‘A pleasure, Special Agent Farinelli. And believe me, I’ve heard a lot about you,’ he said to her. ‘So Kay and I are going to do the dirty work while you play with the computer.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she sweetly said.
‘Is there anywhere to have breakfast around here?’ Gallwey asked the private, who was tangled in confusion and suddenly shy.
He drove us in the base commander’s Suburban beneath an endless sky. Unsettled western mountain ranges surrounded us in the distance, high desert flora like sage, scrub pine and firs, dwarfed by lack of rain. The nearest traffic was forty miles away in this Home of the Mustangs, as the base was called, with its ammunition bunkers, weapons from World War II and air space restricted and vast. There were traces of salt from receding ancient waters, and we spotted an antelope and an eagle.
Stark Road, aptly named, led us toward the test facilities, which were some ten miles from the living area on base. The Ditto diner was on the way, and we stopped long enough for coffee and egg sandwiches. Then it was on to the test facilities, which were clustered in large, modern buildings behind a fence topped with razor wire.
Warning signs were everywhere, promising that trespassers were unwelcome and deadly force used. Codes on buildings indicated what was inside them, and I recognized symbols for mustard gas and nerve agents, and those for Ebola, Anthrax and Hantavirus. Walls were concrete, the private told us, and two feet thick, refrigerators inside explosion-proof. The routine was not so different from what I had experienced before. Guards led us through the toxic containment facilities, and Lucy and I went into the women’s changing room while Gallwey went into the men’s.
We stripped and put on house clothes that were Army green, and over these went suits, which were camouflage with goggled hoods, and heavy black rubber gloves and boots. Like the blue suits at CDC and USAMRIID, these were attached to air lines inside the chamber, which in this case was stainless steel from ceiling to floor. It was a completely closed system with double carbon filters, where contaminated vehicles like tanks could be bombarded with chemical agents and vapors. We were assured we could work here as long as we needed without placing anyone at risk.
It might even be possible that some evidence could be decontaminated and saved. But it was hard to say. None of us had ever worked a case like this before. We started by propping open the camper’s door and arranging lights directed inside. It was peculiar moving around, the steel floor warping loudly like saw blades as we walked. Above us, an Army scientist sat in the control room behind glass, monitoring everything we did.
Again, I went in first because I wanted to thoroughly survey the crime scene. Gallwey began photographing tool marks on the door and dusting for fingerprints, while I climbed inside and looked around as if I had never been there before. The small living area that normally would have contained a couch and table had been gutted and turned into a laboratory with sophisticated equipment that was neither new nor cheap.
The rabbit was still alive, and I fed him and set his cage on top of a counter neatly built of plywood and painted black. Beneath it was a refrigerator, and in it I found Vero and human embryonic lung fibroblast cells. They were tissue cultures routinely used for feeding poxviruses, just as fertilizers are used for certain plants. To maintain these cultures, the mad farmer of this mobile lab had a good supply of Eagle minimal essential medium, supplemented with ten percent fetal calf serum. This and the rabbit told me that deadoc was doing more than maintaining his virus, he was still in the process of propagating it when disaster had struck.
He had kept the virus in a liquid nitrogen freezer that did not need to be plugged in, but refilled every few months. It looked like a ten-gallon stainless steel thermos, and when I unscrewed the lid, I pulled out seven cryotubes so old that instead of plastic, they were made of glass. Codes that should have identified the disease were unlike anything I’d ever seen, but there was a date of 1978, and the location of Birmingham, England, tiny abbreviations written in black ink, neatly, and in lowercase. I returned the tubes of living, frozen horror to their frigid place, and rooted around more, finding twenty sample sizes of Vita facial spray, and tuberculin syringes that the killer, no doubt, had used to inoculate the canisters with the disease.