Silent Night

NINE

Downtown at the Flood Microbiology building, Archer and Josh were absorbing what the doctor had just told them.

‘Tuberculosis?’ Josh repeated.

She nodded. ‘TB. One of the world’s most infectious diseases. It killed 1.4 million people in 2011. You mentioned chemotherapy. People generally know that radiation can be used to treat cancer in very high doses. But as I said, it can be severely debilitating. Healthy cells die too. Medical physics is constantly trying to find a way of targeting radiotherapy more accurately. And that’s where my father came in.’

Josh and Archer listened closely, concentrating, tuning everything else out. Although the lobby behind them was noisy, it might as well have been empty.

‘Given what happened to my mother his interest lay in curing lung cancer. His idea was to create a radioactive virus that could be inhaled. Once in the lungs, the virus would irradiate cancerous tumours from the inside. The TB would act as the cell in which the virus could replicate. Like a breeding ground and a vehicle to get into the lung tissue.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Technically, yes. And if it worked, it would be revolutionary.’

‘When did he start working on this?’

‘He first broached the subject to us eighteen months ago. At first we thought he was crazy, but then we realised it could actually be feasible. And if it worked, it would change lung cancer therapy forever.’

She paused.

‘Our team here are biochemists. What we do isn’t glamorous. We spend all our time working out how and why little proteins work and their roles in long drawn-out cascades of reactions. So what my father outlined was very different and very exciting. He wanted us to find how a small amount of radioactive material could be incorporated into the capsid of a virus.’

‘Capsid?’

‘Protein shell.’ She paused. ‘Still with me?’

Josh nodded. ‘I think so. He wanted to get a radioactive substance inside a shell which would then be incorporated into the virus. That would then be grown along with the tuberculosis and inhaled, allowing it to get inside tumours in the lung.’

She nodded. ‘Spot on.’

‘You said radioactive material. Like uranium?’

‘No, no. That would be a terrible idea. When uranium is mixed with hydrogen it forms plutonium, which isn’t exactly an ideal atom to use in medicine. It also degrades into lead which is highly poisonous.’

‘So what did you use?’

‘Cobalt. It’s a metal which has a radioactive isotope which emits gamma radiation. It’s radioactive and worked medicinally for our cancer treatment. We spent last summer and fall figuring out how to combine the cobalt with the protein shell. It took us six months. But we did it.’

‘So what came next?’

‘We needed a virologist to take what we had, combine it with a strain of tuberculosis and culture the resulting virus into something strong enough to destroy a cancer cell but which wouldn’t infect the patient with TB. We had our own man here who is very good, but my father needed a top-level expert to work with him. He wanted a specialist. He went to South Africa and recruited one such man. His name is Dr Kruger.’

‘He came over here?’

‘Yes. He joined our team a year ago, working with our own virologist Dr Glover. Together, the two of them cultured the radioactive virus with the tuberculosis strain. I couldn’t even begin to tell you the specifics about how they did it. Kruger is a brilliant man. He modified the TB to grow at a much faster rate and neutralised its potency, making it the perfect vehicle for the cobalt. He taught Dr Glover a lot just by working alongside him.’

‘How many of you work here?’

‘Five.’

‘Names?’

‘Myself. My father. Dr Kruger, Dr Tibbs and Dr Glover.’

Josh glanced at Archer, who nodded, making a mental note of the names.

‘This all happened earlier this year. And my father was obsessed at this point. He would stay late, long after we had all gone home, working with Dr Kruger. He began sleeping at the lab. And I started to worry about him. He was neglecting himself and his own health started to suffer.’

She shook her head, looking up with red-rimmed green eyes.

‘My mother’s death, haunting him every day.’

She paused and sniffed.

‘Anyway, four weeks ago they both called us all in on a Wednesday night. They were excited. Dr Kruger figured he’d made a huge breakthrough and struck gold. The radio-virus had cultured and was ready for testing. That evening he was preparing to test it on infected cells in mice. He wanted us all there to watch.’

‘What happened?’

‘It was devastating. We knew it the moment those poor mice began to react to the gas. I’ll never forget it. It turned out that he couldn’t have been more wrong.’

She swallowed.

‘Unstable atoms degrade and release energy. That’s what causes radiation. And the radiation from the virus had knocked out some of the genes that made Dr Kruger’s genetically-modified TB safe. It was intended to attack tumour cells, but instead it went after normal blood vessels in the lung. Once inhaled, infection spread at an obscene pace, bursting the pulmonary capillary bed.’

‘What does that mean?’ Josh asked.

‘Basically, you cough so hard that you hack up pieces of lung tissue. The spasms are so strong that you break your own back. The healthy vessels in your lungs rupture and you drown in your own blood.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It was horrifying. It condensed the infection period from weeks or months into thirty seconds. Dr Kruger and my father had made a terrible, terrible error.’

Her eyes were distant as she thought back.

‘Dr Kruger realised how badly they’d gone wrong. He was willing to throw in the towel there and then. But my father said no. He said if anyone on our team touched the virus they would be fired on the spot. And that’s when he became darker. He lost a lot of weight. He barely ate. He didn’t interact with the rest of us. He was so distracted. He started to obsess about the Atomic bomb. He thought that what he created would have the same devastating effect if it was ever unleashed.’

‘So why didn’t he just destroy it?’

‘I begged him to. Dr Kruger offered to dispose of it. But my father said no. This had been a year and a half of work. He refused to give up. He thought that his ideal medicinal version of the virus was only a few steps away. Maybe only one.’

She paused.

‘He told me he was so close to one of the greatest medical breakthroughs the world has ever seen and he wasn’t giving up now. But the rest of us were thinking clearly. We knew that if this virus got into the wrong hands it would be one of the most lethal biological weapons ever created. My father would be remembered not as a pioneer, but as a monster.’

‘That explains what he was saying,’ Josh asked. ‘Just before he jumped.’

‘Your friend should know. He was standing right there,’ she said, looking down at Archer.

He held her gaze.

‘Thousands of people are going to die,’ Josh said. ‘But why would he say that? The virus is devastating but it’s contained here, right?’

Archer saw the anger in her eyes fade. It was replaced by something else.

Fear.

She looked at Josh.

‘Upstairs, in our main lab, we have six separate vials of the virus. On my father’s orders.’

She paused.

‘And when we arrived this morning, five of them were missing.’



Thirty two blocks downtown, Paul Bleeker stepped into a changing room on the third floor of Macy’s Department Store and pulled the door shut behind him. He was holding a shirt, a random one he’d grabbed from a rail, as well as the plastic bag containing the box. He put the hanger holding the shirt onto a hook then placed the bag gently on the ground.

The changing room’s design meant that there was a wooden ledge at the opposite side from the door that customers could use as a seat. Kneeling, Bleeker pulled out a small screwdriver from the pocket of his thick red jacket and started working the screws off the corners of the panel. He worked quietly and methodically. Soft Christmas music played from speakers mounted on the walls in the changing rooms, intermingling with the rustle of clothes being changed in other stalls and the occasional cough or sniff from someone with a seasonal cold. He worked the last screw out of its home, then placed it alongside the other three in a neat line. Tucking the screwdriver back into his pocket, he quietly lifted off the panel and leant it against the wall.

Under the lid, there was an assortment of electrical wiring, but also a square ledge beside a small air vent.

There was already a box in there, identical to the one he had in the bag. He’d placed it here yesterday in preparation.

He lifted it out, putting it on the floor by his feet, then took its twin out of the bag. He carefully placed the new box inside the compartment, laying it on the ledge. Then he lifted the lid and tucked it underneath the box.

This bomb was different from the one left in Central Park. It had no disruptor or disturbance reactor.

And it also contained much more of the virus in the vial rigged up to the detonator.

The device he’d given to the drug dealer was just a tester. He’d had a small sample of the virus extracted from one of the main vials and transferred into a pressurised cylinder. He’d made a small bomb, something he could do in his sleep. He wasn’t the most intelligent guy out there, but certain things he knew how to do just fine. But he’d needed to see the virus at work, to ensure everything he’d heard wasn’t just bullshit. He knew from a job he’d held briefly in Central Park last year that the groundsman in the Meadow area, Luis Cesar, emptied the trash like clockwork between 9:45 and 10:10 every weeknight.

He’d been watching the Meadow from an upper floor corridor of a hotel on West 67at 10pm last night. He’d seen Cantrell deliver the box earlier. He hadn’t opened it, which Hurley had assured Bleeker he wouldn’t, and it meant Bleeker wouldn’t be on any security cameras mounted inside the Park. Through binoculars, he’d seen the groundsman approach, spot and open the box. He’d watched in fascination at the devastating effects of the virus as it killed the man, blood spraying from his mouth as he fell back and died out there on the snow. It wasn’t a hoax and it hadn’t been exaggerated.

This poisonous yellow shit was the real deal.

He looked down at the bomb in front of him. At the top of the box was a long vial. Inside the glass cylinder was a portion of noxious-looking yellow liquid. Below it was a digital timer, pre-set at 15:00 in lime-green numbers on a black display.

Fifteen minutes would suffice. It would give him enough time to get out of Midtown and be on his way back to Queens by the time it detonated, was sucked into the air ducts and killed everyone in the building.

Reaching forward, his finger rested on a small button on the side of the timer.

He coughed as he pressed it, covering the beep.

The countdown started silently.

14:59.

14:58.

14:57.

Reaching beside him, Bleeker lifted the panel and put it back in place, then quickly replaced the screws. When he'd finished, he slid the other shoebox into the plastic bag and rose. He grabbed the shirt on the hangar and pulled open the door, walking out of the stall.

Outside, Bleeker moved down the aisle to where the changing rooms met the main shopping floor. A female employee was standing behind a counter, a half-filled rail of clothing behind her.

She gave him a courteous smile which he didn’t return.

‘Any luck?’ she asked.

‘Not today,’ he said, passing over the shirt.

She took the garment from him, turning to place it on the rail behind her. Bleeker didn’t hesitate. He moved back out into the store and walked rapidly towards the escalator across the level.

He stepped onto the metal stairwell headed to the ground floor and within a few moments he disappeared out of sight.