Midnight Fever (Men of Midnight #5)(58)

It was her weak point-working until she dropped. And no, it wouldn't help anyone.

"Okay, Nick. I'll try to be smart about it."

He stood and stared into her eyes, all playfulness gone. "Yeah. You will. I'll leave you to it. I'll check in with you from time to time. In the meantime, I'm going to monitor our perimeter and contact ASI. Find out if there's any more intel."

"Find out about Felicity, if you can."

"Will do." He leveled his index finger at her as if pointing a gun. "I'll be checking in on you." And he walked quietly out the door.

He did check in on her from time to time. She'd sit up to stretch her aching back muscles to find that the water pitcher had been refilled, fresh fruit on the plate, new sandwiches. Kay barely noticed. She sank into the job like you sink into quicksand, pulled ever deeper.

It was impossible to tell whether it was day or night. Didn't matter, she was digging deep into the files and trying to figure out what was going on that had cost Priyanka and Mike Hammer and Bill their lives-and figure out who was behind it.

She dove into Bill's work files, opening each and reading enough to discard it. There were thousands of files, each one interesting. She had to tug herself away from most of them because however fascinating they were, they didn't pertain to the issue at hand.

It was an overwhelming job. Not all the files were his-some were research papers from around the world. The Infectious Diseases Data Observatory and the Epidemic Diseases Research Group in Oxford. The French Institute of Health and the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Nagasaki School of Global Health, various agencies within the World Health Organization … the list was endless.

His root directory wasn't organized according to author or source, but according to material. He was a well-known expert on influenza, which was one of the most-studied viruses on earth. The printed information on the influenza virus could fill an entire university library-and in some universities, did.

She sighed and resigned herself to manually examining all the files. It was intense, eye-straining labor, and after a while, the words began to blur on the screen. 

She stopped, rubbed her eyes.

She'd scrolled though about a thousand files and had barely scratched the surface. She couldn't even outsource it because you needed to be an expert to understand what to look for. Mere keywords wouldn't do it. All the files were about the influenza virus and would contain those hundred or so keywords pertaining to it. It would take her days to train someone even as bright as Felicity to search the files, and even then she could easily miss something significant.

It was as if someone had opened up a firehose of knowledge of the influenza virus and was flooding her with it.

In fact, it was almost as if … as if Bill was blinding her with science. From beyond the grave.

Damn! She straightened, widened her eyes to knock the sleep out of them. So far she hadn't found out anything, not after hours and hours of work.

Were all these files essentially smoke?

Because … because he had been working on something illegal, something that transgressed the Biological Weapons Convention, the convention that prohibited research into bio-weaponry. So he'd have done it in secret, wouldn't he?

Could there be a hidden section with the information she was seeking?

Kay went right back to the root directory and searched harder for something that would indicate secret files within secret files behind firewalls and fire-breathing dragons. She went over the lists carefully but as much as she tried to find a secret or separate section of files, she couldn't.

And yet, he'd encrypted his entire computer with another layer of encryption. No one did that if there wasn't something to hide. CDC encryption was very good. But you weren't supposed to be working on non-CDC research.

Maybe … maybe that was it. Maybe he carried out his secret research after hours, when the day staff left and a skeleton staff remained for the evening and overnight.

She'd done that sometimes, with a time-sensitive research project. Her office had an armchair that became a very uncomfortable cot. More nights than she cared to think about, she'd worked until morning, stretching out on the cot for short breaks.

The building grew quiet after six p.m. and there were no interruptions. Just silence and almost unfettered access to the computing power of the institution and all its high-tech equipment.

If Bill had been working on something illegal, surely he'd have done it after hours? And maybe-maybe he'd finessed access to the BSL-4 lab? Mostly only governments ran bio-safety level 4 labs and there were only 9 government labs in the country, including the CDC. And a few private ones.

Though obtaining unauthorized after-hours access to the BSL-4 labs would be incredibly difficult, it was feasible that Bill had done the basic research at work and then tested the virus in one of the handful of privately owned BSL-4 labs with no cumbersome reporting protocols.