The Virus (28 page)

For a moment the President put his head in his hands. Then he looked up. “For Christ’s sake, get on with it,” he said. “For once it looks as though the CIA didn’t goof. You may have taken a risk in bringing the monkeys back but by God you’ve got a vaccine now, just when we need it. You can get the Press and the Television in here and show me rolling up my shirt sleeve and being jabbed.” He smiled. “That will make good copy, won’t it? That will reassure the nation!”

Shearer sensed the lightening of the President’s mood.

“I’m told the buttock is the preferred location, sir. Could you stoop to that?”

“I’ll stoop to anything, John, if I have to.” The President laughed. As an afterthought, he added: “Once I’ve had the jab, I’m going to visit one of the internment centres. We don’t want panic to spread. If the American public realized that I’ve had the anti-Marburg vaccination and that I have complete confidence in it, that will have an immensely calming effect.”

“I don’t think you ought to take unnecessary risks.” Shearer sounded worried. “Pharmacorp assure us that the vaccination will be effective. But I’m not sure the President of the United States should be right in the firing-line.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

Ed Werner was sweating with anxiety.

“What if the President himself is vaccinated and then visits an internment centre where he’s in contact with the virus?”

An almost manic look came into Woodnutt’s eyes as he faced his colleague across his desk.

“Ed.” He had obviously made up his mind. “We’re going to bluff this one out. If the vaccine doesn’t work, they’ll discover it soon enough. But that could just be scientific error; nothing criminal. Marburg’s an unknown disease. So we say nothing. Agreed? Pharmacorp is in this up to the hilt. We have two hundred million units in the pipeline and I’m not going to stand up and say that we knew all along there would be no anti-Marburg protection. Did the car-men ever say that the Pinto’s gas-tank would explode in a rear-end collision?”

Ed Werner made one last feeble protest.

“What about the President? Shouldn’t he be warned at least?”

Woodnutt looked at him witheringly.

“Werner, you’ve got to get your priorities straight. There are a lot of people ready, willing and able to be President of the United States. If one man goes, another man will step up. But Pharmacorp is another matter. One hint of the truth and this corporation is finished. I repeat what I said. We tough this one out. I want all the vaccine production schedules tightened. I want a crash program to get the multi-purpose doses ready. Is that clear?”

Ed Werner left the room, shaking his head. Sometimes he wondered whether Woodnutt didn’t carry ruthlessness too far.

If Ed Werner had been privy to the conversation Irving Woodnutt had the following morning, he would have been more than confirmed in this view. For the head of Pharmacorp was sitting with his wife in the breakfast room of their lavish mansion outside Pittsburgh. (Gloria Nimmo was already dreaming of her very own equivalent of Fallingwater in which an even more sumptuous breakfast room would feature.) They were both of them reading the papers; both of them transfixed by the accounts of the new outbreak of the Marburg virus in the New York area.

“Gloria, you’ve got to do it.” Woodnutt sounded completely emphatic. “The President’s going to have a shot and is going up there to visit an internment centre. You’ve got to go too. Dammit, Pharmacorp makes the bloody vaccine. We’ve got one hundred million units in production already and another batch on the way. But the public has to believe in it. They have to be persuaded that a vaccination is the only chance of stopping America going under.”

“Why me? Why not the President just by himself?” Gloria Nimmo tossed back her glorious blond hair. She looked worried.

“Because you’re my wife. Because Pharmacorp makes the stuff and I’m head of Pharmacorp.”

“You mean because you’re running for the Senate and it will do you a lot of good to have pictures of Mrs Irving Woodnutt, alias Gloria Nimmo, standing shoulder to shoulder with the President on his mercy mission.”

“As long as you don’t get closer than that. You know his reputation with women!”

Gloria Nimmo laughed. “Okay. I’ll do it. I guess it’s all part of the job. When do I report for work?”

“The President is going up to New York in the course of tomorrow. You can join him there. The visit to the centre is planned for first thing the next day.”

They sat together in silence for a few more minutes. Then Woodnutt, who was still reading the paper, exclaimed suddenly.

“Good God! Do you see that?”

“What?”

“European countries have banned all international flights originating in the United States.” He read out the item. “ ‘In view of the present outbreak of Marburg disease in the United States — an outbreak which has already claimed over three hundred lives — and in order to guard against the possible spread of the disease through international travel, European members of IATA late yesterday acted unilaterally to prevent any US-originating flight from landing at a European airport. The ban will only be lifted when U.S. authorities can demonstrate that effective control measures have been taken to prevent the further spread of the virus.”

Woodnutt’s wife whistled, “It’s Fortress America all over again, isn’t it?”

“That’s the way it looks.”

The head of Pharmacorp buried his face once again in the newspaper. If he felt sorry for his wife, he did not show it. By going up to New York to visit an internment centre alongside the President of the United States she would not only be demonstrating an unshakable belief in the efficiency of the vaccine, she would also be providing him and Pharmacorp with the most convincing alibi imaginable. How could anyone suggest, let alone prove, that Pharmacorp had knowingly and for motives of pure commercial gain produced a dud vaccine when the wife of the head of the corporation was willing to be vaccinated and to be exposed to the risk of infection?

A few moments later, Woodnutt thrust the paper aside and rose from the breakfast table.

He looked at his watch. “I mustn’t be late,” he said. “I’m flying to Washington this morning to be present when the President receives his vaccination.”

“Why don’t I get mine done at the same time?”

Woodnutt looked at his wife. There was no way of telling her that the vaccination was useless and she would be wasting her time.

“Come along then,” he said.

Lowell Kaplan was in the Hot Lab at the Atlanta Center for Disease Control. He was kitted out in the standard uniform — perspex face-mask, airtight suit, gloves — and he was working alone, hooked onto the airline with his own umbilical cord. The rules might call for the ‘buddy system’, i.e. never less than two people working together; but for once in his life Kaplan didn’t give a fuck for the rules. He didn’t trust anyone any longer. How could he? It just didn’t make sense to trust anyone when suddenly, out of the blue, Leslie Cheek, his director at the CDC, could announce that yes, after all, there was a vaccine against Marburg and that a major inoculation program was under way with the President himself first in line.

Kaplan had exploded.

“What the hell’s going on?” he had shouted at the thin scraggy man who sheltered anonymously behind thick horn-rimmed spectacles. “I just don’t understand. I don’t care whether it’s combined with the Fukushima-flu shot or not. That’s all tactics. What I’d like to know is how did Pharmacorp make the vaccine in the first place? Where did they get the live virus from?”

When Leslie Cheek had explained about Sam and Griselda, Kaplan had been almost beside himself with indignation.

“The fools! The stupid unbelievable fools,” he cried, referring to the CIA. “Can’t they grow up? Can’t they forget their cold-war tricks for just one minute? They were jeopardizing the health of the whole United States bringing those monkeys back here. The whole point of the WHO operation, and God knows it was a pretty gruesome business, was to achieve a total elimination of the virus, not to take risks by bringing live monkeys home, even if they were to be held under lab conditions.”

Cheek had attempted to soothe Kaplan down. “At least it means, now that the outbreak has happened, we’ve got a vaccine ready and waiting. That’s an almost unbelievable piece of good luck.”

Kaplan had remained outraged and sceptical. “I’m going to take a damn good look at that vaccine.”

“Oh come on, Lowell.” The Director of the CDC had sounded irritated. “Two hundred million Americans are lining up for doses. You’re not trying to tell me that you actually doubt whether the vaccine works. Jesus, people just don’t make that kind of mistake!”

Lowell Kaplan had left the room with a sombre, determined expression on his face. Late that afternoon, after a supply of the vaccine had been flown down urgently at his request from the Pharmacorp laboratory in Pittsburgh, he had begun his investigation.

After two hours of steady uninterrupted work, he put a call through to Ed Werner, chief virologist at the Pharmacorp Laboratories, tracking him down at his home.

“Ed, that material you sent me is a typical flu vaccine. You’ve got Brazil, Texas and now Fukushima protection built in. But as far as I can tell, there’s no new viral material in it. What the hell are you people playing at?”

At the other end of the line the voice sounded smooth and unflustered.

“Let me just check on this, Lowell. There must have been some mistake our end.”

Half an hour later, Ed Werner rang back. Kaplan was still in the lab, waiting with increasing impatience.

“Sorry, Lowell. There
was
a mistake our end. We sent you the wrong sample — you got the medium without the message, as it were.”

“This is no time for jokes, Ed,” Kaplan snapped. “I’ve just wasted two hours looking at that stuff.”

Ed Werner sounded contrite. “I really do apologize. It turns out that my assistant, Philip Mason, already realized that there had been some mix-up. He couldn’t find me since I’d already left the office for the day. So he caught a flight earlier this afternoon with a new load. He ought to be with you any minute.”

They talked for some moments longer. By the time they had finished Kaplan felt slightly mollified. It seemed, after all, to be a genuine mistake.

He had barely put the phone down when he had a message over the intercom from Susan Wainwright. Susan was monitoring Kaplan’s investigation from the work-area outside the Hot Lab. He could see her now across the glass barrier.

“Philip Mason has just come in from Pittsburgh with some new samples of the vaccine.”

“Tell him to scrub up, get suited and come on in.”

“Shall I stay on till you’ve finished?”

“No, don’t worry, Susan. You go on home. I’ll close the lab down.”

“Thanks. Don’t work too late.”

Susan Wainwright stayed long enough to show Mason the layout of the place — showers, changing area and so forth. When she had left, the two men worked alone together.

Philip Mason — it was the first time Kaplan had met the young man — sounded deeply apologetic.

“I just can’t understand how the mix-up happened, Dr Kaplan.”

“You’ve checked on the batches which have already gone out, have you? Remember, the President himself has just been vaccinated and he’s due to visit an internment centre tomorrow morning.”

Mason smiled behind his perspex face-mask. The convex material produced a slight distortion. Kaplan couldn’t help thinking that Mason’s smile had a sinister quality.

They set up the electron microscope. Kaplan thought the other man seemed nervous. But it was only a passing impression and he put it out of his mind as he became engrossed in his work.

It took him about ten minutes to adjust the delicate instrument so as to achieve maximum efficiency. When finally he was ready, he realized with a mixture of annoyance and amazement that the new samples which Mason had brought with him from Pittsburgh were no more relevant than the last.

“Hey, Mason — who are you trying to fool? This is still ordinary flu vaccine you’re showing me here. There’s no Marburg morphology.”

He looked up from the eyepiece of the electron microscope to see that the Hot Lab was empty. Completely empty. Mason had disappeared.

He glanced at the airline and saw that the pipe which a few moments before had been clipped onto Mason’s airsuit was now swinging free as though it had only recently been relinquished.

Above the airline his eye caught sight of a flashing red notice. ‘RESERVE AIR ONLY ONE MINUTE SUPPLY REMAINING.’

“Hell and damnation!” Kaplan swore out loud. Mason must have left the Hot Lab and turned off the external air supply. He strode over to the inside door of the airlock. It was locked. His eye fell on the telephone and he picked it up. But the line was dead. Mason had thought of that too. Above the airline the red plaque flashed again. THIRTY SECONDS RESERVE AIR SUPPLY LEFT ALL PERSONNEL SHOULD EVACUATE LAB AREA IMMEDIATELY.

Kaplan switched on his individual air supply. Every pressure suit used in the Hot Lab was equipped with its own airbottle. It was meant to cover the short period where a researcher, on entering or leaving the lab, had to unclip himself from the airline. He was standing there, still attached by the umbilical cord, when the red plaque signalled starkly NO AIR ENTERING LAB.

Reluctantly, Kaplan pulled out the plug. The plastic pipe hung free. For a few seconds he lost control. He strode back over to the door and hammered on the metal panels of the airlock as though by brute force he could force them to open. He swore out loud. Then, suddenly, the sense of panic left him. He knew that within seconds he would be without oxygen. He would, as a consequence, be forced to breathe in the air of the laboratory itself. That meant he would be directly exposed to the pathogenic material present in the lab. As his oxygen gave out, Kaplan lay face down on the floor. Spores would tend to rise with the air caused by his own breathing. He should try to keep as near the ground as possible.

Kaplan found himself thinking about his children. He still hadn’t taken Jimmy on that white-water vacation. He hoped it wasn’t too late. And then he thought about Stephanie. He wished things had gone better between them. If he survived . . .