The Faithful Spy

He did not enjoy making animals suffer, especially cats. He would have preferred to experiment on a dog, but dogs were naturally immune to plague. So he had no choice. And despite his sorrow at the cat’s awful death, he could not deny the pride he felt at the speed of his progress with the plague. He had stopped all his work on his other germs, even anthrax, to concentrate on Yersinia pestis. Tarik would have liked to credit hard work for his success. But the truth was that the bacteria he had received from Tanzania appeared to be an especially virulent strain of plague. The germs grew quickly in brain-heart infusion broth and stayed alive for hours after he strained them into a weak solution of soy agar that flowed easily through his nebulizer. The bacteria were also more temperatureresistant than Tarik had expected. Without a column chromatograph and a polymerase chain reaction assay he couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that this Y. pestis strain included both the pPCP1 and pMT1 plasmids. Those were strands of DNA that produced enzymes that interfered with the immune system and the blood’s ability to clot. A week before, seeing how quickly his mice and rats were dying, Tarik had started taking doxycycline, an antibiotic known to work against plague. As far as he knew, he had not been exposed, but he wanted to be doubly careful. Looking at the cat’s bloody carcass, he was glad he was taking the medicine. He carefully plucked her body from the cage and slipped it into a large glass jar of hydrochloric acid, where it would dissolve. He would go by the shelter for another cat tomorrow. Though maybe he’d be better off at a pet store. They’d have fewer questions. He had been surprised when the woman at the shelter had asked him what name he had picked out for the cat.

“I’m not sure yet,” he’d finally stammered.

Yes, a pet store was the way to go, Tarik thought. But if his success continued, he would soon be done with cats. His next subjects would be monkeys, whose respiratory systems had more in common with humans’. Unfortunately, monkeys weren’t easy to come by; biological supply companies would sell them only to licensed research centers, and very few people bred them for sale as pets. He had seen Internet ads from breeders in the United States, but he wasn’t sure he could get across the border by himself, much less with a monkey in tow. And he strongly suspected that customs agents — maybe even the police — would pay his house a visit if he tried to order one online. Still, even without the monkeys Tarik believed he now had enough skill with the nebulizer to infect people in an unventilated room — if he could figure out a way to release the mist without anyone noticing. Of course, that didn’t mean he could cause a widespread outbreak. He had months to go before he could figure out how to stockpile enough Y. pestis for a big attack. And he worried that it would take months or years to overcome the technical problems associated with large-scale spraying. Creating an aerosol mist in a lab with a few milliliters of solution was far easier than spraying hundreds of liters of liquid from a crop duster or the back of a truck.

But he couldn’t deny his progress. He had been spending six, eight, sometimes ten hours a day down here, sleeping only in short snatches as his excitement grew. He knew he should pace himself—

he was surprised by how tired and disheveled he appeared when he saw himself in the bathroom mirror — but the plague filled his mind. The plague and Fatima.

As he thought of her his excitement faded. Fatima had grown even more distant from him in the last month, coming home late from work, hardly smiling when he tried to talk to her, pushing off his fumbling advances in their bed. The week before, he’d emerged from his work in the basement and again found her whispering on the phone in the kitchen.

“What do you care?” she’d said. “You’re down there all the time anyway.”

At that he had hit her, just a couple of times.

“Please, Tarik,” she’d said. “What’s happening to you?”

You and your wicked ways are what’s happening, Tarik mentally answered her. He wished he could talk to someone about her, but Khadri was the only person he trusted enough to ask, and Khadri’s advice was always the same: focus on your work. “It’s your problem,” Khadri had said the last time they spoke. “Deal with it.”

Fine. I’ll deal with it, Tarik thought. I’ll deal with it tonight. the oxygen gauges on Tarik’s regulator dipped toward empty. He headed back into the airlock and stripped, then hung up his respirator and wiped down the tanks with bleach. When the tanks were clean he dragged them outside of the bubble into the open area of the basement. There he hooked them up to an oxygen pump to refill them.