Catch and Release

Chapter 9

Chapter 9Zoe parked her car. The heat and humidity in Atlanta could be oppressive, especially this close to summer. The underground parking lot would provide a respite from the conditions. Zoe thought, just one more promotion, and you’ll have a parking space in there. She thought about the note she had been given. If anyone ever found out about her creating a super virus, she wouldn’t have to worry about getting that promotion; her time as a geneticist would come to an end with her imprisonment… if she was lucky.

She checked herself in the rear-view mirror one more time. Happy that the makeup she had put on earlier covered the bruising on her cheek and her black eye, she left her car and trudged the 200 feet across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention parking lot.

Zoe had always admired the way CDC building 21 looked, twelve stories high and made with a great deal of innovative products. The sleek and curved building wasn’t just architecturally significant, it was a great example of innovation in modern engineering.

She entered through the service entrance. She didn’t particularly want to see many people today. She headed up the stairs to the fourth floor where her lab was, entering through a small, pressurized room. The negative pressure caused her ears to pop. She’d thought she would get used to it eventually, but that day had not yet come.

Zoe was surprised to find herself alone in the lab. Normally, her assistant, Damian, would be there to begrudgingly greet her. She didn’t particularly like Damian. A couple of weeks earlier, some of the lab staff went out for drinks after work, and she had managed to find a sitter and decided to go with them. Damian had a couple drinks too many and started hitting on her. When he tried to kiss her, Zoe slapped him and called him a paramecium, an insult that would mean little to most people but hit its mark on the young scientist. Their professional relationship had been going downhill ever since.

Zoe sat down in front of her computer and turned it on. A computer-generated voice chirped out of the speakers. “Good morning, Doctor Morgenthal.” She’d always hated that greeting but had no idea how to get rid of it. She typed in her password and was confronted with multiple windows showing various projects she had been working on. She closed all the windows and opened a program on the desktop. Once the program finished loading, she scrolled through the various viral agents the CDC held for testing and research. When she got to the M section, her mouse cursor hovered over the word Marburg. She let out a deep sigh as her shaking hand clicked a button labeled order sample.

A new window within the program opened, asking for authorization. She’d expected as much. The sample was one of the deadliest viruses in the world, after all, and all viral sample requests had to be approved by a senior geneticist. Zoe might only be a junior geneticist, but she had ways of getting things done. Last time she’d needed to order a viral sample, she’d called her boss. He’d been in an important meeting and told her his access code over the phone. Maybe he trusted her with it or maybe he thought she wouldn’t remember it. Either way, that lapse in protocol would work in her favor today. A fact she despised.

Zoe clicked into the text box, typed 16431879197242, and hit enter. “Isaac Newton’s birth year, Albert Einstein’s birth year, my boss’s birth year, and the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Never underestimate the size of that man’s ego.”

Zoe got started on preparing the culture mediums she needed. She had 48 hours to complete her task and programming the Herpes Simplex viral vectors would take a little under 48 hours. This was going to be close!