by Tom Clancy
“We know they were behind Japan—Zhang personally was behind that Yamata bastard and—”
“Yes, I know. And they must know that we know, and that’s one more reason not to piss us off. There are a lot of chips on the table, Jack,” Adler emphasized again. “And I do not see a reason for this.”
“Tell Taiwan we’re behind them?”
“Okay, if you do that, and it gets out, and the PRC ups the ante, we have thousands—hell, close to a hundred thousand citizens over here, and they’re hostages. I won’t go into the trade considerations, but that’s a big chip in political-economic terms.”
“But if we don’t back Taiwan up, then they’ll think they’re on their own and cornered—”
“Yes, sir, and the same thing happens from the other direction. My best suggestion is to ride with it. I deliver the demand, Taipei says no, then I suggest that they suggest the issue is held in abeyance until the issue of the airliner is determined. For that, we call in the U.N. We, that is, the United States, call the question before the Security Council. That strings it out. Sooner or later, their friggin’ navy’s gotta run out of fuel. We have a carrier group in the neighborhood, and so nothing can happen, really.”
Ryan frowned. “I won’t say I like it, but run with it. It’ll last a day or two anyway. My instinct is to back up Taiwan and tell the PRC to suck wind.”
“The world isn’t that simple, and you know it,” Adler’s voice told him.
“Ain’t it the truth. Run with what you said, Scott, and keep me posted.”
“Yes, sir.”
ALEX CHECKED HIS watch. Next to the electron microscope was Dr. Clemenger’s notebook. At 10:16, she lifted it, made a time notation, and described how both she and her fellow associate professor confirmed the presence of the Ebola virus. On the other side of the lab, a technician was running a test on blood drawn from the wife of Patient Zero. It was positive for Ebola antibodies. She had it, too, though she didn’t know it yet.
“They have any children?” Janet asked, when the news arrived.
“Two, both away in school.”
“Alex, unless you know something I don’t ... I hope their insurance is paid up.” Clemenger didn’t quite have the status of an M.D. here, but at moments like this she didn’t mind. Physicians got to know the patients a lot better than the pure scientists did.
“What else can you tell me?”
“I need to map the genes out a little, but look here.” She tapped the screen. “See the way the protein loops are grouped, and this structure down here?” Janet was the lab’s top expert on how viruses were formed.
“Mayinga?” Christ, that’s what got George ... And nobody knew how George had gotten it, and he didn’t know now how this patient ...
“Too early to be sure. You know what I have to do to run that down, but ...”
“It fits. No known risk factors for him, maybe not for her, either. Jesus, Janet, if this is airborne.”
“I know, Alex. You call Atlanta or me?”
“I’ll do it.”
“I’ll start picking the little bastard apart,” she promised.
It seemed a long walk from the lab back to his office. His secretary was in now, and noticed his mood.
“DR. LORENZ IS in a meeting now,” another secretary said. That usually put people off. Not this time:
“Break in, if you would, please. Tell him it’s Pierre Alexandre at Johns Hopkins, and it’s important.”
“Yes, Doctor. Please hold.” She pressed one button and then another, ringing the line in the conference room down the hall. “Dr. Lorenz, please, it’s urgent.”
“Yes, Marjorie?”
“I have Dr. Alexandre holding on three. He says it’s important, sir.”
“Thank you.” Gus switched lines. “Talk fast, Alex, we have a developing situation here,” he said in an unusually businesslike voice.
“I know. Ebola’s made it to this side of the world,” Alexandre announced.
“Have you been talking to Mark, too?”
“Mark? Mark who?” the professor asked.
“Wait, wait, back up, Alex. Why did you call here?”
“We have two patients on my unit, and they’ve both got it, Gus.”
“In Baltimore?”
“Yes, now what—where else, Gus?”
“Mark Klein in Chicago has one, female, forty-one. I’ve already micrographed the blood sample.” In two widely separated cities, two world-class experts did exactly the same thing. One pair of eyes looked at a wall in a small office. The other pair looked down a conference table at ten other physicians and scientists. The expressions were exactly the same. “Has either one been to Chicago or Kansas City?”
“Negative,” the former colonel said. “When did Klein’s case show up?”
“Last night, ten or so. Yours?”
“Just before eight. Husband has all the symptoms. Wife doesn’t, but her blood’s positive ... oh, shit, Gus ...”
“I have to call Detrick next.”
“You do that. Keep an eye on the fax machine, Gus,” Professor Alexandre advised. “And hope it’s all a fucking mistake.” But it wasn’t, and both knew it now.
“Stay close to the phone. I may want your input.”
“You bet.” Alex thought about that as he hung up. He had a call to make, too.
“Dave, Alex.”
“Well?” the dean asked.
“Husband and wife both positive. Wife is not yet symptomatic. Husband is showing all the classic signs.”
“So what’s the story, Alex?” the dean asked guardedly.
“Dave, the story is I caught Gus at a staff meeting. They were discussing an Ebola case in Chicago. Mark Klein called it in around midnight, I gather. No commonalties between that one and our Index Case here. I, uh, think we have a potential epidemic on our hands. We need to alert our emergency people. There might be some very dangerous stuff coming in.”
“Epidemic? But—”
“That’s my call to make, Dave. CDC is talking to the Army. I know exactly what they’re going to say up at Detrick. Six months ago it would have been me making that call, too.” Alexandre’s other line started ringing. His secretary got it in the outer office. A moment later, her head appeared in the doorway.
“Doctor, that’s ER, they say they need you stat.” Alex relayed that message to the dean.
“I’ll meet you there, Alex,” Dave James told him.
“AT THE NEXT call on your machine, you will be free to complete your mission,” Mr. Alahad said. “The timing is yours to decide.” He didn’t have to add that it would be better for him if Raman erased all his messages. To do so would have appeared venal to one who was willing to sacrifice himself. “We will not meet again in this lifetime.”
“I must go to my workplace.” Raman hesitated. So the order had really come, after a fashion. The two men embraced, and the younger one took his leave.
“CATHY?” SHE LOOKED up to see Bernie Katz’s head sticking in her office door.
“Yeah, Bernie?”
“Dave has called a department head meeting in his office at two. I’m leaving for New York to do that conference at Columbia, and Hal’s operating this afternoon. Sit in for me?”
“Sure, I’m clear.”
“Thanks, Cath.” His head vanished again. SURGEON went back to her patient records.
ACTUALLY THE DEAN had told his secretary to call the meeting on his way out the door. David James was in the emergency room. Behind the mask he looked like any other physician.
This patient had nothing at all to do with the other two. Watching from ten feet away in a corner of the ER already set aside for the situation, they watched him vomit into a plastic container. There was ample evidence of blood.
It was the same young resident working this one, too. “No traveling to speak of. Says he was in New York for some stuff. Theater, auto show, regular tourist stuff. What about the first one?”
“Positive for Ebola virus,” Alex
told her. That snapped her head around like an owl’s.
“Here?”
“Here. Don’t be too surprised, Doctor. You called me, remember?” He turned to Dean James and raised an eyebrow.
“All department heads in my office at two. I can’t go any faster, Alex. A third of them are operating or seeing patients right now.”
“Ross for this one?” the resident asked. She had a patient to deal with.
“Quick as you can.” Alexandre took the dean by the arm and walked him outside. There, dressed in greens, he lit a cigar, to the surprise of the security guards, who enforced a smoking ban out there.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“You know, there is something to be said for these things.” Alex took a few puffs. “I can tell you what they’re going to say up at Detrick, sure as hell.”
“Go on.”
“Two separate index cases, Dave, a thousand miles apart in distance, and eight hours apart in time. No connection of any kind. No commonalties at all. Think it through,” Pierre Alexandre said, taking another worried puff.
“Not enough data to support it,” James objected.
“I hope I’m wrong. They’re going to be scrambling down in Atlanta. Good people down there. The best. But they don’t look at this sort of the thing the way I do. I wore that green suit a long time. Well”—another puff—“we’re going to see what the best possible supportive care can do. We’re better than anyplace in Africa. So’s Chicago. So are all the other places that are going to phone in, I suppose.”
“Others?” As fine a physician as he was, James still wasn’t getting it.
“The first attempt at biological warfare was undertaken by Alexander the Great. He launched bodies of plague victims into a besieged city with catapults. I don’t know if it worked or not. He took the city anyway, slaughtered all the citizens, and moved on.”
He got it now, Alex could see. The dean was as pale as the new patient inside.
“JEFF?” RAMAN WAS in the local command post going over the coming schedule for POTUS. He had a mission to complete now, and it was time to start doing some planning. Andrea walked over to him. “We have a trip to Pittsburgh on Friday. You want to hop up there with the advance team? There are a couple local problems that have cropped up at the hotel.”
“Okay. When do I leave?” Agent Raman asked.
“Flight leaves in ninety minutes.” She handed him a ticket. “You get back tomorrow night.”
How much the better, Raman thought, if he might even survive. Were he to structure all the security at one of these events, that might actually be possible. The idea of martyrdom didn’t turn his head all that much, but if survival were possible, then he would opt for that.
“Fair enough,” the assassin replied. He didn’t have to worry about packing. The agents on the Detail always had a bag in the car.
IT TOOK THREE satellite passes before NRO was willing to make its estimate of the situation. All six of the UIR heavy divisions which had participated in the war game were now in a full-maintenance stand-down. Some might say that such a thing was normal. A unit went into a heavy-maintenance cycle after a major training exercise, but six divisions—three heavy corps—at once was a bit much. The data was immediately forwarded to the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments. In the meantime, the Pentagon called the White House.
“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” Ryan said.
“The SNIE isn’t ready yet for the UIR, but we have received ... well, some disturbing information. I’ll let Admiral Jackson present it.”
The President listened, and didn’t need much in the way of analysis, though he wished the Special National Intelligence Estimates were on his desk to give him a better feel for the UIR’s political intentions. “Recommendations?” he asked, when Robby was done.
“I think it’s a good time to get the boats at Diego moving. It never hurts to exercise them. We can move them to within two steaming days of the Gulf without anybody noticing. Next, I recommend that we issue warning orders to XVIII Airborne Corps. That’s the 82nd, 101st, and 24th Mechanized.”
“Will it make noise?” Jack asked.
“No, sir. It’s treated as a practice alert. We do those all the time. All it really does is to get staff officers thinking.”
“Make it so. Keep it quiet.”
“This would be a good time to do a joint training exercise with friendly nations in the region,” J-3 suggested.
“I’ll see about that. Anything else?”
“No, Mr. President,” Bretano replied. “We’ll keep you informed.”
BY NOON, THE fax count at CDC Atlanta was over thirty, from ten different states. These were forwarded to Fort Detrick, Maryland, home of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases—USAMRIID—the military counterpart to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. As chilling as the data was, it was just a little too chilling for snap judgment. A major staff meeting was called for just after lunch, while the commissioned officers and civilians tried to get their data organized. More senior officers from Walter Reed got in their staff cars for the ride up Interstate-70.
“DR. RYAN?”
“Yes?” Cathy looked up.
“The meeting in Dr. James’s office has been moved up,” her secretary said. “They want you over there right now.”
“I guess I better head over, then.” She stood and headed for the door. Roy Altman was standing there.
“Anything I need to know about?” SURGEON’S principal agent asked.
“Something’s up. I don’t know what it is.”
“Where is the dean’s office?” He’d never been there before. All of the staff meetings she’d attended recently were in Maumenee.
“That way.” She pointed. “Other side of Monument Street in the admin building.”
“SURGEON is moving, going north to Monument.” The agents just appeared out of nowhere, it seemed. It might have seemed funny except for recent events. “If you don’t mind, I’ll stand in the room. I’ll keep out of the way,” Altman assured her.
Cathy nodded. There was no fighting it. He’d hate the dean’s office for all the big windows there, she was sure. It was a ten-minute walk over, almost all of it undercover. She headed outdoors to cross the street, wanting a little fresh air. Entering the building, she saw a lot of her friends, either department chairmen or senior staffers standing in as she was doing. The director-level people were always traveling, one reason why she wasn’t sure if she ever wanted to be that senior herself. Pierre Alexandre stormed in, wearing greens, carrying a folder, and looking positively grim as he almost bumped into her. A Secret Service agent prevented that.
“Glad you’re here, Cathy,” he said on the way past. “Them, too.”
“Nice to be appreciated,” Altman observed to a colleague, as the dean appeared at the door.
“Come in.”
One look at the conference room convinced Altman to lower the shades with his own hands. The windows faced a street of anonymous brick houses. A few of the doctors looked on with annoyance, but they knew who he was and didn’t object.
“Calling the meeting to order,” Dave James said, before everyone was seated. “Alex has something important to tell us.”
There was no preamble: “We have five Ebola cases in Ross right now. They all came in today.”
Heads turned sharply. Cathy blinked at her seat at the end of the table.
“Students from someplace?” the surgery director asked. “Zaire?”
“One auto dealer and his wife, a boat salesman from Annapolis, three more people. Answering your question, no. No international travel at all. Four of the five are fully symptomatic. The auto dealer’s wife shows antibodies, but no symptoms as yet. That’s the good news. Our case wasn’t the first. CDC has cases reported in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Dallas. That’s as of an hour ago. Total reported cases is twenty, and that number doubled between ten and eleven. Probably still going up.”
“Jesus Christ,” the director of medicine whispered.
“You all know what I did before I got here. Right now I imagine they’re having a staff meeting at Fort Detrick. The conclusion from that meeting will be that this is not an accidental outbreak. Somebody has initiated a biological-warfare campaign against our country.”
Nobody objected to Alexandre’s analysis, Cathy saw. She knew why. The other physicians in the room were so bright that sometimes she wondered if she belonged on the same faculty with them—she had never considered that most of them might harbor the same thoughts. All of them were world experts in their fields, at least four the very best there was. But all of them also spent time as she did, having lunch with a colleague in a different field to exchange information, because, like her, they were all truly fanatical about learning. They all wanted to know everything, and even though they knew that such a thing was impossible, even within one professional field, that didn’t stop them from trying. In this case, the suddenly rigid faces concealed the same analytical process.
Ebola was an infectious disease, and such diseases started from a single place. There was always a first victim, called Patient Zero or the Index Case, and it spread from there. No disease just exploded in this way. CDC and USAMRIID, which had to make that conclusion official, would have the duty to assemble, organize, and present information in what was almost a legalistic structure to prove their case. For their medical institution, it was simpler, all the more so because Alex had commanded one of the divisions at Fort Detrick. Moreover, since there was a plan for everything, Johns Hopkins was one of the institutions tapped to receive cases in the event something like this took place.