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VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 14, 2001
late monday afternoon, roger gordian lay
asleep in his room at San Jose Mercy Hospital, having been given a series of physical examinations, blood tests, and chest X rays throughout the earlier part of the day. At four p.m. on Sunday, he had been transported to the hospital aboard an ambulance, accompanied by his daughter, Julia Gordian Ellis, after losing consciousness in the backyard of her Pescadero residence. When the emergency vehicle appeared in response to her frantic 911, Gordian had a fever of 102.7ø, was suffering from dehydration, and had lost several ounces of blood from a superficial wound to his left hand inflicted by the power tool he had been using at the time of his blackout. The medical technicians aboard the ambulance were able to control the bleeding and dress his injury on scene, and they administered oxygen and an electrolyte IV, which revived him during his transport to the hospital. Gordian was fully awake and alert upon reaching the ER, where he was joined by his wife, who had been
BIO-STRIKE
via her mobile phone by Julia while en route dero from San Jose International Airport. to that time, Gordian’s temperature remained ele- 1, and he was experiencing respiratory difficulties, infill sore throat, abdominal pains, nausea, muscle es, and chills. An initial examination by interns on tion led them to a preliminary diagnosis of influenza stress due to overexertion. In spite of his repeated ence that he was fit enough to be discharged and ver at home, the severity of his symptoms led doc- i suggest that he be admitted for routine monitoring testing, a recommendation to which he eventually liesced at the strong urging of his family members, ifithin an hour of his arrival at the ER, Gordian was ved to a private room on the hospital’s fifth floor. As i standard procedure for high-profile individuals, hos- security offered him the option of registering under i alias to deflect attention by ambulance- and celebrity- sing reporters. Though he was disinclined to accept preferential treatment, his wife and daughter pre- upon him to reconsider and finally got him to ulate with reminders of his past unhappiness with i media, striking a particular nerve by mentioning the ageous factual distortions of Reynold Armitage, the ial columnist and television commentator with an awn ax to grind who had been unduly eager to pro- ttnce UpLink International DOA in the middle of a eholder’s crisis the year before, and who might be cted to jump at the chance to write Roger Gordian’s ature obituary if word of his illness leaked to the
On Ashley’s recommendation, the door sign beside 5C would read: Hardy, Frank.
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By Monday morning, Gordian’s fever had lowered to 101ø and he was feeling stronger, though his breathing continued to be strained and he showed little desire for food. His standardized physician’s treatment sheet- known by the memory key ABC/DAVID to every fourth-year medical student, physician’s aid, and registered nurse-listed his condition as stable on its third line, between the Admit to: and Diet information. The next line (A for Activity) had a check mark in front of the words Bed Rest. Blood and sputum samples were ordered in the space that read Studies and Lab on this particular hospital’s form (synonymous with Intake and Output in the next-to-last line of the trainee’s mnemonic). The final line, listed as Medications (i.e., D for Drugs), called for a moderate dosage of acetaminophen every four hours pending the lab results, which were not expected to return positive for anything more severe than the flu.
At 8:30 a.m. sharp, Ashley and Julia arrived to visit, Julia leaving at 10 o’clock to attend a meeting at the fashion design firm where she’d recently been hired as a public relations consultant, Ashley staying on until Gordian shooed her home at noon with reassurances that he was doing fine-though she made a point of reassuring him that, fine or not, he could count on seeing her again by dinnertime.
Around three in the afternoon, Gordian’s attending nurse came to take his temperature, pulse, and blood pressure readings, give him his prescribed Tylenol capsules, and scribble something on his chart. A few minutes afterward, he became groggy and let himself doze off for a while.
At four P.M., as Gordian slept on the fifth floor, a
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on station duty two floors below briefly left her for the ladies’ room. The moment she did, a man : crisp white uniform of an orderly entered the sta- from where he had been drifting near a supply
treading quietly in crepe-soled shoes, eping an eye out for the nurse, he pointed-and- through several menus on her computer and re- the bed assignment information on all patients in the past twenty-four hours. He could have to use any of the networked unit computers at ‘station in any ward in the building. This was simply nvenient opening; amid the constant movement of a ‘hospital, he would have had no trouble finding othconds
later, the data on the patient in room 5C ap’. on the computer, minus his falsified name, liming to the opening screen, the man left the e’s station and strode along the hall until he found 11, unoccupied patients’ lounge and entered it. he slipped a wireless phone from his pocket and a call on a digitally encoded line. ie’s here,” he said into the mouthpiece.
s bottleneck elevator rose from the upper sublevel and to release him with a pneumatic sigh. Emerging > the corridor, he turned to the right and walked past h-security doors marked with signs for the laborato- in the connecting hallways behind them. Some dis- the universal biohazard symbol at eye level, their l-and-black trefoil pattern conspicuous against the sur-
iing grayness.
||He carried himself lightly for a man of his muscular tions, and this partially went to explain the dead
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silence of his progress down the hall. But as the fluorescent panels overhead neutralized shading and shadow with their suffused radiance, so did the thick concrete walls seem to dampen sound, flatten color, deduct from between them all except the essential and functional.
While the drab work environment required varying degrees of acclimatization from most of the personnel who spent their days and nights physically isolated even from the outlying northern wilderness, Siegfried Kuhl found it to his decided liking. There was a sense of impregnable weight and austerity that suited him. But he felt something beyond that, an unseen force. On occasion, he would put his two hands against a wall and feel the strong vibrational pulse of machinery behind it, the pumping of compressed-air streams to microencapsulation chambers and “space suits” in the Level 4 laminar flow enclosures underground. At such times Kuhl imagined himself to be touching a hard womb of stone, the life forms within seething and twisting in furious gestation.
Kuhl advanced through the hall, men and women in surgical scrubs moving singly and in groups toward the laboratory entrances on either side of him. Comparable in his mind to Los Alamos at its inception, this was the only facility of its type on earth, at the frontier of the development and mass production of biological weapons -of which the Sleeper virus was the current acme. Its operations covered every stage of the pathogen’s creation from genomic analysis and DNA splicing to its cultivation, stabilization, and chemical encoating. The microbe’s trigger mechanism additionally required the concurrent and coordinated applications of protein and molecular engineering processes. And experimentation
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(refine the virus continued with the goals of acceler- its lethal progression within the target host or increasing its resistance to potential cures and initiations, and addressing the need for variant strains : would provide buyers with widened options, allow- them to select from among diverse packages of
us.
ere was still work, much work, to be done before ion was achieved.