“I guess so,” Tad agreed reluctantly.
It was obvious that he was wavering. The fact that Marissa would only see him if he took her into the lab seemed to force his decision.
He told her that he’d pick her up in half an hour and that she wasn’t to breathe a word to anyone else.
Marissa readily agreed.
“I’m not so sure about this,” admitted Tad, as he and Marissa drove toward the CDC.
“Relax,” said Marissa. “I’m an EIS officer assigned to Special Pathogens for goodness sakes.” Purposefully, Marissa pretended to be a little irritated.
“But we could ask for your clearance tomorrow,” suggested Tad. Marissa turned toward her friend. “Are you chickening out?” she demanded. It was true that Dubchek was due back from a trip to Washington the next day and that a formal request could be made. But Marissa had her doubts about what his response would be. She felt that Dubchek had been unreasonably cold over the last few weeks, even if her own stupidity had been the cause. Why she hadn’t had the nerve to apologize or even say she’d like to see him one evening, she didn’t know. But with every day that passed the coolness between them, particularly on his side, increased.
Tad pulled into the parking lot, and they walked in silence to the main entrance. Marissa mused about men’s egos and how much trouble they caused.
They signed in under the watchful eyes of the security guard and dutifully displayed their CDC identity cards. Under the heading “Destination,” Marissa wrote “office.” They waited for the elevator and went up three floors. After walking the length of the main building, they went through an outside door to a wire-enclosed catwalk that connected the main building to the virology labs. All the buildings of the Center were connected on most floors by similar walkways.
“Security is tight for the maximum containment lab,” said Tad as he opened the door to the virology building. “We store every pathological virus known to man.”
“All of them?” asked Marissa, obviously awed.
“Just about,” said Tad like a proud father.
“What about Ebola?” she asked.
“We have Ebola samples from every one of the previous outbreaks. We’ve got Marburg; smallpox, which otherwise is extinct; polio; yellow fever; dengue; AIDS. You name it; we’ve got it.”
“God!” exclaimed Marissa. “A menagerie of horrors.”
“I guess you could say that.”
“How are they stored?” she asked.
“Frozen with liquid nitrogen.”
“Are they infective?” asked Marissa.
“Just have to thaw them out.”
They were walking down an ordinary hall past a myriad of small, dark offices. Marissa had previously been in this portion of the building when she’d come to Dubchek’s office.
Tad stopped in front of a walk-in freezer like the kind seen in a butcher shop.
“You might find this interesting,” he said, as he pulled open the heavy door. A light was on inside.
Timidly Marissa stepped over the threshold into the cold, moist air. Tad was behind her. She felt a thrill of fear as the door swung shut and latched with a click.
The interior of the freezer was lined with shelves holding tiny vials, hundreds of thousands of them. “What is this?” asked Marissa.
“Frozen sera,” said Tad, picking up one of the vials, which had a number and a date written on it. “Samples from patients all over the world with every known viral disease and a lot of unknown ones. They’re here for immunological study and obviously are not infective.”
Marissa was still glad when they returned to the hallway.
About fifty feet beyond the walk-in freezer the hail turned sharply to the right, and as they rounded the corner, they were confronted by a massive steel door. Just above the doorknob was a grid of push buttons similar to Marissa’s alarm system. Below that was a slot like the opening for a credit card at an automatic bank teller. Tad showed Marissa a card that he had around his neck on a leather thong. He inserted it into the slot.
“The computer is recording the entry,” he said. Then he tapped out his code number on the push-button plate: 43-23-39. “Good measurements,” he quipped.