Ice Age

by Brian Freemantle

  Geraldine was still at the Washington Hotel ahead of the American and managed to secure a table against the rail again. She was halfway through her first glass of wine, playing a game with herself that it was her own secret celebration at knowing she was quite well, when Stoddart arrived.

  She nodded out towards the unseen White House and said: ‘You didn’t get the President to put on a show for me.’

  ‘He put one on for me instead,’ said Stoddart. There was no reason why she shouldn’t know, in advance of something that was going to be made very public indeed.

  He included his doubts and suspicions when he told her and when he finished she said: ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘Keep in mind what Morgan told me: that the job will be what I make it.’

  ‘That sounds like a threat.’

  ‘It is,’ admitted Stoddart. ‘But they don’t know that.’

  It was when Stoddart was ordering the second round that he admitted not bothering to contact the other two, insisting the White House session had driven the thought from his mind, which it hadn’t. He and Geraldine by themselves made it a pleasant, undemanding hour’s relaxation. Including Dupuy and Raisa would have turned it into an organized, follow-my-leader outing with him as tour guide and he didn’t want to be that.

  ‘You mind?’

  She shook her head. ‘Maybe we should do it one night at Frederick?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, unenthusiastically. ‘Any news from your genetic investigation?’

  Geraldine shook her head. ‘Still going through the sequential computers. I told you how it was.’

  They had a third drink and served themselves give-away happy hour snacks and Geraldine said she supposed they shouldn’t stay on in Washington for dinner and Stoddart said he supposed they shouldn’t either, although it sounded like a good idea to do next time.

  They drove not needing conversation, Stoddart for a long time unsure if the head-slumped Geraldine was dozing after their through-the-night session. He got off the Beltway as soon as he could, hoping the traffic would be freer on the 270, disappointed that it wasn’t.

  ‘We’re going to be late getting back,’ he said, more to himself than to her. ‘Not that it matters.’

  ‘Carriers!’ declared Geraldine, uncoiling in her seat. ‘That’s it! Carriers!’

  ‘What?’ said Stoddart, bewildered, his first thought that she had awakened from a dream.

  ‘The something that was worrying me this morning. It’s not my science, but it’s my understanding that a virus doesn’t always infect the person it initially invades. Their body becomes a host, in which it can develop: live for months, years even. They become carriers, never falling ill themselves but passing it on to others …’

  ‘But who …?’ started Stoddart and stopped. Then he said: ‘No! I couldn’t be. I had every test: was kept in isolation …’

  ‘Did you have nose and throat swabs? Mucus tests?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ The car swerved as he snatched up the cellphone. ‘Call Pelham!’

  It was a short, staccato conversation. With the telephone cupped between both hands in her lap, not looking across the car to him, Geraldine said: ‘He doesn’t see how you could conceivably be—’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you—?’ started Stoddart.

  ‘But that it’s possible,’ she finished. She turned in her seat, to look directly across the car at him. ‘You’ve been with the President, Jack! All through the White House. You could have made the rest of us carriers … We’ve been to the embassies … tonight at the bar … everywhere … that’s how viral infections spread …’

  Twenty

  They alerted the complex to their arrival, as they’d been told to do, and Stoddart’s car was identified from its registration and waved through, without any gatehouse contact. Their waiting escorts were protectively suited – close by the car in which Raisa and Dupuy had obviously arrived back ahead of them – but they remained in the street clothes they’d worn to Washington. If he were a carrier and Geraldine or anyone else in the group had contracted it, they were going to die and an entirely new unit would have to be created. It wouldn’t actually put the scientific investigation back to square one but it wouldn’t be far beyond. He wasn’t thinking in the right sequences, he told himself, recalling – how could he have forgotten! – what Geraldine had blurted in the car. He’d been in close proximity – contagiously close – to the President and a lot of the White House staff. Amanda O’Connell and … He couldn’t remember, count how many other people. With the sudden, physical sensation of nausea came what had to be the final, emptying thought. If he were a carrier he’d have to remain in permanent, goldfish-bowl confinement until a cure was found. And there was no possibility – no hope – so far of that being achieved.

  At their separation in different isolation chambers Stoddart said: ‘We’re going to be OK.’

  Geraldine didn’t reply.

  Stoddart wasn’t sure, because the interiors were identical, but he thought it was the same room into which he’d been put after Antarctica. He looked up to the smoked glass observation window and said: ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Duncan. Duncan Littlejohn,’ came a voice.

  ‘And me, Barry Hooper,’ said a second.

  The Fort Detrick department heads he’d met when Geraldine had carried out her personal examination of Henri Lebrun, Stoddart remembered. ‘Where are the others? Walt, Raisa, Guy …?’

  ‘All in isolation,’ said Hooper.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘They’ve all tested negative. That, in itself, is a pretty simple pathology screening by swab, blood analysis and electron microscopy but all it establishes is that they’re not carriers; it doesn’t mean they haven’t contracted the full blown disease from you,’ said Littlejohn, the laboratory chief. ‘The helicopter that took a unit up to the White House – and to test the Blair group – is already on its way back. There’s another helo on standby to evacuate anyone here, if anything shows that we can’t understand. The big test is to see how you check out. If you’re clear, the panic’s over.’

  ‘I don’t remember any throat or nose swabs being taken,’ said Stoddart.

  ‘There was every other test and examination,’ said Hooper. ‘Something would have shown.’

  The defensiveness was obvious in the man’s voice. Stoddart said: ‘But swabs should have been taken, shouldn’t they?’

  Before an answer there was the hiss of the airlock to admit a suited figure anonymous behind the vizor.

  ‘Hello again,’ said the woman doctor who’d examined him the first time. ‘This will only take a minute.’

  He coughed, close to gagging, at the depth at which she took her swabs from his throat and the nose sample made him sneeze and his eyes water. She took two phials of blood. He went back to the unseen observers as the door sucked closed after the doctor. ‘I didn’t get an answer?’

  ‘Yes,’ conceded Hooper. ‘It should have been done.’

  Stoddart decided he was more frightened now than he’d been when he’d first returned from the Antarctic. Then he hadn’t known that the others who’d been there with him were infected: not fully believed or imagined, even, that in some way it could be transmitted. Now he very definitely knew it could happen and that he could have spread it to God knows how many people – the President himself- but most horrifying of all was knowing there was nothing that could be done to prevent or stop it. He bit off a half considered, angry demand to the men behind the glass; losing his temper, losing control, was pointless. Instead he said: ‘How about the two guys who survived Alaska – Darryl Matthews and Harold Norris?’

  ‘Both tested clear,’ said Hooper.

  Should he be encouraged by that? ‘How long will it take to decide whether I’m a host or not?’

  ‘A couple of hours,’ promised Littlejohn. ‘Maybe less. You’re not actually in a queue.’

  ‘How can you do it so quickly?’

  ‘Elimina
tion,’ said Pelham shortly. ‘A diagnostic template, if you like. We just go through the list.’

  ‘So if I did have something you couldn’t eliminate you’d isolate what’s causing the ageing!’ He’d become the guinea pig, as Patricia Jefferies had so willingly offered herself to be. Which he’d have to … Stoddart stopped the incomplete thought, his mind flooded by another. It wasn’t the guinea pig recollection – or personal awareness – that startled him. It was that he hadn’t thought for days of the woman he’d told he loved and watched die, making promises he hadn’t kept. Stoddart was ashamed, all the submerged anger churning in him turned against himself. They’d both known it hadn’t been love – Patricia, more openly honest, had actually acknowledged it wasn’t – but he hadn’t considered it a lie, wanting her to believe him at the end. But hadn’t she – didn’t she – deserve more than a final, almost automatic act of kindness? At least a memory, even occasionally. He had no right to despise the men in the White House for their self-serving hypocrisy, imagining – flattering himself – that he had more integrity.

  ‘We haven’t thought things through that far yet,’ said Hooper. ‘But yes, it could be that way.’

  With difficulty Stoddart forced himself back to the bizarre, talking-to-the-wall conversation. ‘What’s to say the germ or bug or whatever couldn’t somehow mutate from being non-infectious in me to giving me the disease? That I couldn’t become a victim myself, after having spread it around?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Hooper flatly.

  They were made irrationally hit-out angry, initially unthinking, in their fear, Partington pacing his small, private office off the larger public business – and tape monitored – oval room, repeating over and over that he couldn’t believe it and asking how it could have been allowed to happen of two men as disbelieving as himself and who didn’t, for once, have any answers.

  ‘We could die! Be dying! That’s the bottom line, right?’

  ‘Pelham told me he doesn’t think it’s possible,’ tried Spencer.

  ‘And after that went into isolation in his own complex and there’s a helicopter out on the lawn to evacuate us there as well and I’ve just had a probe stuck down my goddamned throat and given Christ knows how much blood to guys dressed up like something out of Star Wars!’ Someone had to answer for this. Suffer like I’m being made to suffer.

  Richard Morgan remained steadfastly silent, willingly surrendering the scapegoat search to the man who’d painted the target on his own chest. Spencer said: ‘Pelham called it an outside precaution against a trillion to one possibility.’ Which wasn’t strictly true – the man hadn’t given odds – but Spencer’s sole intention at that moment was indelibly establishing Pelham as the expert who’d made the mistake.

  ‘I’m the President of the United States of America! I shouldn’t … we shouldn’t … have been exposed to the goddamned man if there was a zillion to one risk!’

  ‘No, sir,’ agreed Spencer. ‘Detrick fouled up big time. Theirs was the medical advice we had to rely on.’

  ‘They’re supposed to be solving the problem, not fouling up!’ If it turned out all right – had to turn out all right – Pelham was history. Spencer, too. The whole goddamned lot. How could they have let it happen to him? He couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Spencer, with nothing else to say.

  Morgan knew he had to make some contribution, difficult though it was to think beyond the photographs he’d seen of wizened, monkey-small people the same age – some younger than himself. The helicopter will be back at Detrick by now. They said our tests wouldn’t take long. Stoddart’s too.’

  Partington stopped pacing, standing in front of his desk to face the two aides. Extending cupped fingers he said: ‘It was all so good. We had it right there, in the palm of our hand.’

  ‘Yes, Mr President,’ said Spencer, dully.

  ‘I’ve been let down,’ complained Partington. ‘I trusted people and I’ve been let down. Now I could die.’

  At that moment Spencer thought that if it hadn’t meant he’d almost certainly go too, he would have enjoyed watching the whining motherfucker wither away.

  There was matching disbelief holding the four at Blair House, but it wasn’t directed upon the need for an individual culprit. Within the first few minutes of them reassembling at Pennsylvania Avenue, Amanda had, without a choice she instinctively wished she’d had, acknowledged the seemingly inconceivable oversight at Fort Detrick and just as haplessly and logically – accepted American responsibility. She’d actually been surprised, although perhaps more relieved, that the reaction had been so muted.

  Gerard Buchemin had said virtually nothing, retreating within himself, his mind’s eye blocked by the memory of Henri Lebrun’s shrunken body and skeletal face, further horrified by the English scientist’s insistence, relayed just hours before by Guy Dupuy, that victims died from within, an organ or a part at a time. He was not sure that if he fell ill – knowing now how it attacked and that it couldn’t be stopped – if he had the courage to kill himself at the very onset, while he was still capable of doing so. He had to find the courage: make himself do it. Something painless. Pills. A lot of pills and alcohol and simply go to sleep and not wake up. He’d die with dignity, not as a freak.

  Gregori Lyalin was also contemplating death, although far more rationally and philosophically than the Frenchman, his imagery uncluttered by mental pictures of dying victims. He was totally confident and supported by his religion and on that level could even find an anticipation in so early leaving a secular existence for what and to what he knew his soul if not his mortal body to be going. He was even able to find a comforting reassurance on a secular plane, knowing that although his wife and adored children would grieve – as he would grieve to leave them during the time it took him to die – their belief and devotion, as strong as his, would enable them to celebrate his death, not mourn it. The vision he did call to mind was actually comical: how he’d look at the end if all his hair remained after losing its colour, like a mole buried in a snowdrift. Lyalin actually sniggered, which the rest misunderstood as suppressed hysteria.

  Peter Reynell’s refusal to believe he could be infected, which he thought of more in terms of being interrupted, was not a mentally imbalanced rejection of reality, because he totally recognized the need to be medically tested. It was, rather, the consuming, overwhelming conviction – an arrogance that did come close to a mental imbalance – of a man who had no religious belief that his impending success was assured by something akin to supreme divine right and that nothing whatsoever could possibly prevent it happening.

  He was careful with his approach to Amanda, leaving her what he considered the proper reflective time and space. As she looked up he said: ‘I’ve calculated something. We can make a direct comparison between how long, either directly or through association, we’ve been exposed to Stoddart against how long it took for the other Antarctic rescuers very obviously to show signs of infection. They all became ill in days: the longest, three and a half. Stoddart’s been out of isolation, meeting you direct or with Geraldine, with whom I’ve been in contact, three times that long. If any of us four were going to get it, it would have happened by now.’

  Amanda smiled, wanly. ‘He wouldn’t have infected everyone. But we could have become carriers too, from him.’

  Reynell shook his head, determinedly. ‘And you’ve been tested and very shortly you’re going to be told you’re OK. No one’s got it! This will end up nothing more than a bad embarrassment, for what Detrick didn’t do.’

  ‘Embarrassment we can live with …’ She stopped, smiling despite herself. ‘I didn’t intend it to sound like that, as if it was a joke …’

  Reynell decided fear had melted the ice: softened it, at least. Stripping it away completely, along with that blue silk dress, would be an excellent end to what had most definitely been an unexpectedly traumatic day. ‘I’m offering to buy the celebration champagne.’

  Amanda decided,
close to astonishment, that it wasn’t bravado. Reynell genuinely wasn’t frightened. ‘Let’s see if there’s anything to celebrate, first.’

  ‘Trust me.’

  ‘Let’s see about that, too.’ Why had she said that! It had sounded like a come on: worse, a very gauche come on.

  ‘Let’s do that,’ he said.

  Shit, Amanda thought. But dinner hadn’t been the problem she’d feared it might be and she’d need a drink when the decision came, whatever it was.

  It was precisely 9:33 p.m. by the bureau clock in his isolation room when Barry Hooper told Stoddart: ‘You’re OK. You’re clean. Congratulations,’ and Stoddart hoped the permanent and automatic recording didn’t pick up the whimper of relief that he at once tried to turn into a cough, actually bringing his hand up to his mouth. He made the pretence of needing the toilet further to compose himself and the rest – even Raisa – were already waiting in the outer corridor when he finally emerged.

  Stoddart said: ‘We originally planned to get together when we all got back. Why don’t we do just that; talk a few things through?’ He listened to the business-as-usual tone, pleased there was no tremor in his voice.

  Unprotesting, each of them working to regain their mental – even physical – equilibrium, the group followed Stoddart back to his office. As he turned to face them he said: ‘I’m sure as hell glad that’s over!’ That had sounded calm enough, too.