Chapter 14 #3
After she stopped the virus, she could finally ruminate on her feelings.
She didn’t have time to be emotional when there was work to be done.
If Teuling wanted her to cook up a slow-burn virus, he’d have to provide a lab for her to work in.
On the sly, she could engineer the antiviral she’d use to stop Vasquez.
Once she had the antiviral, she’d find a way to escape and take Cate with her.
“How would you like to work in a lab with dangerous pathogens?” Marta asked.
“Beats staring at these walls,” Cate answered.
“If I’m to do Teuling’s bidding, I’ll need help I can trust.”
“If you can get them to buy it,” Cate said, “I’m all in.”
Marta marched to the door and banged her fist against the metal. “Hey! If you want me to work, I need a lab. Yo! Guard! Tell Teuling I’m ready to work.”
“Good luck,” Cate said. “I think they have selective language skills. I yelled myself hoarse the first day.”
“Teuling wanted me for a reason. I suspect he has a timeline he’s working against.” Marta prayed she was right. “Once they get me in a lab, I’ll tell them I need an assistant.”
Thirty minutes later, Marta’s door opened. Two guards stood ready to grab her, she assumed, in case she decided to run. She had no intention of running.
Yet.
To create an antiviral to counter Vasquez’s attack on the Summit, she needed a lab.
If it meant pretending to engineer Teuling’s virus, at least she’d be in a lab where she could work on the more immediate spread of another deadly virus.
Hopefully, Priya had connected the dots and was having the Helvetic’s water systems shut down before more people died.
The guards took her deeper into the facility to an elevator. One guard passed his ID card in front of a scanner. The elevator door opened.
Marta was led into the elevator, the door closed and they descended into the bowels of the structure.
Once the elevator came to a stop, the door opened into a hallway with white tile flooring, white walls and ceilings. Halfway down the hall, they paused in front of a door. Again, the guard used his card to open the door.
Marta made a mental note that if cards could get her into different rooms in the facility, they might get her out as well.
The door opened into a clean room where personal protective equipment (PPE) hung on hooks on the wall.
A man geared up in a full hazmat suit stepped forward. “I will take Dr. Hale from here,” he said in the Queen's English with a decidedly German accent.
The guards remained outside the door as Marta entered.
“This is a Biosafety Level 3 lab,” the man in PPE said. “Please put on the personal protective equipment. We have secured samples of the virus you were working with in the Colombian compound, as well as the files you created.”
They must have hacked into Vasquez’s database—her data—to get it.
“Once you are ready, I will take you into the laboratory. If you have any questions about the various pieces of equipment, I am here to assist.”
Marta stepped into the coveralls and pulled them up over her body and arms, her thoughts going back to the day Crusher had stormed into the lab in Colombia.
Thankfully, she’d been working on DNA sequencing at her computer that day, or she’d have been decked out in PPE, making it harder for her to drop everything and run.
If he’d grabbed her to make that escape while she’d been working with the virus, he could have been infected.
Apparently, their stars had aligned that day.
She grabbed a powered air-purifying respirator (PAPR), checked that the battery was fully charged and secured it around her waist. After she pulled a hood over her head, she connected the hose from the hood to the PAPR.
Once she was sure the unit worked correctly, she fitted her hands into two pairs of gloves and then turned to the man who would take her into the lab. “I’m ready.”
He stood beside a door opposite the one through which she’d entered the chamber.
He checked for a green light, then opened the door and took Marta into the laboratory, where he showed her the biosafety cabinet she’d be working with when handling the virus, the containment apparatus and the computer she would use to modify the virus’s attributes.
Two hours later, Marta had navigated the system she’d be using and set up two projects.
One was visible to Teuling’s scientists checking her work, and the other she buried as best she could, deep within other files, deliberately mislabeled to avoid discovery.
She’d checked the virus samples to ensure they matched those she’d worked with at the Colombian compound.
She went to work feverishly manipulating data, the virus and the gene sequencing, pulling from memory the work she’d done on an antiviral for this virus prior to being fired from the CDC.
A task as daunting as the one she was attempting could take weeks, months, or sometimes years. She didn’t have that kind of time. The Summit was days away. If she didn’t have something viable by then, people would die.