The Hades Factor Read online

Chapter One

  2:55 P.M., Sunday, October 12

  London, England

  A cold October rain slanted down on Knightsbridge where Brompton Road intersected Sloan Street. The steady stream of honking cars, taxis, and red double-decker buses turned south and made their halting way toward Sloan Square and Chelsea. Neither the rain nor the fact that business and government offices were closed for the weekend lessened the crush. The world economy was good, the shops were full, and New Labor was rocking no one’s boat. Now the tourists came to London at all times of the year, and the traffic this Sunday afternoon continued to move at a snail’s pace.

  Impatient, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jonathan (“Jon”) Smith, M.D., stepped lightly from the slow-moving, old-style No. 19 bus two streets before his destination. The rain was letting up at last. He trotted a few quick steps beside the bus on the wet pavement and then hurried onward, leaving the bus behind.

  A tall, trim, athletic man in his early forties, Smith had dark hair worn smoothly back and a high-planed face. His navy blue eyes automatically surveyed vehicles and pedestrians. There was nothing unusual about him as he strode along in his tweed jacket, cotton trousers, and trench coat. Still, women turned to look, and he occasionally noticed and smiled, but continued on his way.

  He left the drizzle at Wilbraham Place and entered the foyer of the genteel Wilbraham Hotel, where he took a room every time USAMRIID sent him to a medical conference in London. Inside the old hostelry, he climbed the stairs two at a time to his second-floor room. There he rummaged through his suitcases, searching for the field reports of an outbreak of high fever among U.S. troops stationed in Manila. He had promised to show them to Dr. Chandra Uttam of the viral diseases branch of the World Health Organization.

  Finally he found the reports under a pile of dirty clothes tossed into the larger suitcase. He sighed and grinned at himself—he had never lost the messy habits acquired from his years in the field living in tents, focusing on one crisis or another.

  As he rushed downstairs to return to the WHO epidemiology conference, the desk clerk called out to him.

  “Colonel? There’s a letter for you. It’s marked ‘Urgent.’”

  “A letter?” Who would mail him here? He looked at his wristwatch, which told him not only the hour but reminded him of the day. “On a Sunday?”

  “It came by hand.”

  Suddenly worried, Smith took the envelope and ripped it open. It was a single sheet of white printer paper, no letterhead or return address.

  Smithy,

  Meet me Rock Creek park, Pierce Mill picnic grounds, midnight Monday. Urgent. Tell no one.

  B

  Smith’s chest contracted. There was only one person who called him Smithy—Bill Griffin. He had met Bill in third grade at Hoover elementary school in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Fast friends from then on, they had gone to high school together, college at the University of Iowa, and on to grad school at UCLA. Only after Smith had gotten his M.D. and Bill his Ph.D. in psychology had they taken different paths. Both had fulfilled boyhood dreams by joining the military, with Bill going into military intelligence work. They had not actually seen each other in more than a decade, but through all their distant assignments and postings, they had kept in touch.

  Frowning, Smith stood motionless in the stately lobby and stared down at the cryptic words.

  “Anything wrong, sir?” the desk clerk inquired politely.

  Smith looked around. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Well, better be on my way if I want to catch the next seminar.”

  He stuffed the note into his trench-coat pocket and strode out into the soggy afternoon. How had Bill known he was in London? At this particular secluded hotel? And why all the cloak-and-dagger, even to the extent of using Bill’s private boyhood name for him?

  No return address or phone number.

  Only an initial to identify the sender.

  Why midnight?

  Smith liked to think of himself as a simple man, but he knew the truth was far from that. His career showed the reality. He had been a military doctor in MASH units and was now a research scientist. For a short time he had also worked for military intelligence. And then there was the stint commanding troops. He wore his restlessness like another man wore his skin—so much a part of him he hardly noticed.

  Yet in the past year he had discovered a happiness that had given him focus, a concentration he had never before achieved. Not only did he find his work at USAMRIID challenging and exciting, the confirmed bachelor was in love. Really in love. No more of that high-school stuff of women coming and going through his life in a revolving door of drama. Sophia Russell was everything to him—fellow scientist, research partner, and blond beauty.

  There were moments when he would take his eyes from his electron microscope just to stare at her. How all that fragile loveliness could conceal so much intelligence and steely will constantly intrigued him. Just thinking about her made him miss her all over again. He was scheduled to fly out of Heathrow tomorrow morning, which would give him just enough time to drive home to Maryland and meet Sophia for breakfast before they had to go into the lab.

  But now he had this disturbing message from Bill Griffin.

  All his internal alarms were ringing. At the same time, it was an opportunity. He smiled wryly at himself. Apparently his restlessness still was not tamed.

  As he hailed a taxi, he made plans.

  He would change his flight tickets to Monday night and meet Bill Griffin at midnight. He and Bill went too far back for him to do otherwise. This meant he would not get into work until Tuesday, a day late. Which would make Kielburger, the general who directed USAMRIID, see red. To put it mildly, the general found Smith and his freewheeling, field-operations way of doing things aggravating.

  Not a problem. Smith would do an end run.

  Early yesterday morning he had phoned Sophia just to hear her voice. But in the middle of their conversation, a call had cut in. She had been ordered to go to the lab immediately to identify some virus from California. Sophia could easily work the next sixteen or twenty-four hours nonstop and, in fact, she might be at the lab so late tonight, she would not even be up tomorrow morning, when he had been planning to share breakfast. Smith sighed, disappointed. The only good thing was she would be too busy to worry about him.

  He might as well just leave a message on their answering machine at home that he would arrive a day late and she should not be concerned. She could tell General Kielburger or not, her call.

  That was where the payoff came in. Instead of leaving London tomorrow morning, he would take a night flight. A few hours’ difference, but a world to him: Tom Sheringham was leading the U.K. Microbiological Research Establishment team that was working on a potential vaccine against all hantaviruses. Tonight he would not only be able to attend Tom’s presentation, he would twist Tom’s arm to join him for a late dinner and drinks. Then he would pry out all the inside, cutting-edge details Tom was not ready to make public and wangle an invitation to visit Porton Down tomorrow before he had to catch his night flight.

  Nodding to himself and almost smiling, Smith leaped over a puddle and yanked open the back door of the black-beetle taxi that had stopped in the street. He told the cabbie the address of the WHO conference.

  But as he sank into the seat, his smile disappeared. He pulled out the letter from Bill Griffin and reread it, hoping to find some clue he had missed. What was most noteworthy was what was not said. The furrow between his brows deepened. He thought back over the years, trying to figure out what could have happened to make Bill suddenly contact him this way.

  If Bill wanted scientific help or some kind of assistance from USAMRIID, he would go through official government channels. Bill was an FBI special agent now, and proud of it. Like any agent, he would request Smith’s services from the director of USAMRIID.

  On the other hand, if it were simply personal, there would have been no cloak-and-dagger. Instead, a phone message would have been waiting at the hotel
with Bill’s number so Smith could call back.

  In the chilly cab, Smith shrugged uneasily under his trench coat. This meeting was not only unofficial, it was secret. Very secret. Which meant Bill was going behind the FBI. Behind USAMRIID. Behind all government entities … all apparently in the hopes of involving him, too, in something clandestine.

  Chapter Two

  9:57 A.M., Sunday, October 12

  Fort Detrick, Maryland

  Located in Frederick, a small city surrounded by western Maryland’s green, rolling landscape, Fort Detrick was the home of the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. Known by its initials, USAMRIID, or simply as the Institute, it had been a magnet for violent protest in the 1960s when it was an infamous government factory for developing and testing chemical and biological weapons. When President Nixon ordered an end to those programs in 1969, USAMRIID disappeared from the spotlight to become a center for science and healing.

  Then came 1989. The highly communicable Ebola virus appeared to have infected monkeys dying at a primate quarantine unit in Reston, Virginia. USAMRIID’s doctors and veterinarians, both military and civilian, were rushed to contain what could erupt into a tragic human epidemic.

  But better than containment, they proved the Reston virus to be a genetic millimeter different from the extremely lethal strains of Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. Most important was that the virus was harmless to people. That exciting discovery skyrocketed USAMRIID scientists into headlines across the nation. Suddenly, Fort Detrick was again on people’s minds, but this time as America’s foremost military medical research facility.

  In her USAMRIID office, Dr. Sophia Russell was thinking about these claims to fame, hoping for inspiration as she waited impatiently for her telephone call to reach a man who might have some answers to help resolve a crisis she feared could erupt into a serious epidemic.

  Sophia was a Ph.D. scientist in cell and molecular biology. She was a leading cog in the worldwide wheels set in motion by the death of Maj. Keith Anderson. She had been at USAMRIID for four years, and like the scientists in 1989, she was fighting a medical emergency involving an unknown virus. Already she and her contemporaries were in a far more precarious position: This virus was fatal to humans. There were three victims—the army major and two civilians—all of whom had apparently died abruptly of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) within hours of one another.

  It was not the timing of the deaths or the ARDS itself that had riveted USAMRIID; millions died of ARDS each year around the planet. But not young people. Not healthy people. Not without a history of respiratory problems or other contributing factors, and not with violent headaches and blood-filled chest cavities.

  Now three cases in a single day had died with identical symptoms, each in a different part of the country—the major in California, a teenage girl in Georgia, and a homeless man in Massachusetts.

  The director of USAMRIID—Brig. Gen. Calvin Kielburger—was reluctant to declare a worldwide alert on the basis of three cases they had been handed only yesterday. He hated rocking the boat or sounding like a weak alarmist. Even more, he hated sharing credit with other Level Four labs, especially USAMRIID’s biggest rival, Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control.

  Meanwhile, tension at USAMRIID was palpable, and Sophia, leading a team of scientists, kept working.

  She had received the first of the blood samples by 3:00 A.M. Saturday and had immediately headed to her Level Four lab to begin testing. In the small locker room, she had removed her clothes, watch, and the ring Jon Smith gave her when she agreed to marry him. She paused just a moment to smile down at the ring and think about Jon. His handsome face flashed into her mind—the almost American Indian features with the high cheekbones but very dark blue eyes. Those eyes had intrigued her from the beginning, and sometimes she had imagined how much fun it would be to fall into their depths. She loved the liquid way he moved, like a jungle animal who was domesticated only by choice. She loved the way he made love—the fire and excitement. But most of all, she just simply, irrevocably, passionately loved him.

  She had had to interrupt their phone conversation to rush here.

  “Darling, I have to go. It was the lab on the other line. An emergency.”

  “At this hour? Can’t it wait until morning? You need your rest.”

  She chuckled. “You called me. I was resting, in fact sleeping, until the phone rang.”

  “I knew you’d want to talk to me. You can’t resist me.”

  She laughed. “Absolutely. I want to talk to you at all hours of the day and night. I miss you every moment you’re in London. I’m glad you woke me up out of sound sleep so I could tell you that.”

  It was his turn to laugh. “I love you, too, darling.”

  In the USAMRIID locker room, she sighed. Closed her eyes. Then she put Jon from her mind. She had work to do. An emergency.

  She quickly dressed in sterile green surgical scrubs. Barefoot, she labored to open the door to Bio-Safety Level Two against the negative pressure that kept contaminants inside Levels Two, Three, and Four. Finally inside, she trotted past a dry shower stall and into a bathroom where clean white socks were kept.

  Socks on, she hurried into the Level Three staging area. She snapped on latex rubber surgical gloves and then taped the gloves to the sleeves to create a seal. She repeated the procedure with her socks and the legs of the scrubs. That done, she dressed in her personal bright-blue plastic biological space suit, which smelled faintly like the inside of a plastic bucket. She carefully checked it for pinholes. She lowered the flexible plastic helmet over her head, closed the plastic zipper that ensured her suit and helmet were sealed, and pulled a yellow air hose from the wall.

  She plugged the hose into her suit. With a quiet hiss, the air adjusted in the massive space suit. Almost finished, she unplugged the air hose and lumbered through a stainless steel door into the air lock of Level Four, which was lined with nozzles for water and chemicals for the decontamination shower.

  At last she pulled open the door into Level Four. The Hot Zone.

  There was no way she could rush anything now. As she advanced each step in the cautious chain of protective layers, she had to take more care. Her one weapon was efficient motion. The more efficient she was, the more speed she could eke out. So instead of struggling into the pair of heavy yellow rubber boots, she expertly bent one foot, angled it just right, and slid it in. Then she did the same with the other.

  She waddled as fast as she could along narrow cinder-block corridors into her lab. There she slipped on a third pair of latex gloves, carefully removed the samples of blood and tissue from the refrigerated container, and went to work isolating the virus.

  Over the next twenty-six hours, she forgot to eat or sleep. She lived in the lab, studying the virus with the electron microscope. To her amazement, she and her team ruled out Ebola, Marburg, and any other filovirus. It had the usual furry-ball shape of most viruses. Once she had seen it, given the ARDS cause of death, her first thought was a hantavirus like the one that had killed the young athletes on the Navajo reservation in 1993. USAMRIID was expert on hantaviruses. One of its legends, Karl Johnson, had been a discoverer of the first hantavirus to be isolated and identified back in the 1970s.

  With that in mind, she had used immunoblotting to test the unknown pathogen against USAMRIID’s frozen bank of blood samples of previous victims of various hantaviruses from around the world. It reacted to none. Puzzled, she ran a polymerase chain reaction to get a bit of DNA sequence from the virus. It resembled no known hantavirus, but for future reference she assembled a preliminary restriction map anyway. That was when she wished most fervently that Jon was with her, not far away at the WHO conference in London.

  Frustrated because she still had no definitive answer, she had forced herself to leave the lab. She had already sent the team off to sleep, and now she went through the exiting procedure, too, peeling away her space suit, going through decontaminatio
n procedures, and dressing again in her civilian clothes.

  After a four-hour on-site nap—that was all she needed, she told herself firmly—she had hurried to her office to study the tests’ notes. As the other team members awakened, she sent them back to their labs.

  Her head ached, and her throat was dry. She took a bottle of water from her office mini-refrigerator and returned to her desk. On the wall hung three framed photos. She drank and leaned forward to contemplate them, drawn like a moth to comforting light. One showed Jon and herself in bathing suits last summer in Barbados. What fun they had had on their one and only vacation. The second was of Jon in his dress uniform the day he’d made lieutenant colonel. The last pictured a younger captain with wild black hair, a dirty face, and piercing blue eyes in a dusty field uniform outside a Fifth MASH tent somewhere in the Iraqi desert.

  Missing him, needing him in the lab with her, she had reached for the phone to call him in London—and stopped. The general had sent him to London. For the general, everything was by the book, and every assignment had to be finished. Not a day late, not a day early. Jon was not due for several hours. Then she realized he was probably aloft now anyway, but she wouldn’t be at his house, waiting for him. She dismissed her disappointment.

  She had devoted herself to science, and somewhere along the way she had gotten extremely lucky. She had never expected to marry. Fall in love, perhaps. But marry? No. Few men wanted a wife obsessed with her work. But Jon understood. In fact, it excited him that she could look at a cell and discuss it in graphic, colorful detail with him. In turn, she had found his endless curiosity invigorating. Like two children at a kindergarten party, they had found their favorite playmates in each other—well suited not only professionally but temperamentally. Both were dedicated, compassionate, and as in love with life as with each other.

  She had never known such happiness, and she had Jon to thank for it.