‘We talking breakthrough?’ demanded Reynell.
‘Excitement was Spencer’s word.’ Amanda looked at Lyalin. ‘Seems it all began with something Sergei Grenkov said.’
‘What are you going to tell the President?’ asked Reynell. If Fort Detrick was excited, then so should they be. There was no way he could physically get back to London to compete with a White House announcement if it really did mark a breakthrough. He could easily speak to the British press here in Washington, as a build up for the personal House of Commons statement tomorrow.
‘Nothing until I know what I’m talking said Amanda. ‘If it’s good it’s got to be right first time.’about,’
Raisa Orlov personally conducted the preparation experiment, most of them duplicated and sometimes repeated for a third time, with her customary meticulousness. She paid the closest attention to the weight differentiation, calculating to 200th of a gram against dosage, and adjusted the heat treatment ratio of that accordingly. She monitored the surviving chimpanzee on an hourly basis, taking blood samples as regularly, and on the last full day the haemal tests achieved twelve consecutive enzyme-free readings.
It was to the institute’s chief haematologist that Raisa finally disclosed her intention, timing it to avoid any official intervention, and for several moments he stared at her in disbelief.
‘No!’ he said, finally. It was the first time in fifteen years he had ever contradicted her even though, several years before, he had been one of her ordered lovers.
‘There are times I may be relying on you. I’m trusting you.’ It was another first for Raisa to concede a need for help.
‘You should not do this!’
‘It’s not the first time it’s been done.’
‘It was luck more than proper science!’
‘You questioning my science?’
‘I’m sorry,’ the man immediately retreated.
‘You know what I want you to do?’
‘Please don’t,’ he said, and winced when she did.
Knowing she could not as successfully evade official intervention – and prevention – of another full scale media event, Raisa this time limited herself to just one telephone call, to the Moscow bureau of the which would guarantee the necessary exposure. Then everyone could come begging to her.New York Times,
It was an hour before the insect and worm experts returned together and by then Geraldine had listened to the stenographer reading back the notes of what Sergei Grenkov had said, found the missed remark and checked it with the Russian. She’d also managed, just, to babble what she was thinking to Stoddart.
There was an anxiousness to sit and before everyone had done so Pelham said: ‘You got it?’
‘Positive,’ said the helminthologist.
‘It’s a gap filled in,’ said the insect expert.
‘More,’ insisted Geraldine. ‘Much more.’
‘We going to get some help here?’ asked Spencer.
There was a hesitation between Pelham and Geraldine. Pelham shook his head and said: ‘I’ll come in, if I think you miss something.’
‘The killer – the cause of the disease that kills – is the enzyme we can’t encode,’ said Geraldine. ‘It’s the catalyst that’s causing everything to go wrong with the genes. As you’ve heard, the majority of the enzymes that have been scientifically isolated are in the gut and the intestines, converting food into energy. Most whales, the largest sea mammals, exist on the smallest of sea life. Other fish do, as well. And other fish eat other fish—’ She indicated the entomologist. ‘The ticks that were found in the Antarctic and Noatak victims – and at Baikal – begin life as pupae, one form of life that mutates into another. You want an example, you’ve got a caterpillar that grows into a butterfly. Our microscopic worms become microscopic ticks. Puparial means that the last larval skin becomes the skin of its new existence. That shared skin might contain the enzyme: it might not show as poisonous under laboratory testing but become poisonous when it enters a body and comes into contact with other enzymes, as a protective system in both forms against predators. That’s common in all sorts of life forms. Or the enzyme might exist within the gut of both. The worms have a digestive system, so whatever it ingests for food needs to be broken up. And any creature that ingests, excretes. The worms themselves could be harmless, its excretion the poison. And we’ve got the enzyme in the droppings of the cave bats but far more importantly from birds – a lot of them dead – in every place where we’ve now got outbreaks …’ She stopped, dry-throated, looking enquiringly to Pelham.
‘It’s all there,’ said the installation director.
‘It still isn’t for me!’ protested Spencer. ‘You got something with stick men?’
‘Try a food chain,’ said Stoddart, soberly. ‘The worms are getting into the oceans from melting base ice. Fish eat the worms or already infected fish. The carcases that get washed up on shorelines are scavenged by migratory birds, dead fish that aren’t eaten by other fish float and are scavenged by sea birds. Before all those birds die, to be consumed by other carrion-eaters, they excrete over land. Their droppings infecting crops would explain how the epidemics are striking inland, hundreds of miles from any sea or water. Animals will eat the dead birds and become infected. Their excreta will go on spreading the disease.’
‘We’re looking for cures. You’ve just given us a situation twice as bad as it was,’ said Spencer. And he’d told Amanda O’Connell it was looking good!
‘Much more than twice,’ said Stoddart. ‘Try ten times.’
They reached Blair House, by helicopter, by early evening. Jack Stoddart did most of the talking, there and later in the White House, which they reached by the tunnel to avoid the permanent press cordon. They agreed every one of Stoddart’s suggestions and the need to inform the World Health Organisation and the United Nations’ Environmental Division overnight gave Peter Reynell time to get back to London for a House of Commons statement timed simultaneously with Henry Partington’s television address. For that the president insisted Stoddart appear with him.
It was midnight before everything was in place and by then the first editions of the New York Times had broken the story of Raisa Ivanova Orlov intentionally infecting herself with the ageing illness to prove she had a vaccine against it.
Thirty-Seven
The identification of a contagion chain physically divided Stoddart and Geraldine. Blair House is more normally the government guest house for visiting dignitaries, so there was accommodation there for him that night and for nights – and days – that followed co-ordinating state by state responses and extending that liaison – and consultation – internationally. Apart from this time there being no purpose, it would have been impractical for Stoddart to try to hijack the president’s televised address, but Partington personally voiced the warning (‘let’s keep the surprises to what we’ve got to tell the people, OK Jack?’) although establishing responsibility for unforeseen problems by having Stoddart be the one to talk about unspecified precautions.
‘He’ll get the glory, you’ll get the shit,’ predicted Geraldine, unhappy from the outset with a long-distance telephone relationship.
‘He’s promising Cabinet-level appointment, a budget up there with Defence and State and department staffing at whatever figure I ask for.’
‘You’ll be his man, in his cage.’
‘I can always leave by the same door I go in by. With the official authority I can achieve a lot more than by staying outside.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘I am.’
Stoddart used his opening address in the United Nations in New York to describe the gathering as an agenda-preparing forum for every participating nation’s environmental and public health group to contribute improved, better or new suggestions. The proposals he was listing were provisional, an instant response to an instant emergency. Washed-up carcases of all sea mammals and fish should be burned where they lay and the pyres afterwards doused with the stro
ngest available insecticide. Naval and coastguard services should spread and ignite oil slicks to incinerate floating, rotting shoals at sea. The corpses of infected birds and animals – domestic and wild – should also be burned. Without naming Geraldine he said Fort Detrick had advised every affected country to have their agronomy and agricultural authorities test all food crops for genetic mutation possibly caused by the droppings of diseased birds and animals. That advice extended to there being held a separate, agricultural science conference to consider the wholesale introduction and consumption of genetically modified crops to replace those found to be poisoned. There was the obvious risk of herbivores ingesting contaminated grass, which could possibly pass into the human food chain through their meat or milk. Any country discovering the infection in farm animals should report it immediately to the UN monitoring agencies and again those animals should be burned. No carcases should be buried because of the danger of the germ entering the soil as bodies decomposed. Bird egest had possibly polluted reservoirs, the water from which should be constantly analysed. In areas already affected by the ageing disease, all drinking water should be boiled and bird-scaring noise systems installed at sewage plants. Street cleaning departments should heavily douse bird-soiled public places with insecticide before scouring it away.
The totally compatible working relationship between Geraldine Rothman and Sergei Grenkov began within hours of their learning of Raisa Orlov’s self-experimentation, by which time Raisa was already in an isolation chamber. She’d entered under protested duress from a drafted-in medical team, whose arrival finally broke the woman’s rule-by-fear authority and reversed her edict that there should be no further exchange with Washington, most specifically about what she had done to herself. Raisa’s full medical case history arrived in the same – although protectively separate – shipment of tick-infested nothofagus and Geraldine said at once: ‘It’s her choice, even if it wasn’t intended for our research use.’ Two of the chimpanzees in that day’s renewed tests were infected with precisely the same enzyme dosage that Raisa had self-administered, as well as being injected with the same measured, heat-treated inoculation of the same protein. It was also arranged for daily samples of Raisa’s tissue, blood, faeces and urine to be flown from Moscow to Washington, for Fort Detrick analysis.
There appeared an immediate – literally within hours – result from the colonized vegetation tests that Geraldine spread with detailed but shared instructions between the no longer compartmented sciences concentrated at Fort Detrick. Entomologists were asked for a molecular comparison between those mites recovered from the Antarctic, Iultin and Noatak victims. Toxicologists, already attempting to refine components from the gaseous discharge, were brought in with paleobotanists to reduce the plant to its base chemical elements.
There were other developments which Geraldine and Grenkov agreed could have a connected relevance without being able to fit them into Walter Pelham’s mosaic. The Fort Detrick director couldn’t, either. Immunology analysis from the nasal and upper air passages of the unaffected cave children showed a high level of glutathione, a naturally occurring antioxidising enzyme medically acknowledged to lessen the effects of respiratory infection. And geneticists in England found the tissues of both prehistoric and modern victims lacked the non-coding cytokine gene.
By the time that information arrived, the United States’ navy and coastguard had set up the daily collection of helicopter-delivered Arctic and Antarctic sea water from which it was hoped to extract undigested microscopic worms. From Moscow came reports of Raisa Orlov suffering hair loss and discolouration, with keratosis developing on the skin of her arms, hands and back. She’d also developed a bronchial infection. At Geraldine’s suggestion, Grenkov telephoned the institute to suggest they determine the woman’s antioxidant level before administering booster dosages of glutathione. The chimpanzee infected with the same dosage that Raisa had given herself developed severe influenza that glutathione failed to relieve.
The day Geraldine heard from England of the dyskerin gene mutation in the prehistoric as well as modern victims, she moved into Fort Detrick’s genetic laboratory to work full time alongside the team there.
Peter Reynell was very satisfied with the way everything went. He’d limited himself to the House of Commons statement that coincided with Partington and Stoddart’s television appearance, insisting in advance that all he had was the likeliest explanation for how the disease was spreading, not yet answers to any of the questions it naturally prompted. He pleaded pressure to find those answers for refusing any press interviews or statements (‘the seriousness demands that the House is the only right and proper place from which to address the people of this country’) and stayed in daily contact both with Amanda O’Connell at Blair House and with Geraldine Rothman in Maryland, although he spent much longer closeted in Cabinet-formation discussion with Ranleigh, evincing more strongly than before his later intended independence. Ranleigh argued that they’d maximized the benefit of Reynell’s personal involvement and that he should succeed to the leadership in the already smoothly prepared power transfer and let a new science minister take over in Washington. ‘Staying with it will become a burden if a cure and prevention isn’t found and there’s no guarantee of that.’
Reynell’s counter-argument was that the public perception would be of his putting personal ambition and career above a declared and pledged commitment. ‘A medical failure won’t be put against me; abandoning ship at this moment would. Things are moving forward, at last. It’s too soon for me to leave.’
Reynell had scheduled to the specific day his return to Washington, although telling no one – not even Henrietta – because he wanted the last minute adjustment to the parliamentary order paper to create the drama, but learning from Geraldine of the large number of microscopic worms recovered from Arctic and Antarctic oceans heightened his departure announcement. It would, he told a hushed House, always have been necessary for him to be involved personally in the prevention precautions for which a team from his science ministry were already moving to New York to join other detailed UN planners. But now he understood there were rapid scientific developments that he could not at that time divulge but which made it even more essential for him to go back.
He and Henrietta that night lingered over brandy in the drawing room at Lord North Street after the departure of their dinner guests, one of whom had inevitably been her father. Henrietta said: ‘You are going to work closely with Daddy, aren’t you?’
‘I hope so,’ said Reynell, guardedly.
‘He’s done an enormous amount to bring all this about.’
‘I thought we both had.’ The old bastard was already sniffing the wind.
‘I wouldn’t like there to be a schism.’
‘There’s no cause for you to imagine there could be.’
‘Guess what he asked me tonight?’
‘What?’
‘When we’re going to start a family.’
Reynell laughed, outright. ‘What did you tell him!’
‘That it’s your decision.’
Reynell said: ‘Not even I believed your father would try to be with us in the bedroom.’
Henrietta remained serious. ‘That’s not an answer.’
‘I didn’t think I was being asked a question.’ When Reynell refused Henrietta joining him that night because of the early morning flight she said she understood and Reynell hoped she did. He hoped even more strongly she’d make her father understand, too.
‘You put a whole bunch of foxes in the chicken coop up there in New York; it was all too much for people to take on board.’ It had to be an easy beginning.
‘The purpose was to generate ideas,’ said Stoddart, who’d come directly to the White House from the airport. ‘Every proposal got on to the agenda. At least eight countries – and fifteen states here so far – are adopting some of the precautions ahead of any legislation or finance allocation. I want to talk specifically about an Executive Order, to ge
t the navy and coastguards involved.’
Partington frowned at Stoddart apparently believing he could set the Oval Office agenda, as well, ‘I don’t think we took things slow enough before you went to New York.’
‘You seemed happy with the ideas I sketched out,’ insisted Stoddart. He thought, you want the glory, you risk the heat.
‘We’ve got to get things costed, budgets agreed to put forward to Congress. And then some. The navy aren’t going to agree to their involvement coming from their current allocation. Neither are coastguards.’
The Congress carousel, Stoddart recognized, expectantly. ‘I’ll have costed figures ready in a week. Contingency extras, too. What I’m asking for is an interim Executive Order, between now and Congress approval. With other countries moving right away – and us the environmental hosts – it wouldn’t look very good if we lagged behind, would it?’
It was too late to move to the other office, away from those goddamned revolving tapes, but Partington was sure he could make the reality of life clear to Stoddart without it becoming a rebounding problem. ‘You’re talking billions for a department that hasn’t properly been created yet. And the hindrance there is your not making up your mind whether you’re going to accept the appointment. A lot of people might be confused by that reluctance. I admit to being so myself.’
‘It would bring me officially – responsibly – into the Executive?’
Partington allowed the token smile, and thought, and just you wait until it does. ‘You got a problem working with the President of the United States and being a member of the Cabinet?’
‘I can’t imagine how there could be,’ lied Stoddart easily.
It won’t take you long to find out, Partington promised himself.
Stoddart was told Geraldine was unavailable when he telephoned from Blair House and it was an hour before she returned his call, her exhilaration audible. She said: ‘We’ve got something! Too soon to talk about it but it’s looking good!’
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