But I also knew I had to do something for my high school record; and I wasn’t an athlete, so I joined the Anti-Communist Club. I thought it was going to be a group of kids who’d discuss Marxist economics and our free-market system, maybe the misconceptions Marx had about human nature, and maybe even mistakes we were making in developing countries, both propaganda-wise and in the kind of help we were giving them. I didn’t know it was just a front for Barry Goldwater and that all we were going to do was make election signs, but at least I had it on my record.
Because a lot of Agency recruiting happens at private colleges, I went to one in Southern California—not far from where my parents lived. My high school grades were good enough for a state scholarship, and my dad covered the rest. It was the ’60s, but the administration was conservative; and I was expecting the typical Cold War Agency recruitment to happen to me the way it had happened to people I’d heard about—the sons of some of my dad’s friends. But it didn’t. I went through five majors without doing well in any of them; and it wasn’t until my senior year, when I was taking an IR course with a popular prof named Booth—a guy who’d been a POW in WWII—that I mentioned what I wanted to do. He worked, everyone said, in germ warfare policy—classified stuff—at Stanford; and I figured that if I was about to graduate I’d better tell someone, anyone, what I really wanted to do in life: not sell insurance or be a middle manager or a government bureaucrat, but work for a civilian intelligence agency—get a graduate degree on their tab maybe—and be an analyst.
I could tell he wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. He was a good guy. The administration didn’t like him because he never went to faculty meetings; and he didn’t act like a scholar, even though he had his doctorate, and he wasn’t on campus much. But when they tried to fire him, the students protested—carried signs, wrote letters, and caused enough of a scene that they kept him. This was back in the ’60s when you did this kind of thing.
He was smiling at me and I could see those teeth—the ones he hadn’t taken good enough care of in the POW camp, the ones that had rotted and were gone now, replaced years ago with dentures.
He looked at me for a long time, very serious, and said, “I could put in a good word for you at the USIA. You’re a good writer, Matt.”
“I’d rather be an analyst.”
“Have you thought about the FBI?”
I had to laugh at that.
“Okay,” he said, laughing, too.
“I shouldn’t be doing this. Your grades are terrible and I can’t say much about you except that you’re a good writer. In fact, I’m not sure why I’m even considering this. You’re a pretty tame guy. You’re even tamer than I was at your age and I was pretty tame. I stole hubcaps at least.”
We both laughed.
He got serious. “You want to do something for your country, right?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t want to join the military like your father did. You love and admire him, but you don’t want to join the military.”
“Right.”
“No one’s enlisting these days anyway,” he said. “Can’t blame them. JFK and his brightest aren’t fighting this war very well. Look at the Chinese—how those crossborder ops brought them in. Jack’s Green-Beanie darlings.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the Army won’t take you anyway, right?”
“Yes. I’ve got some scoliosis, and you can see how thick my glasses are, sir.”
“That’s what I thought. What you need to do is send for the Agency application. Make two Xeroxes of it, send one to me, fill out one for yourself rough draft, send a copy of that to me, and I’ll help you with it. You’ll have to have a physical, just like the Army, and a polygraph, and you’ll have to have your doctor send your records. How does your dad feel about this?”
“My dad’s always been for it,” I answered.
“He’s not very political, is he.”
That was true.
“No,” he said quickly, grinning, “I haven’t been talking to your dad, but people say he’s a good man.”
What people?
“You’re right,” I said. “He’s not political, and neither am I, I guess.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m doing this.”
“Sir?”
“You can’t analyze a situation if you’re blinded by your own politics, Matt.”
“You’ve taught us that, sir.”
He laughed again.
“And you don’t have to kiss ass, Matt. Remember that in the interview. Either they want you or they don’t and either way you’ll never figure out exactly why.”
Some people—maybe one in one hundred thousand—can get infected by an epidemic disease and not get sick and die. They don’t even get the symptoms, but they can carry it and they can give it to others. They’re called “chronic asymptomatic carriers,” or CACs. You’ve heard of Typhoid Mary maybe, in health class or history. She was one. Not to the degree that the history books say she was, but she was. She didn’t even know she was one until they told her how many people she’d probably killed; but she was one and it drove her crazy to find out. It drove her crazy and the government dropped their case against her. That was about 1910, I think, and it was here in America, during an epidemic.
That’s how hard it can be on a person when they find out they’re a carrier. That’s what I’m saying, I guess.
I don’t know whose pull did it. I know it wasn’t my record. The Anti-Communist Club certainly wouldn’t have been enough and my grades in college weren’t very good, though Booth was right. I was a good writer. Both of my parents were good writers. My mom had a master’s degree and my dad did a lot of writing for the admirals he served. Maybe it was the writing, but I also knew they could get all the 1600 SAT and 4.0 GPA graduates they wanted—who were better writers than I was—so it had to be something else. It had to be Booth or one of my father’s friends or even the fact that my dad was about to retire as a rear admiral.
However it happened, I got called into an interview in Los Angeles in the middle of summer after graduation. The man wore a short-sleeve shirt with a loud red tie and didn’t seem very interested. I panicked, thinking, “Shit, he’s just interviewing me so the Agency can tell Booth or my dad’s friends they did, but they’re not really interested.” That’s how it felt. At one point the man did look up at me with interest, like he was waking up, when I said stupidly, “I feel like I really don’t have a country.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Uh oh, I thought, and tried to backpedal. “I don’t mean that in patriotic terms. I don’t mean—”
“I know you don’t mean it in patriotic terms,” he said impatiently. “You’re the Cold War son of a Cold War father, Mr. Hudson. Even if you had long hair and were running around with posters saying KILL THE FASCIST PIGS!, you’d still be your father’s son and I wouldn’t doubt your patriotism.” He stopped himself and I didn’t know whether to believe him. “So how do you mean it?” he said.
I took a deep breath. “My dad’s a career Navy man, and my mother’s a teacher. We moved around a lot and my father is a kind man and my mother loves people of all races, all cultures, so it’s a little hard to talk about hometowns and wave the American flag the way some people wave it. . . .”
He didn’t say anything for a moment.
“You’re a perceptive young man, Mr. Hudson. That’s what we’re looking for, but I don’t think you’ve finished your answer, do you?”
“Sir?”
“How do you wave the American flag?”
“I guess I don’t, sir. It’s not my style. I don’t burn the flag—that would be wrong—but I don’t wave it. I don’t need to. I see the United States as a good country, one that should be defended at all costs because history doesn’t see enough good countries.”
“You learn that in college?”
“I was thinking it before—when my dad was stationed with NATO in Italy, when I was younger—but, yes, I lea
rned that from a college professor of mine, too.”
He was nodding.
“I think I know which prof you’re talking about, and he’s right. It’s an experiment, our society—the most successful experiment in the history of humankind—and certainly worth protecting.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you for coming in today, Mr. Hudson. We’ll let you know if we decide another interview would be helpful.”
What they were looking for was not just somebody who could carry the plague without getting sick—your normal CAC—but someone whose body could get rid of the disease fast with the right antibiotics—what you’d call “designer antibiotics” these days. Experimental. Even classified. And definitely not yet FDA-approved. And it couldn’t be a genetically engineered plague. That would be discovered pretty quickly and you wouldn’t be able to deny it. Everyone would know it was GW—germ warfare—so they had to use good old-fashioned plague. Bubonic, the Black Death of the Middle Ages, the Great Dying. History’s had a lot of names for it. It had to be “natural.”
And it wasn’t any good if it took the carrier days or a week or more to get clean. If it still showed in his blood, he’d never be able to get out of the quarantine areas; he’d never be able to get out of the field and sit the crisis out—back in the States or somewhere—until he was needed again.
They’d already found one carrier—a guy they could use—but he went crazy in the field halfway through his first mission and they had to pull him.
I didn’t hear about him until much later. I wish I’d heard earlier.
I waited two months working in the sports section of a K-Mart. I’d given up, in fact, ever hearing from them when a different guy called to set up another interview, this time in Riverside. There would be a physical just after the interview, he said, and I needed to be able to give urine and blood samples.
I don’t remember exactly what I said in the interview or even what the guy said. He was interested at first, asking me about my relationship with my father—which I told him was great—and about any research papers I’d found most rewarding in my college courses. One on “economic sanctions and North-South relations,” I said, and another on the impact of military invasion on the cultural history of Vietnam. He perked up hearing that, but after that lost interest again. I don’t know whether it was the questions he had to ask—they bored him—or my answers to them—which were boring, too—but all I remember is saying “Yes” and “No” a lot and not much else.
So I wasn’t surprised two weeks later to get a letter turning me down. I knew I’d get something in writing so they could tell Booth and my dad’s friends and anyone else that they’d considered me “very carefully” and sent me a nice letter.
I was getting ready to apply—my father had offered to help and I had some savings—to graduate school, for an MBA at a state college, when someone called from the L.A. office again. The voice sounded not just interested, but even a little urgent. They wanted me to come in for another interview and more blood tests.
I couldn’t imagine what had changed their minds.
I should explain what a “vector” is? A vector is how a disease—an epidemic—is spread. In the case of Yersinia pestis—the classic plague—it’s carried not by a rat, but by a flea on the rat. It’s very interesting actually. There are three main forms of plague: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic. Bubonic is the most famous. It’s the form you see in etchings from the Middle Ages—what was called the Black Death. Incubation—which is how long it takes you to come down with it—is two to five days, and your lymphatic system tries to deal with it, but can’t. Your lymph nodes swell up and they’re so full of the bacteria, the bacteria’s toxins, that they’re like knobs on your skins. These are called “buboes”—and why it’s called bubonic—and eventually they burst and run. You also get a red rash. This is the “ring around the rosies” that the old nursery rhyme is referring to. It’s a terrible way to die. Your temperature gets up to 103-106. Your blood pressure’s so low you can’t stand up, and you’ve got to watch these things, these big bumps, growing on you. You’re becoming something else—your body is changing completely—and even if you’re delirious, you hate what you’re becoming. You’re rotting, actually rotting, and you can smell it.
I’ve never had the symptoms, but I know what that feels like—to hate what you’re becoming.
The second form is called “pneumonic”—like the word pneumonia. It fills your lungs. You get it from what’s called “aerial droplet transmission”—which means from the air. It goes straight to your lungs and you come down with a pneumonia that’s actually plague. You can even get it from your cat or your dog. From their saliva or their sneezing. This kind takes half as long to come down with. You get a splitting headache, chills, fever, and before you know it you’re coughing up blood. It looks like strawberry jelly—even the doctors describe it that way. Your lungs are dying and you get to watch. With this kind if you don’t get treatment, you always die.
The worst form—septicemic—isn’t very common, fortunately, but I should mention it anyway, so you’ll know. In this kind the flea is so full of the germ that when it bites you—just one bite—when it tries to suck blood from you—the germs backwash into your bloodstream, and you get infected instantly. You die in twenty-four hours. Your blood is crawling with the bacteria—it just can’t handle it—and that’s how you die, poisoned by living things crawling through your bloodstream.
Actually there’s a fourth type, a meningitis plague—a brain membrane kind. I’d forgotten that, but it’s even less common. Its code in epidemiological circles is A20.3. You don’t hear about it.
The kind they wanted me to spread—the only kind I could spread—was pneumonic. I’d cough, and the coughing would spread it, but once the pneumonic gets started you see the first type, too, the bubonic. That’s what they wanted. Something fast to get it started, but then both kinds appearing so that it couldn’t be traced.
It’s important to know the history of things. That’s what Booth always said and that’s what they said at Langley, and it’s true. In the old days—when they first had a drug for the plague, in the early 1900s—they used sulfonamides. That’s the fancy name for sulfur drugs. Back in the Middle Ages the guy with all the prophecies—Nostradamus—was so smart he invented an herbal treatment that was actually pretty good. It had rose petals, evergreen needles, and a special root in it, but you couldn’t save the entire population of Europe with that. You couldn’t even save twenty percent. Even if everyone had believed it would work, there wouldn’t have been enough roses.
So the sulfur drugs in the early 1900s weren’t very good, but they were better than nothing and they could have cut the Black Death mortality rate by fifty percent. Later, what’s called the tetracycline drugs came in and these cured people quickly. That’s why you only get a couple of plague cases every year in the U.S., and they’re out on Indian reservations or in the woods in a national park somewhere, someone getting bitten by a squirrel maybe.
But if you’ve got a Third World country, what we used to call an “LDC”—a “Lesser Developing Country”—you couldn’t necessarily get the drugs, either quickly or at all, and maybe thousands would get infected and thousands would die. Especially if you didn’t want them to get the drugs. If, say, the president of a little country was a leftist and you didn’t want that kind of leadership in that country—where American businesses had factories and relied on certain kinds of privileges, and because you saw communism as a threat to our way of life—you could keep the drugs from getting to it. If the country couldn’t get the drugs fast enough and enough people died, the country would become “destabilized.” And if there was a group like the military or a landowner with the army’s backing ready to overthrow the president, that was the time to do it. You know what I’m saying. I’m not talking politics here. I’m just saying how it was back then.
I’m sure you’ve heard about some of these things before. In World War II
the Japanese tried the plague on China and killed a couple of hundred Chinese, but also one of their own companies of soldiers. They were also, later in the war, planning to try it on San Diego, California, but then Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened and they signed the surrender. And all the old Agency stories—the news media coverage, the “black ops,” the assassinations of heads of state, the secret support of coups d’état—all those covert actions that got the intelligence community in trouble in the 1970s. You’ve heard about those things, I’m sure.
They didn’t want me as an intelligence analyst. They wanted me to do this other work for them—in countries where they needed it done. I needed training for that—any twenty-two-year-old would have—and it was the kind any overseas operative would get. In my case it was training for South America. It lasted sixteen weeks—they taught me Spanish and E&E, escape and evasion—and gave me some medic training, some reporter-skills training (I’ll talk about that in a minute), and some firearms training—which was pretty funny with my bad eyesight. Right before I left for all that training I went to visit my parents. I couldn’t tell them anything, but I wanted them to be proud of me. All I could say was, “I’m about to work for the intelligence community, Dad. But not as an analyst. I’m heading out in two days for sixteen weeks of training.”
“I thought that might be what was happening, Matt,” he told me with a smile, but I could tell he was worried. Analysts live safe lives. Field operatives don’t always. “You haven’t been saying much recently.”
“You’re right,” I said. “That was why.”
I couldn’t tell them what I’d be doing. I couldn’t tell anyone. Even if I’d been allowed to, how could I?
“I know I can’t ask you anything about it, Matt, and that’s okay,” my dad said. “During the war in the Pacific we couldn’t tell our families. No places, people, events. Just what we were feeling. Whenever you want to tell us how you’re feeling, we’d like to hear. We’re very happy for you.”
The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories Page 11