here. Press on.”
“This is a tissue incubator,” Joe said, closing the monkey file and opening another, the first picture of which showed a burned stainless steel cabinet that looked like a small refrigerator. “They used it to grow Ebola in a cell culture, probably monkey kidney, as that’s common and they had a full supply of monkeys.” He changed to a picture of charred plastic and metal box, about 3 feet square.
“This isolation chamber is really too small for their purposes, but they apparently used it to make inoculations and to work with cultures. They isolated the virus in this centrifuge.”
Joe changed slides rapidly now.
“And freeze dried it in this. This is an ultracentrifuge, which will separate RNA from the protein cover of the viral cell.”
“Wait, why would they do that?” Ferguson asked, recovered from the monkey pictures and back to his job as a general officer, stopping the show and asking questions.
Joe frowned, stopped changing pictures, and looked at Ferguson. “That’s what’s bothering me. What did Mosby want with RNA? I can think of a couple of harebrained ways he might use it for a vaccine. I get sweaty when I think about some of the other things he might do with it.”
“Like what?”
“He could start cutting it up into segments and trying to splice them into something else to see what each segment does. He might have the idea that some feature of Ebola, if separated from the rest of it, might be worth something. Very, very dangerous thing to do. Especially if he isn’t any better at it than these two clowns were at what they did. He could end up putting Ebola’s worst trait into some common virus, like herpes, and letting it get out.”
“Herpes?” Ferguson asked, quizzical look on his face.
“In addition to a cold sore, you’d get purpura and hemorrhages like we saw on Jacques there,” Joe responded, pointing to the flat-screen.
Ferguson frowned, then added, “OK, go on. What next?”
“This next slide shows the back of the centrifuge where the manufacturer puts a plate telling which model it is and where it was made. You can see there, it’s been ground off. Everything was like that. They knew going in they were going to leave the equipment, and they didn’t want it traced.”
“How much is all that worth?”
“Two hundred thousand dollars, maybe a little less. Some of it was old.”
“Not state of the art?”
“No, but adequate.” He paused, waiting for more questions. “OK, that’s what I have. Boyd, you’re up.”
He closed his files and opened Boyd’s.
Boyd went through a brief summary of the interesting volcanic birth of the island only a hundred years before and showed some slides of the cone and the lava flow to the sea. Then the generator house came up.
“See those nails bent up. A slow explosive, like gunpowder or dynamite, would have built up pressure slower and blown the building apart. Plastique is hot and fast. It acts as an incendiary when it’s not contained, and a very fast explosive when it is.” He flicked through the sequence of the roof, summarizing a week’s work with some army bomb experts while on Diego. “The detonator was an electronic blasting cap, initiated by a satellite phone. Someone simply called a number and blew the place up. That had been built into it from the beginning, and Jacques and Franz probably didn’t know it. Jacques shot Franz to stop him from sending the distress signal and then had a change of heart and radioed the warning about Ebola. Someone in Victoria heard it and made the call to blow everything up. By then, Jacques was outside. Seeing the place go up, he retrieved the notebook and wrote the note, then went down to the beach to die. At least, that’s what I think happened.”
Boyd stopped, waiting for comment.
“So, we have someone who knows viruses, vaccines, RNA, and explosives, and isn’t afraid to
“This is a tissue incubator,” Joe said, closing the monkey file and opening another, the first picture of which showed a burned stainless steel cabinet that looked like a small refrigerator. “They used it to grow Ebola in a cell culture, probably monkey kidney, as that’s common and they had a full supply of monkeys.” He changed to a picture of charred plastic and metal box, about 3 feet square.
“This isolation chamber is really too small for their purposes, but they apparently used it to make inoculations and to work with cultures. They isolated the virus in this centrifuge.”
Joe changed slides rapidly now.
“And freeze dried it in this. This is an ultracentrifuge, which will separate RNA from the protein cover of the viral cell.”
“Wait, why would they do that?” Ferguson asked, recovered from the monkey pictures and back to his job as a general officer, stopping the show and asking questions.
Joe frowned, stopped changing pictures, and looked at Ferguson. “That’s what’s bothering me. What did Mosby want with RNA? I can think of a couple of harebrained ways he might use it for a vaccine. I get sweaty when I think about some of the other things he might do with it.”
“Like what?”
“He could start cutting it up into segments and trying to splice them into something else to see what each segment does. He might have the idea that some feature of Ebola, if separated from the rest of it, might be worth something. Very, very dangerous thing to do. Especially if he isn’t any better at it than these two clowns were at what they did. He could end up putting Ebola’s worst trait into some common virus, like herpes, and letting it get out.”
“Herpes?” Ferguson asked, quizzical look on his face.
“In addition to a cold sore, you’d get purpura and hemorrhages like we saw on Jacques there,” Joe responded, pointing to the flat-screen.
Ferguson frowned, then added, “OK, go on. What next?”
“This next slide shows the back of the centrifuge where the manufacturer puts a plate telling which model it is and where it was made. You can see there, it’s been ground off. Everything was like that. They knew going in they were going to leave the equipment, and they didn’t want it traced.”
“How much is all that worth?”
“Two hundred thousand dollars, maybe a little less. Some of it was old.”
“Not state of the art?”
“No, but adequate.” He paused, waiting for more questions. “OK, that’s what I have. Boyd, you’re up.”
He closed his files and opened Boyd’s.
Boyd went through a brief summary of the interesting volcanic birth of the island only a hundred years before and showed some slides of the cone and the lava flow to the sea. Then the generator house came up.
“See those nails bent up. A slow explosive, like gunpowder or dynamite, would have built up pressure slower and blown the building apart. Plastique is hot and fast. It acts as an incendiary when it’s not contained, and a very fast explosive when it is.” He flicked through the sequence of the roof, summarizing a week’s work with some army bomb experts while on Diego. “The detonator was an electronic blasting cap, initiated by a satellite phone. Someone simply called a number and blew the place up. That had been built into it from the beginning, and Jacques and Franz probably didn’t know it. Jacques shot Franz to stop him from sending the distress signal and then had a change of heart and radioed the warning about Ebola. Someone in Victoria heard it and made the call to blow everything up. By then, Jacques was outside. Seeing the place go up, he retrieved the notebook and wrote the note, then went down to the beach to die. At least, that’s what I think happened.”
Boyd stopped, waiting for comment.
“So, we have someone who knows viruses, vaccines, RNA, and explosives, and isn’t afraid to
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