Bioterror! (an Ell Donsaii story #14) Read online

  The men from the government had taken Adin’s son away, leaving black despair in Adin’s soul. Adin had hired good lawyers who’d told Adin the evidence was overwhelming. They’d work toward a short sentence but could not even hope for a dismissal of the charges. If Adin’s son could be an exemplary prisoner, perhaps he could be out in a decade or so.

  Grasping at that straw, Adin visited his son frequently, encouraging good behavior and talking of what they’d do after Shadan was released.

  But then Adin’s son was dead…

  He’d attacked a guard, they said. Shouting Allah’s name and suicidally attacking one of two armed guards. He’d tried to take the man’s pistol.

  The other guard had killed Shadan, Adin’s only son, leaving Adin’s soul impoverished and bleak.

  It’d taken months for Adin to realize that his son had been a warrior till the end.

  Even prison hadn’t been enough to blunt Shadan’s will. Even from prison Adin’s son kept attacking his enemy as represented by the nonbeliever guards.

  After much soul searching Adin decided to take up arms in his son’s war himself. Surprisingly Homeland Security hadn’t removed the material his son had downloaded onto their house AI. Adin disconnected that AI from the Internet and bought another one to replace it. Then, keeping the old AI isolated from the Internet, Adin used it to learn about Islam Akbar and God’s fiery will without going onto the net himself.

  Adin would take the place of his son as one of God’s warriors. He’d do it in such a way that Homeland Security wouldn’t ever realize what was coming.

  The sword Adin could wield was mightier than any that’d ever been forged from steel.

  Adin was a virologist…

  Prologue

  Paris, France—Another cheating scandal erupted at the Tour de France today when officials discovered that yellow jersey rider Emile Vargas had oxygen transmitting ports glued to the back surface of his molars. Initially angry at Vargas, when the doctors for the Tour insisted on inspecting their teeth as well, several of the other riders then objected that it was an invasion of their privacy.

  Seven other riders were also found to have oxygenating ports…

  Adin walked down the hall with Jerry Scott, one of the techs who worked in the BSL-4 (Biosafety Level 4 lab). They’d been talking about soccer, a favorite pastime of both of them though Adin preferred to call it futball. Adin rattled on about one of the players while Jerry coded in his password. The keypad had a shield to keep people from watching password entries, but Adin had practiced watching videos of people’s hands while they entered passwords. He’d gotten pretty good at telling what password was keyed from the way a hand moved.

  As Jerry said goodbye and went on into the BSL-4 Adin recited the password in his mind to be sure he’d remember it.

  A couple of weeks later Adin stopped back by the lab late one night—not at all unusual behavior for him. An hour later he palmed the door plate so his implanted RFID would key him out of the building. Pushing the door open he jammed it with a shoe and stepped back inside. He attached a thin steel plate to the magnetic door sensor so the building’s AI would think the door had closed again. The plate had a thin, Kevlar string hanging from it. He put a piece of duct tape over the latch on the door so it wouldn’t lock when it closed. Knowing his AI’d have had a handshake with the building’s AI as he left, he walked all the way to his car. There he was far enough from the door that the building’s AI’d lose direct contact and think he was completely gone from the campus. Shutting off his own AI, he changed his clothes, put on a hood and pulled on some blue lab gloves which would both prevent fingerprints and disguise his skin color. Sending his car home, he returned and reentered the building. The duct tape on the latch meant he didn’t have to use his RFID key to get back in.

  He had a copy of Jerry’s fingerprint that he’d lifted off a glass. Adin’d glued copies of the fingerprint to several of the digits on the lab gloves before he left home. He made a quick detour to where everyone kept their white coats on a line of hooks in the hall and took Jerry’s badge. Jerry, squeamish about needles, had never been RFID implanted so his RFID was in his photo ID badge. Jerry was supposed to keep the badge with him at all times, but he was well known to forget it. Adin knew Jerry’d left the badge on his coat because he’d been looking for it every day when he left work for weeks. Adin always hung his own coat on the hook adjacent to Jerry’s. The presence of the badge was the reason Adin was here on this particular night. Arriving at the BSL-4, he tapped the palm pad with Jerry’s card, carefully holding the card in his left hand so the pad couldn’t sense his own RFID. Then Adin applied the glove finger with Jerry’s fingerprint to the sensor next to the pad. Finally, with a little shudder of nerves, he keyed in what he believed to be Jerry’s password.

  Adin exhaled in relief as the door unlocked. Inside the BSL he stepped over to the -80o freezer. He’d been in the room last month with one of the other investigators, so he knew what to expect. Pulling open one of the freezer drawers he looked in the back of it where a door was locked over the bin containing reference cultures for highly pathogenic organisms. Adin used a screwdriver he’d brought to scrape the frost away from the front edge of the bin.

  Adin didn’t have a key, but the screwdriver also served to pop the door open. As he’d known from studying the freezer in his own lab, the latches on the locked bins were pieces of crap. He lifted out a rack of vials and studied their labels, wondering whether there’d be something dangerous enough in the bin to justify the risks he’d taken to break into it. To his astonishment he saw one of the vials was labeled Variola major!

  Samples of Variola major, or smallpox, thought to have been eradicated in the wild, were only supposed to be kept in the CDC in Atlanta, and the Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Russia. As a disease, smallpox spread rapidly from person to person and had a mortality over thirty percent. With trembling hands he lifted out the smallpox culture. After a moment spent staring at the innocent looking vial of death, he dropped it in his pocket and put an empty vial into the bin in its place.

  Back in his own lab, Adin quickly scraped the smallpox label off the vial and covered it with a label for adenovirus B-28. Such a virus didn’t exist, so he could be relatively sure no one would come looking for it and take his vial by mistake. On the other hand, if someone found the vial and wondered about it, they’d probably just assume that someone had been told to write out a label for D-28. It’d be easy to understand how they might’ve heard B instead of D and written B-28 on the label instead.

  Hustling down the stairs he went over and picked up the Kevlar string dangling from the steel plate that was spoofing the magnetic door sensor.

  Pushing the door open, Adin trailed the Kevlar string from the magnet out through the gap in the door. He pulled the duct tape off the door latch and gently closed the door. Once the door was shut and attracting the sensor itself, he used his Kevlar string to pull the magnet off the sensor and out of the door gap.

  Taking a deep breath, he started the long walk home. His car had, as instructed, driven itself home shortly after he left the building the first time. This’d give him an alibi if, or rather when, someone detected his second spate of activity in the building. At various locations on the long walk home he disposed of the mask, the fingerprints, and the gloves, each in separate trash cans.

  ***

  Carley looked around Dr. Barnes’ lab, wondering if she could ever learn how to use all the equipment in it. She’d done very well as an undergraduate at UNC, getting bachelor’s degrees in both biochemistry and microbiology during the four years covered by her Morehead scholarship. She’d decided that her real interest lay in the study of DNA, so she’d applied to Duke University’s PhD program in genetics.

  When she started her first semester of grad school she’d been hoping to get into Dr. Hodges lab. She’d been disappointed when he hadn’t accepted her. Instead she’d wound up with Dr. Barnes who’d been her second choice.
As she’d learned more about the two researchers however, she’d decided that fate had smiled on her. Hodges was supposed to be quite the jerk. Apparently, he seldom accepted women grad students and most people thought he was pretty misogynistic.

  And just plain mean.

  Barnes had a great reputation for being very nice. Nice or not, everyone said she was a genius.

  Carley hoped she could measure up to Barnes’ standard.

  ***

  Adin opened the -80o freezer in his lab. It’d been a couple of months since he’d stolen the smallpox sample and so far no alarm had been raised. At first he’d feared someone would notice the broken latch on the bin containing the pathogen reference cultures. However, it hadn’t happened. He suspected that, since no one in the lab had worked with high end pathogens for years, no one’d had an occasion to try to open the bin and thus notice its latch was broken. Even if they did, the frost in a minus eighty freezer could sometimes jam up a bin so that it needed to be pried open anyway. They might attribute the broken latch to their own efforts in opening it. Now that months had passed, if someone did notice it’d take extensive detective work to even determine when the freezer had been broken into, much less track it to Adin.

  As well, when he’d pondered why a sample of smallpox still existed in their freezers, he realized that there was a good chance no one’d been in the highly pathogenic organism drawer for years, possibly decades. If anyone knowledgeable had seen the Variola major label they’d have known that the lab wasn’t allowed to store it. On the other hand, he supposed it was possible someone was simply flouting the law.

  Adin felt a little bit nervous working with such a dangerous organism when the biosafety set up in his own lab would only qualify as level 2. However, he’d spent some time upgrading the filters and seals in the safety cabinet and had purchased high quality disposable protective clothing. In his own mind he thought of his lab as a level 3. It met most of the standards anyway. Besides, Adin was immune.

  Like most people born since the early 1970s, Adin had never been vaccinated for smallpox which would’ve made working with the sample particularly dangerous. However, he’d also found a sample of cowpox. Cowpox was a milder virus which was used to vaccinate people for smallpox since immunity to cowpox provided immunity to smallpox. Thus, after growing up some of the cowpox, he’d been able to vaccinate himself with it.

  Now it was time to sequence the Variola major virus. As unbelievable as it might seem, a few decades ago, he could’ve avoided all the cloak and dagger required to steal the actual virus and just downloaded its DNA sequence off the Internet. However, in the past decade a significant effort had been made to remove such sequences from publicly available databases. Adin suspected that if he’d searched the web hard enough he might’ve found a sequence hidden away on some server somewhere, however, he also suspected that the NSA kept a careful watch for people who were making such searches.

  He’d just have to get the sequence the old-fashioned way…

  ***

  Carley’d stolen some time to do yet another web search for her brother Eli. Eli’s name might be unusual, but there were plenty of Elis to sort through considering that she had no idea what his last name would be now. Searches for Eli Bolin hadn’t turned up anything so she assumed he’d been adopted and changed his last name like she had. Requests to the court system for information about her brother’s current name or location had all been rejected.

  She looked up as Alice dropped into the lab chair near her. Alice was a more senior grad student who Carley frequently looked to for advice. She looked excited so Carley said, “What’s up?”

  Alice lifted an eyebrow, “Know where Dr. Barnes is this afternoon?”

  Carley shook her head.

  “D5R!” Alice said in an awed tone. “She said she had an appointment with Ell Donsaii herself.”

  Carley stared for a moment, “Are we going to be working with extraterrestrial DNA?”

  “Maybe?” Alice said. “I can’t imagine why else Donsaii’d want to talk to Dr. Barnes!” Alice leaned closer and lowered her voice a little, “Better yet, Dr. Hodges came by in one of his moods. He buttonholed me, wanting to know where Reggie was. I got to tell him that she was out at D5R talking to Donsaii. You’d have thought I’d shit on his shoes!”

  Not wanting to encourage it, Carley suppressed a giggle over Alice’s crudity. She’d already learned to dislike Hodges though, so she couldn’t help but smile at the image. “ET DNA,” she said, pretending that was the reason for the smile. “Wow, that could be very cool.”

  ***

  Adin Farsq leaned back in his chair and admired the results of his labors. In the months since he’d discovered the smallpox sample he’d managed to get himself established as an Orthopoxvirus researcher—Orthopoxvirus being the genus which included the smallpox, cowpox, monkeypox, buffalopox and camelpox species. Ostensibly, he was working on them because of the health and economic problems caused by cowpox and camelpox. Cowpox, or Variolae vaccinae was actually what the practice of vaccination was named after. In 1796 Jenner’d begun advocating the inoculation of people with material from cowpox lesions in order to prevent smallpox. Cowpox could attack an unusually wide range of animal hosts—in fact the cows it was named after were one of the animals it least frequently attacked—and vaccine derived versions of cowpox had spread all around the world during the efforts to eradicate smallpox. Camelpox caused trouble in various nomadic communities which depended on camels.

  With this as his justification for studying the Orthopoxviruses, Adin had been growing up cultures of the various species, decoding their DNA and manipulating them in ways that he posited might make them less pathogenic to their hosts. This was in keeping with his desire to develop a milder form of cowpox that he could use to vaccinate the faithful before he began to spread his weaponized version of smallpox. The original use of cowpox as a vaccination had been much more dangerous than subsequent modern vaccinations for other diseases. It invoked substantial risks because it was a live virus which caused a substantial illness in a small percentage of people vaccinated with it. A small percentage of those vaccinated actually died from cowpox. The risks of being vaccinated had contributed substantially to the argument for stopping vaccinations once smallpox had been eliminated—other than in the laboratory. If there had been a safer vaccination, the presence of smallpox in various biowarfare stockpiles might have caused countries to continue vaccinating their citizens.

  There were, however, some downsides to stopping smallpox vaccination because the vaccination provided some level of protection from HIV. In fact, though it wasn’t clear why, asthma, malignant melanoma and various other infectious disease hospitalizations were lower in people who’d been vaccinated—both asthma and HIV having notably become much more of a problem in the decades subsequent to when the smallpox vaccinations were stopped. In fact, even after smallpox had been eliminated; in low income countries, adults who had smallpox vaccination scars had a substantially lower overall mortality than adults who hadn’t been vaccinated—for reasons that were not fully understood.

  Thus Adin had been able to couch his proposals to study Orthopoxvirus species in terms of the economic benefits that might be achieved from a camel vaccination program and the human health benefits that might be achieved through development of a less dangerous cowpox vaccination for humans.

  Hidden amongst his viral specimen and viral genomes were the specimens and genomes of smallpox. He’d mislabeled them Variolae vaccinae GER-1999, a version of cowpox that didn’t exist. Because the cowpox and smallpox viruses were related, it’d take a high level of suspicion and a concerted effort for someone to prove that his GER-1999 was in fact smallpox or Variola major and not Variolae vaccinae.

  Now he felt safe beginning the work of developing a safer version of cowpox and a more lethal version of smallpox…

  Chapter One

  Vanessa knocked on the frame of Dr. Turner’s open door. When he looked up inquisit
ively she said, “It’s about Zage.”

  “What’s he done now?”

  “As he’d anticipated, his peptide made the obese rats lose weight.”

  Turner barked a frustrated laugh. “When’s that kid going to hypothesize something that doesn’t prove to be true?!”

  Vanessa shook her head, “Damned if I know. Wish it’d rub off on me.”

  Letting out a sigh, Turner said, “You going to help him write up a paper?”

  “Already done.”

  “Whoa, you got right on that.”

  “I didn’t do it. Zage just sent it to me this morning.”

  Turner shrugged, “You up to whipping it into shape then?”

  She shook her head, “Nothing to whip that I can find. I wish I could write that well.”

  Turner laughed again, “The kid’s going to drive me to drink! Send it on to me. Hopefully I can find something to change. We don’t want him getting a swelled head.”

  After Vanessa left, Turner thought, I suppose we’d better file that peptide with the University’s patent office…

  ***

  Adin’s AI chimed a reminder and he got up to put the book back on its shelf. As he made his way out of the medical library he took care to do nothing that might bring attention to himself. Leaving before it got so late that there were few patrons left was the first step of this. Adin did have library access, but when he entered the library he waited for the approach of another patron and followed closely enough behind them that he could slip in without extending his hand and letting the library’s AI read his RFID. So far, only one person had frowned back over their shoulder at him as if they thought it odd that he’d followed them so closely. He exited the building in the same fashion.