Rex into the darkness. Cameron walked over and pulled herself up on the ledge beside Juan. The echo of the church bells lingered in the darkness. The air was thick, humid, foreign. It smelled sharply of bark, burning wood, and stale food.

"I come here often at night," Juan said softly.

Cameron gave him the silence, listening to the rush of cars beyond the high cemetery wall.

Juan pulled off his wedding band and set it on his knee. He regarded it for a few moments. "I lost my wife," he finally said. "And my baby girl. I was teaching at Universidad when the apartment building collapsed. That was...that was almost three years ago, but still I feel it sharply on quiet nights like this." He picked up the ring, tilted it so that he could catch the blur of his reflection in the gold, then slid it back on his finger.

When she realized that he was crying, Cameron wasn't sure what to do. She popped a stick of gum in her mouth and worked it over, waiting uncomfortably through the silence. Juan finally wiped his cheeks and raised his head.

"I am sorry. You do not need this. There's just something in your eyes, some softness that lets me talk where I haven't before. That's unusual for Americans. They often come down here and see our ways and the vio-lence, and think us primitive." He shook his head. "Death is part of our culture. During the conquest, half our population was killed by disease, civil war. But no country can endure this kind of disruption, this kind of..." With a sweeping gesture, he indicated the cemetery before them. "Loss."

A man stumbled by, his head lowered, carrying an armful of flowers. When he pa.s.sed Cameron and Juan, he paused and looked up at them. Cameron couldn't make out his face, because he was wearing a hat pulled low over his eyes. "No, gracias," she said, waving him away.

The man spoke back to her in a soft but angry voice. He gestured at her several times, and she felt for the pistol, just to make sure it was still there.

"What did he say?" she asked Juan when the man finished speaking.

Juan slid off the ledge onto his feet. "He asked that we get off his family's mausoleum, that he can lay the flowers there for them."

He nodded an apology at the man and headed back toward the foot-bridge.

CHAPTER 13.

--------------------- ex leaned over the hotel phone as Tank stretched out on the bed. He had to dial three times before the call went through. Donald picked up on the first ring. "How is it?"

"Lovely as always," Rex said. "Puts Paris to shame."

"Some interesting news. Remember that seawater that Frank sent back?"

"Of course." Rex pulled off his shirt and turned so that he could see his back in the mirror. He pressed his hand to the back of his neck, and the white imprint of his fingers lingered a few moments before fading.

"I finally got it under a microscope. The sample from Sangre de Dios was highly unusual. Most of the plankton were dead. Clumped together. Mostly unicellular phytoplankton-dinoflagellates were most prevalent, but a lot of them I didn't recognize."

"Really?" Rex said. "Species you didn't recognize?"

"My guess is that they were nonviable mutations. Remember, plank-ton are extraordinarily sensitive to UV-B."

"Yes," Rex said, pulling a Natural History magazine from his bag and perusing the back cover, "but they live at depths that screen out most radiation."

"Ah," Donald said. "But this was a surface sample. So my thought was, seismically motivated shifting currents pushed them upward, and their composition was altered by UV exposure. But the range of the mutations was staggering-they couldn't be based on radiation alone."

"So?" The phone line cut out. Rex looked over at his sat phone, still charging at the outlet, cursed, and dialed again. This time, the call went through on the first try.

"So," Donald said, picking up right where they'd left off. "I did a gas chromatography ma.s.s spec to check for DDT, but that came back nega-tive, so I isolated some dinoflagellate DNA, and ran a gel."

Donald checked his watch. His linen shirt was creased and wrinkled across the front, dotted with sweat. He'd spent the entire morning in the lab. The work required a precision that had quickly become tedious. First, he'd centrifuged the water samples, placing them in a rapidly spin-ning test tube so that the denser dinoflagellates would settle at one end of the tube. Then, he'd made genomic preps to isolate the DNA strands, cut specific segments, and ran those segments through ethidium bromide-soaked agar to see how they'd settle. When they did, their banding patterns were visible under UV light, and ready to be compared to the control.

From past studies, Donald was familiar with the banding pattern of dinoflagellate DNA from around Galpagos; generally it banded from three to five kilobases down to ten base pairs. The DNA from the island of Santa Cruz matched this banding pattern. However, the sample from Sangre de Dios was irregular, with several of the DNA segments remaining at the top of the agar, barely traveling downward.

When Rex heard the results, he sat down on the bed. "Holy s.h.i.t," he said. "What are you thinking?"

"Those segments are swollen with something to be moving that slow," Donald said. "I'm guessing a virus got ahold of them, finding its way through the UV-weakened cell walls and inserting its own DNA into their structures."

Rex whistled. "Well, viruses are phenomenally bountiful in H2O."

"That was my understanding. But this is well out of our field. I'd like you to take plenty of water samples on Sangre de Dios. In the meantime, I've sent the sample off to Everett at Fort Detrick."

"Samantha Everett?" Rex rubbed his forehead. "Are you sure that's such a good idea? I've heard she's a little . . . " The line cut out. "Unpre-dictable."

Former Chief of Viral Special Pathogens Branch at the Centers for Dis-ease Control in Atlanta and current Chief of the Disease a.s.sessment Division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Inst.i.tute of Infectious Dis-eases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Samantha Everett was decked out in a blue full-body s.p.a.ce suit, complete with neoprene gloves taped to her sleeves. The droning air circulation unit inside the s.p.a.ce suit was mes-merizing, forming a low-pitched symphony with the other sounds of the Biosafety Level Four lab-the constant one-way airflow, the blowers sit-uated near the doors to ensure negative pressure, the HEPA filters work-ing double-time overhead. To maintain her sanity, Samantha sang "Itsy Bitsy Spider" to herself, subst.i.tuting her own lyrics where she forgot the words.

A short woman-five foot two in sneakers-Samantha had the slightly frazzled air of a mother of three. Having neglected the wash for the past month and a half, she'd shown up to work wearing her daugh-ter's T-shirt featuring the five smiling faces of NVME's members. Fortu-nately, she also fit into her six-year-old son's shoes-green Velcro Adidas with asphalt marks on the white rubber outsoles-as she'd run from the house barefoot that morning only to realize it when she'd pulled up to base. She'd found the Adidas in the back of the minivan, buried in a mound of camping equipment from a trip into the Catoctins that, having been planned for two months and canceled three times, had almost come to fruition the prior weekend, only to be interrupted by the emergency at hand. A pair of wire-frame John Lennonstyle gla.s.ses perched on her nose, the thin metal arms disappearing back into her curly brown hair.

Having little use for a husband, she'd adopted all three of her children over the past nine years. Earlier in her career, she couldn't have even considered being a mother. She'd been dispatched for months at a time on various projects-bleeding horses in rural Costa Rica for Venezuelan equine encephalitis, chasing Machupo virus up the eastern slope of the Andes, trekking through mosquito breeding grounds in the Nile Delta. But after her stint at CDC in Atlanta, she was given an offer to run DAD at USAMRIID, and she'd vowed to attempt some form of a domestic life. Being a mother, she'd found, had toughened her considerably more than being a major and running a division of testosterone-poisoned, military-sanctioned control freaks. But she liked Fort Detrick nonethe-less, and the seasons in central Maryland.

The stark modern USAMRIID building looked as if it had been dropped into the middle of the base from orbit, so out of place did it look among the conservative, faded-brick buildings. Inside, the sleek, tiled floors and fluorescent lights countered the battleship-gray walls. All work with infectious agents was undertaken in one section, divided into four units, each of which was in turn split into four "hot suites." Each hot suite employed a constellation of blowers, vents, and pressure sys-tems to ensure that airborne pathogens could not leak from the area. The filters killed any atomized biohazard before laboratory air was released to the outside. Everywhere in the building, the airflow was directed inward.

It was precisely this inflow of white noise that Samantha sought to combat with her singing. "The itsy bitsy spider..." Her voice, soft and high like a child's, activated the small microphone that allowed her to communicate with her lab technician, who wore a s.p.a.ce suit similar to her own. ". . . contracted a new strain of aerosol-infectious Bolivian hemor-rhagic fever..." She leaned forward over the cadaver. She'd already made a Y-shaped incision to open the chest and abdomen. Her arm throbbed slightly from the latest battery of inoculations; because of all the shots she received in her line of work, her deltoids were usually sore.

She gestured with her scalpel at the lab tech. "Retract the small bowel so I can get at the root of the mesentery." The abdominal cavity was always difficult because it was so full; with all the coils of bowel, there was less room for maneuvering. She reached down and poked at the fattened stomach, knowing from experience it would be filled with clotted, foul-smelling liquid. Unfortunately, the respirators did not screen out odors.

"Down came the virologist, and washed the virus out," she sang.

The lab tech leaned forward and secured the squishy bowel in his gloved, slightly unsteady hands. "Don't cut me," he said.

"Oh really?" Samantha replied. "Well, there go my plans for the week. I was hoping to watch the effects of the disease take hold in one of my colleagues."

Starting at the mesentery, she cut away excess tissue and muscle attachments so that she could pull out the organs. The procedure was cra.s.sly referred to as "the pluck." One "plucked" out first the thoracic organs, then the abdominal organs.

"Hemorrhaging around the gums, yellow sclera, b.l.o.o.d.y stool, ecchy-moses, petechial hemorrhages, blood in the urine . . . " Samantha grasped the enlarged heart, pulling gently, and began singing again. "Out came the sun and dried up all the rain...."

The tech nervously regarded the nearby formalin, ready to plunge his hand into the sterilizing agent at the slightest nick. But Samantha's hands were completely steady. She trimmed neatly around her a.s.sistant's fin-gers, humming the next bar from the children's song as she sliced through tissue. She stopped suddenly. "Aha! Look at this."

The pleural cavity was filled with fluid, and the lungs were scattered with hard patches of red. She took a sample, placing it in a small vial and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the lid on tightly before scrubbing the outside with a disinfectant.

"Condom," she said. Another lab tech stepped forward, holding open an unfurled, nonlubricated Trojan. They'd had to be slightly inventive with their equipment; the last shipment from the supplies company in San Diego hadn't arrived due to a train derailment outside Vegas. Samantha dropped the vial into the condom, and the a.s.sistant knotted the end of the latex, placing it into a nylon stocking and lowering it into a tank of liquid nitrogen. He hooked the end of the stocking on the lip of the tank, careful to keep his hands clear of the liquid, which was 195 degrees Celsius below zero.

Samantha turned back to the body. It was a gruesome specimen. A prominent Baltimore businessman had returned six days ago from Cochabamba, Bolivia, in his Gulfstream VII. Previous to his flight, he'd been febrile, with myalgias, weakness, and chills. Though the symptoms had quickly become gastrointestinal-he'd been beset with abdominal tenderness and diarrhea-he'd decided to fly anyway. After takeoff, the man had been stricken with vomiting, and spontaneous bleeding from his nose, gums, and the whites of his eyes. Johns Hopkins Hospital received warning while the plane was midair, the pilot calling ahead to have an ambulance waiting at the airport. The reports worsened as the plane approached Baltimore, and the Chief of Staff at Hopkins had reached Samantha at her campsite in the Catoctins. They'd agreed to have the plane diverted to a stretch of Highway 15 near Fort Detrick, so that the businessman, and his wife, pilot, and flight attendant, who were showing early symptoms, could be quarantined at Level Four.

Samantha had raced home to treat them, but the virus had reached high t.i.ters in the businessman's blood, and the coagulopathy had already been far advanced. The antiserums they stored in the banks that coun-teracted other forms of BHF were not working on this mutated strain, nor had ribavirin.

Samantha had taken fluid and tissue samples from the businessman while he was still living and inoculated cell cultures with them, allowing the virus to replicate until the cell cultures contained viral antigens. The pilot's and flight attendant's condition continued to deteriorate, but the wife had recovered from her fever on the second day, which meant she'd probably produced antibodies that had fought off the virus. Sure enough, her serum showed the presence of immunoglobulin G antibod-ies, indicating an older infection from which she'd previously recovered. The IgG had enabled her body to combat her reexposure to the virus.

Samantha drew blood from her to isolate these antibodies, then spun down the blood in a centrifuge to separate the antiserum. The antiserum was added to the inoculated cell cultures, then washed down to remove everything that didn't specifically bind to the antigen. Next, she'd added specially tagged antibodies that allowed her to see, under ultraviolet light, that the antiserum had indeed bound to the antigen, strongly indi-cating that the antibodies in the wife's blood were manufactured to com-bat this specific virus.

Samantha had managed to isolate enough of the antibodies to fight off the virus in six of seven rats she'd infected. Each of the surviving rats had replicated the antibodies, which she'd been able to extract from them, isolate in larger amounts, and, using advanced genetic manufac-turing techniques, replicate on an even larger scale.

Samantha was now awaiting clearance to pa.s.sively immunize the pilot and flight attendant with the experimental antiserum. Top bra.s.s from PHS and the FDA were meeting next door, deciding whether or not to approve the experimental plan of treatment. If the patients had to wait for the antiserum to clear the usual PHS paperwork labyrinth, they would surely die within the week.

Samantha forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand-per-forming a full autopsy on the body of the businessman, who had died that morning. She tried not to think about the decision being made next door that would determine the fates of two people. The body on the autopsy table was grotesque. Old, fading lesions peppered the armpits, and the gums were a b.l.o.o.d.y, suppurating mess. The mouth was caked with blood.

Samantha dug into the open cavity with renewed vigor. She continued to sing; her lab tech continued to sweat.

"So the itsy bitsy spider climbed up the spout again...."

A woman in a white lab coat tapped on one of the windows. "Sammy!" she called out.

Samantha couldn't make out what the woman was saying, so she set down the autopsy instruments and shuffled to the window, awkward in her s.p.a.ce suit. "What!?"

The woman leaned forward and shouted something, but Samantha couldn't hear over the hum of the air blowers. She leaned forward until her hood was inches from the gla.s.s. "What?" she mouthed.

The woman shook her head in exaggerated fashion. "They voted no," she yelled, enunciating each word for Samantha's benefit.

Samantha closed her eyes tightly. She tried to count to ten to quell her rising temper, a device her youngest had learned from his kindergarten teacher and in turn imparted to her, but by the time she reached four, her mind was rife with images of the fever that was sure to befall the pilot and flight attendant. The sweats, the shaking, dappled bruises taking shape under the surface of the skin. Because of legal concerns, the PHS and FDA were going to send them to their graves, wrapped in red tape.

Samantha turned to the lab tech. "Take over," she said. She banged on the gla.s.s. "I'm scrubbing out."

The uniformed and suited men and women sat around a large confer-ence table, sipping coffee and talking. A plate of Krispy Kremes sat untouched on a silver tray. Folders were stacked around the pitchers of water, and a single telephone sat at the end of the table, before an older woman in a gray Chanel reproduction. The others were just rising to leave when Samantha banged through the doors, a metal briefcase bal-anced on her hand like a c.o.c.ktail tray.

She slammed the briefcase down on the table and opened it. Two syringes filled with liquid lay in the spongy bedding.

The older woman stood, her expression hardening. A rose blush col-ored her cheeks one shade short of absurd. "Samantha, we knew you'd be difficult about this, but we can't be expected to approve a treatment of this magnitude for humans based on animal experiments alone. There are precedents, legal complications. Maybe next week, we'll be able to get the results back from the autopsy and run some experi-ments...." Her voice faded as Samantha unb.u.t.toned and rolled up her shirt sleeve. "What are you..."

Holding the first syringe vertically before her, Samantha smiled sweetly. "Bolivian hemorrhagic fever," she said. "New strain." She bit the tip protector off the needle and spit it onto the floor.

Two women fell back into their chairs. "Jesus Christ," one of the men cried, covering his nose and mouth with his tie.

Samantha deftly ran the needle into her arm, sinking the plunger.

"G.o.dd.a.m.nit," the older woman cried. "Where's her senior officer?"

Two people crept around the table, backs pressed to the walls, and fled the room.

Samantha raised the second syringe. "My antiserum," she said. She shot it into her arm, just below the mark the last shot had left.

The older woman's lips were quivering with anger. "Well, you've done it this time," she said. "This cowboy routine of yours is going to land you in a heap of trouble."

"Yippee kay yay," Samantha said.