Whiteout by Ken Follett Page A

He’s got something under his arm.”
    â€œYes—wrapped in blue plastic suit fabric.”
    She ran the footage forward, stopping again as Michael moved away from the rabbit rack. “How many rabbits in the top right-hand cage?”
    â€œTwo, damn it.” Stanley looked perplexed. “I thought your theory was that Michael took a rabbit out of the lab. You’ve shown him bringing one in!”
    â€œA substitute. Otherwise the scientists would have noticed one was missing.”
    â€œThen what’s his motivation? In order to save one rabbit, he has to condemn another to death!”
    â€œInsofar as he was rational at all, I imagine he felt there was something special about the rabbit he saved.”
    â€œFor God’s sake, one rabbit is the same as another.”
    â€œNot to Michael, I suspect.”
    Stanley nodded. “You’re right. Who knows how his mind was working at this point.”
    Toni ran the video footage forward. “He did his chores as usual, checking the food and water in the cages, making sure the animals were still alive, ticking off his tasks on a checklist. Monica came in, but she went to a side laboratory to work on her tissue cultures, so she could not see him. He went next door, to the larger lab, to take care of the macaque monkeys. Then he came back. Now watch.”
    Michael disconnected his air hose, as was normal when moving from one room to another within the lab—the suit contained three or four minutes’ worth of fresh air, and when it began to run out the faceplate would fog, warning the wearer. He stepped into a small room containing the vault, a locked refrigerator used for storing live samples of viruses. Being the most secure location in the entire building, it also held all stocks of the priceless antiviral drug. He tapped a combination of digits on its keypad. A security camera inside the refrigerator showed him selecting two doses of the drug, already measured and loaded into disposable syringes.
    â€œThe small dose for the rabbit and the large one, presumably, for himself,” Toni said. “Like you, he expected the drug to work against Madoba-2. He planned to cure the rabbit and immunize himself.”
    â€œThe guards could have seen him taking the drug from the vault.”
    â€œBut they wouldn’t find that suspicious. He’s authorized to handle these materials.”
    â€œThey might have noticed that he didn’t write anything in the log.”
    â€œThey might have, but remember that one guard is watching thirty-seven screens, and he’s not trained in laboratory practice.”
    Stanley grunted.
    Toni said, “Michael must have figured that the discrepancy wouldn’t be noticed until the annual audit, and even then it would be put down to clerical error. He didn’t know I was planning a spot check.”
    On the television screen, Michael closed the vault and returned to the rabbit lab, reconnecting his air hose. “He’s finished his chores,” Toni explained. “Now he returns to the rabbit racks.” Once again, Michael’s back concealed what he was doing from the camera. “Here’s where he takes his favorite rabbit out of its cage. I think he slips it into its own miniature suit, probably made from parts of an old worn-out one.”
    Michael turned his left side to the camera. As he walked to the exit, he seemed to have something under his right arm, but it was hard to tell.
    Leaving BSL4, everyone had to pass through a chemical shower that decontaminated the suit, then take a regular shower before dressing. “The suit would have protected the rabbit in the chemical shower,” Toni said. “My guess is that he then dumped the rabbit suit in the incinerator. The water shower would not have harmed the animal. In the dressing room he put the rabbit in the duffel bag. As he exited the building, the guards saw him carrying the same bag he came in with,