Oath of Office

CHAPTER FOUR

June 7th

8:51 p.m.

Galveston National Laboratory, campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch – Galveston, Texas

“Working late again, Aabha?” a voice said from Heaven.

The exotic, black-haired woman was almost ethereal in her beauty. Indeed, her name was a Hindi word for beautiful.

She was startled by the voice, and her body jerked involuntarily. She stood, wearing a white airtight containment suit, deep inside the Biosafety Level 4 facility at the Galveston National Laboratory. The suit which protected her also made her look almost like an astronaut on the moon. She always hated wearing the suit. She felt trapped inside of it. But it was what her job demanded.

Her suit was attached to a yellow hose which descended from the ceiling. The hose continually pumped clean air from outside the facility into the containment suit. Even if the suit ruptured, the positive pressure from the hose ensured that none of the laboratory air could get inside.

BSL-4 labs were the highest security laboratories in the world. Inside them, scientists studied deadly, highly infectious organisms that posed a severe threat to public health and safety. Right now, in her blue-gloved hand, Aabha held a sealed vial of the most dangerous virus known to man.

“You know me,” she said. Her suit had a microphone that would carry her voice to the guard watching her on closed circuit television. “I’m a night owl.”

“I know it. I’ve seen you here a lot later than this.”

She pictured the man watching over her. Tom was his name. He was overweight, middle-aged, she thought divorced. Just her and him, alone inside this big empty building at night, and he had very little to do but look at her. It would give her the creeps if she thought about it too much.

She had just removed the vial from the freezer. Moving carefully, she approached the biosafety cabinet, where under normal circumstances, she would open the vial and study its contents.

Tonight wasn’t normal circumstances. Tonight was the culmination of years of preparation. Tonight was what Americans called the Big Game.

Her co-workers at the lab, including Tom the night watchman, thought the beautiful young woman’s name was Aabha Rushdie.

It wasn’t.

They thought she had been born into a wealthy family in the great city of Delhi, in northern India, and that her family had moved to London when she was a young girl. It was laughable. Nothing like that had ever happened to her.

They thought she had obtained a Ph.D. in microbiology and extensive BSL-4 training from King’s College, London. This wasn’t true either, but it might as well be. She knew as much about handling bacteria and viruses as any Ph.D. candidate, if not more.

The vial she held contained a freeze-dried sample of the Ebola virus, which had wreaked such havoc in Africa in recent years. If it were just an Ebola virus sample taken from a monkey, or a bat, or even a human victim… that alone would make it very, very dangerous to handle. But there was much more to the story.

Aabha glanced at the digital clock on the wall. 8:54 p.m. One minute to go. She need only delay for a very short time longer.

“Tom?” she said.

“Yes?” came the voice.

“Did you watch the President on the TV last night?”

“I did.”

Aabha smiled. “What did you think?”

“Think? Well, I think we got problems.”

“Really? I like her very much. I think she is a great lady. In my country…”

The lights in the laboratory went out. It happened without any warning – no flickering, no beeping, nothing at all. For several seconds, Aabha stood in absolute darkness. The sound of convection fans and electrical equipment that was a constant background hum in the lab slowed to a halt. Then there was total silence.

Aabha put what she hoped was just the right note of alarm in her voice.

“Tom? Tom!”

“Okay, Aabha, it’s okay. Hold on. I’m trying to get my… What’s going on in there? My cameras are down.”

“I don’t know. I’m just…”

A bank of yellow emergency lights came on, and the fans started up again. The low light turned the empty lab into an eerie, shadowy world. Everything was dim, except for the bright red EXIT lights which shone in the semi-dark.

“Wow,” she said. “That was scary. For a minute there, my air hose stopped working. But it’s back on now.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Tom said. “We’re on reserve power all over the building. We have full-power backup generators that should have kicked on, but they didn’t. I don’t think this has ever happened before. I still don’t have my cameras. Are you okay? Can you find your way out?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “A little scared, but okay. The exit lights are on. Can I just follow them?”

“You can. But you need to follow all safety protocols, even in the dark. Chemical shower for the suit, regular shower for you – all of it. Otherwise, if you feel like you can’t follow protocol, we need to wait until I can send someone in there, or until we get the power back up.”

Her voice shook a tiny amount. “Tom, my air hose went off. If it goes off again… Let’s just say I don’t want to be in here without my air hose. I can follow the protocols in my sleep. But I need to get out of here.”

“That’s fine. All procedures to the letter, though. I trust you. But I don’t have any lights. It looks like it’s going to be dark everywhere, the whole way out. The airlock was off for a minute, but it just came back on. It’s probably best if we get you out of there. Once you’re through the airlock, you shouldn’t have any problems. Let me know when you’re through, okay? I want to shut it down again to conserve power.”

“I will,” she said.

She moved slowly through the darkness toward the exit door to the airlock, the vial of Ebola still cupped in her gloved right hand. It would take twenty or thirty minutes to follow all procedures on her way out. That wasn’t going to happen. She planned to cut corners from here on out. This would be the fastest lab exit they had ever seen.

Tom was still talking to her. “Also, please make sure you secure all materials and equipment before you exit. We wouldn’t want anything dangerous floating around.”

She opened the first door and slid through. Just before it closed, she heard his voice for the last time.

“Aabha?” he said.

*

Aabha drove the BMW Z4 convertible with the top down.

It was a warm night, and she wanted to feel the wind in her hair. It was her last night in Galveston. It was her last night as Aabha. She had accomplished her mission, and after five long years undercover, this part of her life was over.

It was an amazing feeling, to cast off an identity as though it were a suit of clothes. It was freedom, it was exhilaration. She felt like she could be the protagonist in a television advertisement.

She had grown tired of studious, serious Aabha a long time ago. Who would she become next? It was a delicious question.

The drive to the marina was brief, just a few miles. She pulled off the highway and down the ramp to the parking lot. She took her overnight bag and her purse out of the trunk and left the keys in the glove compartment. In an hour a woman she had never seen, but who had similar features to Aabha, would get in and drive it away. The car would be two hundred miles away by the morning.