Medusa

“As fishy as ever,” Austin said with a slight smile. “I’m meeting someone here.”

“Your friend arrived a few minutes ago,” Stavros said. “I’ve seated him at the admiral’s table.”

He led Austin to an alcove at the rear of the dining room. Admiral Sandecker had often dined at the restaurant when he was NUMA director. The table offered a modicum of privacy and a view of the dining room. The blue walls flanking the table were decorated with pictures of squid, octopi, and various other denizens of Stavros’s kitchen.

The man seated at the table gave Austin a quick wave of recognition.

Austin pulled out a chair and sat down opposite Max Kane. “Hello, Doc,” he said. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

“I’m shocked that you were able to see through my masquerade so easily.”

“You had me for a second, Doc, then I noticed your hairline was listing to starboard.”

Kane snatched the thick black wig from his head. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it gliding like a hairy Frisbee toward a nearby table where two men were seated. The wig almost landed in a bowl of avgolemono soup. They glared at Kane, and one man stuffed the hairpiece under the jacket of his dark suit, then went back to his di

Kane burst into laughter.

“Don’t look so worried, Kurt. Those guys are my babysitters. They’re the ones who insisted that I wear the rug out in public.”

Austin gave Kane a tight smile, but he was in no mood for idle talk. In the short time he had known the colorful microbiologist, Austin had almost lost one of his team, seen the B3 project scuttled, and fought an undersea robot a half mile down. He wanted answers, not wig tosses, however skillful. He signaled Stavros by holding two fingers in the air, then turned back to Kane and skewered him with his coral-hued eyes.

“What the hell is going on, Doc?” he asked.

Kane sagged in his chair, as if the wind had gone right out of him.

“Sorry, Kurt. I’ve spent the last few days with those creeps in a safe house subsisting on pizza and Chinese fast food. I’m starting to get a little loopy.”

Austin handed Kane a menu.

“Here’s my antidote for fast food. I’d recommend the psari plaki, fish Athenian-style. Tsatziki and taramosalata for appetizers.”

When Stavros arrived with glasses of ouzo, Austin ordered two of the succulent fish plates. Then he raised his glass. Looking Kane straight in the eye, he said, “Here’s to a discovery that is going to affect every man, woman, and child on the planet.”

“Joe must have told you about my near-death confession.”

“He said the prospect of a watery grave made you forthcoming, up to a point.”

Kane clamped his lips in a smirk.

“I guess I owe you an explanation,” he said.

“I guess you do,” Austin said.

Kane took a blissful sip of ouzo and put his glass down.

“For a couple of years now, I’ve been chairman of a scientific advisory group called the Board on Marine Biology . . . BOMB, for short,” Kane said. “The board includes some of the most brilliant minds in the field of ocean biomedicine. We work with the National Research Council, and advise the government on promising scientific discoveries.”

“And what was your promising discovery, Doc?”

“About a year after I had moved the lab to Bonefish Key, we acquired a rare species of jellyfish related to the sea wasp. We named it the blue medusa because it had an amazingly bright luminescence, but the toxin that the thing produced was what really blew our minds.”

“How so, Doc?”

“The medusa’s toxin didn’t kill. It immobilized the prey so that the medusa could dine on food that was still alive. That’s not an unknown practice in nature. Spiders and wasps like to keep a fresh snack handy.”

Austin nodded in the direction of the restaurant’s lobster tank.

“Human beings do the same thing.”

“You see my point, then. The steers and hogs that we turn into steaks and pork chops have better medical treatment than many humans. We even load those animals down with antibiotics and other medicines to keep them as healthy as possible until we can eat them.”

“Animal husbandry isn’t my strong suit, Doc. Where are you going with this?”

“The blue medusa toxin is the most complex naturally produced chemical I’ve ever seen. It puts up a wall that keeps pathogens at arm’s length. The doomed prey enjoys the best of health while it waits to be devoured.” Kane leaned across the table and dropped his voice. “Now, just suppose we could put those same protective qualities in a drug for humans.”

Austin pondered Kane’s words.

“You’d have an all-purpose pill,” Austin said. “What the snake oil salesmen used to call a cure-all.”

“Bingo! Only this was no snake oil. We had found a medical miracle that just might neutralize some of the greatest scourges of mankind, the ailments caused by viruses, from the common cold to cancer.”

“So why all the hush-hush?” Austin asked. “If people knew you had discovered a cure-all, the world would build statues in your honor.”

“Hell, Kurt, at first we were nominating ourselves for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. After the initial euphoric thrill, we realized that we were about to open Pandora’s box.”

“You wouldn’t get any love letters from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries,” Austin said. “But, in the long term, you’d get a healthier world.”

“It’s that long term that worried us,” Kane said. “Say we give this boon to the world, no strings attached. An easily accessible cure-all goes into production. The average life span increases stratospherically. Instead of six billion souls on the planet, we’d have ten or twelve billion. Picture the pressure that would put on land, water, food, and energy resources.”

“You could have riots, wars, governments toppled, and starvation.”

Kane spread his hands apart as if to say Voila!

“Now imagine what would happen if we kept the discovery secret.”

“Nothing is secret forever. Word would leak out. Those who didn’t have access to the medicine would resent those who did. People with life-threatening diseases would be pounding down the doors of city hall. Chaos again.”

“The scientific board reached the same conclusion,” Kane said. “We were in a quandary. So we compiled a report, which we transmitted to the government. Then fate intervened. An epidemic broke out in China, an influenza-type virus with the potential to set off a worldwide pandemic that would kill millions. And guess what? Our crazy little lab held the key to the cure.”

“Blue medusa?”

“Yup.”

“Is that what you meant when you said your research could impact everyone on the planet?”

Kane nodded.

“Turns out our research held the only hope to fight this thing,” he continued. “The government took over the lab, locked the doors, and worked with the Chinese government to keep the research under wraps until we could come up with a synthesized form of the chemical. They put out a cover story suggesting that the new virus was simply an outbreak of SARS and thus controllable. Which it isn’t. It’s a mutated strain that’s even more virulent than the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic. In one year, that virus killed millions.”

Austin let out a low whistle.

“With the ability people have to globe-hop now,” he said, “that 1918 figure would be a drop in the bucket.”

“This time, it’s the whole bucket, Kurt. The feds classified our findings and made all the lab people government employees, so that anyone talking out of turn could be prosecuted for treason. They also added White House and military people to the board. Then they moved most of the research to a secret undersea lab.”

“Why not stay at Bonefish Key?” Austin asked.

“Too public, for one thing. But there were practical reasons too. We wanted to be near the resource. The blue medusa once covered a wide area, but now it is found primarily in and around a specific deepwater canyon. And we wanted to quarantine our work. We were developing an enhanced version of the medusa, a sort of superjellyfish, a dangerous predator, not the kind of thing you’d want to find in your swimming pool.”