Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (14 page)

“Like we did. Sick dog. Dead fox. Hell, anyone could walk into the freezer where
our
samples are kept,” I said.

Sengupta recoiled. He was not a soldier, trained to look for enemies. “That is crazy,” he said. “Why would someone do that? If you wanted to hurt someone, there are other ways, easier ways to do it. You are talking about a very, very insane individual.”

Eddie said, “You don’t think it’s a weapon, One!”

I knew from our unit files that in those old Soviet labs, across the Bering Sea, as recently as thirty years ago, scientists had tried to weaponize rabies.

“We treat it like its contagious,” I said, reaching for the phone. “Your wife isn’t going anywhere, Ranjay. No one in town is. We need to quarantine this place, now.”

“Oh, pshaw! It won’t be rabies,” the distinguished-looking doctor on my computer screen said.

It was ninety minutes after we’d made our discovery, the amount of time it had taken General Wayne Homza to gather up the five faces looking back from the split screen. I’d alerted D.C. from the Quonset hut, not the lab, because of the crappy security. Just over the past few days Eddie and I had overheard detectives interviewing people in other labs through the vent system, a veritable highway for talk.

Bruce Friday telling Merlin,
“Where was I on August second, when the Harmons had the lab fire? Hmm! Oh! Anchorage. At the Cook Hotel conference on polar bears. Here’s the photo.”

Anthropologist Candida McDougal, Alan’s wife, saying,
“Leon Kavik was yelling at Ted about Kelley, just furious that he couldn’t see her more.”

I’d been quite rational in my step-by-step presentation. I’d told the men and women on-screen that something terrible and inexplicable had infected five so far, but we must anticipate more. I’d listed possibilities, that the rabies might be man-made or a natural mutation. I’d suggested the investigation split into two paths: tracking the infection backward, and considering that the Harmons had been targets from the first. That’s when Homza, incredulous, had sneered, “Targets? The
algae
people?”

The CDC, in the U.S., has the authority to call a national medical emergency. And its chief, Dr. Rudolph Gaines, looked like one of those M.D.s on old 1970s medical TV programs, when doctors were godlike, a status to which he seemed to feel he belonged. Silver hair. Pale blue eyes. Smooth movements. White coat. He radiated
soothing.

“Rabies simply does not present this way,” he lectured. “We’ll send up a couple of epidemiologists. They’ll repeat the test. False positives! It happens all the time. You’re a warrior, Colonel. You believe intent exists where there’s merely understandable error. You’re simply not a rabies expert, sir. No shame in that, my friend.”

“How long will this confirmation take?”

“Hmm. Our plane is in Haiti, on the cholera now, so our people will use commercial flights . . . back and forth to Barrow . . . we’ll want the bodies back here. Retest, all total, electron microscopy, antibody tests, antigen, amplicon tests, oh, I’d say six or seven days at the most.”

“Six days? The whole town could be sick by then.”

“I very much doubt that.”

He gave me—and the four other faces on screen—a sincere, sympathetic doctor look.

“Colonel, please understand. Two years ago we had a similar panic in Braxton, Missouri. False positive! One hundred people vaccinated and then we find out that the preliminary was wrong!”

“We tested four people, sir.
Four
tests!”

“But the same equipment, same lab, same testers. I admire your zeal and dedication. Let’s begin from scratch. Tell me, what would you have us do right now?”

I answered immediately. “Protocol four.”

The faces seemed shocked. Protocol four was one of those secret plans, hopefully never to be used, to attempt to impose
rules
on danger. It called for an executive order to seal off a small town, in the event of a contagious outbreak. Protocols one to three involved similar measures in a major city, military base, harbor, or airport.

I said, “To be safe. Nothing leaves or enters until we track down the source. Hold any planes out of Barrow on the runway, and get more serum up here . . .”

In disaster films, it looks relatively easy to seal off a populated area. The president makes the call. The troops move in. The fences go up. Voilà!

But in the lawsuit-crazy U.S., protocol four took a lot more into consideration, involved coordination of multiple moving parts. Governors secretly notified, health officials secretly on board, judges secretly signing papers, a whole set of contingencies designed to cover the asses of the decision makers later, after the emergency was over, when the lawsuits and finger-pointing began. Protocol four was as much an act of political preservation as it was an attempt to control a deadly outbreak or attack.

Now the man in Atlanta listened, as if he was considering it, but he wasn’t.

“Premature.”

“Would you say that if the disease had broken out in, say, Greenwich, Connecticut? Or Beverly Hills?”

“If you’re implying that I regard life differently for a native population, or a poorer one, that’s offensive.”

“Really? Beverly Hills stops funding candidates if garbage collection gets held up for more than forty-eight hours.”

“Colonel, you can’t test for rabies until symptoms appear, and you know it. You want passengers to sit in planes for days? And have the news get out? Panic! And
shots
? There’s no stockpile of vaccine for this disease. It is not a mass threat. At summer’s end, what few supplies exist have been diminished. How many people in that town? Five thousand? We don’t have enough vaccine in the entire country to treat a quarter of that amount.”

“Then perhaps we need a crash program.”

I heard a groan from the speaker on my laptop. It came from General Wayne Homza, whose bristling visage stared out from the top left box. The general looked like he’d swallowed a lemon. He was undoubtedly envisioning the cost of mass manufacturing a drug instead of spending the money on weapons or troops.

Dr. Rudolph Gaines sighed. “Phhhhpt! Because of five presumptive positives? Only two companies make the stuff and they’re in Europe. And even if they started a batch, it would be a year before they had any supply for the FDA to check. So let’s come back to Earth, Doctor.”

“In the meantime, what if more people die?”

“No need for theatrics,” he said unpleasantly. “I’m not saying ignore your problem. I’m saying this will turn out to be something else. We want to get it right, sir. Of course, I’ll be grateful if General Homza allows you to stay on, you know, to liaise with the locals. Calm them.”

Homza smiled with his lips only. His eyes wanted me out of there. He radiated force. “Yes, he will assist,” he said. It was like watching a piece of wood talk.

One by one the faces before me signed off, and other ones grew larger as their space expanded on screen. Gone was the Alaska state epidemiologist, state department of health, a timid political appointee Merlin had called, now grateful to be relieved of responsibility. Gone was the Federal Aviation Administration deputy administrator, who’d listened in about the part concerning quarantining an airplane. Gone was the White House rep, who had been silent the entire time, taking copious notes.

Homza’s face filled the screen. I flashed to a story I’d heard about him once at a hotel bar, at a conference on biowarfare. The source had been a colonel who’d attended West Point with Homza. The story was that Homza’s father had been a violent drunk who routinely beat his mother, and killed her with a garden rake when Homza was eleven, at school. Previously, the father had been released early from prison after agreeing to participate in a University of Chicago study on domestic-violence causes. The story was that eleven-year-old Homza had been restrained in court, trying to attack a testifying psychologist. “You studied him? You should have shot him,” the boy screamed over and over as guards dragged him from the room.

Now Homza’s brows drew in. From thousands of miles away, he watched me.

“You are a troublesome man,” he said.

“I’m just trying to complete my mission, sir.”

“If we find proof that you’ve shared security secrets with enviro-agitators, I will prosecute you.”

“There’s no proof because I didn’t do it.”

Close up, Homza’s lips were thick, his jaw powerful, a nut cracker, his eyes blunt and deep blue, and I could see the swell of muscle beneath his taut shirt and crisp tie. He’d trained to be a weight lifter, I’d read somewhere. He was legendary at the Pentagon gym.

“Perhaps, Colonel, you believe that because you will be retiring in a few months that you have more latitude than others to do whatever you want.”

This was true, actually, but I said, “No, sir.”

“If you do think that, I suggest you reconsider. You are in until we say you are out. I can and will bury you, Colonel.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve checked you out. In the past you’ve had the protection of powerful people. “Then,
in front of the president,
you asked that a key policy, a necessary policy, be changed. Well, one word about contagious rabies and you go down. We sell a story up there until we know more. You will be our mouthpiece.”

“Sir, what exactly do you want me to do when the CDC gets here?”

“I admire loyalty. I reward loyalty.”

He was gone.

•   •   •

I FELT THE AIR GO OUT OF ME. I LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW AND SAW MIKAEL
Grandy trudging away from our hut, glancing back. I had not heard the door close. Shocked, I turned. Karen was in the doorway, snow still dusting the shoulders of her parka, stocking hat over her hair. Her beautiful mouth moved, but no sound came out. How much had she heard?

She said, “Don’t worry. I sent him away before we got inside.”

And then, in a very quiet voice, “Rabies?”

I slumped. “Yes. But they won’t believe it yet.”

She took a step into the room, which seemed smaller suddenly. “Infectious? Is that possible?”

“We don’t know.”

She nodded. “You said you wanted them to seal the town, quarantine everyone.”

“Yes, until we know for sure, because . . .” My mouth snapped shut and we stared at each other in bald understanding. I’d forgotten about her, forgotten, in the urgent moment, that I was talking not only about shutting in myself and strangers with death, but her, too. I felt sick. I’d seen my friends dead, heard the agony in the way they died—the pain, the terror. Then I’d asked . . . no,
demanded
that my superiors order the woman I loved shut in with a possible killer, intentional or accidental, either way.

I felt my face go hot, my mouth dry up.

“Got to take precautions,” she said. She was a scientist. She understood. She meant it. But it wasn’t the point just now. The point was, I’d forgotten her.

“I know.”

“Can’t have the thing spread, if you’re right.”

I could have said,
You weren’t here, Karen.
I could have said,
I planned to tell you,
or,
There was no time to call.
But there had been time. I’d had over an hour to call. She’d been within phone reach all day.

I just said, “No.”

“Want some tea? Mikael got a package from his boys at HBO, from Zabar’s,” she said. “Russian tea. New York sesame bagels, chorizo sausages, and cheese, air-dropped supply.”

Tea! I suppose that every couple have their trigger words, which, when said, raise the alert level to DEFCON two. My first wife used to say,
take a nap
when something bothered her. My mother preferred,
bake pies.
My father opted for,
couple of cold ones.
I glanced at the thermostat, set at sixty-seven. But the room had gone chillier.

“Sure,” I said, hoping that what had just happened would have limited consequences. Joe Rush, great at professional problems. There’s nothing like ignoring personal ones, hoping they’ll go away.

Why do I screw up every relationship?

The tea tasted odd, metallic,
wrong
, but I attributed that to the acid surging out of my stomach. The bitter taste went down and came back as harsh bile. She cut up the chorizo. We sat snacking silently on Mikael’s gift. The TV went on—I wanted sound—and an announcer out of Anchorage said something about a dispute in the Bering Strait between Russia and America, the Russians wanting to move the border—which has never been nailed down—to give them more space.
“Sources inside the State Department confirmed that the Russians offered a trade, they will back off on the Ukraine if Washington agrees to a small shift in the Arctic.”

“Everybody wants a bigger piece,” Karen said at length, chewing. So we were both going to ignore it.

Ignore threats and they come back.

But it was easy to ignore this particular threat that night because an hour later my phone rang and Merlin told me that a sixth case had shown up at the hospital. It was a child this time, a six-year-old, the son of one of the Cambodian taxi drivers. The boy had been complaining of a headache for two days. Now he was vomiting, running a high fever, and he was losing feeling in his right hand.

Seven hours later, he died.

•   •   •

EDDIE, RANJAY, AND I SAT IN THE MAYOR’S OFFICE WITH MERLIN, IN BOROUGH
Hall, a new comfortable building built with oil tax money. Exhibits—artifacts and photos of Eskimo dances, or bowheads—were displayed on walls or in glass cases inside the bright atrium. I’d been ordered to downplay rabies. I’d been threatened with arrest if I disobeyed. My intestines burned as Ranjay filled his bosses in on the medical situation.

Ranjay seemed relieved that the CDC believed that our tests had been flawed. He wanted to believe that the rabies was a false alarm. When the mayor asked me if I agreed with the CDC opinion, my words came out in my normal voice, but I was surprised that my throat didn’t cut them off.

“CDC has a pretty good record,” I said.

Sengupta nodded, admirably devoid of ego. “If the CDC believes we made an error, that is good enough for me.”

At least the mayor followed our recommendations to cut down on panic or illness. Schools closed due to
flu
. Pets that have not been vaccinated to be inoculated at the vets for standard diseases: distemper, animal flu, rabies.
Wash your hands more. Cover your mouths when coughing. There is illness in Barrow,
the mayor told the North Slope’s eight villages, over the radio that night.

And we waited.

Sixteen hours later, two CDC experts got off the morning 737 from Anchorage, looking young and concerned, advising Eddie and I to steer clear of the labs as they worked. They seemed certain before they started that their tests for rabies would turn out negative.

Another day passed before they knew they were wrong.