But for now all he had to decide was what his own first move was going to be. He dwelt for a moment on the largest of the photographs, an already slightly faded black-and-white picture of his parents taken at his graduation ceremony more than thirty years ago. And suddenly the answer to his problem was so obvious it almost brought a smile to his face. That he had not thought of it immediately was entirely down to the fact that, to him, Toni Restelle was still the little girl growing up next door in Vaughan Street, Portland. Far too little in fact for him to have taken much notice of her at the time. But in the last six months it had been almost impossible not to notice her, so often had she appeared on the networks. It had been obvious she was going places on the ticket but, despite the speculation, the news of her appointment as White House Chief of Staff had still come as something of a shock.
At this moment, it was a welcome shock. They had kept in touch, meeting up at least once a year at Thanksgiving and sometimes at New Year’s when her parents traditionally invited the neighbours in to drink fruit cup and enjoy themselves for a couple of hours embarrassing their children with their reminiscences. He was pretty sure he had her home number in DC.
He thought for a few minutes more, dismissing alternatives, then pulled the phone to his lap. It was ten minutes past ten on the evening of Tuesday, February 10th.
So cheerless was the loft when Michael and Stephen had left that Seema had even thought of rekindling the fire. If Stephen had been the first to leave, there might have been a chance to talk of other things. But when the conversation had finally died and Stephen had shown no signs of leaving, it had been Michael who, seeing the tiredness in her face, had brought the evening to an end. Sleep was unthinkable, and all that was left was this exhausted, wide-awake loneliness. She lit two new candles in a small show of defiance and resolved to make herself a hot drink. But for the moment she remained where she was in the chair, wondering if she was also in Michael’s thoughts as he walked the forty or so blocks, as she knew he would, back to the Doral Inn.
Becket Bradie found himself having to strain to hear her voice against what sounded like a party in the background.
‘Good evening Ma’am. This here is Dr Becket C Bradie of the Centers for Disease Control via Vaughan Street, Portland, Maine.’
‘Beck! Quelle surprise! Listen, sweetheart, if by any chance you’ve very sweetly called to congratulate me, can I call you back later and we’ll have a proper chat? It’s crazy here.’
‘Many congratulations, Toni, but I’m afraid things might be about to get a whole lot crazier. Can we meet first thing in the morning?’
‘You’re in DC?’
‘Atlanta. But I can be with you by nine.’
‘Beck, I don’t want to come all over self-important on you, sweetheart, but I’m the new kid on the block and my schedule tomorrow is unbelievable.’
‘Believe me, Toni, this call is strictly business and whatever else is on your agenda this will go straight to the top.’
31 | That can’t happen
Camden Hughes was woken at six o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, February 11th, by a telephone call from Atlanta. He made sure his long inner sigh was unheard, as Becket Bradie asked him to take the first shuttle to Washington, bringing the envelope and all its contents and handling everything as little as possible.
He made himself a quick coffee and left a message at the UN asking his deputy to stand in for him at the morning’s budget meetings. Within fifteen minutes of taking the call, he was out on First Avenue, flagging down a cab for La Guardia.
Seema and Michael were unable to summon much enthusiasm for talk of ordinary things as they ate breakfast at a greasy spoon on the Avenue of the Americas where toasted bagels were accompanied by long silences and much abstracted staring out at the crowds emerging from the 14th Street subway. Both wondered if an ordinary conversation would ever be possible again.
Seema held her coffee halfway to her lips, blanketed in a kind of stupefaction in which everything outside the window was as it was before. Except that there was now a chasm between herself and this New York morning, a stranding of the person who is me, sitting here with this man, my hands wrapped around the ridges of a cardboard cup. I am a forty-one-year-old Professor of American History at the University of New York. I am writing a book about a family of slaves on a Virginia plantation in the nineteenth century. I am divorced and living an independent life in Greenwich Village. And this morning I am breakfasting with an old friend from college days who is now a high-ranking official of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Except that …
The weather all down the east coast was unrelenting that winter and the skies over Washington were bleak and cold as the Lincoln Continental left National and turned north on the Expressway. The back of the cab, by contrast, was way too warm and rivers of condensation obscured what view there might have been of the waterfowl sanctuary. Normally, a car would have been sent by the Washington office of the Centers for Disease Control, but that morning the office had no knowledge of Director Becket Bradie being in town and the car now heading towards the Potomac was a regular District of Columbia licensed cab. In the back seat, Camden Hughes handed over the Gristedes supermarket bag without a word as the nose of the cab tipped up towards the 14th Street Bridge.
Becket had donned a pair of surgical gloves many times in his life, but never in the back of a cab on his way to an appointment at the White House. On the ten-minute ride he read the letter and statement through, glancing only briefly at the metal key in its sealed plastic bag. There was no partition in the cab, and talk was impossible. Returning the envelope to its bag and peeling off the gloves, Becket’s murmur was almost inaudible. ‘You could wish they sounded a little bit more like cranks.’
Camden Hughes nodded his head slowly before wiping away some of the condensation from the window to reveal the blurry skyline of the nation’s capital.
Three thousand five hundred miles away, Toby sat alone in the drawing room of his home in Ealing. Since getting in from work, he had been sitting by the fire burning pages torn from his notebook. He stared into the flames, thinking of Hélène, as another page curled into a dark bruise and suddenly ignited. He wished he could send her what he had sent to Michael and reflected with a sigh and another sip of Scotch that the best thing he had penned in years would, he sincerely hoped, never see the light of day.
Michael had called the previous evening. They had conducted an absurd conversation with Michael attempting a kind of impromptu code. Congratulations on the latest ad. Great grab line. Bound to boost the response rate, give the product more traction. Mail shot already under way. Let you know when we have first sales figures. It had taken Toby a while to realize that the call was from New York and he had struggled for a response. ‘Well, you know what they say in the States, Michael, “send it out local, see if it comes back express”.’
Alighting from the cab on Pennsylvania Avenue, the two men in overcoats were name-checked by a young armed marine and invited to proceed on foot to the east entrance of the White House. There, a waiting secretary introduced herself and led them down a long corridor, passing the office of the Vice-President, to a small reception room.
Becket Bradie was still struggling with the idea of waiting for an audience with Toni Restelle when she appeared, greeting him with a hug and a kiss. After shaking hands with Camden Hughes, she took Becket’s arm and steered them through to an elegantly furnished office where they seated themselves at a small conference table. Camden had been surprised to find that Toni Restelle knew who he was.
‘So, it’s good to see you, Beck, but what’s with the big mystery?’
Checking that the door was closed, Becket Bradie took a deep breath and lifted the supermarket bag to the polished table top, not quite knowing how to relate to this version of Toni Restelle. He had seen her in a trick-or-treat costume with a witch’s hooked nose, in a pink tutu with bleeding knees, stuck halfway up a tree with the seat hanging out of
her jeans, in a graduation gown with sash and mortar board, and in a sensational, figure-hugging cashmere one-piece last Thanks giving. But he had never before seen her in a slate-grey business suit and ivory silk shirt, wearing a choker of small pearls and light, day-time make-up, her hair scraped back and held by a tortoise-shell comb. She frowned now as he drew the surgical gloves from his briefcase and pulled out the manila envelope, still in its plastic, from the supermarket bag. ‘This was pushed through the mailbox of Camden’s home in Midtown Manhattan sometime between eight and nine o’clock last night.’
Toni Restelle accepted the offered gloves, pushing back the slit sleeves of her suit jacket. Frowning at the envelope, she snugged the gloves and took out the three sheets of paper and the plastic bag containing a single key.
There was silence for two minutes as she read, the two men looking patiently around the room. The Regency-style drapes were sashed back so that, despite the greyness of the day, the corner office was not in need of artificial light. There were framed photographs of political figures, past and present and, over the fireplace, a Thomas Eakins oil of two rowers on the Schuylkill.
‘Who else knows about this?’
Toni moved her hands below the arms of the chair as the secretary entered with a tray of cups and a thermos of coffee.
When they were alone again, Becket glanced at Camden Hughes. ‘On our side of the fence, just the three of us.’
‘And you think it’s genuine?’
Becket shrugged. ‘We can’t afford to think anything else until we can get a look at whatever’s in that locker.’
‘It hasn’t been collected?’
Becket shook his head. ‘We can’t just send a couple of guys along with the key. We have no idea what’s in there. If it’s the virus and if it’s freeze-dried and if it’s in some kind of airtight container it’ll be pretty safe, but we can’t know that. We’ll need a HazMat team and they’ll want to have Grand Central evacuated, couple of blocks cordoned off.’
‘Prob’ly someone might notice that.’ Camden Hughes watched as Toni Restelle calmly poured coffee from the insulated jug.
‘Okay, let’s assume we find a way to get it into a lab and it turns out it’s what they say it is. Most people have had their shots, right?’
Becket accepted the cup. ‘Most people who lived in the US through 1972, when we called a halt on routine smallpox jabs. But single-shot immunity fades with time. So a lot of people are going to be susceptible, as well as every kid under the age of eight. Which means their moms and dads are not going to be immune from panic.’
Toni Restelle looked again at the letter. ‘They’re not threatening to release it. Or at least not yet. They’re only threatening to go public. What do we say if that happens?’
Becket shook his head. ‘Better it didn’t happen. Instant demand for vaccination, especially for kids. And not enough supplies, all hell breaking loose – be hard to avoid a coast-to-coast panic.’
The Chief of Staff looked up from the letter. ‘That can’t happen.’
Neither man said anything as she tugged off one of the gloves. ‘So, how do we stop them going to the press with this?’ She dropped the envelope on the table, letting the glove fall with it.
Camden Hughes returned his cup to the saucer. ‘Favourite would be making the acquaintance of whoever wrote it.’
‘And second favourite?’
Becket shook his head again. ‘If we don’t find out who’s behind it then it looks like we all have just over two weeks to get ready for it going public. I suppose you could try for an injunction, but …’
‘Wouldn’t hold five minutes.’ Toni Restelle was thinking hard. ‘Just so I know what we’re talking about here, go ahead and give me your worst-case if the virus got itself released someplace.’
Becket had anticipated the question. ‘A lot depends on whether we know where and when. It takes ten or twelve days to develop symptoms, so we’d have that time to surround the release site – immunize all possible victims and their contacts. The vaccine stops the disease developing even after someone’s been infected, or at least stops it becoming lethal. If it’s a covert attack – meaning we don’t know the when or the where – then we’re in a lot deeper. We wouldn’t know anything about it until we got symptoms showing up. And most physicians aren’t going to think smallpox when they get presented with back pain, headaches, muscle pain, nausea, fever – could be any viral infection. The rash comes a couple of days later, but even then it might get itself misdiagnosed as chickenpox or EM. And by that time it can be passed on by person-to-person contact. So you’ve got a real small window between the first case being identified and the second wave of infection starting. In practice those infected could be both symptomatic and all over the place before we knew anything about it. We might still be able to cope, given that most people are probably still immune, but it would be a whole lot more difficult.
‘And what would “coping” involve?’
‘ID all possible cases, quarantine victims, immunize anyone and everyone they might have been in contact with. But the critical thing at that point is speed, speed and more speed. So we’d need to be super-ready.’
‘There’s no plan in place for anything like this?’
‘Every State and County Health Officer has a CASE manual.’
Toni Restelle frowned.
‘Comprehensive Action for a Smallpox Emergency.’
‘They’ve all read it?’
‘Don’t have to. Every copy’s got a wallchart in the front. Take it out. Stick it up. Follow it step by step. Tells you exactly what to do if you think you’re looking at smallpox. Each step keyed to the relevant page in the manual. But it would still mean alerting all – and I mean all – clinical staff and front-line health personnel so they know what they’re looking for. Fact is, Toni, hardly any of the front-line people today have ever seen a real case. Even physicians. Most of them probably wouldn’t know it from chickenpox without sending scrapings to a lab. So I’m not saying the thing would be a breeze, but if we got things up and running fast enough there’s a chance we could get it back in the bottle.’
‘But people would still die.’
Becket nodded. ‘But like I said, how many depends on how fast on our feet we are.’
‘But with most people still being immune, it would be hundreds not thousands?’
‘Hard to say. If we’re lucky. And ready. If it’s not a covert attack. If it’s a small outbreak in a limited number of places. If cases get picked up in super-quick time. If the quarantine plans work and isolation wards can cope. If we have vaccination teams good to go immediately. If no one gets on a plane or decides to go kiss all his relatives in the Mid-West. And, Toni, above all – if there’s no panic.’
‘That’s a heck of a lot of ifs, Beck – why couldn’t we just vaccinate everybody again now, say it’s purely a precaution?’
Becket Bradie shook his head. ‘We’d want to avoid that, Toni. For one thing, we don’t have enough vaccine, not even for the kids. And even if we did, there’d be a tiny percentage of people who’d get a real bad reaction. We’ve just spent years backing up WHO to persuade countries they don’t need to carry on vaccinating. Same goes for those tatty certificates of smallpox vaccination we’ve all still got in our passports. It’d be a huge setback. But all that’s by the by. The main reason is – it just isn’t the best way of coping. Mass immunization’s not nearly as effective as ring vaccination, like I said.’
Toni slowly tugged off the other glove and readjusted her sleeves, thinking for a few seconds before turning to Camden Hughes. ‘Any idea why this was delivered to you, Mr Hughes?’
‘I’ve been pondering that one pretty much since this thing all blew in. No reason I can hit on. Leastways no reason that’s got to do with me personally, far as I can see. Went through all the people I know who know where I hang my hat, scratching around for any kind of a hook-up with a thing like this’ – he gestured at the envelope on the table – ‘bu
t nothing came to mind even in the early hours when these things tend to float up, leastways for me. Best guess is – they were out looking for someone in New York City who’s at a certain height up the pole, with contacts a lot higher up the pole. Even that leaves a big field in New York. Seems to me my principal qualification was – someone who lives alone and has themselves a street-level mailbox.’
Toni nodded and began replacing the contents in the envelope, holding it with the empty glove in her left hand. ‘I’m sure you’re right about that. Unfortunately it doesn’t narrow down the search a whole lot.’
‘No, Ma’am.’
The two men remained silent as Toni Restelle studied the envelope on the table. After a few seconds she stood up abruptly, smoothed her skirt and used the other glove to pick up the envelope. ‘Okay, gentlemen, can I ask you to wait here for a few minutes? Help yourselves to more coffee.’
Camden Hughes pulled his chair closer to the table and poured for them both. ‘Whip-smart young lady.’
Becket accepted the cup pushed towards him. ‘Yeah. Weird thing is I’ve known her since she was an annoying little kid in a velvet jumpsuit.’
The Kennedy Moment Page 19