“Frau Matthofer? I was hoping that I would find you here.”
The old woman started as though she had been struck.
12
Irving Woodnutt sat at his desk on the eighteenth floor of the Pharmacorp building, overlooking the Golden Triangle in downtown Pittsburgh. He felt vaguely dissatisfied. On the surface, everything had gone right for him. Under his leadership, Pharmacorp had grown into one of the largest drug and pharmaceutical corporations in the land, ceding place only to giants like Mercx and American Cynamid. He himself held a commanding position among the heads of the large corporations, not just in Pittsburgh, but across the nation. He had power. He had influence. He could pick up the phone and be put through to the President. Or at least to one of the top Presidential assistants. That kind of thing counted. At the golf club, people would point him out — a large, thickset man, almost florid and running to fat.
“That’s Irving Woodnutt,” they would say. “He’s President of Pharmacorp.” And they would stop and stare for a moment as Woodnutt drove off down the fairway before heaving himself into the electric golf-cart to follow the ball around the course.
Irving Woodnutt’s vague dissatisfaction with life had, therefore, nothing to do with Pharmacorp Inc.’s performance among the ranks of Fortune’s first one hundred American companies. It had nothing to do with Pittsburgh as a place to live. The air pollution which had once been such a feature of the city was a thing of the past. The waters of the two great rivers, the Allegheny and the Monongahela, which flowed together at the point of the Golden Triangle, were cleaner than they had ever been. The fact that great corporations such as Westinghouse and Pharmacorp had chosen Pittsburgh as their national and international headquarters had brought to the city lustre and prestige and the civic amenities had improved accordingly. The city’s orchestra was world-renowned; its libraries extensive; its suburbs on a par with, if not better than, those to be found in the large cities of other eastern states. No, if Irving Woodnutt wore the beginning of a frown on his broad tanned face, it was because — at the ripe age of fifty-three — he was looking for a new challenge in life.
Such as politics. Out of the window, as he mused, he saw a string of barges being towed down the river. They were carrying coal to the great new power plants which, over the vociferous objections of the environmentalists, had been constructed downstream. Either coal or nuclear, the environmentalists had been told. Ultimately, he thought, as the last of the barges disappeared from his line of vision, everything’s political. If you’re not in politics, you’re nowhere. For the moment Woodnutt had concluded that in spite of the appearances to the contrary he himself was still nowhere.
Realistically, Woodnutt knew that at his time of life, if he was going to make the jump into politics, he would have to go for Senator. It was that or nothing. The House of Representatives didn’t interest him. You did that for starters. But he wasn’t looking for starters. He was looking for the main dish. To be elected to the Senate he needed support; not just support from the party in the state: support from the party at the national level.
It was therefore a particularly happy coincidence that, just as Woodnutt had reached this point in his reflections, the telephone should ring.
Woodnutt noticed the light flashing, but left his secretary to take the call.
“It’s Mr Peabody from Washington; Mr George Peabody, Mr Woodnutt. Do you wish to take the call?” The voice of his secretary came through on the intercom.
“Don’t be naive, Louise,” Woodnutt spoke sharply. “Of course I wish to take the call.”
As he reached for the telephone, Woodnutt reflected that anyone who was interested in running for the Senate and didn’t wish to take a call from the Hon. George Peabody must be out of his mind. For George Peabody was a wily Quaker who, after an immensely varied career which (amongst other things) included a stint as director of the CIA, now looked after the national fortunes of the Democratic Party. Without a fair wind from Peabody, there was no way a Woodnutt candidacy for one of the two Pennsylvania seats in the Senate could stand any chance of success.
“Irving, how are you?” The cracked tones identified the man as surely as a red marker.
“Fine, George. Just fine.”
“That’s great, Irving. Just great.”
Peabody came straight to the point.
“Irving, is there any chance of your getting down to Washington within the next day or so? There are one or two things I and some friends of mine would like to discuss if you had a moment. It could be important. I know you’re thinking about that Senate seat, Irving, if you follow me.”
Irving Woodnutt followed him only too clearly.
“Just name the time. I’ll be there.”
Two days later, the President of Pharmacorp Inc. caught the morning flight from Pittsburgh into Washington’s National Airport. There was a limousine waiting for him, an anonymous black car. On the driver’s door the words “U.S. Government — Federal Service agency” were printed in small gold letters.
Woodnutt had assumed that he would be meeting Peabody downtown — probably at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. However, instead of crossing Memorial Bridge into the city, the driver turned off the freeway at the Arlington exit. Five minutes later the car pulled into the underground garage of the Arlington Sheraton.
They took the elevator up to the top floor of the hotel from the garage, without passing through the lobby.
“Why the secrecy?” Woodnutt asked.
The driver was non-committal.
Peabody was already waiting for him. He was a tall man, nearer seventy than sixty, with bushy eyebrows and a firm handshake. There was another younger man with him.
“Hi, Irving. Good of you to come.” He introduced the other man. “You know Dick Sandford, don’t you? My successor at the Agency.”
Woodnutt gave a start of surprise. When on the telephone Peabody had mentioned some “friends,” he assumed that Peabody was referring to some political cronies. He had not imagined for one minute that he would be meeting the present director of the CIA.
He shook hands with the thin dark-haired bespectacled man whom Peabody presented to him. He knew Dick Sandford by repute as one of the toughest operators in Washington; but they had never met.
While Sandford and Woodnutt were introducing themselves to each other, George Peabody was looking around the room as though sizing it up.
It was a penthouse suite and the large windows provided a superlative view of downtown Washington. Across the Potomac, the Lincoln Memorial gleamed white in the sun. The planes roared in low to land at the airport. Nearer at hand, the traffic curled off the Arlington Expressway bound for the Pentagon or for Alexandria.
“Don’t worry about the room, George.” Dick Sandford had noted Peabody’s interest in his surroundings. “The Arlington Sheraton is one of our safe houses. We use this place often.”
He turned apologetically to Woodnutt. “You must forgive the cloak and dagger,” he said. “When George and I have finished telling you what we want to tell you, you’ll understand why we can’t afford to have any official log of this meeting.”
The three men sat down. There was coffee in a flask and they helped themselves to it. For a few moments they made polite conversation. Then Peabody looked at his watch. He turned to Sandford. “Dick, I think the best thing would be if you led off on this one. I have to run along in any case. But that doesn’t matter. After all, I’m just the intermediary. You needed to get to Irving here and Irving happens to be an old friend of mine whose political career I’m following with interest.” Peabody leaned over and punched Woodnutt’s shoulder to make quite sure that the President of Pharmacorp didn’t miss the point. Then, as Sandford began to speak, he slipped away.
Sandford launched straight into the substance of the matter.
“You probably know,” he said, removing his spectacles and polishing them as he spoke, “that the Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement betwee
n this country and the Soviet Union doesn’t cover chemical and bacteriological warfare. SALT is, as its name implies, limited to strategic arms.”
Woodnutt nodded. “I know.”
“One of the consequences of this situation is that the United States as a whole, and clandestine agencies like the CIA in particular, have been devoting many more resources than in the past to CW and BW. This is more or less inevitable. The system is geared up for a certain amount of military spending. If you stop the money flowing down one channel, it merely flows down another.”
Again Woodnutt nodded. This was the kind of reasoning he followed easily. It wasn’t so different in industry. Once the budget was approved, the pressure to spend was there. And if it didn’t go on one thing, it would go on something else.
“Frankly,” Sandford continued, “CW and BW have become one of the Agency’s priorities. Of course, the United States is party to various general conventions which are meant to limit the use of chemical and biological weapons. Pious platitudes from the United Nations. The usual rubbish. The language is so vague you can drive a coach and horses through each subordinate clause. In any case, most of the international conventions which are meant to limit CW and BW are still couched in terms more relevant to the First World War and German mustard gas drifting over the Allies’ trenches.”
“You mean the CB/BW parameters have changed?”
“You bet they have. For some time one of our main priorities in the CW/BW field has been to examine the potential of exotic viruses.”
“Potential for what?”
“Potential for influencing the balance of power or terror.” Sandford warmed to his subject. “Imagine,” he said, “that the United States and the United States only is in possession of a lethal exotic virus which the whole world believes has been eliminated once and for all because the vector for this lethal exotic virus has itself been eliminated. Imagine what the United States might be able to do with that virus, under certain circumstances!”
While Woodnutt listened fascinated, Sandford explained what he meant. Twenty minutes later the Director of the CIA was nearing his conclusion.
“Only the firm — the CIA — knows about this,” he said. “It’s an Agency concept. The Secretary for Health and Human Services — HHS — has no idea. The National Institutes of Health — NIH — has no idea. Nor does the Center for Disease Control at Atlanta, Georgia, or any of the people there. Lowell Kaplan, whose reports initiated this whole thing, is completely unaware of what we are doing. Frankly, I don’t think we could ever expect HHS or NIH or CDC to approve our action. Those institutions are run by medical men and medical men are guided by medical criteria and priorities. Do you follow?”
“Perfectly.”
“But the mandate of the Agency, of the CIA, is different. We have to look at the interest of the United States as a whole. We cannot afford to take a narrow sectoral view. And it is our best judgement,” he spoke with deliberate emphasis at this point so that Woodnutt should not fail to catch his meaning, “that the United States cannot afford to let this opportunity slip.”
“What exactly do you mean?”
Sandford took him through the logic of the thing, step by step.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “As far as the outside world is concerned, the WHO-sponsored operation has been successful. The green monkeys have been eliminated and the threat of Marburg disease has been eliminated with them. As we know, the newspapers have carried the story. José Rodriguez, that fat Brazilian who runs the World Health Organization, has had his picture on the front page of the New York Times. Up here on the Hill, Congress has shown its pleasure by increasing the appropriations both for WHO and HHS. Congressmen like this kind of thing much better than Medicare, you know. It’s effective; it’s dramatic and above all it’s cheap.”
“Well?” Woodnutt still didn’t quite see what Sandford was driving at.
Sandford took his time. He lit a cigarette before continuing, and offered the packet to Woodnutt, who declined.
“I said,” Sandford repeated, “that the outside world thinks we have made a clean sweep of the green monkeys. In fact that isn’t quite true. There were two survivors of that particular massacre and both of them” — he leaned forward and prodded the air dramatically with his forefinger — “are now in the care and control of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States.”
Woodnutt gasped with astonishment. But before he could say anything, Sandford had gone on to describe the circumstances under which two green monkeys had been returned to the United States. Without specifying the precise nature of the inducements offered to Colonel Albert Mugambu by the CIA’s local director and without mentioning the secret airbase in the Congo where the transfer of the animals had taken place, Sandford was nevertheless able to embellish his story with a wealth of convincing detail.
Intrigued though he was by the daring and sheer inventiveness of the CIA’s approach, Woodnutt believed he saw a fatal flaw in the whole concept.
“Surely you can’t take a bunch of viruses and send them marching off like soldiers in a fore-ordained direction? Diseases spread in the most unpredictable way. Pharmacorp has been in this business a long time. We try to forecast the course of disease because that way we can have our products at the right place, at the right time. But we’re often wrong, I can tell you. In my view, you can’t take a BW agent like the Marburg virus, or whatever it’s called, and direct it at the Soviet Union without repercussions on the United States. The thing’s just not feasible. It would get back to us somehow and the population of the United States would have no effective protection, any more than the Soviets.”
“Who said the United States would have no protection?” Sandford asked the question quietly, but with great force.
“Well, what protection against the Marburg virus is there?” Woodnutt sounded petulant. “Nobody’s mentioned any protection so far, except isolation and serum. And as we all know, that’s a very limited strategy indeed. I wouldn’t risk anything on that. And the Russians would know that.”
“But my dear Irving,” — for the first time Sandford sounded patronizing — “I was not suggesting that we should go in this without protection. If the Marburg virus is to take its place in our national arsenal as a credible deterrent, or — under the worst case assumption — as an actual and usable weapon of war, it is precisely because the United States will have an effective protection against that virus and will, if necessary, be known to have such a protection.”
“But surely, there is no protection available on a mass basis?”
An element of sarcasm had now crept into Sandford’s tone of voice.
“Do I hear right? Do I hear the President of Pharmacorp suggesting there is no remedy against this Marburg virus? Is that the kind of positive thinking Pharmacorp’s shareholders have come to expect from the head of America’s fastest-growing pharmaceutical corporation? Today, for the first time, we have the real live vector to work with. We have two live green monkeys, steaming hot from the tropical jungles of Zaire. Those monkeys contain the Marburg virus in their blood. I’m not an expert but, as I understand it, that virus can be isolated; it can be attenuated; and it can then be mass-produced as a vaccine for the American population.” Sandford stood up, carried away by the excitement of his own irresistible vision. “That changes the picture, doesn’t it? If we have the virus and we have the vaccine . . . And the bloody Russians don’t have a goddamned thing?”
Suddenly, Woodnutt saw the whole thing clearly.
“You want Pharmacorp to find a vaccine?”
Sandford, who was still pacing the room, turned in mid-stride.
“Oh, more than that. Much more than that. There’s a lot in this for Pharmacorp, you know. I’m not just talking about discovering the vaccine. Your people can do that all right. You’ve got six Nobel Prize winners on your research staff. I know you’ve got the technical capability.” Sandford dropped his voice. He was kicking a bit more into the pool. “
I’m talking about a multi-million dollar operation. When you find that vaccine, you’re going to put it into mass-production.”
“Twenty million units?”
“Twenty million? No! Two hundred million units and more! I want to see every man, woman and child in the United States protected against Marburg virus. I want us to be a wholly-protected population. It’s not enough to have the occasional fall-out shelter here and there. I want total protection.”
Irving Woodnutt was silent for a long time as he reviewed what Sandford had said. He could not help focusing on the limitless possibilities which a scheme of this nature offered for himself and Pharmacorp. Two hundred million units at a minimum. At, say, $10 a throw? $20?
“Wholly underwritten, I suppose?” he asked. “We wouldn’t be manufacturing on spec.”
“No, of course not. The U.S. Government would guarantee to purchase the whole amount.”
Woodnutt thought he saw another flaw in the plan. “I thought the U.S. Government as such wasn’t overtly party to this. How are you going to get 200 million doses of anti-Marburg vaccine into the American population without going public?”
Dick Sandford smiled at him. A warm, frank, friendly smile which told the President of Pharmacorp in no uncertain terms to mind his own business.
“Let’s take one step at a time shall we? I’ll look after my problems. You look after yours.”
One last thought occurred to Woodnutt as they rose to leave. “These monkeys, then. Where are they? If we’re to start working on the vaccine straight away, we had better get them over to our laboratories in Pittsburgh as soon as possible.”
Sandford smiled yet again. An even warmer, franker, friendlier smile than before.
“Didn’t I tell you! We flew the monkeys straight to Pittsburgh. We’re holding them for you now at the airport there. They’re still on the plane, awaiting collection.”
Irving Woodnutt felt slightly ruffled.
“You kinda took me for granted there, didn’t you!”
The Virus Page 17