Rafelson clearly outclassed him. Once again, after having spent his entire adult life braving the worst that Earth could throw at a human male, he was coming up short in the eyes of a woman he thought he might care for.
And what the hell did it matter? What did his masculine ego, his sex life, matter in the face of Herod’s?
Dicken came around the corner onto Clifton Road and stopped, confused for a moment. The attendant at the garage booth had mentioned something about picketing, but had given no hint of the scale.
Demonstrators filled the street from the small plaza and tree planter fronting the redbrick entrance of Building 1 to the American Cancer Society headquarters and the Emory Hotel across Clifton Road. Some were standing in the beds of purple azaleas; they had left a path open to the main entrance but blocked the visitor center and the cafeteria. Dozens sat around the pillar that held the bust of Hygeia, their eyes closed, swaying gently from side to side as if in silent prayer.
Dicken estimated there were two thousand men, women, and children, in vigil, waiting for something; salvation or word at least that the world was not about to end. Many of the women and more than a few of the men still wore masks, colored orange or purple, guaranteed by half a dozen fly-by-night manufacturers to kill all viruses, including SHEVA.
The organizers of the vigil — it was not called a protest — walked among their people with water coolers and paper cups, leaflets, advice, and instructions, but those holding the vigil never spoke.
Dicken walked to the entrance of Building 1, through the crowd, attracted to them despite his sense of the danger in the situation. He wanted to see what the troops were thinking and feeling — the people on the front line.
Cameramen moved around and through the crowds slowly, or more deliberately along the pathways, cameras held at waist level to capture the immediacy, then being lifted to shoulders for the panorama, the scale.
“Jesus, what happened?” Jane Salter asked as Dicken passed her in the long hall to his office. She carried a briefcase and an armload of files in green folders.
“Just an accident,” Dicken said. “I fell. Did you see what’s going on outside?”
“I saw,” Salter said. “Creeps me out.” She followed him and stood in the open door. Dicken glanced over his shoulder at her, then pulled out the old rolling chair and sat down, his face like a disappointed little boy’s.
“Down about Mrs. C.?” Salter asked. She pushed back a wisp of brown hair with the corner of a folder. The wisp fell back and she ignored it.
“I suppose,” Dicken said.
Salter bent to set down the briefcase, then stepped forward and laid the files on his desk. “Tom Scarry has the baby,” she said. “It was autopsied in Mexico City. I guess they did a thorough job. He’ll do it all over again, just to be sure.”
“Have you seen it?” Dicken asked.
“Just a video feed when they took it from the ice chest in Building 15.”
“Monster?”
“Major,” Salter said. “A real mess.”
“For whom the bell tolls,” Dicken said.
“I’ve never figured out your position on this, Christopher,” Salter said, leaning against the door jamb. “You seem surprised that this is a really nasty disease. We knew that going in, didn’t we?”
Dicken shook his head. “I’ve chased diseases so long…this one seemed different.”
“What, more sympathetic?”
“Jane, I got drunk last night. I fell in my house and cracked my shoulder. I feel like hell.”
“A bender? That sounds more appropriate to a bad love life, not a misdiagnosis.”
Dicken made a sour face. “Where are you going with all that?” he asked, and shoved his left forefinger at the files.
“I’m moving some stuff over to the new receiving lab. They’ve got four more tables. We’re putting together personnel and procedures for a round-the-clock autopsy mission, L3 conditions. Dr. Sharp is in charge. I’m helping the group doing neural and epithelial analysis. I’ll keep their records straight.”
“Keep me in the loop? If you find something?”
“I don’t even know why you’re here, Christopher. You flew way above us when you went with Augustine.”
“I miss the front lines. News always gets here first.” He sighed. “I’m still a virus hunter, Jane. I came back to look over some old papers. See if I forgot something crucial.”
Jane smiled. “Well, I did hear this morning that Mrs. C had genital herpes. Somehow it got to little Baby C early in its development. It was covered with lesions.”
Dicken looked up in surprise. “Herpes? They didn’t tell us that before.”
“I told you it was a mess,” Jane said.
Herpes could change the whole interpretation of what happened. How did the infant contract the genital herpes while still protected in the womb? Herpes was usually passed from mother to infant in the birth canal.
Dicken was severely distracted.
Dr. Denby passed by the office, smiled briefly, then doubled back and peered through the open door. Denby was a bacterial growth specialist, small and very bald, with a cherub’s face and a natty plum shirt and red tie. “Jane? Did you know they’ve blocked the cafeteria from outside? Hello, Christopher.”
“I heard. It’s impressive,” Jane said.
“Now they’re up to something else. Want to go look?”
“Not if it’s violent,” Salter said with a shudder.
“That’s what’s spooky. It’s peaceful and absolutely silent! Like a drill team without the band.”
Dicken walked with them and took the elevator and stairs to the front of the building. They followed other employees and doctors to the lobby beside the public display of CDC history. Outside, the crowd was milling in an orderly fashion. Leaders were using megaphones to shout orders.
A security guard stood with his hands on his hips, glaring at the crowd through the glass. “Will you look at that,” he said.
“What?” Jane asked.
“They’re breaking up, boy-girl. Segregating,” he said with a mystified look.
Banners stretched in plain view of the lobby and the dozens of cameras arrayed outside. A breeze rippled one banner. Dicken caught what it said in two sinuous flaps: VOLUNTEER. SEPARATE. SAVE A CHILD.
Within a few minutes, the crowd had parted before their leaders like the Red Sea before Moses, women and children on one side, men on the other. The women looked grimly determined. The men looked somber and shamefaced.
“Christ,” the guard muttered. “They’re telling me to leave my wife?”
Dicken felt as if he were being whipsawed. He returned to his office and called Bethesda. Augustine had not arrived yet. Kaye Lang was visiting the Magnuson Clinical Center.
Augustine’s secretary added that protesters were also on the NIH campus, several thousand of them. “Look on the TV,” she said. “They’re marching all over the country.”
47
The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda
Augustine drove around the campus on the Old Georgetown Road to Lincoln Street and made his way to a temporary employee parking lot near the Taskforce Center. The Taskforce had been assigned a new building at the surgeon general’s request just two weeks before. The protesters apparently did not know of this change, and were marching on the old headquarters, and on Building 10.