The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  During law school, Sloan had dated a guy a class ahead of her who was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. If the media reports were correct—and I have no reason to believe they were not—she also had a “serious romantic entanglement” with her constitutional law professor in her third year. None of these relationships left Cambridge with her. In New York, she had taken up with a prominent staff writer for The New Yorker, which is highly relevant for all that came next. I took a $65 WeGoNow and arrived at the appointed Starbucks about fifteen minutes early. I lingered near a professional couple sitting opposite one another; both were working their devices frenetically between large sips of coffee. They seemed more likely to get up and leave than the elderly couple a few seats over, whose cups were empty but seemed in no rush to go anywhere. The professional couple soon stood up to leave, and I took their table. (I was right about the elderly couple. They were still sitting there when Sloan and I left.)

  Sloan was more or less on time. She spotted me and offered a beaming smile. After waiting in line for a black coffee, she made her way to the table and gave me a big hug. “This is great!” she said. “So how are you?” We did the usual catching up. It was a delightful conversation, diminished only slightly by the fact that Sloan glanced at her watch periodically. I would have stayed there all night, even as I grew ever hungrier. I explained the rudiments of my Ph.D. dissertation and talked about my work in the lab. “But you’re not teaching?” Sloan said. The tone suggested it was a question, but it was more of an observation, and it had layers and layers of significance. This was the first reference either of us had ever made to that starry night during senior week when we had pronounced our life plans.

  There was so much implicit in what Sloan had just asked, or said. On that lovely evening, she had predicted that she would go to law school and then enter journalism. And here she was, a Harvard Law grad, checking her watch because she was due back at the New York Times. I had said I wanted to teach at a place like Dartmouth, yet the closest I had been to a classroom on campus since graduation was my meeting with Professor Huke. I knew, even if Sloan did not, that my job talks at various colleges and universities had not gone well. My only offer had been at the University of Nebraska—not even at the main campus in Lincoln, but one of the satellite campuses. My work at the lab was, in the eyes of most academic scientists, significantly less prestigious than a post at a top research university.

  “I really like what I’m doing,” I offered, trying hard not to sound defensive.

  “That’s great,” she said. The reply felt slightly patronizing, or maybe I just perceived it that way.

  “I like applied science,” I explained. “I get to work on real problems, stuff that affects people’s lives.”

  Sloan nodded, smiled, and sipped her coffee. “Do people ever move from what you’re doing into teaching posts? Could you still end up at Dartmouth?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I’d want to do that,” I answered.

  She raised an eyebrow skeptically. “Really?”

  “It’s too academic,” I said. I paused, because somewhere in the recesses of my brain there was a safety alert telling me to stop talking. I felt a physical warning from my body, as if I were getting too close to a steep ledge. I kept talking anyway. I felt an overwhelming need for Sloan to appreciate my work, to acknowledge that I had not failed the grand plan that I laid out on that inimitable, sex-charged evening during senior week. “I was with the President yesterday,” I said.

  At that point, the dam holding back my urge to say too much had broken.

  “Of the United States?” Sloan asked with a quizzical look.

  “What other president would it be?” I asked facetiously.

  “That’s cool, like a photo op?” she asked.

  “The whole day.”

  Sloan put down her coffee. She never looked at her watch again. “What were you doing?” she asked.

  “I can’t say,” I replied. “I don’t mean to be a jerk about it. All I can tell you is that something is happening and I’m right in the middle of it. I never dreamed that my work would have this kind of significance.” That was all I told her about what was going on. The reality, of course, is that Sloan is smart and ambitious. She could put two and two together, especially with all the resources of The New York Times at her disposal. More important, she was dating a staff writer at The New Yorker, which was where the first piece on “the Outbreak” would run. I was not quoted in that piece, directly or indirectly. When I was asked at the first congressional inquiry whether I had had any contact at any time with any person representing The New Yorker, I answered no—truthfully. To this day, I do not know if the meeting with Sloan was a coincidence or not. The whole journalism community knew that something was afoot at the White House. The cleverer ones realized it was probably something more than a presidential mistress. If Sloan had seen a leaked copy of the White House logs, she would have recognized that I was spending time there. And if I was at the White House, it was probably not to help the President of the United States disentangle himself from a relationship with a Colombian diplomat.

  Our strategy throughout the crisis had been to keep each part of our response compartmentalized. Tie Guy knew about Capellaviridae but had no idea about the looming Dormigen shortage (despite his ongoing suspicions that something was up). The senior management at Health and Human Services knew about the Dormigen shortage but had never heard of Capellaviridae. With two sentences I had delivered to Sloan a journalistic gold mine. I was “the guy” on lurking viruses; she knew that. It was the crucial puzzle piece. All the others were in plain view. The warehouse fire in Long Beach was a matter of public record. Presumably some quick research turned up the fact that the fire that had seriously injured Bobo the chimpanzee had also destroyed a large proportion of the government’s Dormigen stock. The Centera arrests were not publicized but they were still public record. Sloan walked out of the Starbucks with a Rosetta stone for the whole story: the connection between Long Beach and Centera and the lurking virus. Since each involved party was unaware of the larger crisis, they all spoke freely when contacted by reporters. When Sloan called Professor Huke the following morning, he talked to her for half an hour about “this thrilling new virus.” And so on.

  Sloan and I said a pleasant goodbye outside Starbucks with another platonic hug. We vowed to stay in touch. Once the story broke, the White House dictated whom we spoke to in the media and what we told them. Later, when the various inquiries and commissions began their work, my lawyers would not let me speak with Sloan. When those verdicts arrived (paving the way for this book), I finally was in a situation where I could just pick up the phone and call her. By then, she had been promoted and was coordinating all of the New York Times investigative pieces. I left a message—a semi-rambling request to catch up “after all this.” She did not call back. I sent a text a week or so later and did not get a reply to that, either. Once I called her office at the Times, where an intern dutifully took a message. I never heard back. I have since learned that Sloan married the guy from The New Yorker. I was not invited to the wedding.

  PART 4

  IT HITS THE FAN

  40.

  THE PRESIDENT HAD FLOWN TO LOS ANGELES THAT AFTERNOON, where he spent several hours before Air Force One took off for Australia, with a refueling stop scheduled in Hawaii. The national security team had made no decision with regard to the Chinese Dormigen offer, but they had decided that he should make the trip to Asia to preserve his “optionality.” If nothing else, flying to the South China Sea Conference would give the President a little leverage. We all recognized that if the Chinese understood the scale of the Capellaviridae crisis, the price for the “free” Dormigen would rise precipitously. The President was en route to Australia in part to keep up appearances, like an unhappy couple who put on a good face for Thanksgiving. Maybe the President would sign the South China Sea Agreement; maybe he would take the Chinese Dormigen instead. Flying to the region kept all
the options open. Obviously we were in constant secure contact with him.

  At about four a.m. on the day after I met with Sloan—one a.m. on the West Coast—The New Yorker posted a short “breaking story” on its website. In just a few paragraphs, the piece outlined the Dormigen shortage and the fatal outbreak of Capellaviridae. Because The New Yorker deemed the story “enormous and urgent,” the magazine had immediately enlisted a consortium of print and media news outlets to assist in the follow-up reporting. Just about every news outlet in the nation, and subsequently the world, was following up on The New Yorker story within an hour of the original post.

  Some crucial details in those early stories were incorrect—fabulously so. First, most posts described Capellaviridae as “spreading,” giving the impression that it was a contagious disease. Second, some of the early reporting by Home Depot Media quoted unnamed “national security” officials who described the situation as “most likely a highly sophisticated terrorist attack.” The unnamed officials speculated that a hostile government or a terrorist organization (“or several such entities working in collaboration”) had introduced the Capellaviridae virus into the U.S. and was also responsible for the Long Beach warehouse fire that had caused the Dormigen shortage. Because the September 11 attacks had been unexpected and unusual, the public was primed to believe the next big attack could be equally imaginative and unprecedented. One anonymous official at the Department of Homeland Security laid out a grim scenario: “The worst case is that a hostile government or terrorist organization has introduced a pathogen that will kill us on a scale previously unimaginable. The best case is that the group responsible has an antidote and will hold us hostage until they get what they want.” This was what America woke up to.

  In Asia, where it was late evening, government leaders were suddenly made aware of the magnitude of what was happening in the United States. China’s President Xing was addressing a convention of farm equipment manufacturers in Shanghai when an aide walked onto the stage and delivered him a note. President Xing excused himself, walked off the stage, and never returned.

  41.

  I WAS SLEEPING ON MY COUCH WHEN EVERY DEVICE I OWNED began to ping or beep. I had fallen asleep the night before after two beers, having watched mindless television as I mulled over my conversation with Huke, searching for clues. My thoughts kept skipping to the encounter with Sloan instead. The first text I saw was from the Chief of Staff: “Call me immediately. Urgent.” My mind raced, in part because I was trying to figure out where she was texting from. The President would have taken off from California some hours earlier, so the only possibility was that she was on Air Force One somewhere over the Pacific. That assumption turned out to be correct. Air Force One had taken off from Los Angeles around nine p.m. California time, midnight on the East Coast, so the President and senior staff, including the National Security Adviser and the Secretary of Defense, were nearly to Hawaii when the first Capellaviridae stories began to break. The Communications Director was on board, but it was one of his aides—with no knowledge whatsoever of the crisis—who first spotted the stories as she perused the first headlines of the day. The early stories seemed so bizarre that she ignored them, but within minutes credible news organizations were reporting more details. She woke the Communications Director, who immediately woke the Chief of Staff, who woke the President. This cascade of “who woke whom” would have been amusing under different circumstances.

  Immediately after waking the President, the Chief of Staff sent orders to turn the plane around, hoping to get back to the mainland before the story spiraled into national chaos. She, like all of us, had known in the back of her mind that this moment would come, though it was difficult to imagine a worse place for the President to be when the story broke than over the Pacific Ocean. The Captain notified the Chief of Staff that there was plenty of fuel to return to Los Angeles; with favorable winds and a higher airspeed, the plane could be on the ground in less than three hours. The Captain never asked why the President had to return urgently to the mainland. One has to appreciate the integrity of that chain of command. An order was given on behalf of the President and the Captain turned the plane around.

  The President and his senior advisers—those on board with a knowledge of the crisis—gathered hastily in the Air Force One conference room. Others on the plane, all the junior staffers and the traveling press, were awakened as the hulking 797 banked sharply and began its 180-degree turn. Even the most junior reporter recognized that a U-turn on Air Force One was likely to be newsworthy. As the media folks picked up their devices to report what might be a mechanical failure, or perhaps a medical issue on board, they received frantic incoming messages from stateside editors and producers. The fact that Air Force One was now turning sharply back toward California was evidence, if somewhat circumstantial, that something potentially massive was afoot.

  I called the Chief of Staff, still not aware of the breaking news. The call went straight to voice mail. I left a short message and then sent her a text acknowledging her text to me. As I waited for a reply, I scrolled through the headlines on my phone, immediately recognizing what had happened. A few seconds later, I received a return text from the Chief of Staff: “Give me a few minutes.” Those few minutes grew to ten, then twenty. I fidgeted on the couch, recognizing that the longer the story bounced around without some adult supervision from the White House, the less recognizable it would become. Eventually the Chief of Staff called on my secure phone. I answered immediately. “I’ve seen the news,” I said, trying to appear calm.

  “We need to get a better scientific understanding of the virus out there,” the Chief of Staff said breathlessly. “We are working on a statement right now, but we are going to need you to do a press conference. We need a scientist to calm people down.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I’m going to have to call you back,” she said suddenly, and hung up. I sat on the couch waiting for another call. I turned on the television, flipping to CNN, where a somber anchor (no one recognizable in the studio at that hour) was sitting solo above a huge red image on the screen: “BIOTERROR STRIKE, POTENTIALLY NATIONWIDE.” I found it hard to watch; the story was completely inaccurate, and I, who could set the record straight, was sitting on the couch in my boxer shorts. I walked to the bathroom, balancing my secure phone on the sink so I could answer it if it rang while I was in the shower. The call finally came while I was shaving. (I distinctly remember putting the phone to my left ear to avoid the lather on the right side of my face.) “Get yourself to the White House,” the Chief of Staff instructed. “Someone will meet you there. We need to get you on camera for the morning programs.”

  “Is there a car coming?” I asked.

  “Take a taxi.” She hung up. I finished dressing as quickly as I could, slipping a tie in my jacket pocket to put on later. I walked briskly out of the house into a light rain, prompting me to wonder if I should go back to get an umbrella so I would not be soaked when I went on camera. I decided against it, but then realized I had also left my White House badge behind. I rushed back inside—thinking about the fact that I had not seen any cabs—and grabbed both the badge and an umbrella.

  The streets were empty and dark, save for the streetlights reflecting off the damp pavement. I recalled a film professor in college who pointed out to us that cinematographers always hose down the pavement before filming their night scenes to give the shots a glistening effect. That thought lasted just a split second. I jogged half a block to Nineteenth Street, looking both ways. There were no headlights, let alone taxis. I stood there briefly, my mind now spinning with what I knew from basic statistics: if there were no cabs now, the chances of one coming along anytime soon were slim. I patted my breast pocket and realized that I had left my regular cell phone back on my coffee table. I had checked the WeGoNow app back in my apartment, but the closest car was twelve minutes away, which seemed like an eternity. I must have set the phone down after that. I considered waking up one o
f my neighbors, but I did not know many of them, and the ones I did know did not have a car. Or I could go back to my apartment to get my phone, but there was no reason to think a WeGoNow driver would be any closer. I had deleted my other ride-sharing app after it was reported that their algorithm used crime data, which effectively steered drivers away from low-income neighborhoods.

  I saw headlights behind me—no taxi light, but maybe I should flag it down anyway. I stepped into the street, waving my hands. The car swerved away and accelerated. No one was going to pick up a stranger at four in the morning, not even a white guy in a suit (with a tie stuffed in my pocket).

  I called the Chief of Staff, figuring that getting a White House car might be the only hope here. “What?” she answered sharply.

  “I can’t get a car,” I said. “I’ve been on the street for—” She hung up, or we were cut off. I assumed it was the latter and that she was too busy for me to try calling back. My best bet at that point was a hotel. There was a Marriott about ten blocks away, not close, but what else was I going to do?

  42.

  ON BOARD AIR FORCE ONE, THE PRESIDENT WAS HUDDLED with his senior advisers. A television set mounted on the wall of the conference room was broadcasting the semi-apocalyptic headlines, all still with a terrorism theme. Some of the more familiar anchors had begun to appear on camera, no doubt roused from bed as I had been. By all accounts, the President was poised and calm. Perhaps that was the athlete in him, exercising an ability to screen out distractions in the midst of a situation that one participant described as “trying to play chess at night in a sandstorm.”* The President and Chief of Staff, in consultation with others around the table, had agreed on four key priorities: (1) refute the terrorist story; (2) correct public misunderstanding of the virus (my job); (3) get the President on air to reassure the nation; (4) reach out to our Asian allies to reassure them (perhaps falsely) that we remained “steadfastly committed” to the South China Sea Agreement. It was a laudable strategy given the unfolding chaos, but, as the Communications Director told the Chief of Staff, “When your top two priorities involve the words ‘refuting’ and ‘correcting,’ you’re pretty much fucked.”