The Pinocchio Syndrome

by David Zeman

  “I heard that some of the doctors think Everhardt’s problem may be functional,” she said.

  “What do you mean by that?” Kraig asked.

  “Mental. Emotional. Everhardt has been under a lot of stress recently. Maybe he cracked under the strain.”

  Kraig was looking at her face now. There was an odd concentration in her eyes, almost an animal concentration. He wondered for a split second whether she was on something, some sort of upper. But he rejected the idea. She was simply a newshound, ready to knock down any obstacle that stood between her and a story. Her kind didn’t need uppers. The stories themselves were their drug.

  “Everhardt is a good man,” she said, “but he’s not really cut out for the presidential wars. Consider the way Colin Goss had him buffaloed onWashington Today . Maybe the pressure was getting too great for him.”

  Kraig cut her off. “I don’t have anything for you,” he said.

  “As I say, I don’t want you to leak anything,” she said. “I just want . . .”

  Kraig gave her a dark smile. “What is it you want, Miss Embry?”

  “Call me Karen. Please.”

  Kraig was not taken in by her friendliness.

  “What is it you want?”

  “I don’t want to chase windmills,” she said. “I would like to have a contact who can help me stay on the right track. I really don’t want to print things that aren’t true.” She hesitated. “Call it a friend I want,” she said. “And I can be a friend in return.”

  Kraig gave her a long look. A tough reporter, wise to every angle an evasive government would try to pull on her. Looking for a scoop, and willing to trade. Trade what?

  Something told him not to blow her off completely.

  “Then stop jumping to conclusions,” he said, “and start looking for better sources.”

  “That’s why I’m here.” That intent look was still in her eyes.

  “I have work to do,” Kraig said, taking out his keys. “See you.”

  He went inside and closed the door. The ceiling light in his foyer sent dim rays into the empty apartment. He felt an urge to turn on all the lights in the place and fill it with music, as quickly as possible.

  But after hanging up his coat he looked out the window to see if the girl was gone.

  She was standing on his steps, looking at the closed front door. She had pretty shoulders under that long hair. She must be cold out there.

  He felt an impulse, half sexual and half pure loneliness, to let her in and give her a drink. He hesitated for a long moment. Then he reached for the doorknob. At that instant she started down the steps to the parking lot. She moved quickly, all business, her car keys in her hand. Yet as she opened the car door she looked younger, almost girlish.

  Sighing, Kraig turned back to the emptiness of home.

  7

  —————

  November 17

  EIGHTEEN HOURS after she left Joseph Kraig’s apartment Karen Embry stood in a hospital ward in Des Moines, Iowa, staring at a little girl.

  The girl’s arms were curled around a ragged teddy bear. Her fingers were frozen against the fur. The creases in her hospital gown remained exactly as they were when it was put on, for she had not moved since they brought her in. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling of the ward, as though the answer to a long-pondered riddle would appear there at any minute.

  The ward was crowded. There were no medical facilities in the affected part of the state capable of handling the victims. The majority had been taken by ambulance or National Guard transport to hospitals in Sioux City and Des Moines.

  The epidemic that had spread through a dozen towns in five counties now seemed to have stopped. No new victims had been found since the initial outbreak. This fact came as a relief to the public health officials, but did little for the harried medical professionals who were struggling to deal with fifteen hundred gravely sick adults and children.

  A cold front was sweeping across the Midwest and the Plains states, bringing wind chills below zero. Local inhabitants were wearing down jackets and parkas they had not expected to need for another month. Visitors, like Karen, found themselves underprotected against the intense cold.

  The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had sent a team of specialists to investigate the epidemic. Unfortunately for them, there were no unaffected citizens to interview. Every man, woman, and child in each affected town had been struck down by the mystery illness.

  Karen learned all this upon her arrival at the university hospital in Des Moines from the CDC official in charge, Mark Hernandez. Though Hernandez was not happy to see Karen, he had been instructed by his superiors that good relations with the press were crucial at this sensitive time.

  He helped Karen put on anticontamination gear. “It’s almost certainly unnecessary now,” he said, “but we’re still being careful.” He took her to a quarantined ward lined with beds occupied by immobile, empty-eyed patients of all ages. Overworked nurses were busy feeding and caring for the patients.

  It was a disturbing sight. Men, women, and children, still looking healthy and well fed, lying silent in their beds. They looked like film extras hired to play the role of the sick.

  Karen was struck by the look in their eyes. They seemed to be hypnotized from within. It was a fixed stare, but not suggestive of dementia. There was something almost visionary about it.

  When she remarked on this to Dr. Hernandez, the doctor shrugged. “It is strange. But so far we haven’t been able to attach any significance to it.”

  “I’m puzzled by the symptoms,” Karen said. “Shouldn’t there be fever or chills or nausea, or something to indicate the internal disorder?”

  “Off the record?” the doctor asked.

  Karen nodded. “Of course.”

  “I’m puzzled myself.” He shook his head. “The symptoms make no sense. All the vital signs are normal. The patients seem conscious, but their will seems to be paralyzed. Their power to act, even to feed themselves.”

  “Were any of them able to walk?” Karen asked.

  The doctor shook his head. “Judging by where we found them, the illness stopped them in their tracks. If they were sitting, they just stayed there. If they were standing, they remained standing until weakness made them keel over. It’s like being struck by lightning. They just froze.”

  Karen was thinking of Vice President Everhardt, lying helpless in a bed at Walter Reed. She wondered whether he looked like the patients here.

  “What is your people’s thinking on this?” she asked.

  Hernandez shrugged unhappily. “Frankly, we don’t know what to think. We’re concentrating on life support, nutrition, and so forth. We’ve quarantined the communities involved. We’re analyzing water and soil samples, even the air. It’s possible that something got in there and affected the whole population. Whatever it was, it didn’t affect anyone else. Each pocket of infection is completely encapsulated. People in the surrounding communities are healthy.”

  He looked at Karen. “But even if we find a vector, we still don’t understand the symptoms. They’re not like anything infectious I’ve ever seen or heard about. The body keeps functioning normally, but the patient is incapable of action.”

  “Have you heard about the vice president’s illness?” Karen asked.

  “Yes, I have. Why?”

  “It presents some intriguing parallels to this one,” Karen said. “Lack of voluntary motor capacity, inability to respond to commands, but apparently normal perception and vital signs.”

  “Really,” the doctor said. “How did you know that?”

  “I never reveal my sources,” Karen smiled. “It was told to me off the record in Washington. You might want to talk to your people there, though Walter Reed is buttoned up tight.”

  “I’ll think about it.” The doctor shook his head slowly as he scanned the ranks of helpless victims. “If it’s the same disorder, that could be a bad sign.”

  “For Everhardt?” Karen ask
ed.

  “For all of us.” The doctor shook his head. “If a thing like this ever started to spread . . . and us without a clue as to how to treat it . . .”

  As they were leaving the ward they passed the bed in which the little girl lay holding the teddy bear.

  “How did that get here?” Karen asked.

  “I think they found her at home,” said Dr. Hernandez. “She was in her playroom. I suppose one of the paramedics brought it along to keep her company here.”

  Karen looked more closely at the child’s eyes. Did she know where she was? From her glassy stare the reporter could not tell.

  For the first time the tragedy around her struck Karen. What if this little girl never moved again, never spoke again?

  Karen took her leave of Dr. Hernandez and went downstairs to the hospital cafeteria. Her stomach was rumbling, for she had eaten nothing since early this morning. Unfortunately smoking was not allowed in the hospital. She would have to wait for a cigarette until she was outside.

  She put a tuna sandwich, a granola bar, a container of yogurt, and a bag of potato chips on a tray and filled a Styrofoam cup with black coffee.

  As she was carrying the tray toward a window table a familiar voice sounded in her ear.

  “Miss Embry. You get around, I see.” It was Joseph Kraig, the Secret Service agent she had talked to last night. He was sitting alone at a table for four. He looked unhappy and somewhat more tired than the first time she saw him.

  “So do you,” Karen said. “May I join you?”

  “Why not?” He pushed back a chair for her. She threw her coat over one of the unoccupied chairs and sat down.

  “That doesn’t look warm enough for you,” Kraig said.

  “I haven’t been outside much,” she said. “Have you?”

  “Now that you mention it, no.”

  He watched her peel the top off her yogurt.

  “You don’t look as though you eat enough,” he said.

  She shrugged off the comment, sipping at her coffee with a look of distaste. “I hate hospitals,” she said. “My grandmother was in a succession of them when she was dying. If I never see one of these cafeterias again, it will be too soon.”

  Kraig nodded. He had his own hospital memories. He did not care to revisit them.

  Karen ate a few spoonfuls of yogurt, then sat back to study Kraig’s face.

  “What I really need is a cigarette,” she said. “These hospitals are too strict about smoking.”

  Kraig nodded. “The world is tough on smokers nowadays.”

  “Did you ever smoke?” she asked him.

  “In high school,” he said. “I quit when I got to college.”

  Karen nodded, glancing at the thick wrists emerging from his suit jacket. His fingers were square, almost stubby. The backs of his hands were broad. She guessed he worked out, perhaps too much.

  “How did you get into the federal agent business?” she asked.

  He smiled, reflecting that it was indeed a business, like any other.

  “I was young, I had just gotten married. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, and we needed money,” he said. “A friend of mine was an FBI agent, and he told me about the salary and the benefits. From there, things just evolved.”

  “Are you still married?” she asked.

  He shook his head. She recognized the slight curl of his lip as the outward disguise of a pain he didn’t like to talk about. It was a look she had seen on her own face in the mirror.

  He struck her as a straight arrow, but not as shallow. He looked like he had been around, made his share of mistakes. She liked that in him.

  “How about you?” he asked. “How did you get into the reporting business?”

  “I always wanted to be a reporter,” she said. “Even in high school. It keeps you busy. You meet a lot of people.”

  “People who aren’t necessarily glad to see you,” Kraig added.

  “That’s right,” she said, nodding. “But at least it gets you out of the house. I’m not that fond of my own company.”

  She took a bite of her tuna sandwich, grimaced, and drank a swallow of coffee. “Jesus,” she said. It had been years since she tasted food this bad, even on an airplane.

  Kraig smiled understandingly.

  She switched to the granola bar and ate half of it before saying what was on her mind.

  “It’s the same thing, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “The same disease,” she said. “The same as Everhardt.”

  Kraig gave her a steady look.

  “You don’t listen, do you?” he said. “No comment.”

  “On background?” She smiled. “Off the record?”

  He shook his head.

  She was watching Kraig closely.

  “All vital functions normal,” she said. “But the patient can’t act. Can’t obey simple commands, can’t talk, can’t walk, can’t feed himself. A paralysis of the function of action or decision.”

  Kraig said nothing.

  “They’re looking for a vector,” Karen said. “But they don’t really have a disease, so the vector may not help. There is no known disease that produces these symptoms.”

  Kraig asked, “How do you know?”

  “I never reveal my sources.” She shrugged. “Anyway, as it happens, I know a little something about this sort of thing. I did a double major in biochemistry and journalism in college. I’ve done a lot of reporting on diseases. This is definitely something new.”

  Kraig shrugged. “If you say so. I’m not a doctor.”

  She leaned forward, a hint of her clean-smelling cologne reaching Kraig, who smiled slightly.

  “Out here there are hundreds of victims,” she said. “Each area is covered completely. But in Washington there is only one victim. The vice president of the United States.”

  Kraig kept his poker face. But he knew she was right. If Everhardt had the same disease, dozens of others in Washington should have it by now. Something here didn’t add up.

  “Everhardt is a key to the president’s popularity. He’s big, he’s down to earth, he’s popular among men as well as women. It took the party a long time to come up with him as a running mate. Take him away, and the administration is a lot weaker with the voters. He won’t be easy to replace.”

  Kraig was silent.

  “And what about the president’s political enemies?” she asked. “What about Colin Goss? How does he feel about this turn of events?”

  Kraig shrugged. “Am I supposed to have a reaction to that?” he asked.

  She crumpled the wrapper of the granola bar and threw it on the tray.

  “Something isn’t right,” she said. “About Everhardt. And about this.” She glanced around her at the deserted cafeteria.

  Kraig said nothing.

  “I’m going to find out,” she said. “With you or without you. When the time comes, it may be you asking the questions.”

  “Maybe.” Kraig nodded.

  “I’m betting twelve years of journalism that you won’t like the answers,” she said.

  Picking up her coat, she left the cafeteria. Her shoulders looked very small under her sweater. A tired young woman, no doubt an incurable workaholic, who did not bother to hide her unhappiness.

  Kraig liked her. There was a tranquil hopelessness about her that struck a chord in him. She had given up on something a long time ago—love? belonging?—and the emptiness it left behind gave her sharp definition as a person. The reporters he had known were shallow people, slaves to their own ambition. Karen Embry was a human being, albeit a scarred one.

  Kraig wondered what she looked like without those clothes on. What her cologne smelled like closer up, when one’s lips were against her skin.

  He hoped he would never see her again.

  8

  —————

  Washington

  November 22

  SUSAN CAMPBELL was the only child of a wayward New Hampshire beaut
y queen and a philandering Boston blue blood named Lee Bellinger. Their marriage had lasted seven years. Susan was six when her father abandoned her mother. A series of boyfriends had followed, along with a desperate search for money that led “Dede” Bellinger into brief forays into television, radio, advertising, and public relations, until her taste for alcohol and her notoriously poor driving ability got her killed in a one-car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike.

  Susan was brought up by two straitlaced Bellinger aunts who sent her to the best private schools and offered her the combined wisdom of the Bible, theFarmer’s Almanac, and Ralph Waldo Emerson as a guide for living. At fourteen she entered Rosemary Hall as a thoroughly confused young girl with braces, skinny legs, and a worried look.

  Four years of private school in the company of privileged girls from the best families in the nation did little for her confidence. She was a shy freshman at Wellesley when a friend introduced her to Michael Campbell, a Harvard junior who was about to undergo a second serious spinal operation after his first one had failed. Michael was frightened; Susan took it upon herself to encourage him. It was in that gesture of giving that she became a woman.

  By the time Susan caught her breath Michael had won two Olympic gold medals and was a national celebrity. He finished law school two years after the Olympics, and two years after that ran successfully for the Maryland state legislature. By now Susan was his wife, and she helped him campaign for the U.S. Senate. Her extraordinary blond beauty made her an attractive partner for him on the campaign trail. She had worked her way through college as a catalog model specializing in sportswear and lingerie, and for several years her scantily clad image was on every package of silk panties sold under the exclusive S/Z brand name. That image still haunted her, for the feature articles on her in women’s magazines often included it.

  Susan was too beautiful for a political wife, and too shy. Michael’s campaign advisors did not quite know what to do with her.

  Then something happened that changed Susan from a minor asset to a crucial weapon in Michael’s political arsenal. She was invited to be a guest onThe Oprah Winfrey Show . At Oprah Winfrey’s request Susan brought along the photo album that documented her early years with Michael.