The Bug Hunter: A Novel Page 14

  Gabriel returned to the main lab room and raised his index finder, circling it as if to say, “Wrap it up,” and proceeded back into the air lock. He waited for Brooks and Bower to join him; as soon as the door to the lab shut tight, blue-hued lights turned on, bathing them in high-intensity ultraviolet light that in seconds killed off any bacteria they might have picked up on their suits.

  Once they were back in the locker room, Brooks asked, “Well?”

  Gabriel didn’t want to speak in front of Dr. Bower, so he simply said, “Pretty much as I remembered it. I’d like you to help me review those computer files when we get back to the office.”

  Dr. Bower put her suit in an airtight hamper and motioned for Gabriel and Brooks to do the same. “I’ll show you both out.”

  Jensen and Detective Carlson were waiting for them with Dr. Simons in the lobby. Jensen could tell from Gabriel’s face that they hadn’t found the smoking gun they were looking for. But he’d wait until they got into the car to discuss this.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Dr. Simons asked.

  “Not really. But I do have a few questions,” Gabriel said. “When was the last time you had medflies in the lab?”

  Simons looked at Dr. Bower and then at Gabriel. “I’d have to check. Sometime last year, I believe. Why?”

  “Just curious,” Gabriel said. “If you could find out, we’d appreciate it.”

  “OK. What else?”

  “I noticed that the vector tanks in there were empty with the exception of the one holding the black salt marsh mosquito. Do you know why the inventory is so low?”

  “I wasn’t aware that the tanks were empty. The last time I was in there they were full.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “A month ago. Six weeks, max.”

  Gabriel thought for a moment. What had Adnan been up to? “Do you know what kind of work Adnan was doing on the black salt marsh?”

  Simons shrugged but looked over at Dr. Bower. “I believe he was working with the infectious disease team on something.”

  “That your team, right, Dr. Bower?”

  “Yes,” she said. “To say he is working with my team is overstating it. He has been asking a lot of questions about how viruses are transmitted through the blood to the gut and salivary glands, particularly in mosquitoes. He says that he is preparing for a research project looking at why mosquitoes don’t transmit HIV and Ebola but do transmit Zika and West Nile.”

  Gabriel was trying to digest what he was hearing. “Given that Adnan’s lab doesn’t work with those kind of pathogens, does that seem strange to you?”

  Dr. Bower shrugged. “I guess it is. I didn’t think much about it. We don’t really pry into our colleagues’ research projects.”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “OK. We’re done here for now,” Jensen said. “Thanks for your cooperation, Dr. Simons.”

  “It’s not like I had a choice,” Simons said. “But you’re welcome.”

  In the car on their way back to DC, Gabriel was quiet. He was thinking through what he’d seen—and not seen—in the lab. Jensen, sensing that Gabriel was troubled by something, said, “Uh oh. I know that look.”

  “It’s not adding up,” Gabriel said.

  “How so?”

  “First, Adnan had complete sequences on his system for diseases that his lab doesn’t work with—Zika, dengue, Ebola. I believe those had to come from GenomeX.”

  “If that’s true, there’s our connection to Lebedev.”

  “But the lab was empty of vectors. Except for the black salt marsh.”

  “And that matters because why?”

  “Because the black salt marsh mosquito doesn’t really transmit diseases the way Aedes aegypti or Culex pipiens does. It doesn’t fit with the work that Adnan would do at the BRL. It’s weird.”

  “‘Weird’? Now there’s a scientific term,” Jensen said with a laugh.

  “Something’s not right but I don’t know what. How about his office?”

  “You saw there were papers everywhere. When I sorted through them, it was like a career retrospective. Papers he’d written, photos of his work, even a few pictures of him in Afghanistan.”

  “Why did he turn the office inside out? Was he looking for something?” Brooks asked.

  “He was,” Jensen said. “He was looking for this.” He took out the picture of the woman. “This was stuck in a crevice under the desk.”

  Gabriel took the picture and whistled out loud. “Too beautiful for Adnan. But that sure looks like his house in the background. Who is she?”

  Brooks grabbed the picture. “Why would he want this so badly that he’d trash his office? I mean, she’s hot, but it’s just a picture,” said Brooks.

  “Because he didn’t want us to find it,” Jensen answered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Washington, DC

  By the time they got back to DHS Headquarters, Witt was waiting for them. He’d been pacing his office like a caged cat, hoping that the search of Adnan’s house and the lab would break the case open. Jensen had been cryptic on the phone: “We have a clue. It could be significant. I’ll update you when we get in.” When Witt heard the word “clue,” he’d immediately thought of the board game he’d played as a kid. “Great, he’s bringing me a candlestick,” he said to himself when he hung up the phone. “Maybe he’ll bring the rope too, and I can hang myself.”

  As Jensen, Brooks, and Gabriel walked toward the elevator in the underground garage, Witt’s assistant met them. “The secretary is waiting for you in his office,” she said. Gabriel looked at Jensen and raised an eyebrow.

  They rode the elevator to the eighth floor and made a straight line for the double doors of Witt’s office. Without knocking, they walked in.

  “Did you bring your candlestick?” Witt asked, coming around from his desk.

  Jensen looked confused. “What?”

  “Never mind,” Witt said. “Whaddya got for me?”

  “Two things. We found the link between Lebedev and Adnan,” Jensen said, telling Witt about the sequences they’d found and their belief that they came from GenomeX.

  “Can we prove that, or is it an educated guess?”

  “It’s an educated guess. But it makes sense given what Lebedev accessed at GenomeX.”

  “OK,” Witt said. “What else?”

  Jensen pulled out the picture he’d taken from Adnan’s office and handed it to Witt. He then went through the search and what they’d found in detail.

  “Do we know who she is?”

  “Not a clue. I discreetly showed it to a few of the staff at the BRL, and they’d never seen her before. But that’s definitely Adnan’s house in the background of the photo.”

  “OK. Let’s get her picture loaded into SPARK as soon as possible. It’s a long shot, but maybe we’ll find a match. If she’s applied for a visa or traveled abroad over the past several years, she’ll be in it.”

  Jensen nodded. “That’s going to take time. The last facial recognition search I did with SPARK took three days to complete.”

  “I’ll fast-track it. But let’s keep moving,” Witt said. “What’s our next step?”

  “First thing we do is get over to GMU and pick up Lebedev’s trail. We need to find out whom he worked with, whom he drank with, where he hung out, and whom he fucked.”

  Witt nodded. “What are we looking for?”

  “Anything and everything that ties him to this plot.”

  “OK. I’m still waiting to see if the CIA can find something out about his ties to Chechnya. If we can link him to a specific terrorist group there, we might have a better idea of who he was working with here.” Witt then looked at Gabriel. “You look pretty beat. You doing OK with all this?”

  Gabriel smiled. “Yes, sir.”

  W
itt studied him. “I promised your wife I wouldn’t strong-arm you to stay on this longer than you want to. You still in?”

  “All the fucking way in,” he said, and then added, “sir.”

  Gabriel’s enthusiasm was mostly real. But that night, as he got his first rest in the last thirty-six hours in a tiny hotel room across the street from DHS Headquarters, he struggled to get the image of Adnan out of his mind. Gabriel had not seen death like that since Iraq, and even then, it had usually been nameless, faceless Iraqis whose bodies were grotesquely twisted by the violence that had befallen them. They had seemed like no more than roadkill, random detritus littering the streets. That was the sad reality of war. This—this was something different.

  His relationship with Adnan had been brief but intense. They’d worked closely in a lab for a few months, shared a tent in Afghanistan, gotten shot at together, and then separated as quickly as they’d come together. Gabriel hadn’t really liked Adnan very much and remembered feeling relieved when their mission in Afghanistan was over. In particular, Gabriel had thought Adnan was hostile to America and was very angry about the war in Iraq. Had those been the musings of a potential jihadist? Or of a disaffected academic who hated George W. Bush? Gabriel didn’t yet know.

  But this he did know: the list of pathogens he’d found in Adnan’s lab represented a tremendous threat to the country. And that wasn’t even counting the danger of KPC, which, if synthesized in a mosquito, could create a deadly carrier of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Gabriel realized that the work he and Adnan had done in Afghanistan had helped to start Adnan down this path, and Gabriel felt partly responsible for it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Red Bluff, California

  The small hospital in Red Bluff was quiet that Sunday morning when Mary Mills carried her young daughter Sally into the ER. Sally had been unable to eat dinner the night before and was complaining of “seeing two of everything.” Mary had thought it was just fatigue, and so she had put her daughter to bed. But at 4:00 a.m. Mary had awoken to the sound of her daughter throwing up. When Mary asked her if she wanted a sip of water, her daughter couldn’t speak.

  The ER staff, led by Dr. Barton Sewell, immediately knew they were dealing with some kind of neurological problem, but they had no idea what it was. They intubated Sally to clear her airway, gave her a CT scan, and started to run tests on her blood and were able to stabilize her. But it was clear to Dr. Sewell that the little girl was seriously, even gravely, ill.

  “Mrs. Wells, can you tell me what Sally has had to eat or drink over the past twenty-four hours?” he asked.

  “She had a breakfast of cereal and then ate a normal lunch yesterday of bread with almond butter and honey,” Mary said. “It’s her favorite sandwich. But she didn’t eat dinner because she wasn’t feeling well.”

  Dr. Sewell wrote down what he’d just been told. Red Bluff was in California’s almond country, and almond butter was a staple. “How old was the almond butter, and was it refrigerated? Sometimes it can go bad,” he asked, even as he knew this was no case of rancid nut butter.

  “It was fresh. I’d just bought it that morning from one of the stands outside Addison’s.” Addison’s Farm was one of the largest almond growers in the area.

  “Anything else you can tell me?”

  “Not really. She got sick so fast. Is she going to be OK?”

  Dr. Sewell, who’d worked at Red Bluff Community Hospital for more than twenty years, was worried but tried not to show it. “We’re doing everything we can, but we don’t have the right equipment here. She needs an ICU with capabilities to handle what looks like some kind of toxic poisoning, and we need to get her to UC San Francisco Medical Center. I’m going to order up a helicopter to transport her.”

  Back in Atlanta at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Director Ken Smythe was looking at disturbing reports coming from throughout central California. Over the past thirty-six hours, there had been multiple cases of what appeared to be food poisoning with a set of suspiciously familiar symptoms: double vision, muscle paralysis, acute nausea, and high fever. The pattern looked a lot like how the outbreak of botulinum toxin had started on the East Coast, and this worried Smythe a great deal.

  Smythe keyed his headset and said, “Call Secretary Witt’s mobile phone.”

  The phone rang on the other end of the line with no answer. Smythe hung up, and he pressed the speed dial for Witt’s office number. “Secretary Witt’s office,” said a cheery voice.

  “This is CDC Director Smythe calling for the secretary.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll connect you.”

  The assistant got up and knocked on Witt’s door and opened it without waiting for a response. “Mr. Secretary, I have Dr. Smythe on the line.”

  Witt looked up from the report he was reading. Oh, shit, he thought. He picked up the phone.

  “Dr. Smythe, what can I do for you?” Witt asked.

  “Mr. Secretary, we’re starting to get reports coming in from California that look strikingly similar to the ones from the Florida citrus attack. Seven cases of toxic poisoning of unknown origin, including four cases of paralysis and one death.”

  Witt’s stomach sank. This was what he feared. “Damn it! What do we know about it?”

  “Not much at the moment. They are all centered in Red Bluff, California, which is almond-growing country. One of the reports indicated that a patient had ingested almond butter just before she got sick.”

  “Almonds? Seriously? Do they grow on trees? I must admit I have no goddamn idea where almonds come from.”

  Smythe laughed. “Don’t feel badly; I didn’t either. I had to ask my staff. Apparently they grow on a tree in the form of a drupe, which is a fancy name for a shell with a seed inside. That seed is the nut.”

  “God, I just remembered my grandmother used to have bowls of nuts—walnuts, pecans, and almonds—in the shell, with one of those nutcrackers. I loved that thing.”

  “Mine did too.”

  “Did the others get sick after eating almonds?”

  “We’re looking into that now. I just dispatched a team out to California to check things out. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear something back. It could be nothing. But given Florida, I think we should be prepared for the worst.”

  “OK, Ken. Thanks. I’ll wait to hear from you.” Witt hung up. “Goddamn it!” He then punched in the number for Lee Jensen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Fairfax, Virginia

  As Witt dialed, Jensen and Gabriel were sitting in front of a bank of monitors at the George Mason University registrar’s office. They were looking at Antonin Lebedev’s academic record. Jensen was tempted to let his phone go to voice mail, but then thought better of it. Their investigation was moving quickly, and he didn’t want to miss anything.

  “It’s Witt,” he said as he punched the screen with his index finger. “Yes, sir?”

  “I just got off the phone with the CDC,” Witt said. “They are tracking another potential attack, this time out in California.”

  “Shit. What kind of attack?”

  “The symptoms are similar to Florida. This time they think it might involve almonds.”

  “Almonds? As in the nut?” Jensen asked, looking at Gabriel.

  “Almonds, as in the nut.”

  “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” Jensen said.

  Witt got the Jaws reference. “Yep. I’m going to brief the president again shortly. But we should expect that the FBI will be all over this by morning.”

  “OK, boss.”

  “What have you found out about Lebedev?”

  “Looking at his academic record, it’s clear he was a top student. Pretty much earned straight A grades across the board. His thesis was entitled ‘The Use of Blockchain in the Communication and Analysis of Genomic Sequencing.’”

  “Sounds like
our guy.”

  “Yeah. And get this—his thesis advisor was a professor named Abdul-Azim Bashera.”

  “Sounds like an Arab to me. What do we know about him?”

  “Nothing yet. But I’ve got Brooks doing a deep background check on him now.”

  “Good. Keep me posted. And keep digging,” he said and disconnected the line.

  “What’s that about almonds?” Gabriel asked.

  Jensen told Gabriel about what the CDC had reported, and as he did, Gabriel’s face visibly darkened. “Uh oh. I don’t like that look,” Jensen said.

  “Fucking genius,” Gabriel said. “Almonds are the perfect vehicle for this kind of attack. They’re a staple ingredient in hundreds of foods, and you can poison virtually the entire crop of the world’s almonds in one fell swoop.”

  “Huh?”

  “California grows and exports eighty percent of the world’s almond supply—or at least it did before the tariff wars hit the market. But whatever it is now, it’s still a huge component of California’s agribusiness. So not only do you sicken a lot of people; you cripple the economy at the same time.”

  Jensen pondered that for a minute. “What kind of insects would be used in an almond attack?”

  “Aphids, spider mites, whiteflies. Lots of different species.”

  Jensen was looking at the time on his phone when it started buzzing. It was Lisa Brooks. “Whaddya got for me?” he asked, putting her on speakerphone.

  “Plenty,” she said. “Abdul-Azim Bashera came to GMU in 2020 from Turkey, where he was teaching at the American University in Ankara. A Professor Ian Campbell, who at the time was the chair of the Computer Science Department at GMU and who was doing a sabbatical year in Ankara, recruited him. Bashera had arrived in Turkey in 2007 as a refugee from Iraq. His application for employment at the American University says he earned his PhD from Baghdad University and worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority during the occupation. After the CPA disbanded, he wrote that he faced persecution from Shi‘ite factions. So he fled to Turkey.”