The Virus (35 page)

Kaplan needed no prompting. “Alternatively,” he continued, “the Soviets might have had a different game-plan. Once they had the virus and the serum, they might have gone public and used them to improve their general bargaining position vis-à-vis the other great powers, namely the United States and China. If you know you can infect the other side without any danger of becoming infected yourself, and if you know that the other side knows this too, then you’re in a very strong position indeed. Frankly, the Soviets would have been in a position to upset the balance of power, or terror, to a very considerable extent. In my view, not that I know a great deal about this — after all, I’m a scientist, not a politician — the Soviets could have exacted a very high price indeed.”

Stephanie interrupted Kaplan’s speculations.

“But the United States could have had the virus too and the serum. The Russians hadn’t shipped all the monkeys back to Russia. There were still some left in Burundi when we got there.”

Kaplan shook his head. “No, we wouldn’t have had the virus or the serum. You heard Mtaza talking to Louis Vincennes. The Soviet plan was always to eliminate completely the tribe of monkeys and any surplus serum. Our arrival on the scene merely served to accelerate the time-table.” He summarized the situation. “The Russians have the virus and we have the vaccine. It works as the old woman said it would and we’ve pumped it into two hundred million Americans. As far as the Marburg disease is concerned, the United States is now a wholly protected population.”

“Shield and rapier, eh?”

“I suppose you could call it that.”

They lapsed into silence. Then Reuben asked:

“What about Vincennes?”

“Out of business,” Kaplan replied. “Father and son together. The Belgian government at last had the guts to act on its own initiative without any prompting from the United States. Mind you, I would have done my bit. I’m quite sure Vincennes tipped off the Soviets about my second visit. So, as far as I’m concerned, all bets were off.”

Reuben seemed genuinely pleased that the Vincennes had got their come-uppance. “That’s good news.”

“There’s more good news as well,” Stephanie added. “We’ve learned that Victor Mtaza’s revolution never worked. He only got a trickle of support. The idea was that there was to be this massive uprising against the government which had permitted the ‘foreign devils’ to desecrate the graves of the royal ancestors. But it fizzled out, even though it clearly had the backing of the Soviets. I guess potential revolutionaries don’t feel strongly about royal graves! Anyway Victor Mtaza has fled to neighbouring Rwanda; his father has stepped down as President because of the unrest and our old friend, Michel Ngenzi, has succeeded.”

“That’s wonderful!” Reuben had heard all about the gentle Tutsi professor. “So that’s where you’re off now, is it? Back to Burundi?”

“Yes. Lowell and I are going on honeymoon there, actually.” Stephanie found that she was blushing. “Ngenzi is arranging a special zoological expedition in cooperation with the World Wildlife Fund to the Mount Lwungi area. It appears that there may still be some green monkeys in what’s left of the forest after the fire. If there are, we are going to find them. We’re going to create a nature reserve for them, a national park where they can live in peace.”

Reuben had one last question. “And what about the green monkeys in the Soviet Union? What’s going to happen to them?”

Stephanie looked at Kaplan. “You tell him, Lowell.”

Kaplan smiled. “There’s good news there too. John Shearer and I talked yesterday about the green monkeys in the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviets know the virus is no good to them now.”

“How so?”

“The population of the United States is already vaccinated against Marburg and we’ve taken care to ensure that the Soviets know that this is the case. The President has agreed to work through the World Health Organization and through U.S. aid programmes to ensure the worldwide dissemination of the vaccine. So the Russians know that they will be holding a virus which can be of danger only to themselves. For they have only the serum, in presumably limited quantities — and the President has determined that they shall not receive the vaccine unless . . .”

“Unless what?”

Kaplan concluded his sentence.

“Unless they ship back the green monkeys which they hold, every single one of them, to Burundi.”

“Lowell! Stephanie!” the old doctor rose to his feet. “I want to hug you both.”

Isaac Reuben folded his arms around them in an all-enveloping embrace. Then he took their glasses and refilled them. When he was once again seated, he turned to his guests. He had a solemn, even portentous look on his face.

“There’s something you both should know,” he said. He looked at Stephanie: “You especially, Stephanie. It’s about Diane, your sister.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “We heard this morning that she is to be awarded posthumously the Congressional Medal of Honour. That’s the highest peacetime award this nation can bestow. This letter is signed by the President himself.”

Stephanie read it first, with tears in her eyes. Then she passed it to Kaplan.

“I don’t understand,” she said to Dr Reuben, “why does the President write to you?”

“He thought I deserved to tell you the good news, I guess.” Reuben smiled. “After all, Diane was my favourite pupil. I trained her. I probably taught her most of what she knew about exotic viruses.” Sadly, he shook his head. “Your sister was a very brave woman, Stephanie. She knew the risks. But she would never let go.”

Stephanie still looked completely nonplussed, almost numb.

It was Kaplan who said: “Dr Reuben, I’m as much in the dark as Stephanie is. I think you ought to explain.”

Dr Isaac Reuben examined the contents of his glass. “You do understand, don’t you?” he began quietly, “that nothing of what I’m about to tell you now should go beyond this room.”

They nodded.

“Very well,” Reuben continued. “I’ll be as brief as I can.” He turned to Kaplan. “A moment ago, Lowell, you gave a very fair summary of the Marburg affair. I was deliberately drawing you out to see how much you had understood. Frankly, you understood most of it. But there was one vital element which you left out. Diane Verusio was actually looking for those green monkeys at the time she got infected. She was a member of the CIA’s top-secret BW — Bacteriological Warfare — unit specializing in virus diseases. I should know. I recruited her for the work in the first place.”

Stephanie asked: “You mean you’ve been working for the government too all along?”

The old doctor smiled: “If Lowell had looked me up in the register, he would have seen that my speciality was always tropical diseases and that there are a number of vague references to past government employment which of course were a cover for the real thing. And the general practitioner work in New York was at best a part-time occupation.”

Kaplan could not disguise his astonishment. He remembered so clearly the afternoon when he first visited Reuben’s surgery in Greenwich Village. If anyone had looked the part of the benign family doctor, Reuben had, then.

“I still don’t understand . . .” he began.

Reuben held up his hand. “Let me finish. It’s not so difficult. What you have to realize,” he said, “is that the U.S. intelligence community has over the last few years become increasingly concerned by the growing Soviet interest in bacteriological warfare. It’s logical enough, I suppose. Limit the arms race and the Russians naturally look for some other weapon. I was — and still am — in charge of the unit which tries to monitor Soviet efforts in this area. Diane was one of my top agents. I knew her first as a patient — what I told you about the Verusios and the Rabinowitzes arriving in New York together was all true. I recruited her when I realized that her work with wildlife and the trade in endangered species provided the ideal cover for the type of investigations we had to conduct. We wanted to know what diseases the Soviets were working with and where their source material was coming from.

“When Diane died — when you and I nearly died,” Reuben looked at Kaplan and both of them recalled that awful period — “we knew that the Soviets were obviously in possession of some amazingly potent BW weapon. I think you were quite right, Lowell, to suppose that Diane’s death was an accident. I’m sure it was. I agree with you that the Soviets would never have used their new weapon in such a random way. When I recovered from my illness, I and the other BW experts who worked with me in the unit faced the terrifying prospect that the Soviets might at any moment decide to deploy the weapon properly against the United States. We also knew,” Reuben paused to allow his words to sink in, “that if the Soviets knew we knew they had the Marburg virus as a BW weapon, they might decide to use it immediately in a preemptive strike and the United States would of course have had no defence. And that, my dear Lowell, was where you came in with your splendid freelance activities.”

Reuben looked affectionately at the other man. Kaplan responded with a wan smile. He was not sure he liked the term “freelance activities”.

“You see,” Reuben continued, “your investigations in Marburg and Brussels, in Geneva and Zaire gave us a heaven-sent opportunity to convince the Russians of our own ignorance. We were playing for time and it worked.”

“I’m not sure I understand.” Kaplan still sounded offended.

Reuben looked at him in surprise. “But surely you see that by participating in the Zaire expedition, by accepting the WHO philosophy of ‘eliminate the vector’, we were indicating our total lack of suspicion of Soviet intentions.”

“You mean you knew what the Russians were up to and never told me.” This time, Kaplan sounded positively indignant.

“Of course, we had our suspicions. We had Diane’s death in the first place. Then we had Boswell’s report from Brussels about how a non-existent Delgrave fed you with information. There was the fact that the Chancellor never visited Marburg at the time of the original outbreak. And there was Paula Schmidtt. We knew she was a Communist agent. And we rather suspected Franz and Heidi Schmidtt were as well.”

“Even Heidi?”

Reuben nodded. “Yes. She disappeared soon after you spoke to her the second time. She had served her purpose.”

“Which was?”

“To make sure that in the end we knew about the true green monkeys and intervened. The object there of course was to create a political incident in Africa and further embarrass the U.S. That was overkill, if you like. Something the Russians threw in for good measure.”

Kaplan went completely red. “You mean I was taken in by Heidi Schmidtt and by the others all the way along the line, and you knew about it all the time?”

Stephanie joined in the chorus of indignation.

“And you always knew the monkeys in Zaire were clean? You allowed that pointless massacre to happen?”

Reuben deflected their anger. “It wasn’t pointless. I’m sorry about it. As sorry as you are. But there was no other way we could convince the Russians we had swallowed the bait. Leontiev had to see you there, Lowell. What’s more he had to see that you really believed in what you were doing. And you, Stephanie,” he turned to her, “there was no way I could stop you doing what you wanted to do. When you called me from Paris and explained that you wanted some serum I realized what you had in mind. But if I had told you the truth then the whole operation would have been at risk. So we had to let you go ahead.”

Kaplan was beginning to understand the full dimensions of the thing.

“And the CIA bit? You knew about that too?”

“Of course we did. We set it all up. We had to ask ourselves: what would the Russians expect the U.S. to do in these circumstances? And then we had to do it. Now, obviously, in a situation where a vector is about to be totally eliminated the Russians would expect a self-respecting intelligence service on the other side to try to grab an animal or two. So that’s exactly what we did. Then, Dick Sandford who runs the CIA got hold of Irving Woodnutt, head of Pharmacorp. Of course, we made sure the Russians knew what we were doing. That ‘safe house’ in the Arlington Sheraton where George Peabody and Dick Sandford met with Woodnutt was blown, only the Russians didn’t know we knew it was blown.”

“Did Woodnutt know the monkeys were clean?”

“Only when he and his people found out in the laboratory.”

“And then you let them go ahead with their massive immunization programme knowing all the time that they must have been using a dud vaccine? Do you realize I almost got killed investigating that stuff?” Kaplan recalled with a shudder his experiences in the Hot Lab.

Reuben rebuked him gently. “These things have a momentum of their own, Lowell, you know.”

Kaplan shook his head in disbelief.

“And what do you propose to do about Woodnutt and Werner. And Mason.” Kaplan uttered the last name with particular savagery.

“Don’t worry,” Reuben replied. “We’ve already gone after them. We won’t even let them out on bail.”

Again, Kaplan shook his head, wondering at the madness of it all.

“You push them to make a vaccine when you know they can’t and then you hit them when they pretend they can.”

“We like to know who our friends are.”

Kaplan pondered the events of the last few weeks.

“I suppose the Soviets were watching our efforts to control the second outbreak of Marburg disease. Presumably, once they were ready, they would have stoked the flames by the judicious release of Marburg as a BW agent if it looked as though the fire was dying down.”

“Exactly.” Reuben agreed with Kaplan. “Frankly, if Stephanie hadn’t been up there with Frau Matthofer; if she hadn’t learned the secret of the vaccine, we would none of us be here today.”

The thought sobered them. It had been a close call. As close as any in U.S. history.

Reuben refilled their glasses. The moment of solemnity had passed. They had lived to fight another day. The doctor smiled at his guests.

“May I make a last suggestion before you leave? Talk to Ngenzi when you get to Burundi. Tell him about Diane’s Congressional Medal. He’ll be thrilled. He was very close to the Verusio parents.”