Ecuador

Chapter 3

Chapter 3‘WHERE’S BARBARA?’ ASKED JIM.

‘Ah, um… Doctor Milton’s home sick. She asked me to fill in for her, ah with you,’ said Nusmen, looking decidedly uncomfortable.

The two men were close to the same height, with Jim’s defined muscles giving him the larger, wider presence compared to Nusmen’s beanpole body. Jim studied the man for a few seconds—looked at his crazy untamed hair and watched his Adam’s apple move up and down as Nusmen kept swallowing.

Then, Colonel Johnson considered the respectful way Nusmen had said Doctor Milton’s name and said, ‘The general has put a lot of faith in you. I didn’t have anything to do with you being appointed the co-director of BWC’s laboratory. What I do have is a long history with General Crystal, and I trust his judgment. And Heather always said you were not only exceptionally knowledgeable with botanical studies, but helpful with her field research. I value her opinion too, but I thought you to be…’

As Jim hesitated, Nusmen finished his sentence… ‘weird?’

Jim didn’t say anything. There were probably several psychological terms to describe Nusmen besides weird. He would bet that Katarina had a mile-long psych profile on him. He would ask her for it some time.

Nusmen continued, ‘Well, you were no doubt right and still are. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love this place, the chance to be here. I’ll never forget what the general has done for me. I have even made friends here…uh, maybe a friend, Brad, and I think Doctor Milton likes me, even though she says I am not very good with people, so maybe weird is, …ahh, right. I don’t know…I’ve never paid much attention to what people thought.’

‘Maybe one good friend is more important than many. Time to quit chatting and get on with it.’ Something Nusmen, the General, and Colonel Johnson had in common: none liked small talk, and while Jim was perhaps coming to a new understanding of Nusmen, he had had enough chitchat. The colonel just didn’t like to waste time chatting about unnecessary things that weren’t pertinent to the topic at hand. But for a different reason than Nusmenwho didn’t know how.

Jim interjected, ‘This is a big place, and I only have about an hour left today. It’s been a long time since I had a real feel for what goes on here, so stay with your main projects on this level. We won’t do the restricted levels today, but you can tell me how everything weaves together as we go along.’

Nusmen looked down at the floor and said, ‘Finding a cure for the Staph aureus, the one I turned loose. The one they call the Nusbug…’

Jim cut him off. ‘I don’t care about the past, only the present. Anything else?’

‘Well, with the resistant Staph, we are in the final tests, a different protocol than just a new antibiotic. We are combining antibiotics with phages. The phages poke a hole through the cell wall, and the antibiotics enter and wreak havoc on the bacteria,’ he said with a little regained pride at his new method.

‘Both Gram-positive and negative bacteria?’

‘I dunno yet. I have only been testing the Staph. They get right into the cell wall through the peptidoglycan. Of course, there is only a thin lipid layer in the gram positives. I hope we might be able to penetrate a thicker lipid layer on the gram negatives too.’

‘What else?’

‘This is peculiar. There are these groups of repeating DNA sequences.’

‘Why is that unexpected when a lot of DNA appears to serve no function?’

‘I dunno what it means, but I found the same thing a while back looking at archaea sequences.’

‘Go on.’

‘We’re sequencing the H5 N1 flu virus, the avian coronavirus that emerged in Hong Kong in 1997. I’m trying to work out how someone could re-engineer it.’

‘To what end?’ asked Jim.

‘To make it transmissible from human to human. The problem is still transmission. It’s a hundred times deadlier than the 1918 flu. The same thing for other coronaviruses, or dengue, or lassa. A variant could be deadly if it jumped species and was transmittable human to human.’

Jim had to smile, as Nusmen stated the reasons the Biological Warfare Center had been started. In order to prevent pandemics, they needed to create the very organisms that could cause them, understand them, and develop countermeasures to them. As a philosophical problem, Jim had endlessly wrestled with whether what they did was ethical or not. His practical side said that if they didn’t pursue this, someone else would. By the same token, his natural distrust of the people running governments caused him concern. What if the wrong people were able to gain control of the BWC? What if one of their creations escaped?

Nusmen, mirroring Jim’s thoughts, looked distracted as he mumbled, ‘And we have to understand it, so we can fix it before someone turns it into a bioweapon.’

‘Our exact purpose for being here. What else?’

‘I’m sorry. You already know all this. I’m wasting your time.’

‘I want to hear your take on things.’

Nusmen had not intended to mention this, but he couldn’t help himself. He became excited and blurted out, ‘This one is really cool! If rabies could be made transmissible, either by engineering it, or combining it with something like measles or a flu virus, then it would create Zombies. You know, like the movies. It gets into your brain and messes up your personality and makes you aggressive like dogs when they get it.’

‘Combining rabies with other viruses is unfeasible, right?’

Nusmen’s eyes twinkled. ‘Difficult maybe, but not impossible.’

‘Fictitious zombies become a reality. That’s pretty freaky, Nusmen.’

‘Yeah, like I said, really cool. Okay. On level four, we’re working on the current top ten viruses and bacterial resistant bugs: MRSA, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae, etc. Also, we have a re-engineered the1918 flu virus, the H5 N1 bird flu, and a Variola major species. The general said the Russians were once working on combining smallpox with another virus to shorten the incubation period. You probably know more about it than me.’

‘Doubt it. Too much time spent in admin or the field to keep up as well as I would like with the science. Time is short, so take me through the rest of the lab.’ While they walked, Jim said, ‘I reviewed your safety inspections. They’re first-rate.’

‘It’s not me. It’s Barbara. She is almost fanatical about level three and four protocols.’

They walked for another forty-five minutes, looking at the high throughput genetic analyses, beaker after beaker on shaker platforms, robotic arms moving multiple pipettes up and down, a wide array of mass spectrometers with dozens of tiny acrylic holders, clicking faintly as they stopped and started on conveyors. Machine after machine: High-Performance Liquid Chromatography; electron microscopes, both SEM and TEMs; and the newest addition, a combination Scanning Electron and Transmission Electron Microscope; even an MRI. Much of the lab was automated, seemingly run without human input: hundreds of small lights blinking on and off, leaving a faint blue glow, with only the occasional technician moving, inspecting, and adjusting equipment.

The tour brought Jim more respect for Nusmen. Had he misjudged him? He had only briefly interacted with him outside the laboratories and hadn’t been impressed with what he’d observed in the mountains last fall. When he eventually arrived at the assumption that Nusmen was most likely autistic, Jim’s opinion had softened. He would later find out from Katarina that she labeled Nusmen a super-high-functioning Asperger’s with typically little or no social skills. But she emphasized that he was not an extreme case and was able, more or less, to temper many emotional reactions. Nevertheless, he found it nearly impossible to mesh with most “normal” people.

What didn’t jibe was that Barbara, the BWC’s long-term lab manager, decided Nusmen had a heart. Time would tell, thought Jim again. I’ll have time to see who he really is. He would have that time while he replaced the general as the BWC acting director. Jim was determined to keep his new admin role as short-term as possible.

The tour showed him the exponential growth that the lab had gone through. He remembered the past all too well: buildings that housed mainframe computers with humming punch card readers, optical microscopes to observe bacteria, and then, in later years, tedious manual culturing, splicing, and analyzing. All ancient history now. The question he wondered most about was, Who else had this sort of ability? Who was creating and producing a dangerous, infectious virus or bacteria out there? It was only a matter of time before a terrorist obtained or engineered a deadly microorganism.

The main public biothreat so far had been anthrax. Despite its bad reputation, it was easily treated with antibiotics.

Tomorrow, Jim planned to take a look at the BWC’s security as well as one of his favorite areas, the weapons and equipment rooms. He hadn’t been there since Najma had killed his long-term friend Sergeant Mason at Jim’s and Heather’s Eastern Washington ranch. His death had left an empty spot. Another old friend that was no more, he thought. After tomorrow, he would fly back to the ranch. He had promised to take Pedro horseback riding along the bottom edge of Wolf Mountain if the snow wasn’t too deep.