Over the next twenty-six hours, she forgot to eat or sleep. She lived in the lab, studying the virus with the electron microscope. To her amazement, she and her team ruled out Ebola, Marburg, and any other filovirus. It had the usual furry-ball shape of most viruses. Once she had seen it, given the ARDS cause of death, her first thought was a hantavirus like the one that had killed the young athletes on the Navajo reservation in 1993. USAMRIID was expert on hantaviruses. One of its legends, Karl Johnson, had been a discoverer of the first hantavirus to be isolated and identified back in the 1970s.
With that in mind, she had used immunoblotting to test the unknown pathogen against USAMRIID’s frozen bank of blood samples of previous victims of various hantaviruses from around the world. It reacted to none. Puzzled, she ran a polymerase chain reaction to get a bit of DNA sequence from the virus. It resembled no known hantavirus, but for future reference she assembled a preliminary restriction map anyway. That was when she wished most fervently that Jon was with her, not far away at the WHO conference in London.
Frustrated because she still had no definitive answer, she had forced herself to leave the lab. She had already sent the team off to sleep, and now she went through the exiting procedure, too, peeling away her space suit, going through decontamination procedures, and dressing again in her civilian clothes.
After a four-hour on-site nap— that was all she needed, she told herself firmly— she had hurried to her office to study the tests’ notes. As the other team members awakened, she sent them back to their labs.
Her head ached, and her throat was dry. She took a bottle of water from her office mini-refrigerator and returned to her desk. On the wall hung three framed photos. She drank and leaned forward to contemplate them, drawn like a moth to comforting light. One showed Jon and herself in bathing suits last summer in Barbados. What fun they had had on their one and only vacation. The second was of Jon in his dress uniform the day he’d made lieutenant colonel. The last pictured a younger captain with wild black hair, a dirty face, and piercing blue eyes in a dusty field uniform outside a Fifth MASH tent somewhere in the Iraqi desert.
Missing him, needing him in the lab with her, she had reached for the phone to call him in London— and stopped. The general had sent him to London. For the general, everything was by the book, and every assignment had to be finished. Not a day late, not a day early. Jon was not due for several hours. Then she realized he was probably aloft now anyway, but she wouldn’t be at his house, waiting for him. She dismissed her disappointment.
She had devoted herself to science, and somewhere along the way she had gotten extremely lucky. She had never expected to marry. Fall in love, perhaps. But marry? No. Few men wanted a wife obsessed with her work. But Jon understood. In fact, it excited him that she could look at a cell and discuss it in graphic, colorful detail with him. In turn, she had found his endless curiosity invigorating. Like two children at a kindergarten party, they had found their favorite playmates in each other— well suited not only professionally but temperamentally. Both were dedicated, compassionate, and as in love with life as with each other.
She had never known such happiness, and she had Jon to thank for it.
With an impatient shake of her head, she turned on her computer to examine the lab notes for anything she might have missed. She found nothing of any significance.
Then, as more DNA sequence data was arriving, and she continued to review in her mind all the clinical data so far on the virus, she had a strange feeling.
She had seen this virus— or one that was incredibly similar— somewhere.
She wracked her brain. Dug through her memory. Rooted through her past.
Nothing came to mind. Finally she read one of her team members’ reports that suggested the new virus might be related to Machupo, one of the first discovered hemorrhagic fevers, again by Karl Johnson.
Africa pushed none of her buttons. But Bolivia…?
Peru!
Her student anthropology field trip, and—
Victor Tremont.
Yes, that had been his name. A biologist on a field trip to Peru to collect plants and dirts for potential medicinals for… what company? A pharmaceutical firm … Blanchard Pharmaceuticals!
She turned back to her computer, quickly entered the Internet, and searched for Blanchard. She found it almost at once— in Long Lake, New York. And Victor Tremont was president and Chief Operating Officer now. She reached for her phone and dialed the number.
It was Sunday morning, but giant corporations sometimes kept their telephones open all weekend for important calls. Blanchard did. A human voice answered, and when Sophia asked for Victor Tremont, the voice told her to wait. She drummed her fingers on the desk, trying to control her worried impatience.
At last a series of clicks and silences on the far end of the line were interrupted by another human voice. This time it was neutral, toneless: “May I ask your name and business with Dr. Tremont?”
“Sophia Russell. Tell him it’s about a trip to Peru where we met.”
“Please hold.” More silence. Then: “Mr. Tremont will speak with you now.
“Ms…. Russell?” Obviously he was consulting the name handed to him on a pad. “What can I do for you?” His voice was low and pleasant but commanding. A man clearly accustomed to being in charge.
She said mildly, “Actually, it’s Dr. Russell now. You don’t remember my name, Dr. Tremont?”
“Can’t say I do. But you mentioned Peru, and I do remember Peru. Twelve or thirteen years ago, wasn’t it?” He was acknowledging why he was talking to her, but giving nothing away in case she was a job seeker or it was all some hoax.
“Thirteen, and I certainly remember you.” She was trying to keep it light. “What I’m interested in is that time on the Caraibo River. I was with a group of anthropology undergrads on a field trip from Syracuse while you were collecting potential medicinal materials. I’m calling to ask about the virus you found in those remote tribesmen, the natives the others called the Monkey Blood People.”
In his large corner office at the other end of the line, Victor Tremont felt a jolt of fear. Just as quickly, he repressed it. He swiveled in his desk chair to stare out at the lake, which was shimmering like mercury in the early-morning light. On the far side, a thick pine forest stretched and climbed to the high mountains in the distance.
Annoyed that she had surprised him with such a potentially devastating memory, Tremont continued to swivel. He kept his voice friendly. “Now I remember you. The eager blond young lady dazzled by science. I wondered whether you’d go on to become an anthropologist. Did you?”
“No, I ended up with a doctorate in cell and molecular biology. That’s why I need your help. I’m working at the army’s infectious diseases research center at Fort Detrick. We’ve come across a virus that sounds a lot like the one in Peru— an unknown type causing headaches, fever, and acute respiratory distress syndrome that can kill otherwise healthy people within hours and produce a violent hemorrhage in the lungs. Does that ring a bell, Dr. Tremont?”
“Call me Victor, and I seem to recall your first name is Susan… Sally… something like…?”
“Sophia.”
“Of course. Sophia Russell. Fort Detrick,” he said, as if writing it down. “I’m glad to hear you remained in science. Sometimes I wish I’d stayed in the lab instead of jumping to the front office. But that’s water over a long-ago dam, eh?” He laughed.
She asked, “Do you recall the virus?”
“No. Can’t say I do. I went into sales and management soon after Peru, and probably that’s why the incident escapes me. As I said, it was a long time ago. But from what I recall of my molecular biology, the scenario you suggest is unlikely. You must be thinking of a series of different viruses we heard about on that trip. There was no shortage. I remember that much.”
She dug the phone into her ear, frustrated. “No, I’m certain there was this one single agent that came from working with the Monkey Blood People. I didn’t pay a lot of attention at the time. But then, I never expected to end up in biology, much less cell and molecular. Still, the oddness of it stuck with me.”
” `The Monkey Blood People’? How bizarre. I’m sure I’d recall a tribe with such a colorful name as that.”
Urgency filled her voice. “Dr. Tremont, listen. Please. This is vital. Critical. We’ve just received three cases of a virus that reminds me of the one in Peru. Those natives had a cure that worked almost eighty percent of the time— drinking the blood of a certain monkey. As I recall, that’s what astonished you.”