Читать книгу Undercover Wife - Merline Lovelace - Страница 9

“What do you think it is?”

His voice muffled by his surgical mask, the pathologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Lab yielded his place at the electron microscope to his partner.

“Damned if I know,” the second scientist answered as he peered at the sample taken from the carcass. “It doesn’t match any known viral strains.”

He straightened, and both men’s glances went to the glass enclosure separating them from the creature stretched out on the autopsy table. It was a nomascus concolor, or Western black-crested gibbon, very rare and native to the jungles of Asia. The two pathologists had no idea how it had made its way to the ditch beside California’s Highway 101 where it had been found dead, its carcass pecked almost to pieces by crows. The fact that those same crows lay in lifeless heaps beside the gibbon raised an immediate red flag with the road worker who stumbled across them. Within hours, local authorities, worried about a possible outbreak of avian flu, had sealed and shipped the remains to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Lab in Oregon.

The pathologists performing the autopsy could confirm that bird flu had killed neither the monkey nor the crows. The mounting evidence of what had killed them scared the crap out of both scientists.

“Looks like we’ve got us a mutant virus,” the senior member of the team acknowledged reluctantly. “Very contagious and very deadly. We need to issue an immediate alert.”

The alert went out to all government agencies. The Centers for Disease Control reissued it to the civilian sector, where everyone not directly involved in health care or simian research pretty much ignored it.

Except for one individual halfway around the world. When the alert painted across the screen of a computer configured to search for such items, it was read with fierce, almost primal satisfaction.

“Soon.” Exultation shattered the stillness of the darkened room. “Soon my revenge will be complete.”