Sam shook her head. “We’re the monsters Cornell thinks we are.”
Ralph laughed. “Don’t be so dramatic. What did you think this job was, Dr. Bower? As a physician you make life and death calls. What does it matter if it’s over one person in an ER or on the scale of an island?”
“Ralph, please, don’t do this.”
Duncan jumped in, “There are alternatives. We can request volunteers, not just from here, from all over.”
“And what happens if one of those volunteers gets infected and we don’t catch it when they decide to come home? Do you have any idea what a virus like this could do in a major city? Pushkin’s run the numbers. Within ten days, fourteen percent of the population of the United States would be infected. Within twenty-five days, it would be sixty percent. Within a month, ninety-eight percent would be infected. We’re not talking H1N1, we’re talking Armageddon.”
Samantha rose. “There are some things you don’t do, even at the risk of your own life. You’re giving these people a death sentence. And I can’t be a part of it.”
“You want to quit? Quit. It won’t change anything. You’re still on that plane.”
“I’m going to stop this.”
“Feel free. I think it’s probably time for you to learn that there are things beyond your influence.”
Duncan gently put his hand on her arm. “Let’s go, Sam. There’s nothing we can do here.”
As they walked out of the restaurant, Sam kicked over the trashcan outside and began to pace.
“Feel better?” Duncan said.
“What can we do, Duncan? These people are all going to die. They asked for help from their government and we’re going to abandon them.”
“Sometimes there is nothing you can do. You just have to do the best you can and hope it works out.”
She shook her head, her thumbnail in her mouth as she paced back and forth across the hotel’s entrance. “There’s got to be something…we’re not helpless in this.”
Benjamin Cornell was waiting on the hood of a car and he hopped off and came over to them. “So?”
They didn’t respond and he grinned. It wasn’t a happy grin; it was filled with melancholy. As if he were sad he had been proved right.
“I thought so,” Benjamin said.
Duncan was about to grab Sam and leave when Benjamin heard her say, “There has to be something we can do.”
“There is,” Benjamin said.
“Sam, we’re ending this conversation. We’re not helping him do anything.”
Sam ignored Duncan. “What?” she said to Benjamin.
“Iquitos, Peru,” he said. “The woman that survived. They’ve cancelled the expedition to find her. Only one known survivor of this thing and they’re going to completely ignore her.” He glanced around and saw Ralph Wilson leaving the building, surrounded with men in suits, discussing something. Ralph saw them and shook his head before entering a Jeep. “I’m not going to ignore her,” Benjamin said. “Why don’t you come with me and meet some of our people to talk this over?”
“No,” Duncan said. “Sam, this guy is a borderline terrorist.”
“Why, because I don’t accept everything my government tells me? My father fought in Vietnam, young kid of seventeen. He was so patriotic he lied about his age to fight. He got sprayed with Agent Orange by his own government and died of cancer nine years later. That’s the government you work for, Dr. Adams. So don’t you dare tell me I’m the terrorist.”
“Stop it, you two,” Sam said. “Duncan, I’m going to go with him. Are you coming with me or not?”
“Sam—”
“No, I’m not sitting by and watching these people die. I have to do something.”
“Why? You don’t even believe in a God; what does it matter to you if these people die?”
“It matters to me because I’ve devoted my life to helping people. God or not, I couldn’t live with myself if I just went back to Atlanta and pretended like these people didn’t exist.” She turned to Benjamin. “Be honest with me: why do you want me to come?”
“An honest question, and I have an honest answer: This woman may not come back with us. She may not even want to talk to us. But I think I can convince her to give us some blood and tissue samples, or maybe the hospital still has some. But I need a laboratory, a very advanced laboratory in a BSL 4 environment to analyze them.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do. Let’s go.”
As Sam was climbing into Benjamin’s car, Duncan ran over and got into the backseat. “I’m coming, but I’d like to make it official that I think this is a mistake.”
“Duly noted,” Benjamin said, starting the car and pulling away.
CHAPTER 32
They pulled to a stop in front of what had been a massive grocery store, something like Wal-Mart but with a name Sam had never heard before, and parked near the front in handicap parking. Benjamin stepped out without saying anything.
“You sure you want to do this?” Duncan said when they were alone in the car.
“Rather than just sit at home and read about what’s going on on Twitter? Yes.”
They got out and followed Benjamin inside through the automatic doors. The grocery store had been rearranged in a way that all the goods were up against the walls. The floors were cluttered with desks and cubicles but they weren’t staffed with more than half a dozen people. Samantha recognized one of them as the FBI agent she had met earlier.
“You know he’s with the FBI, right?”
“Who, Billy? Yeah we know. He’s one of the good ones, though. He’s been helping out now here and there. Damn good at everything too if you ask me. Isn’t that right, Billy?”
He came over, a smile on his face as he bowed his head slightly in acknowledgement of the compliment. “Glad I could be of service.”
“What’s a federal agent doing helping these people out?” Duncan said.
“I suppose I could say the same thing about a military scientist.” He looked to Sam. “Or a CDC field agent. You didn’t like the thought of being shipped off and leaving everyone here, huh? Me neither. But if you’ll excuse me I have a couple of things I need to follow up on in our itinerary.”
“Our itinerary? You’re coming to Peru as well?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said, a wide grin on his face.
“Don’t worry about him. I want to introduce you to everyone else. I’m heading down with you guys as is Cami over there—wave hi, Cami—yeah, her right there. So it’ll be the five of us.”
“And what exactly is the plan?” Duncan asked.
“We’re going to find this woman and bring her back to the States. We have a few physicians in DC that are ready to analyze why she survived when no one else did. If we can do that, we can save a lot of lives.” He looked to Duncan. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. But if you do, you gotta pay your own way. I’ll be covering the ticket for Dr. Bower.”
“No,” Duncan said, “I don’t want her in debt to you for anything. I’ll pay for both our flights. Sam, I need to talk to you a sec.” He took her by the arm and they stepped aside out of earshot. “This is crazy.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Yes, let the pros handle it.”
“I’m a pro. I’m a field agent. This is something I was actually planning on doing until they decided that it would be better to let everybody die.”
“Sam, look at these people. They’re nutballs. That girl over there can’t be more than eighteen. These are the people that think the CIA killed Kennedy or that the moon landing happened at a set in Hollywood.”
“That might be true, but all they want to do now is find a patient that could help us come up with a vaccine.”
“We might not have needed another vaccine if these guys hadn’t destroyed the shipments we got!”
“There’s no proof they did that. Besides, Pushkin said it’s unlikely the standard smallpox vaccine was going to do anything anyway.�
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“But we won’t know that because they destroyed it.”
“I didn’t do that,” Benjamin said.
Duncan turned to him. “I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you want. We’re all going to LA on that plane and then we have a flight chartered for Mexico. You can come if you want to. We could use your expertise. That girl that you said was eighteen is a doctor from John Hopkins who’s risking her life and her job to come with us and investigate this survivor. Show a little respect before you start criticizing.”
Duncan looked to the young girl. He saw the screen of the mac she was working on: it was a computer model of the smallpox virus. A program was molding and sculpting the virus into different mutations.
“She may be noble, but you’re not. I know you, Ben. I know people like you. Your type. Your motives are pure and your means destructive. I’m coming, but the only reason I’m doing it is so Sam isn’t alone with you.”
He smiled. “The more the merrier.”
CHAPTER 33
Samantha stepped on the plane and turned around to get one last look at Honolulu. Even at night it was beautiful. At one in the morning, the moon was a crescent slit in the black sky and the tips of the palm trees shimmered under its light. The night air was warm and salty and she inhaled deep lungfuls before turning and sitting down in her seat.
It was early morning in Atlanta but she knew that Pushkin tended to answer his phone at any time. She took out her phone, fully charged thanks to Benjamin’s charger, and called him.
“This is Dr. Pushkin,” he said on the third ring, sleep still in his voice.
“This is Samantha Bower, Doctor.”
“Sam, how are you? Are you on your way back to the States with everybody else?”
She glanced around at the twenty-five or so people on the plane with her. “Yes.” She wasn’t quite lying. They were heading back to the States before going to Peru, as there’d be no way to get a straight flight to South America from Hawaii. “I have a favor to ask.”
“Anything.”
“The girl in Peru, the survivor, I may be shipping some tissue and blood samples back to you for analysis. We need to figure out what made her unique.”
“I thought that operation was cancelled?” She didn’t say anything. “Oh, I see. Well, I don’t like doing things off the radar but this seems sufficiently warranted. Send them through the normal biohazard but have them labeled for me instead of Infectious Diseases. I’ll keep my eyes open.”
“Thank you. And thanks for not asking questions.”
“I’ve been here a long time, Sam. And I’ll be here long after you’re gone. You’re not the first field agent to go against policy. But this time I agree with you. The smallpox vaccines were ineffective. We’re completely exposed to this agent and they won’t even go down and interview this woman much less examine her. Just do me a favor and be careful; we don’t know how the initial transmission occurred. It could’ve been something as simple as a mosquito. You won’t know until it’s too late.”
“Thanks, I’ll be careful.”
She hung up and glanced next to her. Billy Donner sat next to her reading a copy of Tropic of Cancer.
“You wouldn’t just lose your job for disobeying orders,” she said. “They’d bring criminal charges against a law enforcement officer.”
“I know. But the bureau’s not as efficient as all that. I’ll be back before they miss me.”
She glanced back at Benjamin who was already asleep with headphones poking out of his ears. “What made a man like you put your trust in him?”
“He’s sincere. That’s a rare quality. And unlike most people in the government, and major corporations helping us out, he actually cares about curing this disease, not just avoiding blame.”
There was a bottle of water tucked into the back of the seat in front of her and she took it out and opened it, taking a sip. “They’re going to fire me for this. Pushkin’s unique; they can’t get rid of him. They’ll put all the blame on me and I’ll be the scapegoat.”
“You never know. Things could go well and we could discover a vaccine. That’ll probably buy you some leniency.”
She chuckled. “You haven’t worked for the government long, have you?”
He smiled, lowering his book. “I’m not used to bureaucracy if that’s what you mean.”
“I disobeyed a direct order from my boss and didn’t follow the accepted procedure from the head of the department. They care more about that than any benefit they get out of it.”
“Well, I won’t hold it against you,” he said, smiling as he brought the book back up.
The plane roared to life. It began to rumble down the strip that had been cleared and turned into a runway, and then slowed and turned the other way. It began to speed up and then lifted into the air. Samantha looked out the window and watched as the lights on the island sparkled like gems in the darkness and then began to fade. Eventually, there was only darkness beneath her as the plane leveled out, and then only the open sea. She took a deep breath and leaned back in the seat, closing her eyes and drifting off.
Sam felt a hand gently placed on her arm. She glanced down and saw the finely manicured nails of Agent Donner’s hand. She looked up and saw his smiling face.
“You slept the whole flight,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I haven’t gotten much sleep lately.”
“It sounds childish but warm milk really does work.”
She unbuckled herself as Donner did the same. He stood in the aisle and offered his hand to help her up. She grabbed her gym bag from above the seats and slung it over her shoulder. They walked down the aisle and she saw Duncan up front. He smiled to her and took her bag.
“I was going to switch seats with Billy here, but you looked so comfortable I left you alone.”
“I was out cold. Did you get some sleep?”
“A little.”
“Let’s get some breakfast somewhere.”
They walked out onto the tarmac and through the airport. There didn’t appear to be any other planes.
“The runway’s been cleared,” Agent Donner told her, “so that we could land. I’m sure we’re going to have some upset people inside, so it was for the best not to let them know we were on that flight.”
LAX appeared as it always had: modern and rundown at the same time. The maintenance was top notch and kept it as clean and well oiled as possible, but where a mass of human beings gathered and moved about every day, there was always decay.
Benjamin caught up to them and gave them keys to their hotel rooms at the Marriot. He and Agent Donner said they’d see them in the morning and left together in one cab as Sam and Duncan got into another.
“What’s the best for breakfast around here?” Samantha asked the driver.
“Dinah’s is the best I think,” the driver said, his voice raspy from prolonged cigarette smoke.
“Dinah’s it is.”
As they pulled away and got onto the freeway, Sam leaned back into the seat and watched the multitudes of cars and SUVs passing by. She had grown so accustomed to seeing no one and nothing on the streets that at first it seemed odd to her that people would be out. She marveled at how quickly the mind adjusted to changing circumstances; it was what was responsible for our species’ survival. Adaptability was more important than intelligence, than power, than connections…it made and broke men in seconds.
“You okay?” Duncan asked.
“Yeah, why?”
“You look lost in your own little world over there.”
“I’m just wondering about this virus. How many more like it are out there? If this is just a random fluke of nature, there’s probably more, and some of them might even be more deadly. How many outbreaks like this until our species succumbs?”
“Extinction is the most natural process on earth. It even predates our understanding of evolution.”
“I think that’s why climate change is such a
debated issue. Some people think we’re causing our own extinction and others think it’s a myth. Since we haven’t studied extinction as long as adaptability, it’s all conjecture.”
“It is and it isn’t. We know about one species per day has gone extinct since life on earth began. From that we can come up with averages. For most animals, the mean timeframe before a species goes extinct is a little over four million years. But for humans and other mammals, it’s about nine hundred thousand. So, I guess you could say we’ve already outlived our mean. Maybe it is just a matter of time until our number’s up?”
She looked out the window again as the cab got off the freeway and onto the lamp-lit streets of Los Angeles. She had lived here once for a period of three years during a graduate fellowship and her mind was instantly flooded with memories of college parties and cramming for exams.
“I think it’s deeper than that,” she said absently. “I think mammals are perfectly capable of adapting to different environments but they still die out. I think the problem is that their behavior advances to a point that they’re no longer receptive to what’s happening in their environment. They lose their intuition, their imagination, and begin to rely solely on reason. When that happens, they don’t respond to their environment anymore. They die.”
Duncan shuddered, exaggerating it for effect. “Creepy.”
He reached down and held her hand. She didn’t object and turned and gave him a smile.
CHAPTER 34
Sam slept until nearly noon and when she awoke she found that Benjamin, Duncan, and Agent Donner had been waiting for her downstairs in the hotel lobby for over an hour. Duncan didn’t want to wake her. Besides, their flight wasn’t for another four hours and a hotel lobby was as good as any airport.
They eventually called a cab company, requested two vans, and headed back to LAX. The young doctor, Cami Mendoza, was with them as well and she mostly read on her iPad or listened to music. Sam sat next to her in the cab and noticed a tattoo of a dragon on her arm, running all the way down to the tips of her fingers.
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