Crime Zero by Michael Cordy Read Free Book Online Page A

circles forming Vi-roVector's biosafety laboratory complex.
    The structure was built to exacting federal standards and could withstand an earthquake or a direct hit from any known warhead. This was intended less to protect the inhabitants than to ensure nothing inside escaped. The concentric circle design was based on the Russian model; each glass-walled airtight circle was kept at an increasingly lower air pressure toward the center. Any breach in the reinforced glass walls would suck air into and not out of the structure.
    Each circle represented a staging post, reflecting the four classified levels of virus. Level one viruses, such as influenza, were stored and researched in the outer circle. Levels two and three viruses, including HIV and hepatitis, were in two circles closer to the center and required increased protective clothing and vaccinations. Level four viruses, so-called hot agents, such as Ebola and Marburg, with up to a 90 percent mortality rate, were housed in the penultimate area and required full biological suits. In the few institutions authorized to house these highly infectious agents, including the U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Maryland and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, there was no more dangerous area than the BioSafety Level 4 lab, the so-called Hot Zone.
    But at ViroVector there was one more level of peril. The central circle was a Level 5 facility. Ahead was an airtight door. "BioSafety Level 1," was printed on the glass in ten-inch-high red letters. Again she placed her palm over the DNA sensor and stepped through when the door opened. Walking down a glass corridor, she could see the Level 1 laboratory facilities to her left and right. They were busy but not overpopulated with white-coated virologists. Much of her viral work was now automated. In one corner on the right were the huge stainless steel refrigerators that housed ViroVector's library of bacteriophage samples. Alice Prince was particularly proud of her phage collection.
    ViroVector owned the largest selection of phage specimens known to humankind. These quasi-viruses fed on bacteria, such as Mycobacterium, Staphylococcus, and Enterococcus. Each was bacterium-specific, feeding off a particular strain, mutating with it so the bacterium could never develop immunity, as it could to antibiotics. In the mid-nineties, at a time when the power of bacteriophage technology was discredited by the giant drug companies still trying to sell their increasingly ineffective antibiotics, Alice Prince had seen an opportunity.
    Her company had bought access to the vast phage library in the Tbilisi Institute in Georgia, collected during the Soviet Communist era of central control. Having replicated and enlarged the collection, ViroVector now had a phage virus to kill most known bacteria. And since the year 2000 many Western hospitals, plagued by antibiotic-immune superbugs, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus, had been forced to use her company's products to sterilize their wards and operating rooms. Now airports and many train stations and seaports used ViroVector's bacteriophage air purifiers in their embarkation and disembarkation tunnels, as viral customs officers to reduce the risk of deadly bacteria moving around the world with their human hosts. The bacteriophage business had become ViroVector's major income stream, funding much of its growth.
    Looking straight ahead, Alice made her way through the sealed doors leading to BioSafety Level 2 and then Level 3.
    These labs were smaller, and many of the personnel wore masks. Leaving Level 3, she found herself in a decontamination and preparation area equipped with chemical decon showers, scrub stations, and another row of lockers. Alice walked to her locker and pulled out a blue Chemturion biological space suit with "Alice Prince" printed on the back. After checking it for tears, she suited