Cold Plague

by Daniel Kalla

  “Not alive,” Jean echoed softly. “But still contagious.”

  Elise nodded. She glanced from Duncan to Noah, before her eyes settled on Jean. “With respect, I understand my department’s worry about the outbreak in these French cattle farms, but why is the WHO so concerned about three cases of vCJD in France when there were over a hundred and twenty cases reported in Britain the last time?”

  Jean leaned back in his chair. “Ah yes, Elise, but these French cases appeared at the same time as the cattle outbreak.”

  “And in the U.K.,” Duncan added, “despite millions of infected cows, we only saw a hundred or so human cases. So far, in France the ratio is seven to three!”

  Seven to three. Noah fought off a shudder. “We’d better find out why this cluster of vCJD has had such a short incubation period,” he said. “If this prion is more contagious to humans than it was in Britain, we might be facing an infectious crisis. And not just in France.”

  “Or even Europe,” Duncan muttered.

  “How do you intend to find this out?” Elise asked.

  “We’ll start with the families,” Noah said. “And speak to the victims themselves if they can still give us reliable information.”

  Jean shook his head. “None can.”

  “Oh?” Noah said.

  “All of them are dead.”

  Noah went cold. The warning bells were clanging in his brain. He glanced over at Duncan, who had paled noticeably. “Shite, Jean, are you saying these people died in a matter of weeks from vCJD?” he asked.

  Jean nodded.

  “Are we dealing with an unknown entity here?” Duncan said, and seemed to hold his breath.

  Noah was thinking along the same lines. His temples pounded as he realized that this outbreak was already behaving differently from any variant CJD previously seen. Worse. “What if the BSE prion has mutated and is now more aggressive and contagious than before?”

  “Christ, Haldane!” Duncan stormed. “Then we haven’t yet seen the tiniest tip of an extremely nasty iceberg.”

  “I should clarify my answer,” Jean said. “Only two of the victims died directly of their disease. The third died in an accident.”

  “An accident?” Noah asked, taking no comfort in Jean’s clarification.

  Jean nodded gravely. “A fire.”

  3

  Montmagnon, France. January 12

  Pauline Lamaire stood at her kitchen countertop, eyeing the sandwich she had just constructed. She would have loved to add a slice of roast beef or, at the very least, a sliver of Brie, but her refrigerator held neither; even if it did, she wasn’t about to break her self-imposed yearlong vegan diet. Not when she was starting to see sustained improvement for the first time in three years.

  There wasn’t much the thirty-seven-year-old had not tried. When conventional medicine failed to halt the rapid advance of her rheumatoid arthritis, Pauline turned to alternative therapies. Ignoring the advice of her doctors—in whom she had lost faith anyway—she gobbled vitamins and herbal remedies with abandon. She was willing to try almost any new treatment that she dug up in books or magazines, or through the Internet—even those she knew crossed the line into quackery. Pauline was desperate to reclaim her life. She used to run marathons, but now she had so much pain and stiffness in her knees and hips that walking a few hundred yards into town was almost impossible. She was a nationally recognized concert violinist who had not touched her instrument in more than a year.

  She held up her hands and studied the knobby arthritic joints in her fingers. No question, they were less swollen and the throb had diminished. She balled her fingers and almost managed to form fists. Her heart leaped at the sight. She never would have been able to do that a month ago.

  Maybe the diet is helping, she thought. However, she gave most of the credit to the new therapy she had commenced. She had been taking it for more than four months and, as promised, the results had been striking.

  Did I take my morning dose? Pauline wondered. She couldn’t remember. Strange.

  Your memory would shame an elephant, her mother used to joke when she was a child. But in the past week or so she had been forgetful in uncharacteristic ways. The previous evening, she had left a tap running when she went out to the store. Earlier in the week, she had forgotten her cane at the bank. She had taken that oversight as an encouraging sign of her physical improvement, but the growing memory lapses had begun to worry her.

  The smell of basil and mustard reminded Pauline how hungry she was. Shrugging off her concern, she reached for the sandwich on her plate. The edge of rye bread grazed her cheek and smeared mustard on her face. She bit through the perfectly crisp crust. As she returned the sandwich to her plate, she lost her grip. It toppled onto the floor and landed in a mess of vegetables and sauce.

  “Clumsy, Pauline!” she muttered.

  Both knees burned with pain as she knelt down to pick up the remains of the sandwich. Her right hand swept forward but missed the bread altogether. She tried again. This time she caught the sandwich by the crust, but no sooner had she lifted it off the ground than it tumbled from her grip.

  Ignoring the spill, she leaned back against the wall and raised her hand to her face. Trembling slightly, it felt entirely numb. She tried to form a fist again but this time the hand simply twitched, dead in response.

  Sudden fear winded her. What is happening to me?

  4

  Geneva, Switzerland. January 15

  As the Airbus A321 sat on the tarmac waiting for clearance to depart, Duncan squirmed relentlessly in the seat. Beside him, Noah read the International Herald Tribune while trying to ignore his fidgeting friend.

  “I thought the Swiss had a thing for punctuality,” Duncan grumbled. And for the umpteenth time, he jerked his arm up and made a show of studying his watch. “It’s been over an hour. You think the captain is waiting for France to come to us?”

  Noah tapped the fogged-up window. “Not much they can do about a blizzard.”

  “And this comes as a surprise to them?” Duncan rolled his eyes. “I don’t believe there was an ultraviolet sun-screen warning outside when they dragged me away from my beer and football match in the terminal, just to have me sit on the runway like a giant log.”

  Noah bit back a smile. “We both know Lufthansa has been out to get you for a while now.”

  Duncan sighed heavily. “I’m not terribly pleased about this.”

  Noah shrugged. “Would have never guessed.”

  “Not the bloody flight!” Duncan snapped. “The mad cow situation in France.”

  Despite his friend’s exaggerated charade of trying to avoid every assignment the WHO sent them on, Noah knew that Duncan shared his passion for the job. However, since the meeting in Geneva, Duncan had been uncharacteristically dour. Sensing it was best to let him get it off his chest, Noah simply nodded and waited.

  Duncan arched in his seat and flopped onto his side, facing away from Noah. Just as Noah began to raise his newspaper, the Scot turned back to him. “Back in the nineties, I was one of the supposed experts they consulted with on managing the mad cow outbreak in Britain.” He paused. “They didn’t listen to me then. I’ve got no reason to believe they will listen now.”

  “What did you tell them then?”

  “That they were fools to think that infected cows existed only on our miserable little island. I told them to look closer at the rest of the world to see where the bugger was hiding. Their answer was to ban British beef indefinitely, and destroy a way of life for thousands of cattle farmers. It had everything to do with politics, and nothing to do with science.”

  Noah knew that time had proven Duncan right. Thousands of cases of BSE had been underreported or even ignored in mainland Europe before exhaustive surveillance systems were adopted. “And ‘they’ are?” Noah asked.

  “The new motherland.” Duncan laid a hand on his chest, feigning patriotism. “The European Union.”

  “Aha,” Noah said. Duncan’s unpr
ovoked outburst at Elise Renard, the E.U. envoy, suddenly made more sense.

  “Granted, I’m not a huge fan of governments of any kind,” Duncan said with a fleeting half-grin. “But the E.U.? It’s not even a government. Nothing of the sort. It’s no more than a huge trade monopoly with its own colorful money. I trust those bumbling E.U. bureaucrats even less than I trust the dangerous clowns who run your empire.”

  Noah ignored the anti-American dig. “And Elise Renard?” he asked.

  “Works for them.”

  “Maybe, but Jean specifically asked us to work with her on this one.”

  “Jean asks a lot of us.”

  “Don’t give me that crap.” Noah’s grip tightened on his armrest as his patience suddenly gave way. “He’s always been there for us. And if he asks us to work with Elise and the E.U., then we work with them.”

  Duncan shrugged noncommittally.

  Glowering, Noah grabbed for his newspaper and flapped it open noisily. He realized that part of his frustration was misdirected at Duncan. He was no happier than his colleague about having to report to a second regulatory body on their progress. And this mysterious French outbreak made him uneasy. Though the numbers of infected were still small, he sensed that the potential for something much bigger lay under the surface.

  “Weeks, Haldane,” Duncan said. “I don’t know of a prion that manifests itself and kills its victims in a matter of weeks.”

  “Neither do I,” Noah grunted from behind his newspaper.

  “And between us, we do know a thing or two about the wee bastards.”

  Duncan had a point. As an infectious-disease specialist, Noah subspecialized in emerging pathogens; and Duncan was one of WHO’s leading clinical microbiologists. Prion-related diseases fell within both their realms. “Let’s face it, prions are the black holes of microbiology,” Noah said in a more civil tone. “No one knows much about them.”

  “True. But with other prion diseases like scrapie in sheep or even kuru that cannibals get from eating human brain that’s been left out of the icebox too long”—Duncan joked of the brain-wasting disease New Guinea cannibals acquired from consuming infected brains—“I’m not aware of a case of spontaneous change in the disease incubation or progression. Gruesome as they are, those prions are as predictable as a clock. This thing sounds potentially explosive.”

  Noah’s guts churned, as he tried to shrug off Duncan’s ominous comment. “Microbes change all the time,” he rationalized. “That’s the joy of our job.”

  “I keep forgetting how joyful our job is.” Duncan reached out and took a section of Noah’s paper. “Now let me have a look at the obits. They might cheer me up.”

  Half an hour later, the plane finally lifted off. Noah stared out the window at the clouds enshrouding the aircraft, trying to ignore the flight’s at-times-violent vibrations and unexpected drops in the turbulent air. His thoughts drifted to his family. He hadn’t been able to reach his ex-wife, Anna, from his hotel room or his cell phone. He guessed she and Chloe were somewhere on the road to South Carolina, where her parents wintered.

  He would have loved to have spoken with Chloe. And Anna. More than a year had passed since their separation and, though Anna had moved in with her partner, Julie, time had soothed the wounds; his sense of hurt and betrayal had ebbed until an ember of regret replaced what had once been a fire. They had grown far tighter than he ever anticipated. She told him once that their closeness was a sore point with Julie. And while Noah had grown to tolerate—even grudgingly admire—the “other woman,” he took vindicatory satisfaction in knowing he was responsible for her jealousy.

  Gwen had never been jealous of Noah’s closeness to Anna. On the contrary, she encouraged it, reasoning that it was best for his daughter. Thinking of Gwen again, his heart sank. He was tempted to call her and run the details of the French outbreak by her. Though vCJD had little relevance for an expert on bioterrorism, Gwen had superb judgment. Once, he had gone so far as to pick up the phone and dial the first three digits of her number before hanging up, realizing it would not be fair to either of them to initiate contact.

  “Finally!” Duncan shouted, waving the paper in his hands and causing the timid-looking woman across the aisle to almost leap from her seat. “It’s refreshing to see a scientist more famous than you!”

  Noah glanced at the paper. A half-page photo of a smiling man was inlaid with a diagram of a lake, a shot of an ice field, and an electron-microscope image of a bacterium. Noah recognized Dr. Claude Fontaine from his picture. His name and face were everywhere lately, cutting across the media spectrum from respected scientific journals to TV talk shows and even the gossip columns.

  “I still don’t see why they’re making such a fuss over this bloke,” Duncan said.

  “Fontaine found organisms in a lake miles under the Antarctic ice thriving under conditions supposedly incompatible with life. Even you have to admit, that’s impressive.” Noah pointed at the photo of the ruggedly handsome Frenchman. “Plus he has that mug and one of those irresistible French accents. Face it. He’s a media dream.”

  “I don’t know, Haldane. You’ve got a cheesy smile and a ridiculous accent, too, and the press forgot you in a big hurry after the ARCS scare.”

  “Thank God,” Noah said, and meant it. “Did you read Fontaine’s article in Nature? Amazing how those bacteria have adapted to Lake Vishnov. Zero light, and living at the freezing point under a water pressure that would crush a tank.”

  Duncan shrugged. “They’re not so adaptable. The little bastards explode like dynamite when they’re brought anywhere near atmospheric pressure.”

  “Yeah,” Noah agreed. “It’s going to make studying them a challenge. They’ll have to keep them pressurized and away from all light.”

  “Kind of like us.” Duncan’s lips cracked into a mischievous grin. “Under intense bloody pressure and usually completely in the dark.”

  At 3:05 P.M., their plane touched down bumpily on the runway of Limoges’s modest airport. Noah and Duncan deplaned onto a tarmac that was even colder and windier than the streets of Geneva. They hurried inside the terminal, where Noah was relieved to see that no one awaited them. He preferred to avoid the (often well-intentioned) meddling from local governments and sister agencies that dogged him throughout the ARCS crisis.

  In front of the airport, they grabbed the first cab they spotted. The driver’s swarthy face boasted at least three days’ worth of stubble, and he smelled of some kind of fried meat. Noah guessed he was Eastern European, though he had no way of knowing because the man spoke no English and barely any French. In his own basic French, Noah conveyed the address of their hotel.

  In a stop-start jerky ride that would have tested the nerves of most New York cabbies, the driver wove in and out of traffic, not slowing when the highway gave way to the narrower twisting streets of the city of Limoges, built on the banks of the Vienne River. Noah fought off his growing queasiness and took in the city from the backseat of the hurtling taxi. He marveled at the medieval churches and ornate Renaissance buildings interspersed among red-roofed apartments and other more ordinary recent structures.

  The driver slammed on his brakes, screeching to a stop halfway through an intersection, barely avoiding a truck that sailed inches past the front of the car. He leaned on the tinny horn and unleashed a stream of expletives. “I was prepared to take my chances with mad cows,” Duncan said, white-knuckling the door handle. “But no one mentioned the insane cabbies!”

  The driver hit the accelerator as if a racing flag had dropped, and they were off again.

  “You know, Richard the Lionheart was killed by a crossbow just a few miles south of here,” Noah said, trying to focus on something other than his flip-flopping stomach.

  Duncan pointed at the driver, who was busy working the horn. “You sure it wasn’t in the back of some medieval cab that reeked of fried sausages?”

  Noah chuckled. “This city has quite a history. During medieval times, it held
one of the largest libraries in the known world at the Abbey of St. Martial. In the 1700s, unique clay was discovered on the riverbanks and Limoges became world famous for its porcelain. Still is today.”

  “Oh, Christ, Haldane.” Duncan grinned. “You’ve been at your Frommer’s tour books again, haven’t you?”

  Noah flashed the thumbs-up sign. When work took him to any new destination, he made a habit of reading up on the region first. Duncan teased Noah for it, but in his way, the Scotsman was eager to hear about the local color. “Limoges is the capital of Limousin, but its population is barely over a hundred thousand,” Noah went on. “Apparently, Limousin has the smallest and oldest population in France’s forty provinces. But the terrain is supposed to be beautiful.”

  “Nowadays people prefer their McDonald’s and WiFi to quiet forests and babbling brooks,” Duncan said wistfully.

  Noah wondered if Duncan was referring to his teenaged twin boys, but he didn’t ask. His friend rarely discussed his home life, though from their few previous conversations Noah knew that the frequent travel away from home was tough on Duncan and his tight-knit family.

  “On the other hand,” Noah said, “this is still one of the top cattle-producing regions in France. In fact, Limousin is a popular breed the world over.”

  “Marvelous, Haldane. Let’s just hope their trendy cows aren’t responsible for the end of the world.”

  Before Noah could comment, the taxi skidded up to the entrance of the Grand Hotel Doré on Avenue Garibaldi. Feeling seasick as he got out, he was glad to be on stable ground despite the biting cold. He gave the pale stone exterior of the dated hotel no more than a quick glance. Providing the roofs didn’t leak and the floors didn’t crawl with insects, Noah didn’t demand much of his lodgings. His own two-bedroom condominium just outside the Beltway in D.C. was new and bright, but since moving in more than a year before, he had not hung a single decoration on the walls, and only Chloe’s room was fully furnished. Even Gwen had raised an eyebrow at the sparseness of the place.