Mirrors

© Copyright 2015 by Karl C. Klontz

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in instances of brief quotations incorporated in review articles or commentaries.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN 978-0-9963918-0-1

Cover design by Sensical Design & Communication Illustration by Leslie Prunty

To my former students in the Master of Public Health (MPH) degree program.

The most important failure was one of imagination.Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies.It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.

—The 9-11 Commission Report. Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Official Government Edition

The la
te
Thomas
“Tip” O’Neill, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977 to 1986, often reminded others that, “All politics is local.” It was his father who uttered the words first—shortly after Tip O’Neill had lost a close race for a seat on the Cambridge, Massachusetts City Council, his first bid for political office. After the defeat, the aspiring politician acknowledged that he had spent too much time campaigning citywide without locking in votes from his own neighborhood first.

All politics is local. Had I known …

Twenty chicken pens
bristled in the sun on wooden stilts. I opened a door to one and extracted a chicken. Wrapping it with a towel to access the underside of a wing, I cleaned a vein with alcohol before drawing enough blood to run a test for antibodies to West Nile virus. I’d drawn blood from other flocks in like fashion every week since mosquito season began that summer in a program to detect West Nile virus in areas surrounding Washington, D.C. A positive test would mean chickens had been infected with the virus by mosquitoes, which, in turn, could infect humans, an event that would prompt health officials to alert the public.

As I compressed the vein following the blood draw, my cell phone rang.

“What is it, Francois?” I asked, annoyed with my supervisor from the Pan American Health Organization, or PAHO, in Washington, D.C. He had a penchant for interrupting chicken rounds.

“I’ve got a job for you.”

“I have one.”

“A
temporary
one,” he countered. “They’re calling it a ‘detail.’ ”

“Who is?”

“CDC—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They want you to do a stint in their Washington office.”

“They don’t have scientists there; that’s an administrative office.”

“Right, but they want you there.”

“Why?”

“They wouldn’t say. You need to call them immediately.”

“Tell them I’m not available for a detail. The West Nile season is heating up.”

“You don’t have a choice because CDC feeds you.”

He had a point. My job at PAHO was funded by CDC, the mission being to determine whether a protein I discovered might be tamed to serve as a mosquito killer. CDC funded the position at PAHO because West Nile virus had abruptly entered the United States for the first time in 1999 and was spreading through the Americas. It was a virus to be feared given its ability to infect the brain.

I sighed. “Give me the number.”

He did. “It’s a guy named Randy Flagstaff you need to talk to.”

I got into the pickup and placed the call. Within moments, Flagstaff was on the line. “Can you get here in 30 minutes?” he asked. He gave me an address.

“No,” I replied. “That’s downtown D.C. and I’m an hour away.”

“Drive fast.”

“Listen, this isn’t a good time—”

“You want to clear your name?”

“Of what?”

“You’re a suspect in an attack on America. Ten people sick so far, including two dead. Your protein’s the culprit.”

A rooster crowed behind me. Although the sun was high, it felt like a new day dawning.

When asked why
I became a physician, I answer, “roadkill.” Having grown up in rural Wisconsin, I was fascinated by dead animals encountered along country roads—opossums, beavers, dogs, cats, you name it—with their entrails splattered along asphalt. I often returned with knife and tweezers to dissect the remains, although foxes and raccoons were taboo given their propensity to be rabid. With each dissection, my interest in anatomy grew, prompting me to enter medicine. I chose human over veterinary medicine because of an ailment my mother had. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, I went to medical school at the University of Nevada and spent the following decade in Las Vegas—four years in medical school, three in internal medicine residency, and three in a hematology fellowship.

Early in my hematology training, I evaluated a patient who sustained a leg wound in Madagascar. He was a graduate student at the University of Nevada in Reno who traveled to Africa to collect snakes for his PhD research. During an expedition to a remote region of Madagascar, he and a colleague were crossing a ravine on a bamboo bridge when the supports crumbled, hurtling them into a thicket of trees. My patient suffered a crushing blow to the thigh which required a splint to hike back to civilization. His colleague fared less well. Having lacerated his arm on a tree trunk, the colleague’s wound bled profusely despite the application of a tourniquet. Within minutes, the skin surrounding the laceration turned purple from subcutaneous bleeding. The discoloration soon spread to his shoulder and torso. Before long, the young man, healthy before, bled from his nose, lips and gums. That was followed by vomiting of blood and hemorrhaging from his bowels. Within an hour, the man bled to death, lying in a bloody pool on the forest floor.

The grad student who survived noticed a piece of bark wedged into the lacerated arm of his dead colleague. Taking care not to touch the bark with bare hands, he extracted the wedge and located the tree from which the bark came. He then carefully removed a larger section to carry home. After receiving first aid in Madagascar, he hurried back to the U.S. where he was admitted to the University Medical Center in Las Vegas with a dangerously swollen thigh. The attending physician who admitted him asked me to evaluate the young man after hearing the story about the colleague who had bled to death after being lacerated by bark.

I met the grad student on the hospital ward. He pointed to the bark beside his bed. “That’s what killed my colleague,” he said. He insisted it contained a substance that caused intractable bleeding.

Intrigued, I asked if I could show the bark to researchers in the lab. Three months later, I proved the grad student to be right: The bark contained a previously undescribed protein that, when fed to mice, caused fatal bleeding. I named the protein “XK59”—“XK” for extreme killing, and “59” for the average number of minutes that elapsed before the mice exsanguinated. Later, near the end of my hematology fellowship, a pharmaceutical firm hired me as a consultant to explore whether XK59 might serve as a clot dissolver. The protein proved to be too hazardous to tame. However, CDC heard about the protein and, wondering whether a reconfigured version might kill mosquito larvae, offered me a job at PAHO. But now, two months into my new job, I was charged with turning XK59 into a weapon.

Washington, D.C. often
fares better in recessions than other areas of the country because of money Congress pumps into the region. Consider the late 1920’s when millions were appropriated to erect new government buildings in the city, funds that bolstered the local economy during the Depression. One building constructed during that era had the indiscreet name of “Federal Office Building 18”—or FOB-18. Although it was located near the National Archives and Department of Justice, it abutted a vacant lot once used by pimps and hookers at night.

As I popped out of the underground Metro station, I noticed a limestone building nearby that fit the description Flagstaff had given me for FOB-18, its columns and granite a cheap impression of the Acropolis, only instead of commanding a hillside, FOB-18 lurked within a depression, a pit that once belonged to Washington’s swamps, which, of course, had been drained to rid the mosquitoes so bureaucrats could infest the place. If the building’s depressed setting didn’t humble it, neglect did: its façade was stained with pigeon droppings, its flagpole peeled like a bad case of sunburn, and the statue before it was sullied by an oxidative green veneer.

I reached the building after passing the International Spy Museum. A stone staircase brought me to the entrance where I was greeted by a blast of cool air. A guard stopped me as I stepped inside.

“Purpose of visit?” he asked.

“Summoned by Randy Flagstaff.”

“That would be
Randolph
Flagstaff.”

I didn’t begrudge him. As a boy, I was teased about my last name. “Krispy-critter,” friends would say, or “Krispix-crème.” I vowed to respect others’ names henceforth.

He took my PAHO badge. “Second ID, please.”

I produced a driver’s license.

“Nevada,” he observed.

“Yes, I just moved here from Las Vegas.”

“My sister lives in Phoenix,” he announced.

Did he know Las Vegas was three hundred miles from Phoenix?

“Does she visit Las Vegas often?” I asked.

“No.”

End of niceties.

He dialed a number. “Dr. Krispix to see you, sir.” Then: “Fine, we’ll send him through.” He turned to a colleague. “Iris check.”

I followed a second guard to a wall holding an aluminum box with a glowing purple eye.

“Look in,” came the command.

I did, triggering a mechanical voice: “ID verified.”

“Metal detector,” my escort instructed.

I cleared it with ease.

“Take a seat.”

The austere waiting area had only a few wooden chairs. A sign in large letters read,
CDC
, while below it, in smaller letters,
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Health and Human Services
. Beyond the sign, a hallway split into two corridors.

I heard my name called. The voice was soft and velvety, incongruous with the gargantuan figure who owned it. “Randy Flagstaff,” he said, extending a hand.

I shook the vast expanse of flesh. “Jason Krispix.”

The behemoth smiled, revealing gaps between his teeth the size of doorways. Had he been an actor, he would’ve been the giant in
Jack and the Bean Stalk
, only he appeared to be good-natured. He had bulbous shoulders, bulging biceps, and tree-thick arms. His eyes were sunken, or perhaps it was just that his brows were massive. His skin, reddish brown, was pocked by what looked to have been a tough case of teenage acne. Despite his Mack truck size, however, he exhibited tenderness, the sort a gorilla might show in cradling a kitten. A pony tail flicked to the side as he waved me to follow him.

“I trust you’ll make this short,” I said. “I’m testing chickens these days.”

He adjusted his Bolo tie. “I know.”

He said nothing else, leading me down a hall as his cowboy boots clicked the floor.

“Tell me,” I said, “how can this be CDC when the directory lists the Washington office as being on the mall?”

“It isn’t CDC,” he replied.

“But, that sign—”

“It’s a cover.”

“For what?”

“A top-secret agency.”

I gulped. “Which one?”

“The United Network to Interdict Terrorism, or ‘UNIT.’ ”

“Is it part of Homeland Security?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“National Security Agency?”

“Nope.”

We rounded a corner and passed numberless offices. At the end of the hall, Flagstaff swiped a card to open a door. “Our psychologists have dubbed this place the ‘Amygdala,’ ” he said, “because, like the part of the human brain called the amygdala, we deal with fear and aggression here.”

The vast concentric space before us was clearly the dome I had seen while approaching the building from Metro, and it buzzed with the activity of a busy anthill, only here, humans scurried among aisles with blipping monitors.

“Yup, fear and aggression,” Flagstaff repeated. “Welcome to your detail.”

“This must be
Dr. Jason Krispix,” a sliver of a man said as he wedged himself between Flagstaff and myself.

I dropped my eyes from a walkway overhead that transected the Amygdala.

“Dr. Glenn Bird,” Flagstaff said, introducing me to the man. “Lead scientist for the UNIT. Like you, he’s a physician.”

Bird offered a dead-fish hand—cold and limp. A tuft of aging blond hair jiggled as we shook hands. He was in his mid-forties, I guessed, which made him a decade older than I, yet his complexion was youthful. He wore tasseled loafers, crisp khakis, and a golf shirt with a thin silk tie, a medley of business and leisure.