Richard Preston - The Cobra Event

Critical acclaim for Richard Preston

'Move over Stephen King and Michael Crichton' Arthur C. Clarke

'Why did I stay up until 2am finishing this book, scared out of my wits all the way? ... [ The Cobra Event is] utterly terrifying ... but wonderfully readable' Newsweek

'Enormously entertaining' New York Times

'[An] exciting tale of bioengineered viruses on the rampage ... like Crichton ... Preston knows how to explode from the gate; will plunge readers into shock' Publishers Weekly

'One of the most horrifying things I've read in my entire life' Stephen King

'Utterly engrossing ... will make your blood curdle' Washington Post

'First rate ... this book scared the living daylights out of me' Entertainment Weekly

Richard Preston is the author of the bestselling The Hot Zone (about the Ebola virus), American Steel and First Light . Before writing The Cobra Event Richard Preston conducted over a hundred interviews with people in government agencies, in the military, and the scientific community. The Cobra Event took three years to research and is based on fact.

THE

COBRA EVENT

A Novel

RICHARD PRESTON

An Orion Paperback
First published in Great Britain by Orion in 1998
This paperback edition published in 1998 by
Orion Books Ltd,
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane,
London WC2H 9EA

Copyright 1997 by Urania, Inc.

The right of Richard Preston to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 0 75281 712 4

Typeset by Deltatype Ltd, Birkenhead, Merseyside
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

This book is dedicated to my brother David G. Preston, M.D., and to all public health professionals, wherever they may be

It is the greatest art of the devil
to convince us that he does not exist.
- Baudelaire

Contents

PART ONE
TRIAL 1

PART TWO
1969 11

PART THREE
DIAGNOSIS 31

PART FOUR
DECISION 167

PART FIVE
REACHDEEP 197

PART SIX
THE OPERATION 319

The Reality Behind The Cobra Event

Glossary 445

Acknowledgments 453

Part One

TRIAL

Arc of the Circle
NEW YORK CITY, LATE 1990S

Kate Moran was an only child. She was seventeen years old and lived with her parents in a loft apartment on the top floor of a handsome old building to the west of Union Square, just on the edge of Greenwich Village. One Wednesday morning in late April, Kate was slow getting up. She had woken in the middle of the night in a sweat, but it went away, and she fell back asleep, into bad dreams that she could not remember. She came awake with a fresh cold, and she could feel her period coming on.

'Kate!' It was Nanette, the housekeeper, calling to her from the kitchen. 'Katie!'

'Okay.' She didn't like being called Katie.

She sat up and found a Kleenex and blew her nose, and went into the bathroom. She brushed her teeth, then went back into the bedroom and dressed in a flowered dress that she had found in a flea market. The mornings could be chilly this time of year, so she put on a sweater.

Kate had wavy russet hair, beautiful hair with natural pale highlights, which she wore medium length. Her eyes were grayish blue or bluish gray, depending on the light and the weather and her mood (or so she liked to think); complicated eyes. Her face was changing fast. She could almost see the bones of the woman emerging, yet she had found that the more she stared at her face in a mirror the less she understood it. She thought about this as she brushed her hair, pushing it back so that the two platinum earrings in her left ear were visible.

Kate's mother called her the Packrat, because she accumulated things. The worktable in the corner of her room was littered with old cigar boxes covered with their original illustrations, plastic boxes, metal containers, purses, bags, puzzles. Things that opened and closed. There was an old dollhouse that she had found in a junk shop in Brooklyn and had been taking apart, cannibalizing it for a project. She reached into the dollhouse and pulled out a prism made of glass, and the smooth white skull of a vole, with tiny yellow teeth, that she had bought at a bone shop in SoHo. She held the prism up to the light falling through the skylight of her bedroom, and just to see what it would look like, she held the vole's head behind the prism. No colors appeared; you needed direct sunlight. She stuffed the objects into her knapsack. They were going to become part of the Box that she was constructing in Mr Tafides's art room at the Mater School, a private girls' school on the Upper East Side.

'Katie!' Nanette was calling.

'Okay, okay.' She sighed and threw her knapsack over her shoulder and went out into the living area -- a large open space with polished wood floors and antique furniture and rugs. Her parents had both already left for work. Her father was a partner in a Wall Street investment house, and her mother was an attorney at a midtown law firm.

In the kitchen, Nanette had poured orange juice and toasted a bagel.

Kate shook her head. She wasn't hungry. She sneezed.

Nanette tore off a paper towel and handed it to her. 'Do you want to stay home?' 'Uh-uh.' Kate was already out the door and into the elevator.

It was a glorious morning. She hurried along Fifteenth Street to Union Square, striding on long legs, heading for the subway entrance. The ash trees in the square were threatening to break bud. Puffy white clouds drifted in a blue sky over the city, winds whipping in from the southwest, bringing a warmer day than Kate had expected. The daffodils were mostly gone and the tulips were blown and flopping their petals. Spring was beginning to give way to summer. A homeless man passed Kate going in the other direction, leaning into the warm wind as he pushed a shopping cart piled high with plastic garbage bags full of his possessions. She threaded through the stalls of the farmer's market that filled up the northern and western sides of the square, and at the subway kiosk she ran down the stairs and caught the uptown Lexington Avenue express.

The train was crowded, and Kate found herself crushed in a corner of the first car by the front window. It was where she had liked to stand when she was a girl riding with her mother and father, back when they had more time to take her places. You could look out the window and see the steel columns marching by under the car's headlights, and the track extending out into seemingly infinite darkness. Switches and branches whirled past, and if you were on an express train that caught up with a local on the adjacent track, there would be a moment when the two trains were locked together in a shuddering rush forward.

She didn't like it. The lights flashing in the tunnel made her feel sick. She turned away. Then she found herself looking at the faces in the subway car. The faces bothered her. If you look at too many faces jammed together, every face begins to look alien. People in the subway can look ... humanoid.

The Mater School was only a few blocks from the Eighty-sixth Street subway station. Kate was still running a little late, and by the time she got to the stone parish building that housed the school, the younger girls had mostly gone inside, although some of the upperschool girls were hanging around on the steps.

'Kates, I have to tell you something.' It was her friend Jennifer Ramosa. They walked in together, with Jennifer talking about something that Kate didn't follow. Kate felt strange, as if a feather had brushed across her face....