The Nirvana Plague (11 page)

Knowing that Ally would be too busy to talk till the dinnertime crowd thinned, Marley waited till after eight o’clock to call.

The first thing she said was: “So where are you exactly?”

“I’ve got guest accommodations on the NIH campus.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s in Bethesda. You’re still at work, I assume?”

“Have you talked to Karen yet?”

“No. I had a fairly irate e-mail from her, which I responded to. But I didn’t feel up to calling her.”

“Well, I had a fairly irate call from her. She thinks you put Roger into quarantine.”

“I know. But I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even told about it until after I got here.”

“Whether you had anything to do with it or not, she’s—”

“—I just said I didn’t.—”

“—she’s feeling desperate. If Roger’s in quarantine, so is she. She can’t leave him alone. He won’t stay in the apartment if she does. She can’t go to work. She won’t let them put him back in the hospital. She’s not allowed to have anyone come in to baby-sit. She can’t tie him to the bedpost.”

“I see.”

“She’s afraid even to go out for groceries. I volunteered to help her out with that. I’ll take some things over in the morning before I open up the shop.”

“That’s great. I’m glad the two of you have become friends.”

“So what you are doing there exactly?”

“I can’t tell you any more than I already have.”

“You haven’t told me anything really. Secret government research.”

“Something like that.”

“You’re not helping them perfect their mind-control techniques, I hope?”

“Very funny.”

“I assume this has some connection with IDD?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“My, what a good little soldier.”

“Don’t.”

She dropped her voice: “Hey, should we be talking like this? Is this line secure?”

“You wanna give me a break?”

“Sorry.”

“What is your point anyway?”

“It’s just kind of weird, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anyway, this is your big break, right?”

“My big break?”

“The chance you’ve been waiting for — to make a name for yourself. Run with the big dogs in the high grass. Develop a following. Acquire groupies. You know.”

“This is serious, Ally.”

“What is?”

“What I’m here for.”

“What’s that?”

“I told you I can’t discuss it.”

“But we
are
discussing it.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I apologize. I apologize for doing something. I apologize for giving a shit.”

“You know that’s not the problem. Giving a shit. Where are you?”

“I told you—”

“—But where are you
really?
Where did you go?”

“This is not the time, Ally.”

“Are you ever coming back?”

He didn’t know how to answer her. Everything was in a whirl.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“I’m sorry. For everything. I’ll call you again tomorrow.”

Marley sat up late poring over medical records. Assaulted by the incessant flap of helicopters ferrying in and out of the place all night, aching with discomfort on his hardened slab of a bed, and tormented by cascades of conflicting emotions and thoughts, he slept fitfully at best. Finally, around 6:00 a.m., his phone started ringing with a vicious malevolence.

He slapped around on the bed till he connected with the tablet.

“Yes?” he answered on speaker, hoarse.

“Dr. Marley, Lieutenant Tennover,” the tablet replied. “Time to get up, sir. Your meeting starts at 0800.”

“Jesus. You have to get me another place to stay.”

“I’ll pick you up for breakfast at 0700.”

He grunted and slapped the tablet off.

Tennover’s knock came at 7:00 sharp — six merciless military raps.

Marley’s corpse rolled off the slab and opened the door.

A six-foot statue of military poise stood there. “You’re not ready, sir?”

“Come in,” Marley muttered. “Make yourself at home,” and shuffled into the bathroom.

The commissary was a dreary low-ceilinged white-walled hall, thick with nervous-looking physicians and pasty-faced researchers bolting down sticky doughnuts and bitter coffee.

Tennover sat down with Marley but didn’t eat, and didn’t say six words in twenty minutes.

Breakfast done, the laconic lieutenant chauffeured him by electric cart through the tunnels that linked all the major buildings on the sprawling campus.

By 7:45, they were at the security center where Marley produced two forms of identification for a fishlike clerk in a constrictive dress who fingerprinted, photographed, DNA-sampled, and RID-scanned him to produce yet another credential.

“
This
is your temporary visiting employee security badge,” she explained, making an odd
puck
sound with her lips. “It must be worn on the
outside
of the shirt at
all
times while on campus.”

Back in the cart, Tennover followed a map on the dash through the tunnels to their final destination on the northeast corner of the campus.

“Building 33,” he said, turning into a parking area crowded with a dozen other carts identical to theirs.

A sign on the wall next to the elevator said “NIAID Biodefense”.

“What’s N-I-A-I-D?” Marley said.

“National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Everybody calls it ‘
nigh
-add’.”

Tennover keyed the elevator with his ID card and punched the 2
^nd
floor button. “We’re late,” he said.

On the second floor they had to key their way individually through a mantrap between the elevator lobby and the rest of the building. Marley’s card was already functional.

Tennover hurried him along a series of windowless corridors. The stale monotony of featureless grey walls was punctuated at compulsively regular intervals by framed false-color prints of abstract expressionless art, which Marley supposed might have been meant to suggest the strange nano-cosmos of the average microbe.

Tennover stopped before a heavy door marked only “Room No. 2470.”

Tennover swung open the conference room door. Marley felt a gentle swoosh of air, and it occurred to him as he entered that the room was kept under positive pressure because elsewhere in this facility there was a level 4 biohazard research lab stocked with some of the deadliest pathogens ever engineered by natural or unnatural selection.

The meeting was already in progress. A long glass conference table gleamed like a pool of milk under overhead downlights. Benford was sitting at the head of the table.

“You’re late, Lieutenant.”

Tennover gave Marley a very slight glance. Not quite an accusation.

“Sorry, sir,” he said to Benford.

Marley looked at his watch. So did everyone else in the room. 8:04.

Benford gestured him toward an open seat.

Marley took his place down the table from Benford. Tennover joined the other aides seated around the perimeter of the room.

“Is that coffee?” Marley said.

Benford waited while they passed the pot down to him. Not quite the picture of patience.

The woman seated next to him introduced herself as she passed the pot.

“I’m Xan Delacourt.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re Carl Marley.”

“Yes.”

“Recognized you from your dossier.”

“Ah.”

“I enjoyed your paper. Fascinating stuff.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t worry. We’ve only just started.”

Marley liked Delacourt immediately. She was a cognitive science researcher; he’d skimmed a couple of her papers last night. He knew from her dossier that she was forty-six, but she looked like she could be any age — or any racial type. Her straight dark hair suggested east Asian, but her features looked like a mix of African and European. Even her name was unplaceable. Was “Xan” Chinese? And she had the most remarkable green eyes. He wondered if they were artificially enhanced.

She was dressed in jeans and a sweater. Looking round the table, Marley saw that this was more or less the standard non-uniform for the group.

He’d worn a jacket and tie.

Benford resumed the introductory remarks his entry had interrupted:

“As I was saying, our meetings are being recorded and transcribed.”

Everyone looked down at their tablets again. Marley tapped up the LEAF (Local Environment / Area Functions) on his screen. The room was wired for video and tracking. He had the choice of four different camera angles from which he could observe the meeting he was sitting in. Little nametags hung over the participants’ heads. A running auto-transcript scrolled down the side of the screen a few seconds behind their speeches. The sound was being recorded too, but was muted to prevent feedback.

Benford continued: “You’ve all received the same comprehensive briefing materials, so there’s no need for me to tell you why we’re here. We’ve got a problem, and our job is to find a solution to that problem. Simple as that.”

No introductions all round, no preliminary small talk, none of that. Straight to business. Marley scrolled back through the transcript. The figures on screen scrambled backwards through time. Benford walked in at 0800 sharp and started the meeting at once. He hadn’t missed the preliminary chitchat — there wasn’t any.

Benford continued in the present: “As you know, yesterday Secretary Pritzker authorized the CDC to implement level one quarantine on all known civilian cases. Now, has everyone reviewed the latest updates this morning?”

Yesses all around. Marley had skimmed through the latest on the way over while Tennover drove.

“Then you know that two more cases have been reported in two different theatres of operation. Anything notable or significant about them?”

Noes all around.

“Now, I think the place to begin is diagnostics. How do we know when we have a case? You’ve all seen Dr. Marley’s paper from
Clinical Psychiatry
. I suggest we take that as our starting point for developing diagnostic criteria. That case report was our first indication that the syndrome had begun to appear in the civilian population. Before that, only military physicians and psychiatrists had seen these cases, and their diagnostic criteria were simplistic: if you zoned out on the line and didn’t want to fight, you had it. Obviously, that’s not going to work in the real world.”