Final Epidemic

by Earl Merkel

Beck frowned, calculating the collective stature of the people at this table. Health and Human Services was Cabinet level, the surgeon general only a half-step below; add to that at least one senator, an assortment of expensive Brooks Brothers suits, and an impressive number of uniformed military, none of them below flag rank.

  The heavy hitters were here in force, he realized.

  A thin blue plume rose from one of the chairs, catching his attention. The occupant was facing away from the door where Beck, Krewell and Wheelwright had entered. Only the balding dome of the back of his head was visible, but Beck felt a sudden flash of recognition.

  Carson,Beck thought.Of course, it would have to be Carson.

  As if he heard Beck’s thoughts, Billy Carson, national security advisor to the President, swiveled to look back at the entering trio. His face showed no sign of greeting, though his eyes locked on Beck’s for what seemed like a long moment.

  Then he turned away, leaning toward a stocky man in a short-sleeved white shirt who sat to his right. He murmured what might have been advice or instructions, then raised his voice to address the rest of the room.

  “If I may. Please.”

  As always, Beck found the tone surprisingly mild, matching an appearance that would have better fit a stereotypical midlevel bureaucrat than the de facto head of the U.S. intelligence community. It was easy to underestimate Carson on the basis of how he looked and acted; in Beck’s personal experience, a number of people had done just that, to their regret. In one notable instance, an undersecretary of defense had wondered aloud how “such a goddamn shoe-store clerk” could have risen so high in the intelligence community.

  The remark had since become famous in the upper circles of government.

  The undersecretary had seen neither the intellect nor the fierce pride that burned behind Carson’s calculatedly mild demeanor. Only when the hapless official had found himself quietly outflanked and outmaneuvered had he looked closer, and by then it was too late to salvage his own career. The erstwhile undersecretary had left government, ironically to join a corporation that supplied footwear to the Army.

  Beck had heard the story any number of times, even after he had left the job that kept him in regular contact with Carson. It had become a legend, and even the incumbent President was among those who regularly repeated the story. But rumor said he was the only one who did not smile when he told it.

  Now Carson’s quiet tone sliced through the debate like a bayonet.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Dr. Porter tells me he is prepared to address the nature of the situation we are facing. It might be valuable to hear him now.”

  Krewell touched Beck’s arm. “Ray Porter heads CDC’s Bio-Pathogen Forensics,” he said in a low voice. “Knows his business. This guy, believe what he says about anything medical.” They moved to the chairs behind Carson, where Wheelwright was already seated.

  Porter fiddled with the keyboard, and an image lit up the room’s large screen. It was a gray-and-white photo of what looked like fuzzy cotton balls, each corralled by a thick variegated circle. There were a number of them lumped together so tightly that some of the circles had flexed into the shape of hens’ eggs.

  “What you’re looking at is an electron microscope’s view of what we’re calling H1N1-Florida,” he said. “It’s a virus culture sent to CDC by a pathologist in Niceville, Florida, down in the Panhandle. Patient was a thirty-six-year-old male, a limousine driver who had been hospitalized for a case of severe pneumonia. He died on the ninth of July. The sample was logged in here on July 11, and two days ago was assigned to a lab tech for A and I—analysis and identification.”

  “Thereby wasting almost two weeks,” a woman sitting stiffly at the table did not quite mutter. The blue-black jacket draped over her chairback bore the gold shoulder boards of a Navy vice admiral and the bright silver caduceus of the medical corps.

  Porter reddened, but his voice was unfazed.

  “We get about a hundred and fifty culture samples here every working day,” he said. “More on Mondays. You do the math, okay?” He pressed another key and a new image appeared along side the first.

  “I’m not an expert,” the ferret senator said, “but I don’t see a difference.”

  “Genetically, there isn’t one,” Porter replied. “They’re the same bug. Except this one came from in from a pathology lab in Mary Esther, Florida. An eight-year-old female presenting what the clinic’s attending described as ‘mild flulike symptoms.’ That was last week—the sixteenth, I believe. We were sent the culture on July 18, the day the girl succumbed to severe respiratory failure.”

  Porter blew out hard. “Okay. We have a middle-aged male with pneumonia, which isn’t all that uncommon even in the summer. This guy had all kinds of risk factors: he was a smoker, grossly overweightand in a sedentary job—”

  He shrugged.

  “Well. And sad as it is, sometimes when a kid catches the flu, or even a common cold, there’s a toxic-shock reaction. So the cultures came in. The first thing our people do is look over the paperwork that comes with ’em. Seemed routine. The clinical symptomology didn’t raise any red flags, right? They had to wait in line for A and I.”

  “We all understand,” the senator growled. “Your ass is covered. Get on with it.”

  Porter ignored the interruption.

  “We ran the standard virological tests on the sample from the limo driver. It was an A-type, but we couldn’t get a match on the strain. Wasn’t Victoria, wasn’t PR-34, wasn’t WS. Then the lab tech ran an ELISA—that’s shorthand for ‘enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay’—and got somevery confusing results. We seemed to have some kind of swine flu virus, non–type specific.That rang some bells—enough so the tech fast-tracked it to genetics for comparison.

  “Yesterday, the computer came up with a hit—a form of Type A influenza, H1N1. Not an exact match; there are some very interesting antigenic shifts in the hemagglutinin protein that have us puzzled. But it was close enough for identification. More than close enough to make us start rescreening the paperwork backlog, looking for any cases with similar symptoms. That’s how we found the other one, the girl.”

  He touched the keyboard again, and a map replaced the virus images. It was a detailed section of Northwest Florida, the stretch that ran along the Gulf Coast from the bulge of Applachicola to Mobile Bay in the west. Porter did something to the laptop that caused the display to zoom in, centering on the large patch of blue that was Choctawatchee Bay. Touching the northern shore was the town of Niceville; to the west, Mary Esther. Over both, a large red “1” was superimposed.

  Between them, on the left side of the bay where the blue of the gulf touched a forest green shoreline, lay the city of Fort Walton Beach. There, on the display monitor, a large yellow “4-?” blinked relentlessly.

  There was a stunned silence for a moment. Then the significance of what they were seeing dawned on those seated around the table, and several voices started to speak simultaneously.

  Porter’s next words rolled over the commotion like a tank.

  “Approximately two hours ago, CDC fielded a call from a general practitioner in Fort Walton, which is on the coast about ninety miles west of Tallahassee. The physician—a Dr. Mayer—was reporting the death this morning of a fifty-three-year-old male who collapsed in the clinic where she works. Dr. Mayer indicated that the dead man presented with symptoms consistent with those of three other patients she had already examined this morning.”

  Porter paused for a moment.

  “And here’s worse news, people. Dr. Mayer says her waiting room was full of people with upper-respiratory complaints—an unusually high number, she believes.”

  The surgeon general spoke up.

  “Can we confirm it’s our virus?”

  Porter shrugged. “I’ve got a team in the air now”—he glanced at the wall clock—“and they should be landing in a few minutes. We’ll get swabs of the dead man and the three other patients, and run a field antibody test
. My prediction is it’s H1N1. If that’s the case, I have no doubt that we will find others. It’s only a matter of time.”

  From the chair beside Beck, Krewell’s voice was hard, uncompromising.

  “Time,” he said, loud enough for the room to hear, “may be what we have the least of.”

  All eyes swiveled to Krewell. There was a silence for a moment, an appraisal of sorts. Then the senator spoke.

  “Dr. Krewell, with all due respect, we’re aware of your position. I’m certain the Special Pathogens Branch is sincere in its concern. But three or four cases of the flu—most of them not even confirmed—don’t make for an emergency.”

  “This isn’t just ‘the flu,’ Senator,” Krewell said. “Not this variant of H1N1.”

  “Pardon me.” Beck spoke up, feeling like a man come late to the party. “I don’t know anything about this . . . H1-what- ever.”

  “Sure you do,” Krewell said. “Maybe not by that name.”

  “The form of H1N1 we’re looking at doesn’t exist in nature,” Porter said. “At least, we believe it hasn’t for more than eighty years. But when it was making the rounds, back in 1918, it was called the Spanish flu. And now it’s back.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Beck said softly. “My great-grandfather died from that.”

  “Really?” Porter said. He spoke in a voice intended to carry throughout the room. “So did forty million other people.”

  Chapter 3

  Fort Walton Beach, Florida

  July 21

  It was gloriously hot on the beach, moderated only slightly by the steady breeze that blew in from the sea. Gulls swooped in, hovering to investigate a scrap of bread crust on the sugar white sand before banking away in search of fresher sustenance. A sandpiper, either hungrier or less choosy than his larger cousin, darted in comically on its stiff bird legs and snatched up the morsel in his beak. Outside the surf line, fifty yards from shore, the occasional mullet broke the sun-dappled surface in fancy or in flight.

  Katherine Casey—Katie to her friends—stretched languorously in the bright sunlight. She lay on her back, eyes closed, one knee carefully bent in a way she hoped displayed her fifteen-year-old charms to her best advantage. This, despite the fact that there were no teenage boys within view and only a handful of older male specimens in evidence. And most ofthem must have been thirty, maybe thirty-five—if not absolutely ancient, she told herself, then at least teetering on antique.

  Still,Katie thought, savoring the sensation of warm sun on mostly bared flesh,it doesn’t hurt to practice.

  “Sure beats hanging around Arlington, doesn’t it?”

  The voice came from Carly Holmes, who at seventeen constituted the adult supervision for the trio. Carly had the car, a Chinese red LeMans; she had the credit card, a Gold American Express belonging to a mother both absent and indulgent; and she had the supreme self-confidence that came of past consequences habitually avoided. In this, she was the most experienced among her companions. It had been Carly’s grand plan that brought them here, to the Florida Gulf Coast, in the first place.

  “You said there’d be guys. Lots of guys.”

  The tone was not quite accusatory, not quite a question. It belonged to Jayne Lynn Soratelli, “J. L.” to her close friends, “J. L.-bait” to the more literal-minded of her male classmates. Having just turned sixteen, J. L. was ready to prove her sophistication was at least the equal of her older friend’s. Even without opening her eyes, Katie knew J. L. was propped up on her elbows, as if impatiently scanning the beach for likely prospects.

  It was largely an act, and all three of the girls knew it. Of the trio, only Carly would be bold enough to initiate contact with the random passing male; she was also the only one of them who might take such an encounter to its logical conclusion.

  Still, Carly had missed her only chance so far. When they pulled up outside the beachfront hotel late the night before, she had popped inside to see if there was a vacant room. Through the large glass lobby doors, Katie and J. L. had watched Carly lean over the counter, close to a skinny boy who was working the night desk. They saw Carly smile and pass her hand a little too casually through her blond mane. The clerk had nodded back at her, and the pair had talked for a moment before Carly had motioned her friends inside and unsheathed her Amex card. But the fates had intervened; it was close to three a.m., and even Carly was too bushed for more than the cursory flirtation. Worse, at close range the boy’s appeal was somewhat muted by the rheumy cough of a bad summer cold.

  Welcome to Florida,Katie thought to herself, remembering. This morning, when they had entered the lobby to walk to the beach, to her relief the desk was staffed by a large woman in a denim shirtdress.

  “Oh, give it a chance,” Carly was saying, listless in the morning heat, to J. L. “Most of the guys here don’t even wake up before sundown.”

  “So why are we up at noon?” J. L.’s voice was now frankly challenging, as if she sensed an inconsistency that boded worse revelations. “Fourteen hours on the road! God, I’m still beat.” Katie felt a sandy foot kick against her extended ankle. “Hey, Kates—you alive?”

  “It’s still better than hanging around at home,” Katie said, eyes still closed. She hoped she sounded more enthusiastic than she felt.

  “It’s better than hanging around at your summer house, too,” Carly said. “Sorry, Katie, but Ihate that place.”

  “We used to have fun there,” J. L. objected. “All of us.”

  “We were kids,” Carly said, with less energy than Katie had become accustomed to when Carly was on the subject. “Now it’s like going to kiddie summer camp. I have had my fill of hiking in the piney woods, thank you very much. I want to have some fun, and this is the place.” There was a pause, and Katie could sense Carly working up her trademark wicked grin. “Come on. We’re hot. We’re three killer babes on vacation.”

  Still on her back, Katie raised her clenched fist in salute.

  “Killer babes, on the beach,” she said. “Get on board with it, J. L.”

  “Well,” said J. L., “if I get caught, my folks will killme. ”

  “Look—nobody’s going to get caught.” Carly’s voice was exasperated. “What’re they going to do anyway? Call the cottage? There’s no phone—right, Katie? So they’d have to call my cellular number, and then they’ll get my voice mail and leave a message. You just block the number when you call back, that’s all. I’ve done this before, dammit. It’sfoolproof. ”

  Katie knew better, just as she had known better in the first place than to sneak away on what Carly described as “a little road trip.” The parents of all three girls had agreed—albeit reluctantly, in the case of Katie’s and J. L.’s—to what was described to them as an extended weekend sleepover at the rural Virginia summer cabin Katie’s mother had kept after the divorce. Had they been aware of the real plan, at least two of the young women involved would not have been allowed out of their respective rooms for the balance of the decade.

  Hence Carly’s precise timetable, under which they would be back home in Arlington, Virginia, after three days of nonstop sun-and-sand, extreme partying on the Redneck Riviera. With, presumably, no one the wiser.

  Katie still felt guilty about the deception, though not as guilty as she had imagined she would. She had been nervous at first, particularly when Carly’s LeMans had crossed the state line into North Carolina. But once her initial anxiety had cooled, she had analyzed her situation with all the logic of her years and experience.

  I might as well enjoy myself now,Katie reasoned to herself philosophically.Because when Mom finds out about this, I’ll be grounded until I’m thirty.

  It was eerie, the way Deborah Stepanovich—she had dropped her married name, with an almost unseemly haste, after the divorce from Katie’s father—could divine events that involved her only child. Perhaps it was her trained legal mind—Deborah was a lawyer on the partner track at a D.C. firm that specialized in representing the interests of obscenely large multination
al corporations, and as such, accustomed to all manner of deception. Perhaps it was simply the finely honed instincts of every working mother.

  Or maybe she’s just a witch, with a “w,”Katie told herself cattily, and bit off the thought as unworthy.

  But whatever the skill, talent or supernatural power involved, there was no doubt in Katie’s mind that her mother would, ultimately, discover the truth. It was a thought that surprised Katie with its mixture of apprehension and satisfaction, in roughly equal proportions.

  The clashes were coming more and more frequently these days, and Katie admitted that it was usually her fault. She was tempted to attribute it to her parents’ divorce, a still-raw wound that all three of the concerned parties pretended bled but a bare trickle; but instinctively Katie knew the conflict had far more elemental roots. Frequently, she found herself driven to challenge her mother even in matters where, secretly, they might have agreed.

  It was as if someone else lived inside her, a malevolent being that automatically bristled at any suggestion, comment, observation or—especially—directive that came from Deborah. Invariably, Katie would respond, flint against her mother’s steel. Then the sparks would fly, ignite the tinder of two women living in close proximity and raise a firestorm that indiscriminately blistered both of them.

  The anger was automatic, virtually out of control, and in a very special way it frightened Katie—mainly because she could see the power she had to hurt her mother. But she could not stop, either. It was as if she were fiercely determined to prove that her mother had no answers, or at least not the right ones; at the same time, she was petrified at the prospect that this might be true.

  It would have been useful to talk about what she was experiencing, Katie told herself; but to whom? Her mother was out, definitely; even on the days when an uneasy peace prevailed, the subject matter involved was decidedly too incendiary. It was, Katie believed, virtually guaranteed to bring about a less-than-fruitful exchange of ideas. There were, of course, the guidance counselors at school—a prospect Katie immediately rejected; only dweebs and losers went to them with their concerns, which were invariably passed along to the relevant parental unit anyway.