The Cobra Event Read Online Free PDF Page B

on Wednesdays, and today he had on a shirt the color of mud, with frayed cuffs. She found herself imagining Mellis as a younger man, grooving at a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert, believing the world was about to change. Now he was getting close to retirement. He had become an aging federal official, stuck at the same government pay scale forever, while the world had changed far more than his generation had expected.
    “This
could
be something good,” he said. “You never know. It could be a John Snow case.”
    Dr. John Snow was one of the first great disease detectives, a founder of the science of modern epidemiology. He was a physician in London in 1853 when there was an outbreak of cholera. Snow found a cluster of cases. He began interviewing the victims and their families, carefully tracing their activities during the days just before they became sick. He discovered that the sick people had been using the same public water pump on Broad Street. The paths of the victims crossed at the water pump. Something in the water from that pump was causing the disease. Snow did not know what substance in the water was making people sick, because the microorganism that causes cholera had not been discovered, but he removed the handle from the water pump. It stopped the outbreak. He did not need to know what was in the water. This is the classic story of epidemiology.
    The C.D.C. has a coveted award called the John Snow Award. It is presented each year to the E.I.S. officer who is judged to have done the best case investigation. Walter Mellis was suggesting to Alice Austen that there was a possibility that the New York case could lead to a John Snow Award.
    She did not buy it. “Is this case part of your project?” she asked. Mellis had some kind of a mysterious project going, a project that no one at the C.D.C. wanted to be involved with, or so she’d heard.
    “My project? The Stealth Virus Project? Yes—it is. My idea is that there may be unknown viruses out there. They don’t cause obvious outbreaks. They sneak around. They’re not very contagious, so they just hit one person here and one person there. They’re Jack the Ripper viruses, serial killers—stealth viruses. Lex Nathanson knows a little bit about the Stealth Virus Project, and I’ve asked him to keep an eye out for anything like this.”
    She noticed that he was wearing a beeper on his belt. She wondered why he needed a beeper.
    “Are you telling me everything?”
    Mellis put his hand up. He sighed. He was accustomed to people ducking his project. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere. “Look,” he said, “if you don’t want to do this, I’ll call Lex and tell him we just don’t have anyone available right now. He’ll understand. It’s no big deal.”
    “No. I’ll go.”
    Mellis looked a little surprised. He opened up his file folder and pulled out a Delta Air Lines ticket and a government expense sheet. He put them on her desk. “I appreciate this,” he said.
    Vision
             
    ALICE AUSTEN drove her Volkswagen Jetta back to her rented condominium in Decatur, a few miles from the C.D.C. She changed out of her uniform and put on a blue silk-and-wool skirt and a silk blouse.
    She put some extra clothing into a travel bag, along with a book to read, although she knew she’d never read it. A big chunk of space in the bag was taken up by her leather work boots, which were encased in a white plastic garbage bag tied with a twist tie. The boots were Mighty-Tuff boots, the kind construction workers wear, with steel toes and nonskid waffle soles. They were her autopsy boots. She put her laptop computer, a cellular telephone, and a green federal-issue cloth-covered notebook—an epi notebook, they called it—into her briefcase. The green epi notebook was for keeping all her data and records of the investigation. She packed a small digital electronic camera. It took color photographs and stored them in memory cards. The memory cards could be