Medusa

CHAPTER 26

AUSTIN FLIPPED OVER THE LAST PAGE OF THE VOLUMINOUS file on Pyramid Trading Company, leaned back in his chair, and rubbed his eyes. The picture that the file painted was of a vast corporation with no regard for human life. Pyramid had put out more than three hundred harmful products. It had exported tainted fish, killer pet food, unsafe tires, and poisoned toothpaste, candy, vitamins, and drugs. Under international pressure, the Chinese government had admitted that there was a problem with Pyramid and promised to remedy the situation. But nothing in what Austin had read would explain why Pyramid would go after Kane and his research project.

Austin went over to a window and gazed down at the lights of Washington as if they might coalesce into a crystal ball that could answer the questions whirling around in his mind. The phone buzzed, and he picked it up to hear the unmistakable voice of Admiral Sandecker in its full flower of authority and brevity.

“Kurt. Please be out front in five minutes.”

Sandecker hung up without further explanation.

Austin put the Pyramid file in a desk drawer, then turned out the lights and headed for the elevator. Five minutes later to the second, he walked out the front door of NUMA headquarters as a dark blue Chevrolet Suburban SUV pulled up to the curb.

A young man in a naval officer’s uniform got out of the back of the SUV and greeted Austin, who recognized Lieutenant Charley Casey, an up-and-coming officer Sandecker had introduced him to at a White House reception.

“Hello, Kurt,” Casey said. “Climb aboard.”

Austin got in the backseat with Casey, and the SUV swung out into Washington traffic.

“Nice to see you again, Lieutenant. What’s going on?”

“Sorry to be evasive, Kurt, but the admiral has asked me to hold off answering any questions for now.”

“Okay. Then how about telling me where we’re headed?”

“Not us. It’s where you’re going.” Casey pointed. “Right there.”

The SUV had only gone a couple of bocks from NUMA headquarters before pulling over to the curb again. Austin thanked Casey for the ride, got out of the SUV, and walked up to the entrance of a restaurant. A neon sign spelled out the name AEGEAN GROTTO.

The restaurant’s owner, an ebullient native of Naxos named Stavros, ambushed Austin as he stepped over the threshold.

“Good evening, Mr. Austin. How are things at the Fish House?”

Stavros used his nickname for NUMA headquarters, where many of his patrons worked as scientists or technicians.

“As fishy as ever,” Austin said with a slight smile. “I’m meeting someone here.”

“Your friend arrived a few minutes ago,” Stavros said. “I’ve seated him at the admiral’s table.”

He led Austin to an alcove at the rear of the dining room. Admiral Sandecker had often dined at the restaurant when he was NUMA director. The table offered a modicum of privacy and a view of the dining room. The blue walls flanking the table were decorated with pictures of squid, octopi, and various other denizens of Stavros’s kitchen.

The man seated at the table gave Austin a quick wave of recognition.

Austin pulled out a chair and sat down opposite Max Kane. “Hello, Doc,” he said. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

“I’m shocked that you were able to see through my masquerade so easily.”

“You had me for a second, Doc, then I noticed your hairline was listing to starboard.”

Kane snatched the thick black wig from his head. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it gliding like a hairy Frisbee toward a nearby table where two men were seated. The wig almost landed in a bowl of avgolemono soup. They glared at Kane, and one man stuffed the hairpiece under the jacket of his dark suit, then went back to his dinner.

Kane burst into laughter.

“Don’t look so worried, Kurt. Those guys are my babysitters. They’re the ones who insisted that I wear the rug out in public.”

Austin gave Kane a tight smile, but he was in no mood for idle talk. In the short time he had known the colorful microbiologist, Austin had almost lost one of his team, seen the B3 project scuttled, and fought an undersea robot a half mile down. He wanted answers, not wig tosses, however skillful. He signaled Stavros by holding two fingers in the air, then turned back to Kane and skewered him with his coral-hued eyes.

“What the hell is going on, Doc?” he asked.

Kane sagged in his chair, as if the wind had gone right out of him.

“Sorry, Kurt. I’ve spent the last few days with those creeps in a safe house subsisting on pizza and Chinese fast food. I’m starting to get a little loopy.”

Austin handed Kane a menu.

“Here’s my antidote for fast food. I’d recommend the psari plaki, fish Athenian-style. Tsatziki and taramosalata for appetizers.”

When Stavros arrived with glasses of ouzo, Austin ordered two of the succulent fish plates. Then he raised his glass. Looking Kane straight in the eye, he said, “Here’s to a discovery that is going to affect every man, woman, and child on the planet.”

“Joe must have told you about my near-death confession.”

“He said the prospect of a watery grave made you forthcoming, up to a point.”

Kane clamped his lips in a smirk.

“I guess I owe you an explanation,” he said.

“I guess you do,” Austin said.

Kane took a blissful sip of ouzo and put his glass down.

“For a couple of years now, I’ve been chairman of a scientific advisory group called the Board on Marine Biology . . . BOMB, for short,” Kane said. “The board includes some of the most brilliant minds in the field of ocean biomedicine. We work with the National Research Council, and advise the government on promising scientific discoveries.”

“And what was your promising discovery, Doc?”

“About a year after I had moved the lab to Bonefish Key, we acquired a rare species of jellyfish related to the sea wasp. We named it the blue medusa because it had an amazingly bright luminescence, but the toxin that the thing produced was what really blew our minds.”

“How so, Doc?”

“The medusa’s toxin didn’t kill. It immobilized the prey so that the medusa could dine on food that was still alive. That’s not an unknown practice in nature. Spiders and wasps like to keep a fresh snack handy.”

Austin nodded in the direction of the restaurant’s lobster tank.

“Human beings do the same thing.”

“You see my point, then. The steers and hogs that we turn into steaks and pork chops have better medical treatment than many humans. We even load those animals down with antibiotics and other medicines to keep them as healthy as possible until we can eat them.”

“Animal husbandry isn’t my strong suit, Doc. Where are you going with this?”

“The blue medusa toxin is the most complex naturally produced chemical I’ve ever seen. It puts up a wall that keeps pathogens at arm’s length. The doomed prey enjoys the best of health while it waits to be devoured.” Kane leaned across the table and dropped his voice. “Now, just suppose we could put those same protective qualities in a drug for humans.”

Austin pondered Kane’s words.

“You’d have an all-purpose pill,” Austin said. “What the snake oil salesmen used to call a cure-all.”

“Bingo! Only this was no snake oil. We had found a medical miracle that just might neutralize some of the greatest scourges of mankind, the ailments caused by viruses, from the common cold to cancer.”

“So why all the hush-hush?” Austin asked. “If people knew you had discovered a cure-all, the world would build statues in your honor.”

“Hell, Kurt, at first we were nominating ourselves for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. After the initial euphoric thrill, we realized that we were about to open Pandora’s box.”

“You wouldn’t get any love letters from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries,” Austin said. “But, in the long term, you’d get a healthier world.”

“It’s that long term that worried us,” Kane said. “Say we give this boon to the world, no strings attached. An easily accessible cure-all goes into production. The average life span increases stratospherically. Instead of six billion souls on the planet, we’d have ten or twelve billion. Picture the pressure that would put on land, water, food, and energy resources.”

“You could have riots, wars, governments toppled, and starvation.”

Kane spread his hands apart as if to say Voila!

“Now imagine what would happen if we kept the discovery secret.”

“Nothing is secret forever. Word would leak out. Those who didn’t have access to the medicine would resent those who did. People with life-threatening diseases would be pounding down the doors of city hall. Chaos again.”

“The scientific board reached the same conclusion,” Kane said. “We were in a quandary. So we compiled a report, which we transmitted to the government. Then fate intervened. An epidemic broke out in China, an influenza-type virus with the potential to set off a worldwide pandemic that would kill millions. And guess what? Our crazy little lab held the key to the cure.”

“Blue medusa?”

“Yup.”

“Is that what you meant when you said your research could impact everyone on the planet?”

Kane nodded.

“Turns out our research held the only hope to fight this thing,” he continued. “The government took over the lab, locked the doors, and worked with the Chinese government to keep the research under wraps until we could come up with a synthesized form of the chemical. They put out a cover story suggesting that the new virus was simply an outbreak of SARS and thus controllable. Which it isn’t. It’s a mutated strain that’s even more virulent than the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic. In one year, that virus killed millions.”

Austin let out a low whistle.

“With the ability people have to globe-hop now,” he said, “that 1918 figure would be a drop in the bucket.”

“This time, it’s the whole bucket, Kurt. The feds classified our findings and made all the lab people government employees, so that anyone talking out of turn could be prosecuted for treason. They also added White House and military people to the board. Then they moved most of the research to a secret undersea lab.”

“Why not stay at Bonefish Key?” Austin asked.

“Too public, for one thing. But there were practical reasons too. We wanted to be near the resource. The blue medusa once covered a wide area, but now it is found primarily in and around a specific deepwater canyon. And we wanted to quarantine our work. We were developing an enhanced version of the medusa, a sort of superjellyfish, a dangerous predator, not the kind of thing you’d want to find in your swimming pool.”

“Are you saying you were working with malignant mutant life-forms, Doc?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“What would happen if they got in the wild?”

“Don’t worry, there’s no danger of them wiping out the ocean’s biomass. They can’t reproduce and would eventually die out in the open. We took great care during the genetic engineering to prevent the possibility of proliferation.”

“That’s still playing with dynamite, Doc. Mother Nature doesn’t like to be upstaged.”

“I know, I know,” Kane said, his voice tightening. “But we were under intense pressure from the government. We had to have greater quantities of the toxin to conduct our synthesis experiments, so we simply grew bigger medusae. The enhanced creatures proved to be more aggressive than the original, and the toxin they produced went off the charts.”

“Before you came to the Beebe, you were in the Pacific Ocean,” Austin observed. “Is that where they put the lab?”

“Yes. Micronesia, to be more exact. The government used an undersea observatory under development for the Navy. We call it Davy Jones’s Locker. I was working there when I heard I’d been nominated for the B3 dive. The project was about to be wrapped up, so I left my assistant, Lois Mitchell, in charge and took a leave of absence. You know the rest.”

“Only up to the point when the Coast Guard snatched you from the deck of the Beebe.”

“The call I got on the Beebe was to tell me that the secret lab had vanished around the same time as the attack on the B3. The security ship guarding the lab was heavily damaged by a missile that may have been launched from a submarine. The whole undersea complex of labs and living quarters, along with the staff, disappeared from the bottom. The Navy’s still searching.”

Austin gazed at Kane as if he’d seen the little man who wasn’t there.

“You’re just full of surprises, Doc.” Stavros was coming from the kitchen with plates in his hands. “Why don’t you tell me about it over appetizers?”

In between bites of pita bread, Kane told Austin about the attack on the support ship and described the depressions left in the ocean floor. When Kane asked Austin if he had any idea how the lab could have been moved, Austin said he’d run it by Zavala. Then he asked a question of his own.

“How far had the research gone when the lab disappeared?”

“We had identified the microorganism that produced the chemical in the jellyfish. With that done, we were on the verge of being able to produce the synthesized version in quantity. We were going to skip over the clinical trials and rely on lab tests and computer models even as we distributed it. There wasn’t time otherwise. We had to have the medicine manufactured and in place if and when the virus broke out of China and spread to other countries.”

“Have you thought of who might be behind the lab’s disappearance?” Austin said.

“I’ve been turning the question over in my mind for days. All I’ve got in return has been a headache.”

“You said that a missile was used to knock out the support ship and that it probably was launched from a submarine. Only a government or a big organization would have the resources to attack the bathysphere and move the lab,” Austin said.

“My thoughts exactly. It follows that only a government would have the resources to untangle this mess. Without that lab, we have no defense against the pandemic. The virus is spreading in China. Once it hits urban areas there, it will break out beyond her borders.”

“The Navy must have ships searching,” Austin said.

“They’re combing the area. But the people who did this would have expected a Navy search and done something to forestall it. A White House guy at my board meeting said he had heard Vice President Sandecker sing your praises, and I saw what you did when the bathysphere was all but lost. So I put out the word that I wanted to see you. And here we are.”

“And here’s our dinner,” Austin said.

He ordered a dry white Santorini wine to go with the fish. For the next half hour, Austin entertained Kane with accounts of dives he had made in the Greek island’s caldera and theories about Santorini being the site of the legendary Atlantis. He then pushed away his empty dinner plate and ordered a custard and thick Greek coffee.

“Well?” Kane asked expectantly.

“I’ll do what I can, but you will have to be totally up front with me, Doc. No holding back. And I’ll need to be able to get in touch with you at any time.”

“You’ll have my full cooperation, Kurt.” He looked over at his bodyguards. “My babysitters are giving me the eye. I have to leave. They think that there’s a whole army of assassins waiting out there to do me in.”

“Don’t be too tough on them, they’re only trying to keep you alive. I’ll pick up the tab.”

Kane jotted down a number where he could be reached. Austin watched Kane with careful eyes as he left the restaurant trailed by the two men. Then he signaled Stavros for the check.

LIEUTENANT CASEY WAS WAITING outside the restaurant in the navy SUV. Austin got in this time without an invitation.

“Nice to see you again, Lieutenant.”

Casey handed him a phone, and Sandecker’s voice crackled on the line.

“Dr. Kane fill you in on the situation, Kurt?”

“He told me about the blue medusa research and the missing lab.”

“Good. This thing is ready to blow up if we don’t find the lab and get hold of that vaccine. You’ve got to find Davy Jones’s Locker. I’ll put the whole damn U.S. Navy at your disposal.”

“How long do we have, Admiral?”

“The CDC computers say the virus will hit the major Chinese cities seventy-two hours from midnight. It will be raging around the world within weeks.”

“Then there is still time?”

“Not really. Once the virus goes beyond China’s borders, it will become unstoppable. The President is gearing up the National Guard so he can declare a state of emergency.”

“In that case, I’ll take whatever help you can give me, sir.”

“If you need more, give me or Casey a call directly. Don’t bother going through intermediaries.” His voice softened. “Good luck, Kurt. And keep an eye on that libidinous Mexican pal of yours.”

Austin handed the phone back.

“When do we leave, Lieutenant?”

“I’ll pick you up and we’ll be at the airport at three a.m.” He paused, then said, “Just to let you know, I have a wife and two kids, Kurt. I’m told that there will be no way to protect them once this thing spreads to the U.S.”

“Those are three good reasons to move quickly, then.”

Austin said he would see Casey in a few hours and got out of the SUV in front of the NUMA tower. He called Zavala’s number on his way to his office to retrieve the Pyramid file but got no response. He wasn’t surprised. His friend could have joined the surveillance team and might be unable to talk. Austin left him a message to call back as soon as he was clear.

Austin picked up the file, then got on the elevator and headed to the fifteenth floor. He followed a corridor to a door marked NUMASAT and stepped into a large, dimly lit space that had a wide, curving wall lined with glowing television screens. The screens displayed information from NUMA’s satellite system, a complex network that collected information about oceans from around the world for scientists and universities.

Presiding over the communications network was an eccentric genius named Jack Wilmut, who supervised the system from an elaborate console in the center of the room surrounded by workstations. From his perch, he could also keep track of every NUMA research project, ship, and staffer working in the field. He saw Austin approaching, and a smile crossed his plumpish face.

“What a surprise to find you here at headquarters, Kurt.”

Austin pulled a chair up to the console.

“Don’t kid me, Jack, you could figure out exactly where I am in a second. I’ve got a favor. I’ve lost contact with Joe. Can you find him?”

Wilmut patted down one side of his double comb-over.

“He’s probably in a Washington boudoir,” he said. Seeing from Austin’s unsmiling face that he was deadly serious, he added, “I’ll do my best. What’s he got?”

“Transmitter in his Corvette, for one.”

“Easy,” Wilmut said.

He tapped the keyboard in front of him, and seconds later the screen displayed a blinking red star on a map of Falls Church. The location was displayed in a box next to the star.

“The car is at the Eden Center. He probably stopped in for some Vietnamese food.”

The Eden Center was a complex of shops and restaurants that served the Vietnamese population of Falls Church.

“He doesn’t like Vietnamese food,” Austin said. “Try finding his phone.”

Wilmut traced Zavala’s cell through its GPS chip.

A second blinking star appeared on the outskirts of the city, several miles from the first. Wilmut enlarged the map and switched to a satellite picture. The star was on one of a couple of dozen rectangles, apparently the roofs of large buildings. He zoomed in.

“Looks like an industrial complex,” Wilmut said. “All the buildings look pretty much alike.”

“I need an address,” Austin said.

Wilmut punched a button and GOOD LUCK FORTUNE COOKIE COMPANY appeared on the screen. He laughed, and said, “Guess he likes Chinese food.”

Austin thanked Wilmut, and rode the elevator down to the garage to pick up his Jeep Cherokee. As he drove along the Potomac, he found Caitlin’s number in his directory. She immediately recognized his voice.

“This must be my lucky week,” she said. “The two handsomest men at NUMA calling me. How are you, Kurt?”

“I’m a little worried about Joe. Do you know anything about an FBI Asian gang stakeout involving Charlie Yoo?”

“No such thing, Kurt. Charlie is a guest of the Bureau. He is notified of field ops only at our discretion, and we don’t have anything like that going.”

“That’s what I thought,” Austin said. “Thanks for your help, Caitlin.”

“What the hell-”

Austin clicked off, and the unfinished question was lost in the ether. Driving with one hand, he quickly programmed the address Wilmut had given him into the dashboard GPS unit.

Next, he reached for a rack under his seat, pulled out the holster containing his Bowen revolver, put it on the seat beside him, then stomped on the gas.