The Bug Hunter: A Novel Read online

  “Nothing of value. We need to get into his lab.”

  Just then Jensen’s phone buzzed. “Yes? Ok, we’ll be right down.” He hung up.

  “Witt’s got our warrant. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Manassas, Virginia

  When the caravan of SUVs carrying the DHS team arrived at the BRL parking lot, they were greeted by a cluster of Prince William County and Manassas police cars, along with a couple of vans and more than half a dozen detective sedans. Someone had also called the media, and the local Fox television station was setting up a feed.

  “Everyone wants their fifteen minutes of fame,” Jensen said as he got out of the car. He knew that this was certainly the biggest crime committed in the area in the past decade, and he was certain that the local authorities were going to want their piece of the action. So he’d asked Witt to call the chiefs of both police departments to make sure they didn’t screw up his investigation. Now he was going to see just how much juice the secretary of homeland security had.

  Gabriel, Jensen, Brooks, and four other agents approached the scrum of police outside the entrance to the building. The DHS team had put on blue windbreakers with “DHS Police” stenciled on the back. When Detective Lankford saw them, he immediately called out. “You two, Jenkins and Marx!” he said.

  Not knowing if he was purposely butchering his name or not, Jensen said, “It’s Jensen.”

  “Right, Jensen. You two go with Detective Carlson. He’s going to start in the lab proper and then work his way back to the victim’s office.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jensen replied. He handed over his warrant. “This is a warrant issued by a federal judge that gives DHS the right to search the lab of the deceased. Do you have a warrant, Detective?”

  Lankford smiled. “I sure do,” he said, handing it over to Jensen.

  Jensen skimmed the particulars. “This warrant says nothing about the lab. It’s a general search warrant for the deceased’s ‘office work area.’ An office is an office. A lab is a lab. They’re not the same.”

  “Bullshit. This warrant is valid for the lab, which is where the deceased worked. Furthermore—”

  “Detective! Sorry to interrupt. The chief’s calling,” a police officer said, handing Lankford a cell phone.

  Lankford was irritated, but he took the phone. All Jensen and Gabriel could hear was Lankford’s half of the conversation, which was more of a series of grunts with a few groans thrown in. Finally, Lankford hung up without a word. He then turned and called out, “Carlson!”

  “Yes, sir?” A detective, dressed in a blue jacket and gray slacks, walked over to the group. He looked to be about thirty-five years old and was still in good shape; the years of long days and donuts as a detective hadn’t yet taken a toll on him.

  “You are going to accompany these gentlemen into the building. You’re to stay with them at all times. I want you to carefully watch and record anything they find that you even remotely think could be connected to our murder case.” Lankford then turned to Jensen.

  “My chief says you win this round, Jenkins,” he said, again getting Jensen’s name wrong. “But she also said that the agreement she made with your boss is for us to shadow you. So that’s what we’re gonna do. Are we clear?”

  Jensen tried to suppress a smile over the slap down. “Yep,” he said. He turned to Gabriel and the others in his team. “Let’s go.”

  They entered the BRL as a group, with the two detectives in tow, and were immediately met by an armed guard. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, you can get out of the way,” Jensen barked, flashing his badge. “We have a federal warrant to search these premises.”

  The guard, a slender man about thirty years old, worked for a private security company and quickly gave way. “No problem, no problem,” he said.

  Jensen pushed to the front desk. “Who’s in charge here?”

  “I am,” a man said, emerging from a side office. “I’m Dr. William Simons. What is this about?”

  “Dr. Simons, we have a warrant to search the lab and office of Dr. Adnan Mishner,” Jensen said.

  “Adnan? Has he done something wrong?” Simons asked.

  “We’re not sure yet. That’s why we’re here.”

  Simons looked thoroughly confused. “I’ll call him now. I’m sure he would want to be here.”

  Jensen looked over to Detective Carlson, clearly wanting him to address Adnan’s murder. “Sir, Dr. Mishner is dead,” Carlson said. “He was murdered last night.”

  “What? How? Where?”

  “He was found at home,” Carlson said. “That’s all I’m able to discuss. We are conducting an investigation, obviously.”

  Simons looked at the warrant and at Jensen. “Why Homeland Security? Isn’t this a matter for the police?”

  This time Carlson looked at Jensen. “We are looking into Dr. Mishner’s work here at the lab,” Jensen said. “That’s all I can tell you. Can you please show us the way to his office?”

  Simons glanced one last time at the warrant and handed it back to Jensen. Then Simons said, “Right this way.”

  They followed Simons down a series of hallways to a set of double doors with a sign above that read, “Entomology Vector Research.” Simons put his face up to a screen next to the door so his irises could be scanned, and a solenoid buzzed, automatically opening the lock. “We use all biometric security here,” he said as he opened the door to a lobby area. It was furnished Spartanly with a worn couch and coffee table. “That’s the lab itself,” he said, pointing to a pair of large double doors with a biohazard sign attached. “It’s a Biosafety Level Two facility, meaning to gain access to the inner area you must wear personal protective equipment including Mylar suits, gloves, and face masks. Our safety protocol requires that a staff member accompany you inside, and not more than two visitors at a time may enter.”

  “Why is that?” Jensen asked.

  “It’s because they are working with pathogens that may make you sick,” Gabriel interjected. “I worked here a number of years ago with Dr. Mishner. I’m familiar with the lab and how it works.”

  Simons looked intently at Gabriel to see if he remembered him. “When was that?”

  “Early 2020,” Gabriel said.

  Simons thought for a moment. “I remember that project very well. Caused quite a stir among the faculty. They didn’t much like supporting U.S. policy in Afghanistan.”

  “Where’s the office?” Jensen said, interrupting the jaunt down memory lane.

  Simons motioned to a hallway with a half-dozen doors off it, most of them closed. “Adnan’s office is the third on the left,” he said as he moved down the hallway. He used a key to unlock it. As he pushed the door open, his breath caught. “Oh my,” he said.

  Jensen took a half step into the office. It was a mess; papers were everywhere, and the desk’s drawers were turned over onto the floor. The dock for Adnan’s computer was there, but there was no PC. “Did Dr. Mishner use a BRL computer?”

  “He did, but only in the lab and only to run his experiments. We all use our own devices now and store everything in the cloud. So he likely used his tablet for everything else.”

  Jensen grunted. That was disappointing because they’d already scanned Adnan’s tablet. It made it even more critical that they get into his Amazon cloud account. “OK, thanks, Dr. Simons. We’ll take it from here.”

  Simons started to say something but then thought better of it. “Call me when you finish,” he said, handing them the keys. “I’ll call Dr. Bower and have her come over to accompany you in the lab.” And with that, he left.

  Jensen watched Simons walk down the hall and then turned to Brooks. “I want you and Gabriel to get into the lab. We need to know if there is anything of value on the computer in there. I’m going to stay here with Detective Carlson and go through
the office. Or what’s left of it.”

  As Brooks and Gabriel went to ask Dr. Simons to call Dr. Bower, Jensen started picking up the overturned drawers. “Someone either broke in, or Adnan was looking for something in a hurry,” he said. “Given the security what are the chances that someone broke in here?”

  Carlson looked around. Poking his head out into the hallway, he noticed surveillance cameras. “I’ll go check out the camera feed. That should tell us something.”

  “Go,” Jensen said. He then started sorting through the materials in the office. Most were academic papers that Adnan had written for various journals. It appeared that he’d been looking through his own work from the time he’d written his PhD dissertation to the last set of articles he’d written for publication in various scientific journals. There were also photographs mixed in. One of Adnan at a microscope, one of him in front of a genetic sequencer, and one of him high-fiving a colleague. There were also a few pictures of Adnan in Afghanistan.

  Jensen was running his hands inside all the drawers to see if anything had been missed when his fingers caught the edge of a photo. It had become lodged in a crevice on the underside of the desk. With some effort he managed to work it free. “Well, hello there,” he said to himself. It was a picture of a young woman. She was smiling at the camera and was wearing a tank top that showed her slender arms while accentuating her large breasts. She was striking. As he studied the image, he realized that he recognized the setting as Adnan’s house. Turning the photo over, Jensen could see that it had been printed on a home printer. There was no date. Rather than put the woman’s picture with the others, he slid it into his jacket pocket.

  By the time Carlson returned, Jensen had finished sorting through the papers. “Got video?” he asked.

  “Yep,” Carlson said, proffering a CD of the footage. “They’ve got quite a high-def system here.” He took out a small spiral notebook from his pocket. “Adnan was in the lab all day and then entered his office at 4:30 p.m. the day of the murder and left at 6:00 p.m. No one else came or went after that. When he left he was carrying a briefcase.”

  “What about his body language?” Jensen asked. “Was he rushing?”

  Carlson thought for a moment. “He looked pretty frazzled. His hair was mussed. He wasn’t running or anything. But he seemed stressed.”

  “So he was the last in and out. That’s not a surprise given what I’ve found,” Jensen said. “This is all Adnan’s work,” he said motioning to the papers and photos on the desk.

  Carlson looked at the material and picked up one of the photos. “What do you make of it?”

  “I think he left here knowing he wasn’t coming back and wanted to remind himself of the brilliant career he’d had.”

  “So you think he knew he was gonna get killed?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he thought he was leaving town and not coming back.”

  Carlson nodded. Seemed plausible to him. He took pictures with his phone of everything that they’d found. He knew Lankford would want to know what they’d come across. “Now what?”

  “We’ll pack all this up and do a deeper dive back at DHS. And I’ll make sure you get a complete accounting of it. Now let’s see what’s going on in the lab.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Manassas, Virginia

  When Gabriel and Brooks arrived at the entrance to the lab, they were met by a tall, striking redheaded woman in a white lab coat. She wore a blue dress over black tights and ankle-high black boots. She put out her hand and said, “I’m Dr. Bower. I work in the infectious disease wing. Dr. Simons said you need an escorted tour of Vector Research?”

  “We don’t need a tour. I worked in VR for a time, so I know the lab well,” Gabriel said, a bit more stridently than he’d intended. “What I mean is, we need an escort per regulations.”

  Dr. Bower looked at Gabriel curiously but finally said, “OK. You’ll need to suit up.” She presented her face to the scanner next to the lab door, and a light turned green; she then pulled the door open. “Follow me,” she said.

  They entered a holding area off which there was a small locker room. Gabriel immediately went in and took one of the white Mylar suits off the wall. It was like a big version of the onesies that babies wear and included attached booties.

  “Anything my size?” Brooks asked Dr. Bower.

  “I think so,” she said, pulling open one of the cabinets. “Here’s a female medium,” she said, handing a suit over to Brooks. “This should fit.”

  They quickly suited up and put on gloves and face masks that shielded their eyes and mouths. Then Dr. Bower read them the standard rules and regulations. “Are either of you suffering from any immunosuppressant diseases such as HIV?”

  Both Brooks and Gabriel shook their heads. “OK. You are about to enter a BSL-2 lab that deals with agents that are potentially hazardous. Most of the infectious agents are behind biological safety cabinets, which are essentially glass-enclosed boxes with built-in gloves for handling materials inside. But you are better off being safe than sorry. So treat everything as if it has cooties.” Dr. Bower smiled and put on her own mask. “Follow me.”

  They proceeded to a large interior door made of stainless steel with a small window in the center. On it was a big sign that said, “BSL-2 Lab: Restricted Access,” along with a big orange sign that said, “Biohazard.” Bower approached a security screen, where she punched in a code. “The iris scanner doesn’t work well with these shields on,” she said in a muffled voice. In an instant the door opened, and they walked into an air lock; the door to the lab itself couldn’t be opened until the outer door to the air lock was sealed tight. Once they were all in, a green light flashed indicating that it was safe to proceed. With a whoosh, the lab door, under negative pressure to ensure that no air would escape, opened inward.

  The lab looked exactly as Gabriel remembered it. There were parallel workbenches that ran the length of the room on top of which sat microscopes, genetic sequencers, and autoclaves. On the far wall were floor-to-ceiling cabinets that contained test tubes, lab glass, and other vessels for specimen sampling and testing. And on the near wall was a line of biosafety cabinets (BSCs) that looked to be empty. “This is the main work area where the experiments are set up,” Dr. Bower said. “For DNA work, physical samples of bacteria and viral agents are handled in the BSCs, and then they are genetically sequenced and analyzed at the bench. We then slice and splice new code snippets into larva DNA, and we then incubate the larvae in our vector tanks. They stay in the tanks until we are done with our experiments, we deploy them, or they die from natural causes.”

  “Wow, this is unbelievable,” Brooks said. “I had no idea. This is like science fiction!”

  “It’s science, but it’s not fiction,” Gabriel said. “Let’s check out the computer.”

  Brooks nodded and went over to the terminal on one of the benches. She powered it up and motioned for Dr. Bower to come over. “Can you use your credential to sign in?”

  Bower hesitated. She saw it as a violation of professional ethics to access her colleague’s lab computer without his knowledge. But she had also clearly heard Dr. Simons tell her to “cooperate fully and give them access to any information they require.” So she reluctantly reached over the put in her password.

  Brooks did a quick scan of the system and directory and opened up a lab folder with a list of the agents in the sequence database. She motioned Gabriel over for him to take a look.

  Nipah

  Dengue fever

  Ebola

  Rift Valley fever

  Yellow fever

  Zika

  Malaria

  Japanese encephalitis

  West Nile virus

  Sandfly fever

  Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever

  Lyme disease

  Typhus and louse-borne relapsing fever

 
; “Dr. Bower, can you take a look at this?” Gabriel asked.

  Bower came over and looked at the screen. Her face suddenly showed confusion. “What is this?”

  “It looks to me like a shopping list for some pretty gnarly pathogens,” he said.

  “I—I don’t know where these came from. This lab doesn’t work with most of these. Lyme disease and sandfly fever are the only ones approved for a BSL-2 lab like this one. The rest of those are restricted to BSL-3 and -4 labs.”

  “You run a BSL-4 lab, correct? Any chance these sequences could have come from there?”

  “No chance. We have twenty-four-hour surveillance, and someone is in the lab 24-7.”

  “Could they come from anyplace else?” asked Brooks? “Isn’t there a public database where scientists upload genetic sequences for research?”

  “It’s called GenBank,” Dr. Bower answered. “The answer is yes and no. GenBank has sequence data for some of these diseases, but not all of them and they are not always complete. To really ensure quality and efficacy you want to use your own sequence data.”

  “And accessing GenBank creates a trail, correct?” Gabriel asked. “So if you were concerned about secrecy that wouldn’t be the way to go.”

  “I guess not,” Bower said, a hint of confusion in her voice.

  Gabriel nodded and asked Brooks to copy the folder and upload it to a cloud account set up for this purpose. In thirty seconds it was done.

  Gabriel then went into the room that housed the vector tanks to see the lab’s current insect inventory. To his surprise most of them were empty; there were no Mediterranean fruit flies and thus no direct link to the Florida citrus attack. Just as it seemed he’d reached a dead end, Gabriel noticed one tank at the back of the room filled with Aedes taeniorhynchus, more commonly known as the black salt marsh mosquito. Gabriel remembered the lab as focusing on a wide variety of insects, including many rare and obscure species from around the world. The presence of a single tank with a fairly common mosquito such as the black salt marsh seemed odd to him, and he made a mental note to ask Dr. Simons about it.