Case:Black - 23. Chapter 23

Fort Detrick, Maryland

Virology Division Lab

2035EST/1935CST

Dr. Frank Liao watched the screen of his scanning electron microscope as the computers assembled the images on his monitor. The samples from the Montross Park crash site in DC had been delivered to USAMRIID Labs after the FBI Labs at Quantico had confirmed that they were dealing with a pathogen.

The huge nano-tech containers appeared as small planets surrounded by virus particles. Liao studied the containers carefully. What they were and where they came from was every bit as big a mystery as the virus itself.

He scanned the sample and found a few they were broken. They appeared to be a thin membrane that contained thousands of the tiny virus particles. While the containers were definitely not the high tech nanotechnology that was first assumed, they were still exceptionally sophisticated. Alphaviruses did not fare well in the open air. Were they encapsulated for delivery? Liao didn’t have a clue how that might be accomplished.

He made a pictorial three dimensional study of the viral delivery capsules and then turned his attention to the tiny viral particles and began to zoom in.

The scanning electron microscope (SEM) did not capture images as most people understand them. It fired a tight beam of electrons and translated the attenuation of the beam to a rectangular array called a raster. The rasters individual bits are re-assembled to create the image.

It was usually very difficult to find and identify viruses in the wild. The microscopic landscape at this scale could be pretty wild. That was not the case for this sample. It only took a few minutes to get good, solid images of the Pandora virus.

Superficially, Pandora looked quite a lot like its progenitor virus Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis or VEE. It appeared as a sphere with a rough, irregular surface. As the focus tightened and more detail became available, there were obvious differences.

Pandora had spike-like structures that Liao recognized as the receptor sites the virus used to latch onto the membranes of host cells. This was a distinct departure from the typical Alphaviruses. Pandora’s shell also showed subtle differences from the VEE reference strain. Those differences are what make Pandora a different animal. To learn more the lab would have to sequence the little beast.

He carefully began taking a series of images so that he could map Pandora in three dimensions and then took a series of images of other viral particles to judge how much variation there was between them.

When Liao was finished, he organized the images into a database, captioned them and added notes. He then sent it to the labs email list and decided it was time for a break.

The labs cafeteria had a build-your-own sandwich/salad bar so he made a combination BLT/turkey creation on wheat bread and had a seat. The flat screen television on the wall was set to CNN with the volume off and the closed captioning turned off. There were eerie pictures of empty and quiet cities. There were also interviews of people, carefully wearing masks, denouncing the imposition of martial law. Before he was done with his plate Dr. Wells and his squad of graduate students entered the cafeteria and began their own orderly assault on the sandwich/salad bar.

Liao said, “Philip. How goes the sequencing?”

Dr. Wells sat at the opposite side of Liao’s table and said, “The computer is chewing on it now. With any luck we’ll have it mapped in the next few hours. I saw your images. The Pandora bug has some peculiar features for an Alphavirus.”

Liao said, “I want to see how it stacks up against the VEE reference strain and the one that we have from White Sands.”

Wells took a sip of coffee and asked, “What are you thinking?”

Liao said, “This bug was created using fairly primitive gene splicing techniques back in the eighties. RNA viruses are unstable to start with. I am betting this one is going to mutate on us in a few generations.”

Wells graduate students gathered around the table. A young lady with a distinct Australian accent said, “We’re assuming that Pandora is a group IV virus according to the Baltimore scale?”

Liao paused considering his coffee. He finally said, “While that may be the case with VEE, we can’t make any assumptions about Pandora because of the modifications made to the base strain. There may even be further modifications since White Sands incident. We’re just going to have to take it one step at a time. We can’t afford to make any mistakes with this one. There’s too much riding on it.”

Dr. Wells looked at his grad students and said with a stern voice, “There has already been one catastrophic lab accident with this beastie. I’m expecting everyone to be very, very careful with this one.”