“There’s too much saliva,” Ethan complained. “I feel like I’m going to drown. It’s even difficult to talk.”
“Oh, thank God you answered,” Melanie said the moment she heard the doctor’s voice. Turning her back on Ethan, she began a rapid description of Ethan’s mysterious state and her confusion about what to do. She specifically asked if she should call the police and ask Chief Hargrove to get out the old ambulance.
“Sounds like it could be organophosphate poisoning,” Dr. Nielson said with urgency. He knew the toxicity of some of the products the American Pest Control Company used. “Put on some gloves immediately!”
“I did!”
“First give him some atropine stat! Next, get him into the shower and get him to scrub his entire body! And bag his clothes! I’m on my way!”
“The shower might be difficult. He’s having trouble walking.”
“Do the best you can! I’ll be there just as soon as possible.”
Chapter 2
Monday, July 21, 9:20a.m.
Bennet Estate
Hamilton County, New York
Dr. Viktor Sergeyevich Mikhailov switched on the incubator heater along with its agitator after adding the appropriate amount of ligase. At that point there was nothing remaining to do but allow the contained theta prion gene along with a galactose promoter to go through the process of inserting itself into the plasmid yeast expression vector.
Viktor and Dr. Nikolai Alexeyevich Petrov had been hard at work in the makeshift molecular biological laboratory they and their two assistants—Alexei Ivanov, a microbiological technician, and Dmitry Volkov, a biomedical instrumentation expert—had created in a nineteenth-century barn. It hadn’t been an easy task, as all the necessary equipment had to be obtained de novo from various American medical and scientific sources mostly in Albany, a two-hour drive away. All they had brought with them from Russia was a microscopic amount of theta prion gene in a sealed vial.
Luckily, they had a limitless supply of US cash, thanks to access to adequate Bitcoin ATMs not only in Albany, but also in Saratoga Springs and Glens Falls, both of which were closer than Albany. Prior to this operation, neither man had realized how important the development of the cryptocurrency was going to be to their work, but there was no way they could have accomplished what they had without it.
Viktor and Nikolai had been closeted in their makeshift lab since five o’clock that morning following their decision over celebratory vodkas late the evening before to do one more major prion harvest and release before fleeing the decadent West back to Holy Mother Russia. They had already completed five prion harvests and releases over five weeks, and accomplished “proof of concept,” namely that the theta prion Viktor had created back at the Vector Institute in Koltsovo had the potential to become a game-changing bioweapon, capable of tipping the balance in the ongoing confrontation between Russia and the West.
Although they lacked absolute scientific corroboration that the theta prion they’d introduced into the Essex Falls domestic water system was causing the onset of very rapid neurogenerative disease, they’d had more than adequate verbal confirmation that there had been a sudden upswing in the incidence of rapidly progressive episodes of dementia mimicking Alzheimer’s, which was what they’d fully expected. Despite their eagerness to leave, they couldn’t resist doing one more release as a kind of icing-on-the-cake celebration, as well as a personal expression of contempt for Essex Falls, the most boring, utterly uncultured, isolated place any of them had ever been, despite it being only two hundred miles north of cosmopolitan New York City.
“Talk about being sent to Siberia,” Nikolai suddenly said,breaking the silence that had prevailed for more than two hours while the two men had been busily working. He’d just straightened up from cleaning the thermocycler after having used it to ramp up the amount of the theta prion gene while Viktor had been preparing the vector to receive it. Since they had been working together for years in multiple locations in Russia, they hardly needed to speak with each other when involved in a combined task. “Our being sent here to this godforsaken place and having to deal with all these uneducated boorish imbeciles has been far worse.”
Viktor’s response was to laugh so hard he had to slap a hand to his face to keep from spraying saliva, and with his naturally deep baritone voice, the sound caused Nikolai to guffaw at his own joke.
With the incubator running in the background and the contentment of a good laugh, they both felt a sense of accomplishment. They had completed what they had set out to do, and at the moment there was nothing more to be done until Alexei and Dmitry were roused out of bed and sent on their way to Albany to get a batch of supplies for the final harvest, particularly the yeast, which would serve as the living prion protein factory. Once the cells had been transformed by the vector being readied in the incubator and isolated, they would be put into the fermenter that they were using as a bioreactor and allowed to do what microorganisms were good at doing under the right conditions: massively reproducing and following the orders dictated by their genetic code. In this case that meant making the theta prion.
Both Viktor and Nikolai were medical doctors as well as PhD biochemists, with Viktor having an additional PhD in molecular biology. Both had committed themselves to research and shunned clinical medicine from early in their careers. Although Viktor had been born and spent his early childhood in Nizhny Novgorod whileNikolai came from Saint Petersburg, both had ended up for final PhDs at Moscow University, where they’d met. Together they had gone on to spend time working in a number of “closed” Russian cities on classified projects, first at the 33rd Central Scientific Research and Testing Institute in Shikhany and then later at the 48th Central Scientific Research Institute in Kirov before finally moving on to the Vector Institute in Koltsovo. It was at Vector where they began to work on prions, and it was while they were working together on prions that Viktor had made the breakthrough discovery of the theta prion. He’d done it almost by accident by using CRISPR/Cas9 to cause a series of multiple but very specific point mutations in the human prion gene CD230. Testing his discovery on transgenic mice specifically bred for prion research, he’d been shocked to observe the speed at which the resulting neurodegenerative changes occurred in the animals’ brains with this new prion. Instead of the normal weeks or months, it was hours, meaning in humans it would be days or weeks instead of years and decades.
Although immediately highly classified, Viktor’s discovery received at lot of attention and commendation from the highest levels of the FSB and the GRU, where both Viktor and Nikolai were known from their time in Shikhany and Kirov. This attention and commendation couldn’t have pleased both Viktor and Nikolai more than it had. The reason was simple, as the two men shared a deep and sincere commitment to staunch right-wing ideology. Both had been leaders of Russian youth organizations as teenagers, which had translated into continued active personal support of a powerful, authoritarian, right-wing Russian paramilitary group in which Viktor was an acting general and Nikolai a major. When the men had promoted the idea of Viktor’s discovery being an enormously effective bioweapon in the ongoing conflict with the West, they hadbeen rewarded by the FSB and GRU offering Viktor and Nikolai logistical support to secretly carry out an actual proof-of-concept field trial and hence their search for, and eventual arrival in, Essex Falls, New York.
“What do you say we go back to the house and wake up the two sleeping beauties?” Nikolai suggested. He stripped off his protective gloves and took off his apron. “The sooner we get the fermenter up and running, the sooner we’ll have final product, meaning the sooner we’re out of here and, thank God, on our way home.”
“You are absolutely correct,” Viktor said, peeling off his own gloves and apron. “But I’m going to pull rank and have you do it on your own. I’m not in the mood to face their complaining. And I don’t blame them. Staying out all night babysitting this bunch of country bumpkins had to have been trying.”
“And scary.”
“You got that right. The two times I made myself spend the night out with them was about all I could handle. Training them is, after all, an impossible task. It would take a lot more than a few nights drinking beer and running around in the forest with loaded automatic weapons to turn these yokels into soldiers.”
“I shudder to think of what our guys, Alexei and Dmitry, had to endure all these weeks.”
“Agreed,” Viktor said. “Yet it had to be done to humor our hosts.”
“I’m actually more worried about our techs being truly disappointed when I tell them that we decided to do another harvest and release. At dinner last night we seemed to be leaning toward getting the hell out of here this afternoon.”
“You’re undoubtedly right. They’re as bored as we are, but just be sure to emphasize to them the sooner we have this last harvest,the sooner we can dump it into the municipal water sedimentation tanks and be out of here.”
“I’ll make sure to emphasize that very point,” Nikolai said as he turned off the light before following Viktor out the barn’s side door.
