“Once he debriefs you,” Drake finished, “you should be able to go home.”
She didn’t respond, but she tightened her grip on her hidden phone, thinking of that Washington bureaucrat.
Whoever you are, mister, you’re not getting rid of me that easily.
6
April 27, 9:45 P.M. PDT
Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, California
“We’re on final approach,” the pilot announced over the radio. “We’ll be wheels down in ten.”
Painter stared below the wings of the military aircraft as a meadow came into view, nestled high within the Sierra Nevada Mountains. A few lights shone from a cluster of buildings and homes down there, marking one of the most remote U.S. bases. The Mountain Warfare Training Center occupied forty-six thousand acres of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. It was literally in the middle of nowhere and at an elevation of seven thousand feet, the perfect place to train soldiers for combat operations in mountainous terrain and in cold-weather environments. Classes here were said to be the most rigorous and daunting anywhere.
“Have you heard anything new?” Lisa asked him, stirring from the jump seat next to him, a pile of research notes stacked on her lap. She looked at him over a pair of reading glasses, something she had taken to wearing of late. He liked the look.
“Gray and the others are still working with Dr. Raffee back at Sigma command. They’re gathering intelligence about what was really going on at that station. It seems only a handful of people had intimate knowledge of Dr. Hess’s secret research.”
“Project Neogenesis,” Lisa said.
He nodded with a sigh. “As project leader, Hess kept any details limited to a small circle of colleagues. And most of them were on-site when whatever containment was breached. The status of those at the base remains unknown. Until that toxic cloud dissipates or neutralizes, no one can get near the site.”
“What about my request for a shipment of biohazard suits? Properly equipped, we should be able to survey the area on foot.”
He knew she wanted to lead that expedition. It chilled him to picture her venturing into that toxic miasma wearing a self-contained isolation suit, like a deep-sea diver in hellish waters. “For now, until we know more, no one goes near there. Evacuations are still continuing with the help of local authorities and the military. We’re cordoning off a fifty-mile hot zone around the site.”
She sighed and glanced toward the small window next to her seat. “It still seems amazing that something like this could’ve happened. Especially with no one knowing what was going on at the deepest levels of that base.”
“You’d be surprised at how common that is. Since 9/11, there’s been a huge spike in biodefense spending, resulting in a slew of new Level 4 labs popping up across the country. Corporate-funded, government-backed, university-run. These labs are dealing with the worst of the worst, agents that have no vaccine or cure.”
“Like Ebola, Marburg, Lassa fever.”
“Exactly, but also bugs that are being engineered—weaponized—all in the name of preparing for the inevitable, to be a jump ahead of the enemy.”
“What sort of oversight is there?”
“Very little, mostly independent and piecemeal. Right now there are some fifteen thousand scientists authorized to work with deadly pathogens, but there are zero federal agencies charged with assessing the risks of all of these labs, let alone even keeping track of their number. As a consequence, there’ve been countless reports of mishandling of contagious pathogens, of vials gone missing, of poor records. So when it comes to an accident like this one, it was not a matter of if but of when it would happen.”
He stared out the window, toward the south, toward that pall of toxic smoke. He had already been informed about the countermeasures released by the base: an engineered blend of a paralytic agent and a nerve gas, all to thwart what might have escaped, to kill any living vector that might transmit it or allow it to spread.
“The genie’s out of the bottle,” he mumbled, referring not only to events here but also to the rapid escalation of bioengineering projects going on across the country.
He turned back to Lisa. “And it’s not only these sanctioned facilities we must worry about. In garages, attics, and local community centers, homegrown genetics labs are sprouting up everywhere. For a small price, you can learn to do your own genetic experiments, even patent your creations.”
“How very entrepreneurial. It sounds like the cyberpunks of the past have become the biopunks of today.”
“Only now they’re hacking into genetic code instead of computer codes. And again with little to no oversight. At the moment, the government depends on self-policing of these grassroots labs.”
“The sudden escalation in the number of labs doesn’t surprise me.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“The cost of lab equipment and materials has been plummeting for years. What once cost tens of thousands of dollars can be done for pennies now. Along with that, there’s been a corresponding increase in speed. Right now, the pace of our ability to read and write DNA increases tenfold every year.”
He calculated the implication in his head. That meant in ten short years, genetic engineering could be ten billion times faster.
Lisa continued. “Things are moving along at breakneck speeds. Already a lab has managed to create the first synthetically built cell. And just last year biologists engineered an artificial chromosome, building a functional, living yeast from scratch, with gaps in its DNA where they plan to insert special additions in the near future.”
“Designer yeast. Great.”
Lisa shrugged. “And there are darker implications about that genie getting out of the bottle. It’s not just accidental releases we need to worry about. I was reading about this Kickstarter program—where for forty dollars, a group of enterprising young biopunks will send you a hundred seeds for a type of weed that incorporates a glowing gene.”
“Glow-in-the-dark weeds? Why?”
“Mischief mostly. They want their funders to spread the seeds into the wild. They already have five thousand backers, which means over five hundred thousand synthetic seeds could be cast across the United States in the near future.”
Painter knew such actions were merely the tip of a dangerous iceberg. General Metcalf—the head of DARPA and his boss—had expressed that one of homeland security’s greatest fears was how vulnerable U.S. labs were to foreign agents. A terrorist organization could easily insert a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow into one of these bioweapon facilities, either to obtain a deadly pathogen or to get the necessary training to run their own labs.