The Book of the Dead (2 page)

D
r. Lauren Wildenstein watched as the “first response” team carried in the blue plastic hazmat container, placing it under the fume hood in her laboratory. The call had come in twenty minutes earlier, and both she and her assistant, Richie, were ready. At first it sounded like it might be the real deal for a change, something that actually fit the profile of a classic bioterror attack—a package sent to a high-profile New York City institution, dribbling brown powder. But on-site testing for anthrax had already come up negative, and Wildenstein knew that this one would almost certainly be another false alarm. In her two years leading the New York City DOHMS Sentinel laboratory, they had received over four hundred suspicious powders to analyze and, thank God, not one had turned out to be a bioterror agent. So far. She glanced at the running tally they kept tacked to the wall: sugar, salt, flour, baking soda, heroin, cocaine, pepper, and dirt, in tha t order of frequency. The list was a testament to paranoia and too damn many terror alerts.

The delivery team left and she spent a moment staring at the sealed container. Amazing, the consternation a package of powder could cause these days. It had arrived half an hour ago at the museum, and already a guard and a museum administrator had been quarantined, given antibiotics, and were now being treated by mental health services. It seemed the administrator was particularly hysterical.

She shook her head.

“Whaddya think?” came a voice from over her shoulder. “Terrorist cocktail du jour?”

Wildenstein ignored this. Richie’s work was top-notch, even if his emotional development had been arrested somewhere between the third and the fourth grade.

“Let’s run an X-ray.”

“Rolling.”

The false-color X-ray that popped up on the monitor screen showed the package was full of an amorphous substance, with no letter or any other objects visible.

“No detonator,” Richie said. “Darn.”

“I’m going to open the container.” Wildenstein broke the hazmat seals and carefully lifted out the package. She noted the crude, childish scrawl, the lack of a return address, the multiple strands of badly tied twine. It seemed almost designed to arouse suspicion. One corner of the package had been abraded by mishandling, and a light brown substance not unlike sand dribbled from it. This was unlike any bioterror agent she had studied. Awkwardly, on account of her heavy gloves, she cut the twine and opened the package, lifting out a plastic bag.

“We’ve been sandbagged!” said Richie with a snort.

“We treat it as hazardous until proven otherwise,” said Wildenstein, although her private opinion was the same as his. Naturally, it was better to err on the side of caution.

“Weight?”

“One point two kilo. For the record, I’m noting that all the biohazard and hazmat alarms under the hood are reading zero.”

Using a scoop, she took a few dozen grains of the substance and distributed them into half a dozen test tubes, sealed and racked them, then removed them from beneath the hood, passing them on to Richie. Without needing to be told, he started the usual set of chemical reagents, testing for a suite.

“Nice having a shitload of sample to work with,” he said with a chuckle. “We can burn it, bake it, dissolve it, and still have enough left over to make a sand castle.”

Wildenstein waited while he deftly did the workups.

“All negative,” he reported at last. “Man, what is this stuff?”

Wildenstein took a second rack of samples. “Do a heat test in an oxidizing atmosphere and vent the gas to the gas analyzer.”

“Sure thing.” Richie took another tube and, sealing it with a vented pipette which led to the gas analyzer, heated the tube slowly over a Bunsen burner. Wildenstein watched, and to her surprise the sample quickly ignited, glowing for a moment before disappearing, leaving no ash or residue.

“Burn, baby, burn.”

“What do you have, Richie?”

He scrutinized the readout. “Just about pure carbon dioxide and monoxide, trace of water vapor.”

“The sample must have been pure carbon.”

“Gimme a break, boss. Since when does carbon come in the form of brown sand?”

Wildenstein peered at the grit in the bottom of one of the sample tubes. “I’m going to take a look at this stuff under the stereozoom.”

She sprinkled a dozen grains onto a slide and placed it on the microscope stage, turned on the light, and looked through the oculars.

“What do you see?” Richie asked.

But Wildenstein did not answer. She kept looking, dazzled. Under a microscope, the individual grains were not brown at all, but tiny fragments of a glassy substance in myriad colors—blue, red, yellow, green, brown, black, purple, pink. Still looking through the oculars, she picked up a metal spoon, pressed it on one of the grains, and gave a little push. She could hear a faint
scritch
as the grain scratched the glass.

“What’re you doing?” Richie asked.

Wildenstein rose. “Don’t we have a refractometer around here somewhere?”

“Yeah, a really cheap job dating back to the Middle Ages.” Richie rummaged around in a cabinet and drew out a dusty machine in a yellowed plastic cover. He set it up, plugged it in. “You know how to work this puppy?”

“I think so.”

Using the stereozoom, she plucked a grain of the substance and let it sink into a drop of mineral oil she put on a slide. Then she slid the slide into the reading chamber of the refractometer. After a few false starts, she figured out how to turn the dial and obtain a reading.

She looked up, a smile on her face.

“Just what I suspected. We have an index of refraction of two point four.”

“Yeah? So?”

“There we are. Nailed it.”

“Nailed what, boss?”

She glanced at him. “Richie, what is made of pure carbon, has an index of refraction above two, and is hard enough to cut glass?”

“Diamond?”

“Bravo.”

“You mean, what we’ve got here is a bag of industrial diamond grit?”

“That’s what it would seem.”

Richie removed his hazmat hood, wiped his brow. “That’s a first for me.” He turned, reached for a phone. “I think I’ll put a call in to the hospital, let them know they can stand down from biological alert. From what I heard, that museum administrator actually soiled his drawers.”

F
rederick Watson Collopy, director of the New York Museum of Natural History, felt a prickling of irritation on the back of his neck as he exited the elevator into the museum’s basement. It had been months since he’d been down in these subterranean depths, and he wondered why the devil Wilfred Sherman, chairman of the Mineralogy Department, was so insistent on his coming to the mineralogy lab instead of Sherman’s coming to Collopy’s office on the fifth floor.

He turned a corner at a brisk walk, his shoes scraping the gritty floor, and came to the mineralogy lab door—which was shut. He tried the handle—locked—and in a fresh surge of irritation knocked sharply.

The door was opened almost immediately by Sherman, who just as quickly closed and locked it behind them. The curator looked disheveled, sweaty—not to put too fine a term on it, a wreck.
As well he should
, thought Collopy. His eye swept the lab and quickly fixed on the offending package itself, soiled and wrinkled, sitting in a double-ziplocked bag on a specimen table next to a stereozoom microscope. Beside it lay a half-dozen white envelopes.

“Dr. Sherman,” he intoned, “the careless way this material was delivered to the museum has caused us major embarrassment. This is nothing short of outrageous. I want the name of the supplier, I want to know why this wasn’t handled through proper procurement channels, and I want to know why such valuable material was handled so carelessly and misdelivered in such a way as to cause a panic. As I understand it, industrial-grade diamond grit costs several thousand dollars a pound.”

Sherman didn’t answer. He just sweated.

“I can just see the headline in tomorrow’s newspaper:
Bioterror Scare at the Natural History Museum
. I’m not looking forward to reading it. I’ve just gotten a call from some reporter at the
Times
—Harriman something or other—and I have to call him back in half an hour with an explanation.”

Sherman swallowed, still saying nothing. A drop of sweat trickled down his brow and he quickly wiped it away with a handkerchief.

“Well?
Do
you have an explanation? And is there a reason why you insisted on my coming to your lab?”

“Yes,” Sherman managed to say. He nodded toward the stereozoom. “I wanted you to take a… take a look.”

Collopy got up, went over to the microscope, removed his glasses, and put his eyes over the oculars. A blurry mess leaped into view. “I can’t see a bloody thing.”

“The focus needs adjustment, there.”

Collopy fumbled with the knob, sweeping the specimen in and out of focus as he tried to find the right spot. Finally, he found himself staring at a breathtakingly beautiful array of thousands of brilliantly colored bits and pieces of crystal, backlit like a stained-glass window.

“What is it?”

“A sample of the grit that came in the package.”

Collopy pulled away. “Well? Did you or someone in your department order it?”