White Plague

by James Abel

  “And that’s your theory,” said the director.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I have an old college roommate who is now a film producer in Los Angeles, and he would probably like this idea for a cute science fiction piece.”

  “Good, because then I could give him the real film we found, did I mention that? Especially the first part, which wasn’t really blank, sir. We lied to you. It showed the program at Fort Riley, the creation of the Spanish flu, which we tried to introduce into Russia. That film’s on about two hundred cell phones now, ready to go out.”

  This was the bluff I’d been building up to since the session started. It had to come at exactly the right moment, and I watched the bomb hit home. There was no mistaking the reaction. He was an accomplished dissembler, but he’d been sure I’d used all my ammunition, he’d allowed himself to relax, think he’d beaten me, I was done, and now just for an instant the blood drained from his face and his fingers clawed at the sides of his chair.

  He saw me see it. He knew that words were useless. He knew that he’d just admitted it, and that lies would not convince me otherwise anymore. He canted his head, seemed more like a professor regarding an especially smart student, and then his smile broadened approvingly.

  “Was that the truth, Joe? Copies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh. Then by the way, where is the original first part? Throw it out? Hide it? Oh well, either way, that was very well done. I always admired the way you could put things together. Kudos, man.”

  I felt the rage engulf me then. That he could have sent in the antidote from the first moment. That he could have avoided the suffering and death. That he’d played me and Eddie for fools and almost killed us and two hundred other people, almost started a war.

  But the director seemed more proud than embarrassed. He opened his top desk drawer, extracted a report, tossed the thing on his blotter, backward, so I could see the title of the White House executive order:

  300 MILLION DOSES TO BE DISTRIBUTED.

  “All Americans will be protected, Joe, for the rest of their lives. Like polio vaccinations. Or typhoid. Thanks to you, to this, we’re saving lives.”

  “And what is your personal profit, sir?”

  He snorted. “The profit! What are you saying? That it’s wrong to earn profit and help people at the same time? I didn’t think you were that liberal, Joe. Why do you think that people like me go back and forth between private industry and government? It’s a system that keeps both sides honest. Good policy is good profit. Good profit encourages good policy. This system is old, practical and moral both.”

  “A class of rulers, you mean. A class.”

  “I saved your life. Why do you think that Chinese captain warned you? Eh? Or would you rather we played amateur hour with the fate of our country? Yes. A class. Tell me a single great benefit that humanity has enjoyed, that’s made lives easier, and that didn’t make someone a profit. Polio vaccine? Building codes? Flight? Heart transplants? I challenge you. One!”

  “And that was your goal, the good of all.”

  “Soon three hundred million people will be protected against the very danger that you’ve warned against, which would not have happened if we’d rushed the drug up, given it to the crew, and hushed the whole thing up. Yes, we’d have saved a few dozen people, but then what? The drug goes back into hibernation. The company gets nothing for hard work. There’s no supply when the disease does reassert itself. And meanwhile, people like you take it for granted that you’re owed anything you need at any given moment. I’m sick. You owe me. Well, Joe? We don’t owe you. People owe us something and it is called thanks.”

  I turned to leave and heard him call me back.

  “Oh, stop it! You’re angry.”

  I reached the door.

  “Cool down, man. Sit a bit. I said sit! For Christ’s sake, sit down!”

  I opened the door.

  “Joe! There’s more!”

  I stopped.

  “Thank you. Now sit. Sit if you want to hear. Good. Very good. Take a breath, Joe. Joe? Focus! Look, I couldn’t tell you earlier, but with my position vacant, the White House is looking for a replacement, and your name is in the mix. I know that at the moment you’re steaming. I’d be mad, too, if I were you. No one likes to find things out this way. I understand. I do. I sympathize. Another drink? I’m not an ogre. No? No drink?”

  I said nothing.

  “Joe, when you can think clearly, you’ll see that you can continue your good work by taking the job.”

  I said, stunned, “You’re trying to buy me?”

  He shook his head, sitting on the arm of my chair now. “No, I’m offering you what you always wanted, a chance to be one of the people who decide things. And, Joe, I don’t have to buy you. I just threaten you. Ten minutes ago when your theory was conjecture, and you had no evidence, you might have made a weak case for sharing your theories with a reporter, a blog. But now that you know facts, your oath binds you to secrecy. Any violation will be met with an immediate response. Joe, listen to me carefully. I have your best interests at heart. Immediate response means something legal to most people, arrest, trial, Leavenworth, but to others, to more radical elements, immediate response can be . . . well . . . think of it as triage. Sacrificing a few to save the many. You do know what I mean, right?”

  There are many powerful drugs but sometimes I think that words are the strongest. They bind you, paralyze you, spread through your bloodstream faster than an antibiotic. A man sits in a chair, stunned, unmoving, just from words.

  “I . . . we . . . we’d be killed?”

  “Do you really think that you’d be allowed to reveal that the worst outbreak of disease in history, the deadliest plague to ever hit mankind, fifty to eighty million killed . . . in allied nations, our friends, our great-grandparents, that a starting point for modern flus that have killed thousands was an accident that came from a U.S. Army laboratory? Do you have any idea of the damage? The lawsuits? People are still dying every year. International Court. UN. Justification for any terrorist revenge attack . . . The utter destruction of our credibility when it comes to situations involving chemical or biological weapons overseas. Joe? Are you seeing it? The damage you would do? And the people who did it in 1918 aren’t even around anymore, so what is the point?”

  “Once you know you can make secrets, you make more,” I said.

  “So what? Look, maybe it’s for the best that you figured things out. In fact, that is exactly the case. I’m glad! Now you can stop poking around. And I’d advise you to stop your friends also. Me? I’m safe, whatever you do. You’re the one—they’re the ones—who are not.”

  On the way out, I heard him say, “The truth is overrated, Joe. You should know that by now. Come back and let’s have dinner when you calm down. And take the job when they call!”

  The elevator doors opened and the guards let me pass. I was in the lobby. And then I was outside, on the plaza, beneath the bronze statues of Salk and Pasteur and Jennings, surrounded by thousands of New Yorkers going about their daily business, perhaps already making appointments with their doctors to arrange vaccinations—when the drug became available—against the Spanish flu.

  My friends had been waiting and they crowded around me: Sachs and Karen, Eddie and Clinton, Marietta, Pettit, DeBlieu. Their voices were a far-off chorus. The cacophony seemed to merge into one word, the director’s word: triage.

  They asked, Did you tell him? Did he admit it?

  I told them that we had been wrong and he had shown me conclusive proof that the drug had been made in China. I said that our guess about the Spanish flu being a hundred-year-old bioweapon was wrong, too. The first cases had not been at Fort Riley, but somewhere else, it turned out. I said that the director’s move to Pacific-North had been planned for a long time, predating the emergency, and was not a result of anyth
ing that had happened in the Arctic. I said it had been a privilege to serve with them.

  I turned and walked away.

  There really was nothing to be gained by telling the story, I thought sometime later, sitting on the last stool in the ground floor bar of the Three Mark Hotel on Fifty-ninth Street, downing a third glass of Svedka. And there was plenty to gain by accepting a job as new director, and continuing the work I had been doing at a higher level, having input, as the director would say, at the top.

  Maybe I’d find myself at meetings in the future, with the director as an equal. Maybe I’d be the one planning triage next time, to a town, a city, a ship. It’s what I’d wanted. It’s what I’d lost my first wife over. It’s what I’d cut myself off from people for. It’s what I’d chosen, and so, I told the bartender morosely, “He was right. I’ll go along. He was right.”

  “Who was right?” the bartender asked.

  “No,” I said loudly as he stared. “He wasn’t right.”

  I didn’t want to use my cell phone and there didn’t seem to be any land phones anymore in New York City. I walked for blocks before I found one of those antique phones which now took credit cards instead of coins, and cost more for one call than a monthly charge for my iPhone.

  But no one, I knew, was listening when I punched in the number on the card I extracted from my wallet. And no one stopped me after I made the phone call, as I walked over to the Forty-first Street, headquarters of the New York Times.

  The truth is overrated, the director had said, and I wondered how you could assign it a numerical value. Maybe it was a line in the dirt. Maybe it was the ultimate gift that God gave to Adam and Eve. Maybe it was simply a case-by-case choice.

  I stood looking up at the Times building, from across the street. The curb was like a line in the dirt, cross it and the world would change. The reporter was waiting for me. But I didn’t move. And then I felt something brush my hand and I whirled, and was surprised to look into the open, scared face of Karen Vleska.

  “You, too?” she said.

  “This isn’t the way to do it either,” I said after a moment, aware of the hundreds of people on the block flowing past, going to work, shopping, oblivious to the nation’s old secrets and new ones, needing to know more about some things, I knew, but, I realized suddenly, not needing to know all.

  Was I already becoming like the director?

  “We need to go to Washington,” I said.

  Our fingers had become entwined, and I knew that to anyone on the street we looked like lovers, holding hands, walking away from the Times building, toward the happy bustle of Broadway. A couple in deep loving conversation. A couple so involved with each other that we seemed cut off from the world. A couple strolling out of Times Square and later, through green, lovely Central Park, and after that, into a Central Park West hotel.

  Lovers? Well, we spent the night together, all right, but not that way . . . Karen dozing fitfully, waking from nightmares occasionally, me awake, too alert to sleep, with my sidearm within reach; me aware of every creak in the hallway, every ring of a phone through the wall, every honk of a cab far below.

  He tried to bribe me with a job, and then he threatened my life. Were we followed here? Maybe we should not have waited, should have just gone to the Times.

  The early Metroliner brought us into the capital at rush hour, when the highways around Washington were as clogged as arteries, tubes carrying life blood from the body’s extremities in or out of the pumping heart. Andrew Sachs had called ahead, had made arrangements, had reached his counterpart at the Pentagon, and so we were expected when we arrived, ushered through security, and along the bustling hallways, and into the muted, wood paneled room from which emanated directions guiding millions of U.S. servicemen and women around the world.

  Up close, the Secretary of Defense looked smaller than he did on television, but more robust, with a thoughtful bluntness. He served us coffee himself, added two sugars to Karen’s, milk to mine. He told us to relax, although he didn’t seem that way himself. He leaned forward in his leather chair and kept his hands flat on his desk blotter, beside the Remington sculpture of an Indian hunting buffalo. Behind his head was a photo of the President looking down, and four oil paintings of World War Two battle scenes, one honoring each branch of service. Naval aircraft carriers under fire in the Pacific. Army troops in their foxholes among the wintery French woods. Marines storming ashore at Normandy. Coast Guard rescuers taking survivors aboard after a U-boat sank a merchant marine ship off Maine.

  “Sir, we have a story we think you should hear,” I heard myself say.

  He told me to tell it slowly, to take my time. He never took his eyes off my face.

  (reprinted from the Wall Street Journal)

  BIG PHARMA SUICIDE ROCKS WALL STREET

  Top executives at Pacific-North Pharma, one of the Dow’s biggest gainers this month, were rocked Sunday night at the news of the suicide of the head of their generics division.

  Elias Pelfrey shot himself to death at his suburban home in Westchester. Bedford Hills police said that Pelfrey left a note saying that he was depressed over personal matters. His wife told them that she heard the shot around 2 A.M., rushed into his study, and found him dead of a wound to the head. He had shot himself through the mouth.

  Pelfrey had recently taken over the generics division of Pacific-North, the group responsible for designing the vaccine effective against the Spanish flu. The drug has been responsible for saving millions of lives, said spokespeople at the Surgeon General’s office. It also made Pacific-North Pharma Wall Street’s biggest gainer recently.

  Pacific-North Pharma stock price seems unaffected by Pelfrey’s death.

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