Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (237 page)

“HELLO, I’M CALLING for Dr. Ian MacGregor.”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“This is Dr. Lorenz at CDC Atlanta.”

“Wait, please.”

Gus had to wait for two minutes, by his watch, long enough to light his pipe and open a window. The younger staffers occasionally chided him about the habit, but he didn’t inhale, and it was good for thinking ...

“This is Dr. MacGregor,” a young voice said.

“This is Gus Lorenz in Atlanta.”

“Oh! How do you do, Professor?”

“How are your patients doing?” Lorenz asked from seven time zones away. He liked the sound of MacGregor, clearly working a little late. The good ones did a lot of that.

“The male patient isn’t doing well at all, I’m afraid. The child, however, is recovering nicely.”

“Indeed? Well, we examined the specimens you sent. Both contained the Ebola virus, Mayinga sub-strain.”

“You’re quite certain?” the younger man asked.

“No doubt about it, Doctor. I ran the tests myself.”

“I was afraid of that. I sent another set to Paris, but they haven’t got back to me yet.”

“I need to know a few things.” On his end of the line, Lorenz had a pad out. “Tell me more about your patients.”

“There’s a problem with that, Professor Lorenz,” MacGregor had to say. He didn’t know if the line might be bugged, but in a country like Sudan, it was not something he could discount. On the other hand, he had to say something, and so he started picking his way through the facts he could disclose.

“I SAW YOU on TV last night.” Dr. Alexandre had decided to see Cathy Ryan at lunch again for that very reason. He’d taken a liking to her. Who would have expected an eye cutter and laser jockey (for Alex, these were more mechanical specialties than the true medicine he practiced-even that profession had its rivalries, and he felt that way about almost all surgical specialties) to take an interest in genetics? Besides, she probably needed a friendly voice.

“That’s nice,” Caroline Ryan replied, looking down at her chicken salad as he took his seat. The bodyguard, Alexandre saw, merely looked unhappily tense.

“You did okay.”

“Think so?” She looked up, saying evenly: “I wanted to rip his face off.”

“Well, that didn’t quite come across. You were pretty supportive of your husband. You came across smart.”

“What is it with reporters? I mean, why—”

Alex smiled. “Doctor, when a dog urinates on a fire hydrant, he’s not committing vandalism. He’s just being a dog.” Roy Altman nearly choked on his drink.

“Neither one of us ever wanted this, you know?” she said, still unhappy enough to miss the jibe.

Professor Alexandre held his hands up in mock surrender. “Been there, done that, ma‘am. Hey, I never wanted to join the Army. They drafted me right out of med school. It turned out all right, making colonel and all. I found an interesting field to keep the brain busy, and it pays the bills, y’know?”

“
I
don’t get paid for this abuse!” Cathy objected, albeit with a smile.

“And your husband doesn’t get paid enough,” Alex added.

“He never has. Sometimes I wonder why he doesn’t just do the job for free, turn the checks back in, just to make the point that he’s worth more than they pay him.”

“You think he would have made a good doc?”

Her eyes brightened. “I’ve told him that. Jack would have been a surgeon, I think—no, maybe something else, like what you’re in. He’s always liked poking around and figuring things out.”

“And saying what he thinks.”

That almost started a laugh. “Always!”

“Well, guess what? He comes across as a good guy. I’ve never met him, but I liked what I saw. Sure as hell he’s no politician, and maybe that’s not a bad thing once in a while. You want to lighten up a little, Doctor? What’s the worst thing that can happen? He leaves the job, goes back to whatever he wants to do—teaching, I guess from what he said—and you’re still a doc with a Lasker on the wall.”

“The worst thing that can happen—”

“You have Mr. Altman here to take care of that, don’t you?” Alexandre looked him over. “I imagine you’re big enough to stand in the way of the bullet.” The Secret Service agent didn’t reply, but his look at Alex told the tale. Yes, he’d stop one for his principal. “You guys can’t talk about this sort of thing, can you?”

“Yes, sir, we can, if you ask.” Altman had wanted to say this all day. He’d seen the TV special, too, and as had often happened before, there was light talk in the Detail this morning about popping a cap on the reporter in question. The Secret Service had a fantasy life, too. “Dr. Ryan, we like your family a lot, and I’m not just saying that to be polite, okay? We don’t always like our principals. But we like all of you.”

“Hey, Cathy.” It was Dean James, passing by with a smile and a wave.

“Hi, Dave.” Then she noted a few waves from faculty friends. So, she wasn’t as alone as she thought.

“Okay, Cathy, are you married to James Bond or what?” In a different context the question might have set her off, but Alexandre’s Creole eyes were twinkling at her.

“I know a little. I got briefed in on some of it when President Durling asked Jack to be Vice President, but I can’t—”

He held up his hand. “I know. I still have a security clearance because I still drive up to Fort Detrick once in a while.”

“It isn’t like the movies. You don’t do stuff like that and have a drink, kiss the girl, and drive away. He used to have nightmares and I—well, I’d hug him in his sleep and usually that calmed him down, then when he wakes up, he pretends it never happened at all. I know some of it, not all. When we were in Moscow last year, a Russian comes up and says that he had a gun to Jack’s head once”—Altman’s head turned at that one—“but he said it like a joke or something, then he said the gun wasn’t loaded. Then we had dinner together, like we were pals or something, and I met his wife—pediatrician, would you believe it? She’s a doc and her husband is the head Russian spy and—”

“It does sound a little far-fetched,” Dr. Alexandre agreed with a judiciously raised eyebrow, and then a real laugh happened on the other side of the table.

“It’s all so crazy,” she concluded.

“You want crazy? We have two Ebola cases reported in Sudan.” Now that her mood had changed, he could talk about his problems.

“Funny place for that virus to turn up. Did they come in from Zaire?”

“Gus Lorenz is checking that out. I’m waiting for him to get back to me,” Professor Alexandre reported. “It can’t be a local outbreak.”

“Why’s that?” Altman asked.

“Worst possible environment,” Cathy explained, finally picking at her lunch. “Hot, dry, lots of direct sun. The UV from the sunlight kills it.”

“Like a flamethrower,” Alex agreed. “And no jungle for a host animal to live in.”

“Only two cases?” Cathy asked with a mouthful of salad. At least, Alexandre thought, he’d gotten her to eat. Yep, he still had a good bedside manner, even in a cafeteria.

He nodded. “Adult male and a little girl, that’s all I know right now. Gus is supposed to run the tests today, probably already has.”

“Damn, that’s a nasty little bug. And you still don’t know the host.”

“Twenty years of looking,” Alex confirmed. “Never found one sick animal—well, the host wouldn’t be sick, but you know what I mean.”

“Like a criminal case, eh?” Altman asked. “Poking around for physical evidence?”

“Pretty much,” Alex agreed. “Just we’re trying to search a whole country, and we’ve never figured exactly what we’re looking for.”

DON RUSSELL WATCHED as the cots went out. After lunch—today it was ham-and-cheese sandwiches on wheat bread, glass of milk, and an apple—the kids all went down for their afternoon nap. An altogether good idea, all the adults thought. Mrs. Daggett was a superb organizer, and the kids all knew the routine. The beds came out of the storage room, and the kids knew their spaces. SANDBOX was getting along well with young Megan O’Day. Both usually dressed in Oshkosh B’gosh outfits decorated with flowers or bunnies—at least a third of the kids had them; it was a popular label. The only hard part was parading the children into the bathrooms so that no “accidents” happened during the naps - some happened anyway, but that was kids for you. It took fifteen minutes, less than before because two of his agents helped. Then the kids were all down in their cots, with their blankets and bears, and the lights went down. Mrs. Daggett and her helpers found chairs to sit in and books to read.

“SANDBOX is sleeping,” Russell said, stepping outside for some fresh air.

“Sounds like a winner,” the mobile team thought, sitting in the den of the house across the street. Their Chevy Suburban was parked in the family garage. There were three agents there, two of whom were always on watch, seated close to the window which faced Giant Steps. Probably playing cards, ever a good way to pass dead time. Every fifteen minutes—not quite regularly in case someone was watching—Russell or another of the crew would walk around the grounds. TV cameras kept track of traffic on Ritchie Highway. One of the inside people was always positioned to cover the doors in and out of the center. At the moment it was Marcella Hilton; young and pretty, she always had her purse with her. A special purse of a type made for female cops, it had a side pocket she could just reach into for her SigSauer 9mm automatic, and two spare magazines. She was letting her hair grow to something approaching hippie length (he’d had to tell her what a hippie was) to accentuate her “disguise.”

He still didn’t like it. The place was too easy to approach, too close to the highway with its heavy volume of traffic, and there was a parking lot within plain sight, a perfect spot for notional bad guys to do surveillance. At least reporters had been shooed away. On that one SURGEON had been ruthlessly direct. After an initial spate of stories about Katie Ryan and her friends, the foot had come down hard. Now visiting journalists who called were told, firmly but politely, to stay away. Those who came anyway had to talk to Russell, whose grandfatherly demeanor was saved for the children at Giant Steps. With adults he was simply intimidating, usually donning his Secret Service sunglasses, the better to appear like Schwarzenegger, who was shorter than he by a good three inches.

But his sub-detail had been cut down to six. Three directly on site, and three across the street. The latter trio had shoulder weapons, Uzi submachine guns and a scoped M-16. In another location, six would have been plenty, but not this one, he judged. Unfortunately, any more than that would have made this day-care center appear to be an armed camp, and President Ryan was having trouble enough.

“WHAT’S THE WORD. Gus?” Alexandre asked, back in his office before starting afternoon rounds. One of his AIDS patients had taken a bad turn, and Alex was trying to figure what to do about it.

“ID is confirmed. Ebola Mayinga, same as the two Zairean cases. The male patient isn’t going to make it, but the child is reportedly recovering nicely.”

“Oh? Good. What’s the difference in the cases?”

“Not sure, Alex,” Lorenz replied. “I don’t have much patient information, just first names, Saleh for the male and Sohaila for the child, ages and such.”

“Arabic names, right?” But Sudan was an Islamic country.

“I think so.”

“It would help to know what’s different about the cases.”

“I made that point. The attending physician is an Ian MacGregor, sounds pretty good, University of Edinburgh, I think he said. Anyway, he doesn’t know any differences between them. Neither has any idea how they were exposed. They appeared at the hospital at roughly the same time, in roughly the same shape. Initial presentation was as flu and/or jet lag, he said—”

“Travel from where, then?” Alexandre interrupted.

“I asked. He said he couldn’t say.”

“How come?”

“I asked that, too. He said he couldn’t say that, either, but that it had no apparent connection with the cases.” Lorenz’s tone indicated what he thought of that. Both men knew it had to be local politics, a real problem in Africa, especially with AIDS.

“Nothing more in Zaire?”

“Nothing,” Gus confirmed. “That one’s over. It’s a head-scratcher, Alex. Same disease turned up in two different places, two thousand miles apart, two cases each, two dead, one dying, one apparently recovering. MacGregor has initiated proper containment procedures at his hospital, and it sounds as though he knows his business.” You could almost hear the shrug over the phone.

What the Secret Service guy had said over lunch was right on target, Alexandre thought. It was more detective work than medicine, and this one didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, like some sort of serial-murder case with no clues. Entertaining in book form, maybe, but not in reality.

“Okay, what do we know?”

“We know that Mayinga strain is alive and kicking. Visual inspection is identical. We’re running some analysis on the proteins and sequences, but my gut says it’s a one-to-one match.”

“God damn, what’s the host, Gus? If we could only find that!”

“Thank you for that observation, Doctor.” Gus was annoyed—enraged—in the same way and for the same reason. But it was an old story for both of them. Well, the older man thought, it had taken a few thousand years to figure malaria out. They’d been playing with Ebola for only twenty-five or so. The bug had been around, probably, for at least that long, appearing and disappearing, just like a fictional serial killer. But Ebola didn’t have a brain, didn’t have a strategy, didn’t even move of its own accord. It was super-adapted to something very limited and exceedingly narrow. But they didn’t know what. “It’s enough to drive a man to drink, isn’t it?”

“I imagine a stiff shot of bourbon will kill it, too, Gus. I have patients to see.”

“How do you like regular clinical rounds, Alex?” Lorenz missed them, too.

“Good to be a real doc again. I just wish my patients had a little more hope. But that’s the job, ain’t it?”

“I’ll fax you data on the structural analysis on the samples if you want. The good news is that it seems pretty well contained,” Lorenz repeated.