Stolen Virus

CHAPTER 2-1

CHAPTER 2St. Paul

Evening, March 14

Jason, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and oven mitts, reached into his oven and pulled out a pizza. He turned, kicked the oven door shut with his heel, slid the pizza onto a cardboard circle, pulled off the mitts, and rubbed his hands in anticipation. There was a knock at the door as he picked up his pizza cutter.

His shoulders sagged. “What the hell?” He put the pizza cutter down and headed to the door, kicking a couple of empty pizza boxes lying on the floor out of his way. Jason’s housekeeping schedule depended on whether he expected Ann to visit. He’d been dating her exclusively since their senior year in vet school.

Sexual exclusivity would have seemed sacrificial to him in his undergrad years, but a furious co-ed with a nose for traces of strange perfume taught him his choices were either monogamy or laundering his sheets regularly. It hadn’t been a tough choice. In equal measure, he was devoted to Ann and to ignoring his laundry.

His irritation melted as he opened the door and saw a big smile on the face that had captivated him since they’d met in vet school at Michigan State. “Ann, come in.” He embraced the willowy brunette in front of him and gave her a quick kiss. “Care for some pizza? Did you come to stay the night?”

She kissed him back. “Don’t you think of anything but food and s*x?”

“But you’re so—”

“Can it, big boy. I dropped by to give you a heads up on some odd lab results.” She brushed past him and walked into his kitchen. “Mmm . . . smells good. Pepperoni and sausage?”

Jason came up behind her, put his arms around her waist and nuzzled her neck. “And peppers and mushrooms. Is that the only reason you came over?”

Ann snuggled against him. “With everything that’s going on, I couldn’t face the night alone.” She turned and kissed him.

Jason was conflicted. His two favorite things in the world, Ann and food, demanded his attention. “Care for salad and pizza? The pizza is done.”

Ann looked at the table. “Where’s the salad?”

“I’ll slice the tomatoes if you clean and chop the lettuce. Deal?”

“Deal, but put on a clean shirt.” She tapped an index finger on the largest of a collection of tomato sauce and ketchup stains on Jason’s T-shirt, avoiding other blotches of less certain provenance. “This shirt gives ‘grungy’ a bad name.”

Jason went to his bedroom to change and Ann found the lettuce in his refrigerator. She rinsed it and searched under and around the clutter and dirty dishes on the counter for a clean bowl. She wondered if Jason ever cleaned his kitchen. Lifting a coffee cup, she grimaced at the brown crust around the lip. “Yuck! How do you . . .” She stalked into the bedroom. “Damn it, Jason. I hope you’ve been washing your sheets more often than you clean your kitchen.”

“Unhh,” Jason mumbled. A quick calculation and he decided honesty was an extravagance his budget didn’t cover. “Of course.”

Ann chose to believe him rather than spend the night alone in her apartment. She returned to the kitchen and began clearing the table. “I heard about your lecture this morning. Actually, I heard several versions of your comments on SARS, Joe, the super virus, and the coming pandemic.”

“What?” Jason scrambled out of the bedroom, a long-sleeved shirt partially buttoned, his jeans unsnapped, and his fly open.

“I was in the break room at noon.” Ann looked up from cleaning the table and waggled her eyebrows. “Were you planning on entertaining me with a show this evening?”

“Uh, no.” Jason finished dressing. “What were the stories you heard?”

“Some of the grad students were comparing stories about your lecture. I think there were a few vet students there, too. Paul and Bill were brown-bagging it, and Paul looked like he choked on his sandwich when he overheard the conversation at the next table. He stood up, got everyone’s attention, and said we sounded like a group of gossiping old ladies. ‘As professionals, you’d better learn to squelch gossip instead of spreading it or the dean will do something to make the lesson stick,’ he said. He really looked pissed.”

“Christ!” Jason leaned against the kitchen counter. “It all started when students asked a bunch of questions about Joe and our study after the lecture. When I dodged the questions, they made up their own theories. Some hit damned close to what I think occurred. I explained what happened to Paul before lunch, and I’d hoped that was the end of it.”

Jason looked so forlorn that Ann stopped cleaning and gave him a friendly hug. “Don’t worry. I don’t think he’s blaming you.”

She gave him a kiss. “I tested fecal samples from the calves today. The results were weird. The samples should have been strongly positive for BCV, but they were only weakly positive or suspect.”

Jason put his hands on the back of a chair, leaned forward, and stared absently at his table as he thought through the possibilities. The table—a red wobbly 1960s Formica and chrome eyesore with two God-awful matching chairs—was a paean to Jason’s thrift.

He explained to Ann the theory of the hybrid virus he’d discussed with Paul. “A new virus would have spread like wildfire in those calves.”

Besides the physical attraction, what drew him to Ann was their mutual interest in biology. He could talk to her about virology and molecular biology without boring her or wondering if she understood. Ann’s practical approach to science and medicine kept his tendency to concentrate on the theoretical in check. They were a team, as well as lovers.

Ann pursed her lips slightly and considered Jason’s hypothesis while he continued. “The test you used would have been screwed up if the mutation was in the gene for the BCV spike protein, because that’s the protein the test identifies. It’s also the protein that determines what cell type the virus can infect. That would explain why the virus infected cells in the lungs instead of the gut.”

“Okay,” Ann said. “So a hybrid of BCV and SARS would explain the calf pneumonia and my odd test results today. You’ll have to sequence the gene for the spike protein from the virus we get from the calves to prove that.”

“Right. I’ll ask Paul tomorrow who can help us with the extra work. We’re both already swamped.”

Ann put her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands. “Bill told me the dean doesn’t want anyone else exposed to our samples. We’ll have to do all the work ourselves.” She shook her head and looked at Jason. “It will take us forever to finish this.”

“s**t!” Jason took a deep breath. “Has the dean heard about everybody working with BCV and the calves getting diarrhea?”

Ann shrugged. “That was with a different group of calves, before Joe joined our group, and everyone recovered in forty-eight hours. It couldn’t have anything to do with the respiratory disease of this group of calves.”

Jason smiled and raised an eyebrow. “True, but it might have saved our butts. We were exposed to BCV, recovered, and were immune to it before the virus mutated. That may have given us a partial immunity to a hybrid virus.” He glanced at the pizza. “The pizza is getting cold. Let’s talk about this later. I have an idea to reduce our work, too.”

“So, what’s your idea?” Ann asked as Jason cut and served the pizza.

“Once the DNA and RNA are purified from our samples, the virus won’t be infective. Paul can have anyone do the sequencing.”

Ann chewed her bite of pizza until she could speak. “I think I love you.”

Jason was stunned. He hadn’t thought of their relationship in terms of love before, but the word fit. Comfortable with that, he still wasn’t comfortable saying the L-word. “Well, ah, it isn’t that great an idea.”

Ann finished her pizza, dropped the paper plate in the trash, and wondered why guys were so afraid to commit. “Okay, be that way.” She walked to the bedroom door, turned toward Jason, and unbuttoned her blouse. “You can sleep on the couch, under the table, or in bed with me. Which will it be?”

Jason nearly turned the table over scrambling to join her. At the door, she put her hand on his chest. “Not so fast, Romeo. Are we in love, or do you still think I was talking about your great idea?”

“Aahh . . .”

“Are we in love or do guys always think with the wrong head?”

With enough prodding and a few hints, even Jason could sometimes come up with the right answer. He put his arms around her and kissed her gently. “I’ve been in love with you for years.”

St. Paul Campus

10:30 p.m., March 14

It was late, closing time at the Student Union. The few who saw Ahmed descend the stairway thought nothing of it, although those who were more observant noted that he glanced around nervously. His confidence seemed to grow as he walked through the dimly lit hallways and tunnels, from the basement of the Student Union, under the street, through the administration building, and past the lecture halls.

He kept to the shadows even though he knew only a few students would still be in the labs, animal rooms, and maze of hallways of the University of Minnesota veterinary school. He would be home in Pakistan before anything was missed—but why take a risk?

He entered the veterinary complex at the lecture halls on the west and took a flight of stairs to the basement. The buildings of the vet school were built on a slope. The basement, buried in the hill, was the second floor of the Veterinary Teaching Hospital at the other end of the building. He caught a whiff of formaldehyde a few yards down the hallway. Through the open door of the anatomy lab, he saw a clutch of desperate veterinary students gathered around stainless-steel tables examining dog cadavers. Must be a test tomorrow, he thought. He knew they’d ignore him.

The clang of steel slamming on steel startled him. His heart racing, he pressed his back against the rough brick wall and checked the hallway in each direction.

Empty.

He looked at his watch and relaxed. An intern would be doing late-night treatments in the wards. The sounds were cage doors slamming shut. No one in those rooms could see him.

He took a passage past an upright freezer sitting in the hallway and the open door of a teaching lab. A student in the lab, engrossed in her work, muttered to herself and swore as he walked by.

Ahmed recognized Margie, a senior veterinary student who never admitted to making a mistake. He didn’t recognize the resemblance, but Margie’s arrogance and attitude of entitlement mirrored his and that of his mother. That made him loath her.

His mother was from a liberal, politically connected family; his father, an army general and a martinet, came from a conservative military family. Ahmed carried the scars of the internecine warfare of his parents’ marriage. Each had used him against the other, and he had returned the favor. Never exposed to unconditional love, he cared only for himself; used as a tool by his parents, he learned to manipulate others; caught between warring parties, his only principal became to get what he could.

The scholarship for graduate work in the US allowed him to put half the world between himself and his parents. He’d needed time to be away from their domineering influence, but American culture came as a shock. His arrogance masked a deep insecurity, and he’d walked a tightrope of social anxiety for five long years, afraid of looking foolish in public. Knowing that would be over was exhilarating. In a few hours, he would be on his way home, where he would no longer have to be polite to pushy women like Margie.

He took the second-floor walkway to the Vet Sciences building on Commonwealth Avenue as Margie tried to make sense of the petri dishes in front of her. She’d inoculated them the day before with an assigned unknown bacteria. Correct identification of all species of bacteria in the sample was a major part of the final grade in her course.