Chapter 13

“Why can’t we just turn the lights on?” Fish asked. He stood next to the desk by the wall farthest from the door.

“Because, if we get caught, it will not only mean the end of our own relatively unimportant lives, but also the deaths of billions of others.” Abdul felt uncomfortable about the enormous gravity of what he’d just said so he added, “We’ll have all the light we need from the computer.”

He sat down at the keyboard on the other end of the desk. “Just be patient.”

“I’ve been extremely patient,” Fish said in a very annoyed tone.

Abdul looked up at him and sighed. “Yes, I suppose you have. Just give me another thirty seconds and I’ll see what I can do about giving you some light.”

Abdul shined his cell phone over the keyboard in his search for the power button. He found it and pushed it. The monitor blinked on. A few seconds later, that quarter of the room had some light on it.

“It shouldn’t take me longer than five minutes to log in and download the file,” Abdul said handing his cell phone over to Fish. “After that, I can show you the second laboratory. Go ahead and look around if you’d like.”

“I’m not walking around a potentially biohazard area in the dark. I just want to see the results on the computer. If the lab really is what you say, I’m not going near that thing.”

“Even better. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner we can go to the authorities.”

Ed Lawrence drove with one eye on the mostly empty road in front of him and one eye on his smart phone’s screen. Whatever the hell the two misguided grad students were doing there, they were doing it on the computer.

Lawrence had no idea what they might be looking for and he didn’t care. His job had been to secure the building and make sure no one got in who wasn’t supposed to get in. And since it was excruciatingly obvious that he’d royally cocked that up, he now had to clean up after himself.

He’d chosen his hotel room for its close proximity to his target. If he was honest with himself, he should have been sleeping somewhere in the building. But, he’d gotten lazy; or at least grown too fond of the comforts he enjoyed. That, combined with Miles Devlin telling him this was going to be his easiest assignment ever, was why he was currently driving ten miles over the speed limit with only one eye on the road.

Abdul smiled when he saw Radford hadn’t changed his password since he had broken in the previous night. “I’m in.”

Fish had been using the cell phone to light up the office. He hadn’t seen anything suspicious except for the fact that the office was actually here when Radford had specifically told him the building’s top two floors were empty. He hustled back to behind the desk. “What have you got?”

Abdul went into the only file on the computer. Three clicks later and Fish’s research showed up. “Does this look familiar?”

Fish recognized his work instantly. “Yeah, that’s my vaccine.”

“Have you seen the virus?”

“I’ve seen the DNA, but I haven’t seen it in action if that’s what you mean.”

“Would you like to?”

Seeing it in action shouldn’t be anything special. Still, he’d come all this way. And who knew what the feds would allow him to see if things ever got that far. “Sure.”

Abdul clicked on a digital video. He’d already seen what the virus could do. He’d watched the recording over and over: first in shock, then in horror, then in awe. He was now watching Fish to gauge his reaction, hoping he hadn’t erred in thinking him innocent.

Fish saw the virus enter the healthy cell through the outer wall. The virus started dividing inside the healthy cell. “What speed is this?”

“Real time.”

“No way. It’s too fast. It’s not possible.”

“It is possible if you allow for the fact that the person infected dies in approximately three days.”

“This isn’t…” Fish’s thought trailed off as he saw the virus cells divide again inside what had been a healthy cell. Another group of divisions and the original cell wall burst. The only cells left were from the virus.

Fish didn’t say a word. He just stood there and thought over the implications of what he’d just seen.

Abdul gave him a few seconds, then said, “I’m certain you’ve been too busy working to know anything about what’s happening in Berhanu.”

“Where?”

“It’s a country in the Eastern part of Sub-Saharan Africa. There’s an Ebola-type epidemic right now. It hasn’t been big news here in the States yet, but there are reports from both Europe and Africa itself. It’s a disaster.”

“Okay, I’m making a vaccine to help stop it.”

“No, you’re making a vaccine to stop this.” Abdul dragged the cursor to another window and double-clicked on it.

Another virus attacked what seemed to be a healthy cell. First, it bounced back and forth on the cell’s outer wall. After about six tries, it penetrated the membrane. Once inside, the virus split once into two distinct smaller viral cells inside the larger healthy cell. The viral cells bounced around a bit at the perimeter of the healthy cell’s nucleus.

“This is so much slower,” Fish said.

Abdul was quiet. Fish figuring it out for himself would make it sink in more than if Abdul explained it to him. And there was no doubt in Abdul’s mind that Fish would indeed figure it out.

Fish watched as the virus slowly overtook the healthy cell, using what it needed and destroying the rest. “Fuck me in the ass with a two-by-four.”

“What?” Abdul said, stunned at the vulgar phrase he’d never heard before.

“The first virus… if you catch that, people would be able to tell you were sick the first day. Everyone who didn’t love you would stay the hell away from you. But this virus… you wouldn’t know you were infected for the first two or three days.”

Fish was quiet for a couple of seconds, thinking the implications through in his mind. He then spoke them out loud. “If it was airborne, someone would infect a cluster of people. Those people would mushroom out, each person starting their own cluster. If this thing was turned loose in an airport, it could go all over the world before the first cluster of people even knew they were sick. Health officials wouldn’t know there was a problem until it was too late to quarantine anyone. It would all just… multiply until it was too late to do anything.”

Abdul nodded, happy that Fish had agreed with his own estimations. “That’s why they need the vaccine before they unleash the second virus.”

“Yeah, but Abdul, even if the virus is ninety percent effective, ten percent of the people who get vaccinated still will die. Add those dead bodies to what… about ninety percent of the people who aren’t vaccinated and you get…”

The more Fish thought about it, the more agitated he was becoming. “This thing is worse than the worst case scenario of small pox or bird flu, or… or any of them. Even the Bubonic Plague only killed about half of the people who were infected with it. If Radford can make this thing air-born… oh, my God. It’s the end of the world.”

“I’d have to disagree with you there. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, just the end of the human race. Except for the vaccinated. Or, I should say, ninety percent of them.”

“Have you seen any records for a second and third laboratory?”

“No, why?”

“Because after he makes the vaccine, he’ll have to mass produce it. Unless he lives like a caveman, people are going to be needed to keep the electricity coming, national defense… Jesus, who’s going to take care of all the nuclear weapons?”

Abdul reached into his shirt’s front pocket and pulled out a USB stick. “You make a number of excellent points I hadn’t considered but those answers are too much for us to find tonight. It’s time to leave and go to the FBI.” He slid the stick into the computer’s hard-drive and made a copy.

“Are we ready?” Fish asked.

Abdul stood up and put the memory stick in his front pants’ pocket. “We’re off.”

Abdul fell in behind Fish who turned and lit the way in front of them with the cell phone.

Ed Lawrence made his way down the hallway with a silencer-tipped gun in his right hand and a mini-flashlight in his left. As he looked up, he saw a faint light from the side at the far end of the hallway. He turned his light off, dropped down to a squat, and raised his left hand high above his head. His right hand was in front of his eyes and ready to shoot.

Fish held the cell phone in front of them as he led Abdul out of the office and into the hallway. He took two confident steps when a voice came out of the black in front of him and yelled, “Freeze!”

Fish froze.

“Put your hands up!”

“Okay, but you said just freeze and I’ll have to move to do that.”

“Put your hands up, smart ass!”

Fish put his hands up. A flashlight shined on him with the most powerful part of the white beam directed at his eyes. He turned his head and squinted them shut.

“Tell your pal to come out from behind you.”

Abdul came out from behind Fish without having to be told. The beam moved to Fish’s left to catch both grad students in the light. Both of Abdul’s hands were in the front pockets of his windbreaker.

“Put your hands up.”

“I’ll do no such thing. I refuse to be treated like a common criminal,” Abdul said with his hands still in his pockets. “Identify yourself or we’re leaving.”

Lawrence was caught off guard. He’d never been verbally accosted by someone he was holding a gun on. That’s when he realized they couldn’t see his weapon. “You’re under arrest.”

“That’s a great idea,” Fish said with a smile. “Let’s call the police.”

Lawrence couldn’t figure out why the grad student with no criminal record was so excited at the notion of being arrested.

“Why haven’t you turned the lights on?” Abdul asked. “Why are you sulking around in the dark?”

Lawrence had hoped to interrogate both of them before their double execution. But given the Arab’s disagreeable disposition, that was seeming less likely. Still, if he killed one in front of the other, it would make the one still alive more cooperative.

“Brace yourself,” Abdul whispered toward Fish.

“For what?” Fish whispered back with his hands still in the air.

Abdul gripped the handle of the gun in the front pocket of his windbreaker. He’d never fired from his stomach’s level before but there was no way he had enough time to pull his weapon and aim properly. There was no doubt in his mind the man holding the flashlight was a professional killer and not some security guard making ten dollars an hour. He took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger twice.