Free The Deep Zone by James M. Tabor Page A

that.”
    She’d said it, but not without dread. Cueva de Luz was a true supercave, thousands of feet deep and many miles long, located in the high, remote forest of southern Mexico and filled with bizarre and exotic dangers.
Journey to the Center of the Earth
but worse, and for real.
    “It’s not going to be as easy as it was last time.” Barnard’s voice was grim.
    She gaped. “
Easy?
Don, it was a nightmare. I didn’t think any of us were getting out. Two didn’t, as you know.”
    “I know that expedition was hellish. But there are other complications now.”
    “Such as?”
    Lathrop looked at his gold wafer of a watch. “Dr. Leland, we can fill you in later. Just now, however—”
    She ignored Lathrop, addressed Barnard: “We’ll need a team. That will take a week at least.”
    Lathrop smiled for the first time since she’d walked into the office. “Already done!”
    “What? Where? When do we meet them?”
    “Right now. You’re the last to arrive. The others are waiting downstairs.”
    It was past nine P.M . when the four of them took a secure elevator to the lowest level that BARDA acknowledged publicly and then dropped on down to Sublevel 1, the first of four classified levels that it did not acknowledge. The elevator stopped. Barnard entered an alphanumeric code on a keypad, the elevator door opened, and they walked forward into a biosecure chamber with gray walls and blue germicidal UV lights. The door slid closed behind them and there was a soft hiss as the chamber’s airtight seals engaged. Clicks and whirs, integrated sensors and analyzers scanning them for pathogens, explosives, biological material. Presently a group of lights on the air lock’s far wall glowed green and the inner door slid open.
    The limited access was essential, for reasons well known to Hallie. In January 1989, chimpanzees infected with Ebola Zaire virus had gotten loose inside a research facility in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. They, in turn, had infected hundreds of other chimps. Before long, the entire complex became one vast Ebola-Z growth medium. Hot animals were running amok, others going crazy in their cages, still others breaking out.
    Hallie did not routinely work with chimps, but she knew that they were eight times stronger than a human and could eat a man’s face in ten seconds. If any of those animals had escaped, a pandemicof hemorrhagic fever with a 90 percent mortality rate and no known cure would have burned through Washington’s civilian population in two weeks. It would have obliterated the constitutional line of succession like a wet sponge wiping chalk marks off a blackboard. There would not have been an executive, legislative, or judicial branch of government, nor any military command to speak of. Washington, D.C., would have been a cauldron of death.
    In the end, only the work of some very brave people and more sheer luck than humanity had any right to expect had averted disaster. But the Monkey Business, as it was known forever after, had had lasting effects. To ensure that nothing like that
ever
happened again, the CDC had imposed fail-safe security precautions. Now a hot pathogen break might kill many BARDA people, but the bug would find no further hosts. Those BARDA lives would be the price of containment.
    They stepped into a long corridor flooded with more watery UV germicidal light, cream-colored walls, tan floor. Though mostly administrative work was done here, some research was ongoing and the air carried odors of alcohol and formaldehyde and disinfectant. People in white lab coats and business suits moved in both directions, some pushing carts, others speaking into Bluetooth-style microphones attached to earpieces. It could have been a hallway in any government building, except that it was almost ten P.M . and everyone was in a hurry.
    “How on earth were you able to get me back in here?” Hallie was a little surprised by how good it felt to be back in a place where important