White Plague

by James Abel

  The medicine worked both as cure and preventative. The protocol called for a six-day treatment, and after four weeks on base, when no new cases presented themselves, a few braver VIPs began touching down—the Secretary of Health and Human Services; the Vice President; a couple of senators from terrorism committees—making sure they were shown on TV addressing “our Arctic heroes.”

  On Thanksgiving we got a terrific meal, turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pies, donated by the State of New Mexico. The Discovery Channel featured stories about “the possible breakout of new viruses in the Arctic.”

  There also came gifts from around the country, so many that an entire Quonset hut was needed to contain the loot, including several hundred pairs of socks, four giant flat-screen TVs, a planeload of North Carolina barbeque from Wilmington, two hundred subscriptions to the beer-of-the-month club, dinners at restaurants in thirty-one states, and a smuggled-in package from Paramount Pictures offering a million-dollar contract for movie rights, just sign here and e-mail a copy back.

  Families arrived next, and “personal contacts.” There was a viewing area outside the fence, or in bad weather, relatives used the interview booths and spoke by microphone. Eddie’s wife and kids visited me. And my ex-wife, Nina, showed up when her hours with Pettit were over. I was surprised by it. It was a bittersweet session, lots of memories, but she seemed a figure from a long time ago, and I actually wished her and Pettit well.

  Among the visitors to the base was Karen Vleska’s boyfriend, who took up residence in a motel thirty-five miles away and commuted daily. Since he was a lawyer for Electric Boat, he was here to prepare a corporate response should any angry civil suits be filed by relatives of the dead. This was unlikely, we’d been assured, but he stayed on anyway. He seemed a caring, loving man. I watched Karen go off often, eagerly, to sit and talk with him, or take walks along the fence, he on one side, she on the other.

  I told myself she was lucky to have him. That she probably had all kinds of personal problems I’d discover if I got to know her better. That my feelings for her had been ratcheted up by danger, and that in normal day-to-day life, I’d probably lose interest in her fast.

  I hated the boyfriend being there.

  Meanwhile, the Spanish flu made headlines. The Washington Post ran a series reliving the horrible outbreak in 1918. The New York Times parked a science reporter at the CDC, and FOX-TV sent a crew to the North Slope of Alaska, after a scare in Wainright, a possible flu case which turned out to be a different, milder form.

  Reuters headline: ANXIETY GROWS AROUND THE WORLD AS FLU SEASON ARRIVES.

  We were growing more irritable by the day, and even the most conservative CDC doctors were signing their reports with the word “clean.” Finally, we were told we’d be free in two more weeks, after a few last medical tests.

  “What will you do when you get home, Karen?”

  My favorite part of being on base were the hikes we took, and today we were on a mesa, humping through an old firing range, under a bright, cold sun, in forty-eight-degree weather. Around us grew buffalo grass and snakeweed, and prickly pear cactus. There was cholla cactus with porcupine-style barbed quills, and strands of cottonwood. A hawk watched us pass.

  “Carl wants us to take a vacation,” she said.

  “Sounds great. Where?”

  “Mexico. I think he’s going to propose.”

  “Congratulations.”

  She turned and stared at me. She seemed annoyed with me lately, but then again, tempers were growing short all around. She was healthy, fully recovered, burned brown from the hikes, trim, small, and agile, hopping from rock to rock when we reached an arroyo, scrambling up onto high ground with a gymnast’s joy. Her silvery hair, worn long again, was magnificent.

  She said, “What about you? Back to Anchorage?”

  “The old grind.”

  “You don’t seem to mind it here like the rest of us.”

  I said, “I just hide it better.” I thought, That’s because you’re here.

  “Eddie told me about your ex-wife and Major Pettit.”

  “Eddie’s as discreet as the National Enquirer.”

  “He’s got some idea about you and me,” she said, plopping down on a sunny flat rock.

  “You think? Being around Eddie is like being on Millionaire Matchmaker, except for the money.”

  She reached into her rucksack and unwrapped today’s sandwich, avocado and smoked turkey on a sesame seed roll, thanks to Uncle Sam’s airdrop last night. There was apple juice in the water bottles. The sun on my face felt good. In the distance I saw a trail of rising dust approaching, which meant a jeep was out. Chief Apparecio spent his spare time repairing the old stock lying around. Trucks. Jeeps. Generators left to rust. About two million dollars of taxpayer money being intentionally left to rot.

  “Eddie e-mailed me some interesting pictures,” she said, and handed over her iPhone. I cursed inwardly and felt myself grow warm. There was a shot of me sitting beside her cot on the icebreaker, while she slept. There was a shot of me wiping sweat from her forehead with a cool rag. There was a close-up of my face, and only an idiot wouldn’t see that the expression held more than professional concern. The fourth shot was of me asleep beside her, in the chair.

  “That’s what doctors do. Hey,” I said, following the jeep’s progress, grateful it was there. “That’s Eddie and Sachs. They’re waving.”

  Sachs had his binocs out, too, and he was pointing so Eddie could change course. The two men had become fast friends. The jeep raised dust behind it. Minutes later it stopped at the foot of the trail and the men scrambled out and headed up the steep trail. Sachs had acquired a tan, and definition in his muscles. Eddie always looked the same. He was built like a horse and, I thought irritably, sometimes about as smart.

  Sachs opened his knapsack and, as they closed, pulled out papers. He thrust the sheaf toward me, even before they reached us. That’s how eager he was.

  “You were right, Joe,” he said. “More right than anyone thought. My guys didn’t want to make waves but I insisted. You won’t believe how it started, but you’ll sure believe,” he said, flourishing a printout of the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal, “where it’s ending. Get this.”

  I felt my breath catch as I looked over the information; page after page, building it all up; the years, the names, the connections, the transactions.

  A dizzy rage rose up inside me. All I could think of was, You did it for this?

  TWENTY-NINE

  The uniformed guards were polite and efficient, patting me down in the lobby. Another guard ran a scanner over me when I reached the second bank of elevators to the tower, the one that started on the forty-first floor. A third man handled the wand and hand search outside the executive suite. Normal precaution, he said. He had the look of ex-military; had the politeness, the firmness, the obvious strength.

  “We’re checking all visitors. There’s been a threat,” he apologized. I knew he was lying, and he knew I knew. He was looking for recording devices, not explosives. I didn’t mind.

  It was early December, three weeks after we finally got out of quarantine. Today’s headline in the New York Times, sitting on the guard’s desk, read:

  PRESIDENT AUTHORIZES SPANISH FLU VACCINATION PROGRAM.

  THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOSES TO BE PREPARED.

  BRITAIN, FRANCE & GERMANY CONSIDER SIMILAR PROGRAMS.

  The front page of the business section, partially visible below the A section, read, PACIFIC-NORTH STOCK SURGES! GREATEST ONE-DAY GAIN IN MARKET HISTORY!

  Inside, the director’s new office was three times the size of his old rabbit hole in Northwest Washington, glass instead of tired gray marble, eightieth-story view instead of basement, soundproofing, art consultant–picked canvases, Italian leather chairs, all the perks of upper floor life in New York. I remembered reading once that in jungles, so
me animals spend their entire lives in high tree canopies. They don’t come down. They never experience the dirt of the forest floor. How like the tropical jungle this city was, I thought.

  He rose from behind his old walnut Washington desk—an out-of-place and doggedly sentimental attachment—clad in a three-button pinstriped suit in dark blue, with light gray stripes. The shirt was crisp white, the tie Armani, the gold cuff links sparkled from sunlight slanting through floor-to-ceiling windows. The sky was urban blue, a washed-out vestige of what I recalled from the Arctic. Below rose the lesser towers of Gotham, their spires mere supplicants, straining, like the city, for more.

  “Nice office, sir,” I said, looking down at Fifty-seventh Street.

  “Every time I come back, it takes getting used to, Joe.”

  The triple-strength windows blocked out any hint of unwanted sound. New Yorkers moved below as in a twenty-first-century silent movie. Or if you preferred the inside view, there was a big-screen TV, tuned to FOX Business, a built-in wet bar, and several colorful canvases. The photos of his wife and two girls in Bermuda were the same ones he’d exhibited in D.C. The wall of VIP photos showed the director in the old days, more hair, bigger stomach, nerdier glasses, with the President, the National Security Advisor, at a London conference on bioterror.

  I said, “I bet you see pilots’ faces when they go by.”

  He chuckled. “Oh, it’s just more space I have to figure out how to fill. They hire people to help you do it.”

  I accepted a Tito’s vodka on ice. The glass was crystal, the tongs silver. We made small talk, and at length, when it was time, I said, “You know the thing that keeps bothering me? It’s who told the Chinese to send that submarine.”

  He shrugged, sipped single malt on ice. He’d told his secretary to hold all his calls. “Del Grazo, I imagine.”

  “No, he only knew we were going north. Zhou was dispatched before anyone on the Wilmington knew about the illness, yet the sub carried the antidote. Funny, huh?”

  “Hmm. Now that you mention it, I do find it odd.”

  I felt his smooth, icy vodka spread through me. I reached into my breast pocket and pulled out a folded paper, and his pleasant expression turned curious.

  “Records, sir, on some old Kansas pharmaceutical company. Maybe you heard of it. E.E. Worth & Sons.”

  He’d heard of it, all right, that much was evident in the slight straightening of shoulders, and briefest hesitation in the way his glass lifted toward his mouth. It’s funny how loud silence can be. I heard an ice cube crackle in his glass.

  “What’s that name again, Joe?”

  “Well, sir. E.E. Worth, a little company established 1887. They provided drugs to Fort Riley. Had a contract with the Army—headache powders, gargles, medical needs. Apparently had a research arm, too.”

  “Is that so,” the director said in an interested voice.

  “Yes, sir! Turn of the twentieth century. World War One, the bioweapons race! Total war! The French came up with tear gas in 1914, then, in ’15, chlorine from the Germans, and phosgene from France. In 1917, mustard gas. A whole biowarfare effort, and E.E. Worth did their part.”

  “And how was that?”

  “Andy Sachs’s guys found this. Worth had a research farm near Fort Riley, Kansas. Experimenting on sheep. Pigs. Horses. Gasses and diseases, sir! Conditions must have been primitive as hell, poking around. No idea that viruses even existed yet. No containment. Just doctors and amateur chemists stumbling around dirty labs. Then, in 1918, the Spanish flu suddenly breaks out at Fort Riley, in the middle of this race for new weapons!”

  The director’s brows rose. “You’re suggesting a connection?”

  “So far, just facts. In 1931, Worth merges with Ashcroft Drugs of Chicago. In 1952, with Chicago-Midland; ’64, Boyd & Sons; and they’re absorbed into Pacific-North in ’87. And P-N acquires Jade Pharma for their generics arm, an Asian arm in 2008, brings us up to today.”

  “Joe, I don’t understand where you’re going.”

  “Don’t you?”

  His eyes were in shadow. His shoulders did not move.

  I pulled out another folded paper and felt his gaze slide to it, cool, gray, distant.

  “What I couldn’t figure out first . . . well . . . actually, what none of us could figure out, was why all records relating to that old farm—bills for services, invoices, details of work projects, you name it—nothing was in the archives.”

  “Tsk! No one keeps work orders a hundred years old.”

  “Oh, archives did for the other forts, sir.”

  “An oversight, then, with a war on.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Lost then, certainly.”

  “Oh, definitely. Lost.” I nodded. “But why?”

  “I think you’re about to tell me.”

  This time when more papers came out, he slid forward in his chair a few inches. I heard the creak. It seemed actually to come from inside his body, not from the chair.

  “It’s a family history excerpt, sir. One of those privately printed works; family wants Granddad commemorated. A CEO wants a book to give his kids. This one was commissioned by the head of a Sacramento software company, great-great-grandson of E.E. Worth. The guy hired a writer to do his autobiography. You pay the writer fifty thousand dollars and get your own book, but these things still get cataloged by the Library of Congress. That’s where I found this.”

  The director said nothing.

  I unfolded the pages, read out loud:

  My inspiration has always been my great-great-grandfather, E.E. Worth, who looms in our family history. After the Spanish flu first appeared at Fort Riley, great-great-grandfather tirelessly threw himself into research to try to cure it. It was almost as if, my dad told me, E.E. blamed himself for the disease breaking out, for the death of his infant son Kyle from the illness. E.E. poured all his profits into the search for an antidote. Long after the outbreak subsided, he spent nights in his lab, insisting that one day the disease would come back, that mankind would need a cure.

  Toward the end of his life, feeble minded, he would break into tears and tell doctors that he’d caused the Spanish flu; he had done experiments with pigs that went bad, and caused soldiers to get sick . . . but that he had prayed to God and that God had finally forgiven him and let him discover an antidote, and it sat in the company freezers.

  He never lost his preoccupation with the flu.

  And while it is true that he had dementia, my dad drilled into me that even in the grip of insanity, E.E. remained dedicated to helping humanity. He was our example. His quest to find a cure for that long-dead plague made me equally committed to humanitarian causes, which is why . . .

  I looked up. “And so forth,” I said.

  The director relaxed, slid his chair back, crossed his legs. “A family history?” he said. “Uncorroborated? An old man babbling that he created the flu? Please. You ought to hear the stories at my dinner table. By the time they’re told for the fifth time, they have no resemblance to the truth.”

  I said nothing. I just waited.

  At length, the director broke the silence. But he seemed easier, as if danger had approached and slid past. “Joe, think, if someone had an antidote for this disease back in the 1930s, don’t you think they would have patented it, advertised it?”

  “Why? Patents are only good for twenty years. He had a cure for a disease that no longer existed! If they patented the drug in 1930, there was a good chance that by the time the disease returned, they wouldn’t own the patent anymore. So they kept it quiet. It didn’t hurt to put the thing in a freezer, and wait until it was needed. You yourself said many times, All diseases eventually come back.”

  “Ah, ties in with your theory, that the melting Arctic will rerelease old diseases.”

  “It’s not a theory after what just happened.”

&nbs
p; “So you’re actually saying,” he said, grinning now, “that this alleged cure sat in company freezers, passed from corporation to corporation for eighty years, and finally lands up with this company’s subsidiary in China.”

  “You needed to keep it a secret,” I said, flourishing the newspaper headline about the announced vaccination program, “until you knew it worked. So you told the Chinese—your own guys—to send the antidote. Maybe you already knew you were going back to work in the company. Maybe you negotiated the job when you realized what was happening. Either way you had access to old records. You knew about the outbreak before I did. You had time to make the call. You had the Chinese mislabel the stuff in case it didn’t work, to protect the formula. If it didn’t work, no one would know. You’d go back to waiting. If it did work, you’d capitalize on the drug.”

  He broke out laughing. He stood up.

  “If there weren’t so many holes in this,” he said, “I’d be offended. But tell me, Joe, if there was such superb coordination between New York and China, why did the Chinese almost blow you to smithereens, instead of just handing over the drug? Not exactly self-interest!”

  “That bothered me, too, at first. But then I realized the answer. It’s because someone made a mistake. You treated Chinese executives the way you’d treat American ones. You forgot that in China, the military owns companies, especially ones that deal with drugs for the military. By alerting them, you were also unwittingly letting the Chinese Navy know that a U.S. sub was out of commission.”

  “Oh, I find this incredible!”

  “And their military people,” I continued, “wanted it all. The Montana’s torpedoes for the Navy. The drug profits for the company, for themselves. Here’s a photo Andrew’s boys found of a board of directors’ meeting of Jade. See these guys here? An admiral. A general. Heavy on the military side, sir. I’m guessing that the Chinese double-crossed you. They tried to get both, the sub and the profits. Maybe they fought over it. After all, the original admiral who gave Zhou instructions was replaced after the fighting, right?”