Deadly Memory (Living Memory Book 2), page 14
The director cleared his throat. “Excuse me?”
“You were funding Elena’s research just like you were funding ours. She already had some idea what she might find down there, didn’t she? Why else would she be targeting underwater Permian layers? There are plenty of exposed Permian layers on the surface to study. You couldn’t pass up the possibility of getting your hands on an ancient, world-destroying virus. You funded her research, and when it got loose, you kept it secret.”
The silence stretched. Then the director said, “I’m not a monster. I want this virus stopped the same as you.”
“You were keeping it secret to develop as a weapon!”
“Of course we were. Don’t be naive, Dr. Shannon. As soon as our enemies think they can attack us without consequence, they will. They have to know they won’t succeed. We don’t collect weapons to use them. They’re deterrents to war. That means that any weapon our adversaries could acquire, we have to get first. Until it’s fully developed, it has to be a secret, or else they’ll know our weaknesses. They’ll know what we can’t do.”
Samira clenched her fists and set her jaw. “It’s too late to worry about that. People are dying. This information could help. It’s bigger than just the United States. If this is true, the world needs to know about it.”
“And I told you I would take care of that. Am I going to have a problem with you?”
She bit her lip. Beth nudged her and nodded at the phone.
“Dr. Shannon?”
“No,” Samira said. “No problem.”
“Excellent. Then I thank you for bringing this to my attention.”
The moment the phone went dead, Samira slammed her fist down on the table. “He’s going to bury it,” she said, wanting to scream. “This isn’t about national security. It’s about covering his ass. If he tells anyone at all, it’ll be people in the agency who have the wrong qualifications and little experience with the virus. He’s just going to hide and hope it blows over.”
Samira called Paula back, who picked up on the first ring. “Did someone contact you?” Paula asked.
“Yeah. Was it Everson that you called?”
“Hunt, actually. He’s higher up; I thought he could get it up the chain to the top faster.”
“He got it up the chain, all right,” Samira said. “The director called and told me to keep it quiet. I’m pretty sure he already knew where the virus came from. He’s been sitting on it for national security reasons. Or at least so nobody knows that he’s partly responsible.”
Paula whistled.
“But I can’t keep it quiet, can I? What if it’s someone in China or Russia or Egypt or Turkmenistan that can figure out a cure? I can’t just sit on this knowledge and trust the director to do the right thing.”
“He probably wants to prevent a panic.”
“We already have a panic. People know we can’t stop this thing; they say so over and over again on the news. Additional knowledge might give people some hope that we’ll figure it out.”
“What are you going to do?” Paula asked.
“I don’t know,” Samira said. “I guess I have to listen to the director.” Beth gave her a strange look, but Samira shook her head. “He probably knows more about what’s going on than I do.”
“Probably for the best,” Paula said. “Let me know if you decide to do anything else.”
“Okay, will do,” Samira said. “Stay safe.”
“You too.”
When she hung up the phone, Beth raised an eyebrow. “What was that about? You’re not going to let it go.”
“No. But Paula’s in deep with the Agency, and I didn’t want her tattling on me. Listen, I bet that neither Paula nor the director actually believe that I’m going to stay quiet any more than you do, so if I want to do something, it needs to be quick.”
“What are you going to do?”
She thought about putting what she suspected out on social media. But she didn’t have much of a following, and even if it did get some traction, it would just join the host of conspiracy theories about the virus already bouncing across the internet. No one doing serious work would pay any attention to it. It was too weird, too crazy an idea. But she couldn’t just write an academic paper, either. She needed to get the attention of people who might use the information to make a difference, and she needed to do it fast.
Samira looked at the TV, where the news anchors were still talking about the latest body count. “Let’s start by calling them.”
Samira had never visited a TV studio before, and had no idea what to expect. An extremely efficient young man took charge of her, speaking constantly as he clipped a visitor’s badge to her shirt and whisked her through a series of doorways.
He handed her off to a makeup artist, who pushed her gently into a swivel chair in front of a mirror bordered by large, circular light bulbs. The efficient young man and the makeup artist spoke rapidly about her appearance and how best to fix it as if she weren’t sitting right there. She felt like a parcel being passed through an assembly line.
Her makeup was swiftly seen to while a woman behind her did something to her hair. The young man looked at his watch. “Time,” he said.
He ushered Samira through another room filled with people and monitors and through another door with a sign that read “Quiet, Filming in Progress.”
The next room was vast, like a warehouse, but most of it was dark and painted a matte black, making it hard to see what was in it or how far it stretched. On the other side, taking up maybe a third of the space, was what looked like someone’s living room, dazzlingly lit by an array of lights pointed at it from different directions. Several large cameras snaked out of the dark mounted on hinged booms and focused their unblinking eyes on the scene.
On the left, already seated in an easy chair with her legs crossed, was a young woman with a perfect physique and a tailored suit who looked painted into the scene. Samira recognized her as news anchor Kelly Coyle. She looked just as unreal and larger-than-life in person as she did on TV.
“So, how’s this going to work?” Samira asked, suddenly feeling like this was a bad idea. It wasn’t like she was sure about her conclusion. She just wanted the possibility to be investigated. What if she did incite a panic, like the director warned?
“You’ll do fine,” the young man said. He unclipped her visitor’s badge and held out his arm, directing her to the couch opposite Kelly Coyle.
Samira stared at him. “What, now?”
“Camera rolls in two minutes,” he said. “It’ll be no problem. You’ll do great.”
She climbed up to the stage and sat on the couch, feeling profoundly conspicuous in the bright lights. Kelly sat perfectly at ease, reviewing a piece of paper, presumably her opening interview questions. The easy chair and sofa seemed much too brightly colored, as if they were animated set pieces instead of real objects. In her bright green suit and perfect blond hair, Kelly looked the same.
Samira crossed her legs one way, then the other. Should she sit on the edge of the couch? That felt awkward, like she was getting ready to run. But if she sat back, she’d look unengaged. She tried to think how she would sit on a couch normally and couldn’t think how to do it.
Someone off stage held up five fingers, then four, then three. Kelly handed her review sheet to an aide and looked straight into the camera, unhurried, her position on the chair somehow seeming both poised and utterly relaxed at the same time. Samira wished desperately for a drink of water.
While Kelly delivered her opening remarks, Samira tried to review what she intended to say, but her mind had gone blank. All she could think about was her own physical anxiety: Where should she look? Should she smile? Where should she put her hands?
Finally, Kelly directed her larger-than-life smile at Samira and said, “In the studio today we have famed paleontologist Samira Shannon, who found an entire nesting site full of dinosaur eggs in Thailand five years ago. Dr. Shannon, what have you been up to since then?”
“A lot more digging,” Samira said, with a nervous smile that felt fake. That first find had earned her a lot of articles and calls from journalists, and one interview on NPR, but never television before now. She was surprised by how different it was. “I’ve led several more expeditions to the Khorat Plateau in Thailand, which is one of the world’s most exciting new fossil locations.”
“You didn’t come here to tell us about one of your fossil finds, though,” Kelly said. “You came because you believe you know the source of the Julian virus.”
Samira took a deep breath. “That’s right. I want to emphasize that this is a theory, one that I myself am in no position to verify one way or another.”
“Because you’re stuck in Denver like the rest of us,” Kelly said.
“Yes. But as a scientist studying the deep past, it looks like a real possibility to me. About 250 million years ago, something nearly killed all life on Earth. Almost everything living was affected, on land and in the oceans. Most of them died. It’s called the Permian Extinction, or just the Great Dying. We don’t know what caused that. But now we’re facing this virus with similar characteristics: it crosses species boundaries, killing everything from humans to hummingbirds. So maybe it’s the same.”
“Viruses can’t usually affect so many species like this, can they?”
“No, that’s right. Most viruses have evolved in tandem with their hosts for millions of years, so they’re tailored to infect only them. Some can jump species boundaries, but never so many species at once. But if this is a truly ancient virus, then it makes more sense. It’s a virus that’s common to all our ancestors, only it’s been so long, we’ve lost any defenses our ancestors might once have had against it.”
“So you think the Julian virus spreading around the world now is the same virus that killed all those animals back before the dinosaurs?” Kelly asked. “Do you have any proof?”
“Not proof, no. More like circumstantial evidence. One of the first people infected was a scientist named Dr. Elena Benitez. She and her team had been drilling into the layer of sedimentary rock formed during the Permian era. We can’t tell exactly what she found, though, because she and her team are all dead.”
“A killer virus, raised from the deep?”
Samira nodded. “One that very nearly eradicated all life on the planet 250 million years ago.”
“Are you telling us there’s no hope? That we’re all going to die?”
“No! I don’t even know if I’m right about this. I’m trying to get the word out to medical researchers around the world that this is a serious possibility. It would explain how it jumps from species to species, and why it’s so much more deadly than COVID. If it can be verified that the disease started on board Dr. Benitez’s ship, then that brings us one step closer to finding a cure.”
“And what will happen if we don’t find a cure?”
Samira was taken aback. She wasn’t expecting the question. The answer seemed kind of obvious, but she didn’t want to say so on television. “Disaster response isn’t my area of expertise,” she said. “There are people whose job it is to make decisions about evacuation, quarantine, containment, that sort of thing.”
“But you’re saying the death count could be extremely high. In the millions? Billions?”
“I don’t know. It could be very high.”
“Is our survival as a species at risk?”
“We should take that possibility seriously,” Samira said. “I don’t have the expertise, but I’m talking to those who do: Please investigate this. Look into Dr. Benitez and her team. Examine the drilling rig they were on. Test ancient animals for immunity. We have to act fast. This might be the scariest thing we’ve ever faced as a species.”
Kelly’s professional face showed a carefully-crafted expression of shock. “Should we be getting out of Denver?” she asked.
“No. Again, I’m not a specialist, but I’m sure the experts would tell you to stay inside and stay calm. The more people move around, the faster the disease will spread.”
“Thank you, Dr. Shannon.” She faced the camera. “You heard it here first: the scariest disease we’ve ever faced. Stay safe, everyone. This is Kelly Coyle.”
The cameras went dark, and Kelly grinned at her. “That was great. Thank you so much. We’ll be worldwide news by ten o’clock.”
Samira left the studio in a daze, wondering if she should have listened to the CIA Director after all.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The morning after Samira’s appearance on television, the military arrived in Denver in force. Humvees and armored patrol vehicles lined up on the highways and barricaded intersections. The perimeter stretched from Fort Collins in the north to Castle Rock in the south. Routes 25, 70, 270, and 76 were closed to all non-military traffic.
In a television address, the state governor announced that, with the help of the Army and the federal government, the municipalities of Denver, Aurora, and Boulder were being placed under forced quarantine. All flights in and out were canceled. Non-essential personnel were instructed to stay in their homes.
Normally-crowded streets emptied of traffic, while on television, endless images of vehicles with machine guns and grenade launchers paraded past with suburban developments in the background. Every shot seemed to include a McDonalds or a baseball diamond or an elementary school with US flag flying, as if to emphasize: This is happening in America.
Samira sat glued to the screen, stricken.
“You did the right thing,” Beth said. “This was going to happen anyway. If you sped up the timeline, that might even be for the best.”
“I just hope someone can find a cure.”
“Don’t we all.”
Army personnel stopped food delivery trucks at the perimeter and drove them to distribution centers. Hospitals filled with the infected. Clinics appeared all over the quarantined area, giving people a place other than the hospitals to be tested. Many doctors from outside the quarantine willingly entered it to help staff these, even though they would not be allowed to leave again.
Despite their best efforts, it was an impossible perimeter to maintain. Even a place like Denver, with the mountains as a natural barrier and a large nearby military presence, had too many roads in and out to completely corral a frightened populace. People determined to get out would find a way.
A few days later, a case was diagnosed in Grand Junction, near the Utah border. Someone had gotten out through the mountains and had brought the virus with them.
“How can they even stop it?” Beth asked. “This thing can infect birds. What are they going to do, cordon off the sky?”
More cases turned up in North Platte and Omaha, and then, terrifyingly, in New York City.
Paula called. It took Samira a moment to realize she was crying.
“You couldn’t wait, could you? You couldn’t listen!”
“Paula, are you okay? Are you sick?”
“Sick? No. Not yet. But they’re shutting us down.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re discontinuing the program. Permanently.”
Samira rocked back from the phone. Permanently? “But...what about Charlie?”
“They’re going into ‘full scale development’ mode. It means they’re going to strap him down and engineer situations to make him produce the chemical in large quantities. They’re going to hurt him, in other words. No more talking, no more science. Just torture and extraction.”
“There must be some mistake.”
“No mistake. There were always some who thought a science team was a waste of time. Everson, for one. They’ve been lobbying the director to scrap it for months. After your little stunt on national news, he’s ready to listen. They convinced him we’re a security risk and a needless hindrance, and he’s shutting us down.”
“They’re going to end up killing him, and then they’ll have nothing. No scientific understanding, and no Charlie, either.”
“That line of reasoning worked for a while, but not anymore. Hunt used to listen to me, or at least humor me. He let me continue that side of the project, despite the expense, because I convinced him it might give us more unique knowledge. But they don’t care about the science. They don’t care about what things were really like in the Cretaceous, or about preserving the last of a species. He’s just a weapon to them.”
“But he can talk. He’s a person. They can’t just torture him.”
“Who’s going to stop them?” Paula took a breath and lowered her voice. “To tell the truth, they never planned to let us go very much longer anyway. I was buying a week at a time, begging the money out of Hunt to keep it all going.”
“You never told me.”
“Hunt is mostly on my side, I think, but as far as his superiors are concerned, the science team is nothing but an impediment and an expensive security risk. The CIA isn’t set up for operations that include acquiring and transporting live deer on a regular basis in secret. They’ve wanted us gone for a while.”
Samira paced the room, clutching the phone in a death grip. “We’ve got to do something.”
“There’s nothing to be done. Honestly, I think you’ve done quite enough.”
“Don’t put this on me! I was trying to save lives. Possibly billions of them.”
Paula sighed. “I know. But what do you think I can do? Sneak him out in my pocket? Even if I could, where would he go? The Denver Zoo?”
“Are you at the facility right now?”
“For the moment. I’m packing up my things.”
“Don’t leave yet. I’m coming.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. At the very least, I’m going to say goodbye.”
“This isn’t a good idea,” Beth said. “You should stay here. You can’t do anything there, and if you go, they might just decide to arrest you.”
“I have to go. I can’t let this happen to Charlie without at least talking to him one last time.”
“Tell me you’ll behave. That you won’t try to take on the military single-handed and fight your way out.”
“You were funding Elena’s research just like you were funding ours. She already had some idea what she might find down there, didn’t she? Why else would she be targeting underwater Permian layers? There are plenty of exposed Permian layers on the surface to study. You couldn’t pass up the possibility of getting your hands on an ancient, world-destroying virus. You funded her research, and when it got loose, you kept it secret.”
The silence stretched. Then the director said, “I’m not a monster. I want this virus stopped the same as you.”
“You were keeping it secret to develop as a weapon!”
“Of course we were. Don’t be naive, Dr. Shannon. As soon as our enemies think they can attack us without consequence, they will. They have to know they won’t succeed. We don’t collect weapons to use them. They’re deterrents to war. That means that any weapon our adversaries could acquire, we have to get first. Until it’s fully developed, it has to be a secret, or else they’ll know our weaknesses. They’ll know what we can’t do.”
Samira clenched her fists and set her jaw. “It’s too late to worry about that. People are dying. This information could help. It’s bigger than just the United States. If this is true, the world needs to know about it.”
“And I told you I would take care of that. Am I going to have a problem with you?”
She bit her lip. Beth nudged her and nodded at the phone.
“Dr. Shannon?”
“No,” Samira said. “No problem.”
“Excellent. Then I thank you for bringing this to my attention.”
The moment the phone went dead, Samira slammed her fist down on the table. “He’s going to bury it,” she said, wanting to scream. “This isn’t about national security. It’s about covering his ass. If he tells anyone at all, it’ll be people in the agency who have the wrong qualifications and little experience with the virus. He’s just going to hide and hope it blows over.”
Samira called Paula back, who picked up on the first ring. “Did someone contact you?” Paula asked.
“Yeah. Was it Everson that you called?”
“Hunt, actually. He’s higher up; I thought he could get it up the chain to the top faster.”
“He got it up the chain, all right,” Samira said. “The director called and told me to keep it quiet. I’m pretty sure he already knew where the virus came from. He’s been sitting on it for national security reasons. Or at least so nobody knows that he’s partly responsible.”
Paula whistled.
“But I can’t keep it quiet, can I? What if it’s someone in China or Russia or Egypt or Turkmenistan that can figure out a cure? I can’t just sit on this knowledge and trust the director to do the right thing.”
“He probably wants to prevent a panic.”
“We already have a panic. People know we can’t stop this thing; they say so over and over again on the news. Additional knowledge might give people some hope that we’ll figure it out.”
“What are you going to do?” Paula asked.
“I don’t know,” Samira said. “I guess I have to listen to the director.” Beth gave her a strange look, but Samira shook her head. “He probably knows more about what’s going on than I do.”
“Probably for the best,” Paula said. “Let me know if you decide to do anything else.”
“Okay, will do,” Samira said. “Stay safe.”
“You too.”
When she hung up the phone, Beth raised an eyebrow. “What was that about? You’re not going to let it go.”
“No. But Paula’s in deep with the Agency, and I didn’t want her tattling on me. Listen, I bet that neither Paula nor the director actually believe that I’m going to stay quiet any more than you do, so if I want to do something, it needs to be quick.”
“What are you going to do?”
She thought about putting what she suspected out on social media. But she didn’t have much of a following, and even if it did get some traction, it would just join the host of conspiracy theories about the virus already bouncing across the internet. No one doing serious work would pay any attention to it. It was too weird, too crazy an idea. But she couldn’t just write an academic paper, either. She needed to get the attention of people who might use the information to make a difference, and she needed to do it fast.
Samira looked at the TV, where the news anchors were still talking about the latest body count. “Let’s start by calling them.”
Samira had never visited a TV studio before, and had no idea what to expect. An extremely efficient young man took charge of her, speaking constantly as he clipped a visitor’s badge to her shirt and whisked her through a series of doorways.
He handed her off to a makeup artist, who pushed her gently into a swivel chair in front of a mirror bordered by large, circular light bulbs. The efficient young man and the makeup artist spoke rapidly about her appearance and how best to fix it as if she weren’t sitting right there. She felt like a parcel being passed through an assembly line.
Her makeup was swiftly seen to while a woman behind her did something to her hair. The young man looked at his watch. “Time,” he said.
He ushered Samira through another room filled with people and monitors and through another door with a sign that read “Quiet, Filming in Progress.”
The next room was vast, like a warehouse, but most of it was dark and painted a matte black, making it hard to see what was in it or how far it stretched. On the other side, taking up maybe a third of the space, was what looked like someone’s living room, dazzlingly lit by an array of lights pointed at it from different directions. Several large cameras snaked out of the dark mounted on hinged booms and focused their unblinking eyes on the scene.
On the left, already seated in an easy chair with her legs crossed, was a young woman with a perfect physique and a tailored suit who looked painted into the scene. Samira recognized her as news anchor Kelly Coyle. She looked just as unreal and larger-than-life in person as she did on TV.
“So, how’s this going to work?” Samira asked, suddenly feeling like this was a bad idea. It wasn’t like she was sure about her conclusion. She just wanted the possibility to be investigated. What if she did incite a panic, like the director warned?
“You’ll do fine,” the young man said. He unclipped her visitor’s badge and held out his arm, directing her to the couch opposite Kelly Coyle.
Samira stared at him. “What, now?”
“Camera rolls in two minutes,” he said. “It’ll be no problem. You’ll do great.”
She climbed up to the stage and sat on the couch, feeling profoundly conspicuous in the bright lights. Kelly sat perfectly at ease, reviewing a piece of paper, presumably her opening interview questions. The easy chair and sofa seemed much too brightly colored, as if they were animated set pieces instead of real objects. In her bright green suit and perfect blond hair, Kelly looked the same.
Samira crossed her legs one way, then the other. Should she sit on the edge of the couch? That felt awkward, like she was getting ready to run. But if she sat back, she’d look unengaged. She tried to think how she would sit on a couch normally and couldn’t think how to do it.
Someone off stage held up five fingers, then four, then three. Kelly handed her review sheet to an aide and looked straight into the camera, unhurried, her position on the chair somehow seeming both poised and utterly relaxed at the same time. Samira wished desperately for a drink of water.
While Kelly delivered her opening remarks, Samira tried to review what she intended to say, but her mind had gone blank. All she could think about was her own physical anxiety: Where should she look? Should she smile? Where should she put her hands?
Finally, Kelly directed her larger-than-life smile at Samira and said, “In the studio today we have famed paleontologist Samira Shannon, who found an entire nesting site full of dinosaur eggs in Thailand five years ago. Dr. Shannon, what have you been up to since then?”
“A lot more digging,” Samira said, with a nervous smile that felt fake. That first find had earned her a lot of articles and calls from journalists, and one interview on NPR, but never television before now. She was surprised by how different it was. “I’ve led several more expeditions to the Khorat Plateau in Thailand, which is one of the world’s most exciting new fossil locations.”
“You didn’t come here to tell us about one of your fossil finds, though,” Kelly said. “You came because you believe you know the source of the Julian virus.”
Samira took a deep breath. “That’s right. I want to emphasize that this is a theory, one that I myself am in no position to verify one way or another.”
“Because you’re stuck in Denver like the rest of us,” Kelly said.
“Yes. But as a scientist studying the deep past, it looks like a real possibility to me. About 250 million years ago, something nearly killed all life on Earth. Almost everything living was affected, on land and in the oceans. Most of them died. It’s called the Permian Extinction, or just the Great Dying. We don’t know what caused that. But now we’re facing this virus with similar characteristics: it crosses species boundaries, killing everything from humans to hummingbirds. So maybe it’s the same.”
“Viruses can’t usually affect so many species like this, can they?”
“No, that’s right. Most viruses have evolved in tandem with their hosts for millions of years, so they’re tailored to infect only them. Some can jump species boundaries, but never so many species at once. But if this is a truly ancient virus, then it makes more sense. It’s a virus that’s common to all our ancestors, only it’s been so long, we’ve lost any defenses our ancestors might once have had against it.”
“So you think the Julian virus spreading around the world now is the same virus that killed all those animals back before the dinosaurs?” Kelly asked. “Do you have any proof?”
“Not proof, no. More like circumstantial evidence. One of the first people infected was a scientist named Dr. Elena Benitez. She and her team had been drilling into the layer of sedimentary rock formed during the Permian era. We can’t tell exactly what she found, though, because she and her team are all dead.”
“A killer virus, raised from the deep?”
Samira nodded. “One that very nearly eradicated all life on the planet 250 million years ago.”
“Are you telling us there’s no hope? That we’re all going to die?”
“No! I don’t even know if I’m right about this. I’m trying to get the word out to medical researchers around the world that this is a serious possibility. It would explain how it jumps from species to species, and why it’s so much more deadly than COVID. If it can be verified that the disease started on board Dr. Benitez’s ship, then that brings us one step closer to finding a cure.”
“And what will happen if we don’t find a cure?”
Samira was taken aback. She wasn’t expecting the question. The answer seemed kind of obvious, but she didn’t want to say so on television. “Disaster response isn’t my area of expertise,” she said. “There are people whose job it is to make decisions about evacuation, quarantine, containment, that sort of thing.”
“But you’re saying the death count could be extremely high. In the millions? Billions?”
“I don’t know. It could be very high.”
“Is our survival as a species at risk?”
“We should take that possibility seriously,” Samira said. “I don’t have the expertise, but I’m talking to those who do: Please investigate this. Look into Dr. Benitez and her team. Examine the drilling rig they were on. Test ancient animals for immunity. We have to act fast. This might be the scariest thing we’ve ever faced as a species.”
Kelly’s professional face showed a carefully-crafted expression of shock. “Should we be getting out of Denver?” she asked.
“No. Again, I’m not a specialist, but I’m sure the experts would tell you to stay inside and stay calm. The more people move around, the faster the disease will spread.”
“Thank you, Dr. Shannon.” She faced the camera. “You heard it here first: the scariest disease we’ve ever faced. Stay safe, everyone. This is Kelly Coyle.”
The cameras went dark, and Kelly grinned at her. “That was great. Thank you so much. We’ll be worldwide news by ten o’clock.”
Samira left the studio in a daze, wondering if she should have listened to the CIA Director after all.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The morning after Samira’s appearance on television, the military arrived in Denver in force. Humvees and armored patrol vehicles lined up on the highways and barricaded intersections. The perimeter stretched from Fort Collins in the north to Castle Rock in the south. Routes 25, 70, 270, and 76 were closed to all non-military traffic.
In a television address, the state governor announced that, with the help of the Army and the federal government, the municipalities of Denver, Aurora, and Boulder were being placed under forced quarantine. All flights in and out were canceled. Non-essential personnel were instructed to stay in their homes.
Normally-crowded streets emptied of traffic, while on television, endless images of vehicles with machine guns and grenade launchers paraded past with suburban developments in the background. Every shot seemed to include a McDonalds or a baseball diamond or an elementary school with US flag flying, as if to emphasize: This is happening in America.
Samira sat glued to the screen, stricken.
“You did the right thing,” Beth said. “This was going to happen anyway. If you sped up the timeline, that might even be for the best.”
“I just hope someone can find a cure.”
“Don’t we all.”
Army personnel stopped food delivery trucks at the perimeter and drove them to distribution centers. Hospitals filled with the infected. Clinics appeared all over the quarantined area, giving people a place other than the hospitals to be tested. Many doctors from outside the quarantine willingly entered it to help staff these, even though they would not be allowed to leave again.
Despite their best efforts, it was an impossible perimeter to maintain. Even a place like Denver, with the mountains as a natural barrier and a large nearby military presence, had too many roads in and out to completely corral a frightened populace. People determined to get out would find a way.
A few days later, a case was diagnosed in Grand Junction, near the Utah border. Someone had gotten out through the mountains and had brought the virus with them.
“How can they even stop it?” Beth asked. “This thing can infect birds. What are they going to do, cordon off the sky?”
More cases turned up in North Platte and Omaha, and then, terrifyingly, in New York City.
Paula called. It took Samira a moment to realize she was crying.
“You couldn’t wait, could you? You couldn’t listen!”
“Paula, are you okay? Are you sick?”
“Sick? No. Not yet. But they’re shutting us down.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re discontinuing the program. Permanently.”
Samira rocked back from the phone. Permanently? “But...what about Charlie?”
“They’re going into ‘full scale development’ mode. It means they’re going to strap him down and engineer situations to make him produce the chemical in large quantities. They’re going to hurt him, in other words. No more talking, no more science. Just torture and extraction.”
“There must be some mistake.”
“No mistake. There were always some who thought a science team was a waste of time. Everson, for one. They’ve been lobbying the director to scrap it for months. After your little stunt on national news, he’s ready to listen. They convinced him we’re a security risk and a needless hindrance, and he’s shutting us down.”
“They’re going to end up killing him, and then they’ll have nothing. No scientific understanding, and no Charlie, either.”
“That line of reasoning worked for a while, but not anymore. Hunt used to listen to me, or at least humor me. He let me continue that side of the project, despite the expense, because I convinced him it might give us more unique knowledge. But they don’t care about the science. They don’t care about what things were really like in the Cretaceous, or about preserving the last of a species. He’s just a weapon to them.”
“But he can talk. He’s a person. They can’t just torture him.”
“Who’s going to stop them?” Paula took a breath and lowered her voice. “To tell the truth, they never planned to let us go very much longer anyway. I was buying a week at a time, begging the money out of Hunt to keep it all going.”
“You never told me.”
“Hunt is mostly on my side, I think, but as far as his superiors are concerned, the science team is nothing but an impediment and an expensive security risk. The CIA isn’t set up for operations that include acquiring and transporting live deer on a regular basis in secret. They’ve wanted us gone for a while.”
Samira paced the room, clutching the phone in a death grip. “We’ve got to do something.”
“There’s nothing to be done. Honestly, I think you’ve done quite enough.”
“Don’t put this on me! I was trying to save lives. Possibly billions of them.”
Paula sighed. “I know. But what do you think I can do? Sneak him out in my pocket? Even if I could, where would he go? The Denver Zoo?”
“Are you at the facility right now?”
“For the moment. I’m packing up my things.”
“Don’t leave yet. I’m coming.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. At the very least, I’m going to say goodbye.”
“This isn’t a good idea,” Beth said. “You should stay here. You can’t do anything there, and if you go, they might just decide to arrest you.”
“I have to go. I can’t let this happen to Charlie without at least talking to him one last time.”
“Tell me you’ll behave. That you won’t try to take on the military single-handed and fight your way out.”
