Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (205 page)

“Dr. Lorenz down in Atlanta returned your call returning his call returning your original call,” she told him as he passed. As soon as he sat down, he dialed the direct line from memory.

“Yes?”

“Gus? Alex here at Hopkins. Tag,” he chuckled, “you’re it.” He heard a good laugh at the other end of the line. Phone tag could be the biggest pain in the ass.

“How’s the fishing, Colonel?”

“Would you believe I haven’t had a chance yet? Ralph’s working me pretty hard.”

“What did you want from me—you did call first, didn’t you?” Lorenz wasn’t sure anymore, another sign of a man working too hard.

“Yeah, I did, Gus. Ralph tells me you’re starting a new look at the Ebola structure—from that mini-break in Zaire, right?”

“Well, I would be, except somebody stole my monkeys,” the director of CDC reported sourly. “The replacement shipment is due in here in a day or two, so they tell me.”

“You have a break-in?” Alexandre asked. One of the troublesome developments for labs that had experimental animals was that animal-rights fanatics occasionally tried to bust in and “liberate” the animals. Someday, if everyone wasn’t careful, some screwball would walk out with a monkey under his arm and discover it had Lassa fever—or worse. How the hell were physicians supposed to study the goddamned bug without animals—and who’d ever said that a monkey was more important than a human being? The answer to that was simple: in America there were people who believed in damned near anything, and there was a constitutional right to be an ass. Because of that, CDC, Hopkins, and other research labs had armed guards, protecting monkey cages. And even rat cages, which really made Alex roll his eyes to the ceiling.

“No, they were highjacked in Africa. Somebody else is playing with them now. Anyway, so it kicks me back a week. What the hell. I’ve been looking at this little bastard for fifteen years.”

“How fresh is the sample?”

“It’s off the Index Patient. Positive identification, Ebola Zaire, the Mayinga strain. We have another sample from the only other patient. That one disappeared—”

“What?” Alexandre asked in immediate alarm.

“Lost at sea in a plane crash. They were evidently flying her to Paris to see Rousseau. No further cases, Alex. We dodged the bullet this time for a change,” Lorenz assured his younger colleague.

Better, Alexandre thought, to crunch in a plane crash than bleed out from that little fucker.
He still thought like a soldier, profanity and all. “Okay.”

“So, why did you call?”

“Polynomials,” Lorenz heard.

“What do you mean?” the doctor asked in Atlanta.

“When you map this one out, let’s think about doing a mathematical analysis of the structure.”

“I’ve been playing with that idea for a while. Right now, though, I want to examine the reproduction cycle and—”

“Exactly, Gus, the mathematical nature of the interaction. I was talking to a colleague up here—eye cutter, you believe? She said something interesting. If the amino acids have a quantifiable mathematical value, and they should, then
how
they interact with other codon strings may tell us something.” Alexandre paused and heard a match striking. Gus was smoking his pipe in the office again.

“Keep going.”

“Still reaching for this one, Gus. What if it’s like you’ve been thinking, it’s all an equation? The trick is cracking it, right? How do we do that? Okay, Ralph told me about your time-cycle study. I think you’re onto something. If we have the virus RNA mapped, and we have the host DNA mapped, then—”

“Gotcha! The interactions will tell us something about the values of the elements in the polynomial—”

“And that will tell us a lot about how the little fuck replicates, and just maybe—”

“How to attack it.” A pause, and a loud puff came over the phone line. “Alex, that’s pretty good.”

“You’re the best guy for the job, Gus, and you’re setting up the experiment anyway.”

“Something’s missing, though.”

“Always is.”

“Let me think about that one for a day or so and get back to you. Good one, Alex.”

“Thank you, sir.” Professor Alexandre replaced the phone and figured he’d done his duty of the day for medical science. It wasn’t much, and there was an element missing from the suggestion.

23

EXPERIMENTS

I
T TOOK SEVERAL DAYS TO get everything in place. President Ryan had to meet with yet another class of new senators—some of the states were a little slow in getting things done, mainly because some of the governors established something akin to search committees to evaluate a list of candidates. That was a surprise to a lot of Washington insiders who’d expected the state executives to do things as they’d always been done to appoint replacements to the upper house just as soon as the bodies were cold—but it turned out that Ryan’s speech had mattered a little bit. Eight governors had realized that this situation was unique, and had therefore acted in a different way, earning, on reflection, the praise of their local papers, if not the complete approval of the establishment press.

Jack’s first political trip was an experimental one. He rose early, kissed his wife and kids on the way out the door, and boarded the helicopter on the South Lawn just before seven in the morning. Ten minutes later, he left the aircraft to trot up the stairs onto Air Force One, technically known to the Pentagon as a VC-25A, a 747 expensively modified to be the President’s personal conveyance. He boarded just as the pilot, a very senior colonel, was making his airline-like preflight announcements. Looking aft, Ryan could see eighty or so reporters belting into their better-than-first-class leather seats—actually some
didn’t
strap in, because Air Force One generally rode more smoothly than an ocean liner on calm seas—and when he turned to head forward, he heard,
“And this is a nonsmoking flight!”

“Who said that?” the President asked.

“One of the TV pukes,” Andrea replied. “He thinks it’s his airplane.”

“In a way, it is,” Arnie pointed out. “Remember that.”

“That’s Tom Donner,” Callie Weston added. “The NBC anchor. His personal feces are not odorific, and he uses more hair spray than I do. But part of it’s glued on.”

“This way, Mr. President.” Andrea pointed forward. The President’s cabin in Air Force One is in the extreme nose on the main deck, where there are regular, if very plush, seats, plus a pair of couches that fold out into beds for long trips. As the principal agent watched, her principal strapped in. Passengers could get away with breaking the rules—the USSS wasn’t all that concerned with journalists—but not POTUS. When that was done, she waved to an Air Force crewman, who lifted a phone and told the pilot that he could go now. With that, the engines started up. Jack had mostly lost his fear of flying, but this was the part of the flight where he closed his eyes and thought (earlier in his life he’d whispered) a prayer for the collective safety of the people aboard—in the belief that praying merely for yourself might appear selfish to God. About the time that was finished, the takeoff roll began, rather more quickly than was normal on a 747. Lightly loaded, it felt like an airplane instead of a train pulling out of a station.

“Okay,” Arnie said, as the nose lifted off. The President studiously did not grip the armrests as he usually did. “This is going to be an easy one. Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, and back home for dinner. The crowds will be friendly, and about as reactionary as you are,” he added with a twinkle. “So you don’t really have anything to worry about.”

Special Agent Price, sitting in the same compartment for the takeoff, hated it when anybody said that. Chief of Staff van Damm—CARPENTER to the Secret Service; Callie Weston was CALLIOPE—was one of the staffers who never quite appreciated the headaches the Service went through. He thought of danger as a political hazard, even after the 747 crash. Remarkable, she thought. A few feet aft, Agent Raman was in an aft-facing seat watching access forward, in case a reporter showed up with a gun instead of a pencil. There were six more agents aboard to keep an eye on everyone, even the uniformed crewmen, and a platoon of them standing by in each of the two destination cities, along with a huge collection of local cops. At Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, the fuel truck was already under USSS guard, lest someone contaminate the JP to go into the presidential aircraft; it would remain so until well
after
the 747 returned to Andrews. A C-5B Galaxy transport was already in Indianapolis, having ferried the presidential automobiles there. Moving the President around was rather like transporting the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus, except people generally didn’t worry about people trying to assassinate the man on the flying trapeze.

Ryan, Agent Price saw, was going over his speech. That was one of his few normal acts. They were almost always nervous about speeches—generally not so much stage fright as concern for the content spin. The thought made Price smile. Ryan wasn’t worried about the content, but was worried about blowing the delivery. Well, he’d learn, and his good fortune was that Callie Weston, administrative pain in the ass that she was, wrote one hell of a speech.

“Breakfast?” a steward asked now that the aircraft was leveled off. The President shook his head.

“Not hungry, thanks.”

“Get him ham and eggs, toast, and decaf,” van Damm ordered.

“Never try to give a speech on an empty stomach,” Callie advised. “Trust me.”

“And not too much real coffee. Caffeine can make you jumpy. When a President gives a speech,” Arnie explained for this morning’s lesson, “he’s—Callie, help me out here?”

“Nothing dramatic for these two today. You’re the smart neighbor coming over because the guy next door wants your advice on something he’s been thinking about. Friendly. Reasonable. Quiet. ‘Gee, Fred, I really think you might want to do it this way,’ ” Weston explained with raised eyebrows.

“Kindly family doctor telling a guy to go easy on the greasy food and maybe play an extra round of golf—exercise is supposed to be fun, that sort of thing,” the chief of staff explained on. “You do it all the time in real life.”

“Just do it this morning in front of four thousand people, right?” Ryan asked.

“And C-SPAN cameras, and it’ll be on all the evening network news broadcasts—”

“CNN will be doing it live, too, ’cuz it’s your first speech out in the country,” Callie added. No sense lying to the man.

Jesus. Jack looked back down at the text of his speech. “You’re right, Arnie. Better decaf.” He looked up suddenly. “Any smokers aboard?”

It was the way he asked it that made the Air Force steward turn. “Want one, sir?”

The answer was somewhat shameful, but—“Yes.”

She handed him a Virginia Slim and lit it with a warm smile. It wasn’t every day one got a chance to provide so personal a service to the Commander-in-Chief. Ryan took a puff and looked up.

“If you tell my wife, Sergeant—”

“Our secret, sir.” She disappeared aft to get breakfast, her day already made.

THE FLUID WAS surprisingly horrid in color, deep scarlet with a hint of brown. They’d monitored the process with small samples under an electron microscope. The monkey kidneys exposed to the infected blood were composed of discrete and highly specialized cells, and for whatever reason, Ebola loved those cells as a glutton loves his chocolate mousse. It had been both fascinating and horrifying to watch. The micron-sized virus strands touched the cells, penetrated them—and started to replicate in the warm, rich biosphere. It was like something from a science-fiction movie, but quite real. This virus, like all the others, was only equivocally alive. It could act only with help, and that help had to come from its host, which by providing the means for the virus to activate, also conspired at its own death. The Ebola strands contained only RNA, and for mitosis to take place, both RNA and DNA are required. The kidney cells had both, the virus strands sought them out, and when they were joined, the Ebola started to reproduce. To do that required energy, and that energy was supplied by the kidney cells, which were, of course, completely destroyed in the process. The multiplication process was a microcosm of the disease process in a human community. It started slowly, then accelerated geometrically—the faster it went, the faster it went: 2-4-16-256-65,536—until all of the nutrients were eaten up and only virus strands remained, then went dormant and awaited their next opportunity. People applied all manner of false images to disease. It would lie in wait for its chance; it would kill without mercy; it would seek out victims. All of that was anthropomorphic rubbish, Moudi and his colleague knew. It didn’t think. It didn’t do anything overly malevolent. All Ebola did was to eat and reproduce and go back to its dormant state. But as a computer is only a collection of electrical switches which can only distinguish between the numerals 1 and 0—but does so more rapidly and efficiently than its human users—so Ebola was supremely well adapted to reproduce so rapidly that the human body’s immune system, ordinarily a ruthlessly effective defense mechanism, was simply overwhelmed, as though by an army of carnivorous ants. In that lay Ebola’s historic weakness. It was
too
efficient. It killed
too
fast. Its survival mechanism within the human host also tended to kill the host before it could pass the disease along. It was also super-adapted to a specific ecosystem. Ebola didn’t survive long in the open, and only then in a jungle environment. For this reason, and since it could not survive in a human host without killing that host in ten days or less, it had also evolved slowly—without taking the next evolutionary step of becoming airborne.

Or so everyone thought. Perhaps “hoped” would be a better word, Moudi reflected. An Ebola variant that could be spread by aerosol would be catastrophically deadly. It was possible they had exactly that. This was the Mayinga strain, as repeated microscopy had established, and that strain was suspected to be capable of aerosol transmission, and that was what they had to prove.