Plague (9 page)

“Hi, I’m Duncan.”

“Samantha, nice to meet you.”

“Hm, you’re a doctor
,
right?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting. You didn’t introduce yourself as a doctor. Everyone I’ve met in this room calls themselves doctor like they don’t have names.”

“It’s ego. That’s probably why they went to medical school. Are you a physician as well?”

“Sort of. I got my MD before
my PhD but I never took
the boards or practiced.”

“Th
at seems like a lot of
work for nothing.”

“I wouldn’t say nothing. It taught me that I didn’t want to be a doctor.”

Ralph Wilson got up and stood at the front of the room. A
PowerPoint
display was on behind him and he flipped through a few slides and then
said, “Ladies and gentleman, I’m Dr. Ralph Wilson of the Centers for Disease Control. I’m the
deputy director
of Infectious Disease Research for those of you who haven’t met me before. I know everyone’s been called
o
ut here in the middle of the night so let’s begin so we can get as much shut-eye as possible. We all have a big day tomorrow and tomorrow’ll be here sooner than we think.”
He adjusted his glasses, and began with the first slide.

It was a black hand with yellow, brittle nails that had fallen off. It appeared to belong to a body that was housed in a crypt.

“This,” Ralph said, “is a victim of the plague of Justinian circa 541 AD. It afflicted the Eastern Roman Empire, after Constantine had split the empire and left the Western portion with Rome as its headquarters abandoned. Justinian was the emperor of the time and like
with
all leadership positions, whatever happens is your fault, so the plague
was
attributed to him.

“It was, by all accounts—
and modern forensics conducted by the University of Tubingen
has confirmed this—
the worst natural disaster in human history. Responsible for the death of over half the world’s population.
We believe it had its genesis in China and spread from there. It went through the Middle East, devastated Africa, and was recurring in Europe centuries later. It would disappear and then reappear twenty years later to re
-
infect a new generation.
”

The screen shifted to
a screenshot from under an electron microscope.

“You can see here that it appears much like common bubonic plague, but with these ridges here on the periphery of the virus. In fact, we believed for a long time that it
was
the bubonic plague, but research conducted on the remains of priests in Constantinople—it was the common practice at the time to bury priests in underground catacombs, making a type of preserve for tissue—shows us that it was in fact some now extinct form of Yersinia pestis.

“If you can imagine the scene in Constantinople, you can see how frightening this particular contagion really was. Bodies were piled so high in the streets that t
hey were like
roadblocks at every turn. Justinian eventually ordered the burning of the bodies on the outskirts of the cities and this calmed the contagion until the next iteration. But to be perfectly clear, we don’t
know
why this contagion occurred, or why it went extinct.

“In my research into the plague of Justinian, I developed a coding system, a type of shorthand, for the infectibility of a particular contagion. I did this so that those outside the medical and scientific communities could understand the level of threat they were facing with any disease. I called it the T score and now it is a widely accepted rating model.

“Its theory is simple: T-1 means that the contagion is such that each person infected, on average, will infect one other individual. The common flu is a T-1 contagion. The bubonic plague was a T-3 contagion. The plague of Justinian was a T-4. The scale goes to T-7, which, in effect,
would cause
the extinction of all mammalian life on earth.”

Ralph looked up to the screen as it changed to a shot of the earth. It went through the different iterations of T, showing small red spots
that
grew as the
infectibility rate
progressed
.
At T-5, all human life on earth was extinguished. He looked back to the audience and adjusted his glasses.

“
This contagion has been determined to be a strand of
smallpox
. What strand, we cannot say for sure, though we have our theories
that it could be black
pox
.
Smallpox
,
and its derivative black
pox,
currently, only exist in two places on the planet earth: the CDC BSL 4 labs in Atlanta, and a remote outpost in the former Soviet Union. Other than that, man has conquered and abolished it. It has, to put it bluntly, come back somehow.” He shook his head. “Mother nature always has surprises in store for us it seems.

“
Our most important goal for this contagion is determining its T score, containing
it
,
and if possible, destroying it.
”
He adjusted his glasses again. “I see many worried looks in the audience. I myself am not taken to panic and I apologize if I seem too relaxed in discussing this subject. But please do not misinterpret my calm for a lack of concern. To put it bluntly, we are looking at an extinction-level event. At least, for mankind.”

CHAPTER 11

Wilson sat down after the Q
& A and a
general took his place to begin
talking about logistics. Sam noticed that there were no reporters asking questions
,
just a news crew taking video and audio.

When the
general
was done speaking, everybody stood and mingled a bit before filing out of the room. Duncan remained seated and sipped his drink as he stared off into space.

“You look worried,” Sam said.

“About possibly
the deadliest disease known to man popping its head up? What’s there
to worry about?
” He wiped his lips with a napkin. “Sorry, that was a smart-ass thing to say. It’s actually not so much that. I work with stuff almost as dangerous every
day.”

“Then what is it?”

“It doesn’t make sense.
Smallpox
is abolished. It doesn’t exist except in those two laboratories. Why would nature just
‘
spring
’
it
on us? And here of all places?”

“I don’t think it was here.
I’ve been tracking down the index patient’s history and he was a tour guide in South America.”

“Even if it originated in South America, it’s an extinct organism. We wiped it from the face of the earth. It can’t just come back.”

“So what do you think’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know why I feel uneasy about it. Do you know there’s a type of moth that only lives for twenty-four hours? It’s born without a mouth so it doesn’t eat. It does have a full digestive system and
could
produce excrement if it could eat. It just doesn’t have a mouth. Sometimes nature is random and cruel. Who am I to think this disease wasn’t just waiting in the jungle for us somewhere and has de
cided to come out of hiding now? But still, I’m uneasy about it.
”

“I think your point is a good one. I thought the same thing when I was told it was black pox. It shouldn’t exist. And the region the tour guide
was
exposed to is a place he’s been
probably dozens
of times before. It doesn’t make sense that if the virus were living in some host there that only now we
would
be seeing the begin
ning
s of an epidemic.”

He looked up, his eyes in bewilderment. “Holy crap, is that really what we have now? An
epidemic? I never thought I would
actually live to see one. I mean a real one, not the swine flu BS. An actual Book of Revelation epidemic.”

She bent down and took one of the bagels. “You almost
sound
excite
d
saying that
. I wouldn’t be.
”

Samantha sat in her hotel room through the morning and into the afternoon
,
running through medical charts for all the patients admitted to Queen
’
s Medical with black pox-like symptoms. There were no
w
over a hundred; forty had been added since last night.

Samantha stretched her neck and stared out the window.
In epidemics, like in anything that had an outward spreading force, you would hit a tipping point and there would be no turning back. If every patient infected only one other patient, the disease would actually be in decline. Without hitting that tipping point, it would simply run its course and die out. But if it hit the tipping point, it would grow exponentially
, and t
he point itself
is
unpredictable.
T
he difference
could be
a half of one person infectibility rate among the population. If every person infected 1.1 instead of just 1 person, that could cause the epidemic to grow beyond control.

Sam rose from her bed and began pacing the room. The thoughts darting in and out of her mind going back to her CDC training courses. The
CDC’s procedure
in a situation like this was clear
: isolate, isolate, isolate. Any patient with even a hint of the disease was not allowed anywhere near the general public. Medical staff never made contact with them and anyone that had direct contact was quarantined. Even those that did not have direct contact were observed closely.

She thought of the families; i
t was a
lways a
painful process for families. They would have to watch loved ones through glass and plastic, and that
was
if they were lucky. Many times families would be unable to see their loved ones for weeks and then one day Sam or another field agent would call to notify the family of the death. It tore Sam’s heart out every time she had to place one of those calls.

A simple flu in 1918 had killed off millions of people. With an agent as deadly as this, Sam truly felt that not just
the community, but the species might be
teetering on the brink of extinction.

CHAPTER 12

T
wo men sat in
a
café and wiped the sweat from their brows with silk handkerchiefs. This time of the season Bangkok was sweltering; it felt like an oven that had been left on too long. It was also the tourist season and the sidewalks and streets were packed to the point that you couldn’t walk more than a foot in front of you without bumping into somebody else.

“I fucking
hate this place,” Conrad Moore
said. “It’s too hot and the food is awful.”

Tyrone Booth finished the last gulp of his Tsing Tao beer and waved to the waitress for another.
He took a piece of his spicy chicken and reached below the table, letting his Pomeranian finish it off
before licking
his fingers.

“I love the food. You never got to liking spicy food. If you did
,
you wouldn’t be knockin’ Thai food at all.”

“It’s spicy
‘
cause there’s not much sanitation
here
and the spices kill the bacteria. It has nothing to do with flavor.”

Conrad sighed and looked out the windows onto the busy street. They were seated in a corner booth away from the rest of the public in the restaurant
,
a place that was supposed to give them privacy but instead made their waitress
ignore them
.

He’d been to Bangkok before, at least three or four times. The prostitutes were some of the best in the world in his opinion. Not that he really needed to hire prostitutes. He’d learned that flashing enough cash can get you just about any woman you wanted
—
at least the type of women that he wanted. He’d go to bars and pick up some nice twenty-
three-year-
old. They’d take his limo
straight to his Gulfstream and
fly to the Caribbean or Mexico for a weekend. He would do what he wished however many times he wanted and then drop them back off at the airport.

But prostitutes were much better. They knew they were whores and they would get into what fantasies he wanted for that night. Plus, there was no
need for the
pretense of telling them he was going to see them again or having to talk about himself. There was a whorehouse not two blocks from here, one of the best in the city, and he wished like hell he was there right now.