n aked beneath her sterile surgical gown, Dr Kate Braithwaite was protected by a blue biosafety spacesuit. When anyone left a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, nothing was allowed past the decontamination showers. Although it was already after 9 p.m., Kate was not ready to leave yet, and she moved towards the door at the far end of the deadly hot-zone laboratory, shuffling in the galoshes that protected the soles of her spacesuit from any wear from the floors.
Only thirty-four, and Australian-born, Dr Kate Braithwaite was one of the most respected biochemists and virologists in the United States and she was one of the few scientists in the world who could claim to be an expert on Variola major, otherwise known as smallpox. Her long, blonde curly hair was held in place with a hairnet to keep it from falling across her eyes behind the heavy plastic face mask. Her lightly freckled face was tanned and, even behind a visor, Kate Braithwaite was clearly a very attractive young woman, although on this night her normally sparkling green eyes smouldered with anger. Kate was usually based in Maryland at USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, but a week ago she’d received a top-secret directive ordering her to divide her time between Maryland and the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Dr Braithwaite had been instructed to prepare some of the most dangerous experiments ever conducted in the history of biological warfare.
CDC’s main Biosafety Level 4 laboratory in the western sector of the complex was one of the deadliest laboratories in the world. The floors and walls were tiled and kept immaculately clean. There were dozens of red, coiled air hoses hanging from the ceiling. The air in the lab was at negative pressure and was constantly replaced. Telltale banks of chimneys on the roof expelled micro-filtered air that was also super-heated to make doubly sure any pathogens like Ebola and Marburg, for which there was no known cure, were well and truly destroyed before they reached the outside world. Alone in the lab, Kate had put in an exhausting fourteen hours hunched over Petri dishes that contained India-1, one of the most lethal strains of smallpox known to man, but she wanted to check on her beloved chimpanzees before she left for home.
To go ahead with these experiments was utterly irresponsible, she thought angrily, as she eased open the heavy steel door to the animal room. The world had already seen enough horror without risking another outbreak of smallpox. Kate knew there were only two repositories of smallpox left on the planet. One was in the Russian laboratories in Koltsovo in Siberia and no one was really sure that the Russians could account for all of their lethal stocks. The other repository was here at CDC, which was surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent anyone driving a truck bomb into the building. The smallpox was kept under the tightest laboratory security found anywhere in the world.
Kate’s thoughts turned briefly to Professor Imran Sayed, her immediate boss from her home base in Maryland. She had supported both her Professor and the old Colonel Commanding USAMRIID, the three of them arguing passionately for the destruction of the world’s two remaining stockpiles of the deadly virus, but each time they had been firmly rebuffed by those in power. They had argued just as passionately that experiments on the great apes should not proceed, but last week a new Colonel Commanding had been posted in – Colonel Walter C. Wassenberg III; and it was he who had issued the orders for the experiments. She would no doubt get to meet him when she returned to Maryland, but she had already heard enough from her colleagues back at ‘the RID’, as USAMRIID was known to the inmates, and the news was not good. Wassenberg was a stickler for military discipline and a staunch supporter of White House policy, and Kate had a terrible feeling that neither she nor Professor Sayed would be successful in getting the dreadful experiments stopped.
Kate closed the heavy steel door behind her and reached for one of the red air hoses, plugging it into her regulator. The cool air pres-surised her suit with a loud hiss and she shuffled over to the first of the cages that held the small family of chimpanzees brought in from Gabon for the research.
None of the chimps had settled into their new homes; half-eaten persimmons, bananas and paw paws were scattered among the green leaves on the floors of the cages. Kate had named the alpha male Maverick and as she looked into his soulful brown eyes, her anger softened. He was sitting at the far end of his cage thoughtfully stroking his chin. His big, black nose was squashed onto his wrinkly old face, and his powerful arms and the rest of his body were covered in black hair, although there were grey touches on the top of his head. As Kate continued to hold eye contact, he got up and ambled over to the bars of the cage, pressing his face between them, looking at her quizzically. Although he was well built, the alpha male wasn’t the biggest in the group. In many ways, families of chimpanzees mirrored their human communities. In Maverick’s case, he was the most politically astute and he had ascended to the position of alpha male because he possessed the best social skills and was the most capable of maintaining order within the group. He had the respect of all the others, which gave him first feeding rights, as well as mating rights.
Kate felt a strange connection to the big primate. It was not the first time she had wondered about DNA and the inter-connectedness of life. She knew that, unlike gorillas, chimpanzees’ DNA differed from human DNA by only 1.6 per cent, but that didn’t mean she agreed with the Administration’s view that chimpanzees provided the best chance of success in the deadly experiment. The gentle primate seemed troubled, Kate thought. She could see the sadness in his eyes. It was almost as if he had some inkling about what was going to happen to him and his family, and Kate shared his concern. As skilled as she was in handling Variola major, the experiments she had been ordered to conduct had never been tried before and she had no way of knowing how they might turn out or how dangerous they might become.