The Bug Hunter: A Novel Read online

  Gabriel didn’t move, preferring to wait until Witt approached him; he’d learned long ago that it was wise not to make any sudden movements with so many armed men around.

  Witt smiled as he walked up. You look just like your picture,” he said to Gabriel, proffering his hand. They shook, and Gabriel looked into Witt’s eyes.

  “And you look a lot like your dad,” Gabriel said after a moment. “This is my wife, Claire.”

  “Nice to meet you, Claire. And my apologies for this intrusion,” he said, looking quickly back at the caravan of SUVs now taking up their driveway. “They don’t let me travel light.”

  “Not a problem, Mr. Witt. Nice to meet you,” Claire said.

  “Please, call me Jason.”

  “Well, all right then. Jason, would you like some coffee?” Claire asked.

  “I’d love some.” They walked into the house and were immediately greeted by Frankie, who gave Jason a sniff and promptly leaned into him, looking for a scratch behind the ears. “Beautiful place you have here. And the view is spectacular.”

  Claire placed a cup of piping hot coffee down, and they sat around the kitchen table.

  Gabriel got right to the point. “Your dad says that you need some help. Not sure what I can do for you, but he asked me to meet with you, and I’d never turn down a request from Travis Witt. So here we are.”

  “Yes, here we are. I’m happy to finally meet you, Gabriel. My dad has been talking about you for years. It’s nice to put a face to the name.”

  “Your dad saved my life,” Gabriel said simply. He figured that Jason knew the story and didn’t see the need to elaborate.

  Jason smiled and nodded. “Well, I appreciate you meeting with me.” He looked at Claire. “I’m afraid I need to talk to your husband in private, Mrs. Marx. You see, what I’m about to discuss with him is classified, and he still holds an active security clearance.”

  “Of course, I understand,” she said, standing. Witt stood too as a sign of respect, and Claire reached down and kissed her husband. “I’ll be in the study if you need me, babe.” She shook Witt’s hand and left the room.

  “She’s lovely. You are a lucky man.”

  “Yes, she is,” Gabriel said. “And yes I am. You married?”

  “I used to be,” Witt said with a tinge of sadness in his voice. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a vial with a half-dozen flies in it. He handed it over to Gabriel.

  Gabriel held it up to the light. “Ceratitis capitata. Nasty bugger. Where’d you get them?”

  “What I’m about to tell you must be kept in complete confidence. It can’t be shared with anyone, including Claire. OK?”

  Gabriel nodded. “OK,” he said after a moment.

  “Have you been following the orange juice contamination scare on the East Coast?”

  “More than a scare. A few people have died. That’s some pretty strong E. coli,” Gabriel said with a bit of a raised eyebrow, showing that he didn’t believe what was being reported in the media.

  “That’s because it’s not E. coli. It’s actually botulinum toxin.”

  Gabriel looked at Witt and then looked again at the flies. “And you think that these”—he shook the flies—“are the source of it?”

  Witt nodded. “These flies infested a citrus farm in central Florida, contaminating thousands of trees. We traced the affected juice to oranges produced by this farm during the time that the contamination was in full bloom.”

  “Ceratitis capitata usually kills the fruit and eventually the trees; the infestation must have happened at just the right time for the oranges to make it to harvest. That was bad luck.”

  “Or good planning.”

  “If these are what you think they are,” Gabriel said, again holding the vial up to the light, “and for the record, I’m skeptical that they are, then you are dealing with an Alpha Vector.”

  “Alpha Vector? Shit, that doesn’t sound good,” Witt said.

  “In the entomology world, it’s pretty much the doomsday scenario for bioterror. It involves modifying a vector to carry a disease or compound that is fatal to humans. That’s the bad news.”

  “Does that mean there’s good news too?”

  “Maybe. Creating an Alpha Vector involves some pretty heavy genetic engineering and also requires access to toxins that are difficult to acquire. It can only be done in a few places. So that narrows things down some.”

  Since Witt knew that already, it hardly qualified as good news. “I figured that.”

  “Why not have them tested by taking them to the Biomedical Research Lab at George Mason or to Plum Island off Long Island? In fact, I once knew a guy who worked at BRL. We did a mission in Afghanistan together. He may still work there. I can put in a call—”

  Witt interrupted Gabriel in midsentence. “I can’t do that. If these flies are the source of the botulinum toxin, they may have been engineered in one of those labs. I can’t take the chance of tipping them off that we are on to them.”

  Gabriel nodded. That made sense. “So what do you want from me?”

  “My dad tells me you have a state-of-the-art lab here,” Jason said, gesturing to the property surrounding them. “The kind of lab that might be able to verify what we’re dealing with here. Is that true?”

  “Yes, that’s true. I have the equipment to sequence the genes and see if these flies have been altered to synthesize botulinum toxin.”

  “And I also know that you are capable of doing that kind of work.”

  Gabriel knew that Witt was referring to Afghanistan. “I can do it,” Gabriel said.

  “Will you do it?”

  Gabriel hesitated for a split second. Of course he was going to do it. But he didn’t want Witt to think him too eager, because once you gave the government an inch, they would always take a mile. He took a slow sip of coffee, letting the tension rise. Finally he said, “OK.”

  Witt looked relieved. “Great. How long will you need?”

  “Twenty-four hours.”

  Witt looked at his watch. “Then I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “And what happens if this turns out to be an Alpha Vector? What then?”

  Witt shrugged. “Then we have a big fucking problem on our hands.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Russian River Valley, California

  For several hours Gabriel watched the shadows gradually recede as the light of a new day filtered through the lab’s windows. He’d been working all night and was about to look at the final results of the gene sequencing he’d done on the flies Witt had given him. Now it was time to see what they were really dealing with.

  The Illumina gene sequencer flashed a message on its screen indicating that the results were complete. Gabriel quickly scanned the output, a four-color chromatogram graph that looked something like an EKG. Each color corresponded to a specific base that makes up the double helix of the DNA: black for guanine, blue for cytosine, red for thymine, and green for adenine. He looked for abnormalities in the peaks and valleys of the data, which at first glance appeared negligible; he found minimal noise that distorted the results and no mis-spaced or double peaks.

  So far, so good.

  Gabriel then loaded the raw data file into his computer and ran a program that compared the genetic sequence he’d just run to the known normal sequence of Ceratitis capitata in InsectBase, a publicly available database that contained more than 12 million sequences of over 150 insects. This comparison was designed to quickly tell Gabriel whether the medflies that Jason had given him had been genetically altered or not.

  After a few minutes, the comparison was complete.

  By the time Jason Witt showed up at the lab, Gabriel had showered and changed into jeans and a light jacket.

  “How’d it go?” Witt asked as he came through the door. A man in a suit carrying a large satchel fol
lowed him closely. He was slightly taller than Witt, about thirty pounds heavier, and twenty years younger. Something told Gabriel that this man was not part of Witt’s normal security detail.

  “It’s done,” Gabriel said after a moment.

  Witt waited for Gabriel to continue. When he didn’t, Witt said, “And?”

  Gabriel nodded at the man with the satchel. “Who’s he?”

  “This is Lee Jensen, a special agent in our Homeland Security Investigations unit. Lee, this is Gabriel Marx.”

  Jensen stepped forward and put out his hand, which Gabriel took; Jensen’s grip was like iron. His eyes were steel blue, and Gabriel instantly knew that this was a warrior. “Marines?” he asked.

  “Army Special Forces, actually,” Jensen said. “You?”

  “Marines. I was with 3/5 in Iraq in ’04 and ’06.”

  “No shit. I was in Ramadi in ’06.” Jensen and Gabriel were having one of those instant bonding experiences between veterans that civilians don’t really understand. They were both independently reliving their years in Iraq, and though one was army and the other marines, they had seen the same things and chewed the same dirt.

  Gabriel, deciding that Jensen passed his test, instantly switched gears. “Follow me.” He turned on his heels and walked to the bench where his computer was set up. He moved the mouse to wake the computer up, and the chromatogram immediately appeared.

  “What’s that?” asked Witt.

  “This is basically a map of the DNA of the flies you gave me. It’s the sequence of chemical base pairs that make up the DNA molecule. By looking at the sequence of the bases—the A, C, G, and Ts—we can determine a lot about the organism, including whether or not it’s been mutated or altered to synthesize botulinum toxin.”

  Witt nodded. “OK, I got it.”

  “Without getting into the weeds, here’s how it works: We use a DNA sequencer to scan the DNA and pull out all these bases in their specific order. That leaves us with a code of millions of letters strung together. The whole process of mapping the genome was essentially assembling a machine to break this code by identifying the specific genes that these letters make up.”

  “So these letters correspond to different genes.”

  “Yes and no,” answered Gabriel. “A gene is really a small section of the DNA that contains instructions for a specific protein molecule. The human genome is made up of more than twenty thousand of these protein-coded genes. In fruit flies it’s usually something around fourteen thousand. But not all of these letters correspond to genes. They also correspond to instructions and other information that determine how the genes function.”

  “How do you find the genes in all these letters?”

  “Fortunately, genetic sequence technology has continued to improve, and it’s a lot easier than it used to be. We use annotation pipelines to mark where known genes are in the sequence, using proteins and start and stop codons as markers. . . .” Gabriel looked at Witt and Jensen and knew he’d lost them. “In English, we use a combination of technology and manual review of the sequences to find the genes.”

  “Got it,” Witt said, relieved.

  “Good. So what you are looking at is the result of the process I’ve just described. What I did next is take this genome and compare it to the known genome of medflies from a public database that stores sequence data. This process allowed me to find out whether this genetic sequence had been modified or mutated using CRISPR/Cas9 technology.”

  “What’s a crisper?”

  Gabriel laughed. “CRISPR/Cas9 is essentially a biological scissors that can be used to cut and splice new genetic code into the sequence. It’s how genetic alteration takes place at the cellular level. Make sense?”

  Both Witt and Jensen nodded that it did, though Gabriel wasn’t sure they understood. But in the end, the details mattered less than the results. “So, was it altered?” asked Witt.

  “Yes,” replied Gabriel, pulling up the chart of the comparison chromatogram he’d run. “A string of code was inserted in the sequence here.” Gabriel pointed to a section of the graph. “It corresponds to a gene sequence found in the database GenBank that instructs a protein to synthesize a variant of Clostridium botulinum—”

  “Shit,” Witt said before Gabriel could finish his sentence.

  “—toxin. Only there’s a problem.”

  “I’d say we have a problem all right,” Witt said, his voice rising. “A big fucking problem—”

  “Mr. Secretary,” Gabriel said loudly. “Please, listen.”

  Witt gathered himself. “Sorry. Go on.”

  “This genetic sequence doesn’t match any of the known sequences that produce botulinum toxin. There are currently eight families of botulinum toxin—named A to H—on record. This appears to produce a new one—type I—and that poses additional problems.”

  Witt stared at Gabriel and motioned with his hands for him to continue.

  “How did those sickened by the orange juice on the East Coast react to treatment?”

  “Not well. They were all given antibodies provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to try and combat the poison. But none of them responded well to them.”

  “I’m not surprised. The CDC would only have antidotes for versions A through H. This version has no antidote.”

  Witt tried to comprehend what he was hearing. “Jesus, this gets better by the minute.”

  “Take a look at this,” Gabriel said, handing Witt a printout of an article from the Journal of Infectious Diseases. “Apparently type I was identified three years ago by scientists at Berkeley after a child got sick and died after receiving known antidotes. The scientists sequenced the bacterial DNA and found it was a new variant.”

  “So why doesn’t that show up in the database you used?”

  “Good question. Because there is no antidote, the scientists decided it was too dangerous to make the sequence public, fearing that someone might use it as a weapon. They did the same thing with Type H when they discovered it back in 2013 – the sequence wasn’t published until 2017 after the antidote was developed.”

  “So if I understand this correctly, you are saying that not only do these flies produce botulinum toxin but also it’s a variant that has no known treatment.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “This is worse than I thought,” said Witt. “And if this news gets out to the public, there’s going to be a panic that will make ‘The War of the Worlds’ look like child’s play.”

  Gabriel and Jensen both had confused looks on their faces.

  “Orson Welles? Alien invasion?” Witt looked at them each and then said, “Never mind.”

  “Oh, that. I saw the movie. Tom Cruise. It sucked. But I take your point,” said Jensen.

  Witt went over to a stool and sat down heavily. He looked frazzled; he’d not slept much over the past few days, and his suit was wrinkled. He desperately wanted to lie down. For a moment he put his face in his hands and rubbed the stubble and tried to slow his mind so he could see a clear path forward. Finally he looked at Jensen. “OK, Lee. Any suggestions?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jensen said. “We have a genetic sequence that was never published but has ended up in the hands of someone with the knowledge and technology to genetically alter a fly to secrete a deadly toxin. So I suggest that we first pursue the source of the type I sequence. If we find that, we will have a better chance of finding out where the genetic engineering on the fly was done. And hopefully that will lead us to who did it.”

  Witt thought for a moment. “You have any thoughts on the matter, Gabriel?”

  “I think that makes sense. I have a contact at UC Berkeley—one of my mentors teaches there—so you could start by seeing who had access to the type I sequence.”

  “You?” Witt said. “You mean ‘we,’ right?”

  Gabriel
looked at Jensen and then at Witt. “Sorry?”

  “I need you, Gabriel. You are still technically on contract with DHS, and I want to assign you to work with Jensen on this.”

  “Mr. Witt, I appreciate the offer. But I’m a vintner now. I’m not sure I’m the best person to help. . .”

  “Actually, you are the only person. My dad told me about your service in the Marine Corps, and I know what you did in Afghanistan. But more important, I need your brain. This guy,” he said, looking over at Jensen, “is tough and smart, but he doesn’t know a gnat from a butterfly.”

  “That’s true,” Jensen said with a smile.

  Gabriel was immediately uncomfortable. While he looked strong on the outside, he felt crippled inside, a prisoner of his dreams and of his mind. He didn’t know if he could do it and wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. He needed to stall for time. “Can I talk to my wife?”

  Witt nodded. “Yes, but I need an answer today. In the meantime, I’ll need to brief the president and see if I can contain this before it blows wide open.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Berkeley, California

  Gabriel sat next to Lee Jensen as he drove down Interstate 580 toward Berkeley in a government sedan. Jensen had the self-driving mode on and was looking at the Wall Street Journal on a heads-up display that projected the “paper” onto the car’s windshield. The lead story was President Cooperman’s upcoming visit to Beijing to discuss the growing trade war between the US and China.

  Gabriel looked out the passenger window and watched the miles slip by. He was feeling better since they’d left the vineyard, and a calm had come over him. Maybe Claire was right that he needed to be on a mission to feel like he was normal. He went over the brief, cryptic conversation he’d had with her before he left.

  “Secretary Witt wants me to work on this . . . project.”

  “Great!”

  “It’s going to require me to be away for a bit. It’s an investigation . . . into something I can’t really talk about.”

  She’d laughed. “Go.”