Free Rise of the Beast: A Novel (The Patmos Conspiracy Book 1) by M.K. Gilroy Page B

so treatments could be designed. But finding the exact source of Ebola wasn’t nearly so easy to identify—and that made prevention and treatment protocols much more difficult.
    More than thirty years after Ebola first grabbed international headlines no one actually knew its source and natural incubator. Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on research, scientists also didn’t know how to treat the hemorrhaging disease that killed 80% of those it infected. Scientists still didn’t know why some people survived it either. But that was a small matter, Dr. Claire Stevens thought. Close counted in horseshoes, hand grenades, and Ebola.
    It met all reasonable standards of successful lethal application to major population concentrations.
    The most significant research into Ebola, at least for her needs, was done in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and early 90s at the State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology, secreted away in Siberia. While everyone else worked on a vaccine, Soviet scientists worked on finding a solution to weaponize Ebola. The exchange of bodily fluids within human contact was a wonderful conduit of disease but not efficient enough. It was too easy to stop through quarantine. To survive you simply didn’t go near anyone bleeding their guts out and didn’t let them near anyone else. Fifteen million people were going to die through mass quarantine with a new outbreak in West Africa—she didn’t think, she knew—and that had nothing to do with their operation that was going to infect a new part of the world before anyone knew what was happening.
    Before the collapse of the USSR, one of its best scientists had come close to putting it in an aerosol form. When the Berlin Wall fell signifying the death of the Empire, the program was disbanded.
    Or so it seemed.
    In 2004, Dr. Antonina Presnayakova, a scientist at the same facility, now privatized and heavily funded by American and European biotech companies, accidentally pricked her thumb with a needle laced with Ebola. She was purportedly working with Ebola infected guinea pigs to discover the elusive vaccine. She died ten days later, suffering convulsive hemorrhaging by herself in a quarantined white laboratory room.
    Claire knew that Presnayakova was—despite the protests of conspiracy theorists—indeed working on a vaccine. But one of Presnayakova’s colleagues, Dr. Dimitri Dolzhikov, had resumed working on the aerosol version—the weaponized version—and she knew for a fact that he had sold his documentation and his services to Claire’s employer.
    Her generous employer’s identity was a secret to everyone in the Patmos labs, except for the director, Dr. Rodger Patton. Shortly afterarriving, Claire proffered a guess, but the second she broached the subject with Patton, Rodger told her that such a line of inquiry was a certain path to termination. She wanted to ask what he meant by termination but held her tongue. That was the first time she understood the full implication of her decision to bring Mariama to the world. Did she regret it? Not in the least. Doing something great always conveyed a price. She kept her mouth shut on her suspicions.
    It was irrelevant after she met Nicky. He was using a different first name and no last name. But she recognized him from a tabloid story she had read years before. Even before the pillow talk with Nicky began, she knew almost as much about their employer as Patton did.
    Claire’s specialty was biological chemistry and to the delight of the small team she worked with, she quickly made her mark by dramatically increasing the absorption rate of airborne Ebola. Her lab partners had already enhanced the Ebola strain with the addition of anthrax to increase the kill rate from eighty percent to almost ninety percent. They were killing chimpanzees like clockwork in the lab. But results in open air spaces were desultory, threatening the project’s timetable.
    She introduced an updated version of