Lost Immunity

by Daniel Kalla

  Peter’s fingertips blanch as he presses them against the wood. “That cannot happen, Nathan.”

  “How do we stop it?”

  “What evidence do they have?”

  Nathan shrugs.

  “Exactly. They’ve got nothing.”

  Nathan eyes the CEO for a long moment. “Those ‘spies’ you mentioned last time we spoke. What do they know about the website?”

  “They only watch, Nathan.” Peter’s lips break into a sly smile. “But there’s little they don’t see.”

  Nathan’s stomach churns at the veiled threat. “I should probably go back to Seattle,” he says.

  “What for?”

  “Not fair to leave Fiona there alone to deal with all of this,” Nathan says, but mainly he wants to get as far away from the office—and Peter—as possible. “She tells me that Public Health has confiscated a bunch of samples of Neissovax to analyze themselves.”

  “What will they find in them, Nathan?”

  “The same thing we did. The vaccine is pure.”

  “Hmm.”

  “They’ve also asked us to keep the entire supply in the warehouse there.”

  “More evidence?”

  “No idea. Lisa is leaving us in the dark now.”

  “Then what’s the point of you going back?”

  Nathan wonders the same. He cannot believe how much has changed in a single day. Yesterday, he thought Lisa was destined to become his lover. Now she threatens to be his undoing. And yet he still wants to see her again. “Maybe Lisa will confide in me. Maybe I can convince her in person.”

  “And maybe she won’t, and maybe you can’t.”

  “Something tells me we haven’t seen the end of this yet.”

  “What more could there be?”

  Nathan shakes his head. “Not sure.”

  Peter studies his fingers for a long moment. “Fine. Go to Seattle. See what you can sort out.”

  Nathan rises to his feet.

  “I’ve always liked you,” Peter says. “You know that, right?”

  Nathan nods once.

  “I suppose I’ve always seen a bit of my younger self in you.”

  There was a time when Nathan might have taken that as a compliment. Not today.

  “But, Nathan, this company comes before anything or anyone.” Peter’s tone is frigid. “I hope you understand that.”

  Only too well.

  CHAPTER 54

  Lisa struggles to get through the morning’s Outbreak Control Team meeting on day fourteen of the epidemic. Not only because of poor sleep. Her thoughts drift and dart in multiple directions, and she feels guilty for withholding the news of the poisoned vaccine from the rest of the committee. But the FBI agents were adamant about the need for secrecy, and with good reason.

  Had Angela shown up, Lisa knows she wouldn’t have been able to keep that bombshell to herself. But Angela’s chair remains empty throughout the meeting. Lisa tries not to assume the worst about her friend, but it’s difficult, particularly in light of all the depressing developments about the worsening spread of meningitis. In total, thirty-one people have already died—thirty-two, including Darius—the oldest of whom was only thirty-six years old. With the infection raging in four distinct geographical clusters across the city, Seattle’s death toll is poised to eclipse Iceland’s. Even more frustrating, two of the recently hospitalized victims had chosen not to take the prophylactic antibiotics that they were given, despite the warnings.

  We won’t be able to control this without restarting the Neissovax campaign! Lisa wants to scream, but she says little during the meeting.

  She is just sitting down back at her desk when her phone rings. She answers and a familiar voice says, “Lisa, hello, it’s Edwin Davis from Harborview ICU.”

  “Oh, hi, Edwin.”

  “I get it,” he says with a sad chuckle. “At this point, I wouldn’t want to hear from me, either.”

  “You’ve got new patients from the outbreak?”

  “Indirectly, I suppose.”

  “How so?”

  “I admitted another patient with a severe vaccine reaction. Thought you’d want to hear.”

  “I do.” Lisa’s heart sinks. “Stevens-Johnson?”

  “More like toxic epidermal necrolysis. The poor girl is covered from head to toe in blisters.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Her name is Brooke Hogarth. Nineteen years old.”

  Lisa jots the name on the notepad by her phone. “Do we know when Brooke got her vaccine? And at which clinic?”

  “Two or three days ago, but I’ll have to get back to you about the where.”

  “Never mind. I’ll be able to figure it out on my end.” She takes a slow breath. “Is Brooke going to make it?”

  “Her blood pressure is very soft, and she swelled up like the Michelin Man.” He clicks his tongue. “But yeah, my gut tells me she’ll pull through.”

  “That’s something,” Lisa says with relief. “I hear Mateo is slowly recovering, as well.”

  “He is. Very slowly.” Edwin exhales. “Lisa, these are two of the worst rashes I’ve ever seen.”

  “You don’t have to convince me.”

  “But they’re still not half as bad as the meningitis cases we’ve been wrestling with.”

  “No doubt.” The new reports of critically ill kids don’t affect Lisa as much as they did only the week before. Part of her worries she might be running out of capacity for more pity. “OK, Edwin, please keep me posted.”

  “Will do.”

  Lisa is about to hang up when she’s hit by an afterthought. “Can you save a sample of Brooke’s urine?”

  “Her urine?”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  “All right.”

  Lisa thanks him. As soon as she disconnects, she searches the vaccine database for the clinic where Brooke was inoculated. Her hope that it was one of the two clinics the other three victims attended are soon dashed. Brooke was vaccinated two days after Mateo.

  Lisa calls the toxicology lab and tracks down Jimmy. “Perfect timing, Lisa,” the toxicologist chirps. “I was just about to call you.”

  “There’s been another critical reaction,” she says.

  “Oh? Do tell.”

  “The patient’s in the ICU. If I can get you a sample of her urine, can you test it for the same medications you found in the syringe?”

  “Definitely,” he says enthusiastically. “Nothing better for concentrating toxins than the old kidneys. If she got the tainted vaccine, we should be able to isolate most of the same contaminants in her urine that we found in the other syringes.”

  “Syringes?” Lisa gasps. “As in plural?”

  “That’s what I wanted to tell you,” Jimmy says. “So far, we’ve run through about eighty of those used syringes. We were only able to extract enough of a sample to test about half. But among those, two more syringes have tested positive for the same six toxins we found in the first one.”

  Lisa goes cold. “One in twenty, then?”

  “Roughly, yeah.”

  She thinks aloud. “So the toxins weren’t in the entire batch of vaccine.”

  “Which fits with the rest of the picture. We’ve run screens on vials from every one of the unopened batches of vaccine you sent over. None of them are contaminated.”

  “Whoever’s been poisoning them was doing it one vial at a time.”

  “That, or one syringe at a time,” Jimmy cautions.

  “And either the poisoner was tainting the doses at the clinic, or he or she was sneaking in tainted vials and substituting them for legitimate ones.”

  “The logistics of smuggling them in seems way easier than tampering with them on-site.”

  “I agree,” Lisa says. “There’d be too many eyes on him or her inside the clinic.”

  “Probably.”

  Lisa considers the situation for another moment. “There were four hundred people inoculated, give or take, at Mateo’s clinic. And so far,
Mateo is the only one who’s had a major reaction.” She makes the calculation in her head. “If one in twenty doses were tampered with, that would mean that about twenty of the vaccines were poisoned at the clinic.”

  “Does that math add up?” Jimmy asks.

  “I think it does. No matter how many different medications you contaminated a vaccine with, only a fraction of those inoculated are going to go on to develop a life-threatening immune-mediated skin reaction.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jimmy concurs. “That’s logical.”

  “We now have four confirmed skin eruptions out of six thousand people vaccinated.”

  “And if we’re assuming that one in twenty of the doses were poisoned…”

  “Up to three hundred people might have been poisoned,” she says with a chill.

  “How long after exposure might these people still react?”

  “A week or two, probably,” she says. “But they would be at highest risk in the first few days after inoculation.”

  “Holy! So a bunch more kids could still get sick?”

  “Yeah,” Lisa says just as Tyra walks into her office and closes the door. “Thanks, Jimmy, for everything. I’ll make sure we send over that urine sample today.”

  She hangs up the phone and immediately says to Tyra, “We have another vaccine reaction. And more poisoned doses. Potentially lots of them.” She walks Tyra through the estimates, and then asks, “Do you know how many nurses worked at the clinic Mateo attended?”

  “Ten,” Tyra says. “But they worked in pairs. Each giving half the shots.”

  “Four hundred patients divided among ten nurses, means each one of them gave forty shots, give or take,” Lisa thinks aloud.

  Tyra’s eyes narrow. “So, theoretically, one nurse could easily have administered all twenty poisoned vaccines at each clinic.”

  “One of our own? I can’t wrap my head around that.”

  Tyra eyes her steadily. “I cross-referenced the two clinics involved. I emailed you the list.”

  “How many nurses worked both clinics?”

  “Eight in total. All of whom have been with us for at least a year. Three of them more than ten.”

  “We can narrow it down even further, once we throw in the clinic the latest victim attended.”

  “That might not be necessary,” Tyra says, wiggling a finger at Lisa’s computer screen. “I emailed you an article.”

  “An article?”

  “Yeah. It was written by one of the boyfriends of the eight nurses in question. Open it.”

  Lisa clicks on Tyra’s most recent email and opens the attached hyperlink. Her screen fills with a blog post titled “Light Finally Shone on Vaccine Genocide.”

  Just as Lisa opens her mouth to ask which nurse, the author’s name catches her eye: “Dr. Max Balfour, ND.”

  CHAPTER 55

  “Do you mind closing the door?” Lisa asks Yolanda as she steps into her office.

  Yolanda is as nervous as she is excited. She’s always liked Lisa’s easygoing and informal style, but she’s never been called into her office before. And Tyra’s presence reinforces how important the meeting must be.

  “Please, sit,” Lisa says with a welcoming smile.

  Yolanda lowers herself into the chair beside Tyra, flattening the hem of her dress to ensure it doesn’t ride up or lie funny.

  “Thanks for coming, Yolanda,” Tyra says.

  Their smiles are almost too bright for this early in the morning. Yolanda’s discomfort rises. She doesn’t know what to say, so she just nods.

  “You’ve been putting in a lot of long hours at the vaccination clinics,” Lisa says. “Thank you for your dedication.”

  “No more than anyone else on the team,” Yolanda mumbles. “And now that we’ve suspended the program…”

  “It’s been a moving target for all of us,” Lisa says sympathetically.

  “We’re considering relaunching the campaign, Yolanda,” Tyra says.

  “With Neissovax? After all that’s happened? With the rashes and all?”

  Nothing is decided,” Lisa says. “But since you’ve worked so many of those clinics, we wanted to get your impression.”

  “My impression?”

  “Yeah, like a debrief,” Tyra says. “How’d you find them compared to any of the other vaccine clinics you’ve run in the past.”

  Relaxing slightly, Yolanda considers the question. “They’re different.”

  “How so?”

  “You know, with those very detailed consent forms. All the questions from the families. And the staff from the drug company… observing over your shoulder. To be honest, it’s kind of intimidating.”

  “Like you’re being watched all the time?”

  “Exactly.” Yolanda giggles. “Like being in a fishbowl.”

  “But it’s only our own staff who handle the vials, right?” Lisa says. “I mean once they’re open.”

  Yolanda eyes her swiftly, alarmed again. Lisa should know all of this. “Yeah, just the nurses. We crack the vials, draw up the doses, and give the shots.”

  “So they’d never be out of your sight between opening the vials and disposing the syringes into the sharps container?”

  “Never.”

  Tyra gives Yolanda’s arm a reassuring squeeze. “After what’s happened, we’re just covering all our bases, Yolanda. You understand? We’ll be debriefing everyone on the team.”

  Lisa smiles again. “Before we even consider relaunching the campaign.”

  “So aside from the fishbowl thing,” Tyra says. “You never saw anything else that concerned you about the clinics?”

  “Honestly, no,” Yolanda says. “After a couple of days, we were really getting the hang of them. The flow was good. I thought we were really efficient.”

  “We did, too,” Lisa says.

  Tyra nods. “Proud of you all.”

  “Thanks for this feedback,” Lisa says. “And if anything else occurs to you, please let us know.”

  “Will do,” Yolanda says, confused but also relieved that the interview is ending.

  As Yolanda begins to stand up, Tyra asks, “You’re still with Max, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Things good? Haven’t heard you mention him in a while.”

  “Absolutely,” Yolanda says, although she hasn’t spoken to Max in almost two days. Not since their heated discussion at her condo. He didn’t reply to her phone calls or respond to the multiple texts that she can’t stop herself from continuing to send.

  Tyra seems to pick up on her doubt. “Can’t always be easy, huh?”

  “Are relationships ever easy?” Yolanda asks with a nervous laugh.

  “True enough.” Tyra laughs, too. “Although, after twenty years, I finally got my husband trained. Almost, anyway.”

  Uncertain how to respond, Yolanda only nods.

  “We hear that Max has some pretty strong views on vaccines,” Lisa says.

  Yolanda freezes. She’s always been embarrassed to discuss his anti-vax position at work and has only ever mentioned it to her closest friends on the team, Katerina and Stacy. “Yeah. At first, we argued a lot over that. Tried to persuade each other. Nowadays, we mainly agree to disagree.”

  “I bet,” Lisa says. “I see Max has become a bit of a spokesperson for the anti-vax movement. He publishes a lot online. I’ve even heard him on the radio.”

  I knew this would get back to me! “I’m not proud of his views or anything. And it doesn’t affect my work at all. Not at all.”

  “It’s your own business.” Lisa extends a hand in her direction. “One hundred percent!”

  “But Max has taken an interest in Neissovax, hasn’t he?” Tyra says.

  “He’s obsessed with all vaccines,” Yolanda blurts.

  “I got that feeling when I ran into him at one of our clinics,” Lisa says.

  Yolanda gawks at her. “Ran into him?”

  “He told me he was considering getting his son vaccinated. Said he want
ed to check the clinic out for himself.”

  “Does that sound like something he’d do?” Tyra asks.

  Not in a million years! “It would kind of surprise me,” Yolanda says.

  “Why do you think Max went, then?”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “It’s not possible he was spying on the clinics, is it?”

  “Spying? No, he wouldn’t.”

  “But Max wanted to know all about Neissovax, didn’t he?”

  “I guess. He’s so focused on his cause and all.”

  Lisa nods, her expression understanding. “What sort of questions did he ask?”

  “I don’t know,” Yolanda says, trying to tamp down her rising panic. “Like about the clinics and how well attended they are.”

  “And how you run them?”

  “Maybe. He just seemed super curious about everything.”

  “Did Max ever ask you to bring vials home for him?” Tyra asks.

  Yolanda feels her jaw drop. “I… I’d never!”

  “What is it, Yolanda?” Lisa asks, sensing Tyra’s hit on something.

  “He kept pestering me to show him what the vaccine looked like.”

  “You mean the vials?”

  Yolanda can’t make eye contact with either of them. Chin down, she nods slightly.

  “And did you?” Lisa asks.

  “I… I took a few photos on my phone,” she mumbles. “And I sent him those.”

  CHAPTER 56

  Nathan finds Fiona in front of her computer in her cubicle in the warehouse, her face as blank as the screen, her gaze miles away.

  “I came directly from the airport,” he says, pulling her out of her trance. “What’s going on?”

  “Not here.” Fiona motions to the gaping space above the temporary walls. “Let’s take a walk.”

  “OK.”

  She calls a car on her ride-share app, and they head out to meet it. As they pass the bank of refrigerators lining the near wall, Nathan asks, “Still full?”

  “Sixty thousand doses.”

  He shakes his head. “To think, only a few days ago we were worried about running out.”