The Cobra Event by Richard Preston Read Free Book Online

staring at the electronic mapping screen.
    “We got lost,” Hopkins said to the radio.
    “Turn back!” Pascal Arriet shouted.
    “It’s impossible,” Hopkins said.
    “
Turn back!
”
    Driving with one hand, Hopkins popped a panel from the shortwave radio with his thumb. He fiddled with some wires. His fingers moved rapidly, with precision. Abruptly some grunting shrieks came out of the radio.
    “You’re breaking up,” Hopkins said to the radio. “We’ve got trouble with the ionosphere.”
    “
L’ionosphere? Crétin! Idiot!
”
    Hopkins placed the radio on the dashboard, wires dangling out of it. It continued to squawk and squeal. He reached into the radio with his fingertips and yanked out a part the size of a sunflower seed. It was a resistor. The squeals were transformed into a weird rubbery sound. The car swayed as he worked on the radio.
    “I hope you can fix that,” Littleberry said.
    The French voice was sounding more and more hysterical on the shortwave radio.
    “Our Iraqi friends can’t hear our radios,” Littleberry said to Hopkins, “so they don’t know Pascal is ordering us to turn back. If I know Pascal, he won’t dare tell the Iraqis we’ve gone AWOL. He’ll follow us, because he’s under orders to keep the group together at all costs. So the Iraqis are gonna think this is an authorized inspection, since Arriet is following behind us. They may let us in.”
    “Are we going to wear any safety gear?”
    Littleberry turned around and reached into the back seat, next to the black suitcases, and pulled out a full-face biohazard mask, equipped with purple HEPA filters. He gave it to Hopkins to clip on his belt.
    “We’re not interested in the whole building,” Littleberry went on. “There is a
door
I want to have a peek at. The folks at the National Security Agency have some information on that door.”
    “You’re sure you know how to get to the door?”
    Littleberry pushed a button and held up the screen mapper. It showed a detailed diagram of a building. “We pretend to stumble into the door by accident. Don’t follow me in there, Will. Give me a minute and I’ll come out.”
    “Then what?”
    “Big apology. We rejoin Pascal. He will be furious, but he’ll have to pretend the thing was authorized. We’ll be in Bahrain by tonight.”
    Hopkins didn’t ask Littleberry what they were looking for, but he knew it was not a chemical weapon. He assumed it was bacteria or a virus. A bacteriological weapon is grown in a fermenter tank, and it gives off a yeasty smell, somewhat like beer, or sometimes a meaty smell, like a meat broth. Virus weapons are not grown in fermenter tanks, because a virus doesn’t cause fermentation when it grows. A virus converts a population of living cells into more virus. What happens is called amplification of the virus. The machine that amplifies a virus is called a bioreactor. Nothing ferments inside the tank, and no gases are let off, so there is no odor.
    A bioreactor is a rather small tank with a sometimes complicated interior. The tank contains a warm liquid bath that is saturated with living cells. The cells are infected with a virus that is replicating. The cells leak virus particles, and the bioreactor becomes charged with them. A virus particle is a tiny nugget of protein (sometimes with a membrane) that surrounds a core of genetic material, which consists of strands of DNA or RNA, the ribbonlike molecules that carry the master software code that directs the activities of life. A typical virus particle is a thousand times smaller than a cell. If a virus particle were an object about an inch across, a human hair would be a thousand feet across. Viruses use their software code to take over a cell and direct the cell’s own machinery to make more virus particles. A virus keeps a cell alive until the cell is full of copies of virus particles, and then the cell explodes and releases hundreds or even thousands of copies of the virus.
    A wide variety of