Plague: A gripping suspense thriller about an incurable outbreak in Miami

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Mr. Gaines?’ persisted Mr. Gross.

  ‘Very well,’ said Herbert, and opened the security locks. He turned away from the door, haughtily winding himself in his long black kimono, as Jack Gross stepped inside.

  Jack Gross respectfully removed his hat, and peered into the stale, unventilated gloom. ‘I’ve never been in Concorde Tower before. Quite a place you have here.’

  ‘It’s adequate,’ said Herbert. ‘I trust you don’t mind if I finish preparing my breakfast.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Jack Gross, affably. ‘You just go right ahead.’

  Herbert Gaines shuffled back into the kitchen and picked up his slicing knife. Jack Gross followed him, peeping as discreetly as he could into bedrooms and down corridors.

  Herbert sliced vegetables while Jack Gross perched himself on a kitchen stool, balanced his hat on his knee, and started to talk. Gross spoke directly and fast, but his eyes flickered around the room as he talked, taking in the authentic antiques, the genuine butcher’s table and the expensive built-in ovens and ranges. Even the view through the kitchen window, a misty panorama of Gabriels Park and downtown Manhattan, was worth more money than most people ever accumulated in their whole lives.

  ‘Mr. Gaines,’ he said, in his brusque, cheerful voice, ‘you’re still something of a hero to most people.’

  Herbert looked at him balefully. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? Down in Atlanta, people still stand up in the movies and cheer at Captain Dashfoot. A thirty-year-old picture, and they cheer.’

  Jack Gross kept smiling. ‘We know that. That’s why I’ve come around to see you this morning.’

  ‘Well, fire away, Mr. Gross. I may look as if I’m fixing breakfast, but I assure you that I’m agog.’

  Jack Gross said, ‘Thank you.’ Then he fixed his smile into a serious, sincere expression and continued, ‘It’s a question of public sympathy, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘No. Spell it out for me.’

  ‘Well, it’s like this. A politician and an actor have got more in common that most people would like to think. Look at Ronald Reagan. Look at Shirley Temple Black. They didn’t have to go through the hard graft of building themselves a sympathetic image in the public eye because they had it already, through movies. All they had to do was convince the public that they were serious, identify themselves with a clear-cut political line, and they were made.’

  Herbert Gaines dropped peppers, tomatoes, celeriac and sliced apple into his blender. ‘Are you trying to suggest something, Mr. Gross?’

  Jack Gross smiled warmly. ‘My people are, Mr. Gaines.’

  ‘And who, exactly, are your people?’

  Jack Gross looked almost embarrassed. ‘Well, Mr. Gaines, let’s say that my people are political realists. They come mainly from the staunch right wing of the Republican party, and also from industry and finance. They’re not, though, what you’d call the old guard. I guess the easiest way of describing us would be to say that we are the young, committed right.’

  Herbert Gaines raised an eyebrow. ‘How right?’ he asked. ‘Right of Ford?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘In other words,’ Herbert said, ‘you’re the Green Berets of the Grand Old Party?’

  Jack Gross grinned. ‘You could say that, Mr. Gaines. That’s a nice turn of phrase.’

  Herbert Gaines left his blender and moved closer to Jack Gross.

  ‘Mr. Gross,’ he said steadily, ‘I’ve been a Republican all my voting life. I used to go around with pals of Duke Wayne, and I’ve come out now and again and said my piece about pinko thinking and moral standards. I have letters of admiration from the Daughters of the American Revolution, and I contribute to veterans’ charities and several other conservative causes.’

  Jack Gross didn’t flinch. ‘We know all that, Mr. Gaines. We have a dossier.’

  Herbert Gaines stood straight, and nodded. ‘I’m sure you do, Mr. Gross. But there is one thing that your dossier obviously omits to mention.’

  ‘What’s that, Mr. Gaines?’

  ‘I am not a politician, Mr. Gross, and I never want to be. I have a patriotic duty to my country, but I also have a private and personal duty to my art.’

  ‘Your art?’

  Herbert Gaines lifted his gaunt, withered head.

  ‘Yes, Mr. Gross, my art. I am – I was – one of the finest movie actors that ever crossed the screen. I made two pictures and both pictures are classics. Even today, after three decades, people still applaud out loud when they see them. Mr. Gross, I have an abiding duty to those people. It is my task in life to make sure that those magical images I created in my youth stay fresh. If I come out now, like a skeleton out of a closet, and try to whip up political support on the strength of those images, my whole life’s achievement would be destroyed. Who could ever look at Captain Dashfoot again, after seeing me, as I am today, talking about busing and housing and economic tariffs?’

  Jack Gross still smiled. ‘Mr. Gaines,’ he said gently, ‘we don’t want you to talk about anything like that. We want you to talk about plague.’

  Herbert Gaines frowned. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Plague, Mr. Gaines. The ancient scourge of nations. The Black Death.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Have you heard the news?’

  ‘I haven’t had breakfast yet, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Well,’ Jack Gross explained, ‘there’s a serious epidemic down in Florida. The government and the press have been keeping it tightly under wraps, saying it’s an isolated outbreak of swine ‘flu, but we know better. It’s a highly dangerous, highly virulent strain of plague. The whole of Miami is afflicted, and there’s talk of razing the whole city to the ground. It’s also broken out in Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Brunswick and Charleston.’

  ‘Is this some sort of joke?’

  Jack Gross shook his head. ‘It’s not a joke, Mr. Gaines. It’s the most disastrous result of this administration’s mismanagement we’ve ever experienced. The US Disease Control Center have failed to contain the outbreak, and the government is so terrified that they don’t know what to do next. They’re too frightened even to tell the nation what’s really going on.’

  ‘But—’

  Jack Gross raised his hand. ‘It’s the chance my people have been waiting for, Mr. Gaines. It’s the chance to show up these weak-kneed liberals for what they really are. It’s the chance to make the GOP a pure and concerted and effective machine again.’

  Herbert Gaines ran his hand through his white hair. ‘And you want me to help you? Is that it?’

  ‘We want you as our figurehead. Captain Dashfoot to the rescue.’

  Herbert Gaines found himself a kitchen stool and sat down. He was thoughtful and grim-faced.

  ‘Mr. Gross,’ he asked, after a few moments, ‘is this epidemic really serious?’

  Jack Gross nodded. ‘As far as we can tell, between six and seven thousand people are dead, and many more are dying.’

  Herbert Gaines looked up. ‘So there must be great fear and panic in those places? In Florida and Georgia?’

  ‘There is. The police and the National Guard have cordoned off the Florida state line, as far as they can. And no one, but no one, is allowed out.’

  Herbert Gaines got up from his stool and walked across to the kitchen window. He stared out at Gabriels Park for a while, then he said, ‘Mr. Gross, you’re asking me to do something that conflicts with my sensitivities.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Gaines. I don’t get you.’

  The old movie actor turned around. ‘If there’s an epidemic in the south, and people are dying, then the last thing I want to do is make political capital out of it. It’s against my nature to advance myself through the fear and suffering of others. I have made terrible personal mistakes in my life, Mr. Gross, and I have been fortunate or unfortunate enough not to have been punished for them. I don’t intend to add callousness and exploitation to my list of sins.’

  Jack Gross
smiled. ‘Well, I understand your objections. But there’s no reason why they should stand in your way. You have to see this thing in its historical context. A chance like this may never happen again.’

  ‘A chance like what? A chance to put the squeeze on the public’s uncertainty and fear? A chance to sweep into power on a tide of dead bodies? I’m not interested, Mr. Gross.’

  Jack Gross sighed. ‘I really think you’re being oversensitive, Mr. Gaines.’

  Herbert returned to his blender, and mixed his vegetables into a reddish-green froth. He poured the juice into a tall glass of crushed ice, and sipped it. He didn’t look at Jack Gross, and was obviously waiting for him to go.

  Jack Gross stared at the floor. ‘I didn’t want to do this, Mr. Gaines,’ he said softly.

  Herbert Gaines patted his lips with a Kleenex. ‘Do what?’ he said impatiently.

  ‘Exert pressure.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ said Herbert Gaines. ‘What possible pressure could you exert on me?’

  Jack Gross shrugged, still staring at the floor. ‘There’s always Nicky,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Jack Gross was silent. He just smiled.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Herbert snapped.

  Jack Gross looked up. ‘I mean that our patriotic duty sometimes has to come before our personal opinions – and that it always has to come before our personal pleasures.’

  ‘Is that a threat? By God, you’d better not threaten me, Mr. Jack Gross.’

  Jack Gross took his hat off his knee and parked it neatly on his head.

  ‘I’ll make myself plain, Mr. Gaines. We need you, and we need you now. If you don’t oblige us with your assistance, then some friends of ours will have to pay you a visit. Those friends of ours come from Chicago, Mr. Gaines, where the stockyards are, and they’ve had a lifetime of experience with stud bulls like Nicky. When those stud bulls won’t behave, they take their stockman’s knives, the sharp ones with the hooked blades, and they castrate them.’

  Jack Gross said all this with the same radiant smile on his face with which he had first walked in. At the kitchen door, he turned and said, ‘Think about it, Mr. Gaines. I’ll be in touch.’

  Then he let himself out of the apartment, and closed the door behind him.

  Herbert Gaines, pale-faced, went slowly into the bedroom, and stared for a long while at Nicky, sleeping peacefully on the satin sheets. ‘Oh, God…’ he murmured, with a shiver and went back into the living-room to find the brandy.

  *

  At two-thirty, just before the court hearing Glantz vs Forward went back for its afternoon session, the news finally hit the streets that Florida and parts of Georgia were stricken with plague.

  The New York Post brought out a special edition with a front-page photograph of Miami’s ruined Civic Center, and a banner headline saying SUPER-PLAGUE SWEEPS SOUTH, THOUSANDS DIE. A kind of nervous ripple went through the city, and the lunchtime bars stayed crowded until well after three as New Yorkers watched the special half-hourly TV reports on the effects of the epidemic.

  The President, looking tired but, trying to sound optimistic, explained in a special interview that ‘everything humanly possible has been done to contain the outbreak.’ He announced that the entire state of Florida was quarantined until further notice, and that ocean bathing was prohibited all the way from Cape Fear to Key West.

  ‘It appears on first examination that a possible source of the plague bacillus is pollution of the ocean by raw sewage, although where this sewage is coming from, and how such an unusual and virulent bacillus could have developed within it, are still mysteries. This year’s unusual climatic conditions, in which the currents in the ocean are running counter-clockwise, may be a contributing factor.’

  The President wound up by saying that he intended to pray for the sick and the dying, and that the best medical brains in the country were working on antidotes.

  Ivor Glantz, sitting with his attorney Manny Friedman in a dark and busy Wall Street bar, watched the President fade from the TV screen next to the bottles of Jack Daniels, and shook his head.

  ‘You know what that means?’ he said seriously.

  ‘Sure,’ said Manny Friedman, rustling impatiently through a sheaf of pink legal papers. ‘It means the end of civilization as we know it. Now, can we please go over these patents?’

  ‘It means,’ said Ivor, ‘that they haven’t yet found a way to cure it. If they could cure it, or contain it, they’d say so. But they can’t. You see what the paper says? “Super-plague”. Ordinary plague responds to sulfonamides or Haffkine antiserum, but this one evidently doesn’t.’

  ‘Ivor,’ interrupted Manny impatiently, ‘today is the most crucial day of all. Can we just concentrate on your bugs, and leave the President’s bugs alone?’

  Ivor checked his watch. ‘We’d better get back to court anyway. But I’d sure like to know a little more about this plague. Do you realize – this could be an entirely new disease? Some new strain of bacillus, totally unknown?’

  They collected their things together and went out into the humid afternoon street. Manny hailed a cab, and they drove through heavy traffic towards the court house. Ivor, sweating in his dark, too-tight suit, mopped his forehead with a clean handkerchief.

  The cab-driver, a big-nosed Czech in a cloth cap and horn-rimmed spectacles, was rapping about the plague.

  ‘If you ask me,’ he said, swerving imperturbably across three lanes of traffic, ‘if you ask me it’s the Soviets.’

  ‘How do you make that out?’ asked Ivor. ‘Are you a buddy of Kosygin?’

  The cab-driver laughed. ‘You gotta be kidding. If you ask me, the Soviets is responsible for half the troubles this country’s got. They bought our wheat, correct? Well, they bought our wheat so that they could trade good American grain for worthless roubles, right? I mean, what good’s a rouble to anyone? Grain – that’s different. You can offload a loaf of bread any place.’

  Ivor grinned. ‘You wouldn’t be Polish by any chance?’ he asked.

  ‘Am I hell,’ said the cab-driver.

  The courtroom, dusty and badly-lit, looked as if a burglar had just rifled it. Sheaves of paper spilled on to the floor, and volume after volume of legal books and evidence, files and clippings lay scattered all over the attorneys’ desks. It was the debris of a four-day hearing.

  Ivor Glantz and Manny Friedman pushed open the swing doors and went to their places. Across the court, a thin, blue-suited figure with a gray crewcut, Sergei Forward the Finnish-born bacteriologist, was consulting with his lawyer. He was a calm polite man with a meticulous accent and a way of leaning forward when he spoke, like a near-sighted stork investigating an appetizing grub. He didn’t look up when Glantz and Friedman came in.

  By three o’clock, the courtroom was filled. There was a high burble of conversation – more intense than this morning. News of the Florida plague had spread, and every science journal and bacteriological expert in the place was discussing it. To them, it was the hottest medical story in years.

  Esmeralda, severe and elegant in a pale pink 1930s suit, her curls tucked into a pink turban hat with a diamond brooch and a feather, came into the courtroom just before the judge. She sat down behind her stepfather, in a heady cloud of Chant d’Arômes, and touched his shoulder.

  ‘Have you heard about the plague?’ she whispered. ‘Isn’t that awful?’

  ‘I heard over lunch,’ Ivor whispered back. ‘I’m only guessing, but I’d say it’s even worse than they’re pretending.’

  ‘The Army have sealed off Pensacola and Mobile,’ said Esmeralda. ‘I just heard it on the car radio. They say that people are dying at the rate of two thousand a day.’

  At that moment. Judge Secombe came into the courtroom, and they all stood. When he had sat down and put on his spectacles, Sergei Forward’s attorney raised his hand to make an application.

  ‘My client respectfully wishes to apply for adjournment, your
honor. While he appreciates the serious consequences of this action for infringement of patent, he believes he can make a material contribution to the government research work to find an antidote for the plague that we now hear is threatening our southern states. Mr. Forward is sure that Mr. Glantz will not stand in his way in this crucial emergency, and he hopes that Mr. Glantz will perhaps also wish to join in the government research work.’

  Manny Friedman swore under his breath.

  ‘What does he mean,’ Ivor Glantz asked. ‘He can’t do this.’

  Manny Friedman said, ‘He can and he has. Unless you agree to an adjournment, you’re going to look like a self-centered schmuck who puts his own money-making before the good of America. He’s got you, right by the balls.’

  Ivor frowned. ‘But why does he want an adjournment? What for?’

  Manny shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me. Whatever he’s up to, I don’t like it.’

  Judge Secombe called for Manny Friedman’s attention. ‘Mr. Friedman,’ he said, ‘does your client have any strong feelings about an adjournment?’

  Manny Friedman stood up. ‘My client appreciates Mr. Forward’s devotion to public service, your honor, but does not regard an adjournment necessary. This action can only take one more day at most, and twenty-four hours is hardly likely to make any material difference to Mr. Forward’s research. Perhaps I can remind the bench that most of the great breakthroughs in bacteriology only came after years of intensive labor – including the process claimed by my client under this present action.’

  Sergei Forward’s attorney protested. ‘Your honor, we believe that twenty-four hours – even four hours – could be vital. This plague has infected an entire state in a week. People are dying right now, even as we speak.’

  Manny Friedman glanced down at Ivor Glantz, who shrugged helplessly. Then he looked at the press table, where reporters from The New York Times, The Daily News and Associated Press sat with their pens poised, eager for any story that would tie up with the plague. He could see the headlines now. ‘No Mercy Adjournment, Insists Litigating Scientist.’