The Cobra Event

  He opened it. Now he was in a corridor even shorter than the first one. There were some white Tyvek coveralls on a shelf, and some masks hanging on a wall. The masks were full-face respirator masks with purple virus filters. At the end of this corridor was yet another door. This one had a window in it, with a biohazard sign on the window, and the numeral 3. The door led inward toward the center of the building.

  “The ring design,” Littleberry said.

  He looked through the window.

  It was a small room, gleaming white, antiseptic. On a table in the center of the room sat a bioreactor. It was a top-hat model with a core in the shape of an hourglass. The unit was marked with the name of a manufacturer, Biozan.

  He reached up and took one of the masks, and put it on. He opened the door, carrying the briefcase.

  The Biozan reactor was running. He could feel the warmth coming from it. There was no smell in the air.

  He placed his hand on the glass surface of the Biozan unit. It was exactly the temperature of the human body, 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 37 degrees Centigrade. The temperature of living cells. The hourglass core was full of cells, and the cells were sick with a virus. From the top hat (the upper lid) of the bioreactor came tangles of flexible tubing. A liquid was draining out of the Biozan slowly into a sealed glass collection jar, which sat on the floor. The liquid inside the reactor was a pinkish red. The cells in the reactor were sick and dying, and were bursting and pouring out virus particles into the liquid, and then the virus-saturated liquid was running slowly out of the Biozan.

  “Caught a fly,” he said out loud.

  He opened the Halliburton and pulled out a sterile swab. He stripped the wrapping off the swab. Just then he heard footsteps in the corridor. Quickly Littleberry ducked down against the wall, below the level of the window in the door. The Halliburton was sitting open and in view.

  Someone looked into the room but didn’t enter. He heard sharp-heeled shoes. It sounded like a woman.

  He got to his feet and jammed the swab into and around the exit port of the Biozan, where liquid was flowing out of the bioreactor and into the collection jar. He held a Boink biosensor unit in his hands. He stuck the swab into the sample port of the Boink.

  It beeped. The screen read “COBRA.”

  He jammed the swab into a sample tube, to preserve it, and dropped it into the Halliburton. He had seen enough. Time to get out of here before the stuff gets into my brain and turns me into a human bioreactor. He put the mask back on the wall and went out through the vestibule. He emerged in the main hallway and turned a corner, looking for Hopkins and the others.

  That was where he encountered the woman. She came around the corner heading in the other direction. Their eyes met.

  It was Dr. Mariana Vestof.

  He blurted out, “I was looking for a men’s room.”

  Time hung suspended. Her face held no expression. Then she smiled, but her face was drained of blood, and she said, “Still inspecting toilets, Dr. Littleberry?” She laughed a musical laugh, but her face hardly moved, and was without emotion.

  “Still making vaccines, Dr. Vestof?” he said.

  “Only for you, Dr. Littleberry.”

  At that moment, Hopkins and Austen appeared, coming down the hall, followed by Heyert.

  The sight of Hopkins seemed to paralyze Dr. Vestof for a few seconds.

  Hopkins reacted not at all.

  “I will attend to some business,” Dr. Vestof said, turning away.

  Hopkins looked at his watch, “Well, thank you, Dr. Heyert. You’ve been very generous with your time.”

  “I wish I could help you more.”

  “You’ve been very helpful.”

  HOPKINS, AUSTEN, AND LITTLEBERRY dove into the waiting F.B.I. car. Hopkins was on his cell phone immediately with Frank Masaccio. He asked for perimeter surveillance to be thrown around the Bio-Vek building. “We need this building covered completely. Mark says it’s a weapons facility. He took a sample from a bioreactor and it came up positive for Cobra.” He explained who Dr. Vestof was. “I saw her last week in Iraq. She’s an international type, Russian-born, lives in Geneva, she told me. She is in this thing deep.”

  “If that’s a biological weapon they’re making, we can bust them now,” Masaccio said. “That’s a Title 18 crime. Except that sample Mark took might not hold up in court.” Masaccio was thinking about the way Littleberry had gathered the evidence. It may have been an illegal search.

  The question was whether to raid Bio-Vek immediately or to hold perimeter surveillance and gather more evidence. Masaccio finally decided to hold surveillance for the night. “Remember, our main goal is to get the Unsub before he kills more people. The company could lead us to the Unsub.”

  The helicopter crossed Red Bank, New Jersey, and bent out over Raritan Bay. It headed up the eastern side of Staten Island, vectoring on Governors Island. Whitecaps whipped the sea below; a strong onshore breeze buffeted the helicopter.

  “Bio-Vek may be connected to BioArk, the company that Vestof said she works for,” Hopkins said. “Maybe the two companies are swapping strains and technology.”

  “Welcome to the global village,” Littleberry said.

  “I’ll bet Heyert’s telling himself he hasn’t done anything wrong,” Hopkins said.

  “He’s probably working both sides of the street,” Littleberry said. “Making money curing diseases. Making money selling diseases.”

  AT BIO-VEK, Dr. Heyert, Dr. Vestof, and two other managers sat in the conference room. The late-afternoon sunlight lit up the tinted amber window. There seemed to be no one around, and the fields outside were serene and beautiful. The F.B.I. was pouring surveillance into the area. The surveillance teams, which were coming out of Trenton and New York, were men and woman of varying ages and ethnic backgrounds, driving various kinds of cars.

  Outdoors a swollen female robin, gravid with eggs, bounded across a stretch of manicured grass. Inside, Heyert was speaking. “I want the production stopped. Immediately.” They were going to stop the Biozan, stop the centrifuges, stop everything. They would sterilize all liquid materials by mixing them with bleach, and when they were sure the materials were dead, they would pour them down the drains, followed by water. “I want those rooms nuked with bleach, from top to bottom,” Heyert said. “We will restart the production line with our non-weaponized virus. Destroy all weaponized product, including the master seed cultures. Destroy every trace of the weapon. Erase all data pertaining to the project from the computer hard drives.”

  “If they search you, I assume there will be nothing to find,” Dr. Vestof said.

  “The problem is Tom Cope,” Dr. Heyert said. “He’s done something—I don’t know what he’s done, but they are looking for him. He was a sick man, Cope. I knew it at the time. When we fired him, that number-four Biozan went with him. He stole it. He must have taken a master seed culture of the weapon. Did he?”

  The managers didn’t know.

  “How can you possibly tell me you don’t know if Cope stole a master seed?” Heyert said angrily. “Every single seed tube was bar-coded!”

  “He may have grown virus from a very small amount,” one of the managers said.

  “Do you think this employee stole a seed culture, Dr. Heyert?” Dr. Vestof said. She held him in a hard gaze. “That is incredible. The Concern will be appalled.”

  Sweat was pouring from Heyert. The armpits of his shirt were dark and wet. “This isn’t my fault!”

  “You are the manager of this division, I believe,” she replied cooly.

  “Where is Cope now?” Heyert asked his managers.

  No one had any idea.

  “Is he in New York?”

  Dr. Vestof had changed her plans. She would fly out tonight. She could see that the American subsidiary was about to blow up, and she didn’t want to be anywhere near the United States when that happened.

  Freeze

  THAT NIGHT, the Reachdeep unit went into a kind of stasis
on Governors Island. Suzanne Tanaka was hovering between life and death in the medical unit. She had had a seizure. Her prognosis was terminal, according to Dr. Aguilar.

  Oscar Wirtz readied his people for an operation. His squad consisted of a total of six agents from the Hostage Rescue Team who were trained in chemical, nuclear, and biological hot operations. It was clear that a freeze-and-seize raid would be made on Bio-Vek, but it was not clear when the raid would occur. Masaccio wanted to wait, to see if more evidence would develop, and he also hoped that the surveillance of the company might lead directly to the Unsub. But he realized that he might have to move at any moment to shut down the company, depending on what the surveillance revealed.

  There were fifteen Bio-Vek employees at the headquarters. The rule of thumb the F.B.I. uses for a freeze-and-seize raid is for the evidence team to outnumber the employees at the site. You assign one agent to each employee, including secretaries and mail clerks. The culminating rush of a freeze-and-seize raid should take perhaps sixty seconds. During that time, every employee of the company is frozen by an agent who finds the employee and orders him to stop his physical hand motions, to move his body away from any company equipment and then freeze his body. Most employees will be innocent of any crime and will not be subject to arrest. But the company in its entirety can become federal evidence. Masaccio thought the raid could be accomplished with about forty agents, including the Reachdeep operations squad. He gave Hopkins the job of talking to a federal magistrate, asking for a search warrant to be drawn up.

  AT ONE O’CLOCK in the morning, agents watching the Bio-Vek building reported lights and activity. It seemed that all the Bio-Vek employees had gone home, except Heyert, who had not emerged from the building. The lights and activity did not look good. Then, through a window, the agents observed Heyert putting paper into a shredding machine.

  “That’s it! They’re destroying evidence! Freeze them!” Masaccio shouted. He was sitting in the Command Center of the Federal Building in New York City. Helicopters took off from Governors Island. Bureau cars carrying agents converged on Bio-Vek.

  Alice Austen did not go on the raid. She was not trained in operations. She stayed with Suzanne Tanaka, sitting by Tanaka’s bedside, wearing a protective suit. Tanaka was connected to monitoring machines and life-support machines, but they made no real difference, nor did any of the supportive therapy seem to make any difference. The virus had invaded Tanaka’s midbrain, had nested itself at the top of the brain stem, where it could not be reached. Tanaka had bitten her lips, but what seemed to bother her the most were the poxlike blood blisters that formed and began to burst inside her mouth. She asked for water but could not coordinate her swallowing, and she spilled water mixed with blood from her mouth over the arms of Austen’s biohazard suit. Tanaka remained conscious until nearly the end. The virus had left the conscious part of her mind clear even while it destroyed her unconscious mind.

  “Do you believe in God, Alice?” Tanaka said. Her voice was thick, difficult to understand. Her face twitched, covered with sweat.

  “Yes, but I don’t understand God,” Austen answered.

  A helicopter landed, carrying Suzanne Tanaka’s mother, who had been flown up from North Carolina. Tanaka had finally asked for her mother to come see her. But by the time they got her mother dressed in a protective suit, it was too late. Suzanne Tanaka had died.

  THE FIRST UNIT of F.B.I. agents to move on Bio-Vek was a group wearing operational clothing but not space suits. They tried the door. It was locked, so they broke it with impact rams, and rushed in. They were followed instantly by Wirtz and the Reachdeep operations group, who were wearing space suits. They had suited up at the airfield. They peeled off down a corridor. Littleberry and Hopkins, both wearing protective suits, went with Wirtz to show him the way to the bioreactor room. Agents poured into the building, heading in all directions.

  They found Heyert and one Bio-Vek manager. There was no one else on the premises. Heyert was in his office talking on the telephone when they entered. The team served him with a search warrant and informed him that all of Bio-Vek, Inc., was being confiscated as federal evidence, including all computer data. They did not place Dr. Heyert under arrest. They asked him if he would mind waiting voluntarily in his office for a short while, because Hopkins wanted to speak with him. Even though he was not under arrest, they read him his constitutional rights and reminded him of his right to say nothing, and his right to have an attorney.

  Heyert agreed to wait. He did not want to seem to be fleeing.

  Littleberry led Hopkins and Wirtz straight to the bioreactor room. They entered it thirty seconds after they’d gone through the front door of the building. The bioreactors were shut down and the room stank of bleach. They could smell the bleach coming through their respirators.

  They took out swabs and collected samples from a variety of spots in the bioreactor room. They filled two dozen small plastic tubes with swab tips. Hopkins swabbed the bioreactor and the equipment, while Littleberry swabbed the walls, corners of the room, and a light switch. Hopkins stood on a table and pulled down the HEPA filter units in the ceiling. There was fresh, new fiber material in them.

  “Look in the trash,” Littleberry said.

  They found a trash can stuffed with used HEPA filters and used bioprotective suits. Everything was drenched with bleach. It was a small room, and it was obvious that one or two people, working for an hour or two, could clean it up.

  Hopkins ran samples through the hand-held Boink. It chimed and chimed, telling them that it saw Cobra everywhere in the room. The effort to clean the room had failed completely. The bleach had killed the virus but could not destroy all the DNA of the dead virus particles.

  They went back to the office, where agents waited with Dr. Heyert.

  Hopkins sat down facing Heyert, with Littleberry next to him. They removed their face masks. Hopkins thought it might make medical sense to leave his mask on, but on the other hand, Heyert was not wearing a mask, and neither were most of the F.B.I. agents. It was one of those situations where you take your chances.

  Hopkins said, “I want to offer you an opportunity to make the right decision. It will be the most important decision you make in your life, Dr. Heyert. We have found an overwhelming amount of evidence that you are making biological weapons here. You cannot justify this as legitimate medical research. Your company has been seized and you are under investigation. I believe you will be arrested. The charge will be violation of Section 175 of Title 18 of the United States Criminal Code. That’s the biological weapons section. Conviction can result in life imprisonment. If the crime is connected to a terrorist act, then it is a capital crime, and the death penalty can be imposed. I want to repeat: the death penalty can be imposed.”

  Heyert stared at him.

  “We can’t do a plea bargain with you,” Hopkins continued. “But if you cooperate with us right now, we can recommend leniency to the sentencing judge. Otherwise I believe you are likely to spend most of the rest of your life in prison.”

  “I haven’t committed any crime. If there was anything wrong…it was an accident.”

  “We took samples from your bioreactor yesterday when you were running hot, Dr. Heyert. We found a virus. We have sequenced most of the genes in the virus and it is clearly a weapon. It is a weaponized chimera. It’s a mixture of an insect virus, smallpox, and the common cold. It’s very nasty. It seems to alter a gene in the human body, creating Lesch-Nyhan disease in normal people. It is a lethal weapon.”

  “This is a lie.”

  “The evidence will be introduced at your trial.”

  “I have not committed any crime!”

  “You could be charged as an accessory to terrorism,” Hopkins said.

  Heyert was deeply frightened now. “There have been deaths?”

  “You tell me,” Hopkins said.

  Something began to fracture inside Heyert. It happened delicately at first, like an egg developing a crack. The egg did no
t exactly break, it only leaked. “It isn’t my fault,” he said.

  Littleberry, who had been staring at Heyert with a fierce expression, yelled, “Then whose fault is it?”

  “We don’t control things,” Heyert said. “We are controlled by BioArk, the Concern. BioArk is our silent general partner. I’m an employee. I am only a middle manager.”

  “How do we find BioArk?” Hopkins asked.

  “Geneva.”

  “It’s a Swiss company?”

  “It’s a multinational. I don’t know where the Concern comes from originally. It is headquartered in Switzerland.”

  “There’s a terrorist making threats in New York City. Who is he?”

  Heyert almost shuddered. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said.

  “Yes, you do. Please do the right thing, Dr. Heyert. For your sake and that of your family.”

  Heyert drew a long breath. “His name is Tom Cope—Thomas Cope. He’s a strange man. A good scientist. He helped develop…our…some of our…uh…strains.”

  “What do you mean?” Hopkins asked.

  “We hired him to do research on a—a particular aspect of the virus. It wasn’t able to replicate in human tissue very well. He…fixed it.”

  “Why? Why did you want the virus to do that? Replicate in human tissue?”

  There followed a long pause, and Hopkins saw fit to let it drag on. Finally Hopkins repeated, “Why?”

  Heyert seemed on the edge of tears. “I have a family,” he said. “I am afraid for them.”

  “Why?”

  “BioArk. I am afraid. Can you—I—I can help you. I can tell you about BioArk. But can you protect my family? And me? These BioArk people are…without pity.”

  “We can’t make any promises,” Hopkins said. “If you can help us in the investigation and agree to testify, there is a witness protection program.”

  “I’m more afraid of BioArk than I am of you.” The words tumbled out. Heyert couldn’t stop now. “BioArk is a biotechnology company. A multinational. Part of the BioArk business—only part of it—is black research into weapons. They also make medicines. They do both. They work both sides of the street. They were paying me and my staff well, but if we talked we would be killed. They located a subsidiary here because this is—well, this is America, where the most talented people in biotechnology are. They set up this company, Bio-Vek, to do contract weapons-research into focused areas. One of them was the development of N.P.V. as a weapon. I—I hired Tom Cope to figure out how to get N.P.V. to infect humans. There is very big money in this, Mr. Hopkins.”