The Nirvana Plague (27 page)

Marley sat in the front row of the auditorium, waiting to make his report. Dr. Delacourt sat beside him.

Benford strode to the lectern in front of them. On a huge wallscreen behind her, an array of display-frames looked into the conference rooms of remote attendees in Washington, Bethesda, Atlanta, and Zurich. In another frame, a colorful graphic represented the estimated worldwide incidence of IDD, derived from data jointly maintained and continuously updated by statisticians at the CDC and WHO.

The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security looked down from his part of the wall and shook his head. “That looks pretty bleak.”

General Harden was sitting beside him in the executive conference room at DHS headquarters in downtown Washington. “Yes, sir, Mr. Secretary,” Harden said. “It sure does. Colonel Benford?”

Benford addressed herself to the audience in front of her, but her face was copied ten feet wide in one of the screens behind her.

“Sir,” she said, “obviously, IDD is completely out of control. The daily incident rate has now reached about four hundred—”

“And more every day,” Pritzker said.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Secretary. Total cases from the start of the outbreak are approaching five thousand. The new case rate is
increasing
at a rate of about ten percent per day. That rate of increase means that the total case count is doubling every week.”

“So a week from now, there will be ten thousand total cases?”

“Yes. In two weeks, twenty thousand.”

“And nobody is recovering?”

“No. Not that we’ve seen. Not that we know of.”

“Is there any indication that we might be nearing the end? It can’t go on like this for long, can it? How long before the growth rate begins to level off?”

From another screen, Dr. Julia Moran, Director of the Centers for Disease Control, answered from CDC headquarters in Atlanta: “Mr. Secretary, if I may? At this point we simply have no idea how far we are from the top of the curve. We have not identified any causative agent. We don’t know anything about how it’s transmitted. We don’t really know
if
it’s transmitted.”

In Washington, General Harden burst out impatiently: “Oh come on, doctor! Of course, it’s
transmitted!
”

“We don’t really know whether it’s transmitted between people or whether it’s environmental or interspecies or what. Maybe parasitic. We just don’t know.”

Pritzker cut them off: “My point is that it can’t go on forever. Eventually it has to run out of steam. What I want to know is whether that’s going to be tomorrow or next week or next year.”

“Sir,” Moran said, “nobody knows the answer to that question. Nobody can tell you that.”

Back in Alaska, Benford said, “I can tell you definitely that it won’t be next year.”

That got everyone’s attention.

“If this rate of amplification continues,” she said, “everyone on the planet will have it well before we get to next year.”

From yet another screen wall, a bleary-eyed Dr. Ali Nobuto spoke from the international headquarters of the World Health Organization in Zurich: “Yes, that’s right. We agree with these projections.”

Pritzker turned toward Zurich: “So, it can’t continue at this pace, right? And we know that some people seem to be immune to it, even though they’ve been in close contact with it when and where it was actively breaking out. So, doesn’t that indicate to you that the thing can be stopped?”

Nobuto was a tall handsome African. Even in the small hours of the night in Europe, he looked regal. He frowned and shrugged. “Difficult to say, sir. Difficult to say. What is
it
? That is the first question.”

Pritzker turned back to Alaska: “All right, we’ve been putting people into quarantine for thirty days, and — How many do we have in quarantine now?”

Moran answered from Atlanta: “Nearly ten thousand people. About one thousand of them are probable or suspected cases, the rest are family and contact risks.”

“Ten-thousand people in quarantine and we’re still getting four hundred new cases a day.”

“That’s the worldwide estimate, of course, in the US, it’s about—”

“The point is that quarantine isn’t working, is it?”

“I wouldn’t leap to that conclusion, sir. For all we know these numbers could be even worse.”

“Jesus Christ! I don’t see how they could be much worse than doubling every week! IDD is exploding. Quarantine isn’t working. What about treatment?”

Benford summoned Marley to the lectern to give his report. She stood beside him as he spoke. His face flew up on the wall next to hers.

“Mr. Secretary,” he began. “We’ve tried various psychoactives. Both broad and narrow spectrum neurotransmitter re-uptake inhibitors and stimulators; various kinds of targeted proximity agents, mostly dopamine derivatives and steroid precursors; electro-stimulation and electro-inhibition; old-fashioned electro-convulsive-induced coma; anything we could think of. Of course,—”

Pritzker wagged his hand impatiently. “Bottom line, doctor.”

Marley looked up from his notes. “The bottom line, Mr. Secretary,” he said, “is that nothing works. One of the remarkable features of IDD is the pronounced resistance of these cases to psychoactive treatments. None of the regimens we’ve tried have had any real effect. We can drug them out of their minds and mask the symptoms, but that just leaves them completely dysfunctional.”

“They’re already dysfunctional,” Pritzker said.

“Well, no, sir,” Marley said. “Not really.”

Pritzker looked sour.

Benford stepped in quickly: “What Dr. Marley means is that they’re no more functional when heavily medicated than they are without medication.”

Marley caught Delacourt’s eye. She was suppressing a smile. Benford let him continue. He frowned and went on: “Moreover,” he said, “as far as we can tell, none of the treatments we’ve tried are likely to have any impact on the rate of infection.”

“How do you know that?” Pritzker said.

“IDD outbreaks seem to come in extremely random clumps. Typically there’s a sudden burst of new cases among a group, then nothing. By the time we begin treating them, the outbreak is already over.”

“But it’s not all that random, is it? I mean it’s not happening just anywhere, is it?”

Benford leaned in again: “No, sir, that’s right. It is characteristic of these clumps that they appear in segments of the population that are living under stressful conditions. Hospital patients, battlefield units, penitentiary inmates.”

“All right,” Pritzker said. “Bottom line. Nobody has said anything in this meeting that argues against taking this thing to the next level. General Harden, do you agree?”

Harden nodded gravely. “Yes, sir. I don’t think we have any choice.”

“Then that’s the recommendation I’m going to offer the President this afternoon.”

Nobuto stirred himself theatrically, and addressed himself to the screen: “Secretary Pritzker, I would just like to remind everyone that this phenomenon is global in scope. The United States seems to be mostly affected at this moment, perhaps even it is the epicenter of the — well, of what’s happening. Nevertheless, also
several
countries are affected now, and I have no doubt that
many
countries soon will be. I feel it is vitally important that we at the UN work hand-in-hand with your US agencies in this matter.”

Pritzker turned back to Zurich with a big smile and started playing politics.

After the meeting, Marley said he was going outside for a breath of air.

Delacourt invited herself along.

He stalked up and down the sidewalk that ran along the perimeter fence, his hands jammed in his coat pockets. It wasn’t his own coat, but a black Army jacket Benford had issued him. He had no idea what had become of his own clothes, or any of the personal effects he’d packed for Washington five weeks ago.

The perimeter fence was a ten-foot chain-link barrier topped with loops of razor wire that completely enclosed the Abrams medical center complex, keeping it safe from the locals on Douglas Island. The General David Abrams Memorial Medical Facility was a high-tech bio-hazard treatment hospital — state of the art, shiny and new. Perched on the hills above the town of Douglas, the place looked like a futuristic hamster house — airtight silver blocks and spheres interconnected with glass tubes and steel pipes. Despite the hypermodern medical technology it housed, Abrams didn’t get much publicity. The Army didn’t see much payoff in bragging about the world’s most sophisticated bio-warfare defense treatment center.

A broad concrete sidewalk separated the facility’s buildings from the perimeter fence. The walkway looked like nothing so much as the kill zone of a high-security prison. It was kept lit all night with yellow mercury arc lights.

There were some rubberized steel benches along the east fence. Delacourt sat down and took in the view while Marley paced up and down.

The sun was low. Across the channel, their faces glowing in the angling amber light, the mountains came right up to the shore as though to toe the water before getting in. The little city of Juneau clung to the very rim of the water, slowly sinking as the mountains eased themselves in. With every fraction of a degree that the global climate warmed, a little more of the glaciers melted from the shoulders of the mountains, a little worse the storms came in, a little more of the coastline was trimmed away by the tides, a little more of Juneau and environs disappeared into the widening seaway, a little higher grew the seawall built against it.

“It’s so quiet,” Delacourt said.

“Calm before the storm,” Marley said.

Directly opposite Abrams, a thin highway snaked along the shore south of Juneau. There were very few vehicles on it. In berths along the city front, seaplanes and trawlers sat idle. At the big dock, a gleaming white cruise ship, the biggest building in town, lay at its moorings.

Down the hill from the complex itself, the windows of Douglas were winking on. It was unnaturally quiet. Now and then a dog barked, or boat horn blew as a frustrated fisherman protested the lockdown. But no traffic noise, no door slams.

Around Marley and Delacourt, the complex hummed and droned. As the daylight faded, the arc lights glowed to yellow life. They buzzed for a while, warming up.

After a few turns along the fence, Marley came and sat down on the bench with Delacourt.

“You look like a caged lion,” she said.

“I wish I had a drink.”

“A brandy would be dandy.”

“If we ever get out of here, I’ll buy the first round.”

Delacourt drew her coat together. It was getting colder. “What’s got you so irritable?” she said.

Just then they heard the hydraulic swish of one of the airtight facility doors open behind them. Benford came out and joined them on the bench. She didn’t say anything for a while. The three of them sat in silence, watching the evening mist rise over the water of the channel.

A bald eagle swept past at eye level. Everything was so quiet and it was so close they could hear the wind rustling through its feathers. The tips of its great wings curled up like spring buds as it gracefully wheeled, gently sinking down toward its fishing grounds on the water two hundred feet below them.

Marley thought of Yeats’ famous line: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” he said.

“Eliot?” Delacourt said.

“Yeats.”

“Right. Things fall apart.”

“The center cannot hold.”

Benford said, “I hope it’s not as bad as all that.”

“Tomorrow,” Marley said, “the president of the United States is going to institute martial law.”

“No, he isn’t,” Benford said irritably. “It’s no use being melodramatic.”

“No, I suppose not.”

The eagle dropped out of sight. The sound of a car horn came from over the water, and a second one answering it — plaintive as an orchestra tuning up before a performance.

“We should drop the drug experiments,” Marley said.

Benford looked at him, surprised. The gauzy yellow lighting made her face look blank, unnatural.

“You do? And do what?”

“Good old-fashioned observation.”

“Observation?”

“Yes.”