Midnight Fever (Men of Midnight #5)(59)

Or he could have done the theoretical work and then handed off the testing to a private lab. This kind of project, in the wrong hands, would have almost unlimited funding, unlike the CDC's funding, which was squeezed harder and harder each year.

But then, Kay and her colleagues were trying to save lives, not a top priority these days. If you were trying to take as many lives as possible, create the most suffering possible, well then … money would flow to you. A weaponized Spanish flu virus would, really, be worth billions. Using bio-weapons was crazy reckless, but if you knew what you were doing, and if you could design a flu that degraded quickly and you were far from the borders of the country being attacked, you could depopulate a country in a few weeks and take over the infrastructure.

You'd have to be as mad as Hitler, but theoretically, it could be done.

No!

Her entire body rebelled at the thought.

Kay went back to the root directory and selected files from no more than a year ago and files time-stamped past 1800 hours.



       
         
       
        

Priyanka said she'd started observing odd behavior eight months ago. A year would probably cover it all.

The files appeared on her screen, but there were 20 files per screen and-she peered at the numbers at the bottom of the screen-50 pages each. A thousand files. Doable, certainly. And better than the hundreds of thousands of files that had at first appeared.

By the fourth file, Kay knew she had hit gold.

Bill had put together all the latest research on the Spanish flu, including Russian research on a patient buried in the Russian permafrost for a hundred years. It took her several hours, but she read it all and saw that he was interested in a fast-acting, fast-degrading flu.

Made sense. The virus was like tossing nuclear bombs around. No one wanted a worldwide pandemic, not in these days of mass air travel, of mass movements of people. At any given moment, there were 40 million refugees awash in the system, more than at any other time in the history of the world. A locus of infection in a group of refugees who were not monitored and the spark could turn into a conflagration that would burn the world down.

This original weaponized influenza virus had been genetically engineered to kill select individuals or groups with shared DNA.

Kay stopped for a moment, rubbing her eyes.

All of this was so freaking hard. It felt like she was twisting her brain so much it hurt. This was the opposite way of thinking of a medical researcher, who was trained-and trained intensely-to look for ways to mute the effects of disease. If possible, to eradicate it. The brass ring for every researcher was to do to all infectious diseases what had been done to smallpox-eliminate it from the earth.

Humankind's most ancient and relentless enemy made powerless.

And now she had to follow the thought processes of someone who wanted to make our mortal enemy stronger. More virulent, more dangerous, more lethal.

It went against absolutely everything she believed in. It went against everything she'd ever done with her life. It went against everything science stood for.

Kay had grown up with an FBI Special Agent and she knew the men of ASI. They trained hard to serve and protect. It was their instinct. Her grandfather, as a young special agent, had run into a burning building to save two children who had been held hostage. The hostage taker had set fire to the building, preferring death to capture. The two children survived, thanks to her grandfather.

She'd asked him how he'd had the courage to run into a fire and he'd looked at her blankly.

Because that was what he did.

What Nick did. What Metal and Joe and Jacko and the other men at ASI did.

What she was doing was the equivalent of asking them to cower and hide if terrorists attacked. They couldn't do it. She couldn't do this. 

But she had to.

She leaned forward again, holding another sandwich that had magically appeared at her elbow.

Hour after hour went by as she began to pick up on what Bill had been doing.

The first thing he'd done was increase the morbidity of the virus. She deleted out for the moment everything but the effect of the virus. In one file, she found a 3-D rendering of the virus, the elements in yellow where the virus attacked the human system. That was on one half of the screen. On the other half was the original virus, the yellow smaller, more scattered.

The new gene had been designed to attack the immune system immediately, like an RPG. The effect was immediate and devastating. The incubation period was reduced to almost zero.

He-and whoever was working with him-had created a virus that blew the immune system up and flooded the lungs with fluid.

God, the image flashed in her mind of Mike Hammer clutching his throat, drowning before her very eyes in a back alley. How he'd clutched his throat, chest heaving to bring in air that couldn't fill the lungs, which were already filling with fluid. His face going from shock to fear to death in a minute and a half.