The Virus (22 page)

While Woodnutt listened fascinated, Sandford explained what he meant. Twenty minutes later the Director of the CIA was nearing his conclusion.

“Only the firm — the CIA — knows about this,” he said. “It’s an Agency concept. The Secretary for Health and Human Services — HHS — has no idea. The National Institutes of Health — NIH — has no idea. Nor does the Center for Disease Control at Atlanta, Georgia, or any of the people there. Lowell Kaplan, whose reports initiated this whole thing, is completely unaware of what we are doing. Frankly, I don’t think we could ever expect HHS or NIH or CDC to approve our action. Those institutions are run by medical men and medical men are guided by medical criteria and priorities. Do you follow?”

“Perfectly.”

“But the mandate of the Agency, of the CIA, is different. We have to look at the interest of the United States as a whole. We cannot afford to take a narrow sectoral view. And it is our best judgement,” he spoke with deliberate emphasis at this point so that Woodnutt should not fail to catch his meaning, “that the United States cannot afford to let this opportunity slip.”

“What exactly do you mean?”

Sandford took him through the logic of the thing, step by step.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “As far as the outside world is concerned, the WHO-sponsored operation has been successful. The green monkeys have been eliminated and the threat of Marburg disease has been eliminated with them. As we know, the newspapers have carried the story. José Rodriguez, that fat Brazilian who runs the World Health Organization, has had his picture on the front page of the
New York Times.
Up here on the Hill, Congress has shown its pleasure by increasing the appropriations both for WHO and HHS. Congressmen like this kind of thing much better than Medicare, you know. It’s effective; it’s dramatic and above all it’s cheap.”

“Well?” Woodnutt still didn’t quite see what Sandford was driving at.

Sandford took his time. He lit a cigarette before continuing, and offered the packet to Woodnutt, who declined.

“I said,” Sandford repeated, “that the outside world thinks we have made a clean sweep of the green monkeys. In fact that isn’t quite true. There were two survivors of that particular massacre and both of them” — he leaned forward and prodded the air dramatically with his forefinger — “are now in the care and control of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States.”

Woodnutt gasped with astonishment. But before he could say anything, Sandford had gone on to describe the circumstances under which two green monkeys had been returned to the United States. Without specifying the precise nature of the inducements offered to Colonel Albert Mugambu by the CIA’s local director and without mentioning the secret airbase in the Congo where the transfer of the animals had taken place, Sandford was nevertheless able to embellish his story with a wealth of convincing detail.

Intrigued though he was by the daring and sheer inventiveness of the CIA’s approach, Woodnutt believed he saw a fatal flaw in the whole concept.

“Surely you can’t take a bunch of viruses and send them marching off like soldiers in a fore-ordained direction? Diseases spread in the most unpredictable way. Pharmacorp has been in this business a long time. We try to forecast the course of disease because that way we can have our products at the right place, at the right time. But we’re often wrong, I can tell you. In my view, you can’t take a BW agent like the Marburg virus, or whatever it’s called, and direct it at the Soviet Union without repercussions on the United States. The thing’s just not feasible. It would get back to us somehow and the population of the United States would have no effective protection, any more than the Soviets.”

“Who said the United States would have no protection?” Sandford asked the question quietly, but with great force.

“Well, what protection against the Marburg virus is there?” Woodnutt sounded petulant. “Nobody’s mentioned any protection so far, except isolation and serum. And as we all know, that’s a very limited strategy indeed. I wouldn’t risk anything on that. And the Russians would know that.”

“But my dear Irving,” — for the first time Sandford sounded patronizing — “I was not suggesting that we should go in this without protection. If the Marburg virus is to take its place in our national arsenal as a credible deterrent, or — under the worst case assumption — as an actual and usable weapon of war, it is precisely because the United States
will
have an effective protection against that virus and will, if necessary, be known to have such a protection.”

“But surely, there
is
no protection available on a mass basis?”

An element of sarcasm had now crept into Sandford’s tone of voice.

“Do I hear right? Do I hear the President of Pharmacorp suggesting there is no remedy against this Marburg virus? Is that the kind of positive thinking Pharmacorp’s shareholders have come to expect from the head of America’s fastest-growing pharmaceutical corporation? Today, for the first time, we have the real live vector to work with. We have two live green monkeys, steaming hot from the tropical jungles of Zaire. Those monkeys contain the Marburg virus in their blood. I’m not an expert but, as I understand it, that virus can be isolated; it can be attenuated; and it can then be mass-produced as a vaccine for the American population.” Sandford stood up, carried away by the excitement of his own irresistible vision. “That changes the picture, doesn’t it? If we have the virus
and
we have the vaccine . . . And the bloody Russians don’t have a goddamned thing?”

Suddenly, Woodnutt saw the whole thing clearly.

“You want Pharmacorp to find a vaccine?”

Sandford, who was still pacing the room, turned in mid-stride.

“Oh, more than that. Much more than that. There’s a lot in this for Pharmacorp, you know. I’m not just talking about discovering the vaccine. Your people can do that all right. You’ve got six Nobel Prize winners on your research staff. I know you’ve got the technical capability.” Sandford dropped his voice. He was kicking a bit more into the pool. “I’m talking about a multi-million dollar operation. When you find that vaccine, you’re going to put it into mass-production.”

“Twenty million units?”

“Twenty million? No! Two hundred million units and more! I want to see every man, woman and child in the United States protected against Marburg virus. I want us to be a wholly-protected population. It’s not enough to have the occasional fall-out shelter here and there. I want total protection.”

Irving Woodnutt was silent for a long time as he reviewed what Sandford had said. He could not help focusing on the limitless possibilities which a scheme of this nature offered for himself and Pharmacorp. Two hundred million units at a minimum. At, say, $10 a throw? $20?

“Wholly underwritten, I suppose?” he asked. “We wouldn’t be manufacturing on spec.”

“No, of course not. The U.S. Government would guarantee to purchase the whole amount.”

Woodnutt thought he saw another flaw in the plan. “I thought the U.S. Government as such wasn’t overtly party to this. How are you going to get 200 million doses of anti-Marburg vaccine into the American population without going public?”

Dick Sandford smiled at him. A warm, frank, friendly smile which told the President of Pharmacorp in no uncertain terms to mind his own business.

“Let’s take one step at a time shall we? I’ll look after my problems. You look after yours.”

One last thought occurred to Woodnutt as they rose to leave. “These monkeys, then. Where are they? If we’re to start working on the vaccine straight away, we had better get them over to our laboratories in Pittsburgh as soon as possible.”

Sandford smiled yet again. An even warmer, franker, friendlier smile than before.

“Didn’t I tell you! We flew the monkeys straight to Pittsburgh. We’re holding them for you now at the airport there. They’re still on the plane, awaiting collection.”

Irving Woodnutt felt slightly ruffled.

“You kinda took me for granted there, didn’t you!”

Sandford laid an encouraging hand on the other man’s arm.

“Aw, come on. Peabody’s an old hand. He doesn’t make mistakes. At least, not that kind of mistake.”

Mrs Irving Woodnutt, alias Gloria Nimmo, came to the airport to meet her husband at the end of his long but interesting day.

Normally, his driver would have picked him up to take him home. But, when he called from Washington, Gloria had insisted.

“No, darling. Let me do it. I haven’t seen enough of you lately. I’d like to meet you.”

He hadn’t said much on the way back from the airport. He needed to unwind. His arm rested lightly on the back of her seat as she drove skilfully in the evening traffic. Once he put up a finger and brushed her lightly on the cheek. She turned to him, for a moment taking her eyes off the road.

“You’ll tell me about it, won’t you? Your day in Washington seems to have done you good.”

She was pleased for him at that moment. She knew how desperately keen he was on politics and how frustrated he had been lately because that particular ball didn’t seem to start rolling. At last something had happened. Or so it appeared. And if she was pleased for him she was also pleased for herself. In the long run she was more interested in her role as Mrs Irving Woodnutt than she was in being Gloria Nimmo. The movie-going public was notoriously fickle. And her looks wouldn’t last for ever. She stole a glance at herself in the driving mirror.

He noticed. “You look pretty good yourself. We ought to get together some time, what do you say?”

She gave an imitation girlish squeal. “Darling, I can’t wait.”

Over dinner, he took her through the events of the day step by step.

When he had finished, she asked simply: “Are you going to do it?”

He pushed back his chair and stood up from the table.

“Let’s go outside.”

They went out onto the balcony. It was a warm balmy night. Woodnutt put his arm round his wife’s waist. He noticed, as he did so, the slight thickening that had occurred over the last two years. “Watch that, my girl!” he thought to himself. In the movie-business, an expanding waistline could spell the beginning of the end.

“Darling,” he pointed out across the lawn, “do you see those lights in the distance?”

She followed the direction of his gaze.

“I see them.”

“Do you know the house the lights come from?”

“Of course I do. It’s Fallingwater, isn’t it?”

He turned back to her. “Yes, that’s Fallingwater out there. Back in 1935 Frank Lloyd Wright built the house for Edgar J. Kaufmann right here in this Pittsburgh suburb. I was down at the Golf Club the other day and an old boy who remembered the house being built told me how it all began. Apparently, Lloyd Wright was a blustering cantankerous fellow. He used to give the shopgirls hell if they didn’t let him have a discount. But he knew his onions as far as architecture was concerned . . .”

He could see her eyes shining as he spoke.

“How marvellous! How thrilling!” She saw her own home with new eyes. “It makes this place seem very dull, doesn’t it, when you think of Fallingwater.”

He had made his point. He led her back inside.

“Gloria,” he said quietly, “you asked me what I was going to do. And I tell you: I’m still thinking.”

He looked at her handsome face across the room. “If we go ahead with this idea; if I and Pharmacorp play ball, this time next year you’ll be able to pick your own site anywhere in the United States. You’ll be able to choose the best architect and walk over the ground with him. Anything that Frank Lloyd Wright did with Fallingwater, you and your man will be able to do better.”

He walked over to her and took her hand. “Honey, this is the big time. A deal like this could put Pharmacorp at the top of the league. We’d be past Mercx and American Cynamid and the others so fast they wouldn’t even know it. In personal terms, given the stake I have — we both have — in the company, we’d be up in the multimillionaire class. And in political terms, you can be sure that George Peabody will be as good as his word. Anything that man
can
deliver, he will deliver. The rest is up to me.” He laughed. “After all, the candidate has to do some work too.”

She was proud of him. Immensely proud of him. He was going to make it. She was sure of that. He was tough enough to play with the big boys. She stood on tip-toe and kissed him full on the lips.

“What’s holding you up?”

He looked her in the eyes.

“You approve?”

“Of course, I approve.”

For a second he held her at arm’s length. Then he clasped her to him. Hungrily. His heavy florid face thrust into hers, searching greedily for her mouth. It was as though he had waited a long time for this moment.

13

The tall distinguished gentleman who was Chairman of the Senate SubCommittee on Health and Scientific Research rapped on his desk in Room 1202 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The gathering subsided into silence. Photographers who had been popping away with flashbulbs before the session withdrew. The witnesses who had come into Washington for the day shuffled their papers and prepared themselves for interrogation.

Senator Matthews availed himself of the customary privilege of an opening statement:

“Today,” he began, “the SubCommittee on Health and Scientific Research convenes to discuss the Administration’s proposed program for immunization against influenza. It is not sufficient to have a vaccine that will protect those who receive it from illness. We must be confident that we can get that vaccine to people in the right time and place, at an acceptable cost and without creating exorbitant and unpredictable legal difficulties.”

The Senator raised his head from his prepared text to look directly at the row of witnesses who sat across the room from him, each one marked by an appropriate name-card.

“We will want to know, therefore, from the witnesses here today exactly how this new program will work. We will want to know how much vaccine we can actually get to the American public. We will want to know how each of the necessary participants — the Federal Government, the state and local health agencies, the vaccine manufacturers, the public health professionals, the insurance companies — regard the program. Above all, we will want to look at the size of the program itself. The Administration proposes an immunization program that is focused on, indeed I might almost say limited to, critical groups such as the elderly, the chronically ill and children.”