A War of Shadows

SIX

Dr. Sandra O’Connell made her way through the double security maze to the experimental lab section of Fort Dietrick. The routine military security was almost equivalent to that of an atomic missile launch site—television monitors all over, locked and sealed doors three or more centimeters thick with pressurized compartments, each with its own air supply. Guards and electronic safeguards, too; sets of keys that could be used only from the inside, with ID photos, fingerprints, and retinal patterns checked every step.

The special new security was just as severe. Complete change to sterile clothing, shower which included chemicals designed to kill any forms of micro-organisms, and much more.

The place hadn’t always been a part of the National Institutes of Health. At one time the U.S. Army had been here alone, playing deadly games of chemical and biological warfare, trying to create organisms such as the one someone else had now created. For years its nearly perfect medical security system had been superficially in effect. Only since the Wilderness Organism had arrived had the military returned.

Still, it was here that mysterious organisms were brought, it was here where cancers were probed with the best staff and best equipment to find the keys to switching them off, it was here where microbiology was practiced to the limits of technology and international treaty.

Through the last checkpoint, Sandra followed the sterile wall of pale yellow to the double doors marked Serology Control Center and went in.

Mark Spiegelman turned in his swivel chair and brightened as he saw who it was. He had been alone in here for thirty-four straight hours, after only a few hours sleep before, and he looked like hell. Somewhere in far-off Arlington, Virginia, he had a wife and two kids he hoped understood.

“You look awful,” she said. “You can’t go on driving yourself like this. You start making mistakes. There’s eleven other people working on this down here—I’m going to call Ed Turner and tell him he’s on in here.”

He started to protest, but she was frankly saying what he wanted to hear, and her taking it out of his hands removed the guilt.

“You’re the boss,” he said tiredly.

“Before you go, tell me what you got,” she insisted. “Ed will have your data upstairs, but I don’t want to have to go through everything again with him.”

He sighed, leaned back, and dared to relax. “Well, first of all, it’s one of the finest little nasty pieces of engineering I’ve ever seen. An incredible organism—or set of organisms,” he added.

Her eyebrows shot up. “Set of organisms?”

He nodded. “Yep. Two of them. That’s what threw me. One does the dirty work and the other murders the bum.”

She was excited. “You know how it vanishes!”

He nodded again. “Yeah, a neat trick, too. Anybody can design a bug. The basis of this little bastard, at least its long ago ancestry, was almost certainly Escherichia coli, the bacteria used in the earliest recombinant DNA experiments—including Cambridge and Limitov.” He turned, punched up a picture on the CRT. “There it is—or was.”

She stared at the thing, a pretty common-looking organism considering its effect. “Doesn’t really look like E coli, though,” she said.

“Oh, it isn’t—not any more,” he told her. “It’s something new, unique. Damned well designed and built. Lots of little tricks. Denise Murray will probably be able to tell you what it does in the system—my guess is it’s a borer. Gets inhaled into the lungs, bores into the capillaries there and thence into the blood stream. You probably could get it a million ways. Inside of twelve hours there’s enough of them in there to make a colony visible without a microscope. What it does in its swim through the brain I couldn’t guess, but somehow it must recognize a particular place and secrete some nasty little enzymes that produce that catalyst I was talking about a couple days ago.”

She frowned. “But if it’s a standard-sized bacteria, why didn’t we find antibodies in the victims?”

“Oh, it does a neat trick, it does,” he said. “You know as well as anybody that an antibody is a reaction to a foreign agent, not really a disease-killer. That little baby on the screen has a number of antigens and they do, in fact, stimulate the production of a globulin protein in the human system. There are nine antigens in the bacteria, and nine different antibodies. They should react with each other to do nasty things to each other. Only they don’t.

When the antibody approaches the Wilderness Organism, it’s absorbed into the bacterium—which then does a neat trick not in the biology catalogs. It slightly changes the composition of its own complementary antigen—and pretty damned quickly, too, as if it sampled the threat, then decided on a counter-move. It’s not all that tough, though. There are three basic changes it can make, so it’s usually one step ahead of the body’s ability to manufacture the proper antibodies. It’s just getting into full steam on antibody one when WO, here, adds a dash of this or that from a small amino acid reserve and changes the antigen composition. You remember your basic biology.”

She nodded. “An antibody is the exact complement of an antigen. It can’t react to any other. It’s helpless.”

“Exactly!” he said. “So our little WO-soldier here can escape the enemy by changing its uniform. But, additionally, it does something even nastier—it eats antibodies.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “All of them? Digested?”

“More or less,” he said. “It has the ability to break down the antibody into its component amino acids and store them. What’s an antibody but a protein globule anyway? And the engineer behind this had the advantage of knowing exactly what three antibodies he’d be facing. So the antibodies invade, the WO-soldier changes its spots, then attacks and breaks down the antibodies. Anything it can’t use it expels as waste.”

She considered this. “But such a parasitic organism with those defenses would be impossible to stop. It’d finally grow into colonies so large it would cause strokes, block flows all over, kill the host—and very quickly if it reproduces as fast as you say.”

“True, but look at this.” He punched up a different picture.

“It’s a virus of some kind,” she said, waiting for more information.

“Not just a virus, a second engineered organism,” he responded. “It, my dear, is inside every lousy little WO-soldier. Our parasite’s got a parasite—a bacteriophage. Jillions of them in the world of the microbe, but not like this one. It just rides along, fat, dumb, and happy, eating some excess from the bacteria but nothing harmful, and growing at precisely the same rate as the bacterium—for the first twenty-six hours. Then it goes wild, starts growing like mad, eating our poor kamakaze WO-soldier from the in-side out. Its appetite is enormous and insatiable. Its little clock is perfectly timed; no matter if the WO-soldier is an original or a latest generation a few minutes old, twenty-six hours after the first penetration of the host they start getting eaten alive. It’s fast—damned fast. By the thirty-sixth hour there isn’t a trace of the invading army. All broken down into a mess, and passed out in the usual manner. Without anything left to eat—and bacteriophages are absolutely matched to one type of bacteria and no others whatsoever—the colonies break apart, crumbling like so many old cookies, and are themselves treated as waste by the body. By our seventy-two-hour trigger mark, there wouldn’t be a trace of either organism in the body we could discover. Some leftovers, maybe, but never could they be found or shown to be unusual unless we were looking specifically for them.”

She was silent. Finally she asked, “Mark? Is it within our current technology to build something like this?”

He shrugged. “I guess so. The bacteriophage would be the toughest. Give me Fort Dietrick, about twenty or thirty million dollars, and a staff of a dozen really good medical technicians, and I think I could do it in half a year or so.”

Sandra shivered slightly, even in the controlled atmosphere of the labs. “Now I see why they had all those conventions against this sort of thing. Edelman—that funny little ugly FBI man—said upstairs that it was an erector set for scientists.”

“At least that,” Mark said grimly. “And somebody’s really made a nasty toy here. Or toys. There’s one other thing.”

She looked up at him. “What?”

“The empty cylinders contained, of course, some of the Boland strain. Apparently it’s kept in a nice mixture of freon and other gases which make it totally dormant until exposed to air. Some of the stuff would be left, naturally.”

“Naturally,” she agreed. “So?”

“It’s different, Sandy. It had the same ancestors, but that’s all. It’s not the same bug at all.”

She stared at him. “So much for the universal vaccine, then,” she said flatly.

He smiled. “What can be engineered can be destroyed,” he assured her. “At least we got the start. Now, as for me, I think a good eight hours and I’ll lick it. You get some sleep, too. You’re as dead as I am.”

She smiled weakly. “Okay, we’ll both go. You going home?”

“No, I’ll go beddy-bye upstairs in the clinic. You?”

She sighed. “I’m going to try and make it. I need clothes, a shower, and sleep. They know where to find me if they need me. I’m only the paper-pusher here.”

“No you’re not,” he said kindly. “You’re the glue.”

Her sleep was deep and dreamless, the best sleep, the kind her body and mind craved. In her own apartment, in her own bed, a comforting sleep that, deep down, she knew might be her only chance for many days.

As it always did, the telephone’s constant ringing brought her out of it. She sought to ignore it, even as it drew her consciousness to the surface.

She awoke as if drugged, and reached for the phone. As she did her eyes fell on the little electric clock next to it.

It said 4:12 P.M.

My god! she thought. I’ve slept almost thirteen hours!

She picked up the insistent phone. “O’Connell,” she managed, her mouth full of mush.

“Sandy? This is Mark,” came a familiar voice. “I figured you’d still be out. Good girl. Now get over to the labs here as soon as you can.”

She tried to shake the sleep from her. “What’s happening?”

“I—I can’t tell you right now,” he said hesitantly. “Something nasty. Something I stumbled on by accident. Just—well, get over here quick as you can, okay? I’ll be in my cubbyhole.”

She was puzzled, but said, “All right, Mark,” and hung up.

It’s funny how when you oversleep you feel like you’ve never slept at all, she thought for the tenth time since starting out. The trip was a quick one, under an hour if you had the traffic with you, and she pulled into a space assigned to NIH bigwigs and hurried inside. Mark’s tone on the phone worried her.. Something nasty, he’d said. Something I stumbled on by accident.

Of course most business couldn’t be done by phone anyway—security and all that. But his tone—he’d been upset, terribly upset, and fear tinged in his voice.

What would cause fear in the medical Rock of Gibraltar?

There were the usual procedures to go through. Nine guards, twenty-six TV cameras—maybe more, they never told you everything—four airlocks and the whole sterilization mess.

Finally in her medical whites she walked again down that familiar yellow-painted corridor to those double doors and pushed them open.

Nobody was there. The computer was on, the whole lab was activated, there was even a sample on the electron microscope. A pad lay on the floor as if hastily dropped, and she picked it up. It held a lengthy serological series in Mark’s handwriting. He had been trying to find the key, the organisms from which the two Wilderness Organisms had been bred.

She was curious, but not concerned. He went out for more coffee, probably, she told herself. She settled down to wait for him, passing the time until his return by going over his notes. They were in a typical doctor’s scrawl, and highly disorganized, and outside her specialty at that, but she roughly followed what he was doing.

Having isolated from the protein “punctuation mark” the first signal in the DNA message of the Wilderness Organism, he and the computer were trying to duplicate it using computer models.

Dr. Denise Ferman, a petite little black woman who was a crack expert at toxicology, stuck her head in the door.

“Oh, hi, Sandy!” she said. “Where’s Mark?” “In the canteen, most likely,” Sandra replied. Ferman shook her head. “No, I just came from there. He must be up top—I’m pretty sure he’s not in A-complex.”

That worried Sandra. She reached over, pressed an intercom stud and three numbers on its face. “Security,” said a voice in her ear.

“This is Dr. O’Connell,” she said. “Is Dr. Mark Spiegelman in A-complex or did he come out?”

“Let me check,” said the voice. There were a few seconds of dead air, then the voice returned. “Dr. Spiegelman logged into A-complex at 12:15, cleared security and decontam at 12:45, and has not yet emerged.”

“All right, thank you,” she said, hanging up. “He’s got to be here someplace,” she said to Denise Ferman. “Security says he is.”

The toxicologist looked puzzled. “Let’s go see,” she suggested.

There were eight one-person control centers in A-complex, four multi-person labs, and a small automated canteen. They checked them all.

Nobody had seen or heard Spiegelman in hours. “This is impossible,” Ferman insisted. “You can’t disappear out of a place like this. He has to have gone up, no matter what security says.”

She didn’t know why, but she was suddenly feeling nervous and a little scared. “I’m going back up,” she told the scientist. “You let me know if he somehow turns up here.”

Ferman nodded, and Sandra O’Connell began the long procedure back out. Something smelled—and smelled bad. First that strange phone call, then this. At each step in the chain she questioned the human attendants. None had seen Dr. Spiegelman leave, and his initial passes were still there. Once out, she called down to Denise Ferman once more.

“Still nothing,” the toxicologist told her. “He isn’t here.”

She went to security and made a scene. They, too, assured her that it was impossible for him not to be down there, but when they checked with the others they agreed to go down and take a look. A huge black sergeant and four very efficient-looking squad members went down, through the same procedure, checks, and watches that made it impossible for anyone to just vanish.

The security team was very efficient without being intrusive. They searched the obvious places, then the less than obvious, then the impossible places as well.

Over an hour after they went in, the intercom at the security central desk crackled. “We found him,” came the sergeant’s voice.

She could hardly restrain herself. “Oh, thank god! Where was he?”

The sergeant hesitated. “Inside a vacuum chamber in Con 3. Somebody knocked him out, dragged him in there, and pumped all the air out.”